The Lesson Read Online Free Page A

and that I will see you the same. Such a moment—for that I would give the rest, all the rest, all these useless rags, buildings, people.
    Being old is being useless, and having things be useless to you. Because: the world is what is still to come. It isn’t what is or what was.
    For me that what-is-to-come, well, you know, you know what it is, my love. I am reaching out towards you in your narrow space.
    yours,
    l.
    When she had finished writing the letter, she looked at it carefully. She held it in her hands, looking at it carefully, and then she tore it up. The torn-up pieces she left there on the table, as if they might do something for one another in such a state.

The Second Visit
    Just at the strike of nine, the boy arrived. Loring had left a note on the door. It said,
LET YOURSELF IN. I AM UPSTAIRS.
    The boy came into the house. Two shoes faced him in the narrow passage, two shoes in the very middle. As many things seem hostile when arrayed in strangeness, so one might imagine the dark hall of this house with its shuttered windows to frighten him, but he was not frightened. He stepped over the shoes, went straight through and found the stair and climbed. These were steep steps, of the sort in old colonial houses. He was by no means assured of an easy time, and stopped halfway up at a little window carved in a half-moon. The glass was warped and the street below was bent into an impossible shape. He sat looking through for quite a while until the voice came from above.
    —Stan?
    —Here on the stairs.
    He went up the rest of the way.
    Loring was sitting in a room off to the left. At the top of the stairs were three rooms. One was the bedroom, one a workroom, and the third, well, she was in it. That room was for nothing at all, and never had been. Loring and Ezra had never liked the room. There was something wrong with it, but they couldn’t say what. They would occasionally put things in there because they felt something would happen. The things that happened were never anything that one could really know about.
    The room was at this time empty save for one chair, and a little table by the window. On that table, sat a box. It was shut, closed with a tiny clasp over which wax had been dripped. The wax was unbroken.
    —Hello, said the boy.
    Loring looked at him and thought, If you are listening, when I ask you this question, you will respond to something else I have said.
    —Did you finish the problems I left you with?
    —Is this the room you were talking about?
    —What did I say about it? asked Loring.
    —You said that it was almost like the room was in this house and in another house, and that was why it didn’t really work to put anything in it, unless you felt like the things in it would also be elsewhere.
    It took him a little while to say this and he got it wrong the first time, but the second time said it straight through with a very serious expression.
    —That’s right, she said. That’s what I said.
    —But why would you sit in a room like that?
    She didn’t reply.
    —Anyway, I can’t feel it. It just feels like a room.
    —The…
    —What is in that box?

What
i
s in
t
hat box?
    It was an ordinary question, and of course, one that troubled Loring to no end. In all the time since her husband’s death, she had puzzled over nothing so much as this. Of course, the permission to open the box had long been received. That it could have been opened at three months is clear. Three months had been the agreement for quite a while before he had suddenly changed it, and in some ways it would make perfect sense to honor the previous agreement. The year’s permission was also long gone, for had not one year, then two, three, four, five, all come and gone? Why then was the box still there, still unopened?
    The truth was this: as long as Loring did not open the box, some mystery still remained, some hint of life, a secret kept—an act still continuing in its efficacy, on the part of Ezra. And so in