The Dark on the Other Side

by Barbara Michaels

  “Then you didn’t know him well?”

  “We had several interesting chats at the Faculty Club.”

  In a pig’s eyes, Michael thought crudely.

  “What did you talk about? Economics?”

  “Among other things. He was very well informed for a layman, very much so. A brilliant mind, of course. And capable in a wide range of subjects. That is of course the outstanding factor in his personality. And that’s what you’re interested in, isn’t it, my dear fellow? His personality. I’m sure everyone who knew Gordon was struck by that-the breadth of his interests.”

  It went on in this vein for some time. Michael had suspected from the first that this pompous ass could not have won Gordon’s friendship, and after half an hour of name dropping and burbling generalities, he was sure of it. It took him another half hour to extract the information he wanted. When he left, the Vice-Chancellor sent his regards to dear old Gordon.

  On the steps of the Administration Building, Michael saw a bearded youth attired in a red plaid poncho selling copies of the school paper. He bought a copy. The picture on the front was a scurrilous caricature, badly drawn but recognizable, of the Vice-Chancellor. Michael turned back.

  “Contribution to the cause,” he said, and went on his way leaving the hairy young man looking in bewilderment at the five-dollar bill in his hand.

  It took Michael the rest of the day to find one of the teachers who had been Randolph ’s colleagues. Though they all had offices and office hours, nobody seemed to be in his office at the specified time-or, if he was, he refused to answer the door. (Michael could have sworn he heard harried breathing inside one locked and unresponsive room.) What were they afraid of? he wondered. Students? Which wasn’t so funny, nowadays…He finally caught one man as he was making a surreptitious exit, and when Martin Buchsbaum found he was not a student, he invited him in.

  Buchsbaum was a youngish man, chubby and pink, with a nose that looked as if it had once been broken, and a cherubic smile.

  “ Randolph? Sure, I met him. But I never knew the guy, not to talk to. I had just made my Assistant Professorship, didn’t even have tenure. He was one of the sheep, and I was the lowest of the goats. You know, the sheep and the-”

  “I know. My father was a teacher.”

  “Then you do know. The gulf between the tenured and the non-tenured is wider than the one between the Elect and the Damned. I’m sorry, friend, but I can’t tell you anything about the Great Man. He was lionized, idolized-”

  “Even canonized?”

  “Man can’t even plagiarize a quotation these days,” said Buchsbaum amiably. “What did your old man teach, English Lit?”

  “Right.”

  “It doesn’t follow, though. I threw a chunk of Andrew Marvell at a cop once. He not only capped the quote, he went ahead and gave me a ticket.”

  “Amere traffic ticket? Weren’t you out there hurling obscenities and bricks at the police last fall?”

  “I was.” Buchsbaum’s face was glum. “I slipped and fell and sprained my sacroiliac while I was running away. Cost me seventy-eight bucks for doctor bills. After that I decided I was too old and too underpaid to be a liberal.”

  Michael laughed. He got up to go a little reluctantly; Buchsbaum was a pleasant change from the Vice-Chancellor.

  “Stick around,” Buchsbaum suggested. “A man who knows his Fry is a man worth knowing. Or, better still, come home, meet the wife, have a beer. I’ll try you on the more obscure metaphysical poets.”

  “If I didn’t have eight more people to track down today, I’d accept with pleasure. I used to enjoy this sort of thing, in my younger days. You ivory-tower boys have a nice life.”

  “You are viewing it with the rosy glow of old age remembering lost youth. Don’t kid yourself. Why do you think I skulk around the halls with my collar turned up like James Bond? Students, committees, secretaries wanting lists of things, parents, students…”

  “Without the students you wouldn’t have a job.”

  “Don’t give me that; I’ve quit being a liberal.” Buchsbaum put his feet up on the desk and adjusted them so that he could look between them at Michael. “We all hate students. Most of my peers aren’t that blunt about it; they blather on about the book they haven’t been able to finish and the vital research they can’t carry out because of their onerous teaching load. The majority of them couldn’t write a book if you dictated it to them. What they mean is, they hate students. Like me.”

  “What about Linda Randolph? Did you know her?”

  Later, Michael was to wonder what made him ask the question. He had meant to throw out some feelers about Linda; this was where Randolph had met her. But she was not his main interest.

  “I knew her,” Buchsbaum said.

  “That romance must have caused a lot of comment.”

  “You could say that.”

  “I’ve met her. She’s charming, isn’t she?”

  “Is she?” The feet were still on the desk, the stout body as relaxed; but the pink face wasn’t friendly any longer. Feeling idiotically rebuffed, Michael turned toward the door. Buchsbaum said suddenly,

  “Sit down, Collins. Don’t go away mad. I’m sorry if I sounded…Hell, I was in love with the girl, of course.”

  “Of course?”

  “Most of her teachers were.”

  “Not the students?”

  “Oddly enough, no. Caviar to the general, you know.”

  “Cut that out.”

  “Sorry, it’s a bad habit. No; I think she put the kids off a bit-the callow youth. She was bright as they come, and the juvenile male doesn’t care for that kind of challenge. But…”

  He was silent for a time, staring reflectively at the tip of his left shoe; and Michael was reminded of Gordon, groping in the same way for words to describe his wife. When Buchsbaum began to speak, his voice was soft and abstracted, as if he were talking to himself.

  “We make cynical remarks about the lousy students. Most of the mare, you know. They don’t give a damn-they lack motivation, in the current jargon-and even if they have motivation, they don’t have the intelligence of a medium-bright porpoise. Day after day you stand up there on your podium and you strip your brain and throw it out, into a sea of dead faces, and it falls flat on the floor and dies there. But now and then-once a year, once out of a thousand students, if you’re lucky-you look around and see a face that isn’t a flat doughy mass with the right number of holes in it for eyes and nose and mouth. It’s a face, a real face. The eyes are alive, the mouth responds to the things you say. When you make a joke, the eyes shine. When you throw out an idea that takes a little cogitation, the forehead actually wrinkles-something is going on behind it, some gears are really meshing. When you say something that-that moves her, the mouth curves at the corners, not much, just a little, up or down depending on whether she’s moved to laughter or to tenderness…”

  The pronoun had slipped out, but Buchsbaum didn’t try to retract it. His eyes moved from his shoe to Michael’s face, and he smiled.

  “The Reminiscences of a Middle-Aged Loser,” he said wryly. “It’s true, though; every teacher knows about it. The quality of the response differs. Hers was unique. I won’t say that I wasn’t affected by the fact that she was also a gorgeous dish.”

  “I’m sorry,” Michael said, realizing that the revelations were finished. “I didn’t mean to probe into your private affairs.”

  “Sure you did.” Buchsbaum took his feet off the desk and stood up. It was dismissal. He was friendly, but guarded, now. “Only you wanted me to talk about Gordon, not his wife. Sorry I can’t help you.”

  “Have you read his book?”

  “Naturally. It’s brilliant. Like everything else the man has done.” Buchsbaum beamed at his visitor. “I hate his bloody guts. You noticed that.”

  II

  “I hate his bloody guts.”

  “If it hadn’t been for him, I’d have killed myself that night.”

  “A de
sperately unhappy man.”

  Three interviews, three different comments.

  Pacing the dark streets of the town in search of a restaurant that promised something more suited to an over-thirty stomach than pizza or oliveburgers, Michael pondered the results of his day. He had located one other teacher, and one student. The latter, Tommy Scarinski, was on the last leg of his doctorate, having taken off several years because of illness. Michael was fairly sure that the illness had been what is referred to as a nervous breakdown. The boy still twitched. He was a pale, very fair youth, slender as a girl, looking much younger than his twenty-four years. He had idolized Randolph -canonized him, in fact. Michael didn’t doubt that he had contemplated suicide. The impulse was far more common in this age group than most people realized. With the majority of the kids it was only an impulse. Some of them liked to believe that the influence of a friend or lover had been the catalytic agent that deterred them from that most final of all gestures of protest. In this case, though, Michael rather thought that Tommy-it was a mark of his immaturity that he still called himself by the diminutive-did owe his life to Randolph. He had been at the age, and at the stage of mental deterioration, when the influence of an idol could make or break his mind. But-my God, what a responsibility. What a delicate, damnable job. Chalk one up for Randolph.

  There was a sign, down the block, that said “Restaurant.” Michael opened the door and saw a dim interior, not too crowded. A waiter appeared promptly. He ordered a drink and a steak and let himself relax against the imitation leather of the booth.

  Buchsbaum’s comment wasn’t really a mark against Gordon. It was another example of the man’s sophomoric attempt at wry humor, with strong touches of masochism. Buchsbaum had never been Gordon’s rival, in the ordinary sense of the word; he was the sort of man who would always prefer a romantic illusion to a possible rejection. Most probably he didn’t even dislike Gordon.

  And why, Michael wondered irritably, should he be thinking in terms of pluses and minuses? He wasn’t trying to defend Gordon or play the part of Devil’s Advocate; that wasn’t the way he worked. He wanted the truth-and he knew it was never a single isolated fact, but a patchwork of differing, sometimes contradictory, views.

  The waiter arrived with the drink, and Michael took a hearty swig of it. He made a wry face. Should have specified the brand; this tasted like something out of a still. But it was better than nothing.

  The third interview had been the least productive, for all its verbiage. Professor Seldon was almost at the compulsory retirement age of sixty-five: a diminutive, dapper old man with a mop of white hair and a goatee and beard of the same silky hue. He talked fluently; God, Michael thought with an inner grin, how he did talk! He had been dependent on clichés for so long that he couldn’t have said “Good morning” if Shakespeare or Milton hadn’t happened to say it first. And he was Chairman of the English Department.

  Seldon’s comments on Gordon were about as useful as the newspaper accounts had been. Reflex reactions. The remark about Gordon’s tragic unhappiness had some normal human spite behind it, though Professor Seldon would have been genuinely indignant if you pointed that out. He was a third-rate scholar and a second-rate human being; envy of a better man could not be openly expressed, so it masked itself under the guise of benevolent pity. Translated, his remark simply meant: This man has everything I would like to have. Nobody ought to be that happy-except me. So he must be miserable, down deep underneath, where it doesn’t show.

  And, ironically, the old man was right. Randolph was an unhappy man. There was a serpent in his Eden, though that was a cliché worthy of Seldon himself. But Seldon had no knowledge of Gordon’s private life. His assessment of Gordon might have come straight out of the high school Class Prophecy: “Bright, intelligent, friendly; bound to succeed.”

  Michael caught the waiter’s eyes and nodded. The mellowing effect of the whiskey wasn’t quite complete, he could stand another one. Frustration of this sort was normal, he knew that. Most people weren’t perceptive about other people. Wrapped up in their own miseries, they had no energy to spare for the problems of others; anyhow, they tended to pigeonhole people as they did ideas, and reacted to deviations from a wholly imaginary picture with astonishment and annoyance. “Good old Sam wouldn’t do a thing like that.” “Mary, of all the people in the world; she must have changed a lot since I knew her.” Whereas, of course, Mary hadn’t changed at all. Mary, like everyone else, was not one Mary but a dozen. Her astonished friend had just not happened to see the Mary who finally broke out.

  Then why, Michael wondered, was he so irritated by his failure to get an instant, comprehensible picture of a man as complex as Gordon Randolph? Was it because he wasn’t getting any picture at all, not even a misleading one? Hadn’t Randolph had any friends, only associates and disciples?

  No. He had not. That was the only useful point Michael had obtained from Seldon.

  “Oh, no, Randolph didn’t associate with…us,” he said. Mentally supplying the three missing words, Michael suppressed a smile. “I presume he passed his leisure hours with friends in the city. Except-yes. I recall being surprised, at the time…He spent a good deal of time with the students.”

  The emotion that colored his voice-one of the few times that genuine feeling was allowed to show-was simple astonishment. Remembering Buchsbaum’s conversation, and some of the student complaints he had seen published in recent months, Michael understood. His internal amusement, this time, was rather sour. By God, things had changed. He remembered the big, echoing old house where he had grown up; the front door always open and the carpet in the hall worn threadbare with the tread of students’ feet, in and out, at all hours of the day and night. His father had had a funny notion of a teacher’s role… Professor Seldon would probably never know why Michael left so abruptly.

  But it was that very lead that had led to his present frustration. The student-teacher relationship, if it was a good one, could be one of the most important in life. He had expected some interesting material from Randolph ’s students. Having gone, posthaste, to look up the enrollment for Randolph ’s class, he was delighted to find that one of the top students was still around. Tommy Scarinski.

  Maybe his reasoning had been fallacious. But he didn’t think so, he was inclined to cross Tommy off as an isolated aberration. The best students in the class, the ones who got the highest grades-they still gave letter grades in those bad old days-might not necessarily be the people who had most attracted Gordon, but it was far more likely that his favorites would be found among that group than among the kids whose work had been too poor to rate Gordon’s approval. Besides, the class file included Randolph ’s comments-terse, sympathetic, and intelligent. The four “A” students had received the most favorable comments-with one exception. Miss Alison Dupuis had been dismissed with a curt: “Idiot savant; but how can you flunk a calculating machine?” With the other three, Randolph had obviously enjoyed a personal friendship.

  One of the three had been Linda.

  The second, Joseph Something or Other, had dropped out of sight. The vinegary spinster at the Registrar’s office could tell him only that Joseph was no longer registered. Well, that was something he could do tomorrow; he had been too pleased at the availability of Tommy Scarinski to check the other records, to see whether Joseph X had matriculated, or transferred to another institution. Graduate school somewhere was a likely possibility, in view of his scholastic record and his teacher’s praise. What had Gordon said? “Genuine creativity and drive-a rare combination.” Yes, Joseph was worth tracking down. The evaluation of a brain like that, sharpened by several years of maturity and by absence from his former mentor, would be valuable. That was why Tommy had been so disappointing: The years hadn’t sharpened his brain, it was still mushy… Poor devil.

  The waiter brought his steak, and Michael finished his drink and his deliberations. As he ate he glanced around the room in search of distraction from thoughts that were becoming stale
and futile. It was a pleasant, undistinguished little place, like a thousand other restaurants in a hundred other towns. The only thing that made it different was the fact that it was in a college town. There were a lot of students present, mostly couples, and they definitely brightened the scene. The voices were shrill, but they were alive; they got loud with excitement, they vibrated with laughter. Collegiate styles were undoubtedly picturesque. Floppy pants, beads and pendants, clothes that dangled, and jingled, and blazed with color. Michael approved of beards; at least you could tell the boys from the girls that way, and the Renaissance look appealed to him. A couple at a table next to the booth he occupied might have posed as models for the New Look-the boy had long brown hair, and hair over most of the rest of his face; a red kerchief was knotted around his throat. Michael’s eyes lingered longer on his date. The long, straight blond hair obscured her face most of the time, but her legs were in full view. They were booted up to the knee, and what she wore above them, if anything, was hidden by the tablecloth.

  Michael signaled the waiter for his coffee. The man lingered, swabbing unnecessarily at the table, and Michael resigned himself.

  “Stranger in town?”

  “Yes. I’m just here overnight.”

  “You busy tonight?”

  “No,” Michael admitted, wondering what form the conventional offer would take this time.

  “You like music?”

  “Well-some kinds,” Michael said, surprised and curious.

  “Stick around then, have another cup of coffee. Kwame is due in a few minutes. He’s not bad, if you like that kind of music.”

  “Kwame?”

  The waiter, a tired-looking man with receding hair, grinned.

  “That’s what he calls himself. Real name’s Joe Schwartz.”

  “What does he play? The sitar? The viola d’amore?”

  “Just the guitar. But, like I said, he’s not bad. If you like that kind of music.”

  He moved on to the next table, leaving Michael feeling ashamed of his cynicism. Maybe he ought to get out of the big city more often. It was a hell of a note when you were surprised by ordinary human amiability. The conversation was a lesson for him in another way; it emphasized his point about personality stereotypes. The weary middle-aged waiter was not the sort of person you’d expect to enjoy the music produced by somebody named Kwame, even if he didn’t play the sitar.