The Swisson woman—he managed to catch her name now, Katie—was to Mickelsson’s right. She held her fork daintily, as if fearfully, like an astonished bird invited to dine with tomcats. She looked up with exaggerated interest, head tipped meekly sideways, whenever anyone spoke her name, asking for her plate, passing asparagus, pouring wine into her glass. To make her feel less a spectator, Mickelsson inquired, “You have children, Ms. Swisson?”
She shook her head, chewing, trying to swallow quickly.
He told her about his son at U.V.M., excellent photographer—perhaps she’d heard of him? (it was impossible, in fact)—and his daughter Leslie, taking classes at Brown, though a highschool senior, planning to enter McGill next year to study French. He glanced at Jessica. If he was behaving like a fool she hadn’t noticed. She was deep in conversation with Phil Bryant and Gretchen Blickstein. Yet the back of her head struck him as alert and too still, as if she were eavesdropping on his talk.
“French! How interesting!” Kate Swisson said, looking up at him, wide-eyed.
Mickelsson shook his head. “You know what it means,” he said, mock-morose. “She’ll go off to Paris and fall in love with some miserable Frog and that’s the last I’ll see of her.”
She laughed, large eyes grown larger. It struck him that, though he’d meant it as a joke, he’d spoken with some vehemence, as if in fact he were furious with his daughter, not to mention the French. He wondered if it were so—that he was angry at his daughter, that is. It was true that she never phoned, kept losing his number. Like her mother, she was congenitally disorganized. He could phone her, but the chance that Ellen might answer put him off. He realized that the table had fallen silent and said, to cover himself, “It’s surprising how close you can feel to a daughter, and how little you really know her.”
“Peter! You, a man, expectin to understand women?” Edie Bryant cried out, across from him, brandishing her fork. Her eyes sparkled like the cut-glass candlesticks. “Perhaps shortly after the Second Coming!”
“Why, Edie,” her husband said, to Jessica’s left, his voice even more than usually melodious (he was fond of quoting Shakespeare, and his fifty-year-old Yale songs could make a turnip cry), “you surprise me!” He paused just an instant, then added, “Again!”
They all laughed, even Mickelsson, as if it were a wonderful piece of wit. He wondered, inwardly tumbling toward darkness, if it were possible that they all laughed, as he did, from politeness hiding disgust. It didn’t seem so, he thought, furtively glancing around the table—though certainly it had to be politeness with old Meyerson, who never heard anything anymore, not even the town’s many churchbells, against which he’d once lodged complaints. He sat next to Gretchen Blickstein at the foot of the table, wheezily laughing with his eyes shut. His wife, beside him, watching him like a hawk, suddenly dabbed at the corner of his mouth with her napkin. He pulled angrily away and said something in German.
“Don’t worry,” Jessica said, sotto voce, speaking past food, “she’ll hate it at McGill. Believe me! She’s like you.” She touched the corner of her mouth with her napkin.
“Like me?” Jessica and his daughter had never met.
“Intuition,” she said; “maybe a little simple deduction.” She smiled, then suddenly returned her attention to the conversation to her left.
Dinner wore on, painfully like every other dinner he’d ever been to, here, in Providence, in California, in Ohio: predictable compliments, jokes, earnest fragments of discussion, the usual little flashes of sexuality or annoyance between husbands and wives, husbands and other husbands’ wives; the usual spilled wine and quickly poured salt; the usual sudden, deep pauses. For a time Mickelsson was free to let his mind drift. Blickstein, to her right, had taken over conversation with Kate Swisson, bending over his folded hands toward her big, frightened eyes, grinning like a jack-o’-lantern, the chandelier and candlesticks reflected in the lenses of his glasses. Mickelsson found himself musing idly on the curious distance between this world and the world he’d be driving back to later tonight: here fine clothes bought in New York or London or at very least Fowler’s Department Store in the local mall; there in the mountains … The image of John Pearson rose again in his mind: faded blue workshirt, bib-overalls, heavy boots. … What would the old man think, walking in on this—the glittering silverware, the china, dirty now, the once-sparkling wine and water glasses smudged by lips and fingers? (It would be different with the real-estate salesman Tim Booker. Tim would be delighted.) Beyond the lace-curtained windows of the Blicksteins’ diningroom, Mickelsson could see only darkness. The conversation droned as if the dinner were taking place in a room at the bottom of the sea. The girl he’d met in the kitchen was clearing plates now, speaking to no one, meeting no one’s eyes. When she reached past him to take his plate, Mickelsson drew back to make it easier for her and said, “Thank you.” She showed no sign of hearing. Perhaps it was something about the way she moved, slowly raising the plate and drawing it toward her; the thought of rattlesnakes leaped into his mind.
He must shake this mood, he told himself. These people were his friends.
Blickstein said, leaning forward to look past Kate Swisson, his cheeks and jaw as muscular as his arms, “Pete, how’s my boy Nugent doing?”
“No problem, so far as I can tell,” Mickelsson said. Blickstein was looking at Jessica, making sure he hadn’t interrupted. It was curious that Blickstein remembered the young man and knew he was in Mickelsson’s class.
Tom Garret said, leaning toward them across the table, pivoting on his elbows, his short, thick hands folded for prayer in front of him, “Nugent? Is that somebody I should know?”
Everyone was listening.
The dean was embarrassed. “Well,” he said. His right hand made a kind of brushing motion, but he couldn’t seem to think what to say.
Gretchen Blickstein, at the foot of the table, called out, “Now I remember what I wanted to ask! Fred, whom are you voting for?”
Rogers smiled sorrowfully and considered his plate. He looked up with sagging eyes at Mickelsson, then solemnly raised his spoon to clink it three times against his water glass. “My friends,” he said like a funeral director, “friends and dear colleagues, in these trying times—”
“Hear, hear!” Phil Bryant said, and clinked his glass with his spoon, his handsome, wrinkled face grinning all over.
“No speeches!” old Mrs. Meyerson said, batting her hands about, crazy as a loon. But the majority was against her.
In the livingroom after dinner, while Blickstein poured liqueurs, Tom Garret sat down in the chair beside Mickelsson’s, cocked his knees out, and leaned toward the coffeetable, smiling his amiable Southern smile. His skin glowed. “Pete,” he said, “how’s Al Blassenheim doing? You’ve got him in P and A, right?”
“He’s doing fine,” Mickelsson said, turning.
Garret grinned, waiting for something more, then looked down. “Terrific kid,” he said. “I had him in Philos and Lit. He did me a wonderful paper on Wallace Stevens. ‘Beauty is momentary in the mind,’ so forth and so on—you know the passage. ‘But in the flesh it is immortal.’ ”
“Yes, he’s still working on it,” Mickelsson said a little testily (he disapproved of the Philosophy and Literature course) and glanced over at Jessica, who was watching them. When Garret raised his eyebrows, Mickelsson explained, waggling his hand, not wanting to make too much of it, “He’s not resigned, if you know what I mean. He’d like to have it both ways.”
Garret nodded, grinning. Jessica asked, “What do you mean, Pete?”
“Oh, you know. He’d like to take the view that evolution stumbles blindly, but also he’d like to believe that after Nature’s done her stumbling, God gives out grades. What survives is not just what’s fit but what fits God’s plan.”
“That’s sort of nice!” Jessica said.
“It is,” Mickelsson said.
She looked at him thoughtfully, still smiling, her shadowy Oriental-Icelandic
eyes narrowed, then over at Blickstein, who was coming toward her and Edie Bryant, carefully carrying their liqueurs. The small glasses glinted—dark, colored flames.
“But wouldn’t it be interesting if it were true!” Garret said, mainly to Jessica. “The whole universe just atingle with forms, waiting for matter to come up to them!”
“Like eggs waiting at the end of the cosmic fallopian,” Phil Bryant said, drawing up his chair. He chuckled heartily, like one who’s said something risqué, and glanced at Jessica.
Garret said, grinning, punching the air high above his shoulder, like a spectator at a racetrack, “Come awn, dinosaur! Come awn, Pax Romana!”
They all laughed, even Jessica, bravely agreeable. With her right hand, perhaps unaware that she was doing it, she fingered the softness of the couch beside her.
“Pax Romana?” Blickstein asked, eagerly grinning, handing Garret his glass.
“Just havin a little joke with the boys, sir,” Garret said. He once again sat still and formal, stocky, toeing out, his wide mouth impishly clamped shut; one could hardly believe that an instant ago he’d been clowning.
Blickstein gave Mickelsson his glass, eyebrows still lifted, waiting for enlightenment. A spark of red danced on the rim of the glass, then vanished.
“Philosophical discussion,” Mickelsson explained. “Whether or not Plato’s museum can be restored.”
“Ah!” Blickstein said, and straightened up, delighted that such things should be discussed in his livingroom, then looked around to see whom he’d missed.
“Well, you know,” Garret said, abruptly serious, still speaking mainly to Jessica, one had a feeling, though it was Mickelsson he looked at, “it’s easy to dismiss these ideas kids have, put them away in little boxes marked ‘Kant,’ ‘Hegel,’ ‘Whitehead,’ and so forth and so on. Kids don’t know how much argument’s already piled up against ’em. But I like the way they keep comin and comin, like termites. One morning you wake up and look around and—no castle!”
“Termites don’t eat stones,” Phil Bryant said, and chuckled.
Garret glanced over at him, friendly. “Sir?”
“Castles are made of stones,” Bryant said. His grin showed large and perfect teeth. He’d been an officer under Patton in World War II, had directed the mission stealing gas from ambulances for Patton’s famous drive. “Termites don’t eat stones.” He gave another little laugh.
Garret seemed to give it serious thought, his eyes fixed on the rose in the cut-glass bowl on the glass-topped coffeetable. “What you mean is,” he said, jabbing a finger toward Bryant but not looking up from the rose, “so far there is no definite physical evidence that termites eat stones.”
“I read in the paper that there are termites that can eat cement,” Gretchen Blickstein said.
Jessica smiled and tipped her head with interest. No one else seemed to have heard her.
“That reminds me,” Mickelsson said, “that house I bought, down by Susquehanna, Pennsylvania—it’s supposed to be haunted.”
They all looked at him, expecting a story—or all but the Swissons.
“Britt and I don’t believe in ghosts,” Kate Swisson said.
“I do,” old Mrs. Meyerson cried out sharply, and considered saying more, then hushed. Her husband slowly turned his head and looked at her, as if startled to discover her still there.
Jessica said, tilting toward Mickelsson, “Tell us about it, Pete! Are you serious?”
He told them what he knew. He was surprised himself at how little he’d bothered to find out.
Though he knew it was foolish, Mickelsson refilled his martini glass. As he poured from the pitcher, now more water than gin, the young woman who’d helped out was putting her coat on to leave. “You do this kind of thing often?” he asked. When she said nothing, he glanced over his shoulder. She had her lips clamped together in stern concentration, buttoning the coat—black cashmere, fairly new or else very well cared for. She bent her head forward, drawing her flowing auburn hair from under the collar and shaking it out behind her. He put away the pitcher, closed the refrigerator door, and asked again, “Do you do this kind of thing often?”
Suddenly she looked straight at him. “I’m sorry, I’m not good at talking to people yet,” she said. Her eyes were filled with tears. Then, turning away, she snatched her white scarf from the back of the chair and was gone.
“Hey, wait!” he began, then closed his mouth.
It was not that she’d attacked him; she’d somehow made it clear that it was nothing personal, not his fault. But for all that, the hand that held the martini was shaking so badly he had to put the glass down on the counter. How terrible, he thought, that the universe should be so charged with pain and rage! Universe, universe, universe, he heard his wife’s voice hiss, the voice so clear, so “real,” so to speak, that he turned and looked past his shoulder. The room was empty—more than empty, he thought: drawn back from him like a cowering beast; it seemed if he moved nearer it would strike. Some thought trembled at the edge of his consciousness, some familiar idea turned at a strange new angle; but try as he might, straining his attention like a man trying to read a clue in charades, he couldn’t quite spring it. He got his pipe from his coatpocket, packed it and lit it, and at last, feeling calmer, took his martini from the counter and started back to the livingroom. He remembered the young woman’s eyes as she spoke to him. Had she been raped? Newly released from prison? Had she lost a child? He got an image of her standing in the shadow of the woods above his house, motionless. Then it came to him that, imperceptibly, her image had confused itself with that of another angry young woman, his student Brenda Winburn, watching him patiently, with an expression he could not read. “Not me,” he whispered inwardly, meeting the sullen, witchy eyes. When Mickelsson realized he was talking to himself, he immediately forgot, if he’d ever known, what he’d been thinking.
Jessica said, “I understand your friend Dr. Bauer is being sued for malpractice.”
Mickelsson looked up, slow-witted from drink, and saw what he should have known, that there was nothing snide in it. “Bauer?” he asked, then remembered. “That doesn’t seem likely,” he said, forming the words with care.
They were among the last remaining. The Rogerses, Swissons, and Meyersons had left over an hour ago, the Garrets maybe half an hour later. Now the Bryants were at the top of the stairs leading down to the entryway, where for the past ten minutes they’d been talking with great animation to the Blicksteins. Gretchen Blickstein looked asleep on her feet, but the dean, smiling and punching out diagrams in the air, made up for her. His shirttail bulged out in front, but he seemed not to notice, enjoying himself immensely. “That Blickstein’s got energy,” people said. “I wonder if he ever sleeps.”
“I’m sure she’s not guilty, if that’s what you mean,” Jessica said, and shrugged. “But she is being sued; some young woman died in childbirth. It was two or three years ago. The doctor’s lawyer is a friend of ours—that is, mine.” She saw his look of disbelief and came straight at him. “These things happen, you know.”
Mickelsson shook his head. “Maybe so,” he said. “I would’ve thought, the way they seem to feel about Dr. Bauer—” He was suddenly conscious of two things at once, his attraction to Jessica and the distance he had to go to reach home. He didn’t feel too drunk to drive, exactly, but his eyelids were leaden; perhaps he’d have to sleep beside the road. He thought of trying to proposition her; but he said, voice lowered and a trifle stern, “Everybody you talk to in Susquehanna speaks highly of ‘the doc.’ ”
“I’m sure that’s so,” she said, half smiling, watching him. She sat finely balanced, legs crossed at the knees, her smooth-muscled body alert and calm, like a slightly displeased schoolteacher, or some superior lifeform in a sci-fi movie, observing but carefully not meddling. “Yet there are some pretty strange people down there, I’m told.”
“Me, for one!” Mickelsson said, hitting his chest with the inside of his fist and laughi
ng, playing maniac.
She looked cross for an instant, then reconsidered, frowning down at her hands folded on her knees. She moved her right hand to touch the gold chain on her left wrist, making light blink. “You’re right, it’s none of my business,” she said. “I’m sure they’re fine people. It’s just that it’s so far from—” She hesitated, trying to find the word.
“The city’s bright lights,” he offered, gesturing with both hands, suggesting a kind of umbrella of light in the air between them. Gin made what he’d meant for irony seem anger, but she seemed not to notice.
“Maybe that’s it. I worry about people getting too far out of touch.”
“Turns ’em into witches,” Mickelsson said, and grinned evilly. Also gives them heart attacks, he remembered, but didn’t say it. He pulled uncomfortably at his pipe. Dead again.
“It does, you know? Not literally, I suppose.” She blushed slightly. “OK, you’ve made your point. I’m not to worry about you.” Her smile made the dimple show. Her eyes, pale as the arctic, met his steadily.
“I’m grateful to you for worrying about me,” he said, and gave her an embarrassed nod. It was the last thing in the world he’d intended to say. He set down the glass, pocketed his matches, and stood up. He felt a moment’s unsteadiness. “Well—” he said.
“You’re right,” she said, leaning forward and rising too. “I have a nine o’clock class in the morning!” She took a step in his direction, then looked startled, maybe dizzy. Without knowing he would do it he held out his hand to her, as if to help her over slippery ground.