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Some Mornings on the DMZ

Some mornings, a guy would have to admit,

were clear-blue beautiful,

no clouds hiding the foil strip of river

twisting an elbow

over to Route Nine

for the walk up the valley to Khe Sanh,

no medevacs pulling wounded from trapped patrols

at the base of the mountain,

no B-52 strikes cracking the opposite ridgeline into

roiling cauliflower columns of dust

no rain polishing the shell-casing stairs and mud

till walking means falling twice every five meters,

no rain sluicing mud and drowning rats downhill

till sandbags slough away from the bunker walls,

once intended to be the latrine

to add a little water to the local mud,

no weeklong monsoon downpours

soaking the sandbags to ooze gritty mocha streams

no frustrated recoilless rifleman from another hilltop

blowing rounds at the command post southeast corner

chewing away one sandbag at a time,

no superindoctrinated mortarman blasting a circle

around the chopper pad with 82 millimeter rounds

no, some mornings were still, soft, blue-sky beautiful,

the hills still marching grass and brush and bamboo

January/Chinatown/1991

sign fronts a clutter of dusty carpet scraps and

chairs. A few tourist traps still light the alleyway

tea sets and cork carvings. I find another small

place to get a bowl of barbecued shrimp and rice

noodles. I make my bid in the home language. The

man nods and turns to the kitchen. I roam the place

for papers left for patrons to read. The stack

is all Chinese. I head back to my table, then

retrieve it, and sit to scan the front page stories.

The elder son suspects a ruse. He asks if I

Later he will tell me the Air Force veteran

story is about an Air Force veterans’ group.

Next the father sits down to talk. Mother, daughter

and two sons sit near by to listen to the odd

accents this stranger brings to the mother tongue. The

old politics, the new views on trade and travel.

He, this year, reached the age of forty-nine, past the

average life span in the homeland. He recalls the

partition of ’54: his family fled south

to Sàigòn; the party Secretary General

shot his own father to prove the righteousness of

Class Warfare; and even in the South, the VC

traced and shot his father; battle took his brother

near Rạch Gia. The father has the daughter bring me

a second cup of tea. He thanks me for my time

in the homeland, despite the loss. Now his life is

calm: feeding the customers feeds the children, but

of course, the long days in the shop leave no time for

English class. I thank him for talking with me. He

thanks me again. "No," I say, truth deep in the home

tradition, "I dare not accept your thanks." The young

ones and wife clean up for closing. I am ready

to drive home in the dark. I pay my tab, and I

tip more than usual. He sees me to the door.

Before he locks up, we shake hands firmly. It is

Western New Year this week in Chinatown, and we

agree that, this young year, in a world rushing its

children to new wars, the old griefs are sufficient.

In the thicket east of the trestle

old vines, clumped like saplings thick as his arm

barrelled up purple only to drop

six, eight, even ten feet off

in slim green whips that set tendrils

back into the soil.

Through the young brush under those arches,

paths broke into the vault.

If he came too soon after another,

the lesser vines still leaned,

but little fruit was left within his reach.

Coming too long after

meant seeing berries ripe beyond the blades

curved to cut his flesh,

and hunting hard around the edges to find

whatever might have ripened

since the last pickers worked the vines,

berries the birds had skipped

Clusters in full sun

were easiest seen and almost always scant,

their berries baked hard,

wantonly beaked to shreds.

At the edges, easy access meant

slow, meager picking.

This afternoon he paced the thicket edge

considering the yield.

August lay bright on the dusty green leaves.

The spike-and-sickle briers,

the dried, the slashed, and the few still green

knots of berry clusters.

All was aftermath. To have fruit

he must force the vault.

He stooped to peer inside, between the vines,

but till he shaded his eyes

he couldn’t tell the clusters from the shadows...

yes... berries were there—

well guarded, but large and visibly ripe.

If he forced a path on his own,

he might very well fill his empty pail.

He sniffed, curled his lip,

and started stepping down the nearest vines.

The youngest still caught him

and pulled away no worse than noisy zippers.

Those old enough to bear

had hard, curved spurs and sawed his arm

unless he lifted them

with caution, or whipped back across his face,

refusing to hold firm

in the new patterns he tried to weave

when turning them aside

to avoid breaking or splitting the stalks.

Those that wouldn’t yield

he trampled low as he could. More than once

a vine withstood his weight:

his sole slid off; the vine raked back

across his blue-jeaned leg

leaving thorns in the cloth and skin

to be picked out.

Mother might hear him.

But he was getting close. Another yard

of trampling and side-weaving

and he’d be deep enough for good picking.

The vault made high shade

breathing out, as thickets often will,

cooler than it breathed in.

Still he beaded sweat,

and circling gnats lit for water and for blood

between his slaps and twitches.

Hunted as much as hunting, he groped the shade,

avoiding the purple hooks

when he could, and shrugging off the slices

they did take along his arms,

for only a few berries drummed the can:

the bottom quickly blackened

and took the rising harvest silently.

Another trampling move,

and a cluster worth a pint was open to him.

Ripe and overripe,

some fell before the fingertips could close;

others crushed at the touch,

leaving a few spheres among the pulp

to be licked away.

Here in the mottled light, August stained him.

Taking the broken fruit

purpled his tongue and lips. Always among

the firm fruit he found

his fingers dark with mishaps at the vine.

At thicket’s edge, the gnats

raising welts, the briers slashing back

at every move were

unacceptable but, in the opened heart,

were standard August price

on prime fruit taken for a hunger,

to burst across and linger

rich upon the pressing tongue tomorrow.

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Over the past year, Praesidium ran two special issues on the subject of creeping "post-literacy" and the decline of Western culture. For me, journalism always leaps to mind as an illustration of this decline, perhaps because I wasted a year or two in that major once upon a time as an undergraduate. Journalists are not dumb people: on the contrary, I believe they manifest the essential profile of the post-literate literato (which would make them oxymorons rather than morons). They circulate widely at the better soirées, they have attended the better schools, they know bohemian artists and legendary celebrities, they clearly brim with progressive ideas for a better future…they just don’t read, and they don’t think like people who read. They consume the book’s images, but not the book. The images are the book: the new book is the extravaganza of photos on your coffee table. The other day, when American tanks were pausing on their prowl through Baghdad and a young Marine began to blow a handsome bubble from his turret behind a machine gun, Diane Sawyer instantly remarked—instantly, before the little voice in her ear could even bestow creativity—"If anyone out there happens to recognize this soldier, please send us what you know!" Sure enough, interviews with the Marine’s family appeared on the evening news.

The camera pans desultorily, it captures a face, the talking head throws a frame around it, a network of minions is activated to secure guffaws from Ma and Pa behind their pitchforks… these people are good at what they do. They can follow a lead better than the CIA. The difference with their hard-bitten, nicotine-stained progenitors pecking out copy after a day at central booking isn’t that they’re lazy, uninquisitive, or stupid (though a literate person might be stirred to employ all of these words against them): it’s that their news isn’t a body of facts, but an image trailing more images.

The thirst for images comes at a cost in sacrificed truth—not just a swap of one truth for another, but a real sacrifice. The pampered children of the technocracy just don’t understand certain realities from which they have always been insulated. I shall always remember the collapse of the first World Trade Tower in tandem with Peter Jennings’s ludicrously ineffective appeals to his on-site reporter. Watching a monitor, Mr. Jennings plainly couldn’t get his mind around images that didn’t belong on the coffee table. "What’s happening there? Is that smoke?" "No," I recall muttering to myself, "it’s the tower falling, you blind ___!" Now, Jennings is no babe in the woods, at least chronologically. He had no Nintendo when he was in knickers, and he probably read Shakespeare when he was in college. I doubt, though, that he saw much of mortuaries or shanty towns as a cub reporter, and his day’s privilege is our day’s routine. Television journalism (and what remains of print, too), especially on the national scale, is increasingly the province of Ivy Leaguers who couldn’t gas and oil a lawnmower if you put a revolver to their head—let alone discern at a glance if the revolver was loaded. I hate to pick on Diane Sawyer (Katie Couric is too easy a target)… but her running commentary on the Iraqi men who threw a noose around Saddam’s stature in central Baghdad was uproarious. She had them "discussing what to do next" when they were clearly tying a knot and probably (so I guessed) waiting for a pole to push the rope over the left shoulder. Sure enough, a pole appeared a moment later. God forbid that anyone at the news desk should ever have to change a tire!

And what applies to wrenches and winches may be multiplied a hundredfold for bullets and bodies. "Image journalism" may think that it understands violence and death as no variety of reportage before it: after all, Peter and Diane’s generation was reared on Joe Friday and James Bond, and its children on Schwarzenegger and Stallone—as well as, for the youngest, Mortal Kombat. This is a false baptism of fire, however—a baptism of fiery images which choreographs mayhem and distributes death on impact. It is a complete parody of mortal reality. The most prominent characteristic of violence in real life is its utter absence of choreography—its perfect nonsense with respect to the established patterns of living. The most chilling characteristic of death by violence in real life is the wait between impact and exit: the rolling, panicked eyes of the victim, and sometimes the agony of pain which finally retreats into an impenetrable stupor. Nothing could be less appropriate for coffee table or den. How do you run to relatives with images like that in your hand, in your head? You don’t. You lie. You say, "He died in peace. His last thoughts were of you." Joseph Conrad might prepare you a little for times like these: Lethal Weapon and CSI will leave you as exposed to them as a soldier taking a smoke is to a sniper.

Not surprisingly, then, the reporters who went along for the ride in Iraq, "embedded with" so-and-so company, saw a lot more than they bargained for… and a lot less. They saw things instead of images, raw reality instead of sense: sandstorms, sleepless nights, corpses with half a uniform wrapped around pasty red meat, motors assured to split the hardest head with racket and exhaust fumes. Some of these realities yielded no image at all, and some yielded images to which Mom’s Tears Back Home would somehow have been a stale follow-up. For Mom would at least have been alive. It wasn’t the grief—they knew grief inside-out, these reporters. Grief was their stock in trade. After the flood, after the tornado, there was always grief, and they had always caught it in their camera’s lens. This time, though, it was the mystery beyond the grief—way beyond it. Not the grief, but the… the horror. Not even just death, but the fact of death—the deplorable, infuriating, noisome, scarcely thinkable fact that a person with a certain smile, a certain half-dozen photos in his wallet, can end the day looking like a cut of steak on the butcher’s block. They had built their careers (mostly young, blossoming careers) around gathering the emotions on every side of death; but they had only been assigned to stories after death had already struck, just as they had only sped off to Prom or Spring Break after someone else had already tuned their sportscar and rotated the tires. This was not something they had been remotely prepared for. In a post-literate society, reality is seldom that something.

Many of them grew testy. Their mood at official military briefings became downright pugnacious. NBC’s "trophy" Irish redhead, a thick-spectacled "geek" from a glossy magazine, a tremulous but determined young woman from Hong Kong… they all rose in turn and questioned why things weren’t going quicker, going better. They had come to harvest images of children racing to tanks with flowers, and they seemed upset that the military had not supplied the propaganda of a Hollywood set. Disgruntled, they packaged what images they could muster according to the tried-and-true template. Open with fireworks (mortars, tanks, machine guns), state official position ("Coalition spokespersons claim that…"), contradict previous position ("But resistance within the city is likely to be heavy…"), close on an image of poignant ambivalence (soldier gazing into sunset, child wading through rubble). None of this told anybody much of anything: it was "impartial reporting" à la lettre. Of course, to those who affirmed that the day’s events were not shrouded in ambivalence, the "he said/she said" format was not impartial at all. It seemed deliberate subversion—an attempt to erase the undertaking’s overall progress in confusion and fear.

I am not in a position to assess how much of the reporting about the war was indeed motivated by political objectives. Some of it, no doubt. What I stress here, however, is not political bias, but practical ineptitude. The reporting of this war was inept, because the reporters sent to cover it, for the most part, had absolutely no preparation whatever—no knowledge of local languages, no tutelage in regional history or culture, no experience of combat or violent death, no awareness of the labors involved in getting an engine to run—absolutely no preparation whatever for their task. They were indeed babes in the woods. We had all been told beforehand that the war would be covered with a precision and immediacy never before witnessed. What we got, instead, were a lot of spectacular images of tanks firing with sharp recoils, of tracers carouseling through the night, and of machine-gun crews squeezing off rounds into the distance. Precise and immediate? Well, as images go, these gained in unstaged grittiness what they lost in graininess, and they arrived as quickly as the speed of light can overtake a satellite. But the assessment of just what was happening behind and within and beyond the images was miserable. The best reportage on this score actually came from the military—bad news for a free society if we should ever have occasion to fear a massive cover-up from that quarter. The Secretary of Defense, while publishing his suspicion, refused to declare that drums found in a fertilizer plant contained components of nerve gas. Both the suspicion and the resistance of hastiness turned out to be responsible and justified. On the other hand, the Pentagon, while declining to assert that Saddam had been killed in the bombing of April 8, belittled reports that he had escaped to the Russian embassy or Syria. Two BBC reporters were the source of this dissonance, which proved completely misleading. A good print journalist of yesteryear would have ascertained who the reporters were, what organization paid them, what political view their editors supported, how long they had been in Baghdad, whether they had contacts there and spoke the language, etc. No such investigation was ever prosecuted, though most of it could have been done state-side. The resources back at the home office were all engaged in finding the bubblegum-chewer’s mom.

Expect more of the same as we proceed through the twenty-first century—the first century to attempt building an illiterate culture upon the achievements of literacy. Expect "hard news" images that replicate the mawkish displays of sentiment on talk shows or the visual spectacle of Star Wars. Expect the blithering befuddlement of reporters who don’t know which end of a hammer to hold. Expect "analysis" which focuses on the gripes and grumbles roiling the press corps before a briefing—on polls and "world opinion" and "it seems" and "they wonder" rather than on the collection of testimony from witnesses. Expect a kind of sullen daze during "breaking catastrophe" from the prettily primped faces whom wealth and power got into Yale and Vassar, and whose experience of life has been carefully shielded from its greatest horrors. You say that this last condition has nothing distinctly post-literate about it? Not so. It has been known before, but now it will be known more widely than ever—for our new age of unprecedented make-believe allows even the humblest citizen to grow up in a glass bubble.

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At the sight of three teenaged girls congregated around a red convertible in a driveway—and, even more, at their sound, their childish but no longer child-like laughter—Pettijohn accelerated his pace. Though his Thursday evening walk was usually devoted more to gentle reflection than to physical conditioning, he pushed himself until he started to breathe heavily. He knocked out what he imagined to be a boot-camp rhythm. (That fresh peal of laughter at his back… was he its cause? They should be locked up—they should all be locked up!) Today he didn’t want to think, or whatever it was he used to do so luxuriously on these twilit suburban meanders. Gentle reflection... but no, "reflect" was even farther off target than "think" (he reflected). All those satisfied gazes at the new neighborhood’s young shrubs and clean bay windows, all those satisfied images of the Wordsworth conference where he was going to read a paper next month… images, not issues, were his customary companions. Pure fantasy. God, yes—that was what he usually did on his Thursday evening strolls. He fantasized! The discovery shocked him almost into jogging. At all costs, he must not begin fantasizing.

Around and around the kitchen they sparred, he gulping down his drink and rinsing out the empty can (he had a horror of sticky cans), she searching for a hot pad and then slamming the salt shaker down on the range. "I’m going to get my shower—I’ll help Marshall after supper," he said, throwing in the towel… almost. And then, on his way out of the ring, "To hell with my lesson plans. To hell with getting tenure. I’ll just lose this job, too, and then you can work two shifts in the surgery ward while I cook and do the kids’ homework."

As he raked shampoo through his thinning hair, he realized that there was no chance of… of what he had been thinking about. Of what he had been trying to make himself think about as a way to keep from thinking, from fantasizing. He just wasn’t interested. When Cheryl got bitchy (and she stayed that way most of the time nowadays), she just plain turned him off. She still had a little bit of her figure left, and she was still cute when she laughed (as well as he recalled: she had laughed as recently as last Christmas). Anyway, he was no gorgeous hunk of manhood himself (he admitted with a rueful gaze down his white ventral: the only virtue of those splayed toes was to signal that his fortyish paunch was somewhat in check). And anyway… since when did a woman have to be ravishing to be desirable? If she were just a woman, and especially if she were just your wife…. And anyway, since when did she even have to be pleasant? He recalled a self-styled Marxist revolutionary in grad school, her face permanently sour, her dark eyes permanently smoldering, her semi-permanent turtlenecks permanently advertising those compact, firm breasts, so that even when the veil came off, the mystique of its obstruction lingered….

No, no, no! He turned the lever to full cold and shrieked under the icy spray. He had to chase them away, those breasts. Not the revolutionary’s, but… and to think that he had her in class again tomorrow! No chance of a Spring cold snap, according to the weather (he had already consulted the forecast): another low-cut dress for sure, or maybe even a tank top. And there she’d be sitting in the front row, as she always was—front and center, right smack over the edge of his rostrum.

It was then and there that Pettijohn decided to show a film in British Romantic Literature. He could sit in the back of the room with his fingers curled over a remote stick. He could pause the tape from time to time and make pithy comments. So much for lesson plans.

As he toweled off, he became aware that Marshall was about to catch what-for from the strain in Olivia’s plaintive voice—the note she always used to indict her brother for willfully creating distraction. Sure enough, Cheryl double-teamed the poor bugger on cue. No doubt about it, he couldn’t lay a hand on Cheryl tonight—not even if she miraculously cast off her exhaustion and ill humor. She was getting on his nerves too much. It was one thing to be unpleasant, but her… her mean-spiritedness strangled every trace of desire within him. Just as well, really. The best way to handle this present crisis was probably not to work up his appetite in the mistaken notion that he was quenching it. The monks who’d burrowed into cold stone vaults like Tintern Abbey’s had it right—they knew a thing or two, after wrestling with the problem for a few hundred years. The best way to rein it in was to go cold turkey.

He drew a deep sigh, and headed for the dinette’s battleground. He could already see Olivia pouting over her math. How her face had filled out in the last year! Over her militantly folded arms, he noticed, as if for the first time, the bulge of her blossoming breasts through a sweatshirt. He decided then and there that if he ever caught her going to school in a tank top, he’d drag her by her hair into her room and lock the door. No man deserved to be put through that, least of all a poor teacher trying to gather his ideas. He decided, too, that he would forbid her to keep company with those girls down the street in the convertible… and then he realized that they were far beyond her in their three or four years of superior maturity. What a horrible, sudden transition it was—a decline quicker than AIDS, or even MS. One day, your baby girl finds a pink bicycle in the garage on Christmas morning. The next, she’s nuzzling up to her professor in shirts cut down to the pink. His face became so gloomy that a strange quiet descended over the kitchen table just as he was bracing himself for action.

For the past few days, they seemed always to have something for supper that made him fidget. Last night it was ravioli. The night before that, Marshall had built himself a vanilla ice cream cone for dessert with an ostentatious curl at the dollop’s crest. Little swine! Tonight it was new potatoes, sleek and shiny in butter sauce, their golden flesh swelling from their tight brown jackets. Pettijohn tried spearing them vindictively: that only made it worse. But he couldn’t discern any improvement when, instead, he tenderly halved them, exposing the white meat inside beneath rising veils of moist heat. He gave up and moved on to the peas.

Cheryl, of course, noticed his fidgeting. She wouldn’t have noticed if he had announced that he was going to climb the ladder to the top of the house and throw himself off, but this she noticed. She was very reliable in that regard. "I thought you liked new potatoes. I made them just because you like them. You don’t just throw those things in the microwave, you know—they don’t just come in a cellophane pouch."

"Why not? Everything else does," he grumbled, lancing three at once and stuffing them into his face. Again he was amazed that he could sound so surly while feeling timid to the verge of paralysis inside.

"You sure have been in a foul mood this week," rasped Cheryl. No one was better than she at turning an olive branch into a big stick—and, naturally, she had not hesitated to exploit the advantage of his mouth being stuffed. All he could do was sigh heavily and roll his eyes.

"Can I have another ice cream cone?" asked Marshall.

"No!" he snapped through potato-mush, though the question had not been directed to him.

"Finish your supper first, and we’ll see," soothed Cheryl, her barbs reserved for the glower she turned upon him. Pettijohn realized too late that he had just elbowed Marshall—even Marshall—into her camp. She was going to exploit that, too. He couldn’t contain himself any longer.

"Maybe I have a right to be in a foul mood. Okay, so I sit down most of the day. That’s not true, as a matter of fact. You try delivering three hours of lectures a day, and see how your feet feel." It wasn’t anything like three hours, and he seldom lectured at all… but to hear her talk, you’d never guess that she took coffee breaks, and he happened to know that she took a good many. "But forget about the classes. You think it’s easy sitting through those meetings, trying to stay awake and look like you care—you think that’s easy, don’t you? Go ahead, say so. You make fun of it all the time. You think it’s easy. Why? Because it’s all so stupid? Because it’s all such a waste of time? Because we all just run our mouths and never get anything done? You think that’s easy?"

Pettijohn was momentarily arrested by the thought that what he had just described did, after all, sound definitively easy. With his fork poised in mid-air to secure a rhetorical keystone, he searched the wicker shelves of running plant vines for his next word. He dare not look anyone in the face.

"Of course it’s easy! That’s just it—that’s what makes it so hard! I went to school for half of my adult life so that I could spend the other half sitting in meetings! I’m a highly trained professional who has to tiptoe around all of the authors he dreamed of teaching because a bunch of spoiled brats might find them boring! Whether I get to stay at this job or have to sell my house and drag my family off somewhere else is decided by how un-bored my brats are and by how bright-eyed and bushy-tailed I can look while sitting through hours and hours of… utter crap! And then I get to come home and try to explain to my wife how it is that I work hard all day when I just sit back listening to crap and spouting crap—"

"I wish you’d stop using that word," winced Cheryl. "Or do you want to be called from one of your important meetings because Marshall’s sitting in the principal’s office about to get expelled?"

"Oh, Mom! They wouldn’t expel me for saying that! Anyway, I wouldn’t say it where a teacher could hear me."

Pettijohn noticed that Olivia was tittering. He thought of the three teenaged girls and the convertible again: yes, it was starting.

"So what kind of Gestapo mentality is there at that school?" he protested weakly (he felt weak inside, but his voice continued to sound lusty). "Next thing you know, they’ll want to say a prayer in the morning over the intercom."

"It happens to be the only alternative to public school that we can pay for, that’s what kind of school it is," countered Cheryl, twisting his question. "And I don’t mind one bit that they’re concerned about foul language. Or maybe you think that Finn Kleist is an example of what you’d like our son to be."

"Finn Kleist!" laughed Pettijohn.

"You think that’s funny? Have you forgotten that note I found in Marshall’s jeans last month?"

"No, I was just… Finn Kleist. The first fruits of multiculturalism. His name. It’s… it’s half…."

But Pettijohn was silenced by two gestures. One was the contemptuous wave of the hand which all his pedantry attracted from his wife. The other was the moist stare which Olivia had riveted upon her potatoes. What in hell was she thinking of? What did she know about dirty notes and boys like Finn?

"Finn’s okay," continued Marshall glibly—not at all the right tone to adopt at this moment, especially with his mother. Why did girls learn about men so much faster than boys learned about women? "He’s never gotten into trouble. Not… you know, officially. Not very often."

"He was suspended last fall—they should have kicked him out permanently!"

"Well, not for language."

"That’s not what Matthew’s mother told me."

"What… that he was suspended for bad words? That’s a lie, Mom!"

"She told me that he got kept after school for what he said on his oral report."

Pettijohn, though keeping his silence now, squirmed at the word "oral". He shot a furious look down at Olivia, who was still examining the place mat.

"But that wasn’t his fault, Mom! That was so unfair! I mean, Ms. Calvert was the one who assigned him to do Romulus and Remus… you know, the Greek guys who were brought up by a wolf, and when they were babies they—"

"THAT’S ENOUGH!" roared Pettijohn. He had surprised himself yet again, along with everyone else at the table; but this time, the hostility he felt inside was equal to that of his voice.

Working the plaster of Paris for Marshall’s science project was therapeutic, by comparison. He had been avoiding it all week long (the thought of shaping little white volcanoes lovingly with spatula and fingers, one after another, sent his fantasizing into overdrive). In the oddest sort of way, however, he found his anxiety released. After about five minutes, he was no longer even trying to suppress the images of Amada’s generously exposed sternum and the sugarloaf hills which rose in tandem from a wide, rich plain. He daydreamed himself back into his office on Monday just after class, where Amada had followed him with a trace of steal tension in her mindless prattle. Frankly, he, too, had been a bit shocked by the poverty of her first major essay. She seemed to read most of the assignments (a rarity) and to talk about them in class with genuine sensitivity (a wonder of the world). She even possessed substantial knowledge of related texts not on the syllabus (a miracle): she had all the signs of being an honest-to-goodness lover of fine literature. Yet her essay had been a sloppy mess, both conceptually and visually. She hadn’t taken the minimal pride in her work to type it up after marking out entire lines of the handwritten version and scrawling replacement lines in the margins. That much he might have forgiven, if only what emerged were tinged with brilliance. On the contrary, it was mired in platitude and generality. If he hadn’t already known from class discussion that she did the reading, the essay would have convinced him that she was bluffing her way through the course, for its argument had no acuity whatever, and textual illustrations were absent except in the most elliptical form ("… like the death wishes in Shelley and Keats" had been the closest thing to a primary reference).

Then, in the middle of his shuffling papers on the desk and trying to break the news that she was one lousy writer, she had pulled the empty chair all the way across the room to his left side. Her knees were jammed against the desk’s drawers, so he couldn’t very well ask her to lean forward. He had had to hold the paper between them, on the arm of his swivel chair; and there, as near to his hands as her highly perfumed cheek was to his nose, had been those succulent breasts. He could actually see inside the lower-than-low-cut dress—he could see everything. He had felt so disturbed that he couldn’t put a single sentence together. At any cost, by any means, he had had to disrupt the scene before the restlessness in his lap became visible.

But now, safely sprawled on the den carpet with his head propped on a palm, Pettijohn revisited the scene and slipped the dress down from Amada’s shoulders. He sculpted her breasts over and over, caressing the plaster with thumb and spatula until it ran high and smooth and firm. Only when Marshall began to come after him and gouge out volcanic calderas with a pencil did he feel a frown creeping over his face.

"This looks really neat, Dad!"

He was about to say something—just what it was, he had no very clear notion. But the first words never left his lips. He happened to glimpse Cheryl’s feet beside the sofa, and peeked up from under his brows. Her mouth, too, was open, as if it too couldn’t find that first word to express a horrified indignation. Nervously, he glanced back at his mounds. They were plump, round, and supple—not exactly the raggedly devastated slopes of Vesuvius or St. Helen’s.

"This stuff is kind of… kind of sagging as it dries, Marsh," he stammered. "Be sure to make it look… you know, more like the pictures in your book. In your science book… your geography book."

"Shouldn’t you be making your lesson plans now?" he heard Cheryl ask dryly over his head.

"Oh, umm… made them already. In the shower."

"In the shower."

"Yeah. I get lots of ideas in the shower."

"How about that! Must be the sound of water going down the drain."

If only he had been able to do something equally therapeutic as he lay in bed trying to sleep… but by that time, three hours later, Pettijohn found himself unwelcomely awake and agitated. Just what exactly was he going to say to Amada tomorrow? He might be able to avoid in class the bust that was normally thrust under his nose just beyond the rostrum (and which he had noticed, of course, long before this week—but it had never been a threat to his job, his marriage, and his sanity before this week). How, though, would he avoid her—would he avoid them, those two beautiful balloons—after class? On Monday, he had fled from her to the secretary’s office after faking an urgent phone call, and on Wednesday he had deliberately scheduled other conferences for his morning office hour. But nothing was lined up for tomorrow… and even if he improvised something, how long could he keep dodging her before she complained to Stew Utley? And then he thought of the advice that "Studs" himself—the chair of the English Department, no less—had once bestowed upon him in another context. Give the students all A’s and B’s throughout the semester so that you get good evaluations, then murder them on a killer final exam that counts 40% of the grade and spares you a reproach from the Dean for contributing to grade inflation. (Pettijohn had protested, "What if they come back for revenge next semester?"… to which the one-time radical had replied, with an "old boy" cynicism that was meant to be anti-establishment, don’t-give-a-damn hipness, "They won’t, Raymond! Why should they get shafted a second time just to give you the shaft?")

Well, something like that might work here. Just tell Amada to retype her paper—tell her it’s too messy, to make some of the changes recommended in the margins. Then give her an A-. She’d be off his back and out of his face: goodbye to any further little tête-à-teats in his office For there was never any doubt in Pettijohn’s mind that Amada’s interest in him went precisely as far as his grade book. She was blackmailing him. Her double-barreled gun was forcing him into some kind of career-ending indiscretion, and the price of release was an A. He wasn’t stupid—he knew what was going on here!

The morning was blessedly hectic. He had hardly time enough to drink his coffee, what with straightening out the mess in Marshall’s hair and clearing away the remains of breakfast (Cheryl having charged off bright and early to the hospital: how come her microwaved suppers were hard labor while his frenetic maneuvers at breakfast were unworthy of notice?). There was certainly not a moment to spare upon any apprehensive brooding about Amada and her bow chasers… not, at least, until he was nestled behind his desk with the door safely locked. This was usually his favorite time, a period not scheduled as an office hour and when, indeed, most professors and students were still groggily rolling out of bed. In past years, he had often volunteered to take the eight o’clock class so as to curry favor with everyone around the department; but now that the time to apply for tenure was looming, he needed to think seriously about publishing an article or two: hence this very private spell at the beginning of the day (or what was, around campus, the day’s beginning).

Today, with his video on Lord Byron safely reserved and his notes on Wordsworth’s sister neatly assembled before him, Pettijohn found that he could do absolutely nothing. Nothing but think. It wasn’t even fantasizing any more—he had worked his way through all that. No, it was closer to a genuine reflection upon his mortal coil. A genuinely melancholic reflection. Maybe sullen, as well. Here he was, about to exorcise a voluptuous young woman from his life so that he could settle back into his stultifying grind… and why was the exorcism (about whose success he had no doubts whatever) required of him? Why was his face being rubbed in his own impotence? Naturally, he couldn’t lock the door behind the two of them, clear his desk at one sweep of the arm, and crawl over the well-worn surface into Amada’s luscious embrace… naturally. Even if she were not just teasing him and would really have him, the risk to his career would be incalculable. And he wasn’t quite ready to confront the prospect of being a perfect heel in a divorce suit, either. Quite ready? He wasn’t even preparing for it—it wasn’t going to enter his mind. He was going to do the right thing: he already knew he was. He had known that from the start. That was what saddened him, what irritated him. Somewhere over the last ten years, he had surrendered himself to being boxed up in oppressive duties which would never more allow him to consult his own happiness, first and foremost. In a significant sense, his life was over. Amada, with her low-cut dresses and tight-fitting shirts, had made him see that. Would she have dared to dangle her riches before his nose if she hadn’t well known that his hands were shackled? She was like a strumpet queen blowing kisses at galley slaves.

The result of this meditative hour was Pettijohn’s decision that he detested Amada, perhaps more than he had ever detested anyone in his life.

The real Amada who settled quietly into the front row compared favorably with the one he had briefly imagined slapping in the face. She was wearing a dress again: in fact, she usually wore a dress. Here was one girl, at least, who had never worn a tank top to his class. (He would have noticed; but then, maybe that was why. The casement window was enough—neon lighting would actually have been a distraction from the merchandise.) One could almost say that there was something vaguely traditional about her tastes and manners. The dress’s thin fabric fell well below her knees. The problem was that it also fell almost below her nipples, whose more than ample mountings were held nestled together like hands at once praying for and offering heaven. By the time he had finished taking attendance (with Amada & Company being checked off first), Pettijohn had forgotten all about his righteous loathing. He even felt something melt within as she dealt him that sweet smile, that rather homely smile exaggerated by a slight overbite which became oddly sweet as it contemplated the full masses beneath it. She seemed at times, almost, a naïve country lass bearing blue-ribbon produce back from the fair in her arms: "See how big? The judges hardly looked at the others. Want to touch?"

Pettijohn actually found himself in good spirits as he slyly extolled Don Juan’s saucy delights (hoping to tempt the group into reading the next assignment) before retreating to the back of the room with his remote control. The rest of the hour was dedicated to a scenic tour of Greece and an "in-depth" examination of Lord Byron’s last days: The Travel Channel and The History Channel, basically. (His sense of irony had turned so spicy by now that he smiled over the absurdity of the department’s heavy reliance on these videos after years of undermining the historical approach to literature: too bad he had no one with whom to share the saline morsel. He glanced left and right… no. Not a chance.)

As class ended and he gathered his papers, he remarked vociferously to nobody in particular that he had to get the video back to the library. Amada didn’t make the least effort to detain him or to follow him. Could he really have wriggled off the hook so easily? As incredible as it seemed, he now felt saddened by her indifference, even a little hurt. An hour ago, he had wanted to lift his chin, point his finger out the door, and cry, "Go clothe yourself, you slut!" Now he was stung by the oddest sense of having been betrayed.

The injury evaporated—vaporized instantly in one flashbulb flicker—when, ten minutes later, he turned down his office’s corridor and discovered Amada leaning on his locked door. Already she was unfurling that demure smile which vaguely pointed at her bust (but what didn’t point at her bust, including the smoke alarm and the door stopper?). He fumbled for his keys as he fumbled for words.

"Can we talk about my paper now, Dr. Pettijohn?"

"I… sure, I… if you could just retype it… I mean, type it… maybe a few marginal comments… my comments in the margins, I mean… make a few adjustments…."

But it was hopeless. He couldn’t get rid of her in the hall. What was he going to say—"I’ll give you an A, just leave me alone"?

His damned fumbling incurred a further penalty. As he looked beyond his desk into thin air, trying to impose order on his thoughts while holding his swivel chair’s back in a kind of minuet, she grabbed the free chair and plopped it right beside him once again. Her initiative left him speechless. All he could do was gape; and as he gaped, his eyes sank irresistibly into the chasm between those ripely swollen glories of the flesh. When he caught himself and glanced back up to her eyes, he was absolutely certain that she had been spying out what he was spying on. She smiled more broadly than ever, leaned forward, and elevated her creaseless young throat.

"Uh…." Pettijohn turned away, coughing on his own saliva. It was then that he noticed his wide-open door. Maybe he should close it. Yes, by all means… but he had no sooner reached for it than he abandoned the effort. The fear of being observed with a luscious, unbodiced tart in his lap was squelched by the thought of what Amada might do to him—of what she might do with him, might make him do with her—if they were shut up together.

He heaved an enormous sigh, then plunged into his chair with all the adroit determination of a fireman sliding down a pole.

"So… so, what’s on the menu? I mean…"

"You said you’d explain to me why I got a C."

"Yes, well, I… are my comments not clear?"

"No. You said you would explain them."

"Oh. Well… well, let’s see what I wrote here. Umm. Umm. ‘Almost utter…’." Pettijohn cleared his throat again, and tried to blink away something like spots before his eyes: the word was utter. "‘Almost utter absence of reference to primary sources…’."

"But you said this wasn’t a research paper, that it was just our own ideas."

"Yes, that would be secondary sources. Citing scholarship, I mean, would be secondary sources. Use of… secondary sources. What you need to do here is to pluck… er, to pull a few lines from the poets you discuss and—"

"But it’s supposed to be my thoughts!"

For the first time, Pettijohn gathered something like poise. More precisely, he was struck mute by the obtuse petulance of the objection, and he found in his bewilderment a tiny trace of that former ill humor.

"But… but Amada," he frowned, for once looking straight into her deep brown eyes, "these thoughts of yours are to be about the poetry we’ve read."

She didn’t give an inch: in fact, her obtuseness grew more profound. "They are about the poetry! Why should I just quote stuff that anyone can look up in the book? You want me just to pad my paper like that? I guess Teila was right."

"I… what? Teila?"

"She told me just to cram the paper with a lot of stuff copied out of the book. But I said, ‘No, he wants our own original thoughts.’"

"I… I do! But… but you are thinking about something, right? So you have to show how your thoughts relate to that something that… that you’re thinking about…."

There they were again. If she had positioned two thugs in brass knuckles at her shoulders, he couldn’t have been more distracted.

She must have known exactly what his thoughts currently related to; because, without a word, she leaned toward his lap (how had the paper gotten there? he hadn’t even noticed) and turned back a page, forcing her cleavage right beneath his nose. Pettijohn felt a sort of "what’s the use" swoon begin to descend upon him. In another second, he would have been running his lips up and down those sweet slopes like a desert castaway gulping water at an oasis. At that very instant, however, Gwyn Thomas came prancing down the hall warbling Robin Goch with so many Welsh trills that the tune’s simple harmony somehow escaped. Pettijohn could identify the precise moment when his voice was magnified in the open doorway. Professor Thomas never missed a trill; but the next time he piped the refrain, it was translated into the oppressor’s tongue. "Robin Redbreast, sweet and wild…"

As he withdrew his lips to a safe distance from the limpid pools in his double mirage, Pettijohn found Amada smiling coyly at his eyelids—almost conspiratorially, as if to answer back in song, "People will say we’re in love." For the first time, he remarked how moist and bright her teeth were.

"I really like talking with you," she lisped. "I learn so much!"

He couldn’t take any more. He groaned, shut his eyes tight, and fell heavily back in his chair.

"I was just going to show you this passage," he heard her persisting. "I thought it was one of my best, but you marked it all up."

"Which one is that, Amada?" he droned, still squeezing his lids shut.

"The one where I talk about how the Romantics refused to be enslaved to convention. They were different—they were themselves. Everything they did asserted their independence. They were the beginning of the modern era. In many ways, we are their children. The freedoms we have today are all founded on their will to be free. If it weren’t for them, we would still have marriages arranged by our parents, and the institution of slavery."

Of this, too, Pettijohn could take no more. It was enough to be stitched up tight in a winding sheet and made to witness a strip show as colleagues passed smirking up and down the hall. But his mind, his mind remained unfettered and functional, and he just couldn’t sit still for any more glitter-sprinkled, cliché-wrapped folderol. He wouldn’t. Freedom, yes—he was a free man, though he be shot for declaring the truth. He might have to take this kind of crap from a full class after studying a decade to render himself wise; he might have to swallow large shovelfuls of it at committee and faculty meetings, and then ask for more with a smile. But enough was enough. Something was flowing over, and he wasn’t going to hold it in for this little twit. Even if twit rhymed with another monosyllable highly relevant to Amada, the word that best described her—that really described her, and not just doubled, but squared and cubed—was twit.

"In the first place, our freedoms, as you call them, are primarily an outgrowth of the Enlightenment. Politically, that is. The exchanges which produced them were those between Enlightenment thinkers. Chronologically, it is impossible and ridiculous to maintain that they were a product of Romanticism. In the second place, the Romantics—as I keep trying to tell you guys in class to no avail—were themselves children of the Enlightenment. Why do you think we talked about the sublime all last month? Where do you think that concept came from? Where did I say it came from—no, not me; where did Wordsworth and Coleridge say it came from? It’s not a matter of your opinion here. I’m sorry, but it’s not. You can’t change history. It just didn’t happen that way. In the third place, there was a fierce reaction to Romanticism, and especially in modernism. You can’t just declare that we are their children because you’ve seen news reels of hippies with flowers in their hair. I know you probably haven’t studied those periods yet, except in your survey courses—but why are you even writing about them? This course isn’t about those periods. You’re supposed to be writing about the Romantic Period. For crying out loud, what do you mean rambling on and on about the twentieth century?"

Pettijohn was surprised to discover himself leaning forward in his chair—half risen from it, in fact—and confronting Amada full in the face once more, with a finger raised oratorically over his head. The girl’s features, momentarily but unmistakably, were indeed those of a girl—a child like his daughter, pouting, confused, and intimidated. He was startled that her mouth could sag so and still produce no wrinkles about the corners.

"But Dr. Utley said we were Romantics. He said that’s what the sixties were all about."

For some reason, Pettijohn rose the rest of the way from his chair, fitting a palm carefully over his brow. "Ah… Dr. Utley."

"What’s a news reel?"

"What?"

But either the question had merely been floated to elicit a turn in her direction, or else she had already forgotten about it. She rose to meet him, almost straight into his arms, her plump, thinly veiled cones not two inches from his shirt. Strange… as he looked irresistibly down upon her treasures, he felt tears welling in his eyes. These would never, could never be his.

"So there’s nothing I can do? Because I’m young, and was born too late, and haven’t had these other courses, and haven’t read all the books you’ve read, and didn’t pull stuff out of the book… then I’m just going to have to get a C?"

Miserably, he looked about for her paper—where in hell had it gone? If only he could kiss them goodbye, like Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, just one long goodbye kiss for each one….

"Are you looking for this?"

"Uh… yeah. Just retype it, Amada. I mean, just… just type it out. It’s… it’s almost illegible. I can’t give an A to a paper that’s illegible."

"Then if I type it, I’ll get an A?"

"Um… sure, probably. Let’s just see you try to answer some of those comments I made."

"I can do that!" she said smartly. He had been moping about trying to avoid a frontal view of her. Now that she was fluttering away like Tinkerbelle, he almost lifted a hand to detain her. The decisive swish of her dress betrayed no inclination to linger. In a tingle of plate jewelry—a charm bracelet and earrings (somehow he’d never noticed them before)—she shook back her thickly waved hair, already at his door, and turned one last time.

"Thanks, Dr. Pettijohn! I really appreciate it! You’re a great teacher!"

She said all this quite loud enough to be heard up and down the corridor, almost as though she were the pleased patron in a car commercial. It was his payback, perhaps (his tit for tat, he mused bitterly). Though his feet seemed glued to the carpet, the rest of his body strained after the swish and tingle as they withdrew into the distance. Not five seconds had elapsed before he heard Amada’s satisfied-customer voice chirp once more, "Hey, Dr. Utley!"

"Hi, Maddie!" said "Studs" effusively.

Pettijohn didn’t like something in his tone. He could just imagine Studs, proud owner of a Harley-Davidson, inviting "Maddie" to climb up behind him in a tone like that. He decided that he absolutely had to see the face which accompanied the greeting.

Flinging himself out the door with sudden energy, Pettijohn nevertheless came stalking down the serpentine hallway’s curl too late to catch the backwash of one more swish—but Studs was posed like a piece of driftwood pointing the direction of the tide’s last ebb, his yellowed teeth hanging hungrily out his gray beard, his tall, incredibly lean frame almost coiled around the next corner. His tongue was manufacturing some kind of clicking sound from behind those gaunt teeth. Pettijohn decided that if he ever heard anyone emitting a sound like that after the passage of Olivia, he would kick the culprit in the crotch. Of course, Olivia wasn’t going to hang around places like… like university English departments.

"Raymond, dear boy, you look positively deathly!"

It was Gwyn Thomas. He had padded noiselessly from the direction of Studs’s gaze, his own dark Welsh eyes rolling somewhat more discreetly back toward the main hall. His height a mere fraction of their department chair’s, his compact paunch as well groomed in cardigan and blazer as Studs’s fence-rail limbs shabbily filled their denim and flannel, Professor Thomas nonetheless perfectly completed this pair of Saturnine bookends….

Or so it seemed to Pettijohn. He sighed and continued to glare at Studs, who had not yet so much as acknowledged his presence. How he would have liked to grab the "dude" by his long gray pony-tail!

"Our colleague stands in great need of the looming summer holiday," continued Thomas, feeling out his pants pockets without interrupting the perfect creases. He was gazing philosophically at the carpet, yet Pettijohn could tell by the way his sleek head bent toward Studs that the comment was addressed there, and that its subject was him.

"I could use a vacation myself," murmured Studs behind his horrid teeth, not visibly moving a muscle.

"Get on the bike and head west, eh?" murmured Thomas back: he might have been a priest taking a confession.

"Yeah. Something like that."

"Mm. To my mind, your Rocky Mountains are altogether too… rocky."

"North Wales for you."

"Oh, most definitely, dear boy! There the hills are round and gentle. The mists have wrapped them and caressed them until they wear their rich verdure like a baby’s down. One may tarry among them for hours without growing weary, passing easily to the crest and easily to the valley. For the valleys are also sweet. The mists leave a bead on every grass blade as they trail across the rounded bryn, and the beads flow like a gentle perspiration, and their rivulets wind to the valleys like silver arteries."

"I like my arteries to be moving a little faster." Studs’s facétie slightly startled Pettijohn: the voice of Gwyn Thomas had cast a Merlin-like spell over him.

"One cannot become one with things in haste, dear boy. Many have tried to conquer those hills, but they must be stroked and wooed. He who would come rudely with fire and sword is doomed to stumble into a pwll, or to be devoured by the dragon of the cave."

"Stay out of the caves, is that what you’re saying?"

"Indeed, there is only one way out of a cave, and that is the way in. One enters in conquest, one exits in rout."

"Mm. Stay out of the caves. I take your point."

If Pettijohn could have melted into the newly painted wall, he would have done so. As it was, he managed literally to walk backward in his tracks, always (so he believed) just beyond the border of Gwyn Thomas’s low, abstracted, vatic gaze. Finally he slipped from their view. He turned, followed the corridor to its other end, and mashed the elevator button. He realized belatedly that he had left his office wide open… but what did it matter? He needed some fresh air, and who in this place was likely to steal his Collected Works of Leigh Hunt? As the electric door shut seamlessly upon him and the capsule began its silent, two-story descent, he was again too late in regretting that he had not sought out the stairs. Though the transit was mild, he was nevertheless so overwhelmed by a sudden flutter in his stomach that he fell heavily against the padded wall. With the hard, reassuring pressure between his shoulder blades, he had just time enough to fish out his handkerchief—though not dexterity enough to catch all of his breakfast orange juice in it. He gazed distantly, penitently, at the brilliant, bubbly spatter between his shoes as he folded the kerchief with extreme care. When the door opened upon a virtually empty lobby, he decided to step over the mess and say nothing about it.

back to Contents

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When a nameless Iraqi citizen, asked what he expected would be the consequences of American intervention, jubilantly exclaimed, "Democracy, whiskey, and sexy!" he was probably not very wide of the mark. (And he might have added "mangled English" to the list.) It is not our place in this journal to opine (as Secretary Rumsfeld would say) upon the political implications of current events. Yet somebody somewhere (as Homer would say) really ought to remark the sad irony of the situation. Certain elements of Western culture apparently retain enough common humanity to risk life and limb that innocent non-combatants and children on the other side of the world may be freed from a psychopathic tyrant—and, yes, also enough reason to gauge the long-term effects of trusting in a psychopathic tyrant’s turning reasonable. But the West is crumbling, and has been so for a century. Internal critics of its humanity and its reason are, of course, incapable of appreciating the nature of this decay, since their refrain is precisely that nothing unites human beings, least of all rational discourse. So as our more optimistic brethren warm themselves in the prospect of a dawning renaissance, our gloomier brethren wear themselves out trying to ask Hamlet-like questions without having read Hamlet (or having read him as gay or Oedipal or a chocoholic). The former cannot see that new economic prosperity and new political freedom do not necessarily mean new life for the spirit, and the latter, being fiercely and definitively resistant to the very notion that things spiritual exist, can only cavil that so-an-so is getting such-and-such a sweet deal on oil-drilling rights.

Indeed, on the home front, the "Nothing’s either bad or good" crowd has been instrumental in maximizing Hollywood’s opportunities to degrade our taste and in hazing our children to "experiment" during their college years. The very people who did not want us to "intrude" in Iraq, that is, are closely allied with the degenerative cultural trends which, more than any other single factor, have rendered the West odious to the Muslim world. The very people who pushed ahead to free Iraq, on the other hand, are most likely to adhere to some sort of religiously based resistance to Hollywood and campus libertinage here at home… and yet, their initiative has indeed provided a wedge for "the enemy" to peddle porn and booze in Baghdad (as well as the all-American Coke-and-Big-Mac).

Who can blame the average Iraqi for getting his cheer wrong? Maybe, just maybe, he got it right.

There are times when it is impossible to tell a story blow by blow. Sometimes several things are happening over the same period; and sometimes these same things are not so much happening as evolving, each of them the cause of the others in certain ways, each of them the others’ effect, as well. Spring Break was a descent into a valley of swirling mists, where landmarks seemed to change shape or position—or simply vanish—by the moment. For this golden hour, Celine and Meg and I were eating in a public place as merrily as three sailors on leave in Paradise. For that gray hour, I found myself walking with Celine’s hand in mine and yet unable to follow her gaze or understand her lengthy silences. For a black hour without name or number in the dead of night, I sat wide awake in my bed at home after bolting, cold with sweat, out of a dream, wondering if I would ever see Celine again, yearning to race instantly over to her apartment. Who could be surprised that we were both topsy-turvy? Meg was a blessing to us… but my mother had laid her unspoken curse upon our union. We had finally broken somewhat free of malignant parental influences… but what other friends or relatives did we have in the world? I understood Celine’s past infinitely better after Mona had filled me in, and I had helped Celine to see the pitiful delusion behind my mother’s animosity… but what chance had we of ever bringing peace where so much frustration had festered for so long? We had perhaps learned too much too quickly. It was paralyzing, terrifying, oppressive, and… and something else, something we certainly didn’t expect and something no theorist of the human mind has ever touched on, as far as I know.

We were aroused, physically. We began to want each other as never before—to want to possess and be possessed by each other’s bodies. In the afterglow of Meg’s angelic descent into our complicated lives, we restrained ourselves; but later, on Monday or Tuesday evening, our golden threesome now a star abandoned in another hemisphere, the two of us began to grow intense. We groped and wrestled, and our hands traveled everywhere. Celine had often been a somewhat uneven collaborator in our kisses: she would sometimes seek me out and draw me in, but she would more commonly just throw her head back and offer her lips to me. Now she searched as she surrendered and took as she gave. She was on fire, and she set me on fire. We both struggled like pearl divers at the bottom of the sea, mere seconds away from blackout, our eyes three-quarters closed and useless in the murk, our fingers ransacking shadows for the prize. And when we came back up for air at last, there was no joy in our hearts, but exhaustion and an indescribable sweet sadness.

This will all strike any citizen of the contemporary world as comic, and I won’t deny that it has that dimension when viewed at a distance. Parental rejection as an aphrodisiac: what a delicious irony, and what a biblically ancient one! But ancient as it is, it remains, as I’ve said, undiscussed with any seriousness as part of today’s great social crisis. At least, I myself would never have suspected how my parents’ spurning of my fiancée could end up whetting my appetite for her. As long as I could see Celine and me harmoniously following the pattern of my mom and dad, I regarded her with that quasi-mystical reverence that I’ve already described. We no more needed sex education or sexual exploration than generations of ancestors before us: they had always found out how to keep the line alive, and we would, too, once formally admitted into their ranks. The continuity of history made sexual rebellion, above all else, ugly. We were waiting (or I was waiting) for absorption into the beauty of marriage as a natural cycle, a music of the spheres. We would unite in a fertile explosion perfectly on cue as long as the rhythm was observed on all sides.

But this era had banished rhythm. Even my immovably wedded parents had failed miserably to recognize the importance of physical chemistry to spiritual union. They seemed to think (or my mother seemed to think, with Dad pleading no contest) that I could be reasoned out of my present attachment and persuaded to hold out for more money, better social connections. In an atmosphere like this, sex has always run wild outside marital bonds. Celine, of course, had even less cause than I to hear any mystical harmony descending through the ages. Her parents’ marriage had labored almost from the start, as I learned from Mona by the end of the week, and I had known for some while that she felt herself excluded from her mother’s second marriage. The institution was anything but a picture of permanence to her: it was, on the contrary, the kiss of death to loving ties. Had she sometimes held back ever so slightly, so subconsciously, from my kisses because she felt them drawing her up to some kind of pedestal rather than down to instant gratification? That gratification would have brought the death of desire, true… but it would have been an honest, straightforward death, and seldom (she could hope) a permanent one. Desire could always revive. The fall from the pedestal, however, would be far and catastrophic. The pieces would never fit back together again. Much as she wanted a family and stability, she had a fear of marriage which very much resembled a fear of heights.

And so she caught fire as she felt me heating up, and I caught fire, in return. This, I realized, was the kind of love she had known with men before—especially with Richard, that other Richard. I knew it would end up drawing her back into the fatal cycle of fleeting joys and ultimate disillusion—not that I would ever have wearied of her. But I could sense that I myself was being drawn into a ride down the maelstrom whose circles were ever narrower, and I was not quite vain enough to believe that I might not end up bearing the other Richard’s image in some way that I could neither foresee nor—once it overtook me—deny. The mere appearance that I, too, was mining her sweet body for all the pleasures I could wring from it might cause Celine to supply the rest of the similarity from her imagination. She was good at doing that. Over the years, I have often noticed that neurosis is, from a certain perspective, an overdeveloped inclination to find pattern. The paranoid is a highly creative person in the reverse of what we consider an artistic sense. Rather than finding rich diversity where the rest of us perceive only humdrum routine, he or she finds the same old thing where the rest of us see confusing variety. I was falling into the wrong pattern—the one that Celine knew all too well, not the one bequeathed by centuries of civilization which our era had all but forgotten. Even if I hadn’t the equipment then to assess the dangers as soberly as I do now, I knew better, all the same. Why did I get so close to the edge?

People will say, "Well, you were young. The hormones were running high!" But that kind of explanation is even more obtuse than it is crude. Sex is a less basic motive force than anger or fear, in my opinion. Men can be so consumed by rage or terror that they forget all about sex for days or weeks or months. I’ve seen it happen. At the same time, anger and fear produce certain physiological effects—accelerated heartbeat, raised blood pressure, muscular contractions—which sex can magically relax. Men borne away by battle fury sometimes rape their way through a country village after wiping out its military defenses. Men on the fearful eve of a great battle often fling themselves into the arms of prostitutes. My parents had delivered Celine and me to just these emotions. Anger dominated in my case. I was fearful of losing Celine, all right, to another severe depression… but I was absolutely furious with my mother, and little less so with my dad. Naturally, they had adopted the tried-and-true "see no evil, hear no evil" posture throughout that week. What else would they have done (speaking of neurotic submission to pattern)? The days of my break ticked away, one by one—and never another word on the subject of Celine! If a judge had sentenced me to community service for being drunk and disorderly, and I had wandered to the supper table each night fresh from my garbage-picking duties, the wall of silence could not have been more complete. It made me furious. After Tuesday, I simply ceased trying to eat in their midst. I would stop by the grocery store, show up on Celine’s doorstep with a brown bag of TV dinners, and sit down in an atmosphere where I could actually swallow. But I also brought over all that nervous tension. We broke a couple of plates once when I attacked her at the sink.

On her side, Celine was quivering like a leaf beneath those distracted gazes and numbed silences because (as I can say now, after having seen the whole cycle dozens of times) she was frightened half to death. She was sleeping poorly again—I could see the weariness in her drooping lids, in her contracted lips, in the constant pallor of her cheeks. The lethal idea had taken hold of her that we would never be married, never have a home together—that she would only ruin the home I already had with my parents. Despite all my assurances, she couldn’t believe that she was enough to compensate me for that loss. She could tell that I thought she would be… but that only turned up the tension several more notches. What if I sacrificed everything for her, and then discovered—too late to redeem any of it—that she wasn’t all I had expected? And how could she be all that I expected? She had never been sufficient to hold anyone’s interest before—not her father’s, not her mother’s, not that miserable swine whose name I had "inherited". If Mona had not held her captive by means of a paycheck, she perhaps would even have found a way to back out of her "surrogate mother’s" life. Back out… yes, she was backing up, backing out. Not looking where she was going, just shrinking away from where (as she was convinced) she could not go. But she was also putting up the best fight she could, because she wanted all those things—me, a home, a family, Meg visiting her, Mona cajoling her. Hence the fear. While she fought, she feared, because you only fight while there is something worth winning, and you only fear while there is still something to lose. Eventually, though, fear itself can betray you to the enemy. Lack of sleep and lack of reinforcements wear you down, and you end up slitting your own throat before the enemy is even over the wall. Despair. Despair releases you from fear by releasing you from life. If the fear grows powerful enough, it renders despair overpowering. That’s what Celine was fighting: her fear of fear—her fear of when the fear would be too great to resist. My poor Celine!

And that’s how a young woman who has been discarded in sexual relationships before flings herself right back into the sexual whirlwind. Fear. The sex is a release from the fear, even though, in some subtle but inexorable manner, it is also a path to the fear’s most dreaded nightmare. Looking back, I can recognize in those feverish kisses and caresses (I still remember them well) the struggle of electrified nerves to be rid of fear, if only for a moment. So I fought to suffocate my anger, and Celine toiled to slip loose from her fear, and the two of us ended up pushing our bodies to the very edge of consummation.

I have referred to "the edge" twice now. No, I never actually went over it during that week. What an incredible admission that seems to me now—no legendary medieval knight ever scored a greater victory over a fire-breathing dragon! How did I do it? Youthful idealism, I suppose (aided, of course, by complete inexperience). For besides not wanting Celine ever to believe that I was just using her for pleasure—that it was all "just sex" to me—I also felt the restraint of what I can only call religious scruples. Anyone alert to such matters will have noticed that I seldom spent my Sunday mornings in church. A "born again" movement was sweeping over the land at that time as the heyday of televangelism was dawning, but young men of my stripe were not very attracted to it. I had briefly flirted with a "charismatic" group as an undergraduate, as a matter of fact (praying my guts out, I recall, over that ice queen whose ire I roused with my roses). It was a wholly profitless debauch of humiliating my intelligence which ended, when all my prayers failed, in my frantically concluding that God hated me. I quickly pulled myself together. I needed to believe with my mind, as I soon figured out, and the services of those days were moving in the opposite direction. All the same, I retained a very firm belief in certain things (by the grace of God). More than anything on earth, I wanted my union with Celine to be holy. I wanted it to take place under a veil of mystery and sacrifice, where my anger and her fear would both be infinitely subordinated to that perfect being into whom we had vowed to grow for the rest of our natural lives. If all that doesn’t sound like a belief of the mind, it’s because the intellectual has been so debased by the carnal in our time; for what could be more logical, really, than the insistence on an end beyond logic? Without that end, all must die. The greatest love must die in sexual fatigue, and the greatest devotion must die in mounting boredom. I didn’t want Celine and me, as a couple—as a spiritual unit—to die. I strangled my appetite at the last instant to give us a chance at eternity.

I know those are pretty black-and-white terms; and I have learned, of course, that reducing spiritual struggles to such terms, even with the best of intentions, can often lead to diabolical arrogance. It would reflect very unflatteringly upon my mature faith if I were now to say that I think people go to heaven or hell on the basis of whether they do or do not perform some specific act or say some specific oath. But for a young man in his twenties, surrounded by peers who hadn’t the least respect whatever for any kind of restraint, such rigor, I think, is a testimony to high character. I salute that young man. He had kept his mind in control of his passions, but he had also elevated over his understanding a purpose which can never be fully understood. I haven’t seen that a lot—not in any of my decades on earth.

If it’s comic relief you want, you would have found it in my anguish then. There were times when my strangled appetite very nearly strangled me, in return. I remember rolling off Celine’s sofa on one occasion and pounding her carpet. Sex education, indeed! What I needed was about ten consecutive cold showers. On another occasion, I needed the shower less than the washing machine: I made a royal mess of my undergarment. I won’t dispute anyone’s right to smile at such adventures. I’m smiling right now myself.

I only ask for the concession that such ribald little comedies as these can conceal great tragedies at work. For what I couldn’t feel as I flailed about in the quicksand of my own feelings was Celine’s response. Perhaps it’s foolish to expect a young man to go beyond self-absorption in matters like these… but I often wonder if I should have thought more about Celine’s new sense of eagerness, and even urgency. "It’s all right," she would whisper in my ear at crucial moments. "You can go ahead, if you want." A single Rish-aard appended to that whisper would have brought me on… but she seemed to want me to make the last move. And when I didn’t… why did I not ever look up from my folded arms, my clenched fists, to see how she was taking my retreat? All I can remember is—when I finally did lift my eyes to hers—the sadness. As I reconstruct that response now, I see it, not as sensual frustration over a stimulus removed before maximum effect—that would be the "what women really want" claptrap of a Don Juan or a Stendhal. No, I see fear. Every time I refused to bring our union to a climax and scored one of those spiritual triumphs, Celine felt, far more than a wilting of the flesh, a trembling of the spirit. She felt my triumphs, and they terrified her. Even when faced with my parents’ rejection of her and with the uphill battle of creating a household out of pocket change, I continued to resist the plunge with her into the sweet, dark, forgiving, forgetting shadows. I continued to insist that she join me atop that pedestal. Women talked a lot about pedestals back then, always in voices ringing with indignation. In them, too, though—in all of them—it was fear. Fear of the spirit, of high places, of the infinite. They wanted to find themselves rather than to lose themselves… but they didn’t stop to consider that the self they would thus find would have to be something capable of being fully found: the flesh, the finite, the mortal. What a flight to the finite it all was back then! Even the "born agains" with their "I found it!" bumper-stickers… what, after all, could they so confidently have found? For the only thing worth finding is how to lose yourself—how to find that part of you in which you fully become a mere part, or that merely visible reflection of an inconceivable whole. How terrifying. Better to find the limits—to feel them, caress them, and fold them around oneself like a winding sheet. My poor Celine.

I wonder how many people will consider my portrait of Celine completely self-contradictory when I write down that she took me to church on my last Sunday? Actually, the suggestion that we might go to any church of her choice had come from me on Saturday. I suppose I was exhausted by our struggle against drowning all our sorrows in sensual intoxication. Even if we should haggardly emerge from that struggle in a few more hours without having cheated our wedding night, our final kiss safely exchanged at my car door, I suppose I knew that something critical had slipped from our kisses as they heated up. I suppose I thought church might be a way of refocusing, before we had no more time to refocus. After all, we would be married in a church, wouldn’t we? Did that mean nothing whatever? If it meant something, then why not pay our respects to the something on the last day when I would be in town?

So I offered to go with her—just to make the offer, not expecting much of a response. To my surprise, Celine wanted to go to early Mass. We could go before breakfast, she said, and then she would feed me at her place. The cathedral would seem almost empty then, she said (she had the Catholic church downtown in mind): the kneeling boards would be cold and hard, the liturgy’s words would dissolve over the empty pews, the chalice and the platter would distantly clink, and the freshly risen sunbeams would spin horizontally through the stained glass. I am not really embellishing her words, or not much; and these were indeed words of anticipation—perhaps a kind of vision, perhaps a distillation of many lonely hours in that cathedral—because they scarcely described the scene that awaited us. (The morning was overcast, and, thanks probably to Easter’s proximity, the pews were about a third filled even at eight o’clock.) I already knew that Celine had a delicate eye for beauty, but I had never before noticed this seamless fusion of taste and spirituality. There was a poet in her, and perhaps a mystic—and, just maybe, a true believer. I felt ashamed that I had assumed these doors of her life to be closed; and I also felt delighted to be so thoroughly put to shame. For the first time since I had introduced her to Meg a week earlier, I found reason to start hoping again.

My parents took for granted that I had slipped away so early on Sunday morning to bid my china doll an infatuated farewell. Naturally, my final departure for the big city would be launched from the warm nest where I had been raised. Naturally. I didn’t disabuse them. After finishing breakfast at Celine’s, I came back home for a few hours to pack my things and say my good-byes. I had never properly sat down and talked with Roger about his major, and I begged him to give me a rain-check until the summer—or else to write me a letter. I felt pretty disgusted with myself as I patted him on the shoulder: it was the one moment I passed at home that week when I really did feel guilt. But Meg brightened us up, and we all three chattered a bunch of nonsense while I stuffed my car’s trunk, then determined that I needed to lighten the load. After all, I was supposed to be clearing out of my apartment at the end of May. I shouldn’t be hauling records and headphones across the state just to bring them back in two months crammed beside a lot of other junk. (But I ended up taking the records: I decided to sell them on the sly for my "grub stake".)

Dad wandered out as we were trimming the fat off my cargo. He overheard the talk about vacating my apartment, which he silently digested for a while. (It was the kind of decision I had always reached with his help before: I’m sure that fact occupied some of his thoughts.) Then he began to question me, without a trace of antagonism, about my degree work and summer plans. Yes, I said, my Master’s degree was well in hand. I would have completed the required courses by the end of this semester. My thesis would surely be finished by September as long as I could get all the books I needed on library loan. I explained that our local branch in the university system would honor my student card and give me certain privileges.

"So you’ll be moving back in at the beginning of June?" he murmured, watching Meg and Roger drift back into the house. "It’ll be nice to have you home."

No it won’t, I corrected him in my mind, but thanks for the courteous gesture. "As a matter of fact," I said, "there’s a chance I may be moving into one of the dormitories down there on McClain. I’ve applied for a job as a house steward, I think they call it."

"Riding herd on freshmen," he laughed gently, "is that the sort of thing?"

I contributed a smile to his laugh. "Yeah, that sort of thing. It doesn’t pay much, but… every cent counts, and I’ll be close to the library." And close to Celine’s place of employ—but I was now beyond inserting her name into conversations wherever possible. What was the point? "Trouble is, there’s not really an opening right now, and they don’t expect a lot of summer students. I won’t know anything definite until after registration. The one thing I’ve got going for me is my qualifications to do some formal counseling. They said there might be a position where I would be… well, mentoring a lot of the underclassmen. ‘Mentor’ is the big word right now."

"You’ll be a good one."

"I don’t know. I’ve done a lousy job of mentoring Roger this past week. He’s been trying to talk to me the whole…."

And then something came over me. I guess I realized that we were right back in the thick of it—Celine, my afternoons and nights away from the family, all the bad blood simmering away under our roof. Roger had been a casualty of the tension, and I was sure my dad could understand that. Perhaps he had also just glimpsed the unflattering truth that my having neglected Roger was about the only thing caught up in those events which caused me any remorse. If my implied lack of repentance irritated him, however, it didn’t show.

"It’s good that you can help Roger. College has changed a lot since I went on the GI Bill. Everything’s changed. I can’t believe they have some of these majors… and who am I to tell him what to do? I have no idea what’s going to make him a living in this crazy new world."

"Well, it would be easy as pie to help him if I got on that campus in some official capacity and could figure out just what they’re trying to do."

"You really want to work there? I mean, not as a… steward, but… eventually, as something a little more respectable?"

"Right now, I’d be happy with house steward, and even that looks like a long shot."

Dad raised his index finger dramatically, then smacked it three times on the firm bridge of his nose. "Don’t be so sure." I was to remember that gesture several months later, and in circumstances where I allowed Dad’s generous attempt at a peace offering to be overshadowed by my personal sense of humiliation.

I arrived back at Celine’s a little after noon. We went for a walk in the park—that same park where I had hugged her tight to chase away the cold a few nights before Christmas. Now my sleeves were rolled up, and she was wearing slacks and a peach blouse with flounces around the cuffs. I always felt proud—so proud—to be seen with her in public. In the back of my mind, the thought would replay itself incessantly: "Who would ever have believed that a guy like me would be holding hands with a girl like this?" Even under all the recent pressures which had beset us, I was never too far from feeling like the class egghead who gets a date with the homecoming queen. Even with all of our excessive familiarities on her sofa (as the Old Guard still considered them—as I considered them in my calmer moments), that schoolboy wonder of her person never completely left me. Simply to bend my fingers around hers never stopped being magic.

She made me a sandwich later, and then I lay down on her sofa for a rest. Finally, at about four, she walked me down the stairs to my car. We had said little enough during our stroll in the park: now we said nothing. Why did we hold each other so long—was it just because we loved each other so much? Could it not also have been, perhaps, because we both had felt Celine’s spirits sagging and both dreaded a six weeks’ separation which probably concealed a fearful trough just around the bend?

"Come with me," I said, pushing my lips from her temple into her hair. "I’ll help you get some things. We’ll just toss them in the back seat. You can call Mona and explain—she’ll understand. Get your birth certificate. Tomorrow we’ll go down to the courthouse after my classes. We’ll get a marriage license. Come with me and let’s get married."

"We don’t even have the rings yet," she laughed into my shirt. "We can’t afford them."

"I’ll sell something," I said. "Anyway, you don’t need a ring at the courthouse, do you? And anyway… you’ve already given me a ring."

"Did you ever figure out who Joe D is?" she laughed a little higher up, her nose nudging my chin.

"With Mona’s help. It took me a while."

"I knew you wouldn’t know! It’s not in any of your books! I’ll tell you all about it some time."

And then she hugged me tighter than ever. I understood. It wasn’t that we physically could not do just what I had proposed. It wasn’t even that our hearts weren’t in it—on the contrary. But though our bodies were still in the same objective space, our spirits had already embraced solitude. Perhaps if I had made that very suggestion in those very words as we walked in the park… but now the tide had gone out on our resolution, and even the park was probably too late. Obstacles which would have been easily surmountable with a little energy soared invincibly over us in the growing shadows. Mona could hardly grant Celine a two-month holiday out of the blue, staunch friend though she was… and what would Celine do, if not work for Mona? Get another job in the capital as I finished my semester? But I was supposed to come back here for the summer: I had already applied for several jobs. How would we pay our joint expenses with neither of us working and our "household" without roots in either of the cities which held our light baggage? Impossible to elope? No, of course not. Yet we both knew that we couldn’t go through with it. We were too shaky, too emotionally raw, to generate such sudden bursts of determination. Even if some sinister axe were descending upon us (and I secretly regretted mentioning her father’s ring, which had signaled our last decline into the pit), we lacked the vigor to raise a hand. All we could do was hold on to each other, as tightly and for as long as we could. And, at last, we had to surrender our holds, as well.

Of course, my misgivings were not immediately justified. I didn’t expect them to be. I had already learned that Celine’s descents could be very gradual. At the same time, I took heart in recalling how well things had gone over the first part of the semester. (Or, maybe, I just allowed myself to latch on to a shallow reason for optimism: being worried all the time doesn’t help you do your work, even when the worries are well founded.) Perhaps separation was just the thing, I told myself. Now we could go back to writing letters and talking twice a week over the phone. We had shared a lot of secrets and nourished a lot of hopes by that method while tuning down the tension almost to nothing. What had succeeded for us once could succeed again… why not?

In fact, our twice-weekly phone conversations seemed warmer than ever. Celine would now chatter on and on until I had to remind her, laughing with every word, that we would run out of dimes this way. I really don’t recall if I let myself have any suspicions at all of this new effusiveness. Probably not. I was very busy finishing up my course work, and happy answers to questions I couldn’t influence right at the moment, anyway, were just the kind I wanted. In looking back, however, I think I see what was happening. Celine wanted to reassure both me and herself, and the best way to do so was to bubble over when we talked. She could neatly accomplish this by steering the conversation into trivial matters at the office, most often—an area where she might have consumed hours without running out of gossip and where I never had enough knowledge to mount a significant intrusion. Subjects like wedding plans or preferred house designs were not given a sufficient opening to rear their frightful heads. We were somehow just supposed to stay in a holding pattern around those objectives—they’d already been agreed upon, hadn’t they?—while accepting that our higher phone bills proved a greater degree of intimacy than ever.

In the letters, however, such self-deception was hard to hide. Any self-deception is hard to hide, in a letter. When you write an observation down, you take time over it; and when you take time over it, you end up analyzing it, whether you want to or not. If anything penetrated my thick wall of see-no-evil optimism that spring, it was Celine’s letters—hers and mine both. For her part, she wrote less often and not as lengthily. When she did write, she would begin with an apology for not writing, explain tediously (in her telephonic style) what was taking up her time, and then abruptly end with something amounting to: "Oops! I’ve taken up all the time I have by telling you why I have no time!" I stopped pretending early on that I took much pleasure in such wasted space—though, of course, I didn’t rebuke Celine for her sorry effort. How could I? Mine wasn’t much better. I meant to tackle the big questions, all right: to force certain issues like our wedding date or our guest list. But I backed off, every time. I chickened out. I didn’t want to stare a major crisis in the face right at this time, so I kept telling myself that discretion was the better part of valor. If we could just limp and stagger our way to the summer with these feather-weight exchanges, I’d be back home, and I could go head to head with all the problems till I beat them black and blue. Just squeeze out a little more time. At least we were talking and writing, however awkwardly. That was forward motion, wasn’t it?

Well, apparently it wasn’t. Apparently it was backward motion: I wasn’t even holding my own with the truth, since its sudden appearance completely blind-sided me. The first hint I received—or should have received—was the "conference". About three weeks from the semester’s end, Celine told me during our Wednesday evening chat that Mona had booked her on a flight to Chicago later that week, where some sort of conference for small business owners was to take place for the next several days (exact number not specified). Was there ever any conference at all? Probably: Celine had enough details that Mona must have shown her a brochure accompanied by some such remark as, "I wish I could afford to send you to that." But did Celine actually go anywhere? Of course not. Mona would have made the arrangements for such a major trip well in advance, and Celine would have told me about them weeks ago. Besides, conferences never last over Sundays and into the new week—I knew that—yet Celine had implied that she might be gone almost indefinitely to participate in some special seminar. How could I have swallowed such patent nonsense? How? By liking where I was—by not wanting to see the imminent danger. Also by loving Celine "not wisely but too well"—by wanting irresistibly to trust her and wholly surrendering to the exceptional tenderness in her voice. That tenderness in itself should have sounded another warning. Not since Spring Break had Celine talked so haltingly over the phone, offered me so many pauses, and filled them in herself with so many "I love you’s" and "thanks for loving me’s". She was fixing the tones of my voice, the fervor of my words, in her memory. She was signing off.

And, naturally, I had seen it all before. Over Christmas. The trip, real or feigned, which would account for her not being home to pick up the phone; then the quick fade into oblivion, as if I could be so morally callous or intellectually dull as to forget her after one evening of unsuccessful calls. When I failed to draw an answer throughout Sunday afternoon and evening, I guess I was supposed to think that she had indeed stayed over in the Windy City for further tutelage; and, throughout that one evening, I did. I hadn’t the time to think anything else: an important oral presentation in my toughest class was coming up the next day, and I had to get all my ducks in a row. But when I got no answer on Monday night or Tuesday, I finally declared an official end to my stupid, costly tranquillity.

Official? Well, yes, it was almost as though a gavel descended upon me, in a way. It was like the bell which calls a child in from recess, or the alarm clock which announces that a new day on the grind has begun. I suddenly grew very serious—grimly serious. Part of the grimness, the oddest part, was that I felt almost none of the nervous panic I remembered from just after Christmas. This time I knew exactly what was going on: I guess I’d known all along, really. I guess I hadn’t been so much deceiving myself as letting myself catch a little sleep. That week, my nights of sweet dreams ended… not that I burned the midnight oil pacing the floor. On the contrary, I put my time to good use. Especially on Wednesday night, I immersed myself in my work, finishing some papers early and getting as far ahead of every syllabus as I could, since I didn’t know what next week might bring—and since, of course, I had to distract myself from the phone. I was determined not to call. This was Celine’s night to call. Let her call if she dared, if she won some major battle over her conscience or her suffocating self-contempt. I knew damn well she wouldn’t. If I paced a lot that night (and I won’t deny that I did), it was mostly with a book in my hand or to take a short break from the typewriter.

And Thursday… Thursday I did something the like of which I’d never attempted before. I became unscrupulously, aggressively devious: I did some spying. Over Christmas, I had grown so wildly suspicious that I had spent several hours on a bus stop bench behind a newspaper—but that was sheer madness. Now I was downright clever. I schemed. Celine knew perfectly well that I would never call her at work about anything delicate between us. She had actually mentioned that to me at some point before Spring Break—I mean, that it amazed her how I had respected her job obligations during our "break-up" over Christmas and had not called her at the office. It was the only reference she ever made to that week of hell—and it was flooded with more sincere admiration and gratitude, perhaps, than she had ever shown me. I’m sure she was counting on my not invading her "job space" this time, either. She knew that I knew that she couldn’t function at the simplest level if she were afraid to answer her work phone. She knew that I knew that breaking this taboo would submit her to extreme torture—and she knew that I wouldn’t torture her, no matter how much she deserved it.

I had a few friends around campus—not many, not enough that counting them would have required a second hand. But I really only needed one to help me confirm the truth beyond any doubt. Rebecca worked as a secretary in our department. She was quiet, competent, discreet, and wholly unaffiliated with the prevailing lunacy which hummed around her. She just typed and answered phones: it wasn’t part of her job description to liberate the working classes or dazzle the bourgeoisie. She and I had often had brief, ironic conversations about the protracted adolescence of the grad students—and some of their professors—as I checked my mailbox. She was a pretty girl, despite being overweight and wearing rather thick glasses. She had beautiful dark eyes behind the glasses, and her skin was as white as milk. If I had met her a year sooner, and if her being Jewish hadn’t foreshadowed certain problems with my mother, I would have asked her out.

Instead, I asked her to make a phone call for me—a long distance call for which I would pay. It had to be made before lunchtime, I said, but it would consume no more than ten seconds. We would place the call, I would listen for the voice that answered, then I would quickly pass the phone to her and she would sweetly announce that she’d dialed the wrong number. She was entirely cooperative, as I’d known she would be. She told me to come back after ten o’clock, when Dr. Shelton would be out of his office at a meeting. She said not to worry about payment—that wrong numbers were dialed all the time, and that trying to pay for this one would make far more trouble than it would avert. I was convinced.

At 10:05 on Thursday morning, I dialed Images Unlimited back in my hometown. Celine’s voice answered in the perfunctory chirp which she would have used from the guillotine if required to field a call for Mona. I passed the phone to Rebecca, who begged off in an equally professional manner—except that she first uttered a "hello" into the receiver, which would have drawn a second, perhaps more nuanced greeting from Celine. Was that on purpose? I was too embarrassed to tax her with it after she hung up. The look of infinite sympathy which poured upon me through those thick lenses was the first thing that week which had brought me close to breaking down; and, when she said after I’d thanked her and turned to leave, "She has a really nice voice," I couldn’t bear to do any more than nod my head on the way out.

On Thursday evening, I finished my most important paper and threw a few things into my smallest traveling bag. I felt at peace now. It was not a comfortable peace—or no more comfortable than a combat pilot’s who has inspected his plane, assembled his gear, gone over his flight plan, and signed his will. When I finally went to bed that night, I shared the pilot’s deep, dreamless sleep—a sleep without hope, a sleep needed to give the mission the ghost of a chance. I was ready to live or to die: in that respect, it was like Christmas all over again.

I imagine that Celine must have entered an ambiguous peace something like mine. She would have written her "bombshell" letter on Wednesday evening after realizing that I had desisted from calling her She would have inferred… well, who knows what? Probably that I had finally had enough of her, that I was now safely free of her and permanently disgusted with her. Which was just what she wanted—what she needed to achieve her peace of utter hopelessness. Just to nail it down, and to occupy the once sacred hour when we would converse over the phone, she would have written the following letter—which she would have mailed Thursday morning, just in time for me to retrieve it Friday afternoon from my apartment box on the way to my car.

I want you to know first of all that I love you and will always love you more than you can ever know. You will not understand how I can love you after reading this, but I promise you it is the truth. I swear before God that you have meant more to me than anyone I have ever known. I only wish that were more of a compliment. But among the men I have known, especially, you are in a category by yourself, so it doesn’t mean much for me to compare you to them. Maybe they have all made me the way I am—my mother first and foremost, and then all the others, men and women, except for Mona. Maybe that’s why I just cannot reach you way up high where you are, and why you cannot imagine me way down low where I am, where I really am. Richard, because you are so honest and decent, you cannot imagine what dangers might lurk for you in a life with someone like me. You have always thought the best of me, and I am deeply grateful to you for that. But I just cannot live up to that best. In the end, you would be bound to be deeply disappointed in me, and I know I couldn’t bear that. The pressure of knowing how high you rate me and how much respect you give me is making me unravel, darling. It keeps me awake at night and takes my appetite away. It terrifies me sometimes until I start to shake all over. I’m a nervous wreck, all because I can’t stand the thought of failing you—and knowing that I will. I am already failing you just by writing this letter. I know how you will read it, how it will hurt you, and I hate myself for writing it. But it is better to save you from me, darling, before I hurt you more deeply. It is my prayer that you will see that someday.

Dearest Richard, could it be that I actually love you more than you love me? I love you the way you are, and you love me the way you picture me in your mind, a bright little wife making you a happy home. But I would make your home a living hell with my dark spells and these moods that I can’t shake off. I wonder how I would even raise a child? What a terrible mother I would be! And you would not have your own mother to turn to because I would have driven her from you. Richard, my darling, someday you will understand how much better it is this way. Please understand, Richard, and try not to hate a pitiful girl who loves you a thousand times more than herself.

 

I read this letter virtually without emotion as I sat behind the wheel, my traveling bag in the passenger seat. It was just what I’d expected, once I had allowed myself to expect the worst, the obvious. I reinserted it into the envelope—how elegant was the handwritten address, yet how apologetically pinched together!—and I started the car.

As I slipped on my glasses, fitted shades to them, and fought the lowering sun to reach the traffic’s mainstream, I nonetheless felt something begin to fester in me. It was that claim about my expecting her to be something she wasn’t. Damn it! Every robber and murderer in prison might as well plead that he was being unfairly punished for fulfilling his God-given nature rather than society’s expectations! Did she think that I found it easy to scrap and save, to battle with my family, to plan a future while trying to earn an advanced degree, to postpone our marriage rites until our marriage night? Did she think that I enjoyed all this—that it was just how I was made, that my idea of a good time before I met her was hitting my head with a hammer? I was expecting one hell of a lot from myself, too—couldn’t she see that? What was I supposed to have done over Spring Break that I didn’t do? Show up at her place with an armload of six-packs and some weed, strip her clothes off, and come up for air at the end of the week? Would that be putting the bar low enough? My grad school peers had all chosen about that level of difficulty: was that what she expected out of me? No goals to shoot for, no ideals to live up to, no expectations, no pressure, no strain. No hope. As easy as pie… no problem.

Of course, at the red-hot core of this emotional lava flow was my argument with Mom about her squeezing me into a certain image. Celine’s letter had unwittingly accused me of treating her as I had accused my mother of treating me. That stung me to the quick, even though Celine couldn’t possibly have known that she was framing a charge of hypocrisy. (I had never given her any of the details about the blow-up with my mother in March.) The charge had just a grain of truth in it, perhaps—and no false accusation is more searing than the one that isn’t one hundred percent false. I was my mother’s son, and I went through life carrying high expectations. I knew it wasn’t the same thing with the two of us: I knew Mom expected success, prosperity, comfort, even glory—whereas I expected fairness, honesty, and other things that would often sabotage what my mother most admired. Still… there was a certain rhetorical sameness. And it ate and ate at me, all the long drive home.

I had tried to time my arrival at Celine’s apartment for a few minutes before five. That way I could see her come home from work and overtake her just as she was reaching her door. I was too late. A wreck had backed up traffic, and I turned into the parking lot well after 5:30. Celine’s car was already parked in its space. I found an empty space from which I could study her window. She might only just have walked in: I didn’t want to be stuck at her unresponsive door because she was in the bathroom and couldn’t hear me. In fact, I decided that the best course was to wait until it grew pitch dark (still about an hour away), when I would surely see a faint haze of light showing through her drapes. I wanted not only to be absolutely certain that she was inside (and where else could she be with her car right in front of me?), but also that she would know her presence was apparent to anyone who came calling. I didn’t want her to be able to pretend that she wasn’t at home. Whether or not she would have tried such a maneuver, I had no idea. The possibility didn’t seem far-fetched, considering that she had played the same trick several times when the phone was ringing. I had no other fears than this one: it entirely preoccupied me—even (as I caught myself rattling my keys, then thumping the floorboard) consumed me. I had to see her face to face, and if she wouldn’t let me in… what would I do? Break the door down? Wait until morning, or until a security guard chased me off? No, I wanted her knowing that she had given her presence away. Even though she could hardly think I would show up within hours of receiving her letter, I wanted such signs of activity in that apartment as would force her to concede herself spotted once she had spotted me through the drapes. She wouldn’t have the nerve to pretend after that. I knew her too well.

This became one of the most frustrating waits of my life. It seemed even longer than that morning I had spent at the bus stop across from Images Unlimited. Then I had wanted not to be seen, not to speak to her. This time I had no bone to chew on, no dominant thought to mull over. I really had no notion whatever of what I was going to say, if anything. If I could only see her—physically, visually see her and be seen by her… and if I couldn’t, then I could think of no next step. I wasn’t going to my parents. I wasn’t driving two hours back the other way. At what point would some cruising squad car shine a flashlight in my face?

My anxiety rose as darkness fell without being resisted by any light behind the drapes. There were plenty of lights and noises elsewhere: it was Friday night, and most of the tenants were exiting in high spirits. Occasionally, tires squealed on the street in front of the complex, and once I heard a glass bottle shatter to a chorus of male laughter. Celine’s room seemed the only one on her floor which had not betrayed a single sign of life since my arrival. I finally got out of the car and walked across the street to a gas station. I relieved myself there, coaxed some peanut butter and crackers out of a vending machine, and overheard a minute of some serial thriller Roger always watched from a TV by the cash register. It was odd to think of Roger sitting in front of that show not twenty minutes from here, of Meg taking off with her friends and Mom doing the dishes and Dad perhaps classifying old photos while listening to a jazz record, maybe Harry James or Pete Fountain… all of them entirely out of my reach, no less so than if I had been on the dark side of the moon. It was a lonely feeling.

As I crossed back over toward my car, I thought about climbing the stairs and listening at her door. I hesitated, pacing the lawn instead. What could I possibly find out—and what if a neighbor should see me lurking about suspiciously and call the police? What would I tell a cop—would a cop, perhaps, force her to come to the door and vouch for me?

About then, a car turned into my nook of the complex. Its motor purred like a tame cat, and its black silhouette was low. The engine was cut, the headlights died almost instantly, and I heard two doors slam in my temporary blindness. Even before my eyes grew readjusted from the lights, however, I knew that one set of footsteps belonged to Celine. The other was a man’s.

A man. Celine had been out on Friday night with a man. It was the most obvious, most prosaic of explanations, yet I would never have believed it if I had not been standing there in the grass as they clambered up the stairs. My fiancée. As I stood there gaping upward—as the two dark figures partially emerged in the dim light at the top of the stairwell—I did not really register anything that could properly be called belief. I could not have been any less reflective at that moment if I had been a small frog staring wide-eyed from the mulch around the manicured shrubs. If there is a God in heaven, he will bear me witness that I did not even feel any anger, any resentment—not one scintilla. I was overcome with wonder. I did nothing but apply my pupils to the two figures, the two angels on a cloud, the two devils in a pit. Celine was wearing a light coat, probably camel-hair or alpaca, its cinnamon color accenting that thick, compact hair of hers which glinted richly in the light every time the man’s shoulder moved. I paid him little attention. His back was to me—all I noticed was that he kept breaking off my line of sight to Celine. The interruptions were actually rather staccato: they lasted briefly but came often. Perhaps that impression, in all its oddity, was what faintly roused me from my daze. I could comprehend now that Celine was pushing him off, thrusting his hands away from her. I don’t know what was in my mind as my feet started to move beneath me. I have examined my memory under the microscope, and I still do not recall the slightest tinge of anger. Yet some instant of fury might well have exploded if I had turned up the second flight of steps and still found him pawing her. I have heard people describe many such incidents since then. They have no inkling of what’s coming—they feel almost torpid inside: and then, in a white flash whose heat sears away all reason and all memory, they commit acts of mayhem.

Fortunately, the man was just springing off the final stair as I reached the sidewalk. He had shot down in mere seconds, and now he lunged into the darkness so quickly that his shoulder actually rubbed against mine. I didn’t even turn to watch him go, yet I had the strangest sensation of having seen him before. It was the first conscious moment of reflection that had reanimated my mind since the two of them had stepped from his sports car. I know that man!

I got to the top of the stairs somehow—I got to Celine’s door somehow. Perhaps that one reflection which I had lavished upon the dark figure brushing past me had overloaded my numb mind. Now I found myself, as if waking up, right before the bronze digits of Number 31. A light had switched on inside. I could see its luminescence down the central slit in the drapes. I froze for a moment. If I had been in fuller possession of myself, I would perhaps have panicked—but I was already too far gone for a plunge into this abyss to disorient me further. If I had known where I had been for the last hour or two, I would have been horrified now to see that I was nowhere. It was bad enough, just to see my "nowhere" suddenly intensify. No fiancée, no girlfriend, no friend. No common, ordinary decency of the most common, ordinary sort. Just betrayal, just shut doors. Just nullification, the nullity of everything… nothing real but a dirty forty-Watt bulb over my head, a dead cricket on dirty concrete at my foot, and a tacky set of drapes that didn’t fit properly. All else had been a fantasy.

I reached out at the door now less in terror than in a bid for some kind of lifeline. In this corridor-comradeship with decaying insects, I felt that I might throw myself over the rail just any second.

She opened almost at once. My third feeble tap had hardly sounded.

On the drive over, I guess I had expected to create something of a shock at Celine’s door, unlike the time over Christmas when I had materialized in this same spot. We had been less intimate then—half a state hadn’t separated us, either. Now here I was, within forty-eight hours of the weekly call she had refused to make, within six hours of receiving her letter. I shocked her, all right—but it was a delayed shock, a shock whose jolt was bizarrely postponed. She looked right at me through the opening door without batting an eyelash, for a full two seconds. Only then did her lips part speechlessly her fair green eyes widen (seeing them after any lapse of time always made me catch my breath: it did so even now). Two seconds can be an eternity. How could she have peered out into the night, found my face, and studied me almost in weariness for a full two seconds before registering that her dead lover had come to life?

"Richard!"

If someone can be described as fleeing who never turns her back, then Celine fled from me—or cringed, or shrank (for her whole body drew up)—into the apartment. Her evening coat was still on. She had just uncinched the belt which had locked it in a hug around her trim waist. The high collar and epaulette-like straps across the shoulders continued to emphasize the golden-red sheen of her short, thick hair in the lamplight.

I shut the door quietly behind me. Obviously, I must have come in, though I had no consciousness of any movement in my body—of any life, I might say. Even my tongue could not move. I stood there with my collar open, my jacket half-zipped, my hands dangling from my sleeves, just gazing at this woman who held absolute power of life and death over me, for whom I had sacrificed so much, for whom I would sacrifice whatever remained to me and of me in an instant, and who had just barely resisted the embrace of a strange man a few feet from where I now stood, a mere minute before I arrived.

If her shoulders had cringed and her hands were so squeezed together that their bare bones stood out, the clearest sign of Celine’s flight was nevertheless her eyes. I watched them run farther and farther from me, searching the deepest shadows along the most remote walls. Almost imperceptibly, like a flitting ghost, her body gravitated toward the same dark spots. The lamp nestled on the counter/partition between den and kitchen was almost at her back. A single ray of light caught on the finely molded ledge of her lower lip, where I saw no sign of trembling: just the frozen glaze of open-mouthed muteness. At last she came to rest on the far arm of the sofa—the arm where we never sat, thrust far into the room’s most lifeless corner. There she perched herself, leaning her right shoulder into the wall.

I have no idea how long we stayed this way, awkwardly suspended in time and space—for it did indeed seem a complete arrest of time, a balancing act where a kind of nightmarish stasis had been achieved. Nor do I know what finally broke the spell enough to start her talking. If the cue came from me, it was neither any spoken word nor any rustling motion of the body. Can you hear a man staring at his hands—a man who isn’t even breathing, who has to look at some part of himself just to be sure that he still exists?

"I had to let you go," she confided to the wall in a tiny voice utterly drained of tone. "I had to let you go. I got to where… there was no other choice. You told me it would destroy you, if I let you go. You told me that after Christmas. That it would destroy you. Well, I got to the point… the point where I was more sure of destroying you if I held on. More than if I let you go."

You don’t usually remember sighs with crystal clarity, especially after years and years. I can still hear the sigh I gave then—probably the most enormous of my life. Suddenly I couldn’t stand up any longer. I shut my eyes and reeled backward, almost falling into an armchair set against the opposite wall. There I thrust my hands deep into my pockets, as if I were suffering from a chill, and marveled at the lamplight’s sickly yellow color on the carpet. I had never before seen a color that made me feel nauseated. The edge of everything, the boundary line of nothing—the limn of outer darkness—is that shade of yellow.

"You don’t know. You just don’t know. And it would kill me if you did. If we… if I held on to you, you would find out. If you are going to be destroyed by me… at least this way, you won’t find out. The worst thing your mother could think about me… believe me, that would be nothing beside the truth. Even your mother. Even if she would tell you the worst thing she could think… it would be nothing. She… she has the right idea. You need to listen to her. You need to let her have her way. Mothers are always right. Even I was right, maybe, when I…. She’s more right than she will ever know."

The pronouncements of this telegraphic drone must have cost her several minutes to deliver. Yet the silence which followed them was immensely longer. I remember no door slamming anywhere, no footsteps falling anywhere, no car engine growling by in the lot below. I was deaf… but even the deaf can feel the blood pulsing in their own ears. I had no pulse: I had no breath. From somewhere very, very deep within me, I was dredging up that old sensation from last Christmas—that feeling that, null as the possibilities within this small room appeared, there could most certainly be nothing beyond them. This was the antechamber to oblivion. What sense could time have, after all, when all ties to the beyond have been severed? There was no hope or fear for me—no one expecting me, nothing awaiting me—beyond Celine’s front door… so how could I feel any strain of time not used? I believe I could have sat in that chair until I starved without ever noticing daylight come and go at the drapes. I simply sat and watched the old sensation come creaking up from the depths, like some muddy, amorphous terror of the ocean bottom whose sheer dead weight tautens heavy cables almost to the snapping point as its unclean shadow grows and grows. I dredged it up, I reeled it in… or rather, it sucked me down.

From somewhere under those fathoms where no green life lives, I found a word. "Talk," I said gently. "Talk some more."

She tried to, several times. I heard her try rather than watched her try. I heard her draw a breath, hold it to carry forth some few words—a sentence—and then let it go at last, unused. I heard her alpaca coat grind discreetly against the plaster wall. I waited. There was nothing else to do. There was nothing else I could possibly say. Unless she talked some more, the two of us would drown in silence.

"I thought it would be all right. Maybe. After Christmas."

In my mind, I watched the thin filament drift toward me through the soupy murk. It wasn’t a rescue line, but it was a strand. "It was all right," I murmured.

"Yes. It was all right. For a while."

I turned slightly and looked—with my physical eyes—back up the sickly trail of lamplight, as if I might have missed something swimming there or might find something torpidly floating there. Something to knead, to shape, to combine. But I still saw only vacancy, nullity.

She inhaled again, and again the breath escaped without a message—or so I thought. But at the last instant, she caught its tail. "If you hurt yourself… I’ll kill myself."

I received this without moving a muscle. Finally, very slowly, I nodded over it as my eyes infinitesimally seesawed between the yellow mist and darkness. "That… that would be one way."

"No!" I heard her cry. It was the first emotion I had detected in her voice, and it drew the single short syllable out like the groan of a trauma patient whose ruptured organ the doctor has just pressed. In spite of this response, I couldn’t seem to move my eyes, even to blink them. I don’t know if she turned to me or not. I only know that I heard a rustle from her corner.

I thought perhaps she was going to cry, or perhaps to shout or plead. But more minutes went by, more breaths were roughly drawn and roughly exhaled, until again I could hear nothing at all. Even violent motions did not create much of a ripple at these depths.

I was almost a little startled when she started to talk again—I had almost passed into some sort of trance, I think. "It was Spring Break. It was… it wasn’t so much your mother. It was you. It was you… honoring me. Treating me… like I was something I’m not. That was when it really started to hit me. That I couldn’t be that. Not that. What you wanted. Your dreams… they go so high. Someday you’d be sure to wake up. I would wake you up, and you’d ask me… you’d ask me what I did with Celine. With your Celine. But I can’t be your Celine. I never was. You have this image of me, which you honor… but the honor… the honor… the honor was crushing me. It kept keeping me up all night. It wouldn’t let me sleep—"

The last word was never finished: her voice suddenly gave out. Her head thumped the wall audibly, and then was still. I don’t know how she held it down for so long, but at last the moist remnant of a sob fluttered through our renewed silence. I could still not rouse myself to speak, but something was definitely stirring within me now. My eyes widened over it—my physical eyes, turned intently within me. That word "image"… I remembered using it bitterly when arguing with my mother. Of course, every line of Celine’s letter (which we never mentioned a single time that night) came back to me in one hot red flash. All the protests that had seethed in me during my two-hour drive started to simmer once more. My mother’s inhuman image of me… and Celine, all unknowingly, now writing and saying that I was doing the same thing to her—that I was forcing her into an image’s straitjacket! Everything in me began to shout foul. I felt my teeth start to work. Was there no difference, then, between an image which suffocates all the soul’s life out of it to make a nice appearance and an image which calls a soul to fresh new life? From the fingertips, I felt myself starting to tremble.

"You… you’re better off," she concluded, once more dry and toneless. "I could have been… some things for you, if you had let me. Made your meals. Done your shopping, bought you nice things. No one ever buys you nice things, and you would look so good, so handsome, if I could dress you up. Why doesn’t your mother do that? I could do that for you!"

There was a sudden strange warmth in these sentences, which were the longest she had yet pronounced. I actually looked over at her, looked up at her. In fact, I no longer took my eyes off of her. Between the thawing tenderness in her words and the smoldering indignation in my heart, I was able to look at her very directly.

"And share my bed?" I whispered. "As long as we weren’t married, you could share me bed?"

She crumpled against the wall, her gaze following it back into the dark line where it guttered into the rug. "There," she said, once more in a tiny drone. "You see? I’m no good for you. The best that I can offer… it’s so vile to you."

I was bursting to say, The worst that you can offer—that you can dish out to me and yourself—makes me want to fight back, for both of us! But I only trembled a little more. I was going to say something to all this, though. I was going to say something. I felt it slowly rise, so slowly. The voice in which I said it was as hollow and muted as hers. "So that’s the real reason. Because we… never went all the way, you decided that I was… worshiping you."

"Yes."

"And you couldn’t take any more of it."

"No."

"So you… what did you do then?"

"Then?"

"Yes. What did you do then?"

"I…." Her perfect chin suddenly reared from its grave of shadow, and I saw her Adam’s apple work in a thin, supple throat bared from the heavy alpaca collar. "I had to get some sleep."

"So what did you do to get some sleep? How did you get some sleep?"

"I… I still haven’t… I’m still sleepless. This past month, especially this past week…."

"What keeps you awake? Since you already had decided… was it fear of me, of what I would do?"

"Yes. No. It was fear. Again. It was the fear again."

"Fear of what, Celine?"

"That I couldn’t… you know, that I couldn’t keep with the decision." Her "you know" carried a brief turn of the head in my direction which sent a glinting shudder through her rich hair. It also carried a catch in her voice. "I knew I couldn’t have you… but I was afraid you’d come back. Just like this. I was afraid I couldn’t…"

"That I would talk you back into being with me."

"Into being with you. Yes. Into being… honored, adored. And then…"

"And then?"

"And then it would start all over again. The fear. I was afraid of the fear—of it starting up again. When you love me, you put so much… worship into it. And that terrifies me. Because I’m… if you only knew!"

We were going over old ground, digging our heels through the same infinitely slick and shifty mud of the ocean bottom. But her voice was starting to crack frequently now: there were hairline fractures running through every brief sentence she released.

"So… what did you do? You had to sleep."

"I had to sleep."

Within my pockets, I felt my fingers tightening into fists. It was now that those two seconds at the front door reappeared to me—Celine’s look of easy recognition which had dissolved almost at once, but not at once. And I was beginning to see a face on that man who had brushed me in the dark. "Who was that just now who brought you home, Celine?"

"I thought if I closed the circle… if I brought things back to where they were before I met you. That way… if I closed the circle, it would all be over. None of it would ever begin again."

I had risen to my feet. Yet my voice, if anything, was lower and duller than ever. "Who was that, Celine?"

And she looked straight at me then with her beautiful pale eyes—the eyes which ancient Irish poets compared to dewdrops in the rising sun. "I had to go back to how it was. I had to close off all the hope. Hope is the most frightening thing in the universe, Richard."

"Richard." I don’t think my lips even moved. I repeated—stated flatly, for the record, "It was Richard."

Then I started for the door. Don’t ask me why—I haven’t the slightest idea where I intended to go, since anywhere beyond this apartment was annihilation. I guess I intended to accept my annihilation, whatever that means. I don’t know. I can only remember myself unpocketing one hand and gripping the doorknob as you would remember some dramatic gesture from a play or movie. I have to believe that I was about to go out the door.

"Are you leav—"

The word was again unfinished. Her voice had again died on her, this time along the ragged edge of something like a shriek. I looked back at her and found all that wooden composure gone. The mesmerized detachment which had spellbound her for… who knows how many minutes?—that was all gone now without a trace. Her face was a mobile portrait of anguish, a sculpture in jelly. Her eyes had opened as big as screams: even though several strands of hair had slipped down over the left one, I could see its white outline clearly. They glistened, glistened until they throbbed, despite the shadows. But her lower face was yet more distorted. Her chin, her jaw kept quivering in such an intricate chaos of vibrations that her lips had entirely lost their beautiful contours. She seemed at the same instant to be biting them back and about to unleash from them some one last word, or some cry that would never end.

Am I leaving? I thought. Isn’t that what you want? I thought about saying. Instead, I let the knob slide from my fingers and walked over to her. When I stopped, my free hand was within a foot or two of her face, yet I made no effort to lift it and touch her tears. I was far, far above the threshold of understanding that she didn’t know what she wanted, perhaps would never know. I understood fully, too, that I could never want anyone but her, and that if she had determined the Celine I loved to be non-existent, then I wanted nothing, and was dead. I understood that I might well be dead at this very moment, just waiting for the blood to stop. But in the unspeakable calm which that understanding gave to me, a calm which allowed me to stand over Celine without even trying to touch her, I found that I remained curious. I wanted to take one last measurement and see if, just maybe, the two of us were not entirely dead. That was what I wanted, all I wanted. It would perhaps be the last thing I would ever want.

"There’s just one thing. Why? Why did you push him away just now when he tried to come inside?"

"Why?"

"Yes. Why?"

She made no effort to mop away the moisture spilling through her lashes. With her head now feverishly erect, the liquid rounded the ridges of her cheeks in more or less identical curves, washed over the two high, broad summits of her upper lip, then soaked her lower lip until it sparkled. The bath seemed to redefine her face’s wondrous harmony and to lubricate her tongue for what few words she found. One more breath, and she would tell me… what? The last thing I would ever hear from her? The last thing I would ever hear from anyone on earth?

"I… I went to him."

"Yes. You went to him. When was that?"

"That was… I don’t know. Yesterday. It was yesterday. I went during lunch. To his office… his new office. On the fourth floor, at the… downtown. I…"

"You saw him?"

"Yes. No. I saw him, but… he didn’t see me. He was with someone. Someone else. He was with someone else. She was beautiful, and… and she loved him. Or she wanted him, anyway. You could tell. And you could tell she had him. He never even looked my way. When I slipped up to his office, they said he’d stepped out for lunch. I… I said, ‘With his fiancée?’ They laughed, in that way that… people laugh. You know. When someone’s sleeping with someone else. I… I must have given my name when I first walked in. I don’t remember. Either I did or he saw me leave. He called me that night… last night, that would be. But I said no. Then he came around tonight, early tonight. Just after five. I’d just gotten home. I went to the door, and… at first I thought it was you. Just as I thought just now, when you knocked… oh. That was cruel. God, that was cruel!"

"So he took you out."

"Yes. Out to supper. He wouldn’t take no for an answer. And then we came back, and he wanted to come in. He said he’d missed me. He wanted… you know what he wanted."

"And you, too, Celine. You wanted to close the circle. Richard and Richard around me like two bookends, the beginning mistake and the—the end where you know exactly what’s going to happen. Where you’re left in pieces again, and he steps over them all without getting any on his shoes."

"Yes." There was amazement in the gaze she turned on me, amazement whose intensity started to dry and focus her pupils. "Yes."

"So why? Why didn’t you close the circle?"

"I…." Now she was confused. She shook her head distractedly. "I couldn’t."

"Why not?"

"Because of her."

"The other woman—the woman who had him?"

"Yes. Do you think I wanted to help him do to her what he had done to me?"

"Why not? You don’t owe her anything."

"I… I couldn’t. I couldn’t do that to someone else."

"You’re right. You couldn’t, because she had him, and you never had him. You couldn’t have made him do to her what he did to you—"

"No, you’re wrong. I know him. He wouldn’t leave her for me, but… he wouldn’t stay with her. Once I started him off, there’d be others. Even if I just had him one night."

"And you think there won’t be others now?"

"I… I don’t know. But I won’t start him off. She deserves a chance. They both deserve a chance."

"Why? Did you get a chance? Did he give a chance to you? Do you think they deserve anything?"

She was growing agitated. Her right shoulder, rumpling the alpaca coat up around her chin, rolled against the wall, and she reached her feet unsteadily.

"Don’t you deserve a chance at sleep? That’s not asking much, to be able to sleep. Why not just kill off the last ounce of hope…"

"No! No! I… I couldn’t do that to anyone…"

"I’m talking about doing it for yourself. Why not just borrow him for one night?"

"Because he ruined my life! Do you think I want to ruin someone else’s life the same way?"

"Even if it costs you your sleep?"

She looked up at me with a flash of something like indignation. "Even if it costs me my life!"

"But Celine!" I grabbed her wrists just then, my own hands all at once wildly animate, and I shook her back and forth. "You don’t do things like that! You’re no good! You don’t sacrifice yourself for other people! You’re worse than anything I could imagine, or my mother could imagine!" And my hands leapt from her wrists to her shoulders (so thin within the plush coat), and once more I shook her and shook her. "You’re no good! Why would someone like you throw away her only chance to be rid of fear for the sake of a complete stranger—a person whose name she doesn’t even know? You can’t do things like that! That’s beyond honorable—that’s noble! That’s like Christ!"

"No!" she cried, horrified. "No!"

"Why not? Are you afraid? Afraid of all the choices—all the new chances to screw up?"

"I will!" she wailed. "I always do!"

"And you don’t want me, either, because you don’t want to ruin my life, either…"

"No!"

"Because I deserve a chance."

"Yes!"

"So if I take you right now, it’ll ruin your chance to give me a chance…"

"No… yes!"

"If I just take you, just have you all for myself, all of you, right now…."

And I devoured her—her lips, her chin, her cheeks, her eyes. I swept her coat off and flung it across the room in one motion: in the next, I lifted her and lay her on the sofa. I squeezed her into that end where we never used to nestle when we watched TV, the end which thrust itself into the room’s darkest, most doubtful corner. When I saw, as I looked back up from her bared waist, that the lamplight was in her eyes, I peeled off my remaining shoe and backhanded it across the room. The night immediately exploded black around us in a frail tingle of glass; but as I brought her head up on the sofa’s arm, turning it with my chin, I could see the glint of her teeth in the pallor misting through the drapes.

Afterward, we must have slept a while. I remember fishing around in the dark at the sofa’s far end for her quilt. When I returned with it, tucking it up over those thin shoulders as smooth as wet ice (and little less cold), she was awake, or partly so. She said into my ear, "Rish-aard!" I rolled her over onto my chest, thinking we would go back to sleep. It was then that she whispered, "I may not be able to have children. Or not many. The doctor said not to hope for too much. It was… something that happened to me a while back, and… I got hurt, and now…. Well, you kept talking about children, about a big family, and I had a check-up just after your break, and… so I asked."

As I felt her moist warm breath on my neck and felt her fine dense hair on my lips, I watched the whole evening, the whole week, the whole last month reassemble itself in the night above my head. Why couldn’t she just have told me straight out? Why did she have to whisper the most important things into the midnight? I said nothing for a minute, but my palm never stopped running up and down her bare spine. Finally, when I could tell by her breathing that she was clinging to wakefulness for an answer, I put some order in my thoughts.

"I’m sorry, Celine. I’m sorry I put you through that. It doesn’t matter, not in the least. You should have told me…"

"But it does matter! I want children… I want to give you children!"

Another passionate non-sequitur to ease around. "He said… the doctor… that it would be hard. That having a large family would be a long shot. But… so we’ll be grateful for the one or two."

"Yes, but… even that might be hard."

"We’ll really work at it!"

Suddenly I had to have her again. I picked her up in my arms and carried her to her bedroom. When we had made love before, our appetite had been blended from anger and terror—from sleeplessness and raw nerves. This time it was the sheer joy of release—of getting the drawbridge up before the devils on our heels could follow, and watching them whirl and caper furiously below from our turret in the clouds. We loved long and deep, and when it ended at last, sleep had already stretched one wing over us. For me, part of the joy was actually realizing that a doctor’s visit had been behind much of this week’s hell. That was something I could grapple and wrestle down. Its facts could be addressed individually, and its prognosis could be courted with drugs and treatments. After all, our bodies were young and healthy. We had our whole lives ahead of us.

But when I woke up the next morning, Saturday morning, and quietly plumped up my pillow so that I could watch my sweet Celine, my Celine, sleep away… shoulders up, shoulders down, the tips of her upper foreteeth just barely visible, a stray wisp of hairs arching over her upturned nose… I think I began to suspect what hobgoblins lurked in the hard medical facts. We had not raised the drawbridge quite in time, after all. Some of these demons would ride on our shoulders forever, or until a miracle waved them off. Some of them were camped in Celine’s womb. Scar tissue from an abortion… wasn’t that it, how she "got hurt"? This was the very first time I ever actually entertained such a thought about Celine—and it only crossed my mind then because I recollected my best friend in college grieving to me one night over his sister’s virtual sterilization by a bad abortion. Somehow, an abortion would make a lot of pieces fit which had always seemed loose to me before. How could she have gone crazy over the loss of this Richard? Was Richard, then, a man to die for—a lying traitor like him? But to lose a child… and, in losing a child by choice, to discover later that you would lose other children against your choice…. I also recalled at some point, propped against my pillow, that curious unfinished remark last night hidden among Celine’s praise of mothers: how they were always right, how I should listen to mine. What was it she had said? "Even I was right, maybe, when I…"—when she what? When she had an abortion? When, as a would-be mother, she chose to spare her unborn child the misery of having her for a mother?

I brushed the wayward strands of hair off her nose as gently as I could. My mother, of course… Celine was right to think that my mother would stomp her foot and hurl high damnation down upon her if knowledge of the abortion were ever to come out. But me? How could she think I would refuse to forgive her? But how could I forgive her if I must never know?

Or if I told her that I knew and forced my forgiveness upon her, how could I convince her that I wasn’t offering another sacrifice to the flawless image, the Perfect Celine in my heart’s temple? How could I make her accept being forgiven? For that matter, I had nothing to forgive, unless the sons and daughters whom we would never have… and I had already faced that loss by taking her as mine. But how could I ever persuade her to forgive herself? They say that God forgives… what does he do, then, when someone won’t believe herself worthy of his offer?

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In producing the hard copy of this edition, we have abruptly confronted the embarrassing fact, mere hours before our bundle is to be delivered to the printer, that we have an even-numbered blank on the final page’s flip-side! True to our resolution never to let paper go unused, we have scrambled about for five hundred words of further matter. Dr. Palaver’s nugatory nuggets, which usually adorn our receding stern, are not mined in haste (appearances notwithstanding) and are hence unavailable in this moment of crisis. What to do?

Then we recalled an exchange among certain interested parties on the subject of our kids’ baseball experience. The topic is ripe for the time of year, and Praesidium has actually carried at least one essay about baseball (specifically, about its decadence in the nineties—what else would you expect from us?) over the years. The matter of this particular exchange concerns hitting; and, with regard to hitting, it concerns how to hold the bat. Our office-advocate maintains that a small space between the hands—say, of an inch or two—provides both greater bat control and greater bat speed. A simple test of this assertion (he insists) is as accessible as the nearest walking stick, umbrella, or shillelagh. Gripping said object securely, work the wrists back and forth with the hands in various positions: pressed together at the object’s end, pressed together when "choked up" on the object, and separated by the recommended one or two inches. The last position clearly yields both the greatest sense of control and the highest velocity. Of course, a hitter addressing an incoming pitch uses more than his wrists, and a much more sophisticated experiment would have to be devised for comparing the drive of muscular arms to that of wiry, slightly separated wrists. But there’s no disputing that the swing with more "arm" in it is also the swing assured of producing more strikeouts. In other words, a possible slight enhancement of velocity must be weighed against a certain enhancement of typical inefficiency.

Now, here’s the poser. Given the incontestable virtues of the "small space" approach, why do Little League coaches all around this great green land of ours absolutely, categorically refuse to allow their young charges the practice of it? One this point, our paternal colleague grows most exercised. He has heard his own son shouted out from dugout and coach’s box in censure of the "small space" so often that his blood pressure has suffered escalation, and we understand that a series of heated phone conversations ensued after one straw too many touched the camel’s back. Our perceptive father also visited the library to prepare a more thorough brief. There he consulted book after book endowed with grainy photographs of yesteryear’s sultans of the swat. As a matter of fact, Babe Ruth (the proper owner of that sobriquet) turns out to have been a critical force in rendering the "small space" unpopular. Before his rainbow homeruns, the approach was routine among great hitters. Our researcher found photographic evidence that the following worthies refused to clamp the top hand down on the bottom hand: Napoleon Lajoie (who recorded the highest seasonal average ever—.422), Stuffy McGinnis, Fred Snodgrass, Tris Speaker, Eddie Collins, Ty Cobb, and possibly even Lou Gehrig (Ruth’s teammate and psychic opposite) and Hank Greenberg. The photographs, our source warns, can be misleading, and not only because many are simply of poor quality. If a hitter is shown as his bat crosses the plate, or most certainly as it wraps around his front shoulder, the upper hand may well have slipped down on the lower even though it started at the salutary remove of the "small space". The space’s benefits do not require that it be preserved throughout the swing. Indeed (our noble father argues fluently), the upper hand should always be held looser than the lower so as not to impede the bat’s steering except in the event of a high inside pitch. The crowning example in the gallery (because it rests within vivid memory for some of us) is Leon Wagner, who was harrowing American League pitchers in the late fifties and early sixties before his incorrigibly errant throws and stunning flamboyance before the camera led him to employment in another part of Los Angeles. The three-inch space in Daddy Wags’s grip was much admired at the time.

We suggest that there is food for rumination here even for those who detest the game of baseball. A clearer case of universal aversion to a method whose success is empirically indisputable would be hard to find. The moralist may well ask, What makes people cling to a habit in the teeth of solid evidence that another way gets better results—what makes them, indeed, stamp out the other way wherever they find it? Spanish editorialist Antonio Azorín wrote an essay about a century ago reflecting upon his rural countrymen’s loathing of trees (they harbor crop-eating birds) and water (it draws nutrients out of the soil), citing rather extensive studies on the subject. Think of it: poor dirt-farmers, their loved ones dying of malnutrition and tuberculosis, who chop down every tree as though it were a weed and shun aqueducts as though they were a clever plot of peasant-hating Madrid bureaucrats… people trying to scratch a living from a dusty steppe who resist every attempt to transform the dusty steppe! It’s no less incomprehensible than a responsible adult male who watches children strike out time after time and refuses to allow them the advantages that procured four thousand hits for Ty Cobb. O tempora, o mores!