Elizabeth Tallent - Mendocino Fire

“You don’t

get

it. We expected so much from you.”

We

, the nine who held the dinner in her honor, that memorable evening.

In this chilly pause, Clio, love’s insomniac, fails to suppress a yawn. Renee, fervent with insult, closes in, hurling herself into Clio’s office’s only unoccupied seat, a meanly proportioned straight-backed chair designed to discommode students who would otherwise linger in Clio’s aura of disdainful indifference. Throwing one leg over the other,

leaning in, slapping the folder, Renee begins, “You were supposed to—”

Clio says, “‘To’?”

What the hell

is the expression stamped on those fine, ethnically inscrutable features. “To change things! To, not

mother

exactly, but at least

care

about our careers. If you hear the word going around that ‘Nadia’s publications are a little

scanty

to qualify for tenure,’ you’re supposed to have her back, but no one’s heard a peep from you, and Nadia — Nadia’s some kind of demoralized shadow of her former self.”

“Shadow?”

“Me, I fantasize obsessively about burning down this building.”

“But Nadia? She’s a demoralized shadow?”

“Even to confess this fantasy probably gets me on about five different lists right now.”

“I haven’t noticed anything wrong with Nadia.”

“Well: you seem to be avoiding her.”

“No. No, no. Not avoiding her. Why would I avoid Nadia? No.”

“Avoiding all of us, then.”

“You appear to have found me.”

“Right at home in this building I burn down ten or eleven times a day.”

“If you burn it down, what will you do?”

“Ha! Even in daydreams I blow out the match. Even in my head, where you’d think I’d have no fear, I can’t touch the flame to the shitty carpet. This place! Can’t you get a little more involved? Unless you’re willing to get your hands dirty, her tenure meeting’s gonna go in a truly ugly direction. ‘Scanty’! She has two books! Would you like the figures

on just how many junior female faculty this place has

ever

tenured? Because I find that figure impressive. It’s a very round number. Zero! And, excuse me for noticing, but the last male this department gave tenure to had only one — uninteresting, I think — book and a couple of

derivative

articles, yet his shit was never called ‘scanty.’”

“Okay,” Clio says.

“Okay what?”

Down the hallway, a door opens, closes, and is locked, the homeward-bound deconstructionist whistling, the melody trailing down the floor before vanishing into the elevator, not before lodging itself in Clio’s mind.

Miss my clean white linen, and my fancy French cologne.

“I’ll peep,” Clio says distractedly. “I’ll get Nadia’s back.”

“Her books are

really good

You’ve read them, right? Look, did I—?”

“Did you?”

“Offend you.”

“There’s truth in what you said. I haven’t been very engaged.” Gently, but sick of gentleness, disliking the baiting way this woman hangs her sentences in the air.

“Your advocacy will be a game changer, you know that, right?” A pause while this antagonist wonders how far she can push her luck. “Nadia

really needs you

, is the thing.”

“I’ll do what I can.”

But it’s really not my ho-ome.

“I would open a florist shop,” Renee says. “After I burned this building down. Since you ask.”

“You know what I think about?” Clio says — not, in the moment, even faintly surprised, though in retrospect she will marvel at this question, at having done, next, something so unlike herself, telling a truth, and why, when no good comes

of such slips? “A bookstore on a downtown corner in some rinky-dinky town. Rare books, first editions.”

“But you’re famous. You can make waves. You’re not at their mercy.”

You have everything I want.

“There are days, lately, when I don’t love books.”

“You’re losing your soul.”

Clio reflects on the justness of this observation. “People open bookstores because they want their souls back.”

“It works. I know bookstores whose owners have

gotten

them back.”

They laugh, and then don’t know what to do with the silence that follows.

“Does Nadia know you came to me?”

“Nadia. Girl is

losing

it. Sleepless, skinnier than ever, keeps printing out articles about former professors who end up homeless or hoarding cats or whatever. But, no, we’ve never talked about you. I think she thinks you’ve got reservations about her work.”

“What gave her that idea?” In fact, it’s true: in the cool scholarly part of her soul Clio doesn’t much like Nadia’s books. Trusting this secret assessment, with the rest of her judgment compromised by love, would be unwise, and Clio has intended all along to vote yes, has meant, in short, to do the right thing, or at least the least

wrong

thing. Whichever way it goes, next week’s meeting will cause pain: either the pain of Nadia’s being granted tenure and remaining near but unpossessable, or the pain of her being refused tenure, thus vanishing forever from Clio’s life. If not even a starry glimpse of the object of fear and desire is possible, what will become of that life?

And yet, freed on this, the first afternoon in our story

that can safely be called

spring

, lugging her laden briefcase, Clio surrenders to the lightness of soul hidden within each Friday, taking the stairs in long-legged, traipsing descent, her voice pitching

up!

and

up!

precariously, caroming off cinderblock as if the stairwell were a gigantic cement shower stall, quick with resonance, echoing and amplifying:

“Oh, I

“Could drink

“A case

“Of you!”

You!

flung into the rainy outer world as Joni Mitchell, trailing rags of her ethereal voice, charges across the asphalt only to find, wading in a slow circle around a rusted-out wreck of a car in the flooding parking lot, Nadia, head bent under the assault of the rain, carrying something, now and then pausing to hammer with her fist at the car’s Bondodappled hood. Clio suffers a twist of emotion she can’t at first recognize. Before, encountering Nadia unexpectedly, she has experienced a number of emotions — shame of a particularly rich, basking intensity, or a pitiless, wired kind of happiness — but never before has any response to Nadia been as temperate as this: disappointment.

“This is all I can

fuck. Ing.

Take.”

Fuck

and

ing

are blows.

It’s been two months since they have exchanged more than cautious

hi

’s, passing in the hall.

“Keep doing that, you’ll hurt your hand.”

“I locked myself out, can you believe it?”

“Come get in my car. You can use my cell.”

“This had to happen in front of you.” Nadia begins to cry. “When all I want—”

“All you want—?” More baiting sentences? Did the junior women catch this from each other?

“Is to be like you. So to

gether

So far above the shit and disarray.”

Nadia wants not to

have

but to

be

Clio, it seems. “I lose keys,” she says, and tries to catch Nadia’s wrist before she can bang on the old car again, but too late: a racket of reverberating metal, and the rain drumming on the Chevy’s roof and hood, Clio sheltering Nadia’s head, now, under an impromptu roof of briefcase.