He submitted his letter of resignation to Carver in April, with genuine gratitude for what the place had given him and without regret about the leaving. He went to see the dean, Dr. Harriet Obi, who was seventy years old and had been at Carver for thirty of them and who received the news with the calm of someone who has seen everything and chooses to respond only to what genuinely matters.
'Personal reasons?' she said.
'I'm going to New York,' he said. 'There's someone there.'
She looked at him over her reading glasses with the assessing look that had, he suspected, produced better faculty than any hiring process. 'The novel?' she said, because she knew about the novel.
'Almost done. And then — I'd like to teach again eventually, but in a different city.'
'New York has universities,' she said, as if this were possibly new information.
'It does,' he said.
She was quiet for a moment. Then she said: 'You've been good for this department. Your students like you, which matters less than they think it does, and they learn from you, which matters more than they know. I'm sorry to lose you.' She paused. 'Go. It's the right thing.'
He shook her hand. He went to Tom's office and told him. Tom opened a bottle of whiskey he kept in his desk drawer for occasions of genuine significance and poured two small glasses.
'To moving toward rather than away from,' Tom said.
'To both,' Eliot said. 'That's what I'm learning. It's always both.'
They drank. Tom took one of his knights and turned it in his fingers.
'You know,' Tom said, 'I always thought you were a good defensive player. But you've been making better offensive moves lately.'
'I had a good teacher,' Eliot said.
'You had a good reason,' Tom said.
They played one last game, which Eliot lost, but more slowly and with more creativity than he had before. Tom noted this without saying so. They shook hands. They would remain friends — the kind that persists through geography because it is built on something sufficiently real that it does not require proximity to maintain its structure. This is the other thing love teaches you, when you pay attention: not all the important things require you to be in the room.