![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Sure enough, there was a listing, with address, for one “Steegmuller, F.,” on East Sixty-Sixth Street. There was no listing under her name, but I remembered she’d been married to Francis Steegmuller, the late, great Flaubert scholar. For reasons I couldn’t quite explain-I had a job then that involved acquiring film rights to literary properties, which meant it would’ve been easy enough simply to call her agent, if such was what I wanted to know although of course I was writing a novel of my own, so there was that, too-I’d looked her up in the telephone directory. I was fevered with admiration after having read Hazzard’s novel The Transit of Venus. But just then what I felt was surprise-something akin to what an astronomer might’ve experienced (to borrow a figure from one of her own books) upon receiving a signal from another star. Everything that seemed to constitute Shirley, everything that mattered, was also a piece of the historical past. Once I got to know her-it would take a few years-I’d understand that this “remoteness” was not geographical but temporal. The accent wasn’t American, wasn’t Australian, wasn’t English, certainly, although it muddled a few of these things. It sounded, for a moment, as if she might have been calling from somewhere far away-an analog, transatlantic connection-but that wasn’t it. I’d been on my way out to dinner, and only a shot of curiosity at who might have been calling at such an hour, on a Friday, had urged me to run back and catch it. I was breathless, having raced inside to pick up. ![]()
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