“I taught for a while,” Corman said. “That private school you wrote the reference for.”
“Oh yes, I remember,” Maitland said. “How’d that turn out?”
“It was okay.”
“But you’re not there now?”
“No.”
“Somewhere else?”
“Not a school,” Corman said. “I’m working as a photographer. Free-lance.”
Maitland looked surprised. “Photographer? I didn’t know you were interested in that.”
“Newspaper work mostly,” Corman explained. “Off and on.” He thought of the stack of pictures that lay piled like dead fish in his camera bag. “It’s not what you’d call secure.”
“Well, what is?” Maitland said. He smiled. “Except tenure, of course.”
Corman nodded.
Maitland watched him for a moment, as if trying to put him in another category. He seemed vaguely dislocated, as if the fact that Corman was no longer a student or teacher had shifted him into a hazier world that was hard for him to get a grip on. “I always thought you’d stay in teaching,” he said finally.
“So did I,” Corman told him.
“I suppose you like your new work?”
“It’s interesting,” Corman said. “You learn a lot.”
“Well, that’s all that matters, I suppose,” Maitland said. He smiled, a little indulgently, like a grown man who was going along with a child’s view of the world, letting Corman believe in the tooth fairy or Santa Claus or anything else that got him through the night. “How did you happen to discover this new vocation?” he asked a bit sententiously, as if he were still talking to an eager undergraduate.
“I met a man who was already doing it.”
Again Maitland smiled. “And lightning struck,” he said with a hint of condescension. “That’s what I call providential.”
“You might say that.”
“And your studies? What happened to them?”
“They took a different turn,” Corman said, adding nothing else.
Maitland paused again, still watching Corman distantly. “Well, we missed you when you decided to leave graduate school.” He squinted slightly, as if he were trying to figure out exactly where Corman had gone after that. “So, photography,” he said idly.
“Photography,” Corman repeated. He was reasonably sure that Maitland now thought of him as working in some sort of inferior world. It was as if the university were the one true penthouse of existence, the place with the really sweeping view. Everywhere else was somehow blocked in its perspective, hampered by trees, buildings, telephone poles, mounds of useless clutter. Maitland smiled. “Well, as long as you’re happy,” he said, forcing a certain lightness into his voice.
Corman glanced toward the bar and wondered what was holding up the drinks.
“And what about Lexie?” Maitland asked after a moment.
“We’re not together anymore.”
“Oh,” Maitland said awkwardly. Then he shrugged. “Well, that’s par for the course these days.”
“What is?”
“Splitting up,” Maitland said.
“I guess.”
“In my opinion, it’s all cyclical,” Maitland added. “We’ve gone through a period during which the solution to a bad marriage was a quick divorce. Now we’re coming into a different period.”
Corman didn’t feel like going into what this different period might be.
“We’re going back,” Maitland said authoritatively. “The solution to a bad marriage will be to live in it and keep your mouth shut. That’s what people have done through most of human history.” He smiled. “We’re not talking about progress, David. We never are with human beings. We’re only talking about a shift, the latest version of the Eternal Return.”
It was the sort of statement Corman remembered from Maitland’s classes. Only then they’d sounded truer, at times even faintly revealing, despite the superior edge. Now they sounded empty and pompous, something that could only fly in the rarefied air of the faculty lounge.
The beers came, and the two of them clinked their glasses together gently, then drank.
Maitland turned toward the front of the room, glancing at the other people in the bar, mostly young Columbia students.
“The elite,” he said as he looked back at Corman. “What do you think of them?”
Corman shrugged but did not answer.
“You used to have opinions,” Maitland said. There was a faintly knowing tone in his voice, as if he’d caught Corman doing something nasty in the woodshed, but was willing to keep it to himself. “Don’t you have them anymore?”
“A few,” Corman said.
“Like what?”
“More things seem ridiculous to me now.”
Maitland’s face soured somewhat. “You sound like Lexie.”
“Really?”
“Absolutely,” Maitland said.
Corman took a quick sip from his glass. “At this point, I don’t think it matters.”
Maitland leaned forward slightly, his eyes growing somewhat more intense. “Well, what is ‘this point’ exactly? I mean, with you? I take it you’re not interested in coming back to graduate school.”
Corman shook his head. “No, I’m not,” he said. “Actually, I didn’t come to talk about school at all.”
“So I’ve gathered,” Maitland said.
“It’s about a woman.”
Maitland laughed. “And you came to me?” he said. “I’m flattered.”
“This woman, she …”
“Of course, everybody knows that English departments are notoriously horny,” Maitland interrupted. “It’s all that romantic nonsense they read. ‘How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.’” He laughed. “I mean, it’s one thing to study that sort of thing all your life, it’s quite another to take it seriously.”
“She jumped out of a building last week,” Corman said.
Maitland looked at him solemnly. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know you were talking about something like that.”
Corman pulled a photograph from his camera bag. “I took some pictures.” He handed the picture to Maitland. “It turns out that this woman had been a student at Columbia.”
“And that’s what this meeting’s about?” Maitland asked.
Corman nodded.
Maitland’s eyes drifted down to the picture. “I don’t recognize her,” he said.
“She may have changed a lot since she was at Columbia.”
Maitland’s eyes continued to study the picture. He shook his head. “I don’t remember her.”
“Her name was Rosen,” Corman said. “Sarah Rosen.”
Suddenly Maitland’s face turned very grave. “Sarah Rosen?” he said unbelievingly. He looked thunderstruck. “My God, I had no idea.”
“Last Thursday night,” Corman said quietly.
Maitland looked at the photograph again. “When I knew her, she didn’t look like that at all.”
Corman eased the picture from Maitland’s hands. “She was starving,” he said.
Maitland’s eyes widened, and for an instant Corman could see something glimmering behind them. He had seen it before, even felt it in himself, a form of recognition that came up fast, like a man in your face, telling you that nothing could be taken lightly, that everything was real, and that this reality didn’t care about your faith, your analysis, the precious little kingdom of your self-esteem, and that if you didn’t back away from it, dodge it desperately somehow, you’d spend your days balled up in some clean white corner, rocking, wailing, facing the facts.
“Starving?” Maitland repeated.
“I’m trying to find out what happened to her,” Corman said.
Maitland took his glass in both hands and rolled it slowly between them. “She was Samuel Rosen’s daughter.”
“A professor here,” Corman said.
“Not just a professor,” Maitland said. “Samuel Rosen. One of the world’s great medievalists. A specialist on the Renaissance, too. Jesus, didn’t you learn anything at Columbia?” He looked offended by Corman’s ignorance. “Haven’t you at least heard ofhim?”