Journal From Ellipsia: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

small—of last year’s six new male staff members, two had promptly been hijacked to California and two had been of that advanced age which sometimes still did accompany distinction. A few members, of whom he knew nothing, had been on leave. Of the two who were left, Meyer, one of those tall, rawboned Jews of Lincolnian feature, Meyer Spilker—anthropologist, had seemed more likely, until Linhouse, invited to dine, had seen both that organizational household—where in that schedule would there be time for adultery?—and better, had seen Meyer with Lila. There remained: Anders, who in himself seemed a remainder of the race itself, of those of its more questionable qualities which since the days of Pithecanthropus erectus had been debasing its limbs to the glory of its head—unless Anders were something unconscionably new. Anders was preferable. As one’s successor, a freak always is. And there still would have remained Anders, after all, theoretical physicist, latest hero of post quantum mechanics theory, and possibly of women—who by nature and history were always updating the Hero—if not for the last evening on which Linhouse, or anyone else, had seen Janice Jamison.
    That had been in the February of what now, in early December, scarcely seemed the same year. Looking back, the last two years of his life fell as neatly from him its core as the segments of a fruit artificially forced. The two terms of his first year here and their affair, broken only by his annual summer visit to England, mother, and Sloane Street. His early return in August to the Center, where Janice had stayed on in her cottage. Their easy resumption, during an Indian summer slowly bronzing to fall, of that fixed rhythm of time, ergo of love and a good many other things, which was more often than scholarship the real secret of a scholar’s devotion to the academic life—faint monastic reflection as it was, for some only a religious one, of seasons and duties pre-ordained. Her avoidance of him had begun that November; then came that period when he glimpsed her now and then in the way of things here, but no longer by arrangement. His way home from office to flat lay straight down the lane on which she lived; it was only after he realized that they no longer met there even accidentally that her “vagueness” ceased being vague. The scheduled life could of course also be marvelously useful in nurturing the first tucked-in smiles of amorous interest—in the beginning he’d seemed to encounter her everywhere. How the same could be managed in reverse was now brought home to him in those walks, increasingly wintry, on which each day detached its brittle leaf, delivered its more umber dark.
    He could have phoned, but didn’t. The walks kept up both his dignity and the thread of what he refused to name. No one who saw him embark down the untrafficked lane need know that he now passed her door without entering it. From remarks passed idly, “Where have you two—?” she seemed to be staying as socially quiet as he, and gossip still had them together. Others here were also being retiring; though there were no students here, hearts were still sensitive to the academic systole and it was now between terms, that lull of the year when people left and returned on plans accomplished before these were public, and Argus gossip even slept. She hadn’t gone away. He was still here. On his lone walks, these facts—though later at home he saw himself as the lone undergraduate in a forest of senior sense—served to make him feel that they were still together.
    Mountain climate is for teatime, and tea had been their time for love, replacing the siestas that would have been Tuscany. Her house, originally a gate cottage, later on in its modest history remodeled by the estate owner for a lady retired from La Scala, had the characteristics of both eras. All its downstairs sitting-room life, like that of most saltboxes not overshrubbed, was accessible to the