Letting Go (41 page)

As I moved off the steps of Cobb and onto the snow-covered walk, I saw a man, bareheaded and bundled up, sitting on a wooden bench some twenty feet along the path. I was feeling limp—as a result of feeling misguided once again—and I was anxious now to get home and change and be off to Martha Reganhart’s; then I saw that it was Paul Herz. I wondered if he had been watching me as I stood, thinking, on the steps of Cobb Hall. It made me feel vulnerable, as though just from seeing me there without my knowing, he could have divined the secrets of my life. I could not convince myself that he did not somehow know it was I who had called in the morning and hung up. Nor could I logically explain why I had not at least answered him after he had picked up the phone and said hello.

“How are you?” I asked, walking up to him. “Enjoying the night air? It’s a relief, isn’t it—after that?”

Paul removed one hand from his pocket and looked at his watch. “It’s a relief,” he said.

“Spigliano’s mission in life is to burn out the guts of better people than himself. Don’t take him to heart. I once overheard him say to someone on the phone, ‘Gabe is probably a nice fellow, but I wouldn’t say he has too many ideas.’ ” Snowflakes fell onto Paul’s thinning hair, and I had the urge—the kind of silly urge one can so easily give in to—to brush them loose. “You made perfect sense,” I said. “But he’s unbeatable. He doesn’t believe he can rise in the world unless everyone else falls.”

He nodded his head, then checked the time again.

“Well, I won’t keep you …” I said, though he hadn’t moved.

“I shouldn’t have lost my temper.” He looked up at me, speaking in a very soft voice. “It was a bad outburst to show those pricks.” The light from a nearby lamp revealed the creases in his thin face; at that moment he looked nothing at all like the boy in the picture with Maury Horvitz. “Don’t you think so?”

I sat down next to him. “I don’t think much of some of them,” I said. “Do you mind if I sit down? I’ve got a few minutes before dinner.”

“You liked that paper—it had a little something, didn’t it?”

“I thought it was pretty good,” I said. “It was lively, you were right.”

A girl emerged from Goodspeed Hall, and Paul leaned forward and looked her way; then he leaned back again, saying nothing.

“Do you know the student who wrote the paper?” I asked.

“No. But that’s the point …” he said.

I wondered if perhaps he had planned some elaborate hoax; I really didn’t know very much about Paul Herz, and so it was possible to think any number of things. “You didn’t write it, did you?” I asked, kiddingly.

“Who do
you
think—a boy or a girl?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’ve been thinking a boy. A kid I’ve seen in the halls.”

“A student of yours?”

“No,” he said, “I just picked him out. I saw him whining one day in the halls to a friend of his. He’s got an awful face. He was making a terrible scene. Bad posture. Picking at his shorts all the time. He probably has some nasty habit like not flushing after himself.”

The clock in Mitchell Tower struck six gongs, and I realized that I might be late for dinner. Still, across from me Paul Herz had smiled. He was talking, no small thing.

“Why this paper?” I asked. “Why this kid?”

“Just a joke. I’m reasoning after the fact,” he said gloomily. “I don’t know who wrote it.”

“Oh,” I said, mystified.

“Look, what
is
Spigliano?”

“What?”

“Spigliano. Harvard too?”

“Harvard too,” I said.

“Who fires people around here?” he asked, after a moment.

“There’s a committee. Spigliano’s one. So is Sam, and the Dean—I don’t know, three or four others. It’s depressing, I know. Sometimes I wonder why I don’t go downtown and get a job pushing toothpaste for five times the salary.” I hadn’t meant, of course, to indicate that I was in any need of cash; nevertheless, Paul sensed an irony I didn’t intend, and gave me a fishy look. “But in the end,” I said, meaning it, “it’s a healthier life, this one. You go into class and you can do as you please. It’s not a bad life.”

Solemnly, suddenly, he said to me, “I appreciate, of course, what you were able to do …”

“Look,” I jumped in, as his voice trailed off, “why do you think this kid who doesn’t flush after himself wrote this paper? You may have developed a whole new technique of psychological testing.”

He smiled. “Oh—here’s this disgusting unimportant kid being a first-rate bastard to his roommate in public. And here’s this sweet very excited little essay. That’s all. It’s nice to think it happens. I’d like to kick Spigliano right in the ass for filling their heads with all that
form
crap.”

Hating the same people usually turns out to be a weak basis for friendship; nevertheless, I allowed myself to feel considerable fondness for Paul Herz. He seemed to me nothing less than a genuine and capable man. At any rate, I was willing to believe this as the snow fell and we sat together in the dignified environs of the University. I was even willing to believe that he was not Libby’s misfortune, but that she was his. Perhaps the truth was that Libby was a girl with desires
nobody
could satisfy; perhaps they weren’t even “desires” but the manifestation of some cellular disorder, some physiochemical imbalance that fated her to a life of agonized yearning in our particular world of flora and fauna, amongst our breed of humanity. I was
willing to believe that Libby either did not need to be rescued, or was impossible to rescue. The more involved I became in her life, I told myself—repeating a lesson learned several times already—the more anguish we would all have. No one had to marry Libby; she was already married!

“Why don’t you come over to the club with me?” I suggested. “We’ll have a drink. Warm up—”

He checked his watch again and told me he was waiting for his wife.

“She’s still working?” I asked.

“… I suppose so.”

“Well,” I said, “we can all three have a drink.”

“I’m afraid she’ll be too tired. It’s better not to tire her. The weather …” His mood had changed, and so had his voice. Leaving his sentence unfinished, he huddled in his coat.

“What is it?” I asked. “Is she ill?”

“No,” he said. “She only gave it up because the doctors don’t think she should be out at night. Not in this kind of climate.”

“Gave what up? I’m sorry.”

He peered over at me. “School. Classes.”

“I haven’t seen Libby, so I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”

“She said, I think, she met you in the Loop.”

“I meant I haven’t seen her to talk with. I was shopping.”

He chose not to reply. Instantly I imagined scenes in his home where my name was introduced as evidence of duplicity and crime. The little trust that had seemed to have sprung up between us disappeared, and I began to wonder just how disloyal Libby was to
me.
It was clearly time for me to be moving off, by myself.

I said, “Well, I’m sorry about that.”

“She can go back in the spring and summer, you see,” Paul was telling me. “It’ll be all right. When it’s warm again, she can start in again.” I felt as though I were a parent being given an explanation by a child; there was suddenly that in Paul Herz’s tone. “Right now, getting to the train, getting off the train, walking to the Downtown College—” he said. “The doctors—” he began, and the plural of the noun seemed to depress both of us. “The doctors think she should build up resistance first.”

“Yes. That sounds like a sensible solution.”

However there was an even better one. Doubtless it came to me as quickly as it did because it had been hiding all these years only a little way under the surface. It made me feel both old and giddy:
they could borrow my car. Warmed by my heater, Libby could drive back and forth to her classes; I could park it near Goodspeed on the days she would be needing it; an extra key could easily—

“Well,” I said to Paul, “I’ll be seeing you.”

“Okay,” he said.

The formal nature of our relationship immediately reasserted itself; more often than not, when Paul Herz and I came together or parted, we shook hands. It seemed to me always to combine a measure of distrust and a measure of hope. Now when we shook hands I felt a rush of words move up, and what I finally said had to stand for all that I had decided to keep to myself. “By the way, I was in a funk this morning. I dialed your number by mistake. I didn’t realize it until I hung up. I hope it didn’t ruin your day, the mystery of it.”

Though I am twenty pounds heavier than Paul, we are the same height, and when he rose, suddenly, holding onto my hand, I found myself looking into his worried eyes. I couldn’t imagine precisely what it was he was going to say—though I thought for a moment that we had at last reached our particular crisis. I was instantly unnerved, and also, melancholy. Though I tell myself I value passion, I must admit that I do not value scenes of it; though I try to live an honest life, I do not like to see honesty stripped of civility and care. I was prepared, all at once, to be humiliated. But all Paul said, with a pained look of determination, was, “Why don’t we have that drink?”

“Why don’t we,” I said.

“We’ll go. Libby too,” he added.

“If she’s tired, Paul—”

“Libby would like to see the club,” he said. “Libby needs …” But that sentence was not finished either; just the simple subject and that simple verb. With gravity, with tenderness—all this in his dark eyes—he said, “It would be good for Libby.”

I don’t think it would have shocked either of us then if we had embraced. It was the kind of emotional moment that one knows is being shared.

We tramped together through the snow to Goodspeed, and we did not speak. I believed it was crucial for me to stay with him, even though my watch showed that I was going to be late for Martha Reganhart. I believed something was being settled.

Paul stopped some fifteen feet from the entryway. A light from
a second floor window spread around us where we stood in the snow. My companion made a megaphone of his hands and whistled two notes up toward the window. Then, softly, he called, “Lib-by … Lib-byyy.”

He actually sang her name. As though he loved her. “Lib-byyyy.…” After a moment passed and no one had appeared, he called through his hands, “Hey, arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon!” But when nothing happened, he turned to me and said, “We better go in.”

I walked behind him thinking only one thought.
She is this man’s wife.
I followed him up the stairs to the second floor and we turned down the corridor, by the water fountain, and then we stepped into the open doorway of Libby’s office. And there she was, smashing away at the typewriter. Neither Paul nor I moved any further, and neither of us could speak.

Libby was hunched over the machine, wearing—for all that the radiator was bubbling and steaming away across the room—her polo coat and her red earmuffs; her face was scarlet and her hair was limp, and moving in and out of her mouth was the end of her kerchief, upon which she was chewing. Stencils were strewn over the desk and wadded on the floor, and from her throat came a noise so strange and eerie that it struck me as prehistoric, the noise of an adult who knows no words. Yearning and misery and impotence … She was like something in a cage or a cell—that was my first impression. It did not seem as though her own will or her own strength would be enough to remove her from this desk. I watched her fist come down upon the spacer—clump! A stencil was torn free of the carriage with a loud whining that could have come either from the typist or the machine. She threw it onto the floor and then looked up and saw the two of us.

She gasped, she brushed her kerchief over her cheeks, she touched her fingers to her hair, and from behind a mass of clouds, she pretended to be that fair sun her husband had sung out to from beneath the window.

“I’m”—she drew in through her nostrils—“just finishing.” She picked up a fresh stencil. “I’ll only be a minute … Hello,” she finally said.

Paul moved into the office. “Libby—”

But Libby was bending over now, sorting through the papers on the floor. Then, giving up, she raised her body, centered herself
on her chair, centered the stencil, lifted her fingers, and her mouth began to widen across her face. Her eyes swam out of focus for a moment, as she turned to say, “I’m just having a little trouble. The typewriter”—she brought herself under control—“sticks.” She looked down and made the smallest of sounds: she whimpered. “Another minute.”

I remained in the doorway, while Paul’s long figure inclined toward his wife. “Are you feeling all right? Are you feeling sick, you’re so flushed—”

She picked her ratty, lifeless kerchief out of her lap, where it had dropped, and blew her nose into it. “I’m fine,” she said. “I’m not used to stencils, that’s all …”

“Libby, we’re going to have a drink at the Quadrangle Club. Why don’t you save the stencil for tomorrow?”

“I have to finish.”

“You can finish tomorrow. You can’t sit in here with your coat on. Take off your earmuffs, Libby, and we’ll get the place in order and we’ll all go have—”

She was shaking her head. “The Dean needs it. Paul, please, just sit down.”

“Why do you have your coat on? Are you cold? It’s hot in here. Libby, come on now, please.”

“I’m fine—one more—”

“The Dean can wait,” he said. “You’re letting yourself get upset—it’s not important.”

But she was shifting herself around in her chair until she was in the posture prescribed for efficient typists.

“Please, Libby. It’s after six. You’re weak. You’ve been here since eight-thirty.”

“I’m fine! I’m perfectly fine!” She looked over at me, and she exclaimed, as though I doubted the fact too: “I am!”

“Yes,” I said, though not very forcefully.

“Now.” She centered the stencil in the carriage once again, turned to the manuscript she was copying, and struck the first key. “Ooohhh,” she moaned.

“What, honey? What is it?” Paul asked.

“Why do I keep hitting the
half?
I keep wanting the p and getting the half! Oh Paulie—” she bawled, ripping the stencil violently from the machine,
“I can’t even type!”