“I think so,” Corman said tentatively.
“His work is famous,” Maitland insisted. “I know you didn’t major in medieval studies, but for God’s sake.”
“How well do you know him?”
Maitland shook his head and looked embarrassed by his answer. “Not very well. I’ve read all his books.”
“But you don’t know him as a person?”
“No, not as a person.”
“But you did know his daughter?”
“Yes.”
“She took one of your courses her senior year.”
“How did you know that?”
“Her husband.”
“So you know about her examination then.”
“Do you still have it?” Corman asked immediately.
Maitland nodded. “Absolutely.” His face darkened. “It was written in a bizarre way.”
“I’d like to see it.”
“I’ll look for it. It should be in my office.”
“Could we look tonight?”
Maitland hesitated. “Is it that urgent?”
Corman nodded. “Yes.”
“In a minute then,” Maitland said. He smiled thinly. “I trust I can finish my drink.” He took a quick sip, waited for Corman’s next question, then took another sip when it didn’t come.
Corman could feel his impatience growing. He needed facts, important facts. He could feel Trang and Lexie hovering over him, spectral presences hissing from above. He shifted restlessly and felt a clammy sweat gathering beneath his arms. “Can you tell me something about her?” he asked.
Maitland thought for a moment, his eyes rolling toward the ceiling as they did when he lectured, searching for his muse. “I always had the impression that she chose the words very carefully.” He thought a moment longer, his eyes scanning the room until they finally came to rest on Corman. “Why are you investigating her?”
Corman thought of Lucy, Trang, Lazar, Julian, the pictures. It was all a maze. “Why does anybody do anything?” he asked, dodging the question.
One of Maitland’s eyebrows curled upward. “That’s a bit philosophical,” he said. “I didn’t know you were still interested in ideas.”
Corman said nothing. From behind, he could hear a young woman laughing above the general hum of the crowd. He felt like turning and taking a picture of her, for no reason at all beyond its sweet relief.
“I thought of you the other day,” Maitland said after a moment. “I was in the Columbia Bookstore, just browsing. And you know how, suddenly, from out of nowhere, something can remind you of someone? Well, this reminded me of you.”
“What did?”
“It was a book of questions,” Maitland told him. “Nothing but questions. You know the kind I mean: If a museum were burning, and you could save either the Mona Lisa or a cat, which would you save? That sort of thing. It reminded me of you.” He smiled softly. “The way you used to be.”
Corman could no longer get a handle on who that person had been. It was time to move on to other matters. “I’d like to see Sarah Rosen’s exam,” he said.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-NINE
“I THINK it’s still in here,” Maitland said as he opened the door to his office.
Corman followed him inside then stood silently while Maitland felt about for the light switch, his fingers clawing at the wall until he finally located it.
“There,” Maitland said as the fluorescent bulbs fluttered for a moment, then grew bright. He swept his arm out. “Looks the same, doesn’t it?”
Corman nodded, took another step into the room and stared about, his hand unconsciously fingering the latch on his camera bag. The room looked almost exactly as it had that afternoon ten years ago when he’d sat in the plain wooden chair in front of Maitland’s desk and told him he was leaving Columbia.
“Same bust of Poe,” Maitland said. “Only a little yellower. Same diplomas hanging from the wall.”
Corman glanced toward the diplomas, his mind instantly turning to the one they’d found in the burn-out, its cracked glass and shattered frame.
Maitland walked to the large metal filing cabinet at the other end of the room. “The paper should be in here somewhere,” he said as he pulled open the third drawer and glanced down at a stack of undergraduate papers. “In twenty years of teaching, these are the only ones I’ve kept.” He stepped back from the file cabinet. “Sorry I can’t stay,” he added. “Just close the office door when you leave.”
Corman waited until he could no longer hear Maitland’s footfall in the corridor before he began going through the papers. Sarah’s was near the bottom of the stack.
It was very short, only a page and a half of tightly knotted sentences. As a paper, it hardly existed at all. Instead, it was a gathering of sentences, often disconnected, as if Sarah’s mind had been incapable by then of stringing thoughts together in a coherent pattern. Fragmented, often broken off before completion, they suggested a mind that had simply shattered into thousands of tiny shards, like a large crystal vase that had fallen from a great height. It was still possible to catch individual, shining pieces, perhaps even to sense the overall beauty they must have once joined to create. But the whole had clearly flown apart. It was as if the law of gravity had ceased to operate in her mind, so that everything rose, sank and drifted according to weights and measures which were no longer assigned and limited by anything outside them. Because of that, as he read her paper again and again, Corman found himself ensnared in a similar randomness and indecipherability, so that the very act of thinking back over what he’d read drew him into Sarah’s own swirling state, filled his mind with the wild, whirling sparkle of uprooted, weightless things.
And yet, she was there, clearly and powerfully, a voice so lost, and yet so entirely distinct, that her death suddenly came to him as something personal for the first time. He thought of her by the window, her mind shooting through the darkness that surrounded her, a vast sea of flickering lights, red, blue and yellow, burning in her head, burning in the darkness behind her and which, perhaps, she had finally tried to escape by easing herself to the ground on a cool white stream of rain.
He read the paper a final time before returning it to Maitland’s file drawer, then headed toward the subway.
Outside, he could still feel her around him as he scuttled along the wet bricks of Columbia Walk, then took a train to the Village. It was as if she’d entered Maitland’s office while he read and wrapped him in the texture of her anguish. Sentence by sentence, the web of her tiny black script had coiled around him, her words lined up like figures before a firing squad as she struggled madly for some bizarre frozen purity before letting it all fizzle away in long blank spaces and end finally in the coup de grace of an uncompleted sentence: “Given the note/tone/mood of excresence here we may/can/will only/inadequately say/declare that it is/composed/authenticated/ with the heart of a …”
He got off the train at 14th Street and headed east, still thinking of her, rooted in her, his eyes hardly taking in the legions of street-peddlers who spread their rain-soaked merchandise along the whole desolate strip that led to the river.
He could see Joanna already waiting for him as he stopped at the corner of First Avenue. She was sitting near the restaurant’s front window, the table she always preferred, her eyes watching the flow of traffic as it moved southward toward the Bowery. As he watched her from across the street she looked hazy, incorporeal, an artist’s sketch of a human being he’d decided not to paint. For a moment, Corman stood in the rain, watching her as she sipped her margarita casually, fingering the rim of the glass as she always did. He thought of taking a picture of her as she sat in the window, then decided it would seem posed, Joanna only a model who took direction well.