The party, by the way, was for my godson, Neil, who sends you his best regards. He has just passed his bar exam. He says to tell you that you should send flowers! Neil, Alice tells me, goes rollerskating in Washington Square Park on the weekends.
We cannot wait to see you. Living in a hotel is only fine for a couple of days. We are both sorry that the company has not yet decided on what to purchase as a corporate apartment. Why did they let the old one go? Real estate prices are going to begin rising again the nearer we get to the election.
It was lovely to hear your voice. I hope to soon hear you humming, as you so often do, arranging the flowers, which by now must be quite plentiful.
Until Friday,
M.
7
“I TOLD HER I told you,” Cheryl said. “At first she was really upset I did this behind her back, but now she’s agreed to talk to you. But the thing is, she says she absolutely will not go back to student health. I’m sorry to lay this on you. I really am. She just — she seems to want to talk to you to see if you think Professor McCallum was deranged or something. My guess is that she wants to think the closest thing she can to its not having happened, which would be that it was some momentary aberration.”
God, McCallum, he thought. You are an insane fucking fool.
“Are you — I hate to dump this stuff on you, but she and I were just watching the weather, and when the weatherman talked about snow and pointed to asterisks over Boston on the map, she leaned forward and puked on the floor. And it was the first time that day we’d gotten her to eat. I know this isn’t your problem, but—”
“I’m sorry,” he said. What was he sorry about? Was he sorry that for almost a week, Sonja had gone to the hospital to see Evie every day, while he had dropped out days ago? Sorry he had picked up the telephone just now to get Cheryl’s call? Or was he simply sorry that McCallum had done such a thing? Sorry to be involved in this, that was for sure, yet he sympathized with Cheryl. She’d been dragged into a messy situation, and he was about as useful, right now, as McCallum’s hearty, but ultimately dismissive, “God bless.” He hadn’t gotten in touch not only because he didn’t want to be kept posted on Livan Baker’s sad situation, but also because he didn’t want his own life to become a sad situation: a middle-aged man paying too much attention to a teenage girl, himself not so unlike McCallum in being another opportunist, a person who barged into another person’s life just because the opportunity was there. Tonight, Cheryl’s voice was weary, the fatigue barely disguising real alarm. Just thinking about what happened to Cheryl’s roommate made him so depressed he was tempted to personify the weather, to see it as pathetic, this long winter of cold asterisks with diagonal slashes moving in behind and dark puffs of cloud streaming over Boston like steam escaping from a train, obliterating what clarity there was in the sky. McCallum and some kid: Goddamn.
“If somebody can’t talk sense to her, I don’t think she’s going to recover,” Cheryl said.
“I understand,” he said. “I’ve put in a call to my wife’s friend at student health, but there’s been something of a crisis here, and I wasn’t able to keep the appointment.”
“She’s not going to eat tonight,” Cheryl said.
“You’re doing what you can,” he said, realizing as he spoke that he was deliberately missing the point: the point was not that Cheryl felt bad, but that her roommate was losing ground. He was aware of that, but he was sitting on a stool by the phone, about to cook a package of Ramen noodles and eat them in front of the fire he’d just started in the fireplace in the living room — the simple, sensual pleasure of it almost made him laugh: as a young man, would he ever have thought an ideal evening would be sitting cross-legged by the hearth, slurping up twenty-cent noodles, reading an essay in The New England Review by McCallum deconstructing Arthur Bremer’s diary? — when suddenly the quality of his evening, already under a gloomy cloud of anxiety because of Evie’s critical condition, was yet again being tempered by a big dose of reality, the asterisks falling on Boston like footnotes offering bad prognoses about sexual aggression, the devil’s face more ominous than usual, seen on the fireback through flames crackling off burning logs. McCallum’s face … stupid, deranged McCallum, who earlier in the week had walked past his office, flanked by several students, raising his hand in a distracted, two-fingered wave, an odd gesture as if he were speaking in sign language to his troops: There it is, guys; destroy it. That was, of course, what Marshall feared: that somehow, once he was dragged in, it would be war and he would become McCallum’s enemy. Opening the package of noodles, he flinched at what a coward he was, saw himself (chin wedging phone against his shoulder) as self-absorbed, a middle-aged man dodging responsibility in order to eat some fast food while basking by a pleasant fire. He should be interrupting his evening to talk to Livan, if only as a token adult, someone whose sympathetic presence might in some small way mitigate the aftershock of the dreadful trip.