weekends like that would show up in all those catalogues, Ralph Lauren and the others, the smugness of that faded time resurrected as commercial fantasy). At the reception, Charlotte had been seated next to the bride’s brother, a Cadillac dealer who’d clearly never read Appointment in Samarra. Henry, to his credit, didn’t join in the cloying asides about her being next.
She’d spent three years studying: taking seminars, attending extra lectures, working in the library, and reading in the evenings. Her friends were other people in the history department along with the two or three women from college who hadn’t moved out of the city. In school, being single didn’t register the way it did at home with her parents. Time had purpose without a companion. Still, the solitude got to her now and again. Despite her best effort, she couldn’t rid herself of the tug of “Saturday Night” and the need to have something to do. On the weeks she failed to plan ahead and found herself alone, the doubt which concentration otherwise kept at bay entered her, and she heard her mother’s voice. The words in the books and journals spread on her kitchen table seemed lifeless then, dead as the time they described. But the feeling always passed; a paper would demand more reading, 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