He had counted on the cookies to be enough to get him through the milling period, but this was getting to be an unusually long one. In the lecture hall, the professors began to tire of milling. They wanted to sit down. They wanted at this hour to listen and, many of them, to doze. This was supposed to be the reward—a place where everyone believed as they did—after days spent laboring in classrooms, waving their arms, each wave a misunderstood expression of their love of the subject: a mathematical wave, a wave to the beauty of the Principles of Physics. The slippery-eyed students in their straight rows, the visible boredom surrounding them in gray clouds, asked, “But, Professor,” adjusting their miniskirts or basketball shorts, “how many academic sources do we need?”
“We should really be getting started,” the professors began to say to one another. “Isn’t someone in charge here?” Except for a few wiry-haired ex-hippies, the professors tended to be watch-watching on-timers. Lateness was a sign of laziness and unwillingness to attend to The Way Things Must Go.
Faustus took his cookies to a corner seat, alone and with a bad view. “I am at school,” he whispered to himself. “This is fine.” He thought about the last day he taught a class and the doctor’s appointment following it. After, Petra and Faustus had parked their newish car on the street and walked into the house, whereupon Petra took a slow and silent lap, touching each item on each shelf. The Native American pots from trips to the Southwest. The pictures of their nieces and nephews. A hammer left on the mantel after hanging a picture. The sun was still strong and it broke into the house in tubes of light so that his wife, her fingers moving slowly over item after item, was bright white.
A woman sat down next to Faustus and introduced herself as Professor Claire Baker, Bio. They had little in common once they established that he was childless and hadn’t even passed his high school science classes. And in regard to reading, Professor Baker admitted to enjoying a People magazine on the beach but preferred no words to words. “Written words, that is. Talking I like, I can talk plenty of words!” She was visibly amused by her bad sentence, as if it was a shining testament to her identity as a Science Person. “See that?” she joked. Faustus saw that. “You? What’s your story?” she asked.
“My wife is dead and I’m taking the semester off,” he said, too tired to recall the manners he had promised himself to employ. “But I think the center from Duke has amazing potential.”
“Oh, you poor thing,” she began, but he interrupted her.
“What I would like to do?” he said. “Is for us both to pretend that I am invisible.”
At this point, an ambitious undergraduate—feeling the anxiety of this late start, the anxiety of the absence of the great speaker all the way from Oxford whom he knew all the professors had been waiting to meet, professors in whose minds he could picture perfect questions formulated over the last weeks—went to the podium and tapped the microphone. “Hello, everybody,” he said. He clapped his hands together dramatically and projected his voice much more than necessary, so that every time he said the letter P, a great explosion of sound went out through the seats.
“Please, please, settle down. Welcome to this evening’s program. I think we ought to get started, don’t you?” He swished his hand through his thick brown hair. “Um . . . Learning is important, I think we can all agree. So, I think that this university is a great institution. Actually all universities, but this one in particular.” The undergraduate was already running out of things to say and he hadn’t said anything yet. He had hoped that his presence at the podium would root out the Laureate, who might stand up graciously and wait to be introduced. No such graciousness occurred, so the undergraduate continued. “Uh, when I arrived here I didn’t care about the Spanish Civil War. Maybe other people always cared, but I didn’t. But now, because of Professor Paul Pretoria’s class this semester, I think it’s awesome. Oh!” he said, getting an idea, “please put your hands together for Professor Paul Pretoria.”
Professor Baker and Faustus both clapped, but they did not look at each other.
In order to come to the stage, Professor Pretoria had to squeeze past the knees of a half row of people. “What an unexpected honor,” he said when he finally arrived. “Thank you, Carlo. I haven’t prepared anything, but as long as I have you here I might like to say a few words about . . .” Whatever he actually said, what nearly all the other professors heard was “the capture of so and so which I will relate to the events of blah blah and to the unusual situation we find ourselves in concerning blank.”
The speech was certainly more than a few words. The many wrists were busy with watch viewings. “Have you seen the Nobel Laureate?” people asked. “Maybe he’s late? Maybe he’s stuck in traffic? Maybe he’s lost or dead or asleep? But what could be more important than this?” they asked. “His peers have gathered out of respect and admiration, and there is no better honor than that. Certainly, no personal problem could ever matter more.”
After points and counterpoints, evidence and notes on the evidence, Professor Pretoria, nervous and sweating with the excitement of his own argument, suddenly looked up and realized that no one was listening. The entire university faculty, gathered here, was bored by what he had imagined might be his own Nobel Prize–winning theory. He said quietly and with a heave of despair directed at a sleeping man in the second row, “This brings me to the next speaker this evening: the amazing, exceptional, genius Professor Zelk.” His voice was burned sugar.
Bill Zelk woke up to the sound of his own name ringing through the speakers. No notes of sarcasm sounded to him. What a wonderful way to wake up! He squirmed and adjusted his wire-rimmed glasses eight times on the way to the stage, making some who did not know him think he perhaps had some sort of disorder. The psychologists were certain. “I am involved in the study of mole rats,” he said. “We are looking at the act of fecal perfuming.” He looked out at the crowd. “There is an awful lot to say on the subject,” and he began to say it.
• • •
FOR THE FIRST FULL HOUR, the professors, Faustus among them, sat up straight in the auditorium chairs, some with legs crossed at the knee, some at the ankle. They had listened vaguely to each introduction and clapped as the next bespectacled or mustachioed person took the stage. Occasionally some got up and had a bit of refreshment. The respectful professors remained quiet even while chewing their cheese.
By hour two they began to fidget. They continued to scan the room for unfamiliar faces—prize-winning faces, the face of the smartest breed. They pointed through the spaces between heads, hopeful that they had found the guest. Faustus had no intention of trying to pick the Laureate out, worried he might ask someone he should have recognized. Perhaps someone with whom he had had a nice conversation at last year’s Christmas Party about Yeats’s dog.
No one wanted to be the first to give up. They hoped that after such turmoil must come great treasure. Whatever sense it made or didn’t, the longer they stayed the more they felt they must continue to do so. They did take other liberties. Most of the French Department curled up on the floor under their seats and napped. They looked like a series of tortoises, their black sweaters hiding the pink of their skin. Others went back to earlier discussions with one another, always with one eye on the podium in case one of two things happened: they themselves were called up to speak, or the headliner finally arrived.
Words like “venerable” and “inimitable” and “indefatigable” were said so many times they began to sound made up. After an analysis of subjectivity and objectivity in Poe and Dickinson, Professor Sydney Mott looked out at the mess of a room and said, “I’ve been divorced recently, as some of you know. She took the cat and I took the fish.” He wondered out loud whether his teenage daughter was sleeping with her boyfriend and whether he ought to try to stop her if she was. “He isn’t even that cute, the boyfriend,” he explained. “He has a mustache. And my daughter is such a beauty, Botticelli-esque.” The professors itched at this microphoned admission. Thi
ngs like this occurred in creative writing departments, maybe in art, certainly drama, but this was none of those. They did not know what to do.
In the back, the coffee ran out. The cookies were eaten, although a few were secreted away in the corduroy pockets of professors who thought ahead to future hunger. They fingered them in there, little disks of survival. In the back of the room was a cluster of historians and poets talking about what a nice round number one hundred was. Faustus stood behind them and listened.
“You know,” said the same undergraduate who had started things off, “Wilt Chamberlain claimed to have had a hundred illegitimate children.” In this moment that was beautiful to the historians and to the poets.
“They should get them all together for a game sometime. They could sing the national anthem,” someone offered.
“They could file into the basketball court in a long line—just think how tall they would be—all of them wearing their father’s jersey.”
“And the announcer’s voice would echo through the building: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, please rise for the singing of the national anthem by The Illegitimate Children of Wilt Chaimberlain.’”
“They could sing it in a round,” someone else added.
“And all their mothers, who number almost as many, could come out and harmonize.”
“That would be an historical event,” the historians agreed.
“That would be a poetic event,” the poets added.
Some of the members of the French Department touched each other’s black tights, both parties pretending not to be awake.
Claire Baker approached Faustus and took him by the arm. “If you would please come over here, please, I promise we won’t try to talk to you.” She sat him down in a circle of German Romanticists. An older woman, long established in the department, put the bottle of water she was holding down in the center of the circle. “Spin,” she said to Faustus. “As long as we’re here.”
“Is this what I think it is?” Faustus asked.
“We’re all waiting for something great to happen in here,” the woman answered. Faustus spun and the mouth of the bottle pointed directly back at him.
“Spin again,” Professor Baker said. On his second spin, the bottle pointed to a woman whose hair, skin and dress were nearly the same shade of brownish pink.
“I think you are trying to do me a favor,” he said to the circle. The woman looked up at him through her square bangs and smiled, rocking forward onto her hands and knees. He turned his face and offered his cheek to her. She put her lips to his skin and held them there. They were warm and full of questions.
• • •
PEOPLE HAD COME to the funeral heavy with flowers. Faustus stood in the circle with the others—people from the department, people from the neighborhood, cousins. His and Petra’s parents were all dead or too senile to travel, and the two of them had no children. Faustus wished in that moment for someone who felt the loss more than he. He wished for a daughter, eyelids swollen from crying, whom he could put his arm around and comfort, whom he could drive home, where they would sit in the dark of the living room and listen carefully to the absence of their wife and mother. Just hear the house without her.
Faustus had read a poem by Ezra Pound over the hole in the ground and each of the gathered people stooped down and took a handful of dirt to throw on the lowered box. The earth accepted Petra in and the living made their way inside, where they stood together reducing the hill of a vegetable platter and talking in voices much quieter than necessary. The guests stayed long enough to prove that they were willing to give up their Sunday afternoon even though it was a beautiful day, even though it was getting close to summer. If any of them had plans for tennis later or for barbecues, they did not let it show. Faustus imagined them that evening in their various backyards refusing plates of grilled chicken, saying, “I wish I hadn’t eaten so much at that funeral.”
Like the rest of the guests, Faustus finally went home. He let himself into the house and sat down with his back against the door, where the tiles were cool on his legs and he tried to hear, as he had earlier imagined, every single thing that his wife was not doing in their home on this Sunday night. He could hardly keep track of it all, she was so busy being absent. She was not pouring water into a glass or a pitcher. She was not kicking his shoes out of the hall. She was not switching the laundry into the dryer. She was not opening the screen door and going outside barefoot and calling for him to come look at the sunset. She was not putting lotion on her elbows or flattening the newspaper or picking up the ringing telephone, which would go on calling out the absence of Petra in nine-ring sequences dozens of times every day.
• • •
EVENTUALLY, most of the cookie-savers ate their cookies. They sneaked off into dark corners or pretended to sneeze, quickly stuffing the crunchy morsel into their mouths. They did not want to be spotted and have to share. One woman, an administrator in the Composition Department who wanted her saved cookie to last a long time, held it flat against her palm and licked it over and over like a popsicle.
An African filmologist approached the podium. He wore denim shorts and white socks pulled all the way up to his knees and a sport coat. He had three watches on, all of which told him that it was late and he was tired. He said just a few words, then began that practiced acceptance speech for whichever prize he might someday be awarded. “I want to thank you for this incredible honor. When I was a boy, I sneaked into the cinema one afternoon and, in a way, I have never left that dark room full of magic.” The professors let his speech drift in and around them. To hear him thank his mother the way he did, and the teachers of his youth, felt as though they were all thanking their mothers and the teachers of their youth. He leaned his forehead on the wooden surface of the podium and fell asleep like that, his arms up around his head, the dream of acknowledgment hovering above. The microphone was on, and the in and out of his breathing was amplified through the whole room.
“Tell me if something happens,” the professors said to one another, and everyone closed their eyes. Some lay on the shoulders of others, drooling onto the tweed or houndstooth. Some slept in piles on the floor like puppies. Some found places alone. A Religious Studies lecturer sucked her thumb. Someone turned off the lights, and since there were no windows, the auditorium was completely dark.
Faustus and the rest of the spin-the-bottlers lay down in a circle like toppled dominoes, each head finding rest on a foreign set of legs. Faustus’s right ear was suctioned to the monochromatic woman’s bare calf. The calf did not make noises the way a stomach might. It must have been busy in there, distributing blood to each sinew of muscle, but it did so in silence.
He could not see it, but in the dark around him, some players held hands, sweaty and excited. Faustus looked into the dark and tried to make a list of reasons for existing. Kissing was on there, and so were hollandaise sauce and racquetball.
Suddenly he felt a hand on his face, its digits and palm covering most of his features. It was not a gentle touch, exactly. He felt he was the ocean floor and this was an exploratory machine out to map his exact topography. He tried to breathe consistently in order not to throw off the findings. The curious hand stuck three of its fingers into his mouth, and he sucked them like a baby. Faustus was desperately close to believing that the fingertips belonged to Petra, that if he followed them to the hand, wrist and arm, he would find his wife’s body there. All her inner workings clean and polished. He did not move the hand for a long time. He let it sit, heavy on his chin, while all around him, around all of them, the amplified breathing rattled out from the speakers.
But the fingers were unknown and, he checked, ringless. He carefully moved the hand away, placing it on top of its outstretched twin. He extracted himself from the circle and went to the podium, where he held the African filmologist in his own arms and began to talk quietly into the microphone.
“I have been weeding around the Johnny-jump-ups and watering the apr
icot tree. Yesterday the poppies were looking droopy, so I gave them extra water and they perked right up. It was amazing how quickly they reacted. Remember how the upstairs toilet was starting to leak? I think it’s finally time to replace it. I went to the store last weekend, but I couldn’t decide what to buy. I needed your help. All toilets are ugly and all toilets have the same gross function and I don’t know how to prefer one over another. You would have had a much less emotional reaction to this problem. I also wish you had been there to harvest the basil. And I’ve been reading Chekhov, whom I know you love. Food and books and shit, I guess that’s what you’re missing.”
If anyone was awake, they did not make a sound. Faustus said, “I’m not making a very good argument for your return. I promise that if you were here, I would not make you go to the hardware store. If you were here, I would set you up in the yard with a blanket and a glass of iced tea to watch the hummingbirds hover over the sweet syrup in the feeder. You would never have to move if you didn’t want to.” He looked at his left hand, the ring around and around his finger.
“Petra, people tell me I will ‘move on’ and I can’t believe it. But if it does ever happen, and I forget to feel this pressing absence of you, if I make it through a meaningless party and don’t remember to hate everyone for their peaceful lives until the morning, please know that I am already sorry. I am going to try to be brave like you asked me to, but I don’t have any idea yet what that means. Is it braver to allow the sadness of your leaving to spread into each of my bones until it is as big as you were to me? Or is it braver to let you drift out into what may very well be a brighter, finer place than this and be happy to think of your joy there? I hope, Petra, that I get it right.”
A Guide to Being Born: Stories Page 14