by James Gregor
“The sauna sounds nice,” Richard said, at the same time reflecting that for him saunas—whether of the YMCA or the bathhouse variety—had always, whether in reality or just in his mind, been a charged male space where women did not figure at all, let alone prominently. Anne must somehow realize this, he felt certain, and her blindness, her willful ignorance, was strange if gallant. It was like an animal, born blind, that struggles to its feet and instinctively wobbles forward, not cowed by the challenge of the darkness it confronts.
The waiter came and filled Richard’s wineglass to an appropriate level, but as soon as he left Anne grabbed the bottle and added more.
“I really should work this afternoon,” he said, putting his hand over the glass.
“It’s a good vintage,” Anne said, batting his hand away and continuing to pour. “It’s the price of a good vintage anyway. You should think about coming over for a lazy Saturday.”
Not knowing whether the meal was paid for or not, Richard was unsure where to apply the emphasis in his words. He felt he should speak in the effacing tones of gracious acceptance, while at the same time he worried that Anne would detect this grateful register, realize he expected her to pay, and abruptly clarify the terms of the meal.
“Toasted, please,” Anne said when the waiter came to the table with another basket of bread. “I always take my bread toasted.”
Could he ask her outright whether or not she planned to pay? Richard raised the wineglass to his lips and sipped.
“There’s this very good Italian place that just opened near my building,” Anne said. “Their veal meatballs are superlative. We could order in.”
Richard lifted a crumb of goat cheese to his mouth.
“I’m always up for a superlative veal meatball,” he conceded.
“How is the salad?”
“It’s good,” he said. “Like I said, you have great taste in restaurants. You have great taste in general.”
He chewed demurely.
“That’s kind of you to say.”
Richard was beginning to feel buzzed, but at the same time no more confident. The wine wasn’t settling him the way he wanted it to. A growing tension attached itself to every word he uttered; each second mixed the anxiety of his frozen degree with the anxiety of the end of the meal. It was all heightened by the fact that, late that same morning, a message from Antonella had arrived indicating forfeiture of the money if the foundation didn’t receive a response within a week. Richard was worried that Anne would bring up the lazy Saturday again; he felt that in his present circumstances he could only accept.
The waiter cleared the plates. Richard shifted in his chair.
“What are you working on?” he asked.
“De vulgari eloquentia,” Anne said, relishing the pronunciation of the Latin.
“What about it?”
“Well, Dante advanced an important aspect of his linguistic theory in that work: the human need for language. It was a necessity because, unlike with the angels, our thoughts are not instantly and readily available to each other of their own accord.”
What a relief, Richard thought.
“ ‘Therefore,’ ”—she made quotation marks with her fingers—“ ‘in order to communicate their mental conceptions to one another, men had to have some kind of rational and sensory sign.’ ”
“Is that a direct quote?”
“Yes.”
“You have a phenomenal memory.”
“It’s nice to talk to you,” Anne said, leaning forward, her knife and fork poised in the air. “Good conversation is almost impossible to find now. I feel that way sometimes, anyway.”
“I think you can still find it,” he said. “But thank you for saying so.”
The main course arrived.
“Bon appétit,” she said.
Richard began to carve his chicken, while Anne took a small bite of her duck. He observed her movements, which were quick and fastidious but also tentative. It was as though she kept them in a halfway kind of state, so that they might be quickly disowned and replaced should the need arise. The effect was oddly charming.
“When I worked at my father’s firm, I had to talk to the dullest people in the world,” she said. “Client meetings, the small talk, it was awful.”
“You worked for your father’s firm?”
“I did.”
“What kind of firm was it?”
“Biotech.”
He started out as a professor of biology, she said, and then he discovered a way to make certain mammals infertile by shooting them with darts, in the process amassing a considerable fortune. The Canadian government now wanted to buy a stake in his company, establish a fleet of vessels equipped with special cannons. It was a more humane way to control the burgeoning population of Arctic seals, for example, than to club them to death. The Russians were interested too.
“I got hooked on golf when I worked there, because of the meetings,” she said. “Isn’t that strange? I don’t like it, but I’m good at it. It’s the same with math.”
Richard nodded, imagining her with a piece of chalk, like Einstein in front of a blackboard covered in hieroglyphic symbols. This seemed more appropriately rigorous and unfathomable than learning a Romance language, though he didn’t know if she’d ever taught math. She never went into detail about her past, evoking it instead in large arcs, like a great billow of postmodern glass over a crowded lobby, peopled by strangers she wouldn’t discuss. He didn’t even know how old she was. He suspected that she was only a few years older than he was: there was something theatrical about her maturity. But it was also possible that she was forty-five, or some other, similarly extravagant age. Between them there was often the reserve and decorum of two people communicating across a generational divide. She walked and behaved with a tenured nonchalance, which at the same time was artificial, as though it had been learned in a literal fashion and not through accumulated experience.
She would probably want to play the professor with him; he often felt that she did, as if she was practicing for an imminent, glorious phase in her career. Her formality hinted that she could be drawn into a kind of mentorship role, that she would be disposed to help him if she felt that what they were doing was educational, leading him to a better version of himself, adding to the world’s store of knowledge.
The waiter came back, firmly and evenly offering dessert.
“You should have the chocolate soufflé,” she said.
“Is it good here?”
“That’s what he’ll have,” she said. “He’ll have the chocolate soufflé, and I’ll have the crème brûlée.”
Richard watched as the waiter disappeared into the kitchen.
“Crème brûlée,” he said. “I haven’t had that in years.”
“Then you should definitely try some of mine.”
Aside from the fact that she was clearly attracted to him, she would probably want to swing her intelligence like a scythe through the overgrowth of his research, to clarify a mass of lurking, abeyant, and potentially useful or at least elegant knowledge. It was her great talent after all.
“My father is in the city this week. We’re going to play a round of golf early tomorrow morning.”
“Sounds fun.”
She shook her head.
“I don’t get along with my father.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
She shrugged. During her childhood, she said, he had mostly been absent while he laboriously experimented and built his company. Her mother meanwhile was occupied with various therapies designed to address a case of borderline personality disorder— medications, magnets that changed the polarity of the brain, spa treatments, and spells at ashrams. At base, her mother was a flake and her father a rationality zealot, a biological determinist convinced his children’s genes would push their personalities to fruition. For him, nurture was irrelevant, and from a certain perspective this had been a great relief.
“He mostly left us alone. W
e had a few nannies.”
The dessert arrived, and Richard immediately took his fork and sliced down through the cake, into the hot dark lake beneath. He waited for Anne to resume speaking, but she didn’t. When he looked up, she was staring trancelike into her glass, as if a fly had drowned in it. She abruptly consumed the remnants.
“Should we get another bottle?”
“It’s the middle of the day.”
He imagined the thwarted, self-loathing mood that would descend on the afternoon if he continued drinking.
“You’re right. We shouldn’t.”
“This is delicious though. Thanks for recommending it.”
“You really do have some interesting articles to your credit,” she said, which struck Richard as a lucky tack in the conversation, perhaps too lucky. Maybe their thoughts, like the thoughts of the angels in Paradiso, really were available to each other of their own accord. Or perhaps his were available to her. It was a horrifying idea.
“I read a few of them,” she said. “But where are the recent ones? I couldn’t find any links.”
“They’re out there somewhere.”
“Don’t be bashful.”
“I’m not, really.”
He blushed despite himself, a result of the wine and his nervousness.
“I’ve heard you translating with Professor Caputo. You have a nice accent. Who did you work on?”
“I did some modern stuff, and one Guinizelli.”
“Send something to me.”
“You would read it?”
“Of course.”
“I don’t know. I’ll have to think.”
“Everything needs editing. There’s no shame in it.”
“I have to reach certain conclusions first.”
“What conclusions?”
“I think I have obstacles in my personality.”
“I’m very good with obstacles,” Anne said. “I do suffer from chronic fatigue syndrome.”
“We’ll see.”
“Maybe you should be out in the world. Academia will kill you. Besides, there’s a market correction coming. A lot of schools will disappear soon.”
He frowned.
“But you want to be a professor.”
“Oh, it suits me.”
“What about your father’s company?” he asked. “You never wanted to do that?”
She shook her head.
“I don’t want anything to do with it.”
“It was that bad?”
She fixed him with an excavating stare.
“My father started the company with his best friend, another scientist at the university,” she said. “Then that scientist, his name was Gerhardt, had an affair with my mother.”
“Oh, God.”
“Gerhardt was like a second father to me. Or a first father, really.”
“That sounds terrible.”
“The divorce was messy. But I loved Gerhardt,” Anne said.
As a young man, with his young wife, Gerhardt had been in a car accident. It was night; a deer crossed the road. The ditch was unforgiving and his arm was crushed. Over time most of the flesh seemed to disappear; the nerves died. It was more like a kite that he carried around, tucked beneath his other arm. As a young girl, this arm had inspired feelings of compassion and defense in Anne.
“My father had to keep working with him even after everything came out about the affair,” she said. “There was too much money involved.”
The restaurant had largely emptied out; the waiters milled around, pretending to be patient. Richard wondered what his face looked like, if he was maintaining an expression of careful focus. A part of him was honestly intent on Anne’s story, even sympathetic; another part had lifted up to the ceiling and was looking down at them both, like a chimpanzee on a branch, distant, instinctual, cool, asking if it was such a good idea that he was there, despite what he needed from her.
But it wasn’t as if he could stop her and say, I think this is too much information; I’m not sure what you’re getting at by telling me about your childhood and your parents’ divorce; don’t you have someone else you can talk to? He really wasn’t such an asshole. He didn’t want to be a person who fled from honesty, who recoiled from forthright confession, who had no time for genuine human difficulty and judged people inadequate if they weren’t at all times productive and competent, like some animatronic Manhattan professional.
Now she was talking about—was it a tennis match?
“Gerhardt was thrashing my father, even with one arm,” she said.
Somehow this event had led directly to the discovery of the infidelity, and the ensuing divorce.
“I was the one who found them,” Anne said, briefly describing herself as a little girl wandering outside of a log cabin, a fragrant bed of pine needles, standing at a window and glimpsing Gerhardt and her mother wrapped around each other as if scratching at fleas.
Richard could see her drawn away by this decisive anecdote, just as he would have been. In its shadow, his problems felt trivial. Her life had obviously been bigger than his. He frowned. Was it too embarrassing to ask her for help to write a simple paper on Guinizelli after this tale of infidelity?
Then it dawned on him that this was partly why he was here: she needed his help. Not just his help: his presence, his conferment of attention, corporeal evidence that he had chosen to sit and listen.
“After that we took up golf,” Anne said. “My father and I. We never played tennis again.”
They could help each other. Everyone was vulnerable to periodic bouts of system failure. There were moments where doing what was expected of you seemed insurmountable, the most grotesque challenge, and you wondered how other people managed just to live. If he wanted something in return for listening, there was nothing strange or cynical in that. Friendship was more transactional than most cared to admit. It was a struggle to be alone with problems. Besides, the sympathetic part of him, or maybe it was the gossipy part, wanted to know how she had turned out the way she did.
So he listened.
“My father never really got over it,” Anne said. “His life is just an orbit around the insult, some years the circle grows larger, others smaller, but it never goes away.”
Now there was something tranquilizing about her voice. Richard was after all accustomed to the voluptuous complaining of female friends—the warm reprieve of dialogue turning to monologue, his feline withdrawal into the posture of immune observer snugly focused on the cantankerous life across the table, his own life cozily withheld and protected, like an object you hide surreptitiously so a guest won’t ask to borrow it, or a cake you don’t mention, so as not to share it. He’d been in a variation of this situation many times before.
But he knew that Anne would not let him remain quiet and evasive about his own past for long. It was not a place he particularly wanted to revisit, not because it had been traumatic but because it was now revealed to be completely ordinary: the small town in Maine, with its dentists and asset management firms in gabled houses off main street, wooden signs flapping in the wind. He didn’t want to describe the preserved nineteenth-century buildings housing little gift shops and bakeries, and the boat-building festival that happened every summer, and how it was always cloudy and chilly in his memory, covered in a clear Plexiglas rain that never ceased to fall.
It all seemed intolerably maudlin: the easy friendships with girls and the wanting to connect with boys that marked his adolescence. The oddly formal lengths he went to to declare his belief in the ideal of privacy, so as not to have to reveal who he truly was: in retrospect it was weird and silly. He saw himself walking along the sidewalk as a closeted teenager, heading home from school to watch Cabaret or Paris Is Burning. At the time it had been heroic; now it just seemed miserable and pathetic.
There had been no great crisis or climax. When he came out, his parents accepted him. He was the only child of Terry, a patent lawyer, and Angela, who taught French at a local college, both now semiretired.
They were indulgent, liberal-minded, Unitarian Church members. They had happily welcomed him back into the house after college and his wandering spell in Europe. He cringed at the specter of how banal it would all seem to Anne.
“Have you had enough to eat?” she asked.
The waiter was there with the bill. Looking back and forth between them, he held it in the air like a feather.
“That’s for me,” she said.
Richard quietly exhaled with relief.
“Thank you,” he said as they left the restaurant and entered into a warm breeze. “I feel like I’m always saying thank you to you. You’re always doing things for me.”
“I think it’s the other way around,” she said, her voice unexpectedly placid after the rancorous tale she’d just told. But as they walked toward the subway, Richard felt he was expected to say something, perhaps a summing-up, though he had no idea what that should be.
When they reached the entrance, Anne paused at the top of the stairs, looking down into the station as if into a dark pit, grimacing.
“Are you okay?” he asked. He felt like he was also asking himself the same question.
“I’m not,” she said, shaking her head. “I’m really not.”
“What can I do?”
“Can we keep walking?”
“Where should we go?”
“Let’s go to the park. I need some air.”
They walked the few blocks to the park. When they entered, Anne moved with a silent, focused aimlessness. Joggers and dog walkers streamed around them in a blur of Gore-Tex and nylon. They wandered and wandered; she was seemingly lost in her own thoughts. Richard wondered how long this would go on. The buildings stared down at them from above the tree line with Easter Island solidity and composure. When they passed a bench near the eastern edge of the park, Anne indicated she wanted to sit down.