by John Gardner
The pressure of his nervousness made Nugent’s face redder and redder, and he began, just perceptibly, to sway, eyes rapidly blinking. Mickelsson lowered his gaze, lest his looking at the boy increase his discomfort. “It’s bad to dismiss them out of hand,” Nugent said, “dismiss the whole idea of discernible truth just because one doesn’t want to go through the trouble of thinking.” Blassenheim turned, injured, to look at Nugent. Hadn’t Blassenheim stood up for Truth just last week, and Nugent, in his arrogance, made fun of the ‘eternal verities’? Nugent hurried on, “It’s the assumption that some things are true—discernibly true—that keeps us going, makes life even possible.” He flashed a panicky grin, catching Mickelsson’s brief glance. “I mean, that’s where we get our sense of dignity, from the feeling that we’re good, the feeling that our team’s better than the other team. Angels of Life versus Angels of Death, things like that. But the thing is—this is what I wanted to say—even though Plato and Aristotle mean to be logical and reasonable, so you can repeat their processes, when you really look at it nothing ever works. It’s as if between their time and ours all the names of the chemicals got shifted around, so that what we call oxygen is really lithium hydride, and … For instance, take the word moral. What’s the connection between the way Plato uses it in the Symposium or Aristotle uses it in the Ethics or Poetics and how we use it now, when we say ‘She hasn’t got any morals’? Or take ‘virtue.’ ”
Mickelsson raised his head, about to break in, but Nugent pressed forward, raising his voice a little. “They may work differently—Plato’s like a poet, or the person who writes a national anthem, and Aristotle’s more like a novelist, or a symphony composer—or anyhow that’s how it seems to me. …” He looked proud of himself. No harm. For him it was an original insight. “But all the same when they say ‘virtue,’ they seem to mean more or less the same thing. If Kierkegaard uses it at all it’s like somebody handed him the wrong test tube.” Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard, Mickelsson thought. Is that shit still “in”? “Or what does a person mean by ‘virtue’ when he’s talking about the greatest good for the greatest number? I guess Aristotle wouldn’t say, any more than Jean-Paul Sartre, that people are necessarily born with virtues—if they were, Aristotle wouldn’t have had to write that instruction book for his son—but in Sartre, from what I can tell, it’s like virtue is something that just vanished out of the universe.” Sartre! Christ save us! Sartre! “That’s the reason Kierkegaard’s so strange: he tells you right out that he doesn’t know what virtue is, maybe it’s God’s whisper in Abraham’s ear, maybe it’s just insanity. I think he”—Nugent nodded toward Blassenheim—“might be right: maybe Aristotle really didn’t know what he was talking about, he was just saying how we do things in Athens or wherever. He even uses that word—‘we,’ like ‘the reason we believe’—as if he were speaking for all grown-ups. But if he did really know what he was talking about, it seems like it must be lost knowledge, like how to fuse brick. It’s like what Kafka says, there’s this machine that really used to work, but it doesn’t anymore—something fell off and nobody noticed, or the parts are worn out and nobody knows how to make new ones. It’s like words, language, ideas that used to make perfectly good sense—” He raised both hands, as if to guard himself from something invisible. “I realize it’s confusing, the way I’m saying it, but—” He abruptly looked down, then with a jerk, his face whitening, sat back in his chair. “That’s all.”
There was an embarrassed silence. For a moment Mickelsson couldn’t think how to break it. His stomach was in a knot. Some of the students were looking at him, waiting; some looked at the floor. He pushed from his mind the observation that too many chairs were empty. At last he nodded and said seriously, “Very good, Mr. Nugent.” He couldn’t seem to remember the boy’s first name. After another moment he nodded again and said, “Very interesting!” He glanced around the room. “Anyone like to comment?”
Miss Mariani raised her hand, looking troubled.
“Yes?”
“Are we supposed to have read the Poetics? According to the assignment sheet you passed out—”
“Mr. Nugent’s been reading ahead,” Mickelsson answered. “Reading and thinking. A practice I commend to you.”
Miss Winburn was again passing a note to Alan Blassenheim. Mickelsson gave her a look. To his surprise, she smiled brightly, her teeth large and perfect, startling against her tan.
Like someone who has just confessed some terrible crime, or avenged a murder, Nugent sat gravely still, with his eyes closed.
Mickelsson looked at the clock. “Well—” he said.
Sudden, loud rustling of papers and books, a raucous scraping of chairs. The students got to their feet—all but Nugent—and shuffled, beginning to talk now, toward the door. Then a strange thing happened. As the students filed out, Alan Blassenheim, passing behind Nugent, paused, looking down at him, then draped his hand for a moment over Nugent’s upper arm. Nugent opened his pale eyes, throwing a look of alarm up to Mickelsson, who merely gazed back at him, hardly knowing how to respond. Blassenheim, unaware of the effect he’d set off, moved on, loose-limbed, graceful as a dancer, toward the door, turning once, smiling at something another student said, saying something in return. His shoulders, in the dark athletic jacket, were immense.
Now Brenda Winburn, moving in a kind of side-step between the rows of desk-chairs, glided behind and past Nugent, her tanned, amazingly smooth face turned toward Mickelsson. For the second time today, as if she and Mickelsson had some secret, she smiled. She turned from him, swinging her smooth hair, and, just behind Blassenheim, disappeared into the noisy current of the hallway. At last, abruptly, as if someone had told him to, Nugent stood up, wiped his forehead, then his eyes, looking at the floor like someone stunned, mechanically gathered his papers and books, and left. Only now did Mickelsson come to himself and rise to leave.
“What was that curious phrase?” he asked himself, then remembered. Angels of Life; Angels of Death.
He’d meant to spend no more than a few minutes in his office, just drop off his mail as he always did, ritually transport it from his box to his desk, glancing at return addresses as he walked, on the slim chance that there might be something he’d take pleasure in opening—a letter from his daughter or son, perhaps—then get out of there quickly, before some student could catch him and pin him to his chair with questions, requests for favors, reasonable demands he couldn’t decently refuse. But almost as soon as he was inside the door, looking down miserably at his ex-wife’s handwriting (a demand that he send money, he knew without opening it), there stood Tillson, poking his silver-bearded head in, smiling his murderous, fake smile like the Keebler Cookie Elf gone insane.
“May I speak to you, Pete?” he asked, and grinned harder, his eyebrows jumping up and down as if he were clowning, which he was not. He wore an expensive but rumpled black suit, white shirt, a tie with narrow stripes; a kind of hunchbacked dandy. No doubt part of what was wrong with him, Mickelsson had decided some time ago, was that it took so much energy to keep up the opinion that it was the world out there that was misshapen. Not a generous thought, Mickelsson would admit. But Blassenheim was right, why be reasonable?
“Come in,” Mickelsson said, and, when Tillson had slipped through the door, not opening it farther, “sit down.”
“Thank you!” Tillson said. “I’ll only take a minute of your valuable time.” He bent his knees to sit, but then, with his rear end hovering over the chair, two fingers of each hand raising the material of his coal-black suitpants to protect what little remained of the crease, he caught sight of the huge pile of mail on Mickelsson’s desk and, eyes widening, cried, “Wow!” He was pointing now, looking at Mickelsson in disbelief.
“Saving it for a rainy day,” Mickelsson said.
“Gosh, Pete,” Tillson said, “don’t you feel that’s a little … unethical?” He flashed the grin again, slanty eyes glittering, like a fierce debater pretending he never shot to kill.
After an instant Tillson seated himself, once again flashed his exaggerated smile, and said, “Not directly.” His tongue flicked out, wetting his lower lip. “I thought maybe we should have a chat about … Senior Personnel?” He tipped his head, letting his smile come in at an angle.
Mickelsson waited.
“You’ve been getting our notices?” He tapped the tips of his fingers together, eyebrows jerking, smile painfully stretched.
Mickelsson glanced at the pile on his desk. “I’m sure they’re here someplace.”
Tillson laughed thinly, as if gleefully, and nodded. “Yes, I know meetings are a nuisance. Personally, I hate them! But if we don’t all of us pull together on this—” He leaned far to one side, smiling hard, never blinking, his whole body wearing an expression so oddly devious that Mickelsson was abruptly reminded of what Edie Bryant had told him, that Tillson had a wife and a mistress who knew each other, were in fact good friends. It was all very open and twentieth-century except that, she said, Tillson and the mistress were forever sneaking in extra assignations, not telling the wife. “That’s ridiculous,” Mickelsson had said at once, sorry to have lent his ear to such talk. “Isn’t it?” Edie had laughed, innocently delighted.
The memory and Mickelsson’s sense of guilt made him suddenly blunt. “You keep scheduling the meetings on Fridays,” he said. “I don’t come in on Fridays.”
Tillson’s laugh might lead one to wonder if he were actually making an effort to appear insane, but he splashed his hands open and stretched them, palms up, toward Mickelsson, begging him to show a little sense. “It’s the only time the whole committee has free!” he said. “Gosh, I know it’s not ideal—”
“I’m not free on Fridays,” Mickelsson broke in. “Thursdays and Fridays are my days for research.”
“Research is important, I grant you,” Tillson said, “and believe me, we’d be nowhere if it weren’t for the reputation we get from people like yourself! On the other hand, these matters of hiring and firing, tenure and promotion—we need your in-put, Pete. Golly, leave such matters in the hands of the department’s weaker sisters, people like myself, ha ha—”
“I see your point, but I don’t come in on Fridays,” Mickelsson said. He put his arms on the chair-arms, as if to rise.
“Pete, you’re being rigid,” Tillson said sharply. He raised an index finger and shook it, fakely grinning. “You’re new to the department, and of course you’re a ‘famous man’ and all that, so we all like to give you the benefit of the doubt. But we have to work together—that’s civilization. I know you’re a man of principle, an idealist—” Accidentally but quite horribly, as if his face had gone completely out of control, he sneered.
Mickelsson looked hard at the man, confounded by the sudden conviction that Tillson hated him. It was no cause for alarm; Mickelsson had tenure and probably more clout, if it should come to that, than the chairman himself. Probably the discovery shouldn’t even have come as a surprise to him: professionally, Tillson was of the enemy camp, a “linguistic atomist“—so he pretentiously styled himself. No wonder if he minded Mickelsson’s success, such as it was, a success which must in any case seem to Tillson fraudulent, “a shrill pitch to the philosophical right,” as some metaphor-scrambling fool had once written of Mickelsson’s ethics book. And of course it was true too that Mickelsson had never pretended to feel friendly toward Tillson—had perhaps been, at times, barely civil. Nevertheless he was sickened for an instant by the realization that Tillson hated him. Not sickened for good reason; simply a cry of his genetic programming. Thanatos, vulnerability … a dreary business.
Now it came to Mickelsson that he was looking at the chairman—the black suit and too fashionable beard, the monstrous fake smile and piously tapping fingertips—with an expression of undisguised contempt. He had a choice to make: he could negotiate, take back that look of disgust, pour oil on troubled waters; or he could confirm the charge or, at any rate, innuendo—could admit to Tillson and himself at once that he did not care in the least what Geoffrey Tillson and all his kind, spawn of G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, might think.
Though Mickelsson had by now made his face expressionless—might even have seemed to a casual observer to be studying Tillson with a friendly half-smile—the truth was that a peculiar coldness, clammy as cave-walls, had come over him, an indifference that finally had nothing much to do with the nervously leering little scholar. Along with the indifference came a feeling of power, invulnerability like a dead man’s. “Surely your feeling of righteousness is a little misplaced,” he said. He watched Tillson’s pink tongue dart across his lips again, silver eyebrows shooting up, then continued, “You know it takes me an hour to get in from Susquehanna, and an hour to get home again, and at least an hour for those meetings where nothing ever happens.” Though Tillson was showing alarm, he pressed on coolly, “You know I’ve set aside Thursdays and Fridays for my own research and writing. You set up those meetings knowing I can’t come to them—not even wanting me to come to them, I suspect, since my opinions would surely be opposed to your own—” He checked Tillson’s eyes and took pleasure in the look of amazement there. “And then you come in and use my ‘valuable time,’ as you call it, complaining about my failure to attend.”
Tillson’s smile became crazier than ever. “What?” he said, straightening a little. His eyebrows stopped jittering, frozen in circumflex.
“I’m not interested in offending you,” Mickelsson said. He felt his indifference increasing by leaps and bounds. “All I’m saying is”—he pointed at the calendar on the office wall—“you’ve scheduled the meetings for a time when I can’t come. That’s your mistake, not mine. And now, if that’s all the business we have between us …”
Tillson raised his finger again, then changed his mind, leaned his head to one side, and slowly lowered his hand. “Mickelsson,” he said, as if threatening, “you’re a strange man. Stranger than you think!” He suddenly stopped smiling. “All right,” he said, and abruptly stood up, fists clenched. His eyes glittered brighter than ever. “I appreciate your frankness.”
Mickelsson rose.
At the door, Tillson said, “We shouldn’t be”—he paused, hunting for the word, looking wildly dishonest as he did so—“enemies. I’ll admit, now that we’ve talked about it, I may have been a little in the wrong.”
Mickelsson nodded curtly, feeling redness in his face.
“We all have to try to get along, you know,” Tillson said. “None of us is perfect.”
“No doubt that’s true.”
Tillson thought about it, decided against comment—one hand went up furtively to the corner of one eye—and after a moment’s further hesitation, he nodded sharply and left. Mickelsson’s arms and legs began to shake. He bent over the vast mess of mail.
Only the back of his mind was aware that someone stood just outside his door looking in. “What was all that about?” Jessica Stark’s voice asked.
“Oh, hello,” he said. Guilt crawled over him. How fitting that she of all people should catch him at such a moment—Mickelsson the Viking, the Prussian Junker, reducing poor humpbacked Geoffrey Tillson to tears. Well, better Jessica than Edie Bryant.
Jessica was looking down the corridor after Tillson. Now she turned to look in at Mickelsson again. “Mind if I come in?”
“Do,” he said, a little querulous. He picked up the first piece of paper that came to hand and, scowling hard, pretended to read. Proudly, the Department of Music Presents … He put it down again.
She closed the door behind her and stood half leaning against it, her left hand on the doorknob. “Is something wrong?” she asked. She wore, today, a beige turtleneck, dark brown skirt, skin-tight soft leather boots.
“No,” he said, “nothing wrong,” and reached for his pipe. It occurred to him that if he were dying of lung or throat cancer none of this would matter. His father h
ad died of cancer. Pancreas. People had come in great crowds to the hospital; the windows and tables, even the floor at one end of the room, were jammed with flowerpots.
Mickelsson said, “I had a fight with Tillson, as I imagine you saw.” He smiled sourly, then put a match to the tobacco in his pipe. “Poor bastard, he doesn’t deserve me.”
“Don’t be silly,” she said. He registered an interesting complexity in her tone. By an act of will she supported him as if instinctively, but clearly she had private reservations. He wondered if perhaps it was a trick she’d learned with her late husband.
“Well, anyway …” he began, then shifted: “So how have you been?”
She said, “You’re trembling.”
“You think. I’m trembling, you should see Tillson!” He laughed, faking pleasure, and lowered the pipe.
Her eyes narrowed and one side of her mouth went up, not quite in a smile. “You like fighting with him, don’t you.” She came a step nearer.
“It’s always good to keep in shape,” he said.
“I think it’s a little like a fifth-grader picking on a third-grader.”
He stood stupidly gazing at her forehead. Her dark hair glowed; her scent brought a wave of unhappiness. He could think of no witty response.
She turned from him, irritably glancing at the papers on his desk. Something caught her attention. “Look,” she said, “the Swissons are giving a concert.” Then, after a pause: “You want to go?”
He looked down at the paper. Proudly, the Department of Music Presents … “I could,” he said, suddenly thinking of Donnie Matthews. “Do you?”
“Sure,” she said with a shrug, “why not?” She seemed to be working something out in her mind.
