The Thorn and the Blossom: A Two-Sided Love Story Read Online Free Page B

you’d find it boring here, Evelyn from Boston by way of New York. But Bartlett seems to suit you.”
    “It’s … comfortable. And I’m not just teaching literature this semester. They’ve given me an advanced poetry workshop.”
    “
Advanced
being a euphemism for ‘slightly less terrible than what you would get in introduction to poetry.’ ”
    She laughed. “Well, I did get a poem on plumbing yesterday. It rhymed, too. But what I wanted to say is, I’m going to try writing poetry again, myself.” She felt almost uncomfortable telling him. No one, not her parents, not Professor Lambert at Oxford, not heradviser in the doctoral program at Columbia, had ever encouraged her poetry.
Fanciful nonsense
, she still heard in the back of her mind whenever she tried to pick up a pen and write a poem.
Why don’t you focus on the real world?
Those were the words she’d heard all her life.
    “That’s terrific!” said Brendan. “You know, you have a rare and genuine talent. I wish I had your ear for rhythm. It would have helped me with my translation of
The Tale of the Green Knight
.”
    “Your translation?”
    “The one nobody heard about. You know what Oxford University Press told me? There wasn’t enough scholarly interest in such an obscure Cornish poem. Three years later, they published the translation by Thomas Holbrook.” He grimaced. “Well, at least my translation got me out of graduate school. And to Bartlett.”
    “Why Bartlett?” she asked.
    “The same reason you’re here, I imagine,” he said. “Where are you going to find a tenure-track position for a medievalist nowadays? You were offered this position because old Randolph died, and I’m not joking. Literally keeled over in the lecture hall while his students were taking their final exams.”
    She couldn’t help laughing. “I know, that’s not funny, is it?”
    “Not if you’re an undergraduate who needed to do well on the exam. Are you teaching today?”
    “Not today,” she said. She’d come in to grade the first papers of the semester, which she usually enjoyed doing. They would tell her whether the students were really paying attention and what she could expect from them in terms of run-on sentences and dangling modifiers. But suddenly she felt like getting outside, seeing something other than the four walls of her office. It was a warm fall day. She could see students playing Frisbee on the lawn.
    “Come on, then! Play a little, Associate Professor Morgan!”
    She straightened the papers on her desk, hovered indecisively for a moment, and then followed him out.
    W hat she realized, as the semester progressed, was that she had never been in love before. Not really.
    On most days, she and Brendan ate lunch together, either in the faculty dining room or, when the weather was fine, outside in the courtyard, watching the undergraduates make out. They laughed, but the sight hurt her, like a tightness in her chest that kept her from breathing freely. How long had it been since she’d kissed anyone?
    Brendan took her to Richmond, to what was supposed to resemble a genuine English pub but served spareribs and key lime pie. On the tables were candles in mason jars. In their glow, he looked more tired than she remembered. “How is your father?” she asked.
    He smiled wryly. “Dad died years ago. Keeled over right in the bookstore while cataloging a new shipment of nineteenth-century medical textbooks. Not a bad way to go, all in all. But I sold the store. I couldn’t stand to go back there after that. And what was I going to do with it, anyway? I had just graduated and I’d already been offered the position at Bartlett.”
    “I’m so sorry,” she said, remembering how he had looked there, that first day in Clews. Standing among the shelves. “That must have been difficult. You know, I tried to send you a letter there once. I guess it never reached you. Maybe it was after your father died.”
    “It must have been. I would