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The English Majors

Kevin Statham

    I just saw this movie about the life of Lord Byron and it made me start thinking of Edie again, and when I think of Edie, I can’t help but think of Leo Finnegan. I wish she’d never met him. I guess the fact I went to the film means Edie and I still have something in common, but not really. I have to say it was a pretty boring flick.
    Edie was my first serious love. I guess it was love. That’s what I thought at the time. We met in grad school at Georgetown where we were both English majors. I suppose it was her long chestnut hair that first attracted me to her. We had a good relationship, at first anyway. We spent our weekends scouring bookstores and maybe taking in an artsy film at the Biograph – the theater I visited today. We went to the Smithsonian and the Phillips Collection, and caught jazz acts at Blues Alley. We would stay up all night having pretentious, but entertaining conversations about literature. It’s hard to pinpoint where everything turned sour, but I can’t help but think it had something to do with Leo Finnegan.
    When I met Edie I was living in a run-down but expensive Georgetown apartment with a couple of undergraduates and I was getting pretty sick of the endless partying. Edie was also living with hellish roommates, and after we had dated for a few months we decided to move in together. We went looking for a place and finally decided on a quaint, inexpensive house in Arlington, Va. I thought it was great and Edie did too.
    Our house had a little fenced-in yard that we thought a dog could roam around in, so we went to the SPCA to pick out a pet. I guess it was a surrogate child for us. Edie wanted a lab, preferably a chocolate one, but I wanted a Golden Retriever. When we got to the shelter there were no labs, but Edie took a liking to a small Jack Russell Terrier. I put my foot down, however. I didn’t want a small yappy dog, I wanted a real dog – a loyal companion. Finally I convinced her to adopt a gentle, friendly beast which was part retriever and part god knows what else. I told Edie she could name him anything she wanted. She decided on Wordsworth. I thought that was the stupidest name for an animal I’d ever heard, but I couldn’t go back on my promise.
    Wordsworth became a part of the family and Edie spoiled him rotten, giving him treats all of the time. I guess I did too. We lived with Wordsworth until we both obtained our masters’ degrees. We celebrated by going to Comedy Paradise, a club we went to on occasion. As luck had it, Larry Littleman, our favorite comic was playing graduation weekend. There was almost nothing we would rather do than see Littleman.
    I think we laughed louder that night than all the times we’d been to Comedy Paradise put together. Littleman had a new routine about leaving college and entering the real world. He said that’d he’d faked an illness so he could live with his parents after graduation. It was as if he’d planned the act just for us. After the show Edie went backstage to get Littleman’s autograph. At home she pasted it in her scrapbook.
    Littleman was right. The real world punched us smack in the face, and we had to get jobs to pay our student loans. I began writing and editing for a business trade publication. Not exactly Ernest Hemingway stuff, but I think Edie was proud to have a writer for a boyfriend. Edie had a harder time with her job search. She didn’t want to be an office worker, but eventually landed a position teaching English at Northern Virginia Community College.
    Our new careers satisfied us and on weekends we went to the DC Mall and tried to train Wordsworth to catch a Frisbee. We weren’t successful but the attempt was fun. Every evening we would cook a different kind of food. I’m not talking Hamburger Helper stuff, but real food – gourmet. After a while we became fairly proficient chefs.
    Edie began making friends at work and often talked about them over supper. She especially talked about Leo Finnegan who was a creative writing teacher at NOVA CC. She used to tell me that he had spent the last ten years traveling, working a variety of jobs and writing poetry. She said he’d even been to Europe and Asia, supporting himself by teaching English as a second language. Every evening she had a new Leo Finnegan tale to tell.
    After a while I got sick of hearing about Leo Finnegan, but Edie insisted we have him over for dinner. She said I must meet him. “You both have the writing thing in common,” she said. I must admit I was getting a little jealous of this Leo character. I wondered if he was becoming a threat to our relationship.
    When Leo finally came over for dinner, I was a little relieved. He was a short, slightly pudgy guy with glasses. Not the type to sweep Edie off of her feet. He brought a bottle of Chablis from a vineyard I’d never heard of. We asked him to have a seat and he plopped down at the dining room table.
    Edie and I had spent all afternoon preparing a French lobster dish. Edie did most of the work. She wanted everything to be perfect. Every fifteen minutes or so she tossed a scrap of food to Wordsworth, and I worried there would be nothing left for us.
    We sat around the table before dinner, sipping wine and gabbing about literature. Edie and Leo shared a love of the Romantics, especially Shelley. Leo said his poetry was lyrical in nature and greatly influenced by the Romantics. He began to tell us about one of his poems called “The Willful Spirit.” Edie asked him if he had it with him and he said “yes”, tugging a neatly folded sheet of paper from his breast pocket.
     “Read it for us,” Edie said. Leo immediately began to recite in a serious, somewhat haughty tone. I guess the poem wasn’t too bad, but I resented the fact that our dinner had become a poetry reading. His poem celebrated travel and experiencing nature in all of its facets. I thought is verse was a glorification of his lifestyle.
    I could tell Edie was enthralled by the way her eyes widened as he read. After he finished she burst into applause, exclaiming, “Excellent, excellent!”
    Leo asked me what I did for a living and I said I was a magazine writer.
    “I admire anyone who writes, no matter at what level,” he said.
    At that point I just wanted to smack the little bastard in the face.
    I left the dining room and went to the bathroom. While washing my hands and peering into the mirror, I took consolation that Leo had nothing on my sharp facial features and strong chin.
    For the next few weeks Edie talked about Leo a lot, and frankly it worried me. I told her I felt sorry for him, being so homely and all.
    “I don’t think so at all,” Edie said. “His poetry makes him sexy.” I wondered if they were having an affair.
    I tried to re-spark our relationship by coming up with different exotic dishes, but Edie began wanting to go to restaurants. Even though we couldn’t afford it, I began taking Edie out to different ethnic restaurants, but our dinnertime conversations dejected me. She complained a lot, especially about her job. She said she was sick of teaching elementary concepts to teenagers who would rather be home watching MTV. She said she wanted to teach at a higher level and talked of pursuing her doctorate.
    I didn’t see how she could possibly afford more graduate school. Our student loan payments were already straining our finances beyond belief, but Edie said literature was more important than money.
     “That Leo guy is really going to your head,” I said. “What’s he going to have in ten years? He has no financial future.”
    “He has his art and that’s enough,” she said. “Besides, it’s a lot better than that crap you write.”
    That was the first time I realized how much she was changing.
    Over the next few months I was anxious. I tried to keep tabs on Edie, wondering if she was sleeping with Leo. One time I even followed her, but all she did was eat at a Vietnamese restaurant and wander through an art gallery. Whenever she came home late, visions of Edie and Leo locked in embrace invaded my thinking. Finally I confronted her about it.
    “You’re sleeping with him, aren’t you?” I said.
    “What?” she said, bunching her eyebrows together.
    “You and Leo are having an affair.”
    “You’re not serious?” she asked.
    ”I’m dead serious. You’re always talking about the guyÉhow great his poetry is and what an adventurous life he’s led. Do you think I can’t see what’s going on? Do you think I’m stupid?”
    “You must be stupid if you really believe that. I can’t believe you’re so insecure.”
    After that we grew more distant. We didn’t talk much anymore. Edie skulked about the house as if I’d accused her of being a whore. I guess I did in a way.
    At the end of the community college semester, Leo announced he would be moving on. He said he had a travelling bone. Nothing could have pleased me more. I thought his departure might allow Edie and I to renew our relationship.
    We resumed cooking again, but Edie wanted to prepare simpler meals to allow her time to read. After dinner she would pore over Shelley’s poems or some literary criticism of the Romantics.
    Because the community college wasn’t in session I asked her what she did with her days. She said she drove up to the mountains near Leesburg and wandered around. She said she was writing poetry of her own. I asked her if she took Wordsworth with her and she said “no”, that she needed to be alone to commune with nature.
    I was flipping through the paper one day and spotted an ad for a Larry Littleman gig at the Comedy Paradise. I thought it would be a great dose of nostalgia for us to see him. I talked Edie into going. We arrived early to get a good table and I was excited at the prospect of laughing with Edie, just like old times.
    I was chuckling the minute Littleman stepped on stage. He played a lot of colleges and his shows often had an academic twist. He told this joke about a philosophy student who takes a career aptitude test. The results indicate he should be a horse stable attendant. “You must be joking,” the student tells the test administrator. “No, I’m serious,” the administrator says. The job is shoveling shit. Isn’t that what you’re trained to do?” Littleman had another. “How do you spot a poet? He’s the one at the head of the government cheese line.”
    I was cracking up, but when I looked over at Edie she wasn’t even smiling. She just sat there, drinking too much and appearing irritated. After the show Edie said Littleman was trite and banal, and she wondered what she ever saw in him. That’s when I knew our relationship was over. We had nothing in common anymore.
    A few days later Edie announced she was moving to Berkeley to pursue her doctorate. Apparently she had applied some time ago and was accepted. We began dividing our possessions. I thought the most difficult battle would be who decided to keep Wordsworth. Edie said I could keep him. She didn’t want him anymore.
    The day she drove off she didn’t even kiss me goodbye. She just shook my hand limply and walked to the car.
    That was the last time I saw her. Even though there has been no one else in my life, I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t think about her much anymore. That is, until today when I went to see that stupid movie. I’m sitting in a Georgetown bar right now and I’ve had more than a couple of drinks. I wonder what Edie is doing. I can picture her, holed up in a small apartment, reading “Mont Blanc”, mentally climbing the mountain higher and higher, far away from the Earth.

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