Campus Trilogy : Changing Places; Small World; Nice Work (9781101577127)

by Lodge, David

  —Rummidge Evening Mail

  EARTHQUAKE CURE

  Earthquakes, said a speaker at yesterday’s Euphoric State teach-in on Ecology and Politics, were nature’s way of protesting all the concrete that had been laid on top of the good earth. By planting things, one was liberating the ground, and therefore preventing earthquakes.

  —Plotinus Gazette

  CHANCELLOR PROPOSES LEASE OF GARDEN.

  MAYOR HAS DOUBTS. GIANT MARCH PLANNED

  FOR MEMORIAL DAY

  Chancellor Harold Binde told a press conference yesterday that he thought the vexed problem of the People’s Garden could be solved if the University leased part of the land to the City of Plotinus for development as a park, incorporating the present arrangements as far as possible.

  Plotinus City Council will probably consider the proposal at its next meeting, but Mayor Holmes is known not to favour it. There is doubt, too, whether Governor Duck, an ex officio member of the University Council, would allow the lease to be approved, as he is bitterly opposed to any concession to the Gardeners.

  Meanwhile the latter are making plans for an enormous march through the streets of Plotinus on Memorial Day. It is to be a peaceful, non-violent protest, organizers insist; but local citizens, hearing estimates that 50,000 may converge on Plotinus for the occasion, from places as far away as Madison and New York, are apprehensive.

  “A permit for a march has been applied for,” a spokesman confirmed at the City Hall today, “and is being studied by the appropriate officials.”

  —Esseph Chronicle

  ICE CUBE DAMAGES ROOF

  A block of green ice one cubic foot in size fell through the roof of a house in south Rummidge last night, damaging a room on the top floor. The room was unoccupied and no one was hurt.

  Scientists called in to examine the ice, at first thought to be a freak hailstone, quickly established that it was frozen urine. It is thought to have been illegally discharged from an airliner flying at high altitude.

  The owner of the house, Dr. Brendan O’Shea, said this morning, “I’m flabbergasted. I don’t even know if I’m insured against this kind of thing. Some people might say it was an act of God.”

  —Rummidge Evening Mail

  5. Changing

  “You don’t think it’s on the small side?”

  “It looks fine to me.”

  “I’ve been thinking lately it was rather small.”

  “A recent survey showed that ninety per cent of American men think their penises are less than average size.”

  “I suppose it’s only natural to want to be in the top ten per cent…”

  “They aren’t the top ten per cent, stupid, they’re the ten per cent who aren’t worried about it. The point is you can’t have ninety per cent who are less than average.”

  “Ah. I never was any good at statistics.”

  “I’m disappointed in you, Philip, really I am. I thought you didn’t have a virility hangup. That’s what I like about you.”

  “My small penis?”

  “Your not demanding applause for your potency all the time. Like with Morris it had to be a four-star fuck every time. If I didn’t groan and roll my eyes and foam at the mouth at climax he would accuse me of going frigid on him.”

  “Was he one of the ninety per cent too?”

  “Well, no.”

  “Ah.”

  “Anyway, it looks smaller to you, because you’re always looking down on it. It gets foreshortened.”

  “That’s a thought.”

  “Go take a look in the mirror.”

  “No, I’ll take your word for it.”

  But the next morning, drying off after his shower, Philip stood on a chair to examine his torso in the mirror above the handbasin. It was true that one’s normal angle of vision entailed a certain foreshortening effect, though not as much as one might have wished. Forty was admittedly a rather advanced age at which to begin worrying on this score, but it was only recently that he had acquired any standards of comparison. Not since he was at school, probably, had he taken a good look at another male organ until he came to Euphoria. Since then penises had been flaunted at him from all sides. First there was Charles Boon, who scorned pyjamas and was often to be encountered walking about the apartment on Pythagoras Drive in a state of nature. Then the record stores along Cable Avenue began displaying the John Lennon/Yoko Ono album with the full-frontal nude photo of the famous couple on the sleeve. There was the hero of I am Curious Yellow, which they had gone to see in Esseph, queuing two hours with what Désirée had described as a couple of hundred other middle-aged voyeurs hoping it would turn them on (which, one had to admit, it did); and the young man in the audience of an avant-garde theatre group who upstaged the actors by taking off his clothes before they did. These displays had impressed Philip with a sense of his own inferiority. Désirée was unsympathetic. “Now you know what it was like growing up flat-chested in a big-tit culture,” she said.

  “I think your chest is very nice.”

  “What about your wife?”

  “Hilary?”

  “Is she well-stacked?”

  “A good figure, yes. Mind you…”

  “What?”

  “She couldn’t do without a bra, like you.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, you know, it would be flopping about all over the place.”

  “It? Don’t you mean them?”

  “Well, all right, them.”

  “Who says they shouldn’t flop? Who says they have to stick out like cantilevered terraces? I’ll tell you who, the brassiere industry.”

  “I expect you’re right.”

  “How would you like it if you had to wear a codpiece all the time?”

  “I’d hate it, but I bet you could sell them if you advertised in Euphoric Times.”

  “Morris was always a big-tit man. I don’t know why he married me. I don’t know why I married him. Why do people marry people? Why did you marry Hilary?”

  “I don’t know. I was lonely at the time.”

  “Yes. That’s about it. If you ask me, loneliness has a lot to answer for.”

  Philip climbed down from the chair and finished drying off. He rubbed talcum into his skin, feeling with a certain narcissistic pleasure the new cushions of tissue that had appeared on his hips and chest. Since giving up smoking he had begun to put on weight, and he thought it rather suited him. His rib-cage was now covered by a smooth sheath of flesh, and his collar-bone no longer stood out with a frightening starkness that suggested he had swallowed a coat-hanger.

  He shrugged on the cotton happi-coat that Désirée had loaned him. His own bathrobe had been left behind at Pythagoras Drive and Charles Boon had borrowed it so often that Philip no longer cared to recover it. If Boon wasn’t walking about the apartment ostentatiously naked, he was forever pinching your clothes. How much nicer life was on Socrates Avenue. How providential, in retrospect, the landslip that had pitched him out of one address and into the other. The happi-coat was patterned in marine shades of blue and green, lined with white towelling and was immensely comfortable. It made him look, and even feel, vaguely athletic and masterful, like an oriental wrestler. He frowned at his reflection in the mirror, narrowing his eyes and dilating his nostrils. He did a lot of looking into mirrors lately. Hoping to surprise himself, perhaps, in some revealing, explanatory attitude or expression.

  He padded into his bedroom, pulled back the covers on his bed and dented the pillow a little. It was his one, vestigial gesture towards the conventions: when he slept with Désirée, to rise early and come into his room to rumple the bedclothes. Whom he was supposed to be fooling, he couldn’t imagine. Not the twins, surely, because Désirée, in the terrifying way of progressive American parents, believed in treating children like adults and had undoubtedly explained to them the precise nature of her relationship with himself. I wish she would explain it to me, he thought wryly, gazing into another mirror, I’m damned if I can make head or tail
of it.

  Though not one of Nature’s early risers, Philip found it no hardship to be up betimes these sunny mornings in 3462 Socrates. He liked showering in jets of hot water sharp as laser beams, walking about the quiet carpeted house in his bare feet, taking possession of the kitchen that was like the flight deck of some computer-guided spaceship, all gleaming white and stainless steel, with its dials, gadgets and immense humming fridge. Philip laid breakfast places for himself and the twins, mixed a jug of frozen orange juice, put bacon rashers in the electric Grillerette, turned it on low, and poured boiling water on to a teabag. Shuffling into a pair of abandoned mules, he took his tea through the patio into the garden and squatted against a sunny wall to absorb the unfailing view. It was a very still, clear morning. The waters of the Bay were stretched taut and you could almost count the cables on the Silver Span. Down on the ever-moving Shoreline Freeway, the cars and trucks raced along like Dinky toys, but their noise and fumes did not carry this far. Here the air was cool and sweet, perfumed with the sub-tropical vegetation that grew luxuriantly in the gardens of affluent Plotinus.

  A silver jet, with engines cut back, planed in from the north almost at his eye level, and he followed its lazy progress across the cinemascope of the sky. This was a good hour to arrive in Euphoria. It was almost possible to imagine what it must have been like for the first mariners who sailed, probably quite by chance, through the narrow strait now bridged by the Silver Span, and found this stupendous bay in the state God left it at the creation. What was that passage in The Great Gatsby? “A fresh, green breast of the new world… for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent…” As Philip hunted the quotation through his mind the tranquillity of the morning was shattered by a hideous noise as of a gigantic lawn-mower passing overhead, and a dark spidery shadow flashed across the gardens on the hillside. The first helicopter of the day swooped down upon the Euphoric State campus.

  Philip returned to the house. Elizabeth and Darcy were up. They came into the kitchen in their pyjamas, yawning and rubbing their eyes and pushing back their long matted hair. Not only were they identical twins, but to make things more difficult Darcy had the more feminine good looks, so that it was on Elizabeth’s dental brace that Philip relied to tell them apart. They were an enigmatic pair. Communicating telepathically with each other, they were uncommonly sparing in their own use of ordinary language. Philip found this restful after his own precociously articulate and tirelessly inquisitive children, but disconcerting too. He often wondered what the twins thought of him, but they gave nothing away.

  “Good morning!” he greeted them brightly. “I think it’s going to be hot.”

  “Hi,” they murmured politely. “Hi, Philip.” They sat down at the breakfast bar and began to munch large quantities of some patent sugar-coated cereal.

  “Would you like some bacon?”

  They shook their heads, mouths full of cereal. He extracted the crisp, uniform strips of bacon from the Grillerette and made himself a bacon sandwich and another cup of tea. “What d’you want for your lunch today?” he inquired. The twins looked at each other.

  “Peanut butter and jelly,” Darcy said.

  “All right. What about you, Elizabeth?” As if he needed to ask.

  “The same, please.”

  He made the sandwiches with the ready-sliced, vitamin-enriched, totally tasteless white bread they seemed to like, and packed them with an apple each in their lunch-boxes. The twins took second helpings of cereal. Euphoric Times had recently reported an experiment in which rats fed on cornflake packets had proved healthier than rats fed on the cornflakes. He told them about it. They smiled politely.

  “Have you washed?” he inquired.

  While they were washing, he put the kettle on to boil for Désirée’s coffee and picked up yesterday’s Chronicle. “It is to be a peaceful, non-violent protest, the organizers insist,” he read. “But local citizens, hearing estimates that 50,000 may converge on Plotinus for the occasion, from places as far away as Madison and New York, are apprehensive.” He looked out of the window, down to where the helicopter darted and hovered like a dragonfly over downtown Plotinus. Over two thousand troops were in the city, some bivouacked in the Garden itself. It was said that they were secretly watering the flowers. Certainly the soldiers often looked as if they would like to throw down their arms and join the protesting students, especially when the girl supporters of the Garden taunted them by stripping to the waist and opposing bare breasts to their bayonets, a juxtaposition of hardware and software that the photographers of Euphoric Times found irresistible. Most of the troopers were young men who had only joined the National Guard to get out of the Viet Nam War anyway, and they looked now just like the GIs that one saw in Viet Nam on the television newsreels, bewildered and unhappy and, if they were bold enough, making peace signs to the cameras. In fact the whole episode of the Garden was much like the Viet Nam War in miniature, with the University as the Thieu regime, the National Guard as the U.S. Army, the students and hippies as Viet Cong… escalation, overkill, helicopters, defoliation, guerilla warfare: it all fitted together perfectly. It would be something to say on the Charles Boon Show. He couldn’t imagine what else he was going to say.

  The twins reappeared in the kitchen to collect their lunch-boxes, looking marginally cleaner and tidier in blue jeans, sneakers and faded T-shirts.

  “Have you said goodbye to your mother?”

  They called perfunctorily, “’Bye, Désirée,” as they left the house, and received a muffled shout in reply. Philip put coffee, orange juice, toasted muffins and honey on a tray and took it into Désirée’s bedroom.

  “Hi!” she said. “Your timing is terrific.”

  “It’s a beautiful day,” he said, setting down the tray and going to the window. He adjusted the louvres of the Venetian blinds so that the sunshine fell across the room in long strips. Désirée’s red plaits flamed against the saffron pillows of the huge bed.

  “Was that a helicopter nearly took the roof off the house?” she asked, tucking zestfully into her breakfast.

  “Yes, I was in the garden.”

  “The sonofabitch. Kids get off to school OK?”

  “Yes, I made them peanut butter sandwiches. I used up the last of the jar.”

  “Yeah, I must go marketing today. You got anything planned?”

  “I’ve got to go into the University this morning. The English faculty are holding a vigil on the steps of Dealer.”

  “A what?”

  “I’m sure it’s the wrong word, but that’s what they’re calling it. A vigil is an all-night thing, isn’t it? I think we’re just going to stand on the steps for an hour or two. In silent protest.”

  “You think Duck is gonna call off the National Guard just because the English faculty quit talking for a couple of hours? I admit it would be quite an achievement, but—”

  “I gather the protest is aimed at Binde. He’s got to be pressured into standing up to Duck and O’Keene.”

  “Binde?” Désirée snorted derisively. “Chancellor Facing-both-ways.”

  “Well, you must admit he’s in a difficult position. What would you do in his position?”

  “I couldn’t be in his position. The State University of Euphoria has never had a woman chancellor in its history. Are you going to be in tonight, by the way, because we’ll need a baby-sitter if you’re not. It’s my Karate class.”

  “I shall be out late. I’ve got to do this wretched broadcast with Charles Boon.”

  “Oh, yeah. What are you talking about?”

  “I think I’m supposed to give my impressions of the Euphoric scene, from a British point of view.”

  “Sounds like a pushover.”

  “But I don’t feel British any more. Not as much as I used to, anyway. Nor American, for that matter. ‘Wandering between two worlds, one lost, the other powerless to be born.’”

  “You’ll have plenty of questions about the Ga
rden, anyway. As one of its most celebrated supporters.”

  “That was a complete accident, as you very well know.”

  “Nothing is completely accidental.”

  “I never felt more than mildly sympathetic to the Garden. I’ve never even set foot in the place. Now people, complete strangers, come up to me and shake my hand, congratulate me on my commitment. It’s most embarrassing.”

  “There is a tide in the affairs of men, Philip. You’ve gotten caught up in the historical process.”

  “I feel a complete fraud.”

  “Why are you going on this vigil, then?”

  “If I don’t, it will look as if I’ve joined the other side, and that certainly isn’t true. Anyway, I do feel strongly about getting the troops off campus.”

  “Well, take care not to get arrested. It may not be so easy to bail you out next time.”

  Désirée finished her muffin, licked her fingers and settled back into the pillows with a cup of coffee held to her lips. “You know,” she said, “you look really good in that happi-coat.”

  “Where can I get one like it?”

  “Keep it. Morris never wore the damn thing. I bought it for a Christmas present two years ago. Have you written to Hilary, by the way? Or are you hoping another poison-pen letter will do the job for you?”

  “I don’t know what to say.” He paced the room, trying, for no reason at all, to avoid treading on the strips of sunlight. Three images of himself converged in the triptych of mirrors over Désirée’s dressing-table, and cold-shouldered him as he turned to retrace his steps.

  “Tell her what’s happened and what you plan to do about it.”

  “But I don’t know what I’m going to do about it. I haven’t got any plans.”

  “Isn’t your time running out?”

  “I know, I know,” he said despairingly, running fingers through his hair. “But I’m not used to this sort of thing. I’ve no experience in adultery. I don’t know what would be best for Hilary, the children, for me, for you—”

  “Don’t worry about me,” said Désirée. “Forget about me.”

  “How can I?”