The Paris Review - Fall 2016

ONCE THE READING was underway, Leslie found it impossible to
stay focused on what Megan was saying. The essay, if it was an essay, was as
amorphous as advertised. It seemed to be about her body and . . . icebergs?
And her father, who was . . . also an iceberg? She checked her phone and was
disconcerted to see that she already had a response from Marcus. She had
imagined—hoped was too strong a word—that he wouldn’t reply at all, that
her e-mail would simply be registered in her karmic ledger without any need
for it to be acknowledged on the ground floor of actual existence. But here
was Marcus, alive in her inbox. She looked up and saw that she was attracting
a glare from her seatmate, an older woman with a long braid of white
hair. The woman pointed at Leslie, then at the reader at the lectern. Leslie
pointed at her phone.
“I’m texting!” she said in a stage whisper. “Sorry, I’m too busy texting!”
This drew smirks from her friends sitting in the row in front of them,
but she did put her phone in her bag.
“If the heart is located outside the body, is it still of the body?” Megan
read. “If ice is no longer solid, will it cease to be my heart? When I melt, who
will drink what is left behind? Thank you.”
Amid the applause, Leslie returned to her phone. Marcus’s e-mail was
short. “Les,” it said, “very glad you sent this. I think of you often. Can’t wait
to catch up. Till soon, M.”
She was torn between hating her past self—the very recent past self
who had sent that e-mail—and enjoying the surge of gratitude she felt for
Marcus’s response. She was skeptical of gratitude. Like humility, it was what
people told you to feel after you’d been fucked over. Marcus had been awful,
drugged out and petty and selfish in the most unjustifiable ways. But the
sheer reminder of his existence broadened her outlook. The world was not
Missoula.
She felt something cold against the back of her neck and turned around.
“Cold Smoke?” Cal said, holding a beer. “There’s a couple IPAs left, too.”
“This is great,” she said. “Thanks.”
“Thought she was pretty good,” Cal said. “Really poetic language.”
“Definitely,” Leslie said. There didn’t seem to be any pressing need to
correct him. Sure, baby, it was poetic as shit. She sipped her beer, which was
not as cold as it had felt against her neck.
“Hey!” Cal said to a retired UM professor. “So glad you could make it, Jim.”
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