“We were?”
“Totally.” She winks at Michael and walks away. Michael consciously avoids following Bernice’s path across the room, but Wendy notes the way the waitress’s feet hardly seem to leave the floor, gliding around patrons and tables as if she’s wearing slicked socks or roller skates. She wonders whether Bernice sees something in Michael that Wendy’s missing. Could his rap group possibly be good?
“Well that was random,” says Michael, trying to play it cool, though he secretly hopes Wendy will want to harp on the subject and push toward a more in-depth discussion of his musical ambitions.
“Random indeed,” says Wendy. She inspects her salad: skimpy. Rachel would approve. She sips her wine. Michael cuts into his steak. He feels Wendy watching and tries not to make noise. As a child, he was always being reproached for chewing too loudly. Wendy pokes at her salad, takes a long sip of wine. She says, “So where were you?”
“I was outside your apartment,” says Michael, realizing as he says it that there’s still food in his mouth. He finishes chewing, which takes a moment because the pressure to finish makes his throat feel swollen shut. “I was circling your block until you came out.”
“No, I mean where were you? You know, where were you?”
“Oh,” says Michael. “You mean then.”
“Then.”
Michael wonders if he should lie and say he was downtown, sleeping off a hangover at Ricky’s new place. He could say he heard the first plane and saw the second, and though he didn’t run into any burning buildings to save strangers from the flames, he at least, like, assisted rescue workers by doing whatever people do when they assist rescue workers, presumably standing slightly out of the way, like a spectator at a marathon, handing small bottles of water to the firemen.
“Sleeping,” says Michael. “I actually slept right through it.”
“I went to class,” says Wendy. “I knew already, I saw it online. But then I didn’t know what to do, so I went to class.”
This is not exactly accurate. In a purely intellectual sense she understood the protocol, understood upon passing the Lerner Student Center and seeing the dozens of students huddled around a television, that she was meant to join in their nervous pacing and hugging and futile attempts to call anyone who might be downtown. And yet, Wendy refused to accept the campus’s instantaneous transition. To accept it was to concede the proximity of the attacks, to concede the very real impact of what had already become a world-historical event. So she went to class.
“What class?”
“Do you know Professor Green?”
“Elizabeth Green, yeah.” Everyone knew Elizabeth Green, the hotshot young lit prof.
“Everyone knows her.”
“I have her for Brit lit,” says Wendy.
“Huh,” says Michael.
“Huh what?”
“I don’t know,” says Michael. “Is it a good class?”
“Well she hates Brit lit. That’s basically what I’ve learned so far.”
This is not a dig against Elizabeth, so much as a statement one might apply to most professors in the English department who share an unspoken antagonism toward the source texts—novels—that they treat as data sets. Wendy’s not opposed to theory in theory, and she finds her lit classes more substantive than, say, her wishy-washy nonfiction workshop in which the students read aloud from their choicest sufferings and cry on each other’s shoulders, but there is something about the deconstructionist view of literature that she finds unsettling. It feels to Wendy that her classes provide a whole-earth satellite view of the books they read, and that, by attempting to see the larger picture, they’re sacrificing a truer, more complex comprehension to be gained from a series of close zooms.
When she interviewed at the ad agency last week, one thing that struck her was the deceptive simplicity of the poster campaigns that decorated the office. One ad in particular has stuck in her mind, a magazine spread that somehow managed, with a single photograph of two kids eating ice-cream cones on a brownstone stoop, to capture the exact feel of a New York summer day, and to create an indelible link between that feeling and the brand of ice cream being advertised. It was the details—the perfectly achieved messiness of the girl’s hair, or the way the boy had one sock pulled halfway up his knee while the other bunched by his ankle—that made the image not just familiar but some kind of ideal, a snapshot that, instead of representing a single moment, encapsulated the paradox of a childhood lost to time, yet somehow still alive in the milky promise of this particular ice cream.
“Oh,” says Michael, who wonders if he, himself, should offer an opinion on the validity of Brit lit as a subject, and, if so, what that opinion should be.
“Anyway, nine eleven was our second class meeting,” continues Wendy. “Only a couple people showed up. I was one. Elizabeth was the other.”
Michael is trying to eat and listen to what Wendy’s saying at the same time, but multitasking is not his forte, and it doesn’t help that Bernice is in the background, slightly swaying as another of the waiters, or maybe a cook, tunes one of the mandolin-like instruments and shuffles out a test melody. Bernice appears to be looking at Michael, but it may be an illusion, some trick of shadow and candlelight. He focuses on Wendy.
“So it’s just you two in class?”
“It was just the two of us. But we didn’t acknowledge it.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. I guess I thought it was her job to say something. But she just started lecturing.”
“So what did you do?”
“I took out my notebook.”
“That’s crazy,” says Michael, though he’s become distracted again by Bernice, or if not by Bernice, herself, then by the future she’s opened, a future in which he’s a recognizable celebrity and women approach him in public to flirt.
Another of the staff has set up a drum and is beating it in time with the not-mandolin. Bernice laughs and shakes her shoulders. She waves jazz fingers at the men.
“Fado,” Wendy says. “That’s the name of
