A bearded boy in a lumberjack shirt near us said in a carrying voice, "Wenner is naive and so is his magazine. I'll start buying it again when I see a picture of Jerry Brown on the cover."
His friend said, "Wenner is Jerry Brown."
"Berkeley," I said.
"Who is Wenner?"
"I'm surprised you don't know. Jann Wenner?"
"Who is he?"
"He was the Berkeley student who founded Rolling Stone."
"Is that a magazine?"
"You're full of surprises," I said. "You mean you've never heard of it?"
"I'm not interested in most magazines. I never look at them. What kind of magazine is it? Is it named after that band?"
I nodded. At least she had heard of them. "What kind of music do you like?"
"I'm not very interested in music."
"Let's try some other names. Do you know who Tom Seaveris?"
"No."
"Have you ever heard of Willie Mays?"
"Didn't he used to be an athlete? I'm also not very interested in sports."
"It shows." She giggled. "You're getting even more intriguing. How about Barbra Streisand?"
She pouted charmingly, self-parodyingly. "Of course."
"John Ford?" No. "Arthur Fonzarelli?" No. "Grace Bumbry?" No. "Desi Arnaz?" No. "Johnny Carson?" No. "Andre Previn?" No. "John Dean?" No.
"Don't ask me any more or I'll start saying yes to everything," she said.
"What do you do?" I asked. "Are you sure you live in this country?"
"Let me try you. Have you heard of Anthony Powell or Jean Rhys or Ivy Compton-Burnett or Elizabeth Jane Howard or Paul Scott or Margaret Drabble or-"
"They're English novelists and I've heard of all of them," I said. "But I take your point. You're really not interested in the things you're not really interested in."
"Exactly."
"You never even read newspapers," I said.
"No. And I never watch television." She smiled. "Do you think I should be stood against a wall and shot?"
"I'm just interested in who your friends are."
"Do you? Well, you are a friend of mine, aren't you?" Over it, as over our entire conversation, was that veneer of disinterested irony. I wondered for a moment if she were actually entirely human: her nearly complete ignorance of popular culture demonstrated more than any assertion how little she cared what people thought of her. What I had thought of as her integrity was more complete than I could have imagined. Maybe a sixth of the graduate students in California had never heard of an athlete like Seaver; but who in America could have avoided hearing of the Fonz?
"But you do have other friends. You just met me."
"I do, yes."
"In the English Department?" It was not impossible: for all I knew of my temporary colleagues, there might have been an extensive cell of Virginia Woolf fanciers who never looked at the newspapers. In them however this remoteness from their surroundings would have been an affectation; of Alma the reverse would have been true.
"No. I don't know many people there. I know some people who are interested in the occult."
"The occult?" I could not imagine what she meant. "Seances? Ouija boards? Madame Blavatsky? Planchettes?"
"No. They're more serious than that. They belong to an order."
I was stunned; I had fallen into an abyss. I envisioned Satanism, covens; California lunacy at its worst.
She read my face and said, "I'm not in it myself. I just know them."
"What is the name of the order?"
"X.X.X."
"But-" I leaned forward, scarcely believing that I had heard correctly. "It can't be X.X.X.? Xala…"
"Xala Xalior Xlati."
I felt disbelief, shock; I felt a surprised fear, looking at her beautiful face. X.X.X was more than a group of California screwballs dressing themselves in robes; they were frightening. They were known to be cruel, even savage; they'd had some minor connection with the Manson family, and that was the only reason I had read about them. After the Manson affair they were supposed to have gone elsewhere-to Mexico, I thought. Were they still in California? From what I had read, Alma would have been better off knowing button men in the Mafia: from the Mafia you would expect the motives, rational or not, of our phase of capitalism. The X.X.X. was raw material for nightmares.
"And those people are your friends?" I asked.
"You asked."
I shook my head, still astonished.
"Don't worry about it. Or about them. You'll never see them."
It gave me an entirely different picture of her life; sitting across from me, faintly smiling, she was for a moment sinister. It was as though I had stepped off a sunlit path into jungle; and I thought of Helen Kayon working on Scots Chaucerians in the library.
"Even I don't see them all that much," she said.
"But you've been to their meetings? You go to their houses?"
She nodded. "I said. They're my friends. But don't worry about it."
It could have been a lie-another lie, for I thought she had not always been truthful with me. But her entire manner, even her concern for my feelings, demonstrated that she was being truthful. She raised her cup of coffee to her lips, smiling at me with a trace of concern, and I saw her standing before a fire, holding a bleeding something in her hands…
"You are worrying about it. I'm not a member. I know people in it. You asked me. And I thought you should know."
"Have you been to meetings? What goes on?"
"I can't tell you. That is just another part of my life. A small part. It won't touch you."
"Let's get out of here," I said.
Was I thinking even then that she would give me material for a novel? I do not think so. I thought that her contact with the group was probably much slighter than she had suggested; I had only one hint, much later, that it may not have been. She was romancing, exaggerating, I told myself. The X.X.X. and Virginia Woolf? And La Grande Illusion? It was very far-fetched.
Sweetly, almost teasingly, she invited me back to her apartment. It was a short walk from the coffeehouse. As we left the busy street and turned into a darker area of tall houses, she began to talk inconsequentially of Chicago and her life there. For once I did not have to question her to get information about her past. I thought I could detect a glancing relief in her voice: because she had "confessed" her acquaintance with the X.X.X? Or was it because I had not quizzed her about it? The latter, I thought. It was a typical late summer Berkeley evening, somehow warm and chilly at once- cold enough for a jacket but with a sense of hidden warmth in the texture of the air. Despite the unpleasant surprise she had given me, the young woman beside me -her unconscious grace, her equally natural wit which lay embedded in her talk, her rather unearthly beauty- enlivened me, made me happier for life than I had been in months. Being with her was like coming out of hibernation.
We reached her building. "Ground floor," she said, and went up the steps to the door. For the pleasure of looking at her, I hung back. A sparrow lighted on the railing and cocked its head; I could smell leaves burning; she turned around and her face was washed into a pale blur by the shadows of the porch. Somewhere in the neighborhood a dog barked. Miraculously, I could still see her eyes, as if they shone like a cat's. "Are you as circumspect as your novel, or are you going to come in with me?"
I simultaneously recorded the fact that she had read my book and the featherlight criticism of it, and went up the steps to the door.
I had not imagined what her apartment would be like, but I should have known that it would be nothing like Helen Kayon's untidy menage. Alma lived alone- but that I had suspected. Everything in the large room into which she brought me was unified by a single taste, a single point of view: it was, though not obviously, one of the most luxurious private rooms I have ever seen. A long thick Bokhara rug lay over the floor; a painted firescreen was flanked by tables which looked to my untrained eye to be Chippendale. A vast desk was placed before the bay window. Striped Regency chairs; big cushions; a Tiffany lamp on the desk. I saw that I had been right to think that her parents were moneyed. I said, "You're not the typical grad student, are you?"