“In the basement. Tinkering.”
“No, I mean before that.”
“At school.”
“I stopped by your office, but I couldn’t find you anywhere.”
“I had to go over to the bookstore. There’s a problem with the text I ordered for my class.”
“Did you get it fixed?”
“No, of course not. You know that place. I was there all morning—and I never did find the right person in the bookstore.”
“Oh,” she says. “Well I hung around your office for quite a while.”
“Fin sorry, honey,” I say.
I come up behind her. We regard ourselves in the hall mirror, and meanwhile I run my hand under her waistband, down into her pants. All this seems to make her feel better, though I can see she is still a little bit disgruntled, ill at ease.
“Let’s go out to dinner,” I say.
She agrees. We go out to one of the nicer places—the type of place where they bring the visiting professors, the deans, the research specialists. I see my colleague there, the one who despises me. I stop to banter nonetheless. We discuss department business. His eyes gleam. Then the talk turns, as it does these days, to the most recent murder. A coed, this one. The talk dies away. Later, my wife and I are hand in hand, coming up the walkway, back to our house.
“I saw her picture, the red hair—the white slacks. She was such a self-assured girl. With such a future. Who would ever think.”
“I don’t know.”
“The boy they arrested, he denies it,” she says.
“They always deny it,” I say.
Then we go inside, and she lies there quietly, and if there are shadows in that darkness, I don’t know, if people disappear into other lives and come back and disappear again, I don’t know that either, but suddenly I am aware of my wife, lying there beside me, and I decide that I must possess her and I do so, taking her roughly (onto her stomach, she moans, not used to this, no, please, she says, but there is ecstasy in her pleading), and for a minute everything disappears into the darkness, and then we are left, lying there, out of breath in the moonlight, exhausted, spent, and my wife sobs.
Then the next morning it is light—a wild, delicious light—and I am back in front of the classroom, where they are all listening to me, mouths open.
Who are you?
The students gather around me, and in their gathering I can sense their futures, their lives. We are talking about the psychopathic image. About death. About rape and murder. The class scintillates.
“Ritual,” says one. “The grizzly crime, the corpse. It’s a social ritual. Goes back to Jack the Ripper.”
“It’s like Jung says. The world is made of opposites. You can’t have the light without the dark. You need it to be whole.”
“We need the face of death in our lives, dream images, the grotesque.”
“Most of the time, we can’t deal with the truth. We black it out.”
“Or we pretend to black it out.”
“I don’t like this conversation at all,” says another. “Not one bit. I feel like I am being manipulated.”
Through all this I say nothing, silent as a Buddha. The wind is quiet. The young woman I mentioned earlier, she has a seat in the front row. She smiles, I smile back. I walk from the classroom. Feel the bright light of the morning. I remember for a moment how I stood on a far-away street, looking down at the water, the empty house with the light on, and I can taste the essence of that moment—the evergreens, the dark scudding clouds, the mountain looming behind, waiting—even now as I walk across the campus, under sycamores, toward the hillock where the young coeds smile and lounge. As I approach, hearing them giggle, there is still another part of me looking down at that empty house, holding the necklace in my hand, the pearls, listening to the knock of that boat against the dock, the sound floating over the darkening sea, hearing it inside me, like the knocking of my heart. Poor Elizabeth. Meanwhile, the day is bright all around me. I turn away and walk down the long knoll to where the young woman leans against the tree, standing there in the bed of blooming flowers. Later, you and me. I whisper. I give her a wink. She smiles and bends my ear to her mouth, touches it with her tongue. In the distance stands my colleague. Looking at me with scorn, desire. He thinks he knows all of my secrets—and I know his. And for a moment, it’s as if I am him and he is me, and the two of us, we turn away, then turn back, beneath the trees, in this dappled light. We circle each other on the path.
HCC 006 - The Confession Page 20
