It Will Come to Me Read Free Page B

seemed hardly to register her existence. She was neither one thing nor the other to them, she supposed, neither daughter nor wife. Though once, a few years ago, a redheaded prole resting his head on the bar had peered up at her craftily and told her she looked like Carol Burnett.
    Clutching her three beers to her chest, she shuffled across the floor Geisha-style, doing her best not to spill. Even so, several ounces sloshed down her front. She found a seat on a bench in a quiet corner where the chess players sometimes sat. These were representatives of yet another nonfaculty tribe, the computer technicians and audiovisual specialists, who signaled their class affiliation by wearing button-down short-sleeved shirts and hooking their cell phones to their belts. The walls around thechess corner were rich with graffiti. There were the usual offers of sexual favors attributed to third parties, accompanied by the phone numbers of those third parties, the usual crude drawings of phalluses. There was also a kind of minimalist poem, written out vertically in spidery pencil:
    BOB
    CAN
    SLOB
    ON
    MY
    KNOB
    Sitting here, an unobserved observer, she took note of the scene: the LET'S OBEY THE LAW, PEOPLE sign painted in bold letters on the tented ceiling above the bar; the proles swarming around it like piglets on a sow; the two aging, enigmatic hippie proprietors manning the taps. This was exactly the kind of vantage point Ruth instinctively sought: a wall at her back, a pocket of shadow in which to take shelter, an unobstructed view. She wished she could stay down here all evening, enjoying the cool darkness and the tranquilizing thud and shake of the jukebox.
    An idea came to her. Perhaps here, right here in downstairs Nirvana, she'd found the material she'd been looking for in vain upstairs, the elemental stuff, the mother lode of passion and conflict. And wouldn't it be interesting to make a study of the proles, to investigate their lives. She could see the research stretching out ahead through the fall and winter months, and then in the spring she could start the actual writing. But could she really sustain this vision of the proles as embodiments of Dionysian vitality?How much passion and conflict can be generated in a life spent waxing and buffing cafeteria floors or driving a gnome cart? She felt a little ashamed to catch herself entertaining such a fatuous notion. The proles worked harder than she could imagine. It was unbecoming in her to envy them the solace of boozy camaraderie, to entertain fantasies about infiltrating their society.
    And besides, she'd never get up the nerve to approach them—not unless she drank a very great deal. And what would happen then? The last time she'd spent a lot of time in a bar was more than thirty years ago, before she was married. She and a friend had rented a cabin in the Adirondacks. They fell into a habit of spending evenings at a lakeside roadhouse, where the locals bought them round after round of beer and told them tales of unfaithful wives and children lost to custody disputes. Boredom and curiosity had been the rationale for this early fieldwork, and the result was that she was backed into several dark corners and several tongues were thrust down her throat. That wouldn't happen now, would it? Not that she'd want it to, but perhaps it was the price of access. She hadn't appreciated then how universally accepted a passport her nubility was. She saw that only in retrospect, as she was seeing so many things. How dim she'd been then, how unable to assess herself! If telepathic communications could be directed backward through time, she'd whisper a message to the Ruth of 1972, the one who used an army-surplus shell canister as a purse and wore her luxuriant auburn hair in a badly maintained long shag:
You are sexually adequate.
    She'd heard it said that you don't feel old on the inside, and it was true. She didn't feel old or even middle-aged. Instead, she felt every age she'd ever