The Lady Poet
Connor repeated the mantra to himself: she didn’t say no. Still, that one small ray of hope couldn’t erase the fact that he’d been an idiot. Trusting the advice of a couple of century-old geezers wasn’t all that sane either.
C’mon, he lectured himself, you just don’t blurt out marriage proposals like that. You’re supposed to woo. That’s why the word’s been in the lexicon so damned long (usage noted before the twelfth century: Middle English, from wowen; Old English, from wogian).
Not to mention, his acerbic inner voice continued, if you’re going the direct route, get it out, man, in a coherent interrogative. Four words: an auxiliary, two pronouns, a verb, and a question mark.
Instead, he’d done a good imitation of road kill: Whap! Thump! It was disgusting.
Around eight-thirty he remembered that he hadn’t eaten and went upstairs and nuked some leftover casserole. A few minutes later, he caught himself standing at the sink, wondering what Elly was going to make for dinner on Sunday. Aunt Wanda insisted that she come over and Elly insisted on cooking every other meal in turn.
He watched the first ten minutes of the nine o’clock news, and then put on La Bohème. A tragedy about doomed love, yes, but like Shakespeare, Puccini could convince him that the world was a better place with a little tragedy in it. And since he didn’t understand more than a dozen words in Italian, it was easy to ignore the plot.
Except that he’d read the libretto, and when Mimi and Rodolfo sang O Soave Fanciulla (“Oh, beautiful maiden”), the most beautiful love duet ever written, he had to turn it off.
The last thought on his mind as he faded off to sleep: she didn’t say no.
He awoke without her, and being without her was wrong the same way he knew the world was round. They hadn’t made love since the night of Tanabata, but she was with him every night. Awaking rent apart the slender, silver thread binding their hearts and minds.
Connor sat on the edge of the bed, cold and alone, waiting for the sludge of sleep to drain from his skull. Deep in his brain, a thought flitted along a neuron. He tilted his head to one side, as if to trap it like an air bubble in a bottle. Paths. Something about paths, or roads, or a journey on a road. Walking, no, running—running along a road, a path. A waka—he could remember reading it, could picture the side of the page in the book it was on. But what was it?
A shower didn’t stir his memories, except to remind him that she hadn’t said no, which also reminded him that neither had she said yes—there being no squishy ground when it came to a Packard yes and a Packard no.
He was quite insane, he reminded himself. They’d been together barely two weeks in the real world. But he felt as if he’d known her for years. And somehow, counting backwards from the future past, he had.
He scanned his library. Basho, perhaps? Basho was a traveler, familiar with paths and journeys. But he didn’t think romantic when he thought about Basho. Sei Shonagon was the right era, though she was more an essayist. His Japanese Court Poetry text? A quick look and he put it aside. Not Genji, but a contemporary of Murasaki Shikibu? Think, brain, think. He should know this.
He didn’t have time to think. He had a phonology final in half an hour. He brushed his teeth and checked his backpack and left feeling like a person troubled by hard evidence of early senility.
Nobody was at the condo. Elly and Melanie had already left for their 301 final. He arrived at the JKHB at exactly eight. No time to sit around and fret. Professor Geary was ready with the exams and Connor was armed with his blue, medium-tip Bic. All the anxiety with exams was about the leading-up-to, not the taking. He could be induced to confess, under sufficient duress, that he enjoyed taking tests, zoning everything else out and channeling the contents of his brain into that Zen state for two hours (plus or minus).
He handed in the exam an hour and three-quarters later. Elly wasn’t in the TA office. She wasn’t at the library. But once he was there—he found Mitsutani’s Practical Guide to the National Language in the stacks and checked the literary timeline for the Heian Period. Starting with Murasaki Shikibu, eleventh century, he worked backward through the Fujiwaras, to Kyokai, Kukai, Komachi. Ono no Komachi. She was ninth century, not exactly a contemporary of Shikibu (that was Sei Shonagon). So where was his Komachi? He’d lent his Hirshfield translation to Aunt Wanda.
Knowing the who, he needed only five minutes to find the waka poem in an annotated collection. He jogged over to the bookstore and bought a card and headed back to the Writing Center. He practiced writing out the five lines before committing them to the card. The intensity of the moment focused his mind and the results were satisfactory.
He left the card on Elly’s desk and ran up the stairs and down the hall, just in time to deliver himself to Kusanagi Sensei’s examination.
Ninety minutes later, he placed the completed exam on her desk. She glanced at him and said with an air of inscrutable professorial nonchalance, “You’re dating Elly?”
That unexpected question left him stumbling for an answer. A good thing she hadn’t asked him before the exam. He mumbled an affirmative response.
“Oh,” she said. “Makoto thought otherwise.”
Returning from the Cougareat after a quick lunch, he remembered that Makoto was Oh Sensei’s first name.
Xiaojing stopped by the Writing Center for one last review before her TOEFL exam on Saturday.
Twenty minutes later he heard someone calling his name. He looked up. At the counter, Alicia gave him a “Who, me?” expression and pointed to her right. Elly stood just inside the doorway, a stack of exams clasped against her chest.
“Elly—”
She said in Japanese, “The question you asked me—that you were going to ask me yesterday—ask me again.”
Connor froze, a deer caught in the headlights. He’d never addressed another person using “marriage” as a transitive verb, let alone in Japanese. The words at last fell into place, the question sounding indelicately direct in his ears: “Elly, will you marry me?”
“Hai!” she answered, with an unequivocal nod of her head. “Finals,” she said in English. “I’ll see you at four,” and disappeared down the hall.
Connor blinked. An immense and sublime stillness surrounded him. He could hear his heartbeat, the rush of blood in his ears.
“Connor—” somebody said again.
He sat down and swiveled back. This time Alicia, auditioning for the role of Cheshire cat, pointed to her left. Xiaojing was waiting with a quizzical expression on her face. “That was—” He focused his attention on her workbook. “Um,” he said, keeping his voice low, “that was my fiancée.”
“Oh, when are you getting married?”
Good question. And there was an even better one, the one Elly had posed so long ago: What happens next?
A student wandered into the Center wearing a look of desperation Connor was familiar with at this time of year. When they were done and he checked the clock again, it was five after four.
“Hey Larry,” Connor said to Larry Jackson. “Can you take the desk? I’ll be back in a sec.”
Students streamed toward the stairwells. He didn’t see Elly until she was only two yards from him. She smiled and flung herself at him. He loved the way she did that. He caught her around the waist and lifted her up, her lissome body light as a feather. She threw her arms around his neck and kissed him.
“Tell me the waka.”
“The waka? Oh, the waka.” He had it memorized by now:
I run to you
ceaselessly
on the path of dreams
Yet no night of dreams
could ever compare
to one waking glimpse
of you
He added, as he had on the card, “I do agree with the lady poet.”
She kissed him again, a kiss that lingered longer than the rules governing public displays of affection at BYU generally allowed. As they parted, Elly teased, “I never suspected you were such a romantic.”
“I worried maybe I wasn’t doing enough wooing.”
“I should do more to encourage it then.”
“More encouragement like that and I’ll have a nervous breakdown.”
“I’m the one having the nervous breakdown. I decided to marry you last night. Okay, I didn’t decide—I knew I was going to marry you all along. I just freaked when everything switched into reality mode. Then Melanie told me about this song: ‘A man shall leave his mother—’”
“The Wedding Song, by Paul Stookey.”
“You know it too?”
“Four older sisters, remember? Four wedding receptions.”
“The leaving home part is harder than I thought.” She held onto him for a while longer.
“Do you have work?”
“Yeah, I probably should get back.”
“Me too.” She laughed. “Bradley is waiting. My star pupil. Come and get me when your shift ends.”
They kissed again. She smiled at him in a way that made walking away difficult.
“Hey, Connor,” Larry said, when he walked into the Center, “could you take the computers?”
“Sure.” Connor sat down at the computer sign-up desk at the back of the Center. Alicia walked over and gave him a bemused look.
“What?”
Alicia returned a minute later with a Kleenex. She leaned forward and daubed at his mouth.
“Hey!” Connor jerked his head back.
“Lipstick.” Alicia held up the Kleenex as proof. “And he blushes. That’s so cute.” She resumed making him presentable. “Now the only question is the date. Hmmm.” With a wink she walked away.
Connor rested his forehead on the desk. Einstein said that time slowed down as one approached the speed of light, and Connor could believe it. He’d done a year’s worth of normal living in the past two hours. At this rate, he’d be hitting retirement by Fall semester.
Larry took over the computers at five.
Connor said, “Hey, Larry, see you in the Fall.”
He went to the break room and cleaned out his locker. Alicia was at the front desk. He paused at the counter. “How are you spending the break, Alicia?”
“At Lake Powell with Eddie’s folks. I figure it’s the last time I’ll look presentable in a swimsuit before I blow up like a beach ball. How will you two be spending the next three weeks, pray tell?”
“Hard to say. I’d have to ask Elly.”
“Remember, when it comes to the wedding, your job is to do whatever she says. See you, Connor.”
“See you, Alicia.”
The door to the Japanese TA office was propped open with a doorstop. The only sound inside was the squeak of a red felt tip against paper. He tread softly to Elly’s carrel, put a hand on her shoulder and kissed the crown of her head. She placed her hand on his and said, “Almost done.”
He heard her counting deductions under her breath. She wrote a grade on the cover page. “Okay,” she said. She stuffed the remaining exams into her backpack and hefted it onto her shoulder.
“So,” Elly said, as they walked back down the hall, “what made you decide on Komachi?”
“I don’t know. For some reason I woke up this morning and couldn’t get it out of my head.”
“The things going on in your head fascinate me. Oh, Melanie invited Chalmers Ch r over for pizza and a video. It’s our end-of-finals party.”
“What’s the movie?”
“ Shall We Dance.”
“Good movie. Who’s Chalmers Ch r ?”
“My old zone leader. Mel’s got her eye on him. And she should.”
“So now you’re ready to play the go-between.”
“I’m an expert about being in love with you, which I naturally extend
to everybody I know.”
As they exited the JKHB, Connor remarked, “Alicia figured it out already. Now she’s ruminating about the date. There are three weeks left until Fall semester.”
“So, around the thirtieth?”
“That’s awfully quick, even by BYU standards.”
“I don’t want to wait. To be honest, I never thought I’d think that before.” Connor laughed and Elly said with feigned crossness, “I’m sure you, Mr. Stoic, could persevere for years.”
“No, no, I agree. My will is but Jell-O in your hands.”
And thus, Connor noted, does an indicative statement, when spoken by an Oh woman, become a fact. But he felt compelled to point out the obvious: “You know, this is going to cause some problems.”
“Yes, quite a few.”
She must have considered several, because worry and concern creased her brow. She leaned closer and tightened her hold on his hand.