Stories in an Almost Classical Mode (17 page)

I am a great lover. Of respectability. I never saw respectability as a lie or a hard bargain—harder than any other—or a trap: it can be misused, but what can’t? What isn’t? In return for taking heed of appearances, one is rewarded—that’s what respectability means—and, of course, appearances can’t quite be kept up without some reality, therefore sacrifices. When I was a child in the Midwest, there were little centers of sin every so many hundred miles, and men who could not endure respectability much longer went on business trips to Hot Springs or Cairo (Illinois) or Chicago. Respectability never omitted sin but put it in a place—and after all, why not? The worst scandals were when grownups interfered sexually with the young.

After that Sunday in the park, often in my enormous lecture course when I stood at the podium and looked out at the rows of pale, unformed faces and saw Jeanie’s, I wondered if she was sturdy or neurotic, adept at affection and creating a warm atmosphere, if she was honest or giddy or hollow. It was not at first with anything more than curiosity that I searched out her face, to see if she was indeed in my course—not in simple paranoia but as reflection of something which had been vague and duplicitous in her manner that Sunday, or it could be simply that I was pleased to have had any human contact with one of that vast number of the swarming young.

There is something intoxicating in lecturing and something corrupting as well, something I spoke of in a speech to the National Conference of English Instructors, a sort of damning mythicization of the self, an overwhelming sense of one’s comparative truth opposed to their comparative error, them, sitting out there, the unenlightened, Babbitts, Antichrists, blindhearts.

Sometimes it is merely a sense of one’s own beauty, one’s voice pouring out in almost endless profusion words of penetration, images, points, arguments. My second wife accused me of being “a vocal narcissist.” I use my voice. I argued with her once, “Only three things hold people’s attention: money, gaining or enjoying superiority over others,
and sex.” So I—oh, what a realist I am—build every lecture about one of those three: the money that might go with clear thought, the superiority that so delicately and firmly accompanies knowledge, and sex. I take sex where I find it; sometimes I supply it by a generic flirtation with the entire class—it is a scholarly device.

I never dwelled on her face; I merely wondered what I missed in not knowing her; I wondered if I would become as firm as Ett if I were in the care of a woman of the sort he liked. A good woman to steady me.

Now blur the faces in the lecture hall, whirl them around like a montage turning into wheels, the wheels of a plane; and there I am, in Paris, the summer after that term, delving into documents in the Bibliothèque Nationale, wandering in the Luxembourg to clear my head or to read. There had been an affair that spring, after the day in the park, with a straight-backed philosopher lady whose stinking self-assurance and righteousness had frozen my timid lust—no, not my lust, my heart. One had to cheat one’s thoughts past her, bootleg notions of this or that. She was a relativist and could have easily forgiven infidelity, but never unclear thought. Infidelity is not my problem. It’s belonging to people and yet wanting to think my own thoughts. As everyone knows, an affair or a marriage leaves bruises all over one’s psyche and one’s fantasies, and one wants to be left alone. A man of open and stupid heart, I elevated my condition into a moral style, I was chaste and I was happy, and I credited my happiness to my chastity: one must be moral or suffer. But one day, doused in French prose, pinched and stung by the French sun and by the cries of serious-eyed and somehow gently, interiorly stiffened French children at play—cries rendered haunting by the careful pessimism that seemed to be lodged in the intelligent rigidity of their bones—I plunged into another mood. It was toward three o’clock. Even though I was a tourist, and a tourist is a simpler man than a man at home, I did not at first see any further into my mood than that it was a restlessness—as if French prosody had affected me with a muscular itch. Then at three-thirty the sun clouded over; Paris became misty, became clearly the forest city it is, dominated by Druidical rites of passage (the buildings are like forest rows in stone, the air is both warm and cool with mortality and damp and with faint gradations of temperature that stir the nerve endings in the skin), and I decided I was lustful in a sense. I do not know about other men, but in me a mood is simply a climate in the skull, a quality of light, something quite real but unnamed. Sensibility is not only perceiving; it is attaching names. It was tentatively that
I put the label on my mood, saying “tourist’s lust” as I walked up the long
allée
toward Montparnasse. It was with the first appearance of an argument—“Christianity seems so out of place in Paris,” I began—that I realized how powerful a cramp had attacked me; other men may move more swiftly and surely among their instincts.

One’s appetites nip at one’s heels, distract one’s senses, until one sets them on the hunt; distracted, resistant, I sat at the Coupole and drank Pernod; slowly the moral level at which I thought it necessary to live sank, until by six I had rearranged my thoughts to fit my loneliness and my body heat. It was shortly after six when in a beret sort of thing and a shiny vinyl, almost stylish raincoat, with coarse-textured hair slightly lifted by the moisture of the evening, Jeanie appeared, obviously by herself, and said with a funny, nervous, broken-breathed laugh, “You’re Professor Hofstedt. You probably don’t remember me. I was in your English Prose and Poetry 804B last year.”

Before Paris and after the day in the park, one of the teaching fellows brought me among the sample papers from his group a paper written by Jeanie; she had written, “The goal of poetry is to excite and teach. Sometimes it teaches by being shocking.” She used two quotations:

In Paris, when I suggested if she was not busy or did not have to rush off and meet her parents or friends or some young man, I remembered her paper and that I had thought, reading it, she was a girl of no extraordinary intelligence but of a passionate disposition.

T
HE AWARENESS
quickens: the wallpaper in my room, and after kissing her the sudden conviction that I had ought to love this girl or not touch her because her soul was so naked, her kisses so alive, unconcealed, unself-protective, but not unskilled; then the conviction becomes a clouded French sensuousness, a preliminary regret for the loss to come of her innocence—not her virginity; innocence—and with that loss a loss of what in her held me to this line of action so contrary to my customary rules. I spoke in a sex-deepened voice as I undressed her:
“You understand, I never go to bed with my students.” She sighed, she trembled, she gazed wide-eyed. “You must never take another course of mine,” I said. In sensual moments even good humor blends indistinguishably into fatuity. What is wise is silence: the nerves will speak. I was immensely grateful to her for being so susceptible to me. I felt I would love her very shortly: she had only to be in essence what she was in appearance—fresh, young, simple, good—and I would love her warmly. Yes. Indeed.

The important thing soon came to be not to let her talk too much
before
lovemaking or I sometimes became unexcited; she caught on and was silent while I rambled on, winning her. Afterward was her time to talk: “I hate it in Glencoe, you really see the war between the sexes in a suburb.… Everyone
works
at being insensitive; I’d help Momma in the kitchen and there’d be a package of biscuit mix with some terrible picture on the front and I’d say, ‘Oh, how ugly,’ and Momma would say, ‘Oh, Jeanie.’ Or she’d say, ‘I don’t pay attention to those things,’ but I knew it was me she didn’t want to pay attention to…”

Sometimes in the woods, in the sunlight, at Fontainebleau or in the Bois de Boulogne, a sweetness would seize her, a gentle lovingness that would terminate in hideous solicitude: “The future must be horrible for you to look into, isn’t it? Maybe I can help you against the shadows.” She meant because I was old. And she said things like “I’m good for you, I make you feel young,” when I laughed at something—say, two dogs running in a circle, chasing each other, bodies, necks, legs stretched like held notes in Mozart: I am much amused by animal exuberance.

At times she would be bored; she would wait while I worked and come in suddenly to the room where I was writing and say, “I’m going out.” “To do what?” “I don’t know. Something.” And she could not meet my gaze.
Tell me what to do, tell me something interesting to do.

When I was young, I saw people as sheer appetites, fish leaping for flies, smooth, beautiful, and hungry. But I was perhaps appetiteful myself then. I’m older now and I see people as complex things, held in and mysterious, streaked with virtues and ridiculous with vices; I see them perched on time, each on a breaking branch the buds of which are sticky, new always, ready to unfold into green moments.

Doodling one day, I wrote, “the time and energy it takes to instruct her …”

I did not want to take her back to New York with me or explain her
to my friends or be seen with her: Hofstedes child, Hofstedt’s embodied lust, all my secrets revealed in her reasonable sweet ordinariness.

And then there was her conversation, the words she used: “That was an icky movie.” Some people are austere with silences, others not, but I feel that for us as for primitive man it is language that enables us to move in unison with others, and I did not want to totter with Jeanie.

But I liked her body.

Villon wrote:

I know death, who eats us, I know everything—but not myself. I wanted her; I wanted to set her free; I wanted to be free of her. Above all, I did not want to be guilty of any crime toward her. Gifted with intelligence, aided by thought, we advance on folly.

“Jeanie, I cannot persuade myself that what is happening is good for you or that anything is right except to separate for a while and study our feelings—”

Hofstedt at the window not long after, with his back to the girl he did not just then know if he loved or not, a girl with coarse-fibered hair, white bandages on her wrists; Hofstedt hearing echoes of the wild-voiced, unconvincing, yet wholly terrifying scene in the bathroom—a scene reflected in mirrors, in glossy white tile, in the razor blade itself she held: she had said, “You don’t love me, I want to kill myself” —standing at the window after the scene had ended, Hofstedt said in reply to her (but he did not say it; he thought it),
You are a spoiled, passionate, perhaps unloving child.

The shock echoed in him, caused concern and anger; his nerves and feelings were startled. The girl was monomaniacal—Inez-like.

“God knows,” he said aloud, his back to her, his face looking out at plane trees, at what, after the scene in the bathroom, he could not help seeing as leaves spilling as if from razor-slit bolsters, “I’m a clumsy ass and a bastard and all of that, but can’t we do without the melodrama?”

The girl with that childish hair and dulled eyes said simply, “No.”

The wisdom of conventional rules had never seemed more unexceptionable, and the powers of my own mind more problematic. “Leo,” I asked myself, “what do you want to do?”

I had no idea.

A French friend of mine, Charles N., came to Paris just then; we
talked; he was killed a week later in an automobile accident. But the day we talked he said to me rather crossly—I had been saying unkind things about Sartre’s prose—he said, “Leo, I don’t feel your fundamental optimism proves you are a fool; it merely indicates that you occupy a private world.”

I said, “But I know it for a fact. None of us is going to die.”

I
T
OOK
her back to New York; Ett was mad with jealousy; he said, “How do you rate such a pretty girl?” I announced Jeanie’s and my engagement; the college was most indulgent; I met Jeanie’s parents—they seemed normal, clumsy, child-crippling people. I began to write essays to earn money to buy furniture; my second wife had taken everything—“to teach you a lesson, Leo,” she said. “You underrate what people do for you. Legally—the law thinks I did a great deal for you and that I have a right to these things.”

At a party, my second wife met Jeanie and came up to me later and said, “You’ve shifted to plain girls, have you? Well, at least she’s not a Tahitian.” I have no idea what she meant.

Jean decided Jeanie was too childish an appellation, and she became Jean, giggling. “It’s about time. Maybe
no one
will ever mention my light-brown hair again.” She told me she was beginning a novel.

I wrote:

One night at Inez and Ett’s, Jean held forth on the magnificence and importance of movies, and I said movies were to her what sermons had been to her Presbyterian grandmother—inspiring, part of her Sunday morality, hardly ever intelligent or the source of intelligence but, rather, the source of a good deal of hypocrisy, and so on.

“Don’t start a quarrel,” she said.

“I didn’t mean to—I was making an observation.”

Ett had a special, peaceful gaze—with unwrinkled brows—with which he looked at Jeanie. I think he daydreamed about her unremorsefully always whenever he saw her.

“You’re tired of me,” Jeanie said.

Inez said mysteriously, “Leo is a very sophisticated man.”

“My dear,” I said, “if you want to quarrel, let’s go home and get drunk and quarrel in peace and not upset our friends.”

“We must talk about it!” Jeanie said with a sort of fine desperation.

“Here?”

“You talk better than I do. When we’re alone, you win the arguments. But Inez and Ett know you. They know how unreasonable you are.”