They doted on her, loved her. She was smarter, they said, than Stephen’s usual choices. They were wealthy liberal intellectuals, she was the exact sort of uncertain background, innate brilliance, acceptable attractive that they would have chosen for their son. Maya walked the water with his mother in the mornings and discussed de Kooning, Balthus, Rothko, Dubuffet, the colors of the Dutch. She knew hardly anything about visual art, but she was a quick study and paid close attention. She spent some of the afternoons she wasn’t teaching at the MoMA, Met, Frick or Guggenheim, cultivating enough of an opinion to have more of her own ideas to offer on these walks.
As much as Maya loved and admired them, there was something constantly off-putting about the ease with which her in-laws existed in the world. They’d both come from a long line of money, perfectly educated, consistently loved. They, like Stephen, seemed to feel as if they had a right to all the pleasures they’d been given, while Maya sat most days waiting to be punished for all that she had somehow managed to acquire. Sometimes it scared her how much Stephen trusted the world. But mostly, especially early, she found it astonishing, lovely, in the way that one can see something from far away and appreciate its beauty, but never quite make sense of what it is.
“Why do you think you picked me?” he says to her. He’s finished his sandwich. His plate sits bare in front of him and he reaches again for one of Maya’s fries.
“You make it sound like you had no say,” she says.
“Please,” he says. “I was old already. I was a curmudgeon.”
She eats two french fries dry, swallowing slowly. She hasn’t eaten in days, it seems, weeks. “You were thirty-four,” she says.
A smear of ketchup lingers on the left side of his lip.
“I loved you,” Maya says.
“But why?”
“Jesus, Stephen.”
She picks a napkin up to wipe his lip for him, then hands it off for him to wipe instead.
“I loved your brain,” she says.
This is the answer he expected. She wonders how to make it something else. How to maybe give him something more.
“Your humor?” she says.
He laughs. “But I’m not funny.”
She laughs too. “You made me laugh,” she says.
“Everybody says that.”
She smiles at him. “No one says that about you.”
And he laughs then in the exact way that is maybe more than any other reason why she loves him: like he’s ten years old and doesn’t care who’s watching, loudly. His large body unfurls. His head tilts back.
It’s the sheer dissonance between this and every other aspect of the man she married that is the most charming. It still surprises her when he laughs, when he is dry, quiet, and biting, usually at his own expense. And she’s so very grateful to him for this; she’s more than grateful — these moments have always made her think there could be more surprise to come. Surprise for both of them, in what they might give to one another, in all, together, they might be capable of.
He waits for more.
“I thought. . I think I thought the way you trusted the world. I wanted to be as certain as you were.”
He laughs again. “Now you know better,” he says.
Ten years before: “Christ, Maya!”
“If you use the word reputation I’ll jump out of the car.” There had been a party for the faculty in Stephen’s department. He was angling for department chair.
He stared at her. He had only one hand on the wheel.
“Look at the road,” she said.
He fiddled with his glasses, loosened up his tie. “It was two hours. Two hours when you could have just smiled and nodded and played the game a little bit.”
“The game, Stephen? Seriously?” She had her foot up on her knee and was slowly peeling off her shoes.
“This is not a vocabulary thing.”
“It is exactly. Since when do you care about a game?”
He waited, and she knew the answer before she’d even asked the question. He always had. She rolled her window down and rested her hand along the outside of the car.
She’d done nothing. She’d drunk more gin than she’d intended. She’d been asked about her specialty and had gone on a bit too long about Virginia Woolf and death.
She kept her eyes fixed on the trees along the West Side Highway, the stretch of cobbled concrete, and then the water just beyond. She wished that she were running. That she were all alone, feet pounding, and Stephen were safe and quiet in their bed. Her voice got quieter as she spoke. “I was explaining what I do,” she said.
He’d called it proselytizing. “You were freaking people out.”
“They’re academics Stephen. They don’t freak out that easily.”
“You were too drunk to see.”
“I wasn’t drunk.” She hardly ever drank and could not hold her liquor. Probably she had been a little drunk. “Would you rather I just talk about the children?” El was ten, Ben was eight.
He turned to her again. “Would that have been so hard?”
It would have been. Even when she wanted to just sit and gush about her children, take out pictures, tell stories of all the ways in which they astounded her each day, she was too terrified of losing hold of all she was outside of them. She was adamant in her need to be someone separate from their mom.
The car turned down into the tunnel. The smell of exhaust hit Maya, then the bright lights on either side. She rolled her window up.
It had been awkward. She’d tried at first. A man she’d never met had asked her what she did. He was condescending, the way he kept looking past her for some other, better conversation, feeling stuck, perhaps, sitting next to this small woman whom he did not know or care to get to know. She always felt slightly, in some specific but noticeable way, as if she were awkwardly dressed. This night it had been the shoes she was wearing, high-heeled and open-toed, shoes she aspired to wear with confidence and then was not quite able to walk in comfortably. They were garish, she saw as soon as they’d made it uptown, not quite right, and she was forced to spend the night seated, her feet tucked beneath her chair, leaning forward with her elbows resting on the table, wishing she were — like every other woman in the room — wearing flats.
“Woolf,” she’d said in response to the man’s question. Clipped and inappropriate. But she was gauging him, testing — Stephen hated when she did this; why, he asked her, could she not just be pleasant and smile and nod — she was interested in how he would respond. Would he think Thomas or Tom or Tobias, would he know immediately, because of her demeanor or the way she pulled tight on her shawl, that she meant the tragic female character, the one who’d chosen water over life? He was the husband of one of Stephen’s colleagues, a mathematical philosopher, empiricism. If pushed, Stephen would have had to admit he didn’t like the wife any more than Maya liked this man. He traded futures. Maya’d loved the sound of this, the idea of such a phrase. But it had been much less interesting than it sounded as he’d explained. And there was, then, the third glass of gin and lime.
“Virginia,” she said when he stayed silent. “The presence of the absence.” He looked at her as if she were speaking some language unknown to anyone but her. “Death,” she said. “I look at how she has used it in her work to explore both the experience and effects of death, the particular way in which it’s always present, entering the room, overtaking life, dissipating, sliced like a knife through everything.” She stopped to sip her drink again. “Death as communication when all other forms have failed.” He squirmed and cupped the base of his drink with meaty fingers. He shook his glass and tipped it, then sucked slowly on a piece of ice.