For two years she was happy at school, happy back home for the summers, the fire coiled in the near distance. She had Hemingway, Freud, Copernicus, Jefferson, Eliot. She had Angela, who ran the only coffee shop in Belle Haven and could not be matched for pure wit, wisdom, and gritty charm. Rachel had the finest of parents. She was fit. Most of the time, she felt as if she were on the verge of bursting from her skin.
If anything, it was only romance that she missed. College boys, as a breed, had proven uninteresting or, on the whole, more trouble than they were worth. They had flocked to her, attracted by how she looked, by the way her body swept, riverlike, from one smooth curve into the next. But they had not seemed to listen to her when she spoke. And they rarely said anything that she had not heard a dozen times before.
Holding out for something better, she had watched her friends suffer disappointments, cry into their hands as one after another they were awakened to the reality that many young men—whether they meant to or not—broke hearts. And she had waited more than once, among the magazines and the ashtrays, while down the hall a friend lifted her feet into a set of cold stirrups and lived through the sound of a vacuum sucking her dry.
If a boy did manage to stir Rachel, so that she found herself quickening or shy, she ordinarily drew back. She was not at all cynical, not worldly, certainly not wise in matters of the heart: when it came to such things she was simply cautious. Not in the way that victims are cautious. She had never been assaulted or in any way misused, and the boys in Belle Haven had wooed her in a safe and simple way that had never caused her alarm. She had as much as told them what kinds of lines she drew and where.
It was not fear that made Rachel reluctant. It was longing.
She had seen the way her parents treasured each other. She had studied their affection. They had never seemed embarrassed by it. Rachel had often seen them become quietly aroused, had watched them tangling like young bears, harmlessly rough, affectionate, and so absorbed with each other that at times she felt forgotten.
She had once asked her mother, “How does it feel to be in love?” Her mother was kneeling in the grass with a knife in one hand, a pot of warm beeswax in the other. She was grafting a strong, juicy twig of pear tree to an adoptive stump. She had made a clean cut in the stump, eased the transplant into the cleft, and was now binding them together with wax. It was something that took practice and care.
“Oh, I don’t know,” her mother finally said. “The feeling changes over time. In the beginning it’s almost like a sickness. It takes you over and it eats you up, and if you’re loved back, it thrills you. It absolutely thrills you. And then, later on, if it lasts, it settles down a bit. It comes back at you often enough, that feeling of complete joy.” She worked the wax with her knife. “I’ll be brushing my teeth and I’ll hear your father yawning and fumbling around for his robe and suddenly I can barely stand up, I feel so good. Sometimes it’s a long time between the moments when I’m aware that I still love him that way. You get busy with everything else. There are other people to love. You, for instance. Things change. Things stay the same.” She smoothed the cast of wax once more with her blade. “I have a lot of things to feel lucky about. Your father is one of them, and by now I know he always will be.” She sighed when she saw the look in her daughter’s eyes. “You’ll know what it feels like when you feel it,” she said. “Isn’t that what mothers are supposed to say?”
Then she smiled at Rachel, put the lid on the pot of wax, and surrendered the tree to its fate.
When Rachel left home, for the first time free and on her own, she remembered these things and allowed her expectations to rise. Whenever she met a boy, she could not help but measure him, perhaps more severely than he deserved. Fair or not, Rachel’s hopes were as ingrained as her resolve to satisfy them. And so Rachel waited. And then came Harry.
The professors called him Henry, for that was the name they were given by the registrar—Henry Gallagher—but everyone knew him as Harry. He had joined Rachel’s class as a junior, having transferred from another school, and so it came as a complete surprise when Rachel first saw him one day as she sat in the refectory having a bad lunch of ham loaf and macaroni salad.
“Have you ever read Charlotte’s Web?” she said to Paul, the best of her school friends.
He shook his head, daydreaming.
“Read it,” she said, peering at her macaroni. “The pig in it, Wilbur, gets fed all this luscious slop. Scraps of this and that, soup labels, potato peelings. Somehow it all sounds just great. I’d trade this slop for that any day.” She threw down her fork. “What I wouldn’t give for some five-bean salad.” And that’s when she looked around and saw Harry, three tables down.
He was quite a lovely man, as a painting is lovely, or a meadow, and looking at him made Rachel feel hungry in a completely physical sense.
Paul pushed his own plate into the middle of the table. “Key lime pie,” he said. “Or maybe a proper hot dog.” He
