And so, whenever we passed each other in meetings or in the hallways, there was a kind of strange happiness, as if our private arrangement could be glimpsed there in the indifferent way we acted when we were around other people, or in certain stray words and phrases—appointment, device, attachments, desert island—that might come up in the middle of a meeting, spoken only for me.
The first half of the semester was about to end, and spring break was approaching. Of course, I felt at the time that everything was an anticipation of those nights with Ida in the bright, impersonal rooms of the towering Hyatt on the way to New York. In those days, like a lunatic, I thought that anything anyone said was an allusion to my secret life.
In class the following Monday, John III gave a presentation on A Crystal Age. According to him, utopia in Hudson’s novel consisted precisely in a transparent, neutral, desexualized world, an earthly replica of life in paradise, where sexual difference and desire had no place. John III noted that utopias never knew how to handle the body, and they tended toward worlds without desire because sexual drives operated independently from collective needs and interests, failing to account for equality and indeed often working at its expense. “Pleasure can’t be socialized, and it has no regard for balance,” John III said. “It escapes the logic of economics. For that reason, utopias tend to deny sexuality outright, because they can’t regulate it democratically.” There were sexual utopias, of course, but these were always arrogant and despotic. Rigged lotteries regulating the selection of sexual couples and improving the race in Plato’s Republic; Justine’s desire for philosophical slavery in the novel by Sade; brothels in the life of Bataille; bodies as living currency in Klossowski’s aristocratic exchanges. “Can these regimes organized around sex be called utopias?” John III asked, rhetorically, to conclude his brilliant exposition.
Rachel immediately drew a connection between that ascetic condition and the rejection of belongings, and she read one of Hudson’s letters from 1884: “I do not share your feelings regarding continued ownership and keeping your possessions with you. If someone brings me a cup and saucer to replace a broken set I feel sorry. The less tied I am to any place and the fewer things I possess, the freer and lighter I feel. I believe that lightness is connected to my style: I seek the same dispossession and the same clarity.”
“Divesting oneself of all property, forgetting the body; the great prophets—just think of Tolstoy—chose lives of poverty, asceticism, and nonviolence. They reversed society’s regime of signs,” she concluded, making a tacit reference to her French readings.
The discussion became general, and, while the students were debating and arguing, I thought about my next date with Ida and glimpsed stray images—the white cloth curtains of a room, identical to every other room in the hotel—with the same euphoric feeling I had when I was driving along the road at night and saw in the distance the approaching lights of the Hyatt’s entrance sign and imagined Ida’s ritual as she dressed up in her house and then covered herself in her gray overcoat before venturing out into the street.
At that time I was never able to stop my ideas from revolving around my rendezvous with Ida; they were flashes, visions, as if a projector had been plugged in, searing images into the wall of my mind, of her and me, at once protagonists and observers. They would appear unexpectedly, always set in the future, and my memories from that time are made of that luminous, fragile material.
I was in my office one afternoon, checking calls on the answering machine or responding to emails, and as I was going out to pick up my mail from the department office I ran into Ida in the hallway. She paused for a moment as if she’d been waiting for me and then came into my office. I think we barely spoke at all; I took her in my arms, and we kissed and, quickly, urgently, like two fugitives meeting in the waiting room at a station in the suburbs, we made a date for Friday. It was slightly ridiculous the way we made all of our arrangements in person, face to face, never using any other message or means of communication (not even a handwritten note). “Erase your traces,” Brecht said in a poem. Spring break was starting on Friday and there were no classes the following week, so we could meet in the hotel for a couple of days and spend the rest of the week in New York. Ida had set down a book and some papers on the table and was searching for something in her jacket pocket, but at that moment someone knocked at the door and she quickly separated and moved away from me. It was John III, who greeted us with a calm air and apologized at once for the interruption, but she said she was already leaving and walked out past us. “See you at the department meeting tomorrow,” she said on her way out. I spent a while talking with John about his presentation in class but realized that Ida had left her papers on the desk, and so I spent the whole time trying to distract him, as if Ida’s papers were a trace of something forbidden. It was nothing, just a book by Conrad, a folder with a list of lectures for the second half of the semester, and a letter from a student explaining his absence from class with a doctor’s note.
The next day, I went to the department committee meeting. Ida was already there, with her relaxed and absent quality. There were six professors, and we sat around a large oak table in a room with wide picture windows. Don arrived a short while later, and we began. We discussed exam dates and a few budgetary matters, and everything was going along
