by The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories (retail) (epub)
‘I just had a great idea, let’s have some tequila,’ shouts Ellie. Laura Ann’s face pushes back into William’s. ‘She’ll be a minute, let’s have a first date and a second date.’ William’s hand goes in under her blouse and slides up over her right breast; she presses it into her and he feels the fluttering stir in his palm. ‘Wait,’ she says, and pulls off the blouse. Her brown body is under the light from the Japanese lantern, and William feels at last the waning of his physical aversion that Miss Daubernethy had left with him. His hands run up her, and then a voice says: ‘Me too,’ and there is Ellie Armfelt by him, swimsuit off, naked. William feels a splendid, relaxed sense of benison, of plurality of gifts. The record player switches over to Beethoven. Now Laura Ann is out of her skirt and her hands are on his body, pushing aside his shirt. Ellie Armfelt is working on the trousers. ‘I thought,’ says William, ‘you were lesbian.’ Miss Armfelt leans over Laura Ann and William and hugs them together, kissing both their faces. Laura Ann is pulling his body round to reach it with her mouth. Ellie Armfelt puts a breast against his face. William can hardly see, but he knows there is another girl in the room. The impression is so hazy that it almost drifts past him. But there she is, near the bicycle, holding up a square black box. ‘Who’s that?’ asks William. ‘That’s our other room-mate,’ whispers Ellie, ‘She’s in your class too.’ The flashbulb goes off, leaving a glaring residue of light in William’s retina, showing him, vividly, the breasts against his face, like the breasts of the fat girl he saw on the grass in the electric storm. She was graceless; he has an instinct of the gracelessness of these bodies too, but the shudder is coming up him. There is another flash of light, and another, and another. The girl with the camera comes nearer for a moment. She says, politely, ‘Why, hi, Mr Honeywell,’ and then she goes away.
IV
There is an envelope, almost expected, lying under the door of William’s office when he gets there early the next morning. He has slept well in his dormitory bedroom, post-coitally tired, and then, waking up towards dawn, has thought of this, getting up soon after the light came to come over and check. But they have been up early too. He carries the envelope, with his name on it, the handwriting recognizable from themes, to his desk. He opens it up and takes out the single Polaroid print, with its whirl of bodies and its central, naked Honeywell, and then the sheet of folded theme-paper, with its long message. It says:
Dear William,
This is to thank you for last night. Oh boy are you a swinger. It really was a good scene. Take a look at the photo. Isn’t it great? It was taken by a friend, Delise Roche, who shares our pad too. I guess you saw her when she stopped by. She’s a really keen photographer, and a friend. Please remember. This is all part of the fun we have had, and a wonderful way of us all remembering it for all time. It was a swell evening, and I know I will always want to remember it. I hope you will come around again, ‘for a drink’, I mean it, you’re really welcome. Next time we ought to make it a foursome. I mean, you really ought to meet Delise. She’s a really good friend of Laura Ann and I. You will know her, she’s in your Comp. class too, a different section than us. A great kid with a problem. Her problem is that she has been working really hard ‘for the cause’, active in Civil Rights, anti-war, Women’s Lib, etc. and has just not made the grades. Like me, she thinks grades are crap, though I guess her parents would kill her or something if she flunked out of college. Anyway we need her around, on the political front, etc. A great girl. Photography’s her bag right now. She says a photograph is truer than words, and I guess she’s right. It’s typical of her that she takes these photographs of us just for fun, and for keepsake. Not to do anything with them. Show them to anyone, I mean. What grade are you giving her in Comp, William? Hey, you have a great body, William. See you maybe? Yours with affection, really,
Ellie.
Williams sits at the desk. He scratches at a body bite and reads the letter through carefully, twice more, trying to penetrate it. It is a crisp and beautiful morning, and through the window he can see the sun bringing out red glitter on the new snow that has dusted the campus, in the small hours after he got back to his room. An innocent morning. The fire seems out now in the computing complex. He stares at the photograph, with its sticky surface and falsified colours, at the image of himself from outside, alienating, gross, yet retrieving the doings already hazy now in his head. There is a footstep out in the hallway. A key turns in the lock. ‘I already opened it,’ shouts William. ‘My,’ says Fardiman, coming inside in red earmuffs, ‘And I thought I was early.’ ‘I couldn’t sleep,’ says William. ‘I’ve got some more grades to turn in,’ says Fardiman, hanging up his coat, ‘I’ve been reading themes all night. I’m so tired. I start to think the way they do. In unattached subordinate clauses. Like this.’
‘Can you bear to read one more?’ asks William. ‘Only for a real friend,’ says Fardiman, sitting down at the desk and taking off the earmuffs. William throws the photograph and the letter onto the stack of papers on his desk. ‘Look at the photograph first,’ he says. Fardiman looks, and whistles. ‘You should make the sex magazines with this one,’ he says. ‘I like it, but I’d question whether you can count it in your list of publications.’ ‘It was taken by a student,’ says William. ‘Well, I like the way the guy has got this bicycle wheel in the foreground, to give perspective.’ ‘Now the letter,’ says William, ‘Read it carefully, for tone.’ ‘For tone, heh?’ says Fardiman, automatically picking up the red pen from his desk, and making marks as he goes through the document. When he has finished he says: ‘Well, William, I think it’s got a lot of tone. I told you if you taught these kids properly they’d learn to write relevant prose.’ ‘You did,’ says William, ‘What do you think it means?’ ‘Well,’ says Fardiman, ‘We could have a graduate seminar on this one. Indeed it’s better than Moll Flanders. If read at the level of innocence, she likes you, William. She’s a sentimental girl, given to reminiscence. If read for irony, with the methods of the New Criticism, hunting for paradox and ambiguity, I’d say she’s got you. It’s a rhetorical technique called blackmail.’ ‘How do we determine which?’ ‘I have a feeling it’s one of those occasions where the intrinsic approach fails us. Where we turn to contextual factors, like are there more photographs.’ ‘I think she took four,’ says William. ‘Of course, they may not all have come out,’ says Fardiman, ‘but that would affect my reading of the text.’ ‘Yes,’ says William, ‘Fardiman, am I in a bad position?’ Fardiman looks at the photograph: ‘It looks quite a good position,’ he says. ‘With the university,’ says William. ‘Oh, with the university,’ says Fardiman, ‘That depends what you want to do, in the future. These are permissive times.’ ‘This permissive?’ asks William. ‘What are your career plans?’ asks Fardiman. ‘I’d like to stay on here a couple of years, and get my Master’s, and then take a university post, if there are any around then. Here, or in England. I’ve been thinking about it a lot. I like teaching.’ ‘William,’ says Fardiman, looking at Honewell in despair, ‘why pick a future like that at a time like this?’ ‘No?’ asks William. ‘No,’ says Fardiman.
William sits for a minute, and thinks. The sun is coming up over the snow, and the early students are going to eight o’clock class. He says: ‘You really think if she sent these photographs to anyone, I’d be in difficulties.’ ‘There’s still a professional code, especially for guys without tenure,’ says Fardiman, ‘If she sends them to our Department Chairman, I’d think your chances of a renewal next year, or a good reference on your placement file, sort of low. Like around zero. If she really papers the town, and sends them to the Regent and the President, it might be wise to have a booking on the next flight home. On the other hand, if she keeps them in her purse, and looks at them occasionally, with a fond smile for the teacher she once had, then you’ll have a sweetness following you for the rest of your days.’ ‘I suppose I could, at a pinch, argue that I’m human like everyone else,’ says William. ‘What kind of an excuse is that?’ asks F
ardiman, ‘The plea of the rogue throughout the ages.’ ‘It could happen to any of us,’ says William, ‘I didn’t really do anything. It was all done to me. And it happens all over, Fardiman.’ ‘I know,’ says Fardiman, ‘But you got caught.’ ‘I could tell the whole story.’ ‘Then all four of you would get fired. You could run away and make blue movies together.’ William sits and stares at his desk, at the list of grades he has given. He inspects the list; Delise Roche has a D. Not even an F. Just a D. ‘Fardiman,’ he says, ‘How will it end?’ Fardiman looks sadly at him. ‘I’m sorry, William,’ he says, ‘You have to write your own ending.’ ‘Do you think,’ says William tentatively, ‘I should raise Miss Roche’s grade? We raised grades for the draftees, for the blacks. She’s been working for them.’ ‘I would never advise it under any circumstances,’ says Fardiman, ‘But my mother, that old fiend, my mother would raise Miss Roche’s grade.’ ‘I’d never do it at home,’ says William. ‘You’d never do that at home, would you?’ asks Fardiman, tapping the photograph, ‘I guess we all do things away from home we wouldn’t do at home. And since most of us are never at home we’re always doing things we would never do.’ ‘Fardiman,’ says William, ‘if I do it, and keep my job, I wouldn’t feel fit to keep the job I was keeping.’ ‘I said you were a well set-up, morally earnest fellow,’ says Fardiman, ‘and they always get screwed. Of course, we could be screwing ourselves.’
William looks at Fardiman, wondering. ‘We’re complex people,’ says Fardiman, ‘that’s our training. We’re always reading for necessi-ty, design, structure, plot.’ ‘It’s quite a plot,’ says William. ‘But are we missing innocence? Maybe it’s contingent, not necessary, as Kermode would say. Maybe this letter’s a pristine, guileless thing, all this while. A statement of modern love.’ ‘Can it be?’ asks William. Fardiman gets up from his desk and goes to his jar of apple cake. ‘We find it hard to believe. I mean, what’s personal now? In bed my wife is a political agent, a minor functionary for the woman revolution. My kids rip off cookies from the refrigerator and call it an anti-capitalist gesture. But people do do loving things.’ ‘But how do we find out?’ ‘Well, how do we? Do we really know about ourselves? You could go and see her.’ ‘These grades go into the office at nine,’ says William, ‘then they go in the computer, unless it’s all burned up.’ ‘There’s always another computer,’ says Fardiman, ‘I’m sorry, William, I don’t think you can know. Here we are: we’ve read Leavis and Kermode, and Tel Quel and Marcuse. We’re lost souls on the historical turn. But, we say, we know how to read. Then here’s a text, offering two worlds, one glowing with fleshy promiscuities, one tainted with the harsh corruption of interest, okay, radical interest, and what happens? We can offer multiple interpretations. We can see it psycho-linguistically and socio-linguistically. We can find the apocalyptic figure and the low mimetic type. We can note its thematic constituents, like Delise, photography, politics, grades. We can observe in it the post-modernist or the McLuhanite emphasis on the visual as opposed to the verbal or linear mode, right? We can read it as Sontagian erotics. The only thing we can’t say is whether she got you round there to try a bit of Sontagian erotics herself on that nice British body of yours, or to shake you down for a safe passing B for this Delise. We can’t read it, William. Or, in a phrase, penetrate the literal level of this reality.’
And so there sits William Honeywell, who came here on the Greyhound bus and stood in the courthouse square, in his high-back swivel chair, looking out at the snow. It has been the coldest night on record in this little Mid-Western town, with its rich folks and its poor folks, its go to church and its not go to church, two hundred miles south of the state capital, where they keep all the money and the record of accurate time. On the literal level of William’s reality, it is seventeen minutes past or after eight, and his grades are due at nine. Can there be a knock on the door, Miss Armfelt come by to say that it is all for love? He sits and sits, staring at the path between Humanities and Business. Fardiman, with a red pen, marks.
VA
There is a knock at the door. Fardiman goes and opens it. ‘Happy New Year,’ he says to whomever is outside. ‘Is Mr Honeywell there?’ asks a voice. ‘He’s gone to Chicago, Mr Krutch,’ says Fardiman, ‘the Windy City.’ ‘I have to see him about my grades,’ says Krutch. ‘Come back another day, when once more he’s not here,’ says Fardiman. ‘There’s someone breathing back there,’ says Krutch, ‘He’s there.’ ‘No, there’s no one breathing,’ says Fardiman, ‘If I let you in here, you wouldn’t see anybody, but I won’t. You’ve got to learn to take words on trust.’ ‘Oh, sure, Mr Fardiman,’ says Krutch, unconvinced. ‘Goodbye now,’ says Fardiman. William breathes: he reads, and then rereads, the letter. He takes up the red marking pen from his desk. From under the letter he takes out the computerized mark-sheet. He runs his eye down it, finds a name and, with the pen, he makes a small alteration. Then he picks up the letter, tears it, and throws it into the wastebasket. ‘How about keeping the photograph?’ asks Fardiman, ‘A sweet reminiscence. Something gained, however momentary.’ William reaches in his pocket and brings out a matchbook. It has the name of a motel in Saratoga Springs, NY, 12866, on it. William stares at it, for he has never in his life been to Saratoga. Then he recalls that he picked it up in Miss Armfelt’s basement apartment, to light her cigar. He strikes a match on the matchbook, closing the cover as instructed, and puts the little match to the photograph. It flares, with a smell of chemicals. ‘You must come back to New York City and meet my mother,’ says Fardiman, coughing in the polluted smoke.
VB
There is a knock at the door. Fardiman crosses the room and opens it. ‘Mr Honeywell in?’ asks a voice. ‘He’s gone to Chicago,’ says Fardiman, ‘Hog butcher, stacker of wheat.’ ‘I need to talk to him right now about my grades,’ says the voice. ‘Try again some other time, Mr Krutch,’ says Fardiman. ‘There are papers rustling in there,’ says Krutch, ‘I know he’s there.’ ‘It’s the wind,’ says Fardiman, ‘The local mistral. I’m all alone. Okay?’ ‘I don’t know whether I believe you, Mr Fardiman.’ ‘What’s truth?’ asks Fardiman, ‘What’s lies? What are fictions? Where is the literal level of reality? You just go away, huh, Mr Krutch.’ ‘Metaphysician,’ says Mr Krutch, and goes. William releases the papers he is holding: he reads, and reads again, the letter. He takes up the red marking pen from his desk. He goes carefully through the letter once more, making professional markings on it. He underlines the phrase ‘a really good friend of Laura Ann and I’ and writes ‘error in case’; he underlines the phrase ‘a different section than us’ and writes ‘Not a comparative: different… from’. On the bottom he writes: ‘You get to the point too slowly’ and then ‘Two errors carrying full penalization: F.’ From his desk drawer, he takes a clean envelope and addresses it to Miss Ellie Armfelt, at her apartment address. ‘Sell me a stamp, Fardiman,’ he says. Fardiman, marking, reaches in his back pocket and pulls out his black wallet. ‘Have it on me,’ says Fardiman, and then, ‘Let me go down the corridor and mail it. That guy could still be waiting out there, puzzling through the metaphysics.’ Fardiman goes, and William sits at his desk, and looks out of the window.
Vc
There is a knock at the door. Fardiman steps across and opens it. ‘Oh, hi,’ he says. ‘Is Mr Honeywell there?’ asks a voice. ‘He’s gone to Pittsburgh,’ says Fardiman. ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ says a voice, ‘My name’s Krutch. I just wanted to tell him he’s the best teacher I ever had. I really learned from his course. I didn’t understand it, but it was really good, you know what I mean? It’s funny, there are some teachers who just make everything seem really interesting. I mean, I’m a dull, ordinary guy. I got these terrible grades from him. I may flunk. But who cares? That’s not what matters. I’ll never forget being taught by him. You know?’ ‘I’m sure he’ll be really glad to have that message,’ says Fardiman, ‘I’ll tell him when I see him.’ ‘You won’t forget?’ asks Krutch, ‘I mean, if a guy’s great, he ought to be told, right?’ ‘R
ight, Mr Krutch,’ says Fardiman. ‘Oh, and a Happy New Year,’ says Krutch. ‘And to you.’ says Fardiman. William reads, and then re-reads, the letter. He takes up the red marking pen from his desk. He takes up a clean sheet of paper and begins writing. ‘Dear Ellie,’ he writes,
