Patra sat in the backseat with him. She gave me the key, so I climbed in the passenger seat to turn on the air. It blew hot as breath for a minute or two, then gradually cooled, so we rolled up all the windows and sat in the chilled car, cut off from the summery world outside. I had the impulse then, as my sweat dried, to slide to the driver’s seat and pull the gearshift into drive. It would be simple I thought. How hard could driving be?
“He’s not himself today,” Patra said from the backseat. I glanced back at her. I assumed she meant Paul at first, but she was staring out the window in the direction of the hotel. So it was Leo she meant. She unclasped her breath the way people do when they’re about to speak, then closed her mouth again, chewed on her lip.
I curled around more fully, peeped at her over the seat. “Is the temp okay?” I asked, coaxing her out. I wanted her to unload her worry, like she did in the tent. I wanted her to need me for something she couldn’t do herself.
“Yes, thank you. Thank you, Linda.” She gave me a smile that was all forehead. She was gazing down at Paul, who’d drifted off. She was petting his long bare arm with one hand.
I tested out her gratitude: “Do you want me to pull the car up a little bit? Do you want me to get out of this traffic?” Cars kept honking at us, hoping to get our parking spot.
She considered it. “Do you have your license?”
“No,” I admitted.
“That’s okay.” She leaned back against the seat and closed her eyes, and in the bright sunlight I thought I could see her eyeballs moving beneath her pale lids. Oh, there are her black pupils, I thought, triumphantly, frightened almost, but then she shielded her whole face with her hand and whatever I saw was gone.
She said, “Leo’ll come for us in a moment.”
I didn’t like how she put that. I didn’t like how confident she sounded. I didn’t like how she changed with Leo around, how all her gestures were stretched out of size with a touch of performance. I didn’t like how deferential she was with him, but also charged somehow, confident she could draw his attention if she wanted it.
Her headband was making my head pound. I could feel its teeth in a cruel crown from ear to ear. I felt just miserable enough to take a swipe at her.
“Where’d you guys meet?”
Patra opened her eyes. She checked Paul before meeting my gaze. “Leo and me?”
I nodded. “Yep.”
“He was my professor.”
I felt smug. “At the University of Chicago?”
“How’d you know?”
She’d worn that sweatshirt about a thousand times. I shrugged.
“Astronomy 101.” She wrinkled her nose, making the smiley rueful expression I was coming to recognize. She set her hand on Paul’s sleeping forehead. “I thought it’d be easy. I thought we’d memorize constellations, learn the names of planets. That sort of thing.”
“Did you?”
“We did some of that, sure.” She caught my eye. “It’s not what you think.”
I held her blue gaze. “What do I think, Patra?”
She shifted in her seat, fingered Paul’s hair so he stirred. For a moment, he looked hounded by his dreams. His face crumpled as if he might cry out. He didn’t wake up, though. “I’m the one who stayed after class, who, you know, actually asked him out. It was me, not him.”
I waited for more.
“He was, like—I don’t know. He was bigger than anything else to me at the time.”
I found that hard to believe. I found it difficult to imagine that slippered, thin man leaving such a mark. He seemed insubstantial to me—though stubborn, maybe, like a stain. I thought about how his heel had bulged out of his slipper, how the slipper was worn and black and ugly.
“Once, one of my friends at school ran into him on campus—she was collecting signatures or something, for charity—and she said, there’s something unsettling about him. And I said, I agree! He’s unsettlingly smart. He really is.”
She was justifying herself. She was making a case to me, setting up her defenses. She was trying to convince me of something, and as she spoke I could see she was sitting up straighter, finding focus.
“Listen, Linda.” She was attempting to whisper, so her consonants got especially hissy. “I’m not any good at explaining things. I’m not like Leo in that way. After the semester ended I got him to sit with me in the cafeteria and eat a muffin, and he had a bran and I had a blueberry, and we did that again the next week, and the next, and I remember how he tucked in his shirt when he stood up. You know how that is? How you wait for someone to do this thing, and then he does it? He tucks in his shirt the same way every time he stands up, and it seems, I don’t know, like you don’t have to go to all the work getting to know him because he does this thing, this one thing, and you can predict it. He was so smart, and I felt like I knew him better than he knew himself, right away. That’s very powerful.”