more research; the vistas would open up again inside her, lending the world that sense of integration, as she discerned more and more of the structure of the present in the society and politics of Europe three centuries before, as though she were glimpsing the hidden order of things. Try explaining that over gin and tonics at the beach club to one of the sons of her mother's friends. Why no, Chuck, I don't get to play much squash. You see, I'm a secular mystic, transported in private hours by the grandeur of human knowledge. You don't say? Well, actually, I do.
Of the men she met in the city, most were married or seemed put off by her lack of deference.
It was at a winter party, given by one of her professors at Columbia, that she met Eric. She knew most of the people there, other graduate students, junior professors she'd taken classes with or heard speak. She noticed him first with his back to the room, examining the bookshelf, his head craned to read the spines. When he turned, he accidentally met Charlotte's gaze and smiled, shyly, before looking into his drink. Something about the curly brown hair that hung over his brow and the creamy skin and the wide, slightly unshaven jaw had caused her to stare. That afternoon, sitting at her desk at the back of her apartment as the light faded in the courtyard, she'd finished writing what she considered her best work yet, a paper on Milton's tenure in Cromwell's government, the result of a year's research. She remained full of the satisfaction of being done, a pleasure so long and scrupulously deferred. Eric looked a bit younger than she was, in his mid-twenties perhaps. Keeping an eye out, she spotted him a few minutes later on the far side of the room and went over to introduce herself. It was the kind of egalitarian gesture she believed in and for once she'd drunk enough to bring it off.
They spoke for two hours that evening, sitting on the bench in the bay window, the Hudson visible through the bare trees. After an awkward few moments, he had started in, dispensing with the pleasantries of asking who she was or where she fit in the party, right away wanting to know what she'd read recently, "the best things," he said, "the stuff that could change you," and he didn't want to hear only about history but about novels, journalism, poetry. And then through and past that, to her thoughts, assuming without question that her ideas possessed the same integrity and significance of any of the books that helped shape them. His need to hear all this seemed almost animal-like, as though by elaborating her thoughts she were feeding him. At first, she spoke haltingly. She was used to the prescribed discussions of seminars; she'd never been asked to offer such comprehensive views. Answering his questions, she felt ideas, long inchoate, come into focus. The plainness of early Protestant worship explained something about why she'd been transfixed in Amsterdam the summer before by Vermeer's painting of an everyday exterior - the brick fronts of the merchant's house, the gray cloud, the women doing their daily work. And this connected in ways she could only guess at to idealism in politics, the insistence on equality, the plainness of it, and thus too, somehow, to the power of the spectacle of troops in Little Rock escorting a black girl to the ordinary activity of school. She understood then, and even more later, that others, the beautiful perhaps, would laugh if she were to confess it, but sitting fully clothed on that window seat, never having touched a hair on Eric's body, she felt more sexually alive than ever in her life. She would have walked into a bedroom of that apartment, closed the door on the party, and made love to him at once if he'd asked.
As it happened, they made love on her couch the next night after dinner, the heat of his chest on hers and the smell of his flesh a blessing she'd thought she might never receive. Before they even climbed in the bath together, before he even raised himself from her and stood, naked and wet, looking down at her in surprise, she already feared the power of her wanting. She was twenty-nine and a fierce social independent, a position that had cost her a sense of future safety. They'd said nothing about anything