The coursework is getting harder, so I’m being kept busy, and I can’t wait for summer to arrive.
There are highlights, too. I go up to see Topper at Harvard when I can, and I visit Cornelia at Radcliffe as well. She’s found herself a boyfriend, a cute, scatterbrained boy with a soft heart and a sense of fun. He wears moth-eaten jumpers and forgets his glasses everywhere. He’s funny and charming, and the two of them are flying on a unicorn through the spring, always together, mostly laughing, sometimes bickering, but in that way that’s more humanist than emotional, like a light-hearted intellectual exercise.
Topper and I don’t get a word in when we have dinner with them; we just watch the organic, performative chaos of the two of them.
“I hope they end up together,” Topper says as we walk back to his house.
“Me too,” I reply, and take his hand.
Topper asks what I want to do after college. I tell him I don’t know for sure.
“You’d better find out soon,” he says, putting his arm around me. “Don’t waste your life doing nothing. I’ve seen too many people like us do that, and it ruins a person.”
“Yes,” I say. “I know.” Then: “I was thinking about interior decorating.”
I don’t tell him that I’ve also entertained ideas of something edging the visual arts, because it still sounds too frivolous. I haven’t worked it all out in my head yet.
He agrees, “I thought that for you too. But I didn’t want to force the thought on you. Interior design sounds great, you have the eye for it.”
Topper unlocks the front door and stretches out his arm. “After you,” he says, letting me step inside first. Once we’re in, he helps me out of my coat and hangs it up neatly in the hall before offering to fix me a drink.
***
I spend the first months of summer on Martha’s Vineyard with Topper, meeting up with Tilly and some of our now-fractured old crew. On sunny days, Topper takes me out on his boat alone. On colder days, we disappear indoors, finding other ways to stay warm.
Afterward, Topper gets up, brings coffee back to bed. He asks what I’m reading, listens when I talk. He’s present, attentive, unhurried. He knows who he is and what he wants. There’s no posturing, no restless energy.
The boy would already be pacing, wanting to go somewhere, do something. He’d consume me and then need more, more attention, more movement, more of everything.
With Topper, there’s space to breathe. He holds me without swallowing me whole.
It’s more civilised. More adult.
I don’t know which I prefer. The boy’s a mess, but a lovable, hysterically funny mess. There’s a romantic fascination in that chaos, that raw unpolished hunger. Nostalgie de la boue, as Tilly calls it, my weakness for what she perceives to be beneath me.
But it’s really something older. Something I can’t quite name.
“Hey. Have you read this?” Topper will say, casually tossing book after book into my lap as he walks by on his way somewhere else in the house.
And I read. And I read.
***
Postcard from Biloxi, July 1956:
Poultry, send me your flight details and I’ll pick you up at the airport.
—Eagle
***
August comes quickly. I have long planned to go home to see Miss Mary, about the house, and about a boy.
Topper takes me to the airport in New York City before flying to Europe with old friends from school.
“I love you,” he says. “But I also know you.”
He parks the car and turns to me. “I don’t want to curb your freedom. Find your own way. If it leads to me, wonderful. If not, I can live with that.”
He takes both my hands. “What I’m trying to say is: do your thing down there in the garden of good and evil. But if you want to keep me around, don’t tell me anything that will rip my heart out. Because then I’ll have to let you go.”
I hug him and tell him I adore him.
“Good,” he says. “Now let’s get you safely on that plane, so you can come back to me in one piece.” He kisses me before I leave him at the gate.
“I love you too,” I say. “See you soon.”
My World of Interiors 