The next day the sight of her skirt clinging to her thighs was enough to upset him. After once glancing at her, every line lovely, conscious of his relentless consciousness of her he vowed not to look again, and managed not to that morning, but it was worse later when he was alone. Desire butchered him. He beheld his slaughtered face in the mirror and stared at it, wretched. How escape the ferocious lust that enflamed and tormented his thoughts as it corroded his will? Why must Levin’s unlived life put him always in peril? Why obsessively seek what was lost—unlived—in the past? He had no wish to be Faust, or Gatsby; or St. Anthony of Somewhere, who to conquer his torment, had nipped off his balls. Levin wanted to be himself, at peace in present time.
He tried various means of self-control: exhortation, rationalization, censorship, obfuscation. One trick was to think of the girl as his daughter. He was her old man and had watched her grow from a thing in dirty diapers. At twelve she was menstruating; on her eighteenth birthday Levin married her off to a successful lawyer, to whom she bore seven children in six years, all boys. Her father, ever a man to be tempted by every damned temptation—life had plugged him full of sockets
and it took only a slight breeze to make a connection—was safe and sound in her invasive presence, until by a dirty stroke of fate (try as he would Levin-père could not reverse it) the lawyer expired of a heart attack from overwork. But Nadalee was financially provided for, so Levin went off to Europe to live, traveling from country to country this side the iron curtain. It couldn’t be said he didn’t enjoy his life, though where exactly was home? Several years later, in Sevilla—he was then fifty-five going on fifty-six–half drunk on val de peñas one festival night before the corrida, he met this masked beauty at a costume ball. One tango led to another, the dance to a sense of fundamental intimacy—what, after all, is a dance? So, whispering together—Levin confessing most of his sins, including advancing age, the senorita saying nothing of importance—they left for his suite at the Hilton. First they ate. George, the fine waiter, served wild asparagus, a plate of cold meats, manchiego cheese and some dry white capri, iced in buckets; after coffee a bottle of anis del mono, which tasted like licorice and warmed all the way. Then they made love. The masked beauty refused—despite the inconvenience, which she argued was tit for tat for his grizzled beard—to remove her disguise until it was unalterably too late. When he looked at her true face at dawn, he groaned at the misery he had committed. Levin thereupon put out both eyes and threw himself off a high cliff into the shark-infested sea.
He argued with himself: I have evil thoughts, expensive to my spirit; they represent my basest self. I must expunge them by will, no weak thing in man. I must live by responsibility, an invention of mine in me. The girl trusts me, I can’t betray her. If I want sex I must be prepared to love, and love may mean marriage. (I live by my nature, not Casanova’s.) If I’m not prepared to marry her I’d better stay away. He exhorted himself: teach her only grammar, the principle parts of verbs, spelling, punctuation—nothing not in the syllabus. He would not let the casual brush of a girl’s breast against his sleeve seduce him into acting without honor. The self would behave
as it must. She would not make a fool of him, much less a worm. He would, in denial, reveal the depth of his strongest, truest strength. Character over lust. By night, after these terrible exertions, including two cold showers, Levin’s mind was comparatively calm–he had bludgeoned desire, and though exhausted, beaten half to death by the bloody club he carried against the self, felt more or less at peace.
About a week later, Levin encountered Nadalee, one morning, in the college bookstore. He had been wandering among the book tables and looked up, experiencing overwhelming relief to find her by his side, for he had at once seen her as she was—diminished from a temptress into a nice kid. Levin observed with interest the errors of her face and figure, the thin underlip, too heavily penciled brows; her legs less than slim although not actually skinny, and her childlike ballet-slippered feet. Objectivity, if it did less for her, did more for him. It was her youth that moved me, Levin thought. Also her unexpected favor. He desired those who found him desirable, a too easy response; he must watch this in himself.
Nadalee said she was looking for an entertaining novel and could he suggest one: “It’s a gift—a birthday present for guess who?—me, I’m twenty today.”
Levin congratulated her. “Twenty, did you say?”
She explained why she was two years older than most freshman. “You see, I worked in a bank before coming here.” But the bank had bored her, so she had quit and registered, with some financial assistance from her father, at Cascadia College. All this was news to Levin, though he tried to sidestep the impression it might be good news. Could good news be bad? Her age, perhaps, explained her maturity. Yet twenty was not too different from eighteen. Before he could decide how different, if different, or where or why different, he hastened to think: she’s still too young—ten years between us—a kid. Just look at her feet. Besides I’m her teacher.
Levin found her a novel, tipped his hat, and left for lunch.
Later, to prove he trusted his strength he telephoned her to
ask if she liked to walk. “Madly,” Nadalee answered. Since she honestly interested him, he had made up his mind it would be better for his nerves if he saw her now and then, in a Platonic relationship. A walk, a bit of a drive here and there, at most a movie in a neighboring town. Company, talk—a blessing under the right circumstances.
They met in the park by the green river. She came in cardigan and skirt, carrying a poplin raincoat; Levin had his on. They wandered along the bank of the Sacajawea. The morning had been gray but this afternoon was blue, infused with light of the invisible sun.
“Don’t you just love the day when it’s like this?” Nadalee said.
“Very much.”
“Look at those clouds in the west. How would you describe them?”
“Vaporous, toiling.”
“Tempestuous, like some people’s emotions?”
“Whose, for instance?”
“Yours.”
“You are observant,” he said with a sigh, “mature.”
“I’m glad you finally noticed.”
Levin bent for a stone to scale on the water but it sank with a plop.
“If you had any idea that I am a little-innocent,” she said, watching the ripples in the water, “well, I’m not, if that’s what you’re worried about. I was once engaged to be married.”
The wall he had so painfully built against her, against desire, fell on his head.
He asked in hidden anguish, “Why do you tell me that?”
“Because I am a woman and wish to be treated so.”
“By me?”
“Yes, if you must know.”
“But why me?” he asked.
“I guess you know I’m different than most of the other girls
in your class? I’m tired of college boys. I want real companionship.”
“But why me?” Levin said. “There are other men around, graduate students, instructors, some handsome.”
“I bet you’d be better looking without your beard.”
“No, I wouldn’t.”
“Anyway, the answer is you happen to appeal to me. I’ve always liked the intellectual type. I like the way you talk, it’s very sincere.”
He was humbly grateful to her. They were standing under a tree and impulsively kissed, her young breasts stabbing his chest. They kissed so hard his hat fell off.
Levin said, as they went on, hands locked, “I don’t have to tell you Nadalee, the need for absolute secrecy? Many people would not understand or approve this. It could make trouble.”
She said she had thought of that and had a scheme for them to spend some time together alone if he agreed. He agreed. Her aunt, Nadalee said, owned a little motel on the coast. She was planning to visit her daughter in Missoula next weekend, and whenever she left she closed up and lit the no-vacancy sign. There wasn’t much business at this time of the year, only occasional tourists and some hunters or fishermen. Anyway, Nadalee had promised to look after the place and they could have it to themselves. “We could walk on the beach and the dunes, and picnic and ride around, and just sort of relax. My aunt won’t get home till late on Sunday.”
Levin resisted every sentence but his imagination was whipped to froth. Who could resist Eden?
Came Friday. He was resolved to go but not necessarily to collect. The fun was having a place to go, companionship, not something he could unfairly get from the girl. He was obliged to treat her responsibly. He would explain this when he got there—she had left by bus that morning but he had a one o’clock to teach; it had been decided they were not to go or come back together. Let’s be friends, Levin planned to
say. If we can honestly be, later we may think of sex. It will come more pleasurably to friends—a two-fold blessing. That he had reached this conclusion satisfied him. After trimming his beard a half-inch around he drove out of Easchester in a marvelous mood.
For the first time in his life Levin was on the road alone in a car—his own—carried along on his own power, so to say. Three cheers for the pioneers of the auto industry; they had put him on wheels to go where he pleased! He thought with pleasure of the many things he had learned to do in his few months here: had mowed frequent lawns, the grass still green and growing in December; raked a billion leaves, fifty percent from neighboring trees; gathered walnuts in October; picked yellow pears; regularly attended and even cleaned Mrs. B’s rumbling sawdust furnace, and so on and what not. Last week he had washed and waxed his car. Levin the handy man; that is to say, man of hands. And here he was with both of them solidly on the wheel, miraculously in motion along the countryside, enjoying the compression of scenery. Heading towards unknown mountains in voyage to the Pacific Ocean, world’s greatest. Imagine, Levin from Atlantic to Pacific—who would have thought so only a few years ago?—seeing up close sights he had never seen before: big stone mountains ahead, thick green forests, unexpected farms scattered over the hillsides, the ghostly remains of forest fire, black snags against the sky. Something else new: a little too close for comfort he passed a log truck, surely half a block long, pyramided high with enormous tree trunks, heavily chained, thank God. Here and there millponds were afloat with brown logs, to be fished out and cut into boards. He whizzed past a smoldering, tree-tall furnace shaped like a shuttlecock, a black slash burner that consumed wood waste, its head ablaze at night. He was discovering in person the face of America.
And the weather was better than the newspaper had expected. For short intervals warm sunlight—through thick clouds breaking into sky streams—lit the fields; some harboring sheep,
a few with starlings on their backs, picking a living out of the wool. At times the clouds massed darkly, yet the day managed to be cheery, and the bright green winter wheat yielded hidden light. Levin guessed the temperature was around fifty, and this they called onset of winter. It said so on the calendar, and Mrs. Beaty was airing her winter undies and talking of Christmas. Who immersed in Eastern snow and icy winds could guess at Cascadia’s pleasant weather? Here, Bucket had told him, spring came sometimes in midwinter; autumn in the right mood might hang on till January, and at times spring lingered through summer. A season and a half they called it but Levin would not complain. Only a week ago he had caught the odor of a white rose in the best of health on somebody’s front lawn. So what if they paid in wetness for the mild climate; the warmth made up for rain, and wasn’t it wonderful to be riding to the beach in December? Who but a polar bear would indulge in the Bronx?
He saw stone ascending and discovered himself doing the same. “Holy Moses, I’m up a mountain.” As the road turned, his startled sight beheld below a vast forest of pointed conifers, and as he emerged from a corkscrew curve, a mass of peaks-rocks and shadow—extended into the dim distance. “Alps on Alps arise.” His heart leapt at the view but when he realized how narrow the ledge he was traveling on, how sheer the drop if he dropped, his heart settled with a wham and he found himself toiling at driving. WARNING, SHARP CURVES. He was sweating to master them as his tires screeched, rolling the wheel as if fighting a storm at sea; to stay on the road yet keep from hitting anything that might come zooming around the bend—ahead invisible till he got there; also to move fast enough to satisfy the irritable pest behind him, sprung up from nowhere and blasting his horn till Levin had a headache. He was doing twenty and considered crawling at ten but didn’t dare with this madman behind him. He tried to signal the fiend to stop with the horn, or quell him with a dirty look in the mirror, but no signals worked and he had to keep his eyes glued ahead for
fear of losing the slightest sight of the perilous, tortuous road. Another blast of the horn filled him with rage and dismay. He considered stopping and getting out to grapple with his nemesis, but luckily the road widened a few feet, and Levin pulled hard against the side of the cliff to let the monster pass. He furiously shook his fist as a dilapidated Chevy squeezed by, the pee-wee driver with a snip of black mustache, more Chaplin than Hitler, offering a thumbed nose. His dusty license plate read New Jersey—too small world. With no further stomach for tight curves, Levin considered giving his breath a rest, but since no one any longer fastened onto his tail he went his winding way, conscious of abysses deeper than those in dreams, worried that a momentary lapse of attention might send him hurtling into the murderous maw of the forest below, dead, destroyed, never to be seen again. Yet he negotiated each curve as it came, some bent into such unpredictable tormented arcs that it flashed on him he knew for the first time in his life what “straight” meant; and this insight carried him down the mountain onto a peaceful road.