Stoner

by John Williams

  He sat in the upholstered chair across from the couch. She asked him if he would like some coffee, and he said he would. She went into the little kitchen off the living room, and he relaxed and gazed around him, listening to the quiet sounds of her moving around in the kitchen.

  She brought the coffee, in delicate white china cups, on a black lacquered tray, which she set on the table before the couch. They sipped the coffee and talked strainedly for a few moments. Then Stoner spoke of the part of the manuscript he had read, and the excitement he had felt earlier, in the library, came over him; he leaned forward, speaking intensely.

  For many minutes the two of them were able to talk together unselfconsciously, hiding themselves under the cover of their discourse. Katherine Driscoll sat on the edge of the couch, her eyes flashing, her slender fingers clasping and unclasping above the coffee table. William Stoner hitched his chair forward and leaned intently toward her; they were so close that he could have extended his hand and touched her.

  They spoke of the problems raised by the early chapters of her work, of where the inquiry might lead, of the importance of the subject.

  “You mustn’t give it up,” he said, and his voice took on an urgency that he could not understand. “No matter how hard it will seem sometimes, you mustn’t give it up. It’s too good for you to give it up. Oh, it’s good, there’s no doubt of it.”

  She was silent, and for a moment the animation left her face. She leaned back, looked away from him, and said, as if absently, “The seminar—some of the things you said—it was very helpful.”

  He smiled and shook his head. “You didn’t need the seminar. But I am glad you were able to sit in on it. It was a good one, I think.”

  “Oh, it’s shameful!” she burst out. “It’s shameful. The seminar—you were—I had to start it over, after the seminar. It’s shameful that they should—” She paused in bitter, furious confusion, got up from the couch, and walked restlessly to the desk.

  Stoner, taken aback by her outburst, for a moment did not speak. Then he said, “You shouldn’t concern yourself. These things happen. It will all work out in time. It really isn’t important.”

  And suddenly, after he said the words, it was not important. For an instant he felt the truth of what he said, and for the first time in months he felt lift away from him the weight of a despair whose heaviness he had not fully realized. Nearly giddy, almost laughing, he said again, “It really isn’t important.”

  But an awkwardness had come between them, and they could not speak as freely as they had a few moments before. Soon Stoner got up, thanked her for the coffee, and took his leave. She walked with him to the door and seemed almost curt when she told him good night.

  It was dark outside, and a spring chill was in the evening air. He breathed deeply and felt his body tingle in the coolness. Beyond the jagged outline of the apartment houses the town lights glowed upon a thin mist that hung in the air. At the corner a street light pushed feebly against the darkness that closed around it; from the darkness beyond it the sound of laughter broke abruptly into the silence, lingered and died. The smell of smoke from trash burning in back yards was held by the mist; and as he walked slowly through the evening, breathing the fragrance and tasting upon his tongue the sharp night-time air, it seemed to him that the moment he walked in was enough and that he might not need a great deal more.

  And so he had his love affair.

  The knowledge of his feeling for Katherine Driscoll came upon him slowly. He found himself discovering pretexts for going to her apartment in the afternoons; the title of a book or article would occur to him, he would note it, and deliberately avoid seeing her in the corridors of Jesse Hall so that he might drop by her place in the afternoon to give her the title, have a cup of coffee, and talk. Once he spent half a day in the library pursuing a reference that might reinforce a point that he thought dubious in her second chapter; another time he laboriously transcribed a portion of a little-known Latin manuscript of which the library owned a photostat, and was thus able to spend several afternoons helping her with the translation.

  During the afternoons they spent together Katherine Driscoll was courteous, friendly, and reserved; she was quietly grateful for the time and interest he expended upon her work, and she hoped she was not keeping him from more important things. It did not occur to him that she might think of him other than as an interested professor whom she admired and whose aid, though friendly, was little beyond the call of his duty. He thought of himself as a faintly ludicrous figure, one in whom no one could take an interest other than impersonal; and after he admitted to himself his feeling for Katherine Driscoll, he was desperately careful that he not show this feeling in any way that could be easily discerned.

  For more than a month he dropped by her apartment two or three times a week, staying no more than two hours at any one time; he was fearful that she would become annoyed at his continued reappearances, so he was careful to come only when he was sure that he could be genuinely helpful to her work. With a kind of grim amusement he realized that he was preparing for his visits to her with the same diligence that he prepared for lectures; and he told himself that this would be enough, that he would be contented only to see her and talk to her for as long as she might endure his presence.

  But despite his care and effort the afternoons they spent together became more and more strained. For long moments they found themselves with nothing to say; they sipped their coffee and looked away from each other, they said, “Well ... ,” in tentative and guarded voices, and they found reasons for moving restlessly around the room, away from each other. With a sadness the intensity of which he had not expected, Stoner told himself that his visits were becoming a burden to her and that her courtesy forbade her to let him be aware of that. As he had known he would have to do, he came to his decision; he would withdraw from her, gradually, so that she would not realize he had noticed her restlessness, as if he had given her all the help that he could.

  He dropped by her apartment only once the next week, and the following week he did not visit her at all. He had not anticipated the struggle that he would have with himself; in the afternoons, as he sat in his office, he had almost physically to restrain himself from rising from his desk, hurrying outside, and walking to her apartment. Once or twice he saw her at a distance, in the halls, as she was hurrying to or from class; he turned away and walked in another direction, so that they would not have to meet.

  After a while a kind of numbness came upon him, and he told himself that it would be all right, that in a few days he would be able to see her in the halls, nod to her and smile, perhaps even detain her for a moment and ask her how her work was going.

  Then, one afternoon in the main office, as he was removing some mail from his box, he overheard a young instructor mention to another that Katherine Driscoll was ill, that she hadn’t met her classes for the past two days. And the numbness left him; he felt a sharp pain in his chest, and his resolve and the strength of his will went out of him. He walked jerkily to his own office and looked with a kind of desperation at his bookcase, selected a book, and went out. By the time he got to Katherine Driscoll’s apartment he was out of breath, so that he had to wait several moments in front of her door. He put a smile on his face that he hoped was casual, fixed it there, and knocked at her door.

  She was even paler than usual, and there were dark smudges around her eyes; she wore a plain dark blue dressing gown, and her hair was drawn back severely from her face.

  Stoner was aware that he spoke nervously and foolishly, yet he was unable to stop the flow of his words. “Hello,” he said brightly, “I heard you were ill, I thought I would drop over to see how you were, I have a book that might be helpful to you, are you all right? I don’t want to—” He listened to the sounds tumble from his stiff smile and could not keep his eyes from searching her face.

  When at last he was silent she moved back from the door and said quietly, “Come in.”

  Once ins
ide the little sitting-bedroom, his nervous inanity dropped away. He sat in the chair opposite the bed and felt the beginnings of a familiar ease come over him when Katherine Driscoll sat across from him. For several moments neither of them spoke.

  Finally she asked, “Do you want some coffee?”

  “You mustn’t bother,” Stoner said.

  “It’s no bother.” Her voice was brusque and had that undertone of anger that he had heard before. “I’ll just heat it up.”

  She went into the kitchen. Stoner, alone in the little room, stared glumly at the coffee table and told himself that he should not have come. He wondered at the foolishness that drove men to do the things they did.

  Katherine Driscoll came back with the coffee pot and two cups; she poured their coffee, and they sat watching the steam rise from the black liquid. She took a cigarette from a crumpled package, lit it, and puffed nervously for a moment. Stoner became aware of the book he had carried with him and that he still clutched in his hands. He put it on the coffee table between them.

  “Perhaps you aren’t feeling up to it,” he said, “but I ran across something that might be helpful to you, and I thought—”

  “I haven’t seen you in nearly two weeks,” she said and stubbed her cigarette out, twisting it fiercely in the ashtray.

  He was taken aback; he said distractedly, “I’ve been rather busy—so many things—”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Really, it doesn’t. I shouldn’t have ...” She rubbed the palm of her hand across her forehead.

  He looked at her with concern; he thought she must be feverish. “I’m sorry you’re ill. If there’s anything I can—”

  “I am not ill,” she said. And she added in a voice that was calm, speculative, and almost uninterested, “I am desperately, desperately unhappy.”

  And still he did not understand. The bare sharp utterance went into him like a blade; he turned a little away from her; he said confusedly, “I’m sorry. Could you tell me about it? If there’s anything I can do ...”

  She lifted her head. Her features were stiff, but her eyes were brilliant in pools of tears. “I didn’t intend to embarrass you. I’m sorry. You must think me very foolish.”

  “No,” he said. He looked at her for a moment more, at the pale face that seemed held expressionless by an effort of will. Then he gazed at his large bony hands that were clasped together on one knee; the fingers were blunt and heavy, and the knuckles were like white knobs upon the brown flesh.

  He said at last, heavily and slowly, “In many ways I am an ignorant man; it is I who am foolish, not you. I have not come to see you because I thought—I felt that I was becoming a nuisance. Maybe that was not true.”

  “No,” she said. “No, it wasn’t true.”

  Still not looking at her, he continued, “And I didn’t want to cause you the discomfort of having to deal with—with my feelings for you, which, I knew, sooner or later, would become obvious if I kept seeing you.”

  She did not move; two tears welled over her lashes and ran down her cheeks; she did not brush them away.

  “I was perhaps selfish. I felt that nothing could come of this except awkwardness for you and unhappiness for me. You know my—circumstances. It seemed to me impossible that you could—that you could feel for me anything but—”

  “Shut up,” she said softly, fiercely. “Oh, my dear, shut up and come over here.”

  He found himself trembling; as awkwardly as a boy he went around the coffee table and sat beside her. Tentatively, clumsily, their hands went out to each other; they clasped each other in an awkward, strained embrace; and for a long time they sat together without moving, as if any movement might let escape from them the strange and terrible thing that they held between them in a single grasp.

  Her eyes, that he had thought to be a dark brown or black, were a deep violet. Sometimes they caught the dim light of a lamp in the room and glittered moistly; he could turn his head one way and another, and the eyes beneath his gaze would change color as he moved, so that it seemed, even in repose, they were never still. Her flesh, that had at a distance seemed so cool and pale, had beneath it a warm ruddy undertone like light flowing beneath a milky translucence. And like the translucent flesh, the calm and poise and reserve which he had thought were herself, masked a warmth and playfulness and humor whose intensity was made possible by the appearance that disguised them.

  In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before him: that the person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another.

  They were both very shy, and they knew each other slowly, tentatively; they came close and drew apart, they touched and withdrew, neither wishing to impose upon the other more than might be welcomed. Day by day the layers of reserve that protected them dropped away, so that at last they were like many who are extraordinarily shy, each open to the other, unprotected, perfectly and unselfconsciously at ease.

  Nearly every afternoon, when his classes were over, he came to her apartment. They made love, and talked, and made love again, like children who did not think of tiring at their play. The spring days lengthened, and they looked forward to the summer.

  XIII

  In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart.

  The hours that he once had spent in his office gazing out of the window upon a landscape that shimmered and emptied before his blank regard, he now spent with Katherine. Every morning, early, he went to his office and sat restlessly for ten or fifteen minutes; then, unable to achieve repose, he wandered out of Jesse Hall and across campus to the library, where he browsed in the stacks for ten or fifteen minutes more. And at last, as if it were a game he played with himself, he delivered himself from his self-imposed suspense, slipped out a side door of the library, and made his way to the house where Katherine lived.

  She often worked late into the night, and some mornings when he came to her apartment he found her just awakened, warm and sensual with sleep, naked beneath the dark blue robe she had thrown on to come to the door. On such mornings they often made love almost before they spoke, going to the narrow bed that was still rumpled and hot from Katherine’s sleeping.

  Her body was long and delicate and softly fierce; and when he touched it his awkward hand seemed to come alive above that flesh. Sometimes he looked at her body as if it were a sturdy treasure put in his keeping; he let his blunt fingers play upon the moist, faintly pink skin of thigh and belly and marveled at the intricately simple delicacy of her small firm breasts. It occurred to him that he had never before known the body of another; and it occurred to him further that that was the reason he had always somehow separated the self of another from the body that carried that self around. And it occurred to him at last, with the finality of knowledge, that he had never known another human being with any intimacy or trust or with the human warmth of commitment.

  Like all lovers, they spoke much of themselves, as if they might thereby understand the world which made them possible.

  “My God, how I used to lust after you,” Katherine said once. “I used to see you standing there in front of the class, so big and lovely and awkward, and I used to lust after you something fierce. You never knew, did you?”

  “No,” William said. “I thought you were a very proper young lady.”

  She laughed delightedly. “Proper, indeed!” She sobered a little and smiled reminiscently. “I suppose I thought I was too. Oh, how
proper we seem to ourselves when we have no reason to be improper! It takes being in love to know something about yourself. Sometimes, with you, I feel like the slut of the world, the eager, faithful slut of the world. Does that seem proper to you?”

  “No,” William said, smiling, and reached out for her. “Come here.”

  She had had one lover, William learned; it had been during her senior year in college, and it had ended badly, with tears and recriminations and betrayals.

  “Most affairs end badly,” she said, and for a moment both were somber.

  William was shocked to discover his surprise when he learned that she had had a lover before him; he realized that he had started to think of themselves as never really having existed before they came together.

  “He was such a shy boy,” she said. “Like you, I suppose, in some ways; only he was bitter and afraid, and I could never learn what about. He used to wait for me at the end of the dorm walk, under a big tree, because he was too shy to come up where there were so many people. We used to walk miles, out in the country, where there wasn’t a chance of our seeing anybody. But we were never really—together. Even when we made love.”

  Stoner could almost see this shadowy figure who had no face and no name; his shock turned to sadness, and he felt a generous pity for an unknown boy who, out of an obscure lost bitterness, had thrust away from him what Stoner now possessed.

  Sometimes, in the sleepy laziness that followed their lovemaking, he lay in what seemed to him a slow and gentle flux of sensation and unhurried thought; and in that flux he hardly knew whether he spoke aloud or whether he merely recognized the words that sensation and thought finally came to.

  He dreamed of perfections, of worlds in which they could always be together, and half believed in the possibility of what he dreamed. “What,” he said, “would it be like if,” and went on to construct a possibility hardly more attractive than the one in which they existed. It was an unspoken knowledge they both had, that the possibilities they imagined and elaborated were gestures of love and a celebration of the life they had together now.