The City When It Rains

by Thomas H. Cook

  Maitland came in a few minutes later and stared around, squinting in the darkness, until he caught Corman’s eye. Then he moved heavily through a barricade of crowded tables until he reached the booth in the rear corner. He was a large, potbellied man now, not exactly old, but getting there fast. His hair had thinned considerably since Corman had last seen him. It had gotten grayer too. He looked more weathered than before, but still robust, energetic, full of quick responses.

  “Hello, David,” he said as he slid into the booth.

  Corman nodded and smiled.

  Maitland turned toward the bar, ordered two beers on tap, then looked at Corman. “So, what have you been doing since you left Columbia?”

  “I taught for a while,” Corman said. “That private school you wrote the reference for.”

  “Oh yes, I remember,” Maitland said. “How’d that turn out?”

  “It was okay.”

  “But you’re not there now?”

  “No.”

  “Somewhere else?”

  “Not a school,” Corman said. “I’m working as a photographer. Free-lance.”

  Maitland looked surprised. “Photographer? I didn’t know you were interested in that.”

  “Newspaper work mostly,” Corman explained. “Off and on.” He thought of the stack of pictures that lay piled like dead fish in his camera bag. “It’s not what you’d call secure.”

  “Well, what is?” Maitland said. He smiled. “Except tenure, of course.”

  Corman nodded.

  Maitland watched him for a moment, as if trying to put him in another category. He seemed vaguely dislocated, as if the fact that Corman was no longer a student or teacher had shifted him into a hazier world that was hard for him to get a grip on. “I always thought you’d stay in teaching,” he said finally.

  “So did I,” Corman told him.

  “I suppose you like your new work?”

  “It’s interesting,” Corman said. “You learn a lot.”

  “Well, that’s all that matters, I suppose,” Maitland said. He smiled, a little indulgently, like a grown man who was going along with a child’s view of the world, letting Corman believe in the tooth fairy or Santa Claus or anything else that got him through the night. “How did you happen to discover this new vocation?” he asked a bit sententiously, as if he were still talking to an eager undergraduate.

  “I met a man who was already doing it.”

  Again Maitland smiled. “And lightning struck,” he said with a hint of condescension. “That’s what I call providential.”

  “You might say that.”

  “And your studies? What happened to them?”

  “They took a different turn,” Corman said, adding nothing else.

  Maitland paused again, still watching Corman distantly. “Well, we missed you when you decided to leave graduate school.” He squinted slightly, as if he were trying to figure out exactly where Corman had gone after that. “So, photography,” he said idly.

  “Photography,” Corman repeated. He was reasonably sure that Maitland now thought of him as working in some sort of inferior world. It was as if the university were the one true penthouse of existence, the place with the really sweeping view. Everywhere else was somehow blocked in its perspective, hampered by trees, buildings, telephone poles, mounds of useless clutter. Maitland smiled. “Well, as long as you’re happy,” he said, forcing a certain lightness into his voice.

  Corman glanced toward the bar and wondered what was holding up the drinks.

  “And what about Lexie?” Maitland asked after a moment.

  “We’re not together anymore.”

  “Oh,” Maitland said awkwardly. Then he shrugged. “Well, that’s par for the course these days.”

  “What is?”

  “Splitting up,” Maitland said.

  “I guess.”

  “In my opinion, it’s all cyclical,” Maitland added. “We’ve gone through a period during which the solution to a bad marriage was a quick divorce. Now we’re coming into a different period.”

  Corman didn’t feel like going into what this different period might be.

  “We’re going back,” Maitland said authoritatively. “The solution to a bad marriage will be to live in it and keep your mouth shut. That’s what people have done through most of human history.” He smiled. “We’re not talking about progress, David. We never are with human beings. We’re only talking about a shift, the latest version of the Eternal Return.”

  It was the sort of statement Corman remembered from Maitland’s classes. Only then they’d sounded truer, at times even faintly revealing, despite the superior edge. Now they sounded empty and pompous, something that could only fly in the rarefied air of the faculty lounge.

  The beers came, and the two of them clinked their glasses together gently, then drank.

  Maitland turned toward the front of the room, glancing at the other people in the bar, mostly young Columbia students.

  “The elite,” he said as he looked back at Corman. “What do you think of them?”

  Corman shrugged but did not answer.

  “You used to have opinions,” Maitland said. There was a faintly knowing tone in his voice, as if he’d caught Corman doing something nasty in the woodshed, but was willing to keep it to himself. “Don’t you have them anymore?”

  “A few,” Corman said.

  “Like what?”

  “More things seem ridiculous to me now.”

  Maitland’s face soured somewhat. “You sound like Lexie.”

  “Really?”

  “Absolutely,” Maitland said.

  Corman took a quick sip from his glass. “At this point, I don’t think it matters.”

  Maitland leaned forward slightly, his eyes growing somewhat more intense. “Well, what is ‘this point’ exactly? I mean, with you? I take it you’re not interested in coming back to graduate school.”

  Corman shook his head. “No, I’m not,” he said. “Actually, I didn’t come to talk about school at all.”

  “So I’ve gathered,” Maitland said.

  “It’s about a woman.”

  Maitland laughed. “And you came to me?” he said. “I’m flattered.”

  “This woman, she …”

  “Of course, everybody knows that English departments are notoriously horny,” Maitland interrupted. “It’s all that romantic nonsense they read. ‘How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.’” He laughed. “I mean, it’s one thing to study that sort of thing all your life, it’s quite another to take it seriously.”

  “She jumped out of a building last week,” Corman said.

  Maitland looked at him solemnly. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know you were talking about something like that.”

  Corman pulled a photograph from his camera bag. “I took some pictures.” He handed the picture to Maitland. “It turns out that this woman had been a student at Columbia.”

  “And that’s what this meeting’s about?” Maitland asked.

  Corman nodded.

  Maitland’s eyes drifted down to the picture. “I don’t recognize her,” he said.

  “She may have changed a lot since she was at Columbia.”

  Maitland’s eyes continued to study the picture. He shook his head. “I don’t remember her.”

  “Her name was Rosen,” Corman said. “Sarah Rosen.”

  Suddenly Maitland’s face turned very grave. “Sarah Rosen?” he said unbelievingly. He looked thunderstruck. “My God, I had no idea.”

  “Last Thursday night,” Corman said quietly.

  Maitland looked at the photograph again. “When I knew her, she didn’t look like that at all.”

  Corman eased the picture from Maitland’s hands. “She was starving,” he said.

  Maitland’s eyes widened, and for an instant Corman could see something glimmering behind them. He had seen it before, even felt it in himself, a form of recognition that came up fast, like a man in your face, telling you that nothing co
uld be taken lightly, that everything was real, and that this reality didn’t care about your faith, your analysis, the precious little kingdom of your self-esteem, and that if you didn’t back away from it, dodge it desperately somehow, you’d spend your days balled up in some clean white corner, rocking, wailing, facing the facts.

  “Starving?” Maitland repeated.

  “I’m trying to find out what happened to her,” Corman said.

  Maitland took his glass in both hands and rolled it slowly between them. “She was Samuel Rosen’s daughter.”

  “A professor here,” Corman said.

  “Not just a professor,” Maitland said. “Samuel Rosen. One of the world’s great medievalists. A specialist on the Renaissance, too. Jesus, didn’t you learn anything at Columbia?” He looked offended by Corman’s ignorance. “Haven’t you at least heard ofhim?”

  “I think so,” Corman said tentatively.

  “His work is famous,” Maitland insisted. “I know you didn’t major in medieval studies, but for God’s sake.”

  “How well do you know him?”

  Maitland shook his head and looked embarrassed by his answer. “Not very well. I’ve read all his books.”

  “But you don’t know him as a person?”

  “No, not as a person.”

  “But you did know his daughter?”

  “Yes.”

  “She took one of your courses her senior year.”

  “How did you know that?”

  “Her husband.”

  “So you know about her examination then.”

  “Do you still have it?” Corman asked immediately.

  Maitland nodded. “Absolutely.” His face darkened. “It was written in a bizarre way.”

  “I’d like to see it.”

  “I’ll look for it. It should be in my office.”

  “Could we look tonight?”

  Maitland hesitated. “Is it that urgent?”

  Corman nodded. “Yes.”

  “In a minute then,” Maitland said. He smiled thinly. “I trust I can finish my drink.” He took a quick sip, waited for Corman’s next question, then took another sip when it didn’t come.

  Corman could feel his impatience growing. He needed facts, important facts. He could feel Trang and Lexie hovering over him, spectral presences hissing from above. He shifted restlessly and felt a clammy sweat gathering beneath his arms. “Can you tell me something about her?” he asked.

  Maitland thought for a moment, his eyes rolling toward the ceiling as they did when he lectured, searching for his muse. “I always had the impression that she chose the words very carefully.” He thought a moment longer, his eyes scanning the room until they finally came to rest on Corman. “Why are you investigating her?”

  Corman thought of Lucy, Trang, Lazar, Julian, the pictures. It was all a maze. “Why does anybody do anything?” he asked, dodging the question.

  One of Maitland’s eyebrows curled upward. “That’s a bit philosophical,” he said. “I didn’t know you were still interested in ideas.”

  Corman said nothing. From behind, he could hear a young woman laughing above the general hum of the crowd. He felt like turning and taking a picture of her, for no reason at all beyond its sweet relief.

  “I thought of you the other day,” Maitland said after a moment. “I was in the Columbia Bookstore, just browsing. And you know how, suddenly, from out of nowhere, something can remind you of someone? Well, this reminded me of you.”

  “What did?”

  “It was a book of questions,” Maitland told him. “Nothing but questions. You know the kind I mean: If a museum were burning, and you could save either the Mona Lisa or a cat, which would you save? That sort of thing. It reminded me of you.” He smiled softly. “The way you used to be.”

  Corman could no longer get a handle on who that person had been. It was time to move on to other matters. “I’d like to see Sarah Rosen’s exam,” he said.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-NINE

  “I THINK it’s still in here,” Maitland said as he opened the door to his office.

  Corman followed him inside then stood silently while Maitland felt about for the light switch, his fingers clawing at the wall until he finally located it.

  “There,” Maitland said as the fluorescent bulbs fluttered for a moment, then grew bright. He swept his arm out. “Looks the same, doesn’t it?”

  Corman nodded, took another step into the room and stared about, his hand unconsciously fingering the latch on his camera bag. The room looked almost exactly as it had that afternoon ten years ago when he’d sat in the plain wooden chair in front of Maitland’s desk and told him he was leaving Columbia.

  “Same bust of Poe,” Maitland said. “Only a little yellower. Same diplomas hanging from the wall.”

  Corman glanced toward the diplomas, his mind instantly turning to the one they’d found in the burn-out, its cracked glass and shattered frame.

  Maitland walked to the large metal filing cabinet at the other end of the room. “The paper should be in here somewhere,” he said as he pulled open the third drawer and glanced down at a stack of undergraduate papers. “In twenty years of teaching, these are the only ones I’ve kept.” He stepped back from the file cabinet. “Sorry I can’t stay,” he added. “Just close the office door when you leave.”

  Corman waited until he could no longer hear Maitland’s footfall in the corridor before he began going through the papers. Sarah’s was near the bottom of the stack.

  It was very short, only a page and a half of tightly knotted sentences. As a paper, it hardly existed at all. Instead, it was a gathering of sentences, often disconnected, as if Sarah’s mind had been incapable by then of stringing thoughts together in a coherent pattern. Fragmented, often broken off before completion, they suggested a mind that had simply shattered into thousands of tiny shards, like a large crystal vase that had fallen from a great height. It was still possible to catch individual, shining pieces, perhaps even to sense the overall beauty they must have once joined to create. But the whole had clearly flown apart. It was as if the law of gravity had ceased to operate in her mind, so that everything rose, sank and drifted according to weights and measures which were no longer assigned and limited by anything outside them. Because of that, as he read her paper again and again, Corman found himself ensnared in a similar randomness and indecipherability, so that the very act of thinking back over what he’d read drew him into Sarah’s own swirling state, filled his mind with the wild, whirling sparkle of uprooted, weightless things.

  And yet, she was there, clearly and powerfully, a voice so lost, and yet so entirely distinct, that her death suddenly came to him as something personal for the first time. He thought of her by the window, her mind shooting through the darkness that surrounded her, a vast sea of flickering lights, red, blue and yellow, burning in her head, burning in the darkness behind her and which, perhaps, she had finally tried to escape by easing herself to the ground on a cool white stream of rain.

  He read the paper a final time before returning it to Maitland’s file drawer, then headed toward the subway.

  Outside, he could still feel her around him as he scuttled along the wet bricks of Columbia Walk, then took a train to the Village. It was as if she’d entered Maitland’s office while he read and wrapped him in the texture of her anguish. Sentence by sentence, the web of her tiny black script had coiled around him, her words lined up like figures before a firing squad as she struggled madly for some bizarre frozen purity before letting it all fizzle away in long blank spaces and end finally in the coup de grace of an uncompleted sentence: “Given the note/tone/mood of excresence here we may/can/will only/inadequately say/declare that it is/composed/authenticated/ with the heart of a …”

  He got off the train at 14th Street and headed east, still thinking of her, rooted in her, his eyes hardly taking in the legions of street-peddlers who spread their rain-soaked merchandise along the whole desolate strip that led to the river
.

  He could see Joanna already waiting for him as he stopped at the corner of First Avenue. She was sitting near the restaurant’s front window, the table she always preferred, her eyes watching the flow of traffic as it moved southward toward the Bowery. As he watched her from across the street she looked hazy, incorporeal, an artist’s sketch of a human being he’d decided not to paint. For a moment, Corman stood in the rain, watching her as she sipped her margarita casually, fingering the rim of the glass as she always did. He thought of taking a picture of her as she sat in the window, then decided it would seem posed, Joanna only a model who took direction well.

  Her eyes drew over to him when he came through the door.

  “Hi,” Corman said quietly, as he stepped up to the table.

  Joanna smiled. Her eyes misted. “Leo’s going to be okay,” she said, her voice breaking slightly.

  Corman nodded, bent forward and kissed her, then started to move away.

  She held on to him, her arms squeezing tightly around his body as he continued to stand over her. “Benign, that’s what they said,” she told him. “Completely benign. Like a wart, no worse than that, only inside.”

  Corman sat down opposite her and took her hands in his. For an instant, he saw Sarah’s face float up from just beneath Joanna’s, disappear, then return in a faint, wavering image that swam in and out of his vision.

  “I knew you’d be happy about it,” Joanna said. She daubed her eyes. “Sorry, sorry.” She drew the handkerchief from her eyes. “You’ve never seen me cry before, have you?”

  Corman gazed at her. “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Yeah, that’s part of it, I guess,” Joanna said. She hesitated a moment. “You don’t know all that’s been going through my mind, Corman. What happens is, you lose control. You can think anything.” She took out a cigarette and lit it shakily. “I asked myself all kinds of questions,” she said. “Things about Leo. And about us, too.” She squeezed his hand. “Especially, you know, in a situation like this. I thought maybe I’d been bad for Leo all these years. Bad for his life, I mean.” Her eyes grew very serious. “You can take a lot of things, Corman, but you never want to think that anybody would have been better off if they’d never met you.”