The Name of the World (4 page)

“Finally. Someone crass enough to ask.”

“You’re not slapping my hand, are you?”

“No. Really. Nobody’s ever asked.”

“It’s just that he’s in the news right now. I saw him last night on the tube, dueling with journalists.”

Questions about the Senator’s ethics had come before the public recently. Not for the first time. “‘Fight every battle on TV,’” I quoted. “One of his mottoes. He’s got a million.”

J.J. said, “Many predict the end of his career.”

“Not me.”

“Did you accomplish anything? Working for him?”

“In D.C. I experienced what I once heard called ‘the temptation to be good.’ It’s a curse. As soon as it hit me I got confused. I still don’t know if, by quitting, I gave in to a bad temptation, or managed to resist a good one.”

“Wow. Sounds like Zen,” he said. “Am I supposed to make sense of it?”

“There’s a perfect stillness at the center of Washington,” I said, and he folded his hands before him with the pleasant air of someone stuck beside a psycho on a public bus. “It’s natural to talk about it in paradoxes,” I insisted. “Everything in the world is going on there, but nothing’s happening. It’s all essential, but it’s all completely pointless. The motives are virtuous, but whatever you do just stinks. And then you retire with great praise.”

“Well, we sort of guess all that, don’t we? So why did you enlist?”

“I’ve got a half-dozen explanations,” I said, “but I’ll give you the shortest one: It was financial. I was restless, and I was curious, but mainly I was just poor. I wanted to leave behind the pinchpenny life of a high-school teacher. The prospect of money somewhere down the line meant a lot to me.”

“But you didn’t get it.”

“I got a raise.”

“But you didn’t get rich.”

“No.”

“And you don’t care.”

“No. Not right now. Should I?”

“No,” he said. Then: “How much of a raise?”

“I went from the low thirties to—after two or three years—just about eighty thousand. Just under.”

“Hey. That’s not bad!”

“I was designated executive legal staff. That put me at the high end.”

“And how are your politics now? Or am I prying?”

“You mean, will I vote for Senator Thom?” The Controversial Senator Tom-Tom, he was called by his constituents. The Big Chief, he was also called. I had stayed with the Senator at first in the hope of having influence, later in the hope of being there on the day of his defeat, finally in the hope of gathering evidence to bring him down. But he was clean, and it wouldn’t be fair to omit saying that he was even a good man. It’s just that his principles were small and his horizon was November. He should have been a Republican, but he was a Democrat—why? Why not? I think very little of either party now, and I can’t understand how I ever managed to see any difference between them. Worst of all, somewhere in the middle of my visit to that planet, I’d misplaced my sense of humor about all this. Would I vote for Senator Thom?

“I no longer vote,” I told J.J.

The spaghetti and the lasagna came. J.J. changed the sub
ject, wanted to know how I felt about teaching, about students, about the academy. And now I got it—he was conducting an interview after all.

How many interviews, how many J.J.s winding what quantity of pasta around how many forks, did the future hide? The question dropped me in a pit. Is there any limit, I thought, to how boring this place can be? By the time we’d both turned down dessert and were halfway through our cups of coffee, I’d decided no. No limit. “Do you know what?” I said. “I think I’ll let this next year be my last. I believe I’m through with the life of the mind.” Getting it said felt like a minor thing, but necessary. Like finally taking a second to tie a flapping shoelace.

“Through with the life of the mind! Now I’m convinced you’re just the guy we need at the Forum.”

“No. Thanks, but no.”

A bit of silence between us now. We heard a man and a woman talking at the table just next to ours. The woman mentioned somebody’s funeral. J.J. took an interest.

He stopped eating. He was clearly eavesdropping. Now the woman said, “I think it’s muggy in Alabama. Isn’t it?”

“Muggy?” the man said. “It’s Alabama.”

“I’m sorry,” J.J. said, “excuse me—”

They both looked over at us. J.J. said to them, “Trevor Watt is dead?”

They looked at each other for a second, and then back at J.J. “Yes—he’s dead.” It came out of both their mouths at once.

The man said, “He had a heart attack last Saturday.” J.J. cleared his throat. He looked stunned. “I’m sorry,” he said again. “He was a pretty good acquaintance of mine. Where was he?”

“He was at Brown,” the woman said.

The man said, “Well, but he’d retired. He was living in—”

“Down in Alabama someplace,” the woman said.

While we paid our bill, J.J. went on chatting with them, and I urged him to take his time. I stepped outside and stood smoking a cigar on the sidewalk. Casually I drop that fact, but actually I’ve never smoked. This one had been given to me. People gave me gifts, people liked me, maybe because they sensed I was virtually dead and couldn’t hurt them.

I’d been waiting for J.J to take up the subject of his wife, to open a window on his bitterness this day of his divorce. But nothing of the kind had happened. He and his wife had been separated a couple of years. Crossing the legal finish line seemed to have made him pensive today, but I supposed in general he’d mended.

As a matter of fact, just a few weeks previous I’d met J.J.’s wife. This was at a large dinner party at a Dean’s house, one of those old-fashioned affairs where many had come for dinner but most—the students—would be booted out after cocktails. She’d been traveling through with T. K. Nickerson, the writer who’d won her away from us. Everybody called him “Kit.” Her name was Kelly. Kit and Kelly had been on their way to, or from, Europe in the dead of winter. Kelly was a beautiful woman, striking without having to be glamorous. She just
dropped a purple silk dress over her head and she was ready to spend an evening in a room full of men trying not to go crazy in her presence. Tiberius Soames, my Haitian colleague in the Department of History, attached himself to her early that evening and never left her side. Her eyes looked sleepy, but her gaze was vibrant. She had very pale eyelashes. Straight strawberry hair to her shoulders.

Another redhead was also there at the dinner party that night, the redheaded cellist, the creator of the Cannon Performance, that is. She was working for the caterer of this affair, helping in the kitchen and bringing around the food. She wore a gray-and-white uniform and had her hair bunched under a black net, and she looked very plain. But that only accentuated the aura of her mischief. She moved among us with a tray like the secret queen of some criminal enclave, casing the joint. As I reached for one of her hors d’oeuvres, she smiled and said, “Hello, Michael Reed.”

It had been a month or so since we’d met at Ted MacKey’s, and then only briefly. Tonight I’d noticed her right away, but I hadn’t expected to be remembered. I was astonished. I probably looked it. She smiled and passed by.

Before we all sat down to eat, I made sure to find out her name. This was a nerve-racking endeavor, not entirely to my surprise. Less than two weeks earlier, I’d been staring at her naked privates. I tried to intersect her path as if by accident. I sidled around and we approached each other at a drift, like objects in outer space. “You’re overly fond of these little numbers,” she said of the items on her tray.

“No. I was trying to remember your name. I’m sorry. I can’t remember.”

“Flower.” After a small challenging beat of silence during which I managed not to ask if she was kidding, she said, “Yes. Flower Cannon.”

“Oh!—Cannon.”

“Oh?”

“I must not have heard it, back when we met.”

“You’d have remembered.”

“Yes.”

“But you saw one of my performances last month, I think.”

“Well,” I said.

“Did you like it?”

“Well…” But I was stalled. I’d become completely stupid. “That is the full text of my remarks,” I said.

Flower Cannon laughed at me and moved along.

As for Kelly Stein, J.J.’s wife, I didn’t pass one word with her beyond a glancing introduction, because during dinner she sat way down the long board, in another conversational district.

I sat almost directly facing Kit Nickerson, however: a much less formidable figure than the black-and-white portraits on his book flaps, a tall and thin man with a boxer’s mashed nose, a prominent Adam’s apple, and kind, watery eyes. He had a bit of a stutter. But it went away as he began arguing with a young author who sat across the table and a couple of places down, so that their exchange roped in a
small audience of several others of us. It was hard not to feel slightly embarrassed for the other fellow, a guest teacher in the English Department here, as Kit himself had been two years before, when he’d hooked up with Kelly Stein—a prodigy of sorts, this much younger man, still in his twenties, half lost in his baggy clothing, with shoulder-length hair and a sweet face that cleared him of any suspicion, at least it seemed to me, that he liked to pick fights. “Do you want me to lie?” Kit asked him. “Because I could certainly manage it. Lying is sort of my vocation.” That was the first audible remark.

Apparently the younger man had accused the famous novelist of betraying his early promise. How he’d reached such a point in the middle of a lot of small talk would have been hard to trace, but having found himself out here past the glow of the party’s lights, so to speak, out in the dark with the great man, he wasn’t backing down, give him that much. I saw his fingers trembling as he touched his water glass. He succeeded in keeping his gaze direct. “The people in your early books were all different from each other. You really sampled the world. I mean, those characters, like in
Quest for Tears,
or any of the early ones, really…they have
some
commonalities, they’re people who all have at least some education, and real passion, but outside of that, they can belong to any class, any walk of life. I mean, you got around, put it that way. Now it’s just people covered in jewels, people on yachts, people at state dinners…I’m sorry, I mean I say this as an admirer, a follower, an emulator
even—but don’t you think you’re turning into sort of a lapdog for the privileged?”

“But Seth,” Kit said, “you’re just being a snob in reverse. Don’t privileged people have feelings, too? Don’t they have inner lives? Can’t their passion be real?”

“There’s more to it than their material circumstances. Nowadays—in your books nowadays—somehow they’re kind of morally—uh.” He was wilting. “Morally aloof.”

“Uh-oh! Wait a minute!”

“That sounds stupid. Maybe I don’t know what I mean.” Seth shook his head, embarrassed.

“No. No. Please. Don’t chicken out. What
do
you mean? Why should this accusation prick me?”

“Or, okay, I’ll say the characters are morally unin
struc
tive—”

“Hey, come on, Seth. They’re fictional. Do you really hope to get your moral lessons from people who don’t exist?”

“You don’t challenge them to get down in the muck of themselves and find out what’s right and what’s wrong. Not like you used to—like you once did.”

Kit, who seemed in general a charming man, became at this moment, while his admirer tried to explain himself, suddenly very unattractive, somehow elongated and parsonlike. One corner of his mouth twitched with cartoonish villainy, I have to say, as if he’d arrived first all by himself at this dinner party and set traps around the place and Seth had just sprung one. And the kid did have the nauseated look of someone dangling upside down.

“Look,” Kit said. “You talk about my books as if they’re artifacts. Maybe yours are. Maybe your books are artifacts and maybe for you they serve as currency in various transactions I can’t guess about because I don’t know you. It’s up to you to decide whether those transactions are corrupt or not. I can’t accuse you.” But he said this as if he was in fact leveling some sort of accusation that none of us, nobody other than Seth himself, could understand. I think it was just a conversational ploy, and I don’t think Seth understood the charge any more than the rest of us. It was just that Kit had been in this corner before and he knew how to duel his way out of it without having to say anything that actually made sense.

Having leaned across the table to get right in the guy’s face and put this sinister turn on the conversation, he sat back.

Seth said, “My
book
…there’s only one, and I don’t know if it’s really worth talking about.”

“Then we won’t talk about your book.” By now the whole table was silent, and as he clearly sensed he’d sounded too harsh a note, Nickerson limped on. “Andrew, Andrew, my books aren’t
artifacts
. They’re sloughed off behind me like dead skins. They’re organic to the life.”

“Well…okay, I guess.” Seth didn’t have quite enough steel left now to tell him his name wasn’t Andrew.

The table was silent. Kit’s gaze drifted toward Kelly’s end, maybe seeking some touchstone of support. It stopped at Tiberius Soames, who looked bloated with emotion, in fact whose face in the candlelight seemed to change size and shape rapidly. Soames managed to say: “Dead
skins
.” He coughed
violently several times, sighed with exasperation, looked away from us, from all of this. “Dead skins!”

“They’re detritus,” Nickerson said of his books.

This was right around the end of the meal, whether before or after dessert I can’t remember. Whenever the liqueur is served. I happened to glance in through the briefly open kitchen door where Joan, Mrs. Martin Peele, wife of the Dean of Liberal Arts and the woman of the house, consulted with Eloise, who catered almost all the faculty dinners. Eloise was a character, a very small, rapid woman, perpetually sardonic, and always smoking. She had a round Peter Lorre face and a thin-lipped Peter Lorre mouth. All she needed in this world was a foot-long holder for her cigarette. Mrs. Peele looked flushed and happy. Geniuses were fighting at her party. Directly behind our hostess’s back, Flower Cannon tilted a jug of what looked like Drambuie to her mouth, gulped down a quick one, exhaled, and set the bottle on a tray. I believed she was looking right at me. I expected her to wink. But she didn’t.