“That’s good, Phil. I’m real glad. Because this is where it all started.”
“Where what started?”
He looked down at his beer, which he’d hardly touched, and then back at me.
“You remember we scored all that shit, and then the cops stopped us on the way home and I ate the whole stash?”
“How could I ever forget?”
“Something happened to me that night. Something I’ve never told anyone.”
I groaned inwardly. Surely to God he wasn’t about to lay some wacko acid insight on me after all these years? Sam was still staring at me unblinkingly.
“You’re someone I could tell.”
Not if I can help it, I thought. Some hint of my feelings must have showed in my expression, because he suddenly backed off, drank some beer and went on in a normal tone of voice.
“I always really respected you, Phil. You were different than the others. You’d been in Europe and all. Plus there was that class we took together. That makes a big difference, the fact that you’ve read Blake.”
“What’s Blake got to do with it?”
It occurred to me for the first time that Sam might be slightly crazy. Maybe that year in Vietnam had taken its toll after all.
His next words seemed to confirm my suspicions.
“Blake is very important,” he whispered, as though confiding a great truth.
I shrugged.
“Try telling that to my students. Most of them don’t read anything except the funnies.”
Sam nodded.
“Do you ever get the feeling that some of them aren’t exactly real?”
I frowned. Once again he’d thrown me for a loop.
“What?”
“Don’t you ever feel that there are some of them who just don’t get it? Who never will get it? I’m sure you’re a great teacher, Phil. An inspirational teacher. But I’ll bet that when you look around the class, you see maybe five or ten people out there who just aren’t picking up the signals you’re sending. You know? They don’t get it, because they don’t have it.”
“Don’t have what?”
Sam gave me his meaningful look again.
“Soul,” he said.
It was the first time for years I had heard the word except in a religious context. “Soul” was one of those loose, capacious words we used so much, into which we could pour our feelings without having to analyze them at all. If you liked something, it had soul. If you didn’t, it hadn’t. A neat way of not thinking, but one which had also worn badly with the passing years. I felt slightly sickened by Sam’s hippie one-upmanship, with its unearned suggestions of superior insight and more radical consciousness.
“Some of my students are more gifted than others, of course,” I replied stiffly. “Some are going to get the credits they need to get into a four-year college, others will wind up delivering mail or driving a bus. My job is to educate them up to the level of their abilities, not pick out the brightest and best and stroke their egos.”
Sam smiled and shook his head.
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Then what did you mean?” I shot back.
He tossed his head slightly. The smile disappeared.
“It’s not something you can discuss over a beer. Words are such little things, Phil. You should know that.”
“Words happen to be my business,” I replied huffily.
Again he didn’t seem to hear me.
“All those nights we sat up tripping together,” he said, gazing dreamily at the tabletop. “What happened then was real, wasn’t it? Realer than anything you’d ever felt before. But you could never talk about it after, never describe what you’d seen and heard. You had to have been there. You had to have lived through it.”
I eyed him coldly.
“I don’t do drugs any more, Sam.”
“Neither do I,” he said. “I haven’t touched them since that night we were just talking about.”
Given what I’d heard about the dope intake of our boys in Vietnam, I found this hard to believe. But it was none of my business.
“OK,” I said, “so what was it that happened that night? You didn’t make a big deal of it at the time. In fact you hardly said anything about it.”
Sam smiled and nodded.
“Sure, I know. It took me months to come to terms with it at all. I couldn’t believe it, couldn’t accept it. It was all too new, too overwhelming. It wasn’t till I got back from the war that I really mastered it.”
Our eyes met.
“Is that why you volunteered to become a rifleman?” I asked.
Sam grinned delightedly.
“That’s right, man! You understand!”
He spoke with such feeling that I was almost reluctant to disappoint him.
“I just figured that since you’d done two oddball things, they might be linked.”
He nodded, still grinning.
“I had to put it to the test.”
I stared at him.
“By risking your life?”
He nodded.
“If what I learned that night was true, you see, then I possessed a secret which would give me the power of life and death over every single person on the planet.”
So he was crazy after all. I felt slightly disappointed, but also relieved.
“That’s why it was important to make sure,” he went on in the same conversational tone, “and the only way to do that was to lay my own life on the line. If I survived, against all the odds, that would prove I was right.”
My only wish was to get the hell out of there, but I controlled myself. If I walked out now, leaving him with a sense of unfinished business, I might never hear the end of this. Better to let him get it off his chest now.
“So what’s this all about, Sam?”
He didn’t reply for a moment.
“Remember that argument I had with Larry?” he murmured. “I said that God either wasn’t omnipotent or He wasn’t loving, but you couldn’t have it both ways? Well, I was wrong. You can have it both ways. And that night I was shown how.”
“Uh huh,” I prompted.
He sat looking at me.
“Well, are you going to tell me?” I asked.
He laughed.
“It’s not something that can be told, man.”
“But you said I was someone you could tell,” I retorted, childishly pleased to have caught him out.
Sam turned over the bar tab and wrote a phone number on the back. He pushed it across the table toward me.
“Come out and see us some time,” he said. “It’s very quiet, very peaceful. A good place to kick back and get your head together.”
I tried to keep a straight face.
“So what’s the deal on this place? Is it some kind of commune?”
“Kind of. We’ve got some land, all the basic stuff you need for survival. There’s about twenty of us hanging out there. They’re nice folks. You’d like them. Some great-looking chicks, too.”
I imagined a rag-taggle group of aging hippies camping out in some clearing in the woods, their hand-knit clothes reeking of woodsmoke, a pack of grimy children crawling around their feet while they strummed out-of-tune guitars and cultivated a cozy sense of moral superiority.
“I’d really like for you to join us, Phil,” Sam continued seriously “That would complete the circle. And for you it would mean a whole new life, something you can’t even begin to imagine now. But first you have to change. That’s the key to the whole thing. The old must pass away before the new can be born. First you change, then you are changed.”
I had had enough.
“I have changed,” I replied calmly. “I’ve changed a lot. Not in the twinkling of an eye, after ODing on acid, but day in, day out. That’s the kind of change I believe in, the kind that lasts.”
“My kind of change outlasts everything,” Sam said softly. “Even death.”
This was intended as a challenge, but I wasn’t going to rise to
the bait. I had made my point. Now it was time to throw in the sweetener and get this guy out of my life forever.
“I really admire you, Sam,” I said. “I like it that you’re still tackling the big questions, the big issues. We were all like that once, but most of us have lost it somewhere along the way. I think it’s great that you’re still out there on the edge, but personally I can’t live like that. It turns out I work best with my feet on the ground. I’m neither proud nor ashamed of that. Maybe you’re more flexible. All I know is the kind of change you’re talking about would break me.”
Sam looked at me solemnly a long moment. Then he smiled, as if dismissing the whole matter.
“Well, it’s been good to talk to you, Phil.”
“Sure has,” I agreed heartily. “If you’re ever in town again, give me a call.”
The idea was to reduce everything that had been said to the level of a banal social encounter. I knew he wasn’t likely to pass through the Twin Cities again.
Sam shook his head decisively.
“Next time, you’ll call me.”
I edged out of the booth, gathering my things around me, asserting my separate existence.
“What are you doing here anyway?” I asked.
“I came to see you, Phil.”
This time I couldn’t ignore him.
“You came all this way just to have a beer with me in a bar?”
He said nothing. Never underestimate the power of silence. It made me lose it completely.
“You should have told me you were coming! We could have had dinner, gone out somewhere … You should have let me know.”
His supercilious smile reappeared.
“That’s not the way I operate.”
And with that he walked away, across the bar, out the door. I left some money on the table and went after him, feeling resentful that he had somehow managed to gain the upper hand, despite all my efforts. But when I got outside, the street was empty. Downtown Minneapolis had changed since the old days. The street life which had flourished then had been exterminated, but nothing had replaced it. Consumers drove in from the suburbs, like me, had their fun and went home. The sidewalks were empty, the concrete slabs decorated with a faint flurry of snow.
I got my car from the parking lot, jammed a tape of the Brandenburg Concertos in the stereo and drove home, seething internally. I felt intolerably nauseous, as though I might throw up not just the beer I had drunk and the pretzels I had nibbled but my very brains and being. The whole weight of my misspent youth rose in my throat like a greasy, undigested feast. The evening had been a disaster from start to finish, a farcical misalignment of intentions and personalities. It was futile to try to revive old friendships.
I had tried to be polite and positive to Sam, praising his refusal to compromise and apologizing for having settled for less. This was hypocrisy, a strategy for sending him away happy, for getting him off my back. The fact was that I had come to terms with life. I had accepted its conditions, signed the contract and was now enjoying the modest but solid rewards. Nothing else was real, and anyone who went on trying to pretend that it was would end up like Sam, marginalized and crazy, someone people shied away from in bars.
The whole episode seemed an irrelevance, a freak occurrence of no relevance to my present circumstances. If it hadn’t been for that chance meeting with Vince, it would never have happened. As I drove up to our modest tract house, identical to all the others in our neat, convenient suburb, I made a vow never to let chance interfere in my arrangements again.
5
Bonnie Kowalski drew up to the curb and yawned loudly. It was OK, she was on time, in spite of the traffic. The guy would most likely be late, anyway. He’d phoned in the day before to check the time of their appointment, even though she’d sent him a confirmation in writing. Your typical academic ditz, thought Bonnie. She’d had lots of dealings with them, the campus being so close, and she’d yet to meet one who didn’t seem to be a few dishes short of a combination platter.
She pried the plastic lid off a cup of coffee which read “The beverage you’re about to enjoy is extremely hot.” Bonnie remembered reading something where some woman had scalded herself and sued the company for half a million bucks. She sipped the coffee cautiously and stared out through the windshield at the big trees in the parking strip, gaunt and bare in the morning sunlight.
When she’d started up the car that morning, to take Nathan to the orthodontist and then on to school, the windshield wipers had started too. Their painful scraping across the dry glass had brought it all back to her: the evening which had started so promisingly and ended so brutally, the suddenness with which everything had gone wrong, their inability to turn it around again, Ed’s cold words and unyielding silences, the fit of anger and despair which had forced her out into the rain-sluiced streets, the fact that he hadn’t come after her. The fact that he hadn’t come after her.
And she hadn’t even gotten laid. That’s what it had all been about originally, and even now, after all these months, Ed had only to give her a certain look, and put one hand on her breast and another on her leg, and everything else fell away. That’s what had always held them together. She’d never known a lover so masterful, so greedy, so sure of what he wanted and how to get it. His occasional moods and sulks had seemed a small price to pay for such ecstasy, plus he’d always been at his best in that way after being at his worst in others.
If anyone had told her, six months before, that she’d fall for a man like that, Bonnie would have dismissed the idea with contempt. She’d always thought she liked being in charge in bed, setting the agenda, controlling the pace and the progress. Now she wondered what had made her waste so much time dating men who bought-into that kind of micromanagement. With Ed she’d known from the get-go that she was in safe hands. Sex with him wasn’t a matter of consultation and compromise. He took what he wanted, turning her body this way and that, having his way with her. And she loved it. For a couple of days she’d worried about betraying her principles, then she thought, fuck it. No one need ever know, anyway.
She glanced at her watch. Still five minutes to the appointment. She’d give him fifteen after that, just to be safe, then head back to the office. A wave of depression hit her like a blow, forcing a sigh from her. She suddenly felt that men were standing her up, ignoring her feelings and needs. Even Jerry had been cool and distant when she got back the night before. Maybe he’d guessed. Maybe her pain had showed in her face. It was easier to conceal a happy affair than an unhappy one.
As usual, her alibi had been that she’d had to show a home. Her work was useful that way. Many people could only view a property at night. Bonnie had gone into great detail about the listing, a young contemporary colonial on Indian Ridge, five beds, four and a half baths, boasting a gourmet kitchen, a butler’s pantry and a cathedral ceiling. She’d even described the clients, a gay couple from out of state. Maybe she’d said too much. She wouldn’t have bothered if the story had been true, or even if things had gone better with Ed. She would have felt confident and relaxed, and Jerry would never have suspected a thing. He never had before, she was sure of that.
She took a gulp of the coffee, which had cooled considerably by now. Sherman was late, God damn him. She’d tried to get him to meet at the office, but he’d claimed his time was too valuable. The same apparently didn’t apply to hers. At the office she could have buried herself in her work and joked around with the others instead of sitting moping all alone in her car. Plus, although she tried not to think about this too much, it was safer. There’d been a couple of horror stories involving female realtors recently, rapes, even a murder. But that was some place else. There were neighborhoods where she wouldn’t have shown up alone, but Evanston wasn’t one. Anyway, it was broad daylight, and the guy was a professor. He’d probably be so scared of ending up in a harassment case he wouldn’t make eye contact with her without a witness.
A couple of joggers passing by glanced at the house with i
ts immaculately tended lawn. A metal sign embedded in the turf displayed the logo of the firm along with Bonnie’s name and the hot line number in red. This one was hot, all right. $600,000 was the asking price, although Bonnie was pretty sure they’d go down to the low fives for a quick sale. The seller had been transferred back east and needed cash fast. As for Samuel Baines Sherman, recently appointed MacSomebody Distinguished Professor of Something at Northwestern, he’d already sold.
The joggers passed by again. Bonnie looked them over as they padded along the sidewalk. In their twenties, one a little taller than the other, clean-cut student types. That’s the kind of place Evanston was-college kids, professors, yuppies and rich businessmen, espressos and French bakeries and fresh pasta. Far enough from the city to be safe, near enough to be convenient.
Then there were the properties themselves. This one was a classy Victorian, maybe a little rambling-or “spacious,” as the ads said-but definitely tony. Ten rooms in all, five bedrooms, two fireplaces, hardwood floors, leaded glass, you name it, this baby was loaded. It didn’t have a lake view, but Maple was a very nice street tucked in between Ridge Boulevard and the CTA tracks, quiet and leafy but still only half an hour from the Loop and a five-minute commute to the Northwestern campus. Sherman could bike it, even walk there, or run if he was the type. It was a perfect home for him. Everything looked good, and Bonnie stood to clean up on the deal. These North Shore places sold themselves. It had been dumb to let herself get thrown by what had happened. It was only a lover’s tiff, every couple had them. As soon as she got back to the office she’d give Ed a call and fix up a time to see him again. Then they would talk everything over, get it all worked out.
A car came up the wide, tree-lined street and pulled in right in front of Bonnie. It was a bright red Impala, but the man who got out of it didn’t look like the Impala type. He was of average height and build, but gave the impression of occupying more space than he actually did, and being entitled to it. His hair was dark and curly, his beard grizzly gray and neatly trimmed. He wore a double-breasted astrakhan coat over what looked like a tweed suit, with well-polished oxfords and those Italian-framed glasses that don’t make you look like a nerd. The Impala had to be a rental. The family Volvo or Audi, or whatever distinguished import the Distinguished Professor drove, would be in storage with the rest of his stuff back in New Hampshire. Lifting her purse from the passenger seat, Bonnie Kowalski switched on a smile and got out to greet him.
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