A Single Man (5 page)

Feeling rather pleased with himself, he leaves the Department Building, headed for the Cafeteria.

He starts across the largish open space which is the midst of the campus, surrounded by the Art Building, the Gymnasium, the Science Building and the Administration Building, and newly planted with grass and some hopeful little trees which should make it leafy and shadowy and pleasant within a few years: that is to say, about the time when they start tearing the whole place apart again. The air has a tang of smog; called
eye-irritation
in blandese. The mountains of the San Gabriel
Range – which still give San Tomas State something of the glamour of a college high on a plateau of the Andes, on the few days you can see them properly – are hidden today as usual in the sick yellow fumes which arise from the metropolitan mess below.

And now, all around George, approaching him, crossing his path from every direction, is the male and female raw material which is fed daily into this factory, along the conveyor-belts of the freeways, to be processed, packaged and placed on the market. Negroes, Mexicans, Jews, Japanese, Chinese, Latins, Slavs, Nordics; the dark heads far predominating over the blond. Hurrying in pursuit of their schedules, loitering in flirty talk, strolling in earnest argument, muttering some lesson to themselves alone; all book-burdened, all harassed.

What do they think they’re up to, here? Well, there is the official answer; preparing themselves for life which means a job and security in which to raise children to prepare themselves for life which means a job and security in which. But, despite all the vocational advisers, the pamphlets pointing out to them what good money you can earn if you invest in some solid technical training – pharmacology, let’s say, or accountancy, or the varied opportunities offered by the vast field of electronics – there are still, incredibly enough, quite a few of them who persist in writing poems, novels, plays! Goofy from lack of sleep, they scribble in snatched moments between classes, part-time employment and their married lives. Their brains are dizzy with words as they mop out an operating room, sort mail at a post office, fix baby’s bottle, fry hamburgers. And somewhere, in the midst of their servitude to the must-be, the mad might-be
whispers to them to live, know, experience – what?
Marvels!
The Season in Hell, the Journey to the End of the Night, the Seven Pillars of Wisdom, the Clear Light of the Void . . . Will any of them make it? Oh, sure. One, at least. Two or three at most – in all these searching thousands.

Here, in their midst, George feels a sort of vertigo. Oh God, what will become of them all? What chance have they? Ought I to yell out to them, right now, here, that it’s hopeless?

But George knows he can’t do that. Because, absurdly, inadequately, in spite of himself almost, he is a representative of the hope. And the hope is not false. No. It’s just that George is like a man trying to sell a real diamond for a nickel, on the street. The diamond is protected from all but the tiniest few, because the great hurrying majority can never stop to dare to believe that it could conceivably be real.

Outside the Cafeteria are announcements of the current student activities: Squaws’ Night, Golden Fleece Picnic, Fogcutters’ Ball, Civic Society Meeting, and the big game against LPSC. These advertised rituals of the San Tomas tribe aren’t quite convincing; they are promoted only by a minority of eager beavers. The rest of these boys and girls do not really think of themselves as a tribe, although they are willing to pretend that they do on special occasions. All that they actually have in common is their urgency; the need to get with it, to finish that assignment which should have been handed in three days ago. When George eavesdrops on their conversation, it is nearly always about what they have failed to do, what they fear the professor will make them
do, what they have risked not doing and gotten away with.

The Cafeteria is crammed. George stands at the door, looking around. Now that he is a public utility, the property of STSC, he is impatient to be used. He hates to see even one minute of himself being wasted. He starts to walk among the tables with a tentative smile; a forty-watt smile ready to be switched up to a hundred and fifty watts, just as soon as anyone asks for it.

Now, to his relief, he sees Russ Dreyer, and Dreyer rises from his table to greet him. He has no doubt been on the lookout for George. Dreyer has gradually become George’s personal attendant, executive officer, bodyguard. He is an angular thin-faced young man with a flat-top haircut and rimless glasses. He wears a somewhat sporty Hawaiian shirt which, on him, seems like a prim shy concession to the sportiness of the clothes around him. His undershirt, appearing in the open V of his unbuttoned collar, looks surgically clean, as always. Dreyer is a grade A scholar, and his European counterpart would probably be a rather dry and brittle stick. But Dreyer is neither dry nor brittle. He has discreet humour, and, as an ex-Marine, considerable toughness. He once described to George a typical evening he and his wife Marinette spent with his buddy Tom Kugelman and Tom’s wife. ‘Tom and I got into an argument about
Finnegans Wake
. It went on all through supper. So then the girls said they were sick of listening to us, so they went out to a movie. Tom and I did the dishes and it got to be ten o’clock and we were still arguing and we hadn’t convinced each other. So we got some beer out of the icebox and went out in the yard. Tom’s building a shed
there, but he hasn’t got the roof on yet. So then he challenged me to a chinning-match, and we started chinning ourselves on the crossbeam over the door, and I whipped him, thirteen to eleven.’

George is charmed by this story. Somehow, it’s like classical Greece.

‘Good morning, Russ.’

‘Good morning, Sir.’ It isn’t the age-difference which makes Dreyer call George ‘Sir’. As soon as they come to the end of this quasi-military relationship, he will start saying George, or even Geo, without hesitation.

Together they go over to the coffee machine, fill mugs, select doughnuts from the counter. As they turn toward the cash-desk, Dreyer slips ahead of George with the change ready. ‘No – let me, Sir.’

‘You’re always paying.’

Dreyer grins, ‘We’re in the chips, since I put Marinette to work.’

‘She got that teaching job?’

‘It just came through. Of course, it’s only temporary. The only snag is, she has to get up an hour earlier.’

‘So you’re fixing your own breakfast?’

‘Oh, I can manage. Till she gets a job nearer in. Or I get her pregnant.’ He visibly enjoys this man-to-man stuff with George. (Does he know about me, George wonders; do any of them? Oh yes, probably. It wouldn’t interest them. They don’t want to know about my feelings or my glands or anything below my neck. I could just as well be a severed head, carried into the classroom to lecture to them from a dish.)

‘Say, that reminds me,’ Dreyer is saying, ‘Marinette wanted me to ask you, Sir – we were wondering if you
could manage to get out to us again, before too long? We could cook up some spaghetti. And maybe Tom could bring over that tape I was telling you about – the one he got from the audio-visual up at Berkeley, of Katherine Anne Porter reading her stuff —’

‘That’d be fine,’ says George vaguely, with enthusiasm. He glances up at the clock. ‘I say, we ought to be going!’

Dreyer isn’t in the least damped by his vagueness. Probably he does not want George to come to supper any more than George wants to go. It is all, all symbolic. Marinette has told him to ask, and he has asked, and now it is on record that George has accepted, for the second time, an invitation to their home. And this means that George is an intimate and can be referred to, in after years, as part of their circle in the old days. Oh yes, the Dreyers will loyally do their part to make George’s place secure among the grand old bores of yesteryear. George can just picture one of those evenings in the nineteen nineties, when Russ is dean of an English Department in the Middle West and Marinette is the mother of grown-up sons and daughters. An audience of young instructors and their wives, symbolically entertaining Dr and Mrs Dreyer, will be symbolically thrilled to catch the Dean in an anecdotal mood, mooning and mumbling with a fuddled smile through a maze of wowless sagas, into which George and many many others will enter, uttering misquotes. And Marinette, permanently smiling, will sit listening with the third ear – the one that has heard it all before – and praying for eleven o’clock to come. And it will come. And all will agree that this has been a memorable evening indeed.

As they walk toward the classroom, Dreyer asks
George what he thinks about what Dr Leavis said about Sir Charles Snow. (These far-off unhappy Old Things and their long-ago battles are still hot news out here in Sleepy Hollow State.) ‘Well, first of all —’ George begins.

They are passing the tennis courts, at this moment. Only one court is occupied, by two young men playing singles. The sun has come out with sudden fierce heat through the smog-haze, and the two are stripped nearly naked. They have nothing on their bodies but rubber gym-boots and knit shorts of the kind cyclists wear, very short and close-fitting, moulding themselves to the buttocks and the loins. They are absolutely unaware of the passers-by, isolated in the intentness of their game. You would think there was no net between them. Their nakedness makes them seem close to each other and directly opposed, body to body, like fighters. If this were a fight, though, it would be one-sided, for the boy on the left is much the smaller. He is Mexican maybe, black-haired, handsome, catlike, cruel, compact, lithe, muscular; quick and graceful on his feet. His body is a natural dark gold brown; there is a fuzz of curly black hair on his chest and belly and thighs. He plays hard and fast, with cruel mastery, baring his white teeth unsmiling, as he slams back the ball. He is going to win. His opponent, the big blond boy, already knows this; there is a touching gallantry in his defence. He is so sweet-naturedly beautiful, so nobly made; and yet his classical cream marble body seems a handicap to him. The rules of the game inhibit it from functioning. He is fighting at a hopeless disadvantage. He should throw away his useless racket, vault over the net, and force the cruel little gold
cat to submit to his marble strength. No, on the contrary, the blond boy accepts the rules, binds himself by them, will suffer defeat and humiliation rather than break them. His helpless bigness and blondness give him an air of unmodern chivalry. He will fight clean, a perfect sportsman, until he has lost the last game. And won’t this keep happening to him all through his life? Won’t he keep getting himself involved in the wrong kind of game, the kind of game he was never born to play, against an opponent who is quick and clever and merciless?

This game is cruel; but its cruelty is sensual and stirs George into hot excitement. He feels a thrill of pleasure to find the senses so eager in their response; too often, now, they seem sadly jaded. From his heart, he thanks these young animals for their beauty. And they will never know what they have done to make this moment marvellous to him, and life itself less hateful —

Dreyer is saying, ‘Sorry, Sir – I lost you for a minute, there. I understand about the Two Cultures, of course – but, do you mean you
agree
with Dr Leavis?’ Far from taking the faintest interest in the tennis players, Dreyer walks with his body half turned away from them; his whole concentration fixed upon George’s talking head.

For it obviously
has
been talking. George realises this with the same discomfiture he felt on the freeway, when the chauffeur-figure got them clear downtown. Oh yes, he knows from experience what the talking-head can do, late in the evening, when he is bored and tired and drunk, to help him through a dull party. It can play back all of George’s favourite theories – just as long as it isn’t argued with; then it may become confused. It knows at least three dozen of his best anecdotes. But
here
, in broad
daylight, during campus-hours, when George should be onstage every second, in full control of his performance! Can it be that talking-head and the chauffeur are in league?
Are they maybe planning a merger?

‘We really haven’t time to go into all this right now,’ he tells Dreyer smoothly. ‘And anyhow, I’d like to check up on the Leavis lecture again. I’ve still got that issue of
The Spectator
somewhere at home, I think. . . . Oh, by the way, did you ever get to read that piece on Mailer, about a month ago – in
Esquire
, wasn’t it? It’s one of the best things I’ve seen in a long time —’

George’s classroom has two doors in its long side wall: one up front, the other at the back of the room. Most of the students enter from the back because, with an infuriating sheep-obstinacy, they love to huddle together confronting their teachers from behind a barricade of empty seats. But, this semester, the class is only a trifle smaller than the capacity of the room. Latecomers are forced to sit farther and farther forward, to George’s sly satisfaction; finally they have to take the second row. As for the front row, which most of them shun so doggedly, George can fill that up with his regulars: Russ Dreyer, Tom Kugelman, Sister Maria, Mr Stoessel, Mrs Netta Torres, Kenny Potter, Lois Yamaguchi.

George never enters the classroom with Dreyer, or any other student. A deeply-rooted dramatic instinct forbids him to do so. This is really all that he uses his office for; as a place to withdraw into before class, simply in order to re-emerge from it and make his entrance. He doesn’t interview students in it, because these offices are shared
by at least two faculty members, and Dr Gottlieb, who teaches the Metaphysical Poets, is nearly always there. George cannot talk to another human being as if the two of them were alone, when in fact they aren’t. Even such a harmless question as, ‘What do you
honestly
think of Emerson?’ sounds indecently intimate, and such a mild criticism as, ‘What you’ve written is a mixed metaphor and it doesn’t mean anything’ sounds unnecessarily cruel, when Dr Gottlieb is right there at the other desk listening or, what’s worse, pretending not to listen. But Gottlieb obviously doesn’t feel this way. Perhaps it is a peculiarly British scruple.