February was the month they moved fully into love, and fully into the problem of love.
They did not use the word for weeks after January's revelation, as if saying it would crystallize something they were both circling around. But the word was everywhere between them — in the particular way he watched her when she wasn't looking, in the way she reached for his hand across the table now without asking, in the long Sunday mornings that stretched into afternoons with the drowsy ease of something natural and right.
The semester had resumed and they were both busy — he with a new contemporary fiction seminar and a student whose thesis on Woolf was ambitious and slightly out of control; she with her twentieth-century song seminar and the continuing difficult work of the elegy's fifth movement. They saw each other in the evenings and on weekends and in the faculty lounge on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and the particular quality of each encounter had changed — had deepened, without either of them saying why.
He noticed the change most clearly in the silences. Early in their acquaintance the silences had been comfortable but slightly considered, the silence of two people being careful with each other. Now the silences were something else: the silence of two people who no longer needed to perform ease because ease was simply what existed between them.
He said it first, finally, on a Sunday in February, during one of those long mornings, when she was lying with her head on his shoulder and the light was coming through the curtains and the whole world seemed to have contracted to the size of that room, that light, that shoulder, that warmth.
He said: 'I love you, Mara.'
She was quiet for a moment, and in that moment he felt every second.
Then she turned and looked at him with an expression that was equal parts joy and grief, and she said: 'I know. I love you too. And I'm afraid of what that means.'
'Means for the fellowship?' he asked.
'Means for everything,' she said.
He held her tighter, as if holding was the same as keeping.
✦ ✦ ✦
The following evening she came to his apartment later than usual, with the particular energy of someone who has been thinking through something for hours and has arrived at a temporary stopping point.
She sat at his kitchen table while he made tea, and she said: 'I want to talk about the fellowship. Properly.'
He brought the tea and sat across from her. He noticed that she had her notebook with her, the small one, and that there were new marks in it — not musical notation but words, the kind of working-through she did on paper when something was difficult.
'I want to go,' she said. 'I want to complete the elegy in the way it deserves. I want to work without the constraint of a teaching schedule, with access to a full orchestra and the kind of professional community that New York provides. I want all of that. And I am aware'—her voice was steady, her eyes direct—'that wanting it is not the same as being comfortable with what it costs.'
He watched her.
'I am not asking you to wait,' she said. 'I'm not even asking you to try long-distance, though I would be willing to. What I am asking is—' She stopped. 'I don't know exactly what I'm asking.'
'You're asking what this is,' he said. 'Before September. What we are to each other, specifically.'
She nodded.
He thought about Tom and the chess games, about protection and exposure, about the center of the board. He said: 'We are two people in love who have a complicated situation in front of them. I don't have a better answer than that right now. But I don't want to pretend the situation away, and I don't want to pretend the love away either.'
She was quiet for a while. Then she said: 'Okay.'
'Okay?'
'Okay,' she said again. 'We'll hold both things. The love and the complication. We'll keep holding them.'
'Together,' he said.
'Together,' she agreed.
He put his hand over hers on the table. They drank their tea. The complication was still there, but so was the warmth. For now that was enough.