It Will Come to Me (22 page)

She got up and fetched the phone, but just as she was sitting down to call Ben at his office to let him know what she had discovered, it startled her by ringing. Answering, she heard her own “Hello” as elderly and confused, inflected by a wondering mistrust. “Ruth?” said a young and silvery female voice. “Ricia. Ricia Spottiswoode. Do you happen to have a little time this afternoon? In the next hour, actually? I have some time and I'm ready to talk about your manuscript …”

N
ow. Do it now. Ben was taking the back stairs because the elevator doors faced the Philosophy Department's offices and even if Hayley wasn't actually on the elevator, as she almost always seemed to be, she could see the elevator doors opening and closing from her desk and that would deprive him of the element
of surprise. This time he'd be upon her before she knew it. No premonitory throat clearing, no anxious glance to give the game away. He'd walk down the hall, taking care to keep well over to the right where his approach would be invisible to her, and then he'd come bursting into the office like a one-man SWAT team, talking so fast and seamlessly that she'd have no chance to draw breath to argue or interrupt. He'd startle her out of the cover of whatever persona she might choose to adapt—the martyred mother, the chipper Girl Friday from a forties movie, the muttering mental patient with the paranoid sidelong squint. He'd jolt her out of whatever martial-arts move she might come up with to throw him off-balance and use his psychic weight against him. What was that quote? One of those touchstones that people his age half remembered from high-school English. “There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to …” Leads on to what? He couldn't recall. Some kind of good result. Was it Tennyson? No. It was Shakespeare, of course.
Julius Caesar.

The hall was clotted with buzzing dyads and triads at this hour, graduate students and young faculty who had finished eating their brown-bag lunches in the seminar room and were lingering in conversation for a moment before making their way toward classrooms and the library. Threading his way through these schmoozers, Ben picked up the subtle but unmistakable impression that eyes were rapidly swiveling in his direction and just as rapidly swiveling away, that conversations ceased at his approach and resumed in the wake of his passage. Ted Danziger and Josh Margolis were lounging against a wall, deep in shoptalk. Josh waved him over, but he demurred with a quick smile and an apologetic wave. He would not allow his momentum to be broken.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw Ted rise onto his toes and make small fluttering motions with his fingers.

Here was the office door looming ahead and now he'd walked through it, and here, veering into his surprised view, was Hayley sitting at her glorified desk, eating a slice of pizza. She'd never taken her lunch in the office before. “Hayley,” he said. She smiled warmly.

“Ben,” she answered. After less than a week she was using his first name. Another thing not to let pass. “Hayley,” he said, taking care to keep his voice deep and even, “I'd prefer that you call me Professor Blau.”

“Oh,” said Hayley, holding the drooping slice in midair. “I thought it was OK. I thought I heard Sylvia in art history call her boss Dennis.”

“That's their arrangement,” said Ben. “I have different expectations.”

Hayley carefully laid the pizza slice on a paper plate. “So it's not one way or another,” she said, a considering frown creasing her forehead. “There's no hard-and-fast rule. It's different in different offices.”

“Exactly,” said Ben.

“And you'd feel more comfortable if I called you Professor Blau.”

“Yes I would.”

“Rhoda calls you Professor Blau.”

“Yes she does.”

“Well thank you,” said Hayley. “Thank you, Professor. This is how I learn.”

“You're welcome,” said Ben. Out of habit he walked into his own office and closed the door behind him. No no, wrong. He
wasn't done yet with Hayley. He'd hardly begun. He paused for a moment so as not to seem like a vaudevillian blundering in and out of a broom closet. “Hayley,” he said, returning to stand over her at her desk. She had finished the slice of pizza and was tipping the crusts into the garbage. “Yes, Professor Blau?”

“I'd like to have a word with you. Is this a good time?” Ben was uncomfortably conscious of a need to stoop slightly to keep his head from brushing up against the tiny sharp plastic feet of the fairies dangling from the ceiling—there were even more of them now than there had been a few days ago—but to withdraw from the fairy-occupied zone would take him out of conversational range. Now Hayley was opening a package of hand wipes. “Certainly,” she said. “This is a dandy time, actually,” she added brightly.

“A number of problems have been presenting themselves,” Ben began. “I need to let you know about them so that we can, you can … address them.” The systematic wiping of each of her fingers seemed to be occupying the better part of Hayley's attention, but she had reserved enough to continue meeting his gaze. She was nodding energetically, as if to encourage a faltering petitioner. “Good,” she said. “I can certainly see that. You need to let me know. Keep the lines—”

“The lateness,” Ben interjected. “That's probably the most serious problem. You see, when you're not in the office in the mornings, in the early mornings, that means that Rhoda and I, or Rhoda or I, or Rhoda and/or I, have to come in to answer the phones, and that's not always convenient.” No, no, he thought. Leave convenience out of it. That's not the point. “And even if it were convenient, I'd still expect you to get in on time, regardless.”

“On time,” said Hayley, nodding steadily. “Regardless.”

“And I mean exactly on time.”

The nodding continued, but a look of puzzlement or distraction had stolen over her features. It was as if she had suddenly become aware of some deep internal rumbling or leaking sensation, some painless but disconcerting symptom. Or as if she had just remembered an appointment.

“You need to plan your life around your duties here at school. Sometimes I get the feeling it's the other way around for you and your work here gets sandwiched in around those other demands—your kids, your other … concerns. We all have those outside … preoccupations, and it's not always easy to keep them on the periphery and keep the work at the center—”

“You know,” said Hayley. She leaned forward abruptly and a sudden warm delight flooded her face. “I've been meaning to tell you, Professor Blau. You were so right about Rhoda. I don't know why I won't let people help me. With me it's always, ‘Let me do it for myself! Let me figure it out!’ “ To illustrate her point she took off her watch and dangled it in front of her eyes, her brows contracted in mock-simian curiosity. “With me it's like, what
is
this thing? Let me take it apart and see how it's made. Let me figure out how it works. No no, don't show me!”

“Hayley,” said Ben. “We need to get back to what we—”

“I could have saved myself a lot of time and trouble if I hadn't been so stubborn. Rhoda knows her way around. She's a resource, like you said.”

“We need to—”

“And then I finally give her a chance and you know what I find out? She's a doll. An absolute doll. I couldn't have been more wrong about her. She and I were talking the other day and I've learned so much about her. Did she tell you about her dad?”

“No,” said Ben, instantly regretting it. “But that's not what we were—”

“He's a paraplegic,” said Hayley. “He's a Vietnam vet and he stepped on a land mine and he lost both his legs from the knees down. He drives a special van with hand controls and the whole family goes camping all over the country. Did she tell you about her sister?”

Now she had truly derailed the discussion. Behind his eyes Ben saw a club car lying on its side in a ditch in mountainous terrain, smoke rising, wheels revolving. What was needed here was something dramatic, a sudden move that would throw her off her game as she'd thrown him off his. He turned abruptly on his heel and walked back into his office, stopping at the door. “Hayley,” he said, “please come in.”

Hayley rose hesitantly to her feet, her face registering curiosity and suspicion.

“Come in,” said Ben. “Please.”

Like a doe drawn out of the woods by a salt lick, Hayley approached.

“Take a seat,” said Ben, standing aside and ushering her into the room. She sat. Ben propped himself against his desk. Now he had seized the advantage. “I don't want to talk about Rhoda,” he said. “I don't want to talk about anything but the problems that have come up with your work here. That's our agenda, and I'm going to make sure we stick to it. The lateness is only one issue. There are others and one of them is this business of you going downstairs all the time. Going out to the pavilion—and by the way I'm not sure if you know, but smoking isn't allowed out there. It used to be, but now you have to go clear across the green, all the way to that big live oak.” His arm, he realized, had risen up from
his shoulder of its own accord and was flapping in the direction he was describing.

“Anyway, I have no intention of being … punitive … about your private habits. I've never been one of those neo-prohibitionists.” (Why couldn't he stop qualifying, conceding, digressing, justifying himself? It was as if some insanely reasonable dybbuk had seized control of his brain.) “I'm quite willing to make accommodations,” he went on. (But he was doing it again, wasn't he?) “The bottom line is that you're going to have to limit your breaks to two or three a day. Let's make it three. No more.”

Hayley had raised an anxious finger. “I'm sorry,” she said, her voice a squeak. “I don't mean to interrupt but before we go any further I have to let you know I'm expecting somebody at one. I told them I'd be at my desk. Do you think we could … ? So I could see them when they … ?”

Ben moved to the door, swung it open, returned to his post at his desk. “So, three breaks a day. And you'll take them when your work schedule permits, not just anytime you feel like it. Are we on the same page?” Hayley was nodding, but her nods were small and staccato, as if generated by a new internal rhythm, and her eyes had gone cloudy with thought. It seemed that something was happening inside her, some development, some process, something that would emerge of its own accord. “You know, Professor,” she said. “Isn't it amazing the way somebody will say something exactly when you're ready to hear it and not a minute before? Do you know what I mean?”

Ben made a noise.

“What you just said, about smoking? Well, that was one of those times. Just these past few weeks, since I've been working here at Lola, I've been thinking really hard about quitting. It
helps that practically nobody else smokes because everybody's so educated. There are so many reasons …” She spread out the fingers of one hand and bent each one vehemently with the index finger of the other as she enumerated the disadvantages of smoking. “It's not good for my health … it's disgusting … it's bad for my kids to be around … it's expensive … it makes my clothes smell.” She'd run out of fingers. “Professor,” she said, allowing her hands to fall heavily into her lap, “I'm sick of it. I've had enough. I think I'm ready to quit. I needed one good push and you gave it to me and I can't tell you how grateful I am.” She raised her eyes to his and just as he'd feared, they were wet, shining with tears.

And then she was on her feet, waving and halloing in the direction of the open office door, her face blooming with welcome. A student and an older man with a Mennonite beard had come trooping into the outer office, the latter shouldering what looked like photographic equipment. “Will you excuse me, Professor? It's the
Lola Lantern.
They're here to do a story about my fairies.”

R
uth was waiting for Ricia in the Cosmos Club, a Museum District coffeehouse. She had already run her eyes over the local alternative newspaper, from the front-page exposé of the indiscriminate use of nitrous oxide by local pediatric dentists through an omnibus review of Spangler's new crop of Malaysian restaurants to the advertisements for Thai masseuses in the back pages. A copy of the manuscript of
Whole Lives Devoured
was parked by her chair in the Guatemalan bag. The thought of taking it out and looking it over filled her with dread. It might as well have been a packet of X-rays she was transporting to a consultation with an oncologist.

She was drinking plain hot tea, sitting in one of two sagging armchairs on an elevated wooden platform in the center of the room. This area was a kind of reading nook, defined by two freestanding bookcases. Later it would become a stage for the proprietor, a stringy ex-con in sky-blue clogs who perched on a wooden stool with his guitar and picked out embellished versions of “The Girl from Ipanema” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” for the wine-drinking crowd that began to trickle in after four o'clock. Ruth felt awkward and exposed, an object of speculation for the early-afternoon clientele sitting in booths around the room. She must look, she thought, like a dowager queen preparing to grant an audience. She'd have felt more comfortable at a booth or a table, but the only one available was by a window and she knew she'd be distracted, scanning the rear parking lot for signs of Isaac, who sometimes spent his nights there in a colony of homeless men—or so she'd imagined, though her only evidence was that once she'd seen a pair of derelicts emerge from the wooded area behind the Dumpster, one carrying a duffel bag, the other zipping up his fly.

In one quadrant of her mind she was ruminating over the information she'd uncovered about Eusebio Martinez, trying to settle on an attitude to take about it. If the article she'd found on Google was to be believed, it seemed unlikely that Martinez was taking advantage of her and Ben. Or if he was it was in an entirely well-meaning and forgivable spirit. Even if he'd been squeezing them for funds to support his charitable enterprise in Mexico City, he no longer seemed to be a person capable of holding Isaac captive. It now appeared that it was Isaac who had chosen not to see them, just as Martinez had said. Whether that was good or bad news she hadn't yet decided.