Consequences (18 page)

Most of the writers in this country weren't worth a dime. They were the perfect examples of bad writing. Excellent examples. His students would laugh. He hoped that if he couldn't make good writers out of them, he'd at least make them into good readers. Readers who knew how to listen. He'd line them up and begin reading a page of Raymond Carver, or someone else on that level, marking the cadence with his foot and fingers, and when they felt ready, when they had understood what was happening, each would add his or her voice to his, according to the rhythm. Then new readers joined in, and it became a roaring torrent. In fact, the young people did understand. You had to spend quite a long time explaining things, sometimes insist on them, but they caught the cadence a lot more quickly than the old bastards who put you to sleep by steering a middle course. And that was why he didn't regret not being a writer, not having anything to do with these people; when it came to them, he preferred not having gotten his hands wet.

Myriam agreed. Not that she held herself up as any
authority on the matter, but he'd already lectured her at length about poverty and glory of style, the detailed choices that come into play at every moment; the different conflicts that can proliferate within the same phrase; the sacrifices that had to be granted; the absolute priority of language, dynamism, resilience, fine-tuning, necessity, giving in. She began to have a few serious notions about the subject. It obviously wasn't her favorite food for conversation; she much preferred hearing the story of all the horrors he'd experienced, and what miracle had brought him out of them, right up to the final act. But she listened to him without showing the slightest sign of boredom. She studied the way his eyes shone when he talked about it, and she became speechless.

Sometimes she found him truly moving.
This guy is burning with genuine ardor
, she'd tell herself,
deep down he's fascinating
.

Literature was fascinating. He was nothing. He told her about the time when he believed he could become a writer, the mad hope he'd nourished until the painful realization that he wasn't one, that he didn't have the gift.

This type of conversation affected her. She found him unalterably handsome, unalterably gorgeous as he stood half-naked in the kitchen crushing some ice and smoking a cigarette, telling stories in the half-light. Worst of all was that, on top of it all, he was a great sexual partner, something she hadn't experienced for years.

“Sometimes they're so mediocre that—how can I explain it?—I feel ashamed,” he confessed. “That I could be taken for such an imbecile. Expected to swallow such gibberish, stuff that's so poorly written. But where do they come from? Tell me. Where do they dig up such poverty? Listen, there are no more
than a half dozen major living writers in this country—it isn't complicated. Don't ask me what the others are pretending to be, Myriam, because I really don't know.”

It was hot. A haze
of heat still hovered above the lake at bedtime. Myriam was smiling, but it was obvious to him that she was disappointed. Had he found a single one who hadn't asked for the same thing? Every hour, every minute, Myriam had seemed different than students he'd known, but suddenly she'd become part of the same mentality. Now it was becoming absolutely necessary to go to his place. Now the curiosity to see it was becoming too intense. None had resisted it. You could almost laugh about it. All he had to do was express a total lack of interest in their seeing his place, rendered even more deadly by his sister's exacting surveillance of his comings and goings as soon as night fell, and they began insisting more, pressuring him to give in.

Quite often, after finally saying they could come over, he ended the relationship the next day, unless the young woman deserved extra attention and would benefit from a reprieve that could last a month, or even a month and a half, like that athletic Australian who'd helped him master the hot keys on his word processing program, configure his mailbox, import images, bid higher on a leather Hatteras cap from Stetson that he'd never worn. He still sometimes got letters from that former young blonde, who'd ended up in Paris and was having children while waiting for something better, and who wrote him to say she was sorry about having sabotaged everything and trying to force her way into his life so stubbornly. Sure. But maybe she hadn't
lost out on the deal, despite everything. Maybe having children was the key, he'd tell himself sometimes.

Maybe there was a risk that Myriam would end up coming on too strong. The moment he'd climbed behind the wheel of his car, the thought that she wasn't any different from the others had crossed his mind, but he'd quickly understood he was wrong. They'd barely left the city and entered the shade of the forest when he'd made up his mind: he was thrilled that she was there at his side, thrilled that he wasn't experiencing that uneasiness that poisoned his heart every time he brought a girl back to the house, that vague and confused feeling of guilt each time he tiptoed across the entranceway with his shoes in hand, a finger to his lips, so terrified at the idea of running into Marianne on the way that all his muscles ached.

When he rode with a passenger, the Fiat couldn't be counted on for the same performance and seemed to crawl along despite the fact that he pushed the accelerator to the floor. He kept it in second, sometimes shifting into third to give it a few moments of respite and ease up on the motor, which was roaring like an airplane engine pumping out propellant; but what difference did all that make in comparison to the wonderful time he was having with her, zigzagging through the drowsy woods, listening to Gershwin as interpreted by The Residents; what importance could it possibly have?

Of course, he had no intention of making it obvious they were here together in the house. He had no intention of doing such a thing any more than was necessary; but something amazing was happening. It was so obvious. He let go of his stick shift in favor of Myriam's thigh and turned toward her, smiling.

Since the Fiat was beginning to choke, for the time being
he traded his passenger's thrillingly warm and tender flesh for the hard Bakelite of the stick and shifted down just before the next turn, which threw her against him. And that is where she stayed—a captive, you would have said, of a devilishly clever magnet—her head on his shoulder.

In the course of his entire existence, had he ever met a single woman who knew how to listen? The answer was no. The answer was no, a thousand times no, any way you looked at it.

Until today, until he met Myriam. Who not only listened to him but encouraged him to share as many things with her as possible. Had he ever had this feeling of lightness he was experiencing as he opened up to her more and more? After such a thing, was it surprising that no student could now find favor in his sight?

Annie Eggbaum could stick out her chest, rub her fleshy crotch against the corner of his desk—when she wasn't putting her behind on it—or take advantage of the lessons he was giving her to expose her body to him in more detail. She could swim bare-breasted as he went over the ideas bigger-than-life or less-is-more that were still essential but seemed so little known and still less used that it was astounding, a wretched shame; but no matter what she did, he still had no desire for her.

The student period was now like a dead branch. She teased him about the subject as they were passing below the place where the pit was located, brought up those girls who couldn't have failed to find him to their taste during a screening for some select group in the multipurpose auditorium, or when he was explaining why the very good writers made bad screenplay writers, and vice versa, while he strolled among the tables.

How was it possible not to think of Barbara at that exact
moment, her body lying in darkness at the heart of that hollow mountain not far from here, practically at the bottom of the place where they now were? He nodded vaguely. “There haven't been that many,” he denied. “There's a lot of exaggeration to those stories. It's almost a myth.” As he was scrutinizing her reaction, she sent a charge through him by running her hand through his hair.

“Was there something between the two of you?” she asked quietly.

He froze for a quarter of a second. Then let out a long, desolate groan. “Of course not. Myriam, of course not. That poor Barbara? I even have a hard time remembering her first name. But she was my best student.”

“She would speak to me about you.”

“Positively, I hope.”

“Her tone of voice would change.”

“Did her voice break?”

She stared at him as the lights of the house came into view. “It wouldn't bother me,” she said. “The opposite. I think it would make us closer.”

He parked without answering, stopped the motor, then turned to her, and gathered her hands to cover them with kisses. Was that what it meant to be moved? Is that how it felt? At the same time, he had a terrible urge to smoke. He leaned forward to kiss her and only then noticed Richard Olso's car, which was almost completely hidden by the shadow of the shed.

M
yriam thought it was still
too early for him to move into her place, but this wasn't indicative of any kind of reservations on her part. He reassured her. He wasn't about to land in her house with a trunk and toiletry kit like some kind of low-rent bohemian. That wasn't something he could imagine. Nothing would have seemed less attractive. They deserved better. They kissed. They also had to take into account the possibility—minuscule, of course, but a possibility—that her husband would reappear one day, spit back out from the black hole of Afghanistan. It could happen, she would say. As far as the army was concerned, her husband wasn't dead but reported missing.

He understood perfectly well. Everything was clear. No need to fret; he understood the situation very well. There was no hurry. The important thing was that he'd be able to see her as much as he wanted—that's all that counted for him. It allowed him to stand the horrible mood dominating his house now; it was the most dreadful atmosphere in the long course of their being brother and sister.

It was so palpable that his migraines had come back after a slight improvement. Even this morning he'd finished his lesson
leaning on his desk, overcome by a kind of vertigo. “Are you okay, Marc?” asked Annie Eggbaum, who'd taken advantage of his tottering by holding him up and pressing him against her at the same time. “I wonder what you'd do without me,” she'd declared as she guided him toward a chair.

Actually, the reason was because he hadn't eaten anything for two days, in addition to being sexually spent and having to face his sister's aggressions. Annie undid his tie and unbuttoned his shirt collar, then fanned him with the notebook in which she took notes in hopes of pleasing him. “Feel better, Marc? Can I do anything for you?”

Every time she called him by his first name he nearly choked because of the intimacy she was imposing on him; but aware as he was of the girl's personality, this freedom she took didn't seem negotiable. No matter; she led him next to the cafeteria, which was nearly deserted during class hours, and went to get him a slice of lemon meringue pie, which he swallowed without argument, feeling fairly thankful.

“Tell me what you want,” she said while he was bending over his orange juice, sipping it through a straw that he'd cleverly bent toward him and was holding between two fingers. He shook his head, stared into space—not far from a clump of blue hydrangeas that shimmered like a powdery cloud.

“First of all, who is that woman?” she went on.

“That woman has a name. She's Barbara's stepmother. You want to talk about Myriam. But what business is it of yours?”

“What's this thing you have for old women? What's it mean?”

“Old? Hah. She isn't old. Besides, killing yourself before you're sixty is a pure waste, in my opinion.”

“I don't trust her. In the first place, how could you marry a serviceman? Or anybody wearing a uniform? Couldn't be a very good idea, don't you think?”

“God knows where life takes us, Annie. God knows what we harvest when all is said and done. You decide to choose what's easy, and suddenly everything gets complicated. We pass the better part of our existence paying for our mistakes, you know, and that's not something I made up. Every day brings proof of it.”

“You sure are cheerful early in the morning.”

“The problem has nothing to do with knowing whether I'm cheerful, Annie. Who, in all decency, can be cheerful these days, except for cynics and the well-to-do? Tell me.”

He smoked a cigarette with her and recommended she read Sherwood Anderson and William Saroyan. Then things would get clearer bit by bit, until all the gloom was chased away.

“Don't change the subject,” she said. “You want me to find out about her? My father can get someone to take care of it. It's easy.”

“No thanks, Annie, really. Definitely not. I don't want to find out anything that way. I'm asking you to respect that, okay?”

He knew enough about Myriam and didn't need to know any more today. She filled all the requirements. She was the exact model of the woman he'd always dreamed about, without knowing it. At this point, there was no doubt about it.

“What do you want me to tell you? Imagine a hurricane. Think of those mutilated trees, smashed-open houses, devastated gardens that they show all the time these days; think of those earthquakes, rivers of fire, overflowing oceans, picture it, Annie, and you'll have a vague idea of the effect she has over me.”

She shrugged. Got up, then went outside to join a group of people her age scattered on the steps. It wasn't the first time she'd ditched him there, refused to listen anymore to talk about the effect that somebody else had on him; and on top of all that, a woman who was close to fifty, some kind of grandmother or something.