Time Travail by Howard Waldman

us. She’s obediently trying to enjoy herself. Harvey
ordered her to accept my invitation to Ebbet’s Field. “Have a good
time,” he said to her and went back to his equations. She’s doing
her best. She’s a docile girl and does what Harvey tells her to
do.
    ***
     
    Five
     
    I flew back and wound up the little there was
to be wound up. I paid Mrs Philips for the two months. She was sad
to see me go but happy I’d found a much better teaching position.
That’s what I told her. I’d have had to cook up a different version
for my ex-colleagues. They wouldn’t have swallowed that. But I
didn’t intend notifying my ex-colleagues. I liked clean breaks.
    I transferred my few personal belongings into
the car. Mainly books, the hi-fi, the CDs and clothing, also the
telescopic chinning-bar. I did it with a certain melancholy. It
seemed to me that a man my age ought to have accumulated more than
what could fit into a compact Ford. Shaking off the melancholy, I
tested the tight squeeze of the hi-fi components. Each had been
carefully wrapped in a blanket like a fragile baby. You couldn’t
find components of that quality on the market nowadays. They were
my most precious possession. There was something melancholy in that
thought too.
    Just as I was going to get in the car and
make a clean break Marianne came into sight.
    “Leaving already?” she asked in a casual tone
of voice.
    There are situations where you can disguise
an intended clean break as a round-the-corner errand, picking up a
pack of cigarettes, for instance. Tens of thousands of men
disappear that way every year. That’s how the garden-crazy blonde’s
husband had vanished, according to Harvey. But you didn’t pick up
cigarettes at the wheel of a car crammed with all your worldly
possessions.
    Marianne acted very casually about the
situation but I’d learned to discount that apparent nonchalance.
When she was deeply discontented – not an uncommon condition – she
never had outbursts but inbursts, far worse. Her accent was a
little more apparent than usual. That was a symptom too.
    “I dropped over to recover the book I loaned
to you a few months ago,” she said. “I was going to ask for it on
Friday but you weren’t there. I waited for an hour. I urgently need
it.”
    “Oh God, Marianne, I completely forgot
Friday!” She always came over at four on Friday afternoons and left
at six or seven, more often seven than six. She’d been doing it for
months and months. I hoped I looked aghast. “Something big came up
at the last moment, a kind of emergency. Had to leave for New York
on the spot. I’d have phoned to tell you not to come except we
agreed I shouldn’t ever phone.”
    “ I thought you said you had forgotten
because of that big thing. Be consistent at least. I know all about
that big thing. I passed by this morning. You were out. Your
landlady told me about your so-called new job. I thought she was
going to cry, poor woman, to see you go. I need the book. Gilbert Durand, Les structures anthropologiques de
l’imaginaire .”
    It was somewhere in one of the cardboard boxes
underneath the CDs, the valises and the hi-fi. I told her this and
said I would mail it to her first thing on arriving. She insisted
on having it immediately and expected me to empty the contents of
the car on the sidewalk, exposing the hi-fi components to shock,
all for a book she’d never read and had no intention of reading. I
hadn’t read it myself. Had anybody?
    The conversation broadened. Soon we reached
the point where I was saying that a woman of her age and charm and
looks could do better than an old wreck like me, and it ended by my
saying that it had been marvelous of course, but a terrible strain.
Harry was a colleague, if not exactly a friend at least a very
close acquaintance. That was the last thing to have said in such
circumstances.
    Expressionless, she said that hadn’t
bothered me for the past year. Old wreck? Vieux salaud,
oui .
    I knew what “