Tony and Susan (13 page)

‘I do want to cooperate.’

Let him out at the departure doors. ‘I doubt if I’ll see you again,’ Andes said. ‘I don’t see much future in this case.’

Tony Hastings bent down to the car window, wanting to shake his hand, but Bobby Andes drove off too quick. In the plane Tony felt sure: the man in the dark rimmed glasses was Turk.

Bathroom. Susan Morrow puts the manuscript down, goes upstairs. Music fights in the house. Through the closed study door, American commerce, a teary male voice trying to sell her little daughter the joys of cars and beer. Upstairs,
Parsifal
, ceremonial, exotic, music as perfume.

‘Rosie, go to bed!’

Pursuing the murderers, a new direction in Tony’s story, a complication. Susan’s glad of that. She sympathizes with Tony’s difficulty identifying Turk, and the scene embarrasses her as if it were her fault. How people recognize each other fills her with wonder. She confused the man selling storm windows with her neighbor Gelling, yet knew Elaine at the airport even though she has turned into a sphere. Back in the living room she knocks Martha off the manuscript again. There’s another uncomfortable undertow below her reading, residue of suppressed thought, or else it’s the same one still. She wishes it would go away.

Tony Hastings was in bad shape. Trying to figure out the telephone call last night at three. The voice said, ‘So this is Tony Hastings is it?’ ‘Who is this?’

‘Nobody. I just wanted to hear your voice.’

People were avoiding him. He overheard. Jack Appleby in his office: ‘It’s gone on long enough.’ In the coffee room, Myra Lopez, ‘He thinks he deserves special consideration.’ His friends had discovered how much his acceptability in their houses had depended on his wife’s grace and charm. He knew what they were thinking. Without her he was a dark absence. The students mocked him behind his back. The girls avoided his eyes and watched his moves, ready to slap a suit on him. He looked up
pariah:
a low caste Indian with a turban chained next to the goat in the yard with the ragged castaway on the beach.

They were blaming him but wouldn’t say so to his face. How easily he has recovered. That charade party at the Malks. The way he hangs on, sullen and morose, as if singled out by God. Didn’t you wonder about his story, why he didn’t resist?

By now it was March. He shouted at the student in his office. ‘I told you at the beginning of the quarter. If you want to file a grievance, file a grievance.’ The student was an athlete. He had a T-shirt with a 24 on it. He had large angry eyes and his head was bald except on the sides. He had a small chin. He strode out saying, ‘You’ll hear from me,’ and Louise Germane came in to deliver papers she had graded for him. She must have heard something, or perhaps she had not. She said, ‘Mr. Hastings, are you all right?’

He said something, and she said, ‘I know what you’re going through. Are you getting any help?’

‘You mean a shrink? No one knows what I’m going through, and I don’t need graduate students to advise me.’

Oh, she was sorry, but Tony Hastings, less angry than he sounded, sent her away. Then he was ashamed. Play actor. Poor Louise Germane, probably the only student left who liked him. He had fixed that, all right. He hurried out to look for her.

He found her in the coffee shop. ‘I want to apologize,’ he said. ‘That was stupid of me.’

‘That’s all right, Mr. Hastings.’ The tall girl, her wheat colored hair, loose flowing, the relieved smile. She said, ‘I want you to know, if there’s anything I can do. We’re pulling for you.’

Her looking eyes, sea blue, yearning to be interpreted. He accepted a long idle coffee talk. Allowed himself to talk about Laura. He noticed the glaze coming over her face but kept on talking. She said, ‘Thank you for telling me. I appreciate it.’

He said, ‘Tell me about yourself.’

She spoke of brothers and sisters, he didn’t follow, his concentration not so good. He asked why she was in graduate school. She told him.

It occurred to him her plans were naive and silly, and he said, ‘What are you going to do when the world blows up?’

She looked at him in dismay. ‘You mean, the bomb?’

‘The Bomb.
It.
The rain. The scorch.’

She was bewildered. ‘Maybe it won’t blow up.’

Ha! Tony Hastings shook his head and smacked his lips and leaned back in his chair and told her. He told about the white peacekeeping missiles with the future of the world in their skins, warheads with a city in each, and programmed retaliation for after the people are dead. He spoke of the sun-blast that shoots through human flesh like a grid. He said
preemptive strike
and
lead time.
He told how after the blast comes the fire and then the fallout for those beyond the fire, and then the heavy blackout clouds, and he said
nuclear winter
and
blackened cinder.
‘You think it won’t happen?’

She said, ‘The cold war is over.’

He felt cold superior rage. ‘You think so, do you? The rest of the world is coming. Arabs, Pakistani. Third World. Everybody will have it. You think they have no grievance?’

She said, ‘I’m more worried about the greenhouse effect.’

But she wasn’t worried enough. He pointed at her: ‘The world is dying. The diseases are advanced, the death twitches have begun.’

She said: ‘Anyone might die in an accident tomorrow.’

He attacked: ‘The traditional knowledge that others will live on after you is not like the knowledge mankind is dying and everything anyone lived for is wiped out.’

Mild civilized Tony Hastings: crank, crotchet, curmudgeon. Easy to sizzle. Sometimes he sizzled all day. The morning paper at breakfast full of outrage, editorials, letters, stupidity, prejudice. On a particular April morning he saw a neighbor boy taking a shortcut through his yard behind Mr. Husserl’s house. Tony Hastings ran after him. ‘Hey you!’

The kid stopped. ‘I thought we could go through.’

‘You’re supposed to ask permission. Ask for permission.’

‘Can I have permission, mister?’

Wave him on. The garden was brown, new green poking up through sticks. The weeds were coming. They were on the march, and soon Mrs. Hapgood would be too, telephone calls and complaints. Someone forgot to put a notice of the faculty meeting in his box. To the secretary, calm: I’d just like to know who was responsible. It was Ruth who distributed the notices. Did I miss you? she said. You’re sure it’s not shuffled in with your other things? Control yourself back to the office.

The softball hit the windshield. His brakes screeched. He opened the door, ran out, grabbed the ball out of the gutter before the boys could get there.

‘God damn it, you could kill someone.’

‘Can we have our ball please?’

He slammed the door and locked it, remembering. Five boys gathered around, violently trying to hold him prisoner
by standing in front of the car, while they banged on the hood pleading and bullying. ‘That’s our ball, mister.’

He started the car, tried to edge forward. What held him? If it was a question of violence, his car could run right over them. Their violence depended on his pacifism. He inched forward, pushing them back. What right had they to assume he was law-abiding, or to take advantage of it? They stepped aside, all but one, white faced, who pushed his hands against the front and retreated one backward step at a time as the car forced him on. His face as furious as Tony felt, lips pressed together, eyes hot. Then he too gave way, yelled, ‘Son of a bitch,’ and banged the window as Tony roared by. Zipping into the next block, Tony watched in the mirror. Their ball. Expect more telephone calls tonight. He opened the window and flung it out. The boys in the mirror chased it among the parked cars.

Calm down Tony, take it easy. The house was church, where he prayed his ghosts to restore his soul. Worship service. He put his books on the table and went to the shelf in the living room where he kept the album. Prayer book. He leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes. Tableau. She sits on the couch, he in the chair, Helen on the floor leaning against the coffee table, saying ‘You did? No kidding?’

Bible lesson. ‘Then I began to wonder why I found myself talking to him every day as we came out of class and suddenly I realized he was waiting for me, and I was thrilled.’

Helen amused. ‘You sound like a couple of kids.’

‘We were a couple of kids.’

Tradition. ‘Your father is the steadiest of men. That’s worth something over the long haul.’ Praise Daddy.

History. The spirit of inquiry, giggling. ‘You know what I mean? It’s absolutely impossible to imagine you two as lovers.’

‘Your Daddy is very loving in his way.’

Mystery. The question Helen wanted to ask but did not want answered, which she never asked because not to answer was as much an answer as an answer.

Ritual. April a year ago on bikes after dinner. Signs of the coming, buds, new birds. Daughter leads the way, changing the route each evening, different turns around different blocks. Daddy goes last, guarding the others through the quiet streets, alert when a car goes by, tense when they come out to the main street between the parked cars and the traffic. When they get home it’s dark. Homework time, no television tonight folks. Peace now, all dangers have been left behind.

The steadiest of men, loving in his way, taking coffee in the coffee shop, waved to Louise Germane in a booth with a student named Frank Hawthorne. He did not like this Hawthorne, it displeased him to see her with him, he wondered how to tell her. Frank Hawthorne had a greasy face and a dirty beard, his hair was tangled and bushy, his eyes looked out like an animal in the weeds, lips bulged through his beard like internal organs oozing through an open wound. He remembered Hawthorne’s cheating case, hushed up to improve his character. Also the pigeon case: two guys with a baseball on the slope below Tony’s office, Hawthorne standing by. ‘Gimme that,’ Hawthorne says, then hurls a fast ball into a flock of pigeons, which would have killed or maimed if it had hit. A girl complains, ‘Don’t do that. I like them.’

‘Dirtier than rats,’ Hawthorne, the virtuous murderer, says. In the coffee shop Tony Hastings wondered how to warn Louise.

So he asked Francesca the next time he saw her. She smiled at him. ‘Why bother? If he’s a skunk, she’ll find out.’

‘None of my business, you mean.’

‘Unless you have other business you’re not mentioning.’

That was at lunch. He said, ‘I’ve been irritable lately.’

‘I’ve noticed. Do me a favor,’ she said. ‘Don’t get involved with a graduate student. You don’t need that.’

‘What do I need?’

There was a moment while she looked at him. The look grew long, it meant something. Serious, no smile, blue eyes speaking. It passed and she was smiling again in her usual way of partial implication, balanced complicity. He thought, I missed something. I have just been told, and now it is too late.

But he ate lunch with her regularly in the Faculty Club. Her look, reminiscent and kind. He thought: She is my only friend. She remembered him as he was. She knew he didn’t want to be this way. He looked at her and thought, lovely, beautiful.

So he said, ‘Today’s Thursday.’

‘What about it?’

‘You’re free this afternoon.’

‘So?’

Spaghetti, curling on her fork, she avoided his eyes. Leap. ‘May I take you somewhere in my car?’

Mouth upturned receiving spaghetti, she wiped tomato sauce off her elegant mouth. ‘Where?’

‘Anywhere.’

‘All right.’

That’s all. They drove to an overlook above the river, where they could hear the trucks below the bluff. They looked at the view, near another car with a couple looking at the view, and he felt a sexual surge generating steam like nothing he had felt in nine months, not even his night in New York.

He talked about the carbon dioxide shield, the growing warmer, the coming desert under the cancerous sun. He saw
his eloquence carrying him away. He saw she was bored. He thought, I’m not a nice person any more, and his sexual feeling died.

He took her home, wondering if she would invite him in, but she did not. She thanked him for the afternoon, and he saw no magic in her routine eyes. She went up to her house, and a little girl came out to greet her.

He drove off abruptly enough to make the tires squeal. Stopped hard for the light, screech, then dashed into the intersection. Feeling something, he did not know what. He went out to the expressway, buzzed ahead of the car in front of him, slipped back and forth one lane to another. Blasted his horn at a car in the middle, nudging him along until he could get by.

When the wildness settled, he drove home and rested in his living room. What was this, Laura still refusing to let go? It seemed like something else. As if he needed a ceremony to return Tony to Tony. He imagined a primitive god, male and savage.

The image made him laugh, but the laughter had no feeling, and the next moment he had this overwhelming conviction that no thought of his had any feeling. He saw all his recent behavior on a screen with light shining through, disclosing emptiness. His wild driving on the road an hour ago, a display to conceal something he did not have. The revelation spread, it delved into the past, all the way back to the catastrophe, and all it found was counterfeit or fake. Phony feelings acted out. It frightened him, not for the abyss but for what would happen if anyone found out, thinking, This is something no one must know. A secret. In the late afternoon inside his house, he looked for his soul and saw only white indifference beneath the calculated displays of grief and, as that became
wearisome, irritability and rage. He recognized the privileges grief had given him. What no one knew was how he had fooled them. He was an artificial man, fabricated of gestures. He paced around the house totally free. A vague anger led him to his desk, where he typed out the following note to Bobby Andes: