Had he fallen anyway? There were some who wondered about that. Joey began to receive stares, and he felt he might be the subject of unseemly gossip. Perhaps it was his guilty conscience — a condition that exasperated him further because he believed he had done nothing wrong but bolt like a scaredy. He searched his heart for hidden longings and found none. An inventory of his daydreams came up empty. A minor social gaffe should count for nothing, no more than dandruff on the shoulder of a dark suit, and the momentary embarrassment he had suffered should suffice for punishment.
He was, however, haunted by the concerto he hadn’t heard. Poking about in a few books turned up nothing by the name “concerto” and nothing that might resemble something written for a band instrument whose social status in the world of instruments stood only a few notes above the saxophone. Had he been conned by Madame, lured into her pillow parlor on altogether false pretenses? In class (classes he now prepared for with sweaty desperation) she was as coolly indifferent as he was, carrying on with the other students in her usual loud and quirky manner, while he continued to ignore his classmates entirely, perhaps maintaining a distance that was more carefully policed, and an atmosphere more densely anxious, than usual.
What he had done, of course, was embarrass Madame M, and Joey was not wholly convinced that she had it coming; perhaps she had been an innocent, too, extending her hospitality to a student, willing to take some of her private time to expand his musical world, only to be rebuffed by his childish flight, and rudely, too, without so much as a lame excuse. Certainly he could not put a word to what he feared was about to happen when he weighed himself upon a pile of pillows beside her, had he done so; nor could he confide the affair to his mother, who might have a description in two languages readily at hand and a willingness to redden his ears with her recital. If his skills in most things were rudimentary, and his knowledge of facts and theories spotty, his acquaintance with such a sordid world was indirect, dim, and skimpy. He had no lengthy register of quirks, for instance, to which he might turn, a catalog of eccentricities in which he might find Joseph Skizzen’s reluctance to reveal himself listed alongside men who wore corsets under their suits or women who rolled down mountains of pillows … while smoking … the forbidden weed. With a groan he curtailed his imagination lest he begin to see Madame’s breasts blend into the pile.
Suppose she had said: The pillows are more fun if you’re naked.
His first thought had been that Madame had made this foul business up and was, out of revenge, whispering it in Francophile corners; however, it was possible that someone else had actually done the dirty deed, and it was Joey’s own ineptness that was making him self-conscious and ashamed. Joey was perhaps not the only student she had lured into her delinquent rooms where she had, after some Debussy, made who knew what sort of indecent proposals, or perhaps the stains on the cushions were the consequence of one such invitation being actually taken up. He drew the curtain on any enactment of that possibility.
Suppose she had said: These pillows have an interesting history.
It came to Joey with the force of a revelation and remained as a conviction: this poor Skizzen had to have an education. Joey needed to become Joseph. In self-defense. This was not something Augsburg Community College was prepared to accomplish or encourage. His classmates did not stimulate him: their interests remained coarsely commercial, socially commonplace, and daintily divine. Every gesture they made in his direction turned out to signify a seeyuhlater. Joey was asked if he played bridge, and when he replied that he preferred chess (though his knowledge of either game was minuscule), he was invited to join the chess club. The very idea of belonging to a club made Joey nervous, and, since he could not in any case play, he told the club president that he’d given the game up because he realized he cared for it too much, a confession that got him tagged as an ascetic and admired for a life that was perceived to be austere instead of simply empty.
The faculty had some dogged enthusiasms, but they were really not well informed; how could they be when the administration’s expectations were as low as their own, and they worked for salaries that an organ-grinder’s monkey would refuse. The Salvation Army had a better stock of books; he could not afford to buy even the texts Augsburg’s instructors assigned anyway; and there was no library worthy of the name in the dinkyville where he and his mother lived. Nevertheless, he could not continue careening from author to author, book to book, subject to subject, and period to period, especially — what was most confusing — bouncing from work to work and composer to composer like a golf ball in a parking lot. He had recently dragged himself through These Twain and A Laodicean without realizing that Arnold Bennett was minor and Mr. Hardy’s A Laodicean obscure. When at last he had puzzled out the meaning of this awkward title, a project that had taken far more time and effort than it should, its significance seemed clear enough; however, it was the length of the line of relations involved that surprised and admonished him: a wealthy city in ancient Asia Minor named for the wife of the second of thirteen kings, Laodicea was chastised in Revelation (which he made a note to read) for its lack of commitment to Christianity, the city’s name appropriate to the charge because the water in its aqueduct, unlike the hot springs that fed nearby Hierapolis, was lukewarm or tepid; hence Hardy’s use of it to describe his heroine’s inability to choose between a modern man of good sense and a suitor who represented the romance of the past — condo or castle were the alternatives. In the end, she accepts the former while still wishing the latter were the former. Joey felt the novel did not live up to its author’s massive reputation; however, he was also impressed by the vast areas of ignorance that were not likely to be rumored, Joey was still so young, nevertheless gaps that were not likely to be removed or even reduced. Saint Paul had apparently written a letter to the Laodiceans, although now the letter was lost, and in a.d. 60 an earthquake had shaken the city, but not its pride, for it had refused Roman help in rebuilding. Was this sketchy bit of information relevant to the events of the novel, because the question of whether a castle should be rebuilt or replaced was central to it? Joey had played the piece, but he had not heard all the notes.
Because it was a school presumably built to teach and to observe the tenets of the Lutheran branch of Protestantism, Augsburg Community College was a quiet, placid, unassuming snare for the unwary; a snare for the unwary because its Lutherans did not believe they were merely a branch with its bark but the roots of true belief itself, the trunk the twigs the leaves as well — the earth that held the tree, the water its roots drank, the sun that fed its leaves, the air that trembled them; it was a snare for the unwary because it was more than a cause, it was the corrective of the cause, the righting of a course gone awry, a cleanser for a soul that had soiled itself, a savior of the Savior; it was a snare for the unwary because it was a church that opposed the power of the church, a clergy that resisted the powers of the clergy, a group that dissolved groups into holier members; it was a snare to snare the wary as well as the innocent, to entrap both informed and tenured dupes and naïve unprepared waifs and bumbling chumps like Joey, because they might believe that fellow Lutherans were as one — united — in their love of God and that the church and its clergy would find it quite impossible to be tyrannical, vengeful, obsessed, nitpicky, and absurd, when in fact there was no one Lutherans hated more than Luther, other Lutherans, and themselves, who once had been unwary, who had since been duped, and now were snared.