Read Online As She Climbed Across the Table by Jonathan Lethem - Free Book Online Page A

word
me
.
    “Love isn’t the problem,” she said weakly. “I’m not having a problem loving.”
    “What are you saying?”
    “You still don’t understand, do you? Why I can’t be with you anymore.”
    Don’t address me, I wanted to say. Philip isn’t here. This is Omnipotent Voice you’re speaking with.
    “You’re in love with someone else,” I heard myself say.
    “Yes.”
    A change came over me, a phase transition. A flush rose through my chest and neck.
    “You’re in love with Lack,” I said.
    “Yes.”
    Should I have known sooner?
    Love is self-deception, remember. And my competition was so improbable.
    But now that it was named, Alice’s Lack-love seemed obvious, a foregone conclusion. Probably the whole campus buzzed with it, and I was the last to know.
    “The way you loved me?” I squeaked.
    “No. Yes.”
    I studied her. She sat with a leg up on the chair, her hair wild, her eyes glowing from tired sockets. Her mouth was drawndefiantly tight. Her Lack-love was real, I saw. She looked crushed under the weight of her impossible love. I felt an admiration, despite myself.
    “Does anyone else know?”
    “I hadn’t even admitted it to myself until just now.” A tear painted a reflective stripe down her cheek.
    “Does Soft?”
    “You would know better than I would.”
    Yes, Alice had been living on the brink of the void, but it wasn’t some singular, icy, inhuman place. In fact, the same void yawned out underneath me, too. Unrequited love.
    It seemed reasonable to call hers unrequited. If Alice had really climbed up on Lack’s table, then he’d turned her down, hadn’t he? Making things disappear was the only
I love you
in his binary vocabulary.
    Had she, though? I was afraid to ask. Instead I got up and cleared the dishes into the sink. I wanted to buy a plane ticket, fly away, make my claims to Cynthia Jalter true. Leave my colleagues with a mystery. Professor X.
    In the sink the coffee grounds rose up, swirling out of the bottoms of our cups, and were washed down the drain.
    “All this time down there,” I said, not facing her. “You were slipping away from me. Feeling communion with this thing, unable to talk about it.”
    “Yes.”
    I realized, too late, that I’d used a forbidden pronoun.
Me
. Distracted, I’d pled guilty to possession of a self.
    “So it’s simple, then,” I said. “No mystery. You don’t love me because you love Lack.”
    “Yes.”
    “But he doesn’t love you back.”
    “Yes.”
    “You tried, then. You offered yourself.”
    No answer. But when I turned from the sink she stared at me hollowly, and nodded.

“We’ve drifted a long way past physics here, Philip. I’d like to try to get us back on course.”
    Soft’s office was surprisingly intimate. It was easy to imagine it as a blown-up model of the interior of his skull. The walls were lined with texts, a decade’s issues of
Physics Letters
and
Physical Review
. The desks were heaped. On the wall was a water-stained certificate, subtly crooked inside its frame. Yellowing fireproof ceiling, ancient fluorescent desk lamp. Soft always seemed reptilian inside the physics lab, and out of place everywhere else, but this office was an intermediate, a human space he could credibly inhabit.
    Soft sat behind his desk. In the rotting chair to his right sat an Italian physicist, just off the plane. He was tall and ruddy, and wore a wrinkled, lemon yellow suit. His collar was open and his tie was bundled into his jacket pocket, where it stuck out like atongue. Soft introduced him with a name that began morphing so crazily the moment I heard it—Crubbio Raxia? Carbino Toxia? Arbino Cruxia?—that I didn’t dare try to say it aloud.
    He sat watching me intently while Soft spoke.
    “We’re dividing up the Lack hours,” Soft said. “I’m reclaiming a portion of the schedule myself. A team of our graduate students has submitted an impressive proposal, and they’ll be awarded a shift. Most exciting to me