The Chronoliths

“Thank you, Whit, but it didn’t seem that way at the time.”

Janice said, out of what appeared to be a profounder understanding, “So who are you with now?”

“Well, it’s not for certain, but — you remember Sue Chopra?”

Janice frowned. Then her eyes widened. “Yes! Cornell, right? The junior professor who taught that flaky first-year course?”

Janice and I had met at university. The first time I had seen her she had been walking through the chemistry lab with a bottle of lithium aluminum hydroxide in her hand. If she had dropped it, she might have killed us both. First rule of a stable relationship: Don’t drop the fucking bottle.

It was Janice who had introduced me to Sulamith Chopra when Sue was a ridiculously tall and chunky post-doc building a reputation in the physics department. Sue had been handed (probably as punishment for some academic indiscretion) a second-year interdisciplinary course of the kind offered to English students as a science credit and to science students as an English credit. For which she turned around and wrote a curriculum so intimidating that it scared off everybody but a few naive artsies and confused computer science types. And me. The pleasant surprise was that Sue had no interest in failing anyone. She had put together the course description to scare away parvenus. All she wanted with the rest of us was an interesting conversation.

So “Metaphor and Reality-Modeling in Literature and the Physical Sciences” became a kind of weekly salon, and the only requirement for a passing grade was that we demonstrate that we’d read her syllabus and that she must not be bored with what we said about it. For an easy mark all you had to do was ask Sue about her pet research topics (Calabi-Yau geometry, say, or the difference between prior and contextual forces); she would talk for twenty minutes and grade you on the plausibility of the rapt attention you displayed.

But Sue was fun to bullshit with, too, so mostly her classes were extended bull sessions. And by the end of the semester I had stopped seeing her as this six-foot-four-inch bug-eyed badly-dressed oddity and had begun to perceive the fu

I said, “Sue Chopra offered me a job.”

Janice turned to Whit and said, “One of the Cornell profs. Didn’t I see her name in the paper recently?”

Probably so, but that was awkward territory. “She’s part of a federally-funded research group. She has enough clout to hire help.”

“So she got in touch with you?”

Whit said, “That’s maybe not the kindest way to put it.”

“It’s okay, Whit. What Janice means is, what would a high-powered academic like Sulamith Chopra want with a keyboard hack like myself? It’s a fair question.”

Janice said, “And the answer is — ?”

“I guess they wanted one more keyboard hack.”

“You told her you needed work?”

“Well, you know. We stay in touch.”

(I can find you when I need you, Scotty. Never fear.)

“Uh-huh,” Janice said, which was her way of telling me she knew I was lying. But she didn’t press.

“Well, that’s great, Scott,” Whit said. “These are tough times to be out of a job. So, that’s great.”

We said no more about it until the meal was finished and Whit had excused himself. Janice waited until he was out of earshot. “Something you’re not mentioning?”

Several things. I gave her one of them. “The job is in Baltimore.”

“Baltimore?”

“Baltimore. Maryland.”

“You mean you’re moving across the country?”

“If I get the job. It’s not for sure yet.”

“But you haven’t told Kaitlin.”

“No. I haven’t told Kaitlin. I wanted to talk to you about it first.”

“Uh-huh. Well, I don’t know what to say. I mean, this is really sudden. The question is how upset Kait will be. But I can’t answer that. No offense, but she doesn’t talk about you as much as she used to.”

“It’s not like I’ll be out of her life. We can visit.”

“Visiting isn’t parenting, Scott. Visiting is… an uncle thing. But I don’t know. Maybe that’s best. She and Whit are bonding pretty well.”

“Even if I’m out of town, I’m still her father.”

“Insofar as you ever were, yes, that’s true.”

“You sound angry.”

“I’m not. Just wondering whether I should be.”

Whit came back downstairs then, and we chatted some more, but the wind grew louder and hard snow ticked on the windows and Janice fretted out loud over the condition of the streets. So I said goodbye to Whit and Janice and waited at the door for Kait to give me her customary farewell hug.

She came into the foyer but stopped a few feet away. Her eyes were stormy and her lower lip was trembling.

“Kaity-bird?” I said.

“Please don’t call me that. I’m not a baby.”

Then I figured it out. “You were listening.”

Her hearing impairment didn’t prevent her from eavesdropping. If anything, it had made her stealthier and more curious.

“Hey,” she said, “it doesn’t matter. You’re moving away. That’s all right.”

Of all the things I could have said, what I chose was: “You shouldn’t listen in on other people’s conversations, Kaitlin.”

“Don’t tell me what to do,” she said, and turned and ran to her room.

Five

Janice called me a day before I was due to leave for Baltimore and an interview with Sue Chopra. I was surprised to hear her voice on the phone — she seldom called except at our agreed-on times.

“Nothing wrong,” Janice said at once. “I just wanted to, you know, wish you luck.”

The kind of luck that would keep me out of town? But that was petty. I said, “Thanks.”

“I mean it. I’ve been thinking this over. And I wanted you to know — yes, Kaitlin’s taking it pretty hard. But she’ll come around. If she didn’t care about you, she wouldn’t be so upset.”

“Well — thank you for saying so.”

“That’s not all.” She hesitated. “Ah, Scott, we fucked up pretty badly, didn’t we? Those days in Thailand. It was just too weird. Too strange.”

“I’ve apologized for that.”

“I didn’t call you up for an apology. Do you hear what I’m saying? Maybe it was partly my fault, too.”

“Let’s not play whose fault it was, Janice. But I appreciate you saying so.”

I couldn’t help surveying my apartment as we spoke. It seemed empty already. Under the stale blinds, the windows were white with ice.

“What I want to tell you is that I know you’ve been trying to make it up. Not to me. I’m a lost cause, right? But to Kaitlin.”

I said nothing.

“All the time you spent at Campion-Miller… You know, I was worried when you came back from Thailand, way back when. I didn’t know whether you were going to hang on my doorstep and harass me, whether it would be good for Kaitlin even to see you. But I have to admit, whatever it takes to be a divorced father, you had the right stuff. You brought Kait through all that trauma as if you were walking her through a minefield, taking all the chances yourself.”

This was as intimate a conversation as we had had in years, and I wasn’t sure how to respond.

She went on: “It seemed like you were trying to prove something to yourself, prove that you were capable of acting decently, taking responsibility.”

“Not proving it,” I said. “Doing it.”

“Doing it, but punishing yourself, too. Blaming yourself. Which is part of taking responsibility. But past a certain point, Scott, that becomes a problem in itself. Only monks get to lacerate themselves full-time.”

“I’m not a monk, Janice.”

“So don’t act like one. If this job looks like a good choice, take it. Take it, Scott. Kait won’t stop loving you just because you can’t see her on a weekly basis. She’s upset now, but she’s capable of understanding.”

It was a long speech. It was also Janice’s best effort to date to grant me absolution, give me full marks for owning up to the disaster I had made of our lives.