Selling Out

by Dan Wakefield

“You know, this whole thing’s for you, too. For us. Otherwise I wouldn’t—we wouldn’t be doing it.”

  “I know,” she said, fitting right and full in his arm.

  They had talked long into the night about it, sitting much like this, staring into the living room fireplace, sharing their dreams of what this unexpected financial bonanza could mean. Solarizing the house. Traveling. Taking time off from teaching, maybe someday being free of it altogether, Perry being able to devote full time and attention to his writing, as Jane would to her photography. They did not want “things” but freedom, the freedom to develop their talent and make an even greater contribution to the culture and beauty of the world. They did not want money for ostentation or for luxury, but for good.

  As for fame, well, any of that would only empower Perry to use his name more effectively in causes he and Jane both believed in—the nuclear freeze, the human rights of fellow artists living in nations with oppressive political regimes. Perry would of course not object to his name carrying the added power of one who counted in the world.

  Sinking back comfortably in his seat and closing his eyes, he imagined himself on some kind of crucial mission with other responsible people in the television industry, people like Norman Lear and Edward Asner, the sort of people who would welcome the participation of a delegate like himself from the world of serious literature. He saw himself with Lear, Asner, Phil Donahue, and possibly Norman Mailer (after all, he had written the script for the powerful television dramatization of his own book The Executioner’s Song and so must be considered part of the medium now), debarking from a special Air Force diplomatic plane at the Cairo airport, awaited anxiously by leading representatives of the Middle Eastern nations—but just then another voice broke his fantasy.

  He looked up to see the flight attendant smiling down, gently tilting the frosty bottle of champagne toward him.

  “More?” she asked.

  Perry smiled.

  “You took the word right out of my mouth,” he said.

  “Here’s to ‘more,’” said Jane, lifting her glass.

  Bubbles grew like the buoyant feeling between the happy couple as they soared toward this exciting new phase of their lives. Perry touched his glass to the one his wife held toward him.

  “More,” he said.

  “More?”

  Perry’s best friend, Al Cohen, was genuinely perplexed.

  “I thought you had everything you wanted,” he said. “Didn’t you tell me that, not so long ago?”

  “I did. I do. I know this sounds crazy, but lately I’ve had this feeling, like an itch or something. I don’t even know what it is I want more of—I just want more.”

  It was early autumn, before any thoughts of TV or Hollywood had entered Perry’s mind. He had gone to join Al, as he often did, for the end, or walking part, of his buddy’s daily five-mile run. Though everyone still marveled at how much Perry had shaped up his life since his second marriage, and his physical as well as emotional condition was now acceptably healthy, he had not gone so far as those colleagues like Al, whose rigorous regimens of diet and exercise made them seem like prizefighters training for the final rounds of life.

  Perry puffed vigorously on his well-chewed pipe as he ambled along on this stroll he considered his own day’s virtuous exercise. Al, still breathing heavily from his run, stopped and put his hands on his hips, bending at the waist a few times to limber himself, then stared out at the blue-green hills as if seeking there an answer to Perry’s dilemma.

  “Is it women?” he asked, still gazing at the hills. “You want girlfriends again?”

  “Oh for God sake, man.”

  Perry was disappointed, not only that his wise old friend had failed to come up with some blazing insight into his conundrum, but that this most trusted confidant could be so far off the mark. The very notion of “girlfriends again” suggested regression to the sloppy days of boozy, random beddings that preceded and followed his brief, blighted first marriage, that in fact made up most of his allegedly adult life before he met Jane and achieved some semblance of maturity and order.

  “Sorry,” Al said as soon as he saw Perry’s face. “Maybe it was the word ‘itch’ that made me think that. As in The Seven Year Itch.”

  “You realize I’ve been almost five years with Jane now?” Perry asked.

  He smiled, proud of his record.

  “Hell, for me, that’s a miracle,” he said. “And I have every hope of making it twenty-five more. As many more as I’ve got.”

  “Right,” said Al, nodding affirmation and starting to walk ahead again on the dusty path, as Perry, locking his hands behind his back, followed along, concentrating, trying to solve his riddle.

  “No, it isn’t women,” he mused, as if eliminating categories in a quiz game.

  “You’re pleased with the book, aren’t you?” Al asked.

  “Like a proud papa,” Perry said. “Maybe more than I should be.”

  He had spent the past few weeks reading galley proofs of the new collection of short stories his publisher was bringing out the following spring, and enjoyed the warming sense of satisfaction that comes with seeing one’s words in print, and the larger fulfillment of completion of a work. This would be his third book of stories, and he felt justified and pleased in the expectation that it would bring, not fame and fortune, but a continued growth in what Al had called—with his usual candor and accuracy—the “small celebrity” Perry had earned.

  “Maybe you need a change of scene,” Al suggested, pulling up a stalk of foxtail grass from the side of the road.

  Perry stopped in his tracks.

  “From here? From Haviland?”

  The idea of living in some other place, or teaching at some other college, seemed not only disorienting to Perry, but worse, disloyal. This was the place that had taken him in when he needed a home, had given him shelter and sustenance, professionally and financially, at a time when other colleges and universities had looked down their academic nose at his credentials, or lack of them. Dropping out of the Ph.D. race at Harvard to support his short-story writing by bartending, baby-sitting, selling encyclopedias and vitamins door to door, and teaching freshman composition at a pharmaceutical college in Boston had not made him an attractive candidate in the eyes of most of the English department chairmen around New England. There was one, however, who saw something more in him, and valued it.

  “You’re a writer!” old Professor Bryant had said to him seventeen years ago, looking up from Perry’s short story in the Atlantic Monthly, lifting his hands in a gesture of honor and welcome. With Bryant’s influential backing, Haviland had given Perry the time to write as well as teach, and the college community came to regard him proudly as their writer. They nested and nourished him, protected and praised him, shared the honor of his books and prizes, put up with his black moods and drinking bouts, stood by him through the busted marriage that sent him into a tailspin at thirty-two and the ragged personal life that followed till Jane came along, like a real-live happy ending, beginning brighter days.

  “I only meant a temporary change,” Al said. “I never thought I’d be saying this to you, of all people, but maybe you’re too comfortable now.”

  “Too fat and happy, huh?” Perry grinned. “Maybe that’s it. Maybe I do need a change—a challenge.”

  Al suggested he apply for a grant or fellowship to go abroad for a while, and Perry pounced on the notion. He sent off to foundations for applications, lined up distinguished sponsors, and with Al’s help concocted high-sounding proposals for literary projects. Yet all the time, underneath all the activity, he knew that none of it would really happen because in his heart he really didn’t care. The romantic images he had held in his youth of “Paris” and “Ireland”—not the real places but the literary dream about them—had faded, lost their power. Trying to revive his feeling about them was as useless as trying to re-create the passion once felt for an old lover.

  Jane did her admirable best at play
ing the game of enthusiasm for going abroad. She even revived Perry’s fantasy of the two of them doing a book together, one of those color-filled coffee-table numbers, a marriage of her pictures and his words: The Irish Coast–A New View, or Sidestreets of Paris Reconsidered. Perry brought home maps that they spread on the living room floor, bending over to study as assiduously as explorers, but under the bright pretense Jane sensed his real unrest and lack of interest. She was worried about him.

  “What is it? What’s happening?”

  She would ask, with gentle concern, when she woke in the dark hour before dawn to find him noiselessly pacing the room in bare feet, or simply sitting in the old easy chair in the corner, smoking his pipe and staring.

  “Nothing,” he answered quietly, or “I don’t know.”

  He came and kissed her gently on the forehead, wondering himself what it was that distracted him during the day, acting like a subtle itch on his concentration. His senses had never seemed so acute, yet when classes began in September he found himself losing thoughts in midsentence, suddenly standing and staring at the students’ familiar faces and wondering who they were and how they got there.

  All the girls seemed to be named Michelle now. When he started teaching they were mostly Mary Lou and Cindy and now they were Michelle and Dawn. Of course they weren’t girls any more, they were women. It was difficult for Perry to look at the latest crop of rosy-cheeked, milky-skinned, lithe young damsels, some of them teenagers fresh from pubescence, and call them women, just as it was incongruous for him to think of their giggling, pimply male counterparts as men. It was all right to slip now and then and refer to the male species as boys (the football coach called them his kids), but calling the females girls was a real cultural-political gaffe, practically reportable as an incident of sexual harassment.

  There was a gorgeous Michelle who sat in the front row of Perry’s “Art of the Novel” class who he privately felt was sexually harassing him, and certainly contributing to his already acute condition of mental disorientation, by every ten minutes or so tossing back her head in such a way that her long mane of glossy hair swung like a golden curtain across her face and spread itself on her other shoulder. The execution of the movement involved an arching of the neck and back that thrust forward her high, ample breasts, which of course were not confined by the unnatural constriction of a bra, so that, under the low-cut T-shirt-type garment she wore above her skintight jeans, the breasts seemed to be shoved toward Perry like a kind of erotic taunt as he paced in front of the class. He wondered if alleging that this Michelle’s breasts were invading his space would be an acceptably current kind of complaint.

  As the swing of Michelle’s golden mane one morning totally swept from Perry’s mind an intricate formulation he was about to present in regard to Henry James’s style in The Golden Bowl, he stopped and asked, “Excuse me, but do you have some kind of itch that makes you have to throw back your head like that?”

  “No,” Michelle said with eye-blinking innocence, “I don’t have any kind of itch at all.”

  There were giggles beginning now.

  “Then why do you do it so often?”

  “To develop my breasts,” she explained brightly.

  The room cracked up, as Perry felt his face become a beet.

  “Class dismissed,” he said.

  It was one of those days. He happened to be wearing his treasured old faded Jefferson Airplane sweatshirt, which usually made him feel mellow, if not still youthful. He often wore to class instead of the standard tweed jacket with suede elbow patches one of his colorful collection of sweatshirts emblazoned with images and names of sixties music groups, or offbeat places or events he had been to, like the Fifth Annual Joy Street Block Party held on Beacon Hill, in Boston, and the World Blueberry Capital, which was Union, Maine. Wearing one of those with one of his colorful hats (the brief-billed Chinese worker’s cap, the Parisian beret were among his favorites), plus a pair of bright red or green corduroys with hiking boots, made Perry feel happily more like a crazy creative sort than a stodgy professor. It was not only tolerated, he felt it was rather expected of him, part of the fulfillment of his role as the English department’s “real writer.”

  It of course was on that day, the day of Michelle’s coming out with the line about her breast development exercises, that one of Perry’s freshman comp students noticed his Jefferson Airplane sweatshirt and asked, with a kind of remote, antiquarian interest, “Were they around the same time as Elvis?”

  Perry went home and stared at himself in the mirror before lunch, trying to see himself objectively, the way others saw him. His light brown curly hair had begun to go gray, and the boyish freckles now seemed out of place. Would those marks of youth, those happy daubs of Huck Finn innocence, soon be mistaken for liver spots?

  He was, to his amazement, forty-three years old.

  He had a sense of time slipping past, faster than intended, like water spilling from a jug that no one notices has tipped on its side.

  Now—that was the word that kept popping into his mind—and then Now is the time, almost like a voice speaking, and then he would ask aloud, “For what?” But there was no answer, only the rushing of the leaves, of the hours and days.

  Stretched out in front of the fireplace at the Cohens’ after the other guests had gone home from one of Rachel’s fabulous chili and strudel bashes, Perry felt a welcome respite from the nagging, gnatlike doubts that lately were assailing him. This was his home away from home, was in fact the only place he had thought of as home before Jane came along and made one he felt was his own.

  The evening had been especially gratifying, for the Cohens had brought together in the warmth of their hospitality the newest member of the department, a brightly idealistic young man named Ed Branscom and his pregnant wife, Eileen, who were still so new to the place they had not until now met old Professor Bryant, who lived alone in a room at the Faculty Club and was too often taken as a fixture of the place rather than as the honored colleague emeritus and friend he was treated as tonight. In bringing those guests together with Perry and Jane (who was now curled peacefully asleep on the couch) the Cohens had created a sense of a continuum as well as a circle, a feeling of everyone’s being a part of an ordered progression within a harmonious community.

  “This is the way it s’pose to be,” said Perry, sipping his brandy.

  “We’re all very fortunate,” Rachel said, lifting her feet up toward the fire.

  “The most,” Perry agreed. “So why can’t I do my work and be grateful? Why can’t I stop worrying I ought to be somewhere else, doing something different?”

  Al loomed up to put another log on the fire, looking like a big friendly sheepdog in the shadowy light.

  “Maybe you’ve ‘had too much of apple-picking,’” he said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Perry asked.

  “It’s Frost,” Rachel explained. “Don’t you know ‘After Apple-Picking’?”

  “What the hell has Robert Frost got to do with anything?” Perry shouted, suddenly feeling on the verge of tears and wanting to strike out at someone or something, anything, as he scrambled to his feet and yelled, “We’re practically in the year two thousand and you people are quoting me Frost, on apples, for God sake?”

  The next morning he called to apologize profusely to both Al and Rachel. He went to the room where he did his writing to try to think, to try to figure out what was happening to him. From his window he saw distant hills, tall pines, and a rutted dirt road. Sun and shadow, land and sky, were focused and held in the order of rectangular glass framed with wood. This quiet place was more than his study, in fact he sometimes thought of it as the closest thing he had to a soul, if such a thing existed, or had a tangible look. It was, at least, his chosen view of the world—or view of the world he had chosen.

  Jane could be seen in it on her way to or from her expeditions to photograph the plants and trees, birds and insects, leaves and flowers of the nearby fie
lds and hills. When she moved up from the city she became absorbed with the land and its everyday treasures, began to make it the subject of her work, not only in traditional pictures she sold to magazines but in the more original, close-up investigations of nature that she brought together in a highly praised exhibit in a Boston gallery that prompted one critic to call her “an upcoming Annie Dillard of photography.” The good reviews and sales resulting from the exhibit not only made Jane feel her work was understood and appreciated, but gave her professional status as an artist in her own right as Perry was in his, which made them both happy, being in reasonable balance in that way as in so many others.

  Jane was a crucial element in the composition Perry saw from his window, and in fact had made the whole picture possible, not only emotionally, but practically. When she came up to live she found the old farmhouse and pooled her own savings with his so together they were able to buy it. Perry had never owned a place he had lived in before, and after the initial fears and panic arising from such unexperienced responsibility, he came to love it with a pride he laughingly admitted bordered on patriotism. The sense of ownership added to the tranquility he felt in the house, especially in this room, with its view of the shifting colors of the seasons, its ordered presentation of the world. But now he began to wonder and worry if the whole thing, this house and love, this very life he led, was too tranquil, was leading to nothing more worthy or noble than the snoozing peace of pipe and slippers.

  He made himself sit at his typewriter every morning, but felt no inspiration or urgency. The new book of stories consolidated a certain cycle of experience in his life and art, and he did not yet see his new direction in this particular form. Ten years ago he would have felt driven to make another stab at the obligatory novel that custom and commerce required of writers of this time and place, but he had come to finally accept the fact that it was simply not his métier, and the security Haviland gave him, both financially and professionally, spared him that artificial compulsion.

  Sometimes he toyed with the idea of writing a play because he so enjoyed devising dialogue, but the realistic thought of the odds involved in getting anything professionally produced seemed overwhelming. Worse still, the notion of ending up as one of those fuddy-duddy professors whose dramas are staged by the college Thespian Society was too depressing to even contemplate.