Ur (2 page)

And

A teenager falls in love with his best friend’s mother and

Below this one was the final idea, written shortly after Ellen had thrown
Deliverance
across the room and stalked out of his life.

A shy but dedicated small college instructor and his athletic but largely illiterate girlfriend have a falling-out after

It was probably the best idea—write what you know, all the experts agreed on that—but he simply couldn’t go there. Talking to Don had been hard enough. And even then, complete honesty had escaped him. Like saying how much he wanted her back, for instance.

As he approached the three-room flat he called home—what Don Allman sometimes called his “bachelor pad”—Wesley’s thoughts turned to the Henderson kid. Was his name Richard or Robert? Wesley had a block about that, not the same as the block he had about fleshing out any of the fragmentary mission-statements for his novel, but probably related. He had an idea all such blocks were probably fear-centered and basically hysterical in nature, as if the brain detected (or thought it had detected) some nasty interior beast and had locked it in a cell with a steel door. You could hear it thumping and jumping in there like a rabid raccoon that would bite if approached, but you couldn’t see it.

The Henderson kid was on the football team—a noseback or point guard or some such thing—and while he was as horrible on the gridiron as any of them, he was a nice kid and a fairly good student. Wesley liked him. But still, he had been ready to tear the boy’s head off when he spotted him in class with what Wesley assumed was a
PDA
or a newfangled cell phone. This was shortly after Ellen had walked out. In those early days of the breakup, Wesley often found himself up at three in the morning, pulling some literary comfort-food down from the shelf: usually his old friends Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, their adventures recounted by Patrick O’Brian. And not even that had kept him from remembering the ringing slam of the door as Ellen left his life, probably for good.

So he was in a foul mood and more than ready for backtalk as he approached Henderson and said, “Put it away. This is a literature class, not an Internet chat-room.”

The Henderson kid had looked up and given him a sweet smile. It hadn’t lifted Wesley’s foul mood in the slightest, but it did dissolve his anger on contact. Mostly because he wasn’t an angry man by nature. He supposed he was
depressive
by nature, maybe even dysthymic. Hadn’t he always suspected that Ellen Silverman was too good for him? Hadn’t he known, in his heart of hearts, that the doorslam had been waiting for him from the very beginning, when he’d spent the evening talking to her at a boring faculty party? Ellen played like a girl; he played like a loser. He couldn’t even stay mad at a student who was goofing with his pocket computer (or Nintendo, or whatever it was) in class.

“It’s the assignment, Mr. Smith,” the Henderson kid had said (on his forehead was a large purple bruise from his latest outing in the Meerkat blue). “It’s ‘Paul’s Case.’ Look.”

The kid turned the gadget so Wesley could see it. It was a flat white panel, rectangular, less than half an inch thick. At the top was
amazon
kindle and the smile-logo Wesley knew well; he was not entirely computer illiterate himself, and had ordered books from Amazon plenty of times (although he usually tried the bookstore in town first, partly out of pity; even the cat who spent most of its life dozing in the window looked malnourished).

The interesting thing on the kid’s gadget wasn’t the logo on top or the teeny-tiny keyboard (a computer keyboard, surely!) on the bottom. In the middle of the gadget was a screen, and on the screen was not a screen-saver or a video game where young men and women with buffed-out bodies were killing zombies in the ruins of New York, but a page of Willa Cather’s story about the poor boy with the destructive illusions.

Wesley had reached for it, then drew back his hand. “May I?”

“Go ahead,” the Henderson kid—Richard or Robert—told him. “It’s pretty neat. You can download books from thin air, and you can make the type as big as you want. Also, the books are cheaper because there’s no paper or binding.”

That sent a minor chill through Wesley. He became aware that most of his Intro to American Lit class was watching him. As a thirty-five-year-old, Wesley supposed it was hard for them to decide if he was Old School (like the ancient Dr. Wence, who looked remarkably like a crocodile in a three-piece suit) or NewSchool (like Suzanne Montanari, who liked to play Avril Lavigne’s “Girlfriend” in her Introduction to Modern Drama class). Wesley supposed his reaction to Henderson’s Kindle would help them with that.

“Mr. Henderson,” he said, “there will always be books. Which means there will always be paper and binding. Books are
real objects
. Books are
friends
.”

“Yeah, but!” Henderson had replied, his sweet smile now becoming slightly sly.

“But?”

“They’re also ideas and emotions. You said so in our first class.”

“Well,” Wesley had said, “you’ve got me there. But books aren’t
solely
ideas. Books have a smell, for instance. One that gets better—more nostalgic—as the years go by. Does this gadget of yours have a smell?”

“Nope,” Henderson replied. “Not really. But when you turn the pages…here, with this button…they kind of flutter, like in a real book, and I can go to any page I want, and when it sleeps, it shows pictures of famous writers, and it holds a charge, and—”

“It’s a computer,” Wesley had said. “You’re reading off the computer.”

The Henderson kid had taken his Kindle back. “You say that like it’s a bad thing. It’s still ‘Paul’s Case.’”

“You’ve never heard of a Kindle, Mr. Smith?” Josie Quinn had asked. Her tone was that of a kindly anthropologist asking a member of New Guinea’s Kombai tribe if he had ever heard of electric stoves and elevator shoes.

“No,” he said, not because it was true—he
had
seen something called
SHOP
THE
KINDLE
STORE
when he bought books from Amazon online—but because, on the whole, he thought he would prefer being perceived by them as Old School. New School was somehow…mediocre.

“You ought to get one,” the Henderson kid said, and when Wesley had replied, without even thinking, “Perhaps I will,” the class had broken into spontaneous applause. For the first time since Ellen’s departure, Wesley had felt faintly cheered. Because they wanted him to get a book-reading gadget, and also because the applause suggested they did see him as Old School.
Teachable
Old School.

He did not seriously consider buying a Kindle (if he was Old School, then books were definitely the way to go) until a couple of weeks later. One day on his way home from school he imagined Ellen seeing him with his Kindle, just strolling across the quad and bopping his finger on the little
NEXT
PAGE
button.

What in the world are you doing?
she would ask. Speaking to him at last.

Reading off the computer
, he would say.
Just like the rest of you.

Spiteful!

But, as the Henderson kid might put it, was that a bad thing? It occurred to him that spite was a kind of methadone for lovers. Was it better to go cold turkey? Perhaps not.

When he got home he turned on his desktop Dell (he owned no laptop and took pride in the fact) and went to the Amazon website. He had expected the gadget to go for four hundred dollars or so, maybe more if there was a Cadillac model, and was surprised to find it was cheaper than that. Then he went to the Kindle Store (which he had been so successfully ignoring) and discovered that the Henderson kid was right: the books were ridiculously cheap, hardcover novels (
what
cover, ha-ha) priced below most trade paperbacks. Considering what he spent on books, the Kindle might pay for itself. As for the reaction of his colleagues—all those hoicked eyebrows—Wesley discovered he relished the prospect. Which led to an interesting insight into human nature, or at least the human nature of the academic: one liked to be perceived by one’s students as Old School, but by one’s peers as NewSchool.

I’m experimenting with new technology
, he imagined himself saying.

He liked the sound of it. It was NewSchool all the way.

He also liked thinking of Ellen’s reaction. He had stopped leaving messages on her phone, and he had begun avoiding places—The Pit Stop, Harry’s Pizza—where he might run into her, but that could change. Surely
I’m reading off the computer, just like the rest of you
was too good a line to waste.

Oh, that’s small
, he scolded himself as he sat in front of his computer, looking at the picture of the Kindle.
That is spite so small it probably wouldn’t poison a newborn kitten
.

True! But if it was the only spite of which he was capable, why not indulge it?

So he had clicked on the Buy Kindle box, and the gadget had arrived a day later, in a box stamped with the smile logo and the words
ONE-DAY
DELIVERY
. Wesley hadn’t opted for one-day, and would protest that charge if it showed up on his MasterCard bill, but he had unpacked his new acquisition with real pleasure—similar to the pleasure he felt when unpacking a box of books, but sharper. Because there was that sense of heading into the unknown, he supposed. Not that he expected the Kindle to replace books, or to be much more than a novelty item, really; an attention-getter for a few weeks or months that would afterward stand forgotten and gathering dust beside the Rubik’s Cube on the knickknack shelf in his living room.

It didn’t strike him as peculiar that, whereas the Henderson kid’s Kindle had been white, his was pink.

Not then.

When Wesley got back to his apartment after his confessional conversation with Don Allman, the message light on his answering machine was blinking. Two messages. He pushed the playback button, expecting to hear his mother complaining about her arthritis and making trenchant observations about how some sons actually called home more often than twice a month. After that would come a robo-call from the Moore
Echo
, reminding him—for the dozenth time—that his subscription had lapsed. But it wasn’t his mother and it wasn’t the newspaper. When he heard Ellen’s voice, he paused in the act of reaching for a beer and listened bent-over, with one hand outstretched in the fridge’s frosty glow.

“Hi, Wes,” she said, sounding uncharacteristically unsure of herself. There was a long pause, long enough for Wesley to wonder if that was all there was going to be. In the background he heard hollow shouts and bouncing balls. She was in the gym, or had been when she left the message. “I’ve been thinking about us. Thinking that maybe we should try again. I miss you.” And then, as if she had seen him rushing for the door: “But not yet. I need to think a little more about…what you said.” A pause. “I was wrong to throw your book like that, but I was upset.” Another pause, almost as long as the one after she’d said hi. “There’s a pre-season tourney in Lexington this weekend. You know, the one they call the Bluegrass. It’s a big deal. Maybe when I get back, we should talk. Please don’t call me until then, because I’ve got to concentrate on the girls. Defense is terrible, and I’ve only got one girl who can actually shoot from the perimeter, and…I don’t know, this is probably a big mistake.”

“It’s not,” he told the answering machine. His heart was pumping. He was still leaning into the open refrigerator, feeling the cold wafting out and striking his face, which seemed too hot. “Believe me, it’s not.”

“I had lunch with Suzanne Montanari the other day, and she says you’re carrying around one of those electronic reading thingies. To me that seemed…I don’t know, like a sign that we should try again.” She laughed, then screamed so loud that Wesley jumped. “
Chase down that loose ball! You either run or you sit!”
Then: “Sorry. I’ve got to go. Don’t call me. I’ll call you. One way or the other. After the Bluegrass. I’m sorry I’ve been dodging your calls, but…you hurt my feelings, Wes. Coaches have feelings too, you know. I—”

A beep interrupted her. The allotted message time had run out. Wesley uttered the word Norman Mailer’s publishers had refused to let him use in
The Naked and the Dead
.

Then the second message started and she was back. “I guess English teachers also have feelings. Suzanne says we’re not right for each other, she says we’re too far apart in our interests, but…maybe there’s a middle ground. I’m glad you got the reader. If it’s a Kindle, I think you can also use it to go to the Internet. I…I need to think about this. Don’t call me. I’m not quite ready. Goodbye.”

Wesley got his beer. He was smiling. Then he thought of the spite that had been living in his heart for the last month and stopped. He went to the calendar on the wall, and wrote
PRE-SEASON
TOURNEY
across Saturday and Sunday. He paused, then drew a line through the days of the work-week after, a line on which he wrote ELLEN???

With that done he sat down in his favorite chair, drank his beer, and tried to read
2666
. It was a crazy book, but sort of interesting.

He wondered if it was available from the Kindle Store.

That evening, after replaying Ellen’s messages for the third time, Wesley turned on his Dell and went to the Athletic Department website to check for details concerning the Bluegrass Pre-Season Invitational Tournament. He knew it would be a mistake to turn up there, and he had no intentions of doing so, but he did want to know who the Meerkats were playing, what their chances were, and when Ellen would be back.

It turned out there were eight teams, seven from Division Two and only one from Division Three: the Lady Meerkats of Moore. Wesley felt pride on Ellen’s behalf when he saw that, and was once more ashamed of his spite…which she (lucky him!) knew nothing about. She actually seemed to think he had bought the Kindle as a way of sending her a message:
Maybe you’re right, and maybe I can change. Maybe we both can.
He supposed that if things went well, he would in time come to convince himself that was indeed so
.