“But he’s a pain most of the time,” he said. “So I still call him that because it makes him mad.”
Colette laughed at the idea. “I had an older sister who was always mean to me,” she said. “And I used to hide her good clothes or her special jewelry when she had a date with a man. She never knew I did it. She always blamed my other sister, who was closer to her age. But she was mean to me too, so I never cared.”
“Why were they mean to you?” Alex asked. He wondered how anyone could ever be mean to Colette.
“Oh, it was just because I was younger. They are nice to me now. Someday Richbird”—she struggled with the name, laughing as she did—“someday he will be nice to you too.”
“I doubt it,” Alex said. “He’s a jerk.” He said the word in English, and had to explain what it meant. Colette laughed again.
“It is fun being the youngest,” she said. “Especially if there are many children. Then no one has time to watch you very closely. But it is difficult too. Sometimes you have to grow up too quickly. Don’t do that, my sweet Alex. Don’t grow up too quickly.”
Alex wasn’t sure how you did that—kept from growing up quickly or slowly, and he decided it was just something grown-ups said. But he did want to get bigger soon. He had a fantasy about being as big as Richbird and of punching him in the nose.
“Would you like to play a game?” Colette asked.
“Yes. Sure.”
“What is your favorite game?” she asked.
“Hide and go seek,” he said.
“I know that game well,” she said. “Who will be it first?”
“I will,” Alex said, feeling very gallant. “But no hiding in the burial vault,” he added.
“And, why not?”
“It’s too scary down there,” he said.
She laughed again. “Very well,” she said. “We will only hide outside, and only in places that are not scary.”
Alex turned his face to the tree and began counting.
“You must not peek,” Colette called as she ran off toward the rear of the house.
“I won’t,” Alex called back. Then he turned his head slightly so he could see where she was going. But it was all right, he told himself. He had known by the sound of her voice anyway.
Piers and Antoine and Meme had a final glass of marc to celebrate Piers’s promotion and his visit and the agreements they had reached, then walked out to the car that would take them to the airport.
Piers saw Alex over by the garden and was surprised to see he was with Colette. He had seen him earlier, running across the lawn, and had assumed he was alone, happily exploring the grounds.
Now, seeing him with the woman, he felt a twinge of nervousness, and wondered what Colette might have said to him, might have told him about knowing his father in the past.
Antoine followed his gaze and realized how much he would miss the boy. “Why do you not leave Alex here for a few more days?” he suggested. “It would be good for him, and I would take him in the car to see other parts of the island.”
“No, I’m afraid I can’t,” Piers said, his voice distant. He turned back and smiled—with regret, he hoped. “His mother dotes on him. Especially now that Richard is away at school. It was difficult enough bringing him with me.”
Antoine grunted. “It is why I never married,” he lied. “Women never want a man to do anything except bring money home and carry out the trash. It is bad enough having Colette here. A wife would be impossible.”
He glanced across at the boy again and wished he had been out playing with him for the past hour instead of sitting inside discussing business with his father. It was all merde, he thought. A great pile of shit that Meme could as easily have handled by himself. But now it was too late to change it.
Piers called to his son and saw Alex start toward him, then turn and run back to Colette to give her a farewell hug. She knelt for a moment and spoke to the boy, and Piers wondered what she was telling him.
When Alex came running to them, Antoine scooped him up and gave him a great hug. “So, my little Corsican donkey,” he said, “now you go back to the fancy city of Paris, and you will forget all about your poor uncles, eh?”
“No, I won’t,” Alex said. “And I’ll come back soon, and I’ll stay longer next time.” He looked to his father. “Won’t I?” he asked.
“We both will,” Piers said. “I want you to see what the Corsicans call the “white spring,” when the maquis is in bloom. It’s very beautiful.”
“You should come even before that,” Antoine said, reluctantly putting the boy down so he could hug Meme as well.
“We’ll try,” Piers said. “We’ll try very hard.”
As the car headed down the mountain, Alex looked back out the window at the village and the Pisani house, and he wondered when he would see it again, and if he would ever spend a long time there and what it would be like if he did. He thought about Colette too, and about what she had said to him before he left. He hadn’t really understood, but there were other things she had said that he hadn’t understood either. She used a lot of slang, he decided. Words he had never heard before.
The car turned onto the main road and headed north toward Bastia, where the airport was located, and he watched the farms and the vegetable stands slide quickly past as the car accelerated. It was not as pretty as it was up in the mountains and in the high, isolated villages that he could barely see from the road. But he decided he still liked it and would miss it as well.
“Did you have a good time?” his father asked.
“Yes, it was great,” he said. “And I really do want to come back.”
“We shall,” Piers said. “And soon.”
He hesitated, knowing what he wanted to ask, uncertain exactly how he should phrase it. “I saw you with Colette before we left,” he said.
“Yeah,” Alex said. “She’s really nice.”
“Yes, I’m sure she is,” Piers said. He hesitated again, then pushed on. “I noticed she said something to you before you left, and I was wondering what it was.”
Alex seemed slightly embarrassed, or perhaps just confused, Piers thought. He felt a tightening in his stomach.
“It was kind of funny, Dad,” he said. “She told me to love you. She said you were a man who needed to be loved because you didn’t understand what it was.”
Alex looked up at his father, wondering if he would explain, and he noticed his face had turned suddenly red. It was the only time he had ever seen it do so.
BOOK III
CHAPTER
30
Middletown, Vermont, 1990
The official residence of the Middletown College president was an old pile of Georgian brick with two enclosed porches at either end, one screened, the other glassed in against the frigid Vermont winters. The front of the house was dominated by large, formal rooms divided by a long foyer which had a massive staircase with ornate newel post and banister. It spoke of the days when the state had been ravaged by the lumber barons, who had built great homes for themselves and then disappeared with the trees that had sustained them. The houses had been bought up by funeral homes and law firms and colleges, and so had survived, giving the illusion of affluence to small towns that no longer possessed it.
The house, which was located just off the grounds of the campus, was filled now with life of a sort. Every window, at least, was bright and lighted. A party, one of many hosted by the president, was in full flower, and faculty and administrators filled the rooms, glasses in hand, and spoke unkindly about their peers, the curriculum, the school itself. Only the students were spared their invective, for to speak badly of them would reflect upon themselves, and this was something distinctly avoided.
Two men stood by an ornate mantel—one tall and reedy and distinguished, with moderately long white hair and half glasses, which he was now peering over; the second short and fat, with a tightly curled, wild, abundant, frizzy dome, thick lips, and a fleshy face that made him look like a y
oung Charles Laughton. They were associate professors of English. And they were unhappy, which was their normal state of being.
The object of their current unhappiness was Alex Moran, who was standing at the opposite end of the large room with a beautiful twenty-five-year-old graduate student named Jody Walker at his side.
“I don’t know how he continues to get away with it. It’s not as though complaints haven’t been made.” It was the fat one, whose name was Warren Fairchild and whose eyes were not truly on Moran, but on the tightly sheathed buttocks of Jody Walker.
“He’s done it for years, my good man. It’s been something of a movable feast for him. This one’s what? Number four, or five?” The second man was Milton Whitingham, a Shakespearean scholar who favored British colloquialisms. “It’s not as though he’s the only one dipping his wicket into the graduate pool, after all. What offends me is the other special treatment he’s received.”
“But the others don’t live with their wenches and bring them to faculty affairs. They don’t flout the rules with such impunity,” Fairchild insisted.
“Indeed not. But it’s the other special treatment, don’t you see? That truly boggles the mind.” Whitingham sipped his sherry. He too had begun to study Jody Walker’s well-shaped rump. He preferred men if given a choice, but he could appreciate beauty wherever he found it. And Jody Walker was a lovely young thing, he decided.
They were silent for almost a minute, momentarily content with their views.
“I am still waiting for someone to explain to me how he did it,” Whitingham said.
“Did what?” Fairchild asked.
“Came here with tenure, of course. Without one teaching credential to his credit.”
“Well, there are rumors about that, of course,” Fairchild said. “Some definite pull there. Government, or money, or whatever. I, for one, suspect government.” He wagged his bushy eyebrows up and down, turning back to Whitingham. “Have you ever seen him loading his car with those cased weapons he takes up to that shooting club he belongs to?” He widened his eyes as if the statement proved his point beyond question.
“It’s all that contemporary literature you teach. If one can call it that,” Whitingham added spitefully. “Too many spies and outlandish villains. No, I’d place my wager on old money. A purchased position, with the promise of more.” He tapped his nose with one finger. “But cleverly done—the money going to another area so as not to reflect back on what was bought.” He tilted his head to get a better view of Jody, who had been momentarily hidden by another group. “But still, I can see how you might be led astray. He is a terrible loner, except for his wenching frenzies.”
“He does play chess with Marley,” Fairchild said. “And he does grunt to one occasionally when passing in the hall. But he hasn’t spoken at a faculty meeting in over a year. And he’s never sober. Absolutely never. Not completely.”
“Can’t object to a man who likes his nip now and then,” Whitingham said. “And he does publish. We have to give him that.”
“Trash. He publishes trash,” Fairchild said. “But he has tenure, and peer acceptance means nothing to him, so what does he care?”
Fairchild had turned back to look at Moran “and his mistress,” as he thought of her. He felt what Whitingham would have called a stirring of the loins, just watching her.
“But you wait and see. It will all come out someday. And you’ll see I was right,” he said at length.
Jody slipped her arm into Alex’s and squeezed it lightly. He had just insulted his fifth faculty wife, and although he had done it with wit and charm and the woman seemed not to have noticed, he was reaching the dangerous stage she had seen before. She leaned up to his ear and whispered.
“We should go. It’s getting late, and you have an eight o’clock tomorrow.”
“I have an eight o’clock every teaching day,” he said. “My peers see to it.”
Alex was simply grousing, Jody knew. He preferred his eight o’clock classes. He was up at six every morning anyway, doing a regimen of exercise that would put most middle-aged men in traction. She bit her lip. She didn’t like to think of him as middle-aged, although she knew the idea didn’t offend him. But it bothered her. It made her think others would think she had a daddy complex.
She was a beautiful woman, with long blond hair and blue eyes and fine-boned features. She was tall and lithe, and she knew men enjoyed looking at her body. She also knew she was a replica of the other women with whom Alex had lived over the years, and very much like the pictures she had seen of his dead wife. But it didn’t offend her, it only made her nervous. She didn’t mind being one of several who reminded him of his wife. She only wanted to be the last. She was in love with him.
“I need another drink,” Alex said. “Then we’ll go.”
“Why don’t we have it at home?” she suggested.
“I’m out,” he said. “So one more here.”
She knew it was a lie, but didn’t argue. There were enough people who degraded him publicly without her adding herself to the list. If he wanted to get drunk, she didn’t care. She just didn’t want him making a fool of himself. Or her.
He left and returned from the bar with John Marley in tow, and Jody knew it would mean another half hour and at least one more drink. Marley was an expert on Yeats, a passion Alex shared, and they played chess together, and Marley had even been taken to Alex’s shooting club, something not even she had managed.
Marley was a small, almost delicate man with an open smile and boyish features that belied his fifty-three years. His graying hair flopped across his forehead, adding to a carefully planned disheveled look which many adopt in graduate school and which he had never abandoned. He was a perennial schoolboy, who had never been away from a classroom since entering kindergarten, and he had the open, naive, satisfied view of the world of a man who had experienced it from textbooks and newspapers and magazines. But Alex liked him. He said he was the only honest man he had met “in the whole damned school.”
Jody liked him as well. She even liked his repeated offers—always made in Alex’s presence—to be her next lover, so she could learn “the ecstasy of non-macho virility.” Marley was happily married with six children, who kept him penniless, and Jody always responded that she saw ample proof of his virility and it terrified her.
Marley, she noticed, was also slightly drunk, and it was confirmed with his first words.
“Are you enjoying this gathering of mental mysophiliacs?” he asked, making sure his voice carried to those around him. He was grinning, awaiting chastisement that didn’t come. “I, for one, adore these little gatherings. I’m not sure if it’s the cerebral stimulation or the free booze. But I’m working on that.” He scratched his head. “Martha, our beloved hostess and first lady of the campus, just told me to stop acting like a twit. My God, where has the woman been? Twits are the only form of academic life more than three steps beyond the primordial ooze. The rest are just amoeba, swallowing each other whole.”
“You’re drunk,” Jody said.
“Of course. So’s Alex. It’s the only way to survive all this gaiety. Why aren’t you drunk?” Marley demanded.
“I’m hoping to seduce Alex later,” Jody whispered. “I’m not very good at it when I’m slobbering.”
Marley clutched Alex’s sleeve. “My God, man, I am weak at the knees.”
“She only says those things to get you twitching. She never does them,” Alex said.
“She has succeeded,” Marley said. “I am definitely twitching.”
Jody laughed. “God help your wife. Number seven may be imminent.”
“Never!” Marley insisted. “I’ve been vasectomized.”
“You have not!” Jody said. “Your wife told me she’d begged you to do it and you wouldn’t.”
“That’s true. But I like to tell beautiful graduate students that I have been,” he said. “Somehow it seems to make me more appealing. I used to tell them I was sterile. Then the childr
en started arriving and I had to switch tactics.”
“Did either ever work?” Jody asked.
Marley stood as tall as he could, which at five-foot-seven left him an inch shorter than Jody. “Woman!” he intoned. “You are in the presence of a living legend in matters sexual.”
“I know,” Jody said. “Your wife told me about that as well.”
“God,” Marley said, “the woman knows no shame.”
Alex gulped his bourbon. “None of them do,” he said. “They only want us as sex objects.”
He smiled, making small lines appear at the corners of his eyes. His hair was flecked with gray now, and more often than not, his mouth formed a slight frown. His current smile was uncommon. He seldom wore it. Only Jody made him smile with any regularity. He was unable to do the same for her.
“When are you going to take me shooting again?” Marley asked. “I fear my trigger finger is becoming atrophied.”
“Whenever you want.”
Marley turned to Jody. “I am also one of the great shots of the Western world,” he said.
“I have no doubt,” she said.
“I think there’s some connection between shooting and sexuality, but I haven’t quite worked it out yet. But blasting away is so much more satisfying than teaching the genius of Yeats to mean little minds.”
“You should do an article on it,” Jody said.
“On mean little minds?”
“No. On the connection between shooting and sexuality,” she said.
Marley clutched Alex’s sleeve again. “She’s doing it to me again,” he said. “Are you sure it’s all pretense?”
“Positive,” Alex said.
Fairchild was weaving his way past, headed for the bar. He stopped.
“Marley. Moran. Ms. Walker,” he said, nodding to each in turn. “Do I hear that a new article is in the offing?” He was smiling, ingenuously, he hoped.
“Yes,” Marley said, straightening to his full height again. “On the similarities between sexuality and shooting.”
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