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“And so, we see that, in Proust,” Martin said, concluding his lecture and checking his laptop for the time, dreading the rush-hour commute already—two stops following the descent down the concrete, then the Via Rail back to Guelph: “What we call desire is the mind and body’s reckoning with the fact of our inability to ever fully know another person. Swann’s suffering is brought on by the limitations imposed upon his perceptions: he conjures Odette only from fragments, and he suffers for this kind of love; it is the parts of her life that are absent that make it impossible to imagine a life and a future without her.”

Martin was thirty-four, which felt to him like being too young to feel completely settled in his course of life, but also too old to admit that he wasn’t, not in the slightest. He had been married to Helen for almost five years by then. Five years, he realized, as if for the first time. Half a decade. He mourned those lost, perfect days of their earliest years together. The conversation was good, the sex was still amazing, but though he knew she had loved him faithfully ever since, he had wondered about his love for Helen for some time. He’d doubted the marriage early—within the first year—as soon as he’d realized that hurting her would be far more painful than losing her, even if it meant being free of her burden; and so, he had learned to call his mistake “love.”

Reminding the students of the next week’s reading and essay topic, he wrote upon the board, in bold caps:

THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF POSSESSION SUSTAINS DESIRE.

When he turned back to the rows of students, he saw that Clara—his T.A. for the French Literature survey—was writing something on the printout of the passage his slides were currently projecting. She was twenty-six—a freshman PhD student—whom he’d had no doubts since meeting would undoubtedly go on to do great things, recently returned to university after several years of work in publishing. He remembered from their introductory conversation, too, that she’d completed her Master’s in Paris, at the Sorbonne, submitting her first graduate thesis on Flaubert.

He’d made a move on her, it was true, when he’d invited her out to Einstein’s for a drink, writing, in his email, that it could be “an opportunity to discuss the syllabus and general flow of the course, besides the general T.A. workload.” She had the nervous, girlish kind of attention that seemed to invite at least some light flirtation.

He found himself entirely wrapped round, by turns, that evening in details like the dark strand of hair that escaped hold of her ear, and slipped down her cheek until she gently returned it back into place; then the pale insides of her wrists where her sleeves slipped back. He was saying something—right in the middle of speaking—he could not remember what—even if he knew, even in the act of speaking it, that it was something he was likely to regret—when she’d first interrupted him, veering him off course, and eventually naming her boyfriend. To Clara’s credit, she never spoke of the incident again.

With the late-afternoon class finally drawn to a close and the students filing out, he looked back at Helen’s message and typed that he’d be leaving momentarily. No faculty meeting; no need to stay and plan, mark, or write reports to the department head from his office. He’d be home in time for dinner, he said, aware that the smile and heart emojis he’d punctuated the messages with meant nothing.

Of all the students, Clara stood least, and as she rose and turned, bending over to unplug her computer, his eyes fell once more on the dark ribbon of hair that fell to her cheek, the pale insides of her wrists, the easy smile and tender wave as she left.

Sighing, smoothing out the sheets, he put his notes back in his briefcase, then he looked toward the door.

—“And, so we see that, in Proust . . . ”

The words hurt when they arose in memory now.

And so, having understood nothing he had not already known, he went home, where he would continue to call what awaited him there “love.”

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Null Point

Fiction, poetry, author interviews, and personal essays by Brock Eldon

By Brock Eldon

The Commonplace Book

Essays on Books, Film, and Culture.

By Brock Eldon

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For years my mother told the same story about the afternoon I almost drowned in the quarry, a disused limestone pit cut into the edge of the town, chalk walls breaking away in pale, crumbling shelves, the water at the bottom green, perpetually motionless—even in the worst Grey County winds, through gales off Lake Huron that come in off the water and flatten the fields. She never waited for anyone to ask: she just told it—over birthdays, Christmas dinners, to the neighbors we’d only just met, laughing all the while—before she reached the frightening part, because she already knew the ending. I loved listening to it, like children love any story wherein they occupy the starring role. I loved it even when it changed each time: the color of my shirt, the number of boys on the bank, whether or not she heard my shouting from the road, and because I heard it so often I began correcting other people whenever they remembered it differently. No, there were only two boys; no, Mum jumped in immediately; no, I was only under for a few seconds. It was only after she died—after the eulogy, when people had begun folding up the chairs and carrying their half-finished plates back into the church hall—that an aunt touched my arm and asked whether my mother had ever told me what had really happened that afternoon—that before anyone else arrived she had already been there in the quarry with me, and that the men who pulled me out had first had to pull her away because she would not let go, because even after I began struggling she kept forcing me back down beneath the surface. I cannot stop hearing her cries, her disbelief as they dragged her away, the grief that must have followed—and what haunts me isn’t the possibility that my mother once tried to drown me but that I can no longer remember the story without hearing myself interrupt it, softening it, pausing where she paused, laughing where she laughed, helping her to remember it in the only way she could.

Null Point

Fiction, poetry, author interviews, and personal essays by Brock Eldon

By Brock Eldon

The Commonplace Book

Essays on Books, Film, and Culture.

By Brock Eldon

Read more

Read more