Heart the Lover
About this book
In her final year of college, the unnamed narrator meets Sam and Yash in a seventeenth-century literature class. The two best friends live in a professor's house and invite her into a private world of books, arguments, card games, and intellectual competition.
She is drawn to both men and to the version of herself their attention seems to create. Desire alters the friendship in ways that no clever reading of motive can contain, leaving choices whose effects persist long after the term ends.
The narrator addresses the past with the knowledge of a working writer and with uncertainty about how either man would tell it. Literature supplies a shared language, but it cannot make memory impartial or first love follow a clean form.
Heart the Lover is a standalone intimate novel about friendship, ambition, and the afterlife of a college relationship. Lily King returns to questions of writers and desire while focusing on what decades of revision cannot fully settle.
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From the opening
I
You knew I’d write a book about you someday. You said once that I’d dredged up the whole hit parade minus you.
I’ll never know how you’d tell it.
For me it begins here. Like this.
The professor is holding up two neon-orange pieces of paper.
‘Despite its vulgar packaging,’ he says, waving a page in each hand like a flagman at Daytona, ‘I feel compelled to read this one aloud.’
The assignment had been to write a contemporary version of Bacon’s essay ‘History of Life and Death.’ I’d waited till the last minute to write it. The only paper we had in the house was this thick stuff left over from our Halloween party. And it wasn’t easy, feeding that cardstock into my typewriter.
The professor doesn’t read it as much as perform it. He gives it far more life and humor than I imagined it had.
There are two smart guys in the class. They sit up front together and I see only the backs of their heads, one with coppery brown hair and the other with a thick black ponytail. The professor runs things by them so often I assume they’re his grad school TAs. When my essay gets passed back to me, they both turn to watch where it goes.
After that day, the copper-haired one begins migrating back. Three classes later, he takes a seat beside me.
Soon he is walking me across campus to Modern Furniture, the only art history class that wasn’t full by the time I signed up. Our seventeenth-century lit class has only about thirty people, but Modern Furniture is held in an auditorium with cushioned seats set on a steep slope down to the professor at his podium. Behind him is a big screen that flashes pictures of Corbusier’s B 306 chaise longue and Bauhaus nesting tables. I catch up on a lot of sleep in that class.
Sam has short halting steps and speaks in fits and starts too, little articulate bursts then a good bit of silence. We talk exclusively about the class.
‘He’s not focusing enough on Cromwell,’ he says, ‘and how resistance to him galvanized the imagination of this whole generation of writers.’
I agree. What else can I do? I am a mere student, and he is a scholar. That much is clear right away. I’ve never met a scholar who wasn’t a professor. And Sam isn’t even a grad student. He’s a senior, like me.
Later I go to the library and read about who Cromwell was, and the next time we walk to Modern Furniture I make a very small joke about the Rump Parliament. Sam’s laugh is soundless, more like panting.
He asks me if I’ve seen The Deer Hunter and I say yes and I figure he’s going to make a comparison somehow with Venitore, the hunter, in The Compleat Angler. Instead he asks me if I want to see it again, with him. It’s playing on campus Friday night.
We meet at the Student Union. He’s already bought my ticket. They’ve set up rows of metal chairs and a screen on a stand. We sit and wait for the lights to go out. My roommate, Carson, passes us with her boyfriend, Bud, a Green Beret who drives up from Fort Bragg every chance he gets. They’re arguing as they sidestep to empty seats three rows ahead of us and then, once settled, start groping each other.
The movie starts. It is long and brutal. I have to look down into my lap for half of it. Sam sits like a stranger beside me. Finally they sing ‘God Bless America’ at the dinner table after Christopher Walken’s funeral, the frame freezes, and it is over. Sam gets up as soon as the credits roll, and I follow him out of the Student Union.
We head down a campus path that isn’t in the direction of my room on Pye Street or toward town, where I thought we might get a drink. He points out his dorm from freshman year and I point out mine the next quad over. The movie has made these buildings, these quads, these years of our lives seem unbearably naïve. I want to say something about it, but that feels naïve, too. Instead I start to say that I have to get up early and he asks if I’d like to get a beer.
We walk toward the bars, but he veers onto a side street then through the gate of a white fence and up a stepping-stone path to a front door lit by an overhead light.
‘Where are we?’
‘My house.’
I can tell he wanted to show it to me, knew it would be a draw.
It is.
He turns the knob—the house is unlocked—and holds the door open for me. I step into a small vestibule with steep stairs off to the left. To the right is a little table with a lamp and a pad of paper with a pen on top. Through an open door is a living room painted navy blue with a striped couch and a wall of books.
I remark on the number of books.
‘That’s just the overspill,’ he says. I follow him through the living room into a large study out of an old movie—four walls of floor-to-ceiling books, a big, thick-legged desk, and a leather chair before the fireplace.
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‘Is this where you smoke your pipe in the evening?’
With a small smile he pulls open the top drawer of the table beside the leather chair to reveal four old pipes nestled neatly on a wooden rack.
I laugh and he pants.
‘Whose house is this?’
‘Dr. Gastrell’s. Did you ever have him for Chaucer? Or his seminar on Milton?’
I shake my head. I’ve heard of Gastrell before. ‘Gastric,’ people call him. Stay away, I’ve heard, he’s notoriously hard. Can undergrads actually take seminars?
‘He’s on sabbatical, doing research at Merton.’ He sees my lack of recognition. ‘At Oxford. He asked us to take care of the place for the year.’
‘Us?’
‘Yash and me.’
Yash?
There’s so much he expects me to know.
Neither of us is sure what to say after that. Sam shuts the drawer with the pipes and I ask where the bathroom is. He points to a sloped door beneath the stairs. I don’t really have to go. I just need to be alone for a minute. The toilet bowl is deep and the tiny bit I pee makes a loud sound when it hits the water, so I stop. The mirror above the sink is an oval fixed high on the wall. I can see half my forehead at a time, one eye or the other, if I stand on tiptoe.
The hallway is empty, the door out to the street a few steps away. In ten minutes I could be back in my room on Pye Street. But Carson and Bud will be there going at it in one way or another. A refrigerator opens and I follow the sound.
We sit with our bottles of beer on the striped couch in the navy room. Its cushions are stiff and we are stiff and he isn’t a guy who’s afraid of the long pause. We pick at our labels and speak sporadically. He asks if I have a lot of work this weekend and I say I have to write a short story.
‘Why?’
‘For my fiction class.’
He nods slowly, full of some thought he’s decided not to share. ‘What will you write about?’
I look around the room. ‘Tonight, probably.’
He looks alarmed. Then he pants. ‘Good one.’
The front door opens and slams against the wall.
‘Fucking fucking hell,’ says a voice from the hallway. The door shudders shut. ‘I’m locking it in case she followed me.’ A whoop-laugh. ‘You here? How was the daisy?’ He swings into the room, the other guy from our class. Yash. ‘Oh my. If she isn’t right here before us.’
His hair is out of its ponytail, thick and black, just past his shoulders. He is trying hard to stop laughing.
‘The daisy?’ I say.
‘Date, daisy,’ he says. ‘We call all our dates daisies. And my daisy tonight was a doozy.’ He smiles wide and comes closer. I glance at Sam, worried that he’s going to kick him out, but he’s got a little grin on his face I haven’t seen yet. He’s as relieved as I am that there are three of us now.
‘What happened?’ he says.
‘Well, I go and pick her up at Kappa,’ Yash says, standing in front of the coffee table facing us. Sam and I lean back at the same time, as if we’ve turned on a TV. ‘You have to sign in and give blood and take a vow of chastity and then you have to wait in a fucking parlor with doilies on all the tables for twenty minutes with all the other pathetic dudes. God, that guy Ian was there—the one who quoted Victor Hugo’s last words.’
Sam chuckles. ‘I see black light.’
‘I saw black light at Kappa for sure. It’s creepy in that room, and sort of smelly too, like if I get a whiff of my mother’s fingers, all the stuff she’s poked her fingers in during the day.’ He looks at me and jabs a finger in the air a few times. ‘My mother is a real poker,’ he says. ‘Finally we hear steps on the stairs and these girls all come down together and they look kind of alike and now none of us remember anymore who we’re taking out because we’ve been stuck in that playpen all night. However, someone identifies me from the lineup and we get the hell out of there. I take her to Pip’s, we talk about her father, who has some rare ghastly disease, and her brother, who sounds like an a-hole, and I order something that should have been called maroon glop over dirty sponge and bring her back to Kappa. She wants to show me something back in the playpen, which is now empty and very dimly lit, and I have to look at some god-awful Confederate musket on the wall, which she reveals belonged to her grandfather, and I head fast for the door, but her legs are suddenly ten feet long and she gets there first and presses me up against some coat hooks and unhinges her jaw like a snake. It was terrifying. I make a break and manage to get the screen door between us’—he holds up the imaginary door like a shield—‘and say goodnight politely and run.’
Sam is laughing so hard he makes sound.
Yash snorts and apologizes and wipes his eyes. He straightens up and wiggles his fingers at us. ‘I hope this is going a little better.’
‘It’s a little awkward,’ I say, and they both laugh.
‘It’ll get better. Sam is an acquired taste,’ he says. ‘Bonne nuit.’ And he clomps up the stairs.
Sam gets up and shuts both doors to the living room. When he sits back down on the couch, he’s closer.
‘The daisy? Please tell me not as in Daisy Buchanan.’
‘In a good way,’ he says, and kisses me.
On Monday Sam walks me to Modern Furniture, and when I get out fifty minutes later he’s waiting.
‘Want to come over for lunch?’
We eat turkey sandwiches and make out on the couch again. He doesn’t rush things. We kiss and kiss until I have to go to Logic.
I walk across campus a little lightheaded. I keep bursting out laughing, thinking about making out on Doc Gastric’s couch on a Monday in broad daylight. All the awkwardness dissolved when we were kissing. He said little things and I said little things and we made each other laugh on that striped couch.
Could he tell how little experience I’d had? Only one boyfriend so far, Jay, the year before. We met in the fall and I brought him home for spring break and fell out of love with him in my mother’s kitchen. I told him on the plane back to school, which is a terrible place to break up. He cried and thrashed around but wouldn’t get up and go to the bathroom to pull himself together. The conversation started quietly enough, with him saying what he often said to me, which was that I bottled up my feelings until they came out like a fire hose, that if I didn’t withhold so much we could reach each other better. But as he slowly realized that he wasn’t going to be able to talk me out of my decision, his recriminations got louder. He’d paid for our flights. He could have gone to Key West with his friends instead of a shitty town in Massachusetts. His mother thought I was lesbian. ‘I taught you everything I know about sex!’ he hollered all the way down the aisle into the cockpit, which had no door back then. It was true. He had. I’d been a virgin and he’d been a fun and loving guide. I’d had nothing to compare him or our sex to at the time, but now I know that he was particularly uninhibited and passed along that attitude to me. He did not like that now I was going to pass it along to someone else. He got very hung up on that fact. It was the longest flight of my life, and I was grateful when the wheels hit the runway and my freedom was near. After Jay, I made out with the bartender at the restaurant I worked at, with a guy at the senior pig roast at the start of the semester, and most recently with a friend of Carson’s who had also dressed up as Cyndi Lauper for our Halloween party.
Sam invites me for dinner on Friday. I imagine having the house to ourselves, Dr. Gastrell’s candlesticks lit in the dining room. At the door, I hand him a bottle of wine.
Sam looks at the label and puts his arm out for me to go into the living room.
‘We’re pairing a 1987 Riesling with the pepperoni this evening,’ he says behind me to Yash and a guy I don’t know on the couch. This guy has a mat of ginger curls six inches thick on top of his head. He has short legs and big sneakers splayed on top of Dr. Gastrell’s polished coffee table. Beside the sneakers are four boxes of pizza. Yash goes to fetch some wineglasses.
Ginger guy points at me. ‘Freshman year. Stranger mixer. You went with Dale Greensmith.’
‘This is Ivan,’ Sam says.
Ivan shuts his eyes. ‘Red dress. Black buttons.’
‘Well you’re freaky.’
‘I’m right, aren’t I?’
‘About the dress. The date I don’t remember.’
They laugh like I’m lying, like you could never remember a dress better than a guy.
‘In Riesling veritas,’ Yash says, pouring the wine into small, impossibly thin glasses the shape of bluebells. ‘We’ll get to the truth about old Dale Greensmith before the end of the night.’
Sam and I sit in the armchairs across from Yash and Ivan. The wine is sweet and foul, but I love holding the fragile little glass in my fingers.
Ivan is another English major I’ve never met before. ‘Tell me everything, bar-none everything, that comes to mind when you think about James Joyce,’ he says.
Fortunately my high school English teacher was a little obsessed with Joyce. ‘Stream of consciousness, onomatopoeia, epiphany, yes I will yes I said Yes, and falling softly, softly falling on the living and the dead.’
Ivan presses the heels of his hands into his eyeballs and rocks his head back and forth. ‘“Falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.” I’m so fucked,’ he whines.
‘He’s writing his thesis on Finnegans Wake,’ Sam says.
Ivan parts his hands to look at me with a last shred of hope. But I’ve never heard of it.
‘Are you writing a thesis?’ I ask Sam.
‘You have to, in the honors program.’
‘Oh, right.’ The honors program. I feel like I go to a different college, and they know it.
‘Who have you taken?’ Ivan asks.
It was that kind of thing. They don’t ask what classes but which professors.
I strain a little to think of some names. ‘Brody, Iyengar, Doukas.’ They were the only ones that came to mind.
No recognition.
‘They teach creative writing.’
‘Those poor fucks,’ Ivan says. Sam signals something to him. ‘I just mean, what could be worse than reading crappy stories all semester?’
‘They’re not crappy anymore. I’m in advanced.’ You had to take 101, 201, and 301 to get into advanced.
‘Oh, advanced.’ Ivan laughs.
‘I took a creative writing class freshman year,’ Yash says.
‘No you didn’t,’ Sam says.
‘I did. With Iyengar.’ He looks at me. ‘She hated my story.’
‘That is not true,’ Sam says.
‘Hated it.’
‘There were little checkmarks and a nice comment.’
‘Two checkmarks in fifteen pages, and the comment was patronizing.’
‘It wasn’t.’
‘This shows future promise.’ He grimaces.
‘It was probably the first paper you’d ever gotten back without the word “genius” or “incandescent,”’ Sam says, ‘at the bottom.’
‘It’s not that. It isn’t. But “future promise”? Like someday far from now I may show the faintest flicker of talent?’
‘So you never took another one?’ I ask.
‘No.’
‘He didn’t even take that one,’ Sam says. ‘He dropped it after three weeks.’
‘None of the writers I admire ever took a class in creative writing,’ Yash says. ‘I think I’ll be okay.’
Ivan passes me a slice of pizza on a delicate white plate with a gold rim and a cluster of rosebuds in the center. ‘Apart from the night of the red dress, why have we never seen you before?’ he asks me. ‘Where have you been hiding?’
I wasn’t in a sorority and I didn’t go to frat parties and I worked at a restaurant three nights a week. ‘I don’t know. I was on the golf team for my first year, so I traveled a lot.’ This is stretching the truth a bit.
‘You were on the fucking golf team?’ he says. Our university has a very good golf team—ACC Champions eleven years straight.
‘Freshman year. Then I quit.’ I quit the first week.
‘Damn. You were a recruit.’
‘Everyone’s a recruit.’ Did he think it was 1920? No one walked on anymore.
‘She’s not Daisy Buchanan, she’s Jordan Baker,’ Yash says, then bends an ear toward me. ‘Does your voice sound like money?’
‘No. It sounds like someone who gave up her golf scholarship.’
I can tell they all like me better once they’ve changed my name to Jordan. They use it a lot.
Yash carries the empty pizza boxes into the kitchen and comes back with cards. ‘Surely Jordan knows how to play hearts.’
I don’t, but I love card games and am a quick learner and shoot the moon in the second hand.
‘Jordan. Sly J. Watch out there, Sammy.’
Sam glances quickly at me, that little smile above his fan of cards.
‘Well,’ says Sam after we play six hands, gathering up all the cards and not dealing them out again.
‘Time to show her your etchings?’ Ivan says. ‘There are actual etchings in his room. God’s truth.’
‘Have a look?’ Sam is blushing and also asking me with his eyes.
Yash is loading the dishwasher in the kitchen.
I nod.
In the hallway he takes my hand and I follow him up the tight steep staircase. There’s a turn at the top then two more steps. He reaches for a switch on the wall. An old sconce comes on after a delay, dimly. He leads me into the front bedroom. He doesn’t turn on the overhead and we don’t look at any etchings. He pulls me onto Dr. Gastrell’s tall double bed.
We kiss and wrap our legs around each other and he says he’s been wanting to get me up here all night. We press hard against each other and I feel like I might come before I get my jeans off. We laugh because my fingers don’t seem to be working but I get them unzipped and he reaches for me as soon as I kick them off and he makes a sort of low growl when he feels how wet I am. I feel him, too, straining against the zipper of his jeans. I reach for his belt and he says something that sounds like no. I can feel his pulse through the fabric, the shape of his tip. It takes all my strength to remain still. He kisses me and starts to finger me and doesn’t explain why I can’t touch him.
I sit up and pull my pants back on. The desire is still careening around inside me, irritatingly, like being drunk when you need to be sober.
‘Please don’t take it the wrong way,’ he says.
I can hear Yash and Ivan arguing downstairs, a few thuds, then Yash laughing. I feel mortified, like the two of them already know what has happened. Ivan sent us up here. He knew how it would play out. I have a paranoid streak and I need to get out of here.
I put on my shoes, adjust my bra, and open the door.
‘Jordan.’ Sam can move very quickly. He touches my arm, my hip. Lifts my shirt and strokes it with his thumb. ‘Please stay. Please, please, please. I can explain.’ His lips in my hair, his thumb moving over my hipbone. I don’t want to go downstairs and see Yash and Ivan on my way out. Eventually I relent.
We get under the sheets. We keep our shirts and underwear on. He spoons me and kisses my neck and my ear, and my body is in a riot. I need to leave. I need to stay. I can feel him hard against me. I never felt anything like this for Jay. He falls asleep way before I do and does not explain.
I wake up early. I need to go in search of a bathroom. I slip off the bed without waking Sam. Once more I put on my jeans and open the door. The sconce is still on and there are two doors at the end of the hallway. Both shut. My guess is that the bathroom will be above the kitchen because of the plumbing, so I open the door on the left slowly, just a crack.
It’s not a bathroom. It’s Yash in a twin bed under a yellow bedspread. He is surrounded by books. Books in piles along the walls and all around the bed, and a few beside him on the yellow bedspread. He’s on his back with a concentrated, serious expression I’ve never seen before, as if sleep were very hard work. I shut the door and go into the bathroom across the hall.
Sam is awake when I come back. I get in beside him and there’s a lot of kissing and pressing together. With Jay I never liked sex in the morning, but sexual frustration in the morning is even worse. I try to distract myself by looking over his shoulder at the spines of the books on his bedside table. Confessions of Saint Augustine, Paul the Apostle, Mere Christianity.
Oh.
‘I’m hungry,’ I say. ‘I should get going.’
‘I’ll make you breakfast.’
We go down to the kitchen.
It’s a neglected, old-fashioned kitchen with a chipped ceramic sink and big black and white tiles on the floor. There’s a back door with a glass window and a little yard outside with one sad chair perched in the overgrown grass. I sit at the small table against the wall beside the old fridge. Sam makes coffee in one of those percolators with a plastic cylinder at the top that shows the coffee splashing around. He keeps his back to me even while he’s waiting for the water to boil.
He fills the cups and asks me if I take milk. I don’t take coffee so I say no, and he says good, we don’t have any milk, and pants out a laugh. He sits down opposite me at the table and takes long pulls of the coffee with his eyes closed then gets up for a second cup. To me coffee is gross and only parents drink it. I keep thinking I should go but don’t get up. After his second cup he remembers food. He pulls things out of the fridge and I offer to help but he tells me to sit. My body is all out of whack. I don’t remember this kind of silence with Jay. I don’t remember ever wondering what to say or noticing any gaps. I miss him then, for the first time since we broke up. I ask Sam how he and Yash got the house and he says they’d been coming over here for dinner since freshman year when they had Gastrell for Late Medieval Lit. That’s how Yash and Sam met, in that class. Gastrell got Yash a research job at the Sparrow, Sam says. Whatever that is. And, Sam says, he lets Ivan use his study in the faculty club.
‘He’s just really generous to his students. It’s too bad you never had him for anything.’
I’m a good student in English. I get A’s and A-’s and nice words at the bottom of my essays. But I’ve never made friends with any of my professors, all men except for Iyengar. No one has ever given me a perk or suggested a seminar. I waited on Professor Wyler at High Five once, I’d had him for Modern Poetry sophomore spring. He was alone and drank three bourbons and asked me what time I clocked out. I don’t think he was planning to tell me about the honors program. If I’d had Dr. Gastrell, maybe I’d have gotten to see his green bedroom, but I doubt he’d have given me this house for the year for nothing.
Sam makes toast and eggs over easy. He sets the plates down on the table with a ketchup bottle and I feel heavy as lead. I force myself to take a few sips of the black coffee.
I hear Yash coming down the stairs.
‘What’s for breakfast, good people?’ he calls before he comes in. Somehow he knows I’m still here. ‘Morning. Morning.’ He stands at the table, looks down at our plates. ‘No, no, no. How many times must I say it?’ He removes the ketchup and replaces it with red and orange and yellow bottles from the fridge. ‘You must never let Sam make you eggs. It is an exercise in Baptist blandour.’
‘That’s not a word. Even in French.’
‘Blandiosity. Blanditas.’
I pick up the yellow and the orange and sprinkle a few dots on top of the fried eggs. Yash grabs the third bottle and splashes red all over them. The labels are faded and I can’t tell if the sauces are from India. Sam told me Yash’s dad had come to this country alone from Delhi when he was nineteen. He said that Yash’s dad liked to say he stepped off the plane and the first thing he did was get the craziest girl in Tennessee pregnant.
Sam and I watch Yash make his breakfast. He bounces around from fridge to sink to stove. He puts a kettle on and I’m relieved when he replaces my coffee with a cup of tea. He sits down between us, on the side facing the wall, and starts eating fast.
He looks up after a few bites. ‘Sorry. I eat like a jackal.’
‘Older brothers?’
He shakes his head. ‘Only child. But my mother needed to clean the plates as soon as she served the food. You have siblings?’
‘A brother. And steps.’
His eyes widen. ‘Divorced parents. Yay.’ He looks at Sam. ‘Two heathens against one saint.’
He definitely knows what happened in the bedroom.
Sam takes his plate to the sink. ‘One of her parents might have died, Yash.’
Yash looks at me.
‘Divorced,’ I say.
‘Evil stepmother?’
‘Satan’s sister.’
Sam stays at the sink, rinsing his plate for longer than it takes. I’ve known a number of religious people and for a while my mother took me to Mass because she was in love with the cantor, but I’ve never known the kind who sleep with Saint Augustine and Saint Paul by their bed. Sam pours himself another cup of coffee. Number four.
Yash sees me notice. ‘I hope you can stomach the smell of that stuff.’ He looks at Sam. ‘Can I tell her?’
Sam shakes his head weakly.
‘Do you know the Valkyrie?’
‘Who?’
‘Valerie Hayes?’
‘No.’
‘Sam’s old flame. Coffee made her gag. He stopped drinking it for her and he was a beast and that’s a whole different story, but one weekend Sam’s parents came into town and took us out to a lovely brunch and we’re eating our benedicts and Sam’s dad takes a sip of coffee, leans a little too close, and Valerie spews up her eggs so fast no one has time to duck. No one is spared.’
‘It wasn’t that bad.’
‘It was that bad.’
‘My parents loved her.’
‘His parents loved her. Even after that. Good people. Good country people.’
‘Shut up, Rooster.’
‘They’re a tad religious.’
Sam pants. ‘A tad.’
‘A speck. Sam is the rebel. Can you imagine? This is what a black sheep looks like in the Gallagher household.’
Sam is unreadable, looking down into his coffee cup.