On August twenty-eighth, the evening before she left, they cooked dinner together one last time — the Sunday dinner routine in her kitchen, which was now mostly bare, the shelves emptied, the books gone, only the temporary things remaining: the pots she was leaving, the coffee maker, the single mug.
They made pasta — the same as the April conversation, which had not been planned but which felt right, the way repetition in a story feels right, when the same notes return in a different key. She made the sauce; he sliced the bread. They moved around each other in the small kitchen with the choreography they had developed over months, the learned geography of each other's motion, the wordless negotiation of space.
She poured wine. He set two places at the kitchen table, which was the only piece of furniture remaining in the apartment aside from the bed. The absence of the other furniture gave the dinner a strange, formal quality, like eating in a cleared space — which was, he supposed, exactly what it was.
They talked about everything except what was happening. This was not avoidance, not exactly. It was the last ordinary conversation, the final installment of all the ordinary conversations they had been having for a year, and he wanted to honor it by letting it be itself.
She talked about the New York studio apartment she had never seen except in photos — small, she said, but on the fourth floor with a view of Riverside Park and the river. She talked about the Brooklyn studio space where she would work, shared with two other Whitmore fellows, a playwright and a choreographer, neither of whom she knew yet. She talked about the October premiere of the elegy, which had been scheduled at a venue in the West Village, twelve-piece string ensemble, two performances.
He talked about his fall semester — the Melville class, the student thesis on Woolf, a new first-year seminar on the short story that he was designing and which he thought might be the best thing he'd taught. He talked about the novel, which was moving again, which had found something loose and true in its center.
'What changed?' she asked. 'With the novel.'
'You,' he said. 'Knowing you. Or more precisely — learning, from you, what the thing at the center of it was.'
She tilted her head. 'What was it?'
'Grief,' he said. 'But not as an obstacle. As the subject. The thing I was trying to write around was actually the thing I needed to write into.'
She looked at him for a moment. 'That's exactly what happened with the elegy,' she said.
'I know,' he said. 'I think we taught each other the same thing.'
After dinner they sat on the floor of her empty living room — the couch was gone, donated to a colleague — with the last of the wine, and she leaned against him and he put his arm around her, and they were quiet for a long time.
'Tell me about the next year,' he said. 'What you hope for.'
She thought for a while. Then: 'I want to hear the elegy with a full orchestra. I want to hear what it actually sounds like in a real room. I want to know if it's what I thought it was.'
'It is,' he said.
'You don't know that.'
'I heard it. I know.'
She was quiet. Then: 'And for us?'
'What do you hope?' he asked back.
She turned and looked at him, and her face in the dim light of the empty room was the most beautiful and most sorrowful thing he had ever seen. She said: 'I hope we are both brave enough to find out what we are to each other when the geography changes.'
He said: 'I hope so too.'
He held her in the empty room and let the night move past them, and he memorized the weight of her, the warmth, the sound of her breathing. He memorized it the way you memorize things you know you will need to return to.