"Janny." A student pleading for a grade change. "I don't want to leave you at all." I retaliated now with all the secretly stockpiled silence I had stolen from him over the months. "Jan. You want me to make it worse?" I waited, my fingers jiggling like voltmeter needles. "You're asking me to hit you." Yes, 1 thought. Say it. It will never make any sense otherwise. I will never work it out alone. "You cannot," he started. He shifted clauses. "She… Annie. You see, with her—"
"She's still fertile," I supplied. His relief, the greatest 1 ever succeeded in giving him, broke all over his face. I felt, to answer it, only sick, self-confirming, disaster stoicism. Your house is on fire and your children have burnt. I knew what I needed to do, and would do it cleanly. "I'm sorry," I said. "I had no idea. You two are trying to make babies?"
"Janny." Frank was beyond trying. "Janny."
But I was right: the saving maybe. Every option exercised was a small murder. Open-door policy, everything had to remain possible. He couldn't write about his Flemish landscapist without first acquiring botany, geography, geology, optics, another foreign language. He could not write a life with me without a second edition being at least conceivable. He had to remain an able-semened body. My ligation robbed him of potential. His every evasion of commitment preserved the day when he might exercise his birthright, cash in and capitulate to fatherhood.
I had my explanation, and I made to leave. But stopping at the door, meaning to make a concession to closure — a last goodwill drink somewhere — I surprised myself by furiously whispering, "I told you everything early on. Why bother coming back, week after week? Why trouble to move halfway in? Why string out the thing, knowing I was useless?"
A boy, arrogantly loose on his scavenger hunt, stared at me in boyish bewilderment. "What do you mean?" He held his head, searched for the best possible word to counter my willful misrepresentation. "I love you."
I left him and walked alone to the control room, where I heard Dr. Ressler's birthday musical offering. I knocked and entered rapidly, before I could back out. The professor sat behind the bank of monitors, blissfully happy in the spray of dense counterpoint from his turntable. "Ah! A victim. Listen to this," he said, hungry for companionship to a degree I had never seen in him. He was now ready for anything that circumstance might throw him. And I had come to rub his readiness out.
"The D minor partita for solo violin. 'Solo' is a euphemism. Multipart polyphony from a single instrument. Last movement: the chaconne. Constantly repeated eight-bar theme___" He stopped.
I had my back to him, looking through the two-way mirror into the computer room, committing the place to long-term memory. "No music lesson today?" he said gently, without patronage. Unique among males in my experience.
"Your boy says he loves me," I said, trying for lightness and missing by light-years.
Dr. Ressler lifted the needle of the phonograph and bombarded us with quiet. "That much is obvious." My long silence gave him a chance to allude to that old, shared joke. "Well, yes. It is obvious."
"But you see," I said, turning to him and parodying a smile, "I am no longer functional."
He looked me full in the face, searching for the missing pieces. In less time than it would have taken a professional, he had the thing figured. Against room rules, he lit a cigarette brutally, in disgust. A flare-up I didn't know could come from him. He had taken a chance on us, tenderly maneuvered us over our own flaws, poised us for a reasonable chance at happiness; all we had had to do was pay attention and try to be relatively free of cruelty.
He walked a few steps in every direction. His eyes were intent on something farther than the other side of the silvered glass. He shook his head, racing through the permutations, discarding things he might say as pointless. He stubbed out the butt and exploded. "The man is a fool." I felt a forbidden rush: Dr. Ressler needed me. I went over to him, stopped him from stepping away, and pinned myself to him. The only demonstration either of us would ever give one another. I didn't let go; instead, I pressed against him, insisting. Slowly, against his will, he pressed back. We did not caress, but held one another hypothetically, softly letting skin guess at what desire might have felt in another place, another life, halves of a botched dissection, an old whole.
We separated without explanation. He lifted my lowered chin until I had to look squarely at him. "This is not the scenario of choice for you two. You know that."
I shrugged. "It's the scenario we're in." It occurred to me: I could say: Talk to him; shame him. And the thing would be straightened. Ressler knew as much too, and was waiting, weight on his toes, to intercede. I didn't ask. I no longer wanted to be fixed. It was a relief to escape the waiting, the nights away — to break off without it being my fault. To come away with all the benefits of the injured party.
I went home, there being no other place. Over the next several days, most of Todd's possessions politely disappeared of their own accord, vanished under bacterial rot, in stop-action film. The evacuation did leave its slight, keloid blemish. Notebooks, a record or two, a pair of socks left behind, forgotten — the crippled child in Hamelin, or props for a later, staged, happier goodbye.
The room above the antique shop once again became my private reserve. There was nothing to do on evenings off except repair the place. When I could make no more improvements to its chenille stagecraft, I began finding reasons to stay late at the branch, without compensation except the slightly more comprehensive answer.
Q: What is the largest geological feature on earth?
A: The earth's largest feature is also its youngest. The Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a ten-thousand-mile-long submarine mountain range rising to an average height of ten thousand feet and anywhere from three to six hundred miles wide, is split down its length by the breach of new rock welling up from the convection currents of the earth's molten mantle.
I lost several days to the QB. I thought I might be able to go on forever, working it into the perfect artifice, addressing every hidden need in the close-lipped questioner.
Warm days went on increasing. 1 began walking again, more cautiously, not so far afield as when it had been the two of us. Brooklyn is a complex biome. Two and a half million people watching the neighborhood isobars of war and truce. Streets full of Russian, Italian, German, Korean, Yiddish, Spanish, Chinese — a fair slice of the varieties of talk. But the language map is devised to keep out crossovers. I stuck to the island allotted me — branch, apartment, subway opening.
After a long afternoon at the branch rooting through Gov Pubs, I did not feel like going home. One evening, sitting in a convenient pizza parlor among surreal composite frescoes of Venetian and Florentine landmarks, I had time, for the first time since I'd left him, to see how I'd treated Tuckwell. While I'd been flush, I believed that the best thing we could do for old loves was be firm with them. I now saw the weak rationalization for what it was. I simply had had no stomach for messy responsibility. If it were too late to make good, maybe I could at least recant.
Keithy shouted a surprised hello through the intercom and buzzed me in. I walked up to the apartment, disoriented by how familiar the stairs still were. He'd left the door open but did not meet me. He was lying in the recliner, watching TV with the sound off, but in full three-piece uniform as if just back from the office. "Marian," he said, as if I too were just home from work. "What do you have to say for yourself?" I had lived here once, and all the place could say was / remember you; wait, don't tell me.… I sat next to him, ready for any sentence — hostility, abuse, sadistic wit, even affection, caresses, sex-with-the-ex, if that was the penalty he chose to extract. Any slap but casual indifference.