“We’re having company, Levine,” said Professor Baldwin. “One of my wife’s instructors is coming to dinner. What is it, this big, scary thing?”
Levine filled him in briefly on the nature of Kemp’s argument for Antarctic models, without of course saying anything about Dr. Kemp. He said that in his opinion a practical method of cloud control was now ten years closer than it had been yesterday. At first Professor Baldwin interjected such comments as “Yes, yes,” and “I see,” but when Levine had finished he was silent for a long time. Levine could hear Mrs. Baldwin, beautiful Julia, shrieking with laughter in the background.
“Perhaps you’d better come over,” said Professor Baldwin. “I’ll have to ask Julia. Hold on.”
Levine jumped up and down while he waited and watched the last red pennant fade from the evening sky. One of the things he loved best about meteorology was that its domain encompassed sunsets.
“Come in an hour,” said Professor Baldwin. “It’s fine. In fact, my wife has suggested that you invite your friend Smith. We have a whole salmon.”
“Thank you,” said Levine. “I’ll call him.”
It was, of course, this same Julia, or Jewel, Baldwin for whom I had hoped to find that volume of Franco-Egyptian dramatic theory, and I told Levine that I would be more than happy to accompany him.
There were coyotes out laughing and looking for pussycat in the foothills above the Facuplex when Levine and I came up the driveway to the Baldwins’ house on Froebel Lane. This entire neighborhood, with its skinny new trees on their crutches, its fresh-rolled lawns, its streets named for famous educators, had not been here six months before, and Levine and I had often walked up, carrying our binoculars and a six-pack of beer, to a couple of flat boulders that had stood not far from the present site of the Baldwins’ Japanese station wagon. Among a few other things, we shared a soft spot for birds and small animals, although he knew far more about them than I, and we had once been enchanted by the sight of two red rattlesnakes, somewhere in the vicinity of the Baldwins’ front door. I reminded Levine of this.
“They were doing it, too,” he remembered. “Making love like a couple of snakes.”
He rang the doorbell and straightened his necktie. I had told him no one else would have one, but he’d insisted on wearing his. The only tie he possessed, it was at least twenty-five years old, brown, with a vaguely birdlike white figure, inside a pattern of concentric circles, against a grid. He called it his Radar Duck tie, and he generally wore it only on first dates and for court appearances. I was just going to tease him about it for the hundredth time when the door was opened by a large, portly man with very dark skin and gray hair, wearing a bathrobe over a pajama top and sweatpants. The bathrobe had a rodeo motif and was printed with leaping cowboys, lariats, and brands. This was Mehmet Monsour.
“They are having a bitter argument,” he said, grinning delightedly and offering us his big brown hand. “Please come in.”
We followed Monsour into the tiled living room, sat down at opposite ends of an elderly Danish modern sofa, and folded our hands in our laps. The Baldwins bawled and pleaded in another room. Monsour went to a battered recliner and eased himself backward, taking up a large can of malt liquor and the remote control for the television. Wearing a look of rapt scrutiny, as for the turns of a Berma or a Norma Desmond, he flipped back and forth from a courtroom-simulation program to a talk show on which three transsexuals were discussing the male lives they had abandoned; we’d evidently interrupted his theatrical studies. Like most acting teachers, he was famous chiefly for the whimsical and slightly cruel discipline he imposed on his pupils, and for the unconventional sources of his difficult productions. (Six months later I read in the Los Angeles Times a respectful review of Monsour’s “harum-scarum” new play, Divorce Court.) I had met him only the week before, when Jewel took me to his messy room at the Kon-Tiki Motor Lodge, but he showed not the faintest recognition now, and in fact ignored both Levine and me completely. After five minutes we looked at each other and rose simultaneously to our feet.
“Just tell Professor Baldwin I’ll see him tomorrow,” said Levine.
“Sure thing,” said Mehmet Monsour, waving us brightly away.
We went to the door and were about to go out when Professor Baldwin came to retrieve us. His hands were in the pockets of his gray cardigan, and he was wearing the cool, bored demeanor someone in a store attempts to adopt when he has just broken an expensive item. He looked as though he were going to whistle a little song.
“Where are you going?” he said mildly.
“Oh,” said Levine. “Nowhere.”
“We just got here,” I said. “Just this minute. How are you, Professor Baldwin?”
“We don’t have to stay for dinner,” said Levine. “We can leave right now.” Faced with the substance and strife-haunted eyes of his chairman, and not just his disembodied voice on the phone, Levine felt his feet begin to grow a little cold.
“Nonsense. Julia’s just getting dressed. Have you met Mehmet? Met Mehmet. I bet you haven’t met Mehmet yet.” He gave a small laugh, and I could see that he mistakenly felt the rift in his marriage to have been opened and occupied by Mehmet Monsour, and that he consequently liked to make fun of his visiting, untenured colleague. I felt sorry for Baldwin all at once and wished that I hadn’t come. He brought us back into the living room, and then we four sat and watched the television, wondering what it might be like to become a woman. No one spoke. I waited for Jewel to emerge, trying to guess which outfit she would wear. She had a pair of old Levi’s I liked, with a rip in the seat which showed bare skin when she bent forward.
“Mr. Smith!” she cried when she appeared at last, in a purple sarong, and took my hand. “Mr. Levine! It’s so good to see you!” She attempted, as had her husband, to seem as though she had never in her life raised her voice, let alone in the past quarter of an hour, but her cordiality was brittle, sarcastic, and even a little frightening, as though she were doing Shaw.
“Now, if you gentlemen will just give me twenty minutes,” she said, going around to Mehmet Monsour’s chair to give his gray head a fond pat. “Everything’s almost done.”
“Let me help you, Mrs. Baldwin,” I said.
“Good,” said Professor Baldwin. “Levine, let’s you and I sit in my office for a few minutes and talk.”
Levine stood instantly, as though summoned to the bench, and followed Professor Baldwin down the hall and into the small room at the back of the house where Baldwin did his revolutionary work on the so-called greenhouse effect. The room looked out over the canyon, toward the mountains, and was furnished with a single cinder-block-and-plank bookcase on which were massed perhaps a hundred books. A much wider plank spanned two sawhorses to make the professor’s desk, at which he sat in a Barcelona chair that had belonged to his father-in-law, an architect. There was only a kitchen step stool in the corner for Levine. Although relatively young for a full professor and a laureate of atmospheric science, Baldwin possessed the hard-won virtues of an older man: caution, resignation, frugality. The few strands of black hair on his prematurely lunar head seemed, like his spare office, like his marriage, to be the conscious result of an effort to get by with as little as possible, as though he were preparing for the imminent decline of the biosphere. His only indulgence, aside from a small framed photograph of his wife in a parka on a Falkland island, was his computer — an expensive machine capable of animating color images in three dimensions, which he had bought with some of the money from his MacArthur Fellowship, and which was now running a long, slow simulation of worldwide ozone accretion.