might have been nothing more than hormones—he has read about that, how at a certain point the nesting instinct kicks in, in men as much as in women. But at the time it felt like arrival. Like coming to the end of a hard road and being able to rest.
When his father had been diagnosed at the start of his doctorate David had felt rudderless, in the grip of feelings that pulled in so many different directions he thought they wouldtear him apart. He had been in the midst of his comprehensives, up against deadlines for his dissertation proposal, for research funding, for the whole course of his future, yet once it was clear his father was dying, once David no longer had his defiance of him to spur him on, it felt like all volition had left him. There had been one awful night when he had wept like a child at how little his life seemed set to amount to for all his ambitions. And yet he had got through. Had managed barely into his thirties to reach a pinnacle most academics wouldn’t get to in a lifetime.
With the TV deal even Julia’s father finally deigned to take notice of David, inviting him and Julia to dinner. Not at his house, which David wouldn’t see the inside of until after the wedding, but at his club, a fusty place downtown all oak and velour and padded leather where they were served overcooked salmon and underdone vegetables and where some months later, having failed to scare David off, her father would insist on holding the wedding reception, complete with cash bar. David had expected someone more turned out, not this barrel-chested scrapper, a big man a good three inches taller than David with a shock of white hair that looked like it had been trimmed with a weed-whacker and a plaid sports jacket a good half-century out of fashion. But he was sharp, the sort of man who dared you to underestimate him.
“Here he is, our
novus homo
,” he had greeted David, what the Romans had called those striving plebes who had managed to scrounge a place among the patricians.
That was how the evening unfolded, in these smiling assaults, Julia looking on the whole time like an amused spectator. Away from her father she was scathing about him, but up close David could feel the dark lines of force that bound them.
“You’ll get used to him,” she said afterwards. “He just needs to claim his territory.”
Julia, too, had been quick to claim her territory, right from the start giving up any pretense of hiding their relationship at work, lingering in his office, taking his arm in the halls, planting her stakes. The truth was it pleased him to be taken possession of like this. He could see they were the envy of the department, in the untouchable way of celebrities or royalty, as if there was the sort of rightness to their coming together that put aside the usual pettinesses and rancour. Then the more open they were, the sooner Julia would be free of any lingering residue of Dirksen. For his own part, Dirksen had taken the hint early on—there was no more mooning at her office door, no orbiting at a distance, just his nods and smiles and quick retreats as if he were trying to make himself invisible. David figured he had come around like everyone else had, was probably even happy for them. They were both his protégés, in a way, even David, whom Dirksen had pushed for when he’d been hired and had always shown a paternal protectiveness toward.
The television deal brought another wave of buzz around David’s book and another flurry of speaking invitations, some of them from big-name universities in the States. More than once he was asked, with the sort of discretion that suggested serious intent, whether he had any plans for a move. The idea grew more compelling the more he thought about it. Even the B university back home had approached him, with an offer of a tailor-made cross-appointment. Nothing like the money he might get south of the border, but with course relief and a decent research budget.
He made a point of