assault and had responded intuitively. My God, I thought, so that’s what she thinks of me. And yet—I don’t know how to say this without sounding pathological—the notion that Emma thought of me at all was something of a comfort. You see, my body remembered too.
In any event I ran into Serrault on the street shortly afterwards. He was shopping for a meat thermometer (he was quite the cook) and, to his surprise and mine, I began to tell him about this odd sighting of Emma. Midway through it my heart began to pound and a sensation of thinness overcame me, as if I were somehow lying, as if I were suggesting that the sheer violence of her response implied that she was somehow still in love with me. It got worse. Describing my reaction to her, namely, walking out of the store sans rien dire , without even a nod, I seemed to be suggesting, however coyly, that while it was she who had abandoned me, it was now I who kept the door locked. I kept on. I insisted, my voice almost an octave higher now, that sometimes it made me even happy to think about her, to bathe in the knowledge that I had, in fact, recovered. Totally. But the more I tried to explain all this, the more self-deluding, the more obsessed I sounded. (Even now I feel a tad too insistent.) By the end of it I felt as if my body had been poisoned, and I was in a foul mood.
Serrault, of course, had no response whatsoever except for mild sympathy. “ Tiens,” he said, and ducked into a kitchen supply shop. A turkey baster had caught his eye.
That evening I sat out on the back patio in a coat and hat, smoking cigarettes and staring into the garden. And after a while I remembered, comme ça , a picture of Emma rushing down the basement stairs with a load of laundry. Why that image? I don’t know. It’s just that there was something slightly sad about it, as if somehow I should have put my arms around her to stop that nervous rushing, that agitated way of being. She behaved sometimes, I now recalled, like a kid afraid of “getting in heck.” I think she may even have used that phrase once. Getting in heck .
Suddenly my ears began to buzz and I had the feeling that I had entered into her thoughts as sure as if I had put my hand through the wall of her chest and clutched her heart.
The garden hung in frozen icicles; they gleamed under the yard lights. I dropped my cigarette, and when I leaned over to pick it up I exhaled a gust of frozen breath that darted away like a thought. I exhaled again and could see the momentary shapes of an island, a boat, a field, even Brazil. My imagination was like an independent living thing, like a reef or the earth itself. And in one of these exhalations I saw with the detail of a well-lit film the image of Emma walking along a wintry street. She was talking with great animation to a short, grey-haired man. I’d never seen him before, but at one point she stopped dead in her tracks and turned to him and said, I’m so happy!
It was as if her soul was speaking to me, to my soul, as if she were saying, Stop thinking about me. Please. Leave me alone .
I was still rocky the next day—at my age hangovers are two-day affairs—but I had a number of administrative meetings to attend. University departments are run by dictators who surround themselves with committees; it gives things the aura of democracy, and you have to turn up. There was a full afternoon with the Course Content Committee, which provided an opportunity for new faculty members (those without tenure) to second-guess the pleasures of department head Camille Dupré.
Let me say off the top that Dupré was not the college’s first choice. That went to a Harvard man, a white-haired gentleman with an international reputation (Montaigne). We were thrilled to steal him away (and only five years from retirement, no less). But during orientation week there was an incident. To put it mildly. He went to a local pub with a bunch of freshmen and at closing time invited the group back
In any event I ran into Serrault on the street shortly afterwards. He was shopping for a meat thermometer (he was quite the cook) and, to his surprise and mine, I began to tell him about this odd sighting of Emma. Midway through it my heart began to pound and a sensation of thinness overcame me, as if I were somehow lying, as if I were suggesting that the sheer violence of her response implied that she was somehow still in love with me. It got worse. Describing my reaction to her, namely, walking out of the store sans rien dire , without even a nod, I seemed to be suggesting, however coyly, that while it was she who had abandoned me, it was now I who kept the door locked. I kept on. I insisted, my voice almost an octave higher now, that sometimes it made me even happy to think about her, to bathe in the knowledge that I had, in fact, recovered. Totally. But the more I tried to explain all this, the more self-deluding, the more obsessed I sounded. (Even now I feel a tad too insistent.) By the end of it I felt as if my body had been poisoned, and I was in a foul mood.
Serrault, of course, had no response whatsoever except for mild sympathy. “ Tiens,” he said, and ducked into a kitchen supply shop. A turkey baster had caught his eye.
That evening I sat out on the back patio in a coat and hat, smoking cigarettes and staring into the garden. And after a while I remembered, comme ça , a picture of Emma rushing down the basement stairs with a load of laundry. Why that image? I don’t know. It’s just that there was something slightly sad about it, as if somehow I should have put my arms around her to stop that nervous rushing, that agitated way of being. She behaved sometimes, I now recalled, like a kid afraid of “getting in heck.” I think she may even have used that phrase once. Getting in heck .
Suddenly my ears began to buzz and I had the feeling that I had entered into her thoughts as sure as if I had put my hand through the wall of her chest and clutched her heart.
The garden hung in frozen icicles; they gleamed under the yard lights. I dropped my cigarette, and when I leaned over to pick it up I exhaled a gust of frozen breath that darted away like a thought. I exhaled again and could see the momentary shapes of an island, a boat, a field, even Brazil. My imagination was like an independent living thing, like a reef or the earth itself. And in one of these exhalations I saw with the detail of a well-lit film the image of Emma walking along a wintry street. She was talking with great animation to a short, grey-haired man. I’d never seen him before, but at one point she stopped dead in her tracks and turned to him and said, I’m so happy!
It was as if her soul was speaking to me, to my soul, as if she were saying, Stop thinking about me. Please. Leave me alone .
I was still rocky the next day—at my age hangovers are two-day affairs—but I had a number of administrative meetings to attend. University departments are run by dictators who surround themselves with committees; it gives things the aura of democracy, and you have to turn up. There was a full afternoon with the Course Content Committee, which provided an opportunity for new faculty members (those without tenure) to second-guess the pleasures of department head Camille Dupré.
Let me say off the top that Dupré was not the college’s first choice. That went to a Harvard man, a white-haired gentleman with an international reputation (Montaigne). We were thrilled to steal him away (and only five years from retirement, no less). But during orientation week there was an incident. To put it mildly. He went to a local pub with a bunch of freshmen and at closing time invited the group back
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