"Well, it is English-language culture that we want to teach her."
"Whose English? Some eighty-year-old Oxbridge pederast's? The most exciting English being written today is African, Caribbean—"
"We have to give her the historical take if she—"
"The winner's history, of course. What made you such a coward? What are you so scared of? Difference is not going to kill you. Maybe it's time your little girl had her consciousness raised. An explosion of young-adulthood."
"I'm all for that. I just think that you can get to the common core of humanity from anywhere."
"Humanity? Common core? You'd be run out of the field on a rail for essentializing. And you wonder why the posthumanists reduced your type to an author function."
"That's Mr. Author Function to you, missy."
A. smiled. Such a smile might make even posthumanism survivable. I loved her. She knew it. And she would avoid the issue as long as she could. Forever.
"So, Mr. Author Function. What do you think this human commonality is based on?"
"Uh, biology?" I let myself sound snide.
"Oh, now it's scientism. What's your agenda? Why would you want to privilege that kind of hubris?"
"I'm not privileging anything. I'm talking about simple observation."
"You think observation doesn't have an ideological component? Stone Age. Absolutely Neolithic."
"So I come from a primitive culture. Enlighten me."
She took me seriously. "Foundationism is bankrupt," she said. Her zeal broke my heart. She was a born teacher. If anyone merited staying in the profession, it was this student for whom themes were still real. "Why science? You could base your finalizing system on anything. The fact is—"
"The what?"
A. smirked. "The fact is, what we make of things depends on the means of their formulation. In other words, language. And the language we speak varies without limit across cultures."
I knew the social science model, knew linguistic determinism. I could recite the axioms in my sleep. I also knew them to be insufficient, a false split. And yet, they never sounded so good to me as they did coming from A.'s mouth. She convinced me at blood-sugar level, deep down, below words. In the layer of body's idea. I tried to catch her eyes. "You love this stuff, don't you?"
She flinched: What kind of discredited rubbish are you talking now?
"You're not really going to go into business, are you? Give all this up?"
"I like theory, when it's not annoying me. I love the classroom. I adore teaching. But I like eating even more."
Subsidies, I wanted to tell her. What we make in fiction, we can plow back into teaching and criticism. Scholar-gypsies. Independents. There was some precedent, once.
"So what do you want from me?" A. asked.
My head whipped back. She'd heard me thinking.
"Where do I come in?" she pressed.
It took me a couple of clock cycles to recover. Helen, she meant. The exam.
I couldn't begin to say where she came in. What I wanted of her. I wanted to learn from A. some fraction of those facts I dispensed so freely to Helen. I thought she might lend me some authority, supply the missing lines of the functional proofs. I saw us jointly working out warmth, glossing intimacy, interpreting the ways of humility, of second chances, indulgence, expansiveness, redemption, hope, provincialism, projection, compassion, dependence, failing, forgiveness. A. was my class prep, my empirical test of meaning.
But Helen did not need a teacher steeped in those predicates. She already read better than I. Writing, she might have told me, was never more than the climb from buried love's grave.
I tried to tell A. where she came in. I limited myself to a quick sketch of the comprehensive high noon. I told A. that we needed a token human for our double-blind study. That we just wanted to ask her a couple of questions. Trivial; nothing she hadn't already mastered.
"Hold on. You want to test me — against a machine?" Coyer now, more flirtatious than I had yet seen her.
The Hartrick family's appearance outside the office saved me from debacle. "Hello," William announced, peeking in. "Did you know a feather would fall as fast as this entire building, if you dropped them in a vacuum?"
"Where are you going to find a vacuum big enough to drop this building?" I asked.
"NASA," William chanted, defensively singsong. "You know how to get oil out of shale?"
"You know how to spell 'fish'?"
"They're both out of control," Diana apologized to A. A. laughed in sympathy.
I made the introductions. William produced pocket versions of Mastermind and Connect Four, letting me take my pick. He proceeded to trounce me. I might have stood a chance, but for distraction. Something had happened to Peter that I struggled to place. Hand in his mother's hand, he took first, tentative steps.
A. was smitten. "What a beautiful boy you are. How old are you?" She looked up at Diana. "How old is he?" I cringed in anticipation. But A.'s reaction was as seamless as her delight.
William pummeled me turn after turn. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched A. play with Petey, her hand surprisingly blunt on his ear. A. sat on the floor, rolling Peter's ball back to him after his each wild fling. I felt the heat of Diana's curiosity, but she and A. talked of nothing but the boys.
"Come on, William," Diana said at last. "Leave the man with some shred of dignity." William broke into a satisfied grin. Pete grabbed his ball, labored once more into vertical, and the family pressed on.
Their visit turned A. introspective. "I really think I don't belong here, sometimes."
" 'Here'?"
"In academia. I come from a long line of Polish mine workers. Theoryland would baffle the hell out of my family." She grew irritated. Accusing. "Let me show you something." She rummaged through her canvas backpack and extracted a hostage to hand over to me. "Know what this is?" Her voice challenged with mockery.
"Cross-stitch?"
"It's for my mother's hutch. I should be done in time for Christmas. You should see us at holidays. I'm fourth of four. All girls. We go around the house at the top of our lungs, all six of us singing at the same time."
A. fell silent, proportionate to the remembered cacophony. No one knew this woman. Sociability was a brilliant camouflage. Beneath it hid the most private person I'd ever met.
"I could have started one of my own by now. A family. But no. I had to do things the hard way."
I don't know why, but she let me see her. Dropped her guard. I'd made myself fall in love with A. With the idea of A. With her interrogating body. With hands that held in midair all the questions Helen would never touch. I had loved C. wrongly, for C.'s helplessness. I loved A. helplessly, for the one right reason. For my frailty in the face of her. For her poise in knowing how soon all poise would end.
I realized I was going to propose to that body. I needed to see what her person, what the character I steered around in my head would say to total, reckless invitation.
I was going to do what I'd never had the courage to do in my decade with C. I was going to ask this unknown to take me to her and make an unrationed life together. To marry. Make a family. Amend and extend our lives.
"All right," I said, affecting a virtue. "You're sufficiently fallible to be just what we're looking for. Are you in?"
A.'s grimace upended itself. Such a test was no less entertaining than pinball. And what could she possibly lose?
"Okay, girl," she addressed Helen. "I'll race you. No mercy!"
Helen said nothing.
"She's being reticent again. Give her a digital gold star, or something."