Of course I am condensing six months' impressions into a single moment, but my justification is that the seeds of the impression were present as we left the campus to go to a restaurant. Her going with me so willingly, with such unconcern that it resounded with unspoken judgments, did contain a whiff of the passive -the ironic tactful passivity of the beautiful, of those whose beauty has sealed them off inside it like a princess in a tower.
I steered her toward a restaurant I had heard Lieberman mention-it was too expensive for most students, too expensive for me. But the ceremony of luxurious dining suited both her and my sense of celebration.
I knew immediately that it was she I wanted to take to David's house in Still Valley.
Her name, I learned, was Alma Mobley, and she had been born in New Orleans. I gathered more from her manner than from anything explicitly stated that her parents had been well off; her father had been a painter, and long stretches of her childhood had been spent in Europe. Speaking of her parents, she used the past tense, and I gathered that they had died some time ago. That too fit her manner, her air of disconnection from all but herself.
Like Helen, she had been a student in the Midwest. She had gone to the University of Chicago-this seemed next to impossible, Alma in Chicago, that rough knock-about city-and had been accepted as a PhD student at Berkeley. From what she said, I understood that she was just drifting through the academic life, that she had none of Helen's profound commitment to it. She was a graduate student because she had a talent for the mechanics of literary work and was bright; it was better than anything else she could think of doing. And she was in California because she had not liked the Chicago climate.
Again, and overwhelmingly, I had the sense of the irrelevance to her of most of the furniture of her life; of her passive self-sufficiency. I had no doubt that she was bright enough to finish her thesis (Virginia Woolf), and then with luck to get a teaching job at one of the little colleges up and down the coast. Then, suddenly and shockingly, she lifting a spoonful of mint-green avocado to her mouth, I had another vision of her. I saw her as a whore, a 1910 Storyville prostitute, her hair exotically twisted, her dancer's legs drawn up-her naked body was very clear for a moment. Another image of professional detachment, I supposed, but that did not explain the force of the vision. I had been sexually moved by it. She was talking about books-talking not as Helen did, but in a general-reader way-and I looked across the table and I knew that I wanted to be the man who mattered to her, I wanted to grab that passivity and shake it and make her truly see me.
"Don't you have a boyfriend?" I asked her.
She shook her head.
"So you're not in love?"
"No," and she gave a minute smile at the obviousness of the question. "There was a man in Chicago, but that's finished."
I pounced on the noun. "One of your professors."
"One of my associate professors." Another smile.
"You were in love with him? Was he married?"
She looked at me gravely for a moment "No. It wasn't like what you're thinking. He wasn't married, and I wasn't in love with him."
Even then I recognized that she would find it very easy to lie. This did not repulse me; instead it was proof of how lightly her life had touched her, and was a part of all that I already wanted to change in her. "He was in love with you," I said. "Was that why you wanted to leave Chicago?"
"No it was already over by then. Alan didn't have anything to do with it He made a fool of himself. That's all."
"Alan?"
"Alan McKechnie. He was very sweet."
"A very sweet fool."
"Are you determined to know about this?" she asked, with her characteristic trick of adding a soft, almost invisible irony which denied the question any importance.
"No. Just a little curious."
"Well." Her eyes, full of that shattered light, met mine. "It's not much of a story. He became… infatuated. I was in a tutorial, with him. There were only four of us. Three boys and myself. The tutorial met twice a week. I could tell he was getting interested in me, but he was a very shy man. He was very inexperienced with women." Again that soft, lobbing deflection in her voice and eyes. "He took me out a few times. He didn't want us to be seen, so we had to go places not in Hyde Park."
"Where did you go?"
"Hotel bars. Places like that. Around the Loop. I think it was the first time he'd ever done anything like that with a student, and it made him nervous. I don't think he'd had much fun in his life. Eventually I became too much for him. I realized that I didn't want him in the way he wanted me. I know what you're going to ask next, so I'll answer it. Yes, we slept together. For a while. It wasn't much good. Alan was not very -physical. I began to think that what he really wanted to do was go to bed with a boy, but of course he was too whatever to do that. He couldn't."
"How long did it last?"
"A year." She finished her meal and dropped her napkin beside the plate. "I don't know why we're talking about this."
"What do you really like?"
She pretended to consider it seriously. "Let's see. Really like. Summer. Movies. English novels. Waking up at six and seeing very early morning out of the window-everything is so empty and pure. Lemon tea. What else? Paris. And Nice. I really do like Nice. When I was a little girl, we went there four or five summers in a row. And I like very good meals, like this one."
"It doesn't sound like the academic life is the one for you," I said. It was as though she had told me everything and nothing.
"It doesn't, does it?" She laughed, as at something of no importance. "I suppose what I need is a Great Love."
And there she was again, the princess locked in the tower of her own self-regard. "Let's go to a movie tomorrow night," I said, and she agreed.
The next day I persuaded Rex Leslie, whose office was down the hall from mine, to exchange desks with me.
The art cinema was showing Renoir's La Grande Illusion, which Alma had never seen. Afterward we went to a coffee shop, a place packed with students, and bits of conversation from adjoining tables filtered through into our own. For a moment after we sat down, I experienced a flash of guilty fear, and recognized a second later that I was afraid of seeing Helen Kayon. But it was not her sort of place; and anyhow at this hour Helen usually was still at the library. I felt a moment of intense gratitude that I was not there too, grinding away at a discipline that was not only my own but merely a condition of employment.
"What a beautiful movie," she said. "I still feel like I'm in it."
"You feel movies very deeply, then."
"Of course." She looked at me, puzzled.
"And literature?"
"Of course." She looked at me again. "Well. I don't know. I enjoy it."