"I'm not really much of a student."
Of course I did not really imagine that we would spend months and months traveling, but it was a fantasy which seemed at least an image of our shared future; like the fantasy of my continued unspecified approval.
As the day of my Stephen Crane lecture for Lieberman drew nearer, I realized that I had done virtually no preparation, and I told Alma that I'd have to spend at least a couple of evenings at the library: "It'll be an awful lecture anyhow, I don't care if Lieberman tries to get me another year here because I think that we both want to get out of Berkeley, but I have to get some ideas together." She said that was fine, that she was planning to visit Mrs. de Peyser anyhow for the next two or three nights.
When we parted the next day, we gave each other a long embrace. Then she drove off. I walked back to my apartment, in which I had spent very little time during the previous month and a half, straightened things up and went off to the library.
On the library's ground floor I saw Helen Kayon for the first time since she had left the lecture theater with Meredith Polk. She did not see me; she was waiting for an elevator with Rex Leslie, the instructor with whom I had swapped desks. They were deep in conversation, and while I glanced at them Helen placed the flat of her hand on Rex Leslie's back. I smiled, silently wished her well and went up the stairs.
That night and the next I worked on the lecture. I had nothing to say about Stephen Crane; I was not interested in Stephen Crane; whenever I looked up from the pages, I saw Alma Mobley, her eyes glimmering and her mouth widening.
On the second night of Alma's absence I left my apartment to go out for a pizza and a beer and saw her standing in the shadows beside a bar called The Last Reef; it was a place I would have hesitated to enter, since by repute it was a haunt for bikers and homosexuals looking for rough trade. I froze: for a second what I felt was not betrayal but fear. She was not alone, and the man with her had obviously been in the bar- he carried a glass of beer-but was not apparently a biker or a gay in search of company. He was tall and his head was shaven and he wore dark glasses. He was very pale. And though he was dressed nondescriptly, in tan trousers and a golf jacket (over a bare chest? I thought I saw chains of some sort flattened against skin), the man looked animal, a hungry wolf in human skin. A small boy, exhausted and barefooted, sat on the pavement by his feet. The three of them were strikingly odd, grouped together in the shadows by the side of the bar. Alma seemed comfortable with the man; she spoke desultorily, he answered, they seemed closer than Helen Kayon and Rex Leslie though there were no gestures of familiar warmth between them. The child slumped at the man's feet, shaking himself at times as though he feared to be kicked. The three of them looked like a perverse, nighttime family-a family by Charles Addams: Alma's characteristic grace, her way of holding herself, seemed, beside the werewolflike man and the pathetic child, unreal, somehow wicked. I backed away, thinking that if the man saw me he would turn savage in an instant.
For that is what a werewolf looks like, I thought, and then thought: the X.X.X.
The man jerked the twitching boy off the pavement, nodded to Alma, and got into a car by the curbside, still holding his glass of beer. The boy crept into the back seat. In a moment the car had roared off.
Later that night, not knowing if I were making a mistake but unable to wait until the next day, I telephoned her. "I saw you a couple of hours ago," I said. "I didn't want to disturb you. Anyhow, I thought you were in San Francisco."
"It was too boring and I came back early. I didn't call because I wanted you to get your work done. Oh, Don, you poor soul. You must have imagined something awful."
"Who was the man you were talking to? Shaven head, dark glasses, a little boy with him-alongside a biker's bar."
"Oh, him. Is that who you saw me with? His name is Greg. We knew each other in New Orleans. He came here to go to school and then dropped out. The boy is his little brother-their parents are dead, and Greg takes care of him. Though I must say not very well. The boy is retarded."
"He's from New Orleans?"
"Of course."
"What's his last name?"
"Why, are you suspicious? His last name is Benton. The Bentons lived on the same street as we did."
It sounded plausible, if I didn't think about the appearance of the man she was calling Greg Benton. "Is he in the X.X.X.?" I asked.
She laughed. "My poor darling is all worked up, isn't he? No, of course he isn't. Don't think about that, Don. I don't know why I told you."
"Do you really know people in the X.X.X.?" I demanded.
She hesitated. "Well, just a few." I was relieved: I thought she was glamorizing herself. Maybe my "werewolf" really was just an old neighbor from New Orleans; in fact, the sight of him in the bar's shadows had reminded me of my first sight of Alma herself, standing colorless as a ghost on a shadowy campus staircase.
"What does this… Benton do?"
"Well, I think he has an informal trade in pharmaceuticals," she said.
Now that made sense. It suited his appearance, his hanging around a bar like The Last Reef. Alma sounded as close to embarrassment as I had ever heard her.
"If you're through with your work, please come over and give your fiancée a kiss," she said. I was out the door in less than a minute.
Two peculiar things happened that night. We were in Alma's bed, watched over by the objects I have already enumerated. I had been dozing more than sleeping for most of the night, and I reached over lightly to touch Alma's bare rounded arm; I did not want to wake her. But it was as if her arm gave my fingers a shock: not an electrical shock, but a shock of concentrated feeling, a shock of revulsion-as though I had touched a slug. I snatched back my hand, she turned over and mumbled, "All right, darling?" and I mumbled something back. Alma patted my hand and went back to sleep. Sometime later I dreamed of her. I saw merely her face; but it was not the face I knew, and the strangeness of it made me groan with anxiety; and for the second time I came wholly awake, not sure where I was or by whose side I lay.
4
So that may be when the change began, but our relationship remained superficially as it had been, at least until the long weekend in Still Valley. We still made love often and happily, Alma continued to speak enchantingly of the way we would live after we married. And I continued to love her even while I doubted the absolute veracity of some of her statements. After all, as a novelist wasn't I too a kind of liar? My profession consisted of inventing things, and of surrounding them with enough detail to make them believable; a few inventions on someone else's part did not upset me unduly. We had decided to get married in Berkeley at the end of the spring semester, and marriage seemed a ceremonious seal to our happiness. But I think the change had already begun, and that my recoiling from the touch of her skin in the middle of the night was the sign that it had started weeks before without my seeing it.
Yet a factor in the change was certainly the "approval" I had so mysteriously earned. I finally asked her about it outright on the morning of the Crane lecture; it was a tense morning for me since I knew I was to do a bad job, and I said, "Look. If this approval you keep mentioning isn't yours and if it isn't Mrs. de Peyser's, then whose is it? I can't help but wonder. It's not your friend in the drug trade, I suppose. Or is it his idiot brother?"
She looked up, a bit startled. Then she smiled. "I ought to tell you. We're close enough."
"We ought to be."
She was still smiling. "It's going to sound a little funny."
"I don't care. I'm just tired of not knowing."