“Look,” I jumped in, as his voice trailed off, “why do you think this kid who doesn’t flush after himself wrote this paper? You may have developed a whole new technique of psychological testing.”
He smiled. “Oh — here’s this disgusting unimportant kid being a first-rate bastard to his roommate in public. And here’s this sweet very excited little essay. That’s all. It’s nice to think it happens. I’d like to kick Spigliano right in the ass for filling their heads with all that form crap.”
Hating the same people usually turns out to be a weak basis for friendship; nevertheless, I allowed myself to feel considerable fondness for Paul Herz. He seemed to me nothing less than a genuine and capable man. At any rate, I was willing to believe this as the snow fell and we sat together in the dignified environs of the University. I was even willing to believe that he was not Libby’s misfortune, but that she was his. Perhaps the truth was that Libby was a girl with desires nobody could satisfy; perhaps they weren’t even “desires” but the manifestation of some cellular disorder, some physiochemical imbalance that fated her to a life of agonized yearning in our particular world of flora and fauna, amongst our breed of humanity. I was willing to believe that Libby either did not need to be rescued, or was impossible to rescue. The more involved I became in her life, I told myself — repeating a lesson learned several times already — the more anguish we would all have. No one had to marry Libby; she was already married!
“Why don’t you come over to the club with me?” I suggested. “We’ll have a drink. Warm up—”
He checked his watch again and told me he was waiting for his wife.
“She’s still working?” I asked.
“… I suppose so.”
“Well,” I said, “we can all three have a drink.”
“I’m afraid she’ll be too tired. It’s better not to tire her. The weather …” His mood had changed, and so had his voice. Leaving his sentence unfinished, he huddled in his coat.
“What is it?” I asked. “Is she ill?”
“No,” he said. “She only gave it up because the doctors don’t think she should be out at night. Not in this kind of climate.”
“Gave what up? I’m sorry.”
He peered over at me. “School. Classes.”
“I haven’t seen Libby, so I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”
“She said, I think, she met you in the Loop.”
“I meant I haven’t seen her to talk with. I was shopping.”
He chose not to reply. Instantly I imagined scenes in his home where my name was introduced as evidence of duplicity and crime. The little trust that had seemed to have sprung up between us disappeared, and I began to wonder just how disloyal Libby was to me. It was clearly time for me to be moving off, by myself.
I said, “Well, I’m sorry about that.”
“She can go back in the spring and summer, you see,” Paul was telling me. “It’ll be all right. When it’s warm again, she can start in again.” I felt as though I were a parent being given an explanation by a child; there was suddenly that in Paul Herz’s tone. “Right now, getting to the train, getting off the train, walking to the Downtown College—” he said. “The doctors—” he began, and the plural of the noun seemed to depress both of us. “The doctors think she should build up resistance first.”
“Yes. That sounds like a sensible solution.”
However there was an even better one. Doubtless it came to me as quickly as it did because it had been hiding all these years only a little way under the surface. It made me feel both old and giddy: they could borrow my car. Warmed by my heater, Libby could drive back and forth to her classes; I could park it near Goodspeed on the days she would be needing it; an extra key could easily—
“Well,” I said to Paul, “I’ll be seeing you.”
“Okay,” he said.
The formal nature of our relationship immediately reasserted itself; more often than not, when Paul Herz and I came together or parted, we shook hands. It seemed to me always to combine a measure of distrust and a measure of hope. Now when we shook hands I felt a rush of words move up, and what I finally said had to stand for all that I had decided to keep to myself. “By the way, I was in a funk this morning. I dialed your number by mistake. I didn’t realize it until I hung up. I hope it didn’t ruin your day, the mystery of it.”
Though I am twenty pounds heavier than Paul, we are the same height, and when he rose, suddenly, holding onto my hand, I found myself looking into his worried eyes. I couldn’t imagine precisely what it was he was going to say — though I thought for a moment that we had at last reached our particular crisis. I was instantly unnerved, and also, melancholy. Though I tell myself I value passion, I must admit that I do not value scenes of it; though I try to live an honest life, I do not like to see honesty stripped of civility and care. I was prepared, all at once, to be humiliated. But all Paul said, with a pained look of determination, was, “Why don’t we have that drink?”
“Why don’t we,” I said.
“We’ll go. Libby too,” he added.
“If she’s tired, Paul—”
“Libby would like to see the club,” he said. “Libby needs …” But that sentence was not finished either; just the simple subject and that simple verb. With gravity, with tenderness — all this in his dark eyes — he said, “It would be good for Libby.”
I don’t think it would have shocked either of us then if we had embraced. It was the kind of emotional moment that one knows is being shared.
We tramped together through the snow to Goodspeed, and we did not speak. I believed it was crucial for me to stay with him, even though my watch showed that I was going to be late for Martha Reganhart. I believed something was being settled.
Paul stopped some fifteen feet from the entryway. A light from a second floor window spread around us where we stood in the snow. My companion made a megaphone of his hands and whistled two notes up toward the window. Then, softly, he called, “Lib-by … Lib-byyy.”
He actually sang her name. As though he loved her. “Lib-byyyy.…” After a moment passed and no one had appeared, he called through his hands, “Hey, arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon!” But when nothing happened, he turned to me and said, “We better go in.”
I walked behind him thinking only one thought. She is this man’s wife. I followed him up the stairs to the second floor and we turned down the corridor, by the water fountain, and then we stepped into the open doorway of Libby’s office. And there she was, smashing away at the typewriter. Neither Paul nor I moved any further, and neither of us could speak.
Libby was hunched over the machine, wearing — for all that the radiator was bubbling and steaming away across the room — her polo coat and her red earmuffs; her face was scarlet and her hair was limp, and moving in and out of her mouth was the end of her kerchief, upon which she was chewing. Stencils were strewn over the desk and wadded on the floor, and from her throat came a noise so strange and eerie that it struck me as prehistoric, the noise of an adult who knows no words. Yearning and misery and impotence … She was like something in a cage or a cell — that was my first impression. It did not seem as though her own will or her own strength would be enough to remove her from this desk. I watched her fist come down upon the spacer — clump! A stencil was torn free of the carriage with a loud whining that could have come either from the typist or the machine. She threw it onto the floor and then looked up and saw the two of us.
She gasped, she brushed her kerchief over her cheeks, she touched her fingers to her hair, and from behind a mass of clouds, she pretended to be that fair sun her husband had sung out to from beneath the window.