She accepted the fellowship on April fifteenth, and something shifted in the quality of their days — not immediately, not dramatically, but in the way that light shifts in late afternoon, with the same elements and a different angle.
The spring semester ended in May. They were both free for the summer. Eliot had no particular plans; Mara needed to prepare for New York, to begin the final serious push on the elegy's fifth movement, to pack, in small and large ways, for the leaving. And so they spent the summer together in a way that had the beauty and the sadness of things known to be temporary.
They drove to the coast in early June — not her coast, not Oregon, but the Atlantic, a six-hour drive that they made over two days, stopping in small towns to eat at diners and read in motel rooms and look at the road. They did not talk much about the leaving, because there was nothing new to say about it. What had needed to be said had been said in April. What remained was simply to be present to the days they had left.
At the ocean they stood on the beach in the early morning and watched the water, and she put her arm around his waist and her head against his shoulder and he did not speak because there was nothing to say that the water and the light were not already saying more eloquently.
✦ ✦ ✦
They found a rhythm in those summer weeks that felt, paradoxically, like the most fully themselves they had ever been together. Without the structure of the semester, without deadlines and meetings and the daily machinery of institutional life, they simply lived: mornings of work (she at her keyboard, he at his laptop), afternoons of motion (walks, drives, errands rendered pleasurable by company), evenings of food and conversation and the accumulation of the small knowledge that makes up intimacy.
He learned things about her that the semester's pace had not revealed. He learned that she was a poor sleeper, waking at three or four in the morning to read for an hour before returning to sleep. He learned that she had a profound and inexplicable love of thunderstorms, that she opened windows when they came rather than closing them, that she stood on the small porch of her apartment during even the most dramatic ones and watched with her face tilted up. He learned that she sometimes worked in complete silence for six or seven hours without noticing the time passing, and that she ate with great appetite and pleasure and kept a mental catalog of the best thing she had eaten in every city she had ever lived in.
She learned things about him too, he supposed, or confirmed things already suspected. She told him once, in July, that he was the most consistently kind person she had ever been close to.
He was startled. 'I'm not particularly—' he began.
'You are,' she said. 'Not in a performed way. In the way that you're just — oriented toward the people around you. It's your default. It's not something you decide to do.'
He thought about this for days. He thought about his father, who had been this way — oriented, in the same unperformed, unremarkable way — and about how he had not noticed it until it was gone. He thought about it as a kind of inheritance. He thought about whether inheritance was also, in some sense, a form of presence — the people we have lost, continuing to act through us.
He opened his laptop and wrote four pages of the novel without stopping.