with the certitude of someone finished with his important business, and looked up.
âHey,â I said.
You nodded. There was now, at least, instant facial identification.
I opened the door for you. You went to the nearest empty seat. It didnât look strange when I sat in the one next to it; weâd entered the room together and these were the easiest-to-reach places.
I would be sitting within a foot of you for eighty minutes. There was no chance I could follow Samuelsonâs winding disquisition on The Portrait of a Lady and Daisy Miller .
My peripheral vision was limited to your left hand, its blue rivers of veins faintly flowing under smooth skin, its piano-player fingers, its pale pink nails and their small white suns cresting over thecurved horizon. I could absorb more comprehensively your scent, whose intimations that Iâd nosed before now blanketed me: an amalgam of your shampoo and lavender perfume, a hint of cigarettes and whatever natural aroma you exuded. If I could inhale it continuously, eternally, without ever breathing out, I would.
Samuelson riffled through papers on his lectern as he prattled on. âOne of you wrote an essay this week that nicely dovetails with that point. Let me just find it . . .â
We overestimate destinyâs role in our lives, selectively applying it to favorable outcomes; think of all the times when you didnât run into your long-lost friend in the street, when you didnât just catch a bus, when you didnât get placed in a dorm with Veronica Morgan Wells. Or, more starkly, of all the good things that never happened to you because you werenât born as someone else with a better life. But the law of averagesâwhich, when advantageous to us, we prefer to call fate, when disadvantageous we decry as bad luck, and when neutral we ignoreâwill occasionally smile upon us when we most need it.
Samuelson located the correct paper. âDavid Federman argued that, quote, âperhaps the peg-leg-as-primal-wound is intended to throw the reader off the scent with a facile psychological misreading, and Melvilleâs underlying point is that Ahab is simply a susceptible participant in an economic system designed for manic, unslakable ambition. The real primal wound is not his missing leg; it is America.â â
I hadnât even known Samuelson read the student essays; my section leader must have been so taken with my writing that sheâd pressed it on him. It was thrilling to hear those sentences preached to the entire room, especially the final clause, intoned with the halting majesty of a presidential peroration or the voice-over in a domestic car commercial. Rendering the experience even more exhilarating: you, in an orchestra seat to witness my glory.
âDavid, are you here?â Samuelson asked, peering out into the crowd, since he didnât know who I was.
Everyone looked around for the mystery writer. I raised my hand slowly, as if reluctant to take credit.
I savored your surprise next to me: you didnât know who David Federman was, either; might not have even remembered my first name and certainly didnât know my last. You wouldnât forget it now.
âItâs a compelling ideaâIâd love to discuss it further,â Samuelson said to me. âSign up for office hours.â
He dismissed us. My body, to others, remained earthbound, but I was in a crowâs nest high above them. And good luck, let alone destiny, had nothing to do with it. No; years of solitude, hours spent reading when others were going to birthday parties and sleepovers and keggers, had all built up to Professor Samuelsonâs public acclamation for an essay Iâd tossed off in a single sitting. I imagined him inviting me to guest lecture an upcoming class, whatever topic I liked; he just wanted the other students to be inspired by my example, and you would sit in the front row, transcribing every word,