What He's Poised to Do

“What? Wait.” She heard shuffling on the line. “Damn it. I brought you the wrong issue. You have November and that article is in December. I’ll bring it the next time I see you.”

“Or the time after that,” she said. “No hurry.” She had time. Time had been returned to her. And now she had something to fill it. When she hung up the phone with Boatman, she went immediately to the suitcase she had brought from Seattle, which was now serving as a kind of bookcase. She pushed through until she found the slim green volume of Hebert’s work. She knew it by heart, almost, from the first sentence of the first essay (“It is lost to history who made one of the truer observations regarding our perceptual abilities”) through the final sortie of those early years, “The Notepad and the Dictionary: Writing Down as a Form of Looking Up.” She reread his work on the couch. She took the book to bed. She read in the bath. Hebert was with her everywhere, more than a lover was.

ON THE AFTERNOON OF HEBERT’S FIRST READING, weather threatened and then made good on its threat in the evening. By eight the streets were drenched, but there was no way she would be dissuaded. She had thought about asking Boatman to go with her—he was responsible, in a sense—but that ran counter to her ultimate goal.

Hebert looked as he looked on the promotional poster, which was a surprise. Usually such figures submitted outdated pictures of themselves out of vanity, but this one seemed accurate to within a few years. His hairline had receded early, and his skin was not so fine as a young man’s. He held an unlit cigarette and waggled it around in a way that was comically French. He read a pair of short pieces, performed one longer one, and then read a new essay. “I have come back to my home country after a span of nearly a decade and found its character patently obvious from the first steps off the airplane,” he said. “There is a poverty of minor detail and a surfeit of broad strokes, which makes it perfect for philosophy but in some way unsuited to artwork.” Behind Deborah, a woman murmured and said, in nearly inaudible gospel, “C’est vrai, dites-leur, c‘est vrai.”

Afterward there was a reception. Hebert stood in the corner of the lobby where the walls were covered with a growing collection of posters for all the artists who had played at the club. He was directly beneath the poster for a band named Lowest Lane, whose lead singer was a woman who had filed her teeth to fangs. His cigarette was lit now. He seemed to need it. Deborah approached him.

“Will you sign this?”

“This is an old edition,” he said. His tone was gentler than she had expected. “You don’t see them very frequently.”

“Well, I remember buying it in the bookstore in Seattle, during college.”

“Ah,” he said. “Seattle. A place I’ll never be.”

“You were there in spirit,” she said, “through your book.” She was laying it on thick, but that’s what you were supposed to do. “You are in the city now?”

“I am.”

She circled around. She showed leg when leg needed to be shown. She asked him where he was staying, and nodded approvingly. “Would you like to see it?” he said, and she did not answer right away, as if she was surprised, which allowed Hebert to feign a moment of embarrassment even as he was emboldened. Outside in the still-rainy night, the sky was many shades of gray. Hebert called a taxicab, one shade of yellow. At intervals he began to speak, and each time she cocked her head to show that she was listening. She took his hand in his hotel as they rode up in the elevator. The way to do it, she kept thinking, is just to do it. It reminded her of a sentence of his—“Opportunities will not represent themselves unless they are re-created and re-produced, and by that time they are less opportunities than products that carry the sense of opportunity”—and that made her laugh. She stifled her laugh by putting his hand in her mouth.

Hebert, though one of the sharpest and most original of modern thinkers, was uncomfortable in bed. His movements were sudden and seemed to have little to do with his pleasure. Deborah had always taken pride in her body, particularly in bed. It was one of the rare places where she could dominate and seem submissive. Here, though, she felt she was risking injury to Hebert. After working the bed from head to foot, they made their way to the couch. She sat there naked. He occupied the end closer to the window. “Do you believe that humans have bird songs?” he said. “By that I mean, do you think each of us has a native melody that, unsung or sung, represents us like a fingerprint?”