Matt walked over to her immediately, like an emergency responder.
“It’ll be okay,” he said. “It’s fine. There’s always a way to recover the document.”
She had been reworking a chapter all morning, pages she no longer had to rework, according to Bob, who was just starting to become very concerned about what he called her unproductive perfectionism. “Just finish by May,” Bob said, and now it was April.
“We’ll get it back,” Matt said with the certainty of a boat captain. Phoebe didn’t yet know where Matt was from, didn’t yet know he had a very devoted mother who put up a real Christmas tree every year. But she could feel it.
“I hope so,” Phoebe said, relaxing.
Bob walked in, picked up papers at the printer, and said, “Oh, good! These printed in the nick of time.” Then he looked at Phoebe with the glassy look of a man who hadn’t been outside all day, and said, “Oh, hi Phoebe, I didn’t recognize you for a moment. You don’t look all Virginia Woolfish today.”
Phoebe looked down. Did she normally look Virginia Woolfish? She was confused. She had never thought of herself that way before.
“Oh,” was all she said. “Yeah.”
Her advisor left and the room was quiet until she said, “Was that a compliment or an insult?”
“I guess it depends,” Matt said. “Was Virginia Woolf … hot?”
Phoebe laughed. “I mean, I never think of any historical figure as hot. They’re just these bodiless, dusty, sepia-toned entities.”
Matt agreed. “Even the US presidents, the ones who are famous for being hot presidents, like JFK, aren’t really what we’d call hot.”
They sat there and talked about the US presidents, saying things like, “I mean, Lincoln had nice bone structure, I think,” and “What? Lincoln was famously ugly.” They debated whether Nietzsche would be hot if one of his aunts had shaved his mustache, but it was too hard to say, too impossible to imagine the man’s face without that mustache, so Matt finally said, “Hey, want a beer?”
Matt and his friends kept beers upstairs in their departmental fridge because you could do that kind of thing in Philosophy, where the new admin was everybody’s best friend. They sat in the eerie purple light of the storm and talked about how nice it was not to be writing, and how did every waking moment become about our dissertations?
“When my parents call, my mom is always like, But are you doing anything fun for the summer? And I’m like, Well, I’ve been thinking a lot about Platonic forms.”
Phoebe laughed. She felt like she was skipping school, not like she had ever done that before.
“Same,” she said. “I mean, my father. He didn’t really get it, either.”
She told him that her father didn’t understand why she read so much. It had worried him, something he told her during her first Thanksgiving break from graduate school. She had spent it reading instead of going out with her friends or on dates with men. And yes, sometimes she read too much. Sometimes, she read books instead of living a life, but didn’t that just mean that her life was about reading books? And couldn’t that be a life the way his life was all about floating on a river? Every night, she watched her father put on gear and wordlessly get in the boat and try to hook the same fish he’d fished for years and he never thought this was strange at all. But he looked at her reading Emma and said, “Go outside, live a little.”
“Power’s back,” Matt said.
She wished for a tornado to tear through the quad and keep them hidden in the basement for so long, they’d be forced to start a new life together. But the room was lit up now, the computers were alive again, and Matt said, “Okay, let’s see the damage.”
She pulled up the Word document. The morning’s work was gone.
“Is that really bad?” Matt said.
“Yes,” she said. “Very bad.”
She had two weeks to finish her dissertation. And she didn’t have a tenure-track job lined up for the fall like Matt—a stroke of luck, he told her, a retirement at the right time, but Phoebe knew it was more than that. Phoebe knew everybody in the philosophy department must truly love Matt, the way she could already feel herself start to love him. He was the boat captain in every room, who made you feel like everything was going to be okay. He would run the internship program and he would help figure out why nobody cared about philosophy anymore and he would publish a book to much acclaim—a book so popular, he actually made money off it.
But Phoebe wasn’t beloved by her department. She wasn’t hated, but she wasn’t a star—she didn’t have any real publications like many of her colleagues, because she was always in the computer lab, just trying to finish her dissertation.
But it had been worth it, Phoebe thought—to lose the morning’s work in exchange for his company. And maybe this was what her father had been talking about. Maybe this is the life he had wanted for her.
“I’m impressed by your calm,” Matt said. “If I lost this morning’s work, I’d be under the table right now, crying and drinking gin.”
“Well, there’s no gin, so…” Phoebe said.
“Oh, there’s gin. Every academic building statistically has at least one bottle of gin.”
“Let’s go find it.”
“First, work,” Matt said. “Gin, later.”
They went back to work, but she couldn’t focus. The energy of the room had shifted. She wanted to sit there and drink gin with this man. She wanted to know: What did Virginia Woolf look like again? She pulled up her photo online and realized that she never properly looked at the woman before. Yes, she saw her square photo on the back of books her colleagues were reading, but that afternoon, she could see Woolf in a new way, the way she could suddenly see herself—through Matt’s eyes. And through the eyes of a man falling in love, she could see how spirited Woolf had been, how beautiful she was at the right angle. Phoebe had always felt this way about herself. Pretty, but only at certain angles.
“Okay, I give up,” Matt said. “All I’m doing over here is googling photos of Virginia Woolf.”
“Me too,” she confessed.
“Well, let me just say this,” Matt said. “Bob was definitely giving you a compliment.”
She smiled in the privacy behind her computer.
AFTER THEY BOTH finished their dissertations, they spent the summer together, not working. There were long nights at the bowling alley. They listened to the drum circles on Delmar. They took long drives along the Mississippi. Had barbecue at beaver-trapping festivals. She started reading Mrs. Dalloway and fell in love with that, too. She would text Matt her favorite lines without any explanation and he understood.
But nothing is so strange when one is in love (and what was this except being in love?) as the complete indifference of other people, she wrote.
It’s like today when I was at the gas station filling up my tank, Matt texted back. I thought, So I still have to do chores?
But then Septimus killed himself and the fall semester began. She put down Mrs. Dalloway for good, and Matt moved into his new office. She started teaching her first class as an adjunct, while applying to jobs all over again. Each time they said goodbye before one of her interviews, it was upsetting—felt like practice for the real thing. She called him from the hotels, which made her feel like a kid in high school, trying to learn everything about Matt over the phone. Tell me more about your mother, about your father, about the little dog you held in your arms as it bled out in the street, and do you like chocolate or citrus desserts, do you like lakes or oceans, cats or dogs, and why does the world always make us choose?
