“Meanwhile, we’ll be flying right up the center of San Francisco Bay, almost as if we’d departed from San Francisco International. Those of you on the left side of the aircraft will get a good view of San Francisco and the Golden Gate.” The microphone clicked. Then he came back. “And, on the right side, the Oakland section of the Bay Bridge, and Berkeley. Then the valley, the Sierra, and we’ll be on our way. Thank you for flying with us today. I’ll be turning off the seat-belt sign in just a few minutes.”
Not long after, they started up San Francisco Bay. Jules could see the shadow of the plane speeding along the water, and to the west, from their fairly low height before the climb to transcontinental cruising altitude, the Peninsula came into view. First the glittering water, wrinkled and refracting; then industry and highways; then a light-green residential area patchworked with houses overshadowed by trees; the wide open, less green, but still verdant Stanford campus; rolling hills with dry, golden grass, almost silvery white; deep-green, fog-watered mountains; and beyond them the frigid blue of the Pacific, ending at a thick wall of fog that seemed as big as a continent. The land below appeared to be a paradise, the kind of place Jules had seen in his mind’s eye when he wrote the piece, a place where with luck the burdens of history might be left behind. He fixed his eyes upon the garden spaces and great trees between the university buildings and the town. He was often enthusiastic about beautiful places, but this was something more. He felt inexplicably that he might have a chance there unlike any he had had in his life, and as the plane quickly carried him away, he yearned for it.
“WHY AM I GOING to my office? What am I going to do in my office?” Amina Belkacem said to herself aloud, confident that no one would hear, because there was no one. She squeezed the brake levers of her bicycle so hard that its rear wheel left the ground for a moment, and the front wheel skidded on the path for three or four feet. She enjoyed this because she had done it out of anger, and it was decisive. But anger immediately gave way to the despair of someone who has been abandoned. And in her case, it was after thirty years of marriage.
She dismounted from the heavy English bicycle, its tubular frame a deep cobalt blue, and walked it to a lone bench. Long ignored by the groundskeepers, the bench was covered in dried eucalyptus leaves and surrounded by piles of them blown its way by passing bicycles. Amina leaned hers against one end of it, swept the leaves off the other, and sat down, staring ahead at the deserted grove of pale, massive trees. Anger, then to the brink of tears, then strong feelings like those of first love, came and went, one following the other in a terrible beating.
She cried, and afterward felt a little better, but her emotions were like maritime weather – small storms, squalls, sudden clearing, a ray of sun disappearing, all very confusing for the sailor who nonetheless tries to keep her prow headed into the wind. Students rushed past on their bicycles, oblivious of her. She regarded them maternally, knowing what they did not know and remembering how youth had carried her through gales of chance. They lived in a blind world that was yet wonderful. Sayyid, at sixty-seven, was insane to think he could make a new life with a twenty-four-year-old. When and if he would be eighty and in need above all of compassion and possibly diapers, she would be thirty-seven, running marathons with her long legs, not even at her sexual peak. Then what? Serves him right.
Amina, sagacious and lively, sixty-one but looking no older than forty, was still beautiful in a way that was inimitable and lasting, even if not to a shallow man. She had crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes, but these combined with her smile to make her even more alluring and attractive than when she was younger. She radiated happiness, love, intelligence – and mischief. Though practically children, her male students by the score fell in love with her, and, long before, she had learned to put them off while simultaneously comforting them. Sayyid had had no such experience, so when an astoundingly leggy and vacuous graduate student – her doctoral thesis was on women and bus stops – had fallen for him, he was as gone as if he had jumped from a cliff at Yosemite. He had never given Amina children, because he couldn’t. Despite this, Amina had stayed with him.
They bought the house in 1998, at the peak of the dot-com boom, for $550,000. While still in France they had put another $200,000 into it before they moved in the next year. Stanford gave them both tenure when they transferred from Paris-Sorbonne, and even with California taxes, the vastly higher salaries plus a federal tax rate lower than what they paid in France made them feel rich for the first time in their lives. The dot-com bubble deflated and, later, in the crash of 2008, they thought the house value would lessen commensurately, but were incredulous to find that Silicon Valley was an exception to the rule. By 2014, real estate agents were pestering them every week with offers of $2.5 million and more. The house was in her name, and even though California was a joint property state, Sayyid was a son of a bitch and she was sure that he was so crazy now that he would just walk away from it – as he had walked away from her that morning to move into the rental hovel of his seductress and sit there for the rest of his wretched life on a beanbag chair. After everything found its angle of repose, Amina would have, one way or another, three or four million, some Social Security from the U.S. and France, and either a pension or, if she continued working, her considerable salary. But money was not relevant to a broken heart.
Though the cycles of conflicting emotions would quickly come and go and were terribly taxing, still they pushed her slowly and steadily forward, and with time were not merely cycles but spirals. Pain would lead to recognition, and recognition to resolution as the hours passed on the bench. For example, at first she was hurt, and then angry, to reflect upon how much he had changed, weakly floating on the tides around them even as she held fast. She had watched him move with the times so that now he would approach with reason and detachment something like a love story, and exercise indignant, overloaded passion in politics and economics. What had happened to him and others that they mocked sentiment in the love between men and women and treated public policy with the drive and resentment of spurned suitors? Sayyid had become a different person. Whereas he let the world in everywhere, she had never done that, and never would, preferring a life of her own.