"There's no answer to that. Let me get you a cup of tea."
She was lying on the bed in my little apartment, curled up like a fetus. "I feel so guilty."
I came back with her tea. "I wish we could take a trip together," she said. "I wish we could go to Scotland together. I've spent all these years reading about Scotland, and I've never been there." Her eyes were brimming behind the big glasses. "Oh, I'm a horrible mess. I knew I should never have come out here. I was happy in Madison. I should never have come to California."
"You belong here more than I do."
"No," she said, and rolled over to hide her face. "You can go anywhere and fit in. I've never been anything but a working-class drudge."
"What's the last really good book you read?" I asked.
She rolled back over to face me, curiosity defeating the misery and embarrassment on her face. Squinting, she considered it for a moment. "The Rhetoric of Irony by Wayne Booth. I just reread it."
"You belong at Berkeley," I said.
"I belong in a zoo."
It was an apology for everything, for Meredith Polk as much as for her own feelings, but I knew that if we went on I could only hurt her more. She was right: it was not possible that I could ever love her.
Afterward I thought that my Berkeley life had settled into a pattern to which the rest of my life would adhere. It was, except for my work, essentially empty. But wasn't it better to continue seeing Helen than to wound her by insisting on a break? In the workbound world I saw as mine, expedience was a synonym for kindness. When we parted between us was the understanding that we would not meet for a day or two, but that all would continue as before.
But a week later the conventional period of my life came to an end; after it I saw Helen Kayon only twice.
2
I had found the hook for the Hawthorne lecture; it was in an essay by R. P. Blackmur: "When every possibility is taken away, then we have sinned." The idea seemed to radiate throughout Hawthorne's work, and I could connect the novels and stories by this black Christianity, by the impulse in them for nightmare-by what was almost their desire for nightmare. For to imagine a nightmare is to put it at one remove. And I found a statement by Hawthorne which helped to explain his method: "I have sometimes produced a singular and not unpleasing effect, so far as my own mind was concerned, by imagining a train of incidents in which the spiritual mechanism of the faery legend should be combined with the characters and manners of everyday life." When I had the ideas which would structure the lecture, the details fell onto the pages of my notebook.
This work and my writing students kept me fully occupied for the five days before the lecture. Helen and I met fleetingly, and I promised her that we would get away for a weekend when my immediate work was done. My brother David owned a "cottage" in Still Valley, outside Mendocino, and he'd told me to use it whenever I wanted to get away from Berkeley. This was typical of David's thoughtfulness; but a kind of perversity had kept me from using the house. I did not want to have to be grateful to David. After the lecture I would take Helen to Still Valley and kill two scruples at once.
On the morning of the lecture I reread D. H. Lawrence's chapter about Hawthorne and saw these lines:
And the first thing she does is seduce him.
And the first thing he does is to be seduced.
And the second thing they do is to hug their sin in secret, and gloat over it, and try to understand.
Which is the myth of New England.
That was what I had been looking for all along. I put down my cup of coffee and started to restructure my remarks. Lawrence's insight extended my own, I could see all the books in a new way. I discarded paragraphs and wrote in new ones between the crossed-out lines… I forgot to call Helen, as I had promised to do.
In the end I used my notes very sparingly. Once, straining for a metaphor, I leaned on the lectern and saw Helen and Meredith Polk seated together in one of the last rows, up at the top of the theater. Meredith Polk was frowning, suspicious as a Berkeley cop. When scientists hear the kinds of things that go on in literature classrooms, they often begin to look that way. Helen merely looked interested, and I was grateful that she had come.
When it was over Professor Lieberman came up from his aisle seat to tell me that he had enjoyed my remarks very much, and would I consider taking his Stephen Crane lecture in two months' time? He was due at a conference in Iowa that week, and since I had done such an "exemplary" job, especially considering that I was not an academic… in short, he might find it possible to extend my appointment to a second year.
I was stunned as much by the bribe as by his arrogance. Lieberman, still young, was a famous man, not so much a scholar in Helen's sense as a "critic," a generalizer, a sub-Edmund Wilson; I did not respect his books, but I expected more of him. The students were filing up toward the exits, a solid mass of T-shirts and denim. Then I saw a face lifted expectantly toward me, a slim body clothed not in denim but in a white dress. Lieberman was suddenly an interference, an obstacle, and I agreed to give the Crane lecture to get rid of him. "Very good, Donald," he said, and disappeared. As quickly as that: one moment the seersuckered young professor was before me, and the next I was looking into the face of the girl in the white dress. It was the graduate student who had stopped Helen and me on the stairs.
She looked completely different: healthier, with a light golden layer of tan on her face and arms. The straight blond hair glowed. So did her pale eyes: in them I saw a kaleidoscope of shattered lights and colors. Her mouth was bracketed by two faint lines of irony. She was ravishing, one of the most beautiful girls I'd ever seen-no small statement, for Berkeley was so populated by beauties that you saw two new ones every time you looked up from your desk. But the girl before me had none of the gaucheness or assertive, testing vulgarity of the usual undergraduate knockout: she simply looked right, perfectly at home in herself. Helen Kayon didn't have a chance.
"That was good," she said, and the faint lines beside her mouth twitched as if at a private joke. "I'm happy I came after all." For the first time, I heard the Southern accent: that sunny drawl, that lilt.
"So am I," I said. "Thank you for the compliment."
"Do you want to relish it in private?"
"Is that an invitation?" And then I saw that I was being too quick, too self-consciously flattered and one-dimensional.
"A what? No, I'm not aware that it was." Her mouth moved: what an idea.
I looked up to the top of the lecture theater. Helen and Meredith Polk were already in the aisle, going toward the door. Helen must have begun to move as soon as she'd seen me look at the blond. If she knew me as well as she had said she did, she had known just what I was thinking. Helen went through the exit door without turning around, but Meredith Polk tried to assassinate me with a glance.
"Are you waiting for someone?" the girl said.
"No, it's nothing important," I said. "Would you join me for lunch? I never did have lunch, and I'm starving."
I was behaving, I knew, with appalling selfishness; but I also knew that the girl before me was already more important to me than Helen Kayon, and by letting Helen go at once-by being the bastard Meredith Polk said I was-I was eliminating weeks, perhaps months of painful scenes. I had not lied to Helen; she had always known that our relationship was fragile.
The girl walking beside me across the campus lived in perfect consonance with her femininity; even then, moments after I had first seen her in good light, she seemed ageless, even timeless, beautiful in a nearly hieratic and mythic way. Helen's separation from herself had kept her from gracefulness, and she was blatantly a person of my own blink of history; my first impression of Alma Mobley was that she could have moved with that easy grace over an Italian piazza in the sixteenth century; or in the twenties (more to the point) could have earned an appreciative glance from Scott Fitzgerald, flying past the Plaza Hotel on her devastating legs. Set down like that, it sounds absurd. Obviously I had noticed her legs, I had a sense of her body; but images of Italian piazzas and Fitzgerald at the Plaza are more than unlikely metaphors for carnality. It was as though every cell of her possessed ease; nothing less typical of the usual Berkeley graduate student in English can be imagined. The gracefulness went so deep in her that it seemed, even then, to mark an intense passivity.