by Robert Stone
"I'm really sorry to bother you here," Phyllis said. Her regrets were genuine because he had ordered her not to disturb him at the library. He stood blinking, running a hand through his hair.
"I couldn't get you on the telephone," Phyllis said. "But Mrs. Ahearn said you were probably here."
"She was correct." He directed Phyllis to the nearest library table, where there were two vacant chairs.
"I really am sorry," Phyllis said anxiously. "I know how you like to come here."
Michael laughed in spite of himself.
"Just goofing off, Phyllis. What's up?"
"Well, you know, I waited until the last minute to line up a thesis committee."
"Right," Michael said. It had been his fault. He had kept her busy through the break, shamelessly overworked her. She had never so much as breathed an impatient sigh. The rumor about beautiful Phyllis Strom, untrue so far as Michael could determine, was that as an undergraduate she had posed for a Playboy spread, "The Girls of the Big Ten." In any case, as a graduate student she had become a model of industry, modesty, sobriety and decorum.
"Well, you know I asked Professor Fischer when I asked you?"
Michael nodded.
"Well, I have a third person lined up." When Phyllis told him the name he could not quite make it out. He had heard it around.
"Professor Purcell." She repeated it for him. "Marie-Claire Purcell. Everyone calls her Lara."
"She's a political scientist, and her specialty is the Third World," Phyllis explained. "She's real hard to get hold of on campus. Like she doesn't have e-mail and her phone's unlisted."
"Should I write to her?"
Phyllis blushed fetchingly.
"Your wife said you didn't have time to write until after term. So I wondered if you could catch her on campus today. I told her you might stop in."
Michael watched her for a moment.
"I guess I owe you, Phyllis. You were a lot of help to me this term."
"I feel so badly about pushing it," said the contrite but determined Phyllis Strom. "But it's so important to me."
"Is it? Is she so terrific?"
"Yes," Phyllis said simply, "she's great. She studied at the Sorbonne. She has a couple of books and she's been a television journalist."
"Wonderful." He had a vague sense of Mme. Purcell. One of the overpaid Eurotrash faculty who frequented each other's houses for edible food and adult conversation and liked to photograph roadside diners and picturesque gas stations. "Lucky us. Sure," he told Phyllis. "I'll call her. Is she in her office this afternoon?"
"Until four-thirty," Phyllis said with a guilty smile. "Please?"
And who could refuse Phyllis, wintry nymph with her tasseled elfin cap, frost-nipped little nose and principled ambition. So, in violation of the library rules, he dialed the college directory on his cell phone and eventually found himself in conversation with Dr. Lara Purcell.
"We probably met at the dean's drinks party," Dr. Purcell said. She had a pleasant voice, with an accent that continually surprised, with Britishisms and French words pronounced in English. It was not disagreeable. She was said to have grown up in the Windward Islands.
"Yes, probably," Michael said. They agreed to meet at her office in half an hour.
All over the campus, college groundsmen were salting walkways to keep traction underfoot for pedestrians, fighting a losing battle with the oncoming cold of night. The offices in the political science building were lighted as Ahearn jogged up the ornate steps, past the allegorical statues attending them.
The secretary had gone home but the department's door was open. He wandered in and found Professor Purcell at her desk. He knocked twice on her office door.
"Are you Michael Ahearn?" the woman asked him. She got to her feet and came out from behind her desk.
"Professor Purcell?"
She was only slightly shorter than Michael, who stood six feet. She was wearing an elegant purple turtleneck jersey with a small horn-shaped ornament on a gold chain around her neck. A short leather skirt, dark tights and boots.
"I've heard so much about you from Phyllis," Professor Purcell said. "You're her mentor and ideal."
"Well, bless her. She's a terrific kid."
"Is she?" asked Professor Purcell.
The wall behind the desk was decorated with paintings in bright tropical colors. There were photographs too, taken in palm-lined gardens with ornamental fountains and wrought-iron balconies. In the photographs Lara Purcell appeared with people of different racial types, all of whom shared a cool, confident air of sophistication. Almost everyone portrayed seemed attractive. The exception was a pink, overweight and unwholesome-looking man standing next to Professor Purcell herself. His features were distantly familiar to Michael—a politician, unsympathetic, one from the wrong side. But Michael had no time to study the office appointments closely. "Well, I think so," Michael said.
"Call me Lara," Professor Purcell told him. She wore her dark hair shoulder length, streaked from the forehead with a shock of white. Her skin was very pale, her eyes nearly green, large, round and unsurprised. Beneath them were slightly swelling moons of unlined flesh, a certain puffiness that was inexplicably alluring. It somehow extended and sensualized the humor and intelligence of her look. Her mouth was provocative, her lips long and full.
Lara offered him a chair. "She's so serious, is Phyllis. And she thinks you make serious things seem funny."
"Who, me?"
The professor laughed agreeably. "Yes."
"Does she think that's good?" Michael inquired.
"I think she had her doubts. She didn't think it could be done. But now she sees the point of you."
The lady's cool impudence made him blink. It was not how people spoke to each other in Fort Salines.
"I'm glad to hear it. I'm very possessive about Phyllis."
"Rest assured you possess her, Mr. Ahearn."
"Please call me Michael. Phyllis," he said, "is very big on you too."
Lara only smiled. She looked at her watch. "I usually stop for coffee at Beans about now. Like to join me?"
Michael's usual refreshment at the same hour was a glass of the whiskey he kept in his carrel. He decided the drink could wait.
It was tough going downhill on the icy pathway. From time to time one of them began to slide and had to be rescued with a hand from the other. Beans, the coffee shop that served the campus, was at the college end of Division Street, four blocks of thriving retail stores and service establishments that ended in the courthouse square. It was bright, its windows cheerfully frosted. The place was full of kids. At a table beside the door, some of the foreign graduate students and junior faculty were gathered at a long table speaking French. Entering with Michael, Lara stopped to chat. She did not introduce him.
They stood in line for their paper cups of cappuccino and carried them to a table at the back.
"I gather," Michael said, "you haven't agreed yet to serve on Phyllis's committee. And that I'm supposed to persuade you."
"She's sweet," said Lara. "She seems to have done her work. But I don't want any tears. I don't rubber-stamp the language requirement. And I expect a capable defense conducted in standard English."
"Phyllis is quite articulate. I can't speak for her fluency in French. She's intellectually curious. And of course she has a social conscience."
The professor looked over Michael's shoulder to throw a backhanded farewell to one of their colleagues.
"Her social conscience worries me," she said to Michael. "Please assure me. Will I hear pious prattle in American kiddie-speak? If I do, you see, she'll be out on her little bum."
Michael made a note to warn poor Phyllis of what awaited her.
"I'll vouch for her. I think we'll survive your scrutiny."
"On your head be it," Lara told him.
They looked at each other for a moment.
"You do hear a lot of silly uplift," he said. "Phyllis isn't that way."
"It's conte
mptible," she said with a fine sneer. "Life is a fairy tale and they're the good little fairies. The gallant little social egalitarian feminist fairies. It's our responsibility to keep them from getting loose in the world."
"Keep them down on the farm," Michael said, "before they've seen Paree."
"Right. Stifle them aborning. Because, you know, one sees them overseas," she said, "and one's ashamed to be an American."
"They can get nasty too," Michael said. He had somehow not thought of Lara as an American.
"But of course they're nasty. On their own ground, in absurd provincial backwaters of the academy—places like this—they run our lives."
They both laughed.
"You're blushing. I haven't offended you? Oh, but I suppose I have."
"No, you're absolutely right," he said. "Jargon and goodie-speak prevail here. Actually, I'm not sure it's better at ... more prominent institutions."
"There are nuances," she said. "Places like Berkeley are exhausted by politics. They're in deep reaction, which is fine with me. At other places—Yale, for example—the powers that be are merely cynical."
"Tell me this," Michael said. "What's someone like you doing in an absurd provincial backwater?"
"It's what I deserve," she said. "And you?"
"I'm a genuine provincial. People like me provide authenticity."
"In fact," she said, "I planned to settle here with my ex-husband. The job was a great convenience."
"It's a nice town for kids."
She shook her head. "No kids." Then she said, "You'll want to be going. Your dinner will be waiting."
"Norman Rockwell," he said, "is stopping by tonight to sketch us."
A little flaring of the fine nostrils. "An artist, isn't he? A sentimental artist? So you think I picture your home life as a sentimental ideal?"
"Happy families are all alike," Michael said.
"What will you have for dinner?"
"We call it supper," Michael said. "We'll have pot roast."
"I mustn't keep you from it," Lara said. "You can tell your protégée Phyllis I'll serve on her committee. I hope she won't regret it."
"I'm confident she won't."
She offered him her hand. "And," she said, "we can get to know one another."
"Yes. Yes, I hope so."
Just before he turned away, she cocked her head and raised an eyebrow. As if to say it was fated. As if to say, inevitable now. When he hit the cold street, his heart soared.
It was a three-quarter-mile walk from the coffee shop to his house. The cold, the walk and the scintillations of his encounter with Marie-Claire Purcell had sharpened his desire for a drink. Kristin, in gym clothes, was in the kitchen preparing one of her quickie Viking specials, warm smoked salmon with dill and mustard sauce. She had taught two classes and spent the rest of the day at the pool. He went by her and took the Scotch bottle out of a cupboard.
"You're late," she said.
"I was detained."
"Really?"
He poured out half a water glass of whiskey and added water from the tap.
"By Phyllis?" Kristin asked.
"Sort of. You want a beer out of the fridge?"
"Sure," she said. "What did little Phyllis want?"
Michael got his wife the beer.
"Just wanted me to line up her thesis committee. So I did."
"Sometimes I wonder who's assisting who."
"Assisting whom."
She turned to him, put her beer down beside the smoked salmon and gave him the finger. Then she walked out of the room.
Michael quietly addressed the silence she had left behind her.
"Is there some rule," he asked, "by which every time I feel halfway human you get to throw a shit fit?"
He could feel himself coming down hard. It was downright physiological, he thought, the collapse of elan, the sensation of your chin hitting the floor. He kept the image of her retreating figure in his mind's eye, her upright posture, her waggling braid, her small perfect ass in the light gray flannel tights. Though he dreaded it, something about her anger aroused him.
He swallowed his drink. He was bored with pondering the etiology of his own hard-ons, his own insights, literary and otherwise. Bored with introspection. A man without a meaning was a paltry thing, and increasingly, since the day of the deer hunt, he had seen himself revealed as one.
Perhaps, he thought, it was not boredom but fear. They were closely related. Behind the bland irritation, the true horrors. His son came in, pulling off a hockey shirt and tossing it in the laundry pile.
"Mom's in a snit," the boy said.
"Have some respect," Michael said, pouring another drink, "for your mother's feelings."
"Huh?"
"How can we call the rage of Iphigenia a snit?" he asked. And while the poor kid was dutifully trying to remember who Iphigenia was, Michael commanded him to do the laundry. "Don't just toss that dirty shirt in there. Stick it all in the machine. I'll get dinner."
While Paul hauled the basket into the laundry room, Michael took his drink up to the master bedroom. His wife was not to be found.
"Kris?"
The door to the attic was slightly ajar but there was no light on in the stair that led up to it. He opened the door a little more, on darkness.
"Kris?" he called up.
"It's all right," she said. "I'm sorry."
He found the light switch and snapped it but the bulb must have been broken; the stairway and the attic stayed dark. He climbed the first two steps.
"You know," he said, "you must know there's nothing between me and Phyllis. I mean nothing."
"I believe you," she said. "I'll come down. I'll come down in a minute."
"I'm going to put your lovely salmon out."
"Yes," she said. "Yes, go ahead."
He stood in her darkness, wondering whether to put another foot on a higher stair.
"Go ahead," she said. "I'll be down."
Paul put the laundry through its wash cycles and Michael warmed the fish and finished making the tart sauce but there was no sign of Kristin. He put two plates on the kitchen table. By then he was well down the bottle of Scotch.
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 questio
n 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."
