“Here or out there?”
“There,” Betsy said.
“Did you know that the Swedes, the French, the Dutch, the West Germans and the Spanish all have picked up the rights to Cate’s last?”
“That certainly won’t hurt,” Paul said. “Won’t hurt a bit.”
“Cate,” Betsy asked, “do you know this guy Brance from Life?”
“Only indirectly. Why?”
“He’s coming out next week,” she said with a theatrical innocence. “Wants to do a spread on Paul. Just thought you might know him.”
Allis stood Mack on his feet. He swayed there. “Jill Krementz is to do the jacket photo for Cate’s new book.”
“She’s doing Paul’s too,” Betsy said.
Then we were silent, listening to the wind slipping through the rushes, and the waves lapping against the beach as the tide moved in. The echoes of all we’d said and all we’d meant were like a swamp of sea gull shit.
I said, sitting up, “We’ve known each other too long for this bullshit.” But then I wondered. “Haven’t we, Paul?”
“Hell, yes.” He poked in the sand. “Yes,” he said again. “This shit is like a disease, isn’t it?” He stood and bashed the heel of his foot into the sand until he’d made a pit.
“Listen, Cate: Will the teaching hurt your work?”
“I hope not.”
“Don’t let it, man.”
“No.”
He seemed to want to say more but did not. We sat enshrouded in our silences, benumbed by the knowledge now plainly obvious, so much so that we could no longer delude ourselves, that our friendship existed only because of the tension caused by the enmity of our kinds. Like matter must beget antimatter; like antimatter simply cannot be without matter; we were particles of a scheme, magnetized, in motion, quarking under impetuses not quite our own.
12
This branch of the university was private. The children of wealthy parents attended, slipping in and out of the hollows and trudging assuredly over the hills of the near-New York City countryside. The place was toughly bucolic; one could discern, almost without trying, nearby traffic rushing into and out of the city or, in the evening hours, hear it lapping along the interstate. The isolation was more imagined than real.
If the rich had always been different from the rest of us, then their children were trying hard not to be. Their allegiances were with the times: smelly clothes and Afro cuts. They liked rock music, of course; there was little other popular music so readily available. They drank wine and smoked the grass—ditchweed, mainly—that some jive townie had sold them at exorbitant rates while claiming it to be “superbad.” About their courses of study the students were quite nonchalant; grades did not mean nearly as much as their family names, and they had come here, after all, because there was some understanding about the names.
A few black students were in attendance. Those who were not on scholarship scrambled frantically to create and maintain distances from those who were. These last, to a girl or boy, were from the streets of the city and were “down,” wearing hats in the classroom and blocking narrow stairwells to give each other the most intricate handshakes or to pound their upraised fists on the air near their heads in emulation of John Carlos and Tommie Smith. They were all good dancers, and thus the males ran rampant through the “liberal” white coeds while invariably proclaiming BLACK POWER. Now and again one met serious black couples, quietly outraged by the racism they alleged had invested the campus. The males, with some caution, picked me up as a “brother.” The females, sloe-eyed and wise, seeming to hear things with their eyes and see things with their ears, drifted about the campus, into and out of classrooms, with, very infrequently, white boyfriends and more frequently black boyfriends; I was not “brother” to them. I never knew what I was.
My colleagues were friendly, bending easily with the times that had cast me into their select company. They were poets and novelists and American literature specialists; this one had Melville, that one Hemingway; this one James, that one Crane; this one the Fugitives, that one the Lost Generation …
But at least I was in touch. We were out of the isolation of raising our child and of licking the wounds imposed by family, and we were back in the middle of things, where cities went up in flames, where national leaders were knocked off. To be in touch was really to be with students, I thought.
Allis had returned to fund-raising as a consultant, picking and choosing her hours so that she could spend the most time with Mack. A woman named Mrs. Lee, a thin, anxious grandmother, came to care part time for Mack. My own work was taking shape under the title The War Has Already Begun.
And Glenn had returned to school. His friend from the assembly line, a six-foot-eight-inch weed—Jed, by name—was transferring to another Ohio school to play Big-Time Ball so that he would have a better chance of getting a shot with the pros. He had now a scholarship that had brought him a Chevrolet Impala. After he red-shirted a year, he thought they’d probably give him a Hog to wheel through his junior and senior years. Jed was a poorly spoken, innocent and gullible boy, totally confident that his basketball skills would place him on top of the world. Nothing else mattered—rebellions, assassinations, Vietnam—nothing. I feared his being hurt by the hardball players.
There were times during their four days with us when I walked into the living room to find him sliding from pivot to post, swinging his body this way and that, head jerking left and right, looking for the imaginary ball, the imaginary open man. Glenn watched with not quite a sneer, for he was envious of such dedication, such confidence.
“Two seconds!” I would yell and watch him uncoil, scrape the pads of his fingertips softly against the ceiling and hear him say (his eyes following the imaginary ball as it arched over imaginary outstretched hands), say with the awesome certainty of athletes completely in tune with their bodies, “Swish!” Glenn would applaud.
They were gone now and I was moving through the university, pleased that it was not draining my energies. No doubt there was some small wonder at my being there, one of three black faculty. But the old rich know more of the whys and wherefores than most of us. There were no riots, no insults (that I could detect) and only one student, a female, who asked during her usual acerbic conference hour, “What are you doing here, anyway?”
She, alas, had tipped her hand; she was new money, obviously.
There were, of course, the tales (sometimes legends) of writers who’d run through the coeds like Zeus through a flock of swans; and there were the novels whose dénouements hinged on the coed-professor relationship. The campus hummed as much with the movement of eyeballs as with the passing of gossip.
There was an entire literature on writers on campus; thus there seemed to be no reason for what happened.
The second semester began with great promise. My European publishers were pooling their resources—each had proclaimed a singularly impoverished budget—to bring us to Europe during the summer to promote my books. Paul had come and read, along with other poets, mainly, and novelists, who through successive springs and falls “do the circuit” in much the same way another generation had “done Europe.”
March winds like a troop of chasseurs whirled around the campus, over which students, bundled like Teddy bears, walked past my window.
I was working at my desk in longhand because I didn’t want my colleagues apprised of my presence, for the door was still open for the wandering student who might want to talk or drop off a late paper. The sound of a typewriter is an insistent reminder that a loner crouches down the hall and that he or she may, at that very moment, be composing a fiercely brilliant paper, a book, a proposal, that would leave the listener of that peckapackapucka in shadow. I wrote in longhand.
I felt a presence, a lightness, inserting itself into the shadows of the doorway. I looked up. There stood a female student, her books held against her breasts. She was vaguely familiar, perhaps one of those two or three black females whose mouths lifted
in slight smiles of greeting as I moved about the campus. She had been studying me for some seconds. Now she smiled, and in some way it was like the sun breaking out after a four-day rain. “Professor Douglass?”
“Call me mister. Or Cato. Come in?”
She drifted forward and sat down with a rustle in the straight-back chair. I waited. I looked at her face. Do faces really tell what we are? What’s Hollywood done to our realities?
“I’m Raffy Joplin,” she said.
Then I remembered the rumor that the daughter of Ralph Joplin was on campus, that Joplin was studying the syncretisms of religions and theater in Baía; that his plays were said to have run out of popularity in the United States. Well, I thought, he had at least done well enough to have sent his daughter here. I had liked his plays.
“Hello, Raffy. How’s your father?”
“Do you know him?”
“No. Just his work.”
“Oh, he’s marvelous,” she said with an expanding smile. “He’s just written to me about Carnaval in Brazil. That’s where he is now.”
I nodded. My voice wouldn’t come because I was chasing the echoes of her inflections; they reminded me of the touch, the warming touch, of gold molded by African craftsmen, and I was conscious of a sudden warmth spreading through my body, as when the acupuncturist’s needles, precisely placed, open up blocked channels to restore dark and light, sweet and sour, fast and slow, to proper balance.
“I’m glad to hear that he’s all right,” I said finally. “He’s a wonderful writer.”
Shyly she said, “Thanks.” Then: “Am I supposed to say that? I never know how to respond when people compliment my father.” She heaved a sigh, her head turned chastely to one side. “Anyway, indirectly, that’s why I came. I’m in Anthro, but I think I want to write, too. I’m not enrolled in any of the writing classes, but I wondered if you could, please, take the time to look at some of my stories and tell me if they’re any good.”
“Have you let your father see them?”
“Not yet. I know he’d like me to write. But I also know that he despises the system that controls what writers produce.”
“Ah, I see.” She looked like Sarasvati, of poetry and music. “Are you a junior? Senior?” It was suddenly and strangely urgent that I know how much longer she would be around.
“Senior.” She sounded apologetic.
Within, I felt an explosion of tension. “Oh! You’re finished in June.”
She smiled proudly. “Yes, thank God.”
“And then?”
“Michigan. University of Michigan. Graduate work.”
“Ann Arbor. Well. Listen: Do you have your work with you? Yes? Why don’t you leave it and come back, oh, whenever. Or call and we’ll set up a time to talk. All right?”
Raffy was beaming as she leafed through a folder and handed me a batch of neatly typed and clipped stories. This once I would not have cared had they been handwritten. But, I thought, score one for her. “I really appreciate this,” she said, standing. “My father’s always liked your novels …” She stood there, holding the books against her body; her eyes roamed away from me and then back to my face. “Maybe I can do you a favor in return.” She smiled. There seemed to be something behind the something already in her eyes.
“Well,” I mumbled, “I’m sure you can. I mean, I’m sure of it.”
Was she laughing at me?
“Bye. I’ll call soon,” she said.
I understood now why my male colleagues stayed on here and suffered low wages, divorces, remarriages to former students and divorces and remarriages again.
I lingered in my office, during the days following, longer than usual; my eyes sprang open to watch the coeds passing my window. I pawed through the campus dorm directory looking for her name and address in vain. Then, after a week (I’d read her work that same afternoon), when I’d relegated her into that corner of the mind reserved for students you wondered about, she called.
“I wanted to read your books—some of them, anyway—before I came. May I come today?”
“Today—ah, sure.” I had wanted to ask: Right now?
It all would have been so perfect if she had been a good writer. She wasn’t. Her father must’ve known. Her work was like the paintings on velvet seen at art hustles in various towns or cities that occur with the onset of spring—flashy, depthless and with much flourish.
She sat down. “Well, what do you think?”
I said, “I thought they were good stories.”
She brightened and shifted to the edge of the chair. She carried no books with her this time, and she appeared fresh and lean. “Really? I thought you wouldn’t like them.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. Something about you.”
“Well, Raffy, they do need some work.”
“Of course. Will you help me?”
That smile again.
I shrugged. “Help? I don’t really teach writing, you know.”
“No?”
“No. I try to teach the habit.”
She laughed merrily, flashing neat rows of white teeth. “Then why is it offered?”
“Because people think it can be taught.”
“But why do you teach it if it can’t be taught?”
“To find the people who can write, I guess. To help them. To meet them. Kindred spirits, and all that. Do you write poetry, too? You must.”
“I do write poetry,” she said, tilting her head in appreciation of my discovery.
We sat in a brief silence, smiling at each other. “Why did you want to read my books?”
“To know you.”
“Is that important?”
“It wasn’t before I first came to see you.”
“Ah,” I said. We did not look at each other. “Have you had lunch?”
“No,” she said. “Have you?”
“No.”
“Then let’s go have some lunch.” I got up. She stood, waiting. “Here’re your stories.”
She looked quickly at the typed comments, then rolled them up. “Where shall we go? Off campus?”
“Okay.”
“I can make you lunch.”
“Okay.” I closed the door. “You a good cook?”
“Sure.”
We walked slowly over the campus the way two young people do when they like each other, turning easily to talk and smile. I had noticed this from my window and, remembering what it looked like to others peering through windows, I tried to assume a professorial gait, whatever that was, and I shortened my stride and tightened my smile and tried to talk seriously about writers and writing.
Yet I was in awe of the ease with which this thing was taking place. Though writers will never admit it, there are certain events they assume must happen to them, or certain things they feel are due them, perhaps in return for what they imagine they have themselves given to the world at large. Yes, I felt I had this coming, but I was also wondering why I was there, why I’d let myself be there, whether I was like the cliché, getting old enough to desire to press my flesh against, into, younger flesh in the hope that, like the fountain of youth waters, it would make me young. Or was this a vague revolutionary impulse, a cementation of racial blood from which I was now legally absented …
She lived not far away, in a small cottage of which she had one half—a studio flat. It was done in greenish yellows, like the first deceptive sprays of forsythia that offer some confusion with languid spring sunlight. She herself was the gingerbread-brown counterpoint.
The ease, I thought again, a flaccid warmth growing inside my thigh. My generation, in most instances, had had to run through the maze, finding some exits blocked, others set with shock, making do with thinking how close we’d come—a desperate finger hooked on the elastic band of the panties; a far more desperate finger sliding through the wet, all hopes that its touch, its insertion in the proper place, would bring a frantic dropping of everything …
“Have a seat.” She smiled a
s if she knew that I wished I had a pipe to clench between my teeth.
“Nice place,” I said. I was sitting on the couch that had to pull out to a bed.
She placed a casserole in the oven and poured some wine. It seemed to have been already opened and breathing near the sink. All ready and waiting. I took the wine and looked at her pictures while she set up the folding table. I wondered if the diaphragm case on the end table was empty.
“My mother,” Raffy said, coming over and pointing. “And my aunt Iris.”
I had heard of Iris Joplin, the expatriate singer. Raffy was telling me that Iris no longer liked Europe and was planning to return to the U.S. While certainly not nearly as old as Alberta Hunter or Eubie Blake (more like Sarah Vaughan, who was making good in her comeback), Iris thought that perhaps she could arrange something with her old friend Bobby Short. Anyway, she wished to return.
“Do you,” I said, tapping the diaphragm case, “have that in now?”
She had started for the stove and stopped; her eyes followed my finger. “That? Yes.” She turned away again and pulled the casserole out. She smiled over her shoulder; it was teasing and seductive and something else I was not able to identify. I walked over.
“For me?”
She moved the casserole to the table. “Yes, of course. Ready to eat?”
“Sure.” I sat down. She filled my glass again. The ease, I was thinking. It was too easy. No. That was the way things were today.
“How do you like it?” Raffy asked. It was macaroni, cheese and ham.
“Good, very good,” I said, though in fact it was quite ordinary. That surprised me the way her stories had.
We talked of people on the campus, her father, the black students, and we ate and drank more wine and then, with nothing more to say on those subjects, I helped her to open the bed. Facing each other, admiring each other, we undressed and slid into it.
That, too, was disappointing. But she didn’t think so. There was a curious disjunction between what she thought she could do and what she actually did. She did not perceive this. She lay breathing heavily, watching me.
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