3. Thomas
Thomas
Somebody had spent real time scratching a name off the table in my seminar room.
That's the part I kept snagging on afterward: not the name.
The time. Stroke over stroke, dozens of them, worked crosswise over one spot, deep enough to go through the varnish and into the oak underneath, which means a person sat down in a room where I teach and worked at erasing another person with the patience you'd bring to needlepoint.
I didn't know that yet at nine on Tuesday morning. At nine on Tuesday morning, all I knew was that I had my first seminar in four years, a tin of chalk for a room that turned out to have whiteboards, and a heart rate far too fast for a man walking into a seminar.
The room is on the second floor of the Letters building: paneled, radiator with opinions, one long oak table carved up by generations with more feeling than skill.
Initials, dates, one genuinely committed engraving of a duck.
Eight chairs. I got there twenty minutes early, arranged my notes four times, and then they came in, and I want this on the record ahead of everything else I'm going to write about this place: I liked them inside of five minutes.
Priya Raman arrived first, took the seat facing the door like a woman securing an exit, and had read not only the Consolation but two secondary sources I hadn't assigned, "in case you assigned the bad ones.
" Wes Ferro came in already talking, having evidently started in the stairwell, about the radiator, the fire door, and a theory connecting both.
Kit Sorensen brought coffee, nodded at me, and said nothing for so long I assumed he hated me; I found out later that's what Kit sounds like when he likes you.
Hannah Voss sat by the window, squared her notebook to the table edge, and wrote the date in handwriting you could print currency with.
Toby Renner brought pastries for eight without being asked, which turned out to be a standing arrangement, and the standing arrangement turned out to be the whole of Toby's philosophy.
And June Alvarez, nineteen, the only undergraduate ever admitted to the graduate seminar, a fact she announced with the cheerfulness of a weather report, took the chair beside mine and asked, before I'd introduced myself, whether it was true I'd once called Boethius "the most consoling liar in the canon. "
"Misquoted. I called him the most honest liar."
"Better," June said, and opened her notebook.
Nobody took the eighth chair. Seven of us, eight seats; fine; that's arithmetic. What wasn't arithmetic: every one of them came into the room and made the same small detour around the far end of the table, the way you walk around a puddle that dried up months ago.
I noticed. I filed it. I had a seminar to teach.
Here's the book my whole career leans against, in one breath: a man sits in a cell in Pavia waiting to be executed on charges he didn't earn, and instead of a pardon he gets a visitor, a woman who might be Philosophy herself and might be a fever, and she doesn't save him.
She doesn't even try. She reorganizes him.
My monograph argues that this is the honest transaction: consolation is what philosophy offers when it can't offer rescue, and the next thousand years of readers were people deciding whether that's enough.
I've defended that thesis in print, at conferences, and once, without anybody knowing it, at a hearing.
"So the lady is a coping mechanism with a hem," Priya said, twenty minutes in, "and we've built a discipline on a prisoner's self-soothing. Convince me otherwise."
"Why would I? Maybe that is the discipline."
"Then the wheel," Wes said. "Okay. Fortune's wheel, hear me out, it's a con. It's the oldest crooked casino in the canon. She runs the wheel, she comps your first spins, and the house edge is time—"
"The house edge is death," Kit said. His first full sentence of the morning.
"—thank you, the house edge is death, and Boethius's move, and this is the genius part, his move is: stop gambling. The wheel can't take what you never put on the table."
"He put everything on the table," Hannah said, not looking up. "They executed him anyway."
"Right, but—"
"That's why the book works, though." June leaned in. "He wrote it for himself. In the cell. You can't console anybody secondhand unless you've been in the cell yourself. That's why he reads honest and every imitation reads like a greeting card."
The room went quiet in the good way: seven people listening to a nineteen-year-old say the thing the doctoral students were circling.
Priya wrote a line down, which from Priya was a standing ovation.
And I thought, because there was no version of me that wasn't going to think it, of a fireplace, and a glass turned a quarter turn on a mantel, and you assume the two are different.
One conversation and the man had left a wire in my best chapter that hummed every time I walked past it.
I hadn't put it in my notes. It got into the room anyway.
We took a ten-minute break at half past ten.
Nobody left; Toby ran a second pastry service.
And I walked the length of the table, because I touch things; it's a diagnostic; ask any book I've ever owned.
Initials. Dates. The duck. And at the far end, at the place with the chair nobody took, my two fingers went over a patch that didn't read like carving.
Hatching. Cross-scratches, dozens, worked over one spot.
Underneath them, fainter, grooves that had been made with intention. Letters.
I did what I've done to gravestones and brasses and tabletops since I was nine years old. I laid a sheet of paper over it and went across it with the flat of a pencil.
The graphite picked up the storm of scratches first, a gray thicket. Then, under the thicket, where the older grooves ran deeper than the newer ones, ghost letters surfaced, one at a time, the way things surface in developer fluid.
M. VANE.
"Who's M. Vane?" I said it to the room, holding the rubbing up, a professor pleased with a parlor trick.
The room shut.
That's the only verb I have for it. Hannah's pen stopped mid-word and stayed stopped.
Priya turned the assignment sheet over as if the reverse had gotten interesting.
Kit looked out the window at nothing on the lawn.
Toby held a pastry he didn't bite. And June opened her mouth, and four people did not look at her, in the aggressive way of not-looking that presses a hand flat over somebody's mouth from across a table, and June closed her mouth, and that was the loudest thing that happened all morning.
"Every good table's got a ghost," Wes said, bright and fast. "It's an accreditation requirement, professor, they can't certify you without one. Anyway. Next week, are we doing Fortune or the fake lady, because Kit and I have a bet and the stakes are humiliating."
It got a laugh. It was built to get a laugh, and it got one, and the laugh went around the table and closed the subject the way a door closes a corridor. Click. Done. We did forty more minutes on Fortune, and they were good minutes, and nobody looked at the far end of the table again, including me.
I folded the rubbing into the notebook.
Item twelve: M. VANE, scratched off the seminar table, dozens of strokes, crosshatched, same hand. Somebody worked at it.
Item thirteen: seven people avoid one chair, and a room full of professional arguers has exactly one subject it won't argue. Don't ask who Vane is. Watch what happens while you're not asking.
* * *
Wednesday was office hours. My office is a converted linen closet with one window and a cold September radiator that knocks like a man changing his mind even with the heat off, and I'd had a sign-up sheet on the door since Monday, and the two o'clock was a second-year graduate student named Leah Brandt, who'd emailed me Monday night: three paragraphs, urgent in the clipped sentences and repeated underlining.
Everything has been sideways since last Thursday. Can I come Wednesday.
She came Wednesday. She sat down, thanked me for the time, started explaining her chapter, sensible, organized, and then in the middle of a sentence about prosody, with no wobble in the sentence before it, she was crying.
Not performative crying. Quiet, steady, tears coming down a composed face like a machine running a program the face didn't know about. I did the triage you do: tissues, water, take your time. I asked what was wrong.
"I don't know," she said.
People say that when the thing is too big to say.
This wasn't that. She said it the way you'd read an empty page aloud.
And then she went looking for the reason, I watched her go looking, eyes moving along the shelf over my shoulder as if the reason had been left up there, and there's a clock over my door, and I'm not proud of this, but I timed it, because a stopwatch is what I have instead of composure.
Four minutes. Nearly to the sweep hand. Then it stopped. Didn't taper. Stopped, weather leaving a valley, and she blinked, and apologized, and thanked me.
"For what? We haven't gotten to your chapter."
"For the talk," she said, warm, entirely sincere, already reaching for her bag. "It helped. It really did."
We had not had a talk. I had said maybe eleven words, and four of them were take your time.
She stood in my doorway visibly lighter than she'd come in, shoulders down, face smoothed out, and could not tell me what she'd come for.
She looked at the sticky note on her own folder, in her own handwriting, and laughed at it, and said the chapter was basically fine, she didn't know why she'd gotten so worked up on Monday, and left.
Vaguer. That's the word I wrote down. She left lighter and vaguer, in that order, and her footsteps on the stairs were quicker than the ones that had come up.