Melusine

Marilyn Harris Kriegel

History

Virginia knew that getting a sexually transmitted disease at 62 signified more than a moment’s bad judgment. Yet no matter how she ran the information through her tortured mind it left her dumb. More unfamiliar than the HIV virus replicating its way through her body was her sudden inability to categorize, or fix the situation.

Distracted, she sat at her desk trying to assemble an agenda for the History Department’s annual budget meeting. This time of year was fraught with fear: The younger staff afraid of being fired; the tenured terrified that prized classes would be reassigned to the more published and popular; the petty politics of possession, greed, position and power all of which had been a source of amusement and challenge to her, today seemed trivial.

At the top of the page she wrote AGENDA. Under Roman numeral I she wrote Death. When she wondered, in a year? Longer? Should she resign? Wait out the disease? Wait out the predatory professors already competing to step into her place of supremacy and power when she retired.

Virginia had worked long, hard and carefully to secure the leadership of the department. In every way possible she had made sure her position was unassailable. Yet, she had not covered her flank. She could not complete one thought without her mind drifting away to the diagnosis.

Year after year she cautioned her undergraduates that one small digression from an otherwise circumspectly lived life could radically change the course of history but had never applied it to herself. Christ, she thought, and then ran into a dead end, a pile up of clichés: it wasn’t fair, it wasn’t worth it, and it wasn’t what she had planned for her last years at the University. She would have asked why me, but the banality of the question was too humiliating to pursue.

Mortified, she told no one. Her colleagues noted her distraction with disinterest assuming she once again was immersed in research. Her closed door along the corridor of offices indicated work in progress. There was no need of a sign, a closed-door read do not disturb.

Virginia had read Gideon’s letter, written on Marriott Hotel stationary, in disbelief. Then, accepting his advice, she drove herself South of Market Street to the clinic where she exchanged her blood for a number. They were kind when she returned to receive what she thought of as “the death sentence”. They tried to explain that HIV generally could be managed with some relatively insignificant changes in her daily routines. They were full of pamphlets and suggestions, but she could not wait to leave and be alone.

She drove immediately across the city to the Great Highway to walk the long empty beach in solitude. She embraced the comfort of the infinite horizon while she sorted through what might be left for her of life.

What is left in anyone’s life? What does any older woman have to look forward to? Perhaps this is simply a gift, she thought, a foreshortening of the inevitable, the other shoe finally dropping. Perhaps, she should be grateful instead of frightened, humiliated, and alone. Nothing she could think of had ever left her feeling as abandoned as this.

Virginia had continued to return to the beach for solace and to contemplate her alternatives. Regret was not one of them, history was made by moving in the only direction possible, forward. Nothing could be undone. The fact of HIV was incontrovertible. Her work had always been the study of that which could not be changed, but which with luck and persistence, could possibly be understood. She would think about her own life as history, look for undiscovered patterns and then she would write the last chapter. There was research to be done. And, there was swimming.

Years before Virginia had taken to swimming laps regularly at the university natatorium, loving the rhythmic repetition and profound isolation. Now she bought a wetsuit and began to swim in the ocean, sometimes at Stinson Beach, occasionally just beyond the Gate at Kirby’s Cove. Friends thought of it as a fitness craze born of vanity, a last ditch effort to defeat the ravages of gravity. She thought of the vast ocean as the beginning and end of history, as her escape.

Every afternoon she swam out as far as her breath allowed, and then after resting on the swell, turned back, riding the waves to shore. It was a new way of life for her, one in which chance became a dominant player. At any moment the weather could change, or the wind or the swells. She could over-estimate her strength, or underestimate the undertow. She began teaching herself to live on the edge of the danger she had for so long carefully tried to avoid.

Virginia thought of a swim to the Farallon Islands as an elegant final solution. She rehearsed for it, leaving her car keys and clothes in a neat pile on the shore. Of course, she knew she could never make it but if she became strong perhaps she would be able to swim out far enough to become dinner for one of the Great Whites that cruised the north coast for seal. She could become a part of a shark’s history, or simply sink to the bottom, an anonymous woman from the end of the millennium.

At the same time she rehearsed for her death she researched life. In spite of having in the past frowned on what she called the web’s plethora of misinformation, she found her way into the intricacies of HIV protocols. She had chided her students for having little respect for history because, at some limbic level, they believed that it could be rewritten in blogs, cut and pasted into posterity. Nevertheless she read everything she could find, grateful for the volumes of material she digested in the privacy of her den.

She sat at her desk staring at the piece of paper. Perhaps, she thought, running the end of her freshly sharpened pencil back and forth under the word Death, nothing would happen until after she retired. Perhaps she would get away with ... she laughed. Murder.

Up until the phone call from Gideon, Virginia had lived a scholar’s life, studying, writing and teaching, her area of expertise, the role of women, in particular widows, during the Civil War. From the sanctuary of her position at the university she investigated another century’s debacles, other women’s tragedies, terrible times rich in pathos, replete in dramatic values. The boundaries she had drawn so precisely around her own life, until that night, had provided the security that is found in consistency. Predictability. Only twice in twenty-five years had she invited a student to visit her home.

She pushed her old, comfortable chair away from the desk to pace, searching for a clue as to how Gideon had so easily penetrated her defense. He had phoned, a voice from the past, deeper than she had recalled. Sweeter. Yes, sweet. She paused recollecting his soft appealing drawl. Damn she said circling back to her desk only to stare at the one word she had written under the heading, Agenda. She turned away to the window. Outside were all the signs of a West Coast spring: tulips, daffodils, acacia and broom. Inside, her office felt airless and small. Yes, she had told him, she remembered him -- his exquisite paper about the singing soldiers, the ballads of the Civil War. What have you been doing? Music? Where? Yes, of course, let’s have coffee.

Let’s have coffee. Let’s have coffee? What had she been thinking? What had his call awakened? Why hadn’t she met him in any one of myriad coffee shop surrounding campus? What had she wanted enough to invite the enemy behind the lines?

Invasion. Loss: the inevitable consequence of an incursion. Virginia leaned her forehead against the windowpane, the cool glass against her brow providing a brief respite as she parsed each moment of the formidable late afternoon.

Within the hour Gideon had been standing at her door. Taller than she’d expected (or was she shrinking with the years?) More commanding than the undergraduates who deferred to her, he had walked in tossed his well-worn leather bomber jacket over a chair and sat down as if it was his living room and she, still standing, his student. “Well,” he had said in bit of a hum, “It’s been too long."

Virginia thought about the agenda that needed her attention. She was familiar with the pull to her desk, the urgency to attend to the task at hand. She had relied for years on her ability to focus, to put aside any distraction. Not now, she cautioned herself. Not now. Now, she would stand at the window and watch the sunlight ebb across the campus, casting shadows. Now, she would remember.

Gideon had followed her, leaned over her at her desk where she went to search for the lyrics of a tune she thought he would like. She had wanted to give him something. He had only touched her shoulder, breathed against her neck, but when she turned to face him, to make space for herself, he had seemed to envelope her.

I was off balance, Virginia thought. I must have held on to him for balance. She could not understand her complete absence of resistance when he held her. I must have wanted ... what? She thought she had turned to Gideon the way poor Sergeant Absalom Peters had led his rag-tag Tennessee brigade north to certain death, writing in his diary that to retreat would have been the greater loss.

Virginia smiled, embarrassed at the memory of having desired Gideon. She had made no protest, allowed him each step. After years without touch she wondered if her body had simply rebelled. Eddie had always made the point that revolution was natural. Why hadn’t she known? Why was it such a surprise?

The incomparable couple: Eddie and Virginia. College sweethearts they had found each other as freshman at one of the great state universities. By the end of the first week of school they discovered they shared not only exact schedules, but also were living on the same floor of the freshman dorm. Their meeting and then meeting again and again catapulted them into a mystery of coincidence and the excitement of waiting to see what would happen next. They seemed destined for each other and were happy to cooperate with circumstance and become inseparable. For four years they studied together, slept together, and enjoyed friends and food together. They swore they were not competitive; they complemented and goaded each other on to the top of their class graduating with identical grade point averages and applying to the same graduate schools as a married couple.

History scholars, they came to the crossroads of their young married lives in the sixties, in the community of small cottages on Leland and Stanford streets named for the founder of the prestigious private university they thought they’d take by storm.

Nothing had prepared them for the possibility of paths more divergent than the particular aspects of American history each chose to investigate. Virginia immersed herself in the study of the Civil War because a country divided against itself was something she intuitively understood. Eddie identified with revolution and the philosophers of the Enlightenment.

He teased that America would have remained a British colony if it had been up to Virginia and she’d countered with the accusation that had he lived in the mid 1800’s he would have been a Northern Copperhead, taking, the repugnant to her, moral position that the South should secede and the country split in two. Hey man, no problem. You do it your way -- we’ll do it ours.

Their differences deepened. Eddie discovered lysergic acid diethylamide and though he tried to convince her that he was participating in a major paradigm shift, his interest in the exploration of consciousness-raising drugs frightened her.

“God woman,” he cried, “You want to study history, I want to make it.”

It was inevitable that they would part, she to the academy, research, authorship and tenure, he to the ecstatic possibilities of pure Sandoz acid and a quest to find within himself Rousseau’s noble savage, uncorrupted by society.

When Eddie died ten years later of a heroin overdose in Mexico, she had mourned not her loss but his choice. Now It amazed her that in one unpremeditated evening almost thirty years later she’d accomplished what she had spent her life avoiding. Oh Eddie, she thought, you would have appreciated the irony.

Then Gideon phoned. He would be back in San Francisco the next day. Could he come? Would she see him? She listened to the green gray depths of his voice the way she had been learning to read the ocean. “Yes,” she said. “After four.” Tomorrow was an intensely busy day she told him, Starting off with the most difficult faculty meeting of the year. Then she would need a few hours –– a few errands to run, some exercise. “Exercise? Oh, I swim,” she told him. “I’m an endurance swimmer.” Virginia smiled, shifted her weight on to one hip and lowered her eyes like a young girl. “Gideon,” she whispered, “come with me. I’d like that, just the two of us, I’ll pick up a wet suit and goggles for you. It’s exhilarating, you’ll love it and then ...” her eyes focused inward to the vastness of the sea and reaching for a word and finding it in the vernacular of her young students, she grinned, “and then, whatever.”

Marilyn Harris Kriegel grew up in Elizabeth, NJ but has spent most of her 70 years in California. She's been a school teacher, union organizer, mother, editor, psychotherapist, nonfiction author, public speaker and a pioneer leading early encounter groups at Esalen Institute. She currently teaches yoga and is getting her MFA in creative writing at SF State.