January rain. Esker, home at last, towel-dries her hair. She changes into leggings and wool socks and her coziest, rattiest sweater, and climbs up on the couch, pulling one of her mother’s old afghans around her, and still she can’t get warm. The damp’s gone into her bones, as her mother would have said, preposterously.
Florence has decided to convene a committee to look into the possibility of an inappropriate teacher-parent relationship, said the two-sentence memorandum waiting this morning in a sealed envelope in Esker’s box in the faculty room, although it eschewed the singular pronoun in favor of the royal “we.” Esker can expect to be contacted by the committee shortly. That’s what the second sentence had said. She has no idea how many people will be on the committee, or who they’ll be. Presumably she’ll find out in advance of being summoned before them. Isn’t that how these things go? Are they going to summon Wally, too? Can they do that? It seems absurd; she wants to laugh, but can’t. Panic like birds beats at her ribs. Not panic, fury. Isn’t that what it’s called? Isn’t she furious? The whole thing is medieval. Florence, despite all the enlightenment and reason she projects with her decorously appointed office and her genteelly trendy suits and pearls, might as well do her work from a dank stone chamber, clad in chain metal and visored helmet, for all she can be reached.
They will question her about the nature of her relationship with Wally. They will ask her to use and apply the words “dating,” “involvement,” “romantic.” She doesn’t want to laugh at all, she wants to throw up. She hates these words, which may be ugly anyway but will certainly be ugly in the mouths of the committee. She ought to have a right to rail against these words, do battle with them, protest them, protest her relationship to them, before Wally if before anyone at all—not before some horrible semicircle of Florence-appointees. She has not dared use these words herself; they have not passed her lips, and now the committee will ask her to claim or renounce them without her ever having had a chance to admit them to the realm of possibility, to hold them there awhile, to see. And now she never will see. She will never have the chance to learn what she might have been capable of, with Wally; what they might have been capable of with each other.
She thinks to quit. Quit her job and she’s free. But that’s rash, that’s shooting herself in the foot, and besides it would be like an admission of wrongdoing. This is crazy. This is Florence’s craziness. No; this is what she knew would happen: something bad. She tried to get rid of the ghost in her basement, the ghost in her mind; she has been greedy to want it gone, inhospitable to throw it out; it was hubris to think she could rid herself of it, unreasonable to think she could stop being a ghost, to think she could inhabit her life and want things, things beyond the scope of Delos, with all its measured speech and silences, its well-tempered desires, its kneesocks and right angles and carefully drawn shades, its care, its carefulness, above all—and this is the price, not a week later, the damage. One way or another she’ll hurt Wally, hurt Ann, whether she wants to or not.
The force of self-loathing is fueling her now. She begins to be less cold. She gets up, shedding the afghan. She goes to the kitchen, then her bedroom, the bathroom, the living room again; she doesn’t know where she’s going, she simply needs to walk. But this is more like pacing, she feels walled, caged, too enormous and powerful for the space. She gets her coat, stamps her feet into boots, goes out. The rain comes down in icy specks. She cuts over on Spring Street and goes west, toward the highway, sluggish with headlights now, at rush hour, west toward the piers, and the water, black and mobile beneath the perseverating drops, a border. Of course that border’s different now from when she moved here, with its fenced jogging path and the landscaping; it’s been cultivated, certified now as a place in the city for people to go and enjoy. She prefers it as it was that summer, that August night when she first moved in and last saw Albert, that night she walked and walked along the ragged border between highway and piers, trying and failing to lose herself in that nameless territory. For crying out loud, now it even has a name: Something-or-Other Park.
Her hair is wet again, and there’s slush in her boots, but it’s not enough. She’s still too big for this cage, too powerful for these elements. Let it be a blizzard. Let the river rise into a tidal wave. Let the slushy whoosh of the traffic become a true, drowning roar she could really sing against, screech against. Let there be one thing big enough to assume the burden of her.
She fixes her gaze on the umbral, undulating Hudson—her boundary; she cannot walk farther west—lapping irregularly against the city’s pilings, and, like a truly crazy person, smiles suddenly, for the first time relaxes her pace; she is remembering a paper she read in college, “How Long Is the Coast of Britain?” Its thrust had been that all coasts, all borders, are infinitely long. It was written by Benoit Mandelbrot, the “father of fractals,” who by then had become her little hero, her college-girl crush, and he’d said, in this paper, that, as your scale of measurement becomes smaller, as you try to get more exact, the coastline becomes more and more curvy—longer—since you’d eventually have to measure around every cove and jetty, every rock and pebble, every jagged groove on the surface of every pebble, and so on forever. It was that “forever” she fell in love with, same as the Mandelbrot–Peano–von Koch snowflake, only this article made her realize you didn’t need a specially concocted geometrical shape to find it; it was everywhere; in coastlines and cliffs, but also in the seemingly smooth surface of an apple, whose skin under a microscope would reveal itself as more than a perfect, mathematical curve. It was there in paper, in glass, in her own, asperous skin; anything with surface area was one of infinity’s dwellings. She’d even written Mandelbrot a fan letter, as it were, but never mailed it, understanding, perhaps, that she’d rather be in love with an idea than a person.
And it rescues her tonight from her feeling of confinement within her own impossible desires, her own guilt-ridden skin, from her terrible, pacing walk in the icy rain. The idea of infinity counters the idea of confinement, mitigates it at the very least, and though her anger is not lessened her feeling of helplessness is. She is tasting rain; it has slid inside her lips; that’s how wet she is, and it’s January, cold; what a total idiot. She didn’t even put on a hat.
She’s been walking uptown this whole time; she’s all the way to Charles Street. Game will be warm and dry. The sentence comes to her like a given.
Ten minutes later, dry it is. The fire’s going, and strings of little lights star the velvet curtain. Lots of customers; the wait staff have to turn sideways, with plates of food held high, to slip through the channels between chairs, and they do it like dancers, a man and a woman, circulating among the close-packed tables. The music on the stereo, turned low, seems to be the Moldau, that building caravan of melody.
Esker stands dripping. She runs a hand through her hair and actually hears drops spatter the glass door behind her.
“Someone will be with you in a moment,” says the waiter.
Someone turns out to be Wally, maître d’ing tonight, looking the embodiment of warmth and dryness as he comes through the kitchen door. And registers her with a look. She’s beginning to shiver again, the heat of her anger losing out to the winter downpour. A drop of rain descends from her brow and skirts, slowly, the corner of her eye. Wally reaches her, takes her in. “Wet kitten,” he pronounces.
“Wet cat.”
And he regards her with the efficient, measuring eye of a triage nurse. “Sit at the bar?” he offers.
“No. No.”
He is unruffled, reassessing the situation. His eyes fairly click, like abacuses; he is good at this, in his element, a far cry from the food-poisoned, weak thing of Monday night, and Esker wants only to believe that he will know what to do, wants only to be a bedraggled kitten—cat—to his innkeeper tonight. “Come.”
She weaves after him soddenly, around pockets of chewing, chatting engagement, follows him back through the kitchen doors, through the sudden fluorescent brightness of the kitchen, over rubbery mats, around gleaming steel counter and industrial sink and range and things—she barely looks up from his feet, her guide—and into a narrow cubicle of space: the office.
“Sit down.”
There’s one swivel chair on wheels, which is funny, the office being too small for the chair’s occupant to wheel anywhere.
“I’m all wet.”
“Well, take off your coat.”
She does and is less wet underneath. She hands him the coat and sits in his chair. She swivels.
“Wait here.” He starts to leave.
“Everything is very bad,” she warns him.
He looks at her. He nods. “I’ll be back.”
He’s gone for forever. She swivels back and forth in his chair; she remembers her feet are soaking and takes off her boots and socks; she finds a clean, folded cloth napkin and uses it to towel her hair; she reads the things on the surface of his desk without touching them: bills, business cards, part of the newspaper, a ripped section of yellow legal paper on which is scrawled ketchup, kale?, orzo and, next to that, an assortment of doodles, some of which appear to be domestic objects: eyeglasses, a salt shaker?, a gooseneck lamp. Even this doesn’t help her to relax.
When he comes back he has a bowl of dark-orange soup and two rolls. He helps clear a place on the desk for the food. “All of a sudden it’s jumping out there. Can you wait a little longer?”
She nods. The soup smells unreal, like a dream of soup, like soup as a symbol of bounty in a dream. “What kind of soup is this?”
“Carrot-pear-ginger.”
“What does that have to do with game?”
“It complements it.”
It’s heaven. She eats it slowly, and both rolls, also slowly, and still she finishes before he comes back, but now she is sleepy, and warm from all the heat in the kitchen, and, more than that, lulled by the partly audible banter of the dishwasher and cook, and sometimes the waiter and waitress as they move in and out, with the sound of the kitchen door swinging. Perhaps she could stay here. Not go to work in the morning. Not go home. She could curl up like a cat on some blankets in the corner and stay here, unobtrusive, dozing off and on indefinitely, warmed by the voices of everyone busy and bustling beyond the door, buoyed by the sporadic nearness to Wally whenever he has to come in and do some work at his desk, his back to her. There are some holes in this plan, she realizes, but it’ll do for now, more than do. The chair doesn’t only swivel and roll; it tilts, too; really, it’s got more ergonomic perks than this humble office would seem to warrant. She tilts back, rests her head against the wall, puts her bare feet up on Wally’s desk, closes her eyes. My, these restaurant people work late.
But she cannot sleep, cannot even fool herself into dozing. Tears come down her cheeks, slower than the rain and almost peaceful. She’s crying because it’s not really a cat she wants to be, its diminutive shape blended in the corner against blankets and such, unobserved, content with the proximal warmth of those moving around her. For all that she might as well be a ghost, a shade passing through rooms unnoticed, sucking drafts of heat from the atmosphere and nothing else. And she doesn’t want to pretend anymore that that’s what she wants.
His office has no clock. She hasn’t worn her watch. It must be midnight or something. When he comes in at last, she hasn’t really been asleep, and her eyes fly open and her feet spring off the desk. He sits down on the filing cabinet. “So. What’s going on with you?”
She hates to put it into words, to speak the detestable words that tell the story of her encounter with Florence. So she is sullen-seeming as she tells it, looking mostly at the detritus strewn across his desk and not at his face, speaking mostly in a dull voice as though reciting someone else’s story, unrelated to her. At the end she says, “I’m sorry.”
“You are?”
She can’t help laughing. “What do you mean?”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m sorry for . . . bringing you into this mess.”
He thinks about this. “I don’t think you’ve brought me anywhere I didn’t want to go. Or didn’t choose to go. And it sounds like the mess is messy for you more than for me.”
She acknowledges this with a kind of shrug and hand gesture that are far too casual, and far too resigned, for the situation. “That was such excellent soup,” she says, after a moment, hollowly, looking at a pencil.
“What do you plan to do?”
“Say goodbye.” She tells the pencil.
“To me?”
She nods.
“And Ann?”
She is a statue. Never mind being a cat in his office; she could just be stone, even better. A paperweight, a figurine, what are those awful things called? A Hummel. She could turn into an ugly little Hummel and adorn one corner of his cluttered desk, and never go in to face Florence or the committee, never have to answer anyone’s questions about romance, involvement, love, desire, not even her own.
“I’m not sure—” He breaks off. “Have you spoken with a lawyer?”
“Oh God,” says Esker, and lowers her face into both palms.
“Do you need the name of one?”
She is a statue.
“Because it’s unclear to me that they actually have any power to regulate this.”
She is a statue.
“Or . . . do I have your permission to describe the situation to an attorney and get some feedback?”
“Shh.” Her face is still in her hands.
“What?”
She can sense him bending forward to hear.
“Just stop talking,” she whispers. And when he begins to touch her, “Don’t do that, either.” She feels him shift away.
After a moment, with false enthusiasm, “More soup?”
She laughs. She lets her hands fall away to her lap. “I hate you.”
“You hate me?”
“No . . . no. I just need a taxi.”
“Right. I often get those two confused.”
She gives him the finger.
“Come on, let’s get you a cab.”
She stands up.
“I think you’re going to want your shoes and socks on.”
She sits back down, dresses her feet. She likes following directions, even such simple ones as these, especially such simple ones as these. It’s a relief. Her socks have dried on the radiator, but the boots are still wet inside. She shudders and pulls them on anyway. Stands. He gives her her coat. She puts it on. There. They don’t go back through the front of the restaurant, but out the alley door, for which she is grateful. Steam is coming up from a manhole cover, like in a music video. The rain has stopped, and everything is glistening. They start walking toward the avenue. A streetlamp is out; it’s very dark. Then a Yellow Cab comes down the street, a reggae-thumping coach, and it swerves to a stop by Wally’s upraised hand, and he discharges her into it, says good night.
“Oh, wait!” she cries, and the driver, having begun to roll forward, slams on the brakes. She opens the door, speaks to her friend, who has just turned away. “I have no money.”
He has, she notices, even in the darkness of the street, the excellent grace not to smile as he reaches into his pocket for cash.