I didn't want you to hear from Ulrich tomorrow, secondhand, about what concerns you at first. I worked up the courage to tell you face to face, but as you know, courage has always been at best a periodic phenomenon with me. A few minutes of sitting, waiting for you to catch me here, and I rush into the cowardice of print. I keep thinking I can hear your step coming up to the door. I keep rushing up, shutting this thing with guilty relief. Impossible hope that you might somehow still free me from having to say all this. You always could revise even my firmest rules. Why don't you come home?
Here is what has happened. Herbert, my husband, foreseeing every eventuality, knowing I might take it in mind really to fall in love with you long before I did, put in for a transfer some months back. The arrangements have at last come through. He has been assigned to — no matter where. The world is flattening out to uniformity anyway. The next choice is mine: Wife, are you coming or staying? Coming.
You will walk in now before I can finish this clause. You'll look over my shoulder, read this, laugh. You will turn and walk out, leave me, unable to understand. How could you? I told you once that I have never lied to you. It's true, Stuart. But all along, from the opening note I passed you, I've let you draw your own conclusions. The line between that and lying now seems more equivocal than it did before I turned thirty. What good is it to claim that I never misrepresented myself to you, if I never presented, either?
Oh, love. If all I had to do now was admit, make out that we two stole your baby. If I could say: my husband, all along, was the barren one. That we two, in sickness and health, in love so deep that it reached bottom, colluded to dupe you. That he told me: go find someone, someone brilliant, soft, crystal in temperament, kind. That I found the most intelligent, gorgeous seed imaginable to use. (Beautiful isn't enough: I see your tightening lids, the flush of your cheeks as you tense under me. Brilliant doesn't suffice: your leaps are like nothing I will see again.)
If only we had stung you for a little fertility. I could have lived with that on my conscience. Isn't that love, when it comes down to it? The old pollen trick? Mutually profitable trade, exploitation. I give you pleasure to match your inbred fantasy, and take, in return, a painless biopsy, a little tissue you will never miss. I could forgive myself for having tried to steal your genes.
But that isn't how it went. That wasn't how I came to you. It's exactly as I told you long ago: Herbert is fine. I'm the one with something wrong. He could leave me cleanly by anyone's rules of fairness. Give me the severance payoff, go land a twenty-five-year-old with all her parts working as advertised, and even now start a family. That's what all the tests showed. But, good radical skeptic, I didn't believe the tests. I had to run my own. All I needed to disprove them was the perfect man.
I told you I never lied to you. I wanted you, wanted to give myself to you from the moment I toweled dry your angelic hair. But from the start, want was couched in hysterical denial. I thought we might remake physiology, you and I, if we were fierce enough. All selfless and abject, but everything I ever gave you I handed over with an eye toward the impossible return on investment, your saving me. You see, I've never wanted anything in my life as I want to be a mother. Think of the deepest desire you have ever felt. Then let it last unanswered every day for ever.
He looks up from the page, up where the walls meet the ceiling. She means discovery. Science. An urge greater than what I am after: in vivo. And she will never have it.
All this makes what I did even worse. I loved you, I love you this minute. Stuart, believe none of this but that. I would retract, qualify beyond recognition, to be able to promise you again all the mutual evers we have ever given each other. That's really why I came by. Not to tell you about my going: to stare you in the face, get you to swear that you will never leave me.
The most selfless love I ever felt was self-serving. The deepest altruism I am capable of feeling is still after something, the thing I was after in you. You were going to rewrite the rules for me, or at least explain, at cell level, why I'd been singled out, left with a desire beyond solving. But you couldn't do that for me. You could do nothing for me but love me.
You have cause to trust my truths less than my lies, but believe me. Your love has become, despite my best self-interest, as necessary, as desperate, as the little window of time that we've had. I seem to have reached a pitch of knowledge with you that I will never know again. But I'll never be without it entirely, now. I see you teaching our little girls to sing rounds. I watch us selecting chemistry sets for them for birthdays, together, carefully. Oh God. It will break my heart to go on. I'll never get through this. You've let me see what it might have been like to have a real home.
I am leaving to be with a man who, during the course of my hysterical year, looked the other way. Nothing, nothing in it for him. He knew what I was going through — my refusing the proof of sterility. He let me sneak, granted me the dignity of pretending not to know, and when pretense became impossible, arranged to leave. And still, he booked a place for me, should I want to leave with him. I'm leaving because I'd like for once to follow something other than the calculus of personal gain. I'm not trying to be worthy of him or to offer myself to sacrifice. You see, for whatever the sloppy term means, I love Herbert. I loved him for years before I fell for you. His is the only love I can carry through without invalidating the whole shooting match.
I've made some noises about being taken on at the university twenty miles from where we're heading. It won't be much, but perhaps Herbert will agree to follow me for the next move. We move a lot in this country, don't we? So know I will still have our work, in some form at least, to compensate me for all I have lost in you. I will read about you in the lit, and the children Herbert and I adopt may well yet read about you in the texts. Stuart, I hope it. I know it. But you must agree that that can be all the contact we can allow.
It seems you're going to force me to get all the way through this. But I will not leave without asking what I came here to ask. Friend, love me. Marry me, in some other, hypothetical life? Barring that (and I understand perfectly if you refuse), think of me sometimes, and of the time we had. It was a time. How much will still happen to you! Tell the woman you end up loving all about me. Never let her live a day for granted. And prove to the gold bug that it is ingenious enough to crack itself. You have cause, so have we all, for joy.
He flips the page, as if everything she has written might still be canceled out by one more amendment. But she has written nothing more except "Sorry to have spoiled a beautiful notebook." The record has run out while he read. It was in the high twenties when he entered. If she'd put it on from the beginning, as fortification for her act of mercy killing, he must have just missed her. She is still in town, at the building perhaps, cleaning out her desk. He could intercept her, pretend not to have seen the note. Incite that change of mind she seems to half hope for in every paragraph. Or he could help her, just this once, to locate the sequence for love.
He stares blankly at the stacks of journals for several inaudible variations before he sees something else there. Another, out-of-place publication: a goodbye gift, a chaste kiss between yearning cousins, the pocket edition of A Field Guide to Flowering Plants. He searches the front pages for an inscription. She has indeed left a message there, the only possible one. In her irreproducible script she has written, "Flowers have names." But neither book nor letter — nor any communication in his possession — bears Jeanette's signature.