“I’ve known a lot of men who were less bright by a long shot—a lot of men with no mental equipment to speak of—but I’ve never met one with so much mental equipment being put to so little use.”
I laughed at that—one of those reckless, bitter laughs that Bertie Wooster used to specialize in. “You sound just like my faculty adviser in graduate school,” I told her. “You have no idea how much you sound like him.”
She sighed, and I could see the anger drain away from her. Unexpectedly, she apologized for losing her temper. “I have to adjust my own thinking to this, Jared. You see, what I find maddening about you is just what Charles found useful. You’re able to hold information in your head for an incredibly long time without drawing a conclusion. To me, this looks like stupidity. To Charles, it looked like … something else.”
“You mean it takes me a long time to get things.”
“That’s the way it looks to me. To Charles, it looked like you had a terrific capacity for not jumping. For resisting the temptation to understand too quickly. For resisting the temptation to grab onto something, even if it wasn’t what he was saying.”
“Wow,” I said. “What a fabulous thing to be good at.”
“Don’t knock it, Jared—and I’ll try not to knock it either. But where it kills you is in dealing with someone like Fr. Lulfre. You think pawn to queen four is a brilliant first move, but while you’re shoving up that pawn, he’s bringing out both knights, both bishops, and has castled. He’s always eight moves ahead of you.”
“How does Fr. Lulfre come into this?”
“He comes into this by way of you, of course. He dropped you into this action two weeks ago and can pull you out whenever he pleases.” She cocked her head to one side. “Unless you’re ready to walk away from your vocation.”
“I’m not.”
“Then here’s what you have to face right now: Fr. Lulfre knows you at least as well as I do. This means that, consciously or unconsciously, he chose you because you won’t leap ahead to conclusions he wants to reserve to himself.”
“Now I have an inkling,” I said, “of how a retarded person must feel when he finally realizes that he is retarded.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“I have a question I’ve no business asking but that I’m going to ask anyway. What was your relationship with Charles?”
She gave me a frozen look, which I returned. “You didn’t dare to ask Charles that.”
“That’s right.”
“But you dare to ask me. Why?”
“Because you’re the one I want to hear it from.”
“Why is that?” she demanded, glaring.
“If Fr. Lulfre is eight moves ahead of me, then you must be at least four moves ahead, in which case you already know why. I’m still at move one, trying to figure it out.”
B gave me a long look in an effort to sort through this mess. I’m not sure whether it was beyond her or she just decided to pretend it was beyond her. In any case, she said, “B and I were not lovers.”
“I see. Nothing to add to that?”
“We were exactly what you saw. What part of that do you need to have explained?”
“None of it,” I said. “I just didn’t realize I was in the presence of a miracle. Friendships like yours are one in a billion. You were damned lucky—the two of you.”
She sat through a full minute like a rock, refusing to let me see the tears welling up in her eyes, and if I’d been foolish enough to say a word or reach out a hand, she probably would have flattened me. At the end of it, she brushed the
tears away, not minding my seeing her do that, because it was over.
“Characteristically,” I said, “I don’t know what’s going on. What are we doing here?”
“I’m picking up your education where Charles left it off.”
I stared at her for a while then asked why she would do that. “I know why Charles would do it, I just don’t understand why you would do it.”
“You probably won’t like this answer,” she said after a moment’s thought, “but it’s the only one I have. You see this education as a favor we’re doing you, not as a necessity. We see it as a necessity because we’re playing four moves ahead of you. Can you accept that?”