“All right. Thanks for calling.”
“Love you.”
“Love you.”
“So how are we going to do this?” Lauren said. “I mean, I know we can do it, but how are we going to do it?”
“We’re just going to,” Martin said.
“Is cancer contagious?” Sarah asked.
Martin looked at her. “Where’d you get that idea?”
“You know, can you catch it?”
“No.”
“I think I’d rather stay with Grace this summer.”
“You love Aunt Elizabeth.”
“I don’t wanna be away for the whole summer,” she said tearfully. “I won’t have any friends.”
“Max will be there. We’ll be there. Aunt Elizabeth and Uncle Richard will be there.”
“It’s not the same.”
“I know, sweetie. I know. But you always have fun when we go away.”
“You can’t keep doing this to me,” she cried. “And now I don’t even get to pick the place!” She ran upstairs and slammed herself into her room.
“So, you just said it was all right? You didn’t think of asking me or anything?”
“Maybe they won’t come,” she said tiredly.
“I want them to come. I just wish you’d asked me.”
“Can they come?” she asked.
“Of course they can come.” He looked around at the perfect house. “How long do you think they’re going to stay?”
“Ten or twelve weeks.”
“Good god.”
“We’ll paint after they leave.”
“Two little kids—we’re certainly not going to do any touching up beforehand.”
“I never said we were.”
He pulled out his electronic calendar, punched in access numbers. “I might need to be away for a part of that time.” He typed with his index finger. “Maybe half of it.”
“I could tell them to rent an apartment.”
“That’s all right.” He closed his calendar and smiled. “They don’t have any money anyway.”
“I need you, too,” she said.
“Maybe you’re just being needy.”
He shut himself in the meditation room, saw Muyamaya, took a cleansing breath. Oh that was wrong, that was wrong. But what else could he say when the only mantra that ever came to him these days was I am absent, I am absent. People had no idea—no idea—what his life was like, what their life was like. They’d been in their prime, he’d loved his job, she’d made a lot of money, and they’d take on anything. She was fearless. She wanted it all and she tried everything. Once they’d gotten lost in the snow in the Italian Alps—a storm had come up so late in the season it was practically an illusion—and they’d stepped into a miracle of a trekkers’ hut and sat up all night sipping scotch and even—even made love when they were supposed to be worried for their lives. The next day they’d walked out. Now they had to try everything just to survive, and they had to live with it and figure out how to live beyond it at the same time. Practically every week a new therapist came to the house, or she bought a new remedy or she took a trip somewhere to work with somebody. She had to devote herself to it, and he tried to devote himself to her. And now she was going to draw a line around the summer and have them both give in to it. He supposed he could go off to Bridgetown, maybe do an Epiphany course in Amsterdam, and see where the firm might send him. Twelve weeks wasn’t so long. Just a whole bloody summer. But what was she thinking? Was this another one of those moments when you got caught in the middle and you just had to wait your way out? What about them? He opened the door and looked over the stairs. She was standing under the crystals in the foyer. He padded down to her.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I just get a little tense, that’s all.”
“You like your space,” she said.
“I do.”
“I’m not saying I’m dying,” she said. “I’m just saying time is precious, and I want to be with them and I want to be with you.”
“Okay,” he said.
She sniffled. “You think I’m being a shit, don’t you?”
“Darling. Sweets.” He touched her cheek, held her. “You need to do what you have to. Me, too. Right?”
“Right,” she said.
“I’m sorry about the other thing.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Then I’m sorry about not being sorry. I’m going back upstairs. Okay?”
She nodded. “Okay.”
FURTHER QUESTIONS
I have to apologize for calling you at home like this,” the provost was saying in that measured voice of his, “and so early at that. But I’m afraid I had no choice. Jane Wilson … ah … it seems that one of our students, Jane Wilson, hung herself late last night.”
“Jane Wilson?” Martin said, sitting up in bed in the still-dark room. That wasn’t Jane Doyle. Who was she?
“I’m afraid so,” the provost said. “We’re all terribly saddened about this. Can you make a noon meeting in my office?”
“Of course.”
“See you then.”
Jane Wilson? She was in his residential seminar on living anthropology. He could not quite summon her. Indifferent brown hair, combed back. Her face puffy and sallow. She’d just handed in a paper on Friday.
“Jane Wilson?” Lauren whispered beside him.
“A student,” he said. “Suicide.”
“Oh no.”
On his walk to the class, Martin avoided knots of students talking in hushed or loud voices, excited, gossipy, stricken. The dorm was locked. He looked around for a phone or a doorbell. He pounded on the door.
No answer.
All the students had dispersed to their classes. He pounded on the dorm door again. Nothing. The class was held in the basement. He hiked around to where he thought the window was and bent down. They were there in the cramped room. He knocked. They were all talking. He knocked again.
“The professor,” someone called out.
“Could you let me in?” he shouted through the closed window while pointing toward the side door.
Geoff opened the door for him. He was tall and pale, with red hair falling across his face as if he’d just woken up. Martin hated teaching in the dorms.
“I got locked out,” he said.
“We had to.” Geoff hurried ahead of him down the stairs, toward the class. “There were too many people coming through.”
“I understand.”
In the room the students looked at him, expectant, tinged with misery. “I guess you heard what happened,” he said. They nodded. “We’re not going to have class today.” They nodded again. “But we can talk about it, if you want. Or you can leave.”
No one left. A sorrow for all of them leaped from his heart—even for the lacrosse player who was always late and hadn’t turned anything in yet, and for the stoner who made too many sarcastic remarks—and he fought to restrain it. He sat cross-legged on his desk and waited.
“She killed herself,” a girl said. “I just saw her Friday.”
“I saw her yesterday afternoon,” a guy who had taken out a pack of cigarettes said.
“And?” the girl said.
“Nothing. I just saw her.”
“Does it make any of you feel like killing yourselves?” That was—thank god—not Martin who asked. It was one of the students. There were nods and groans.
“I tried once,” someone whispered. He could barely catch who it was.
“I haven’t thought about it since I was a freshman,” a junior said.
And he sat there, for the hour, letting them run their encounter session. He said as little as possible. At the end there was a kind of sigh, and they all looked at him, deflated. He had to say something. His face grew hot and he knew he was blushing, and he’d long since ceased to blush in front of students and this made him hotter and redder.
“You just—we just—need to be as kind to one another as we can,” he said. “Because we can never
know if it will be the last time we have.” Kindness, he was teaching them kindness. The faculty handbook said to teach Truth and Art. There was some truth in kindness—perhaps some art, too—but did he have to sound like a goddamn Hallmark card?
As he walked to his office, he jammed his hands deeper into his pockets and tersely shook his head. Nailed to the brick wall of the dining hall were banners. WE MISS YOU. GOD BLESS YOU! A few wrapped bouquets sagged on the lawn. Along the path toward him marched Annka. He swallowed a gasp. Now, as he looked at her, he tried to feel a complexity in her face that would speak to him, that would tell him she was capable of empathy. She taught less than he did and she made nearly twice as much money, and all he could see behind the clear-framed glasses, framed by the blond hair pulled back into a bun, was that she was capable of empathizing with herself.
“Hello, Martin.” She smiled quietly. “How are you holding up?”
“Fine, I think. And you?”
“You know.” Again she smiled without teeth, her pointy chin pointed down. “It’s hard.”
“Did you have her in any classes?” he asked gently.
“Oh no,” she said, as if, had the girl been under her instruction, she would never have killed herself.
“She was in mine.”
“I know.” Her hand fluttered at her side. He was relieved it did not touch him. Briefly they waited for the clock tower to toll. It didn’t.
“I just had the class she was in,” he said anyway.
“I know.” Now she patted him on the shoulder. He recoiled. She looked at him, still tightly smiling. “We missed you at the town meeting this morning. It was so cathartic.” Again her chin dipped toward the ground. “I sang a solo of a hymn.”
This time the clock did toll. He could have kissed it. “I have to run,” he said.
“There were more than a thousand people there,” she called after him. “It was really something.”
He hurried back to his building. She sang hymns?
In his office the voice mail light blinked its orange bulb. He dialed Lauren.
“Hey,” he said.
“I know,” she said, “we missed the town meeting. But listen, Elizabeth called. She thinks Richard has left.”
“What?” he said. At the mention of her name, he’d been all prepared for awful medical news. This was somehow … worse? Better?
“I could tell you more, but she’s waiting for your call.”
“Uh-huh.” He felt his stomach beginning to cave. The last time he’d seen Jane Wilson, she’d smiled shyly as she passed in her paper.
“Too bad we couldn’t make that baby happen,” Lauren said.
She’d come back from what… what. Shopping? The spa? Someplace neutral. Someplace she couldn’t quite name. And there was something not subtle about the house. Something off. He wasn’t due for another few hours, but she sensed a dysfunction beyond the usual dysfunction. An opening, a hole, a gap, a chasm. Her mother had tried to warn her. Missing. He had gone.
Three pairs of shoes missing from the closet, two sweaters from the drawer, and, when she brought out the ladder and climbed to the attic door and pushed it open, a carry-on from the attic. Had he told her he was going? In the kitchen she checked the calendar. Against her cheek she felt for the impression of his last kiss. There wasn’t one. She called his office. His voice mail. “I can’t come to the phone right now, but if you leave a message, I’ll get back to you.” He didn’t have a secretary or an assistant. She called the main number.
“Richard Perkins,” she said.
“I’ll put you through—”
“I just—”
And there he was again. “I can’t come to the phone right now …”
She hung up. Was there a note in some secret place? Her pillow? The bath? On top of the goddamn telly? In the refrigerator? Inside the microwave? The checkbook? He’d left the checkbook, not a check missing. He had credit cards, a bank card.
“Richard,” she called.
The phone rang. She snatched it up.
“Hello?” she said.
“Is this Elizabeth Kreutzel-Perkins?”
“Yes.”
“I’m afraid I have a message for you.”
“Go on.”
“Your ball therapy session for Thursday has been canceled. Alan has taken ill.”
Good Christ. “Thank you,” she said.
“We will reschedule.” Reshedwell. Brits.
She hung up the phone.
“Richard,” she said uncertainly, as if just saying the name might break the plumbing.
That was all hours ago. She’d combed out her hair, stuck on a morphine patch, decided which rings to leave which nieces, and then had a glass of wine and a chat with Lauren across the pond. She wasn’t quite ready for her mother. The wine felt awful in her stomach, at the back of her throat, along the crust of her brain, wherever it went. The morphine tried very hard to take the edge off, but seemed only to make everything more jagged. Uncomfortable. Tangled. In a disarray.
Ray, ray, ray, the house seemed to say.
The phone.
“Hello,” she slurred.
“Elizabeth?”
“Hey. Thanks for getting back to me so quickly.” It was good to hear his American voice. It was good to hear her own American going back to him.
“Are you sure about this?”
“Yes.”
“I can get there on Friday.”
“That would be great,” she said.
“Anything else?”
“I hope not.”
“Well, we have a little crisis here. I’ve got to—”
“Really?” She tried to feel interested. “What?”
“One of my students.” His voice dropped to something almost below a whisper. “Killed herself,” he said. “Anyway, I’ve got to go. Love you.”
“Love you.”
She hung up and stared at the blank television. There’d be hours and hours for it. She could see herself hooking up to it like it was another dose of pamidronate. All these people who lay solitarily—was that a word?—dying in their hospital beds, gazing at a last football game or talk show. She already knew that she was alone. Was this going to be such a big deal? So he was gone. So she was alone alone. She’d be alone in her coffin, for god’s sake.
Maybe he was her cancer. Maybe he had his own cancer. Maybe they could squeeze into that box together.
She switched on the telly.
“Do you know,” asked the girl’s biology professor, “if there’s anything like client privilege between us and her?”
The provost shrugged. On the surface he was always affable, almost dopey. You could fall asleep to his lush, modulated voice. “I don’t think, and I’m not going to suggest, that we need to be adversarial.” He smiled at the five professors around the table. “If you know anything, you need to be honest about it. But for the sake of privacy, we all”—and here he nodded at two attorneys to his right—“feel that no one needs to speak to the press. For the family’s sake, the less public speculation—or even analysis—the better.” He frowned slightly and then relaxed his face in a gesture of neutrality and harmlessness. “We’ll work with the authorities. We’ll work with all parties. But we have no official stake in this. We’re not asking to be in any loop. Every loss of this nature”—now he was quoting an e-mail he’d sent that morning—“is both private and communal. It is with us all. Further questions?”
“I told you I could see this coming,” Martin’s mom said. “Didn’t I?”
“Yes.” He tried to hide his impatience. “Yes, you had an inkling.”
“An inkling.” She bit into what sounded like an apple. “Let me tell you, we’ve known a lot of people who’ve had this kind of thing, and none of them, and I mean none of them, have devoted themselves to it the full-time way that she has.”
“And what happened to them?” he had to ask.
“They died.”
“Well, maybe that’s just it. Maybe you h
ave to do it full-time to have a chance to live.”
“I don’t think so.” She took another bite. “I think he probably had another—you know—woman.”
“So you’ve said.” Martin thought of hanging up, but she was one person you couldn’t hang up on.
“Or he’s gay. Or bi. Or whatever you call it.”
“Whatever,” Martin said.
“Good thing Lauren isn’t having that baby.”
“Mom.”
“So when do you leave?”
He told her. Then, to get her off his sister, he told her about his student.
“Did you know her?”
He tried to give her as much as he could stand, and she riddled him with questions about what she was like.
“What do you have to do with any investigation?” she asked.
“I don’t really know.”
“Well.” She finished her apple. “If you need any help, you can always call Martha.”
“Mom.” He swallowed whatever he could think of saying. “I’ve got to go.”
“Call from Elizabeth’s.”
“I will.”
He set the phone on the charger and stared at the suitcase he’d been trying to pack while he’d talked to her. He’d forgotten underwear. Max toddled in and stuck to his knees.
“I’ll miss you,” the boy said.
“I’ll miss you, too.”
He took up his son and felt him sinking into him, the chest against his shoulder, the head heavy and dropping into his neck, the warm breath on the hollow of skin around his collarbone. Max rested there. Then he pushed himself up and pointed.
“TV?” he said.
“Okay,” Martin said. He picked up the remote and clicked it on, and Max wriggled free and sat on top of the suitcase, watching. The phone rang. He let it go. From downstairs, he heard Lauren pick up. He tried to listen closely. It was someone she didn’t know that well. She called to him to get on.
“Hello?” he said.
“Professor Kreutzel?”
Somebody official. God, he hadn’t even helped out with the laundry or dinner or the kids or whatever else was down there in the toy-strewn swirl of the kitchen and dining room and living room. He wanted to say no, he was just another numb nut watching an almost-three-year-old watch TV, while his skull closed itself tighter and tighter over his brain and his lids clenched over his eyes and his dick shriveled into minisculity and his balls withered and shrank—
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