Afterward, he drifted for a moment.
When he woke he could still hear the muffled music from downstairs, which now sounded slightly comical through the carpet. A snare-drum military excitement behind a pair of wailing horns. She was rummaging in the closet. His glance fell on the curtain rod over the window, and its shiny knobs dimpled for an instant and tensed toward ovoids. He rose and ransacked his pants for the pills. They weren’t there. His thoughts crowded. Then he was up and into the house. Down the stairs to the kitchen. He rifled the bag of pastries, then remembered the overcoat. Yes: he could feel them in the pocket. Three of the slippery things, down the hatch in a single swallow, and a breath of air at the kitchen window until at last he felt their arrival at the base of his brain. Ah, my lovelies. The yard looked normaclass="underline" trees and birds. The sun between clouds. He raced back upstairs, the pastry bag in his hand. In the bedroom, another pull of bourbon. 12:35. He had another quarter hour before he had to leave for class. They could do it once more if he didn’t rest. Hurry. She was already in bed. He shook open the bag and offered an éclair. She laughed and tore it from his fingers with her teeth. He laughed, too, and he heard with relief the calm in his voice.
He climbed onto the mattress and began kissing her neck. He whispered, “What did your husband do after the prize?”
“What?”
He lifted his lips. “What did Yevgeny do after he won the Nobel Prize?”
“I’d rather not talk about Yevgeny. Not at the moment. As you might imagine.”
He touched his lips to her flesh. “Just tell me what he did.”
“What do you mean, what did he do?”
“How did he go on?”
She pulled away. With her hand she lifted his head from the sheets. “My dear, it was the easiest thing imaginable. He always felt he deserved it. And he probably did. And then he won it. And now he’s doing what he’s always done, which is work. Work, work, work. Nothing’s changed for him at all. I suppose he wonders if he’ll win another.” She ripped another bite of the éclair and pushed his head back down. “That’s all I’ll say about it.”
“Really? Nothing’s changed?”
“Milo, if you really—” Suddenly she sat straight. She pulled him up again, roughly, and looked at him with wild eyes, her words stacking themselves into a stammer. Then silence.
That was when the door opened. There he was, a bellman with their room-service order. Stocky legs. Polyester dress shirt too tight in the chest. Oily hair. Kyphotic slouch. Not exactly one’s vision of a Nobel laureate: from the bed, Andret actually laughed. Annabelle screamed and pulled the blanket to her neck. Yevgeny Detmeyer cursed, then kicked over the floor lamp before starting across the room with his fists cocked at the shoulder.
—
THE FOLLOWING MONDAY, Andret met again with Knudson Hay. Their second tête-à-tête on what amounted to the same subject. Milo’s face in the mirror that morning had been green-black, the cheekbones still blazingly tender, as though they’d been scalded.
“What are you going to do?” Milo said. “Fire us both?”
“No, Andret, I’m not. Professor Detmeyer is not under my jurisdiction.” He cleared his throat. “But it is tempting to fire you.”
“He’s the one who started slugging.”
“Milo, this is an embarrassment to the university. It ought to be an embarrassment to you. Yevgeny Detmeyer’s a Nobel laureate. You were in his house. You were in his bed, if what I heard is correct.”
“He was supposed to be on a flight to Europe.”
Hay stared at him. “Are you really telling me this?”
“I’m a Fields laureate, Knudson.”
“Look, Milo. What you ought to be doing is hoping that none of this makes the papers. And then you need to figure out how we can be sure nothing like it ever happens again.”
“And I’d be a Nobel laureate if there was one — everybody knows it. Everybody fucking knows it. What’s this meeting really about, Hay?”
“What this meeting’s about is that we’d like to help you.” His chairman rapped on the desk. “That’s what it’s about.”
The door opened: a uniformed figure stood in the hallway.
“What the hell, Knudson? Is that a cop?”
“Campus security, Milo. We’re going to give you one more chance.”
“You’re what?”
“Frankly, I’m not sure why.”
Inventory
MILO ROSE FROM the mattress. In the ruthless winter light he stepped to the window to gaze out at the fields. Last night, his bunkmate, a fussy man named Drake who sold Yellow Pages advertising in Racine, Wisconsin, had neatly set his reading glasses on top of his Bible before climbing into bed on the other side of the room. Drake’s wife had sent him, had packed his things and put him on the bus one morning after church. Milo stared out into the snow, listening to the man’s untroubled breathing.
What was it like to have someone in the world who loved you?
Princeton had flown him here. Eaubridge, Wisconsin. The Walden Commons Addiction Center and Residential Treatment Facility. Arranged and paid for. The chaperone from campus security, a quiet and decent man — he’d graciously changed out of his uniform for the flight — had let him drink on the plane. Had even joined him for a scotch after takeoff. But when they arrived in Eaubridge, Milo had been started on Valium for withdrawal and packed off to his room, where they searched his bags. The huge black orderly found the flask in his sneaker and the bourbon in his mouthwash, unscrewing them both with his elephantine hands and pouring them down the sink with a flourish. He had a sidekick for a witness, a tattooed, wiry Irishman as pale as a corpse who leaned against the counter, observing the dealings like the detective in a hard-boiled procedural. Neither said a word as the booty was discovered, noted, and disposed of, the wiry one merely letting out a short yap of a laugh when his comrade shook the pair of rolled-up socks and the soft rattling of pills could be heard. Both were graduates of the program themselves. Green-and-white ball caps. Green-and-white polo shirts. Everything noted in triplicate on the green-and-white clipboards. The place seemed to be an employment agency, as well.
Welcome to boot camp.
Across the meadow, at the base of a distant slope, the bright morning’s snow lapped itself in diminishing semi-ellipses along the staggered rise of a cattle fence.
—
IT WAS SO strange to be sober. Every blade and hammer of the world suddenly unsheathed. The light in the fields. The trees tipped with ice. Inside, he heard sound harshly and could no longer discern the importance of detail. The voice of the staff counselor at the front of the room interrupted by the squeak of a shoe at a desk behind him, in turn intruded upon by the violent slamming of a door, somewhere down the corridor. His nerves were threads. His cheekbones still burned. When he held out his hands, they shook.