The Morels (22 page)

“I hope this isn’t because of us,” I said. “Please don’t leave because of us. You two can still work it out.”

Penelope glanced past me to make sure nobody was there and then narrowed her eyes at me. “I told you never to mention that,” she hissed. “There is no us. I told you that, too.”

“Then where are you going?”

“I tried,” she said. “I tried with him, but there’s only so much I can do. At a certain point, I’ve got to start being a mother. God, why did it take me so long to figure that out?” She clicked the suitcase handle into place and rolled it out of the room. “Will,” she shouted down the hall, “are you ready?”

I tried with him
. Was she talking about Will or Arthur? I followed after her into the living room.

Will was kneeling at the television. “Hey,” he said to me.

Penelope said, “Where is your sleepover stuff?”

“I want to make sure it tapes. It’s the second episode in a two-part—”

“I told you, Will. We’re not coming back for a while.”

“But when we do come back—”

“Your sleepover stuff. Now.” Will got up and marched into his room.

“I know you have your hands full here,” I said, “and I don’t want to make things more complicated for you right now. But I have a thought—not a thought, more of a proposal—for you to think about on your way to wherever you’re going. Where are you going, by the way?”

“Jesus, just ask what you’re going to ask already.”

“I want an interview with you.”

“An interview.”

“We’re going to make a film. About Arthur, about your lives. You can be famous.”

“What is this? You want to film me? What for?”

“And Arthur. It would be a documentary.”

“Fucking unbelievable. You people are fucking unbelievable. It’s like a steamroller, a runaway steamroller. Will!”

Will stomped out of his room. “I’m packing,” he yelled. His voice was angry, but his eyes were afraid.

“Forget it. We’re leaving. Now. Out the door.” She ushered Will into the hallway. “Hit the button,” she called, following him, leaving me standing in the center of the room. She didn’t bother to close the door on her way out.

I related this run-in to Suriyaarachchi, who said, “Don’t worry about her, she’ll come around.” He rubbed his hands together. “So the plot thickens!”

The next day, I tried knocking on their door again, half expecting it to be open, but it wasn’t, and nobody answered. I had Arthur’s cell number and tried that a few times, but it was going straight to voice mail. The campus directory at Columbia put me in touch with the Writing Division, and the woman who
answered the phone said he had office hours on Thursdays. It was Friday.

“Isn’t he around any other day?”

“He’s here now, but I couldn’t say how much longer he’ll stay. Most people leave early on Fridays.” I thanked her and told Suriyaarachchi that I would be back later.

I arrived at the doorway to Arthur’s office, flushed and out of breath. “I’ve been looking for you.”

He was seated at his desk, stack of papers in front of him. He looked up. “What do you want?”

Despite Penelope’s claim, it seemed clear to me that the frantic business of her packing was the direct result of our affair. I was certain it had caused this final tumult in their lives—a shouting match that ended with her throwing the fact of her infidelity in his face. Arthur’s abruptness appeared to confirm it.

“Nothing urgent,” I said. “Mostly just concerned.”

He gave me a frown. The office was dim and windowless, barely big enough for one of the two enormous desks here. Whoever occupied the one opposite Arthur was not here now, though there were signs of a recent vacancy: unfinished e-mail on the monitor, a Tupperware container open next to the keyboard: pasta, fork with a bite twirled neatly around resting on the lid.

“That’s Don,” Arthur said, seeing where I was looking.

“I tried calling. And knocking and ringing your doorbell. Where have you been?”

He was unshaved, hair uncombed, shirt untucked. He watched me for a moment and then, as if to wish me gone, returned his attention to his papers. I sat down at the unoccupied desk, waiting for him to tell me what he knew, readying my apology.

“Don’s coming back,” he said without looking up. And then, putting down his pen, “Penelope left me. She took Will.”

“Oh no,” I said. Then, testing the waters, “What happened?”

“I came home last night,” Arthur said. “There was a reading up
here, over at eight. I thought she might be picking Will up from the neighbors’. Then I saw the bedroom.”

Closet empty. Dresser empty.

He called her cell—straight to voice mail. He sat down on the bed, pulled a coat hanger out from under his seat. He tossed it on the floor with the others. He had always thought that he would one day end up alone—that his luck would one day run out. So in this way, the discovery was not an unexpected one. After all, who could love someone like him? What was there to love? He was too literal, too humorless and detached, with a self-destructive streak a mile long. Arthur would say to Penelope during their first year of marriage,
You’re going to leave me
. At first she would protest, reassure him that she wouldn’t, then later it would provoke an argument.
Do you want me to leave? Is that it? You can’t handle being married? Is it too hard for you?
Somewhere along the way he’d stopped saying it, though he hadn’t stopped thinking it, which was maybe why this scene he’d walked in on was not shocking, why it felt like some piece of bad news he’d known for some time though hadn’t been officially told to him.

What did surprise him was the panic. He’d recently gone after a student for describing a character as being
in the grip
of panic. Why does panic always have to
grip
? Can’t panic do other things? Can’t it
flog
or
pinch
or
startle
or
finger
? Why always
grip
? But sitting there on the bed, he felt very much in its grip. His ribs pressed in on him, he had trouble catching his breath, he felt squeezed, felt his pulse ticking loudly in his head, his thoughts trapped in his skull. He got up, paced the apartment.

Will’s room was similarly ransacked of things.

He called Penelope again, and again got her voice mail, again stopped short of leaving a message.

Where had she gone? Where had she taken Will?

He dialed the Wrights. Constance answered. She doesn’t want to speak with you, she said. That was it. She hung up. Arthur called back, but this time got the recorded voice of Frank declaring that nobody was home.

Arthur was not a man of action and would not have imagined he’d be one to hail a taxi to the airport, no plan other than to see his wife and son, to wait standby for a flight to Dulles, yet there he was, no overcoat, no change of clothes, still gripped—yes, gripped—by a feeling that some terrible change was taking place, had already taken place, while he wasn’t paying attention, and that he was entirely at fault. It was up to him to make it right. But what could he do, what could he say to make things right? He had tried. For the past two weeks, he had tried—but had obviously failed miserably.

“Why didn’t you just take the train,” I asked.

“Haven’t you been listening? I was in a panic. And we usually fly when we see Penelope’s parents—Will’s not good with sitting for long periods.”

His name was the last to be called, his seat between a pair of squabbling young boys. Their mother came over to apologize several times and to scold each into sitting quietly in his seat, but Arthur couldn’t help noticing that she didn’t offer to switch places with him. He felt a sudden pang of sadness for Penelope, who didn’t have the luxury of this mother—her ignorance of him or her freedom from him. Penelope was stuck, forced to carry with her the burden of knowing him and sharing a child. She wanted out—her parents had finally convinced her—and here he was, following her. She wanted to be left alone. To be free of him. Why couldn’t he leave her be?

But this empathy for his wife passed, and in its place came a wave of self-pity. His students loved him; he was their hero. He stood cornered after the reading the night before by a gaggle of them, eager for his esteem, eager to prove that they too understood literature’s power and importance. The fluorescent overheads were too bright for a cocktail party, but under their glare he had a cup of white wine, and then another. He enjoyed their belief in him, in what he’d written; it must be how a revolutionary feels after leaving home—family furious at being abandoned and put at risk—to arrive in the basement of his comrades, welcomed
warmly as a fellow soldier, admired for the sacrifice he’s made of his family for the greater good of the cause. These were his true believers, fellow revolutionaries. They regarded him with awe, with respect. He stayed as long as he dared in that corner with a second, then a third, cup of wine, just to hear them talk, to have them ask him questions.

Overheard at the start of the semester, while passing a fellow faculty member’s office:
One book does not a writer make
. Had they been talking about him? Probably. He had not made friends among his cohorts. It was more important to have the alliance of faculty than his students. Full-time positions were not determined by student evaluations. Penelope urged him to invite his colleagues to dinner, to get to know the dean. Penelope was smart in these matters. It was all Penelope’s dream—the novelist husband, the distinguished professor—not his.
One book
. Whoever said it was right. He should have quit while he was ahead.

But he didn’t quit. Something compelled him to keep going, to seek publication. What was it he was doing? What was he trying to say? It was something Penelope had asked relentlessly, day after day, these two long weeks, and when he answered her, she assumed he was hiding his true intentions. But he wasn’t. If there were other motives, motives behind the reasons he gave her, then these motives were hidden, even from himself. Yet he could say this for certain: whatever he was trying for in that book, whatever possessed him to write what he wrote, these ambitions were not the same as, or even related to, the ambitions Penelope wanted for him—the academic ladder, lucrative book contracts—they were not the ambitions of even his most idealistic students either: he wasn’t aiming for great literature, to add to or dismantle the canon or reveal some hidden aspect of human nature or prove some political or philosophical point or make innovative use of language or form or style. They weren’t necessarily the ambitions of a writer at all. They were, if anything, related to his notions of art from many years ago, when he was studying music.

His old composition teacher worshipped at the feet of the
“great” composers. He played Arthur recordings of the established living masters, “bearers of the torch,” he used to say, as though each of these men from different parts of the world, from different generations, shared the same aim, an aim that his teacher could never articulate clearly to Arthur. As if Bartók’s curatorial notions of his countrymen’s folk music were in any way related to the playful, kaleidoscopic symmetries that flowed from Mozart’s brain. For a while, Arthur would allow himself to become enamored of a composer or a certain contemporary school of thought—new serialism, indeterminacy, minimalism—feeling each time that yes, this was the answer. But then he would decide that the theory fell short in some way, didn’t account for some music, unwritten, that was inside of him, needing only to be unlocked.

However these composers and schools of thought failed individually, they failed collectively in the same way: the music was all dead on arrival. For every piece of music, once written down, was merely a description of itself, its true purpose a set of instructions. And to perform that set of instructions was merely to describe the description. It was to confuse the act of cooking with the act of reading a recipe out loud. True music was not created by instruments squawking out noises specified on a page. It was not to be written down. It was not to be thought about, codified into some school of thought—somewhere along the line, music found itself divorced from one of its more powerful, primal purposes.

Catharsis.

“It’s an antiquated notion,” Arthur said. “The lost art of ancient bards with their lyres. It’s been replaced by a more general suggestion that music should quote-unquote ‘move people,’ that it should activate the emotions in some way, but on the whole, people who make music—composers, performers—disown themselves from this responsibility: it’s up to the audience to feel what it will and is generally out of the hands of the person onstage. And many contemporary composers have taken it a step further—they reject the notion that music should do anything at all, that, in fact, to actively try to provoke a feeling in a listener is a futile effort at best and, at
worst, a manipulative act better left to the hacks who score movies and, as such, something any serious-minded composer ought to avoid. So freed from any and all obligations to a listener, the contemporary composer is free to annoy—or more likely bore—that listener to death.”

Catharsis: to cleanse, to purge. According to my dogeared college dictionary, “an emotional purification through art, intended to renew the spirit.” Or “to rid oneself of a fixation by allowing it direct expression.” An appealing idea for Arthur, one that came to him not through his time at music school but at home, in the process of teaching himself French.

His parents’ bookcase at home was a special kind of library. Guests were free to take any book they wanted as long as, in its place, they donated one of their own. It was a tradition his parents began before he was born and continued to this day. It was better than any public library, they claimed, bringing them into contact with titles they would never have chosen on their own. (The spring of 1976 saw the sole, important amendment to the rules: the book donated must not already exist in the bookcase—after they noticed their shelves overrun by dozens of copies of
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
, threatening to overtake their entire library like a virus.) They received books of all kinds, many in languages other than English, and during Arthur’s foray into the French language, he scoured the bookshelves for titles a little more challenging than
Le Petit Prince
. Arthur found a book by one Louis Moulinier entitled
Le Pur et l’Impur dans la Pensée des Grecs
, which seemed to describe, if he was reading correctly, cathartic traditions and rituals in ancient Greece.