The Archivist (30 page)

Her hands lightly covered her face. I heard a brief intake and exhalation of air; then she lowered her hands. I looked once more into the grey-green lambency of her eyes, and the Eliot lines she’d once read aloud returned to me:

… and I knew nothing
,

Looking into the heart of light, the silence.

“I’m sure I haven’t explained anything clearly. To you, I mean. I owe you some explanation for being here.”

I stood suspended, her presence my only certainty.

“You know, all my mother wants from me is forgiveness. But I seem able to forgive only something I can understand — not something I can’t fathom.” She smiled a little. “Though that’s exactly the kind of thing you’re supposed to forgive, isn’t it?”

She crossed her arms over her chest, one palm cupping each shoulder, her head lowered. The arms wrapped around the self: that frightened embrace which children give themselves when they are forced to confront, in their silent rooms at night, their perfect aloneness.

The moment held still. And then she moved, she was leaning into me; her arms still crossed, the intersecting forearms pressing on my heart, her bent head at my neck.

This one who stands here inert, overcome by fear
.

My own self, motionless.

The buried sheaf of paper.
The only silence that has ever spoken to me
.

Somehow I found Roberta’s wrists and pried them gently apart, and even more gently pulled her arms around me and then put mine around her, my wrists crossed at her waist; and we stood like this without speaking, until the guard called out Roberta’s name.

“Spire. Roberta Spire. You still in here?”

T
HE SECURITY GUARD
was easily dispatched. I explained to him that Roberta was assisting me with an upcoming photo exhibit for the main library, and he asked if she would need a pass for future evening work. I told him she wouldn’t — conscious, as I answered him, of her eyes on me. We’d lock up, I said. He could go home if he wished. Looking grateful for the unexpected reward, the guard left. There was a heavy thump as the outer door closed.

“I’ll be right back,” I said to Roberta.

I walked into the receptionist’s area and pulled a small bottle of brandy from a side cabinet. Roberta’s brows rose in surprise as I reentered with the bottle. She was once again seated, her legs crossed, and her expression was composed but slightly tense.

“I didn’t know you drank on the job.” Her voice too was edged with tension. Its teasing note was forced.

“I don’t,” I said. “We sometimes have receptions here, so I always keep brandy around.” I put the bottle on the table. “I think we could both do with a drink.”

“Just a little. Please.”

I found two teacups in the supply cabinet. “No snifters,” I said. “Can you handle brandy in a cup?”

She smiled and took the cup. I sat down in a chair near her; we sipped in silence. The brandy’s smooth warmth slid through me, cutting the sharper edges of my nervousness but leaving me alert.

Roberta glanced at me, then looked away as she spoke.

“You were kind,” she said. “When I get tired like this, I’m not aware of exactly when I’ve crossed the line. Things sort of fill up and spill over. I’m sorry if I —”

“— don’t,” I interrupted.

“All right,” she said quietly.

Within me a wave of anxiety swelled, crested, then broke. “This man you lived with,” I said. “Peter. Tell me more about him. You started, the other day. But you didn’t really finish.”

One of her hands, resting on the table, twitched very slightly, the only sign of her emotion. We were sitting within the circle of light cast by the two lamps suspended overhead. Darkness lay pooled under the reading carrels, whose attached metal bookshelves and sides transformed them into small confessionals.

“I don’t really know what else to say. I hardly ever talk about Peter. I tried to, after he left, but talking didn’t clarify anything. There was nothing to clarify.”

She gazed up at the ceiling. “What was he like? He had this vitality — it was like nothing I’d ever come across before. It was the vitality of a precocious child. You know — the kind who doesn’t notice what the adults think because he’s so much more aware of things than they are. Peter didn’t walk around bragging about his mind. He just loved using it. Like a kid using his favorite plaything.

“He liked games. The mental kind, complex games like chess and Go, puzzles with intricate designs, acrostics and word games — anything you can lose yourself in, even when you’re playing with or against another person. He loved mazes and labyrinths. I guess they appealed to the engineer side of him. He was a terrific storyteller, and he could invent characters and scenes and dialogue on the spot, without any inhibitions. It was like putting up scaffolding, he said.”

Her laugh was low, brief. “We used to make up little games of our own. Like, one of us would start a story, and every two minutes the other would pick up the narration, and we’d alternate like that until one of us ended the story somehow — usually me. Peter could keep the thread going forever. When we first began living together we used to play that game a lot. We’d lie in the dark and go back and forth, weaving the story …”

She hesitated as if unsure of her direction. When I spoke, my voice sounded unnaturally calm.

“Did he leave his family to be with you, or did he intend to leave anyway?”

“You’re asking why we were together,” she answered. “I’ll never know the answer to that. All I can tell you is what I thought the answer was then.”

“Tell me that,” I said.

“His marriage was over. He was ready to leave it. We’d begun an affair, and I was tormented by it because I was already in love with him. So when he actually left his family, I thought the hard part was over.”

Again her uncertain pause. She was slouching in her chair, her legs crossed. With one hand she perched the cup of brandy at mid-thigh. The forefinger of her other hand lightly traced the cup’s rim.

I made myself speak again. “Did he blame you? For the breakup of his marriage?”

“No. It was nothing like that. When we first got the apartment, things were easy, like we’d been together a long time. I’d sometimes wake up in the middle of the night and sit up in bed and watch Peter sleeping. I’d think, this is home — ours! And it was a deeply interesting place to me. I don’t know how else to put it.”

She frowned. “I’ve always hated talking about relationships. Just the sound of that word — there’s something ridiculous about it …”

“Keep going,” I said. “Describe him.”

Her finger stopped circling the cup’s rim. “Peter wasn’t living in the clouds. I mean, he’d had real experiences. The people and things that made up his life — like his kids, or his work, or our intimacy — all of it was comforting and real to him. But none of it was essential. He belonged to a special, small class of hugely gifted people — mostly philosophers, mathematicians, scientists — you know the types I mean. They’re people who live for the experience of honing their abstractions. They refine their thinking until it becomes lustrous and elegant, like burnished gold. Everything else is secondary.”

“What was his temperament?” I asked. “Was he ever aggressive?”

“No — which is partly what confused me. People who met him said he seemed balanced and tolerant — which on one level he was. His equanimity was one of the things I loved about him, in fact.” She shook her head. “If I’d been able to
see
him, I would’ve seen how profoundly detached he was — and not because he was hiding some deep hurt. You know, before I met Peter, I thought that people who are incapable of intimacy have always suffered some early trauma or abuse, but that’s not necessarily so. Peter had cut a deal with himself. He knew he couldn’t pursue elegance and be engaged with the world at the same time — the two acts are antithetical. So he’d made a choice. You could call the choice emotional, or moral, or intellectual — I’d call it spiritual, if I had to call it anything. He’d set out to find the prime mover, the source of beauty and elegance, and pay his respects. Which in Peter’s view is something you do by yourself. Not with other people. Other people muddy the waters.”

She paused to sip some brandy.

“Why did he leave you when he did?” I asked. “Why not sooner, or later?”

Her brows arched momentarily: the reflex of memory.

“There’s always some — what’s the phrase — some precipitating event, isn’t there? When something happens and everything suddenly looks different. Or maybe what I mean is, when suddenly everything can be seen differently. Peter and I had been living together for six months or so. I was happy, happier than I’d ever been, and he seemed happy, too, in his own way — which wasn’t very verbal, as mine is. I didn’t feel the slightest need to interrogate him about it, though. That was one of the pleasures of living with him.

“When we first met, he was beginning to get more interested in Christianity after years of sidestepping it. He’d started reading Augustine and Aquinas, exploring pieces of his Episcopalian upbringing — reading the Book of Common Prayer, the catechism questions. I remember a couple of long discussions in which Peter quoted all these theologians I hadn’t read. He made several arguments for Christianity that I found a little bloodless. I chalked up my lack of responsiveness to my own doubts, which I didn’t voice much to him or anyone else. I was sort of keeping the lid on that.

“Then came the incident with the photos, at my parents’ house. I told Peter I’d discovered I was Jewish and that the discovery was enormously confusing and exciting. He wasn’t able to conceal his disappointment. I was shocked — it’d never occurred to me that he’d be anything other than sympathetic. But by now he was through with his adopted religion. He said Judaism focused too narrowly on law and behavior, and not enough on suffering and evil. When I talked about feeling betrayed by my parents — all those years of lying and concealment — Peter became dismissive. None of that matters, he said. The only thing that counts is which religious system is more valid.

“At that point I knew something was very wrong. We weren’t talking about what was actually going on. I’d just lost my parents as I’d always known them: as people who would never lie to me about anything important. And here was the man I loved, telling me that none of this mattered, that its painfulness was basically of no consequence.

“I burst into tears and started yelling at him. You aren’t seeing what this means, I said. There’s nothing to see, he said: what’s happened doesn’t
mean
anything. And in that instant I understood that he was completely disinterested in my experience — not scared or dismayed, simply bored by it. Emotion for him was like sex, or food, or faith: you entered these realms when you had need, and you satisfied your need — which in any case was always temporary — without taking anything that didn’t already belong to you. And without leaving anything behind.”

Her words and tone communicated something incontrovertible. I believed in the man Roberta had described to me. She’d delivered him whole, with the unintended force of accusation. Though I knew myself to be a different man, retreating had been as irresistible for me as it was for Peter.

I closed my eyes, and my wife’s face came into sudden, shocking focus. It was pale, bloodless, and beautifully alert: I was seeing Judith at the moment of her death. For one instant, I was able to reciprocate her gaze without fear.

I opened my eyes. Roberta was staring at me.

“Where are you?” she asked.

“Here,” I said. “With you.”

“I can stop talking, you know. I think you get the basic —”

“— no, please,” I said. “Don’t stop. I want to hear the rest. When did you realize Peter was leaving?”

“I knew his leaving would only be a matter of time. So I decided not to wait for it: I asked him to go that same night. And he did. Peter was really not capable of behaving badly. He left me the apartment. It was leased in his name, but he had it signed over to me, and he paid the balance of his half of the rent.”

“Do you know where he is now?”

“No, but I’m sure he’s found someone to live with for a while. Then he’ll leave again. He won’t linger. He’s learned how easy it is to separate from people, even from his kids. He doesn’t have to struggle for disengagement. It’s his natural state.”

She looked directly at me now. “Can you tell what happened?” Her gaze lowered. “The problem with describing someone who lives abstractly is that the description itself sounds abstract. There’s nothing to blame him for. This is who he is.”

“I think I can tell what happened,” I said. “It doesn’t sound abstract to me.”

“I’m always amazed when I think of him,” she said softly. “And I miss that amazement. Despite what it cost me. Such a person enters your life only once.”

I had to look away from her. Phrases from the letters were flooding me; I was sure Roberta could read them on my face.

Yet I continue living as if under a spell of immobility.

How can I make you see I have no choice?

Emily! — you’re what I know, this clear truth is all I know. And still I can’t have it.

Roberta’s words came to me as if from a distant corner of the room. “I need to go,” she said. “I’m exhausted.”

“Do you need a lift?” I asked. The question sounded like someone else’s. I couldn’t recognize my own voice.

“Thanks,” she said, “but I have my own car. I’ll see you tomorrow. Sleep well.”

Her fingers brushed my shoulder as she passed. Then I heard all the doors close.

The Mason Room was peaceful, as it always is at midnight. In a few minutes I heard the books’ voices: a low, steady, unsuppressible hum. I’d heard it many times before. I’ve always had a finely tuned ear for a library’s accumulations of echo and desire. Libraries are anything but hushed.

I listened, knowing I couldn’t expect anything like concrete guidance, but hoping for some signal or prompt. At first I was edgy, but gradually I quieted. I sat and meditated, if that’s the right word, on Roberta, Judith, and Emily; finally, on Eliot. I considered various conflicting imperatives. It took me a while, but finally I realized there was really only one thing to be done, and I might as well get started.