False Entry (34 page)

As to his memory, it seemed now to have found an environment ideally suited to its excesses, if—as he sometimes began to doubt—such these were. The university was after all a temple to memory, often its Babel. Pierre, concealed in his own
expertise
like a priest inside the confession box, began to recognize all the devices of others and forgive his own. He came to know the amusement of watching the unoriginal steal their opinions from authority; he grew accustomed to the confrere sadness of listening without protest to a radical intelligence forced to claim authority for opinions that were its own. From time to time he did both himself and benefited accordingly. By hiding what he owed to the spadework of memory, he could sometimes persuade the brilliant that he was of their company; by openly, averring it, soothe the second-rate into the surety that he belonged to theirs. He was becoming that exemplary scholar who is suitable to each side and discountable by both. And being so, he found that each often sought him out privately. No warning musk of ambition seemed to emanate from him—people were safe in telling him the story of theirs.

Socially too—and for much the same reasons—he became unobtrusively successful, never becoming violently partisan to one group, mildly ingested into the pattern of many. Being of the age he was, in the environment he was, it is to be feared that for the first and only time in his life he even preached. “Values” were being examined all around him by those still young enough to be convinced that they must do so, by elder instructors pretending that they still were. Later on in life he formed the habit of destroying personal papers as quickly as possible, on the grounds that they detracted from the power of memory rather than aiding it, but there was extant at one time a philosophical essay, written in his third year, whose thesis was that values were only the momentary “clotting” of alternatives. It brought him a second prize, a taste of the terrors of exposure, plus a number of inconvenient confidences from those who are always waiting for some such signal to fall. Later on too he could recall that no such signal on his part had ever been needed—that if the bleating of the lamb excited the tiger, then perhaps even as a child he must have had the reverse power—a silent cub, unaware of his own stripings, whose orange aura drew forth the lambs. But at this ebullient period of his life he no longer resented his portion, even pursued it. As with most young men, and young civilizations, the technique of anything attracted him. If, then (as he told himself intoxicatedly at this silliest, most ordinary period of his life) he was perhaps destined to be an
éminence grise
to someone or some section of society as yet unidentified, he might as well perfect himself now. So, reminding himself that self-interest was the most palatable compromise of any, he accustomed himself to listen once again without rancor. Certain tonalities of confidence became as familiar to him as finger exercises—the stop in a man’s voice—like the musical hold in a measure—that preceded a tale of love, the moist phrasing that shaped a woman’s lips confessing it.

Women especially liked and trusted him, against any obscure warnings about himself that he at first might have felt romantically bound to give them. Early on he discovered, like many an intentional blackguard, which he was not, that such warnings only attracted them the more. Given the basic attraction—and the range of his seemed to include both the woman of parts and the frivolous—it seemed that he had only to assure a woman that he could not be permanently counted upon in order to have her hang on all the harder, first in order to suffer the consequences, then to deny them. If in an affair he made it plain that he wasn’t serious, his partner tended at once to be convinced that he was—and of his honor as well. No, the pose of the frank disclaimer wasn’t practicable—besides, though he’d felt all his life that he had something to disclaim, he had not yet found out what it was. Altogether, his natural inaccessibility did him extremely well, allowing women to assume in him a lovable “difference” that they could tout to others and to themselves, without ever having to come to terms with it. An ideal lover for most women, he concluded, was one conventionally well enough endowed to excite public envy, coupled with some exciting but tractable variation from the norm—such as a revolutionary not averse to wearing a dinner jacket, and carrying it well.

But now let us put an end to such reflections, always darted so easily, with twisted, avuncular lip, at our younger selves, and pick up our hero some two and a half years after his arrival in the city, in June Week, say—though of course we do not choose this week at random—end-of-term week of … it would be 1939. We are sitting, with the dearly bought privilege of retrospect, gazing down at the young man from the rafters of his own future. Augustly situated as we are, he still has the advantage, for we shall not be able to change by one minim what we shall see. But this time—very early morning but already broadly past dawn in the way that summer days open—no spectator would wish a change here, for as our gaze spirals down, down, it rests on a scene always fair to the benevolent—we find him in bed with a young woman who is still sleeping by his side. Indeed, as he leans on an elbow, just awake, wishing idly for the coffee that, if she does not rouse soon (and she will not), he will get up and make himself, he would be happy to be so found, prideful over his membership, not absolutely new but recent, in the ranks of those of whom this sort of thing must be expected. And with some reason. It is June Week, end-of-exam week—the best of those sectors of time which the academic year offers, conveniently docketed, to lucky recipients who then may know, without the slightest further personal effort, who they are and where.

He
is a junior. For another year he will be heir apparent, a year away from exile into a life lacking such markers. Outside, the moist blue morning is turning itself with noises once as sudden as brickbats, still exciting because no longer strange. A bus heaves by, with a characteristic groan the girl beside him had once mocked him for cherishing—as part of a glossary, so welcome to him, that she was born to; an ash can clangs down and he knows, without stirring, how the afflatus of dust follows after, settling a moment’s visible rhythm on the air. Charming, gritty noises, if one has no pressure to heed them, but can lean on one’s elbow staring into the kernel of this week, the slowly expanding summer, the future, the ages, meanwhile nestling one’s backside. Backside is one of a category of good old English words that his inhibited share of his heritage had hitherto denied him, mildest of a number that he has learned to use, although not with the insistence of some around him. In the same way he is not much given to other typical excesses; on occasion he has been drunk, but seldom as a steady member of that undergraduate virility cult which many will maintain long after graduation, and when he exercises that long muscle on which, smiling backward now at the girl and a bit of Balzac, he thinks that he might play her a tune if she would only awaken, he does so with a modicum of the demonic self-consciousness of his time. Something has kept him median here also. We in the gallery can shift in our seats if we wish, remembering certain more intense demons he thinks he has left behind. He shifts too, but only to cuddle into the softness back of him, while our movement has foreshortened our range. We are in the room with him now, silent and invisible, looking at him eye to eye.

His are veiled and he is still smiling, though more practicably than before. He is thinking of the summer job that awaits him in ten days or so and will keep him up North quite excusably, just as other jobs have the two preceding years. This year he will have one of the university plums, equivalent to the editorship of the
Law Review
for a law student, and like it ordinarily given to a graduate student. Pierre’s major is philosophy. Hindered in his choice of one by his almost too various equipment, he has been helped to it by one of the university’s real notables, Sanford Serlin, a man whose antennae are always alert for the protégé, whose motives for this even the more scurrilous campus gossips do not impugn. Serlin is not the department’s head, having no patience with this factitious distinction, his being more worldly, but the college tolerates this as it will for the few whose reputations will thereby redound. Other scholars of this stamp often keep salons; Serlin’s is more in the nature of a symposium. For although his large apartment, more like a family place than a bachelor’s, is always running over with
Kaffee-klatsches
and small dinners (presided over by a housekeeper of whom Pierre will one day be reminded by the Mannixes’ Anna), Serlin is the kind of professor who goes down onto the hustings and can be found, more afternoons than not, at one of the lowly zinc tables in the soda shop or drugstore currently favored for dawdling. Found there, he looks more like an undergraduate than any of the long-necked goslings to whom he is modestly listening—a small man whose head, though haired, has the startling all-over pallor of a blanched almond, for he is an albino—a former child prodigy who will resemble one to the end of his life. His coloring is the key perhaps, for he is one of those whose flaw has not crippled but become a kindly
Sesame
to the flaws of others. And perhaps too, his name, with its odd, Judaeo-Germanic echo of Merlin, the “Sanford” a mother’s vanity obscuring what might otherwise have been “Solomon.” Not a feminine man, probably never a sexual one, he is one of the rare neuters who make the world’s arch-appreciators, which is what he is in his field. The most that the gossips can say of him is that his foible is always for the young, the worst that he tempts these to—a bachelordom of scholarship like his own. Each summer he takes two students, chosen as much from the drugstore as the classroom, up to his mountain home, there to assist him with his edition of the classic philosophers, to which he adds a volume every other year. Two young men so tapped will have a chance to meet the really elect on the easy terms of the campfire and the outhouse, will have their names attached to a preface, are already, like their predecessors, marked for observation themselves. And Pierre will be one of these.

As he stretches himself, the cathedral tower equidistant between the college and this vulgarly cozy apartment sounds the quarter of an hour he does not know, and strikes him back with it, adding its fillip to the planes of idleness in the room. It is June Week, tune-week of a year, it is true, when Hitler has already entered the Sudetenland, but there has never been a year in the history of undergraduates ivoried safe from history, of which this kind of
post hoc
elegy could not have been made. It is youth who has the power. And he is here, in a city that gives most of its celebratedly hard heart, much of its preferment, to the young; a city so great for anonymity that it puts a cathedral in a slap-up back street. He is here, far away from what he once knew too well, in a place where no one, even himself, need know him—here in the city of coffee-drinkers, where he will seldom even need to refuse the tea which, even when it is pressed on him, is not tea. A truck, rumbling by, dislodges a flake of calcimine from the ceiling, and as it wafts down he waits for it as for an augur to see whether it will anoint him or the girl. It comes to rest on her cheek like a beauty patch. Never mind. The patch is half his, or will be shortly. And he is heir to the ages. Coffee is all he needs.

Once he has set it to making, according to her recipe, in the kitchen whose glisten and completeness is part of the whole comfortable sphere of her attractions, he returns to look down at her. It had all come true; in the first steps of the ballet he had learned to dance, although that was a long way back, and not with the girl lying here. He seldom thinks of this, except in some popinjay moment when he counts on his fingers—of which he still has more than enough to spare. Already he knows how healthily a present woman will expunge prior ones, how obligingly memory will abscond for him there. There all the world and poetry, as well as the funny paper, will conspire to reassure him that men are separate creatures; here he need not feel himself in the least unique. But this is his first affair, and though come to him in terms as ideal as any young man could wish for—
ménage tout compris
by a woman, the reverse of fly-by-night, whose permanent plans do not however include him—“What a setup!” as a coarse friend has commented—he sees no reason to abolish sentiment because of it. Impermanence breeds its own sentiment, tenderness not precluded. Subsequent women will hate him for this and say so, but—how lucky he is—not she. We who are in the room with him can doubt his luck—and even doubt her. Of her we will never know for sure. Watch him is all we can, while, wearing an air of experience as consciously as a turban, he bends to her cheek and blows on it.

Really, a woman who is all comfort can be too much so; she is sleeping on like one whose every dream is habitable. He kisses her, knowing better. Nevertheless, at twenty-six, lying there with all her chunky prettiness exposed—round face and waist, snub breasts whose cocoa-pink tips match her unpainted mouth, short legs, feet that are unbeautiful in shoes but look, when walking naked and even-toed, as if gravitation were something they awarded the floor—she has the matter-of-fact aura, even in dream, of a woman who, promising no more nor less than she has, knows that these promises will be fulfilled. Any man who gets her for good shall have permanence exfoliate round him like a rose made of stuff sterner than roses, house and board more extravagant than he needs but always solid and in the end a bargain, bed as is good for him, and children like the one she already has, all chub demispheres of herself. For this, such a man must give her the means—which is money—but she will not take money unaccompanied by other worth. In return, gravitation will be awarded him daily.

“Mmm.” He blows again and she answers, eyes closed. Born Leah Appelbaum, she has been known all her life as Lovey, a name that no one has ever thought to decry. The telephone listing here, however, remains under the name of Jerome Donegan, Irish jewelry salesman, dead four years ago in a car crash, while on business upstate “for the firm.” The car, a gray coupé scarcely battered, she noncommittally still drives. They used to drive up the parkways on weekends—and they were still paying for it on time. Crazy to buy a brand-new one, even on the fine salary of the job she has returned to (secretary to Bijur, the head of the firm); and the large sum from the insurance she had made Jerry buy before they were married—“After all, he was top salesman; he could afford”—is doled out only for the weekday nurse for the child. Besides, the car is needed every Saturday to drive the child to its grandparents in Brooklyn—“You ever been on the New Lots train Saturday morning?”—where the little girl, a lovely Irish-Jewish mutation, is the idolized excuse, along with tragedy, for reconciliation with a daughter who has married a
goy.
And besides, as she will say without a quiver, she still likes to drive the parkways. Like her figure are her reasons, a maddening ooze of the soft into the sensible, that only an ingrate, or perhaps a non-Jew, will attempt to divide. One wonders whether Jerry, handsome top salesman, ever wondered which category he belonged to, or cared. For—as to the listing—“This single-girl stuff, in the telephone book, it don’t look good, ever”—and before Pierre can speak—“Doesn’t!” she says, flashing him a smile, for she encourages him to correct her English—this too has value—and he seldom has to mention the same error twice. It would be his error to think that she values only the tangible. From the cabinet photo, large almost as life, sole object allowed on the immense, polished surface of her proudest and quite good investment—“You mean to say you don’t know what a credenza is!”—Pierre knows that he markedly resembles Jerry. In any case, for whatever reason, the telephone listing remains unchanged.