Out of the dark she said, “It’ll be better next time,” not knowing whether there would be a next time, not knowing if he’d heard her, her voice so hushed, so constricted. Not ten minutes after they’d begun, she’d cried out and it was over, she was done, and if he’d come too, she’d missed it. He must have, because he was going off to the bathroom to flush away the condom.
She turned on the bedside lamp and pulled the sheet to her chin. She’d been a long time without sex, despite the night with Stephen, whatever that was. It was as though she’d forgotten how. How could she tell him she wasn’t always like this? Maybe she was, now. After so much raw luck and adventure, after so much loneliness, maybe this grabbing and scrabbling was all the lovemaking she had left.
He lifted the covers and slid in beside her. “Next time,” he said, “starts now.”
“It does?”
He mimicked her, all round eyes, and tugged the sheet from her chin. So he wanted her again, wanted her, too? The way he looked at her had nothing superior in it. In his hands, she rediscovered the thickness of her hair and the weight of her head and how it moved nonetheless lightly on her neck, how her breasts rose and fell with her breathing, and how changeable she was in her feeling—first defeated, but now flaring up bold.
Hurry vanished. She had nowhere to be but in her bed with him, nothing to do but to feel with her hands what he was. She settled again into the smells of vinegar and warm fur. Finding him hard, she hoisted herself astraddle him. He gasped and began to move under her and she settled into the rocking sounds, the gasping and grunting and liquid sounds, the sucking and sliding that had embarrassed her when she was very young but now seemed friendly and familiar. It was good. They were going to be fine.
Going slow was now the thing. It became a game—was she even moving on him?—and he laughed aloud. They’d come to call this glacial slowness though it only made the heat more intense, lowering their melting point together, so that the rush, when it came, made them both one thing.
They slept. From the apartment overhead, if anyone was listening, came the distant sounds of bath and bedtime and, later, of Frances coming to sit at Alan’s desk for her now brief and nearly silent vigil. Rose had come to know, moment to moment, ticking, nervous, at the center of her life, where Frances was, what Frances felt and what she would likely say or do next. But now Rose slept all tangled up with her new love.
And what was there to do in the morning but make love again? It was August; they had no reason to put on clothes. Eating, bathing, making love, they wandered her rooms—white paint, dark wood, pale of bare legs against the dark plush of her easy chair.
She’d been alone with her thoughts for a long while. Alone and now not alone, perhaps never alone again. She’d had no one to talk to except Frances, who only listened for what was pertinent to her, what she’d already heard of, what she could understand. Graham listened for every-thing, even what was strange, what Rose felt and thought and was that he might never have guessed. She was only beginning to feel how essential he would be to her. She found herself blurting out nearly everything that came into her head.
Walking over to his carriage house to “break in” his big bed, they went hand in hand, so giddy and giggly that kids paused in play to watch them. Passing through the gate in the brick wall felt to her like stepping straight out of the world. Here it was again, the loneliness that came with love, the spookiness of being two alone. Suddenly not alone, never alone again—and then, somehow, doubly alone. Shivering, she followed him up the rough wood staircase. It was either loneliness with love or without it, and she would take hers with.
Graham laughed, picked her up, and hoisted her over his threshold.
This can’t be love, this confusion, this weakness. But it was. In a flash, she saw the end of her symphony and, over several fevered days and nights, got up from bed at her place or his and threw a towel over the chair or piano bench and wrote naked, cum oozing from her as she played and sang for him of loneliness linked to love, then fused, and then the resolution that wove up all the ragged strands.
Just like that, she was done. Finished.
What did he think?
He thought it was great.
Aw, but he was partial. In his music collection, she’d discovered every piece of hers ever recorded. How long had he been collecting her, anyway?
None of her business. He didn’t want her getting a swollen head.
“Hah,” she said. “Too late!”
She copied the symphony and sent it to London to support an application for a fellowship there with an orchestra that had once performed a piece of hers, and sent another copy to Lila, inscribed “To my teacher, my maestro,” and danced it to the mailbox, thrilled as Meggy in her brand-new, starry nightgown, a sight Rose recalled with an ache. It wasn’t a swollen head she had, but a swollen heart. She loved Graham and she missed Meggy; she loved Graham and missed Frances and Max. She ran upstairs to see them any number of times, but they were suddenly never at home.
Neither was she. Home was now wherever Graham was, her place or his.
August turned to September. Crossing campus on the first day of classes, a warm day when the few fallen leaves lay live and wet underfoot, she remembered her first view of the college: the ivy-covered walls and great stone steps that had seemed corny to her then. By now, the place was thoroughly peopled for her. Every corner of campus held a memory, and, as she went, she was called by name, by first name, as she’d long insisted, artist’s prerogative, the informal, the real. “Rose, hello, Rose, hi, Rose, Rose, Rose,” came the voices of professors, staff, and students like the chiming from the clock tower welcoming her back to where she very much hoped she belonged.
“Hello, Rose,” said Frances at her desk in the glass front of the music department.
“Frances—how are you?” she blurted—an unfair question. Frances could hardly give a real answer in the midst of the busy office, and Rose was due in the classroom.
There, third hour, Victor came to every class and took a place in the back and participated, his answers proficient and pointed. He alone would not use her first name, but addressed her as professor. Professor Mac-Gregor, a personage. She let it stand.
The Rose that ran home and stripped off her clothes for Graham was someone else entirely. When she was in front of her students, she some-times felt this other self impatiently waiting, and it worried her. She couldn’t afford to lose concentration.
It occurred to her that Frances might serve as her model. Frances held the department together, its entire workings, and nothing in her private life ever interfered. Her pregnancy was showing now and she was back and forth to the bathroom often, but her posture radiated poise. However devastated, she looked luminous, her eyes enormous, her features so dis-tinct that they seemed carved.
Passing her desk, Rose developed the unfortunate habit of asking Frances several times a day how she was. And then she’d kicked herself, only to hear herself shortly after asking again. She knew she was asking not about Frances, but about herself—meaning tenure, a reading on her tenure situation that might be gotten from Frances.
Frances would give an eloquent pause and, in a brightly neutral tone, always answered, “Well enough.” If Frances knew anything about Rose’s tenure, she wasn’t saying.
“Rose,” said Graham, “Rose, Rose, Rose.”
“What?” she asked and he told her how lovely she was and how long he’d waited for her. He had a past—girlfriends who hadn’t worked out. He told her only enough so she’d know that she hadn’t been the only one, over thirty and still unpartnered, to worry that there might be something wrong, some inner flaw.
“And who’s to say there isn’t?” she said. “Who’s to say it’ll work out this time—the confirmed bachelor and the settled spinster?”
And she wasn’t even settled—her career still hanging, her fate yet undecided.
Graham didn’t see it that way. He claimed she was only in danger if she thought she was. There were ways to earn besides teaching. Not all com-posers and musicians taught. He was surprisingly stubborn on The Sub-ject, which was how he’d begun to refer to her tenure worry. She did talk about it, but that was understandable—it was pending.
She found him sometimes tactless.
He called it being direct. He was thinking of clearing the pianos out of the garage stall below his loft, of finishing repairs and selling them off. He could insulate and soundproof down there, put in heat and a good wood floor. There were decent windows facing the garden, and windows high in the carriage doors. The place could be a studio. A composer’s studio was what he meant, a place for her.
When she imagined how it might be to live and work in the carriage house, a longing seized her, followed by vertigo. She had fallen for him and would probably go on falling for some time to come. Yet she had maintained her own household for years. If anything needed to be built or bought for her, she’d built it; she’d bought it.
Deliberately misunderstanding him, pretending that he meant the studio for himself, she asked whether he was planning to take up an instrument, or maybe get serious about his drawing, his bird drawings? They were sitting after supper at his table, which, through a small window, overlooked the wall across the alley where a creeper climbing the brick showed bright red leaves, a possible warning of an early winter. He leaned back, his alert, brown eyes on hers, and dropped his chin.
Also, what was the use, she wanted to know, of putting money and labor into the place when he was only a renter?
Only a renter? Renting was what he believed in, renting and renovating to suit the present, the best way to deal with fleeting time. “Life is a rental,” he said and got up and grabbed his coat and went out the door.
For the first time, she realized, he was really angry with her. But his anger didn’t worry her. Skipping over his offer and its import and the fact that she’d deflected it, she stepped into a new, warm certainty of him and imagined a life within his yellow walls. If she had no mortgage nor condo dues to pay, if the two of them split expenses, it might not matter whether or not she got tenure. A rescue! But she had no intention of letting him know how much the idea appealed to her, to what she thought of as her weakness. And was time really fleeting? She didn’t think so. Tenure, in fact, was time to her. Tenure was something permanent. Tenure would be her strength, her calm from which she’d plan life afresh and give of herself, of her plenty. She could be the rescuer then. Maybe she could even help him buy his place, though she wouldn’t suggest that now, not yet, not till she figured out his pride. And, of course, not until she knew for sure she had it—had tenure.
He came back from his walk and she kissed him hard. His way, free-lancing and renting, was good, she acknowledged, a good way of life. And she could do the same, scrounge a living and write music somehow. But she made real money teaching. Did he think it would be nobler if she made peanuts? Did he see her waiting tables?
“Know how I see you best?” He tugged her to the bed and pulled her shirt off.
Seriously, would he prefer her as a nurse’s aide? A secretary, like Frances?
“Status,” he said.
“Money,” she countered. Money to buy freedom from worry, money to buy the dreaming time she needed to write good music. Okay, so she enjoyed a certain standing. A college job conferred status, but it also opened doors.
She’d earned it, though, hadn’t she? She’d applied herself, won artist trophies, won teaching awards—the teaching award by student acclaim her first year back on campus as a member of the faculty, bona fide, that is, on tenure track. If she’d been lucky, she’d made her luck.
“Rose,” he said and raised himself over her. “Haven’t we said enough on The Subject? Can’t we find something better to do?” Readily, she opened her legs to him.
For good measure, she’d dropped a note to her Chair, offering, in addition to her regular load, to take on Alan’s committee work. Alan had left town with James. He’d applied for sabbatical the previous spring, as if he’d foreseen the split with Frances, which he probably had, having caused it. This made an opportunity, anyway, for Rose, who offered to take Alan’s tutoring responsibilities, as well—anything to demonstrate her worth, her versatility to anyone who might be watching and judging.
She reached up and picked at a string on the broken lute overhead, and Graham paused in his motion. She’d later have to wonder why she’d done that, plucked a dead string in the midst of love? The string made an inert snapping sound. She could make music; she was meant to make music and to get her music out. If not tenure here, then at some other college, some other platform from which to launch her music. She could go else-where. She recalled that, when she’d first come there, she’d only thought of it as a stopping place on her way to the rest of the world.
He lifted himself from her. “What?”
Had she really said that aloud? She hadn’t meant it. She was just talking.
“You’re going. You’re already gone,” he said and rolled away from her.
She hadn’t meant it. She had no other teaching offers. She wanted him; he felt good inside her.
“What am I? A fuck on the way to the rest of the world?”
“No, of course not,” she said, horrified.
But he’d had enough of The Subject for a while. His backpack, half-filled for the island, sat in a corner. They’d never managed to go. August over, the berries were gone, but the leaves would be turning. He thought he’d go up for a while.
He understood she couldn’t come with him.
She agreed it might be for the best. She didn’t dare miss a single class, committee meeting, or campus event. She’d get notice of tenure any time, possibly by the middle of October—at the very least by Christmas.
He didn’t plan to stay away on the island till Christmas.
“Of course not—I never meant that,” she said.
It got cold up there early. By the end of October, the ferries stopped running and the place iced in for the winter. But he’d stay awhile and air out his brain. He could afford it, as a matter of fact. He made enough money to take a month off whenever he wanted.
She watched him pack his tent, his maps, and his food and hoist his canoe to the roof of his van. She kissed him and stood waving till he drove out of sight.
And then she was bereft. She’d expected to feel released, to move lightly and swiftly to all she had to do. She had not expected to feel dead. His mail would be held at the post office. Why hadn’t he asked her to bring in his mail? She did feel lighter, but painfully so, as if a weight she had thought was herself had been wrenched off. She stood at the curb, achy in her skin.
She’d been thinking of nothing but tenure. Now, without Graham, she could think of nothing but love. She couldn’t bear to be the sort of woman who thought of nothing but love. She went to the condo, looking for company, but Frances and Max were not at home. She trudged through her days, to her office, to her classroom, to her condo.
Her London proposal came back far earlier than expected. A refusal. She hadn’t even made the first cut. Shocked, she read closely and found the reason why: on the list of names of preliminary judges was Stephen Orrick of the Seattle Sinfonietta.
She crept over to the carriage house and let herself in with the hide-a-key. In Graham’s big chair, she talked to herself. She’d put her symphony in a fresh envelope and send it out again immediately; she’d hold to her course; she’d hold on. She turned back Graham’s bedcovers and lay down to sleep in his bed that night, and the next night did the same. Without his permission, without his knowledge, she tried to sleep with him that way, she in his bed, he in his tent on his island.
They were exchanging postcards: mild jokes, short accounts of life in a tent or in a music department. Love, she signed hers, love, love, love.
Love, Graham, he replied. Love in the singular. It began to seem an injunction: love Graham. She didn’t have to be told to love Graham. She loved him, but she must have blown it with him because otherwise how could he stand to be apart from her?
Word came by departmental memo that Alan’s tutoring duties would be covered by a temporary hire. She dropped by Chairman Atkinson’s office to ask why.
Oh, they could afford it, the Chair said, and reminded her in his genial way that she, their composer, had never been expected to take on extra duties. They all knew the creation of new music required ample time. This was so, but Rose noted that his tone was perhaps a bit distant. She was the department’s only woman professor; they’d think twice before dumping her, wouldn’t they? she thought, as the Chair went on to tell her that the new hire was Vietnamese, a fresh-faced young man, an expert in computer-generated music. Racial diversity was the new mandate.
Hold on, hold steady, Rose told herself, but she felt her grip slipping. Frances. Time to go to Frances. She’d humble herself and ask Frances what all this meant, what it would mean for Rose vis-à-vis tenure.
But Frances was not at her post.
“She’s packing up to move,” explained the student answering the phones.
Rose ran over to the condo. On the landing sat a stack of cartons.
“What’s all this?” she called out, as if she couldn’t see for herself.
“Selling the place, if a buyer can be found,” said Frances. And as though there had been no interruption in their life together, she beckoned Rose inside. “The market’s flat, so it may stand empty awhile. Either way, it’s time for us to go.”
The curtains were down. The dining room stood entirely bare. In the living room, a pair of chairs and a small table were set in the place of Alan’s great old couch. His rug, also missing, left an expanse of freshly waxed wooden floor across which the light skated, chilly and dazzling. The table appeared to float, and on one side sat Max, his tousled hair shining and blueberries in a white bowl before him like bubbles of ice. Max slid off his chair, took his bowl, and came and climbed into Rose’s lap. His cheek against hers burned. She clutched him and recalled his baptism, how she’d held him in her arms and promised in his stead to trust entirely in grace and love. Max was still her godson and Frances her—what? god-sister?
They hadn’t had a real conversation in weeks, but it wasn’t as though they’d quarreled. They’d simply stepped apart. Rose had stepped first, but she’d done nothing to Frances, really, except to fall in love.
She would ask Frances for news of tenure. She would be direct.
“How are you, Frances?” was what came out of her mouth.
Frances laughed, and Rose laughed with her.
“I’m sorry,” said Rose. “I can’t seem to quit that.”
“Oh, I’m fine, really,” said Frances. “I’m sure I’m just fine.” Exhaustion showed in her eyes, and her features seemed once again as oddly sharp as they had on Rose’s first impression of her, though her hair, growing out from its boy-cut, softened her angles. She wore no makeup and the man’s white T-shirt she had on—V-necked and immaculate—over a pair of sweat pants, accentuated her swelling belly. She was simply, strikingly herself.
“You look wonderful,” said Rose. It was true.
Frances rolled her eyes. “You look worried.”
“Tenure.”
“Right,” said Frances, but offered nothing more.
“You know, Frances,” remarked Rose, “you really do look stunning.”
Frances sent Max from the room on some obscure errand—to get a dinosaur book or something of the sort—and when they were alone, she reached across the table, almost but not quite touching Rose. “Why did he say he loved me?” she asked. “Why did he insist over and over that he loved me? Do you know?”
For a moment, Frances let her grief show and wasn’t any sort of beauty, but a pregnant mother, burdened with children but otherwise alone.
“Alan did love you,” Rose stammered. “You made him a home and a family.”
But Frances shook her head, unsatisfied, this new Frances who had torn down the curtains, who seemed intent not on preserving, but on removing illusions. Rose couldn’t imagine why Frances would want to punish herself with the why of it. But Rose did know why, and Frances was asking.
She offered up the ancient history, how, back in the spring before Alan was tenured, she and Alan, standing outside the open door of the Chair’s office, had overheard Frances speaking against Alan, saying he shouldn’t be trusted with students because he lacked a family.
“And so he married me?”
“He thought you were going to put him out of his position.”
Frances regarded Rose, and her eyes had never seemed more piercing. “You people,” she said, “and your positions.” She got to her feet, and Rose struggled up after her. “I suppose you were only ever Alan’s friend, not mine.”
“Oh, no,” said Rose. “Come on, Frances.”
“Really,” said Frances. “Do you think we were ever true friends, you and I?”
“Of course we were. Are. After all we’ve been through together, of course we’re friends. Oh, Frances, why ever not?” Rose begged and realized she had not gotten what she’d come for and would not get it. Frances gave no reply. Frances had controlled the interview, and Frances had the last word, which was no word at all.
At the end of September, having sold the last of the furniture, even the table and chairs and the beds, Frances moved herself and Max and a dozen neatly labeled cartons of clothes and toys, barely filling a college maintenance van.
Not far, was all she would say about where she was going. Rose sup-posed she didn’t want to admit she was going home to her mother’s, only a few blocks away.
Back inside her own place, Rose found the ceilings too high, the space vaulting and colder yet with the empty rooms above. She packed Jewels, the cat food and litter box, and carted them over to Graham’s. Wrapped up in Graham’s blankets, wearing his sweater and his socks in double pairs, she began to cook with his pans and utensils and to eat out of his dishes. But she hadn’t moved in—oh, no. Before he returned, she intended to wash every dish, all the sheets and towels, and put it all back the way he’d had it. He was never to know.
On a night in early October, however, a key turned in the lock and there he stood. It was snowing on the island, he said, and dumped down his pack. Even from across the room, he smelled of campfire. Though she had no right to be, she was completely taken by surprise, not frozen, but painfully alive as if thawing too quickly. He was bearded, shaggy, and so bundled up that he seemed bearlike. He took her breath away. She jumped up to fill the kettle and halted. Glancing sidelong, she saw the many signs of her trespass, her failures written in her disarray: her jacket flung on his floor, her underwear in a dirty pile at the foot of his unmade bed. She turned to face him.
His gaze went by slow and exhausted degrees from puzzlement, not to dismay nor disapproval, but to what seemed like relief and then to a sort of merriment and a radiance as though he’d solved the puzzle, coming to the answer he most wanted. He sat down unsteadily and opened his arms to her.
Love, love, love, she’d signed her postcards. And here she was, waiting for him.
“I was only borrowing the place. Only camping out. I know I didn’t ask,” she blurted and rushed to the nearest pile of her things and began to gather them up.
“Stop that,” he said sharply.
If ever the time had come for trusting in grace and love, it might have been then. But she couldn’t stop—she was too embarrassed. Why trust, why fall in a heap on someone else when she had something private and far less helpless? She had her luck; she preferred her own if she had any luck left at all.