“So, Ben,” her husband says. “You think he’ll be okay?” It seems they’re done with Ellie for the day.
Twice, she almost takes his hand — Maya crosses her arms over her chest.
“It must be so much for him,” she says. “I think he needs a break.”
“I guess it won’t. .” He grabs her elbow to stop her from stepping into the crosswalk. An SUV speeds past.
“It’s nothing that he can’t undo,” she says. They wait for the walk signal, Stephen’s hand still on her arm. “He can try out other things. .”
They go into a diner, some self-conscious attempt at a Manhattan college hangout. Maya orders a plate of french fries and a glass of wine. They’re silent till the food comes. Maya tries a single fry, then pushes her plate toward her husband, sips her wine. Stephen takes large bites of a chicken sandwich and picks at Maya’s fries.
“I’ve been rereading Zarathustra,” he says.
Of course, she thinks, we’re returning to these things.
“You know the part with the dwarf?”
Maya nods, though she barely remembers. She read it years ago, lugging around the portable Nietzsche just after she met Stephen. She’d slogged her way through the lot of it, Beyond Good and Evil, The Anti-Christ, even some of the letters to Wagner. She and Stephen had had some interesting, what felt then like life-changing, conversations and she’d thought, Yes. This. But, really, she had hardly made sense of most of Zarathustra. She remembers something jarring about the part with the dwarf. He jumped on Zarathustra’s shoulder and poured lead in his ear.
“I’ve always hated that part,” Stephen says. “I always thought it couldn’t be as straightforward as it felt. Even with the aphorisms, maybe because I’ve built my life on asking questions.” He shakes his head. “We have this need to make everything mean five or six different things.”
He passes her plate back toward her and nods toward the french fries. He pours ketchup on the side of the plate and hands her a freshly dipped fry as he speaks.
She eats, chewing slowly, her husband watching, the salt and grease mixed with the ketchup almost pleasurable along her tongue.
“I think part of the reason I focused on the Germans is because it all seemed so endless, every word they said had been driven all these different ways.
“Martin,” he says. He smiles at her.
She shakes her head to make clear she doesn’t know which Martin.
“Heidegger,” he says. “God bless him, I don’t think he knew what he meant half the time. Sometimes I think that’s his whole point.”
He hasn’t even meant to, but she watches him turning back into the man she knew. The man with whom she chose to build a life.
“But I’ve decided to fall in love with the dwarf now. I want it to be that simple. I need something that just means what it says. I think it was the moment, maybe Friedrich was tired, but he was just playing straight for once. Things jump on our backs and overwhelm us, they pour into us and drown everything else out. For him it was this idea of the eternal recurrence, which, though you mustn’t ever tell anyone, I really never understood. I mean, yes, things repeat, time is crooked, I think that makes sense, but the idea that it’s a circle seems to me not quite accurate, and part of me wishes it was, because. .”
He stops. She stares at him. He holds his sandwich in midair but doesn’t move to put it down. Because then maybe they could do it all again.
She loves him, she thinks. She was right to marry him.
Maya — twenty-three — she sat outside Avery Library with her book. The weather had fallen into biting early winter cold, but she was desperate for the air and bundled up.
“He’d be proud,” said Stephen, nodding toward her.
Maya jumped at the sound of him. He seemed grown-up, confident. He wore glasses with thick rims, a thin dark blue wool coat that looked smooth and costly. He wore a bag slung across his chest and had dark hair cut close to his head.
“Fyodor,” said Stephen. “Dostoyevsky. He’d love you out here, suffering for your work.” He said the last bit in a deeper voice than he’d said the first, scowling, then raising the corners of his lips.
Maya laughed at him, and shrugged. “I love him,” she said. She hadn’t meant to sound as emphatic as she did.
“Well, he’d love you too, on sight,” said Stephen. “The bluster of you.”
“Bluster?” said Maya. “Are you British?”
Stephen laughed. “Just stuck up.”
He was a scholar of Nietzsche, all the Germans, political philosophy. He stood up very straight and once he smiled he looked much younger than he was. She felt her body leaning toward him. She smiled back at him, and when he asked her out for drinks she said yes and it felt good.
They had drinks and dinner. They had breakfast. Two weeks passed and then a month. He read the final draft of her dissertation over a single weekend. She made him stay at his apartment and she at hers while he read. “So serious,” he said when she decreed this. And she could tell, and she was gratefuclass="underline" he appreciated gravity.
They met for breakfast that Monday morning. He hadn’t slept, she thought. It was the first time she’d seen him with stubble and wanted to touch it, to ask him to run it slowly, a little forcefully, down her length. They were at a diner on Waverly near his apartment. They both lived downtown, separate from school. She was half an hour early, but Stephen was already there. He had his hands, one on top of the other, set atop the stack of now-worn white paper. His back was tall against the booth. The whole time he spoke she was incapable of holding still. She’d ordered water, orange juice, and coffee and kept fingering one glass and then the mug and then the other glass, sipping, cupping, lining rims.
It was better than him loving it. He had notes for her and more in the margins. They sat for hours with their half-filled plates and endless cups of coffee. He talked and talked and she thought yes.
“I love you,” she said when they were done and back at her apartment. When they had discussed it all and she’d called her advisor and asked for one more month. After she’d led him to the shower, both of them drained and greasy from the diner — he’d had her up against the grimy black-and-white tiles, his hand cupping her left thigh, her right leg held up by the tips of her toes, almost slipping, grabbing tight to the shower rod.
There were water spots on Maya’s pillows from their still-wet hair. She ran her hands along the dry and then the wet. It was the first time she’d said “I love you” to him, to anyone besides her dad. He laughed.
“I wonder if you don’t just love my notes,” he said.
They read out loud to one another things that they were working on, passages they hadn’t quite made sense of yet. He liked to garden, would spend hours outside in ratty shorts and moccasins, looking exactly like the privileged boy from Collegiate that he’d always been. And sometimes he would yell things, stinging low-slung vitriol that he would later say he didn’t mean, but that hung over them and threatened, long after the hurt had been repaired.
He traveled often and missed birthdays, holidays, trips to Florida that he would lament afterward, but when he left again he often seemed relieved. He took her out to the Cape to spend weekends with his parents — they’d relocated permanently once Stephen started grad school. His mother spent her days walking along the water every morning no matter the weather, cultivating a modest art collection that she didn’t seem to have much interest in once the work had been acquired. His father spent his days reading, the newspaper in the morning, large nonfiction in the afternoons, then quizzing Stephen, Maya, and his wife over dinner about topics so obscure that he was almost certain to be the only one of the four of them to have the answers to.