After I went off to grad school in the States, I saw R only once more, at a party the first Christmas I was back. She was sitting with her new boyfriend, and we couldn't have said more than a few words to each other. I think she married him in order to take him with her when she, too, went off to grad school in the States. But she was on the opposite coast.
I was surprised, one fall, to get an e-mail from her, from a Waterloo address. She had, after a postdoc, been hired into a tenure-track job at UW. I could almost see her building from my office. But it was in a different Faculty, and I never went up there, and I suppose she never came through my building, either. We promised to have lunch together some time. Every so often, we'd exchange a bit of e-mail, and renew the promise.
Nearly two years later, she wrote with the news that she'd been offered a junior research chair at a university in the West, and was leaving soon, and if we were going to have that lunch, we'd better do it now. So we nailed down a day, and she agreed to meet me at my office.
I recognized her instantly when she showed up, though it had been over a decade. If anything, she was skinnier and more freckled than before, her hair the same straw-red colour. I probably looked much the same also. We both still dressed and acted like graduate students.
There was a bit of awkwardness when I discovered that she had brought her lunch. I normally brown-bagged my lunch as well, but I had thought that we'd go off to a nearby restaurant, and hadn't brought anything. She agreed to come with me and have just a little something while I had a full meal.
So we went off to the nearby plaza, to a popular Japanese restaurant, and were given a table in the window, with sunlight streaming in. I ordered a bento box and she ordered a small salad.
There were so many questions I wanted to ask her about our undergraduate years: "Did you know...?" and "Would you have...?" So much had remained unspoken at the time, so much I didn't understand, pieces of the puzzle I was missing. She was, I felt, the one woman towards whom I had behaved absolutely correctly, but maybe that was just my perception. Maybe things had been different, or could have been different. I needed to ask her.
But, in the end, I just couldn't. Too much time had passed. The grand mysteries had become little mysteries, whose only charms lay in their remaining mysteries. The truth would probably have been banal, or disappointing. I worship knowledge, but that was perhaps the first time I deliberately turned away from it. There would be other such times. Not many.
So, instead, I talked about my wife and kids, and my work, and she talked about her husband, and how fortunate she was that his work was portable, and what she thought life would be like in the new position, with compelling opportunities but also corresponding pressures. It was a fine enough last lunch.
She walked back with me to my office, on a long, busy corridor which led on to an exit heading directly for her building. I unlocked the door and opened it, then turned and stood in the doorway to say goodbye. "We'll have to do this again some time soon," she said, and I was startled: surely she couldn't be serious, she was leaving in three weeks. But then I realized that she was trying to soften the goodbye. Yes, I said, we'll have to do this again some time soon, and she headed off down the hallway, still holding her bagged lunch.
I stood by staring on like some helpless, primitive advertisement for aspirin under the pear tree as she walked out of my life for the second and final time in the Twentieth Century.
[Reference: Richard Brautigan.]