The fall semester began on the Tuesday after Labor Day, and the work resumed — the classrooms, the students, the stacks of ungraded papers, the committee meetings, the steady professional occupation of a life — and Eliot understood, with a clarity he had not expected, that the work was good. That teaching literature to twenty-year-olds who were beginning to read seriously was a real thing, a thing that mattered, a container for the self.
He taught the Melville seminar. He taught the first-year short story seminar, which was, as he had anticipated, the best thing he'd done in the classroom in two years. He advised Yolanda Chang's thesis on Woolf, which was becoming something genuinely interesting, more interesting than she seemed to know.
He did not go to the faculty lounge on Tuesdays at half past noon, at first. Then he did — not to look for her, or with the morbid logic of mourning, but because the room had become his room too, over the course of the year, and he was not going to forfeit it to its previous status as a place he mostly avoided.
He sat at the table where they had always sat, with his coffee and whatever he was reading, and he let the room be empty in the way that rooms are when a person who has been in them is gone. He did not try to fill it. He simply sat in it. The light came through the window at the same angle in the same season, and it was the same color it always was, gold and particular, and he let it be that.
He called Mara on the Sunday of her first weekend in New York. She answered from Riverside Drive, her voice slightly breathless from the stairs — the elevator in the building was temperamental. She described the apartment: small, bright, with the river view she'd hoped for. She described the neighborhood, the park in the morning, the bookstore on Broadway she had already found and spent an hour in.
'How is it?' he asked, meaning more than the apartment.
'Enormous,' she said. 'The city. It keeps happening in all directions at once. I'd forgotten.' A pause. 'I'm glad to be here. I miss you.'
'I miss you too,' he said.
They talked for an hour and twenty minutes. He did not look at the time until they had hung up, and then he was surprised by how much of the evening had passed, and also by how much lighter the apartment felt afterward — not her absence filled, but acknowledged, given its proper form.