(Thanks to those of you who have read and commented and hopefully enjoyed so far. I have to confess to a continuity error; there was something in the first chapter about a university literary magazine that can be disregarded. I mixed up my drafts. I graciously beg your apology and ask that you erase that from your memory as we go back a little bit in this chapter.)
Calvin was twenty-three years old, in the second year of his master's degree, and, if not entirely happy, he was secure in his purpose. He believed in his own abilities and intelligence, and life as yet had not sent him any serious reasons to doubt either. He had the assured disposition of a person doing exactly what he wanted to do, and the stubbornness of any believer wholeheartedly committed to a cause--in this case, his own ambition. He sometimes infuriated people because of that, sometimes also invited ire just for his particular combination of talent and privilege. But he was kind, enthusiastic about what interested him, generous as a teacher, and woefully bad at lying or hiding his opinions.
What had been hardest about his life up to then had been loneliness. Sometimes he reproached himself for living such a monkish existence during what were supposed to be the best years of his life, in a city full of young people his age carousing at bars and sporting events and concerts every night. He had acquaintances, colleagues, but no one he was truly close to. With women he simply hadn't had the luck. Or at least he told himself that's what it was. After all, he wasn't bad-looking; he was tall and built broad, with a thatch of sandy hair. He did wear glasses, and he probably didn't shave as often as he should have, but he never figured it really mattered. He'd been interested in a few people, and a few people had been interested in him, but they weren't the same ones, unfortunately. Timing and fate simply hadn't matched him up with anyone yet. Though he was beginning to wonder why it had to take so long.
That was one amusing piece of luck: that when he met Ginny, he wasn't searching for a date. He was searching for a text.
If Calvin did have one person who could be considered a close friend, the title would probably fall on his office mate, Assif. It was Assif who dragged him to the bookstore in Cambridge back in August. The shop was practically in a back alley, one of the tiny winding streets that served as a horse path when redcoats were still running around the north bank of the Charles. When Cal peered through the plate-glass window he saw that the place only had room for four rows of folding chairs. There might have been room for another near the front, but a large chunk of the floor near the cash register was taken up by what appeared to be a snoozing wolf.
"This is the worst idea you've ever had," he told Assif.
"No, no, no. Sharing an office with you was the worst idea I ever had." Assif smiled, revealing nicotine-stained teeth. He continued, in the peculiar cadence that endeared him to Calvin, "This is nothing. This will not fill my days with the melodies of your personal discontent."
"We'll see about that."
They pushed in through the small blue door, one at a time, Assif lingering behind him as if he expected Cal to turn around and bolt. Above them a string of bells tinkled in a shimmer of F-sharps, slightly high to Calvin's perfectly-pitched ear. In such a small space, the group of maybe a dozen and a half people really felt like a crowd. A smattering of people who seemed to fit in no particular category were in the store: art student types, a young man with dreadlocks, an elderly couple in identical brown rain coats, and an attractive girl with a mane of the brightest unnaturally red hair he'd ever seen.
He and Assif took seats in the row farthest from the small podium next to the slumbering beast. The proprietor, a middle-aged woman with short graying hair and clunky metal jewelry who reminded Cal of his mother, clapped her hands. "Welcome," she said. There was no further preamble; the young man with dreadlocks rose with a notebook and began reading his poetry. Three words in, Cal knew that whatever he was looking for, this wasn't it.
Just what "it" was that he was looking for had no clear definition. That was part of the problem. All summer he'd been poring through books of all shapes and sizes. He was starting to run out of time if he wanted a completed, symphony-length piece for his master's thesis. Thankfully, his advisor, Katzoulas, an eighty-two year old Professor Emeritus and the only faculty member who would work with Calvin, didn't insist on deadlines. People said Katzoulas was half-senile anyway. Calvin didn't think so - he thought Katzoulas was brilliant, but then, Calvin was aware that some people thought he was also half-senile. He didn't particularly care. He was too busy looking for a text.
"Just pick something!" Assif would fume at him, dismayed to step into their shared office, a room the size of a walk-in closet, and find each day yet more books, as if the tomes were mating like rabbits in the night. "You have the wealth of world literature in your hands and none of it's good enough."
"It's good--well, some of it. It's just not right."
"And what is right, hmm? What does that mean, right?"
How could he explain? It wasn't as if there were a checklist. It had to have a rhythm, an internal logic, a spareness that he could work with. A spark. A language all its own that could communicate in tandem with his own. "I'll know it when I read it."
But he had, at that point, read an awful lot. There was more poetry in the world than he'd imagined. And he'd read so much of it, even some absolute doggerel. Then Assif had seized on an idea that would at least get the books out of his way.
"What about poetry that hasn't been published yet?"
"If it hasn't been published, it probably isn't any good."
"Oh? Because your work has been published, yes? Remind me, Calvin - are you in the Kalmus catalog, or is it Schurmer?"
The appeal to his ego was a good one, a sharp blow that he had to respect. "Fine, then. Find me some unpublished poetry and I'll take a look."
"Rather a listen, I should think."
So there they were, crammed into a small bookstore with a struggling air-conditioner while the elderly woman in the raincoat read tightly rhymed lines about gardening with her grandchildren. The woman took her seat to the same polite applause that had greeted everyone else, and Assif patted Cal on the shoulder before disappearing out the tinkling door for a cigarette while the girl with unnatural hair rose from her chair.
She introduced herself as a student at Calvin's university. "I only have one tonight," she said, her voice clear and a little cold. She had a few neatly folded pages in her hand and she read from them with a soft and nuanced inflection. The way her voice shaped the words was almost painful. It made Calvin sink back down into his seat. And then the words washed over him. There were patterns, it seemed like she had rules, but he didn't quite know what they were. There were a few lines in crisp German, later a few in languid French. He didn't need to know what every word meant; it was the rhythm, the cadence, that drew him in. Nominally the poem was about a dead child; but like many poems, it touched worlds.
The applause seemed more tepid, more perfunctory; Calvin saw the elderly couple frowning as if it were a bad note to end on. He supposed that child mortality would be a hard act to follow a lilting paean to the pleasures of grandchildren, and for a moment admired the young woman all the more for not hesitating, not saying a word to mitigate the discomfort.
As people started to rise and fill the awkward silence with their small talk and shuffling, he extended his long legs to step over two rows of chairs. She was looking down, putting the folded pages into her small black leather bag, and when he said, "Can I have a look at that?" she glanced up in surprise.
