Free My Buried Life by Doreen Finn Page B

privy to far too much departmental chatter, the rolling commentary on others’ lives. Chinese whispers informed me of his wife, an heiress, and the Central Park West apartment they shared. The same whispers spoke of his solo sojourn abroad, of another woman, terribly distinguished in her field, who left her post in Barcelona for him, and of how it ended badly somewhere between Sydney and King’s College.
    ‘I’m impressed with what I hear. Eliot, Yeats, Cummings. This is exciting stuff.’
    Like most academics, I am guarded about work in progress. So much possibility of it going wrong. But this man, the star professor, a brilliant light in the world of early twentieth-century literature knew my realm of interest. His passion for it surpasses mine. Isaac simply lives it, and there we differ. For me, it’s still a job that I can leave behind. He can’t.
    He leaned closer to me, Chardonnay on his breath. He paused, his mouth almost touching my ear. ‘Do you like jazz?’ His hair, cropped against the possibility of receding, shadowed his skull. His skin, that skin, smooth, honey-coloured, unwrinkled. There was no paunch, no sagging jowls. He hadn’t lapsed into that state of bewilderment that claims so many men in their fifth decade. He had more of the successful novelist about him than the chair of English at a good university. His beige linen suit sat lightly on his frame.
    ‘I do, Professor.’
    He downed the rest of his wine in one go. ‘Then come on. We’ll be late.’
    ‘And my paper?’
    ‘You’ll get it done. I trust you, Doctor.’
    And so it was. Our shared love of jazz was the excuse I used for seeing him, for spending evenings in his company in dark clubs all over Manhattan. It was easy to catch the subway to meet him and convince myself that it was just for fun. It was fun, in that giddy, uncontainable way that love always is in the beginning. Isaac didn’t know about my drinking, not yet. There was no need.
    Now I’m here and he is in New York. Someone else is doing my job, teaching twentieth-century poetry to undergraduates, guiding my doctoral students through their theses, publishing papers and going to meetings in my place. My apartment has been sublet, and I can’t go back, not yet.
    I shove my mother’s letters in a recycling bag. I care not who wrote to her, what they told her. It won’t help me unpick her, uncover her depths. She learned too well to hide herself, to pack herself into the tightest suitcases, bury her truths.
    I didn’t choose this house, but it shelters me for now. I’ll work my way through each room, lighting sage in corners, chasing away the ghosts that linger.
    But my personal ghosts still waltz to silent music, dusty candelabra lighting their spooky way.

    Later, I stand at the kitchen window, John Coltrane’s tenor sax fattening the silence of the early evening. The topaz light slips slowly away, and I finish the bottle of wine I started in order to shake the dust of my mother’s papers off me. Irish days take forever to end, twilight at this time of year stretching on past its bedtime. I’ve stood in this same spot on countless evenings, watching the same scene smoothe itself out before me. There’s comfort in that for me; no matter what happens during the day, it will end.
    That’s the thing about home. It tricks you into thinking that nothing has changed. But in the universe of our lives, nothing could be further from the truth.

CHAPTER 10
    T he window has darkened without my noticing it. The overhead light flickers insistently. A faint buzzing like a trapped bee is the only sound in the empty classroom. I’ve just finished marking the last of the essays, all thirty of them. Two exam questions on solitude in Emily Dickinson’s poetry, with reference to five poems. The church on Rathmines Road bells the hour. Six. My hand cramps from holding my pen.
    This is the first time I’ve stayed late since I started, but I don’t want to go home. The emptiness of