After a moment, he raised his hand and waved.
She made no response.
When she turned again and moved toward the rear of the store, he realized that, whoever it was, it wasn’t Helena.
Instead of returning to his office, though, he stopped for the afternoon at Clip’s, a dark-paneled pub that catered to cops and road crews. Sitting at the bar with his bourbon, he gazed out at the sidewalk, at all the shoppers and clerks and bookbag-lugging students hurrying through the snow. At five o’clock the crowd thickened, and at the dinner hour it quieted. He stayed there until long after the streetlights had come on. A couple of times in their yellowish glow he thought he saw Helena again, moving toward him across the slushy sidewalk. But each time the figure drew closer, he realized that it was someone else.
—
EACH FACULTY MEETING began with Knudson Hay straightening his tie and neatening the stack of papers in front of him, then noting attendance and reading the agenda. Then, within moments, the proceedings would degenerate into wrangling. Andret’s senior colleagues seemed to disagree over every imaginable issue, from whether the honor code allowed an undergraduate to remove an exam book from the classroom to which drinks would be served at the fall-semester mixer. Each item was approached like an affair of state. Some of the voices were decorous and level while others sounded like curses in a foreign street. At the center of it all, Hay kept his hand on a copy of Robert’s Rules of Order.
There seemed to be no question too small to generate a half hour of steady opposition. Would a third, lower-level calculus course be added? Should there be a bench in every hallway or only in those that ended at a ladies’ restroom? By some kind of self-imposed discipline, the new hires sat in metal folding chairs in the center of the grand room, generally unwilling to speak, while the tenured professors arrayed themselves among the leather armchairs at the perimeter. Obviously there were factions and alliances, but Andret couldn’t parse them. Along with the rest of the new faculty, he sat silently.
Midway through the semester, there was a deliberation about whether to plant an oak tree or a sycamore tree in the mathematics quad, in honor of a recently deceased emeritus chair who had been an accomplished cabinetmaker. The conversation went back and forth among the senior faculty while Knudson Hay took notes at his desk in the center. This was the pattern on most questions, at the conclusion of which the group would generally vote.
Finally Andret could contain himself no longer. “Why not a beech?” he blurted. “There’s no tree as magnificent as a beech.”
For a moment, nobody spoke. Then, to Andret’s surprise, Knudson Hay said, “Well then, a beech it shall be.”
—
IT WAS TRUE: he’d sometimes thought he’d seen her other places, as well. Standing in a group of pedestrians once, under a traffic signal where he’d been waiting for the light; in the parking lot of the dry cleaner’s another afternoon when he was running to his car in the rain; even outside on the front walk of his own building one spring evening, when he opened the windows for the first time after winter and saw a woman walking away from him following a small dog on a leash.
But he couldn’t say with certainty whether any of them had actually been Helena Pierce.
What he felt when he saw her each time, he couldn’t discern. Shame? Disappointment? Longing? He was aware of something attempting to make itself known inside him, but he couldn’t decide what it was.
—
“YOU LOOK NERVOUS,” said a voice behind him. “You have done something wrong?”
Andret turned, laughing falsely. “Is it so obvious?”
“No, is not exactly obvious.”
She was pretty. Short chestnut hair and a tight skirt. Vaguely Eastern features. He’d positioned himself next to the sangria bowl, and now he held the ladle over her glass. It was the first mixer of the new semester.
“Thank you,” she said. “And I see you have chosen strategic place to fish, Professor Andret.” She glanced down as he filled her drink.
“Have I?”
“I would expect no less. Certainly not from man who defeated Kamil Malosz.” She took a sip and frowned. “But why this dirty water you are fishing in?”
Twenty minutes later, he and Olga Petrinova were walking in two different directions across the campus — she insisted on taking her own car. And ten minutes after that they were sitting side by side at a plywood bar upstairs from a defunct auction-house on the outskirts of town. In front of them were two double bourbons, no ice.
She was a visiting scholar from St. Petersburg State University, newly arrived after the thawing of Soviet relations. Even her work was fashionable: hyperbolic and elliptic geometries. She drank the bourbon like water.
After her second one, she stopped calling him Professor.
After her third, he felt a knee against his thigh.
He excused himself. In the bathroom, he looked into the tiny mirror and saw the same face he’d always seen — long and stolid, wide at the temples, the nose overly defined, the dark eyes made prominent by the thickness of their ridges. Young for his age, a face flawed by overreaching. It had always slightly shamed him.
Since the Malosz theorem, though, it seemed to have gathered a new charisma.
He tightened the knot of his tie, the bourbon gently separating him from his thoughts. He checked the mirror again, decided the knot was better loose, and walked back out to the bar, loosening it.
—
THAT SEMESTER HE was assigned to teach the midlevel introductory class in calculus. Three days a week he found himself at a dusty green chalkboard expounding in front of a lecture hall full of first-year students. These were not the mathematics majors or the electrical engineers; and these were not the poets from Professor Rosewater’s class at Berkeley; these were the doctors and the accountants and the bankers, the young men — Andret could see few female faces — with enough intelligence to make it to the top but without nearly enough brainpower to change anything. He realized he was envious.
That year, having accepted every lecture invitation in his mailbox, he’d discovered himself to be an able speaker; but this audience of submissive-looking teenagers didn’t seem to care. Looking out at their vaguely distracted faces, he suspected that whatever would induce them to their historical destiny hadn’t yet arrived on the scene. Sometimes he would lower his voice to a whisper — a trick he’d learned while on the lecture circuit — or pause for several long moments, waiting for their attention to return.
He always had a drink or two before he taught, and now and then his mind would bring him back to his own undergraduate days in East Lansing. By the time he was a sophomore, he was already taking upper-level courses, sitting at the back of the room considering the differences between himself and the boys he’d gone to school with in Cheboygan, most of whom were by then a good way through their second or third tours in Vietnam. He himself had been kept out of the draft by collapsed arches in his feet — he still sometimes wondered if the doctor had exaggerated his condition — and then in Berkeley had been given another five years of reprieve. Now the war was over, and the draft, too, and when he looked out over his classes, the seriousness of those times seemed no more relevant to the students in front of him than some ancient Assyrian epic. In East Lansing in the sixties, the men — future or past soldiers, nearly all of them — had worn ties to class, and there was a gravity to the tone that he hadn’t found since. Not even in graduate school at Berkeley, the thought of which, as he stood before his class one day recalling the incense that burned in the back corner of the Lime Rose, deflated him. On the other side of the podium, in the rows of sloping, newly upholstered seats, sat the sons of attorneys and financiers. They rested their sneakers on the chairbacks, passed notes across the aisles, and opened sodas loudly as he spoke. A few of them fiddled with skateboards.