Lizzie sat, red-faced and stunned, as the rest of students drifted out of the classroom, a few coming by her desk to pat her back in solidarity, or just smile at her in what looked like sympathy. She knew what Marla would do in a similar situation: she’d march herself to the dean of Arts and Sciences and make a formal complaint about Terrell. She wasn’t sure she had the fortitude to take that step. Jack waited for Lizzie to get up before he stood and spoke to her. “So. Millay. And another Housman fan. I think I just might be in love.”
Lizzie looked at him. All her life she would remember that the perfect response came to her unbidden, as though it were a gift from the gods, a line from a poem they’d been assigned in AP English last year. “Really? ‘Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?’ That’s your position, is it?”
He laughed and took her arm. “Yes, Christopher Marlowe and I are more alike than you might think. Let’s get coffee and be poetry lovers together. You can bind my wounds, and I’ll bind yours. Do you have another class right now?”
At that moment Lizzie would have gladly given up the rest of the quarter’s classes to spend time with Jack. “I have anthro at eleven but nothing until then.”
“Great. Let’s go.”
As they walked, Jack said, “I’m really sorry you went through that with Terrell. He’s always been pretty nasty, but that was much farther than I’ve ever heard him go with a student.”
“What does he have against Millay, or me, for that matter?”
“It isn’t you, or Millay. It’s just that he’s a miserable human being. My guess is that he resents being regarded by the critics as second-rate, plus he has to teach a bunch of undergraduates whose idea of poetry is probably nursery rhymes. He’s stuck with this life he hates.”
“That all may be true,” Lizzie said, “but it doesn’t give him a special dispensation to be nasty.”
“No, of course not. But there’s a line by Housman that I’ve always felt applied to Terrell: ‘The mortal sickness of a mind / Too unhappy to be kind.’ That helps me deal with him.”
They walked to Gilmore’s, one of the many coffee shops close to the quad that sprang up, shut down, and shortly reopened under a different name with amazing regularity. It was, as usual, packed with other students.
“Um,” Lizzie said when they finally found an empty table. “Do you think you could empty that ashtray? I’ll get sick if I look at it.”
“Ah, there’s a contradiction, a poetic sensibility and yet lacking a love of smoking to complete the very picture of a dissolute soul.”
“Hardly dissolute. My parents are serial smokers and when I was little I used to go around hiding all the ashtrays and hoping that would make them stop. I thought it was disgusting. And, as you can see, I still do.”
“I take it they never did.”
“Nope. Probably even as we speak one or both of them are lighting up. And they don’t have a speck of poetry between them. They like it that way.”
Jack grabbed the full ashtray and went up to the counter. When he came back with their coffees and a lemon poppy seed muffin for them to share, she said, “I know I’m probably irrational about this, but did you wash your hands after emptying the ashtray?”
“Wow. You’re just a little intense, aren’t you?”
“Well, yes, I guess so. About this, anyway.”
“I’m awfully glad I don’t smoke,” Jack said, sitting down. “We almost certainly wouldn’t be here together.”
He held out his hands for her inspection. His nails were short and very clean. His black hair fell into his eyes and she wanted more than anything to brush it off his forehead. She could smell the shampoo he must have used that morning; it contrasted sharply with Mendel’s, which was tangy and unpleasant, something to keep dandruff at bay. Oh, why was she sitting here with this gorgeous, smart (and poetry-loving!) guy and thinking about her father’s shampoo?
“Me too,” Lizzie assured him. “Otherwise I’d probably get up and leave.”
“You’ve never smoked? Not even to see what it’s like?”
“Well, not cigarettes, anyway. ‘I neither smoke nor drink, but I have my memories,’” she said, mock tendentiously.
Jack laughed. “Did you make that up? Is it true?”
“No,” Lizzie told him. “I read it somewhere. And the drinking part is definitely not true. I do love beer.”
“Really? Beer? You don’t look like a beer girl to me.”
“What does a beer girl look like?”
Jack thought about it for a while.
“Well, where I come from, the beer-drinking girls are fast and loose, with loud laughs and big voices and big hair.”
She laughed and then sighed and thought of all those Friday nights, all those boys, during the football season and afterward. “I guess I’d have to say that being fast and loose doesn’t come in one style. Hey,” she said, changing the subject. “Did you really suffer through a different class with Terrell?”
“I did. Honestly, he’s not so bad. He’s a bully, of course, and just a little full of himself. But he has this sly sense of humor.”
“Ha ha,” Lizzie said dryly. “Save me from whatever sly sense of humor he might have. And don’t for a moment think I didn’t get the oh-so-not-humorous implications of ‘you bind my wounds,’ et cetera.”
Jack grinned. “I’m so glad you told me. If you hadn’t gotten it, I would’ve been really disappointed in you.”
They stared at each other for a few moments.
“I still think he’s an insensitive, pretentious asshole whom I already dislike intensely. Maybe nobody reads Millay these days except me, but isn’t that what he should be doing? Introducing us to poets who might not be so popular now?”
“Okay, okay, don’t despise me for this, but I’ve never actually read her.”
“As long as you start to remedy that condition, I’ll forgive you.”
“Thank you, Lizzie,” Jack said formally. “I appreciate your generosity. Do you think I’ll like her?”
“Honestly, I’m not going to pretend that Millay’s not romantic or doesn’t write almost always about being in love and having your heart broken, and her poems always rhyme, like Housman, which I’m quite sure Terrell despises, but she’s so good at making you understand how love and loss feel. I mean, they’re not light verses, like Dorothy Parker, who I also read obsessively, and she’s not ironic and detached at all. She writes these wonderful lyrical poems that I find so moving and true. They just work for me,” Lizzie finished, somewhat apologetically.
Jack had been listening intently, leaning toward her. “So where should I begin? What’s your favorite poem?”
“Mostly it’s individual lines that capture my imagination. ‘Neither with you nor with myself, I spend / Loud days that have no meaning and no end.’ I suppose that a man could have written that, but he probably wouldn’t. I mean, I bet that a lot of the poets Terrell admires might have had that feeling about someone, but they’d never admit it in a poem. Don’t start with ‘Renascence,’ which is the poem she first became famous for when she was a teenager. Maybe read the sonnets.” She thought a moment. “Yeah, start with those. I can lend you my copy if you want.”
“Sounds great,” Jack said. “Bring it to class on Thursday.”
For some reason Lizzie felt unaccountably shy and quickly changed the subject. “So, what’s your favorite Housman poem?”
“No,” Jack said decidedly. “Housman’s too depressing for spring, or at least this spring. Let’s wait until it snows to talk about him.”
Can you fall in love this quickly? Lizzie wondered. And that was the beginning.