Lori Ostlund - The Bigness of the World

I am reminded of Miriam, a woman I knew many years ago in graduate school. Several years before she and I met, her husband was killed by a speeding truck after he pulled over on a Los Angeles freeway and stepped from his car. The police were not able to figure out why he had stopped that night, but Miriam said that she was haunted less by the mystery of this than by the constant replaying in her mind of the moment when her husband looked up and saw the truck nearly on top of him, saw reflected in the driver’s eyes his imminent death. Miriam was a rational woman in every other way, a student of mathematics like me, but she could no longer drive on or near the highway — a main artery of Los Angeles — on which her husband was killed. She told me this story as we studied together over coffee late one night, by way of explaining why she had left Los Angeles, where even attending to simple errands had become complicated and draining.

I understood, of course, the way that memory worked, the way that one could see or smell or hear almost anything and be reminded of lost love. Passing a certain deli, I would think, There, once, I purchased a bit of expensive cheese in hopes of enticing him to share my lunch ; and a few blocks later, On that bench, we professed our mutual disdain for sentimentality while watching pigeons toss bread crumbs about ; and finally, awfully, There, at that corner, as we walked together after a performance of what was to have been Mahler’s ninth symphony but which Mahler, overcome by superstition, had called his tenth, hoping to trick death as Beethoven and Bruckner had been unable to — there we parted ways for the very last time .

I sit for some minutes, staring at the face of young Mr. Jefferson, thinking to myself, “This beautiful young lad is dead.”

“Doctor,” says Marcos, and I drop the newspaper, startled by his presence.

“Dinner?” I say, struggling to my feet.

“Telephone,” he replies.

“I did not hear it ring.”

“Your principal,” he mouths, his expression serious, for my principal never phones me at home.

I go into my study to take the call. “Good evening, Thorqvist,” I say.

“Daneau. Sorry to trouble you at home. The, ah, your…” he says, struggling for words to describe Marcos, who undoubtedly introduced himself as my houseboy.

“My houseboy?” I say, attempting matter-of-factness.

“Yes,” he says, clearing his throat directly into the phone. “He assured me that I was not calling you away from the table.”

“Not at all,” I say.

“Excellent. I, listen, we must speak tomorrow. First thing.”

“Very well. I will stop by your office. Seven thirty shall we say?”

“Fine.” He sounds distracted, and in the background, I hear a woman, his wife no doubt, asking querulously, “Well, what does he say for himself?”

“Good evening then, Thorqvist,” I say and hang up.

As usual, the chicken is dry, but I spend an inordinate amount of time praising it, sidestepping Marcos’s questions regarding Thorqvist’s call. After dinner, I beg off of our nightly study session. “Headache,” I explain, touching my temples, and though it is only eight o’clock, I go off to bed.

In fact, my head is throbbing. I realize this only when the room is dark and I am lying very still, listening to the familiar sounds of Marcos’s cleaning. When I interviewed Marcos three years ago, we walked through the house as I described his duties room by room, ending up here, in the bedroom, where two full-size beds sat side by side. “Yours would be the right one, though if you prefer the left, that would be fine,” I explained nervously. This was the moment when interviews crashed to a halt, when the houseboy-to-be exploded angrily out the door or made some awkward excuse and left. With those few, like Jung, who stayed, a round of negotiations ensued, during which the salary crept upward while I assured them repeatedly that nothing more was required than their nightly presence in the other bed. This was true, though I did not mention that without it, I could not sleep. Only Marcos knows this — Marcos, who took in the two beds and my nervous fumbling and said, “Doctor, when I was a boy, we were very poor. My brothers and I slept in one room. I miss that very much.” He smiled, and I clasped my hands together and smiled back.

Finally, I doze off, awakening when Marcos slips into his bed. Moments later, the room fills with the uncomplicated and reassuring sound of his snoring.

* * *

“Ah, Daneau,” Thorqvist greets me heartily the next morning.

“Dr. Thorqvist,” I reply, waiting for an invitation to be seated, but he is busy rummaging through papers, no doubt seeking out the newest bit of damning evidence. “Coffee?” he asks at last, looking up. I nod, and he rises and leaves quickly, almost, I think, gratefully. Out of habit, I glance at the row of his wife’s samplers, noting that an eighth one has appeared. Its focus is also the ant, though this one offers an Iranian perspective on those troublesome creatures. In faulty English, it reads: “For an ant to have wings would be his undoing.”

“Sit. Sit,” says Thorqvist, bustling back in with two coffees.

“Thank you,” I say, accepting one of them, and then, “Your wife seems quite enamored of the ant.”

“Yes.” He settles himself back behind his desk. “She finds them industrious and underappreciated and—” He waves his hand about to indicate that there is a third adjective he cannot recall.

“Iranian, this one,” I say. “Have I told you my favorite Iranian proverb, Dr. Thorqvist?”

He stirs his coffee.

“He’d hang if it were free,” I say.

“Who?” he asks, looking up quickly.

“No,” I say. “That’s the proverb. Well, it’s not exactly a proverb. It’s what one says of a cheapskate. He’d hang if it were free.” I laugh suggestively, and he spits out a halfhearted chuckle that turns into a thundering bout of throat clearing, at the end of which we both fall silent.

“Dr. Daneau,” he begins tentatively. “I wonder—” He falters when I hold up my hand warningly, for he knows how I feel about the word wonder, not the word itself but the usage that has been imposed on us by the Critical Friends, a nervous, giddy group of experts brought in by the school to help improve classroom performance. The Critical Friends is their actual name, a name far better than any I could devise by way of satire, and they employed it without a trace of irony when they introduced themselves at the first meeting of the school year. “We are here to help,” they continued earnestly, the frequency with which they made this assertion calling it into question, just as the fact that they referred to themselves as friends when they were so obviously not underscored that discrepancy.

They would be coming into our classrooms to observe us, they explained, after which they would discuss with us what they had observed. This process, the process of discussing their observations with us, was referred to as reflecting, a word once used to define the capabilities of mirrors and perfectly still bodies of water. No more. Now, we cannot act, speak, or read without being obligated to reflect, publicly and aloud. Reflections have become the bookends to our days, the benedictions to our meetings.

At a meeting last month, for example, we were placed in pairs and told to reflect upon our days; after several minutes of this, we were instructed to reflect upon our partner’s reflection, at which point I lost all patience and cried out, “Sir, we are fiddling as Rome burns. I have students who cannot say how many inches are in a foot, who do not understand that four times five begets the same answer as five times four.” This outburst, as it was termed, merited a visit to Thorqvist’s office, where he explained that the exercise had been intended to promote faculty camaraderie. How, he asked me, did I suppose Miss Thoreson felt about my outburst?