It Will Come to Me Read Free Page A

Ben and tapped him on the shoulder, holding up her plastic cup. “Get you one?” “Oh yes,” he said, pulled back into the scene, “yes please.” She turned inquiringly to the student, who flashed her a smile, held up his water bottle and mouthed, “I'm good.” No you're not, she muttered to herself as she descended the steps from the second-floor terrace, stepping gingerly over pairs of outstretched legs. You're just conventional.
    But not quite gingerly enough, because her foot caught on something that threw off her balance enough to send her lurching down several steps with her arms outstretched, breaking her fall against one student's chest and another student's shoulder and finally the stone balustrade at the foot of the stairs. She took a moment to examine the abraded palms of her hands, then turned to see what it was she'd tripped over. A purse? A bike helmet? No. Apparently it was a baby, a very small one, strapped into a car seat. A company of young couples had risen as a body to surroundthe baby's mother, who was sitting with her knees drawn up to her chest, cradling the baby in its car seat. Through a stand of heads and shoulders Ruth could quite clearly see the baby's face, an enraged knot of negative capability All was eerily silent for a long moment, and then a great wail rose up and out of it.
    “Oh, I'm so sorry,” Ruth cried, pushing up the steps against a tide of concerned murmurers. A few faces turned her way. “Please!” she called out. “Let me through. I want to see …” The baby was crying lustily now. “I'm so sorry,” Ruth repeated. “I just didn't see it. Is the baby OK?” The look the baby's mother gave her was not so much one of blame as of nonrecognition, as if she were unsure how to respond to a being that had yet to be classified and described. “I'm sorry,” said Ruth again, but now a move was afoot to shoo people away so that the mother and baby could make their way down the stairs to the access road and into a waiting car, driven by a weedy young man Ruth assumed was the father. In a moment the crowd had closed up around the hole the resolved event had left. There was nothing for it but to climb down the remaining steps and make her way around the corner, stonily ignoring what she took to be looks of disapproval, to the wide-planked wooden door that led down a final flight of stairs to the basement where the kegs were kept.
    The barroom, if it could be called that, made her think of a festive antique submarine; it was a dark, smoky, air-conditioned cylinder with pale-green plaster walls, hung year-round with twinkling holiday lights. Down here was where the electricians drank, the maintenance men, the guys from buildings and grounds—the proles. A space alien happening to wander down from the upstairs aspect of Nirvana might conclude that he'd stumbled upon an entirely distinct species, like the underground Morlocks whoterrorize the gentle Eloi in H. G. Wells's
The Time Machine.
Up above among the academics, the rule was quiet and moderation; down here it was noise and excess. For every beer the academics drank the proles drank three. At a recent dinner party the topic of alcohol abuse downstairs at Nirvana had come up—Ruth, in fact, had been the one to raise it. One of Ben's colleagues made a prissy observation about how it certainly couldn't be good for anyone's health to drink that much, and a sociologist mumbled something about shortened time horizons.
    The proles smoked and guffawed. When they threw back their heads in laughter she could see that they'd lost molars. They coughed wetly and hung on one another, stumbled a little as they dismounted their stools to head for the bathroom, flirted lewdly with the occasional stubby female who joined them at the bar. Whenever a young woman from above invaded the proles’ territory they fell awkwardly silent, but when Ruth appeared among them to order her three beers (one for Ben, one for her now, one for her later) they