Helen amused. “You sound like a couple of kids.”
“We were a couple of kids.”
Tradition. “Your father is the steadiest of men. That’s worth something over the long haul.” Praise Daddy.
History. The spirit of inquiry, giggling. “You know what I mean? It’s absolutely impossible to imagine you two as lovers.”
“Your Daddy is very loving in his way.”
Mystery. The question Helen wanted to ask but did not want answered, which she never asked because not to answer was as much an answer as an answer.
Ritual. April a year ago on bikes after dinner. Signs of the coming, buds, new birds. Daughter leads the way, changing the route each evening, different turns around different blocks. Daddy goes last, guarding the others through the quiet streets, alert when a car goes by, tense when they come out to the main street between the parked cars and the traffic. When they get home it’s dark. Homework time, no television tonight folks. Peace now, all dangers have been left behind.
The steadiest of men, loving in his way, taking coffee in the coffee shop, waved to Louise Germane in a booth with a student named Frank Hawthorne. He did not like this Hawthorne, it displeased him to see her with him, he wondered how to tell her. Frank Hawthorne had a greasy face and a dirty beard, his hair was tangled and bushy, his eyes looked out like an animal in the weeds, lips bulged through his beard like internal organs oozing through an open wound. He remembered Hawthorne’s cheating case, hushed up to improve his character. Also the pigeon case: two guys with a baseball on the slope below Tony’s office, Hawthorne standing by. “Gimme that,” Hawthorne says, then hurls a fast ball into a flock of pigeons, which would have killed or maimed if it had hit. A girl complains, “Don’t do that. I like them.”
“Dirtier than rats,” Hawthorne, the virtuous murderer, says. In the coffee shop Tony Hastings wondered how to warn Louise.
So he asked Francesca the next time he saw her. She smiled at him. “Why bother? If he’s a skunk, she’ll find out.”
“None of my business, you mean.”
“Unless you have other business you’re not mentioning.”
That was at lunch. He said, “I’ve been irritable lately.”
“I’ve noticed. Do me a favor,” she said. “Don’t get involved with a graduate student. You don’t need that.”
“What do I need?”
There was a moment while she looked at him. The look grew long, it meant something. Serious, no smile, blue eyes speaking. It passed and she was smiling again in her usual way of partial implication, balanced complicity. He thought, I missed something. I have just been told, and now it is too late.
But he ate lunch with her regularly in the Faculty Club. Her look, reminiscent and kind. He thought: She is my only friend. She remembered him as he was. She knew he didn’t want to be this way. He looked at her and thought, lovely, beautiful.
So he said, “Today’s Thursday.”
“What about it?”
“You’re free this afternoon.”
“So?”
Spaghetti, curling on her fork, she avoided his eyes. Leap. “May I take you somewhere in my car?”
Mouth upturned receiving spaghetti, she wiped tomato sauce off her elegant mouth. “Where?”
“Anywhere.”
“All right.”
That’s all. They drove to an overlook above the river, where they could hear the trucks below the bluff. They looked at the view, near another car with a couple looking at the view, and he felt a sexual surge generating steam like nothing he had felt in nine months, not even his night in New York.
He talked about the carbon dioxide shield, the growing warmer, the coming desert under the cancerous sun. He saw his eloquence carrying him away. He saw she was bored. He thought, I’m not a nice person any more, and his sexual feeling died.
He took her home, wondering if she would invite him in, but she did not. She thanked him for the afternoon, and he saw no magic in her routine eyes. She went up to her house, and a little girl came out to greet her.
He drove off abruptly enough to make the tires squeal. Stopped hard for the light, screech, then dashed into the intersection. Feeling something, he did not know what. He went out to the expressway, buzzed ahead of the car in front of him, slipped back and forth one lane to another. Blasted his horn at a car in the middle, nudging him along until he could get by.
When the wildness settled, he drove home and rested in his living room. What was this, Laura still refusing to let go? It seemed like something else. As if he needed a ceremony to return Tony to Tony. He imagined a primitive god, male and savage.
The image made him laugh, but the laughter had no feeling, and the next moment he had this overwhelming conviction that no thought of his had any feeling. He saw all his recent behavior on a screen with light shining through, disclosing emptiness. His wild driving on the road an hour ago, a display to conceal something he did not have. The revelation spread, it delved into the past, all the way back to the catastrophe, and all it found was counterfeit or fake. Phony feelings acted out. It frightened him, not for the abyss but for what would happen if anyone found out, thinking, This is something no one must know. A secret. In the late afternoon inside his house, he looked for his soul and saw only white indifference beneath the calculated displays of grief and, as that became wearisome, irritability and rage. He recognized the privileges grief had given him. What no one knew was how he had fooled them. He was an artificial man, fabricated of gestures.
He paced around the house totally free. A vague anger led him to his desk, where he typed out the following note to Bobby Andes:
Just to say I’m now certain the one I couldn’t identify was Turk. I hope you are not easing up your hunt for those men. I promise to cooperate in every possible way, for I am more determined than ever to bring them to justice.
FIVE
The next page has a notice: PART THREE. Good. A change, Susan Morrow’s had enough of this. She wonders if Edward expects a compliment on the internal organs oozing through the beard. Perhaps the pariah with the turban and the castaway goat was something he forgot to revise.
How far can she read tonight? She looks ahead to calculate. Right now we’re about midway, should finish tomorrow. Take a break.
“Rosie, bed!”
Tiny voice upstairs. “I yam in bed, Mama.”
Jeffrey wants to go out. She opens the door, lets him go. Not supposed to, but it’s late, no one will know. Keep out of trouble, mister. She goes to the kitchen. Snack, a Coke? The kitchen is cold, temperature dropping outside. In the study she hears the voices of a television sitcom, nobody watching, someone left it on all evening.
She feels bruised by her reading and by life too. She wonders, does she always fight her books before yielding to them? She rides back and forth between sympathy for Tony and exasperation. If only she didn’t have to talk to Edward afterward. If you say Tony is going mad—or turning into a jerk—you need to be sure Tony is not really Edward.
Now he’s Tony the artificial man. She wonders about that. Generally Susan is skeptical about words like hollow and superficial. Is she hollow or full? Damned if she knows, but she doesn’t want someone else deciding for her. If Edward is condemning Tony through Tony’s own voice, that’s old judgmental Edward again. When he judges she resist. But she also has a notion of a fairer second reading, later when the soreness has eased and everything is past.