He had married to settle himself into a certain life, to place himself in a certain relationship to his own family and to her family, whom he liked well enough. He liked everyone well enough. He had wanted to come to the end of uncertainty. He had wanted an end to the confusion of emotions that had made his adolescence miserable, and it frightened him to think that, at thirty-four, he had really settled nothing. He could not control his emotions. They broke and flooded about him, teasingly.
Still, nothing would happen.
His wife went to take care of the baby and he picked up her magazine. He leafed through it hurriedly. Have a Gala BirthdayParty for Your Child! He passed this by. How to Create Happiness. Drinking his coffee, he skimmed through an article, The Five Basic Don’ts: “Don’t worry needlessly. Don’t expect too much, particularly from your husband. Don’t compare yourself to your friends. Don’t take anything for granted. Don’t daydream.” He was irritated by this: why not daydream? He turned the page and came upon another article, no, a short story about a wedding…a soft, somber drawing of a big-eyed girl in a wedding dress…the first paragraph went, “Elinor was certain that the telephone had rung, but now she heard nothing. Bitter tears filled her eyes…” Over the page, an article by a doctor, Intimate Problems of Marriage. “The most destructive problem in a marriage is lack of communication, particularly concerning love, sex, and money…” And pages of hairdos for spring, girls with glossy healthy hair smiling out at him, girlish girls, no threat, with ribbons, with tiny buds in their hair, with gleaming white sanitary smiles, not threatening him or any other man, about to break into a chant: Love us, only love us!
Behind everything lay love, a hunger and a mystery. He was in love himself, he loved his family, and he loved himself, in a sense, as a man in this family; he loved that role. Of himself apart from that role he did not think since that self did not exist, nor was there the possibility of its coming into existence. A sudden thought: why not move out of Detroit? He wanted to see another landscape. To Europe? A trip to Europe? He wanted to see his family by a foreign river, by an ocean, he wanted them joyful with freedom and the knowledge of their being totally, permanently loved. He wanted to escape Detroit with them.
And now, would his car start? He went out to see. It was always a surprise, and he felt both an exasperating helplessness and a kind of detached, amused contempt, wondering if it would start. His fate lay out of his hands. That morning they would investigate the complex causes of European decay in the eighteenth century. Decay always had complex causes whereas health was simple: was there a riddle in that, or was it a lie? His friend Max had left one of his books on the floor in front, a paperback copy of King Lear. Max was working for a Ph.D. in English and was harassed, lonely, inarticulate…always losing things. It was good to have such a friend, to invite him to dinner, to talk out his problems with him. All this was familiar, familiar. Out of habit, he leafed through the book. Books attracted him. There were many footnotes, many marginal notes in blue ink. He felt a vague apprehension, glancing at the lines of poetry. He did not trust Shakespeare. Tragedy had always terrified him with its blunt, raw stops and starts, its elegant language and bloody endings and calm revivals. A sense of apocalypse followed by an ordinary morning. Horatio and Fortinbras playing chess in a drafty, velvet-hung room, yawning and patient, good men left over to fight a good fight, ignorant enough to survive. And there was always a Cassio left over, bruised but energetic, and Kent dazed with the past but optimistic enough to take on the future, the long rise of history. He leafed through the book, not letting his eyes linger too long on anything: “But yet thou art my flesh, my blood, my daughter; / Or rather a disease that’s in my flesh…” “Hang him instantly. Pluck out his eyes…” “My sickness grows upon me…”
Making so much out of death! So much out of life! He felt a little sick himself, closing the book. No, it did no good. It was pointless to think about death, about life. Getting through the day…The day was a part of the enormous, indecipherable granite block of his life, which he had to chip at, chew at, tease and plead with, having no instruments sharp or powerful enough to do what another man might do with one blow; love, sex, money…The dream of Europe had become slightly stale. He and his wife had talked it over too many times, had played out their mutual roles with too much enthusiasm; that was that. The future. But at least his car worked, it started at least—wasn’t that a good omen? A chip the size of a splinter off that great granite block, a tombstone of a block with his name on it: the car starting this morning. If he was late for this class again and the students trooped out to complain, then what, what might happen next semester? He owed money, he had three children.
He tossed the copy of King Lear into the back seat. Bad to glance at such things so early in the morning. He was too sensitive. Weak. What did he have to give to anyone, even his wife? He was closer to his wife than to anyone in the world, yet what did he have to give her that was uniquely his own? His permanent love, his intelligent, serious, permanent love?
The day passed. Evening came. At the school in Highland Park, before class, the girl was waiting to see him. He had asked her to come down early. He was nervous, approaching her, anxious to see whether she would be there at all and then mildly gratified that she was—standing in the dim corridor, very much alone, waiting for him. He wanted to draw his hands roughly across his eyes but he kept his face serious, smiling a serious smile.
They said hello. She was quiet, shadowy. He sat at his allotted desk (shared with a daytime instructor, whom he never saw) and the girl sat across from him. Gentle, very quiet. He grew cheerful and boisterous, imitating an uncle of his. What weather! What air! He had to say a few things, a few foolish things. Then he took her compositions out of his briefcase and glanced through them, though he was perfectly familiar with them. The girl sat watching him. After a few minutes he said, smiling to comfort himself and her, “I’m afraid you have a problem with writing, Miss Wendall.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, don’t be sorry, that’s why you’re a student.” A friendly smile, a poster smile. Put her at ease; she is a student. “That’s why you’re taking the course, but I can anticipate some difficulty in your handling the next assignment. You seem to have a definite problem with writing, with…expressing yourself in words, on paper.”
He smiled, feeling his eyes crinkle, feeling the lines deepen in his face. Both jaunty and old tonight, jaunty in the girl’s presence but old from a long day of work, rushing around, a little put off by the girl’s youth. She did not look much more than twenty. He was excited by this and resentful, both. His head began to ache. He said, “I wish I could see some improvement from paper to paper, but you seem to be making the same mistakes. They’re not mistakes exactly—”
“I suppose it’s the way I think,” she said.
“It might be that, I don’t know. No, I don’t want to say that,” he said quickly, alarmed. He avoided her still, sad look and shuffled through the papers again. He was too clumsy a man to handle this. He looked through the papers helplessly.
There was silence. The girl did not move, very obedient, respectful. As he looked through her papers, staring at the handwriting that now made no sense to him, saying nothing, he had a sudden sense of her restraining an impulse to reach out to him, to call out to him. But no. Nothing. He looked up and all was ordinary.
He cleared his throat. “Do you understand my comments on your papers? Do you feel they’re fair? What do you think of my criticism?”
It was a ruse of his, a familiar plea: pretending to be at the mercy of a student. But really he was in control. The girl did not go along with him. She looked confused.
She said, “But I don’t know enough to think anything.”
He laughed. “Miss Wendall, that isn’t true. Not at all. For instance, do you understand what I mean by…lack of coherence?”
And then, as if giving up suddenly, he saw that she was a beautiful gir
l, sitting across a battered desk from him, helpless. But her beauty had nothing to do with hair, skin, eyes—it seemed deeper, a kind of wound, a bewilderment. He could not make sense of it—he felt only helpless before it, himself. No one would ever take a picture of her for a magazine; she wasn’t clear, she couldn’t come into focus, she was a threat. Her look was uncanny. In class, while he droned on for an hour and a half, sneaking looks at his watch, the class of students listened quietly to him and among them the girl listened, watching him, seeming to open herself to him continually, apart from the others. But was it true that she was unlike the others? Wasn’t there something sleazy and unsubstantial about her, something that might rub off under the thumb?
Her silence made him nervous.
“Well, forget about that. Tell me something about yourself,” he said.
She stirred, coming obediently to life. She almost smiled. “There isn’t much to tell.”
“Nothing in your background to explain this? I mean, this problem, the way your sentences don’t make sense—don’t follow one another logically, I mean,” he said, embarrassed, afraid of seeming crude. “I mean, is there anything in your past to account for your being confused maybe? Uncertain about anything?”
“I don’t know.”
“Has anyone ever discouraged you from expressing your own ideas? I mean, a teacher or someone in your family? Argued with you? Rejected your ideas?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You seem so hesitant.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, don’t be sorry,” he said, laughing a little noisily. “My God! I only wonder what’s holding you down. Obviously you have something to say. You’re intelligent. But this—this”—he tapped her papers in a hearty gesture—“this doesn’t show it.”
“I’m sorry,” said the girl.
“I wish I could help you more.
I wish I could do something.”
“I never had trouble…”
“Go on, don’t stop. You never had trouble?”
“I never had trouble except after my father left.”
“Your father left?”
“He left my mother.”
She spoke shyly, yet there seemed to be a strange pleasure in her confession. It was the first intimate fact about her he had learned and it gave him pleasure too. Her coat was still buttoned, a cheap yellow coat that looked lemon-colored in this light.
He leaned forward gently. “So your father left your family?”
“Yes. I was fifteen then.”
And how old are you now? he wanted to ask. Her youthfulness irritated him. But he said, “I’m sorry to hear that.” It showed in his voice, that he was sorry. She glanced at him in surprise. The moment weighed strangely upon them, and he felt that his face might break into a stupid grin. “But you…you’re all right now? Do you live at home?”
“Not now. I moved out.”
“Do you live alone?”
A strange question. Shouldn’t have asked…Into the kind, patient, generous range of his life many people had come, students and friends, and he had always opened himself to them all: he was a good man. He looked like a good man. His father, who had run a dry-cleaning store, had been a good man also for fifty or sixty years, and it was in the genes, fated. The careless and the lonely were drawn to his shabby, pleasant looks, assured by his uncut hair, his squinting, his groping after words, his soft uncertain voice, even the frequent trembling of his fingers early in the morning. His eyes were blue, a little prominent, and he felt them get bloodshot as his long, exhausting day wore on, tiny threads of blood cracking to the yellowish surface of the eyeball. The backs of his large, square fingers, which sometimes trembled, were covered with fine golden-brown hairs. It seemed to him suddenly that his wife was with him in this office. She was leaning forward to peer into his face, watching and judging.
“Did you say you lived alone?”
“Yes. Alone.”
She had the appearance of a certain kind of student—night classes, courses stretched out over a number of years, hopeless. Lost and thoughtful. Her eyes were clear, surprising, self-conscious. What to do? For some seconds they had been looking at each other. Between them, on the nicked surface of the desk, lay her latest paper with red marks on it. He was alarmed to see how cruel they looked, his marks—red, angry exclamations shouting out against the small, regular, mediocre lines of her handwriting.
“Is my writing hopeless?” she said.
“I wouldn’t say that, no. No, of course not.”
“Is it…is it the writing of an insane person?”
“Of course not!” he said, shocked.
He fell silent, wondering at her perception. The writing of an insane person? Yes, that was true, true enough. And yet she was not insane. He was certain of that. He avoided her troubled look as he avoided her gaze in class—it opened too much to him, it disturbed him. Shy and naïve but strangely knowing, a puzzle. What did she think of him? Intelligence. Tenderness. His wife might glance over at him and see everything there was to see, having heard years ago everything there was to hear, helpless herself to change this fact, a fact of history. She saw through him—why not? She had constructed him, partly. She had helped imagine him for himself. She could not help seeing through his try at calm, elegant language (in imitation of a favorite professor) to his panic, his exhaustion, to the shabbiness of the tweed jacket he wore, the feeble exoticism of his necktie of red and green scimitars, or parrots’ beaks, this crazy necktie he had had for too many years. Did his students notice his shabby clothes, or him? He taught English composition here two evenings a week, from eight to nine-thirty, and the fifteen adults enrolled in his class watched him on those long evenings as if he were a figure in their restless dreams, incomprehensible in his smiling irony and verbiage and perhaps worth listening to, of value, if only they could keep awake. On those nights the air was heavy with fatigue and futility. They all liked him very much, he knew that. It was part of their fatigue and futility. Several housewives, a sour-faced taxi driver, a milk-delivery man, three men who worked at Ford’s on the day-shift, all of them worn to the bone by other lives, other identities, so that their shoulders were permanently rounded. He would have liked to toss his book aside and say the hell with it and caress their aching shoulders, pass a cool hand over their sad aching eyes. To save them! To change their lives!
“Is there any hope for me?” the girl said suddenly.
He awakened. For a moment he thought she was asking about her life, any hope for her life? But they were talking about her writing. She was his student. Nervously he said, “Of course there’s hope. Of course, you have to keep reading and writing, practice writing. I’ll give you some books you might like to read. You’ll improve, please don’t worry.”
He caught in this girl’s alert, dreamy look a peculiar kind of intelligence—not much surprised her. A sudden pang of desire for her ran through him. He leaned forward and brought his arms down on the desk, in front of him.
“Why…what made you say that, about your writing? Like an insane person’s writing? Why did you say that particular thing?”
“I just thought of it.”
“Are you troubled about something?”
“The usual things.”
“What?”
“How to live, what to do, how to get through certain days,” she said. She smiled slowly.
“Do you get a ride home after class, or take the bus?”
“I take the bus.”
“It isn’t dangerous?”
“Nothing has happened to me yet.”
“But it might be dangerous, a girl like you—”
“I can’t help that.”
“No, I suppose you can’t help that,” he said slowly.
He knew he ought to dismiss her. Time to stop this. Out in the corridor someone was waiting, another student. He glanced through her papers again
, frowning, though he was tired of this pretense and tired, really, of this girl, whom he had been thinking about for too long. It was absurd, his thinking about her. He did not need her in his life. He did not even have time for her. And, being himself, he had no idea of how to approach her had he wanted anything from her—he had been married too long.
“Someone is waiting to see you, I think Mrs. Thibodeau,” she said.
“All right.”
She left. He had got through it: he hadn’t offered her a ride home. A little relieved, he prepared himself for Mrs. Thibodeau, one of the class talkers, nervous and defensive. She came to him with a hefty, imposing need, sliding onto the chair Maureen had vacated.
He said very genially, “How are you, Mrs. Thibodeau?”
Only a few minutes before class.
That night, after class, he stood around talking with a few students and did not watch the girl leave. Walking to his car, he did not glance over at the small crowd of people waiting for a bus. She was protected by that crowd. She could take care of herself. He drove home and felt his attraction for her lessen, stretched out thin. He was a husband, a father of three small children, a man with a certain identity. This identity drew him home. He knew where to go. It was the girl’s voice that struck him most, perhaps, a slightly drawling, dreamy voice with a certain authority and expectation. Did it remind him of something? What did it remind him of? When he read her assignments he could almost hear her speaking in that small thoughtful voice: It is the elaboration of justice out of man’s control, it is in the hands of God. That was the way she wrote. Where did she get such words from, such nonsense? It was insane and yet he understood it. And it was touching, he thought, that she believed in God.
Very dark out now, a long drive. Shopping carts from a supermarket out on the street. Dangerous. A few Negro boys were fooling around on a corner. Their hair grew bushy and wild, as if their heads had been forced out of shape by some exotic ritual, giving them secret powers. Tumbled vacant lots…a mattress lying near the sidewalk…a look of blowy, blowsy disorder…a block of apartment buildings. Did Maureen Wendall live in one of these ugly buildings? How to attach the ugliness of her life to her, to drag her down with it? He wondered if she saw these same sights, one after another, as she rode the bus back and forth in that pack of tired, helpless people.