by Paul Russell
“I trust your research went well,” Louis prodded.
“Oh, the research,” Reid said distractedly. Already it was too late. Louis braced himself for whatever would come. “It was fine when I could work. But my allergies turned out to be just awful. The smog and the traffic and everything. And oh my God, the heat. I could go on. I didn’t get done half what I had intended. But of course there’s always next summer. And I did manage to track down one or two rather obscure items. That in itself, I suppose…” He stopped midsentence, both of them perfectly familiar with this line of talk. Reid’s research, as he called it, had been going on for more years than Louis cared to count. It was a wonder there were any Byzantine churches left to investigate.
Though safely behind closed doors, Reid glanced momentarily over his shoulder, a reflex that might, in other circumstances, have been comic. Reaching into the pocket of his rumpled jacket, he withdrew a photograph and, without a word, laid it on Louis’s desk.
A blond woman in her midforties stared up at him. She had the leathery look of someone who’d squandered years in the sun. Nevertheless, she retained clear traces of her former beauty. A man’s white dress shirt had been unbuttoned to reveal the black bathing suit she wore underneath. It was night; the setting appeared to be an outdoor café. In the flash of the camera, her eyes glowed. She looked slightly drunk—or startled, caught at something. She seemed put out by the presence of the camera, betrayed by it. He assumed Reid stood behind the viewfinder. Her mouth, its smile fading, seemed about to lash out in complaint. Louis felt a surge of squeamishness.
He glanced up at Reid, then back at the photo. He wouldn’t touch it. To touch it would be to involve himself in it. And yet he was already involved. This was hardly the first time Reid had burdened him with such a confession in the nearly forty years they’d been together at the Forge School. There had been that awful hour in the midseventies when he’d confessed, his voice brimming with guilt and exhilaration, the summer’s escapade with a young woman in Ravenna. He’d sworn Louis to strictest secrecy: No one could know; the information would crush poor Libby. Why? Louis asked at the time. Why have you done this? Reid only touched his heart with his fingertips, a delicate gesture he’d learned, perhaps, from ancient frescoes or mosaics, at once so eloquent and absurd that it effectively silenced whatever other questions Louis might have presumed to muster over the years. Because it all happened with depressing regularity: those solitary “research” trips abroad, those end-of-the-summer confessions. Louis felt it his duty to register profound disapproval, but despite the possibility that their friendship had, over the years, perhaps outlived its natural span, he had nonetheless faithfully played his part in the marital deception Reid had pledged him to assist in.
Sighing deeply, with an air of satisfaction—or was it melancholy?—Reid placed his hands over the paunch he’d negligently allowed himself to acquire down through the years. “She heads the American excavation at Pella,” he said. “Louis, I really fell for her. I think she might be the love of my life.” And he sighed again.
“You don’t have to tell me any of this,” Louis reminded him.
Reid looked at him imploringly. “If I don’t tell somebody,” he said, “I’ll begin to think it never happened. And it did happen. I was sitting in a café in Kolonaki. She was at the next table. Kept sending glances my way, then long frank stares. I was talking to a fellow Byzantinist about the mosaics at Daphne, and then when I was finished, she came over and said, ‘Your English is so good, I thought you must be the leader of the Hungarian team.’ Not a trace of a smile. How could I not fall for that? We went right down to her hotel in the Plaka. The afternoon sun was coming in through the windows. She’s such a terribly avid person, Louis, so hungry for life. I had the sense of just being—how shall I say?—enveloped by her. I was practically floating in the light.”
Louis took out his handkerchief and ran it across his forehead. “At least spare me the more gruesome details,” he said dryly.
“Oh,” Reid told him, “there are no gruesome details. She teaches at the University of Texas—married, alas, with three children. Entanglements, entanglements. They joined her in Athens there at the end, which was awkward. She didn’t want me to meet them, and obviously I agreed. But can you believe this? When I boarded the plane to fly home, there she was, husband and children too. What an extraordinary coincidence. But I must say we were magnificent: didn’t even acknowledge one another. Two perfect strangers. She’ll be in Athens for a conference over Thanksgiving, and if there’s any way, I’ll be there too. The relationship’s impossible, of course. She says there’s no future. It was a moment, is all, and I respect her for that. I couldn’t respect anything else. But the fact is, it happened, Louis.”
He reached over and plucked the photo from the desktop. For a long moment he stared at it somberly. All the triumph had gone out of him. He seemed, suddenly, sad and old and tired. “Louis, Louis,” he said. “What was I thinking? Why do I do this to myself? I’ll never lay eyes on her again.”
He bit his lip, and for an appalling moment Louis thought his friend might start to cry. But he didn’t. Instead, he laughed.
“Can I tell you?” he said. “We had so much sex I still ache all over. She was insatiable, Louis. She taxed my imagination severely. But I don’t think I disappointed her. This old man definitely has some surprises left in him.”
Louis wouldn’t say anything.
Reid leaned forward in his chair and gripped the edge of the desk. “I feel like I’ve touched something real, Louis. Body and soul. Sometimes I actually get the feeling there really is some meaning to all this mess we call life. The smile of the divine. And there are other things—but I’ll tell you about them later.”
Louis did have to admit that—for whatever reason—Reid looked rather perversely radiant, as if that Athenian light, even now, enveloped him. Still, he couldn’t resist asking, “And how was Libby’s month on the Cape?” Perhaps it was his own failure, a small-minded lack of imagination in the face of some great adventure he failed entirely to comprehend. Nonetheless, he felt an acute itch of guilt about Libby, kept all these years in the dark. And for the sake of what?
Reid, though, appeared unfazed. “Oh fine, fine,” he said. He picked up the photo and replaced it thoughtfully in his pocket. They’d not speak of her again, this American archaeologist from the dig at Pella. He’d had his say. Now she was between them; he’d safely housed her in Louis’s imagination—where she was free to undergo any number of awful metamorphoses.
“It’s good for Libby to pack me off the way she does,” Reid said fondly. “Demanding old coot that I am. She loves her summers. She positively flourishes in my absence.”
He smiled broadly—almost as if he meant those words.
Shielded from the sun’s merciless glare by the sunglasses he felt so vulnerable without, Louis walked home feeling disconsolate and violated. How dare Reid barge in like that—not into his office, but into his soul? For the hundredth time, he decided theirs was a friendship he could no longer sustain. But how, after all these years, to end it? He was too vastly implicated, because Reid’s secrets really were entirely safe with him. There was that degree of brilliance in his friend’s careful organization of his affairs: here he lived beyond reproach; there, well, anything could happen. And with some regularity did. But were Louis, in some mad fit of candor, ever to reveal the sad truth about his friend, no one would believe him. This schoolteacher who delved into obscurest Byzantiniana, who wrote a pompous column called “The Religious Perspective” for the local newspaper, and whom, as a result, the students had dubbed Father Fallone—apparently without irony: he’d conned them all.
Nevertheless, a damning photo had lain briefly on Louis’s desk. What other tracks had Father Fallone foolishly left uncovered? Louis couldn’t escape the notion that, despite his care, Reid was still playing with fire, the kind that could without warning sheathe one’s whole life in irreversible conflagration.
He made a mental note to steer Tracy Parker clear of Reid’s orbit. There were too many ways of becoming entangled with someone like Reid, and the not-unfriendly word he’d been looking for, ever since their interview, to describe Tracy Parker finally came to him: guileless. Perhaps, like Parsifal, a perfect fool.
Now there was an amusing, frivolous thought.
Sweat slid down his sides. He considered taking off his linen jacket and carrying it over his arm, but decided against it. He didn’t like the feeling of being unclothed.
At Academy Avenue he paused for the crosswalk light to signal safe passage. Traffic streamed endlessly past, sleek new automobiles hermetically sealed against the tribulations of August. Even through dark lenses, the light off their windshields dazed him.
In some countries, India for instance, men weren’t afraid to be seen sauntering along under the shade of an umbrella. Would that he had the courage to put up an umbrella under this unremitting downpour of sunlight. But that had been the trouble with his whole life. A fear that people might notice; people might talk. That was why he found it impossible to imagine a single word of the book he’d fooled himself into thinking he’d spent years preparing for. Closed Fist and Open Palm: Moral Discipline in the Works of Thomas Mann. This past summer he had once again cleared a space for it; despite Claire’s urging, there had been no European vacation, not even a week on the Cape. Every morning he’d compelled himself, with faultless discipline, to inhabit his air-conditioned study for the three long hours between breakfast and lunch. And nothing had happened. Morning after morning he sat at his uncluttered desk and no thoughts came. He opened the diaries of Thomas Mann at random and read. He brooded over the Observations of a Non-Political Man and the “Snow” chapter from The Magic Mountain. Idly he wrote out certain names: Nepomuk Schneidewein, Pribislav Hippe, Clavdia Chauchat. This subject he knew everything and nothing about. It wasn’t so much that he had no thoughts in his head, but rather that, constipated from years of withholding, they now refused to issue forth.
Certain pages had been written. He kept them in a black notebook, which, one day soon, he promised himself, he intended to destroy.
He remembered Reid once chiding him: “You’re so straitlaced. Loosen up, my friend. Life is not a prison sentence.” Stupid not to have asked Reid for a lift home in that embarrassing, bright red sports car he drove these days. But the last thing he wanted this afternoon was Reid.
He had always recognized that the path he had chosen would be difficult. He asked no pity, expected no compassion.
A sudden commotion behind made him turn his head. Two boys on bicycles had ridden up. In the roiling heat, they’d taken off their shirts and tied them to their handlebars. As was the fashion among teenagers these days, they wore their outsized jeans slung implausibly low on their hips; the ribbed waistlines of their boxer shorts showed a full two inches.
They were thirteen or fourteen, with aggressive haircuts and earrings in their ears. One had a tattoo on his forearm: a rose or some other flower. Their bellies were smooth and hard, their chests thrown boldly forth against the wide world that was all theirs. He would not give them more than a single glance. There was something too obscene about them, too intimidating.
Feral. He could almost smell it on them.
But already he’d betrayed his nerves. He’d failed to notice that the light had finally changed. WALK, the crosswalk sign commanded imperiously. “Out of the way, Pops,” one of the boys told him, while the other made what sounded like a farting noise with his lips as they charged past him with only inches to spare. He watched their naked backs, that interval of shorts between jeans and skin, the motion of their buttocks as they stood on their pedals and pumped furiously away.
No doubt about it. He’d become a relic, something to be thrown away. There was no one else like him remaining in the entire world.
Claire had gone out, and Lux didn’t hear him come in; asleep on his pillow in the kitchen, the ancient dog raised his head as Louis entered the room, then heaved himself heavily to his feet. There he stood, unsteady, disoriented. Since his stroke last spring, he listed a bit to the left.
“Hello, old fellow,” Louis told him. He bent down to scratch behind the German shepherd’s ears. Clouded eyes watched him. “Feeling creaky today?” he asked as he unlatched the back door and held it open. “It’s the weather. That’s all.”
Lux made his way with difficulty down the two shallow steps. He waited a moment, confused, then took a few uncertain steps out onto the grass and squatted down. The outdoors seemed, these days, to overwhelm him.
He’d have to be put down in the fall, before the cold came. They’d decided that. After thirteen years, it was going to prove difficult. Already Louis was severely dreading his own weakness.
“Good fellow,” he praised as Lux made his painful way back up the steps and through the door. That long-ago autumn their second daughter had left for college, some loneliness had given Claire the idea of rescuing a dog from the pound. He’d have purchased a purebred himself, but he had given in, and perhaps she’d been right after all. No one could have asked for a sweeter companion these past twelve years.
Rummaging in the refrigerator, he found an end of kielbasa. Lux’s tail thumped the floor with something like his old liveliness. Louis had taken to indulging him, this good and faithful dog facing death at the hands of the humans he trusted.
On the counter, Claire had left a stack of mail—sans bills, which she’d weeded out. Through some set of circumstances he could no longer quite remember, those had become her domain quite early in their marriage. He sifted through what was left: a newsletter from their Republican congresswoman, a package from the Musical Heritage Society. The latest New Yorker offered a vaguely displeasing cover, as seemed often to be the case these days, and its table of contents held little of interest. Except for their monthly ritual of the opera, they never ventured into the city anymore; it had become as strange and off-putting as the magazine that bore its name.
At the bottom of the stack of mail a flimsy blue airmail envelope lay. The gaudy stamp advertised itself as Tanzanian. Puzzled—who on earth might he know in Tanzania?—he carried the mysterious communication into his study and seated himself at his desk. He’d always opened letters with an inexplicable sense of dread.
Childish, blocklike letters lurched across the page.
Dear Mr. Tremper,
Probably you won’t remember me. I graduated from the Forge six years ago. I was in your tenth grade literature class where we read A Separate Peace. Now I’m in the Peace Corps here in the town of Arusha—hard to imagine! But I love it, I love what I’m doing. We’ve been building a bridge across a stream where usually the locals have to ford and in the rainy season it floods. It’s really satisfying to be helping people like this. I also tutor adults and children in English. They’re really a beautiful people here, the Liguru people.
So why am I writing. Well, the other day I was in this little library the Mormon missionaries run, and guess what I found there? A Separate Peace! So I took it out and read it all over again and I had so many memories. I remember our English class really well, it was a really important time for me. You were the teacher who first got me interested in English, which I ended up majoring in College (Ithaca College). It was the friendship between Finny and Gene I really related to, and the school stuff and all.
Anyway I’d been thinking and I thought I’d just write and say thanks for the help and encouragement you gave me. It’s lonely here sometimes. The stars at night are really amazing, though. Maybe I’ll try to teach them to read A Separate Peace (my students, I mean!!).
Sincerely,
Robert Wainmark (Bobby)
Louis vaguely remembered the thin-faced boy with big brown
eyes who’d kept mostly to himself, sat toward the back of the class, rarely ever spoke. One of those adolescent enigmas one despaired of ever reaching. There’d always seemed something faintly sorrowful about him, some sadness that kept him quiet. His work had been earnest but mediocre. And had he written the occasional poem? Louis wasn’t entirely sure, six years down the road, but it seemed possible he’d turned in some vague, obdurate bit of lyric from time to time.
On consideration, he seemed to remember that distinctly. And one of the younger teachers, a dorm adviser, had once mentioned that Bobby had problems with bed-wetting: that too came back to Louis. He read the letter over again, these words addressed to him from Africa, this young man—he’d be around twenty-three now—who’d thought of him on an African night under the lonely shining stars.
Louis was faintly embarrassed that he could recall so little about him. He swiveled his desk chair around to locate the atlas on the bookshelf. Opening the heavy tome on his lap, he perused pinked-tinted Tanzania’s cities—Dares Salaam, Dodoma, Iringa, Kigoma—until he found Arusha in the north, under the very shadows, it appeared, of Mount Kilimanjaro.
He himself had never been to Africa, would never go. The continent held too little interest for him, and far too much in the way of fear. Though northern Africa did beckon in its bleak, unforgiving way. As a boy he’d followed with secret admiration the campaign of Rommel’s Afrika Korps, their valiant and thrilling fight.
He read the letter through a third time, then opened his filing cabinet, took out a manila folder, and filed it with a dozen or so similar letters he’d received over the years. What else did one do with an attempt at communication like that? If he were to write Bobby back, what would there be to say? He had answered some of his boys’ letters in the past, had even maintained a semblance of correspondence with one or two of them, but inevitably it petered out after a couple of years. They moved on to other things—as they should. Their prep-school teacher, having served his purpose with them, appropriately turned his attention to the latest crop of young minds needing encouragement, advice, lessons in various kinds of fortitude. From time to time, of course, he received stray news: This one had married into great wealth, or that one had earned a law degree, or was practicing medicine. More often, they moved docilely into their fathers’ businesses—a fate that had, he supposed, been the point for most of them all along. He didn’t mind, and if the Forge School alumni gave generously to the annual fund, he was hardly the one to complain. He prided himself on having few illusions. The world was a complex place, and there were many complex accommodations to be reached with it.
