The Lair (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) (41 page)

“I’ll cancel the date. I shouldn’t have accepted. She took me by surprise, and I was curious. Curious and childish.”

“You’ve said this before. Meaning you haven’t canceled the fairy tale soiree.”

“I don’t understand why you hate her. She poisoned a few months of mine, not yours. I’m entitled to refuse her offer.”

“Entitled, yes, but you’re curious. You want to see the phantom who sent perfumed letters from the other world up close. I have no reason to be curious. I know the conniver.”

“You thought you knew her. Then your image of her was upturned and proven false. Once again, you think you know her, but maybe she’s someone else. Let’s get dinner. You have your car, I assume.”

“Yes, let’s go. After dessert we’ll escape. To the wilds of Nevada. I hope that appeals.”

“Impressive and frightening.”

“American girls are all about fair play. They announce their intentions, not like the slaves of the Orient, who surrender only to dominate.”

“American girls are more dangerous. Insufferable, in fact. They always feel entitled, vindictive. No misgivings, no melancholy. No flirting. Flirting is ambiguity, isn’t it? Unacceptable, incorrect?! Politically, morally, and religiously incorrect. The American suffragettes have very just and personal criteria, and they respond promptly when ignored or offended, or when they think they are ignored or offended.”

“Oho . . . now that’s going too far. I invited you to run away to Nevada where we can live like savages for a few months. The adventure
compensates for the flaws. A regimen of freedom and primitiv-ism. We’ll retreat to my little provincial hometown. Full of convention and good sense. I’ll introduce you to my aunt. My mother’s unwed sister. You’ll like her. She contradicts the cliche. She has both misgivings and melancholy. Just like I do, besides… but also a sense of fair play. Clarity, humor, vitality. Wisdom. And she’s attractive. America is offering you an American partner.”

“So then, we’re going out to eat.”

“We’re going, but first we’ll go to the bear’s den. So that I can get the scent of the betrayal. I parked the car in front of Professor Ga
par’s cabin. Let’s go to the bear cave first. Just for a second, no need to stay longer. I can sniff out foreign tracks very quickly.”

The red car in front of the cabin. Ga
par opens the door to the den, wide open.

“You want to come in? Come in and pick up the scent.”

Tara hesitates. Smiles and hesitates. Concentrating. You can tell by the furrow in her brow, above her nose. When thoughtfulness becomes worry, that furrow becomes visible.

The professor on the threshold, in front of the wide open door. He makes the grand gesture of a hotelier.

“No, I’m not coming in. I’m not with the police. I’m not even Professor Ga
par’s student any longer. Nor the mailman. I have no
entitlement,
to use Sir Ga
par’s term.”

The restaurant is empty, Tara is direct and full of fair play, even if not always sincere, while Peter is no Pieter, Ga
par is no Mynheer Peeperkorn, doesn’t have the ease, the Dutchman’s irresponsible grace, nor the vitality to sweep away his blunders. The
interbellum
character multiplied himself, all around, not just in the pages of long ago, in the picturesque variations of the present: a man married for the fifth time, to a woman younger than his daughter from marriage number two, husband renewed by Viagra—the new Peeperkorn.

The quiet Italian restaurant, lit discreetly by a single candle on each table, promises a good premise for the Nevada experiment. First glass of wine. Silence, the tick-tock of thoughts, hesitations
flickering in the gaze. The professor extends his hand, the student doesn’t withdraw it, nor does she yell or seem appalled at the touch. No talk of morality or Protestant Puritanism.

The professor squeezes the student’s fingers and leans toward the playful curls. He allows himself to be won over too quickly instead of becoming, through purely his presence, the possessor of the prey. Tara appears grateful for what Peter had changed in her over the course of the last few months. Natural, alive, more present and stronger than the cliches that overwhelm the vocabulary and imagination of so many of her generation, she’d learned to protect her companion with the naturalness of a comrade. A comrade who was deepening their intimacy that evening.

Tara’s car remained parked in front of Professor Gaspar’s cabin over the following weeks. Gossip was kindling and intensifying, but President Larry One impeded the indictment. He frowns wearily when Jennifer Tang informs him laconically and dutifully during the pause of a routine check-in that Professor Ga
par was seen walking aimlessly and negligently around campus, his pant legs dragging on the ground, his fly down, restive and bored, and a car parked outside his house, precisely the car of the suspect tied to the letters.

At the end of year celebrations, Tara receives her graduation diploma, Deste announces that she’s transferring to another university for her last year of study. Ga
par disappears from campus not long after that.

No one knows whether it’s merely a temporary leave, for the duration of the summer, or if he’s disappeared
forever.

A temporary absence or gone
forever?
No one can answer, not Gora’s obituaries, which compete with destiny, nor the disloyal narrator, as Palade used to call me. The narrator who manipulates reality.

During those dizzying days, Gora called me. We’d known each other for a long time, through Mihnea Palade, the Bukovina native who’d
finished high school a few years after me, in our little town of trees and idylls. He was the one who introduced me to the suspects’ attic.

Palade had stopped me in the center of the capital, in front of the Italian church. We hadn’t seen each other since his arrival at the university. On a long walk around the beautiful Ioanid Park, not far from where he’d found me, I shared with him my elation over the anonymity of a large city, and he told me all about his new circle of friends with whom he debated literature and religion and philosophy and art. He seemed vitalized and enthusiastic, happy that the same temptations appealed even to a polytechnic man such as I was. He was studying mathematics himself, not quite born with Leo-pardi’s milk bottle in his mouth, either. And he sought to forge a sort of cultural solidarity between us, not just a geographic one. He gave me the address of the attic, adding maliciously, “It’s not like drinking with women. It’s much, much worse.”

A few boys, a couple of girls. The excessively esoteric discussions, and the juvenile assurance by which those discussions were amplified, bored me, and the open anti-Communism seemed suspect. Blowhard interventions, like some spoken essays, irritated me. I don’t have any special recollection of that night, except for my obsession with Lu.

Neither Gora nor Palade forgot the bizarre state of embarrassment and skepticism of the bibliophile that I was. Gora had participated—with increasing fervor, as I was to find out—in the heated controversies, which he himself directed gradually away from politics and toward literature. That was where Mihnea Palade expounded on Borges’
Death and the Compass
and Kafka’s
The Trial
or Orwell’s allegory, Dima’s books and life. That was where he reen-countered Lu, whom he’d known from some Saturday night parties with other young people captivated by music and dance. I still haven’t forgotten his first descriptions of her.