of vision. She was tall. She had straight brown hair, hooded eyes that gave her glance a steadiness. I remember that she was dressed smartly, in a jacket and black jeans. I noticed this because though I wear team tracksuits often, I still try to dress up to fly. I have always felt the need to reject the clothes people wear in airports, the denial implied by such outfits: the elasticated sweatpants, the soft shoes, the neck pillows they wear hung in place as they pace the concourse, as if any sense of the speed and distance of a flight is only something to be blocked out.
Liz looked at the fifteen-euro voucher when it was handed to her. “I can spend it on wine?” she said.
The flight attendant didn’t look up. “You can spend it on what you want,” she said, “but alcohol is very expensive in this airport.”
“Yes?”
“Believe me.”
Liz looked at me as I received my own voucher. “You want to go halves on a bottle of red?” she said.
We ate in a counter-service pizzeria, in a seating area roped off from the echoing belly of the concourse. We had a bottle of wine, two plastic cups, and a small pizza on a paper plate. The sun was setting and the glassy corridors were full of soft light. Mr. Torres Pereira was missing his flight at gate twenty-seven. The announcement of that fact came again and again over the speakers. From the table, we could see out to the runway, to planes taxiing, made insectile by the expanses of glass and steel and tarmac around them. I was coming back from a training camp, she from a conference. We were unlike the others, I realized, because we were both glad of the delay. I felt this myself, and I sensed Liz’s concordance. She had green eyes, and a funny way of holding her finger just beneath her chin as she talked. We were both busy people with hectic schedules, and suddenly here was a gap in our days for which neither of us had accounted. Perhaps we each knew, from the pleasure we were taking in this break, that there was no one waiting for the other at home. I asked her about her work, and she told me about her PhD: the zebra fish, the gene expression and breeding and lost-function experiments. “So what’s the aim?” I said.
“To get my PhD,” she said.
“The general aim?” I said.
She sighed. “You find the purpose of a gene in a fish.”
“Suppose you do,” I said. “And then?”
“Anything,” she said. She kneaded the edge of her eyebrow with her fingers, looked at me. She wanted me to make the rest up for myself, and I recognized that desire. She had ambitions that she was reluctant to say out loud, and I knew this: the sense that you sought an objective rare enough that it felt too stark, almost childish, to simply say it.
It seemed so unlikely that I should find this woman, this feeling reflected back, in this airport, in all the drag of getting home. All meetings are chance, of course, but this one felt so especially.
* *
“You did well, from what I saw today,” she now says over the phone. B gives a sharp cry like something being dragged across a polished floor. I ask her how he slept, what he ate. Liz gives answers of such scientific detail as would satisfy Rafael. We are that kind of parents now, though I do not mind this in the least. The sound of a vacuum cleaner comes from Liz’s end of the call. Her mother is with her, giving a hand in caring for B. Liz will be going back to the lab in the early evening. We talk about her day at work, her return to it later. She sighs. “My students couldn’t find the end of their own noses if I drew them a map,” she says.
* *
My first sense of her was that she made things happen around her. To go around London with her was like going on a treasure hunt of her devising. She had a gangliness that read alternately of girlishness and durability. She took me to a sushi restaurant above a barber in the West End with her friends, and it was good, so improbably so that I felt her due credit for its existence. When she went to the bathroom, her friends and I blundered on, like people trying to persevere through a power outage. I wondered how she came to be with me. I looked at those around the table and thought that they must have despised me for my good luck. She and I were both only children, and both had a similar sturdiness, a self-sufficiency born of that fact. She had something beyond it, though. She could pull others into her plans, bear them along in a way I could not.
We went to museums. Though I lived so close to the city, I had not done that much before meeting her. It is not that I had not thought museum going a good thing to do, but that I had not opened myself to it. The city offered so much that seemed a distraction, and so I was used to passing up experiences which would have been perfectly pleasant. Liz was different, in this respect. The thought that someone took interest in a subject she knew nothing about would unsettle her. She would return from parties and click through Wikipedia articles until late into the night, researching things she had talked to others about, learning more about the careers of those she had met. She had a deep desire to be rounded. She played a continual thought experiment: “Imagine you were sent back in time four hundred years,” she said. “How much of the modern world could you describe and explain?”
In Tate Modern, we walked through the bright rooms. She watched me examine the paintings. I strained to identify them. I would look at a picture and try to guess the author of the work from the limited cast of names I knew. I would consult the label, then, to check my intuition. When I had failed too often at this strategy, I tried to guess only the nationality of the painter. “They’re not flash cards,” Liz said, when we sat in the café on the third floor, a light rain hitting the windows. “Take a moment with them. See what really works for you.”
The implication that some of them might not “work” for me was surprising. Here were paintings worth many millions of pounds, and Liz was suggesting that it was possible, simply, to not like some of them. I wouldn’t have been more surprised if she had said that I could reach out and run my fingers across the pictures. Still, it was difficult to proceed with this knowledge, to stand and look, with Liz all the while seeking to gauge the authentic effect of the works upon me.
In one of the upper rooms there was a brass sculpture: a figure striding forward, the specifics of its body lost in stylized whorls and dashes of teased bronze. Unique Forms of Continuity in Space. I read the caption, about motion and futurism and the Nietzschean superman. “It’s you,” said Liz. “It’s a man totally dedicated to his motion through the air.”
I shook my head. The likeness did not strike me as true. This figure was so substantial, so defiant in the way it bore itself forward. The superman was bold, fleshed out. My teammates and I, however, were skinny, unique not in capabilities we had gained but in those we had chosen to jettison. The figure seemed to confront the wind, while we, I said, sought only to slip past without its noticing.
She was pleased with this. I felt her satisfaction in the way she turned away from the piece. We rode down through the building on the escalators. I suppose that I had cheated a little, achieved a victory on familiar ground, but I did not think of it that way then. It was exhilarating to meet her challenge.
* *
We end the call, and I leave the hotel room and walk down the corridor. Pictures of sailing boats alternate with sconces along the hallways. I round a corner to see Fabrice sitting on the carpet, his back against the wall. He fidgets, jogs his knees. He is thinking of the end of today’s stage, I am sure. He and I are the same age—nearly thirty—and yet I am younger to it all. He has been racing since he was thirteen. There is still some of that teenager in him—his bounce, his fidgeting, his Kafka ears. One gets the sense that the real world has had little chance to make its mark upon him. He has had some good results in his past: one-day victories, stage wins, and a top-ten
