Roger's Version (24 page)

“You do? How? She just told me herself over the phone the other day.”

“Esther told me.” Esther again. Verna had told Dale, Dale Esther, Esther me.

He didn’t flinch. “You ought to go make a visit, honest. Verna respects you.”

I had to smile. I remembered her angry face, her exposed breasts. “That’s not the conclusion I’ve drawn.”

“You’re her only relative in the area.”

“It may be she came to our fair city to get away from her relatives.”

Dale now seemed much as when I had first met him—the shy yet cocksure do-gooder, the Jesus freak in jeans and camouflage jacket; for the moment he had forgotten (how could he!) that he was in love with my wife, her hundred-pound sack of membrane and guts. Poor Esther had flown from his mind as he worried about hapless Verna. “You wouldn’t be checking on just her, Professor Lambert, you’d be checking on Paula. She’s the one I worry about, really.”

“Why?”

He paused. “Verna does get pretty frantic.”

“But the child is going to the day-care center five mornings a week. Free.” Esther had seen to the financial arrangements.

“That doesn’t help the afternoons and nights, somehow. I don’t know. It’s like if you take the pressure off a little bit, it’s worse when it comes back. I mean, she realizes now what she’s been missing. I really wish you’d at least give her a call; I just don’t have the energy to focus on her any more.”

“Where is your energy going instead?” I mischievously asked. His skin seemed slightly to cloud, and the knit of his long face, its cartilage and cheek fat and underlying bone, to loosen, creating bluish pockets such as a baby’s flesh has. Our exchange of
notwithstanding, I did intend to crush him, and this determination felt delicious and solid and gristly, like an especially circumstantial paragraph in Tertullian.

“My project, I guess. I keep groping around in my mind for the way to frame it, to model reality on the computer, and really it’s too vast. Just to store the data of how a city block, say, looks, let alone the atomic and chemical structures underneath, would take more megabytes of storage than I think
exist between here and Berkeley, even if you posit an omniscient and lightning-fast programmer who had the time to feed it all in. Just the commercial project I’m working on—the problem is to bounce a ball, with the lettering and logo of a certain kind of pet-food can mapped onto it, across a little pebbly patch of landscape that’s already been generated, piece by piece. Sounds simple, but every time the ball bounces you have to show it slightly flattening, otherwise it looks like a glass ball and like it should shatter, and then in mid-air the elasticity makes the shape rebound, so what you have is not a circle but some linked spline curves, not exactly symmetrical, because the ball flattens on one side—all this can be calculated, of course, even in three dimensions, but when you get the functions piggybacking and the mapping going on on these constantly distorting surfaces thirty times a second, not to mention the highlighting and reflection and texture diffusion and all that, well, the crunching, the number crunching, becomes significant. If the system you’re time-sharing is loaded you can sit there for minutes waiting for the processor to grind it out. And this bouncing ball is a relatively trivial animation problem. Cartoon figures made up of cylinders and truncated cones and bicubic surface patches are more complex by another order of magnitude or two. But really, with graphics and robotics both, it’s the elas
tic
ity of organic substances that puts the mathematics of it out of sight.”

I had understood little of what he had said. It depressed me to try. I nodded, saying, “It’s appalling to think about.”

“Well, the machine does most of the thinking for you,” Dale reassured me, “the gritty stuff.” His hands had begun to dart and slide in mid-air, as he empathized his way into the computer, into the problem. “I’ve been thinking, for the proposal, that trying to model the world from the outside bit by
bit is ridiculous; that what I have to imitate is not Creation but the Creator—that is, if I set up a system of, whatever, not molecules and neutrinos and galaxies and microbes, but just a few thousand color blocks, say, and program absolute randomness into the proliferation of one set and tilt another a bit toward teleology by injecting some cellular-automata rules, maybe a planning and reasoning subsystem of some kind, I don’t know, just something mathematically to represent an element of intention, of divine purpose more or less, and then crank up this planner and crank it up again to see if some parallels emerge with the observed world, that is, if the absolutely random set resembles reality less than the teleologically tilted set, we might have a bit of a package to present to your Grants Committee. When did you say they want to meet with me?”

“Soon after spring term resumes. Early February, I would think.”

He stared over my head, into space. “Oh boy. That’s almost immediately. It’s all still so vague in my mind, it’s like this beckoning cloud. I’m not sure I’m the one should be attempting this; I feel too stupid sometimes.”

“Well,” I told him briskly, “perhaps stupidity is one of the qualifications. It has been for a number of noble enterprises.” I heard in my voice a valedictory note, and Dale heard it too, and stood and departed. The angles of his neck and shoulders signalled discouragement; I pictured him making his way down the long second-floor hall with its chocolate-brown linoleum and closed classroom doors, the limestone staircase, its broad oak railing, its slit-windowed landing like a little side chapel, and then the first-floor hall, past the bulletin board with its overlaid announcements of banjo-accompanied Eucharists in downtown ghetto churches, of moonlit rap sessions concerning “The Development of a Jewish Feminist Spirituality” and “Liberation Theology at Work in North America’s
Third World,” or of an address by a visiting M.D. on the sticky matter of “Intimacy and Trust in the Era of AIDS.”

I felt lightly covered in slime after our spiritual grapple, our “reaching out.” I hated to have my most intimate views, my hot Barthian nugget insulated within layers of worldly cynicism and situation ethics, dragged toward the light by this boy’s earnest agony, his obstinate refusal to let me go until I blessed him. I kept my distance from my students and resented this interloper from another department, from another side of the university altogether, tracking his big hush-puppy footprints where so many others had never trod. For many, even square-built Corliss Henderson with her dogged melancholy butchifying of the saints, would have liked to know me better, to “get in touch with” impeccably gray-swaddled Professor Roger Lambert, who had made his deal with the universe and was damned if he was going to welsh on it.

ii

Tentatively I knocked on the blank green door; I had never been here in this kind of daylight before. The morning sun stood at the end of the stripped, scarred hall, and there was a chaste silence to the project—children off at school, adults off at work or still in bed with their sins. Verna opened the door in a prim charcoal skirt and lilac-colored cable-knit sweater. Of course: she had been up and out, walking little Paula to the day-care center on this crisp morning in Epiphany. She had opened the door quickly, as if expecting someone else. When she saw me instead, her wide sallow face—her pieface—underwent a transformation that erased its dimple, and she pulled me into her apartment and collapsed in my arms. Through my several coats I felt the smearing pressure of her
breasts, the heat and pulse captured in her young-woman’s fragile cage of ribs. She was sobbing, her breath and tears hot on the side of my neck. “Oh Nunc,” she was gasping, in her reedy immature voice. “I wondered where you’d got to.”

“I’ve been in town,” I said, stunned. “You could have telephoned if you wanted to see us. Me.” My pronouns reflected, first, a pretense that it was Esther and I together, as surrogate mother and father, whom she might have needed, and then a reflection that she and Esther must see each other at the day-care center and a glad acceptance that it was I myself alone the child wanted to turn to.

She seemed loath to let go. For the first time in fourteen years I knew what it was like to embrace a female who weighed more than a hundred pounds. But my grip was light, confused, apparently avuncular. “Oh Christ,” the girl bawled and sniffled. “It’s been horrible.”

“What’s been?”

“
Ev
erything.”

“I hear you’ve passed part of your tests,” I said. “And don’t you like having Paula off your hands every morning?” We had disentangled, though a kind of heat shadow of her body lingered on the front of mine, mussing my shirt, my trousers.

Her sniffling became a snort. “Poopsie,” she said scornfully. “She’s the least of it.” Verna looked at me with her amber eyes. They had the lashless squinting shape of a disgruntled cat’s. She was putting a bold face on the words to come. “I’m making another, Nunc.”

“Another … baby?”

Verna nodded. Her stringy bleached curls bobbed deeper over her low forehead. Her voice came out squeezed as if by apology. “I don’t know what there is about me; it’s as if these guys just have to wink.”

“Guys?”

“Well, come on, Nunc.” Brightly, as if quoting from
Cosmopolitan
or some breezy advice column: “Today’s young woman plays the field.”

The repeated “Nunc” felt like a jeering; but she
had
been relieved and grateful to see me at her door.

“Didn’t Dale tell you?” she surprisingly asked.

“Not exactly. He thought I should check on you, though.”

“So that’s why you’re here. Thanks.”

“So what are you going to do?” I asked.

She shrugged, and the abstracted way she glanced around the apartment suggested she had put the problem, along with her outburst and embrace, behind her. The radio was on in the other room; the music was repeatedly interrupted by a rapid joking voice, a female voice that proceeded in insolent fits and starts. “Hey there, all right now,” the voice said, as if disoriented. “Station W-I-L-D!” The television set was off, and sat dully on its milk crate. The room looked more like a student’s room. A little white-painted bookcase had appeared; its contents consisted of some fashion magazines and the slippery-blue anthology I had brought her. And there was a new chair, a vivid overstuffed armchair that reminded me of something, I didn’t know what.

My question, somewhat like the theological questions with which Dale and I irritated the space between us, had been a voicing of what should be left unsaid: Verna kept forgetting that actions have consequences. Her unstable face threatened to dissolve again into panic, as when she had greeted me. “I don’t
know
. I don’t want to do
any
thing.”

I decided to become directive. “You can’t just
have
it,” I told her. “That would put you deeper behind the eight ball.”

It came to me what her new chair reminded me of: that
peach-colored corduroy bed rest I had seen the willowy young black carrying on his head the time I had walked to this place, down Sumner Boulevard, before Election Day. Not that the colors or shapes were exactly the same, but they shared an aura, of doomed hopefulness. I touched the chair’s tangerine corduroy. “I see you’ve spent the money I gave you.”

“That’s my uncle’s chair,” she said, imitating a little girl. “For him to sit in when he comes to visit. If he ever does.” I sat in it. Its cushions had the stiff resistance of new airfoam. “How many periods have you missed?” I asked.

“I think two,” she said sullenly.

I realized I had compromised my dignity by sitting down. My face was at the level of Verna’s hips. My nerves still glowed with the sensation of holding her: her body, the weight, denseness, and responsibility of it. There is an odd erotic illumination that comes over us when for a moment we see women as simply the females of our animal species, another set of forked creatures condemned to a daily round of ingestion and defecation, of sleep and exertion. We are in this together.
In carnem
. “You
think
,” I said sternly. “Can’t you count?”

“The third would be about now” was her grudging response. Her hips in their charcoal skirt swayed; she was idly beginning to flirt.

“Well then,” I told her. “No problem. Have the abortion. You’re lucky to live in a time when you can have one for the asking. When I was your age you had to creep and crawl and beg to have it done. It was illegal, and dangerous, and women died of it. And now these idiots want to bring the dark ages back.”

“Did you ever have to creep and crawl, Nunc?”

“No. My first wife,” I said, reluctantly, “couldn’t have children. It was the tragedy of her life.”

“If she had been able, would you have made her risk her life and kill the fetus?”

“We were married, Verna. There is no comparison between our situation and yours.”

“You know, Nunc, I agree with those idiots. The fetus is alive. It shouldn’t be killed.”

“Don’t be grotesque. The fetus, as you call it, at this point is about as big as a peanut, as a minnow. If you’ve ever eaten sardines you should be willing to have this abortion.”