The following year, I received a Christmas card. It was one of those photograph cards that people use to parade their beautiful children, though the image showed only the two of them. The shot had been taken in some arid locale; they were dressed head to foot in khaki and wearing honest-to-God pith helmets. A note from Liz was written on the back, penned in a hurried script, as if added at the last second: Jonas said he ran into you. Glad you’re doing well!
Year by year, the cards kept coming. Each showed them in a different exotic setting: atop elephants in India, posing before the Great Wall of China, standing at the bow of a ship in heavy parkas with a glacial coastline in the background. All very cheery, yet there was something depressing about these photos, a mood of compensation. What a great life we’re having! Really! Swear to God! I began to notice other things. Jonas was the same hale specimen he’d always been, but Liz was aging precipitously, and not just physically. In previous pictures, her eyes had been distracted in a manner that made the photo seem incidental to the moment. Now she looked at the camera dead-on, like a hostage made to pose with a newspaper. Her smile felt manufactured, a product of her will. Was I imagining this? Furthermore, was it fancy on my part that her darkening gaze was a message meant for me? And what of their bodies? In the first photograph, taken in the desert, Lear was standing behind her, wrapping her with his arms. Year by year, they separated. The last one I received, in 2010, had been taken at a café beside a river that was unmistakably the Seine. They were sitting across from each other, far out of arm’s reach. Glasses of wine stood on the table. My old roommate’s was nearly empty. Liz had touched hers not at all.
At the same time, rumors began to swirl about Jonas. I had always known him to be a man of ardent if somewhat outlandish passions, but the stories I heard were disturbing. Jonas Lear, it was said, had gone off the deep end. His research had drifted into fantasy. His last paper, published in Nature, had danced around the subject, but people had begun to use the V-word in connection to him. He hadn’t published anything since, or appeared at the usual conferences, where a good deal of barroom hilarity transpired at his expense. Some of his colleagues even went so far as to conjecture that his tenure was in jeopardy. A certain amount of schadenfreude was built into our profession, the theory being that one man’s fall was another man’s rise. But I became genuinely worried for him.
It was not long after Julianna tossed in the towel on our ersatz marriage that I received a call from a man named Paul Kiernan. I had met him once or twice; he was a cell biologist at Harvard, a junior colleague of Jonas’s, with an excellent reputation. I could tell that the conversation made him uncomfortable. He had learned of our long association; the gist of his call was his concern that his tenure case might be adversely affected by his connection to Jonas. Might I write a letter on his behalf? My initial instinct was to tell him to grow up, that he was lucky to even know such a man, gossip be damned. But given the ignominious workings of tenure committees, I knew he had a point.
“A lot of it has to do with his wife, actually,” Paul said. “You’ve got to feel for the guy.”
I practically dropped the phone. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m sorry, I thought you knew, being such good friends and all. She’s very sick, it doesn’t look good. I guess I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“I’ll write your letter,” I said, and hung up.
I was completely at a loss. I looked up Liz’s number at Boston College and began to dial, then put the phone back in its cradle. What would I say, after so many years? What right did I have at this late date to reinsert myself into her life? Liz was dying; I’d never stopped loving her, not for a second, but she was another man’s wife. At a time like this, their bond was paramount; if I had learned anything from my parents, it was that the journey of death was one that spouses took together. Maybe it was just the old cowardice returning, but I did not pick up the phone again.
I waited for news. Every day I checked the Times’s obituary page, in a grim death watch. I was short with colleagues, avoided my friends. I had turned the apartment over to Julianna and sublet a one-bedroom in the West Village, making it easy to disappear, to recede into the fringes of life. What would I do when my Liz was gone? I realized that in some drawer of my brain I had kept the idea that someday, somehow, we would be together. Perhaps they would divorce. Perhaps Jonas would die. Now I had no hope.
Then one night, close to Christmas, the phone rang. It was nearly midnight; I had just settled into bed.
“Tim?”
“Yes, this is Tim Fanning.” I was annoyed by the lateness of the call and did not recognize the voice.
“It’s Liz.”
My heart crashed into my ribs. I could not form words.
“Hello?”
“I’m here,” I managed to say. “It’s good to hear your voice. Where are you?”
“I’m in Greenwich, at my mother’s.”
I noted that she did not say “my parents’.” Oscar was no more.
“I need to see you,” she said.