January brought snow and the end of the semester break, and it brought also the return of something that had been absent from Mara for months: the call from the Whitmore Foundation.
The Whitmore Foundation was one of the most prestigious arts organizations in the country. It funded composers, playwrights, choreographers, writers — serious people doing serious work — with year-long residency fellowships that included a stipend, a studio, and the full gift of uninterrupted time. The fellowship was based in New York. It had, as far as Eliot could tell when Mara explained it to him on a cold January evening, changed the careers of dozens of major American artists.
Mara had applied for it before coming to Carver. She had heard nothing and assumed nothing would come of it. And then, on the second Tuesday of January, they called.
She told him over dinner — the Vietnamese restaurant again, their place — with an expression he had not seen on her before: a brightness that was also a bracing, the face of someone holding something enormous and not quite sure how to put it down.
'They want me,' she said. 'For the full year. Starting September.'
He said all the right things immediately and with genuine feeling, because he was genuinely happy for her — that part was simple and true and undeniable. He knew how much the work meant to her, how the elegy had been building toward something she could not complete in a semester's worth of stolen mornings. He knew what a year of uninterrupted time would mean.
But underneath the true and genuine happiness was a cold, clear space of fear. September. Eight months away and then gone. New York. Three hundred and fifty miles and a whole other life.
He did not name the fear that night. He raised his glass and said: 'This is everything you deserve.'
She looked at him across the table with the searching eyes she always turned on important things and said: 'I haven't decided yet.'
He said nothing. He understood that his saying nothing was itself a kind of speech, and he was not sure whether it was noble or cowardly.