Cities of Refuge (33 page)

She’d stayed in control for as long as it took to start into the story and look back halfway through – there was Carl Oakes emerging from the car with diplomatic plates – and seeing the places where the rage that she’d brought back from Lana’s farm, and woken with, had blunted the telling, and so rewriting them and then moving forward again and finishing it all in a trance. All for a story no one else would ever read.

The Santiago of decades past, scattered all around her room in books in two languages, in printouts and journals, this city had grown in her, it turned out, and organized itself into one fixed perspective. And now she felt in some way that she was inside it, still there, sheltered, the bitterness gone, in the very place he had known. In recent days her thoughts of him had become obscured. She hadn’t been able to call him up in mind with any certainty. The idea of him. The image of him, his face, doubtful, failing to resolve. But now, even out here in the resuming day, he was with her.

She’d described the world as he saw it, an evil world guided by an evil god, but in doing so found a way to penetrate confusion, guilt, anger, even evil itself. And yes, she held to this word,
penetrate
, to mean what she wanted it to mean – she had put herself lovingly inside another. And writing in his voice, she understood that Harold was someone else from the inside. In the time it took to truly imagine her father, to inhabit him, language and thought, the anger gave way to something like forgiveness, something she didn’t, finally, have words for. A place to rest, to stay, so that a soul might find itself.

A car driven by a young black woman passed by and from inside came two notes of a ring tone and the street sat down differently. The light was soft but brimming, as if the invisible world vibrated to a sound she couldn’t hear.

The house was quiet. Donald and Marian had gone to receive the new blood test results. She went back to her room and lay on her bed.

The ring tone notes were still with her, the familiar first notes of an ice cream truck’s overplayed, fuzzy, demagnetizing jingle. She was still high from the writing, overoxygenated, she could see all the way to Peru.

That she’d found this place in herself, there was hope in that. She wished she could grant her father the same reprieve and take him up into this amazing air, this sunblasted air, and in those few moments when she believed she really could take him there, that this reprieve was available to him in the very words she had found, she returned to her desk and sent him the letter.

H
arold stood on a slight rise in the lawn, with a prospect of the Humanities faculty and graduate students. He sipped his wine and scented rain.

The Dean’s Reception marked the start of the fall term. For years he’d met the event with calm forbearance, and then the year arrived when he no longer had to feign that he’d been put out by company, that it was a strain simply to say hello to acquaintances in other departments. This year, today, he was somewhere else again. It seemed likely that at some point in the next thirty minutes he would be addressed and be unable to respond. With their little exchanges, their show of good enterprise, they were all only re-enacting a ritual diversion from things as they really were. They affected to disarm these things, terrible things, by talking at angles to them. In years past, he himself partook of the show. One minute he’d be comparing the patriarchal leadership of Pentecostal churches and
caudillismo
on the haciendas, and the next he was complaining about the new hours at the library, or listening to someone hold forth on a dead Frenchman’s theory about forced relocations in the early soviet. But he saw through it all now. The only true thing that remained was that the wine was never very good, and there was never enough of it.

Now it was his own name on the wind. In approach were the graduate chair of History, Richard Trevorian, and a woman in a floral summer dress. Brown hair, with bold blond streaks. Her face was sharp and intent, but amiable. Harold allowed himself to notice that her arms and calves were those of an athlete. Not long ago, he would have desired her.

“This is the Harold of lore. Harold, this is Carrie Hughes. Our new Americanist. She’s from New York by way of the original Cambridge. You two have overlapping interests, I think. And she knows your work.”

“Hello, Carrie Hughes.”

“It’s all true, what Richard says. He’s thought through my
connection to everyone quite brilliantly.” She briefly put a hand on Trevorian’s arm. He was clearly delighted. Harold suppressed an urge to shake him by the shoulders as if to make him see. “I could have used you before the interview.”

“You nailed the interview. That committee made for a complicated landscape but you moved over it like …”

“Like a lithe beast of the plain? Can I have been that?”

“Clearly you still are,” said Trevorian.

“You know,” she addressed Harold now, “we just missed meeting each other in Tarrytown, at the Rockefeller archives last summer. I was there the week after you left.”

“You were going through the log books.”

“The archivist, James, told me. He knew we had common pursuits.” A lithe beast in pursuit, thought Harold. The fool he once was would deceive himself to think he’d just been sighted. “And this was before I got the job here.”

“Yes, old James.” He could see she didn’t know what to make of his response. He wanted to help her out, but couldn’t. Trevorian was looking at him oddly, on the verge of concern, but then dismissed himself and went off to find Carrie a glass of wine. She stood with her arms at her sides, and felt no need to do anything with her hands, a posture that most people couldn’t carry off. The woman must have been near thirty-five but she stood unselfconsciously, like a girl. Why had he been in New York? He would recall if he could muster the words. “I was researching suspect sources of missionary funding in the eighties. But then I abandoned it. I’ve abandoned every idea over the last few years. It turns out I’ve been right to do so.”

She looked him in the eye, searched his face briefly. She could see he wasn’t kidding.

“Well. I have to choose a faculty mentor. Forgive me if you’re not on the list.”

“Get tenure and then save yourself. That’s what I’ve learned.”

“I have to say, this is a strange party. I just met someone who claimed to be from Cultural Studies. She’s one of those among us who’s built a career on hostility. She’s found a way to com-modify her rage.”

“We all have to do something with it.”

“I confessed to her that I didn’t know what Cultural Studies was if it wasn’t what all of us were doing. But it must be something else because she didn’t seem to know about history, literature, or languages. Apparently she writes on popular subjects for one of the newspapers. A scholar of American celebrities.”

They began to walk along the edge of the party. The expected thing would be to ask about her work, but he didn’t want any expected thing between them. On the lawn beyond the group a couple of young men were playing catch with a baseball, and for several seconds it seemed to him that the parabola of the ball’s flight was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.

“Not that I don’t enjoy a slant on things.” She was talking about the scholar of celebrities. “I have a feminist friend who reviews movies for journals read by six people.”

She seemed to be hoping for returned wit, or at least a smile from him. He was a disappointment. At least the impression he was making was true. Trevorian spotted them and brought the wine. Now that they all had a glass, they toasted Carrie’s arrival. Then they all agreed it was important for her to meet as many of the faculty as she could. As Trevorian led her away, she turned back to Harold and fluttered her fingers and arched her brow comically.

And then something struck him, a kind of knowledge. Within it, a seed of the familiar, and so the promise that it could be forgotten, for it had come to him as a revelation. He must have known it once and lost it. In the past he would have escaped the knowledge by involving himself in a strong distraction. Back when the distractions still charmed him there was hope, though his preferred distractions tended to damage, and the damage replicated. He told himself to leave the party, but that would trap him alone.

He stood at the edge of things, hoping not to be approached. When next he saw Carrie Hughes she was standing, unchaperoned, in a group who weren’t from the department. No one could see, as he could, that she was by herself in the world. He drifted near.

A young man was saying that the college had just been cleared because of a bomb threat. Everyone stole quick, dumb glances at the stone building before them. A campus security guard was in the doorway but none of the bomb police or dogs had arrived yet.

“Another student lunatic trying to reschedule an exam.” The speaker had a shaved head and wire glasses. He was trying to look like Foucault.

“No exams this time of year,” said the young man. He worked in the building, apparently, but Harold didn’t recognize him. “I hear the caller had … altogether, an Arab accent.”

“Bomb threats are a tradition of the institution,” said someone.

“In winter term we’re always evacuating into the snow,” said the Foucault. “I never invigilate without my parka. It’s all part of the dialectic of external influence and local adaptation.”

“Did you say that you shit in the snow?” Carrie asked.

Harold smiled, at last. She was reckless where she could be. The bald man gave her a curt glance. She took a few steps towards Harold.

“I thought you Canadians had a famous sense of humour.”

A cool breeze came out of nowhere. The sky was massing over them. He wished he hadn’t left his jacket in his office so he could offer it to her. He wanted to tell her that he knew of her loneliness, but that for her, this was a good place. A good university in a global near capital, a place to be. Maybe, in human terms, and if you were lucky, the best. In the history of the species, to be here, now, was to have won the lottery of all creation, to have been swept by the waters of time and chance up onto the shores of a greenness, full of spectacle and quiet, wonder and certainty, possibility. A place that would provide. As long as she hadn’t brought with her some corruption.

The wind stiffened and took up in the white tablecloths of the catering station, and the staff scrambled to save the wineglasses from disaster. Everyone made for the unthreatened buildings. Harold was slow to follow. He began for the nearest entryway, from which Carrie Hughes now watched him, tucked into the old stone. It was a movie rain when it came. The sky falling. When the lightning and thunder arrived he maintained his pace. She stepped aside for him and they stood together a moment and then went into the building and watched the storm become everything. The darkening stone. Then it really came down.

“Do you suppose this is what that phone warning was about?” Carrie asked.

He turned and saw that she was soaked. A little shyly, he thought, she looked at his chest, and her face seemed to change in the dim light through the rain running down the old lead windows.
Even now, he felt no physical desire. Was it that he’d finally come to inhabit his own heart, or had he been relieved of it?

They watched for another minute or two and finally it began to let up. Carrie said she was going to make a run for her car. She asked if he needed a lift somewhere.

“No, thank you. I’ve got to get back to my office. Now that the bomb’s gone off.”

“All right. I’ll think about your advice.”

“The department,” he said. “There are bores and lechers, and a couple of crazies I should have told you about.”

“I’ll avoid them.”

“Don’t do that.” She wouldn’t understand. “They’ll attach to you, I know. But be kind to them. We lose so much to choose differently.”

She paused for a moment. She nodded and he knew her. She gave his hand a little tug and then she left. He watched her fade.

By the time the building was clear and he got back to his office he was almost dry. He locked the door and took off his pants, shirt, and socks and hung them on the coat rack where they’d catch the breeze from the window. From his filing cabinet he took his bottle of single malt and a glass and set them up on the desk. He sat in his underwear and jacket, only a little chilled, his feet wrapped in a throw rug, and tried not to picture himself as he called up his email, and opened a message from Kim that began

Kim,

Once when you were about fourteen

T
eresa was asleep on his chest as he replayed the sex and the stories she had told after it, the way she opened up and led him into her disappointments and pride at having overcome many of them, that no matter how tired she was, she arrived at the café each day upon a kind of illusion that as she moved from table to table, overhearing, entering conversations and leaving them, she somehow held together all these bastards of luck – what her father used to call them, the exiles – and he told her she was right, that it meant something to them to see her move between them, the way they were aware of her without always watching, or watching without knowing why. Her boss had told her she inspired the better men to keep the worse ones in line and so it was a good bar, by day. Her happiness about her work surprised Rodrigo and led them into a round silence, and the silence back into their desire and they began again, in the spirit of surprise happiness, maybe, this time making love for what seemed like hours until the light through the window had tilted away from them and the walls had died a little, and she was still asleep in his arm when he heard the apartment door open.

He didn’t move. The sound of the television woke Teresa and he looked down at her and found a stranger there, though one he’d seen before in other women stricken with fear. He himself was not afraid. There was nothing Luis could say against them.

She crawled across him naked and hurried to close the bedroom door. Only when she locked it did he see that it had been fixed with a small brass bolt, mounted crookedly.

— Don’t worry, he said, and she held a finger to her lips to quiet him.