It Will Come to Me (5 page)

Dolores lingered in the doorway; evidently this was a problem that couldn't wait. Ben got up and followed her into her office, where an unfamiliar custodian stood waiting. “Professor Blau,” said Dolores—Ben had trained her to call him by his first name, but she insisted on using his title in the presence of students and workmen—”this is Roman. He's new in the building.” Roman looked to be roughly Ben's age, about six inches shorter, but powerfully built. His gray hair was full and springy, his shoulders broader than Ben's, his feet in lace-up work boots larger. Ben extended his hand—he'd been raised to consider a handshake a wholesome, egalitarian gesture, appropriate in any circumstance. Roman's grip was deferentially gentle, his palms impressively calloused.

The formalities accomplished, Dolores and Roman resumed what was evidently a broken-off discussion. His tone was respectful but vehement, hers almost theatrically exasperated—Ben had noticed before that an entirely different Dolores emerged when she spoke Spanish with underlings. Eventually Roman threw up
his hands, nodded to Ben, and left the room. “He says he's sorry,” she explained. “They're not allowed to get involved with this kind of thing. Only basic cleaning. Come.” She squared her shoulders and led him down the hall to Irv Dorfman's office.

The door to the office was open. Ben and Dolores stood at the threshold for a long moment. Ben's first impression was that a heavy spring snow had somehow accumulated on every surface, but in a moment he saw that in fact the office was knee-high in paper, layers and layers of it, corners curling in the low current of the air conditioner, which Irv had apparently left on when he departed for Heidelberg at the end of June. It was strange and marvelous and a little sad, this shifting, trembling field of white that seemed to generate its own hush. It put Ben in mind of a documentary he'd once seen, a handheld camera panning silently around the deserted squares of Chernobyl.

After a moment he noticed a faint sweetish odor, like mildly bad breath. On the windowsill was a row of small tarry heaps that had been peaches or plums in June. Irv had evidently left them there to ripen. And there was another smell; something subtly but pungently organic, a bass note that gained power as Ben and Dolores stood there at the threshold of the office, drawing its preserved air into their nostrils. Was it Irv himself, dead under the paper? He was an insulin-dependent diabetic, and lived such a lonely life that for a moment it seemed possible. But no; Ben had seen enough crime dramas on TV to know that a dead body would produce an overpowering stench, detectable throughout the building.

Dolores was standing well back in the hall. Her eyebrows were raised, her nostrils flared, the tendons in her neck visible. “Rat,” she said.

T
hey moved through the room in a slow spiral, Ben doing the stoop work, Dolores following with a plastic garbage bag. The idea was to start by removing any trash that came immediately to hand—food wrappers, Styrofoam cups, cardboard packaging. Under their feet things crunched and crackled. They'd been working for half an hour when Dolores stepped on a syringe. She waded out of the room to find Rhoda, the work-study student, who jogged across campus to the B&G building and borrowed two pairs of utility gloves. These turned out to be so bulky they made it impossible to sort through the paper. Ben took his off. “It's not as if he has HIV,” he observed. Dolores gave him a quick startled look and removed hers.

The second phase of the job was more painstaking and intricate—the separation of important papers from miscellaneous mail and flyers and loose pages from
The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Their chief concern was to reconstruct the scattered manuscript of
The Technology of Being: The Being of Technology
, which Ben recognized from Irv's vita—ever since he could remember, it had been forthcoming from Modernahaus. Under a heap of those pages, January's issue of
The Journal of Speculative Cosmology
lay belly-up, opened to an article entitled “Taxa, Semi-Frequent Events, and Balescu Strings.” Interspersed throughout were class and grade rosters, student papers, loose pages from student papers, pay stubs, and blank checks.

In the course of their excavations they disinterred a cheerful red-and-yellow-plaid couch and an ergonomic rocking chair. How odd, they both noted, that Irv had thought to buy his own furniture. What remained on the floor at this stage were the
books, which they stacked neatly in a corner; a banana peel; a former avocado; several empty smoothie cups; and one smoothie cup half full of fulminating blue mold. There was a lot of loose change, a one-dollar bill, a five-dollar bill, several empty vials of insulin. Ben took a fresh garbage bag and began a last patrol of the room. “No,” said Dolores. “Leave it. That's for Roman.” The source of the bad animal smell turned out not to be a rat but a small bird, fallen into the fireplace from the chimney. It made Ben sad to think of it fluttering helplessly. Dolores laid the little heap of feathers in a Kleenex box and covered it with a layer of tissues.

The job nearly done, they came to a simultaneous, unspoken decision to sit down. After a moment Dolores got up and left the room, reappearing with two mugs of coffee—she remembered that Ben took his with a few drops of milk and no sugar. The two of them sat in companionable silence, surveying the room. The carpet was gritty and littered with detritus and glittering bits of broken things, but they had made order, and made it in an orderly way. Ben took satisfaction in that, and in knowing that Dolores took satisfaction in it too.

He couldn't help feeling close to her at this moment. She sat on the edge of Irv's ergonomic chair, ankles crossed, head modestly lowered. There was something touchingly childlike about the way she wrapped both hands around her coffee mug. It was rare to see Dolores in an attitude of unbustling repose, rare to get a chance to really look at her. She was small, with a round head and a sweet round face and plump, dimpled knees—smiling knees, he thought, and the thought made him smile. Her style of dress reminded him of his mother's tweed skirts, low-heeled shoes, heavy flesh-colored stockings, or panty hose, he supposed.
Whatever the weather, she always arrived at the office in a fully buttoned raincoat, a scarf tied under her chin. What did she make of the undergraduate girls, the ones with studs in their navels and jeans cut down to their pubes?

The raincoat and scarf put her in the company of the older women he remembered from his youth, the ones who seemed to spend their lives in grocery checkout lines, clutching coupons and counting out change. To his adolescent mind, no woman over forty seemed to have a reason for living other than a purely economic one. In unguarded moments that was still how he saw them. (But never Ruth; her wrinkles and sags seemed as accidental and nonessential as his own.) How old was Dolores? Somewhere between fifty and seventy. It was quite possible that she was younger than he was, perhaps younger than Ruth.

It seemed presumptuous to try to guess her age, but as he sat there facing her, the silence between them growing thick, it occurred to him that he could turn his mind to something more presumptuous yet. What would it be like, he asked himself, to entertain a sexual fantasy about Dolores? He was relieved to find that her rectitude was a force field strong enough to repel any such speculation. He had only to think about thinking about this to find his thought instantly rejected, like a crinkled dollar bill from a vending machine.

It seemed time to say something, so he said, “What do you think Irv would say if he walked in right now?” That was a blunder; he could see her shrink back a little in her seat. She must have thought he was inviting her to make fun of Irv. “Oh, I don't know,” she answered, turning a faint smile toward the window, self-deprecation giving cover to her withdrawal.

“Maybe he'd just say thanks,” said Ben, though he thought
it more likely that Irv would go pale with rage. He tried again. “How are your kids?” he asked, and then remembered that there were too many of them for a blanket inquiry. “How's Hector doing?” Hector was her youngest, in law school, the repository of much maternal pride. “Oh Hector is fine,” said Dolores, looking up, smiling warmly. “He's taking his boards in December. We're keeping our fingers crossed.”

“He'll do great. Still engaged to the same girl?”

“Brenda, yes. They're waiting to be done with school, both of them. She's in nursing school.”

“And that'll make—how many of your kids are married?”

“That'll make seven. All seven.”

“And maybe more grandchildren?”

“Yes! More!” Dolores threw out her arms. Her smile was roguish, glorious.

A pause. “And how is … ?” Dolores hazarded.

“Isaac.” It was a measure of his habitual reticence on this subject that Isaac's name appeared to be missing from Dolores's exhaustive database. How often had it happened—in restaurants, at dinner parties, at halftime during basketball games, wherever his fellow academics congregated—that the conversation turned to the doings and accomplishments of adult and near-adult children? Every one of these, it seemed, was a fledgling lawyer or surgeon, or would be after a year spent building latrines in Central America. Whenever this topic came up, he and Ruth exchanged quick furtive looks: let this cup pass from us! But soon enough the assembled inquiring eyes would turn to them.

And then what would they say? That Isaac was twenty-four and not only had never attended college but had failed to graduate from high school? That the only job he'd ever held for more
than a week was as a dishwasher in a cantina where for some reason the proprietor had taken pity on him? That he was a great shambling Goth with a spiked dog collar and a long filthy black coat who mooched around the city streets—Ben had seen him just the other day, coming out of a movie theater at four in the afternoon—wearing a pointed Merlin hat and a pair of split tennis shoes? That he haunted the aisles of pornographic anime stores? That Ben and Ruth hadn't spoken to him in nearly two years—not entirely their fault, as Isaac's therapist (paid for by Ben) had forbidden them any contact with their son. That his last communication before he went to ground had been a crudely addressed envelope containing one of his own decayed molars? That this was his response to Ben and Ruth's campaign to persuade him to see a dentist—to
at least see
a dentist?

They had tried. They continued to try. They enclosed friendly notes in the monthly checks they sent to him through his therapist. They called, allowing the phone to ring and ring, passing the receiver off to each other. Ben had gone to his apartment, knocked and then pounded on the door, shouting, “Isaac! Isaac!” Eventually the door creaked open and a young Mexican woman peered out. “He is gone,” she said. And he was. By the time Ben got a lead on the place he'd moved to he was gone from there too, and then he was gone from another apartment, and then living on the street. It was possible, Ben and Ruth had discovered, to lose a child and to have no recourse.

“Isaac,” he said in answer to Dolores's inquiry, “is troubled. He's had a lot of trouble.” Why was he telling her this? He never told anyone. “Oh yes,” she said. She leaned forward in her chair, her sympathy instant and unstinting, her forehead knotted with
fellow feeling. “I know sometimes … my Evelyn, you see, she was also very troubled. We were at our wits’ end for many years …” But someone was standing in the doorway.

T
wo people, actually. One was a young girl, very small, with red ringlets. The other, standing a little behind her, a proprietary hand on her shoulder, was a large middle-aged man, very ruddy, with a graying pageboy. Was this parents’ weekend? No, that was in November. The semester, he reminded himself, was just beginning.

By the time he had gotten to his feet, Dolores had crossed the room and was asking, “May I help you?” in a familiar vigilant tone. Never a quick reactor, Ben stood there, conscious of his arms hanging heavily in their sockets. For some reason his attention was riveted by the male intruder's great paunch, which strained against the buttons of his pale-blue guayabera. The sight of it seemed to paralyze him.

“This is Ricia Spottiswoode,” said the man. His voice was startlingly deep and cultivated, an FM radio announcer's voice. “I'm Charles Johns. I'm afraid we're early.”

“Oh yes,” said Dolores. “So sorry. Welcome! I hope you've had a good trip.”

“Very pleasant, thanks,” said Charles Johns, peering around the room with puzzled consternation. Ben broke free from his freeze and joined the group, extending his hand. “Ben Blau,” said Ben. “I'm philosophy chair. Glad you could make it.” (Glad you could make it?) Charles Johns's answering grip was strong enough to hurt. He was evidently a handshaker of the old school. “I hope
we haven't put you on the spot. We thought we'd take a few extra days to get settled.” His voice made Ben's fillings vibrate.

Charles Johns was the future inhabitant of this office, the visitor who would replace Irv for the year. The woman (woman?) was not his daughter but his wife, the English Department's new writer in residence. They had been expected to arrive day after tomorrow. Ricia Spottiswoode was actually famous, Ben had gathered, a cult figure of sorts. The English Department considered her a great catch for their fledgling MFA program. One of her requirements had been that an academic perch be found for her husband. The dean had approached Ben and asked him to find a course for this man to teach—he had some kind of background in philosophy, or at least some kind of interest. Ben had resented this pressure, but there was no principled way to say no. More than once he had observed that over the course of the last thirty years nepotism had gone from being forbidden to being obligatory without ever having become merely permissible.