Eye of Flame

by Pamela Sargent

  “I can’t imagine why Tad Braun would want to see any of us.” Jacqueline looked around at the pretty, ageless faces of the other three women, certain that they would not understand what she was about to say. “Tad was a gentle, sensitive boy, but we didn’t care about that, couldn’t see it. Now, at least, his beauty reflects the truth about what he was inside.”

  Patti finished her joint; the others were silent.

  “Well,” Patti said after a moment, “I’ve got an early day tomorrow. Listen, why don’t you all come to the house on Saturday? Joe’s going to be out. Come over around noon. We’ll sit around and swill wine and go out to dinner.”

  Dena nodded. “I think I can take the day off.”

  “Fine with me,” Louise said.

  “Sure,” Jacqueline murmured. “It’ll be fun.”

  It was admitted near the beginning of the Philebus that pleasure and intelligence are both parts of the good life, and yet we cannot decide which is closer to the good (or which determines the character of the good life) without concerning ourselves with what “the good” is.

  Jacqueline looked up from her typewriter. This was hardly a concern of the people out here, who had their own ideas about the good life. They would have taken Callicles’ position in this dialogue and argued for pleasure. She ruffled through the pages of the manuscript she was retyping, unable to concentrate; the intellectual pleasures Plato valued so highly could not overcome her restlessness.

  She glanced at her watch. She had not called Jerome last night, but he might be in his office now. Sarita Ames was teaching at UCLA; she could get together with her old classmate and bitch about how many philosophy departments still held Aristotle’s view of women. Giles Gunderson was at Irvine; there were a number of colleagues she might contact out here. They might draw her out of the spell Patti and her friends had cast, remind her that she was no longer a high school girl who envied the pretty and popular.

  She stood up and crossed to the bed. Telephone directories lay next to the telephone on the floor. She was leafing through the B’s before she realized that she was looking for Tad’s number. No Thaddeus Braun was listed in the local directory, and the Los Angeles book seemed a formidable obstacle.

  She went to the bedroom window and peered out. Tad was standing near the beach; she felt as though she had summoned him somehow. She hurried into the living room, but hesitated in front of the sliding glass door before she opened it.

  Tad strolled up the street, then halted below the terrace and raised a hand in greeting. “Hello, Jackie.”

  “Tad.” She tried to think of something to say. “Are you vacationing, or do you live out here?”

  “I’ve been out here for a while.” He had not really answered her question. Was he unemployed, looking for a position? Tad had been one of the better math students when she knew him; perhaps he did freelance consulting work for computer firms. “You’re visiting, aren’t you?”

  She nodded.

  “Mind if I come up for some coffee? You can tell me what you’ve been doing.”

  “I’ll come down,” Jacqueline said hastily. She backed away, closed the glass door, and hurried to the bedroom for her jacket. Better, she thought, to talk to him outside; she might have known him once, but he was a stranger now.

  As she came outside, he took her arm and led her toward the Strand. She almost pulled away, surprised at how ill at ease she felt.

  “How are all of you doing?” Tad asked. “You know—you and the other members of the Bod Squad.” She glanced at him sharply. “Come on, Jackie—a lot of guys in school called you that. Not the ones you went out with, just the ones who didn’t have a chance with you.”

  “Oh, we knew. We didn’t much care for the term.” She paused. “You might have read something about Louise’s ex-husband; he used to play for the Rams. He gave her a good settlement. Dena’s selling houses to rich people and going out with an Iranian millionaire from Beverly Hills.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’m just a philosophy professor on sabbatical. Patti invited me out when she and her husband were moving into their house, said their condo would be free until their new tenants moved in. Her husband’s a car dealer, kept pointing out his showrooms all the way in from LAX.”

  Two women cycled by as they came to the Strand. Tad gripped her arm more tightly. “Let’s walk down to the water.”

  She was about to refuse. Except for a couple of surfers in wet suits near the pier, the beach was nearly deserted. She was suddenly afraid of being alone with him, but he could hardly harm her there, in sight of the houses lining the Strand.

  He led her through the opening in the wall onto the sand. A group of gulls alighted near them, watching with beady eyes as they passed. She shivered; Tad, in a tweed jacket and jeans, did not seem to notice the chill. “It’s colder than I expected,” she said. “I guess all that propaganda made me think you have an endless summer out here.”

  “I was surprised to see you,” Tad said. “I wanted to speak to you on the pier, but then I thought you might not want to see me. I was thinking of the last time—”

  “I was hoping you’d forgotten that,” she said quickly.

  “Oh, I can’t blame you. I must have seemed pretty hopeless.”

  She slipped her arm from his and walked toward the ocean. It was all coming back to her now, more vividly than she had ever recalled it before.

  He had been the fat, pimpled boy who sat next to her in geometry. She had paid little attention to him, but he had surprised her by calling her up one day to talk about their homework.

  Tad did not ask her out; she doubted he had ever dated anyone. But she pitied him a little and could talk to him about her ambitions, the books she read, the interests she usually cloaked. She did not ask him to her house, but occasionally met him in places where her friends were not likely to see them—at the playground for small children near her street, or at a delicatessen in the city adjoining their suburb. They met only to talk; she did not think of their meetings as dates. She might have guessed that Tad would assign more importance to them.

  He called her early one Friday evening. He had walked two miles from his house to her neighborhood and was calling from a pay phone; he wanted to come over. Carelessly, she agreed.

  Patti, Louise and Dena arrived only moments after she hung up. Her face burned as she listened to the babble of her friends and tried to think of how to get rid of them. Patti was saying something about a party; Jacqueline could guess what her cousin would think when she saw Tad.

  Her friends were unusually perceptive that evening and noticed her nervousness almost immediately; she had to speak. “I can’t go,” she blurted out. “Someone’s coming over.”

  “Who?” Patti asked.

  “It’s—well, it’s Tad Braun. It’s just—he’s supposed to help me with some homework.”

  Dena rolled her eyes; Louise looked disgusted. “Tad Braun?” Patti shrieked. “You’re going to see Tad Braun on a Friday night?”

  “It’s almost like having a date with him,” Dena said.

  “I need some help in geometry,” Jacqueline mumbled. She knew it was a poor reason to give as soon as she spoke. The other girls were aware of her grades; they had copied her homework often enough.

  “Maybe Jackie likes him,” Louise said maliciously. “Wait until I tell—”

  “I don’t!” Jacqueline cried, terrified of what the other girls might do. She was in the middle of denying Louise’s suspicions when Tad came to the door.

  She knew that she should have sent him away quickly, tried to tell him she would call him later, but that hadn’t been enough for her friends. They pulled him through the door, ushered him to the sofa, and made the bewildered boy sit down as they grouped themselves around him.

  Their words, their callous remarks and cruel comments about his weight, his complexion, his clumsiness, awful clothes, and wretched personality had been designed to show him his place and rob him of any shred of self
-esteem. His face grew mottled with humiliation; Jacqueline saw the message in his pained eyes as he looked at her. Tell them I’m your friend, his eyes said; tell them that you hate what they’re saying, that I mean something to you.

  But she said nothing; she even laughed with her friends. He shot her one last glance before he fled the room; she had been surprised to see no anger, only despair.

  She had made her choice and betrayed him. Tad had disappeared from school after that amid rumors he was ill; she had not even called his parents to find out how he was, and found out only later that his parents had sent him to another school elsewhere.

  The sand shifted under her feet. She turned as Tad came up to her side. “What are you thinking about?” he asked.

  “How heartless I was before.”

  He adjusted the collar of his jacket. “I thought I was in love with you back in high school. I think I had a crush on all of you in a way, but you were the only one who would talk to me. I kept hoping, I thought I’d never get over—” He paused. “Well, that’s past. I doubt the others even remember.”

  She looked up at his handsome, even-featured face. At close range, his features were almost too perfect, as if he were hardly human at all. “You’ve changed a lot, Tad. You’ve probably had plenty of opportunities to forget us.”

  He shook his head. “I couldn’t forget you. You were the first girl I loved. You don’t forget that.”

  She sat down on a sandy slope; he seated himself next to her. “I was a fraud then,” she said. “It was all a pose. I was so afraid of—”

  “I can understand that.”

  “I’m still a fraud. I do my work, and I suppose I do it well enough, but it isn’t really my life in the way it should be. I’m supposedly a Plato scholar. Plato valued the life of the mind above all, but I don’t know if I do or not.” She laughed softly. “How naive that sounds. I used to think that once you assented to an argument’s validity, you’d have to change your views, even your life if necessary. One of my professors found that notion quite amusing. He said I had it the wrong way around, that philosophers find arguments to justify only what they already believe.”

  Tad was gazing at her steadily; she was surprised to see warmth and sympathy in his eyes. “I’m supposed to be writing a monograph on Plato’s Philebus,” she continued.

  “I studied some philo in college,” Tad said. “Mostly courses in symbolic logic, but I did read some Plato.”

  “It’s the dialogue where Plato deals with the relation of pleasure to the good and tries to show the comparative worthlessness of physical pleasures. He shows the contradictions involved in asserting that pleasure alone is the good, but he can’t conclusively disprove that purely hedonistic belief. All he can really do is to show that the life of the mind, the intellect, is a truer pleasure than those most people seek.” She sighed. “Maybe I shouldn’t have come out here. It’s just made the contradictions in my own life more evident. If I really believed in the choices I made, I wouldn’t still envy my friends.”

  “I’m afraid my intellectual pleasures were the only ones I had,” Tad said. “Math interested me the most. It seemed to take me to that realm of forms Plato wrote about, where objective truth could be found. I could forget the world then, see it as an illusion, as only the dimmest reflection of the real realm of truth and beauty, as only shadows on the wall of a cave in which people are trapped. Mathematics was far more real to me than the physical world.”

  That, she thought, was a Platonic enough notion. Tad went on speaking of how much each thing in the world also existed as a mathematical possibility; the world would change and eventually die, but the possibilities mathematical sets expressed would always exist, were in fact eternal. But he also seemed to think that the barrier between the physical world and this mathematical one could be breached, that a way of breaching it could be expressed mathematically, that the manipulation of certain symbols by itself could transform physical facts. As he spoke, she lost the thread of his argument, unable to tell if he was talking about applied mathematics or some sort of magical mumbo-jumbo. Words seemed inadequate for what he was trying to say.

  “I explored this for a long time,” he went on. “I was trying to see past the illusions of time and space. Each moment of time became another bead on an endless chain, while the world itself seemed almost like a series of cross-sections, a cutaway set in which, if you could see it all, you could move to any place in it almost instantly.”

  He fell silent; she heard only the rhythmical pounding of the waves against the shore. She felt that if she turned, she would see only bare hills, discover that the world she knew had vanished.

  “We used to talk this way,” he said at last. “I’ve missed you, Jackie. I kept imagining that I’d meet you again. I think I’m still in love with you.”

  He pulled her to her feet and drew her toward him. As he kissed her, she stepped back, startled at how aroused she felt.

  “This is ridiculous.” Another woman seemed to be speaking the words, not Jacqueline herself. “We haven’t seen each other for twenty years. I don’t know anything about you. You can’t be in love with me.”

  “I know what I feel. I wouldn’t be here with you now if I didn’t think you wanted me, too.”

  “There’s someone else. I’m living with a man.”

  “Jackie.” He kissed her again. Her arms were around him, clutching at his back. He drew away and encircled her waist with his arm. “I love you,” he said as they walked back up the beach.

  Jacqueline opened her eyes and stared at the bedroom ceiling. Tad was gone; she could not remember when he had left. For the past three days, it had been like that; Tad had exhausted her with his lovemaking and had been absent when she awoke. She would shower, dress, and go to the terrace; he was inevitably below in the street, waiting.

  Her memories were hazy and blurred. She dimly recalled that Tad had driven her in the Fiat that Patti had loaned her to a restaurant overlooking the beach. There had been a drive up the coast to Marina del Rey and drinks at a bar, but she had only the faintest recollection of the sailboats and yachts in the harbor there.

  Other memories were more vivid—the touch of Tad’s hands, the feel of his muscled body, his whispered endearments as he made love to her. Thinking of him made her want him even more; he had awakened desires she had believed dormant or dead.

  She sat up abruptly. Three days, and she knew about as little of Tad’s life as she had known when she first saw him. They had talked about her life and her problems, or had sat together in a comfortable silence, whenever they were not making love. He had to live nearby, since she had never seen his car, but he had not shown her his home. He had enough money to buy her overpriced drinks and an expensive dinner, but she did not know how he got it. She had been content to tell him about herself while asking no questions about his life; he had been the perfect lover, responding to her needs without imposing his own.

  Now she was appalled at herself, thinking of the risks she had taken. Tad might have herpes or some other disease. She had not even thought of contraception; her diaphragm was back East in her apartment, where its presence might serve to reassure Jerome.

  It was Saturday; Jerome would be home, perhaps hoping she would call. She reached for the telephone, dialed the number, and waited until it had rung fifteen times before hanging up.

  She climbed out of bed, reached for the watch on the folding table where her typewriter stood, then saw that it was nearly noon. Patti would be expecting her. Her cousin had not called during the past days; she wondered why.

  Jacqueline hurried into the adjoining bathroom, pressing the light switch as she entered. The face staring at her from the bathroom mirror looked haggard; the harsh light revealed all her flaws. Tiny lines she had never noticed before marked the skin around her eyes; at her temples a few strands of silver stood out against her auburn hair. She had gained almost fifteen pounds since high school, but her face had stayed youthful; the light made her seem
ten years older.

  Tad had insisted that she was still beautiful to him. He might be waiting for her now, below the terrace; she wanted to be with him, to hear his reassuring words. She forced the thought of him from her mind.

  Patti’s house was a wooden structure with large, glassy windows overlooking the sloping road. Stone walls separated the house from its neighbors; a stocky, dark-skinned man was toiling in Patti’s tiny flower garden. Jacqueline parked, then climbed the steps leading to the side door.

  Patti led her to the patio out back; Dena and Louise were sitting by the pool. Dena stood up, smoothed down her shorts, then handed a glass of wine to Jacqueline. “Tried to call you,” Dena said. “Hope you’ve seen some of the sights. When you live out here, you turn into a tour guide for visitors.”

  “I would have called,” Louise said, “but—” She smiled and lowered her eyelids. “I thought Bob had vaccinated me against serious relationships, but there’s someone—”

  Dena sat down again. “Do tell.”

  “Oh no. This is something special. I don’t want to ruin it. You’ll find out soon enough.”

  The weather had grown warm. Jacqueline set down her glass, then shrugged out of her jacket. In the daylight, Louise’s face seemed puffier; her chin sagged a little, and her breasts drooped slightly under her red halter. Dena brushed her black hair from her face; Jacqueline thought she saw some gray, then noticed a small, bulging vein on one of Dena’s tanned legs. Even Patti looked a bit older; her cheeks sagged just a little. Jacqueline felt a guilty pleasure, quickly suppressed, at seeing that the others were not quite so ageless after all.

  They talked about high school days, real estate, and men. Dena and her millionaire had parted company, but she did not seem all that unhappy about it. Louise mocked her ex-husband, while Patti enumerated Joe’s various faults. Louise remained sober enough to drive them to a restaurant in her Mercedes; there they giggled and recited old high school cheers over margaritas. Yet somehow, to Jacqueline, their joviality seemed forced. They all lapsed into awkward silences before rushing to fill them with words; Dena seemed distracted, while Louise kept staring into space.