by Peter Straub
I looked up to the top of the lecture theater. Helen and Meredith Polk were already in the aisle, going toward the door. Helen must have begun to move as soon as she’d seen me look at the blond. If she knew me as well as she had said she did, she had known just what I was thinking. Helen went through the exit door without turning around, but Meredith Polk tried to assassinate me with a glance.
“Are you waiting for someone?” the girl said.
“No, it’s nothing important,” I said. “Would you join me for lunch? I never did have lunch, and I’m starving.”
I was behaving, I knew, with appalling selfishness; but I also knew that the girl before me was already more important to me than Helen Kayon, and by letting Helen go at once—by being the bastard Meredith Polk said I was—I was eliminating weeks, perhaps months of painful scenes. I had not lied to Helen; she had always known that our relationship was fragile.
The girl walking beside me across the campus lived in perfect consonance with her femininity; even then, moments after I had first seen her in good light, she seemed ageless, even timeless, beautiful in a nearly hieratic and mythic way. Helen’s separation from herself had kept her from gracefulness, and she was blatantly a person of my own blink of history; my first impression of Alma Mobley was that she could have moved with that easy grace over an Italian piazza in the sixteenth century; or in the twenties (more to the point) could have earned an appreciative glance from Scott Fitzgerald, flying past the Plaza Hotel on her devastating legs. Set down like that, it sounds absurd. Obviously I had noticed her legs, I had a sense of her body; but images of Italian piazzas and Fitzgerald at the Plaza are more than unlikely metaphors for carnality. It was as though every cell of her possessed ease; nothing less typical of the usual Berkeley graduate student in English can be imagined. The gracefulness went so deep in her that it seemed, even then, to mark an intense passivity.
Of course I am condensing six months’ impressions into a single moment, but my justification is that the seeds of the impression were present as we left the campus to go to a restaurant. Her going with me so willingly, with such unconcern that it resounded with unspoken judgments, did contain a whiff of the passive—the ironic tactful passivity of the beautiful, of those whose beauty has sealed them off inside it like a princess in a tower.
I steered her toward a restaurant I had heard Lieberman mention—it was too expensive for most students, too expensive for me. But the ceremony of luxurious dining suited both her and my sense of celebration.
I knew immediately that it was she I wanted to take to David’s house in Still Valley.
Her name, I learned, was Alma Mobley, and she had been born in New Orleans. I gathered more from her manner than from anything explicitly stated that her parents had been well off; her father had been a painter, and long stretches of her childhood had been spent in Europe. Speaking of her parents, she used the past tense, and I gathered that they had died some time ago. That too fit her manner, her air of disconnection from all but herself.
Like Helen, she had been a student in the Midwest. She had gone to the University of Chicago—this seemed next to impossible, Alma in Chicago, that rough knock- about city—and had been accepted as a PhD student at Berkeley. From what she said, I understood that she was just drifting through the academic life, that she had none of Helen’s profound commitment to it. She was a graduate student because she had a talent for the mechanics of literary work and was bright; it was better than anything else she could think of doing. And she was in California because she had not liked the Chicago climate.
Again, and overwhelmingly, I had the sense of the irrelevance to her of most of the furniture of her life; of her passive self-sufficiency. I had no doubt that she was bright enough to finish her thesis (Virginia Woolf), and then with luck to get a teaching job at one of the little colleges up and down the coast. Then, suddenly and shockingly, she lifting a spoonful of mint-green avocado to her mouth, I had another vision of her. I saw her as a whore, a 1910 Storyville prostitute, her hair exotically twisted, her dancer’s legs drawn up—her naked body was very clear for a moment. Another image of professional detachment, I supposed, but that did not explain the force of the vision. I had been sexually moved by it. She was talking about books—talking not as Helen did, but in a general-reader way—and I looked across the table and I knew that I wanted to be the man who mattered to her, I wanted to grab that passivity and shake it and make her truly see me.
“Don’t you have a boyfriend?” I asked her.
She shook her head.
“So you’re not in love?”
“No,” and she gave a minute smile at the obviousness of the question. “There was a man in Chicago, but that’s finished.”
I pounced on the noun. “One of your professors.”
“One of my associate professors.” Another smile.
“You were in love with him? Was he married?”
She looked at me gravely for a moment. “No. It wasn’t like what you’re thinking. He wasn’t married, and I wasn’t in love with him.”
Even then I recognized that she would find it very easy to lie. This did not repulse me; instead it was proof of how lightly her life had touched her, and was a part of all that I already wanted to change in her. “He was in love with you,” I said. “Was that why you wanted to leave Chicago?”
“No it was already over by then. Alan didn’t have anything to do with it. He made a fool of himself. That’s all.”
“Alan?”
“Alan McKechnie. He was very sweet.”
“A very sweet fool.”
“Are you determined to know about this?” she asked, with her characteristic trick of adding a soft, almost invisible irony which denied the question any importance.
“No. Just a little curious.”
“Well.” Her eyes, full of that shattered light, met mine. “It’s not much of a story. He became . . . infatuated. I was in a tutorial with him. There were only four of us. Three boys and myself. The tutorial met twice a week. I could tell he was getting interesed in me, but he was a very shy man. He was very inexperienced with women.” Again that soft, lobbing deflection in her voice and eyes. “He took me out a few times. He didn’t want us to be seen, so we had to go places not in Hyde Park.”
“Where did you go?”
“Hotel bars. Places like that. Around the Loop. I think it was the first time he’d ever done anything like that with a student, and it made him nervous. I don’t think he’d had much fun in his life. Eventually I became too much for him. I realized that I didn’t want him in the way he wanted me. I know what you’re going to ask next, so I’ll answer it. Yes, we slept together. For a while. It wasn’t much good. Alan was not very—physical. I began to think that what he really wanted to do was go to bed with a boy, but of course he was too whatever to do that. He couldn’t.”
“How long did it last?”
“A year.” She finished her meal and dropped her napkin beside the plate. “I don’t know why we’re talking about this.”
“What do you really like?”
She pretended to consider it seriously. “Let’s see. Really like. Summer. Movies. English novels. Waking up at six and seeing very early morning out of the window—everything is so empty and pure. Lemon tea. What else? Paris. And Nice. I really do like Nice. When I was a little girl, we went there four or five summers in a row. And I like very good meals, like this one.”
“It doesn’t sound like the academic life is the one for you,” I said. It was as though she had told me everything and nothing.
“It doesn’t, does it?” She laughed, as at something of no importance. “I suppose what I need is a Great Love.”
And there she was again, the princess locked in the tower of her own self-regard. “Let’s go to a movie tomorrow night,” I said, and she agreed.
The next day I persuaded Rex Leslie, whose offi
ce was down the hall from mine, to exchange desks with me.
* * *
The art cinema was showing Renoir’s La Grande Illusion, which Alma had never seen. Afterward we went to a coffee shop, a place packed with students, and bits of conversation from adjoining tables filtered through into our own. For a moment after we sat down, I experienced a flash of guilty fear, and recognized a second later that I was afraid of seeing Helen Kayon. But it was not her sort of place; and anyhow at this hour Helen usually was still at the library. I felt a moment of intense gratitude that I was not there too, grinding away at a discipline that was not only my own but merely a condition of employment.
“What a beautiful movie,” she said. “I still feel like I’m in it.”
“You feel movies very deeply, then.”
“Of course.” She looked at me, puzzled.
“And literature?”
“Of course.” She looked at me again. “Well. I don’t know. I enjoy it.”
A bearded boy in a lumberjack shirt near us said in a carrying voice, “Wenner is naive and so is his magazine. I’ll start buying it again when I see a picture of Jerry Brown on the cover.”
His friend said, “Wenner is Jerry Brown.”
“Berkeley,” I said.
“Who is Wenner?”
“I’m surprised you don’t know. Jann Wenner?”
“Who is he?”
“He was the Berkeley student who founded Rolling Stone.”
“Is that a magazine?”
“You’re full of surprises,” I said. “You mean you’ve never heard of it?”
“I’m not interested in most magazines. I never look at them. What kind of magazine is it? Is it named after that band?”
I nodded. At least she had heard of them. “What kind of music do you like?”
“I’m not very interested in music.”
“Let’s try some other names. Do you know who Tom Seaver is?”
“No.”
“Have you ever heard of Willie Mays?”
“Didn’t he used to be an athlete? I’m also not very interested in sports.”
“It shows.” She giggled. “You’re getting even more intriguing. How about Barbra Streisand?”
She pouted charmingly, self-parodyingly. “Of course.”
“John Ford?” No. “Arthur Fonzarelli?” No. “Grace Bumbry?” No. “Desi Arnaz?” No. “Johnny Carson?” No. “Andre Previn?” No. “John Dean?” No.
“Don’t ask me any more or I’ll start saying yes to everything,” she said.
“What do you do?” I asked. “Are you sure you live in this country?”
“Let me try you. Have you heard of Anthony Powell or Jean Rhys or Ivy Compton-Burnett or Elizabeth Jane Howard or Paul Scott or Margaret Drabble or—”
“They’re English novelists and I’ve heard of all of them,” I said. “But I take your point. You’re really not interested in the things you’re not really interested in.”
“Exactly.”
“You never even read newspapers,” I said.
“No. And I never watch television.” She smiled. “Do you think I should be stood against a wall and shot?”
“I’m just interested in who your friends are.”
“Do you? Well, you are a friend of mine, aren’t you?” Over it, as over our entire conversation, was that veneer of disinterested irony. I wondered for a moment if she were actually entirely human: her nearly complete ignorance of popular culture demonstrated more than any assertion how little she cared what people thought of her. What I had thought of as her integrity was more complete than I could have imagined. Maybe a sixth of the graduate students in California had never heard of an athlete like Seaver; but who in America could have avoided hearing of the Fonz?
“But you do have other friends. You just met me.”
“I do, yes.”
“In the English Department?” It was not impossible: for all I knew of my temporary colleagues, there might have been an extensive cell of Virginia Woolf fanciers who never looked at the newspapers. In them however this remoteness from their surroundings would have been an affectation; of Alma the reverse would have been true.
“No. I don’t know many people there. I know some people who are interested in the occult.”
“The occult?” I could not imagine what she meant. “Séances? Ouija boards? Madame Blavatsky? Planchettes?”
“No. They’re more serious than that. They belong to an order.”
I was stunned; I had fallen into an abyss. I envisioned Satanism, covens; California lunacy at its worst.
She read my face and said, “I’m not in it myself. I just know them.”
“What is the name of the order?”
“X.X.X.”
“But—” I leaned forward, scarcely believing that I had heard correctly. “It can’t be X.X.X.? Xala . . .”
“Xala Xalior Xlati.”
I felt disbelief, shock; I felt a surprised fear, looking at her beautiful face. X.X.X. was more than a group of California screwballs dressing themselves in robes; they were frightening. They were known to be cruel, even savage; they’d had some minor connection with the Manson family, and that was the only reason I had read about them. After the Manson affair they were supposed to have gone elsewhere—to Mexico, I thought. Were they still in California? From what I had read, Alma would have been better off knowing button men in the Mafia: from the Mafia you would expect the motives, rational or not, of our phase of capitalism. The X.X.X. was raw material for nightmares.
“And those people are your friends?” I asked.
“You asked.”
I shook my head, still astonished.
“Don’t worry about it. Or about them. You’ll never see them.”
It gave me an entirely different picture of her life; sitting across from me, faintly smiling, she was for a moment sinister. It was as though I had stepped off a sunlit path into jungle; and I thought of Helen Kayon working on Scots Chaucerians in the library.
“Even I don’t see them all that much,” she said.
“But you’ve been to their meetings? You go to their houses?”
She nodded. “I said. They’re my friends. But don’t worry about it.”
It could have been a lie—another lie, for I thought she had not always been truthful with me. But her entire manner, even her concern for my feelings, demonstrated that she was being truthful. She raised her cup of coffee to her lips, smiling at me with a trace of concern, and I saw her standing before a fire, holding a bleeding something in her hands . . .
“You are worrying about it. I’m not a member. I know people in it. You asked me. And I thought you should know.”
“Have you been to meetings? What goes on?”
“I can’t tell you. That is just another part of my life. A small part. It won’t touch you.”
“Let’s get out of here,” I said.
Was I thinking even then that she would give me material for a novel? I do not think so. I thought that her contact with the group was probably much slighter than she had suggested; I had only one hint, much later, that it may not have been. She was romancing, exaggerating, I told myself. The X.X.X. and Virginia Woolf? And La Grande Illusion? It was very farfetched.
* * *
Sweetly, almost teasingly, she invited me back to her apartment. It was a short walk from the coffeehouse. As we left the busy street and turned into a darker area of tall houses, she began to talk inconsequentially of Chicago and her life there. For once I did not have to question her to get information about her past. I thought I could detect a glancing relief in her voice: because she had “confessed” her acquaintance with the X.X.X? Or was it because I had not quizzed her about it? The latter, I thought. It was a typical late summer Berkeley evening, somehow warm and chilly at once—cold enough for a jacket
, but with a sense of hidden warmth in the texture of the air. Despite the unpleasant surprise she had given me, the young woman beside me—her unconscious grace, her equally natural wit which lay embedded in her talk, her rather unearthly beauty—enlivened me, made me happier for life than I had been in months. Being with her was like coming out of hibernation.
We reached her building. “Ground floor,” she said, and went up the steps to the door. For the pleasure of looking at her, I hung back. A sparrow lighted on the railing and cocked its head; I could smell leaves burning; she turned around and her face was washed into a pale blur by the shadows of the porch. Somewhere in the neighborhood a dog barked. Miraculously, I could still see her eyes, as if they shone like a cat’s. “Are you as circumspect as your novel, or are you going to come in with me?”
I simultaneously recorded the fact that she had read my book and the featherlight criticism of it, and went up the steps to the door.
I had not imagined what her apartment would be like, but I should have known that it would be nothing like Helen Kayon’s untidy menage. Alma lived alone—but that I had suspected. Everything in the large room into which she brought me was unified by a single taste, a single point of view: it was, though not obviously, one of the most luxurious private rooms I have ever seen. A long thick Bokhara rug lay over the floor; a painted firescreen was flanked by tables which looked to my untrained eye to be Chippendale. A vast desk was placed before the bay window. Striped Regency chairs; big cushions; a Tiffany lamp on the desk. I saw that I had been right to think that her parents were moneyed. I said, “You’re not the typical grad student, are you?”
“I decided it was more sensible to live with these things than to put them in storage. More coffee?”
I nodded. So much about her now made sense, fit a pattern I hadn’t seen before. If Alma was remote, it was because she was genuinely different; she had been raised in a manner that ninety per cent of America never sees and in which it only provisionally believes, the manner of the bohemian ultra-rich. And if she was essentially passive, it was because she had never had to make a decision for herself. On the spot I invented a childhood of nursemaids and nannies, schooling in Switzerland; holidays on yachts. That, I thought, explained her air of timelessness; it was why I had imagined her flying past the Plaza Hotel in the Fitzgerald twenties: that kind of wealth seemed to belong to another age.