Richard Powers - Generosity

They stand and shake hands. She starts to speak, but something stops her. He has the weirdest sense that she recognizes him. She almost remembers that they, in another life, were lovers.

“Wait a moment,” Candace Weld tells him. She crosses to her desk. She walks the way Grace would have, if Grace had been the person he thought she was. She riffles through a drawer and retrieves a small white rectangle. She writes something on it, then holds it out to Russell at arm’s length.

The gesture freezes him. The outthrust arm, the cradling grasp: it’s Thassa, pressing her book against the plate-glass window. He shrinks from the offering. But she holds it steady, reeling him back in.

It’s only her business card. He takes it like it’s an archaeological artifact. The college logo, a counseling center address, her name and title, phone and e-mail, and another phone number scribbled in ink. “That’s my direct line.”

In tiny italic font, centered beneath the words “Licensed Clinical Psychologist,” he reads:

You have cause-so have we all-of joy.

He’s sixteen, and seated in a metal lawn chair in the backyard of his childhood home, struggling through a mildewed Shakespeare, with the dictionary and encyclopedia on a drinks table beside him. July of his junior year in high school, and for months, he’s felt an overwhelming premonition that he’ll be a playwright when he grows up.

The premonition was a lie. He never quite grasped drama, never got the hang of how people really talk, never mastered human psychology. The best he managed was a scene or two of clumsy imitation vérité.

He lifts his head, again fighting the sense of being scripted. He searches for any hint that she’s running him through an elaborate psychological experiment. But her face is frank and open in a way Grace’s never was.

“For our escape is much beyond our loss.” He doesn’t mean to speak out loud.

She stares at him. “Oh! The quote. I do like that one. The students usually do, too.”

“Is this the only card you use?”

“Yes. Why do you ask?”

No reason. Less than no reason.

Back outside, on the street below, whiplash settles in. The appointment has done nothing but fill him with shame. Who is he to police someone else’s well-being? A cold wind slices down from Milwaukee. A week ago, the city was a blast kiln. The temperature has dropped from ninety to sixty in four days. Seasonal affective disorder: the entire spinning planet must be bipolar.

Seven things worth journaling about Candace Weld:

Boston accent, not yet obliterated by the Midwest.

She used to be religious; now she’s empirical.

She’s never been without some calling. For the last twelve years, it has been reminding people that they’re free.

Her office walls have three pictures of sisters and two of girlfriends. Five of her little boy. None of the boy’s father.

She has twice taken herself off cases after developing compromising emotional attachments.

Most of her clients love her. The few that hate her need her love.

She wakes up every morning feeling almost criminal that she can make a living doing exactly what she was born to do.

Three things Russell Stone actually writes about her in his journal that evening:

She’s a middle child, a helper. She doesn’t know how obvious this is.

She’d be the best kind of person to have in your court.

The gaps between her keyboard keys are filled with cookie crumbs.

The class grows closer, reluctant to let the holidays split them. They open up their unedited notebooks to one another. Journal and Journey turns into group therapy by another name. They swap all their hidden hostages now, when they trade their nightly writing. They travel together, down into one another’s darkest places and up to their wind-whipped peaks. For one last moment, the eight of them share something better than a story.

They take on Roberto’s nineteen months of annihilation by meth, the weekend-long punding sprees, taking apart and reassembling an old pendulum clock six times in a row. They join Charlotte’s permanent guerrilla campaign against her father after the baffled automotive executive punches daddy’s little girl in the mouth, then spends the next three years begging for forgiveness. They cheer Kiyoshi’s provisional victory over agoraphobia the day he summons up the courage to order a fish sandwich in a McDonald’s.

And they share Thassa’s bewildered glimpses of the United States-waiting to get a license at the DMV, trying to recycle batteries at a behemoth box store, witnessing her first televised megachurch evangelical service. Her journal knocks them back down into immigrant senses. Their country goes wilderness again, through her eyes. Her words make it okay to find pleasure in nothing at all-trading folk songs with the mailman or mapping the trees of the near South Side. Joker Tovar cuts his ADD engines and listens, one hand cupped over his eyes. Even Artgrrl Weston drops the groomed irony and nods, like she, too, wants to be Thassa when she grows up.

Suppose that panic or even pointlessness can’t touch us. Say that nothing can touch us, but what we say.

There’s the scene where Stone asks Thassa to stay after class. As if he wants to talk to her about her course writing. The others, on their way to their traditional post-class jamboree, beg him not to monopolize their ringleader for too long.

He’s practiced this speech for so long that he almost gets the question out without bobbling. “There’s something I’d like to talk about. Would you have a minute? We could grab something downstairs ”

“Hey!” the Algerian asks. “Are you trying to date me?”

He steps back, slapped. “No! I just thought we could sit for a minute and discuss-”

Thassa laughs and shakes his elbow. “ Yes , Mister Stone. It’s fine. I’m joking!”

They descend to the makeshift café, off the main-floor lobby. They hit the self-serve tea station and take their paper cups to a tiny steel-mesh table. Stone chatters nervously about the recently discovered miraculous benefits of tea polyphenols. Thassa waves him off. “Kabyle grannies knew about that, long before chemicals!”

Stone asks about Thassa’s surviving family. Thassa pulls pictures from her shoulder bag. She shows off her brother, Mohand, who has dropped out of community college and returned to Algiers, where he makes a living hiring himself out to stand endlessly in line for people mired in the bureaucratic state services. She passes him a shot of her aunt Ruza, the former dentist, tending the water lilies surrounding the chinoiserie pavilion in the Montreal botanical gardens. “A funny city,” the Kabyle says, shaking her head. “But it’s home now.”

Seeing his chance, Stone blurts out, “Do you miss it?”

“Sure! I miss every place I’ve ever lived.”

“Do you ever find yourself a little low? A little gray, down here, in this place?”

She tips her head, trying to figure out what kind of scene they’re writing. “Of course! I think you can imagine. How else to feel, so far from everything?”

“And does that ever frighten you?”

She sighs and looks skyward. Anyone who didn’t know her might say she’s exasperated. “You think I’m too happy, don’t you? The whole world thinks I’m too happy! Isn’t this America? No such thing as too much?”

His pulse spikes, and he looks around to flee. “I’m sorry. I don’t think that. I was just concerned that sometimes-”