Viator

She tried to make a joke of it, but there was an undercurrent of tension in her voice, and Wilander, recalling what Roogie had said about Arlene needing a commitment, found it strange that he was unable to give that commitment, because when he looked at her, he felt something that wanted to commit, something that once declared would bind them more tightly, and he saw the clean particularity of her spirit, her soul, whatever you preferred to call the light that flashed from her whenever the incidental clutter of her mind cleared sufficiently to let it shine through, the bright flash of her being, and he knew that despite the superficially facile nature of their connection, lonely man, lonely woman, there was something between them that seemed ordained, something he had encountered only once previously and then with a college girl named Bliss, Bliss Giddings, a tall, slender, quiet brunette who was studying to be an astronomer and was devoted to the poetry of Cavafy; poems that, when he read them to himself, communicated a haughty, defeatist sensibility, but when she read them aloud rang with a lovely sad romanticism, and everything was going splendidly for them, they were inseparable, intoxicated with each other, until one day she vanished without a warning, dropped out of the university and returned home, leaving him shocked, deranged, in agony—she refused to take his calls, refused every effort at contact, and he soon learned that she had married a wealthy businessman, a wine importer twelve years her senior, so no astronomy for her, no meteors, no pulsars, no distant suns, no erudite speculation upon whether the shape of the universe, as recently opined, was similar to that of the Eiffel Tower, shattering the reality of those who had based their faith on the theory that it resembled a football, and there would be no hazy unfathomable astronomical objects named Gidding, no prestigious international conferences in Lucerne, no moments of transcendent solitude at the lens of Palomar, the cosmos spread out before her as if she were a spy for God, just lots of expensive grape juice; unless, to humor her, the importer, one Adam Zouski (the cacophonous sibilance of Bliss Zouski an abomination by contrast to the liquid asymmetry of Bliss Wilander), bought a telescope and placed it on the penthouse roof of the New York City castle where she was kept, allowing her to revisit her quaint, childish ambition; and years afterward, many years afterward, she began to email Wilander, gloomy, self-absorbed emails that professed love for him and dissatisfaction with her life, with her husband, a correspondence that grew over the months in intensity and frequency—they talked on the phone, spoke of getting together, made plans, shared sexual fantasies, yet nothing ever came of it, their plans evaporated, their fantasies remained unreal, the emails and phone calls stopped, and he still could not understand why she had left him; the reasons she gave were so flimsy, as if she herself did not understand, and though it wasn’t until he met Arlene that he was able to put that episode in a drawer and lock it away, though he recognized how rare it was to feel this close to someone, the only way he could think to explain his reticence about moving into town, an explanation that would have a tired ring to Arlene’s ears, was that he was not yet secure in himself, not yet solid. Finally, without attempting explanation, he told her that however the job was going, he would come to her after a month or so, when the first snow fell, early September at the latest. She said, All right, but she wasn’t pleased; he could tell as much from the compression of her lips, the deepening of a frown line, and recognized that his indecisiveness (that, he knew, was how she perceived it) bordered on rejection, and might be more painful for her than rejection. He started to offer an apology, but knew it would sound inadequate.

—I don’t get it. I don’t get any part of it. This Lunde gives you a meaningless job, and you…She made a fuming noise and turned her back to him. What do you know about this guy? Nothing! You don’t have the slightest idea what he’s up to!

—It’s only a month, he said, pressing himself against her from behind. A month! That’s no time at all.