I hadn’t expected to find her so interesting. I hadn’t expected that she would be truthful and real. I realized I hadn’t ever heard her speak, and I had imagined her voice to be high and bashful. Instead her voice was low and clean, and her words were precise and well-chosen. She wasn’t below Vladimir at all, she wasn’t even his equal. She was his superior, lowering herself to be with him. Her suicide attempt hadn’t been at all about him, there was no Medea to it, no grabbing for love, no attempt to get attention, as most female suicide attempts are interpreted, as I had maybe interpreted hers. No, she had an honorable depression, the likes of well-known writers, a true despair. “Honorable depression”—what does that even mean? Look at the trees, I told myself. Focus on the spaces between the branches, the light fading and filtering through—
He was incredibly talented, of course. She might not have his talent, his assurance, his hunger, or his drive. He might, from the external perspective, lead the relationship, with his accolades, with his career. You have to be willfully ignorant of certain truths to be successful, you just have to, and she seemed to me like the kind of woman who could not be ignorant of anything. The kind of mind that could paralyze itself. Listen, I reminded myself, what’s the farthest sound you can hear? The cars along the freeway, the shouts from a soccer game in a distant field—
The sun was coming down and there was a chill in the air. Every so often the trees would rustle from a reckless chipmunk careening up its trunk. There was the outline of the moon, there was the North Star, there was the cashier from the nice grocery store walking her dog. We nodded at each other, acquaintances for more than ten years, two people who had exchanged pleasantries about our kids, her parents back in Bangalore, my daughter the lawyer, but who had never known the other’s name.
One thing Cynthia’s visit had certainly confirmed for me was that Vladimir was as sexually attractive as I had perceived, not only for me, an older woman who, I would be the first to admit, might have low standards, but for all women. One of the reasons she was with him was that she found him sexy. He wasn’t a mentor, he was a prize. This was a disappointment. I had hoped that my attraction to him was something private, born out of a subsurface communication, an invisible thumping current specific to him and me.
A bird cawing so loudly it sounded like a cat in a fight. A woodpecker. My daughter at ten years old, saying, “I don’t like nature because everyone is always screaming at you to look at things. ‘Look at this deer! Look at that bird!’？” My daughter. My good and serious daughter. Twenty-nine and interested in the material of the world. She had no use for abstractions, for fiction, for subtleties and nuances. “Subtlety achieves nothing,” she would say. “There’s no room for subtlety right now. There has to be right and wrong, and one has to decide and do it fast and not worry about anyone’s feelings.”
I cycled through memories of my daughter, some real, some photographic, until I reached the end of the two-mile marker and turned around.
It was then I saw a figure walking toward me—a man, with broad shoulders and a confident gait. I had been walking east, so when I turned around to face him he was backlit by the last intense glare of the setting sun. Was it Vladimir? It couldn’t be. And yet the way he walked was recognizable—swinging arms and a rapidity that seemed to suit someone who had recently come from an urban area. As he came closer and closer I thought for sure it was him, and I felt like I was submerged in snowmelt water: my skin was prickling, my old, bad tits hard as rocks at the nipples.
It wasn’t him. It was just some man in his mid-fifties taking a stroll. His shoulders were broad but his face was squashed, it looked as though he was taking the walk in order to lower his blood pressure. Still, all afire, I thought of this man pressing me against one of the fir trees, rubbing a flat palm over my aching breasts. I greeted him, and he responded in an overly loud voice about the last of the nice weather. I thought ruefully about John and about how only recently now, in his early sixties, did he seem too old for his twenty-year-old students, whereas I, in my late fifties, felt too old for a man in his forties. Older women with lust are always the butt of the joke in comedy, horny saggy birds with dripping skin. But then again, what was I saying, I didn’t want to consummate anything with Vladimir. I liked his wife, I liked his daughter, I liked his writing, I liked his personality. What did I even think I wanted to do about it? In truth, when I got to the real imagining of the act, I found myself repulsed by the idea of actual physical contact. I only wanted to think about him, framed by my darkened window.
I quickened to a run, even though my shoes weren’t supportive and my hip would ache and lurch for days after. I ran the last stretch of the road to my car, stripping off my coat and letting the cold air rush against my skin. When I sat in the driver’s seat, I felt it again, that pressing and orgasmic need to write something down. I pulled out my laptop. Unlike other times in my life, when I needed morning or quiet or the right kind of pen—when I was forcing myself—this writing did not need to be coaxed, it erupted.
I stayed at the parking lot until it turned dark. The jocular man who I had passed rapped on the passenger-side window of my car—Is Everything All Right?—and I nodded and gave him a thumbs-up. He kept speaking at me, but I ignored him, my radio playing Tallis, bending my face closer to the laptop screen. Then he came around to the driver’s side and knocked on the window, louder and more urgently, until I turned off the music, opened the window slightly, and asked him, What? Looking hurt, he pointed toward the entrance of the trail. There, a black bear stood on its hind legs, leaning up against a spruce tree, its front paw stretched to hold on to a branch, rubbing its back up and down against the trunk. I smiled and unrolled my window fully to apologize and thank him for showing me. He nodded, walked away, said Stuck-Up Bitch over his shoulder, and gave me the finger.
VI.
I stopped for cigarettes and a bottle of rye on the way home. Checking my email in the driveway, I received a reminder from the Brown summer program and realized I hadn’t written Edwina’s recommendation letters. I marched myself to the desk and stayed until ten finishing them. It was pleasurable, letting my mind rest on her—an exceptional student, proactive, hungry, curious, charismatic. Her mother was from Saint Lucia, her father Italian American, from Staten Island. She had been raised religiously, but spaciously, always with the room for her mind to grow—in her teenage years she had fallen in with the right Catholics, the liberal ones whose thought verged on the esoteric, who were interested in mysticism and symbolism. She came here on a full scholarship and was constantly worried that she had made the wrong choice not going to the Ivy League school she had been accepted to, extortion-level student debt be damned.
In general, I am very distant from the admission process of our school, but I know from the stress on the faces of the students that year after year becomes more visible, like transparencies of strain that lie on top of each other until they solidify into a mask of perpetual anxiety, that it is not the same as when I went to college. I was a good student, I put in effort, I studied and was neat and tried hard on my tests, but I didn’t tear myself apart like the students and parents of today.