The Night in Question: Stories

by Tobias Wolff

  Wiley took a long bath and tried to sleep, but whenever he closed his eyes he felt a malign presence in the room. In spite of the bath he still felt cold. He got up and looked at himself in the mirror again, hoping to find some change for the better. He inspected his face, then brewed a pot of coffee and spent the rest of the night at the kitchen table, staring blindly at a book and finally sleeping, slumped sideways in the chair, chin on his chest.

  When the alarm went off Wiley roused himself and got ready for school. He couldn’t think of any reason not to go except embarrassment; and since other teachers would have to cover his classes during their free time, this did not seem a very good reason. But he gave no thought to the effect of his appearance. When the first students saw him in the hallway and started quizzing him, he had no answers ready. One boy asked if he’d been mugged.

  Wiley nodded, thinking that was basically true.

  “Must have been a whole shitload of them.”

  “Well, not that many,” Wiley said, and walked on. He went straight to his classroom instead of stopping off in the teachers’ lounge, but he hadn’t been at his desk five minutes before the principal came in.

  “Mr. Wiley,” he said, “let’s have a look at you.” He walked up close and peered at Wiley’s face. Students were filing in behind him, trying not to stare at Wiley as they took their seats. “What exactly happened?” the principal asked.

  “I got mugged.”

  “Have you seen a doctor?”

  “Not yet.”

  “You should. That’s a prize set of bruises you’ve got there. Very nasty. Call the police?”

  “No. I’m still in sort of a daze.” Wiley said this in a low voice so the students wouldn’t hear him.

  Wiley’s friend Mac stuck his head in the doorway, nodding coolly at the principal. “You okay?” he said to Wiley.

  “I guess.”

  “I heard there were eight of them. Is that right, eight?”

  “No.” Wiley tried to smile but his face wouldn’t let him. “Just two,” he said. He couldn’t admit to one, not with all this damage.

  “Two’s enough,” Mac said.

  The principal said, “Just let me know if you want to go home. Seriously, now, Mr. Wiley—no heroics. I’m touched that you came in at all.” He stopped at the door on his way out and turned to the students. “Be warned, ladies and gentlemen. What happened to Mr. Wiley is going to happen to your children. It will be a common occurrence. That’s the kind of world they’re going to live in if you don’t do something to change it.” He let his eyes pass slowly around the room the way he did at school assemblies. “The choice is yours,” he said.

  Mac applauded silently behind him.

  After Mac and the principal left, two boys got up and pretended to attack each other with kicks and chops, crying Hai! Hai! Hai! One of them drove the other to the back of the classroom, where he crashed to the floor and sprawled with his arms and legs twitching. Then the bell rang and they both went back to their desks.

  This was a senior honors class. The students had been reading “Benito Cereno,” one of Wiley’s favorite stories, but he had trouble getting a discussion started because of the way they were looking at him. Finally he decided to give a straight lecture. He talked about Melville’s exposure of the contradictions in human law, which claims to serve justice while it strengthens the hand of the property owner, even when that property is human. This was one of Wiley’s pet subjects, the commodification of humanity. As he warmed to it he forgot the condition of his face and assumed his habitual patrol in front of the class, head bent, hands in his pockets, one eye cocked in a squint. He related this story to the last one they’d read, “Bartleby the Scrivener,” quoting with derisory, operatic exaggeration the well-intentioned narrator who cannot understand the truculence of a human being whom he has tried to turn into a Xerox machine. And this was not the voice of some reactionary fascist beast, Wiley said, jingling his keys and change as he paced the room. This was the voice of modern man—modern, enlightened, liberal man.

  He had worked himself into that pitch of indignation where everything seemed clear to him, evil and good and all the sly imitations of good that lay in wait for the unwary pilgrim. At such moments he forgot himself entirely. He became Scott Fitzgerald denouncing the foul dust that floated in Gatsby’s wake, Jonathan Swift ridiculing bourgeois complacency by suggesting a crime so obscene it took your breath away, yet less obscene than the crimes ordinary people tolerated without a second thought.

  And what happened to Bartleby, Wiley said, was only a hint of things to come. “Look at the multinationals!” he said. And then, not for the first time, he described the evolution of business-school theory to its logical conclusion, high-tech factories in the middle of foreign jungles where, behind razor-wire fences guarded by soldiers and dogs, tribesmen who had never seen a flush toilet were made to assemble fax machines and laptop computers. A million Bartlebys, a billion Bartlebys!

  Wiley didn’t have the documentation on these jungle factories; it was something someone had told him, but it made sense and was right in tune with the spirit of late-twentieth-century capitalism. It sounded true enough to make him furious whenever he talked about it. He finished his lecture with only a few minutes to go before the bell. He felt very professional. It was no mean feat, getting your ass kicked at two in the morning and giving a dynamite lecture at nine. He asked his students if they had any questions. None of them did, at first. Wiley heard whispers. Then a girl raised her hand, shyly, almost as if she hoped he wouldn’t notice. When Wiley called on her she looked at the boy across the aisle, Robbins, and said, “What color were they?”

  Wiley did not understand the question. She looked over at Robbins again. Robbins said, “They were black, right?”

  “Who?”

  “The guys that jumped you.”

  Wiley had always liked this boy and expected him to learn something in here, to think better thoughts than his FBI-agent father who griped to the principal about Wiley’s reading list. Wiley leaned against the blackboard. “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Yeah, right,” Robbins said.

  “I really don’t think so,” Wiley said. This sounded improbably vague even to him, so he added, “It was dark. I couldn’t see them.”

  Robbins gave a great shout of laughter. Some of the other students laughed too; then one of them hit a wild note that sent everyone into a kind of fit. “Quiet!” Wiley said, but they kept laughing. They were beyond his reach; all he could do was stand there and wait for them to stop. Wiley had three black students in this class, two girls and a boy. They stared at their books in exactly the same way, as if by agreement, though they were sitting in different parts of the room. At the beginning of the year they’d always sat together, but now they drifted from desk to desk like everyone else. They seemed to feel at home in his class. And that was what he wanted, for this room to be a sanctuary, a place the rest of the world should be like. There was no other reason for him to be here.

  The bell rang. Wiley sat down and rustled through some papers as the students, suddenly and strangely quiet, walked past his desk. Then he went to the office and told the principal he was going home after all. He was feeling terrible, he said.

  He slept for a few hours. After he got up he looked through the veterinarians’ listings in the yellow pages and found a Dr. Kathleen Newman on the staff of a clinic specializing in surgery on exotic pets. He called the clinic and asked for Dr. Newman. The man who answered said she was in a meeting. “Is it an emergency?”

  “I’m afraid so,” Wiley said. “It is sort of an emergency. Tell her,” he said, “that Mr. Melville’s cetacean has distemper.”

  Wiley spelled out cetacean for him.

  And then a woman’s voice was on the line. “Who is this, please?” It was her. But sharp, no fooling around. Wiley couldn’t answer. He’d expected her to pick up his joke, and now he didn’t know how to begin. “Hello? Hello? Damn,” she said, and hung up.<
br />
  Wiley turned to the white pages. There was a Dr. K. P. Newman on Filbert Street. He wrote down the number and address.

  Mac’s wife, Alice, stopped by that afternoon with bread and salad. She had been a student of Wiley’s, and one of his favorites, a pale, slow-moving, thoughtful girl he would never have suspected of carrying on with a teacher, which showed how much he knew; she and Mac had been going strong ever since her junior year. They got married right after she graduated. There was a scandal, of course, and Mac almost lost his job, but somehow it never came to that. Wiley found the whole thing very confusing. He disapproved and was jealous; he felt as if Mac had somehow made a fool of him. But eight years had passed since then.

  Alice stopped inside the door and looked at Wiley’s face. He saw that she was shocked to the point of tears.

  “It’ll mend,” he told her.

  “But why would anyone do that to you?”

  “These things happen,” he said.

  “Well, they shouldn’t.”

  She sent him back to the living room. Wiley lay on the couch and watched her through the kitchen doorway while she set the table and made lunch. He was happy having her to himself in his apartment; it was a wish of his. Alice didn’t know he felt that way. When they all went out to bars she sat beside him and leaned her head on his shoulder. She took sips from his drinks. She liked to dance, and when she danced with Wiley she moved right up close, talking all the while about everyday things that somehow made their closeness respectable. At the end of a night out, when Mac and Alice drove Wiley home and came inside to call their sitter and drink a glass of wine, and then another, and Wiley began to read to them some high-minded passage from whatever novel he was caught up in, she would stretch out on the couch and rest her head in Wiley’s lap while Mac looked on benignly from the easy chair. Wiley knew that he was supposed to feel honored by all this faith, but he resented it. Faith had become an imposition. It made light of his capacity for desire. Still, he put up with it because he didn’t know what else to do.

  Now Alice was slicing tomatoes at his kitchen counter. She had a flat-footed way of standing. Her hair was gathered in a bun, but loose strands hung in her face; she blew them away as she worked. She had gained weight over the years, but Wiley liked the little tuck of flesh under her chin, and the plumpness of her hands.

  She called him to the table. She was quiet, and when she looked at him she quickly looked down again. Wiley didn’t think it was because of his banged-up face, but because they had never been alone before. In all her playfulness with him there was an element of performance, and now she didn’t have Mac here to give it irony and keep it safe.

  Finally she said, “Do you want some wine with this?”

  “No. Thanks.”

  “Sure?”

  He nodded.

  She pointed her fork at the empty bottles lined against the wall. “Did you drink all those?”

  “Over a period of time.”

  “Oh, great. I’m glad you didn’t drink them all at once. Like what period of time are we talking about?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t keep track of every drink.”

  “That’s the trouble with living alone,” she said, as if she knew.

  “I guess.”

  “So how come you didn’t marry Monique, anyway?” She gave him a quick sidelong look.

  “Monique? Come on. She would’ve laughed me out of town if I’d even mentioned the subject.”

  “I thought she was nuts about you.”

  He shook his head.

  “Well, I sure thought she was.”

  “She wasn’t.”

  “Okay then, what about Lynn?”

  “That was crazy, that whole thing with Lynn. I don’t even want to talk about Lynn.”

  “She was pretty spoiled.”

  “It wasn’t her fault. It just got crazy.”

  “I didn’t like her. She was so sarcastic. I was glad when you split up.” Alice bit into a piece of bread. “Who are you seeing now? Some married woman, I bet.”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “We haven’t met anyone since Monique. So. You must have somebody under wraps. The Dark Lady.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t try to act sophisticated,” he said. “Do you really think I’m conducting some great love affair?”

  “I figured you must have somebody.” She sounded bored. She was studying his face. “Boy, those guys really did a job on you, didn’t they?”

  Wiley moved his plate to one side. “There was just one,” he said. “Short fellow. No bigger than a minute.”

  “Mac told me two. ‘Two of our dusky brethren’ was what he said. Where did he get that stuff?”

  “From me,” Wiley said.

  And then, because he trusted her and felt the need, he began to tell her what had really happened to him the night before. Alice listened without any disgust or pity that he could see. She seemed purely interested. Now and then she laughed, because in talking about it Wiley couldn’t help but make his little disaster into a story, and telling stories, even those about loneliness and humiliation, naturally brought out the hambone and wag in him. He could see she was having a good time listening to him, that this wasn’t what she’d expected when Mac asked her to look in on him. And she was hearing some straight talk. She didn’t get that at home. Mac was good-hearted, but he was also a tomcat and a liar.

  Wiley’s way of telling stories about himself was to tell them as if they’d happened to someone else. And from that distance he could see that there was something to be laughed at in the spectacle of a man who energetically professed the examined life, the life of the spirit and the mind, getting drunk and brawling over strange women. Well, the body had a mind of its own. He told it like that, like his body had abducted him for its own low purposes, like he’d been lashed to the back of a foaming runaway horse hellbent on dragging him through every degradation.

  But it was not in the end a funny story. When he told Alice what went on in his class that morning she grew watchful and grave.

  “I was speechless,” he said. “I couldn’t say a thing. We do Native Son, we do Invisible Man. I get them really talking, really thinking about all this stuff, and then I start a race riot in my own classroom.”

  “Maybe you should tell them the truth.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “They’d respect you for it.”

  “Hah!”

  “Well, they should.”

  “Come on, Alice.”

  “Some of them would. And they’d be the right ones.”

  “It would get all over school. I’d get fired.”

  “That’s true,” Alice said. She rested her cheek on her hand. “But still.”

  “Still what?” When she didn’t answer, he said, “All right, let’s say I don’t care about getting fired. I do, but let’s just hypothetically say I go in there tomorrow and tell them everything, the works. You know what they’ll think? They’ll think I’m making it up—the second story, not the first. You know, out of bleeding-heart sentimentality, to make the black kids feel better. But what’ll really happen, they’ll end up feeling even worse. Condescended to. Insulted. They’ll think I’m lying to protect them, as if they were guilty of something. Everyone will think I’m lying.”

  Wiley could see her hesitate. Then she said, “But you won’t be lying. You’ll be telling the truth.”

  “Yes, but no one will know it!”

  “You will. You’ll know it.”

  “Look. Alice.” Wiley was angry now, and impatient. He waited, and then spoke so that his anger would not show. He said, “I feel terrible. I can’t even count all the things I’ve done wrong today. But I did them, they’re done. Trying to undo them will only make things worse, and not just for me. For those kids.” This seemed logical to Wiley, well and reasonably said.

  “Maybe so.” She was turning one of her rings nervously. “Maybe I’m being simplistic, but I just don’t see where telling the trut
h can be wrong. I always thought that’s what you were there for.”

  Wiley had other arguments to make. That he was a teacher, and could not afford to gamble with his moral authority. That when the truth did more harm than a lie, you had to give the lie its due. That if other people had to suffer just so you could have a clean conscience you should accept your fallen condition and get on with it. They were good arguments, the very oil of adult life, but he said nothing. He was no fool, he knew what her answers would be, because after all they were his answers too. He simply couldn’t act on them.

  “Alice,” he said. “Are you listening?”

  She nodded.

  “I shouldn’t have dropped all this stuff on you. It’s too confusing.”

  “I’m not confused.”

  He didn’t answer.

  “I have to go,” she said.

  He walked her to the door.

  “I won’t say anything to Mac,” she told him.

  “I know that. I trust you.”

  “To do what? Keep secrets from my husband?” She laughed, not pleasantly. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I know how he is.”

  Wiley corrected essays the rest of the afternoon. He broke for dinner and then finished them off. It was a good batch, the best he’d had all year. They were on “Bartleby the Scrivener.” One of his students, a girl, had compared the situation to a marriage, with Bartleby as the wife and the narrator as the husband: “He looks at Bartleby the way men look at women, as if Bartleby has no other purpose on earth than to be of use to him.” She bent the story around to fit her argument, but Wiley didn’t mind. The essay was fresh and passionate. This particular girl wouldn’t have thought to take such a view at the beginning of the year. Wiley was moved, and proud of her.

  He recorded the grades in his book and then called the Filbert Street number of Dr. K. P. Newman. When she answered, he said, “It’s me, Kathleen. From last night,” he added.

  “You,” she said. “Where did you get my number?”

  “Out of the phone book. I just wanted to set things straight.”

  “You called me before, didn’t you?” she said. “You called me at work.”