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She must be his mistress.
Julia fixed him with a stony gaze, as her body began to vibrate with anger. “You begged me to come after you — to look for you in Hell. That’s exactly where I found you. And you can stay there forever, for all I care.”
He stepped back, replacing his glasses, his eyes narrowing into slits.
“What are you talking about?”
“Nothing. I’m done, Professor Emerson.” She turned on her heel and walked to the elevator.
Confused, he watched her walk away, his thoughts hazy and unfocused.
After a moment he jogged after her. “Why did you write that ridiculous note?”
She felt as if he’d stabbed a dagger into her heart. She straightened her shoulders and tried to steady her voice. “What note?”
“You know damned well what note! The note you left in my fridge.”
Julia shrugged dramatically.
He grabbed her elbow and spun her around. “Is this a game to you?”
“Of course not! Let me go.” She pulled her arm away from him and began punching the down button for the elevator, willing it to come to her rescue. She was humiliated and angry, feeling silly and oh so small. She couldn’t get away from him fast enough, even if she ran down the stairs.
He moved a step closer. “Why did you sign the note the way you did?”
“Why do you care?”
He heard the elevator approaching and knew that he had mere seconds to get answers to his questions. He closed his eyes, her previous words thundering in his ears. She looked for him in Hell. He’d begged the brown-eyed angel to come looking for him. Of course, she hadn’t. Hallucinations don’t respond to begging.
What if Beatrice wasn’t a hallucination? What if… He felt something like fear begin to creep across his skin. Once again, the impossible floated before his eyes. If he concentrated, he could see her in his memory, but her face was blurry.
The ringing of a bell signaled the arrival of the elevator.
His eyes snapped open.
She stepped through the open door and shook her head at him, at his confusion, and at the intoxication that still swam in his eyes. Everything hinged on this. She could tell him or she could keep secret what happened between them just as she always had. Just as she had for six f**king years.
As the door slowly began to close, she saw a wave of realization wash over him.
“Beatrice?” he whispered.
“Yes,” she said, moving so she could maintain eye contact with him until the last possible second. “I’m Beatrice. You were my first kiss. I fell asleep in your arms in your precious orchard.”
Gabriel sprang forward to stop the elevator door from closing. “Beatrice! Wait!”
He was too late. The door closed at the sound of her name. He pressed the button furiously, hoping to reopen the doors.
“I’m not Beatrice anymore.” As the elevator began its slow but unstop-pable descent, Julia burst into tears.
Gabriel pressed his forehead and palms against the cold steel of the elevator door.
What have I done?
Chapter 15
Old Mr. Krangel looked out his peephole into the hallway and saw nothing out of the ordinary. He’d heard voices, a man and a woman arguing, but couldn’t see anyone. He’d even heard a name — Beatrice. But he was unaware of any tenant called Beatrice on the floor. And now the hall appeared to be empty.
He’d already ventured out once that morning; he’d had to return his anonymous neighbor’s Saturday paper, which had been delivered to his door by mistake. The Krangels didn’t take the Saturday paper, but Mrs. Krangel suffered from dementia and had picked it up and hid it in the apartment the day before.
Slightly annoyed at having his Sunday morning thus interrupted by a kemfn in the hallway, Mr. Krangel opened his door and stuck his aged head out. Not fifty feet away, he saw a man leaning against the closed elevator door. His shoulders were shaking.
Mr. Krangel was immediately embarrassed by the pathetic sight before him but was momentarily mesmerized.
He didn’t recognize the man, and he wasn’t about to introduce himself.
Surely a grown man who would waltz about the thirtieth floor of an apartment building barefoot and casually dressed and…doing whatever it was he was doing, was not the kind of person he wished to know. Men from his generation never cried. Of course, they never took their socks off in hallways, either. Unless they were — odd. Or lived in California.
Mr. Krangel retreated quickly, closed and locked his door, and called the concierge downstairs to report a barefoot crying man out in the hallway who had just had a screaming kemfn with a woman called Beatrice.
It took five tiresome minutes to explain to the concierge what a kemfn was. Mr. Krangel vocally lamented this fact, choosing to place the blame on the Toronto District School Board and their narrow, waspish curriculum.
It was late October, and the weather in Toronto was already cool.
Julia was without something warm under her coat as she slowly and miserably walked home, because she’d left Professor Emerson’s fouled sweater behind. She hugged her arms tightly across her chest, wiping away angry and resigned tears.
People passed her on the street and gave her sympathetic glances.
Canadians could be like that — quietly sympathetic but politely distant.
Julia was grateful for their sympathy and even more grateful that no one stopped to ask why she was crying. For her story was both too long and too utterly f**ked up to tell.
Julia never asked herself why bad things happen to good people, for she already knew the answer: bad things happen to everyone. Not that this was an excuse or a justification for wronging another human being. Still, all humans had this shared experience — that of suffering. No human being left this world without shedding a tear, or feeling pain, or wading into the sea of sorrow. Why should her life be any different? Why should she expect special, favored treatment? Even Mother Teresa suffered, and she was a saint.
Julia did not regret looking after The Professor while he was drunk, even though her good deed had not gone unpunished. For if you truly believe that kindness is never wasted, you have to hold tightly to that belief even when the kindness is thrown back in your face.
She was ashamed that she’d been so stupid, so foolish, so naïve as to think that he would remember her after a drunken binge and that they could return to the way things were (but never were, really) that one night in the orchard. Julia knew that she’d been swept up into the romantic fancy of a fairy tale, without any thought of what the real world, and the real Gabriel, was like.
But it was real — the old spark was there. When he kissed me, when he touched me, the electricity was still there. He had to have felt it — it wasn’t all in my head. Julia quickly pushed those thoughts aside, willing herself to stick to her new, non-Emerson diet. It’s time to grow up. No more fairy tales. He didn’t care enough to remember you back in September, and he has Paulina, now.
When she entered her little hobbit hole, she took a long shower and changed into her oldest and softest flannel pajamas — pajamas that were pale pink with images of rubber duckies on them. She threw Gabriel’s tshirt to the back of her closet where it hopefully would be forgotten. She curled up on her twin bed, clutching her velveteen rabbit, and fell asleep, physically and emotionally spent.
While Julia was sleeping, Gabriel was warring with his hangover and fighting the urge to dive into a bottle of Scotch and never resurface. He hadn’t gone after her. He hadn’t run for the stairwell and stumbled down thirty flights to meet her at the lobby. He hadn’t taken the next elevator and raced to the street to catch her.
No, he’d stumbled back to his apartment and slumped into a chair, so he could wallow in nausea and self-loathing. He cursed the roughness with which he’d treated her, not just this morning, but since his first seminar back in September. A roughness made worse by the fact that she had suffered saint-like in silence, all the while knowing exactly who and what she was to him.
How could I have been so blind?
He thought of the first time he’d seen her. He’d returned to Selinsgrove in depression and despair. But God had intervened, a genuine deus ex machina. God sent him an angel to rescue him from Hell — a delicate, brown-eyed angel in jeans and sneakers with a beautiful face and a pure soul. She comforted him in his darkness and gave him hope. She seemed to cherish a sincere affection for him despite his failings.
She saved me.
As if that salvation wasn’t enough, the angel appeared to him a second time, the very day he’d cruelly lost the other strong force of goodness in his life, Grace. The angel sat in his Dante seminar, reminding him of truth, beauty, and goodness. And he responded by snapping at her and threatening to push her out of the program. Then this morning, he was cruel and compared her to a whore.
I’m the Angelfucker now. I’ve f**ked over the brown-eyed angel. Gabriel cursed the irony of his name as he walked to the kitchen to retrieve her note.
Holding her beautiful, fragile message in his hand, he saw his own ugliness — not an ugliness of body but of soul. Julianne’s note, and even her breakfast tray, confronted Gabriel’s sin in a manner that was stark, convict-ing, and absolutely unrelenting.
She could not have known this, but in that moment her words from a week ago rang true. Sometimes people, when left alone, can hear their own hatefulness for themselves. Sometimes goodness is enough to expose evil for what it really is.
