them

  He had come by accident into the lives of such people, his students. He was studying at Wayne State University for an advanced degree in sociology, having switched out of history because he had grown despairing and impatient with the dead, eager for contact with life, with the living. He had married fairly young, he had three small children, which amazed him, and because of this—the children—he had hired himself out for part-time work through the university’s English office, dignified and desperate in his old tweed jacket and his trimmed, neat brown beard, a gentlemanly young man, a gracious victim. He impressed his superiors as a victim who was not self-pitying but gracious: in short, the kind of man they wanted. So he had hung around the English office asking for work, any kind of work. He was qualified to teach at any dismal extension center or community college or junior college because, six years before, he had earned a Master’s Degree in English, when he’d had other plans for his life—of all these “other plans” he tried not to think. His years in English studies were his blue period, best forgotten.

  He was taking three courses at the university this semester: a graduate course in social-psychological aspects of organizational theory, a seminar in human ecology, and another seminar in sociological methodology. He was a research assistant for one of his professors, a stern, busy man, and he spent many hours of his valuable day in the library, charting statistics. He ate his lunch in the library stacks. In the afternoon he ran across campus to teach an Adult Education course called “Introduction to Sociology,” which met three times a week from four-thirty until five-twenty, in a decrepit university building marked for destruction, overlooking the Lodge Expressway. Then he ran back to the library and to his carrel and took notes on his own reading, scribbling on note-cards in different colors of ink—red, blue, green—writing very fast. Each color indicated a different kind of information. His dinner was what remained of his lunch, maybe an apple. He had no time to be hungry. Sometime between five-thirty and seven he spent a dime calling his wife, who got lonely at the apartment. They talked fast, exchanging news. One of the children had a cold. A letter from her mother had come and she was afraid to open it. How did he feel? Was his throat still sore? He couldn’t afford to get sick again. When was he coming home tonight? Often close to tears, bored and exhausted herself, his wife pleaded with him in her sensible voice: why was he always running around? why were they so poor? and please, please, he mustn’t borrow money from Fred again, that was shameful, she wouldn’t stand for it…Why was life such a mess? Under stress her voice took on a stubborn, melodious sound; he could imagine her skin growing flushed.

  He loved life, he loved living. But certainly it was a mess. It was jammed up, bottled up, impossible. On Tuesdays and Thursdays he had to drive up to that junior college, located in a high school, through a cluttered waste of sad-eyed buildings; when his car broke down, as it frequently did, he had to catch a bus himself. At least he could prepare his lesson on the bus and always put it off until then, when he could run through it feverishly. He was paid $250 a semester for this course. “What is wrong with this sentence? Can anyone explain what is wrong with this sentence?” he would ask his sunken-eyed housewives and truck drivers, gazing out into their furrowed, honest faces as they struggled over a mimeographed exercise he had borrowed from someone in the English Department at the last minute. His students hung onto the mimeographed sheets as if these papers might explain everything that was wrong, as if they were keys to the enormous ultimate mistake of the universe. Maureen Wendall was among them, waiting. Was everything about to be explained to her? Was a revelation near?

  He thought it touching, her belief in God. He was a Christian himself though he didn’t want to push it too far; he never pushed any of his beliefs too far.

  When he finally got home that night he went into the bedroom at once and lay down. He seemed to have collapsed. His wife leaned over him, frightened. He heard himself mutter, on the verge of crying, “I can’t do it. I can’t keep up this goddam schedule, this life is killing me. I can’t keep it up any longer…”

  Crazily he thought his wife might change everything by telling him he could stop. They could all go away somewhere, escape around the world! Why not? But she said instead, not so confident now, suddenly frightened of him and his weakness, “What can you do? What else?”

  So in the morning he was ready to go again. He was a man of thirty-four who looked years younger, perhaps because he had no choice. He was in perpetual motion.

  3

  He was perpetually waiting for something to happen—anxious that it might happen and that it might not happen. He had no idea what it could be. He had begun waiting for it early in life. For a while it had had to do with the priesthood, then it had had to do with marriage, now it was connected vaguely with the mystery of dreams, those disturbing dreams that seemed to belong to another man but had to be his own. During the day, awake, he had no time to dream. He rushed about from one enormous glass-and-concrete building to another, cutting across university lawns, past the white concrete walks and spaces and benches, having no time to see anything, crossing streets against traffic, caught out in the November rain without an umbrella and comically, horribly alone among the thousands of hurrying students—a man who was waiting for something to happen, in spite of his hurry. At the back of his mind was a premonition of blankness, an ultimate disappointment—that he was no more than the ordinary man he had always tried to be, and that his fate was to be ordinary.

  His car was working. Tuesday evening again, another Tuesday evening. He drove out to Highland Park and felt the tension rising in him—not concern for the weary class but concern over the girl, whose face he had been trying desperately to recall all weekend. If she did not show up…? On the several evenings when she had been absent he’d felt an unnatural irritation—a gnawing ache, an embarrassment. Too sensitive. His wife sometimes complained that he was weak, that his being nice was only a phase of his being weak, and he understood that this was true. Everything was true. But he resented the fact that this girl, helpless as she was, had a life of her own and had no real need of him. She was beyond his influence. His feelings were somehow in her control, but she herself was beyond him. And he felt not just this unreasonable apprehension about the girl but a sense of disorder, of danger, that had something to do with the space through which he had to drive—up along Third Avenue past the Fisher Center and Ford Hospital and into the ominous congestion of Detroit’s residential streets. Too many shapes in the corners of his eyes…too many buildings, gas stations, kids on bicycles. There was the pressure of too many people. Pressure. A pressure on the eyes and on the brain. Where, in this dangerous landscape, could he be going? It did not seem right that he, the son of his father, should have been born for any destination of this type. He said to himself, I want…I want to…but he could not think of concluding words, he could not complete his thought. He was too exhausted, he could not think clearly. His life was a joke. The variety of shapes and colors along this street was a joke. Illusions danced before his eyes like the relentless strips of paper pennants decorating gas stations. He was driving from one woman, his wife, to another woman, whom he didn’t know. Yet his heart pounded with the need to get to her.

  Always, he had been a man drawn to adventure—to the longing for it. His mind was filled with movies and books. He loved the commonest of things, movies on television, movies at third-run neighborhood theaters, not just because his life as a student was taken up so savagely with the uncommon, the intellectual, but because his body felt a natural gravitation toward the excitement of the banal. He was an intelligent man, yet he was perfectly ordinary and anxious to remain ordinary. He was ordinarily good-looking. He felt at times gaunt with normality, happy with it and yet distressed, wanting to call out to people on the street, “Yes, this is me but not really me. Look again, look closely!”

  And if the girl didn’t come that evening?

  When he hurried into the classroom, already
five minutes late, she was not there. Not coming. He picked up a gnawed pencil left behind on the desk, examined it with an unusual concern, and put it down again. Time to begin. Everyone else was in the room, waiting. No, not everyone else—Hendrix the cab driver was absent. He cleared his throat. Then the girl entered the room and everything was all right: everything became perfect.

  He talked. Maureen sat with her coat unbuttoned, looking tired; he tried not to glance at her. Overhead the cheap fluorescent lighting flickered. Bad for the eyes and bad for the brain. Objects lost their correct outlines and substance its dimensions in such light. He felt a foreign disquieting strength in himself, an almost giddy sense of power. Mechanical talk, a familiar lesson—he knew this all so well, had known it for years; he was in control and talking to them, talking, exerting power over these strangers. And yet alert, expectant. He liked teaching. He loved teaching. He loved the pull of their eyes upon him, the pull of his voice upon them. He seemed to be transformed into their idea of him, losing his own familiar shabby outline in the light from the fluorescent tubes.

  When the long session came to an end he felt a sense of excitement but also of loss. He was baffled at this, his excessive weariness. He gave so much to his students, even the most helpless of his students, and in turn they gave him nothing. Not really. His life was rushing by, days were being snatched from him in handfuls, he was nearly thirty-five years old…Maureen stood and began to button her coat. Each movement of her fingers was a secret movement, with meaning: he believed desperately in signs and symbols. For weeks, hadn’t this girl been trying to communicate with him? Had he misunderstood? Had he imagined everything?

  He had to get to her before she escaped. He said, “Let me drive you home tonight.”

  She looked only mildly surprised. Very pleased. She smiled and said, “Thank you.”

  And so that had happened. He gathered up his books and papers and dropped them in his briefcase. He had no idea what he was doing. Most of these things were props—he didn’t need them, he felt that students expected books and papers on a teacher’s desk, it looked better. Under the girl’s scrutiny he glanced down at himself and saw, or half saw, that he was dressed no better than any of his students. The same green and red necktie he’d worn the other day, a shirt of narrow blue stripes, a jacket of dull plaid, trousers of dark gray, and his shoes were brown, a scuffed suede. But there was comfort in being so mismatched. There was a kind of innocence to it.

  He took her to a restaurant for coffee. He asked her if she wanted anything else and she said no, nothing else. He himself had a piece of pie; he was suddenly hungry, violently hungry. The girl watched him eat. She was very slender, thin. Why did she live alone? Did she really live alone? He tried to keep the excitement in him under control. Here they were. Maureen with a peculiar birdlike poise, waiting. Her face slender, slightly angular, her skin translucent.

  “Tell me more about yourself,” he said. “Where do you work?”

  “Nowhere special.”

  “Last week you were saying, about your father…”

  “That was just to explain why I’m so stupid.”

  “But you’re not stupid.”

  “I’m slow. I have trouble.”

  “You said that your father left home?”

  Her face colored slightly. “Yes, he left us.”

  “Why?”

  “To get married again.”

  “Did he just…leave?”

  “He walked out. He got fed up and walked out—it happens all the time.”

  “And what about your family?”

  “Oh, we got along. Ma never had any trouble getting along if she had to.”

  “Did you ever see your father again?”

  “Oh, sure. He got married. I see them sometimes.”

  “You don’t mind seeing them after what he did?”

  “I don’t hate him or anything, why should I mind seeing him?”

  “You don’t hate him?”

  “No,” Maureen said. She smiled slightly. “He fell in love with a woman and left my mother—he said he couldn’t help it. He tried to explain it to my brother and me, how he’d fallen in love, but we already knew. We knew.”

  “You and your brother—you didn’t hate him?”

  “Why should we hate him?”

  She crossed her arms shyly. The sleeves of her yellow sweater were pushed up and strained, the cheap wool pulled tight. It crossed his mind that a girl like this, with the same bright pink lipstick and the same sweater, was the kind of girl often found dead in some remote lonely place—there was something permanently doomed about the heart-shaped locket she wore on a thin chain around her neck. It had perhaps belonged to many girls and had been passed down to this one. He could imagine headlines on an inside page in the newspaper and he could imagine lurid pulp-photographs in a detective magazine: here is the shed in which the body was found, here are the “articles of clothing” found two hundred yards away…

  Maureen was saying, “I love my father in spite of all that. He’s all right. It was over between them, my father and my mother, and he was still young, and he just fell in love with someone else. I can see that. So I moved out on my own and started school. I had a hard time making myself go through with it. More than anything else I want to get through college and get a good job, you know, not like typing all my life, I want to make something of myself. I had to force myself to come into class that first night, but I did it. That was your class. It was very important in my life, it changed my life.”

  He was unable to follow all this but he heard the last part. “How did it change your life?”

  “You. The way you teach.”

  “I…I’m glad to hear that. But you’re not afraid any longer, are you?”

  She made a fluttery gesture with her fingers, to show disgust. “Oh sure. I can’t help it. I start thinking about how I’m going to fail, how everyone else knows more than I do, or I think about someone following me home. I live alone and I get afraid.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “It’s nothing I can help. I don’t know how.”

  “Couldn’t you live with someone? Another girl?”

  “I don’t know anyone that well.”

  She lowered her eyes as if she were conscious of his fascination. Was it that obvious?

  She said, “I shouldn’t tell you this because you might think I’m crazy. But sometimes I feel…I feel as if I could die, everything is so lonely. But I don’t want anyone near me. I think that nothing will ever change, that my life will go on like this forever. I think that someone might be waiting in the hall for me, when I come home. It’s crazy. I know better. But it seems to me that I can’t keep going, unless there is the promise of something better, a new life. There has got to be more for me than this, but I’ve got to do it myself. I have got to make it happen myself.”

  He stared at her. “Many people feel that way.”

  “You don’t feel that way, do you?” she said shyly.

  “Sometimes.”

  “But aren’t you married, don’t you have a family?”

  “That doesn’t make any difference.”

  “It doesn’t?”

  “I don’t know any answers.”

  “I’m sure you do.”

  “No. Not me. No answers,” he said with a smile.

  He drove her home. The girl said nervously, not sitting back against the seat, “You don’t think it’s wrong, driving me home like this?”

  “Wrong, why?”

  “If the other students found out?”

  “They’re not going to find out.”

  She looked over at him. He made his mouth stretch into a kindly, reassuring smile, but he was very agitated.

  They parked in front of her apartment building. It was hardly more than a large house. Unpromising, a little shabby. What he had imagined for her. “Would you like me to s
ee you upstairs?” he said. He was afraid she would open the door suddenly and leave.

  “You don’t have to.”

  “I want to.”

  “I’ll be safe enough.”

  “Do you go out with anyone in particular? Any man?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “There’s no one I like. No one I know.”

  “No one?”

  “I haven’t gone out with anyone, like that, since I was sixteen years old. Do you believe me?”

  She looked at him sideways; it might have been that she had revealed something bizarre. He did not understand. “I…I believe you. But why not?”

  “I’m afraid.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of men.”

  He felt oddly touched by this. He could not quite understand. “But don’t you want to get married?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I just don’t.”

  “But is something…wrong? What’s wrong?”

  “Sometimes I think I would like to be like other people; I would like to see men sometimes, go out places, whatever people do, but then I can’t go through with it. I’m afraid of being too close to people, I don’t want to get hurt.”

  “Why would anyone want to hurt you?”

  “But people hurt you. It happens. It happens,” she said, glancing at him.

  “It’s so strange of you to be afraid. Don’t be afraid!” He spoke nervously and jestingly, as if teasing her. She stared at him in silence. He leaned over and rubbed her cold hands. The action took no preparation, no special nerve. Between the two of them there arose a sudden agitation, a breathlessness that was almost painful. He remembered first touching his wife, he remembered their wedding night, the birth of their first child: agitation, this kind of agitation. “Let me come upstairs,” he said, begging, “I want to see where you live. I won’t stay long.”