“Well, do you like the place?” she says, letting me off the hook.
“It’s lovely.”
“Hungry?”
I nod, and shortly after that we are eating room service—ginormous lobster salads, chilled sweet Riesling wine, and carrot cake for dessert—in our private dining room overlooking Central Park.
Portia seems tired from driving. She’s not saying much, pushing the food around with her fork but not really eating either.
“I’m really starting to worry about you,” I say, “which is strange, because it’s you who’s supposed to be saving me.”
She looks up. “Why are you worried about me?”
“Because this trip is not going to end the way you hope it will. It’s a really nice idea. Romantic, even, in a wonderfully platonic way. The former student returning after all these years to save the grizzled teacher who has suffered calamity and given up hope—it’s poetic, but it’s simply not real life.”
“And yet here we are,” she says, far too confidently.
“Look, I’m not going to pretend for you, so you can take all of my remaining strength and go on living your life believing in fairy tales. I won’t lie. I don’t wear a mask for people anymore—not even kids. I just can’t.”
“I don’t want you to lie. I don’t want to see a mask. I just want to awaken that part of you deep down that wants to be a good man again.”
“What if the part of me that wants to be ‘a good man,’ as you say, truly is already dead? Hacked out of me like an appendix just before it erupted? What if it’s simply gone?”
“It cannot die. It cannot be removed—because it’s who you are—your fate,” she says, as only a fool or a child could, and I start to worry even more, because she’s talking nonsense now. Utter rot.
“My fate? You’re starting to sound a lot like my delusional mother. Please don’t start spouting her religious nonsense—”
“It’s whatever I saw in you when I was in your class—the real true you,” she says. “I don’t know what to call it now. Maybe a spark.”
“A spark? Of what?”
“I don’t know. Just a beautiful spark.”
“But a spark flickers for only a moment, and then it goes dark forevermore,” I say. “By definition it cannot endure.”
“Not the kind of spark we’re talking about, and you know it. Those kinds of sparks set blazes that can be seen for miles and miles and provide warmth and beckon strangers to gather round and sing songs even and feel alive and dream under stars and become sparks for other people who will use the light to do great—”
“I’m sorry, Ms. Kane. I cannot follow this line of logic. I just can’t—”
“The spark was there plainly manifested through the smile on your face when I pinned the Mark Twain button to your jacket, the little twinkle in your eye when—”
“Don’t do this to yourself, Ms. Kane. Please.”
She frowns, shakes her head, and then says, “Why did you agree to come with me?”
“So you would finally leave me alone. So I could get on with my suicide. No other reason,” I say, and then add a quote for emphasis. “‘And in that patient truth which proceeds from star to star is established a freedom that releases us from ourselves and from others, as in that other patient truth which proceeds from death to death.’ Albert Camus, from A Happy Death.”
She squints at me for a few moments, looking like she just bit into a ripe lemon. “Oh, bullshit! Stop hiding behind the words of other men. And you can fuck Albert Camus in the ass with a crusty old baguette for all I care about him!”
“Excuse me?”
“Be a man! Stop hiding! I’m so tired of your constant Albert Camus quotes and references. Fuck him.”
“But he’s a Nobel Laureate!”
“Who cares?” She refills her glass and takes her wine into the sitting room.
Who cares about Albert Camus? Everyone with a working mind!
And yet I’m compelled to join her for some reason, to comfort her.
Damn you, teacher instincts, for you are a sickness never cured!
A few minutes later I find her slouched on the couch facing the grand windows, lined with heavy golden curtains.
Wineglass in hand, I sit at the other end of the Victorian-looking ornately carved twelve-foot cherry wood couch adorned with red silk cushions, which is not as comfortable as it is beautiful, and stare at the lit park through the window.
“You used to quote literature for good,” she all but whispers, in this tiny voice.
“Albert Camus put good into the world. Like Thoreau, he inspires us to live an examined life and—”
“You twist his words in a cowardly way now, and it scares me.”
“It ends in death for me. It ends in death for all of us—so why be afraid? And why put off the inevitable when the spark is gone?”
“Because if the world crushes my hero and reduces him to a weak man, then maybe there’s no hope for me.”
“I don’t want to be your hero, Ms. Kane.”
“You could have fooled the eighteen-year-old me,” she says, and when I look over, I’m worried that she’s going to start crying again.
“I was young and foolish back then,” I say. “Maybe even younger than you are now. I had no idea what the hell I was doing, and I’m now very sorry I used to teach that way.”
“You are not forgiven.”