Her name, he learned in the first ten minutes, was Mara Cielo. She was the new visiting lecturer in the music department — a composer, mainly, though she also taught a seminar on twentieth-century song. She had come from Chicago, where she had been based for six years after leaving a graduate program in Paris. She was thirty-four. She drank her tea without milk and had ordered it from the lounge's small self-service station with the confident efficiency of someone who had already learned the machine's personality.
'You're in literature?' she said, not as a question exactly, but as a thing being placed — filed under the right heading.
'I am,' he said. 'Nineteenth and twentieth century, mostly. And a seminar on contemporary fiction that I enjoy more than I should probably admit.'
'Why shouldn't you admit it?'
'It seems like something a serious academic would pretend to find merely professionally interesting.'
She considered this. 'I think the seriousness of a discipline is served by people who actually love it,' she said. 'Not by people who perform indifference.'
He thought this was one of the most sensible things anyone had said to him in recent memory. He had a brief, disorienting awareness that he was already enjoying this conversation more than most conversations he had in a week.
They talked about what had brought her to Carver. She had been offered the visiting position through a colleague who knew the department chair, and she had been ready to leave Chicago — not unhappily, but purposefully, the way she described all her movings: as acts of arriving somewhere rather than escaping somewhere. The position was for a year, possibly two. She had taken it because the teaching load was light enough to allow her to finish a large composition she had been working on for two years, an orchestral piece she described, carefully, as a kind of elegy.
'For what?' he asked.
She smiled, and the smile was private without being unkind. 'I'm still working that out,' she said.
He did not press. There were certain things, he already sensed, that Mara Cielo offered in her own time and could not be reached for.
✦ ✦ ✦
She asked about his work. He told her about the seminar, about teaching the novels he loved to students who were beginning to read seriously, about the particular pleasure of watching someone encounter Middlemarch or Beloved for the first time and find that it rearranged something in them.
'Is that what good books do?' she said. 'Rearrange things?'
'The best ones,' he said. 'The best ones change the shape of what you thought you already knew.'
'Music does the same,' she said. 'Or tries to. The honest ones, anyway.'
He asked about the composers she admired. She talked about Arvo Pärt and his tintinnabuli method, about the structural precision of Bach and how it was also somehow emotional architecture, about a living composer named Valeria Moreno whose string quartets she considered among the most important work being made. She talked about music with the same combination of precision and feeling that he associated with people who had genuinely thought about their subject rather than merely inhabited it.
He asked about Paris, and she told him about the years studying there, about a small apartment near the Jardin des Plantes where she could hear the animal sounds from the zoo at night if the wind was right, about the particular quality of French musical seriousness that had both stimulated and eventually exhausted her. She had left because she needed a different kind of space — literal and figurative, the wide American variety.
'Do you miss it?' he asked.
'The zoo sounds,' she said, without hesitation. 'Not much else. Well — one bakery. And the light in March.'
He laughed. It had been a while since something made him laugh like that, with the whole chest, unperformed.
When she finally stood to leave, gathering her coat and her bag with the unhurried efficiency of someone who moved through the world at her own pace, she paused at the door and said: 'I hope I see you in here again, Professor Voss.'
He said he hoped so too. He meant it with a force that surprised him.
He stayed in the faculty lounge for another twenty minutes after she left, not doing anything in particular, just sitting with the odd warm residue of the conversation, the sense that the afternoon had been unexpectedly worth something.
He found his reading glasses. He had left them in his jacket pocket.