The City When It Rains

CHAPTER

TWENTY-EIGHT

CORMAN WAS STANDING at the door, watching Lucy take off her raincoat, when the phone rang. It was Pike.

“Hey, Corman,” he said. “I got a call from that little fag who writes the society column. What’d you do, buddy, blow his joint?”

Corman didn’t answer.

“Anyway,” Pike went on. “He likes your work. Says you’d be great for his beat when Groton leaves.”

“I did my best,” Corman said.

“Well, this call is just a friendly reminder that Groton has a shoot late tomorrow afternoon,” he added. “If you’re interested, meet him at his place.”

“Okay. When?”

“Six o’clock, sharp.”

“I’ll be there,” Corman assured him. He hung up and turned to Lucy. “I may be getting a steady job,” he said and instantly thought of Julian, the faint hope he offered that there might still be some way out.

Lucy shrugged. “That’s good, I guess.”

“I’d be home nights.”

Lucy glanced up at him and smiled. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Even when you’re gone, it’s like you’re here.” She darted into her room and did not come out again until Corman called her to dinner, scooping out a portion of something he called “Whatever,” a mixture of whatever vegetables and meat were still left in the refrigerator at any given time.

“Are you going out tonight?” she asked, as she drew her fork tentatively to her mouth.

Corman nodded and took his seat at the table. “An old professor of mine, if I can get in touch with him.”

Lucy looked puzzled. “Are you going back to school?”

Corman shook his head. “No. It’s about something else. Some pictures I’m working on.”

“Mama’s thinking about going back to school,” Lucy said.

“Really?” Corman said. It was the first he’d heard of it. “To study what?”

Lucy shrugged. “I don’t know.” She began circling her fork in the food. “She said you were a great teacher.”

“I’m glad she thought so,” Corman said. He glanced over at his answering machine. The red light was blinking madly, but he didn’t feel like listening to his messages yet.

“I guess I’ll never have you, huh?” Lucy said.

“I guess not,” Corman said. He nodded toward the listlessly circling fork. “It’s to eat, not to play with.”

Lucy took a minuscule amount of food onto the fork then brought it slowly to her mouth. “I have lots of homework,” she said after she’d swallowed. “I guess I can’t watch TV or anything.”

“Homework first,” Corman said. “You know that.” To set the right example, he took a large bite of Whatever and chewed it, faking enjoyment as best he could.

Within a few minutes, dinner was over. Corman began clearing the table, while Lucy sat at the small desk in her room, groaning audibly about her homework, but continuing to do it anyway. He washed and dried the dishes, then picked up the few things that had remained scattered across the room long enough to attract his attention: pieces of newspaper, an old cigarette pack or two, junk mail.

The red light of the answering machine finally annoyed him enough for him to listen to the messages. There was only one, from Joanna, telling him she’d be at one of their usual places at around midnight and hoped he’d drop by. Her voice seemed calm, and it was impossible for Corman to judge what she wanted or whether Leo had gotten bad or good news from the tests.

Lucy peeped her head out the door of her room when the message ended. “I guess you’ll be seeing Joanna, too,” she said teasingly.

Corman faked a smile. “Finish your homework.”

When she’d gone back into her room, Corman clicked off the machine, then looked up Dr. Maitland’s number and dialed it.

A man answered immediately, and Corman recognized the deep, resonant voice that he remembered first from the lecture halls, then from the short, earnest conversations along Columbia Walk.

“Dr. Maitland,” he said. “It’s David Corman.”

“David?” Dr. Maitland said brightly. “My God, I thought you’d fallen off the edge of the world.”

“Just to Forty-fifth Street,” Corman said.

Maitland chuckled. “Well, that’s not too far,” he said. “But it’s been a long time since I’ve heard from you.”

“Yes, it has,” Corman said. “As a matter of fact, I was wondering if I could meet you for a few minutes.”

“Of course,” Dr. Maitland said.

“Tonight?” Corman asked hesitantly.

Dr. Maitland laughed. “You always were a fast starter, David,” his voice hinting subtly that it was the finish line that had always given him problems.

“West End Cafe?” Corman said. “Around nine?”

“I’ll be there,” Dr. Maitland said. “Just be sure you are.”

He was, and as he waited for Dr. Maitland, sitting silently in his old haunt, the darkened booth in the rear corner of the cafe, he thought of all the leisurely times he’d spent there, all the high, purposeful talk he’d listened to, with Lexie across from him, boldly holding forth on whatever popped into her mind. It was the sort of memory that had a well-defined potential for bitterness, but quite unexpectedly, Corman found that he still felt a distant fondness for the Lexie of his youth, the one who’d been so brazen, so full of high mockery. She’d had the mimic’s gift for lampooning people, especially her professors. She closed her eyes with mock portentousness as Dr. Berger did. She rolled her eyes and sputtered like Dr. Wilkins. She delivered orotund pronouncements, then sank into obfuscation. She did all of this while Corman and the other students around her teared with laughter. No doubt about it, she’d reigned like a comic queen in those days. It was the years after college that had given her trouble. After graduation, she’d simply put her life on hold, drawn in close to the fire, while everyone else had finally gotten up, swallowed hard and ventured out into the jungle. He couldn’t imagine why this had happened or whether he’d been in any way responsible. He only knew that her edginess had slowly worn down and that a kind of decomposition had set in. There were even times, toward the end, when it seemed almost physical, as if while sitting across from her at dinner, he half-expected to see her face crack like dry ground or a handful of iron gray hair suddenly come loose from her scalp and float down to her shoulder.

Maitland came in a few minutes later and stared around, squinting in the darkness, until he caught Corman’s eye. Then he moved heavily through a barricade of crowded tables until he reached the booth in the rear corner. He was a large, potbellied man now, not exactly old, but getting there fast. His hair had thinned considerably since Corman had last seen him. It had gotten grayer too. He looked more weathered than before, but still robust, energetic, full of quick responses.

“Hello, David,” he said as he slid into the booth.

Corman nodded and smiled.

Maitland turned toward the bar, ordered two beers on tap, then looked at Corman. “So, what have you been doing since you left Columbia?”

“I taught for a while,” Corman said. “That private school you wrote the reference for.”

“Oh yes, I remember,” Maitland said. “How’d that turn out?”

“It was okay.”

“But you’re not there now?”

“No.”

“Somewhere else?”

“Not a school,” Corman said. “I’m working as a photographer. Free-lance.”

Maitland looked surprised. “Photographer? I didn’t know you were interested in that.”

“Newspaper work mostly,” Corman explained. “Off and on.” He thought of the stack of pictures that lay piled like dead fish in his camera bag. “It’s not what you’d call secure.”

“Well, what is?” Maitland said. He smiled. “Except tenure, of course.”

Corman nodded.

Maitland watched him for a moment, as if trying to put him in another category. He seemed vaguely dislocated, as if the fact that Corman was no longer a student or teacher had shifted him into a hazier world that was hard for him to get a grip on. “I always thought you’d stay in teaching,” he said finally.

“So did I,” Corman told him.

“I suppose you like your new work?”

“It’s interesting,” Corman said. “You learn a lot.”

“Well, that’s all that matters, I suppose,” Maitland said. He smiled, a little indulgently, like a grown man who was going along with a child’s view of the world, letting Corman believe in the tooth fairy or Santa Claus or anything else that got him through the night. “How did you happen to discover this new vocation?” he asked a bit sententiously, as if he were still talking to an eager undergraduate.

“I met a man who was already doing it.”

Again Maitland smiled. “And lightning struck,” he said with a hint of condescension. “That’s what I call providential.”

“You might say that.”

“And your studies? What happened to them?”

“They took a different turn,” Corman said, adding nothing else.

Maitland paused again, still watching Corman distantly. “Well, we missed you when you decided to leave graduate school.” He squinted slightly, as if he were trying to figure out exactly where Corman had gone after that. “So, photography,” he said idly.

“Photography,” Corman repeated. He was reasonably sure that Maitland now thought of him as working in some sort of inferior world. It was as if the university were the one true penthouse of existence, the place with the really sweeping view. Everywhere else was somehow blocked in its perspective, hampered by trees, buildings, telephone poles, mounds of useless clutter. Maitland smiled. “Well, as long as you’re happy,” he said, forcing a certain lightness into his voice.

Corman glanced toward the bar and wondered what was holding up the drinks.

“And what about Lexie?” Maitland asked after a moment.

“We’re not together anymore.”

“Oh,” Maitland said awkwardly. Then he shrugged. “Well, that’s par for the course these days.”

“What is?”

“Splitting up,” Maitland said.

“I guess.”

“In my opinion, it’s all cyclical,” Maitland added. “We’ve gone through a period during which the solution to a bad marriage was a quick divorce. Now we’re coming into a different period.”

Corman didn’t feel like going into what this different period might be.

“We’re going back,” Maitland said authoritatively. “The solution to a bad marriage will be to live in it and keep your mouth shut. That’s what people have done through most of human history.” He smiled. “We’re not talking about progress, David. We never are with human beings. We’re only talking about a shift, the latest version of the Eternal Return.”

It was the sort of statement Corman remembered from Maitland’s classes. Only then they’d sounded truer, at times even faintly revealing, despite the superior edge. Now they sounded empty and pompous, something that could only fly in the rarefied air of the faculty lounge.

The beers came, and the two of them clinked their glasses together gently, then drank.

Maitland turned toward the front of the room, glancing at the other people in the bar, mostly young Columbia students.

“The elite,” he said as he looked back at Corman. “What do you think of them?”

Corman shrugged but did not answer.

“You used to have opinions,” Maitland said. There was a faintly knowing tone in his voice, as if he’d caught Corman doing something nasty in the woodshed, but was willing to keep it to himself. “Don’t you have them anymore?”

“A few,” Corman said.

“Like what?”

“More things seem ridiculous to me now.”

Maitland’s face soured somewhat. “You sound like Lexie.”

“Really?”

“Absolutely,” Maitland said.

Corman took a quick sip from his glass. “At this point, I don’t think it matters.”

Maitland leaned forward slightly, his eyes growing somewhat more intense. “Well, what is ‘this point’ exactly? I mean, with you? I take it you’re not interested in coming back to graduate school.”

Corman shook his head. “No, I’m not,” he said. “Actually, I didn’t come to talk about school at all.”

“So I’ve gathered,” Maitland said.

“It’s about a woman.”

Maitland laughed. “And you came to me?” he said. “I’m flattered.”

“This woman, she …”

“Of course, everybody knows that English departments are notoriously horny,” Maitland interrupted. “It’s all that romantic nonsense they read. ‘How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.’” He laughed. “I mean, it’s one thing to study that sort of thing all your life, it’s quite another to take it seriously.”

“She jumped out of a building last week,” Corman said.

Maitland looked at him solemnly. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know you were talking about something like that.”

Corman pulled a photograph from his camera bag. “I took some pictures.” He handed the picture to Maitland. “It turns out that this woman had been a student at Columbia.”

“And that’s what this meeting’s about?” Maitland asked.

Corman nodded.

Maitland’s eyes drifted down to the picture. “I don’t recognize her,” he said.

“She may have changed a lot since she was at Columbia.”

Maitland’s eyes continued to study the picture. He shook his head. “I don’t remember her.”

“Her name was Rosen,” Corman said. “Sarah Rosen.”

Suddenly Maitland’s face turned very grave. “Sarah Rosen?” he said unbelievingly. He looked thunderstruck. “My God, I had no idea.”

“Last Thursday night,” Corman said quietly.

Maitland looked at the photograph again. “When I knew her, she didn’t look like that at all.”

Corman eased the picture from Maitland’s hands. “She was starving,” he said.

Maitland’s eyes widened, and for an instant Corman could see something glimmering behind them. He had seen it before, even felt it in himself, a form of recognition that came up fast, like a man in your face, telling you that nothing could be taken lightly, that everything was real, and that this reality didn’t care about your faith, your analysis, the precious little kingdom of your self-esteem, and that if you didn’t back away from it, dodge it desperately somehow, you’d spend your days balled up in some clean white corner, rocking, wailing, facing the facts.

“Starving?” Maitland repeated.

“I’m trying to find out what happened to her,” Corman said.

Maitland took his glass in both hands and rolled it slowly between them. “She was Samuel Rosen’s daughter.”

“A professor here,” Corman said.

“Not just a professor,” Maitland said. “Samuel Rosen. One of the world’s great medievalists. A specialist on the Renaissance, too. Jesus, didn’t you learn anything at Columbia?” He looked offended by Corman’s ignorance. “Haven’t you at least heard ofhim?”

“I think so,” Corman said tentatively.

“His work is famous,” Maitland insisted. “I know you didn’t major in medieval studies, but for God’s sake.”

“How well do you know him?”

Maitland shook his head and looked embarrassed by his answer. “Not very well. I’ve read all his books.”

“But you don’t know him as a person?”

“No, not as a person.”

“But you did know his daughter?”

“Yes.”

“She took one of your courses her senior year.”

“How did you know that?”

“Her husband.”

“So you know about her examination then.”

“Do you still have it?” Corman asked immediately.

Maitland nodded. “Absolutely.” His face darkened. “It was written in a bizarre way.”

“I’d like to see it.”

“I’ll look for it. It should be in my office.”

“Could we look tonight?”

Maitland hesitated. “Is it that urgent?”

Corman nodded. “Yes.”

“In a minute then,” Maitland said. He smiled thinly. “I trust I can finish my drink.” He took a quick sip, waited for Corman’s next question, then took another sip when it didn’t come.

Corman could feel his impatience growing. He needed facts, important facts. He could feel Trang and Lexie hovering over him, spectral presences hissing from above. He shifted restlessly and felt a clammy sweat gathering beneath his arms. “Can you tell me something about her?” he asked.

Maitland thought for a moment, his eyes rolling toward the ceiling as they did when he lectured, searching for his muse. “I always had the impression that she chose the words very carefully.” He thought a moment longer, his eyes scanning the room until they finally came to rest on Corman. “Why are you investigating her?”

Corman thought of Lucy, Trang, Lazar, Julian, the pictures. It was all a maze. “Why does anybody do anything?” he asked, dodging the question.

One of Maitland’s eyebrows curled upward. “That’s a bit philosophical,” he said. “I didn’t know you were still interested in ideas.”

Corman said nothing. From behind, he could hear a young woman laughing above the general hum of the crowd. He felt like turning and taking a picture of her, for no reason at all beyond its sweet relief.

“I thought of you the other day,” Maitland said after a moment. “I was in the Columbia Bookstore, just browsing. And you know how, suddenly, from out of nowhere, something can remind you of someone? Well, this reminded me of you.”

“What did?”

“It was a book of questions,” Maitland told him. “Nothing but questions. You know the kind I mean: If a museum were burning, and you could save either the Mona Lisa or a cat, which would you save? That sort of thing. It reminded me of you.” He smiled softly. “The way you used to be.”

Corman could no longer get a handle on who that person had been. It was time to move on to other matters. “I’d like to see Sarah Rosen’s exam,” he said.