What followed was, in its early weeks, one of those beautiful and uncomplicated periods that a person recognizes, even as they are living it, as something they will return to for the rest of their life. A before, that later becomes ache.
They spent their evenings together two or three times a week, at first at the Vietnamese restaurant, then at other restaurants, and then at each other's apartments. Eliot lived alone in a two-bedroom on the third floor of a building on Vine Street that was slightly too large for him and always slightly too cluttered with books. Mara lived alone in the faculty housing complex two buildings from his — a smaller unit, tidier, arranged with the spare intentionality of someone who knew what she needed around her to work.
He learned the music of her apartment. She composed in the mornings at a portable keyboard set up on a folding table facing the window, and when he walked past on his way to campus he could sometimes hear through the glass the tentative, searching phrases of whatever she was working on — the elegy, always the elegy, though it was slowly growing, adding movement and dimension. She played him pieces of it once, early on a Saturday morning, sitting at her keyboard while he stood against the wall with his coffee.
He was not particularly musical. He did not have the vocabulary for what she was doing. But he understood that it was extraordinary, that it moved through him the way true things do — not entering through the ears but through some older, deeper channel.
'What is it for?' he asked afterward, softly, because the room was still resonating.
She was quiet for a moment, her hands resting in her lap over the keys. Then she said: 'It's for the things that don't come back. Not as a lament. More as — a record. A way of saying: I knew you were here.'
He thought he understood then, though later he would understand it differently, and more painfully.
✦ ✦ ✦
They developed, without planning to, a set of rituals that became the architecture of their time together. Sunday evenings they cooked — Mara could actually cook with confidence and creativity; Eliot could follow a recipe precisely and no further. They divided the tasks accordingly, with a wordless efficiency that surprised him. He had never been particularly good at the choreography of shared space, had always needed a certain amount of clearance, a margin of solitude around himself. With Mara, the shared space felt like enough space. He did not know what to do with that except accept it.
They went to the farmers market on Saturday mornings, in the cold of November, and bought things they didn't strictly need — persimmons, an unusual squash, a jar of honey the vendor described as tasting like autumn. They walked through Carver's small downtown and went into the used bookstore on Main Street, where Mara always ended up in the music section and Eliot always ended up in the fiction, and they would find each other twenty minutes later and compare what they'd found.
He gave her a paperback Neruda, an old edition with his annotations from graduate school. She received it with the gravity appropriate to something personal, turned the first pages, and read his undergraduate marginal notes with a small, private smile.
'You were very earnest at twenty-two,' she said.
'I was insufferable,' he said.
'No,' she said. 'Earnest. There's a difference.' She put the book in her bag, which he took to mean she was keeping it.
He was right. She was.