Let Me Count the Ways: A Novel

by De Vries, Peter

  “Life, liberty, and the happiness of pursuit.”

  “So cool and rat fink. What college did you go to? That made you so cultured and rat fink.”

  “I can never remember the name of it. It was somewhere in Colorado.”

  This was part of the identity I had rapidly assembled for myself on hearing her say, and give as justification for her “surrender,” that she guessed she was “ready to switch boy friends.” That was a rather ominous note, not to be underestimated. I had told her my first name but had cooked up a last name. I said I lived in Chicago but traveled much in my work, which was selling office equipment. I had completed my regular canvass of Slow Rapids and was returning to Chicago tomorrow, from where I promised I would call her the minute I got in. The absence of a car I explained by saying it was in the shop for repairs. “Well, you’re a fast worker,” she had said, towing me into the bedroom.

  The mountain of falsehoods made me feel guiltier than the misdemeanor they were erected to conceal. The girl had been, after all, willing enough, and in any case the term “seduced and abandoned” seems hopelessly inapplicable to any relationship conceivable under today’s broadened standards. Nevertheless, I did feel a sense of regret, vague but corroding, as I made my way home—sharply intensified at the sight of Marion standing there unpacking her suitcase.

  “I didn’t expect you back till tomorrow.”

  “I can see that.”

  The remark had an all too specific point. Not having expected to see her, I had taken no precautions of checking my appearance before entering the apartment. I noticed her glancing at my cheek as we exchanged these greetings, and hurried into the bathroom at the first possible opportunity, to find to my horror a scarlet smudge staring back at me in the glass. I made the even greater mistake of rubbing it off. So that when I returned to the bedroom where Marion had continued silently unloading her bag, she said after another look, “I see you got rid of it.”

  “It certainly wasn’t yours,” I said, referring to the cool welcome I had received—as cool as her departure the day before.

  Frozen silences are more than I can bear. Words of any sort are better. I kept talking in hopes of bringing some about, any state of mind but this, under which we might retire. Anything would do, heated retort, bitter rebuke, any storm to clear this sky. My sentences ground doggedly away, like an icebreaker through solid glacier.

  “If you knew how casually these things come about, you’d realize how little they mean.”

  She put into a bureau drawer the last garment from her grip and snapped it shut. I reached to relieve her of it so as to stow it in the closet myself. She swung it clear of my grasp and walked around me. I followed her and stood in the hallway as she put it away.

  “This is the ill-wind department, but you learn what somebody means to you when you’ve wronged them. That’s the fastest way. Thank God you get the idea from a trivial peccadillo. A stumble may prevent a fall.”

  She bathed and went to bed, settling down there with a book. I said with sudden spirit, “You ran out on me, you know!”

  She slammed the book shut and looked at me with her eyes flashing. “Which is why I came back early. Guilt! Oh, my God. All the good it did me. This is what I hurry home to.”

  I was on my knees at her side, traversing the last steps in that position.

  “Oh, darling, don’t blame yourself. I won’t let you. You didn’t know what you were doing. All of us do rash things, things we’ll later regret because in so doing we’ve wronged others. So don’t reproach yourself.”

  “Oh, Tom, how could you,” she said with her hands to her face.

  “Don’t ask me, darling. Because I’ll never know myself. I just. Don’t. Know. I’m a thorn in my own flesh!”

  After an hour of this we lay back in a state of emotional exhaustion, glad enough to have it so, our hearts hollow and our minds emptied. Not in one another’s arms certainly, but not at one another’s throats either. A kind of nervous calm had settled upon us, that was very nearly peace, or at least a truce. One more touch was needed to restore us at any rate to the tolerable. The right fond word, perhaps one of our private jokes.

  I smiled tremulously over at her as I climbed into bed and said, before pulling the lamp cord to extinguish the scene, “Know what my mother used to say? She used to say—you’ll love this, ducks—she used to say, ‘There ought to be a law against all these illicit relations.’”

  On that note we managed at last to drop off into a little troubled sleep.

  Remaining yet to be confronted were the Three Little Prigs. For that jig was up too.

  Smadbeck called late the following Monday afternoon and asked if I would step into his office. When I arrived, the trio were there, looking like anything but plaintiffs with a grievance to air. In fact they all looked guilty as hell, with the possible exception of the prickly Fangle. Inskip was the worst. He was evidently shattered by any kind of run-in, any sort of direct human collision. He sat with his elbow on the arm of his chair, his head bowed in his hand. From time to time he rubbed his forehead with his fingers, offering glimpses of a face white as a sheet. Pilbeam had too high a color ever to be called pale, but in his embarrassment the blood drained from his cheeks, too, leaving them mottled, like an overripe apple. Under his thinning blond hair his brow was beaded. He sat slumped back, his mouth open as though gasping for air, with one arm hooked dangling over the back of his chair. Fangle alone, as I say, looked anything like the part of an accuser. Yet even his belligerent manner, with which by contrast he glared at me as I entered the president’s office, did nothing to offset or mitigate my opening impression: that they were curious champions of the principle of detachment.

  Smadbeck came directly to the point.

  “These men claim they have been consistently annoyed by mail, telephone and other means of communication for some time,” he said, “and that the nature of the intrusions and assaults points to a single perpetrator—you.”

  “Me?” I spoke with a smile modestly disclaiming the talent for an undertanking of such large-scale ingenuity, rather than protesting innocence.

  “It would be best not to hedge or diddle about, Waltz.” Another gasp from the wretched Pilbeam and an uncomfortable fidget from Inskip in his chair suggested that mercy for the accusers was the aim in bringing these proceedings to as rapid a close as possible. “How do we know? Comparison with a, well, legitimate document from your typewriter, a departmental memo to Inskip’s office as a matter of fact, hint strongly that those were typed out on your machine too.”

  Smadbeck indicated a jumble of inspirational matter on his desk, everything that had in recent weeks been dispatched by post, tacked to doors or slipped under them, pasted to car bumpers or affixed to coat lapels. It was rather an impressive pile. Add to these the telephone calls by night, and other devices, and my war on the Harvard Group was seen to have been an operation of considerable scope and diligence.

  “Why would I do anything like that?”

  “And those phone calls,” Smadbeck said, ignoring this. “They say they have been even more troublesome.”

  There was a note in Smadbeck’s voice and manner, as of ill-concealed sardonic amusement, not with me so much as the three, that indicated he might be as much ally as judge. From North Dakota, he could be considered even more an outlander than myself, with a name even more onerous than mine. Perhaps honyock origins of his own linked him in spirit with me far more than with exemplars of eastern urbanity. Certainly the fragility of that under fire did little to impress him in its favor now. I thought he was smiling a little behind the hand bunched at his mouth. That was one thing that made me decide to come clean. The other was the evidence itself. The Three Little Prigs must early have suspected who the tormentor was from the cardiac theme uppermost in the sentiments rained upon them, following so closely upon my statement about the importance of heart in matters of artistic expression, in the argument about Picasso. My sensed hostility toward them offered an
even stronger, if less tangible, clue.

  Smadbeck leaned suddenly forward over his desk and said, “And the buckshot business. We happen to know there is an air rifle in your room, Waltz. It’s been searched.”

  This was so transparent I nearly laughed. It was the familiar trick by which the detective tries to trap the suspect into confession by pretending they have got the goods on him anyway. Almost as banal as my thoughts for the day. But Smadbeck had so won my respect and confidence that I wanted him to look as good as he deserved in this affair.

  “Well sir, you’re a hard man to fool, so I won’t try to fool you,” I said. “Not that I made any particular effort to do so with these chaps. I mean surely they must have known I assumed all along they realized who was having the fun with them,” I continued, turning to the trio. “Surely none of us thought the anonymity act was anything more than part of the prank.”

  “Prank,” said Fangle, the one member of the coterie who had reason to feel the shafts not altogether unbarbed, in an intellectual, or controversial, sense. “Prank. When a man comes out of his class in Harmony and finds on the bumper of his car—”

  “All right,” said Smadbeck, rising. “That’s not what we’re here for. We’re here to confront somebody with the evidence and extract an admission. That we’ve done. The rest, the—” He seemed to be groping for a word other than “punishment.” “The final disposition of the matter is my province and that of the discipline committee. I’ll excuse you gentlemen with the assurance that I shall deal firmly with the matter now that the culprit has been brought to heel. Waltz, I’d like a word with you.”

  The three rose and filed out, looking rather hangdog as they closed the door behind them. When they were gone, Smadbeck extended an open humidor to me, which I declined, then helped himself to a large cigar. He dressed and punctured it, and reached for a box of matches which he shook briefly before opening.

  “Why did you do all that?”

  “They make me sick.”

  He turned this motivation over in his mind as he set fire to his cigar, seeming to revolve it seriously as something far more cogent than complex rationalization would have been—certainly more healthily direct and easier to grasp for someone hailing from the robust heartlands of this country.

  “That may be. But it is no reason to—” Here he gave again the impression of awaiting a substitute for the term springing most naturally to mind, but in this case deciding to settle for the original rather than waste time on euphemisms. “To take the law into our own hands.”

  “I know. But sometimes the law is slow, and, in this case, leaves no provision whatever for dealing with the offense.”

  “Ignore them.”

  “I can’t.”

  “That’s your problem. Mine is, how to handle you. I have to do something, you know, and something drastic.” He regarded me through clouds of smoke from the cigar he was now contentedly puffing in his chair. The air became rather pleasantly tainted with tobacco, as a room will from the first few relatively benign fumes of a good cigar. “I cannot let this pass.”

  “I understand.”

  “I see you’ve got quite a backlog of difficulties here, all more or less in the same general vein, or mental level. I’m going to have to get rid of you.”

  “Is it that bad?”

  “Not permanently. For a while. Because I don’t think you’re a very stable character. I mean you’re not responsible. I use the word on two levels. You’re irresponsible, but for reasons for which you may not be entirely responsible. If you get what I mean. I think you’re going through a phase, but how long it will be, who knows? By the time you’re mature you may be ready to leave this earth. Shaw bemoans that somewhere, I think in Back to Methuselah. That it takes seventy years to make a grownup, by which time he’s got to go. Your dossier is appalling,” he said, gesturing to a Manila file I had seen before, now fattened perceptibly. “You need help, and I think you should have a leave of absence until you get it.”

  “How long were you thinking of? And while I’m out will I be … I mean those things cost money.”

  Here Smadbeck rose and walked to the window, where he adjusted a blind to admit what little sunlight there was.

  “That’s the thing. You see, according to our scale for faculty members, which gets to be damned complicated, no provisions like this are made for ordinary instructors. I mean leave privileges and other ‘mercy’ considerations on the scale you’ll need them. Only those with professorial standing. So we’re going to have to promote you to associate professor.”

  “That’s quite all right.”

  “Just cutting somebody off who’s—” Here Smadbeck made a vague gesture which came precariously close to describing circles in the air near his temple. “Who obviously needs rest and so on wouldn’t be humane. And you are in the Humanities Department. Naturally I shall have to take this matter up with the faculty, but they’ll probably take my recommendations for the action to be decided on. And it will have to be looked into. It may be that not even associate professorships provide for financial considerations on the scope your case needs. In that case we’d have to make you a full professor, with tenure.”

  “Please don’t worry about it. And you may be sure I’ll use whatever means are decided on to the fullest. I may even take a trip. Much as I dislike travel, they say a change of scene often does wonders.”

  “You’ve got to get yourself straightened around, Waltz. That much is certain.”

  We shook hands on that note, and as I closed the door and walked down the hall to the front of the building, whose stairs I seemed so frequently to have descended in moments of strain before, I again felt tears of genuine emotion welling to my eyes.

  The understanding, presently confirmed, was that I would leave at the end of the winter term. The solution of one problem is rarely unattended by the appearance of fresh ones in its wake. What about Marion? She, of course, had another full semester to go before summer vacation would release her for a bit of a holiday. I delayed bringing the matter up because I could not do so without revealing why it had come about; I wanted to spare her the news that I had become again the object of disciplinary measures. Yet I knew my silence only postponed the inevitable. And meanwhile there was the risk that she might learn from other sources of the jam I was in. Only full professors constituted the portion of the faculty which dealt with its own members in the fashion required by my circumstances, so Marion had not sat in review of my case; but it was unlikely that she could go on indefinitely without its being brought to her attention by some gossip. I was on tenterhooks all that period up to the holidays—when the trouble was swallowed up in another far worse.

  I had to run into Chicago on Christmas Eve to collect the twenty-five hundred dollars on the television broadcast for which I had written the prize-winning letter. The president of the corporation manufacturing the sponsoring product presented the check to me with a few words, if possible even more heartfelt than mine, and a congratulatory handshake. The show was at seven, and I was back home by half-past nine. I knew instantly from Marion’s face that something was wrong.

  “Your friend called,” she said, stonily.

  “Who?”

  “The one you were out with.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  The crisis was all too quickly clarified. The girl I had picked up in the bar had been sitting in front of her television set that evening and seen me. She had also learned from the formalities my right name, as well as my address and true occupation, and had lost no time in telephoning.

  “She was surprised to hear a woman’s voice, and to learn her Lothario was married. Needless to say, I don’t feel much like celebrating Christmas, but your folks are expecting us tonight and mine are tomorrow. So let’s get through the holidays, and then that’ll be that.”

  I did not understand. “What’ll be what?”

  “I think I’m speaking in plain English.”

  “But we’ve been thro
ugh all this before,” I said, puzzled. “I thought we thrashed it out and it was behind us. That incident. I mean—what did you find out tonight that you didn’t already know?”

  “What kind of girl she is.”

  ‘“Now look, Marion, if you’re implying she was just some cheap—”

  “That’s exactly what I’m not implying! Won’t you ever learn anything? That’s what I might have thought then, and bad as that would be, I could forgive it. I know now she isn’t. From just a few words on the telephone I could tell what she is, that she’s been hurt. She’s not fair game, Tom. You can’t ride roughshod over a creature like that. A physical fling such as you said may not be anything more than you said—if you want to stick to your odd principle that the casual use of sex justifies it—but seducing the little match girl, really! Don’t you understand that people really can have their hearts broken?”

  I dropped into a chair as though I had been clubbed into it. I was still in my overcoat. Amazing, I reflected, how little we know of one another. The woman I was married to did not know that what she had just said was what I firmly believed. It was one of my cherished principles. “Hearts are so easily broken, let us be tender awhile …”

  “That’s been my whole point, what I’ve been trying to tell you from the start. I think we even talked about it the night I visited you in the hospital with Arthur. That you can’t separate sex from love. That it’s indecent and that you pay for it. That it’s even against nature, as our grandparents would say, try as we will with all this Dionysian stuff that’s going around these days. Musical beds! You called your little lark a peccadillo. That’s exactly what’s wrong with it. A real love affair with another woman I might forgive. But your ability to be so casual with somebody you should have seen was innocent, could be easily hurt—no, I don’t want a man like that for a husband. I couldn’t live with a man like that. Come on, your folks will be waiting. The presents are all wrapped and in the bedroom.”