March arrived, and with it the particular cruelty of early spring: the snow receding to reveal what winter had done, the cold still present even as the light grew stronger, a season in conversation with its own ending. Eliot found himself teaching Chekhov to his students and marking with a private, painful awareness every instance of a character who could not speak the true thing, who circled it endlessly and found, finally, that the circling had become its own terminal gesture.
His student Yolanda Chang, who was writing the Woolf thesis and who had a habit of arriving at office hours with too much coffee and too many ideas, came in one afternoon and sat down and said: 'Professor Voss, I want to talk about what Chekhov thinks love is.'
He put down his pen. 'What do you think he thinks it is?'
'I think he thinks it's mostly a failure of communication,' she said. 'All these characters who love each other and can't say it right. Or say it to the wrong person. Or say it too late. He's making an argument that love is mostly a missed connection.'
Eliot thought about this. He thought about a faculty lounge and a paper cup of tea and the gold light of September. He thought about a cold January evening and the word fellowship and the word New York.
'I think Chekhov is more hopeful than that,' he said. 'I think he's showing the difficulty, not the impossibility. He's showing how hard it is to say the true thing, and why it's worth trying anyway.'
Yolanda considered this with the focused skepticism she brought to disagreement. 'Does anyone in Chekhov actually manage it?' she asked.
'Occasionally,' he said. 'And even when they don't, the attempt registers. Even the failed attempt at truth is something.'
She left still skeptical. He sat at his desk for a while after she was gone, thinking about failed and successful attempts at truth, about what he had said to Mara and what he had not yet said. He had told her he loved her. He had not yet told her that the idea of September arriving and then being over and her not coming back was the specific shape of his fear. He had not said: I want a future with you, whatever shape that takes. I don't just want the beautiful year we have.
He was, he recognized, doing the Chekhov thing. Circling.
He made a decision not to. He was going to stop circling. Just not quite yet.
✦ ✦ ✦
He told Tom about the fellowship on a Wednesday, during their chess game.
Tom's response was characteristic: he waited until Eliot had finished explaining, moved a knight, and said: 'What do you want to happen?'
'I want her to stay,' Eliot said, which was the honest answer he had not yet given Mara.
'Have you told her that?'
'Not in those words.'
'In what words?'
'In the words: I want you to do what's right for your work.'
Tom looked at the board. 'Those are very noble words,' he said.
'I meant them.'
'I know you did. But noble words and honest words aren't always the same words.' He took a breath. 'She's asking you something underneath the thing she's asking. She's asking whether you're in this enough to be sad that she's going. Whether it matters to you. And the noble answer doesn't answer that question.'
Eliot stared at the board. He had left his bishop exposed.
'Tell her you want her to stay,' Tom said. 'Tell her and then tell her you know she should go. Both things. Not one or the other.'
Eliot looked at his bishop. 'When did you get wise?' he said.
'I've always been wise,' Tom said, taking the bishop. 'You just keep letting me take pieces while you're thinking about it.'