Bobcat and Other Stories

by Rebecca Lee

  And then I headed, as every day, back to our shabby little coffee-Xerox room to find my friend Liv, just returned from her Italy 1912 class. Liv’s area was Italian Fascism, heavy emphasis on Mussolini, who was cut from the same cloth as Liv’s tyrannical father. Liv had emerged from a terrible childhood and early marriage to be always the sanest, most stable, most cheerful person in any room. Every day after teaching we retired here, to this little notch in the wall, which we just called “small room.” Our faculty mailboxes were in here, so every now and then one of the men in our department would duck in, chat a bit, and retrieve his mail, but they knew the room was ours. One had even complained about it, said he didn’t appreciate having to get his mail out of the “ladies room” every day.

  Liv was standing at the narrow window. We were on the third floor, and our view faced away from campus: You could spot, in the far distance, a patch of something we knew to be the ocean. It was a like a little painting—a miniature line of pine trees, a procession to the sea. Today some dark blue and gray clouds were roiling around, carrying something gorgeous and frightening in from the ocean. Liv was dressed in an old corduroy Laura Ashley dress, which looked like it would be worn by the school teacher in Little House on the Prairie. She was staring outside, pensively. “A storm is blowing from Paradise,” she said, quoting Walter Benjamin.

  I saw she had an application in her hand; she’d already begun reading. “How are they?” I asked.

  “They’re good, they’re fine. Though the one I’m reading right now is about Ronald Reagan’s presidency, which isn’t quite in the past yet. It’s hard to classify it historically already.”

  “We should have a department called the Present,” I said.

  “The Department of the Present,” Liv said. “It would be about what one did last night, this morning, and what one will do tonight,” Liv said.

  “They would all major in it,” I said, as Terrance appeared in the doorway.

  “Oh we’re all having lunch?” Liv said. Terrance had originally been her friend; he was in the Biology Department and had consulted with her while working on his book, which had just been published and was a completely riveting history of various plagues—viral and bacterial—that had flourished on earth in the bodies of men, women, and children from approximately 200,000 BC until now, October of 1981. It was called Plagues and People and seemed to have no preference for the people over the plagues. In fact, at times in the narrative he seemed to be meditating quite deeply on the plight of this or that virus, as it desperately tried to survive on the human body, having to feed off it, but also having to tread carefully so as not to kill its fragile host.

  Then last September Terrance and I had been put on a committee together—the Faculty Hearings Committee—so he and I had spent many Friday afternoons cloistered in a little room high atop the campus, pondering various faculty misdeeds.

  “We can’t have lunch,” I said to Liv. “Terrance and I have an emergency meeting for Stewart Applebaum.”

  “That’s today?” she said.

  “It’s today. It’s in an hour,” I said.

  “Okay. Geesh,” she said. “I wish I could come along. Good luck. It’s getting so scary.”

  “I hope we find that he’s innocent and that the whole thing is just getting away from him.”

  “I don’t think you’ll find that,” Liv said. “I think you’ll find that he’s the devil. Like, the real devil. Using young people’s passions against them, and for his own purposes.”

  “What are the chances that the actual devil is on our faculty?” Terrance seemed thrilled at the thought.

  “I think it’s likely,” Liv said. “Justine has met him already, you know,” she said to Terrance, gesturing to me. “She found him attractive.”

  “Ooooh,” Terrance said. “I can’t wait to meet him.”

  “It’s a hearing,” I said, “I don’t think you’ll really meet him, exactly.”

  “Well, we can still make eyes at him,” said Terrance.

  I had met Stewart Applebaum about a month earlier, at a library benefit, and had been surprised by what a cheerful, relaxed person he was. I’d expected someone darkly muttering, or angry, or a blowhard of some sort. But he had been actually really charming and fun. And I was still clinging (pathetically) to a little thing he said to me, that we ought to have coffee one day together. I had even mentioned it to Liv, hoping she could help me scrutinize it for any romantic content.

  “Couldn’t you tell by the way he said it?” she had asked.

  “Not really. I mean, normally I would think yes, but it just seems so unlikely. He’s about ten years younger than me.”

  “Some brave women overcome that.”

  “You have to be really on top of your game.”

  “Yes. You’ve got to keep it all together.”

  What had struck me about that night was the sudden return of an old feeling, what Rilke called the “calling to vast things.” I had been so involved in the march of time—my marriage, Teddy’s birth, his troubles, my work, my divorce—that I’d forgotten this feeling entirely. I was stepping back inside the library from its big balcony, which is held by huge white pillars and whose view is the entire hissing, southern campus, with the deep turbulent ocean visible in the distance. Stewart Applebaum and I had just had a brief conversation, mostly about some work a colleague of mine was doing on the various economies of Central America, and we had already said goodbye, but then he said to me as I was walking away, We should have coffee sometime soon. I realized it wasn’t the most stunning suggestion any man has said to any woman, but it so genuinely surprised me that it was as if the feeling itself—of attraction or whatever—just appeared as a person appears. I was like a woman at a drawer, putting away her party dresses between tissue paper, and there he stood in the doorway—not Stewart Applebaum, but this feeling—gentlemanly, feral, breathtaking, peaceful, something very close to life itself, asking me for one more dance down in the meadow.

  THREE

  The meeting was across campus. Since the day was so blustery, there was a strange, exciting, hurricaney feel to it, and as we stepped into the quad, a wind was whipping around some tiny raindrops. In one corner some students were setting up a makeshift stage and there was a disorganized crowd gathering. Their signs were face down on the ground to prevent the rain from wrecking them, so we couldn’t read what they would be protesting. I suspected it was Stewart Applebaum’s group but wasn’t sure until I heard a young man shout out as he walked under the clocktower, “While in life,” and a couple guys working on the sound stage stood up and called back, “To fight for life.” These were references to a Stephen Spender poem that the group used as a call and response. It was a beautiful poem—“I Think Continually of Those Who Were Truly Great,” which was written in 1942.

  “So it’s them,” I said to Terrance.

  “Yes. I guess they may be protesting the hearing itself.”

  “Yes.”

  Early in the semester, our chancellor, who was quite sick with a rare form of late-stage leukemia but still working, suggested in a way I found plaintive and sweet, especially from a man so close to death, that perhaps the students should use these “gatherings” not as a time to protest but rather to celebrate what they appreciated about their country and their university, and this had enraged the students and sent them spiraling into the quad with signs aloft protesting the chancellor himself.

  I had one quick detour before the meeting, as Teddy’s teacher had sent home a little note asking us to bring along a “healthy dessert” to World Party tonight. So Terrance accompanied me to Moon’s, a tiny cozy convenience store on the edge of campus, run by Mr. Moon and his wife Liliane. They had Fig Newtons, which I knew were not exactly healthy but they were faintly educational and maybe even sort of biblical. And anyway, I was in the habit of just setting the food down quickly and then disowning it entirely, even in my own mind. And since my ex-husband, Ted, and his wife, Elizabeth, and their two litt
le children—a beautiful blond fairy family—would be there, it would be important not to place my package of cookies anywhere near Elizabeth’s offering, which would be something homey and exquisite, lemon squares or warm flaxen oatcakes.

  We had about five minutes to get to the meeting after we exited Moon’s. As I was telling Terrance about my newest concerns about Teddy—he was refusing to dress up as a character from a book for the party tonight and instead wanted to dress up as death, or a disease, or a rat—I saw that across Great Lawn, the white clover flowers had sprung up everywhere, ten thousand of them. It was my favorite sight—the field suddenly white instead of green. “Well, he’s testing the hypothesis,” Terrance said. “Is it a World Party or not? Is everything really invited?”

  “I guess,” I said. “Maybe. I just wish he wanted to be Willy Wonka or something.”

  “Well, what is he going to be after all?”

  “We compromised with a black hole. He’s going to be a black hole.”

  Just the night before, the Nobel Prize had gone to the Bulgarian writer Elias Canetti for his book Crowds and Power, which I happened to have read (crowds as wildfire, crowds as birds, crowds as a hillside of trees), but it was a lesser play of his—called Their Days Are Numbered—that I recall when I think back to that day, walking across the wildish, newly white field with Terrance. In the play, every person wears a medallion with the day, month, and year of their death on it, so that you know while talking to somebody when it is they will die. I don’t know what I would have done differently if I’d known how soon Terrance would die. I suppose clutch his arm, and stay close to him, try to see things a little longer his way, which was generous and serious, but I was already doing that, holding on to his muscley, tattooed arm.

  As we were making our way up the stairs I saw Stewart Applebaum just standing there, waiting for his time to go in and appear before us. “Oh hey,” I said to him. “It’s you,” he said. Terrance smiled and opened the door for us both.

  FOUR

  Of all the college committees, this one—the Faculty Hearings Committee—was the greatest. If a faculty member did anything suspect—threatened the dean with a gun, gave their classes all A’s, denied the Holocaust—it was referred to us, the most unskilled tribunal ever assembled.

  When Terrance and I arrived, Dana Fisher, our committee chair, who looked like maybe a handsome Ichabod Crane with a salt-and-pepper mustache, was already there seated at the table, behind which there was a big window letting on to an enormous, two-hundred-year-old oak tree. All of our deliberations over the past two years had taken place in the measured, gorgeous aura of this tree. It had turned in the last few days a bright and otherworldly bronze.

  Dana, who was a nonvoting member of the committee, had laid out at each of our places a little packet of information about Applebaum including, strangely, a big glossy picture of him, as if we were considering him for a part in a movie. In the photo, Applebaum looked serious but kind, handsome in a dark, feathered-hair sort of way. His CV was there too: BA from Berkeley, MA from Wharton, PhD in economics from the University of Michigan.

  Within moments, our last member, Geraldine, arrived, bearing poppy seed muffins. Geraldine was a formidable woman—brave, ethereal, intelligent, tall, fragile, and frequently contemptuous of our committee. She was already in her sixties, and had been in that first wave of feminists who had to be absolute warriors.

  Dana decided to invite Applebaum into the meeting right from the start, so he could help us understand the situation, before we began our deliberations. When Applebaum entered he apologized quickly to us all, for taking away our Friday afternoon.

  Dana was a Quaker, so ran our meetings in an atmosphere of almost total silence, out of which speech was supposed to arise like a revelation of some sort. So we all sat quietly for a while, looking over the materials. Finally, Dana said, “We have a crisis. We have a young student in the hospital, after refusing to eat for three days, and we have two more following in his footsteps. They are members of this group, Harvest.”

  “What specifically are they protesting?” Terrance asked Applebaum.

  “Well, we’ve discovered that one of our board members—Dean Forenter, in fact—is the head of a waste company that is currently violating state regulations and dumping waste every day in a waterway that feeds into the Atlantic. These boys cannot tolerate that.”

  “Did you instruct them to strike?” Geraldine asked. I could tell she was angry.

  “No. But we frequently talk about nonviolent means to protest.”

  “But this is quite violent,” I said. “It’s a type of terrorism. It’s a method of force.”

  “I suppose. But for me the question is always whether it matches the activity it is meant to address. We’ve been reading A. S. Mill, The Uses of Obedience and Disobedience, as well as some old Emerson essays. The students who are involved in this particular action are intelligent, free-thinking adults. I don’t tell them what to do. One of them—Griffith Tran—has been studying quite carefully the essays of—”

  “Forgive me,” I said, “but you sound supportive of what they are doing.”

  “Let me put it this way,” he said. “I will be happy if they stop, but I can’t help but be proud of them.”

  “Hmmm,” Dana said. And we all fell silent again for awhile.

  My mind was passing back and forth promiscuously between the matter at hand and a deep inner discussion on the difference in Applebaum’s age and mine. If you squinted we were almost the same age. We were of the same generation, at least. He was thirty-five to my forty-four, which I couldn’t decide if it was vast or negligible. We were on earth at the same time, and maybe that’s all that mattered. Still, how would it all go? I would be fifty when he was forty-one, which would be okay I guess, but then I would be sixty when he was fifty-one, when he could still conceivably date, for instance, a thirty-five-year-old, which would put me at sixty in competition with women in their thirties. Forget it! Dana was going over some by-laws, while I suffered through my breakup with Applebaum fifteen years hence.

  Geraldine leaped in. “You keep referring to these students as ‘adults,’ ” which I think is your unconscious way of removing yourself from any responsibility. Anybody who has had a child of that age knows that they are hardly functioning with the same judgment they will hold in the future when they are thirty and forty.”

  “Well,” Applebaum said, “they are more passionate, yes, and energetic. But I’ve found that people at that age can have a kind of intuitive sense of justice that disappears after people’s lives take on more responsibilities to their children and to their communities.”

  “But the power differential seems to escape you,” Geraldine said. “You have power over them whether you choose to acknowledge it or not.”

  It was three p.m. and the day was already getting darker. There was no rain but an intense afternoon darkness. The tree outside our window registered this by getting brighter, turning its inner light up, and its wet, golden leaves shook with delight at all this weather. My thoughts ran to Teddy and to World Party. I was not late yet, but darkness always signaled to me that I had to get to Teddy, wherever he was. He had a little tic that deepened as the day progressed, and if he got tired especially. Not that it seemed to bother him. We almost never spoke of it. I didn’t want to make him self-conscious. But then I worried that by not mentioning it, I was ignoring something that was distressing him, or just leaving him to manage something on his own when I should be accompanying him in some way.

  When I was young, my family often spent weekends at our old family homestead up in Southern Saskatchewan. Every Sunday we went to a small, beautiful Lutheran church, whose pastor had a severe tic that ran all the way from his temple down across his left cheekbone, over his jaw, down his neck, affecting even his left shoulder. The tic occurred every thirty or so seconds, without fail. You could have timed the passage of the sun and moon with it. And to this day I can’t hear any of those old Bible stor
ies—the exile from Eden, Noah’s flood, the binding of Isaac, Jesus on Calvary—without picturing and even feeling in my own face that great quake, that grave, magnificent revelation of fragility. His name was Glademacher, and he had a beautiful old man’s face, God and time and mortality working its way over it.

  By the time we all stepped out, two hours later, we each—Terrance, Geraldine, and I—had a tiny slip of paper in our pockets, with yes and no written on it. We were to check the box beside yes or no, regarding whether we should allow Applebaum to continue to direct Harvest. A no vote meant that Harvest should be disbanded immediately. We had to return this to a little mailbox outside this building by 6:30 tonight. I was pretty sure Geraldine would check no, they shouldn’t be allowed to continue, and Terrance would check yes, they should of course be allowed to continue, to let everybody’s destinies play out as they will. So that left me.

  FIVE

  The Quaker Day School was so cozy, I just wanted to curl up in the reading corner, on its huge alphabet pillows, and read away into the night, the wind and rain swirling all around. Maybe The Borrowers, or some Beverly Cleary. Of all the books I’ve read since childhood, of all the civilizations risen and fallen, none of them described the futility and fun of life so accurately as The Jumblies, by the great epileptic and depressive Edward Lear, the twentieth child of his parents.

  They went to sea in a Sieve they did,

  In a Sieve they went to sea:

  In spite of all their friends could say,

  On a winter’s morn, on a stormy day,

  In a Sieve they went to sea.

  The parents, all of us soaking wet, battered, nearly ruined by our days, crowded around the outside of the room and watched the quiet processional of children to the banquet table, which was laid with quince, pomegranates, squash, lemonade. My Fig Newtons were actually turning out to be quite appropriate. The teacher, Dominique, had swiftly arranged them in a complicated circle/maze design around a huge platter. She was a magician, who took all of life into her and there transformed it into something that a seven-year-old would love.