“Were you by any chance going to the Gilleys?”
He said nothing.
“I wasn’t meaning to pry,” she said. “I thought I might save you a trip if you were, because I’m just coming from there and they’re about to go out. I walked this way after supper to give Gerald a little thing I had just finished writing on teaching remedial grammar. I have copies if you’d care to read it. Gerald was delighted to have it. He offered to drive me home but I preferred to walk. When I was a little girl in Louisville, on nights like this everybody walked. Daddy often used to take me and sister Cora out and I can recall many young couples courting, holding hands in Charity Park. I realize the automobile is necessary to our economy, Seymour, but don’t you think it has caused something gracious to leave our lives?”
He grunted. Avis’ eyelids fluttered. “Are you bound somewhere in particular?”
He had no particular place in mind.
“Would you care to continue your walk with me? I—I’ve wanted to say something to you, Seymour.”
Levin walked with her. They went toward the campus. It seemed to him that all he could smell of the night now was her overpowering orange blossom. He would walk another block or two, then ditch her and go back.
They passed Humanities Hall, all dark for once. Under the maple tree Avis turned to him breathlessly. “Mr. Levin—I mean Seymour—I shan’t allude to this again, but I do want you to know I am most sincerely grateful to you for—for your self-control that time. It isn’t often a gentleman will assist a lady to preserve her virtue.”
Levin laughed badly.
She said quickly, “But that isn’t what I meant to say. I’ve wanted to discuss with you a matter that concerns the welfare of our department, something I’m sure you’ll be discreet about for obvious reasons. Let’s just walk out of the campus, shall we? Voices carry here.”
He went with her across the quadrangle and lower campus in the direction of the river. They came to a wooded area by the water, to a stone bench dimly lit. Two students who had been necking got up and walked off. She had brought him to Lover’s Lane.
Lighting a cigarette, Avis crossed her legs. She puffed without inhaling, Levin motionless. She glanced at him nervously, then said in a low voice. “Just how much have you been told of the past?”
“Whose?” he asked drearily.
Her eyelids were in action. “Specifically, Leo Duffy’s and, frankly, Pauline Gilley’s.”
“Specifically,” he said slowly, “I know she liked and sympathized with him.”
“Yes, that’s true, but did you know?”—her strained breathiness broke—“that they were lovers”—she wet her lips—“actually?” Avis stared in another direction.
Levin sat there with a splitting headache. Though his impulse was to choke Avis he lived through torment to a clear understanding of Pauline’s anxiety and fear: she had been through it before. Amid the rocks in his heart he silently groaned. What hurt most was the realization there had been in his relationship with her more than he knew, something that explained the end it had come to. What he had assumed to be the unique truth of their love was less than that. That she had had a lover before him he might forgive, but to keep from him that he had followed, under Gilley’s nose, smack in another man’s footsteps was deceit. He felt a rage of helplessness, again the victim of a lying life.
It changes nothing, he desperately thought. At the same time he knew it changed everything, even the past.
Avis, squirming on the bench, apologized for her news. “Please understand I tell you this only because it has some reference, more than indirect, to the future of our department.” She spoke with eyes shut.
It took Levin a minute to speak through his misery, a complex self-renewing institution. But he hid what he felt so that he could learn what was left to know, afraid to be ignorant of anything that concerned him.
“Gerald knew?”
“Yes.” She stepped on her cigarette and sat very still. “It all came out when he—when he developed the picture.”
“What picture?”
She was restless again. The sweat marks around her armpits spread.
“Hadn’t—hadn’t you heard of it? I was sure Dr. Fabrikant had told you.”
“No.”
She hesitated, then quickly said, “Gerald took a photograph of them on the beach one day at the coast. They were both naked. I assumed you knew, or I—I wouldn’t—”
He lived through a nauseating sense of having been here before.
“He—he had followed them. It was when Pauline and he were seriously considering divorce and he was collecting evidence—as he had every right to do. He took it with a certain kind of lens, from a distance. They had been in the water and as they were coming out, Gerald snapped.”
“Was there a mess?”
“Not quite. Although he had consulted an attorney, Gerald did not file for the divorce. And once Leo was discharged from his position by President Labhart, that’s what people talked about. Apparently they hadn’t been seen together. Shortly after Leo had left, Gerald and Pauline dropped their plans for divorce, mainly because their adoption of Erik had come through. I assume Pauline had discovered that her heart was in domestic life after all, and that helped bring them together.”
“Was the picture the only proof they were lovers?”
“I believe,” Avis answered, “that Pauline had admitted that fact to Gerald.”
“He told you that?”
“I’m not really at liberty to say.”
“Did you see the picture?”
“It was described to me. You ought to know that Pauline has not seen it. She doesn’t know of its existence, Seymour. Gerald was going to show it to her but when she confessed she loved Leo, he did not have to. It would only hurt her to know about it—that’s why it’s so important to be discreet.”
“Who knows about it?”
“Not many. Counting—ah—you, about a dozen people. The wonderful thing was that everyone closed ranks behind Gerald to protect him and Pauline from further embarrassment, although perhaps that was more than she deserved.”
Levin asked her if Bucket knew.
“He may possibly have heard from Dr. Fabrikant.”
“Who told him?”
“Gerald, I believe.”
He now understood.
“We’ve all been careful not to talk much about it,” Avis said
uneasily. “But I was certain you had heard, or I would never to my dying day, I assure you, have told you. I felt you ought to know the truth, since there are one or two people who have criticized Gerald for having taken the picture. I give you my word of honor that was my one and only reason for revealing this to you, Seymour, otherwise I would not have under any circumstances. I was told that Dr. Fabrikant—to be perfectly honest he told me himself—he said that he considered you to be one of those supporting his candidacy for department head, and I assumed, though perhaps I should not have, that he had won your confidence by telling you about the picture without describing the extenuating circumstances.” She was unable to sit comfortably on the bench.
“I honestly did not wish to impugn Pauline’s reputation,” Avis went on. “I was thinking of no more than the welfare of our department, as I’ve said. If you knew Dr. Fabrikant as well as some of us, you’d understand he is not the most suitable person for head of department. He may indeed be a scholar, and I personally have nothing against him, but he’s barely civil to other people. I’m not asking you to support Gerald—I wouldn’t presume to—however, I thought it wasn’t fair for you to go around with a wrong impression.”
After a long, hopeless silence, Levin got up. Spring was gone, an interior army had murdered it with hammers.
“If I had to know,” he muttered, “I had to know. I don’t hold it against you.”
“Against me?” she said hotly.
He wandered off.
“Mr. Levin—” she called after him.
He went without hearing, without judgment of her, or memory. He had saved her virtue and she had preserved him as a moral man.
When he attempted, after a period of renewed misery, to grow a beard, the stubble, to his horror, was sprinkled with gray, so he abandoned it.
Q. “What have I done to deserve my fate?”
A. “I am worthy of no other.”
He saw in the strewn garbage of his life, errors, mishaps, ignorance, experience from which he had learned nothing.
He was as a man inadequate, in the sense of being powerless to achieve the most meager happiness. He had been left far behind by Purpose—those chances for self-fulfillment that spring up around the man who is not fortune’s fool.
Whatever strayed into Levin’s orbit wrecked it. He could not make happen to him what happened to all but the poor bastards of the world, a use of the better choices of life; with, sooner or later, some sense of accomplishment—however slow if visible.
And love, for Jesus’ sake, so that he have not lived in vain. He was not ambitious for power, wanted no extraordinary rewards; he wanted most to break through the hardened cement of self-frustation, to live in the world and enjoy it.
He felt, as always, the need of change—in and of himself, but no longer knew where to begin. His life was a sad hash of beginnings.
He could not understand why he chose so badly, why he invariably wound up with just that woman who was most clearly wrong for him, verboten, bound to bring him to broken bloody knees.
But as the days passed, there were whole hours in which he no longer thought of her, and though she still appeared, deviously, trickily in the mind, her image was thin, abstract. Yet it wearied Levin that he should be aware of her so continuously: open an eye in sleep and she was pallidly present. Close it and she trailed across a dream. He had locked himself behind a double-barred door—her rejection of him and the revelation of her true tie to Duffy, consequently, of his own; namely that he was a dead fish to begin with. Her easy way out: she had loved him to repeat Duffy, or possibly forget him, both reasons amounting to the same thing. She appeared and
disappeared, hiding behind her transparent skirts Gilley parboiled before the second cuckoldry. God knows what else.
If in his thoughts she failed him, in fairness, in the same country he failed her. Levin, pipsqueak coward, who had not loved no matter what. “Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,/ But bears it out even to the edge of doom.” He could say, as he often did, I quit to help her, for her, not me; but Duffy, exposed by Avis, made fast the trembling quittance. He had therefore left her for what she had withheld, the Irishman and his aftermath in her life. Aftermaths breed aftermaths. “Strangers are welcome,” the magicians of love who pass in the night. Bearded and beardless whoremasters. He felt for a time a corrosive self-soiling jealousy of a ghost; Levin, contaminated substance of Duffy’s shade. He endured to be unhaunted, the last of love in its rotting coffin.
After an oppressive time, the hours few but endless, his “spirit” a foggy mishap, as if he were in perpetual sleepwalk, Levin found himself looking for something to do in his “spare time.” “But tasks in hours of insights will’d,/Can be through hours of gloom fulfill’d.” Not that he could will or fulfill anything, but he hoped to transform the mind from the vinegar-soaked sponge it had become, or broken bottle full of broken glass, once more into a functioning instrument. He secretly meant to prove there was reason to be alive although he scarcely believed it. In working, one at least worked to an end. With luck some small purpose might come to something larger, possibly a purpose to live for. At this he snickered for he was repeating himself. Still, one sought a task to escape the impoverishing richness of time. Every minute made Levin poorer. If I were a poet, he thought, my miseries would have value; but what does a teacher teach if he can’t teach what he is? He considered a philosophy project, to work towards a unity of Plato and Aristotle? Or maybe learn Russian and read Pushkin in the original? Or take up the guitar or recorder, Bach on both? Maybe paint weekends, not that he could weekdays. He had no heart for any of these things, then
wondered if he could begin to collect material for a critical study of Melville’s whale: “White Whale as Burden of Dark World.” “Moby Dick as Closet Drama.” He liked the idea of an intellectual task, the whale on his head, relief through balancing the weight on the heart, a disguise and punishment in perpetuity, a means of keeping his poor ego from shattering into bits. Under a burden some found freedom. It had happened to slaves.
Levin began to read and make notes but gave up the whale when he discovered it in too many critical hats. He wrote down possible other titles for a short critical essay: “The Forest as Battleground of the Spirit in Some American Novels.” “The Stranger as Fallen Angel in Western Fiction.” “The American Ideal as Self-created Tradition.” Levin wrote, “The idea of America will always create freedom”; but it was impossible to prove faith. After considering “The Guilt-ridden Revolutionary of the Visionary American Ideal,” he settled on “American Self-criticism in Several Novels.” Limiting himself, to start, to six books Levin read and reread them, making profuse notes. Almost with the first words he wrote, he was disappointed in how ill-prepared he was to evaluate ideas and express them. But he forced himself to keep on—if nothing else this might lead to a subject for a future dissertation. He wrote for a week, into the early morning hours, pushing himself, exasperated, suffering for having heaped punishment on punishment, yet ultimately producing a ten-page paper which Milly typed for him. After he had proofread it, the essay looked useless. He reread it with growing hatred, wanting to burn it, but decided to let someone else read it first. He thought of Dr. Fabrikant, thought no, then yes, and finally delivered it to the scholar, apologizing for taking his time. An hour or so later he found the paper in his mailbox with attached note: “I find this an illuminating insight and will be happy to advise where it might be sent. Am glad you have decided to publish. We sorely need that kind of thing in this institution. In the future I would hope to encourage it. CD.” Levin thought of sending
the paper out at once, but doubt lingered so he decided to try one more opinion. He considered Bullock but abandoned the thought and left the little essay on Bucket’s desk. “Would appreciate any comment. No hurry. S.L.”