Death of the Black-Haired Girl

by Robert Stone

  “I haven’t time now, love.”

  He thought her look was suspicious. “Why?”

  “I have a meeting,” he told her falsely. He was anxious for news of Ellie.

  She stamped her foot a little. She looked genuinely pleading. Childlike.

  “Really,” Brookman said, “I have to hurry . . .”

  She handed it to him with what appeared to be a blend of anxiety and self-satisfaction. “Call me, Steve,” she said. “Tell me what you think.”

  When she was gone, he locked up and went home without a thought of the envelope. She was always insisting he preview her writings.

  In the Brookman house on Felicity Street—the larger half of what had been the marble-fronted Federal-style home of a single family—Steve Brookman prepared to grade and comment on his student essays. He was not particularly a drinking man but on this afternoon he poured a half snifter of Courvoisier, an expensive concession to his own self-pity.

  Smart kids were wonderful if they could keep it all together, he was thinking, if nothing bad happened, though every year, somewhere in the college, something did. Whereupon Dean Spofford would call the parents, and you had to give it to the guy who had to do that. There were always casualties, of drugs or madness in general.

  He was thinking of Maud and how utterly demure and innocent she appeared. These terms reflected the attitudes of his generation and she would probably be insulted by them. The young, young texture of her skin always astonished him. He was also wondering how he might be able to break things off with her, in spite of the fact that she was his advisee and had given up a junior year abroad for him. It was late in the semester. They were working on her undergraduate thesis.

  Beyond anxiety, he was aware of feeling a kind of reckless, mindless joy.

  Brookman had no native talent for intrigue. He had been careless and forgetful all his life. In twenty years of teaching he had never slept with a student before. College kids flirted, boys as well as girls. How could they not—the students had been the apples of their elders’ eyes from preschool. During what happened to be Brookman’s first semester with Maud, without intending any personal reference, a younger colleague of his had observed that innocent coquetry now led to innocent fucking. There was also innocent frenzy, innocent passion, the innocent, impalpable knife through the heart. Brookman was the one more experienced with consequences, and to that degree he had thought he could take care of her. Innocent love was not possible, love the least innocent of all things. For a long time he had believed he knew as much as anyone about love but that it had no nameable qualities.

  He drank more than he ought have done if he intended to drive. He’d accepted an invitation to a party that evening, given by the college’s famous resident artist. She was not truly in residence; she commuted by plane from New York but maintained a rustic roost with a Franklin stove and a picture window up in the hills for use on teaching days. A never-to-be-seen friend would fly her from Long Island in a vintage DC-3, the kind of plane in which Ingrid Bergman and Paul Henreid escape from Casablanca. It didn’t get any hipper than that.

  The artist, a tall woman in her fifties, affected a brunette style and black dress that suited her slim figure and large, expressive brown eyes. Brookman liked her work, which had Piero della Francesca–shaped women who were confined in some way—up against walls or prison bars, sometimes dead, sometimes portrayed as mounted condottieri in period breeches, cuirasses and greaves. The paintings invited narrative speculation from the viewer. There were some portraits too, of both men and women. Some of these pictures were in the college museum, which had given her a show. None of her work hung in her rustic hilltop house, however; there it was all West African art—masks, bronzes, elaborately worked cloth-and-feather fetish compositions, baskets, a lightning snake. These objects had been set up in dramatic ways in every public room in the house.

  There were maybe thirty people at the party, most of whom he’d seen around the college. Two of the people he knew pretty well but rarely saw, a young female philosophy professor who had a history with Brookman and was present with her husband, and a frail, long-haired history professor named Carswell, who’d been working on his third volume of the origins, flourishing and destruction of Carthage. Carswell went to Tunis every year, and his first book was highly praised in the New York Review. His second volume was trashed by a rival and not noticed by supporters. He was still going to Tunis but looked a bit discouraged; years were passing without volume three. He told people he was rewriting too much. Behind his back, people were calling him Mr. Casaubon.

  Brookman wished him well; he felt he had been in the same situation. He had a few drinks without paying attention to how many and went over to the historian.

  “Hey, Dan, I ever tell you how much I liked your first book?”

  It was true that Brookman had read and enjoyed the first volume on Carthage. But that had been pretty much enough Carthage for him.

  “Yes, you did, and I’m grateful.”

  “I really liked it.”

  “Actually, the first volume on Carthage wasn’t my first book.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “No,” said Carswell, “I realize that. I hope you’ll like the next. Maybe I should say I hope you’ll actually read it.”

  “Hey, I’m waiting.” He put his hand on Carswell’s shoulder, which was lower than his own. “But don’t give yourself a hernia.”

  He had not meant to say that. It had come out wrong. He had meant to compliment and encourage. He looked back at Carswell, who was staring into his own drink. Best not to apologize. Anyway, Carswell had been insufferable. Brookman thought it was time for him to be going. He took one more round of the African art and found his hostess, the painter, at the door.

  “This is the greatest collection of African art I’ve ever seen,” he told her.

  “Then you haven’t seen many,” she said.

  Brookman looked at the woman in surprise.

  “Buy it over there?” he asked her.

  “Of course.”

  “Did you buy any slaves?”

  No, no, he thought, driving home. Not what he had intended to say at all. There was some bitter herb under his tongue that night. Had there not been a contemptible figure in the days of Emily Post called The Guest Who Is Never Invited Again?

  “Not that I give a shit,” he said to the dashboard.

  But his wife liked parties. Ellie liked people and people loved her, and it would not do for him to lurch from house to house poisoning their social life in a fairly small place. He had no desire to establish himself as the inevitable asshole spouse. As for the people they socialized with—sometimes he enjoyed them, sometimes not. But Ellie had to have her pleasures until she went back to teaching again.

  Ellie’s popularity at the college, among both her colleagues and her students, was a source of great satisfaction to Brookman. He himself was not disliked. In fact he was widely admired, but not, like his wife, so affectionately regarded. He had been raised in a state orphanage in Nebraska, and his colorfully rendered recountings of early deprivations made him an exciting figure to the college’s students. His courses were always oversubscribed, and one he had given, on his own Smithsonian article about a sunken Spanish Manila galleon, illustrated with his underwater photography, had got him a regular forty-five-minute program on PBS. He had been bitterly disappointed at its cancellation after one season, though not everyone in the English and composition department had shared his distress. In any case, it helped secure him a tenured position very early on.

  His popularity and attractiveness led some to suspect him of womanizing, of conducting affairs with colleagues, wives and students. The suspicions were exaggerated. He had indeed dallied with faculty wives, but Maud, with whom he had quite fallen in love, was his first and only student lover and in that regard a violation of his principles.

  After the party he sat in his college-owned house, in the room he had chosen as an office—t
he room where the previous occupants had left their National Geographics—and listened to Chet Baker’s “Let’s Get Lost.”

  His answering machine was on for calls from Ellie. There were fretful calls from Maud. Playing the messages back, he realized she had been drinking. Maud was not a cheap date; she had a hard head and could put a lot away for a girl her age. It seemed the wrong time to redefine a relationship. He failed to call her.

  “Never apologize, never explain” was some vitalist supremo’s line. Sound advice if anyone could hold to it. But within himself it was all he did. His conscience, or whatever it was, kept perfect time with him, stalked him adeptly. He would never be at peace with himself.

  Maud’s youth, unquietness, intelligence, passion and lack of judgment were irresistible to him. So shamelessly bold, reckless. They lured each other. She did it probably out of impatience for real life. He had no excuse but greed.

  At college age Brookman was serving in the Marine Corps at a naval air station in the Mojave Desert. Immediately afterward he had worked in a cannery in Homer, Alaska, then as a crewman on a crab boat out of the same town. The pay was good, the work unbelievably hard for twentieth-century Americans. They had recruited farm boys from the Midwest who were ready to do it. The risk—most of what counted as serious accidents were fatal—was very high. A single night in the rack, with Arctic water sloshing around the berthing compartment, the pitch and toss, the port and starboard rolls, had felt to him like sure, sudden death. Brookman had panicked utterly. He had wanted not to die in cold water, not to breathe his last with his lips up against the overhead while the water rose over his head.

  In his terror he went to sleep. It had happened to him before, in childhood—absolute fear succeeded by sleep. When he woke up in the rack he put on his gear, climbed up on deck into the sleet and went to work. The captain of the boat, an active member of the Alaska Independence Party, had a procedure for men demanding to quit once aboard, which was the impulse of every man jack who had never been at sea before. Quitters had to wait until an inbound boat was sighted. The captain would then sell them a drysuit. The price of the drysuit was deducted from the pay due them, and the price was high. They wore the drysuit to jump overboard into Norton Sound, and assuming they got pulled out successfully the rest of their pay—plus—went for the other skipper’s trouble. For the genuinely ill, Brookman’s captain might provide a breeches buoy. Appendicitis might eventually get you a Coast Guard helicopter. Brookman had other tough jobs, at sea and ashore, and he had done time in jail for no good reason.

  The college’s midnight music station was playing Chet Baker’s version of “But Beautiful.” As he poured himself a last drink, his wife’s cat, Fafnir, came into his study and sat down on the sofa, a privilege he was not allowed when the mistress was at home. Fafnir looked at Brookman as though he’d like Chet Baker explained to him. Brookman leaned over and gently brushed him off. Fafnir seemed to like music but he was very stupid. He had to be brushed off things gently because he did not command cat-like grace and was capable of falling on his ear.

  Fafnir licked his whiskers and promptly climbed back on the cushion, knowing Brookman lacked his wife’s authority and persistence. Persian cats are dumb, Brookman thought, but some possessed mystical powers, and Fafnir was one of these. He could summon the presence of distant people from far places and reflect them in his vapid blue eyes. On this evening Brookman looked into Fafnir’s eyes and saw there Ellie and his daughter, Sophia. Behind them, a snowfield stretched to the ends of the earth. In late summer the field would be gold with wheat, but now there was snow and also the biggest feedlot anywhere near White Lake, Saskatchewan. Ellie and Sophia were wearing little starched caps, looking like a couple of local Mennonites, which was essentially what they were. Sophia would be spending her days being instructed in her mother’s faith, relearning the Gothic alphabet and reciting edifying verses in High German. There they dwelled in an eternal Sabbath.

  Perceiving them in the occult cat’s eyes, Brookman was suddenly overcome with terror. What if they’re dead, the plane’s wings icing, the pilots talking shop. What if Justice was on its way, striking as it will at the innocent and good? Chet Baker was singing “Moonlight in Vermont.”

  Brookman had met Ellie Bezeidenhout at his first teaching job, which was in Nebraska, where he came from. He had got the job after his Bhutan book was commissioned and completed. The position was at what could only be called a teachers’ college, formerly a state normal school, which was now naturally called a university. Certainly not a normal, a term that opened vast caverns of misunderstanding. On one of his first days there he had picked up the course catalogue. The place may have been a normal, but as a university it was quite absurd. Its directory featured maniacally joyous photographs of faculty members beside their names and degrees that made them appear as a band of merry pranksters who did animal voices on a kids’ cartoon show—quack, baaa, oink.

  One faculty entry stopped him:

  Professor of Anthropology Dr. Elsa Bezeidenhout, Ph.D.

  B.S., Nazareth College, Saskatoon, SK

  M.S., University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC

  Ph.D., University of California, Davis, CA

  Elsa Bezeidenhout looked like a teenager. She was very blond, as—he later learned—was everyone in White Lake, SK. Her smile was wide but her face was long and her features were—how to say?—refined. He loved the “Bezeidenhout.” They’ve been married eleven years and she is firmly Ellie Brookman now. “Why don’t you use your maiden name?” he enjoys asking her. “So many women do.”

  “The students can’t spell it,” she says primly. “They can’t even say it.”

  She knows she’s being teased but won’t react. On the rare occasions when he gets to hear her pronounce her maiden name, she utters a priceless interlacing of Plattdeutsch and Canadian vowels that only other people from White Lake could possibly understand. She’s not crazy about the “Elsa” either. Chet Baker sang on.

  Now it has to end with Maud. It’s been a week since Ellie called to tell him she was pregnant. He tried to reason it. Maud, he thought, was there to grow up.

  She’s here to grow up. She has to learn a few things, and one of them is that everything comes to an end. Reasoning was not very supportive. Special pleas. As a friend of his had once claimed: “I’m not a womanizer. Just an easy lay.”

  She won’t understand it now but eventually she will. It won’t be easy. Also, it was always a good idea to break upsetting news—or say anything that engaged her emotionally—when she hadn’t been drinking—which, after dark, was rarely. Maud was one of the great student juicers, a not uncommon group given the pressures of the college. The drink didn’t seem to drain her energy or affect her grades. Such was the resiliency of youth. The semester was ending; they won’t have to meet in class, and she will find herself another adviser.

  Is this cynical? Yes, he realized it perfectly well. Still he felt compelled to reason a further defense. This is love, as it is sometimes called. It always has to end. In practice it has a morality all its own. Surely she didn’t expect to marry him. In the unlikely event of such folly, she would walk in a year or two, chasing the smoke of the next fulfilling experience. Maud wanted fulfilling experiences. She wanted them for free. She’s reckless, he thought—heedless, demanding, and she’ll always be that way. She’ll break a few hearts before she’s through.

  Chet Baker explained love, how it was funny, that it was sad.

  7

  PASSING HIS CLOSED WINDOWS on the street side of the quad the following afternoon, Brookman could hear his office phone ringing. Five or so minutes later, after he had opened the last lock that secured his office from the world, the phone was still sounding off. He let it ring as he hung up his coat. He had spoken with his wife from the Toronto airport minutes before, so there was no doubt in his mind that it was Maud. His cell phone was so frantic with messages from her, ranging from the apologetic to the drunkenly enraged, that he ha
d been driven to turn it off. Whether Maud knew he was in the office or not, she was relentless. He let it ring. No signal or wire could convey what he had to tell her. In time she would show up at his office and he would say what needed saying. He threw the office curtains open because there were no longer any wonders to conceal.

  The remnants of his fire simmered in the hearth. Every morning one of the college servants was dispatched to lay and start a moderate blaze in each of the offices. This would usually go out before the first appointments. Brookman tortured a flame from the kindling. The fire irons were folk art from a hospital craft shop in Rhode Island. They had an animal theme, horned and phallic. Over the mantel was a poster from the Museum of Modern Art depicting Picasso’s Boy Leading a Horse. Brookman set the wicked poker in the andirons and seated himself on a handsome black leather sofa he had salvaged from the building’s basement. He picked up the receiver. The silence on the wire was absolute. He imagined her palm pressed against the speaker.

  Within minutes the phone began to ring again. This time, he thought, there might be news from Ellie on her journey, but the presence on the instrument, he was absolutely certain, was Maud. He heard street noises behind her. The Andean flutes. Traffic. When he replaced the receiver the phone rang once more.

  The afflicted man was circling the quad outside. His hair was freshly and neatly trimmed to an old-time crewcut. He had newly rimmed glasses. Brookman had seen the man often enough that these refurbishings were regularly scheduled, seen to by whoever had chosen or been retained to assist his passage through middle age. He always appeared alone; Brookman had never seen him in company with anyone. Time passed, the telephone rang, and the afflicted man made his circuits.

  Watching these grim winter circumambulations, breathing to the rhythms of his unrelenting phone, Brookman found himself thinking of an early summer day a few years before. It had been the last week of classes in the spring term. The mild sweet wind carried dogwood and azalea blossoms, mission fulfilled, message delivered. The college was busy with preparations for class reunions, graduations, hushed with the efforts of spring-struck adolescents striving against nature for diligence, getting ready for exam week. One of the professors in the English department was a tall, handsome, prematurely gray daughter of the coast of Maine named Margaret Kemp. Some said of Margaret that she burned with too bright a flame. At some point her comp lit class exploded into an explanation of the unitary systems behind the universe, galaxies beyond nebulae, counterworlds intricately linked. Other instructors wore themselves out waiting for the use of their classrooms, colleagues stopped speaking to her, students mainly complained and fled. Not all.