After the premiere there was a small gathering at a bar near the venue, and Mara was surrounded by people — musicians and composers and critics and the foundation staff and a cluster of enthusiastic, slightly overwhelmed audience members who had waited to speak to her.
He stood to the side with a glass of wine and watched her move through the room with the ease of someone in her element. She was different here than she was in the faculty lounge or the kitchen or the parking lot — not more herself, but a different facet of herself, the professional dimension, the public face of the private work. She was gracious and present and a little bit electric, the way people are when they have just offered something significant and it has been received.
Tom Whitfield, the Whitmore Foundation's director, spoke to her for several minutes with what appeared to be genuine excitement. The ensemble's first violinist shook her hand with both of his. A young woman with a notebook who was, apparently, writing a review for a music journal asked careful questions that Mara answered with equal care.
He watched all of it and felt for her a love so uncomplicated and so free of need that it surprised him, almost, by its cleanness. He did not need her to be anything other than what she was. He did not need her to be in Carver, Virginia, at his table on Sunday evenings. He needed her to be herself, and she was — here, tonight, doing the thing she was made to do — entirely herself.
This was not peace with loss. This was something more complicated: the recognition that loving a person and being their home were not the same act, and that both could be true.
She found him at the edge of the room eventually, after the crowd had thinned, and she leaned against the wall beside him with her wine glass and they stood in comfortable silence.
'What did you think?' she asked finally.
'I think it's one of the finest things I've ever experienced,' he said. 'I think you should be very proud. I think everyone who ever heard you say you couldn't find the ending should hear what you found.'
She laughed. 'What do you want to do now?' she said. 'Do you want to stay and talk to people, or—'
'I want to walk,' he said. 'In the city. With you.'
'Yes,' she said immediately. She set down her glass. She said goodbye to the people she needed to say goodbye to, quickly and warmly. She came back with her coat.
They walked out into the West Village night, which was cold and bright and full of the city's particular atmosphere, the sense of the whole enormous organism breathing around them. They walked without a destination, through the streets and then north toward the river, and she told him about the six months — the studio in Brooklyn, the foundation's community of artists, the emerging friendship with the playwright who shared the studio, a woman named Soo-Jin Park who wrote dark comedies and baked compulsively and had, apparently, appointed herself Mara's social director.
He told her about the novel. He was two-thirds through the final draft.
'Read me something,' she said.
'What?'
'Read me a piece of it. Right now. On the street.'
He laughed. 'I don't have it with me.'
'You have it in your head. You always have whatever you're working on in your head. I know this about you.'
He thought for a moment. Then, walking north on the dark street with the city around them, he recited from memory a paragraph he had written the previous week — a passage about a man standing at his father's grave and understanding, for the first time, that the grief had always contained the love and that this was not a consolation but a fact, a piece of arithmetic that changed the nature of the equation.
When he stopped, they walked in silence for a moment.
'That's very good,' she said. 'That's — that's the thing that the elegy is trying to do. Exactly.'
'I know,' he said. 'I think we've been writing the same thing in different languages.'
She stopped walking. She turned and looked at him in the streetlight — that long, searching, serious look.
She said: 'Eliot. What are we doing?'
'Walking north,' he said.
'Be serious.'
'I am serious,' he said. 'I don't know what we're doing. I know that I'm here, and you're here, and the city is very large and cold, and I don't want to be anywhere else right now.'
She looked at him for another moment. Then she said: 'Okay. Let's keep walking.'
They kept walking. The city went on around them, immense and indifferent and entirely beautiful.