Elinor, at 7:00 a.m., asleep on the couch, white comforter pulled up all the way over her head, so completely buried by the drifts it was not clear whether a human lay beneath them. A copy of Iris Murdoch’s The Bell lay tented on the hardwood floor by her head. It looked to be my copy, which she must have taken from the shelves. I bent down and picked it up to see what kind of marginalia it might contain. No notes, but a Post-it from Rose, stuck to the last page, its bright pink color unfaded, in reference to another book, one I no longer owned, that said We can do better than this. We have done better than this! With the have underlined four times. Elinor’s suitcase sat next to it, thrown open, overflowing, possessions in a tumult because that’s probably how she felt when she’d packed them, with travel-size bottles of shampoo and conditioner having leaked out all over her jeans, some socks, and another sweatshirt. I fished out the stickiest pieces, put them in the washing machine, and went off to buy us some expensive croissants.
While we drank coffee and ate, I suggested we drive to Big Sur. Big Sur, because scenery like that would either drive you back into your silence or crack it wide open, and it was mine, now, to show off.
What is this place? she said. Ten in the morning, fog shrouding the ocean and cliffs along the Pacific Coast Highway. It’s like we’re high up in a Chinese mountain painting.
At every overlook she asked if we could stop; at every overlook she said This can’t be real.
On the way to Pfeiffer Beach I lowered the windows and she turned the radio up. When we heard Taylor Swift telling us to shake it off, Elinor abruptly turned the radio down.
I’m sorry, she said. That advice is ringing very hollow right now. Then: I’ve been reading a lot of Joan Didion.
Haven’t we all!
She laughed, which made me happy.
Is that why you moved out here?
I’m sure it’s one of the reasons. I’ve loved her for so long I sometimes forget she’s not actually my mother.
How old are you again?
Again? Now I laughed. I don’t believe I’ve ever told you.
Why won’t you?
It helps me feel more dignified in front of you if I retain some mystery.
Don’t you think it would help me to see a woman embrace the reality of her non-youth?
I laughed. Yes, it would be good for you, but it might not be good for me. I hate to say this, but you’ll understand when you’re older.
Is there any possible way you could do better than that?
I know, and I’m just as disappointed in myself for saying it out loud to you. But—
But what?
Let’s see how I feel after another day or two?
You know what my mother used to say to us? In the immortal words of the Magic 8 Ball, ask again later.
That’s funny, I said, and asked her where her mother thought she might be.
Right here. San Francisco. I didn’t lie this time. I mean, I didn’t lie about where I was going. She has a boyfriend now. Anyway, it means she’s currently not that invested in controlling our outcomes.
That’s good news.
Is it? Yeah, I mean, her getting off our backs is good news. But if you mean it’s good news that she has a boyfriend, I think it’s just one more piece of evidence that we all secretly want some man to save us.
Once settled on the beach, we let the ocean make the conversation for a while. Elinor broke the silence first. She said: He doesn’t belong to you, does he?
No, he doesn’t.
Does he have daughters, too?
Are you pregnant? I said. I must have felt guiltier than I’d been willing to admit, if I turned the tables that quickly.
She looked at me.
There are only so many reasons someone like you would show up on a doorstep belonging to someone like me, unannounced, for a second time, I said.
Is that another way of saying that there are only so many plots?
Yes.
Please don’t be mad at me.
Elinor. I’m not mad at you. I’m sure you’re mad enough at yourself. I’m sorry. Just—please leave him out of this.
I wanted you to convince me not to have it, she said.
I absolutely don’t think you should have it, but I wouldn’t feel right trying to argue you in or out of whatever it is you think you want. That can’t be my responsibility.
Well, who else are you responsible to right now? What else are you doing with all your free time? Why don’t you use it to help me?
I said nothing.
I wanted you to give me a feminist sermon.
Isn’t that what the Internet’s for?
She groaned.
I’m sorry. I can’t.
You won’t, she said.
No, it’s more that I don’t have it in me. I couldn’t even give one to myself right now.
Okay, well could you tell me why I’m in this kind of trouble?
What if I said it was because you wanted some man to save you?
She said nothing.
Do you regret it?
I regret how it ended.
How are you feeling? What are you feeling?
Strange, she said. Bloated, pendulous, displaced from my own body, a little bit.
Yes, I said, and wished I hadn’t.
Have you ever had one? she said.
An abortion? Yes.
How old were you?
Thirty. The age Rose was, her second time.
Did you love him?
Yes.
You loved him but you got rid of it.
We were very young.
Is thirty young?
In New York it is.
That’s the age Joan Didion was when she left New York. Or no, twenty-eight? She sounds like she’s eighty when she’s talking about it.
Two corgis tore across the sand, their pink tongues and avid black eyes visible from where we sat.
What would you say you’ve done with the freedom you have? she asked.
I thought about that for a little while. The real answer, in my opinion, was absolutely nothing, but I couldn’t say that. Didn’t want to say that. I said: I’ve kept myself from slowly killing the spirit of a child or two with my ambient unhappiness.
It’s not the most powerful argument I’ve heard for not marrying or having a family, she said, but you’re being honest, and I respect that.
I might have just needed a certain amount of space and time to think halfway straight. But the real question here is what do you want to do with yours?
I want it to stop mattering so fucking much, what I do with it. I don’t know anymore.
Did you love him? I said.
I wrote a lot while it was happening. Does that mean anything?
I thought about the document sitting on my laptop, swollen like a river from what I’d thought was long-overdue rain, and said nothing.
Have you told him?
No, she said.
Who was he?
She didn’t answer.
Was he a professor of yours?
She said nothing, and scraped the sand back and forth with a rock. At that point I knew I must be officially older and wiser, if not as good as dead, because I was in no way jealous of her realizing one of my more abiding girlhood dreams.
Is he married?
No.
Are you lying about that?
She didn’t answer.
Okay, I said. You need to get rid of it.
Why? Her voice now insistent. How smart am I, after all, if I can make this kind of dumb and totally predictable mistake? Everything I thought about myself must be a lie, if this is what I did with all my intelligence. Why should I protect my intelligence? Why should I give it unlimited time and space and let it keep running the show?
Elinor.
And I have this feeling that it—I mean having her—could turn into something beautiful.
The corgis were on their way back again, tearing down the sand, the helpless mania in their faces now in full view.
But, she said, I feel the same way whenever I sit down to write.
I’m sure she will turn into something beautiful, I said, if you’re her mother. I don’t doubt that, in the least. But he has all the power here, and you have none, because the power of creating life is in many ways no power at all. You fell right into it. I fell right into it. It happened to us. We didn’t make it happen. And you’re protecting him by not telling him. I’m sure at this very moment he’s walking around his life making plans in blithe, unearned confidence, writing whatever the fuck it is, pardon me, he writes, typing up a syllabus, I don’t know, with some tiny satisfied smile on his face, so proud of himself, thinking about what to have for lunch, while here you are spiraling out trying to decide what your own mind is worth.
He’s not smug like that, she said, coldly. I wouldn’t have done this with a person that smug.
I know you wouldn’t have, I said. But the point is that it takes real work for a woman to sustain the creation of something outside herself that is not a child. Real will, because we are always going to be tempted in a way men aren’t to wander off the road and find some place to get knocked up so we can relieve ourselves of the burden of trying to figure out what everything in life is really worth, and then, as a reward for this abdication of responsibility, get ourselves worshipped as if we’d climbed Mount Everest when all we’d done was let nature take its course. Men don’t walk around with a door inside them that they’ll constantly have to worry about—should I open it, should I keep it shut, does it lock, well wait, if I lock it, can I call a locksmith to get it back open, how long does it stay open, what’s the data on what happens if you’ve left it open for a really long time, can anything get through? Should I shut it or keep it open? Shut it or keep it open? Shut it or—you get the idea. This is why men will never experience their underutilized freedom as a perversion. They don’t have this inherent, latent source of power serving as a standard against which they can measure every other way they can access power, or every other dream they might have, and then run the risk of finding those dreams or that power wanting in comparison to the thing their body could do. So men will never put too much pressure on their freedom and it will never put too much pressure on them.
My face burned.
I can always write later, she said.
That’s when I began to envy her. It had never occurred to me, when I was her age, that I could write later; never occurred to me to keep my mouth shut until I’d lived enough to collect a few things worth saying. I’d wanted to enter the convent of art immediately. Elinor might want to enter the convent of motherhood in order to protect herself from further mistakes. I thought of something else.
Who knows what it could do to your sisters if you keep the baby? I said. They could find themselves living in reaction to your decision for the rest of their lives. They could either become too careful or not careful at all.
Oh, she said. She had not thought of that.
Please find another way to punish yourself for not being perfect.
That seemed to have hit home, too.
I’m sorry, I said. Or you could have everything. You could have it and have everything.
That seems unlikely, doesn’t it? she said.
Prove us all wrong, I said. But if you do, promise me you’ll never write a book telling us how you did it.
She laughed.
Later, while climbing back up to the road, Elinor said she wanted to return to the beach in the morning to do some more thinking, and we decided that if we could find a motel room we would stay overnight.
I don’t mind turning my underwear inside out if you don’t, I said.
That sounds delightful, she said. Let’s become feral.
After lunch we visited a bookstore, situated in a cabin by a creek in the redwoods, where I offered to buy Elinor a book if she saw one she liked, but she said there were so many of them she wanted it was stressing her out trying to decide on just one.
Who’s that? she said, sidling up to me at the register and tapping the cover of A Spy in the House of Love, which I was about to buy.
Someone whose work I have actively avoided my entire reading life.
Oooh, she said. Why?
Oh, I’ll tell you later.
Tell us now, said the man behind the register. His manner thoroughly unhurried, his eyes inquisitive and amused, and the combination lent his hooded sweatshirt the air of cashmere and turned his unremarkable face handsome. If I’d been alone I might have tried to flirt with him.
She’s taken, said Elinor, with a sharpness that I sensed had something to do with mothers and their failure to protect.
The man remained unhurried as he handed me my card—as if he had daughters, too, and could not be fazed by their moods, and on the way to the car Elinor started chatting up a storm. And kept chatting, through lunch and just after, because we’d talked enough about what grieved her to contemplate, and she needed to pretend everything was fine. She talked about books she’d been reading, shows she’d been watching, the ridiculous things her roommates did, the ways her sisters pissed her off. She might not have even needed me to listen. But I didn’t mind listening. As she talked I could see her sisters, see her roommates, very clearly, as if she had painted their expressions, their angles, their foibles, with words, which meant she was a writer, and I could see why someone who taught her would have fallen in love with her. My heart hurt, as I listened, and I was glad, very glad, to feel it hurting for someone other than myself, and by the time we reached Point Lobos she’d talked herself out. At dinner I asked her questions so that she would not ask me questions. Asked her what she thought of the Iris Murdoch, and that led to a very long conversation, or, okay, it might have been me giving a lecture, about how Murdoch’s thoughts about fiction might have been more valuable than the fiction she could not stop writing.
Whereas with Virginia Woolf, said Elinor, and from coffee to the motel we finished that sentence together.
In the wood-paneled room we looked in the drawers to see if anyone had left anything interesting behind, and sat on our respective twin beds watching House Hunters until she said:
Did you ever fall in love with a professor?
Not exactly, I said.
That sounds like a good story, she said, and I laughed.
Well, it’s not really a story.
Beginnings and middles and ends are completely overrated, she said. Who was he?
When I was in college, I told Elinor, I had what I supposed you would call a crush on a professor. Dr. K.
How many people are here because this was the only upper-level literature course available to sophomores this semester? he said on the first day of class.
No one raised a hand.
Well, he said, I’ll find out sooner or later by your shitty papers.
Dr. K. I wished for his approval, longed for his approval, worked for his approval, and inhaled, reread, and savored the comments he left in the blue books and on backs of papers the way I inhaled, respooned, and savored Nutella whenever a jar was put in front of me. I’d reread them between classes, and again at the end of the day, just after getting into bed and just before turning the light out. When I learned that my roommate had found me asleep, curled up on my side, cheek resting on one of these papers and drooling, I stopped. I still have those papers, responses still stapled to the back—single-spaced responses printed from a dot-matrix printer, and I cannot throw them out because they made me who I am. Perfectly punctuated, full of insights into my insights that seemed to have rolled effortlessly out of his mind and onto the paper, full of a mind alive and at home in the act of analysis, words just acid enough to provide the thrill of knowing that your intelligence had been just keen enough to outwit their full acidity.
I changed the way I wrote my sevens because of Dr. K—by slashing the number through the middle with a horizontal stroke. This flourish, picked up, I guessed, while he was studying in France, might have been one of his only three affectations.
Dr. K, the crew-cutted son of Staten Island schoolteachers, stood at the podium as if it was his birthright. He projected an air of impregnable but voluble intelligence, and a happy, benevolent openness, and people thought he was handsome because of it. I remember the beat-up brown leather knapsack that he’d toss onto the table near the podium at the beginning of every class—sometimes an apple or a pacifier or a tie would ooze out from it while he lectured—and his penchant for wearing wide-waled brown or green corduroy jackets over khakis or jeans.
Dr. K, I heard another girl once say, made corduroy seem like one of the more sensuous fabrics you could upholster a man in.
That made Elinor laugh out loud.
He did not have a penchant for ties, however, preferring to leave his shirts open at the neck. I would sometimes stare at the divot in the middle of his collarbone, resting there just between his buttoned-down collars, which were often plaid, and envy his wife for being the person who could legally touch her index finger to that hollow.
Which did not mean, I told Elinor, that I wanted Dr. K touching me. I would test myself with the thought, and would invariably recoil.
This isn’t—hitting too close to home? I said. Should I go on?
Please, she said.
Dr. K looked you in the eye when you talked to him, and he very quietly turned skeptics who thought the medieval was moot into English majors with him as their advisor.
The semester I took his course—that fall semester of my sophomore year—I was also a work study for the English department, which meant I spent a lot of time xeroxing things and talking to Joyce, the department secretary, who smelled not unpleasantly of clandestinely smoked cigarettes, Certs, and Oil of Olay. Joyce schooled me on all the soap operas going on around campus. Affairs, breakdowns, suicides, expulsions, staff strikes, meningitis outbreaks, petty cash and property theft, alcohol poisoning, fraternity hazings ending in arrests. I also spent a lot of time watching girls arrive for Dr. K’s office hours. I don’t think Dr. K had any idea he was so beloved by a certain strain of female liberal arts major. He was a husband, a father to a newborn son, and a rising academic star, and was too busy to notice that he might appear as a much-needed instance of confident, enthusiastic authority to young women in need of better fodder for their romantic idealism than the idiot boys around them. But those boys, idiot and otherwise, looked up to him as well, because his wit and confidence created the impression of swagger achieved without recourse to brute strength.
There were other professors who were more celebrated instances of glamour, drama, and cruelty—showboaters who made everybody participate in some ridiculous group encounter on the first day of class, or shot devastating zingers into the unsuspecting crowd. If you liked that kind of act, you liked it, but drama and glamour and cruelty have always seemed to me a waste of everybody’s time. I had papers to finish and a life to write.
A girl named Teri—the smartest girl in our class—often waited outside his office. Her clothes and her glasses were plain but just stylish enough to not draw attention, and her hair was long, but not long enough to make you wonder if she’d been homeschooled.
Teri’s face was free of guile, and her smile was quick. She was smarter than nearly everyone around her, so smart she did not have to worry about people beating her out for whatever she wanted, which also made her nicer than everyone around her, and as such a little bit lonelier than everyone around her. She also played the flute.
Hi Charlotte! she’d say, waving, when she saw me sitting at the secretary’s desk or standing at the copier.
Hi Teri! I’d say, and smile, too, meaning it, wishing I was secure enough in my own intelligence to be a real friend to her.
No other English professor had this many girls standing around waiting for him, and it irked Joyce. Whose recipe for kolaches, which she wrote down for me on an index card, I will also never throw out. Dr. K was beloved by his male students, too, but they didn’t show up outside his office. They argued with him on the way to class, waylaid him in the cafeteria in order to eat lunch with him.
God in heaven, they think no one sees them, said Joyce one day, when three girls showed up early at the same time.
Do you think he knows? I said, relieved that Joyce had not lumped me in with the Rest of Them.
Men are oblivious, said Joyce. Didn’t your mother ever tell you that?
No, I said. Should we hold a brown bag seminar in here about it? Get some folding chairs, some of those chocolate chip cookies from food services?
Don’t be a smarty, she said, trying not to laugh. Then she stood up from her seat, grabbed a piece of paper, wrote on it with her authoritative, sweeping, Palmer Method hand, and then thrust it at me. Dr. K has gone home sick for the day, it said. He hadn’t, of course. She asked me to tape it to his door. I did, and those girls scattered.
Joyce came to my graduation, and I attended her funeral. And when I said that out loud to Elinor it reminded me how lucky I had been to know and love all the women I had known and loved, and realized I no longer wanted what I didn’t already have.
Thank you for spending all this time with me, I told Dr. K, in his office, after I’d clarified some thesis or other.
I have ways of keeping it short if I want to, he said. And if you don’t mind, I’d like to keep you here five more minutes so that I don’t have to talk to that kid, he said, pointing to a legendarily indefatigable loudmouth who could be seen loitering in the hallway through the door window.
I thought I might want to become a medievalist because of Dr. K, instead of a modernist, which is what I’d always assumed I’d be. And in the spring of my sophomore year he asked me to become his research assistant—he’d gotten a grant to turn his dissertation on medieval attitudes toward madness into a book. As fall turned into winter, and five o’clock became the dead of night, sitting in his office with a desk lamp the only light, and a mug of tea, microwaved in the lounge, in front of me—no roommates, no traffic, no crush of students suffocating me—I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.
When I graduated, Joyce told me that it was she who told Dr. K to give his assistantship to me, because I had once or twice mentioned being broke.
One afternoon, when I showed up to work for him, he gestured toward my earrings and said Those are fascinating. They were a brand-new pair of very large silver hoops I’d bought over the weekend, at the urging of friends, in New Hope, in Pennsylvania.
He said it the way he might have said that a car wreck was fascinating or the discovery of water on Mars was fascinating. I told him where I bought them, and who I’d gone there with.
Oh, he said, smiling, broadly. Those alt-rock Valkyries you stalk about with?
I blushed, and then laughed, because I liked that image, thought that line was a pretty good one, astonished in the way youth is always astonished when the ancients let drop that they know what goes on outside their cave of age. Alt-rock! I wanted to be seen by him, and there was pleasure in knowing he looked at me when I was not looking, and that he thought I ran with some tough chicks. I smiled.
Forgive me, he said. I was just teasing. I’m sure they’re lovely people. Would you like a coffee? I was just about to get one.
Yes, I said, and we began to get coffee before every one of my shifts. The coffee would last exactly thirty minutes. No more, no less. I did not feel, sitting on a stool in the café, like a sexual object. I felt like a representative of my generation that Dr. K was examining for defects—like Dr. K had put me on the stool purely because of his interest in making sure the kids were all right. And I had seen him having coffee with male students in the same café, in the same spot. We would get a coffee and he would tease me, but it did not feel like flirtation, it felt familial—as if he was making sure his younger sister wasn’t doing anything stupid, like falling in love with Milan Kundera or Jack Kerouac, or actually believing that the people-pleasing Democrat she’d just helped vote into office was really going to change the country the way it needed to be changed.
Of course you should go to graduate school! he said one afternoon, setting down his coffee cup so hard on the saucer that it rattled.
Did you go? said Elinor.
I went, I said, but I couldn’t stay.
One day I came into the office and found a brand-new copy of The Malaise of Modernity sitting in the middle of his desk. I turned on the desk lamp and opened the book.
For Charlotte, with friendship
I sat down at the desk, and stared at the four words, read them over and over, drank them in until I was flooded with pride, contentment, pleasure, and hope. I sat in his chair, in the mostly-dark, and wished that one day I’d have an office that looked out over a river that glittered at night with light that looked like scattered stars even though the source came from plain old streetlamps. An office lined with books, books like bricks, the wealth of them a fortress, the wealth of them a solace. The accomplishment of them, rising to the ceiling, creating a sanctuary for girls like me whose parents could not give them this kind of home. One day, I hoped, I might create that kind of home for girls myself.
It sounds like he was in love with you, said Elinor.
No, I said, he wasn’t.
I sat there at his desk dreaming, and deepening my will. When I realized how tired I was—it was Friday, and I’d taken two hard exams that week—I placed my hands over the book like a pillow and rested my cheek on top, with the intention to rest there for just a moment. But I fell asleep in that position, and a knocking on the door woke me. Angry knocking. I jumped up, mind woozy, heart racing, and opened it. A woman stood there with a baby on her hip. She was short and elfish and a little pugnacious-seeming, and reminded me of the girls who played goalie for my high school field hockey team. She’d pulled her long, possibly bleached blond hair back on either side with gold-plated drugstore barrettes whose gold, I noticed, had begun to flake off, and wore a long teal parka, pink plaid shirt, jeans, and running shoes. No-nonsense, but clearly feminine colors.
Where’s Dr. K? she said.
I looked at my watch. It was 8:30.
Do you know where he is? His wife, I thought. His son screeched in glee and grabbed at her hair.
I don’t, I said. I’m sorry. She looked through me, once around the office, then right at me.
Get a boyfriend. The baby now screeched in bewilderment. I was too stunned to move or speak. Get out! she said.
Beyond the baby, over Mrs. K’s shoulder, I saw Joyce hustling in her orthopedic shoes like a racewalker, chicken wings out at the side, down the hallway to the office.
Mrs. K! she shouted. Mrs. K!
I grabbed the book off the desk and ran out of there. I could not sleep that night from shame. I kept hearing her voice—Get a boyfriend—and kept seeing her livid face. I don’t think my mother had ever looked at me with such furious ice in her eyes, and my mother’s veins were full of it. Had her nostrils flared? They might as well have. I’d thought I was better than what she was mistaking me for, but I wasn’t, I was just some girl, some thief, hanging around, trampling the garden, feeding on scraps, trying the locks.
But I felt sorrier for Dr. K than I did for myself. That wife. If I never made demands on a man or clung to him for dear life, I told Elinor, watching that woman descend into wild-eyed desperation over her missing husband was at least 50 percent responsible.
That’s not the first time she’s come down here, said Joyce, the next day, with that baby on her hip like a lit torch.
Do you know where he was?
Don’t ask those questions, she said, with a sharpness that I had to wonder at, and then declined to wonder at, because I was, luckily, still an innocent, and I had papers to write and my own life to save.
Which I thought I was doing by signing up for Race, Gender, and the Birth of the Modern, taught by a woman who told me that I should go to graduate school only if I was interested in being infantilized for three to ten years. Dr. L! Who told me that I should be a writer, not an academic, because, as she said, I wrote too well to have such a gift crushed by groupthink. Who told me I had a first-rate mind save for my affection for E. M. Forster—Empire’s vessel full of ectoplasm, she called him—but who through my testimony came to grudgingly understand what those Merchant-Ivory film adaptations had done for principled young American virgins in the 1980s. Dr. L, who, like Dr. K, was not afraid to wield sarcasm in the arena either, and, I told Elinor, when I used it on my students it was in tribute to her utter lack of fear. Whenever I tucked a vintage silk blouse into Hepburn-wide pants, or plaited my hair into pigtails, that was also in tribute to Dr. L, who never wore anything but. Dr. L, who gave very warm and bracing hugs upon hearing both good news and bad. Who, one Friday afternoon after classes ended, while we chatted in her office, introduced me to both red wine and dark chocolate Hobnobs, telling me that she always brought back five tubes of them in her suitcase whenever she visited friends in London, where she’d worked in a pub the summer before starting her PhD. Though you’d never guess, I remember her saying that day as we put away a sleeve of Hobnobs, these go very well with red wine. And then another afternoon she produced a bottle from behind a few books on her shelf, pulled a corkscrew out of a desk drawer, and began waving some colleagues in for a drink through her open door. I remember the laughter and the warmth in that office, and in the hallway that day, the day I learned that ebullient hospitality could turn the humblest of ingredients and settings—industrial carpet, disposable plastic glasses—into a glamorous salon.
I once saw Joyce and Dr. L drinking some whiskeys together at some beloved dump of a student bar—it was like catching Gertrude Stein and Simone de Beauvoir in the act of handicapping the game and shooting the shit.
Dr. L, who let slip a roll of the eyes once when I mentioned how much I loved Dr. K—a response I didn’t quite understand until I began teaching, and my female colleagues and I would roll our eyes at yet another triumph achieved, or innovation advanced, by blisteringly confident male faculty members on the ascendant.
Dr. L, whom I betrayed by writing a senior thesis for Dr. K. I did not think the world needed another modernist—although who on earth needed yet another young woman writing about the covert rebellions of the oppressed sex, circa century twelve—and I thought if I wasn’t just another modernist, I might have an easier time getting a job at the end of the PhD I hoped to earn. And he might feel bad enough about what happened with his wife to go easy on me, and write me a glowing recommendation for graduate school. I could not eat for two weeks between making the decision and informing her of the decision.
When I used the word betrayal in apologizing to her, Dr. L closed her eyes and said, No, this isn’t betrayal, but I am hurt.
But, she added, after thinking for a moment, putting her hands over her still-closed eyelids, trying, it appeared, to commune with something other than jealousy, this is about money and self-sufficiency and, I suspect, your father, a tangle of competing needs and loves that I certainly understand, so I must give you my blessing to go forth and be the Dorothea Brooke of your own life.
She stood up and brought out another bottle of wine from behind a few books, and asked me what I planned to write on.
Heloise and Abelard, I said.
Avenge her for us, my dear, she said, uncorking the wine, the red-black plenty splashing loudly into those plastic cups, the sound of that wine-dark sea turning us into sorceresses.
Dr. K is still married to Mrs. K, who went on to have one more child bearing his last name, while he went on to become the department chair.
What happened to Dr. L? said Elinor.
A lifetime ago, when I told Rose about Dr. K and Dr. L, I said that last I knew, Dr. L had moved back to West Virginia, earned a degree in massage therapy, married the man who took over her father’s veterinary practice, and had twins.
So she committed suicide, said Rose, who could not know how close her joke was to the truth. When Dr. K told Dr. L that he would not leave his wife for her, she hung herself from a bathrobe belt tied to a curtain rod that she’d bolted into the sides of a window in her apartment. I did not mention this to Rose because I didn’t want to turn a woman’s torment into some story I hauled out to show people how close I’d stood to tragedy. And maybe I worried that I’d always had a little too much Dr. L in me and not enough Dr. K, and hid the truth about the past in order to stay in the present, where Rose and I were writing a story that would weave a spell against losing my way to everything I ever wanted. But that worry, I knew, was a bigger betrayal than if I’d demeaned Dr. L’s life by treating it like nothing more than gossip. And here I was betraying her again, telling her story because it was still too painful to tell mine or Rose’s. Trying to write yet another fiction, my favorite: that I could outwit whatever had befallen all the women who had ever given birth to me.
What happened to Dr. L? Elinor said.
I didn’t speak.
What happened to Dr. L?
She killed herself.
Silence.
Is the moral of this story that we should stop stealing men from other women?
Maybe, I said. Although I didn’t mean for it to have one.
Can I turn out the light? she said.
At three in the morning, I woke up, needing to use the bathroom. Elinor had turned the lamp back on and was reading the Anaïs Nin I’d bought earlier that day.
This is gross, she said to the pages, as I passed the foot of her bed. Like, muy stinky.
Should we drive to the bookstore tomorrow and ask for my money back?
No, she said. I think we should just chuck it off one of these cliffs.
Your idea’s better, I said, and shut the bathroom door behind me, thinking that I would be sad when she went back to Ohio. Thinking that, and hoping and praying she did not have that baby. When I came back out she’d turned the lights off.
Do you smell that? I said, ten minutes later, to the dark.
I do, she said. Am I crazy or does that smell like—wood-fired pizza?
That’s exactly what it smells like.
I’m sure it’s just a bonfire or something, she said, and we fell asleep.
We had no idea that wildfires smelled seductively, confusingly, like the platonic form of autumnal woodsmoke, and I had been too worried about earthquakes to remember to be concerned about the wildfires, which I also for some reason thought occurred only in Southern California. To me death and destruction smelled the way September 11 did—charred plastic and paper, seared metal and flesh.
This place has never seen a lick of fire in the fifty-one years of its existence, said the man at the front desk, while we were checking out the next morning, explaining that up where we were the fogs kept the flames from the wildfires at bay.
It’s always been the ocean that’ll kill you here, said his wife, and told us that a body of a woman and her daughter had been found on the beach that morning. If people are stupid enough not to know what that ocean is about just by looking at it, they deserve to drown.
We don’t need to go to the beach, said Elinor, as we walked out of the front office. Can we go back to the city?
We were about halfway through the drive when Elinor said:
Why have we stolen from other women?
Because we wanted to, I said. Because we could. Let’s just stop doing it.