It Will Come to Me (14 page)

As they descended the stairs, it occurred to him that this was the way he'd just come into the building. No, he thought. It can't be. But of course it was. The replacement to whom Dolores was about to introduce him was the woman he'd noticed only a few minutes earlier, the foul-mouthed portico-pacer. There she was,
standing at the far end, still talking on her cell phone. For the moment, she seemed not to be smoking. Dolores paused at the glass door that led out to the portico. The woman's name, she told Ben in a discreet murmur, was Hayley Gamache. She was new to Lola this fall, recently arrived from Vermont. She had started in the registrar's office last week, but some kind of problem had come up.

At the sight of Ben and Dolores, Hayley Gamache raised a temporizing finger and went on with her conversation—presumably the same one she'd been conducting earlier—but now she'd lowered her voice to a raspy stage whisper. She'd cut out the expletives, and her tone had changed; now it was urgently sugary. “Mama's got to go now, honey. You take care. Love you, sweetheart. Mama's got to go right now, BJ. You be good. Bye now.”

“Hayley,” called out Dolores as they approached, “this is Professor Blau.” She turned, and Ben had a quick impression of a puffy, faded blond prettiness. He had another impression as well—that this woman's face was somehow hard to see clearly, as though he were viewing it through a semitranslucent version of one of those quivering pixelated circles used to disguise identities on TV. Her age was hard to guess: somewhere between thirty-five and fifty. He hesitated, then extended his hand. “Dolores says you're new to Lola?”

“Sorry, Professor,” said Hayley Gamache. “My kids are always calling me with one problem or another.” She offered her hand—not her right hand, but her left, so that Ben was forced to awkwardly rotate his own. She squinted, as if trying to place him, and backed away several steps, still clinging to his hand. Suddenly he seemed to be playing the stolid male partner in some fantastical
pas de deux. Releasing him, she twirled away and gazed up into the canopy of live oak branches that overhung the portico. “Is it always so hot this time of year?” she asked, fanning her neck with a vague hand. “The middle of September? In Swanton the nights are cool by now. Everybody's been so nice, but I just can't get used to it. I keep talcum powder in my purse and I'm dumping it down my front all day long.”

As if to verify her claim, she opened the purse, which was white and overstuffed and shaped like a kidney bean, and dug out the can of talc. Confusingly, she handed it to Dolores. Evidently it was something else she was looking for, because she continued to root through the contents of the purse. “Here it is,” she said. “This is my employment letter.” She produced a much folded envelope. “They asked me to get the employer to sign it on the first day? Would you mind, before I forget?”

Ben ran his eyes over the letter. It was from Frank Buonafortuna, the president of an organization called Second Chance/New Start and it thanked him, the employer, for offering employment to someone who needed a break. It assured him that the vast majority of the people who passed through the program went on to become long-term, reliable employees. If there were any problems with this particular employee, he was to immediately contact Frank Buonafortuna's assistant, Alyssa Potter.

“There you go,” said Hayley Gamache. “You can sign under the other signature. You could actually cross it out, I guess.”

“You started in the registrar's office?”

“There was a gentleman there. It was a personality conflict. We couldn't be in the same room together.”

Ben glanced at Dolores, whose expression was darkly non-committal.
He signed the letter. “Thank you
so
much, Professor,” said Hayley, smiling now. “You will
not
regret it. I've had my problems, but that's why pencils have erasers.” She took Dolores's arm, led her a few feet away, leaned in cheek to cheek, widened her eyes conspiratorially. “Can you direct me to the little girls’ room?”

O
n her way from the Q&A to the parking lot, Ruth veered into the student store and bought a pack of cigarettes, which cost three times what they used to. She paid at the counter, walked away, realized she needed matches and returned. They no longer gave away matches, the pimply boy behind the register told her, so for another four dollars she bought a yellow butane lighter. She would face a dilemma later, when she discarded the partially smoked pack, because the lighter was really too expensive to throw away and she'd need to find a place to hide it from Ben. Maybe she could just leave it somewhere on campus, hoping a deserving young person might pick it up. She also bought a takeout cup of coffee as rent for one of the smoking-permitted tables in the courtyard outside the student center. She sat down and unloaded the box containing
Whole Lives Devoured
from the Guatemalan bag and opened it. She could leaf through the opening pages if she needed to look occupied.

In the old days she used to rip into a new pack of cigarettes like a lioness disemboweling a gazelle, but it had been so long now that she had to walk herself through the steps—pull the golden cord all the way around the four corners, remove the little cellophane hat, ease open the top of the box along the cardboard hinge, which tended to be stiff, loosen and lift away the protective square
of silver foil. The actual lighting of the cigarette came easier; that series of steps was deeply encoded in her muscle memory.

She inhaled, and was shocked by the harm she felt it doing her—the searing of the long-healed tissues of her throat, the spasms of suppressed coughing that overcame her as she drew the smoke into her lungs. There was nothing of the effect she remembered so nostalgically, the instantly sharpened focus, the detachment that settled over her like a soft rain of tiny particles. The craving receptors in her brain had died at their posts; she'd have to work to re-addict herself. That would seem to be an argument against smoking another cigarette, but somehow she felt bound by some perverse sense of honor to try. The second was even less rewarding than the first; she stubbed it out almost immediately. It was a sad business when a person failed at backsliding. Was this another consequence of growing old—to no longer even want what was bad for her, or at least to feel herself so unequal to it that it was easier not to want it?

A party of students edged past her table. She looked up at them and down at her manuscript, running her eyes over the opening paragraph. She had reread these chapters so many times that a lacquer of familiarity had settled over them; even if the words seemed remote and drained of meaning, the writing usually seemed competent enough. But sometimes it was as if she'd caught a disastrous glimpse of herself in an unexpected mirror. This was just such a time. What could she have been thinking? What reader would get beyond the first three self-conscious sentences? Those sprung rhythms? That arch tone? Things got a little better in the second paragraph; the necessity for clear exposition saw to that. But not better enough, and then it got bad again, very bad, a few pages in. The question was, if she was able to see
how bad it was, and determine where the worst badnesses were located, why did she feel powerless to revise it? It was as if too much time had passed and she'd forfeited the chance.

But here was Charles Johns, standing at her shoulder and asking to join her. “Please,” she said, shifting her knees to let him by. He lowered himself carefully into a plastic lawn chair that she was surprised could accommodate him, or even bear his weight. She saw that he was looking at the mess she'd left on the table, the short butt and the long butt and the carnage of cellophane and foil and the still-full Styrofoam cup, marked by a scallop of slobber below the rim. “I was trying to start again,” she said. “Can I offer you this lighter?” Wordlessly, Charles pocketed it. “And the rest of these?” Charles took the box of cigarettes. Ruth's relief and gratitude surprised her. “Thank you,” she said. “The Q&A was a great success. I've never seen a crowd like that.”

“I'm sorry you didn't get a chance to ask your question,” said Charles. “She was dying on the vine toward the end. You might have revived her. She had to struggle to make it through the signing. Right now she's lying on the couch in her office with the lights off and a wet paper towel on her forehead.”

“Oh dear,” said Ruth. “I'd never have suspected for a moment. Everybody was absolutely”—Ruth had been about to say “eating out of her hand,” but thought better of it—”enchanted.”

Charles hoisted himself laboriously out of his chair into a semi-standing position so that he could dig into his pants pocket and produce the pack of cigarettes he'd just taken from Ruth. “Ah well,” he said, lowering his eyes to light one, “she's always a consummate professional. What was it exactly you were going to say, before that old character interrupted you?”

“I'm not sure I can reproduce it. I kind of cobbled it up on the
spot. I think I wanted to talk more than I actually had anything to say.”

“Oh yes,” said Charles. “That reminds me. She does indeed admire your book, very much. She's going to ask our house sitter to send it. She remembered a funny line from a scene at an academic convention, I can't recall it now. She quoted it verbatim. She has an extraordinary memory.”

How he loves her, thought Ruth. How he loves to say “she.”

“She very much wants to meet you,” Charles went on. “I think we should arrange it. It would make a difference to her, to have someone to talk to. Someone other than me.”

Would she, Ruth asked herself, want to be loved like that? Yes. No. Yes. No. She supposed she had been, but only by Isaac when he was very small, and of course that wasn't the same thing. And in fact it was she who had loved Isaac the way Charles loved Ricia, not the other way around. She found it hard to imagine Ben doting on her unqualifiedly. He was devoted to her, she knew, but attentiveness had never come naturally to him. From time to time he made gestures, but these self-conscious efforts quickly collapsed into facetiousness. Bringing her breakfast in bed on her birthday, he scuttled into the room like an officious waiter, bent deeply at the waist as he delivered the tray onto her lap, scuttled out again. And if she sulked—which she used to do quite regularly and now did less often—he got angry. “I do my best,” he'd bark at her. “You know I care. You wouldn't want some guy fawning over you. You'd have nothing but contempt for someone like that.” True, but if she'd sunk deep enough into her sulk she'd find herself once again entertaining an old and insidious line of argument:
I've never been loved enough.
And consequently she'd never been able either to command love or to accept it. Every serious
fight she and Ben had ever had found its source in this idea, which was both right and dangerously wrongheaded.

She stole a quick look at Charles again, sitting in profile to her left. His belly, pressed into a great loaf by the confining chair, rose up to meet his chins. In this broad afternoon light his face was as mottled and weary as Rembrandt's in his late self-portraits. His nose was a dismaying sight. On his left temple she noticed a cluster of sebaceous keratoses, those odd “stuck-on” growths that appear overnight in late middle age. (Ruth had a number of them on her back.) The Charles of the other night, when she'd been drunk, had been a spirit. The Charles of this sober afternoon was an all-too-mortal man. Much as she found it consoling and diverting to entertain fantasies about him, she saw now he was no longer a suitable object for even the most qualified forms of idealization. Neither was she. If Charles looked meaty and old sitting here in this campus courtyard, where the starlings bounced from flagstone to flagstone, pecking at crumbs and quarreling in metallic voices, she could be sure that she also did not appear to her best advantage.

A shout and a shriek made them both look up. Some kind of wild horseplay was going on at the other end of the courtyard. Two boys were chasing a girl. She was running, dodging, laughing, grabbing plastic chairs, brandishing them like shields, hurling them at her pursuers. The boys worked as a team, one rushing, the other keeping a strategic distance. For a moment they had her trapped against a concrete-block wall. One of them confined her briefly between his spread hands, but she ducked free and darted out of the courtyard onto the green, both boys following.

Charles and Ruth turned to smile at each other. “What men or gods are these?” said Charles,

He delivered the lines in a low, intimate burble, stifling an impending fit of coughing. The two of them sat companionably for a little while, their conversation having run aground. Charles looked at his watch and rose to his feet. “I must be on my way,” he said, giving in to the cough and digging a handkerchief out of his pants pocket. “The beltway traffic gets untenable in exactly seventeen minutes.” Ruth also rose, gathering her manuscript and returning it to its box. “What is that?” asked Charles.

“It's actually a manuscript,” said Ruth, quite conscious of how much she had wanted him to notice and how full of dread she felt now that he had. “A partial manuscript. Work I did after
Getting Good.
I thought Ricia might … Actually I think I should work on it more before … It's really very …”

But Charles had lifted the box out of her arms and was walking away. “Thanks!” she called out. “Thank you, Charles! Thanks so much!”