Charades Read Online Free Page A

decided whether I’m flattered or insulted that you obviously expected me to drop by your office again. Eventually.”
    â€œWell. I haven’t decided whether I’m flattered or insulted that you obviously expected I’d be there.”
    â€œNo,” she says, ruling this out. “Not valid. You’re always there.”
    â€œAll right then. You obviously expected I’d invite you back here.”
    â€œYou know,” she says earnestly, “I feel you seriously mis­understand why I … It’s true, of course, that I didn’t wander into your office or your class by accident, but I wouldn’t want you to misinterpret my reasons. It’s not sex.”
    â€œOh.” He pauses momentarily between one shirt button and the next.
    â€œHave you ever felt that you were on the lip of a black hole?” she asks him. “And that unless you found something to hang onto in the next few minutes, you’d cross the ‘event horizon’?”
    After that everything was irreversible and absolute annihilation was just a matter of time. So he had explained in Course 8.286.
    And has he ever …?
    Oh yes, he has been at the dangerous rims of black holes.
    â€œThey eat stars, you said. They eat quasars.” As though watching such distant galactic events, she unwinds herself from the chair and stands, looking at nothing, in another of her curious trances. From the window, a faint haze of neon blurs her shape and at the same time gives it a thin radiant outline, a line that shifts and turns misty, so that he has an odd sense of her body as translucent. Her hologram self, he thinks with a slight shock. He can in fact see the blue veins in her breasts, and goes to her and draws the lightest of circles around her nipples with his index finger.
    â€œYou’re not listening to me,” she reproaches.
    And then, for a considerable length of time, she can say nothing at all.
    She manages, at last, to disengage herself from him without breaking the erotic fog in which they move, but establishing nevertheless a delicate space. She curls up in his armchair again and he watches her from the bed. In a curious way, all this seems to him a mode of sexual contact. It is as though they are still physically coupled.
    â€œNo,” she says. “It’s not sex. It’s because of Katherine.”
    He waits and watches.
    â€œBut it’s something different again that keeps me,” she says. “It’s what you know. I want to … well, one of my professors at Sydney Uni described me as an academic glutton. He said I was driven by cerebral curiosity and greed, although he found me lamen­tably deficient in direction and purpose. That’s what he said.
    â€œOn a reference letter, he wrote that I was ‘brilliant but erratic’. Frankly, I thought he could have been more tactful. But my considered response is that erratic  — in its pristine and original sense — did not have a negative connotation. No, that’s comparatively recent, a shift in etymological history. I have nothing against erratic, myself.
    â€œErrare, to wander, right? And by extension to make mistakes. But that’s the human condition, isn’t it? Not to mention the best pedagogical method — the meandering mistake-making self. Don’t you agree? That’s what makes life bearable. I’d say history comes out highly in favour of erratic folk.
    â€œTake Cook, Captain James Cook.” She props her elbows on the arm of the chair, rests her chin on her fists, and leans forward — what he thinks of as her earnest and sermonising pose. He waits for the lecture. “You’re almost certainly woefully underinformed about Captain Cook. Americans are. About any heroes and explorers other than their own, as far as I can see. Does the name mean anything?”
    â€œAh …”
    â€œJust as I thought. Well,