The coffee maker in Eliot Voss's apartment had been broken for eleven days. He knew this because he had been counting — not out of frustration, but because counting small things was the way he managed large silences. Eleven days of silence in a two-room apartment that had once, not so long ago, smelled of espresso and cinnamon and a particular brand of shampoo that came in a green bottle and which he could no longer bring himself to throw away.
He was thirty-one years old and he was standing in front of his bathroom mirror at seven in the morning, trying to decide whether any of this — the broken coffee maker, the green bottle, the counting — meant something, or whether it was simply what grief looked like when it did not announce itself, when it crept into the space between ordinary moments and colonized them without warning.
He taught literature at Carver University, a small school wedged into the foothills of western Virginia, where the oaks turned rust-red in October and the students underlined things in their paperback novels with a seriousness that he found both touching and quietly heartbreaking. He had been hired four years ago on the strength of a dissertation about epistolary novels and a published essay on the unreliable narrator. His students called him Professor Voss. His colleagues called him Eliot. His mother called him on Sunday evenings and never quite knew what to say.
He had been, before the silence, a reasonably functional person. He had friends — three of them who counted, which seemed like the appropriate number for a man of thirty-one who spent most of his time with books. He had a colleague named Tom Ashby who taught history and who played chess badly and with great enthusiasm on Wednesday evenings. He had a neighbor, Mrs. Leighton, who was seventy-two and brought him soup when she made too much, which was always. He had a novel he had been trying to write for three years and could not finish, though he kept opening the file and staring at it with the hope of a man who has misplaced something and keeps returning to the last place he remembers having it.
He had also had, until eight months ago, a relationship with a woman named Claire who taught environmental law and who had been kind and sensible and fundamentally incompatible with him in ways that had taken them both two years to fully understand. The ending had been civilized, as endings go. They had handled it like adults. He missed her sometimes, the way you miss a habit — not the person exactly but the shape the person made in your life, the warm vacancy they leave behind.
It was a Tuesday in late September when he first saw her.
✦ ✦ ✦
The faculty lounge on the second floor of Alderman Hall smelled of old carpet and microwaved soup, and Eliot had no particular reason to be there at half past noon. He had forgotten his reading glasses in his mailbox, and the mailboxes were beside the lounge, and so he found himself pushing open a door he rarely used and stepping into a room he mostly avoided, and she was standing at the window.
She was not doing anything remarkable. She was holding a paper cup of tea with both hands and looking out at the quad, where a group of students were throwing a frisbee with athletic incompetence. The light came through the window at an angle that turned everything gold for exactly that hour of that season, the way Virginia light did in late September, and she was standing in the middle of it without seeming to notice.
She was tall, or taller than average, with dark hair pulled back with the carelessness of someone who had done it quickly and forgotten about it. She wore a blue cardigan with a hole at the left elbow. She had a stack of papers tucked under her arm, covered in the precise small marks of someone who notated by hand. She was looking out the window with an expression that was not unhappy, not happy — simply attentive, as if the frisbee students were data worth collecting.
He stood in the doorway for a moment longer than was strictly necessary. He was not a man who believed in things like fate or the significance of arbitrary moments. He believed in literature, in the slow, careful work of understanding, in the value of being present to what was actually happening. And what was actually happening was that he did not want to enter the room or leave it. He wanted to stay in the doorway and observe the particular way the light moved through her without her knowing.
Then she turned from the window and looked at him with the calm, unhurried curiosity of someone who had nothing to prove. He said something clumsy about his reading glasses. She said something kind about the frisbee students. He sat down at the table. She sat across from him. And in the ordinary way of things that are not yet understood to be extraordinary, they began to talk.