Heart the Lover by Lily King extract

Read an extract from Heart the Lover by Lily King.

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.

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Heart the Lover

by Lily King

From the New York Times bestselling author of Writers & Lovers comes a magnificent and intimate new novel of desire, friendship, loss, and the lasting impact of first love

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