Square Wave (35 page)

“Oh, let me just show you what the fellows’ offices are like. I said I would do that. And thank you again for coming so early. I’ve got to be elsewhere by ten, my wife needs me.”

They wound their way down the central staircase, marble, a soft white. The steps were deep and unusually broad, as if meant for the traffic of a major university library.

“I haven’t exactly used the monk’s methods,” Stagg said. The stairwell was also rock, a speckled gray granite, and his words boomed. He lowered his voice. “But the problems with history, his ones, my ones, aren’t totally unrelated. It’s not a correspondence—that’s too strong—but an affinity. Interpretation, evidence, expression, we’re both figuring out how to do history. It would be one way of setting up the other lectures, since historiography itself is at issue. But there are other ways, yes.”

“Right, well,” Kames said as he reached the base of the stairs and led them out through a corridor of offices. They were each trimmed in dark wood on three sides and sheathed by a glass door, tinged blue, on the fourth. Only the last office on the right was in use. The man within, sleeves rolled loosely just below the elbows, clicked lazily at a mouse.
Principia Ethica
was open, facedown on the black desk, colored stickies poking out on the sides and bottom. “That’s Max. A philosopher too. But we are going to leave him alone this very early morning.”

The corridor merged with a wider walkway flanked by two larger offices with cherry doors ajar, both looking out onto courtyards through far walls of glass. Kames tapped the doorframe of one. “This just came open,” he said. “Better, I think.” Stagg peered in for his sake. Besides stacks of boxes not much could be seen, though there were the vaulted ceilings, and the walls were covered in a creamy paper that looked like cloth. “He’s returning to academe, Chicago. Nothing as nice as this. I think we may have spoiled him.”

They passed through to the atrium, which functioned as the central reading room. The ceiling, thirty feet up, was a single slab of glass, as were the walls to the left and right. Beyond one was the pond, still shaded. The water had more blue in it from here, and the surface, stirred by the wind, had more texture. The clouds shifted, redistributing the sunlight, and from the fringes of the pond a red cloud of rose finches ascended to the branches of the trees.

Beyond the other glass wall was a manicured lawn. Violets circled the bases of oaks. White rocks circled Japanese beeches. Fifty yards into the grass stood a high stone wall with a semicircular entrance cut into it, and farther back, at what Stagg assumed was the edge of the property, he could see, just above the wall, the tops of trees arranged like the pickets of a fence.

The two of them sat at a large circular table in the middle of the atrium, empty of all but rows and rows of books on all sides.

“Did you need coffee?” Kames asked.

“No.”

“Good. Well, the lecture. The approach to historiography.”

“I think there is an affinity,” Stagg said, “but that isn’t the only reason to start with it. It does get into the domestic politics. Whatever tensions were present there, they weren’t simply imported. There’s an internal tension that gets complicated by external forces. My thought had been to begin with that. The distribution of power between the priesthood—a lot of their authority came from being the minders of history—and the king and his court. Then there’s the warrior class, which overlaps with the court but isn’t always allied with it, sometimes siding with the priesthood. Some of the rebellions seem to be spearheaded by it.

“I get into the present-tense of that internal struggle, which happens in the midst of external pressures. But I leave those offstage until later. The complications. The Europeans. The interplay.”

Kames gave no response. He was waiting.

“There’s also the other lecture I showed you, just before, which starts with Rutland’s encounter with the monk. I just think… it’s not as if our own problems, today, are mostly like this, with insides and outsides. There’s no outside anymore. September 11, yes, then, maybe. And that jump-started something. Opened a door, as you put it.

“But now, no one now thinks these things in the news, the hall, the convention center, really have, or
have
to have, anything foreign about them. Maybe it’s more economic than cultural now.”

“Intra- rather than trans-. Right,” Kames said. “Wherever there are conditions for friendship, really. And its other half, enmity. I think Schmitt was right about that much. But we can’t assume economics is always the basis. We never could.”

“Yeah. But money does make friends. Enemies too. Think about the museum—”

“Well that’s certainly the way it’s being set up in the press. It misses the mark, and pretty badly.” He turned sharply to Stagg and stood. “You might be interested in something I’ve just written on this. I have it in the office.”

“I am. And I read it yesterday.”

Kames stayed on his feet. “So?”

Finches continued to ascend from the pond, not in groups now but singly.

“Shall we walk?” Kames said. “It is cold. The garden you haven’t seen. It will bring back England. Cambridge. I remember Caius had something very like this, for the fellows. Here, though, we are all and only fellows. And you can walk on the grass if you want. Do you miss England?”

Stagg only smiled. He followed Kames past the shelves of books, through the automatic doors and onto the pink pebble path cleaving the lawn. He wrapped his hands in the wool of his pockets as a high gust lashed his eyes.

“So you disagree with my little editorial,” Kames said.

“Only about excluding the economics, in that case.” Fog trailed from Stagg’s mouth as he spoke. “But you don’t really do that.”

“No, that’s right. But I make room for the possibility, even the probability, that it’s not strictly relevant in this instance.”

“That Celano is idle.”

Kames paused on the path and Stagg did too. “That’s more possible than it seems,” Kames said. “I do think that, yes. Why shouldn’t he be? He’s very clever, I understand.”

“But he would have a reason to retaliate.”

“Well you haven’t read very carefully it looks like. He and I and you have so many reasons.”

“But after the pool hall—”

“It’s their force that matters, when we talk about reasons, Carl. Their felt force really, how they appear to the parties involved at the moment of decision, under whatever circumstances prevail. It’s got nothing to do with how rationally compelling they are
in fact
, how persuasive they
ought
to be found by them, given their interests. As if we even know, reliably know, what our own interests are. And that’s putting aside how willing we are to reveal them to others. Do you see what I mean?”

They started to walk again.

“This is all very hard to calculate,” Kames said. “So, in the face of this, we simplify. We abstract. We assume likenesses between parties, and in doing that steal all the nuance, the eccentricity, from them. From whatever’s actually driven them to act, I mean, which is often many-faced and not infrequently touched by some element of delusion or self-deception. Even then, though, knowing how un-illuminating it is, we’ll insist on the formulas: ‘Certain sorts of actors are likely to find reasons of such-and-such a kind persuasive.’”

“That the sorts of people Celano backs are just the sorts you’d want disenfranchised, you mean?”

“That’s one assumption we can count on people to make, yes. But it tidies us up, perfects us in a certain way. Celano too. I mean it falsifies us. Grounds, even very good grounds, for hatred don’t guarantee hatred. That you’ve every right to draw a distinction doesn’t mean you will. Political economy can make us mean if we’re not careful, whether it’s Smith or Marx or any of their descendants. We may be prejudiced. We certainly are, actually, and that’s not always a bad thing. But we needn’t be simple too. We’re more interesting than that. I think Celano may be as well, and not just him. All ingeniously discriminating, in enmity, in friendship.”

He stepped through the semicircle and into the open-air chamber, thirty yards square: a private garden, composed only of vines with blue flowers climbing along the trellises on the high stone walls. In the center, a ring of burnished wooden chairs faced out. Tightly clipped grass and a wide, heavily built well sat within the ring.

“Simple, right? The well produces very good water, though it isn’t used much. It was here before the Institute was built, sealed over. So I thought we’d build the garden around it. The superstructure is a bit well-like, isn’t it. That was Zirilella’s idea, the architect. You get this changing configuration of light because of the gaps, like windows, cut into the east and west walls.”

Brilliant blue patches capped thick pipes of light coming in through the gaps. They sat down in the ring of chairs, facing off in different directions, as the configuration didn’t allow sight-lines to cross. The chairs were immovable and so wide that their arms didn’t reach the rests. Only a race twice the size could have comfortably occupied them.

“But yes,” Kames continued, “it’s not necessarily untrue that Celano’s constituency ought to be discounted, given what they are
now
. But why should they remain as they are? Why should they want to? Wisdom is mostly acquirable. And if they transform themselves, well… You know, many of those rich old men at the fundraiser, giving their own money,
they
would be discounted too. Their problem is worse, in some ways. Commerce has deformed some of them, probably permanently. Character is flexible only up to a point. And some of those men are old dogs now. So, yes, they too have misconceptions about who they are. Who will disenchant them I don’t know.” Kames shook his head. “And all these simple lines. Between Celano and I. And Jenko. Must he also stand on the other side?”

“But they’re being drawn all the same,” Stagg said.

“Yes.”

“And that will bring attention.”

“It has.”

“And you’re prepared for that? A wrong impression made on the right people—”

“You know, I’ve always found it funny, the way you can draw all the wrong lines and still the picture you end up with is right in a way,” Kames said. “And not just as a matter of chance. It’s managed to catch something along the way. But it’s a kind of rightness that can leave you casting about when it comes time to figure out what to do.” He rubbed the blood back into his fingers. “No one is wrong to think there is passionate intensity around. Even among the best now. Yeats would be surprised.”

In the light there was shadow and movement. The rose finches had clustered in the windows of the walls; their forms cut shapes out of the light. One shot down into the garden, its shadow contracting to nothing as the bird lighted on the very spot it had been thrown onto among the flowers and vines.

“Anyway, yes, I suppose the domestic situation is fraught enough,” Kames said, no longer as ruminative and more conciliatory. “That makes this piece no worse a place to start, to understand how one layer of complication grafts onto another. But it’s still very thick with exegesis. Perhaps we can backload some of that, even move it to a later talk, and you can build a bit on the relations between the various political bodies?”

“I’ll see if I can find the right materials, from the journals, to interpolate. They might not exist. I’d rather not do it through exposition. But if the material is there, sure.”

“Yes, I can see you are set on that. I think we’ll give it a go, without a real frame then.”

The cold had seeped through their clothes. They rose at the same time, facing away from each other. “Even historians need performance art,” Kames said. “That must be your feeling.”

25

Blue tits, a half-dozen of them, just below the window, hopping about on a branch in crisp Valley light filling the thinnest sky, translucent blue and shading off quickly at its upper edge toward a moon still sharp and clear and of a phosphorescent gray bespeaking death and life both.

Jen loved California for this light, and it was the memory of it, from her first trip out West, that clinched it for her. She was only three weeks removed now from her life back East, in the old apartment, under that ambivalent light that barely lit the place, or Halsley itself, it seemed like.

Whatever she thought of the light, though, she would have had to move—or be moved, forcibly. She’d learned from other actresses she’d met that the adult industry was really a possession of the West. On the East Coast, there wasn’t enough work for them, and the scenes didn’t pay as much as they should have. Since that first shoot with the smoothie, she’d done a few softcore videos, ones where she’d only been called upon to kiss girls or self-penetrate. But the pay was modest and couldn’t offset the rent and the booze (and the pills). She was also finding out it was sheer fantasy to think you could make real money in the business merely fucking yourself. A guy had to give it to you for that to happen.

At that point, she wasn’t quite broke yet, but on the cusp of eviction anyway. The landlord wanted her out, her neighbors too, though she’d been so out of it, she could only partly recall the episodes that explained why. Had she managed to apologize to them, for any of it, or had she only dreamed that she had in drugged slumbers? Either way, they didn’t want to hear it.

Carl had called a few times in those weeks. Early on, she picked up, choosing occasions when she was pleasantly buzzed rather than wasted to do so. She dodged his questions about her new job and steered their conversations toward a common love, books, especially the ancient ones. In the fourth and last of the calls, they talked about ancient history—Herodotus—for at least twenty minutes. It confirmed what she’d suspected, that he was marvelously well read in just the things she found most captivating.

She stopped picking up after that. She didn’t care, or want to care, about what was happening with the case, with the one assaulting the whores. Talking to Carl made that harder. She didn’t care to know about the other girls either, even Mariela. Nothing that really mattered bound them together. She wasn’t interested in false connections. The only person she’d actually talked to with any fondness or frequency in Halsley lately was the Palestinian running the corner liquor store. She thought he had a good heart.