The Lesson

Now, Loring was a most unusual person, you see, for she didn’t like people at all and wanted nothing to do with them

But she had certain exceptions, or I should say, she had made certain exceptions over the years. The trouble is, as you get older, the people you like die and are not replaced with others, so that it is easily possible to end up with no one at all to talk to, or at least, no one you would want to hear responding to whatever it is you might have ended up saying.

This was the trouble that Loring was in. Aside from the times when a visitor came to town — some old acquaintance from their tournament days — aside from that, it was simply a matter of reading books and sitting in chairs. Of course, walking as well, visiting the cemetery, and looking at things, plants and such, animals here and there — but she tired easily, and so mostly it was about sitting and reading.

The book that she was reading at that time was called The Miraculous Indifference of the Eleventh Century. It was about how, for whatever reason, during the eleventh century A.D., there had been several severe bouts of indifference, documented in cultures geographically remote from one another. The meaning of this was unclear, and the historian did himself few favors. Nonetheless, the book was terribly funny, although not meaning to be, and this caused Loring much grief, for when she would begin to laugh, she would be placed back in the room where she was sitting, and the hollow sound of her laugh coming off the wooden ceiling, floor walls, the glass of the windows, it made her feel that she had no one to whom to tell anything, that no matter how much comedy might be found in a passage, it was useless beyond what it might avail her directly. Even should she come upon the most tremendously wonderful thing that had ever been written, she could not say it and have someone useful hear.

Of course, this situation had not come about for lack of trying other options. Do you believe that she did not write letters to him after he was dead? Oh, certainly she did, reams and reams of letters, buried in a box. She wrote him a hundred letters, two hundred letters, a letter a day, and buried them in the ground by his grave. She sat on the grass there and spoke to him. She lay awake in their room and whispered, feeling that somehow whispers travel farther than things said outright.

No proof came that he had heard any of this, that he had read any of the letters. But, of course, neither did there come any proof to the contrary.

She sat at her desk in the evening time, and began to write a letter. It was not the first letter she had written concerning the boy.

e.

He came again, this time for the lesson. I watched him very carefully, and put your sweater in the way, on the chair where he was to sit. When he moved it, he put it on the table on the far side of the room — which is what you always did. I don’t know what that means. Is that just the place where sweaters should go? Or something more?

I asked him to say your name and he said it the way it used to be said — not the way it is pronounced now. But did I perhaps say it that way unwittingly? I can’t remember.

Why am I even writing to you? If it is true, and something of you is in him, then is any part of you elsewhere, receiving such missives as these?

There is no chance of it, I suppose. Then what is this writing? What is it? Is it less purposeless than some other fragile thing?

I feel there can be no good out of it — out of any of it. But then I feel something else, a certainty that through his eyes you will look at me, and see me, and that I will see you the same. Such a moment — for that I would give the rest, all the rest, all these useless rags, buildings, people.

Being old is being useless, and having things be useless to you. Because: the world is what is still to come. It isn’t what is or what was.

For me that what-is-to-come, well, you know, you know what it is, my love. I am reaching out towards you in your narrow space.

yours,

l.

When she had finished writing the letter, she looked at it carefully. She held it in her hands, looking at it carefully, and then she tore it up. The torn-up pieces she left there on the table, as if they might do something for one another in such a state.