Free All Around Atlantis by Deborah Eisenberg Page A

“Yes,” he heard himself say.
    â€œAre you sure?” Caroline said.
    Lady Chatterley leaned herself thuggishly against Shapiro’s shin and began to purr. “Hello, there,” he said. He reached down and patted her gingerly.
    Caroline hesitated at the door, then took a few steps back toward Shapiro, and her delicious, clean fragrance spilled over him. “Your big concert’s in less than a month now…” She tilted her head and managed a little smile.
    Was she going to touch him? Shapiro went rigid with alarm, but she just looked vaguely around the room. “You know, it’s supposed to be a beautiful country…” She scooped up Lady Chatterley and nuzzled the orange fur. “Chat. Dear little Chat. Are you going to take care of Aaron?” She took a paw in her hand. “Are you?”
    Lady Chatterley wrenched herself free and bounded back to the floor. Caroline’s eyes—like Lady Chatterley’s—were large and light and spoked with black. Her small face was pale, always, as though with shock.
    â€œShall I help you with your things?” Shapiro said.
    There was really only one suitcase, a good one—leather, old, genteel—which had probably accompanied Caroline to college; the rest had gone on before. “No need,” she said. Tears wavered momentarily in her eyes. “Jim’s picking me up.”
    The suitcase appeared to be heavy. Shapiro watched Caroline’s thin legs as she struggled slightly with it. At the door she turned back. “Aaron?” she said.
    He waited to hear himself answer, but this time no words came.
    â€œAaron, I know this is probably not what you want to hear right now, but I think it’s important for me to say it—I’ll always care about you, you know. I hope you know that.”
    Â 
    Shapiro awoke suddenly and unpleasantly, as though a crateful of fruits had been emptied out on him. There was an unfamiliar wall next to him, and the window was all wrong. He heard footsteps, a snicker. A hotel room wobbled into place around him—yes, Richard Penwad would be coming to pick him up, and Caroline wasn’t even in this country.
    The night had been crowded with Caroline and endless versions of her departure—dreamed, reversed in dreams, modified, amended, transfigured, made tender and transcendently beautiful as though it had been an act of sacral purification. For a week or so he had been free of her, or at least anesthetized. But this morning he was battered by her absence; in this distant place his body and mind didn’t know how to protect themselves.
    As soon as she’d left that day, he’d closed his eyes. An afterimage of the door glowed. When he’d opened his eyes again, the room seemed strange in an undetectable way, as though he were seeing it after a hiatus of years. Hesitantly, he brushed cat fur from the armchair and sat down.
    Six years. Six years of life that belonged to them both, out the door in the form of Caroline’s fragile person. If only there’d been less…tension about money. Caroline, from many generations of a background she referred to as “comfortable,” was deeply sympathetic with, and at the same time deeply insensitive to, the distress of others. “Why not, Aaron?” she would say. “Why don’t I just take care of the rent from now on?” Or, when she felt like going to some morbidly expensive restaurant, “I could treat. Wouldn’t it be fun, for a change? Of course”—she would gaze at him with concern—“if you’re not going to enjoy it…” Sometimes, when she noticed him grimly going through the mail or eying the telephone, she would say gently, “Something will turn up.”
    Though not quite a prodigy, Shapiro had been received with great enthusiasm at the youthful start of his career. He’d been shy and luminously pale, with dark curls and almost freakish