What she is thinking: it is her nature to be ambivalent, and it is his to be ardently attached. This worries her. She fears she will hurt him. Of course she can’t say that. (If he were thinking it, he would ineptly say it. But he wouldn’t think it.) She wonders if her comment sprang from a regret for lost time. If so, it’s mainly regret that she’s getting older. Maybe regret that their twelve-year age difference doesn’t mean anything, now that she’s no spring chicken. Regret that no fellow old codger will look at them in a restaurant and grossly give Mark the thumbs-up for scoring such a young hottie.
She considers the possibility that, as she’s getting older, she values sexiness less. Sexiness always has an element of mystery, and there’s nothing mysterious about him. Maybe what she values now is crystal clarity, rather than the soft blur of romance. She’s grown impatient with mating games. Spit it out! Time’s a wastin’! She trusts completely that he will always tell her whatever he’s thinking, that he will never lie to her. It makes her feel safe. Someone might say—maybe she would say it herself—that that’s what a father figure does. But she would like to think that that’s also what a partner should do. There’s something so unsexy about it, it’s kind of kinky.
She says, “I’ve wondered if Mette, when she took off like that, had an ulterior motive without being aware of it. You know, the heart has its reasons, which Reason knows not.”
“Isn’t that Pascal?”
“Yeah, you know him because he was a mathematician.”
“You’re probably right.”
“Anyway, speaking of Mette’s reasons, you can pick your movie version. Would you rather be Brian Keith or Dennis Quaid?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“ILYGTFY.”
“Still lost.”
“I’ll Let You Google That For Yourself.”
“Hey, Professor,” one of the young men calls. “How long did you say totality will be?”
“Two minutes, thirty-seven seconds.”
“Why does it vary?”
He gets up and goes to them, happy as a clam. She stays where she is. The heat seems slightly less intense, but not enough yet. She thinks ahead to the rehearsals for Joan, Maid, which (egad! fuck!) she is indeed directing at the SoHo theater whose artistic director she calmly convinced, or maybe cajoled, stalked, and overwhelmed. In the movies, long-gestating artistic endeavors by the protagonist are always rewarded. The excruciatingly squeezed-out first novel becomes a best seller, the edgy smartphone movie made on a shoestring conquers Sundance. Whereas in this sublunary world she’s still not sure whether her play is any good, and even if it’s good, critics may dislike it for capricious or malicious reasons, and even if critics like it, it will probably not run long, nor make any money, as few plays do. The fact is, artistic careers are an uncertain trudge, with no discernible narrative arc.
• • •
The bright light is fractionally lessening. One of the young men says, “Listen, you can hear crickets. They’re getting fooled by the eclipse.”
“Those are cicadas,” Mark says. For the umpteenth time he marvels at all the simple things people don’t notice. Cicadas sound nothing like crickets. These fellows remind him of many of his students nowadays: polite, breezy, uncaringly ignorant of their ignorance. But that’s yet another old-fart thought, so he banishes it and peers again through the welder’s glass. The sun now looks like a crescent moon. Approximately twenty minutes to go.
He adores solar eclipses. He spoke unkindly of eclipse chasers to Saskia this morning, but he’s one, too. He has unblushingly finagled half a dozen free rides on ocean eclipse cruises as the eminent lecturer. His only difference from most other chasers is his desire to be alone when the event happens. To hoard it all to himself, he supposes. He glances briefly at Saskia, then returns to the crescent. Well, no, now he’s being unfair to himself. His desire to be alone at important phenomenological moments arises, he’s pretty sure, from the fact that he can’t concentrate properly on external events when he’s in close proximity with another person. This is especially true when the person in question is someone he cares about. He hopes Saskia understands that. When he’s near her, most of his thoughts revolve around her.
It pains him that his mother died with a bad opinion of Saskia. “I’ll never understand what’s wrong with that woman,” was the way she invariably phrased it. How could anyone not love her Marky-lark? He’s thankful that his mother loved him, but her doting locked out Susan, and it might have also locked out Saskia, even if she and Mark had become a couple twenty-three years ago. How could anyone be good enough for her Marky-lark? His mother tended to see everything as absolutes of light and dark.
As far as he knows, she never got to witness a total eclipse. He remembers being ten, standing on the back porch of the Massachusetts house with a pinhole camera made out of two sheets of paper. It was the eclipse of March 7, 1970, and his family could have experienced totality if they had only driven the ninety miles to Woods Hole and taken the ferry to Nantucket. But he can easily imagine his father expressing horror at the thought of all those cars backed up at the Sagamore Bridge, with another traffic jam waiting outside the gates of the Steamship Authority. “It’ll be the biggest mess you ever saw,” he would have said, and that would have ended discussion. So they stayed in Lexington and he and his parents—who knows where Susan was—stood on the back porch with their punctured papers, and although the eclipse at that location was 96.5 percent of totality, Mark was astonished, and crushingly disappointed, at how little difference it made in the general light level. Equivalent to a storm cloud passing. Looking back, he wonders whether, or how much,
