I ran into an old professor of mine outside Argosy Bookstore in Manhattan. It was raining. I always feel bad holding people up in the rain, but, as I see it, professors sign lifetime contracts to their students; they’re forever bound to hearing about students’ postgraduate activities, authors and scholars they’ve “discovered”, exhibitions they’d seen, critiques they’ve read, et cetera. They must be ready at any moment to listen to a former student talk as if their class never ended and their relationship was always relevant.
Mr. Magritte stood underneath the bookstore’s awning buttoning his coat. From underneath my umbrella, I recognized his famously derelict brown loafers. He hadn’t changed at all.
I told him about the relatively uninteresting few months after graduation, the freelancing I did for Greenwich Magazine, and the new thoughts I had about Renior. I expected none of these topics to interest him but appreciated the decency with which he listened. When he seemed eager to be disinvited from underneath my umbrella, I saved him the trouble and said I was running late. We shook hands and walked in opposite directions like two counting paces in a duel.
Before I reached the end of the block, however, he tapped my shoulder and invited me for a drink. He was only in town until Monday before a trip to Boston with his wife for an exhibition that, he exaggeratedly said, “featured her name somewhere.” I accepted, and the next evening we met downtown.
Mr. Magritte arrived in the same clothes I saw him in the day before. When he joined me at the counter, he took his coat off only after sitting down, awkwardly maneuvering it from underneath him. He leaned in to say he hadn’t been this far downtown in twenty years and I could smell on his breath that, sometime ago, he’d already begun drinking.
After talking about the college and where the discipline of English was headed – he predicted an “apocalypse of language” – he began to speak about himself in a way that reminded me I was no longer his student; for the remainder of the night, I was a boy-confidant to a man with whom I shared a classroom once a week many, many years ago.
“Things weren’t always this way,” he said, jumping to the subject of his wife. “How so?”
“I used to be in love. In it. Have you ever been in it?”
“I believe I am now.”
“Then you aren’t. You aren’t ever supposed to know. If you’re aware of it in the moment, then that’s something else. Call it what you like – but not love. And,” he said, punctuating his next few words with his finger, “that’s the way it ought to be.”
“Why’s that?”
“I don’t know. But I’m not supposed to know and neither are you. If I told you, I’d be lying, because then I’d be pretending to know.”
As evidence of his thesis, Mr. Magritte told me about the women in his life he’d been in love with. He ordered another drink and told me about Barbara with whom he shared his first drink, and how her mother was a seamstress, meaning that she was the daughter of a seamstress, meaning that she was always the best dressed at any occasion. Then he told me about Diane, whose eyes were unlike anything he’d ever seen except in the movies, and about the way she helped him on days he felt directionless. Then he told me about Marianne with whom he shared a short, passing romance but one he would return to often in his mind. She hadn’t gone to college, but despite that, he said, she was a great thinker and someone everyone was proud to know. Then he told me about Cecilia – the woman just before his wife – who worked in publishing and once shook hands with Franklin Roosevelt but who had taken too many sleeping pills one night and, months later, became a Catholic.
“Well, your wife sounds like a wonderful woman,” I said uncomfortably.
“Yes, but I don’t love her. That only comes after,” he said.
Waiting for the subway home, I spotted Mr. Magritte on the opposite platform drunkenly leaning against the tiled wall. When his train arrived, I watched him enter, find a seat, and launch into the tunnel darkness with his head in his hands.
Tyler Martinez is a student in New York. His short story "Language of a Thimble" was previously published in The Olivetree Review. He is currently an associate editor at december Magazine. He can be reached at @martineztyler on Instagram, or by email at tylerthomasmart@gmail.com.
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