By some computer mix-up, or perhaps by some odd preference of Lawler’s, the office was isolated from the rest of the Philosophy Department offices, surrounded by the messy, oddly gray offices of mathematicians. Lawler’s door was closed, as usual. No notes, sign-up sheets, or grade-lists were thumbtacked to the small, framed square of cork under the office number. No New Yorker cartoons, no posters or pictures, no decorative quips like the one on the door across the hallway from Lawler’s: What is the speed of thought?
Mickelsson knocked and, after a moment, as if slightly alarmed, Lawler called, “Come in. It’s open.” The voice was high and thin.
Mickelsson turned the knob, opened the door a foot or so, and poked his head in. In the dimness of the astonishingly cluttered, book-filled room, Lawler sat turned sideways at his desk, thoughtfully chewing a pencil, looking down at the large volume he had open in front of him. Though he did not seem to have glanced up from the book, he said, “Ah, Pete! Sit down.”
Mickelsson opened the door further and entered, gently closing the door behind him. Lawler was dressed, as usual, in his shabby black suit, his shiny steel glasses cutting into the sides of his pale, bloated visage. He was graying and balding—the gray hair unkempt, as if wind-blown—yet he was curiously baby-faced, as if nothing had ever happened to him, no griefs, no joys, no wind to dishevel him but the harmless wind of words. He sat in his old-fashioned mahogany deskchair with his lumpy black shoes resting on a low footstool—he was too short to reach the floor—and his posture was oddly prim, erect, a somehow quaint suggestion of the shy, brilliant fat boy he’d once been and, in some ways, was yet. An antique plush chair stood over by the bookshelf at Lawler’s back, a chair that looked much too rickety to sit in, but the only one available. Mickelsson drew it up to Lawler’s desk and warily sat down. The chair was not the only antique in the room, he saw now, as his eyes became accustomed to the dimness. Over by the window stood a tall grandfather’s clock with a great brass shield for a pendulum and ornate brass disks above the face, gauges of the progress of the moon, perhaps; Mickelsson had no idea. Above Lawler’s desk hung—or mournfully loomed—a large oil painting of a castle almost invisible in darkness and fog.
“How are things?” Mickelsson asked. He watched his colleague’s face closely, with interest, to see if, this once, he would look up.
“Mmm, yes,” Lawler said, and struck directly at his business, speaking in the fussy, at once timid and sober-minded fashion of a schoolboy certain of nothing in the world but his facts. Jessie had of course been exactly right about him: a lonely man cloaked and disguised in fat and abstraction. “I asked you to come by,” he said apologetically, “because I’m rather concerned about our mutual friend or, that is, student, Michael Nugent.”
“Oh?” Mickelsson said, and waited.
“Do you think he seems well?” Lawler asked. Startlingly, his eyes rose to stare straight into Mickelsson’s with what seemed to him—perhaps he was mistaken—dreadful grief.
“He seems to me quite intelligent,” Mickelsson said, hedging.
Lawler moved his hand in a minute gesture of impatience. “Yes, unquestionably. But I’ve been wondering, observing him—of course it’s only conjecture. …”
“Yes, I see,” Mickelsson said, and looked down. “Has Dean Blickstein talked to you, by any chance?”
“Nooo.” There was a hint of alarm in his voice, as if he’d guessed what was coming.
“He’s apparently going through a difficult time,” Mickelsson said. He felt, all at once, awash in guilt. Here was Lawler, of all people, the great, aloof intellectual, distressed about the welfare of one of his students, while Mickelsson, superficially more social, by far more conscious of the world around him, even conscious, some of the time, of the parallel between his students’ unhappiness and the unhappiness of his son, turned his back on his students as on everything else. He said, blushing, “According to Blickstein, Nugent’s father died recently. The boy was extremely depressed by it; in fact it seems he attempted suicide. And then apparently he was hit rather hard by the death of one of his teachers, Professor Warren.”
“Warren?” Lawler echoed vaguely. Again his voice was apologetic, as if the name were no doubt one he should know but, unfortunately, did not.
“It seems they were fairly close,” Mickelsson said. “I’m not sure how close. Apparently, Warren was homosexual, like Nugent.”
“Oh?” Lawler said. He seemed puzzled and a little dismayed by the revelation; he was perhaps not sufficiently of the world to have noticed Nugent’s tendency. “That’s a burden, I suppose, in our society.” His mind was elsewhere. After a moment he said, looking down at his book again, “It sounds as if there’s not much we can do. Is the boy getting counselling?”
“We could suggest it. I haven’t, myself.”
“Counselling might help, I suppose.” He didn’t sound hopeful. Perhaps he too had known his Rifkins. “Warren,” he said, still trying to place the name. “Was he in our department?”
“Chemistry,” Mickelsson said. “Nugent was in engineering before he came to us.”
“Ah! I see! Yes, I knew that. Chemistry, then. I see. And you think they were lovers?” Lawler’s face darkened in embarrassment.
“I wouldn’t say that, though of course I wouldn’t know. Just good friends, I think.”
“Good friends. Yes, I see.” He raised his right hand, unaware that he was doing it, to rub the space between his eyebrows, pushing up the bridge of his glasses, as if he had the start of a headache. “If there were only something one could do,” he said. He seemed to be speaking more to himself than to Mickelsson.
“Yes,” Mickelsson said.
Slowly, thoughtfully, Lawler began to nod. “Well, thank you for coming,” he said. “I suppose all we can do is watch him, try to be whatever help we can.”
“We can do that much, yes.”
On the way back to his office, Mickelsson pressed his fist to his forehead, hardly knowing what he felt. Mainly he felt like a child returning from the principal’s office, found guilty and not properly punished. “Very well, very well,” he muttered angrily, but which of his failures he was confessing was not clear. One thing was certain. He ought to take Michael Nugent aside, have a heart-to-heart talk with him. Ought, he brooded. A stupid word, no force. A word for weaklings, Nietzsche would say. A word for survivors, something he apparently was not. No paradox, for Nietzsche. The species does not grow in perfection: the weak are forever prevailing over the strong.
Jessie arrived three hours later than she’d said, an annoyance not because he had anything planned but because it forced him to another painful recognition: she was one of those people who had a knack for making you worry. He’d pretended to read, glancing now and then at the clock beside the door, sometimes bending close to the window for a look at the weather—clear and frozen as a crystal—sometimes coming alert at the sound of a car, but then time after time the car went on past, another meaningless Not-Jessica, as Sartre would say. When she arrived, she came roaring up to the back door and beeped the horn twice (she drove something small and European-looking), and when he opened the back door and went out to her—no jacket over his T-shirt, hunching his shoulders against the bitter cold and rubbing his hands, whining but widely grinning, “Where were you, Goldfarb? I thought you were dead!”—she opened the car-door (the inside light went on) and called out, “Come on, Mickelsson, lend a muscle!”
The back of the car was piled high with boxes and paper bags which, after they’d carried them in and opened them, he found to be filled with Christmas decorations, napkins and tablecloth, a fruitcake from Texas, a large gilded menorah, which she set up in his window and filled with candles—what he thought of that he wasn’t quite sure: he was no bigot, at least not in relation to Jews, and he didn’t give a damn what his neighbors thought; but all the same, all the same … She’d brought a creche, which she was now setting up on the coffeetable, handling the figures gently, like a child at her
dollhouse, sometimes leaning back to study her arrangement critically, like a painter at her easel; and comparing his feelings about the menorah to hers about the creche, a wave of self-revulsion rose in him. He leaned over beside her, resting one hand on his knee, and waved foolishly down at the glossy, brightly colored figures. “Nighty-bye, Jesus,” he said. She looked up at him, smiling, a sort o£ shadow moving over her features.
He nailed up the three Christmas wreaths she’d brought for the doors—the two large doors on the front porch, the smaller door in back—while she sorted out the Christmas tree lights and ornaments. “Where’s the tree?” she asked, looking around the room as if she thought it might be there but behind something.
“I’ll get the axe,” he said.
Her eyes widened with childish excitement. “We’re going to cut one?”
“Just like Joseph and Mary out behind the stable,” he said.
Again the shadow passed over her face, but whatever was bothering her she quickly put out of mind (he knew pretty well what was bothering her), and, taking his hand, she stood up. They got their coats on—it was now almost midnight—he got the axe from the shed, and they plowed through the crunchy salt-white snow to the starlit woods higher on the mountain, where there were evergreens of every size and shape, none of them quite right when one looked closely. In the end they chose one almost at random. He could cut off boughs where they grew too thickly and wire them in place where the growth was too sparse. “You’re good at that!” she cried as his axe bit in, slanting halfway through the trunk at one blow.
“As a child I was an axe murderer,” he said, and grinned at her.
She shook her head, smiling. He had a sense that suddenly she was standing hundreds of yards away, observing him as if from another century.
He swung three times more and the ten-foot tree toppled, falling slowly, softly, as Jessie called, hands beside her mouth, “Tim-burrr!” They put their hands around one another’s waists and stood for a long moment gazing at the fallen tree as if at some ancient mystery. Then, like two farm horses, they dragged it between them down the mountain.
As he built the stand for it, cutting, notching, nailing there in the livingroom beside the tree, Jessica fussing with candles, Mickelsson asked, “Jessie, how come there are stretch-marks on your stomach?”
He sensed her sudden stillness behind him. At last she said casually, “I had children. Two of them. Girls. I’ll show you their pictures sometime.”
“What happened?” he asked.
“They died,” she said. “Ages three and seven. It was one of those boating accidents. A long time ago.”
He waited for Jessica to say more, but no more came. He heard her move, behind him, to work on the candles at the further window.
“I’m sorry, Jessie,” he said.
After a moment she said, “Me too.”
He nailed the stand to the tree, clipped the excess boughs on one side and with picture-wire affixed them where they were needed. Then they moved chairs out of the way and, with a weight-lifter’s heave—branches and pine-needles scratching against his face—he raised the tree and placed it. They put on the lights, Jessica fussily giving him directions as he leaned into the tree from the step-ladder, Mickelsson swearing a little under his breath; then they put on the ornaments and tinsel. When everything was finished they turned off the room lights and sat side by side on the couch, gazing like children at the Christmas tree lights and their reflections in the windows.
Mickelsson said, when they’d been silent for what seemed a long time, “How long ago was the accident?”
“Six years,” she said. Gently, she squeezed the hand holding hers, telling him, he knew, to ask no more.
In his mind he formed the words, “I love you, Jessie,” but then held back, suddenly repelled by the beauty around him, repelled by time and his inadequacy, the deep cruelty of life this Christian mystery was supposed to have transmuted.
“I think it’s the prettiest tree I’ve ever seen,” she said.
They did not make love that night, though they lay side by side on the rug under the tree, hardly talking, eventually sleeping, waking up stiff and half frozen a little after sun-up.
Twenty minutes after Jessica left, Mickelsson, coming into the livingroom from the kitchen, found a visitor sitting under the tree: a cat. It was as large as any he’d ever seen, almost lynx size, made more lynx-like by its bobbed tail, medallion of some old war. The cat was almost all white, sooty white from end to end except for a gray cap around the partly missing right ear and another gray splotch on the rump. One eye was half closed by tissue like Scotch tape. It had an odd lump on its belly, and the turned-inward, absent-minded look of something dying.
“Hello, stranger,” Mickelsson said. His voice surprised him by its calm.
The cat sat on the rug between the tree and the woodstove, in the position of the Great Sphinx of Egypt except that the immense flat head was partly turned, watching him with yellow eyes. The cat’s neck was almost as wide as his shoulders. He was motionless except for the stump tail moving slowly from side to side.
Mickelsson put his hands in his pockets. “So you’re the mysterious noisemaker,” he said. “I’ve heard you, my friend, knocking things down in the cellar. I must say, for a cat you’re mighty clumsy.”
The tail went on moving. The eyes, aglitter with pinpoints of colored light, never shifted from Mickelsson’s face.
“Look,” Mickelsson said, holding his right hand out. “I have nothing against cats per se. But you’ll have to get over the idea that you own the livingroom.”
Though they were fifteen feet apart, Mickelsson moved carefully, making his way to the chair by the stereo twelve feet from the cat. He could feel the quick ticking of some muscle or vein near his heart. His emotions were in a turmoil he had no time to understand. Slowly, carefully, he seated himself. For all his fear of the cat, he knew, with some part of his mind, that he was glad the cat had come.
“OK,” he said, “so you’ve decided you live here.”
The cat settled toward the floor a little, stating as clearly as he could have done in words that, sick and weary as he was, he was willing to deal. Abruptly but carefully, Mickelsson stood up again and moved toward the kitchen. The cat watched. Mickelsson went to the cupboard and took out a cereal bowl, then went to the refrigerator for the milk-carton, poured milk into the bowl, holding the carton with two hands to check the trembling, then put the milk-carton away and carried the bowl into the livingroom, watching that it didn’t slosh, never looking at the cat. He moved toward where the cat waited and, four feet away, set down the bowl of milk. The cat had had dealings with human beings before, it seemed. It watched the lowering of the bowl, the withdrawal of the human hands, then closed its eyes. It would drink in its own good time. Perhaps it was from cats, Mickelsson thought, that human beings had learned the proper way of dealing with gods.
“OK,” Mickelsson said, and sat down again in the chair by the stereo.
The cat went on watching him, eyes little slits, never glancing at the bowl of milk. His tail was still now. Then he turned his head away and, after a moment, began to lick his paws as if he’d lived here all his life.
Mickelsson waited, cold gray light hanging around them like a fog. The cat went on licking its paws.
He thought of his ex-wife. “You’re my dearest, dearest, dearest,” she had said to him again and again, year after miserable year. Surely it had been true. “What a good, good face you have,” she had said, touching him. He’d felt the same about her. He couldn’t remember why the whole thing had gone wrong.
He turned to look out the window. Across the road there were two hunters starting down through the weeds in the direction of the pond. He closed his eyes.
He remembered for no reason something his son had once told him about whales, how the mother would sometimes swim for miles with the calf cradled under her flipper, not for protection, not for any reason but fondness.
Mi
ckelsson, if he were a decent human being, would be a terrorist in defense of whales, yes. Nasty, self-hired gun to the untainted and lordly. But in fact he would never be a terrorist in defense of anything, not even a writer of vituperative attacks, like his mental life’s hero, the mad malicious cackler, dancing, screaming, blowing the cover of anti-Semites, whorish piety, and worshippers of the Reich—Fritz, crazed Fritz, whose dream of perfection was the wise, serene saint, but who himself achieved only the glee of the buffoon, maddening the devils of the moral majority with his cracked and fake-cracked murderous clowning, wisdom full of pranks: “Why I Am So Wise” “Why I Am So Clever” “Why I Write Such Good Books.” …
On the rug between the couch and the woodstove, the cat feigned sleep. Across the road, not far off, the hunters’ guns began blasting, POOM POOM POOM, like cannons.
9
Alan Blassenheim and Brenda were the first to arrive, triggering Mickelsson’s familiar guilt about Nugent. He should certainly have asked Nugent, if he was going to ask them. The boy had a desperate need of friends, as even Lawler had seen, and he’d certainly done everything to deserve Peter Mickelsson’s friendship. It was all very well to say, as Jessie had said when he’d mentioned his problem—but Jessie’s opinion was not fully informed; he hadn’t made clear to her the apparent extent of the young man’s desolation—“Look, Pete, it’s a party.” She searched his face, then said tentatively, “If you’re really convinced that this Nugent would be a wet blanket, then better to leave him out.” The question was, to put it in the mincing language of an ethicist, what would the probable consequences be when Nugent learned that Blassenheim had been invited while he, Nugent, had been excluded? One could give oneself a thousand excuses and palliations. Friendship was not duty, one should consider the good of the group as a whole, et cetera, et cetera—but the trouble was that Nugent, for all his brilliance, would understand none of those excuses in his heart: his portion of unhappiness would be increased. Mickelsson couldn’t even say with perfect honesty that in deciding against Nugent he had fashionably (however stupidly) set his own good above another’s. He would probably enjoy having Nugent here, getting to know him in a slightly more relaxed atmosphere. No, he’d given in to the side of his heart that was herd-controlled: Nugent would require an excess of attention, limiting Mickelsson’s freedom to dispense hostly blessings equally on all. Now, seeing Alan and Brenda drive up, he knew that he had made a mistake.