Devotion (3 page)

David knew that for the Tate it was a matter of convenience, but he was determined to do a good job—to
keep
the employment. By the time he met Maggie, he was in his third year of teaching the course. Each class was comprised of fifteen students whose ages varied greatly. The course extended over two academic semesters, September through May, with the usual Christmas-New Year break. Class met from six to ten o'clock on Monday evenings. The first year of teaching, the thoroughness of David's preparation overcompensated for any ambivalence he felt, worry about getting stymied halfway through a lecture, a sense of fraudulence in the very role of teacher. The second and third years he still fiddled with lecture notes late into Sunday nights,
but he was far more comfortable with the work. Critical evaluations from students were more than favorable. The Tate was pleased. David grew to enjoy the discussions, often spiced his lectures with gossipy anecdotes from his historical research and conversations with other photographers in London. Truth be told, along with his intermittent love affair with Katrine Novak and dinners with his photography group, students were David's social life. He had never thought of himself as a loner, just someone who was alone a lot. Both his parents were dead and buried, in different cemeteries in Vancouver. He had socked away their life insurance money. His steepest expenditures were on film and travel fares. He had his modest teaching salary. He liked living in London.

 

It was love at first sight. On April 13 Maggie had accompanied the Dalhousie Ensemble to London. It was the first stop on a six-city European and Scandinavian tour. The ensemble put up at Durrants Hotel and the next day began morning rehearsals at Queen Elizabeth Hall. It was nearly 2
P.M.
and had begun raining. David was sitting in the bar just down the hall from the lobby, drinking a ginger ale to soothe his stomach. The bartender was watching a rugby match on television. At a wooden table three window washers scheduled to clean the hotel's outside windows sat in black leather chairs, smoking and talking, celebrating the
turn in weather. “Nice of this rain to give us this time together, eh lads?” one said. “Let's not even suggest doing the inside windows. Let's just keep mum about that, what?” They clinked beer mugs. Their buckets and squeegees were in a corner. David finished his ginger ale and decided to head home; he'd left his umbrella in his flat. When he stepped into the lobby he saw Maggie sitting in a high-backed chair of hard red leather with wooden armrests. She was reading a book. He tilted his head in order to take in the cover and tide,
The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard.
He had not heard of the author, Anatole France. She looked up from the book, not at David, checked her watch, stood and walked outside under the awning. David immediately went there too. That is where they met, David with his jacket caped over his head, Maggie waiting for a doorman to flag down a cab.

To David, the simple fact was love at first sight. The moment provided the definition. He felt a complete realignment of emotions, along with the unbearable advance regret at not seeing this woman again. Whatever her name might be, whatever her life might be. He felt these like pangs, felt them almost hypnotically. He was prepared to get into his own taxi and despite all cinematic cliché order the driver to “follow that cab,” he felt such stupefying urgency about her. If your heart is sinking you must act on it, “follow that cab,” like a 1940s gumshoe trying to catch up with his own fate.
Had Maggie not paid him any mind, he might have done that very thing. He was aware, for an instant, of wanting this to be a philosophical moment, earned by years of waiting for it; wanted to maintain control of his senses. When all he really felt was apprehension and nerves and bewildering abandon, all enough to nearly render him dumb. Of course, one should never expect such good fortune. Not unless you are self-deluded beyond reason. That is just not the world. No, if it is love at first sight, you simply are in it. You cannot hope to step back and observe. His muddle-headedness was such that he could only eavesdrop on his own brain as it came up with nothing but “Hello,” which he said. He and Maggie Field looked at each other's face, studied it, you might say, for just a moment.

“Actually, I can stand flirtation only in small doses,” she said. “So that sufficed.”

“My name is David Kozol.”

A cab then pulled up. The doorman opened its back door and Maggie said, “If I want to introduce myself, I'll be back in about an hour. I'm not staying at this hotel.” She then crouched into the back seat and did not look out the window. The cab moved away from the hotel.

David went back into the lobby and sat in the same chair that Maggie had. He realized that he did this on purpose. He thought,
There are other chairs available.
The man he had met earlier for lunch, portly Harrison Macomb, a publisher
of coffee-table books about painters, photographers, sculptors, sauntered into the lobby. A few days before, David had arranged this lunch to discuss his Sudek monograph or book or whatever it might become. During lunch Macomb had expressed genuine interest but could not commit without a detailed prospectus. He mentioned that his daughter, Maude—“Married name Maude Harvey”—had taken David's history of photography course. “My daughter said it was occasionally brilliant,” Macomb said. “I don't of course expect a book from you that is only occasionally brilliant, mind you.” After lunch Macomb stayed at their table for a drink but David begged off; their conversation had twisted his stomach and he went into the bar for that ginger ale.

Macomb tucked into his raincoat, then noticed David. “Ah, Kozol,” he said. “Still here, I see. My car's coming round. Drop you somewhere?”

“No, thank you. I like hotel lobbies. I'll sit here awhile.”

“I'll be in touch, then. A real understanding you've got about this Mr. Sudek. We've a future together in it, rest assured.”

A chauffeur-driven Bentley waited out front. The doorman escorted Macomb under a hotel umbrella the few steps from awning to curb, held open the car door. David saw Macomb tip the doorman.

I
N FACT
, Maggie returned to Durrants Hotel in a little more than an hour. She paid the cabbie, got a receipt, stepped from the cab and stood on the sidewalk just to the left of the awning. She smoothed down her dress, thought,
I've worn this two days in a row now.
But if she went upstairs to change, David might notice. She might then have to say, “Well, all right, so I am staying here. But a woman today has to be careful,” or something like that. What did she owe him? She did not know him in the least. It had stopped raining but still threatened rain. She saw David Kozol through the window into the dimly lit bar. He sat at a small table, a glass in front of him. When he turned toward
the window (he had been turning toward it frequently) and saw Maggie, he immediately started for the lobby. She viewed what happened next as a kind of choreography, how the short-sleeved young waiter lifted David's glass and napkin, how the window washers leaned back laughing in unison, how David waved at her over his shoulder as he disappeared into the hallway. It was a view, she thought, through an amorous window.

Amorous window. The phrase derived from a concept she had read about in a Japanese novel, a philosophical love story. Back in 1983, she had fallen in love for a short time with a visiting professor of history, Shizuko Tushimo, who gave her this novel. In broad outline, the concept of the amorous window was that passion of a sudden and unprecedented intensity can imbue a window with palpable eroticism. In the Japanese story—now Maggie remembered the title and author,
The Café Window,
by Yasushi Inoue—the final irony was, years after an affair, the woman character recalls the window but not the name of her beloved. The window remains clear in her mind, rain-streaked, spectral, whereas the man in question has faded from memory Standing in front of Durrants Hotel, Maggie, who had heretofore considered romance pretty much an abject condition, realized that no matter the outcome of her meeting with this David Kozol, she had long desired to experience an amorous
window. And here, on an April afternoon in London, she was looking through one.

In the intervening time between leaving and returning to the hotel, Maggie attended to the perfunctory task of finalizing a schedule of radio interviews several of the ensemble's musicians would hold with Paul Marchand, the concert hall's publicist. Marchand would offer these to newspapers, music journals, classical-music radio programs. It was standard procedure on these tours and Maggie was very good at it. Marchand, in his early forties, was pleasant enough. His all-business demeanor proved perfect for keeping Maggie focused. Though at one point she thought,
What am I hoping will happen next?
It was a brief interlude of preoccupation, merely seconds. Snapping back to the present, she said, “Excuse me, I have to use the ladies room.” When she sat down at the table again in Marchand's office, she found him putting papers into his briefcase. He looked up and said, “Actually, Miss Field, I think we've covered everything. Tea?”

“Oh, sorry, can't,” she said. “I've got an assignation—appointment, I mean.” The slip surprised Maggie, who felt disappointments were in direct proportion to expectations, so best keep expectations low; how certain she was that David Kozol would be waiting at Durrants Hotel. Marchand arranged for a cab.

She was not a woman who simply dropped her clothes. That was a phrase favored by her mother, who first introduced it when Maggie was sixteen and lived, of course, with her parents at the estate. It was her mother's warning, a preemptive admonishment toward any young woman, not Maggie alone, who fell to sleeping with a man before falling in love, in fact testing it with celibacy. “Marlais—your second cousin,” her mother said, sighing in genuinely sad resignation, “well, Marlais dropped her clothes. Just like that. And, I heard, on more than one occasion.” Hearing this in her memory just then, Maggie smiled at the endearing quaintness of her mother's exasperation and concern, let alone her phrasing. As the cab turned onto George Street and the hotel came into view, Maggie thought,
I'm thirty years old. Yes, I have dropped my clothes, perhaps twice, but mostly I have waited to know someone. Mostly. And so far I have not regretted it either way.

Sitting for drinks opposite each other at a table in the bar, with its well-worn leather banquettes, chess and cribbage boards, scattered magazines, Maggie said, “I'm Margaret Field.” She and David shook hands. He tried to take in her physical self without being obvious, but of course she detected right away and thought,
Let's just get this out of the way, shall we?
She had fair skin, a constellation of freckles on the left side of her face, a slightly denser one on the right, dark red hair, green eyes; her smile had two stages, tight-lipped
to hesitantly open, and for all David knew, that might be the full extent of it. “I know,” Maggie said, “you look at me and you probably think ‘Irish,' huh? But my mom and dad are from Scotland. There might've been an Irish assignation a long time ago. Who knows?”

Maggie ordered a gin and tonic, two slices of lime, which she squeezed into the glass, then touched the rinds to her tongue before setting them back in. David ordered a White Russian, too sweet, but the cream in it soothed his jittery stomach. “My friends call me Maggie, but in a way, I prefer Margaret. I'm publicity director and all-around trouble-shooter for an ensemble out of Dalhousie University, Halifax, province of Nova Scotia, Canada. They play classical music.”

“I'm from Vancouver,” David said. “Though I haven't lived there since high school.”

“Two Canadians, then, having a drink together in London.”

“Do you like your job?”

“Yes, I do. I do like it. We're on tour here. London. Copenhagen. Oslo. Rotterdam. So I get to see the world. I iron out all the problems. And you, David Kozol, how do you earn your keep?”

“I teach photography.” He had never before defined himself like that. Or had not ever thought of himself first and foremost as a teacher. He felt a slight stab of recognition and
disappointment, not that Maggie would notice. He simply wanted her to believe he had definition. Wanted her to think he was occupied in a useful manner. He hoped she would not ask if he took photographs himself, though it would be the logical question. Not ask it right away, at least. He had a book of Sudek's photographs and a half-composed letter to Katrine Novak (not a love letter: some thoughts about possible dates for his next visit to Prague—the contents could have fit on a postcard) in his leather satchel, which was at his feet.

“Kozol is what, exactly?”

“Czech. My grandfather was from Czechoslovakia. On my mother's side.”

“The ensemble canceled Prague, or vice versa, I can't remember. Anyway, we aren't going there this time around.”

“It's a beautiful city. Mysterious city, I think.”

“I've never been.”

It was surprising to Maggie, and equally so to David—each of whom did not counterfeit expectations or tailor their personalities to fit sudden possibilities—that their conversation lasted three straight hours without food and with remarkably few awkward silences. At the least, it was a welcome indulgence to both, requiring no additional drinks, either, to the annoyance of the bartender. Then the mood changed. Perhaps it was as simple a matter as a mutual sense of happiness, a lack of detected affectation, and not a little
outright lustful attraction. With a relaxed, though slightly giddy aspect, there arrived a fait accompli, a telepathic decision to extend the meeting elsewhere. “My flat is two blocks away,” David said.

“My room is 334,” Maggie said.

They left the bar and entered the lobby. The old Italian bell captain stood at his podium near the registration desk, just in front of the wooden mail-and-key hive, which in turn was adjacent to a storage room and coat rack. Three bellmen, also Italian, at their separate stations, in the formal hierarchical configuration noticeable to any true student of hotel lobbies, as David was, did not watch directly but of course noticed as Maggie and David walked up the central staircase, with its musty-looking maroon carpet, intricate throw rugs at each landing, framed prints of zoology and botany along the wallpapered corridors. In the dusky light of room 334 (no electrical lights turned on) David sat in a pale green overstuffed chair, with its thick armrests like separate flotation devices, should the room capsize. He felt sunk down into it. “Is this the same hotel in which you always don't have a room when the ensemble's in London?” he said.