Happyland

by J. Robert Lennon

  And then a figure appeared, furtively, with the burly hunch of a bear. Archie hadn’t seen a bear on his land in ten years. He stood up from the kitchen chair he’d been sitting on and went to the window. There: between the firs at the edge of the property.

  But the illusion didn’t last. It was a man, coming across the orchard, or maybe a woman. Its coat was thick and dark, its hat a fuzzy brown ball. Definitely a woman—there was something about the feet, the small steps, the rim of fur around the ankle. She was coming this way. He went to the door and opened it, admitting the cold. She arrived on the stoop and Archie stood aside to let her enter.

  “Evening, Happy.”

  “Evening, Mayor.”

  He didn’t know why, but he wasn’t surprised—indeed, he had a comfortable sense of release, of the inevitable coming to pass. She stood in his kitchen, patting herself warm in front of the stove. Her hood and then her hat came off, revealing a tired, human face, still bruised and swollen, slightly, from her fight. He wanted to ask about it, but didn’t dare.

  “Take off your coat and boots.”

  “Thanks.”

  She didn’t look for a hook or stand; she let the coat and hat, the boots and scarf, pile up on the floor beside where the heat was. He was reminded of a trapper stacking his pelts in the trading post. He laughed.

  “What’s funny?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” he said, but now something else was funny: she was standing before him, barefoot, in the thickest, fluffiest terrycloth robe he had ever seen. He said, “Your robe.”

  She smiled.

  “Weren’t you cold coming over here?”

  She shrugged. “Nothing’s far from anything else, in Equinox.”

  “What if I’d been out?” he said.

  She shrugged again.

  “Well?” he asked.

  She pulled on her belt. The robe came open and her naked body spilled out. She said, “Come on.” Her face was drained of calculation.

  He sat for a moment, looking at her, trying to think of something to say. But his thoughts failed to resolve into words. Her black eye, the cut on her forehead, seemed to have a powerful erotic hold on him—he had never been attracted to her, especially, but he was now. As if, unbroken, she had not before seemed real to him. Her breasts were full and low and her hips were curved like an apple. He got up and led her to the bedroom, and she pushed him onto the bed and took his clothes off. She frowned as she did it, in irritable concentration. His erection was painfully sudden and she tucked it in with practiced ease. She took his hands and pressed them to her chest. He took in breath.

  “You’re like a child,” she said.

  For a moment, he was speechless. He gasped, and so did she, though more gently, and perhaps not sincerely. She seemed to study him as she moved, shifting her hips to one side, then the other, gauging his reaction, filing away the data. Already she seemed to be planning to fuck him repeatedly in the future, with this as kind of a troubleshooting session, a debugging.

  For Archie, however, it was shocking and deeply arousing. He was finished embarrassingly soon. She cried out. Or was it a laugh? The kind of sound a toy might make, or a crow.

  She slid off and lay beside him, arms behind her head.

  “Why haven’t I bought your orchard yet?”

  “You didn’t…ask,” he gasped.

  She propped her head up with her arm. “Well? May I then?”

  He shook his head. “Not for sale.”

  “That’s all right,” she sang, “it’s good to have something left to want.”

  She watched him catch his breath. He closed his eyes and willed his heart to stop racing. At last he turned and looked at her.

  “You don’t think I’m a good woman,” she said, not without humor.

  “I don’t have an opinion.”

  She slid down to nestle beside him. “That makes you the only person in the history of the world not to have an opinion.”

  There would be all kinds of things to figure out when she was gone. Ruth, of course. The town. The fact that he had slept, against his better judgment, with a married woman. And his sense—though there had been others since then—that he was being unfaithful, for the first time, to Mary. His frowned, thought hard.

  “Strong, silent type, are you?”

  Her face, its wounds shadowed by a cowl of blankets, disturbed him now. A battered face. He felt responsible for it. It was his town that had beaten her. As if reading his thoughts, she drew back, and eventually got out of the bed.

  He felt the need to speak. “I’m glad you came,” he said.

  “I’m glad you came, too,” she shot back, all vulnerability gone. “But next time you shouldn’t come so soon. Toodle-oo, Mister Mayor.” And she grabbed her robe from the floor and disappeared into the night.

  * * *

  Meanwhile Ruth was spending the weekend in a funk of despair. They had all let her down: Janet Ping, traitor to the forces of money and power. Susan, the girl with the camera. April Cort and her cohorts, who had abandoned the save-the-town meetings for their sex-lecture protests, and now had gotten lost in Jennifer Triesman’s paranoid fantasy world. And it was more than that—it was the entire generation of girls, who had lost (or perhaps never possessed) any sense of the fragility of institutions: a college, a family, a town. Or worse, maybe they knew things were impermanent, and liked it that way. Entertained, distracted to within an inch of their cluttered lives, they foolishly trusted that, whatever good thing was on the wane, something would be right along to replace it. The town might fall apart, but there were others to move to. Loyalty was dead, but promiscuity would do, in a pinch. Modesty was gone, but pride was here to save the day.

  She had always liked turning on the lights in the library—the sensation of illuminating, from the bank of switches in the foyer, an entire vast building with the gentlest swipe of her fingers. She imagined what it must look like outside, the library flickering to life. She contemplated the collected wisdom of human history, packed onto the millions of pages that burdened the sagging stacks, worthless in the dark: and then suddenly, with the crackling dawn of daylight-corrected light, taking on its glorious burden of meaning.

  When she was a student, they would crowd around the door, waiting for it to open. Now, the students trickled in at nine-thirty or ten, and if they stayed late, it was to instant message one another or “study”—a debased bit of terminology that seemed to have something to do with giggling, romancing, passing notes.

  Education is the art of making man ethical. The library, then, was the epicenter of morality and rational intelligence, with the hinterlands beyond it wallowing in chaos and dishonesty. No wonder hardly anybody showed up.

  The e-mail came at around eleven o’clock—at least that’s when Ruth read it. Pam Kulp, the art teacher, had sent it to her. It was brief, and bore the ragged cliffs of nested carats that betrayed its having been forwarded multiple times. The subject line read “Equinox College R.I.P.?”

  We have just been given the sad news that Equinox College has been stripped by the Mid-Atlantic States Academic Association of its accreditation as an institution of higher learning, and will be closed immediately and indefinitely following the end of the fall semester. This closure is effective pending further review, and is expected to last at least through the spring semester and into the summer, until Equinox either resolves its problems to the satisfaction of the MASAA or chooses to cease operation as a college. No reasons were given for this action, but it seems likely that the ongoing faculty credentials and grade-inflation scandals, coupled with the recent withdrawal of many dozens of students from E.C., are to blame.

  There will be an assembly at 4pm in the Furman Auditorium with the trustees of E.C., who would like to present their ideas for the preservation of the college. If you care about E.C. and your work here, please attend. Students, faculty, and staff are all welcome.

  “Yes, MASAA,” Ruth intoned, then hit DELETE.

  * * *
/>   They came from every direction, their heads hung low, their hands in the pockets of their coats, their boots scraping through the mounded snow. Blurred by shifting curtains of white, they came, emerging into clarity, brushing at their hoods and hats, stamping their feet. Some of them were angry, others merely tired. Some had cried and some were crying now. Many had been here for the Sally Streit lecture, and of those, some felt shame, and some felt regret, but for the most part they felt dismay that the exuberant emotion of that night—those feelings of arousal and joy and release—could have been transformed into this horrible melancholy and guilt. That such feelings could have these consequences came, for many, as a terrible blow. It meant that nothing was pure or perfect. It meant that their deepest and intensest secrets, unleashed upon the world, had the power to hurt. Students entered the Furman Auditorium with their arms around one another’s shoulders, limping like invalids, assisting one another past the double doors through which, just weeks before, they had fallen in fits of laughter and nervous anticipation. Friends met other friends’ eyes and turned away. Heads were ruefully shaken, and noses were sloppily wiped, and little conversation could be heard inside, even when all the seats were full, even when the aisles were packed, and the walls crushed against, and the balcony stuffed to its limit. It was winter, and darkness was already falling, and everyone was tired and sad.

  On the stage, six folding chairs had been set up, three to each side of a lectern on which a spotlight had been trained. A skinny man stood on the stage, tapping a small black microphone, gazing up into the balcony for some confirmation. In time a reverberant pock was heard, and the man walked off. And then the trustees, those stern ladies, emerged from the wings and seated themselves in the chairs. One chair was empty: beside the lectern, it stood like an ellipsis, begging the question.

  After an interval of some seconds, during which several of the trustees leaned muttering toward each another, one of them stood. The woman was known to many in the crowd as Ms. Chast, and to some fewer as Betsy, and she moved with a dignified gliding motion to the lectern and adjusted the microphone to better correspond to her considerable height. She leaned forward and said, without preamble, “Good afternoon.

  “You are all aware that our worst fears have been confirmed: the Mid-Atlantic States Academic Association has stripped Equinox College of its accreditation, pending further review. This review will take time and will cost money, and so whether we are reaccredited or not, we’ll be closed next semester.”

  A groan went up, which Betsy Chast ignored.

  “While this is indeed disappointing, we will do everything we can to restore this institution to health. Let me tell you now: there will be firings. There will be reorganizations.” She held up a piece of cream-colored paper. “I have in my hand the resignation of E.C. president Reeve Tennyson. He has asked me to ask you for your forgiveness. This is only the first change you will see in the coming year.

  “But it isn’t the most important change. For that, I’d like to bring on our guest and benefactor, Ms. Happy Masters.”

  In the audience, Ruth sat up a little straighter. Here she came, striding out onto the stage as if to accept an award: the long, even steps, the smile, the wave. In spite of themselves, some people clapped. What, Ruth wondered, was she doing here?

  “Good afternoon,” Happy, said, pulling the microphone down to her height with a confidence and facility that made this petty humiliation seem more like a privilege. Her head was barely visible over the leading edge of the lectern, but her white hands gripped its sides like a sea captain’s on the wheel. Her grin was hard. She scanned the crowd as if attempting to meet every eye, and Ruth felt the gaze pass through her, probing, identifying, pinning in place. She shook off a chill.

  “Before this terrible news reached us, I had been in negotiations with the trustees and with Reeve Tennyson to donate a significant amount of money to this college. My intention was to shore up Equinox’s financial future, renovate and repurpose its crumbling architecture, and expand and deepen its course of study. And though its loss of accreditation comes as a great blow to us all, and will delay many of my plans, I ask you, students, teachers, staff, to please not despair. There will be work for you here next year.

  “The reason I can say this with such confidence is that I now intend, with the full approval of the board of trustees, to buy Equinox College outright.”

  A gasp blew through the crowd. Slumping shoulders rose, heads reared up.

  “Can she do that?” a voice said near Ruth.

  “I guess so,” another replied, quietly amazed.

  “I realize that this may come as a great surprise,” Happy went on. “It is unusual, I know, for such an institution to give itself over entirely to one person. But doing so will free the trustees and me to make the improvements we want without the mess of legal restrictions that would otherwise prevent us. And, once these are finished, I intend to restore the college to the trustees’ hands in an arrangement that will benefit us all.

  “This arrangement will be made within the coming weeks. During that time, I ask professors to teach your classes, students to study. I ask that the college be run as if nothing unusual were happening, because, as I’m sure you’ll agree, the objectives of higher education have not changed, in spite of everything. I realize that many of you will be wanting, in these weeks, to make plans to attend another institution, to seek employment elsewhere, and I cannot stop you from doing so, nor would I want to.

  “But there will be something here for you, and it will be here sooner, rather than later. The changes I intend to make, I will make swiftly and for the good of all. This is what I do best, and I will do it to Equinox College, as I have to Equinox. Thank you.”

  * * *

  Happy’s cell phone had materialized in her hand before she had even left the stage, and by the time she gathered up her coat, opened the stage door and walked out into the cold, she had been put through to Irian Jaya. James was on a boat.

  “The ferry to the airport,” he explained. “I should be getting to Syracuse tomorrow morning, which puts me at the house around ten.”

  “Good,” she said. “I want you to do some research on the way. The quicker we can get this squared away, the less time they’ll have to change their minds. I want to start repurposing and demolishing by the first of the year.”

  “Fine,” he said, in a hollow tone she knew all too well, even from halfway around the world, even converted to ones and zeroes, even transmitted to a tower and from there to a satellite, and there to a switchboard and there to another satellite, and there to a tower, to a tower, to a tower, to a tower, and to her ear. Still she recognized that tone.

  She sighed. “What is it, dear.” Her first concession: dear.

  “I wonder if you’re ready to reconcile.”

  “Tsk tsk,” she said. “So soon after the wound.”

  Silence, and then a chuckle. “You are ready, aren’t you. You sound different.”

  “I’ve taken a bit of revenge.”

  An alternate silence now: hurt, wary. “What kind of revenge?”

  “Nothing you need to know about.”

  “Who’d you screw,” he spat.

  “The mayor.”

  No response to that.

  “You had to ask, didn’t you? I have no illusions here, Jims darling—I know you’ll stray again. I just wish you could have been more discreet. Don’t make it so easy for me to find out.”

  Again, nothing.

  “My assistant, Jims? You have to admit, that was low.”

  “I’m sorry, Hap,” he said, finally. “You know I have a thing for…you know…”

  “I know. Just keep away from the hookers down there, if you please.”

  A harumph. “You know I’m not so foolish as to—”

  “And I’m sorry I fucked the mayor.” But she wasn’t, was she—indeed, she already had plans to do it again. His adolescent avidity and nervousness had charmed her: she grew warm thinking about
it, began to pace, and then to head down the hill toward home, the fevered voices of the auditorium fading away behind her. Older men! She should have been trying that all along.

  “Accepted,” Jims grunted.

  “Now get to work, if you would, please. How exactly does a woman go about buying a college? Let’s make sure I won’t be obliged to reopen the place in September. You’ve got the files I faxed?”

  “The charter, the land grant stuff, yes, I have it.”

  “Good. Now put on your thinking cap and let’s plan on a nice make-up dinner, all right?”

  “Hmm. All right,” he said, as if unsure whether or not he had gotten what he wanted. They said their brusque goodbyes.

  “Hey!” came a voice, dulled by falling snow, from across the quad. Happy tucked her phone into her pocket, looked up. It was a small bent figure approaching, hunched into an old gray coat: Ruth Spinks. Of course. Happy had almost forgotten about her. She stopped, faced the librarian, waited for her to arrive. Said, “Well! If it isn’t our little firebug.”

  That stopped her. What a face! As flaccid and pale as if it were already behind bars. And then it twitched, got a bit of life back. “That wasn’t me,” she growled.

  Happy had to laugh. “You should have seen your face just then! As good as a confession.”

  At the ends of the arms, the gloved hands clenched. “I didn’t tell him to burn it down.”

  Now this was interesting. “‘Him’?”

  She appeared puzzled for a moment, and then a smirk stole over her face. “Your man,” she said. “Kevin Russell.”

  Happy tried to conceal her surprise. Perhaps she even pulled it off. “Well,” she said, with what she believed to be admirable restraint, “you never can trust the help.” And then: “Or boys in general. Which reminds me, have you seen our esteemed mayor lately?”

  Ruth’s face darkened. “I will, I’m sure,” she said.

  “Would you ask him if he’s seen my watch? I think I left it in his bedroom the other night.”