The Angel Esmeralda - Don Delillo [47]
He leaned toward the table and spoke about meanings fixed in advance. We listened hard and tried to understand. But to understand at this point in our study, months along, would have been confusing, even a kind of disillusionment. He said something in Latin, hands pressed flat to the tabletop, and then he did a strange thing. He looked at us, eyes gliding up one row of faces, down the other. We were all there, we were always there, our usual shrouded selves. Finally he raised his hand and looked at his watch. It didn’t matter what time it was. The gesture itself meant that class was over.
A meaning fixed in advance, we thought.
We sat there, she and I, while the others gathered books and papers and lifted coats off chair backs. She was pale and thin, hair pinned back, and I had an idea that she wanted to look neutral, seem neutral in order to challenge people to notice her. She placed her textbook on top of her notebook, centering it precisely, then raised her head and waited for me to say something.
“Okay, what’s your name?”
“Jenna. What’s yours?”
“I want to say Lars-Magnus just to see if you believe me.”
“I don’t.”
“It’s Robby,” I said.
“I saw you working out in the fitness center.”
“I was on the elliptical. Where were you?”
“Just passing by, I guess.”
“Is that what you do?”
“Pretty much all the time,” she said.
The last to leave were shuffling out now. She stood and dropped her books into her backpack, which dangled from the chair. I remained where I was, watching.
“I’m curious to know what you have to say about this man.”
“The professor.”
“Do you have insights to offer?”
“I talked to him once,” she said. “Person to person.”
“Are you serious? Where?”
“At the diner in town.”
“You talked to him?”
“I get off-campus urges. I have to go somewhere.”
“I know the feeling.”
“It’s the only place to eat, other than here, so I walked in and sat down and there he was in the booth across the aisle.”
“That’s incredible.”
“I sat there and thought, It’s him.”
“It’s him.”
“There was a big foldout menu that I hid behind while I kept sneaking looks. He was eating a full meal, something slopped in brown gravy from the center of the earth. And he had a Coke with a straw bending out of the can.”
“You talked to him.”
“I said something not too original and we talked off and on. He had his coat thrown onto the seat opposite him and I was eating a salad and there was a book lying on top of his coat and I asked him what he was reading.”
“You talked to him. The man who makes you lower your eyes in primitive fear and dread.”
“It was a diner. He was drinking Coke through a straw,” she said.
“Fantastic. What was he reading?”
“He said he was reading Dostoevsky. I’ll tell you exactly what he said. He said, ‘Dostoevsky day and night.’”
“Fantastic.”
“And I told him my coincidence, that I’d been reading a lot of poetry and I’d read a poem just a couple of days earlier with a phrase I recalled. ‘Like midnight in Dostoevsky.’”
“What did he say?”
“Nothing.”
“Does he read Dostoevsky in the original?”
“I didn’t ask.”
“I wonder if he does. I have a feeling he does.”
There was a pause and then she said that she was leaving school. I was thinking about Ilgauskas in the diner. She told me that she wasn’t happy here, that her mother always said how accomplished she was at being unhappy. She was heading west, she said, to Idaho. I didn’t say anything. I sat there with my hands folded at my belt line. She left without a coat. Her coat was probably in the coatrack on the first floor.
At the winter break I stayed on campus, one of the few. We called ourselves The Left Behind and spoke in broken English. The routine included zombie body posture and blurred vision, lasting half a day before we’d all had enough.
At the gym I did my dumb struts on the elliptical and lapsed into spells of lost thought. Idaho, I thought. Idaho, the word, so voweled and obscure. Wasn’t where we were, right here, obscure