Magnetic Field(s)

by Ron Loewinsohn

  They had concocted alter egos for themselves up at the cabin. Daniel and Annie became Dr. Zarkov and his protégée, Dale Evans, who could never quite understand why the doctor always wanted her to take “naps” with him in the afternoon. “We never sleep,” she said. Or why he wanted her to do all the housework—all the dusting and moving around of vases of flowers and such—while wearing nothing but a little white lace apron like a French maid. “I don’t see how he expects me to get any work done.” David and Jane were Chuck and Juanita Roast, from the suburbs, the Redwood City Roasts. Juanita (née Goldenberg) was a nisei schoolteacher from Stockton who ran a tight class and didn’t take any “attitude” from her junior high school students. But out here in the country she could let her hair down and put her feet up and be just plain folks. Chuck (a mean man with a barbecue skewer) had played football in high school (Chuck the Truck) and now sold cars: “This baby’s got factory air, four new tires and a rebuilt transmission. You can not go wrong. I’ll give you half of my commission. You want a car. I want a sale: am I going to let my first sale of the day slip away for two hundred and fifty dollars? Hell no. Never mind that sticker price: you just made yourself two and a half.”

  They had all slept on each other’s couches as their marriages had gone through their stresses and strains. He remembered coming in with Jane one night at midnight from a concert and finding Daniel sitting on the couch, his feet propped up on the coffee table, a pile of exam blue books in his lap. The top one was open and he was going over it with a red pen. He had looked up at them and said, “Life goes on.” Danny had let him in and given him the blankets that were piled at the end of the couch. David remembered sitting in the kitchen of Daniel and Annie’s house with a drink in his hand, fighting back his tears and saying, “I don’t know what she wants. Do you know what she wants?”

  So, selfishly, he was sorry because all that was gone. It depressed him to think he would never have that special kind of fun and that special sense of being together in which things did not need to be explained. And it depressed him also to think of Annie, who was not a young blonde model who was amazingly beautiful. She was a handsome forty-year-old woman, curator of the Oral History Archive of the California Foundation, whose talk was filled with stories of the Gold Rush days or early farming in the Sacramento Valley, the conflicts with the railroad barons or fishing and shipping in the Delta. David loved to listen to her tell these stories and once asked if he could hear the original tape of an oral-history interview. On the tape her questions had been insightful and sensitive, tactful. The old man she was talking with was a thundering bore. And now she would be a forty-year-old divorcée, and it pained him to think of her being bright and vivacious on a dreary parade of dates with creepy middle-aged men who did not appreciate her intelligence or her warmth or her wit.

  Or her strength. It was clear to both him and Jane that she had been the real center of gravity in that marriage, that she could let Daniel be Dr. Zarkov because she knew damn well that little Dale was actually holding up the structure. It was she who managed the finances and made sure the bills were paid on time, and the taxes. She had gone through a scare five years ago when she found a lump in her left breast, and she had gotten through it just fine, with a kind of respectful cheerfulness. “Sure it can kill me, but it can’t bring me down.”

  And Daniel. He felt sad about Daniel, and angry too. He had to keep reminding himself, He does have a right to try to find happiness. But with a twenty-three-year-old model? How dumb could he be? He was going to put Annie through all this shit for some bubble-headed twit who could make him feel like a kid again, that he was not really forty-five and starting to go gray. “In what other profession,” Daniel had said, “can you watch yourself grow old so relentlessly? Your students are always the same age, always in their early twenties. Meanwhile you—are—fading out.” Daniel had kept himself in shape, David had to admit that: he ran thirty miles a week—every week—more than David could lay claim to. But obviously this was some sort of mid-life crisis that he should have been able to get through without causing this much turmoil, this much pain, this much irreparable damage. Did he really expect this thing with Connie to last after they changed it from an affair to a live-in, day-in-day-out reality?

  And then there was the “two years” business. “Daniel fell in love with an old student, Connie, with whom he’d been having an affair for the last couple of years.” David had had his affairs and figured Daniel had too. For that matter, he figured Jane had probably had her share: at thirty-seven she was still very attractive, and even though she was heavier now she was actually, he thought, sexier than ever. But his affairs had all been casual, almost all of them one-night stands, matters of opportunity. Like the time after the chamber concert in Montreal. At the conservatory in San Francisco he’d had dozens of opportunities, but he had made a sort of vow never to get involved with his students: it was not either professional or ethical, and he was a little relieved that Michael had said an “old” student (obviously he meant “former”). That said something for Daniel’s discretion.

  But two years! How many times had David seen him in the past two years? How often had they spent whole evenings together, whole days and weekends at the cabin? And not a word, not even a gesture to indicate this other thing with Connie, this other life. And it had been a complete shock to Annie, so for two years Daniel had in fact been leading two lives, and one of them had been kept somehow absolutely secret, excluding everybody but himself and this Connie person. The friendship, David had thought, was itself like a marriage or a family, it was an ongoing music that created a room in which everything revealed itself in a comfortable light. And now all these surfaces, that he had assumed were so open, that gave such familiar evidence of their inner being, turned out to be opaque.

  And Daniel. Did he have his being for these two years in his marriage with Annie and in his friendships, so that this secret affair was a sort of supplement? Or did he have his being in his affair with Connie so that that became the frame within which he lived, whose details—the color of the rug, the pattern of the wallpaper, the house plants in the corner—helped to make him up, so that his marriage and his relationships with friends became a pretense, a fiction, a role that had to be sustained at the cost of constant awareness and vigilance, the details of behavior—the drumming of fingers, the scratching of the head, the silences and the idle chatter—becoming conscious choices, the way an actor will choose to build up a character out of slouches and shrugs. Where was it that Daniel had his being?

  On Monday they got off to a late start, and at nightfall they were still trying to make up for lost time. They eventually stopped in Brookville, Pennsylvania, at a motel that looked across a large park to a minor-league baseball stadium. From this distance the noise of the crowd sounded like the humming of bees. David thought about Daniel and Annie.

  Daniel was a popular teacher. He taught seminars in fiction writing and he also taught large lecture courses on The Modern Novel that drew 150 to 200 students. Two and a half years ago he had given a course on Realism in the Modern Novel that drew 250 students. The class had to be moved to a larger lecture hall. Daniel had loved it. “I’m a ham,” he said. And it was the fact of his being the center of all this attention, a star, that excited Connie and attracted her to him. That and the combination of his hard, athletic body and his graying hair.

  She was tall and willowy, her broad Swedish face framed by her ash-blonde hair, which she wore short. The first time he saw her she was handing him one of those computer cards the students turned in to register for a class. “Hi!” she said brightly. “I’m Connie Olson.”

  He had been putting his books and notes away after the third lecture of the course and the hall had almost emptied of students. Automatically he took the card she was handing him and looked at it. Across the top the computer had printed her name.

  “Hi,” he said, smiling, “but you should have given this to the T.A.”

  “Oh,
I’ve already done that. I just wanted to introduce myself. I’ve just transferred here from J.C, and I thought it would be a good idea to get acquainted with my teachers, especially in these big lecture classes.” She looked him straight in the eye with an easy, comfortable directness. Her eyes were dark blue. “Your class was recommended to me by a woman in the Advising Office,” she said, “and I want to go back there today and thank her for a good tip. You’re good.”

  “Thank you,” he said modestly.

  “You don’t have to be modest. The people over in Advising know you’re good, your students here know it. You are.” She was smiling warmly.

  She usually wore blue jeans and a T-shirt or a turtleneck. She did have one hell of a body—long and lean, with a firm, good-sized bosom—but she did not flaunt it. A couple of times she came to class dressed up, but then she looked like a smartly turned out secretary going to work on Montgomery Street—a plain black skirt, a tan blouse open at the throat and “sensible” shoes. She often stayed after the lectures to talk to him, and she always smiled as she came in and left, but she did not make a pest of herself. She was not a groupie.

  He wondered when she would start coming to see him in his office and how he would tell her that he could not put any move on her while she was enrolled as his student. However, if she could wait till the term was over...

  She did not come to his office until just before the term paper was due, in the last three weeks of the course, and then her questions were all legitimate—“A Character Analysis of Theodore Dreiser’s Carrie Meeber,” by (“Yours Truly,”) Connie Olson. It was a B-plus paper. She would always write B papers, and her male professors would always give her a B-plus. He thought that if she really got herself organized and focused her attention better she could probably earn the B-plus flat out. But that would be it. She had a B-plus mind. But now he was being condescending, and trying to distance himself from his stiffening prick. And it wasn’t that he just wanted to fuck her. There was a tough, energetic thereness about her manner that he enjoyed, a directness that was comfortable, without being either aggressive or needy.

  She never came to his regular conference hours, when his office was jammed with students, but always knocked on his door in the afternoons, when he was alone. With anyone but a pretty girl he would have told the person to come back later. Over the years he’d had a half-dozen or so affairs, mostly with former students, though once with a visiting professor of Italian, a dark-eyed brunette from Torino who quoted Dante to him while they fucked. These were all safe, innocent affairs with women who were clearly passing through, up-front on both sides as temporary, even though they were, he thought, genuinely affectionate. He never broke his rule about current students, and he never let any of it hurt Annie, who never had a clue.

  He did not know if he loved his wife anymore. He enjoyed her and appreciated how she took care of the house and him. She was comfortable as an old shoe, as their old house, whose details all took care of themselves. He supposed he was being selfish, but none of this had ever hurt her. It had not even cost her any of his own affection or sexual energy, since after sleeping with these young women he felt himself not exhausted but refreshed. Some of his best lovemaking with his wife had come in the evening or nignt of the same day he had made love to Jackie or Karen or that redheaded Helen, who came three times pumping herself up and down on his lap as he sat behind his desk in his office.

  Now Connie Olson sat in his office as the afternoon light held the cube of the room in a sort of suspension, drenching the bookshelves that surrounded her and him, and told him about herself. She too was a native of San Francisco, and had graduated from Galileo. She was the youngest of three children. She lived with her mother in an apartment in the Marina. “I mean, I live in her apartment building. We have separate apartments. See, she is the manager.” Her father had been a C.P.A. who died of a heart attack when she was fourteen. “He had a drinking problem. He would come in to kiss us good night?”—the hitch in her voice turning the statement into a question—“and I could smell the liquor on his breath. Once he leaned over like that? and he actually fell on top of me.” The mother never remarried.

  She had put in a year of business school and gotten a job as a secretary in the International Office of Bank of America, down on Montgomery Street. “I looked around and I saw the people around me—I mean, not the other secretaries or anything, but the higher-ups? They all had something they were coming from, they were always referring to, like a whole other world. They were cultured, they were educated, they knew what they were talking about. I mean, these were all the people over me. And I thought, I’m going to get some of that, and here I am.” She was on some sort of educational leave of absence from B. of A., and had discovered a scholarship for women of Swedish-American ancestry. She loved literature, especially fiction, but she was taking mostly Business Administration courses, so that she could go back “and get promoted. I know I’m going to make it.”

  Daniel sat back in his chair, trying to keep from looking directly at her body, and thinking how could he get this girl to come back and see him after the term was over. Underneath that blonde all-Swedish-American-girl-next-door exterior he could sense a heavy grace in her movements and in her stillnesses that went with a rhythm like “feline leisure of lynxes.”

  When the term was over, he waited for her to come back and visit him. He would tell her, “Sure you’re beautiful, but there were probably three or four women in that class more beautiful than you [it was not true], but you’ve got something that none of them has, some kind of liveliness, some kind of animation [this was true].” He would reach out and take her hand, and after a long, tender look she would lean forward reaching out her mouth to kiss him.

  But she never did come back to visit him in his office, as she said she would do the last time he saw her before the final exam as she was walking out the door. He tried to look her up in the university records, but on all her application and registration forms she had checked the little box that said “Do not divulge address and phone number.” That was when he discovered that there are two columns of Olsons—over two hundred Olsons—in the San Francisco telephone book.

  Well, he thought, she was a lovely exciting girl with a good attitude. I think she’ll do just fine. “I think you’re going to make it too, Connie Olson, and good luck to you.” He remembered her term paper: “Yours Truly,” Connie Olson. She’s terrific, he thought, and shrugged his shoulders. This was what faithfulness to principle had cost him. Well, what the hell. How could they be principles if they didn’t cost something?

  In August his phone rang, and when he picked it up a young woman was saying, “Hi, Daniel? This is Connie. I thought I’d just call to check back in with you and let you know what I’ve been up to. I dropped out of school and I’ve gone back to modeling—”

  “Modeling?”

  “Yeah, and I’m doing really well—”

  “Look, Connie, I can’t really talk right now, but can we get together for lunch? How about tomorrow?”

  “Sure.”

  The next morning, driving over to North Beach, he thought, With a girl this beautiful, Daniel, you’ve got to keep your cool. You can’t be the eight hundred and seventy-seventh guy to tell her she’s gorgeous. He met her in front of the restaurant. She came trotting up wearing a silky, clingy white blouse and a woolen skirt in beige. He might have pegged her as a young married from Hillsborough. But then he saw that even though her clothes and her carriage referred to that sort of understated elegance, her own rhythms, her young eagerness, did not. She kissed him on the mouth, there on Broadway, where he was deliriously aware of standing on Broadway being kissed by an amazingly beautiful girl. But it was the kind of kiss women celebrities will give Johnny Carson. It meant only Hello.

  This was one of her favorite restaurants in San Francisco. It had been converted from a theater, its huge interior partitioned off now into separate dining areas, each one with a different motif—a leather-and-n
eon high-tech “Disco” with flashing lights, an Arabian tent with ottomans and carpets, a “modern” room with a huge skylight window and lots of ferns and bare cedar. But it had only one vaguely international menu, so that it was possible to have enchiladas in the Arabian tent and stuffed grape leaves in the Disco. They ate in an approximation of the sort of ice-cream parlor the Bowery Boys hung out in. As they walked through the lunch crowd, he was aware how the men around him would see her and then look again, but they yielded to something in her bearing and looked away.

  “I used to model when I was about fourteen, but I didn’t think I was mature enough then to handle it. But now, last spring, this old friend of mine who’s in advertising that I used to know from when I worked at B. of A.—he has a girlfriend who owns a boutique in Sausalito, and asked me if I would do an ad for her. Well, the ad is in all the BART stations now. I didn’t get paid or anything. I mean, she gave me some clothes and stuff. This blouse. But it was fun, so I checked around with various agencies and I’m in with one that I feel is a good one, and I’m starting to put together a really neat portfolio. Look at this. This is just four months’ work—”

  It was a black zipper-bound spring binder filled with mounted 8″ x 10″ glossies of her in standard modeling poses. In some he would not have recognized her. The poses ranged all the way from cowgirl in tight jeans to haute-couture ball gowns in severe, coarse-grained black and white. She could do the cold-as-Garbo beauty and she could do the young mother holding the baby on the Ivory Snow box.