Socialism, freedom, even birth control. Everything that was once studied was turning into something real, something she could hold. Emma gave her a list of names and citations for her research. And in this joy, she missed Hazel dearly. How long had they worked to invite figures like Higgins to campus? And now here she was, meeting across Higgins’s desk, working for her organization. Hazel would thrive here, but Cora didn’t know if she could send a letter under her pen name without drawing suspicion to them both, so she and her friend would have to remain two buoys, separated by miles of empty expanse, floating on a desolate sea. Time was weakening memory and she struggled to remember what her friend’s voice sounded like. She resolved not to let this sadness take her, not now. Cora took the book list to the New York Public Library and passed beyond the stately lions flanking its entrance. She requisitioned her books and magazines from the stacks and went to sit in the grand Rose Reading Room.

In that splendid space that smelled faintly of sweet baking bread, Cora was surprised to see Indra, stunned by the ferocity of feeling when she saw this handsome man sitting by himself, a few books spread in front of him. It was as if she were looking at some ex-lover from across a room—her heart quickened, and she had a desire to leave.

They weren’t ex-lovers, not yet. What had passed between them was a divergent ambition, not quite a wedge but, rather, the sensation that they were two magnets slowly sliding to separate poles, and if not acted upon by some outside force, they would one day see each other at a distance, from opposite ends of the earth. And perhaps then, and only then, having turned from lovers back into strangers, the space between them would never again yield, and from that vantage she would give him a forlorn wave, the sad hello of two people who saw in each other a death, for the life of a lover could only ever end with a kind of death, the loss of a personhood found only at the side of the other. To be his wife or to be herself, that was the choice, but all love is drunkenness, and like the drunk unable to walk a straight line, there arose in her some uncontrollable bodily urge to go between both, to stumble between fidelity and solitude, to reveal herself at dinner as the (always unnamed) half of Mr. and Mrs. Indra Mukherjee after living a day on her own as Cora Trent.

She sidled up in the seat next to him, pulling her chair close to his, and he looked up with an impression of innocent surprise.

“Fancy seeing you here,” she said with a wry smile, the weak acid returned.

He gave a sheepish look in return, like a boy caught doing wrong. “I didn’t expect to run into you,” he whispered.

“I haven’t caught you much at all outside our small mornings,” Cora replied.

They had become awkward with each other since making rosgolla in Kesari’s kitchen.

“What are you reading?” she asked, trying to break the ice with her own husband.

“I’ve been reading up on the cause of socialism,” Indra replied.

She was surprised, hurt. She had been frequenting the offices of the Clarion for a few weeks. He could have asked her.

He motioned for her to come out into the hallway. They were already attracting the annoyed stares of those around them.

“It was you. You inspired me to start reading,” he said in the hallway outside the reading room. “You were just about to meet with the editor at the Clarion. I was interested in the idea. The night he told me about the police, Kesariji was giving a speech in the city, and some fellow in the back row asked whether freedom was freedom if they were going to replace one class of capitalists with another. Kesariji said it made quite the difference whether a man was being kicked by his own brother.”

Cora laughed. “Did he really say that?”

“Almost exactly those words! I was stunned. He’s of another generation. He’s older. He’s set in his ways. I thought, What would Cora have said to such a comment? What would your editors and friends have said? I immediately began to come here, to read. I needed to know more about the equality among men, the revolution in Russia, everything.”

Cora kissed him, quick and decisive. He was surprised but soon eased into the embrace. “I’ve missed you,” she said.

“After you told me about the Goldings, you seemed like you didn’t need to hear what I had to say. You were going to do what you were going to do. I wasn’t sure if you wanted to listen to me anymore.”

“Shut up,” she said. “I love you.” What he said was true. He had seen directly into her heart. She did not want to listen to him. She wanted what she wanted for herself. “I didn’t know what to say. I’m here now.”

“I’m only in this library because I thought, What would you think about this? What would you do?”

“You can ask me right now,” she said, inviting a spirit of collaboration over compromise. To be his collaborator also meant becoming invisible. She would have to figure out some way to stake her claim, to evade any sense of erasure.

She held his hand and squeezed it just a little bit, the kind of unspoken gesture that said she too was sorry for everything that had passed, that there was something new in front of them now, that the past could burn itself in the great trash heap upon which it accumulated.

For the rest of the day, they worked side by side in silence with a renewed love that passed between them that needed no reassurance of its existence: no conversation, no discovery, just that feeling of sitting next to each other, the heat of his body filling a void she hadn’t known she had felt in the city until that moment.

By the end of the day, she had made good progress on her article and would have something for Higgins soon. As they left, Indra had the same expression of failure as he had on that day he’d told her about what would send them out of Palo Alto and into New York.

“I’ve thought about this a lot,” he said. “I know you want to continue writing, and you can. You just have to do it far from here. You can keep writing for all these publications after we arrive somewhere safe.” He was unable to look her in the eye.

She still desperately wanted the life that was just forming. New York was opening wide to her at the same time forces well beyond her control were beating that world small with heaves from a billy club.

“Where do we go next?” she asked with a sigh.

“Mexico,” Indra said. “We need to go to Mexico, like everyone else.”

Everyone seemed to be going down to Mexico. At first it was the pacifists and the draft dodgers. Now it was the socialists, the anarchists, even the artists and writers, they were all leaving for the revolutionary land to the south.

“You don’t have any more contacts, do you?” Cora asked. “We need someone who could get us papers to move freely down there. We could cross ourselves, but that could be risky too. Nothing’s guaranteed. You got here as Pierre Thomas. Any Germans willing to help you get there?”

“Nothing,” Indra mumbled. “We need someone who knows people of importance. How about you? Scullion? Dawson?”

Dawson. He had to have a connection to someone in Mexico. Or he had to know someone who knew someone who could help them. If he couldn’t help them, no one could.

She would write to him and ask him for something. It would take a few weeks. They’d be here until then. They could pass the time in the Rose Reading Room.

They got to the train.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“Ceylon India,” he said. “Should I go to my shift?”

“Oh, to hell with that job. If we’re going to Mexico, you have to quit anyway. Things are swell with money for now. Come with me,” she said. She wanted him to know that all she wished for in that moment was to have him once more. He had a light in him again, and from that light she drew close to his body. She didn’t want to lose what was hers.

◆

A Bomb Placed Close to the Heart can be ordered here.