The Followed Man

by Thomas Williams

  "Yes, and blew his nose in his underwear and everyone had to be so polite, since no one could decide how to react, and we were supposed to admire the man's poetry. In a way, a fairly tense scene. What did you make of it?"

  "I was glad I wasn't connected to the college," Luke said.

  "And then when his boyfriend demanded a tape recorder and we couldn't find one at that hour. Lord! We were all so embar­rassed for the Lectures Committee. But of course that wasn't the end of it, beause then we found that the boyfriend was really the poet, and it had been the boyfriend, the actual boyfriend, who had given the reading and it was the poet who had demanded the tape recorder. It's always so damnably embarrassing to be the butt of a poor joke. Don't you think so?"

  "I agree," Luke said.

  "It's one of the more untenable positions. But why would this poet have done it? Here we were, a rather poor little community college, all of us underpaid, no tenure, trying to do our job with the materials available, and we scrape up three hundred dollars to have the man come and read, and we turn out to be 'The Estab­lishment' or something, deserving nothing but an arrogant switch of his boyfriend's hairy ass. Imagine the hatred and resentment underneath the japing! Or was it just the arrogance of the artist? Can a poet be such a shit? You're a literary man—that is, you're a writer . . . journalist? What do you call yourself?"

  "I've never known exactly what to call myself," Luke said.

  "Oh."

  "I'm not putting you on," Luke said hastily. The blue eyes seemed confused and hurt. "I've done a lot of things for a living, and most of them were literary. None were very dishonest."

  "That's as much as anyone can say, I suppose," Coleman Sturgis said. "I've taught for sixteen years, and even teaching's not the purest of occupations. No."

  "Once I edited a house journal for a corporation that made, among some useful things, a particularly horrible chemical weap­on," Luke said.

  "Napalm?"

  "No, but something along that line. It ate feet."

  "Ugh! But you quit that job?"

  "I could afford to at the time," Luke said, wondering why he'd had the urge to do a little confessing to Coleman Sturgis. It had been a shock that the man had taught with Helen, and that he'd had a right to mention her and the accident. At first he'd thought Coleman's washed, faded youthfulness was the result of alcohol, but it could have been any sort of disease, suffering and possible cure. He couldn't decide without more evidence, and didn't want to ask. His own pseudo-confession had been warped by Coleman's need for reassurance, unless Luke himself was slightly insane this evening. His attitudes about corporate responsibility were much more complicated than they had sounded. Also his attitudes to­ward war; when one compared, say, a .45 slug in a lower intestine full of partly digested C-ration or rice and fish to a compound that had an affinity for epidermal cells, one's judgments became des­perate, soiled by the desire to purify. If the former seemed less mysterious and horrible than the latter, that was the result of ig­norance.

  Louise Sturgis had been talking to Phyllis and glancing over at Luke and her brother. George kept moving, making drinks, handing out hors d'oeuvres he wouldn't pronounce and couldn't help signalling his disapproval of. Luke wanted to talk to George, if to anyone. He felt that out of loyalty to Phyllis he was being forced into dishonesty. On the way here he'd gone twenty miles out of the way, down the other side of the mountain on dirt roads that threatened to end anytime, just to play with his new truck and to think of what good and useful things he would carry in it. The metallic hollowness of the truck, the rugged controls that worked, its new solidity and smell pleased him in simple ways.

  Freddie Hurlburt arrived, dressed in gaudy, reddish plaid trousers and a red sport jacket, seeming wider than tall. Luke thought of Shem's wooden rule, and how he might unfold it and measure Freddie to see if he were really wider than tall, a Tweedledee without his Tweedledum. He seemed about to burst out of his skin, though he was not that fat, really; it was the broadness of his pelvis, a large woman's breadth of body on the short man. While he spoke to Phyllis, his words coming across the room as lit­tle snaps and pops, Phyllis seeming pleased and slightly hard of hearing, which she was not, Louise came over to Luke and Cole­man.

  "First, are you wearing a gun?" she said to Luke. She wore a filmy short dress of light brown material, which Helen would have called beige and known the name of, tied at her waist with white cord. The outfit looked expensive, and she herself, her dark skin, thin muscles and black hair, seemed to have been turned, by the kind of preparation women did to themselves before they went out for an evening, into a visual object that, strangely, could talk. There had been a darkening of eyelash, some kind of smoothing, the sheen of colorless lipstick. He looked at the texture of her up­per lip and the skin over her cheekbone, her coarse yet smoothly shining black hair, her nipple indenting the expensive fabric, and a small rise of lust and almost detatched curiosity came over him. He saw her in his mind with light blue eyes, like her brother's, but she would be too intense and perverse then. Her olive eyes were more consistent with the whole configuration she made, as an ani­mal's eyes would be, and although he felt some perversity in his attraction to her, because he didn't like her that much, he was at­tracted and would be open to whatever possibilities there were. The whiskey he was drinking had something to do with it, and also the interesting feeling of playing hooky. Then came the emp­tier realization that he had no need to play hooky.

  Since she wanted to be cryptic about the gun, Luke explained to Coleman how they'd met at his uncle's place on the mountain and how he happened to be wearing his uncle's pistol when she and Freddie came by.

  Presumably these were people whose accents, vocabularies, iro­nies and values were also his, so he found it necessary to lie, as he would not have had to lie to Phyllis or George. He could assume, with discouraging accuracy, Coleman's at least public attitudes, and so frivolously explained away the gun.

  Coleman then told him about the old house their parents had bought in the fifties—the old Bean house, about a mile up the road—and how he and Louise had inherited it and were fixing it up. Their parents had been members of the Cascom Mountain Club since the thirties and that was how they'd come to know the area. Louise, since her divorce, had taken up ceramics and had fixed up a studio in the barn, a gas-fired kiln in the cement base where the silo had been. He went on to tell how it had been impos­sible to keep antiques in the house until Louise had lived there the last two winters, because they were always ripped off. They'd lost all kinds of good things their parents had collected. "They simply come with a truck, break in and take what they want," Coleman said. "If a house doesn't look lived in, they'll clean it out." Accord­ing to the State Police these weren't local people, necessarily, but professionals who sold the stuff out of state.

  "Anything old is valuable," Louise said, "and it doesn't have to be very old any more, either."

  "Was your husband's name Sturgis too?" Luke asked.

  "No, I took my family name back."

  "She kept the alimony, though," Coleman said.

  "I'm not that liberated," Louise said. "At least not yet."

  She was beginning to make some money with pots and cups and dishes at the craft fairs, and even had some retail places that bought her things. "You'll have to see my studio," she said. "To­night, come back and have a nightcap with us and I'll show you my wares. It's on your way back up the mountain."

  He thought he would like to see her wares. Danger seemed an abstraction to him. Freddie came over and said hello, again invit­ed him to come to the lodge for potluck, and managed this time to be somewhat unintelligible about trails and distances without sug­gesting to Luke's ear any stranger meanings. This left Phyllis alone in her chair, so he went over and sat on the arm of the sofa next to her.

  "Aren't they interesting people?" Phyllis said.

  "Yes," Luke said. "Very interesting people."

  "She's very attractive, I thought."


  Luke smiled at her and Phyllis looked sly. "Or else George is making these drinks too strong," he said.

  "Now, Luke!" She touched his arm with her bent hand, then said, "That little Freddie's an odd one, though. Can you under­stand what he's saying? We've known him for years, of course, but I never do catch half of what he says, he talks so fast."

  George had brought a large young man into the room and was introducing him with obvious pleasure to Louise and Coleman. Freddie evidently knew him already. The young man wore steel-rimmed glasses, green chinos and a windbreaker. He was gaunt, blond, and red-faced from social unease or weather. George brought him over and introduced him to Luke. "John Pillsbury, the new game warden," George said. "It was him and me found Shem that morning, you know. John here used to check on him now and then, and they got on fine."

  "Shem Carr was quite a man," John Pillsbury said. "I used to like talking to him. He knew more about that mountain!"

  "Shem kind of took a shine to John," George said. "'Course he'd give up hunting illegal by the time John come along."

  They both laughed. John Pillsbury said, "He told me he used to need three limits of them little Zach Brook trout just for break­fast!"

  Luke then noticed John Pillsbury's wife, whom Louise and Coleman were trying to be nice to and were terrifying. She was a handsome young woman who was so ill at ease she could not be whatever her self was, just smiled tight non-smiles at whatever they were saying to her. Phyllis saw this and went over to her, walking without a cane, and brought her back. Her name was Mary. Luke evidently terrified her too, so Phyllis took her off to the kitchen to be her assistant in serving dinner, at which sugges­tion Mary looked relieved.

  At the table Phyllis had Luke sit next to Louise, with Coleman opposite. Mary Pillsbury, postponing the time she would have to sit down between Freddie and Coleman, fussed over the table af­ter the casserole, salad, hot rolls and utensils were all arranged.

  Phyllis finally made her sit down. George served the casserole, the recipe for which Phyllis said she had gotten from Woman's Day. It contained, among other things, ham, tunafish, green peppers and raisins. Luke said it was excellent, especially after his own haphaz­ard meals on the mountain.

  "Single men don't eat what they ought," Phyllis said. "Statistics prove it. They die sooner than married men."

  "What about single women?" Louise said.

  "Women know better," Phyllis said. "A woman takes time to make things. Men just swill whatever's easy or handy."

  George talked with John Pillsbury. Freddie ate. Coleman ate a little and pushed his food around, but concentrated mainly on a strong whiskey and water he'd made himself just before they sat down. When Freddie had eaten enough he began to talk in tongues to Mary Pillsbury, who didn't understand a word, though she tried to smile when Freddie laughed.

  While Coleman and Phyllis talked about property taxes, Louise said to Luke, "She's trying to mate the two of us. Isn't that sweet?"

  "It's what benevolent old ladies do," Luke said, feeling disloyal.

  "Well, how old are you and what are your bloodlines?"

  "I'm a chap in his forties, of ancient lineage," he said, which she seemed to find impressive and even funny.

  "When he looked at me my father used to say there was a touch of the tarbrush in my mother's family," she said.

  "You do look a little Oriental."

  "Is that good or bad?"

  "It's okay," he said, thinking about that—about his saying okay and the sexual rise and tremor in him as he said it.

  "What are you thinking about?" she said. "George says you have a brand-new truck. I've been thinking about that because I've nev­er, ever in my life, ridden in a truck. Will you give me a ride in your truck someday?"

  "Sure. Tonight. I'll give you a ride home in it."

  "Now what are you thinking?"

  "I was thinking I always tend to monitor myself for the truth," he said, "though I do tend to lie."

  "So it's not okay I look like a Slant?"

  "A Gook," he said. "That's the word my enlightened generation used. Anyway, I'm probably too old for you. How old are you?"

  "Twenty-nine. No, thirty-six. I was married at twenty-six, so there was seven years there, then three divorced. That's thirty-six.

  "Children?"

  "My husband had a vasectomy during his first marriage and neglected to tell me about it. He was like that. He'd already made three kids. So. Anyway, my nipples are still pink."

  He looked down at the little points in the material of her dress, she watching him look. She smiled a crooked little smile, a rather aggressive, bitter look.

  Later she went after George about guns, having overheard part of his and John Pillsbury's conversation. George manfully re­strained himself, though, when Phyllis gave him a hard look.

  At ten the Pillsburys left, John a little drunk on George's home brew, so the dinner party was over. Freddie tried to arrange a date when they would all come to the lodge for supper, George being quite skillfully slippery about the matter. As he said good night, Luke told Phyllis he was giving Louise a ride home in his truck, and Phyllis smiled and pushed him in the chest.

  "Is Coleman married?" he asked Louise as they drove to her house.

  "You mean is he queer? No, Coleman specializes in doomed love affairs. Impossibly young students, other people's wives, broads that don't like him enough—like that. God, this truck is big. There doesn't seem to be enough road for it. You could lie down on this seat."

  "You could," he said. "My feet would stick out the window."

  She laughed, and he felt like a schoolboy. He remembered, be­cause he felt it right now, the nervousness that was the bane of the callow. Would she, or wouldn't she? Could he, or couldn't he? That was a new question to complicate things, one that had never occurred to him before. Then came the warning: they want to in­volve you. They are after you and will make you care too much.

  Coleman came along behind them in his Toyota and the three of them entered the old house together. The front hall was cluttered with lumber, lath and sawhorses, the unplaned sub-flooring exposed. The long room they then entered had been parlor and dining room before the wall between was removed. The room was a familiar combination of objects such as wicker peacock chairs, a modern sofa, cobblers' benches and large, colorful paintings of crosses, circles and other geometric slashes on vast whitish back­grounds. There were many books in pine board bookcases, and a Swedish stove set into one of the high-throated fireplaces. The decor was, with minor differences in the styles of the paintings, one his class tended to superimpose upon the rooms of old New England houses.

  They spoke of the paintings, done by friends, and of course the Swedish stove, green-enameled, its heating chamber above the firebox arched and embellished with cast-in designs of leaves and reindeer. Coleman made them drinks, his own pretty heavy on the bourbon, and they went through a big kitchen, across dewy grass to the small barn, where banks of fluorescent lights came on in a room still dusty with ancient hay and cobwebs in its upper reaches and along its square beams. Here were Louise's wheels, racks, glazes, crocks of clay covered with polyethylene, and the cellary damp odor of fresh clay, the floor grayish with clay. On the racks were unfired rows of monochromatic cups, saucers, dishes and pots.

  Beyond the barn was the kiln room built within the round ce­ment foundation of the long disappeared silo. Heat from the gas-fired kiln, that was a cave-like stack of firebricks almost as light as balsa wood, could in winter be vented back into the barn-studio, which Louise was in the process of insulating.

  Some glazed, finished pots and platters were on shelves in the barn. One glaze she seemed to like was milky, and seemed to drip over the sides of pots with a viscous stopped movement, like pho­tographs of semen. When he examined one of these pots closely Louise said that it began as a mistake, but then she'd rather liked the effect. She'd had a difficult time repeating it, though. "It's hard to reproduce a mistake," she said, "because the data's unreli�
�able."

  "We seldom want to reproduce our mistakes," Coleman said, "but we do, we do, don't we?"

  "Speak for yourself, brother," Louise said with a hardness, or bitterness, or a sort of expert sarcasm that gave Luke pause. It seemed unhealthy, suddenly exposed, a disdain that was too heavy.

  Back in the long living room, Coleman made himself another tea-brown bourbon, drank it quickly and said good night. Luke sat on the modern sofa, deep into brown velour, while Louise straddled a cobbler's bench, put down her drink and pushed her black hair back with both hands, arching her chest and neck as if she were posing for him, showing him how her spine articulated. Her neat haunches were planted on the dark old bench, her stock­inged legs exposed. When she got up to get an ashtray she knew his eyes followed her. She came back and sat next to him on the sofa, bent forward to reach for her cigarettes on the coffee table, moving constantly, puffing on her cigarette, tapping it on the ash­tray, sipping her drink.

  "I love Phyllis," she said. "Don't you? Isn't she real?"

  "Yes," he said. Her nervousness, or whatever it was, somehow calmed his own. He put his hand on her shoulder, thinking that she had, after all, sat down right next to him. He was certain of nothing. She let him pull her back, looking at him quickly with her head bent forward, her olive eyes wide open.

  "That doesn't mean we have to do what she wants us to, though," she said.

  "No," he said.

  "Do you really mean that?"

  "I'll mean anything you want me to," he said.

  "Are you a friend, for Christ's sake?"

  "Sure."

  "I never know what a man's really like until after he's come, and then he's usually a shit."

  "Not me, I don't think."

  "Are you still monitoring yourself for the truth?"

  "Yes. I don't know what I can do or not do. I've been carrying this weight around. . . ."

  "Your family. I know."

  His erection faded, and the room came sharply into focus, for­eign and somehow casual, as if its items were on display in a store window he passed with only a glance. She was a collection of ten­dons, bones, glands and unpleasant opinions. Except that now she was sympathetic, and put her hand, which was angular and short—he hadn't noticed before—on his leg.