The phone rang and went unanswered for some time, so Verne had to be out. I picked it up, leaning over to lower the volume of the music (felt more than heard now) and said “Yes?”
“Lew? Jane.” A brief pause. “Janie.”
The past leapt like a toad into my face.
“I’m very sorry to bother you, and I know you’d probably rather hear from just about anybody else but me. But I was wondering when you last heard from David.”
“Three, four months at least. A postcard with bored-looking gargoyles; he was in Paris. The back of it was covered with that tiny handwriting of his, all about people he’d met, things and places he’d finally seen after reading about them for so long. He was even thinking about staying on in Europe once his sabbatical was done.”
“And nothing since?”
“Nothing.”
“Is that usual? I mean, I don’t know how regularly you two traded letters after you started keeping up with each other.”
“Not unusual, at any rate. Several months of absolute silence, then a ten-page letter; that seemed often to be the pattern between us.”
I reached over and turned the music off. A grasshopper strolled obliquely across the outside of my window, legs finding no difficulty with the smooth glass.
“I assume that something’s wrong, Janie, else you wouldn’t have called me, not after all these years.”
“I don’t know, Lew. That’s the worst part. But David wrote me almost every week, on Sundays usually, and I haven’t heard anything now for over two months.”
“Where is he supposed to be?”
“Somewhere between Rome and New York.”
“You have an address for him?”
“The last one was just poste restante to a post office in Paris. He was supposed to let me know.”
“Seven-five-oh-oh-six?”
“Yes.”
“That’s the same one I have, then. Have your letters been returned?”
“No.”
“Then he, or at least someone, is probably getting them. Or forwarding them, anyhow.”
“Someone?”
“Janie. It’s probably nothing; you know that.”
“Yes. But I have bad feelings about it. And it’s halfway across the world, Lew, almost like another planet. I had to call you, to talk to someone. It took a long time to get up enough courage.”
“You don’t talk to your husband?”
“My husband stopped listening years ago. More recently, he stopped being here. There’s a number I can call if I absolutely have to see him about something.”
“And you accept that?”
“Like I have a choice? I’m probably still nineteen or twenty to you, Lew, young, attractive-attractive as I ever was, at least. But the truth is I’m almost fifty and can’t think of much reason to get out of bed most mornings. I’m fat, my hair’s falling out, my teeth are awful. I was never really pretty. Now I’m worse than plain. No man can ever know what that means.”
“Maybe a man who’s loved you can. Give me a number.” She did. “It may be a while.”
The grasshopper had completed its tour and disappeared. I walked out into sunlight and sat on a bird-bespattered bench under one of the trees. Slowly sunlight gave way to evening. Slowly the toad became only history, and bearable.
Chapter Two
I went inside and called Columbia University, reaching the English department without too much trouble (after all, in most universities we’re dealing with bureaucracies aspiring to heights achieved only in the Soviet Union), finally getting through to the chairman.
“Yes?” he said. “Could I help you?” in an accent that was part New England, part Virginia. The sort of accent you think of Robert Lowell as having.
I told him who I was and asked if David was safely back at work.
“As a matter of fact, Mr. Griffin, we’re quite worried about Dave up here. He was to have been on campus last week, and should en effet have met his first class today. But no, we’ve heard nothing. He’s not there, by any chance?”
“No. There’s been no word from him-no one he was close to, to whom he might have sent a postcard, a letter?”
“Well, of course we all like him a great deal. Admire his work tremendously, it goes without saying. But close, no. I don’t think so. Not very social, Dave, if you know what I mean. Keeps his own counsel. Different drummers and all that. But wait, now that I think of it, there was one of the librarians he saw quite often, Miss Porter, our special collections curator. Nothing of the romantic sort, you understand, but good colleagues. Would you like me to transfer you? Miss Porter should be on duty?”
“If you don’t mind.”
“Not at all, es nada. By the way, I’m a great admirer of yours. We’ve even taught your books, in a course we offered on the proletarian novel, quite a popular course as it turned out.”
“Thank you. I’ve always thought of them as only entertainment.”
“Ah. And so they are, most decidedly. But on another level certainly a bit more than mere entertainment-no?”
“Maybe.”
“That’s the stuff: keep the critics guessing, eh? Here you go then, over to Special Collections.”
I got an idiot undergrad shelver, with persistence a graduate assistant, and finally Miss Porter, who told me to call her Alison, one l. She said it as though no one ever had. I explained who I was.
“I thought maybe you’d have had a card, a letter. We don’t even know if he’s back in the States,” I said.
“Well,” she said. “He did write almost every week. We have so much in common, you know. I’m a real Francophile; and he would write and tell me all his discoveries, all about the people he’d met, rare books or manuscripts he had seen all over France. I so looked forward to those letters.”
“When did you last hear from David, Miss Porter-Alison?”
“O dear, I really wouldn’t know. Time and dates and those things just get terribly away from me. Could you hold a moment?”
I said certainly, and listened to the humming in the wires.
“Yes, here it is. The last letter I have is dated 24 August, from Paris. Then there’s a postcard, no return address but with a New York postmark, the date on it’s something of September-seventh, seventeenth? Just ‘See you soon, amities.’ ”
“And nothing since?”
“Rien.”
“Thank you, Alison. I hope if you have further word you’ll let us know.” I gave her my number, thanked her again, and hung up.
After a while I went across the patio into the house and put on the kettle. I was grinding beans when the front door opened and, a little later, Verne came into the kitchen.
“Coffee, huh?”
“Right.”
“Enough for me?”
“Always.”
She filled a pitcher and started watering plants on the window ledge.
“Gonna be away a few days, Lew.”
“Milk?”
“Black, I think. You be okay?”
“As always.”
We sat at the kitchen table, steaming cups between us. Verne sipped and made a face.
“You’re not angry with me.”
I shrugged.
“You know I’ll always come back. No one else makes coffee like you.”
She took her cup and drank it while packing. I turned on the radio to The Marriage of Figaro. Later I heard the cab driver at the door, Verne’s suitcase bumping against the sill as she left. And then the silence.