It Will Come to Me (21 page)

They all sat down. “I'm afraid once again I must ask for your patience,” said Martinez. “Apparently Isaac was not found at the
collection point. The driver was a few moments late. He's presently circling the area, looking for him. You and Mrs. Blau are free to wait if you wish. Or leave, if that's your preference.”

Ben looked at Ruth. Ruth shook her head. Martinez nodded fatalistically. “Much patience is required when dealing with a child like Isaac,” he said. “One must roll with the punches.”

“I must say I wonder,” said Ben after a moment, “why you didn't make sure you had him here before the appointment. We wondered the same thing last time.”

“That effort was made,” said Martinez. “The arrangement had been that Isaac would wait for the driver earlier today, and when he was not there I managed to track him down by phone and make an arrangement for a later time. Isaac is a severely de-compensated young man. One can't assume that a resolution taken one moment will hold until the next.”

“If you can reach him,” said Ben, “then why can't you tell us where he is?”

“Professor Blau, we've been over this before. Several times, I think. If Isaac does not wish to hear from you, I cannot in good conscience let you know.”

Ben turned to Ruth and shrugged a particularly bleak and weary shrug. Ruth realized who it was he'd been reminding her of; his late father, of course. He'd been a shrugger as well, and also a sigher. When Ruth first met him he had just been diagnosed with a sluggish prostate cancer and his doctors had advised a policy of “watchful waiting.”

Having apparently read Ben's shrug as final, Martinez stood. “One more thing,” said Ben, keeping his seat, “I don't believe we've ever gotten an itemized statement from you. We have no way of knowing how our payments are used.”

“I will be pleased to send statements,” said Martinez, sitting down and scribbling a note and swiveling in his chair to leave it on his desk. “May I ask you to leave a payment now? I believe one is due. I'll have to ask for an additional one hundred and fifty dollars, to meet the requirements of a changed circumstance in Isaac's life.”

“Which you won't tell us about,” said Ben.

“Which I cannot,” said Martinez.

Ben reached into his jacket pocket, produced his checkbook, balanced it on his knee, and wrote out a check. “I'd like to assure you,” said Martinez, receiving and pocketing it and rising once again to his feet, “that although I have made inevitable errors of judgment in my treatment of Isaac, I have always dealt with you in good faith. I hope you will believe this. I hope you can find it comforting to know at least that through me provisions have been made for him.”

“I really don't know what to believe,” said Ben, standing. At the doorway Martinez extended his hand. Ben shook it. Ruth made deliberate eye contact with Martinez and offered him her hand as well—somehow it was important to her that she be recognized at least once during this transaction. She applied as much pressure as she could to the handshake; in response his hand wilted. She dropped it and followed Ben as he turned sideways and renegotiated the narrow space between chairs and coffee table—not an easy thing to do while retaining one's dignity.

“One thing,” Martinez called as they were out the door. “Just one thing before you go. I am under an obligation to respect Isaac's privacy, but I can tell you one thing. He is a young man capable of surprising. Isaac will surprise you.”

N
ever?” said Ben.

“Never,” said Dolores.

They were meeting for lunch in a back booth in the Student Union snack bar. Dolores had brought hers in a brown-paper sack—an egg salad sandwich wrapped in wax paper and a Granny Smith apple, which she adroitly peeled and quartered with a small knife, also imported from home. Ben was eating a cheeseburger and fries and drinking a Coke. The patty was thin but fatty and flavorful, in the atavistic Texas style. The Coke was heavy with syrup, like an old-fashioned fountain drink. Only the fries were generic.

“Really, never?”

“Not that I can remember.”

“So I'm stuck with her,” said Ben. If Lola had an institutional memory, Dolores contained it. “Forever,” he added.

Dolores tapped at her lips with her napkin and raised a finger. While she discreetly transferred a bite of sandwich from the front to the back of her mouth, Ben looked around at this small, low-ceilinged rotunda which smelled faintly of grease and disinfectant and burnt coffee, and out the multipaned curved picture window at the flagstone patio and the massed azalea bushes beyond it, which had been used as a backdrop for nearly every bridal photo that appeared in the
Spangler Advocate.
The Student Union had been constructed in the year of Ben's birth and it made him sad to know that it was slated for demolition in the spring. It was too small, too modest, too worn, not consonant with Lee Wayne Dreddle's grandiose vision of the university, and so this nice old yellow-brick building, still serviceable, where generations of Lola students had joked and studied and courted, would be razed and replaced by an off-kilter postmodern confection twice its size with a floor-through “great room” arranged around a coffeehouse with Wi-Fi and a performance stage and a food court featuring tapioca drinks, whatever those were, and ethnic “street food” concessions.

Ben felt comfortable here. The Student Union building carried associations for him, as did Dolores, sitting there refolding the wax paper in which her sandwich had been wrapped—planning to reuse it for tomorrow's lunch, he felt sure. Why would the Dreddle administration tear down a perfectly good building? Why would they take away a perfectly good secretary? How cozy she is, he was thinking, sitting here in the booth with her ubiquitous raincoat draped over her shoulders. How economical and precise her words are, how unmistakably directed
to
him, in contrast to Hayley's, which were directed
at
him and could be understood only as behavioral artifacts—meaningless, gestural,
hysterical. He was feeling particularly Manichean this afternoon; he found himself picturing Dolores and Hayley as a pair of cosmic goddesses filling both halves of the sky, like those two Hindu ones whose names escaped him. Dolores was Order, a stern matron in flowing robes. Hayley was Chaos, a many-armed whirling blur.

“How's it going over there?” he asked. “Are you settling in?” Ben meant the Sociology Department—the Land of Many Hugs, as he called it privately. Hard to envision brisk Dolores among those mournful women in long skirts and trailing scarves, moving languidly from office to office, stopping in the halls to embrace, rubbing one another's backs consolingly.

Ben could see a struggle in her face, but the habit of discretion was too strong. “I'm getting used to it. The work is much the same.”

He'd put her on the spot, as he often seemed to do. The penalty for that was a period of awkward silence. “You could always
talk
to Hayley,” Dolores finally said. “You could suggest she might be happier in some other department, or one of the administrative offices. But then she's been moved once already, hasn't she? From personnel?”

“That's right,” said Ben. “The personality conflict.” The two of them sat glumly for a moment as a quartet of giggling girls piled into the booth behind them.

Dolores brightened. “Things have a way of working out,” she said. “If one party is unhappy, the other is often unhappy too. People can't be fired, but they can quit.”

“That's the thing,” said Ben. “She's not unhappy. She's happy. She tells me so all the time. She comes in two hours late and before I can say a thing she jumps in and tells me how much she
loves this job and how I'm the best boss she ever had and how she's so grateful to be working here and not at all those other offices where she was mistreated and abused. Have you seen the fairies?”

“I've heard about them,” said Dolores. The quick glance she gave him told Ben that everyone else had too. People were probably in and out all day to gawk at them. He wouldn't know, keeping his office door closed as he did. “Have you asked her to take them down?”

Here was the rub. “She has …” he began. Telling Dolores this was a bit of a risk. Even if she understood, she might lose whatever respect she had for him. “She has an odd effect on me,” he continued. “I keep trying to talk to her. She doesn't do any work. None at all. Rhoda and I do everything. I've given up my writing because I have to come in at eight so someone is answering the phone at least part of the time. And once she arrives she leaves the office twelve times before lunch to go down to the pavilion and smoke—she isn't even supposed to smoke there, but it's actually a relief because all day long she's having loud wrangles with her kids on the phone.”

“Yes,” said Dolores. “I didn't like to mention it, but one of the girls from the audiovisual lab said something. She said they could hear her all the way down the hall. And her … language.”

“Yesterday a student was taking a makeup test in her office and he actually knocked on my door to complain that he couldn't concentrate. I keep making up my mind to confront her but just as I get ready to open my mouth she comes at me from some new angle and she always manages to throw off my timing. And then the moment is lost …”

All through this recitation Ben sensed rather than saw that
Dolores was listening intently. For some reason his attention had fixed itself not on her eyes but on her disproportionately large and knobby wrists, one laid across the other on the table. For the first time, he noticed that she wore a man's watch with a wide flexible steel band, very loose. Was it her husband's? Did she suffer from arthritis? How little he knew about her, but somehow those wrists and that watch seemed to embody exactly what it was that he was learning. In the last few weeks he had begun to see her for who she was, to appreciate not only her discretion and efficiency but also her sympathy, her shrewd emotional realism, her rigorous judgment. Looking at her now he understood why it was he'd always seen her as belonging to his mother's generation rather than his own. It was because he felt unequal to the challenge implicit in her virtuousness (“Be like me”). As a moral philosopher he dealt in the idea of virtue. For him it had become an abstract notion, a matter of categories and competing claims, but Dolores reminded him that virtues reside only in human behavior and that human behavior finds expression only through the movements of living human tissue. Virtues, he was thinking, are not airy things. They're meaty.

When she spoke, it was in a newly low and urgent voice, like a doctor alerted to action by the recognition of textbook symptoms. “I know these people,” she said. “They grow and spread like that weed—what's it called?”

“Kudzu.”

“Kudzu. Soon they cover everything. You must cut her back. You must correct her.”

“I'll do my best,” said Ben.

“When?” said Dolores. “When will you do your best?” In
her vehemence she had evidently forgotten the distance between them. She was catechizing him, and he welcomed it. “The next time. The next time there's a reason.” Dolores interrupted. “No no,” she said. “Not the next time. You must do it today. Do it now.”

R
uth typed in “Eusebio Martinez.” The result was 34,000 hits. She added an ampersand and the word “psychotherapy.” This narrowed the field to 270, but she found no recognizable correspondences. She tried once again, adding “Spangler Texas” to the other two terms. Two hits, one a duplication, but here was the first clear mention of the Eusebio Martinez she had in mind. The linked Web page listed Martinez as one of a number of local psychotherapists, giving his old Museum District address and phone number. She paused for a moment, deleted “Spangler Texas” and typed in “Mexico City.” Forty-nine items appeared, all in Spanish. The third linked to a newspaper article entitled “The Rescuer of the Zona Rosa,” with a photograph showing a younger and chubbier Eusebio Martinez in a neon-yellow polo shirt standing in a rubble-strewn lot with his arms draped around the shoulders of two very dark adolescent boys, both smiling beatifically. The Google translation was literal and contained unprocessed Spanish words here and there, like olive pits in a jar of tapenade. The first lines of the piece read “Eusebio Martinez is a therapist with a Program for Young to have flown their homes and homeless youth.” Farther down the page she found another photograph. This time Martinez was shown in the same yellow polo shirt hovering over another group of adolescents, four boys
and two girls, all of them small and dark, with aquiline Indian features, sitting around a card table in what looked like a very low-ceilinged basement. “Dr. Eusebio Martinez shares a time with children of the street who have gathered in a one-time disco where he has provided a warm meal.”

Ruth printed the article and took it out to her chaise on the porch. “Dr. Martinez has also been able to conduct a practice of psychotherapy in the States,” she read. “Here he has recovered sufficient revenues to support his good deeds in Mexico City, but in the States he has not neglected his work with homeless and troubled youth.” On the last page of the article she found the following quote from Martinez: “I find a large sympathy for the adolescent because he is sometimes not so pleasant and not any longer loved by adults. I have made it the work of my life to help him.”