They did see each other in the faculty lounge again — twice the following week, and then with an increasing frequency that could only be described, in retrospect, as inevitable. The faculty lounge became their unofficial meeting place, though neither of them declared it so. They simply kept arriving there at roughly the same time on the days when their schedules aligned, which was four days a week, and then sitting across from one another and picking up wherever they had left off.
There was nothing formal about it. There were no arrangements. It was the organic geometry of two people moving toward each other the way water moves downhill — not because anyone asked it to, but because it is the nature of the terrain.
By the middle of October, Eliot knew the following things about Mara Cielo: She woke at five in the morning to write music, before the day inserted itself. She was allergic to cats but loved them anyway and kept visiting them at the shelter downtown when she needed comfort. She had been engaged once, briefly, at twenty-nine, to a cellist named Daniel, and she did not speak of the engagement's end in terms of catastrophe but rather in terms of an honest incompatibility — two people who had loved each other but had wanted different things and had, finally, been brave enough to say so.
She read poetry in translation, particularly Pablo Neruda and Anna Akhmatova. She cried at films about animals. She could whistle any melody after hearing it once. She kept a small notebook in every bag she owned and wrote things in it at random intervals — observations, fragments of melody, words that interested her — in handwriting so small it required effort to read. She had strong opinions about coffee and flexible opinions about most everything else.
He told her things in return that he had told very few people. He told her about his father, who had died two years ago of a heart attack while mowing the lawn on an ordinary Saturday, and about how the ordinariness of it — the lawn, the Saturday, the mundane container for an enormous loss — was the thing he could not make peace with. He told her about the novel he had been trying to write for three years and could not finish, about the hollow feeling of standing before students who were waiting to be given something he was not sure he had left to give.
She listened to all of it with the focused attention of someone who understood that listening was not passive, that it required the full deployment of the self. She did not offer solutions. She did not redirect. She simply held the space around what he said and let it exist without rushing to fill it.
'You're still grieving,' she said one afternoon, of his father, with no judgment in it, simply recognition.
'I know,' he said.
'Grief is like fog,' she said. 'It doesn't lift. You just learn to move through it.'
He thought of her childhood coast, the Pacific fog dissolving the edges of the world every morning, and understood that she was not speaking in metaphor.
✦ ✦ ✦
One Tuesday she brought him a recording on her phone — a string quartet she had been listening to obsessively, Shostakovich's Eighth, which she said she returned to when she needed to understand what music could hold. They sat in the faculty lounge with an earbud each, her phone on the table between them, and listened to the first two movements.
He had never been a patient listener of classical music. He had always felt slightly excluded by it, as if there were a language being spoken that he could not parse. But sitting there with Mara, with her face tilted slightly down and her eyes closed and the smallest motion of her hand against the table, he found that he could follow it — not technically, not with any vocabulary, but emotionally, the way you follow weather, by the change in the air.
When the second movement ended she opened her eyes and looked at him. 'Well?' she said.
He was honest. 'I don't know what to call what just happened,' he said, 'but something happened.'
She smiled. 'That's the most honest review Shostakovich has gotten in this building, I'd wager.'
'He's saying something enormous,' Eliot said, still trying to find language for it. 'About surviving something. About — the cost of what you carry.'
She looked at him with the quality of attention she brought to things that mattered. 'Yes,' she said, quietly. 'That's exactly what he's saying.'