After a few seconds to recover from the shock of being kissed, I shrugged her off. I had low tolerance for drunks, and she was turning into an annoying rambler. "Sarah, how drunk are you? Are you hitting on me when the corpse of your last relationship isn't even cold?"
Her eyes were unfocused. "Don't be stupid. Chicago isn't much closer than Madison."
"Then what?" I snapped.
Sarah sat up, and held her head as she got dizzy. "You and Dave are my best friends. I fucked it up with him. I don't think he'll ever forgive me, but I don't want to lose you as well. And I know you always wanted... wondered..." She glanced at me for confirmation.
Instead, she saw only the stern face I save for drunks and misbehaving children. I once wanted her, and wondered if we could have been together if she hadn't dated and destroyed my best friend, but it was too late for that now.
Becoming incoherent, she recited, "
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance...
"
"Sarah?" I recognized that line -- Cummings.
She blinked and regained some focus. "You're so clever -- you figure it out. You can't..." She closed her eyes again and nestled her head on my chest.
"Figure out what?" I didn't think I understood her. I leaned closer, but all I got was more nonsense.
"
...know the dancer from the dance.
"
As she passed out, I realized my mistake. It was Yeats, not Cummings.
∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞
I dropped Sarah off at her mom's house, and carried her into the house. Her mom was out, so I laid Sarah in her bed, left a note on the table indicating where their car could be found, and drove home to determine my next step.
The more I thought about my conversation with Sarah, the more frustrated I became. She had succeeded in making me feel sorry for her, even though she was breaking Dave's heart. Several subjective days ago, I had been sure Sarah was the ice queen, killing her relationship with Dave because she no longer needed him. She insisted she loved him, and I now believed her.
Sarah had been the best actress in our school, but couldn't have acted that well while drunk. I knew how she handled her booze. She was the worst kind of drunk -- an honest one. If she drank enough alcohol, her executive brain functions shut down and she committed the horrible social blunder of telling people what she thought of them. I had gotten off easy this time. The previous summer, after she drank a six pack of Schell's, she informed me I was the most arrogant son-of-a-bitch she had ever met, and that I didn't look nearly as sexy wearing an earring as I thought I did. (I wasn't arrogant enough to keep the earring.) While the alcohol may have induced Sarah to divulge more than she intended, she meant every word.
In vino veritas.
No, she wasn't lying, she was just wrong. I knew it. The only way I could stand looking at myself in the mirror each morning was by believing my sacrifices for Tasha were worth it. This wasn't just some rationalization of mine -- I had known Sarah was wrong nine years ago. A couple weeks after college had started, Sarah sent me a friendly e-mail asking how things were going. The timing couldn't have been worse.
Dave's mom had called me the previous week, asking me to visit Madison to check on her son. She was worried. Dave had been ditching his classes and drinking himself to oblivion most nights. While that would have been typical behavior for most first-year college students, it wasn't normal for Dave. I caught a bus and surprised him in his dorm.
I gave him the standard cure for heartbreak -- coffee, the disparagement of the opposite sex, and pep talk platitudes about the quantity of gilled vertebrates in the ocean. Because this was Dave, I ended up getting a lecture on how there weren't enough fish in the sea because of poor fisheries management by the major economic powers.
After two days of this, and the forced distraction of a
Monty Python
festival at the Union, he seemed coherent, and I left. Sarah's e-mail was in my box the day after I returned.
My response was a spleen-venter, recounting what I had been through the previous weekend. I described every emotional wound she had inflicted, in excruciating detail. I questioned whether Dave would ever really recover. I laid calumnies upon her soul, or lack thereof. Every ounce of outraged disillusionment I could muster was set in prose, and I ended with a request she not contact me again.
She never did.
I had even been in New York the entire summer of 2005, and never even looked up her number or address.
Recalling how I had felt then, the anger of the righteous blazed defiantly in my gut.
You're so clever -- you figure it out.
I was more clever than she knew -- that there was nothing to figure out. Sarah was never a might-have-been. There had never been a chance, and I didn't want one. I had now lived through her torture of Dave a second time, and didn't trust her. She was wrong.
Sitting up from my bed, I glanced back at my bookshelf. It had changed since the fall, with the addition of a crop of science books. I remembered that when I had decided on Chicago for college, I started early, reading books written by the more esteemed members of the faculty.
Chicago.
If I wanted to put Sarah out of my mind, and continue chronologically, Chicago was the obvious choice, but there weren't many missed opportunities there. I had played the field, not having much luck finding a woman who was sufficiently interesting, only finding women to keep me busy. In my first year alone, I had dated a dozen women despite the workload Professor Pugachev dumped on me.
No be idiot, Lance.
Professor Pugachev's favorite insult popped unbidden into my head. There was his textbook, sitting on my shelf:
Quantum Concepts, Methods and Theories
. The title just tripped off the tongue. I felt a surge of remembered anger, which fit perfectly into my current mood. I knew I was really still angry at Sarah, but Professor Pugachev would be a worthy substitute target, and I knew the where, when, and whom of my next destination.
∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞
Professor Pugachev was my first adviser in the Physics Department at the University of Chicago. He had an international reputation, which is one of the reasons I had bought his textbook. He was supposed to mentor me, help me select courses, and guide my academic career. The University had scooped him out of the old Soviet Union, and I had been thrilled when I found out he was my adviser. On paper, he was a dream.
Off paper, he was an asshole.
Late in my first year, I won a part-time job doing IT work on a Fermilab project, which was housed on campus. My programming background was exactly what they wanted to create their simulations, and I knew networks, allowing them to avoid dependence on the University's sluggish IT department. Pugachev had earmarked that position for one of his favorite students, and he never forgave me for "going behind his back". The great man was big on hierarchy and pecking order. I had broken one of his rules, and the fact that he had never told me the rule was irrelevant.
After that, he had tried to make my life hell on campus and around the lab -- giving me bad advice about courses, badmouthing me to other professors, and trying to make me seem like a screw-up at work. One of his favorite tactics was to ask for the wrong item (or database query, or file), and then publicly excoriate me when I gave him exactly what he had requested, insisting he had asked for something different. Despite his efforts, I managed to impress the other faculty to the point where he did no permanent damage to me -- in fact my working twice as hard to overcome Pugachev's sabotage is part of what impressed them. Pugachev evidently did this every year to one of the more promising students, and his peers considered the position of Pugachev's whipping boy to be an academic reference. I switched mentors after my second year, and was glad to see the back of him.
Years later, I still felt lingering resentment. I saw a nice way to kill two birds with one stone, taking revenge on my old adversary while making a play for one of my few missed opportunities in college -- Pugachev's wife, Irina.
Pugachev had an ageless appearance, with gray hair and a goatee that could have meant he was anywhere between forty and seventy, but he had married a trophy wife in Kiev just before emigrating to the US. Irina was much younger -- in her mid-thirties -- and was the subject of salacious gossip. I didn't trust rumors, particularly when it came to attractive women, but the scuttlebutt circling around her was consistent and pervasive -- that Pugachev couldn't keep her satisfied, and as a result she had slept with half the professors in the college, and most of the administrators.
Every single male graduate student claimed to have slept with her at some point, which is why I distrusted the rumors -- half those guys couldn't get laid by their own palms, never mind someone as attractive as Irina. Many of the claims about her were just braggadocio between physics geeks.
Still, I suspected they weren't all lies, because I had seen Pugachev rise to the bait on several occasions where Irina was concerned. Most notably, one of the other professors made a reference to seeing her at a Chicago Symphony performance of Prokofiev's
Romeo and Juliet
. Pugachev had acted very suspicious, grilling his colleague about her companion -- what he looked like, when this was, and what she had been wearing. He tried to be nonchalant about it, but his jealousy was obvious.
Irina was well-liked among the students and staff. She was witty, flirtatious, beautiful, and far too good for Professor Pugachev. They had a beauty-and-the-beast relationship normally reserved for rock stars, actors, and billionaires.
