Stoner

by John Williams

  The life they had together was one that neither of them had really imagined. They grew from passion to lust to a deep sensuality that renewed itself from moment to moment.

  “Lust and learning,” Katherine once said. “That’s really all there is, isn’t it?”

  And it seemed to Stoner that that was exactly true, that that was one of the things he had learned.

  For their life together that summer was not all love-making and talk. They learned to be together without speaking, and they got the habit of repose; Stoner brought books to Katherine’s apartment and left them, until finally they had to install an extra bookcase for them. In the days they spent together Stoner found himself returning to the studies he had all but abandoned; and Katherine continued to work on the book that was to be her dissertation. For hours at a time she would sit at the tiny desk against the wall, her head bent down in intense concentration over books and papers, her slender pale neck curving and flowing out of the dark blue robe she habitually wore; Stoner sprawled in the chair or lay on the bed in like concentration.

  Sometimes they would lift their eyes from their studies, smile at each other, and return to their reading; sometimes Stoner would look up from his book and let his gaze rest upon the graceful curve of Katherine’s back and upon the slender neck where a tendril of hair always fell. Then a slow, easy desire would come over him like a calm, and he would rise and stand behind her and let his arms rest lightly on her shoulders. She would straighten and let her head go back against his chest, and his hands would go forward into the loose robe and gently touch her breasts. Then they would make love, and lie quietly for a while, and return to their studies, as if their love and learning were one process.

  That was one of the oddities of what they called “given opinion” that they learned that summer. They had been brought up in a tradition that told them in one way or another that the life of the mind and the life of the senses were separate and, indeed, inimical; they had believed, without ever having really thought about it, that one had to be chosen at some expense of the other. That the one could intensify the other had never occurred to them; and since the embodiment came before the recognition of the truth, it seemed a discovery that belonged to them alone. They began to collect these oddities of “given opinion,” and they hoarded them as if they were treasures; it helped to isolate them from the world that would give them these opinions, and it helped draw them together in a small but moving way.

  But there was another oddity of which Stoner became aware and of which he did not speak to Katherine. That was one that had to do with his relationship with his wife and daughter.

  It was a relationship that, according to “given opinion,” ought to have worsened steadily as what given opinion would describe as his “affair” went on. But it did no such thing. On the contrary, it seemed steadily to improve. His lengthening absences away from what he still had to call his “home” seemed to bring him closer to both Edith and Grace than he had been in years. He began to have for Edith a curious friendliness that was close to affection, and they even talked together, now and then, of nothing in particular. During that summer she even cleaned the glassed-in sun porch, had repaired the damage done by the weather, and put a day bed there, so that he no longer had to sleep on the living-room couch.

  And sometimes on weekends she made calls upon neighbors and left Grace alone with her father. Occasionally Edith was away long enough for him to take walks in the country with his daughter. Away from the house Grace’s hard, watchful reserve dropped away, and at times she smiled with a quietness and charm that Stoner had almost forgotten. She had grown rapidly in the last year and was very thin.

  Only by an effort of the will could he remind himself that he was deceiving Edith. The two parts of his life were as separate as the two parts of a life can be; and though he knew that his powers of introspection were weak and that he was capable of self-deception, he could not make himself believe that he was doing harm to anyone for whom he felt responsibility.

  He had no talent for dissimulation, nor did it occur to him to dissemble his affair with Katherine Driscoll; neither did it occur to him to display it for anyone to see. It did not seem possible to him that anyone on the outside might be aware of their affair, or even be interested in it.

  It was, therefore, a deep yet impersonal shock when he discovered, at the end of the summer, that Edith knew something of the affair and that she had known of it almost from the beginning.

  She spoke of it casually one morning while he lingered over his breakfast coffee, chatting with Grace. Edith spoke a little sharply, told Grace to stop dawdling over her breakfast, that she had an hour of piano practice before she could waste any time. William watched the thin, erect figure of his daughter walk out of the dining room and waited absently until he heard the first resonant tones coming from the old piano.

  “Well,” Edith said with some of the sharpness still in her voice, “you’re a little late this morning, aren’t you?”

  William turned to her questioningly; the absent expression remained on his face.

  Edith said, “Won’t your little co-ed be angry if you keep her waiting?”

  He felt a numbness come to his lips. “What?” he asked. “What’s that?”

  “Oh, Willy,” Edith said and laughed indulgently. “Did you think I didn’t know about your—little flirtation? Why, I’ve known it all along. What’s her name? I heard it, but I’ve forgotten what it is.”

  In its shock and confusion his mind grasped but one word; and when he spoke his voice sounded to him petulantly annoyed. “You don’t understand,” he said. “There’s no—flirtation, as you call it. It’s—”

  “Oh, Willy,” she said and laughed again. “You look so flustered. Oh, I know all about these things. A man your age and all. It’s natural, I suppose. At least they say it is.”

  For a moment he was silent. Then reluctantly he said, “Edith, if you want to talk about this—”

  “No!” she said; there was an edge of fear in her voice. “There’s nothing to talk about. Nothing at all.”

  And they did not then or thereafter talk about it. Most of the time Edith maintained the convention that it was his work that kept him away from home; but occasionally, and almost absently, she spoke the knowledge that was always somewhere within her. Sometimes she spoke playfully, with something like a teasing affection; sometimes she spoke with no feeling at all, as if it were the most casual topic of conversation she could imagine; sometimes she spoke petulantly, as if some triviality had annoyed her.

  She said, “Oh, I know. Once a man gets in his forties. But really, Willy, you’re old enough to be her father, aren’t you?”

  It had not occurred to him how he must appear to an outsider, to the world. For a moment he saw himself as he must thus appear; and what Edith said was part of what he saw. He had a glimpse of a figure that flitted through smoking-room anecdotes, and through the pages of cheap fiction—a pitiable fellow going into his middle age, misunderstood by his wife, seeking to renew his youth, taking up with a girl years younger than himself, awkwardly and apishly reaching for the youth he could not have, a fatuous, garishly got-up clown at whom the world laughed out of discomfort, pity, and contempt. He looked at this figure as closely as he could; but the longer he looked, the less familiar it became. It was not himself that he saw, and he knew suddenly that it was no one.

  But he knew that the world was creeping up on him, up on Katherine, and up on the little niche of it that they had thought was their own; and he watched the approach with a sadness of which he could not speak, even to Katherine.

  The fall semester began that September in an intensely colorful Indian summer that came after an early frost. Stoner returned to his classes with an eagerness that he had not felt for a long time; even the prospect of facing a hundred freshman faces did not dim the renewal of his energy.

  His life with Katherine continued much as it had been before, except that with the return of the students
and many of the faculty he began to find it necessary to practice circumspection. During the summer the old house where Katherine lived had been almost deserted; they had been able thus to be together in almost complete isolation, with no fear that they might be noticed. Now William had to exercise caution when he came to her place in the afternoon; he found himself looking up and down the street before he approached the house, and going furtively down the stairs to the little well that opened into her apartment.

  They thought of gestures and talked of rebellion; they told each other that they were tempted to do something outrageous, to make a display. But they did not, and they had no real desire to do so. They wanted only to be left alone, to be themselves; and, wanting this, they knew they would not be left alone and they suspected that they could not be themselves. They imagined themselves to be discreet, and it hardly occurred to them that their affair would be suspected. They made a point of not encountering each other at the University, and when they could not avoid meeting publicly, they greeted each other with a formality whose irony they did not believe to be evident.

  But the affair was known, and known very quickly after the fall semester began. It was likely that the discovery came out of the peculiar clairvoyance that people have about such matters; for neither of them had given an outward sign of their private lives. Or perhaps someone had made an idle speculation that had a ring of truth to someone else, which caused a closer regard of them both, which in turn ... Their speculations were, they knew, to no end; but they continued to make them.

  There were signs by which both knew that they were discovered. Once, walking behind two male graduate students, Stoner heard one say, half in admiration and half in contempt, “Old Stoner. By God, who would have believed it?”—and saw them shake their heads in mockery and puzzlement over the human condition. Acquaintances of Katherine made oblique references to Stoner and offered her confidences about their own love-lives that she had not invited.

  What surprised them both was that it did not seem to matter. No one refused to speak to them; no one gave them black looks; they were not made to suffer by the world they had feared. They began to believe that they could live in the place they had thought to be inimical to their love, and live there with some dignity and ease.

  Over the Christmas holiday Edith decided to take Grace for a visit with her mother in St. Louis; and for the only time during their life together William and Katherine were able to be with each other for an extended period.

  Separately and casually, both let it be known that they would be away from the University during the Christmas holiday; Katherine was to visit relatives in the East, and William was to work at the bibliographical center and museum in Kansas City. At different hours they took separate buses, and met at Lake Ozark, a resort village in the outlying mountains of the great Ozark range.

  They were the only guests of the only lodge in the village that remained open the year around; and they had ten days together.

  There had been a heavy snow three days before their arrival, and during their stay it snowed again, so that the gently rolling hills remained white all the time they were there.

  They had a cabin with a bedroom, a sitting room, and a small kitchen; it was somewhat removed from the other cabins, and it overlooked a lake that remained frozen during the winter months. In the morning they awoke to find themselves twined together, their bodies warm and luxuriant beneath the heavy blankets. They poked their heads out of the blankets and watched their breath condense in great clouds in the cold air; they laughed like children and pulled the covers back over their heads and pressed themselves more closely together. Sometimes they made love and stayed in bed all morning and talked, until the sun came through an east window; sometimes Stoner sprang out of bed as soon as they were awake and pulled the covers from Katherine’s naked body and laughed at her screams as he kindled a fire in the great fireplace. Then they huddled together before the fireplace, with only a blanket around them, and waited to be warmed by the growing fire and the natural warmth of their own bodies.

  Despite the cold, they walked nearly every day in the woods. The great pines, greenish-black against the snow, reared up massively toward the pale-blue cloudless sky; the occasional slither and plop of a mass of snow from one of the branches intensified the silence around them, as the occasional chatter of a lone bird intensified the isolation in which they walked. Once they saw a deer that had come down from the higher mountains in search of food. It was a doe, brilliantly yellow-tan against the starkness of dark pine and white snow. Now fifty yards away it faced them, one forepaw lifted delicately above the snow, the small ears pitched forward, the brown eyes perfectly round and incredibly soft. No one moved. The doe’s delicate face tilted, as if regarding them with polite inquiry; then, unhurriedly, it turned and walked away from them, lifting its feet daintily out of the snow and placing them precisely, with a tiny sound of crunching.

  In the afternoon they went to the main office of the lodge, which also served as the village’s general store and restaurant. They had coffee there and talked to whoever had dropped in and perhaps picked up a few things for their evening meal, which they always took in their cabin.

  In the evening they sometimes lighted the oil lamp and read; but more often they sat on folded blankets in front of the fireplace and talked and were silent and watched the flames play intricately upon the logs and watched the play of firelight upon each other’s faces.

  One evening, near the end of the time they had together, Katherine said quietly, almost absently, “Bill, if we never have anything else, we will have had this week. Does that sound like a girlish thing to say?”

  “It doesn’t matter what it sounds like,” Stoner said. He nodded. “It’s true.”

  “Then I’ll say it,” Katherine said. “We will have had this week.”

  On their last morning Katherine straightened the furniture and cleaned the place with slow care. She took off the wedding band she had worn and wedged it in a crevice between the wall and the fireplace. She smiled self-consciously. “I wanted,” she said, “to leave something of our own here; something I knew would stay here, as long as this place stays. Maybe it’s silly.”

  Stoner could not answer her. He took her arm and they walked out of the cabin and trudged through the snow to the lodge office, where the bus would pick them up and take them back to Columbia.

  On an afternoon late in February, a few days after the second semester had begun, Stoner received a call from Gordon Finch’s secretary; she told him that the dean would like to talk with him and asked if he would drop by that afternoon or the next morning. Stoner told her that he would—and sat for several minutes with one hand on the phone after having hung up. Then he sighed and nodded to himself and went downstairs to Finch’s office.

  Gordon Finch was in his shirt sleeves, his tie was loosened, and he was leaning back in his swivel chair with his hands clasped behind his head. When Stoner came into the room he nodded genially and waved toward the leather-covered easy chair set at an angle beside his desk.

  “Take a load off, Bill. How have you been?”

  Stoner nodded. “All right.”

  “Classes keeping you busy?”

  Stoner said dryly, “Reasonably so. I have a full schedule.”

  “I know,” Finch said and shook his head. “I can’t interfere there, you know. But it’s a damned shame.”

  “It’s all right,” Stoner said a bit impatiently.

  “Well.” Finch straightened in his chair and clasped his hands on the desk in front of him. “There’s nothing official about this visit, Bill. I just wanted to chat with you for a while.”

  There was a long silence. Stoner said gently, “What is it, Gordon?”

  Finch sighed, and then said abruptly, “Okay. I’m talking to you right now as a friend. There’s been talk. It isn’t anything that, as a dean, I have to pay any attention to yet, but—well, sometime I might have to pay attention to it, and I thought I ought to speak to
you—as a friend, mind you—before anything serious develops.”

  Stoner nodded. “What kind of talk?”

  “Oh, hell, Bill. You and the Driscoll girl. You know.”

  “Yes,” Stoner said. “I know. I just wanted to know how far it has gone.”

  “Not far yet. Innuendos, remarks, things like that.”

  “I see,” Stoner said. “I don’t know what I can do about it.”

  Finch creased a sheet of paper carefully. “Is it serious, Bill?”

  Stoner nodded and looked out the window. “It’s serious, I’m afraid.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  With sudden violence Finch crumpled the paper that he had so carefully folded and threw it at a wastebasket. He said, “In theory, your life is your own to lead. In theory, you ought to be able to screw anybody you want to, do anything you want to, and it shouldn’t matter so long as it doesn’t interfere with your teaching. But damn it, your life isn’t your own to lead. It’s—oh, hell. You know what I mean.”

  Stoner smiled. “I’m afraid I do.”

  “It’s a bad business. What about Edith?”

  “Apparently,” Stoner said, “she takes the whole thing a good deal less seriously than anyone else. And it’s a funny thing, Gordon; I don’t believe we’ve ever got along any better than we have the last year.”

  Finch laughed shortly. “You never can tell, can you? But what I meant was, will there be a divorce? Anything like that?”

  “I don’t know. Possibly. But Edith would fight it. It would be a mess.”

  “What about Grace?”

  A sudden pain caught at Stoner’s throat, and he knew that his expression showed what he felt. “That’s—something else. I don’t know, Gordon.”

  Finch said impersonally, as if they were discussing someone else, “You might survive a divorce—if it weren’t too messy. It would be rough, but you’d probably survive it. And if this—thing with the Driscoll girl weren’t serious, if you were just screwing around, well, that could be handled too. But you’re sticking your neck out, Bill; you’re asking for it.”