Who rise from flesh to spirit know the falclass="underline"
The word outleaps the world, and light is all.
This was our dress rehearsal, a mock examination I would have failed but for Helen's benevolent cheating.
It was time. We were ready. We were past ready.
"Keep your fingers crossed," Lentz told me. That gesture that wishes share with the momentary exemption from lies.
I called A. the night before the date we had made so long ago. Over the phone, at the end, I could say anything. I did not have to see her face, and time was past accounting for.
"I — are you still sitting the test tomorrow?"
"Oh, never you mind. I can write that essay in my sleep. I said I'd do it, didn't I?"
On the real topic, neither of us was saying a word. Tacit negotiation, and the theme would never again come to light. But curiosity got the better of A., at the end.
"Can I ask you just one thing? I don't get it. Why me?"
Because you embodied the world's vulnerable, variable noun-ness. All things ephemeral, articulate, remembering, on their way back to inert. Because you believe and have not yet given up. Because I cannot turn around without wanting to tell you what I see. Because I could deal even with politics, could live even this desperate disparity, if I could just talk to you each night before sleep. Because of the way you use two fingers to hold back the hair from your eyes.
Those were the words I wanted. Instead, I said, "Everyone in the world and his bastard half brother loves you. Your not realizing that is one of the reasons why."
"What do you want from me?" she groaned. Full-blooded distress. That Dutch active verb for remaining mum flashed through my head. I silented. "I never did anything to encourage you."
"Of course not. I've built even larger fabrications on no encouragement at all. All by my lonesome."
A. loosened a little. Everything but exasperation. "What do you expect me to say?"
What did I? "Nothing. Don't say anything. I'm the one who needs to say things. Say yes if you can't think of anything nicer."
A. laughed, scraped open. "I have a life already. Quite populated. Someone for whom — I'm more than a theory. You know that."
I did. I'd inferred her involvement long before the irrefutable evidence. I remembered the revelation, before it happened. I could have scripted it.
"It's — it's unlike any friendship I've ever known in my life. Every day — every conversation is— I wouldn't dream. ."
"Of course you wouldn't. That's why I love you. One of the reasons I want to many you."
She laughed again, conceding the joke of pain. But she was already restless. What would this rushed proposal mean to her, when she was my age, and I'd disappeared into whatever future self would deign to take me? Pleasure, curio, discomfort. She might wonder if she'd made the whole thing up. Most likely, she'd have forgotten.
A., for some reason, still had to explain things to me. Nobody ever quite understands anyone. "I'm not trying to say that we might have had something, in another time or place. I'll spare you that old cliché."
"Please," I begged. "Don't spare me. I could live for months on that old cliché."
I wanted to tell her: Look. I've come back to this place. The complete song cycle spent. And here you are, waiting like a quarterly payment voucher. Like a reminding string around my finger, threatening to tourniquet forgetful circulation. Saying, without once knowing what you were saying, You think it's over? You think you don't have to do this forever?
Relax, I wanted to tell her. The world holds no nightmare so large that some child somewhere sometime won't live it again and wake calling out. My stupid, residual hanger-on-hope that she might somehow feel something for me, a love-at-last-sight, was no more than this: the search for external confirmation. I needed A. to triangulate, to tell me. To agree that living here was the best way to survive the place.
"It just struck me as stupid, that's all. To be so opened to chance by someone and not tell them." Take my mistake with you, my love. And make of it anything you might like.
We talked on, pushing into saving substance. Gossip and event made her comfortable again, as she had been with me before we knew each other. She told me she had accepted a job teaching at a high school in L., two states away. She'd be leaving at the end of summer.
I could hear the excitement in her voice. A whole new life. "You have to get them while they're babies, you know."
"You will," I guaranteed her.
"What happens to you? You going to stick around?"
"Not sure." We fell into a pause as peaceful as anything that had ever passed between us. The peace past the last page.
"Well, I'm glad we talked. Sort of." She giggled. "Take care. I'll see you again before we each take off."
But we never did. Except in print.
"Richard," Helen whispered. "Richard. Tell me another one." She loved me, I guess. I reminded her of some thing. Some chilly night she never felt. Some where where she thought she'd once been. We love best of all what we cannot hope to resemble. I told that woman everything in the world but how I felt about her. The thing that might have let her remain.
I was too late in seeing who she had become. I should have taught her the thing I didn't know.
Harold, as sanguine, as unreadable as ever, delivered the last hurdle.
"So here's the work I want them to interpret."
I took the sheet from him. "That's it? You mean to say that's it?"
"What? There's supposed to be more?"
"Well, yeah. You're supposed to start with 'Discuss how class tensions touched off by the Industrial Revolution produced the reaction of Romanticism in three of the following works.' "
"Not interested," Harold said.
"Something about depth psychology and the arbitrary indeterminacy of signs."
"I just want them to tell me what this means."
"This? These two lines."
'Too much? Okay, make it just the first one if you want."
The sheet, virtually blank, read:
Be not afeard: the isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.
Caliban's read of the spells with which his master imprisons him. Harold had surprised us. He'd given exactly what we'd predicted of him.
'This is not a work," I protested. Helen had read the complete tomes of Trollope and Richardson. She'd read Bronte and Twain at their most nihilistic, Joyce at his most impenetrably encoded, Dickinson at her most embracingly abdicating. "Give her a chance to fly."
"This is her chance," Harold said.
A. used departmental mail to return her response. Helen dumped hers to the network laser.
Lentz held the two papers out to me, as if there were still a contest. "Okay. Guess which twin has the Toni?"
Neither twin would have placed the reference. A. was too young, and Helen far too old.
A.'s interpretation was a more or less brilliant New Historicist reading. She rendered The Tempest as a take on colonial wars, constructed Otherness, the violent reduction society works on itself. She dismissed, definitively, any promise of transcendence.
She scored at least one massively palpable hit. She conceded how these words are spoken by a monster who isn't supposed to be able to say anything that beautiful, let alone say at all.
Helen's said:
You are the ones who can hear airs. Who can be frightened or encouraged. You can hold things and break them and fix them. I never felt at home here. This is an awful place to be dropped down halfway.
At the bottom of the page, she added the words I taught her, words Helen cribbed from a letter she once made me read out loud.