"So I dumped him, naturally," she said. "Couldn't have that now, could we, being married to a star? Absolutely not. I think I dumped him, anyway; it's possible he may've dumped me. Probably depends on who's telling the story. But that was all after a while, not right off.
First he got a job teaching at UMass." and something studious and academic began stirring around again, deep down inside my fevered brain."
She held her hands aloft as though to indicate she was having a vision.
"I perceive that I am getting on in years. By this time I am almost twenty-four, ancient, and I suppose I am beginning at long last to grow up. As the hot-shot young professor's, ah, demure young wife, I was able to get free tuition. Then I was able to talk the proper authorities first into accepting the credits I'd sort of left behind at Wisconsin, and also some I'd sort of picked up while I wasn't doing much of anything else besides sleeping with Tommy in England, kind of studying at the University of London. After that, talking very fast, into letting me switch my major to psychology."
"Wow," Merrion said, "I'm impressed. They always made me give them money."
She smiled. "You probably weren't demure," she said. "I was, I was very demure. And academics're suckers for that. As a teacher's wife I was entitled to the undergrad free tuition anyway, and when they let me transfer credits like that, they were being maybe more than just a little bit crafty. They wanted Tommy to stay at UMass. Didn't want him flying off to some other place, better-known for its economics. So I'm sure it was at the back of their minds to use me to tie him down a little more securely, get his wife involved with a UMass. program of her own.
"So they let me study psych for free, being as how by then I was more interested in that than I was in music. I got so I enjoyed it. I was having fun. So naturally since fun isn't supposed to last very long, it seemed to go fast. It was kind of surprising how fast; what with summer-school and all, and no horsing around, everything fell into place. In just over a year I had enough credits to graduate.
"I'd barely started the grad program for master's in psychiatric social work when Tommy's comet ignited in the heavens of economics and he got precisely what everyone'd been expecting him to get all along: an invitation to join the faculty at the University of Chicago. Muslims have always had Mecca; Tommy in those days had Chicago.
'"I don't think I want to come with you," I told him. "I think I found out where it was that I've always been going. It was here. I want to stay here. You go if you want. I think you should." "So do I," Tommy said, and he did.
"When he left, me and UMass. both, I think they felt a little guilty, too, somehow responsible. After all, they'd lured my young husband to Amherst and what'd he done but go off and leave me there all by myself.
Like it was partly their fault. I didn't discourage that. Whatever they wanted to think that helped me was perfectly all right with me.
I'd finally begun to come down to earth and realize I was never going to be the first-chair oboe in the Cleveland Orchestra and have a torrid affair with George Szell. He was getting a little old for me by then anyway, and since I didn't have a husband anymore I decided the first thing I'd better do was find a way to make a living. And that's why I stayed.
"You see what I mean?" Diane said. "I don't really belong here? This is just where I washed ashore? You and everybody else I've met and gotten to know well here all seem to have some kind of inner gyro that controls you, determines how you rotate. It may be a little out of kilter, so sometimes you spin off-center; quite a few of you're like that. But I've never seen you go completely out of whack. You may teeter and wobble around, but generally you regain control and keep on spinning. And it looks to me as though you can do this without having to think about what you're doing.
"I'm not like that. If something's important to me, I have to have a program, how I'm going to handle it so it doesn't handle me. You're important to me now; we're important to me, so I have to have a program on how I'm going to handle us."
"Why not just make it up as we go along?" Merrion said. "That's what we've been doing up 'til now, isn't it? Worked out okay up to this point, or so I'd say anyway."
