It Will Come to Me (12 page)

Dolores was probably emptying out her desk right now. That was how they did things: endless committee creation, endless meetings, endless bureaucratic inaction, and then—suddenly and without warning and just when everyone was stuporous with boredom—they'd pounce. How would he manage? This news came just as he'd begun the difficult ascent of chapter seven. Now more than ever he needed his long mornings, his freedom of mind. If they'd waited even another six months he might have
managed to scramble over the summit, with nothing but the easy downhill slope of eight in prospect.

“… and we'll just take it from there,” Mitten-Kurz was saying. Just what it was they'd take and from where they'd take it he had missed, but now she was stowing her knitting in a straw bag and rising ponderously to her feet. Evidently the interview was over. Ben stood. Big and Baby took this as their cue to spring up and escort him out of the jungle bower, one dog leaning into his thigh while the other kept him moving along smartly by using its snout as a rectal prod. Pausing at the door, Mitten-Kurz said, “So. Ben. We're on the same page now, are we?”

Same page? As he shook her big soft hand he did his best to produce a small civil smile, but he could feel that all he'd managed was a puzzled wince. “Oh wait,” she said. “Hang on a minute. I have something for you to take to Ruth.”

Ruth? She left him for a moment to the renewed attentions of Big and Baby and fetched something from her desk. “Here,” she said, handing him an envelope. “I thought of Ruth after your lovely potluck last week. She and I had a very interesting talk.”

Once out of the building Ben sat down on a bench in the breezeway and examined the envelope. Mitten-Kurz had hand-addressed it in flowing script. In the lower left corner she'd written “Courtesy of Ben,” and underlined it emphatically. His teacher in fourth grade had done exactly the same when communicating with his mother. He and Ruth had never read each other's mail, but already he'd tucked a thumb under the flap and ripped the letter open. The bloated signature at the bottom of the page was the first thing he noticed. It was like a graffiti tag on a subway car,
each character bellying belligerently into its neighbor. The letter read as follows:

Fat turd. Ben crumpled the letter in his fist. On his way across the green he flipped it into one of the new oversize wire-mesh trash cans the university had just purchased.

E
ver since the night of the potluck dinner, Ruth had been waiting for a summons from Ricia Spottiswoode to lunch or coffee. Or perhaps an invitation to an intimate dinner party: that was her favorite among the possibilities she'd been imagining. Charles would cook, and there would be plenty of loosening alcohol and the other couple would be publishing people from New York, an agent and an editor. They wouldn't actually have read
Getting Good
—Ruth liked to introduce a bit of the grit of the plausible into her fantasies—but while Charles was busy in the kitchen, Ricia would give a rapturous summary, perhaps even take the book down from the shelf and read a few passages aloud. The couple would strike Ruth as intimidating at first (especially the woman, with her sleeveless black linen shift and Long Island-lockjaw drawl), but soon enough Charles's deft pouring would warm everyone up. The publishing couple would demand to know how it was that a savvy pair like Ruth and Ben had come to rest in this Texas exile, and Ruth would rise to a tenderly ironic defense of Spangler, one which only a transplanted Easterner could give. By the end of the evening she and the publishing couple would be gathered by the door in a cozily intoxicated huddle, scribbling
down e-mail addresses and phone numbers. Goodbyes would not be spoken before a promise was extracted from Ruth to let the (the who? What would a couple like that be named? Kay Dworkin and Robert Glassell) the Dworkin-Glassells be the first to have a look at anything new she'd written since
Getting Good.

She was carrying the manuscript of
Whole Lives Devoured
in a typing-paper box in her Guatemalan woven satchel. Foolish of her, no doubt, but what was the harm in being prepared? The box was sliding around inside the bag, its sharp corner bruising her thigh as she wandered, lost, through tiled underground corridors in the new Chemistry Building in search of the Sitwell Auditorium where Ricia Spottiswoode's introductory Q&A and signing was to be held.

She turned a corner into yet another stretch of corridor and found herself greeted by a three-quarter life-size cardboard cutout of Ricia as she appeared on the cover of
The Divining Rod
—the smiling Ricia of the leather mini and the bouncing curl—propped in the doorway to the auditorium. Claude Petrie, the owner and proprietor of Bagatelle Books, Spangler's only independent bookstore, had set up a table in the cave-like vestibule just inside. As she passed, Ruth gave him a quick cautious smile. She was afraid of this waspish and immaculate little man, the warmth of whose greeting was a sure gauge of one's standing in the Spangler arts and arts-philanthropy scene. He looked up and nodded faintly. To this she had fallen. Twenty years ago she'd have gotten the full treatment—the ecstatic wince, the out-flung arms, the double air kiss.

The first to arrive, she climbed the gently graduated steps to a seat in the next-to-last row, stowed her manuscript under her chair and sat down. Almost immediately, her thoughts ran off
into a number of lightly monitored channels. She thought about the snub she'd just received from Claude Petrie, reminding herself that narcissistic wounds heal as readily as cuts in flesh and reflecting on how odd it was that she had come to realize this only a few years ago, and how the understanding itself tended to speed up the process, at least when the hurt was minor (as surely this one was). She thought about the nautilus shape of the auditorium, and that put her in mind of a book about the mathematical basis of the symmetry of natural forms she'd once paged through with Isaac in a used bookstore, close-up photographs of snowflakes and aerial views of deserts and mud slides. Where had they been? In Saratoga Springs. Ben had been giving a talk at Skidmore. When was that? At least ten years ago, because Isaac had been young enough to be led from one enlightening activity to another. Even at twelve he would still consent to look at a book with a parent, and in his absorption he would sometimes revert to the trust of infancy, leaning against her unconsciously as she turned the pages, allowing his hand to rest on hers. She could still retrieve the proprietor of that bookstore, an agelessly odd-looking woman wearing several sweaters over what looked like a dirndl, bald except for a feather of white hair growing out of the crown of her head. It was on that trip that Isaac threw a tantrum at breakfast in a coffee shop because, he insisted, the menus smelled bad. She was thinking about how comfortable she felt sitting here alone in this still-dark, still-empty room. At a long stoplight Ben would swell with irritation, breathe harshly, drum his fingers on the steering wheel. He tended to be just as compulsively early to appointments as Ruth, but to him waiting was anathema while to her it was soothing, a natural condition. That was why she was chronically early. She liked to arrive ten or fifteen minutes before
things began exactly because it gave her a chance to wait, to allow her thoughts to expand and fill unoccupied space. But now two boys and a tall girl had come trooping into the well of the auditorium, their shining hair lit by the overhead spots.

And a beat or two after their passage, Isaac followed. Or it was Isaac, but a clean Isaac wearing a sober dark suit. His hair was long, or at least his sideburns hung down in long curls. And he was wearing a wide-brimmed hat? No, that was not Isaac. That was a young Orthodox Jew. But in the fraction of a second the delusion lasted, the automatic pencil of her imagination had sketched in a vague and wildly hopeful explanatory scenario. Isaac had somehow pulled himself together, washed, bought new clothes, developed the interest in literature she had always hoped he would. He had gotten better. He had returned. That would account for the news he had to impart, for the mysterious appointment scheduled for next Monday.

After him, the deluge: a moment passed and suddenly, as if some seal had been broken, the auditorium proceeded to fill in less than two minutes. When the room had settled people were sitting in the aisles and standing in the entryway. It was the largest literary assembly Ruth had ever seen at Lola. The book editor of the
Spangler Advocate
was here, and a semi-famous transplanted poet and several of the glossy matrons who hosted the luncheons and galas that supported the arts in Spangler. A number of students were present—participants in writing workshops were often conscripted to attend these events—but they made up a smaller percentage of the audience than Ruth would have expected. She picked out a scattering of English Department faculty, mostly the younger people. Lee Odom, the department's elderly Faulknerian, was seated on the aisle near the door. He could be counted on
to show up at every reading in Spangler, even ones held in far-flung suburban chain bookstores, scowling all the while. He had hooked his ivory-handled cane over the chairback in front of him and crossed his arms high over his chest. Everything in his attitude announced a grim determination to keep an open mind, and a concomitant preemptive exasperation.

The bulk of the crowd was made up of a constituency Ruth privately called the Women. This was a large, loosely affiliated group of readers, aspiring writers, book-club and workshop participants, mostly middle-aged. They shifted in tides from one reading or signing or charismatic writing teacher to another. Ruth had taught them in workshops offered by Lola's School of Continuing Education, but she had never managed to become one of the cult figures they followed, probably because her style was gentle and accommodating. They seemed to want harsh teachers, destructive critiques. Perhaps they also sensed the discrepancy between Ruth's encouraging manner and her private assessments of their work.

The Women came to reading and writing with an open and unappeasable hunger for Lessons Directly Applicable to Their Lives. When Ruth spoke, they listened eagerly, and when she failed to offer them what they sought their eyes went cloudy and they turned away. They gathered in force whenever a memoirist or a how-to-write author came through town. Once, five years ago, Bagatelle Books sent Ruth an announcement of a reading by an author whose name rang only the vaguest of bells. On the back of the card Claude Petrie had scrawled in green ink: “Ruth—you mustn't miss this!” Intrigued and flattered, she showed up, twenty minutes early as usual. Already, a number of the Women were circulating through the store, paging through quarterlies, hailing
and embracing one another. A terrible suspicion was born in Ruth's mind, but she suppressed it until the place had grown so full she found herself forced to the back of the room and pushed up against the atlases and art books. The author arrived, flanked by her editor and publicist. Scrawny and pierced, white but wearing dreadlocks, she spoke hoarsely for a few minutes about the six-month anniversary of her sobriety and her recent acceptance of Jesus Christ as her personal savior, then sat down behind the counter to sign books. For the first time, Ruth saw how deeply she'd been demoted—not just a rank or two, but all the way to the bottom. Claude Petrie, who'd once held a book party in her honor, had lumped her in with the literary lumpenproletariat.

A
few steps farther on, Ben turned back, fished the letter out of the trash basket, smoothed and refolded it, and tucked it into the breast pocket of his sports jacket.

Briefly, he cut diagonally across the green, but it was spongy from the aggressive watering of the last few days, so he returned to the sidewalk that led to the back portico of Horace Dees Hall. This had been a designated smoking area until last January, when the university senate established a new policy requiring smokers to move twenty-five feet away from all campus buildings. Today he couldn't help noticing that somebody was defying that edict. It was a woman—hard to guess her age—pacing agitatedly back and forth, talking on a cell phone, smoking away with abandon. She'd left a little trail of butts, in fact, behind her. She had a high, querulous, carrying voice and even at a distance he could catch particularly vehement phrases. “Don't give me that shit … That's old shit … Nobody's listening to that shit anymore, BJ …” Ben
regularly heard foul language from students and colleagues. He used it himself, quite compulsively, but this was different. There was no irony in it, no distance. It was ugly, vulgar; for a moment it jarred him out of his preoccupied state. “Shit,” as this woman spoke it, was no longer a reified linguistic placeholder: it was the stuff itself. He could actually smell it, as if someone had just dipped a finger in it and waved it under his nostrils.