“Of course!” Billy considers his rehearsed delivery. “Uh,” he says. “Here’s the thing. Here you are, a Fulbright scholar far from home living—or so I imagine—in inadequate housing and, well, surely you can see where I am coming from.”
“Sir. I do. I do. I do not dare . . . it’s too kind, far too kind.” Charter runs his fingers through hair he knows is in need of some attention, and which Billy addresses at once.
“Have you, have you . . . been to an American barber?”
“No, sir—”
“Billy.”
“No, Billy. Short on funds and as you can see I am personally not too handy in that direction.”
“I’ll take you to town. I know a good man there. Now, the upstairs is nicely done up.” They stand together on the Circle now, looking at his house, which shares a lawn and a lilac hedge with Asthma’s.
“Terrific closets. Full use of the screen porch,” Billy says, “the kitchen. Do you cook?”
“No—”
“Of course not. You are busy. With Loon! Who could have imagined this! My own days of being busy are over. I’ll cook for the two of us. I am bored cooking for myself. Losing touch! Look at this scar.” He throws a hand into Charter’s face. “Trimming a radish.” He thrusts the tip of a thumb into his mouth and sucks it. “I am, therefore, in all simplicity, no strings attached, proposing a proper dwelling, nicely done up by Margaret, who blessedly is gone to Wisconsin and out of our hair, yours and mine. One of the perks of being a college professor—in case of divorce, the professor cannot give the spouse the house! My campus digs are . . . on the house! On the house!” He laughs almost to tears, raving as they pace together around the Circle. I’ll get the upstairs tidied up and then, Charter, it’s yours. In the meantime, come for supper. Are you free?” Charter nods. “Six. I’ll show you your digs, get the cleaning lady—she’ll be here later in the week—to give the place a thorough . . . Do you need help moving?”
“Sir, Billy. You will be amazed by the little I have. My things, such a nuisance, but it’s o.k., really, were lost in transit. The authorities . . . nothing doing!” (Already Charter was picking up on Billy’s manner of speech.) “Nothing doing! But, hey! I get by! On a shoestring, of course . . .”
“That’s my boy!” Billy slaps Charter on the back. “Till six!” And off he goes.
Charter has a new good-looking back pack purloined from Hum Hall at the final semester’s end a month earlier: solid canvas duck, color of good tobacco, hand sewn, leather trim and straps—a Brunchhauser! He will pick up a pair of serviceable rubber-soled leather boots, heavy for the season but good for walking the woods, a top-of-the-line sweater, and two handsome striped shirts, all currently in a gym locker. He makes his way to the gym and showers, thinking: This could be good. Despite the risks. The heavy price if discovered. Then, suddenly ecstatic, he roars. That night he writes:
The chapel bells guide my hours. To their chimes (every fifteen minutes!) time unspools, the seasons and their constellations spill across campus like a sea. I set off for Billy’s a few minutes before six and arrived just as the bells chimed:
Doing! Dang! Doing!
Doing! Dang! Doing!
As I walked up the Old Boy’s path holding my head high, I considered the nature of destiny. A garden snake rode the grass beside me, the smell of garlic and tomatoes stimulated every nerve in my body, and a flock of swifts disturbed the quiet blue of the sky: And let fowl fly above the earth in front of the vault of Heaven. (Vanderloon quoting the Bible.)
Billy could not be happier having popped the question (a silly way to put it!). Once, he had popped the question to Margaret (fatal mistake!); this time he has simply offered a few vacant rooms to a young scholar. But loneliness has been leeching the marrow from his bones and as he tends to supper, rinsing greens thoughtfully, stirring spaghetti sauce, exuberance overtakes him. The boy, he is certain, will be an easy, grateful companion. He needs attending to; there’s something unfinished about him; he’s wounded somehow, much too thin, older than his years. Billy will feed him the meals he does best: spaghetti, beef with gravy—solid American middle-class fare—along with some of the great dishes of Normandy he came to love during summers spent abroad. Billy also bakes a pie. (Once, he had baked a perfect rhubarb pie that had volatilized as it cooled on the counter. He liked to say it was a miracle: That pie was so flawless it went to Heaven! But things did have a way of going missing on the Circle. Goldie insisted it was poltergeists.)
Billy sets the table. He grates the Parmesan, sets out a small bowl of red-pepper flakes, and sprinkles a pinch of oregano into the sauce for its final fifteen minutes. Precisely at six Charter arrives and the two sit down to supper, the one facing the other. Looking into a deep white dish brimming with hot noodles and large meatballs sweating juice, Charter is moved nearly to tears.
“Biblical!” he exclaims.
“Why biblical?” Billy wonders.
“It’s ambrosial and . . . gives off beams of light!”
“You’ve been reading too much Loon,” Billy jokes. “I’ve only served you a dish of spaghetti.” Yet he is pleased. “Curious you say that, though . . .” He tells his young guest about the vanishing pie. Charter blushes, but briefly. Billy’s innocence in the matter is evident. “Are you religious?”
“No,” Charter tells him. “Although I like to consider just how horny Noah’s toenails were when he hit six hundred.”
“Moses had horns . . .,” Billy muses and then confides: “I am a private sort. Reclusive you could say. In this way I am much like your friend Vanderloon, although he has taken it to extremes. Perhaps campus life breeds recluses. Well. What I mean to say is you will find it quiet in the house. You will be able to work undisturbed. The Circle could not be more conducive to study. Well . . . there are the children and they have their games, but still . . . they really don’t create much disturbance. Let me show you your room!”
What impresses Charter about the house first of all is that there are no photographs, no family pictures on the mantel or sideboard, no dead parents, ancestors, pets. Apparently Billy is not only wifeless, he’s childless. This is comforting. If there had been photos everywhere Charter would have felt like an intruder. But he thinks instead that he can do well here. He will enter into a serious study of Vanderloon’s ideas, not just collect them as one collects curiosities. Not just wander in the books aimlessly.
The house is spare; apparently Margaret had brought along a great deal of family furniture that left the house when she did. Billy has gone for a certain modernist minimalism, uncommon on the Circle. The few pieces he has acquired are angular, blond, the lamps as disquieting as space aliens. On the walls are a few framed museum posters, someone named Rothko who Charter thinks must have been a house painter, and a Dalí that causes him so much anxiety he will stay clear of it during his tenure in the house. An inscrutable Boz Heiffer.
Together they climb the stairs and reach a hallway lit by a clearstory: the light! Billy leads him to a large room furnished with a desk and chair, a reading chair, and a number of those peculiar lamps, each one pointing at them accusingly. “Ah!” Billy laughs. “The cleaning lady, I don’t know why . . .” He redirects them into a more serviceable angle.
Above the desk is a large window. Stub’s heart leaps; his ears are ringing; he feels like singing: the room has an unobstructed view of Asthma’s own.
“What do you think?” Billy asks as they return to the living room and settle into the butterfly chairs. The chairs are a novelty and Charter thrills with a sudden surge of sophistication and expectation. As he sits, he acquires substance, he expands. The blond coffee table is wonderfully indefinable, almost . . . numinous. He thinks the word numinous ridiculous, thinks it ridiculous, too, that ever since he renamed himself so hastily and with such affectation, he is unrecognizable, risks turning into a fop.
“Do you like it? The upstairs; is it—”
“What is there not to like? Your unerring taste, your
bountiful generosity, I—”
Billy reaches into a pocket and tosses him a key. “Not that you need it; I keep the place unlocked, we all do. The only thefts around here—and they are sporadic—appear to affect our pantries alone. The passing hobo, a mischievous undergraduate. Look here. Let’s say you move in Friday night. We’ll have dinner and then, well! The upstairs is yours. I trust you will work well there, that you will honor me and the house with a brilliant dissertation. Nothing, Charter, would please me more.”
Outside, another game of kick the can begins. Asthma shouts: “No! Dickie! That’s not fair! That’s not the way we do it!” For a brief moment a medley of children’s voices sweeps past. “That,” Billy grins,” is about as bad as it gets.”
Later he stands outside the library, still as a stone. The evening grows darker and he stands beneath the great mystery of the night, the Circle house lights above him shining through a tapestry of leaves, making everything look extremely strange and beautiful. He imagines he is deep beneath the sea, a merman maybe, and that the lights are not house lights at all but stars glimmering through sea grass and water.
Blackie keeps breaking her nose. Twice in less than a year. She sits alone nursing her rye as her Rod is intangible up in his study, working on his book (publish or perish!), or so she supposes. Instead, from a distant hill deep within his mind, he is gazing at his magnificent house in Jamaica, burning white in the blazing sun, the rooms freshly scrubbed, tiles cool to the touch. (How he loves tile!)
Blackie gingerly touches her bandaged nose. She has enough self-knowledge to know the drinking, these periodic accidents, have much to do with guilt. The nasty way she treats Asthma, and this despite herself. She wishes she were nicer, knew how to control her irritation, keep her filthy mouth shut, or, better yet, manage a pleasant, an amusing (!), conversation. The truth is, she’s always been nasty, she’s never liked children; her annoyance, her impatience, is visceral. She has always been rude. She likes to think it doesn’t mean anything but is up nights because she knows it does. She’s a bitch at best, a shrew and a crab; she’s shrill and she’s into control. She pontificates like a nun or a nanny. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, she’s convinced much of the time that she has a handle on the stuff that eludes everybody else.
Once, she caught Asthma rolling her eyes. “Don’t you dare do that!” she had shrieked, “You nobody’s fat bottom!” The recollection of scenes such as this torments her. But I didn’t slap her, she thinks, tapping the bandaged tip of her nose. It’s not like I’m Goldie. I know what I’m doing. I struggle. It’s existential.
Looking across the Circle she sees that Billy is entertaining. His young guest is reading on the front porch. It’s pleasant to see that porch in use again. It makes the Circle feel . . . companionable. It makes her feel less alone. As does the rye and the thought that her dilemma is somehow . . . heroic. She will do better. She will think of diversions. She will take Asthma places. Across the river to Kahontsi. Its museums. The theater. Buy Asthma a pinafore. Barrettes. She’ll pack a picnic lunch. She’ll get it right. Nobody’s fat bottom! Where the hell did that come from? Poor little worm, she thinks, her heart sinking. Poor little plucked hen.
Billy has served his guest coffee and they sit together in conversation. The children are merry, running hither and yon; the evening is balmy, the stars turning on one by one, and the frogs! Their voices trilling from the nearby pond. The world is a civilized place, Blackie reminds herself. If only I could remember.
Early Friday evening. His duffel, so large he thinks he could have lived in it all along, is now emptied and stored on a shelf in the closet. He has hung his three shirts on sturdy wood hangers, folded his one good sweater with care and placed it in the middle dresser drawer, rolled up his three pairs of socks, his few pieces of underwear, and placed these in an upper drawer. His few toiletries are in the cabinet above the sink.
He has time for a nap before dinner but his heart is pounding. He is famished and the air smells of fricassee (Billy’s word) . . . the mattress, chosen by Margaret, is impossibly luxurious, however, the bedspread the color of moonlight (starched!), the sheets nacreous. He thinks he will sleep like a chosen child, suspended in a pearly haze. He is soothed by the thought that he is destined for far more than he ever supposed. He is about to become a legitimate entity with an entire suite at his disposal, right smack in the heart of Faculty Circle (but he must be cautious, discreet, patient). He gets not only to see her, devour her, drink her in—but (and why not?) to talk to her. Because he is a scholar of promise and charm come all the way from New South Wales to study one of theirs, the elusive genius Verner Vanderloon. When Billy calls up to him for supper, he is awakened from a surprisingly profound slumber. Hastily Charter pulls himself together and descends to find a table regally set (candles!); he is served farmed chicken, Billy’s own rhubarb wine, biscuits. The carrots (how is this possible!) have been caramelized.
From the dining room window he can see that the brats are out in full number and a new game has begun . . . but Billy is speaking, and for how long?
“. . . always at cross-purposes. But then, isn’t that the nature of things, one moment undoing the next, the web spun only to be ripped to bits. Time compresses, time expands, and sometimes—as when one is in bed with the right person . . .,” he closes his eyes and nods in the direction of a distant memory, “ceases altogether. How many times have I stumbled? How many times have I gathered myself together and set off again? How many times triumphant—yes, I have had my triumphs!—only to fall on my face?” Billy’s eyes fog with tears. “To tell the truth—”
The windows are open to the early summer evening. The brats’ voices, the voices of frogs and crickets, locusts—surge and recede.
“Forgive me,” Billy says. “I ramble on, I have become something of a fool. But I trust this, too, shall pass . . .”
“No fool, sir! Billy—”
“It will pass. My mood I mean. Not my foolishness!” The brats are playing hide-and-seek. Charter sees them scatter. They will hide behind the familiar houses, in window wells, down the backyard basement stairs, in the limbs of trees.
“All that honey spilled,” Billy continues. (Or is it money spilled?) “All those fires stoked that might have been better left cold in their dead ashes; all the ice broken between the teeth; all the false starts, dreary roads taken—as meanwhile the stars pulsed blindly above!”
“You are a poet—”
“No, no, no . . .” Billy shakes his head, yet for an instant a wistful smile enlivens his face and Charter sees the boy he once was, the youth. “What’s worse,” Billy sighs, growing darker, “is that the signs were there. I mean: one should have attended to those pulsing stars and all the rest. Recalled the beauties one had ceased to see. The myriad beauties, Charter. Of the world, the mind, the flesh. The spirit, my boy.” He clenches his teeth and sucks in the air. “The red flags. One must heed them!”
“Red flags?”
“Fog horns! Sirens! Rings around the moon! Oh! Fatality! Nevermore!” Billy ravens. “NEVERMORE!”
“Sir?”
“My marriage, for instance. To a woman who wielded a scythe.”
“That deadly!”
“Too often,” Billy ignores him, “I have not paid attention. Spilled the milk. Soiled the linens. And yet . . . and yet . . .”
Suddenly Asthma dashes past as wild as a fox and unimaginably rich in life. And then she is gone, and Charter is irresistibly drawn to find her.
“. . . and yet, Charter! How eagerly I longed for life. And still . . . longing . . . the longing! Even now!”
“You,” Charter must force himself to speak, “have years ahead, years!”
“Bah!” Billy rises and goes to the kitchen where, astonishingly, he sticks his head under the cold-water faucet and gives himself a proper dousing before shaking his head vigorously from left to right like a wet dog. Charter rises to the occasion and hands him a clean dish towel.
“Good,” Billy says and pats him on the shoulder. “Well done. Time to retire!” he decides. “Don’t worry about the dishes . . . in the morning . . . I’ll . . .” He wanders off.
Charter takes up the dishes and fills the sink with suds. His agitation has quieted. He can hear Blackie calling for Asthma, the other mothers calling (and one blows a whistle). Soon she will be in her room, tucked away for the night, a breath away from him. Lovingly he washes everything, gazing again and again at the Circle, the rich grass wet with color, the trim houses, their slate roofs and stone chimneys, the polished window glass. It all gleams. It is all wonderful.
Once everything has been dried and returned to its place, he steps out into the evening to smoke a Camel—a new habit he can currently “afford,” having, on a visit to the train station down by the river, a pleasant hour’s walk away, purloined the wallet of a well-heeled and permed crone on her way to the city for a hit of high culture. She had fallen into a deep nap beside the alligator purse, its mouth as open as its owner’s. Charter thinks how over time such acts repeat themselves, each alike, each distinct: the local hunter, dashing in sideburns and well-oiled boots, his back pocket unbuttoned; a young coed devoid of common sense, her little silk purse abandoned on the ticket counter as she, tucked into the phone booth, catches up on gossip ($150 in bills!).
How good it is to smoke a cigarette, one’s back against a solid wall, the breeze playing in the leaves, the Circle silenced, each window the promise of a shadow-puppet play. Pathos and terror, black comedy, tenderness and loss, fire and ice, pleasure and punishment—all this surging and ebbing in those ruthless, wondrous, persistent rooms. Such sweetness! Such menace! He looks on as lives grow stale, are renewed. As kittens grow into cats; as betrayal rustles the sheets, rolls under the crib, and comes to rest there; as Death catches a glimpse of a maiden and cannot turn away.
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