It Will Come to Me (11 page)

She had her back to the house and the light, so she was mildly
surprised when Charles Johns settled himself on the bench, close enough so that she could feel both the fat and the muscle in the arm and the thigh that pressed companionably against hers.
“Zoë mou sas agapo,”
he said. His voice was a comforting rumble.

“Maid of Athens, Ere We Part” said Ruth. The region of her brain that stored titles and verses and song lyrics was unassailable. No amount of alcohol could shut it down.

Charles Johns had brought her a selection of miniature quiches and some slices of brisket and what looked like a mound of rice and beans, all piled on a sagging paper plate. “Have something to eat,” he said. “Have you eaten today?” She hadn't, except for a spoonful or two of ill-fated chicken chili and the wasabi peas she'd force-fed herself an hour or so earlier. She took the fork he offered her and made her way doggedly around the plate. The food tasted of nothing, but already she'd begun to feel steadier and clearer. “Thank you,” she said. “I think I'm a little better.”

“Eat it all,” said Charles. “Every bit. You need some buffering fats in your system when you drink.” His accent, she realized, was not slightly British, as she'd thought, but slightly and aristocratically Southern—a Tidewater accent. She finished the food.

“At our age we can't push it as we once did,” he said as he took the damp plate away from her and folded it into a tidy wedge. This from a man who must have weighed two hundred and eighty pounds. If she hadn't felt so grateful she might have bristled. “I've been looking forward so much to meeting you,” she said. For the first time that evening her voice sounded sane and natural. “I've been reading Ricia's book and I was looking forward to talking to her.”

“She was sorry—” Charles Johns began, but Ruth waved him off. “It's just as well,” she said. “She would have been bored to
death. I'm sorry I acted badly,” she went on. “I had an upsetting phone call just before people started arriving. Do you have children?”

“I do,” said Charles. “Two grown children, both estranged. And you?”

“One,” said Ruth. Charles had firmly and deftly turned them off this subject. She rifled through her mental files to find another but nothing came to her, no question or remark that seemed appropriate to this odd encounter. How long could she sit here, like a patient under the care of an attendant? Finally she turned to face Charles Johns directly and blurted out, quite unpremeditatedly, “How do we grow old?”

This caught him by surprise. “Well how do we
not?”

“No, I mean it. I mean of course we
can't not
, but don't you feel that people of our generation are singularly unequipped—” Here Charles lit a cigarette and offered her one, which she declined.

“—singularly unequipped to meet the fact of growing old? Don't you think that after we've reached a certain age, after fifty-five or so, there are no markers anymore? We no longer have any way to locate where we are in our lives? No sense of where we are in relation to the end? Just a long featureless glide and none of the traditional signs along the way. When I think about somebody like Mamie Eisenhower …” But no. Forget Mamie Eisenhower. That was a tiresome way to illustrate her point. “How old are you, by the way? May I ask?”

“You may. I'm fifty-two.” Ruth was surprised. She'd taken him to be her senior by at least five years.

“Does that sound familiar to you? The glide path? Maybe you're still too young. Maybe it really doesn't hit until fifty-five.”

Charles had started to laugh. “What?” said Ruth. “That was funny, what I said?” She was laughing herself, nervously craning her neck in an effort to make out his expression in the darkness.

“Yes it was funny,” said Charles. “If you can think of life as a glide I congratulate you. I think of life as a plummet.”

Charles's laughter brought on a coughing fit. When he'd gotten it under control they sat for a while in a comfortably despondent silence. Ruth was sober now, and very tired. The ordinary rules of social distance had reestablished themselves. She needed to return to a more conventional conversational footing. “I hear you're teaching a very interesting course,” she said, glancing at him as if he were sitting to her left at a dinner party. “Sounds very literary.”

“Ah,” said Charles. “I just reach around and take books off my shelves more or less at random. I'm afraid I'm really not a trained philosopher. Not like your husband. I've done a good deal of reading and thinking, but not in any systematic kind of way.”

“So you've done this before? This kind of teaching?”

“That and a number of other things. I worked in construction until I started sprouting hernias. I ran a bookstore. A few years ago I tried to set myself up as a kind of all-purpose consultant, working from home. I had no idea what I was doing, just imitating another layabout I know. Do I sound like a book jacket?”

“You left out lumberjack,” said Ruth. “And stevedore. And short-order cook.”

A pause followed, long enough to make Ruth begin to feel anxious. “A failed writer,” Charles said at last, shooting her a quick apologetic smile. “That's really what I am.”

“So am I! What do you write?”

“Poetry and plays. There was a time in the early eighties when
my work got some attention. I had a couple of things produced off-Broadway. What do you write?”

“Short stories and novels. I haven't published recently. I had a kind of trilogy published ages ago.” Charles Johns cocked an inquiring eyebrow.

“Getting Good
, “said Ruth. It had been years since she'd found an opportunity to tell someone, years since she'd felt this particular constriction around the heart.

“Getting Good?.
I know
Getting Good.
I can see it on the shelf.”

“You've read it?” Ruth's hands flew to her cheeks. Involuntarily, she stood up.

“Not me. Ricia. It's one of her books. She's had it forever. I know she thinks well of it. I've never had a chance to look at it myself…”

The light went on over the back steps and Ben appeared. The party was over, had long been over. Ben was scanning the darkness, looking irritated. “Shall we go in?” Ruth said to Charles, who rose to his feet. She took the arm he offered. “Ben,” she called out as they made their way across the hummocky yard, both stumbling a little. “You can't guess what Charles just told me!” The toad of the evening had burped up an emerald.

Y
ou fat turd.
The words were so much Ben's thought that for a moment he was honestly unsure whether or not he'd spoken them. Apparently he hadn't, because from her rocking chair across an expanse of sisal mat Roberta Mitten-Kurz was continuing to dispense paragraphs. “Of course we understand,” she was saying, “that the relationship has to have been very special. Dolores was with the department for what—fifteen years?” As she spoke she was knitting something long and ciliated. She kept her eyes lowered and her big jowly chin tilted thoughtfully, as if modeling for Ben a recommended attitude of rueful detachment.

“Seventeen,” he said.

“Seventeen. And we know that your relationship with her has been special as well. She's told us as much. We had to explain to her that while her loyalty is admirable, no department chair has an exclusive claim on any particular staff member.”

“Ah, where … ?”

Mitten-Kurz's pause lasted a fraction of a second too long. Her eyes darted his way, then darted back. “She'll be joining us in sociology.”

Of course.

“We've added several positions in the last few years. Two of the new people are doing ambitious quantitative studies. We've been limping along with one part-timer and one student assistant. It just hasn't been enough.”

In its architectural bones, Mitten-Kurz's office was identical to every other on this corridor of the Lola administration building, but she had transformed it into a kind of jungle bower. Plants gathered thickly in the windows and crouched in every corner. She had seated Ben in a rocker opposite her own in a clearing defined by a circle of potted trees. A great fronded thing reared up behind him and over his head like a cobra; he found himself repeatedly twisting his neck to glance up at it. She kept at least two humidifiers going; the saturated air held a distinct compost smell and a hint of the urinous perfume of orchids. Big and Baby, Mitten-Kurz's two Weimaraners, lay heraldically at her feet.

“Now,” she said, taking a punctuating sip of the pungent-smelling herbal tea she drank continually and never offered to visitors, “there's another more general matter I need to take up with you. I'm sure you're aware there's been a certain amount of talk among the other humanities departments, a perception that philosophy has been, historically, a bit of an outlier, a little less … accountable. We've heard that over the years. To be fair, it predated your chairmanship.” She shot him a look over her half-glasses. “But I have to tell you, Ben, that lately we've been hearing it a lot. I have to tell you that philosophy is now the only humanities
department that has yet to come into compliance with the SCAC guidelines. You've had plenty of time, Ben. Plenty of notice. We started sending out the materials last February.”

Since when had she been using the royal we? Had she been doing it forever? Had he simply not noticed? “So that's why you're taking Dolores away?” he said.

Mitten-Kurz sighed and rolled her eyes. “Ben,” she said. “Please.” Now he was eleven and she was his long-suffering mother. Ben raised his own eyes and looked into hers. How small they were, he thought, punched into her face like raisins into dough. Abnormally small. Wickedly small. For a long moment, neither of them looked away. The dogs raised their heads and joined the contest, fixing Ben with their baleful yellow gaze. Mitten-Kurz was the first to let her eyes slide away, but even so, Ben hadn't won. He couldn't. Not in this Mitten-Kurz total environment, where Big and Baby and all the witnessing plants and even the antique brass samovar on the mantel were assembled against him.

“Ben,” she said, “I'm sure you realize that the decision about Dolores Calderon had nothing to do with any … effort … to punish you. That's not what we're about. It's simply a matter of the efficient and equitable allocation of resources. You know,” she went on, her tone suddenly confiding, “as a matter of fact it very likely would have happened soon anyway. We got a heads-up last April that Dr. Dreddle's employee-rotation policy would be going into effect in the next eighteen months.”

Ben couldn't let this pass. “Employee rotation?”
Fat turd.

“Yes, I know. Everybody had trouble getting their minds around it at first.” (Everybody? This was the first Ben had heard of it.) “Dr. Dreddle comes to us with a doctorate from MIT
and
an MBA from the Wharton School of Management. He'll be giving us the benefit of some very new thinking. The idea behind ER is the same as the idea behind a lot of his initiatives. He says that a university—any institution, really, but
especially
a university—is like a circulatory system. The real danger is blockage. Institutions thrive on change. The mistake administrators make is to try to keep things frozen, keep change at bay.”

Ben hadn't been there himself—he had his own policies and one of them was to duck out of any administration-sanctioned event where he wouldn't be missed—but it came back to him now that when Lee Wayne Dreddle, soon to be installed as fourteenth president of Lola, had been introduced to the university community by the provost last May in the Convocation Chapel, his first act had been to walk around the room throwing open all the windows. Apparently they had been painted shut until a few days before the event, when Dreddle's advance man called the dean, who urgently dispatched the Building and Grounds Department to pry them loose.

Outside the closed windows of Mitten-Kurz's office he could hear the lulling drone of multiple lawn mowers. B&G had been trimming and watering and pruning and planting frenetically in preparation for the ceremonies surrounding Dreddle's installation. Ben looked down on the shining tile of car roofs in the faculty parking lot and the jewel-bright lawn beyond it and beyond that the tall hedges that set the university off from the outer world of Spangler. He watched as a pair of long-legged girls in white shorts twinkled along a path under the live oaks, passing in and out of shadow and chattering soundlessly. He thought of Ecclesiastes:

Change is good. That old wheeze. He'd heard it first in high school, from a self-conscious young civics teacher named Wasserman who made a habit of twirling straight-backed chairs around and straddling them. Later he heard it from the resident adviser in his college dorm, who used it to justify moving him out of a single room when an alumnus who had just donated a skating rink to the university demanded it for his son. How many times had he corrected people who quoted Heraclitus as saying that you never step into the same river twice? (No, he'd told them. You never step into the same river
once)
“Change is good” was the single most hackneyed notion he could think of. No, it was worse than hackneyed, worse even than false, because what could it mean? (Change is good? Any change? At the risk of belaboring the obvious, how could
that
be the case?) And yet decade after decade the phrase was rediscovered and repeated and made much of by people like Lee Wayne Dreddle and Roberta Mitten-Kurz, who understood the uses of meaninglessness.