"Go away, Margaret," he said.
"Actually, I've got to go," Eve said cheerfully. "I'm leaving for Paris tonight. Are you going anywhere this summer?"
"Yes," Margaret said. "We're going to Paris, too."
"Are we?" Edward said.
"Mmm. We'll also drive around to other places, of course, stop here and there. Avignon, Les Baux."
"Ah, yes, of course, how could I forget," Edward said.
"Yes, how could you? Well, age does have a way of catching up with us, doesn't it, Eve?"
"I guess so. I hope we bump into each other, anyway."
"Where?" Margaret asked.
"In Paris!"
"Ah! Paris. Of course," Margaret said.
"Well, au revoir!"
"Yes, bye-bye," said Margaret. "Close the door, dear, would you?" And Eve was gone, leaving Margaret and Edward alone in the small, dusty office.
"Whitman and the Mid-Life Crisis?" Margaret said. "The Self-Help School of Criticism?"
"An unfortunate interpretation, I quite agree."
"Gosh, Edward, now that you're forty, you too can have a mid-life crisis, a full-blown mid-life crisis. Shower your seed upon the young—"
"Really, Margaret."
Margaret got up, sat on his desk, and pretended to look at some papers.
"So what is this about France? You're going to France?" Edward said.
"Why not?"
Edward was silent, tapping his finger on the desk.
"Look, Edward, why not?" Margaret said suddenly, softly. "Let's go. Tomorrow."
He continued to tap his finger on the big scratched desk, then stopped and leaned back in his chair. Margaret heard a jackhammer outside. And a bird. She slid back, off the desk, into the straight wooden chair. I have been waiting to see you, she thought. For weeks. I've been planning what to say. I want to say that I'm sorry, that I see you and hear you when you're nowhere around, that I have no one to talk to and nothing to talk about without you, that the days have no shape and the nights have no end. That I have been a fool.
"Why not?" she said again. She was in earnest now. She wanted him to smile and laugh loudly and lead her off to a drunken landscape of castles and inns and drafty museums.
She looked at him as he sat across the desk from her. There was no laugh, no smile. His pale blue eyes gazed at her steadily. She could hear herself breathing. She turned away. There's one every semester, she thought. Me. I'm the one. Your only one. And you're mine. These students are just students. Lily is just Lily. I am the wife.
But the memory of sitting just like this, herself a student, not a wife, in other offices at other times was strong and surrounded her like a perfume.
"I feel like a student, sitting here," she said. And he was her teacher and her subject. The desire to know was just like desire. Desire was just like the desire to know. She looked at Edward, at his dissident hair, his face of angles and creases, his coldly knowing eyes, which looked back at her, unblinking, and she knew that these statements were true.
She reached for Eve's paper. "'An unseen hand also pass'd over their bodies,'" she read. '"It descended tremblingly from their temples and ribs.'"
"Why did you run off, Margaret?" Edward said. He said it not in the brittle voice he'd used earlier, but in a stern and earnest voice that made her feel very sad, although not quite sad enough to lose wholly her own sense of being wronged.
"Well, you were sleeping with my best friend," she said.
His eyes opened in wide skepticism.
"Okay, not my best friend," she said. "You're my best friend. Or were. So Lily was sleeping with my best friend. Not to mention my husband."
"Margaret," Edward said. He was rocking forward and backward on his chair, in patient disgust. "Richard is your best friend. So it was you who were sleeping with your best friend."
"Richard? I wasn't sleeping with him. And you were."
"I never slept with Richard."
"Of course not. You were sleeping with Lily."
"No I wasn't."
He wasn't?
"Just bathing?" she asked sarcastically.
"She wanted me to take her running."