And somehow, awfully tired now and the butler nowhere in sight, he managed to get back to the second floor and, fully dressed, settle into his unmade bed. From which he would have put through his call to Ms. Kohm on the spot had not he first turned on the television and, quickly reviewing the thirty-or-so network and cable channels available in his city, taken up his remote-control wand and recorded the finals of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit competition on ESPN.
Schiff had long ago discovered the mildly erotic possibilities of the Pause button on his VCR, the flagrantly concupiscent ones inherent in slo-mo and super slo-mo. Certain music videos played back in the super slo-mo mode made Schiff, for all his physical deficits, ardent as something in rut, and caused him to participate in a sort of endless, extended foreplay, the images on the screen grainy as the thrown, close-up pouts and moues of received pornography, his own responses as real in their way as the perspiratory, steamy efforts of the actual. He did not so much play with as handle himself, fondle himself, his eyes on the television screen, on the practically time-lapse movements of the girls, muscles barely visible to the naked eye pronounced, vivid and fluid as avatars in dreams in the delicate, strobographic revelations before him, so that what he saw was a sort of palpable anatomical demonstration, some nudity beneath nudity, going on under the flesh, oily, somehow slow and forbidden as an exhibition of mandatory poses of female field slaves on an auction block.
But could not quite bring himself off, this all-but sixty- year-old man, only sensation available to him, love’s mood music, his hand finally falling away from himself, satisfaction locked up tight inside him like a kind of sexual arthritis.
And might have called Ms. Kohm then and there had not something warned him not to be too precipitate (he knew what it was, that weird boldness and devil-may-care indifference to consequence of the cautious), not to cut off (whatever the hell he meant by that) his chances (maybe only to preserve for as long as he could the last faint, surviving buzz of sexual vibration lengthening in frequency in him like a neurologist’s tuning fork held against the skin). Hanging on, he meant. Hoping, that is, to be saved by the bell. Which, believe it or not, he literally was. His doorbell rang just as he was about to give in and call Ms. Kohm. Once he managed to get into the Stair-Glide, ride downstairs and open the door, it turned out that the PGPC’s subcommittee on decorations was standing on his doorstep in all its rigged and prompted patience under the light rain, which just that moment had begun to fall.
“Come in, come in, you’ll catch your deaths,” Schiff welcomed, breezy as a man half his age and many times more healthy.
For presumedly bluff volunteers — Schiff thought of “neighbors” in films come to raise a barn or bring in a harvest — there was something rather hangdog and shamed in their bearing.
Schiff, a stiff and somewhat formal grown-up better than twice their age who called them “Miss,” who called them “Mister,” supposed them in on their professor’s domestic secrets, supposed himself (one of those — he supposed they supposed — hotshot, crisis celebs, a consultant in times of national stress to movers and shakers with means at their disposal — their bombs and high-tech devices — quite literally to move and shake the very political geography that had hitherto been merest contingency, simple textbook, blackboard example, his finger — their professor’s — on the planet’s pulses, its variously scant or bumper crops, its stores of mineral, vegetable, animal, and marine wealth — currents where the advantageous fish hung — an advisor — he supposed they supposed — to presidents, kings, and others of the ilk, who could determine a vital interest simply by naming it, pronouncing it, pointing to it chalktalk fashion on a map, virtually talking the hotspots into being) fallen in their youthful, fickle estimation, emotional, skittish as a stock exchange. So no wonder they seemed so nervous around him. His wife had left him, he stood as exposed as a flasher. His wife had left him, and now they perceived Professor S. as one who evidently — and oh so feebly — pulled his pants up over his uncovered ass one damaged leg at a time; a man, in the absence of crisis, not only like any other — his wife had walked, had taxicabbed out on him — but maybe even more so. He was revealed to them here on his — the political geographer’s and erstwhile hotshot, crisis celeb’s — very turf as one more defective, pathetic, poor misbegotten schlepp.
Ms. Kohm must have turned them. Ms. Kohm must have been running them. Ms. Kohm, who, if he was the political geographer, must surely have been (with all the coordinates, inside info and morning line she put out on him) the political geographer’s geographer. Who’d told Schiff they took care of their own, but really meant she did, and had organized committees and subcommittees like this one on a moment’s notice. Apparently she had named him a sudden, inexplicable vital interest. Why? Had she set her cap for him? What was this all about anyway? How had he — the defective, misbegotten schlepp — managed to become a target of opportunity, anyone’s eligible man?
Leaning on his walker and reciting at them like a moron, “Come in, come in, you’ll catch your deaths. Let’s have your coats.” Which, had they given them to him, would surely have knocked him down.
“Will it be all right,” Mary Moffett said, “if we put these up now? They’re for the party tonight.”
She held a shopping bag out for his inspection. In it, like wires, lights, tinsel, and Christmas-tree ornaments that could be used, put away, and used again the next year, were a variety of comic maps in assorted joke projections. (Their rendition of The New Yorker’s rendition of the United States.) Some, certain classic campaigns (the siege of Troy, the Norman Conquest, Custer’s last stand at the Battle of the Little Bighorn), were offbeat versions of history, even of epochs (Schiff’s St. Louis suburb at the time of the Ice Age), and many were as topical, or once were, as the monologues of talk-show hosts. All were cartoonish, satirical. There was, Schiff recognized (and had, the sad man, even before he’d become so sad), a kind of desperation in these efforts, almost as if his students were pretending to be like the campus’s engineers and architects, who turned out prototypes of ingenious machines and interesting buildings that seemed to have sprung up overnight on celebratory weekends and occasions. There, tossed at his feet on the hall carpet like a sample of fabric, was this pleated string of construction- paper, accordion-fold maps, silly, insignificant as party favors.
He had to sit down or die, so scarcely had time to do more than acknowledge the presence of the course party’s inherited, cumulative two- or three-year archive.
“Yes, yes,” Schiff said, “very nice, very nice.”
Fred Lipsey carried a sort of easel under one arm, a paper bundle of what could have been placards under the other. Joe Disch held a small stepladder, a Scotch-tape dispenser.
“That won’t stick to the walls, will it?” Schiff said. “It won’t pull the paint off with it?”
“No sir,” Disch said.
“Because that’s all I need, if the paint started chipping and peeling away from the walls.”
“It’s one of those low-grade adhesives.”
“I mean because that’s all I need,” Schiff said, inexplicably close to tears, “this place turned into a total shithouse.”