It was on the last Friday of October — a bright, cold day that smelled of woodsmoke and coming winter — that they had dinner together for the first time. It was not a date, or at least neither of them named it as one. She had mentioned a Vietnamese restaurant in town with noodle soup that she claimed was the only thing sustaining her through the semester, and he had said he hadn't been, and she had said, without apparent self-consciousness: 'Come tonight, then.'
He came. The restaurant was small and warm and lit with the amber light of paper lanterns. They ate noodle soup and spring rolls and shared a bottle of wine, and the conversation moved with the ease and intimacy of something that had been building for weeks — something that had arrived, in this small restaurant on this cold October night, at a new threshold.
She told him more about the elegy. It had begun, she said, two years ago, following a period of her life that she described carefully as a long winter — not a crisis, not a catastrophe, but a prolonged internal weather from which she had eventually emerged changed. The elegy was her attempt to give that period its proper form, to honor it rather than simply survive it.
'What changed?' he asked.
'I think I understood for the first time what I was actually afraid of,' she said. 'Not failure. Not loneliness, exactly. I was afraid that the work wouldn't be good enough to justify the cost of doing it. That I would give everything to it and it would turn out to be mediocre, and the loss would have been for nothing.'
'And?'
She turned her wineglass. 'And I decided I was going to make it anyway. That the making was its own justification, regardless of the outcome. The fear was real, but it wasn't a reason to stop.' She paused. 'Does that sound arrogant?'
'It sounds brave,' he said.
She looked at him. The candlelight from the table's small flame did the thing candlelight does, finding the angles of a face and making them more precisely themselves. 'I don't feel brave,' she said. 'Most of the time I feel like someone walking across ice, testing each step.'
'That's what brave feels like from the inside,' he said.
She smiled, slowly. 'What does grief feel like from the inside?' she asked. 'You described it that way once — your father. What does it actually feel like?'
He was quiet for a moment. No one had asked him that directly. They asked how he was doing, whether he was managing, whether he had good support. No one had asked what it felt like.
'Like something in the ordinary world has a frequency I can't access anymore,' he said, slowly. 'Like there's a channel that used to be available and now it isn't. His voice, specifically. I hear his voice less and less and I can't tell if I'm forgetting it or if I'm just not reaching for it right.'
She was very still, listening.
'And the lawn,' he said. 'Every time I see someone mowing their lawn I have to decide very quickly what to do with the next ten seconds.'
Mara reached across the table and put her hand over his, briefly, with the naturalness of someone for whom touch was a form of speech. She did not say anything. She did not need to.
✦ ✦ ✦
They walked back through the dark campus afterward, through the pools of lamplight and the fallen leaves, and she took his arm without commentary, with the naturalness of something long established. He felt the weight and warmth of it as the most significant thing that had happened to him in a very long time.
At the corner of Alderman and the path that led to the faculty housing, she stopped and turned to face him, and in the lamplight her face was calm and serious, her eyes searching his with the same unhurried intensity she brought to everything.
'Eliot,' she said. Just his name. A full sentence.
'Mara,' he said, equally. A full answer.
She leaned forward and kissed him once, lightly, on the cheek, and then she said goodnight and walked away into the dark, and he stood at that corner for a long time after she was gone, the cold in the air, her name in his mouth like something that had always been there, waiting to be spoken.