looked out at five o’clock, he had gone. I lingered by the window, imagining that I could see his outline in vacated space, a pillar of absence glowing in the late afternoon’s diminishing light.
Then I went and stood by the machine. The red LED showed thirty-three messages. I used the scan function to skip through them and found Clarissa’s voice. She hoped I was all right, she’d be back at six, and she loved me. There were three work messages, leaving Parry’s score at twenty-nine. Even as I contemplated that figure, the tape began to turn. I pushed the volume wheel. It sounded like he was calling from a taxi. “Joe. Brilliant idea with the curtains. I got it straightaway? All I wanted to say is this again. I feel it too. I really do.” On these last words emotion pitched his voice a little higher.
The curtains? I returned to the living room and looked. They hung as they always did. We never drew them. I pulled one aside, foolishly expecting to find a clue.
Then I sat again in my study, not working but brooding and waiting for Clarissa, and again my thoughts returned to how I came to be what I was, and how it might have been different, and, ridiculously, how I might find my way back to original research and achieve something new before I was fifty.
Nine
It would make more sense of Clarissa’s return to tell it from her point of view. Or at least from that point as I later construed it. She arrives up three flights of stairs, bearing five kilograms of books and papers in her leather bag, which she has carried half a mile from the tube station. At her back, a bad day. First thing, the student she supervised yesterday, a raw girl from Lancaster, phoned her in tears and shouting incoherently. When Clarissa calmed her down, the girl accused her of setting her impossible reading tasks and of sending her up blind alleys of research. The Romantic poetry seminar went badly because the two students appointed to give discussion papers had prepared nothing and the rest of the kids had not bothered with the reading. At the end of the morning she discovered that her appointment diary was missing. All through lunch a colleague complained that her husband was too gentle with her in bed and lacked the necessary sexual aggression to overpower her and deliver the quality of orgasm she knew she deserved. For three hours during the afternoon Clarissa sat on a senate committee and found herself maneuveredinto voting for the least bad option, a seven percent reduction in the budget of her own department. She went straight from that to a performance and efficiency interview conducted by the management, where she was reminded that she had been consistently late in filing her workload quota schedules and that her teaching, research, and administration ratios were showing an uneven distribution.
As she lugs her bag up the stairs, she feels it is costing her more effort than it should, and she thinks she might be getting a cold. There’s a tenderness over the bridge of her nose, and her eyes are pricking. There’s also a widening ache in the small of her back, always a reliable sign in her of viral infection. Worst of all, the memory of the balloon accident is back with her. It’s never been far from her mind, but for a good part of the day she has kept it at one remove, anecdotalized, in its own compartment. Now it has broken out, it is right inside her. It’s like a smell on the end of her fingers. The image that has been with her since the late afternoon is of Logan letting go. The feeling that went with it, the horrified helplessness, has been with her too and seems to have generated the physical symptoms of a cold or flu. Talking the events over with friends no longer seems to help, because, she thinks, she has reached a core of senselessness. As she comes up the last flight of stairs, she notes that the ache is spreading to her knee joints. Or is this what happens to you when you haul books upstairs and you are no longer in
Then I went and stood by the machine. The red LED showed thirty-three messages. I used the scan function to skip through them and found Clarissa’s voice. She hoped I was all right, she’d be back at six, and she loved me. There were three work messages, leaving Parry’s score at twenty-nine. Even as I contemplated that figure, the tape began to turn. I pushed the volume wheel. It sounded like he was calling from a taxi. “Joe. Brilliant idea with the curtains. I got it straightaway? All I wanted to say is this again. I feel it too. I really do.” On these last words emotion pitched his voice a little higher.
The curtains? I returned to the living room and looked. They hung as they always did. We never drew them. I pulled one aside, foolishly expecting to find a clue.
Then I sat again in my study, not working but brooding and waiting for Clarissa, and again my thoughts returned to how I came to be what I was, and how it might have been different, and, ridiculously, how I might find my way back to original research and achieve something new before I was fifty.
Nine
It would make more sense of Clarissa’s return to tell it from her point of view. Or at least from that point as I later construed it. She arrives up three flights of stairs, bearing five kilograms of books and papers in her leather bag, which she has carried half a mile from the tube station. At her back, a bad day. First thing, the student she supervised yesterday, a raw girl from Lancaster, phoned her in tears and shouting incoherently. When Clarissa calmed her down, the girl accused her of setting her impossible reading tasks and of sending her up blind alleys of research. The Romantic poetry seminar went badly because the two students appointed to give discussion papers had prepared nothing and the rest of the kids had not bothered with the reading. At the end of the morning she discovered that her appointment diary was missing. All through lunch a colleague complained that her husband was too gentle with her in bed and lacked the necessary sexual aggression to overpower her and deliver the quality of orgasm she knew she deserved. For three hours during the afternoon Clarissa sat on a senate committee and found herself maneuveredinto voting for the least bad option, a seven percent reduction in the budget of her own department. She went straight from that to a performance and efficiency interview conducted by the management, where she was reminded that she had been consistently late in filing her workload quota schedules and that her teaching, research, and administration ratios were showing an uneven distribution.
As she lugs her bag up the stairs, she feels it is costing her more effort than it should, and she thinks she might be getting a cold. There’s a tenderness over the bridge of her nose, and her eyes are pricking. There’s also a widening ache in the small of her back, always a reliable sign in her of viral infection. Worst of all, the memory of the balloon accident is back with her. It’s never been far from her mind, but for a good part of the day she has kept it at one remove, anecdotalized, in its own compartment. Now it has broken out, it is right inside her. It’s like a smell on the end of her fingers. The image that has been with her since the late afternoon is of Logan letting go. The feeling that went with it, the horrified helplessness, has been with her too and seems to have generated the physical symptoms of a cold or flu. Talking the events over with friends no longer seems to help, because, she thinks, she has reached a core of senselessness. As she comes up the last flight of stairs, she notes that the ache is spreading to her knee joints. Or is this what happens to you when you haul books upstairs and you are no longer in
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