Free My Buried Life by Doreen Finn Page A

helped in the way distractions do, keeping it all at bay.
    I dismissed the question. What about your mother? I dismissed it, yet still I craved Isaac’s curiosity, needed him to draw me out, to let me speak about it all. Sure, by that stage he was my superior at work. Sure, I knew he was married, but none of that mattered to me. Not then, not at the beginning. I just wanted him to talk to me, to ask me questions no one had asked before, things I wouldn’t have tolerated from anyone else. In the darkness of that underground club, with music zinging in our ears and the smell of weed thick on the dark air, I wanted him to stroke my bare arms, to pull me in, to talk to me. His eyes were green-grey, like moths, and they travelled over me.
    My mother never loved me. That’s what I wanted to say. I know that now, sitting here with her folders of letters on my lap, her stupid, pointless collection of correspondence. She loved my brother and she never loved me. I always thought there was something wrong with me, some part of me that was missing, because if everything worked properly my mother wouldn’t have looked at me the way she did, telling me without ever having to say it that I was a nuisance, a waste of her time and money, one more piece of clutter in her house. And I suppose I wanted Isaac to know that about me, wanted him to look at me and see something different, not to notice my mother’s loathing.
    But I said nothing, because how do you put into words something that is held so deeply, a nugget of belief that hardens into a diamond with time and pressure from holding it so tightly? What about your mother? And I said nothing because I didn’t want to be tainted by it, by her indifference to me. Not on that night, in that club, with those eyes like moths on mine.
    I told him I loved him right from the beginning. It felt that way. After three years in the community college, I took over from a junior lecturer in poetry in the graduate school at NYU, who took a sabbatical followed by a nervous breakdown. Isaac, NYU’s star professor of English, was on a career break when I was appointed. It was another three years before he reappeared, fresh from a stint in Paris, another in Sydney, and a third in London. Amazingly, I remembered him, remembered his name and his face, six years older now, but as arresting as it had been that cold spring day he interviewed me. He cornered me at a faculty reception to mark a new publication a week after his return. It was a big deal. A donor was in attendance, a New York millionaire with his sights set on seeing his name over a door somewhere in the building. Promises of money gather huge excitement in the world of the university, where funding always runs short of the mark. We are like survivors of war, scrambling over each other to get the spoils.
    There was little in the way of introduction. ‘So, Doctor Perry, I hear great things.’ He held his wine glass as though it were a pint of beer, his elbow sticking out at an angle. A plate of sausages cooled on the table beside him. He pronged three with a toothpick. On the wall over his shoulder hung framed photographs of events like this one, stretching back decades. The room remained the same, the passage of time marked only by changing hairstyles. Across the room a glass was dropped. Someone laughed nervously. The donor’s voice, loud, self-assured, rose above the clamour. I mentioned the abstract I’d finished the previous day, the paper on Eliot I was preparing. Isaac listened, really listened. The noise of the room swelled around us, but I had his attention. He refilled his glass from a bottle someone had abandoned. As he poured, I checked my watch.
    ‘Leaving us already?’
    ‘Soon.’ I’d started going to meetings, and being around alcohol made me nervous. Each time a bottle popped, or ice clinked in a glass, the dark thing in me roused itself and stretched inside me. He was attractive, Professor Kraal. And married. I’d been