Free Nightlight by Michael Cadnum Page A

job, anyway.”
    She looked away, trembling.
    â€œAll right. I won’t press it. God knows, it took me so long to mention it, I’ll probably never say another word about it. I don’t want you to say no, and then feel that you have to stick to that answer out of stubbornness. You like to make up your mind what you’re going to do, and then go right ahead and do it. I appreciate that. More than that, I admire it. You are the most remarkable woman—the most remarkable person—I have ever met. I think, hell I don’t know what I think anymore. I want you to be happy. I want us to be together. So promise me this—you’ll think about it. Okay? You won’t say for sure one way or another, but you’ll think about it. Will you?”
    She nodded, blinking. “I’ll think.”
    â€œGood. Good. You’ll think. I’ll settle for that for the time being.”
    â€œBut you promise me something.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œThat you won’t mention the subject until I say you can.”
    Paul controlled a quick response, and said carefully, “I can wait.”
    â€œAnd you won’t give me meaningful, searching looks. We can just go ahead and have a nice little time away from everything, just like we had planned.”
    â€œSure. We’ll pretend like this conversation never happened. If that’s what you want.”
    But it was clear to Paul that while Lise liked him, and was “honored” by his love for her, she was not quite as fond of him as he was of her. Oh, they were good friends. And lovers, and very affectionate. But she would rather be a scholar. It made her, in a way, all the more alluring. The scholar as beauty.
    â€œI’m glad to be away from it,” she said. “People think of academia as an ivory tower, but it’s more like a factory. People slicing poets thinner and thinner, representations of self in Herbert, introspection in Marvell, the influence of Dante on the Romantics. Not that these studies don’t matter. But that the motive for performing the erudition is to acquire a more lustrous name, so you can move to a better university, get more money, buy a better car. Like those experiments on mice they do over and over again. Everyone knows if you make a white mouse drink a half liter of vodka a day something funny will happen to it, but they pop open thousands and thousands of animals so they can whip their livers into pâté and look at them under a microscope. I think of the poets as mice, only thank God they can’t be hurt, even the living ones, if they have any sense.”
    The mice had something to do with the two of them, but Paul was not sure what. Her weariness with her studies had somehow made her tired of everything, even love. Or not love, exactly, but commitment. She had taken on so much that she could not stand any more demands.
    â€œYou’ll be a magnificent professor,” Paul said. “You’ll become the most incredible thing that ever hit the academic swamp.”
    â€œI don’t want to be incredible. Just competent.”
    â€œYou’ll be great.”
    â€œThe competition is appalling.”
    â€œTerrible, or very good?”
    She smiled wanly. “Very good. There are about two job openings a year and about eight thousand brilliant crazed animals struggling to get in.”
    He wanted to tell her: anything, anywhere. I will do anything for you.
    He shifted the car into neutral without starting it, and wobbled the gear shift back and forth for a moment. “We’ll have lots of picnics,” he said.
    He started the car. He eased the car over the uneven gravel road, as if the birds that peppered the spaces between the rows of grape vines were all the ways that he could lose her. He drove carefully, deliberately, so they would not take flight.

11
    The road twisted through vineyards, some vines ancient with black, arthritic stumps, others new, youthful