Dark on the Other Side (11 page)

“Without the students you wouldn’t have a job.”

“Don’t give me that; I’ve quit being a liberal.”
Buchsbaum put his feet up on the desk and adjusted them so that he
could look between them at Michael. “We all hate students. Most of my
peers aren’t that blunt about it; they blather on about the book they
haven’t been able to finish and the vital research they can’t carry out
because of their onerous teaching load. The majority of them couldn’t
write a book if you dictated it to them. What they mean is, they hate
students. Like me.”

“What about Linda Randolph? Did you know her?”

Later, Michael was to wonder what made him ask the
question. He had meant to throw out some feelers about Linda; this was
where Randolph had met her. But she was not his main interest.

“I knew her,” Buchsbaum said.

“That romance must have caused a lot of comment.”

“You could say that.”

“I’ve met her. She’s charming, isn’t she?”

“Is she?” The feet were still on the desk, the stout body
as relaxed; but the pink face wasn’t friendly any longer. Feeling
idiotically rebuffed, Michael turned toward the door. Buchsbaum said
suddenly,

“Sit down, Collins. Don’t go away mad. I’m sorry if I
sounded…Hell, I was in love with the girl, of course.”

“Of course?”

“Most of her teachers were.”

“Not the students?”

“Oddly enough, no. Caviar to the general, you know.”

“Cut that out.”

“Sorry, it’s a bad habit. No; I think she put the kids
off a bit—the callow youth. She was bright as they come, and the
juvenile male doesn’t care for that kind of challenge. But…”

He was silent for a time, staring reflectively at the tip
of his left shoe; and Michael was reminded of Gordon, groping in the
same way for words to describe his wife. When Buchsbaum began to speak,
his voice was soft and abstracted, as if he were talking to himself.

“We make cynical remarks about the lousy students. Most
of the mare, you know. They don’t give a damn—they lack motivation, in
the current jargon—and even if they have motivation, they don’t have
the intelligence of a medium-bright porpoise. Day after day you stand
up there on your podium and you strip your brain and throw it out, into
a sea of dead faces, and it falls flat on the floor and dies there. But
now and then—once a year, once out of a thousand students, if you’re
lucky—you look around and see a face that isn’t a flat doughy mass with
the right number of holes in it for eyes and nose and mouth. It’s a
face, a real face. The eyes are alive, the mouth responds to the things
you say. When you make a joke, the eyes shine. When you throw out an
idea that takes a little cogitation, the forehead actually
wrinkles—something is going on behind it, some gears are really
meshing. When you say something that—that moves her, the mouth curves
at the corners, not much, just a little, up or down depending on
whether she’s moved to laughter or to tenderness….”

The pronoun had slipped out, but Buchsbaum didn’t try to
retract it. His eyes moved from his shoe to Michael’s face, and he
smiled.

“The Reminiscences of a Middle-Aged Loser,” he said
wryly. “It’s true, though; every teacher knows about it. The quality of
the response differs. Hers was unique. I won’t say that I wasn’t
affected by the fact that she was also a gorgeous dish.”

“I’m sorry,” Michael said, realizing that the revelations
were finished. “I didn’t mean to probe into your private affairs.”

“Sure you did.” Buchsbaum took his feet off the desk and
stood up. It was dismissal. He was friendly, but guarded, now. “Only
you wanted me to talk about Gordon, not his wife. Sorry I can’t help
you.”

“Have you read his book?”

“Naturally. It’s brilliant. Like everything else the man
has done.” Buchsbaum beamed at his visitor. “I hate his bloody guts.
You noticed that.”

II

“I hate his bloody guts.”

“If it hadn’t been for him, I’d have killed myself that
night.”

“A desperately unhappy man.”

Three interviews, three different comments.

Pacing the dark streets of the town in search of a
restaurant that promised something more suited to an over-thirty
stomach than pizza or oliveburgers, Michael pondered the results of his
day. He had located one other teacher, and one student. The latter,
Tommy Scarinski, was on the last leg of his doctorate, having taken off
several years because of illness. Michael was fairly sure that the
illness had been what is referred to as a nervous breakdown. The boy
still twitched. He was a pale, very fair youth, slender as a girl,
looking much younger than his twenty-four years. He had idolized
Randolph—canonized him, in fact. Michael didn’t doubt that he had
contemplated suicide. The impulse was far more common in this age group
than most people realized. With the majority of the kids it was only an
impulse. Some of them liked to believe that the influence of a friend
or lover had been the catalytic agent that deterred them from that most
final of all gestures of protest. In this case, though, Michael rather
thought that Tommy—it was a mark of his immaturity that he still called
himself by the diminutive—did owe his life to Randolph. He had been at
the age, and at the stage of mental deterioration, when the influence
of an idol could make or break his mind. But—my God, what a
responsibility. What a delicate, damnable job. Chalk one up for
Randolph.

There was a sign, down the block, that said “Restaurant.”
Michael opened the door and saw a dim interior, not too crowded. A
waiter appeared promptly. He ordered a drink and a steak and let
himself relax against the imitation leather of the booth.

Buchsbaum’s comment wasn’t really a mark against Gordon.
It was another example of the man’s sophomoric attempt at wry humor,
with strong touches of masochism. Buchsbaum had never been Gordon’s
rival, in the ordinary sense of the word; he was the sort of man who
would always prefer a romantic illusion to a possible rejection. Most
probably he didn’t even dislike Gordon.

And why, Michael wondered irritably, should he be
thinking in terms of pluses and minuses? He wasn’t trying to defend
Gordon or play the part of Devil’s Advocate; that wasn’t the way he
worked. He wanted the truth—and he knew it was never a single isolated
fact, but a patchwork of differing, sometimes contradictory, views.

The waiter arrived with the drink, and Michael took a
hearty swig of it. He made a wry face. Should have specified the brand;
this tasted like something out of a still. But it was better than
nothing.

The third interview had been the least productive, for
all its verbiage. Professor Seldon was almost at the compulsory
retirement age of sixty-five: a diminutive, dapper old man with a mop
of white hair and a goatee and beard of the same silky hue. He talked
fluently; God, Michael thought with an inner grin, how he did talk! He
had been dependent on clichés for so long that he couldn’t have
said “Good morning” if Shakespeare or Milton hadn’t happened to say it
first. And he was Chairman of the English Department.

Seldon’s comments on Gordon were about as useful as the
newspaper accounts had been. Reflex reactions. The remark about
Gordon’s tragic unhappiness had some normal human spite behind it,
though Professor Seldon would have been genuinely indignant if you
pointed that out. He was a third-rate scholar and a second-rate human
being; envy of a better man could not be openly expressed, so it masked
itself under the guise of benevolent pity. Translated, his remark
simply meant:
This man has everything I would like to have.
Nobody ought to be that happy—except me. So he must be miserable, down
deep underneath, where it doesn’t show
.

And, ironically, the old man was right. Randolph was an
unhappy man. There was a serpent in his Eden, though that was a
cliché worthy of Seldon himself. But Seldon had no knowledge of
Gordon’s private life. His assessment of Gordon might have come
straight out of the high school Class Prophecy: “Bright, intelligent,
friendly; bound to succeed.”

Michael caught the waiter’s eyes and nodded. The
mellowing effect of the whiskey wasn’t quite complete, he could stand
another one. Frustration of this sort was normal, he knew that. Most
people weren’t perceptive about other people. Wrapped up in their own
miseries, they had no energy to spare for the problems of others;
anyhow, they tended to pigeonhole people as they did ideas, and reacted
to deviations from a wholly imaginary picture with astonishment and
annoyance. “Good old Sam wouldn’t do a thing like that.” “Mary, of all
the people in the world; she must have changed a lot since I knew her.”
Whereas, of course, Mary hadn’t changed at all. Mary, like everyone
else, was not one Mary but a dozen. Her astonished friend had just not
happened to see the Mary who finally broke out.

Then why, Michael wondered, was he so irritated by his
failure to get an instant, comprehensible picture of a man as complex
as Gordon Randolph? Was it because he wasn’t getting any picture at
all, not even a misleading one? Hadn’t Randolph had any friends, only
associates and disciples?

No. He had not. That was the only useful point Michael
had obtained from Seldon.

“Oh, no, Randolph didn’t associate with…us,” he said.
Mentally supplying the three missing words, Michael suppressed a smile.
“I presume he passed his leisure hours with friends in the city.
Except—yes. I recall being surprised, at the time…He spent a good deal
of time with the students.”

The emotion that colored his voice—one of the few times
that genuine feeling was allowed to show—was simple astonishment.
Remembering Buchsbaum’s conversation, and some of the student
complaints he had seen published in recent months, Michael understood.
His internal amusement, this time, was rather sour. By God, things had
changed. He remembered the big, echoing old house where he had grown
up; the front door always open and the carpet in the hall worn
threadbare with the tread of students’ feet, in and out, at all hours
of the day and night. His father had had a funny notion of a teacher’s
role…. Professor Seldon would probably never know why Michael left so
abruptly.

But it was that very lead that had led to his present
frustration. The student-teacher relationship, if it was a good one,
could be one of the most important in life. He had expected some
interesting material from Randolph’s students. Having gone, posthaste,
to look up the enrollment for Randolph’s class, he was delighted to
find that one of the top students was still around. Tommy Scarinski.

Maybe his reasoning had been fallacious. But he didn’t
think so, he was inclined to cross Tommy off as an isolated aberration.
The best students in the class, the ones who got the highest
grades—they still gave letter grades in those bad old days—might not
necessarily be the people who had most attracted Gordon, but it was far
more likely that his favorites would be found among that group than
among the kids whose work had been too poor to rate Gordon’s approval.
Besides, the class file included Randolph’s comments—terse,
sympathetic, and intelligent. The four “A” students had received the
most favorable comments—with one exception. Miss Alison Dupuis had been
dismissed with a curt: “Idiot savant; but how can you flunk a
calculating machine?” With the other three, Randolph had obviously
enjoyed a personal friendship.

One of the three had been Linda.

The second, Joseph Something or Other, had dropped out of
sight. The vinegary spinster at the Registrar’s office could tell him
only that Joseph was no longer registered. Well, that was something he
could do tomorrow; he had been too pleased at the availability of Tommy
Scarinski to check the other records, to see whether Joseph X had
matriculated, or transferred to another institution. Graduate school
somewhere was a likely possibility, in view of his scholastic record
and his teacher’s praise. What had Gordon said? “Genuine creativity and
drive—a rare combination.” Yes, Joseph was worth tracking down. The
evaluation of a brain like that, sharpened by several years of maturity
and by absence from his former mentor, would be valuable. That was why
Tommy had been so disappointing: The years hadn’t sharpened his brain,
it was still mushy…. Poor devil.

The waiter brought his steak, and Michael finished his
drink and his deliberations. As he ate he glanced around the room in
search of distraction from thoughts that were becoming stale and
futile. It was a pleasant, undistinguished little place, like a
thousand other restaurants in a hundred other towns. The only thing
that made it different was the fact that it was in a college town.
There were a lot of students present, mostly couples, and they
definitely brightened the scene. The voices were shrill, but they were
alive; they got loud with excitement, they vibrated with laughter.
Collegiate styles were undoubtedly picturesque. Floppy pants, beads and
pendants, clothes that dangled, and jingled, and blazed with color.
Michael approved of beards; at least you could tell the boys from the
girls that way, and the Renaissance look appealed to him. A couple at a
table next to the booth he occupied might have posed as models for the
New Look—the boy had long brown hair, and hair over most of the rest of
his face; a red kerchief was knotted around his throat. Michael’s eyes
lingered longer on his date. The long, straight blond hair obscured her
face most of the time, but her legs were in full view. They were booted
up to the knee, and what she wore above them, if anything, was hidden
by the tablecloth.

Michael signaled the waiter for his coffee. The man
lingered, swabbing unnecessarily at the table, and Michael resigned
himself.

“Stranger in town?”

“Yes. I’m just here overnight.”