Authors: Robert Stone
Paul, hungry from hockey practice, finished his first serving quickly and helped himself to another from the stove.
"Leave some for your mother."
"Of course, Dad."
Michael opened a beer to have with the smoked salmon. "You know what I think," he said to his son. "I think there's a vestigial reason why we like this kind of tart, rich stuff. Savory stuff."
"Like a prehistoric impulse or something?"
"That's right." He looked at the salmon in its yellow mustard sauce. "I think we used to like rotten meat. We must have cached it like bears. We're trying to get the taste back."
Michael paused and put his fork down.
"That's like so disgusting. Yarg. Cripes."
"You dismiss my thesis?"
Paul, who had enjoyed their banter since learning to talk, was discovering the difference between his father sober and his father drunk. He did not much care for the drunk game. He quietly cleared his place at table, emptied the rest of his second helping in the sink and prepared to do the dishes.
Michael spent another hour at the table, tapering off the drink, brooding haphazardly, recalling his meeting with Lara. Then he remembered Kristin in the darkness upstairs. When he went up, Paul was at his computer. The door to the attic was firmly closed. Then he saw that Kristin had gone to bed. Her braid undone, she lay facing the wall. He went in and lay down beside her.
"I swear this to you," he said. "I swear it. There is no woman in my life but you. No one. And if that is the trouble between us ... then there is none."
She turned over to face him. "You wouldn't lie to me, Michael?"
He put an arm around her.
"How can you think I would risk what we have for a little kid like Phyllis? She's a baby. I mean really, Kris."
Touching her cheek, he saw some question in the look she fixed on him. It made him understand what it suddenly seemed should have been obvious, that perhaps the trouble was not pretty Phyllis but something else, something Kristin herself might not understand. The thought frightened him.
He got up and went to check on Paul, who had shut his computer off and propped his Tolkien by the table lamp and was saying his prayers. He quietly told the boy good night.
"Night, Dad."
Careful of her wounded leg, he and Kristin gently made love. It was great pleasure to have her long-boned, long-legged body under his hands. A strong body, possessed of surprising softnesses. She could be most avid, with a style of alternate yielding and resistance. There was a kind of physical pride to her; it was necessary to win her each time, convince her. Sometimes it made him think of logic, little syllogisms, discoveries, recognitions. But that night things did not go very well. He kept imagining Lara; Kristin held back as though she knew his mind.
A few days later he had lunch at a burger joint in town with Norman Cevic.
"Miz Purcell," said Norman, "oh my!"
"So what's her story?"
"She had a husband originally. They were hired together. They'd been living in France. Teaching there."
"Her husband was French?"
"Her old man was French and he was considered quite a catch for the poly sci department. He was Ridenhour's kind of guy. But somehow she lost him along the way."
The late Dr. Nicholas Ridenhour had been a minor cold warrior of intensely right-wing views who maintained the university's political science department as a kind of woodsy clerico-fascist grand-dukedom. A wag had once declared that its members printed their own gold-based currency with Dr. Nick's picture on it.
"Lost him?"
"He got a better job back east. Solo."
"A practical man," Michael observed.
"Practical folks," said Cevic.
"So her views are like her husband's."
"Listen, man," Cevic said. "This is a dangerous woman. Really!"
"Dangerous?"
"Very smart girl this is. She has a following—a cultlike following—among some of the kids."
"She's attractive," Michael said.
"She's not attractive. She's about the hottest babe in the history of the state."
"She looks crazy," Michael said. It had not occurred to him before.
"She is. And she makes other people crazy."
"Phyllis Strom wants her on her thesis committee."
"Well, man," Norman said, "this is a struggle for a young mind. See if you can keep her from biting Phyllis on the throat."
That afternoon he suffered a breakdown in communication with his second class, an expository writing workshop. Led by an extroverted young woman athlete, the group undertook to address the personal problems of the characters in one four-page fictional narrative. The personal needs and available life choices of these thin conceits were examined as though they were guests on the kind of television talk show whose participants murdered each other.
"For Christ's sake," Michael told them. "You're supposed to be replicating life here. This is like a drawing class—the characters aren't real until you make them real. It's not group therapy or social work or an uplift pep rally! How about a little more literary criticism and a little less mutual support?"
The class sullenly dispersed ahead of schedule. He had failed to make himself clear. They had understood only that their youthful goodwill was being insulted. He had used abusive language. He had employed sarcasm. He had better watch it.
Rattled, he went over to the pool for a swim. The steamy showers and liquefactious echoes were comforting on that raw winter day. He had the luxury of a lane to himself. He swam hard, trying to outrun the shadow inside him. Some kind of bill had come up for payment.
He had, it seemed to him, done quite well by randomness. By the day at least, unless one insisted on pondering it all, randomness was no less cruel than some unlikely mysterious providence. He had always considered himself a lucky man.
Buying himself a cold can of grapefruit juice from a machine in the lobby, he came upon Lara Purcell sipping bottled water beside it. She was wearing a black sleeveless leotard and there was a damp towel around her neck.
"Doing your aerobics?" Michael asked.
"Squash."
"Where do you find opponents?"
"Oh, there are some formidable women around. I play men too." She drained her plastic bottle and tossed it in the receptacle against the near wall, a rimless shot. "Do you play?"
"What I play is racquetball."
"Oh," Lara said. "I can play that."
"Want to play tomorrow?"
"What time?"
"Three?"
But three might bring him home suspiciously late, if they stopped for coffee. It would be dark by four. They agreed to play at two.
"If you're good enough," Dr. Purcell said, "I'll teach you squash."
Back at his office he called Norman Cevic.
"So Lara Purcell," he told Norman, "invited me to play squash."
There was a brief silence on the line. "So what can I tell you, Michael?"
"Is that a pass?"
"Gamboling half clothed in a sealed chamber? What do you think?"
"I should say no way," Michael said. "I should decline."
"Did you?"
"I accepted. Racquetball, actually."
"You know," Norman said, "some of our colleagues—I won't mention names—are real screwballs. Disasters in search of a victim. Who knows what games are being played out? I'm not talking about squash."
"I'll call her," Michael said. "I'll make an excuse."
"Well," Norman said, "you're a man of the world."
Very funny, Michael thought. But it was not so. He was a tank-town schoolmarm's son, the grandson of farmhands on four quarterings, married out of high school. An overeducated hick.
That night the PBS station presented a particularly absorbing documentary about convicted murderers awaiting execution on death row. It left the Ahearns in mild shock. What terror to fall into the hands of a system so cruel and arbitrary as the law, so surreal in its unconcern for any kind of responsibility. It was the kind of thing that made you want to pray.
Kristin had not allowed Paul to watch because of the warning about graphic depictions. Michael, who would have preferred his son to see it, did not argue. Later he regretted it.
In the morning, he read the class papers on Kate Chopin's
The Awakening.
Many students had not troubled to finish the reading. Several of these compared it to
Madame Bovary,
which was presumably the posted line on it in Cliffs Notes or somewhere. A few apologized for their inability to sympathize with the heroine, vaguely aware that sympathy was the attitude expected. The class feminists abandoned Edna as a flibbertigibbet. Eros and Thanatos were too quaint and reactionary, even embraced in a solitary act of personal liberation.
It was hardly a surprising response. Solitary acts of personal liberation were what everyone must be spared or forbidden. They represented the failure of everything progressive. The courage to be yourself, a virtue much celebrated on campuses like theirs, lost its luster if you were selfish and boy-crazy and a bad mother, the way Edna was.
It occurred to him that he had been preaching against literary vitalism all his career, mocking the pretensions of the antinomians, the self-conscious libertines. If what he thought and said mattered, he would have to reexamine everything now. By midmorning he was beginning to associate the insidiousness of literary vitalism with his afternoon game of racquetball. He skipped lunch and went over to the gym in plenty of time. Lara had reserved the court.
They played for an hour. Professor Purcell wore latex shorts and a red club vest, her dark hair bound in a ponytail with black and yellow ribbon. She played facing the front wall, utterly focused, it seemed, on the game. She was fast and strong, not afraid of getting hit, not afraid of the ball. In two of their fifteen-point matches she beat him, and her game seemed to improve as they played. Their last game was the hardest for him; they exchanged advantage nearly a dozen times before he won it. It seemed to him he had never played a better woman athlete. When they finished the last game he had a quick vision of summer, of tennis and lemonade, a strange, happy anticipation of the sort he had not experienced for weeks.
Surrendering to his final victory, she took her protective glasses off and wiped the sweat from her forehead and rested her right hand on his shoulder. He was intensely aware of her touch.
"Oh," she said, "you're good."
Michael had barely the breath to answer her.
"Will you teach me squash?"
She laughed and shook her head.
They met, dressed, in the lobby, lined with its trophy cases and framed photographs of teams going back to the twenties.
"Coffee?" Michael asked.
She hesitated. "Honestly," she said, "I'm well and truly beat. You don't do massage, do you?"
There was no way in which this could be other than a joke.
"I'm afraid not."
"Well, there's a Latvian lady I go to. I think I feel the need of her."
"Good idea," Michael said. "If I had a Latvian lady I'd go too."
"Oh," Lara said, "no, I feel selfish. Let's do something we can both do. What you like best."
"I think my favorite thing would be to drink a beer."
"Decadent, eh?"
"Not at all," Michael said. "Wholesome. Agreeably provincial."
They drove her Saab to a sports bar in a mall surrounded by dairy farms, whose silos and storage tanks loomed over the fake tiles and tin towers of the mall. A few students from campus and a tableful of off-duty FedEx drivers were half watching a British soccer game on the bar's giant screen. Sunderland against Manchester United. The screen commentary competed with Billy Joel.
Lara was wearing an ankle-length fox coat. Hanging it for her, he could feel the warmth of her body against the coat's silk lining. He ran his fingers over the fur. The bar sold draft Harp lager by the pint.
"I'll sleep tonight," Lara said with feline satisfaction. "I'm sure of that."
"I hope I do."
"Have trouble sleeping?"
He nodded and shrugged.
"Get the health service to give you something."
"Not my guy."
"Nonsense. Insist."
"Come on, you know how they are. He believes in valerian root. He believes fatigue makes the best pillow. He thinks people don't need sleep. He likes saying no."
"You should sleep," she said. "I'll give you something."
Her lips were inches away, and when he kissed her he thought he heard a little yahoo chorus rise from the bar. They sank back against the banquette. Michael was weak-kneed and dizzy.
"Want to play tomorrow?" she asked. "I'll teach you squash."
"I don't like all this losing-to-a-girl stuff," Michael said. "It's against religion."
"I'm a good teacher. I'll have you beating me. We'll turn it into an opera."
"Squash?" Michael asked.
"Squash is fate's game. The ball game. You have to be ready to die. You have to know how to sing."
"Maybe I can beat you," Michael said. "I get your clothes if I do. Isn't that right? I'll settle for that."
"Nicey, nicey," she said. "I'll have you singing in chains. I'll have your soft heart on a dish."
He kissed her again.
That night when Paul had gone to bed, Kristin asked him, "Did you ever think of joining AA?"
"Not for the merest instant," Michael said. "I think I might join Al-Anon."
"Really? Getting bored nights? It's supposed to be a hot pickup spot."
As usual, she left the sarcasm lying where it fell, immune. "I've been thinking about how out of contact you are sometimes. As though you're not there."
They were on the second floor, tidying a spare room full of shelves they'd placed to accommodate an overflow of books.
"But I
am
there, Kris." Dumb denial was the best he could do.
She picked up an unjacketed book and looked at the spine. "I may be a dumb squarehead, fella, but I know when you're with me and when you're not."
They went to bed. Michael turned out his bedside lamp and turned over, facing away from Kristin. She lay beside him stiff as starched laundry, reading or pretending to read. He fell asleep before she did.