He experienced an old man’s ecstasy: unsustained, fading as soon as felt.
She didn’t stay that time. When she finally did return to her apartment, Maude Ann’s door was closed. Dorsey’s watch said it was ten minutes past three, a time of night when the only thing worth doing was to take a shower and then try to get some sleep.
It happened three times after that. Then it was in the past, Dorsey thought: permanently in the past.
In class, Carlo Pavorese is gleeful. He is digressing about non-Abelian Yang-Mills gauge fields with smiling concentration and brilliant methodological rapidity, his chalk squeaking fiercely on the classroom’s blackboard. He asks his students questions that they can’t begin to answer, and he delights in their conceptual blankness, their uninformed youth. From the side of the seminar room Dorsey, who is auditing this class, despite the fact that she has been granted her degree, watches him put his old intelligence on show, not for the sake of education but to leave the young bearded blue-jeaned men in the shade, this one time. They don’t know what’s hitting them. He glances at Dorsey surreptitiously. Does she see the change she has wrought in him, how she has transformed him from a domesticated pedagogue to a terrifying symmetrician who scatters mathematical epigrams and one-liners? One of the students, from Taiwan, who has trouble with English, has brought in a tape recorder, and at the end of thirty minutes he frantically turns over the cassette tape to its blank side, but the machine jams—he cannot keep the RECORD button locked down—and in the middle of his performative utterances Carlo Pavorese sees the student’s impotent fumbling efforts with his machine, and the professor smiles, delightedly.
They are in the Faculty Club, walled with oak, sitting across from each other at a small corner table nestled near an ivy-covered window. A cut red rose is in a glass vase off to the side. Carlo Pavorese has had a good morning, and he pours Dorsey a glass of Chablis from a carafe. She shakes her head, but he seems incapable of noticing any denials in any form from her. He is talkative today, a monologist, a soliloquician. He talks about travel, the cuisine of different countries. He compares the customs of Ireland and the Soviet Union in the manner of treating visiting dignitaries. Have you ever noticed, he asks, the temperamental similarities between the Irish and the White Russians: their passion for orthodoxy and terror, their thirst for alcohol and the whip, their habit of endless grieving, the warmth of their sentimental attachments? She’s not listening closely to this; she knows that he hasn’t noticed the failure of her attention. Dorsey is looking at the window, at the chandelier, and at the floor.
“I brought you a poem,” Carlo Pavorese says abruptly, reaching into his sportcoat pocket. “I want to show you this poem.” He hands it to her, just at the moment that the waiter brings her the dish she ordered, broiled sea bass. The poem has been typed out—she can recognize the type style from Carlo’s upstairs Underwood—but there is no name attached to it.
“I don’t want to read a poem now,” she says.
“All you have to do is glance at it,” he tells her. “Maybe you could just skim it.”
“I’ve just been served my lunch,” she says. “Let’s save it for after the meal.”
His hand does not withdraw. “A poem,” he says. “How often do I give you a poem?”
“How often do you write them?” She is trying to eat her lunch.
“You can eat and read this poem.” It is still being waved in her face like a flag. “It’s a short poem.”
“All right, all right.”
She unfolds it and puts it down on the table to her left, where the salad bowl had been until the waiter took it away.
CROSSING
It was evening when we came to the river
with a low moon over the desert
that we had lost in the mountains, forgotten,
what with the cold and the sweating
and the ranges barring the sky.
And when we found it again,
in the dry hills down by the river,
half withered, we had
the hot winds against us.
There were two palms by the landing;
the yuccas were flowering; there was
a light on the far shore, and tamarisks.
We waited a long time, in silence.
Then we heard the oars creaking
and afterwards, I remember,
the boatman called to us.
We did not look back at the mountains.
At first she doesn’t know what she thinks of it. But the poem does not seem to be a gift. The use of “we” in the poem makes her uncomfortable. And because she is carrying around Carlo’s shadow with her, she no longer has to be polite to him about everything he does.
“Did you write this?” she asks.
“Why?”
“Curiosity.”
“All right. Let’s say ‘a friend wrote it.’ Let’s say that. What do you think of it?”
Dorsey lifts her wine glass, sips from it, puts the glass down and leans back to gaze steadily at Carlo. “A friend wrote it? In that case, I don’t like it,” she says quietly. “It’s not a good poem.”
His face is rigid. “How would you know?” Now his expression flickers in and out of its gargoyle mode.
“Because”—Dorsey stares at him now—“I’m an intelligent woman, and I can read. All right. Let’s say your friend wrote this. Who is this ‘we’ in the poem? And look at how inept this third line is, with the clause introduced by ‘that.’ It’s misplaced, isn’t it? It seems to modify ‘desert’ but it really modifies ‘moon.’ And ranges don’t ‘bar’ a sky. It’s the wrong verb for that context.”
Carlo Pavorese watches her, his hands stilled on the table.
“All right,” Dorsey continues. “This ‘it’ in the sixth line is what I think they call an indefinite reference. If it’s the moon they found, then ‘withered’ is an inappropriate adjective, because the moon doesn’t wither, it wanes. Something withers when it shrivels. Even for a poem, this adjective is out of place. And in this second stanza, why does the boatman call ‘afterwards’? After what? All the wording here is vague.” She pushes the poem away, done with it. “So maybe it is about sudden water and fertility. I suppose it’s a sort of love poem. But it seems so evasive. It’s been worked up. It’s all about ideas instead of love. I wish I could find the world in this poem. It’s so oblique. I’m sorry. Did you write this?”
The waiters pass by their table, and Carlo Pavorese glances at them as if he wants to put in another order for some other meal. His head begins to bob, and his skin appears to be reddening. He thrums his fingers on the table.
“If you had liked it, I would have written it, but since you don’t like it, I didn’t.”
“Well,” she asks, “who did write it?”
“Oppenheimer. It’s his only published poem.”
“For the love of God, Carlo!” She throws down her fork on the plate. It clatters, and some of the other people in the dining room look over at their table.
“I rather like it.”
“If you wanted to write a love poem, you could have done it yourself!”
“No,” Carlo Pavorese says. “I couldn’t.” He waits. “I tried.”
“But why this? Why Oppenheimer?”
“Don’t you know by now?” She shakes her head. “He invaded me. He’s invading you. You know, you remind me of Oppenheimer.”
“I don’t want to hear this,” she says. “Stop this.”
“All right. But I did admit that I didn’t write it. Robert published this after he was already established as a physicist. I found it in a literary magazine called Hound and Horn. I typed it out and even took it to someone in our English department. I told him a friend had written it.”
“And?” Dorsey is at least going to hear if her judgment was correct.
“Well, this person told me that the poem resembles in many respects T. S. Eliot’s ‘Journey of the Magi.’ He said, ‘Your friend knows the poetry of T. S. Eliot
rather too well.’ So there it was: Oppenheimer’s unoriginality again. Such a shame.”
“Carlo.”
“What?”
“I don’t want to hear any more about Oppenheimer. I’ve heard enough. Talk about yourself, if you want, but not Oppenheimer.”
“It’s an obsession, my dear. I can’t help myself.”
“Well, please try! No one is interested in Oppenheimer except you.”
“Oh, no,” he says. He has taken the rose out of the vase and is twirling it between his thumb and forefinger. “You’re quite wrong. People are interested. They had better be. His was an exemplary American life. Yours will be, too, if you stay in this field. Anyway, that’s why I have to write his spiritual biography, even if nobody—”
“—All right,” she says, gathering her purse. “All right. One more word and I’ll stand up and go. And stop twirling that rose.”
“What then shall we talk about?” He drops the rose back into the glass vase and flashes her his peculiar mirthless smile.
“Nothing. We won’t talk about anything.”
“We’ll sit here in silence?”
“Yes,” she says. “That’s a good idea.”
He sits back and examines her face. His own face takes on an expression he seldom displays: puzzlement. For the rest of the meal, they are quiet, and gradually the men and women nearby notice the failure of conversation at the corner table for two, where the craggy professor of physics, close to retirement age, sits with the young attractive post-doctoral student, the two of them sitting there speechlessly attentive to their own failure to converse, as if neither one was able to talk, or to get up and walk away.
One week later, just before dawn, Dorsey stumbles down the dark hallway of her apartment to the bathroom, where she stands nauseated, retching. After the first wave of nausea passes, she thinks: no, no, it’s impossible, not with him, not with someone with that face. She turns on the tap and lets the warm water flow down over her hands. After she has felt the nausea (a curdled, acidic chill) leave her body, she turns off the water, and in the dark of the bathroom she presses her hands to her stomach.
She stops going by the burglar-proofed house, believing that he doesn’t want to see her. For two days she sits alone in her apartment, trying to be clear to herself about what she must do. She rises out of her chair to make toast and tea. Then she sits down again and takes her position in front of the window. At one point, late in the afternoon, she turns on the television set to the rerun station: the Lone Ranger and Tonto, Ralph and Alice, Lucy and Desi, the guileless and happy black-and-white couples of childhood.
A child is not to be blamed for its parents. It will not be the baby’s fault, if Dorsey allows it to enter the world, that its father is Carlo Pavorese. Nor will it be the baby’s fault if Dorsey’s career goes off the main track onto a spur line where the rails are hardly visible for the multitude of weeds growing between them. What Dorsey experiences, sitting in her chair, is a war of her two futures, one with her child, the other without. Her only weapon against this child is what she can imagine of her future power and professional position. It was Hugh, she thinks, who was supposed to have the children. He was going to have the family and I was going to have the career. Her mind veers off into mathematics but comes back to the phrase, they’ll say this happened because I’m a woman. And then she thinks, angrily and happily all at once, all right, let them think that, the creeps.
She stands up. She remembers the slogan her roommate in college had framed and hung on her bedroom wall, just above the dresser: Life is what happens to you while you’re planning something else. Her roommate had planned to be a television newscaster but had married a scholarly demolitions expert with thick glasses whose specialty was blowing up urban high-rises: Pruitt-Igoe had been his masterpiece. To hell with plans, Dorsey thinks; she is on her way to her kitchen to make herself dinner—she has the idea that a tuna salad and some miscellaneous citrus fruit would be nice—when she is struck, walking past the refrigerator, into near motionlessness by an image. The image is that of J. Robert Oppenheimer. She sees in her mind’s eye the famous photograph of the melancholy physicist-as-a-young-man, the scientist as aesthete, his head tilted to the left, the pile of steel-wool hair, and the sad eyes like those of a child who knows he is about to be sent to his room without supper, and for once, and for the first time, Dorsey identifies herself with him, this man of high potential on whom fate played its customary tricks. Standing in the dining room, her left hand on the table, she smiles. “A withered moon,” she says aloud, to no one. She likes the image. “A light on the far shore, and tamarisks.” Yes. Tamarisks, of course. She turns and rushes out to the hallway to see if Maude Ann is home. She has news. The door swings open wide, Maude Ann’s face. “I’m pregnant,” Dorsey says, before hello. Maude Ann screams happily.
He is unavoidable in the Physics Department. She can see his teeth at the other end of the hall, and he walks toward her like a man who has been taken apart and reassembled, his arm and leg movements full of distress and waste motion. “You haven’t called,” she says, putting her hands in her pockets and leaning forward.
“Well, you haven’t come around, either,” he says. “I don’t know where you’ve been. I seem to have grown used to your company. Your telephone is always busy. I came by your apartment once but you weren’t there. I suppose you are angry at me. What I’ve done, I shouldn’t have done, but I didn’t think it would lead to consequences as radical as this.” His breath smells of cheese, and his clothes smell of mildew.
“Carlo—” she says.
“—I just want you to know,” he blurts out, “that from now on, ours will be a professional relationship.”
“Carlo,” she says, “I’m pregnant.”
He leans back, so that he is in fact standing straight up, frail in a thick wind. His mouth closes over his front teeth.
“I’m pregnant,” she repeats, “and you’re the father.”
“Don’t say that. Not here in the hallway of the Physics Department,” he whispers. He glances in both directions: no one is there, no one has heard her yet. “You’re making this up. It’s not possible.”
“It is possible.”
“I suppose you’re going to sue me.”
“Certainly not.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know,” she says calmly.
“It’s not mine,” he says. “I know you. You’ve had boyfriends.”
“It’s yours, believe me. Remember how I said I’d left my diaphragm at home?” She enjoys his silence for a few moments, before she smiles. “Think of this as an occasion for happiness rather than panic. Carlo,” she instructs him, “do the honorable thing.” She cannot stop smiling; teasing demons could almost become her hobby.
“The honorable thing?” He fixes on her, indelicate with trauma, the expression on his face frozen into a disbelieving stare.
“Yes. The honorable thing. Leave me alone and don’t say anything about this. Don’t try to ruin my professional reputation, and I won’t say anything about this affair myself. I don’t know how much longer I’ll be around here. I’ll get a job sooner or later, I know that. Put a glowing letter in my file—you know my work, you can glow if you put your mind to it—and we’ll be square.”
“Is that all?”
“That’s all.”
“You aren’t going to get melodramatic about this?”
“Of course not. Do I look melodramatic?”
“No,” he says. “Actually, you don’t.”
She stands in the hallway, studying him on her own time. “You know, Carlo, sometimes I do love you. But we don’t fit, the two of us. You’re probably not as bad as you think you are. You’re dazzling but you’re not permanently blinding. Your suffering doesn’t mean you’ve been really wicked, you know. Maybe it’s just a hobby, something to fill the hours, like ballroom dancing.”
He looks at her, and she breathes in deeply, the processed cement-
and-glass air of the Physics Building. Two members of the department, Ti-Hua Lee and Maurice Ableuhkov, have just turned the corner at the other end of the hall and are approaching them. Dorsey quickly puts her hand on Carlo Pavorese’s shoulder, leans forward, and gives him a brushing, almost-social kiss on his cheek. She has to stand on tiptoe to reach his shabby face. When she pivots and begins to walk down the hallway away from him, she sees that both professors, Carlo Pavorese’s colleagues, have seen what she has just done and are now visibly struggling to pretend that they have not seen it. But it has happened in exactly the manner Dorsey wanted it to: the kiss was a public gesture, an acknowledgment of affection that cannot be rescinded, given and witnessed on the second floor, the east wing, to the accompaniment of the secretaries’ typewriters clacking away in the main office.
She wakes up at night and stares at the window. He hates thoughts, she says to herself. He hates having them. But once he has them he makes the mistake of believing that they all originate from him. But ideas don’t originate anywhere, just as water doesn’t originate in clouds. Ideas are there, waiting, for someone to seize them. Carlo wants to have the guilt that the gods feel, when in fact he’s only entitled to guilt at the human level. His egomaniacal guilt is an intellectual mistake. She leans back on the pillow and falls asleep easily.