Three years after she drove away from the faculty housing parking lot in the September light, Eliot sat at his desk in the apartment on Riverside Drive on a Sunday afternoon and tried to take stock of what had been lost and what had remained.
Lost: Carver University, the specific shape of that institutional life, the particular pleasure of the faculty lounge at half past noon, the Wednesday chess games with Tom (though they still played online with approximately the same result), Mrs. Leighton's soup (though she sent recipes, occasionally, by actual mail, which he found touching beyond what he could easily explain). The green bottle of shampoo, which he had eventually thrown away, not as an act of forgetting but as an act of having moved far enough forward that the holding was no longer necessary. The novel's three-year weight, which was gone, completely, in the way that only finished things are gone.
Lost also, though in a different category: certain things from before. The shape of his father in the world. The particular quality of Sundays before he knew what Sundays could be. The version of himself who could not finish things, who circled the center of the difficult rather than entering it.
Remained: his mother, steady and plain-spoken in Ohio, who had met Mara once in a long weekend visit and had said, afterward, privately to him: 'She's serious. I mean that well.' Remained: Tom, who was writing a book about the Pittsburgh steel strikes of the 1950s and who sent updates with the regularity of someone who understood that friendship required maintenance and was worth maintaining. Remained: the novel, in its published form, on the shelf, with its dedication. Remained: Mara's listening journal, returned to her after the year, now back in his hands because she had said: 'Keep it. You'll want to read the new parts eventually.'
Remained: Mara herself, at the keyboard in the morning light, making something out of what the world gave her. This was the central remaining. This was what the accounting always came back to.
He thought of the elegy, of its fifth movement, of the resolution she had described and composed and premiered in a small room in the West Village. He thought of the thing the music had said about loss and presence and the difference between erasure and absence.
He picked up his pen and began to write.