GABRIELLE WANTED US TO take a course in Chaucer with her. She had decided to major in English—in case the dancing did not work out, she could always be a writer. Chaucer? Nina frowned. Aristotle didn’t say whether friendship went that far. We were juniors now, supposed to be serious and focused. Nina had not gone home over the summer but worked in a laboratory in the city. The nervous smile was growing extinct, and in its place was a new species, wry and enigmatic. Chaucer. She smiled doubtfully. “Just three hours a week,” said Gaby.
“No one would take Organic Chemistry or Logic with me. No one cares about the beauties of the basic syllogism. Sixty-four permutations!”
“They’re too hard for us,” Gaby said craftily. “Chaucer is entertainment. Divertissement.”
The professor’s head was large, heavy with the weight of his scholarship, and his body was fleshy, but he moved with a sprightliness befitting his subject. Just as Professor Boles had seemed close kin to the pre-Socratics, Professor Mansfield appeared to live and move and have his being in the days when that plucky band wended on their pilgrymage to Caunterbury with ful devout corage, and to regard us—our strange garb, our unadorned accents—as curiosities. Like the Host of the Canterbury Tales, he was bold of his speche, and wys, and wel ytaught; like the Host he praised us for being so merry a company, and offered to guide us on our journey, on which no translations were permitted; we had to learn Middle English. My text was soon dense with scribbled definitions, the pages richly ornamented like a medieval manuscript. We were required to memorize twelve lines from every tale, and each day, to open the class, Professor Mansfield would choose someone to perform. At the back of the room sat a cluster of males who had crossed the street into our domain. I knew two of them slightly from the Gilbert and Sullivan Society, George Silver and Ray Fielding; one of the pleasures of the course was hearing Ray deliver his Middle English lines with the brilliance of a born actor.
Diverting, as Gabrielle had promised, until “The Clerk’s Tale” of Patient Griselda, a parable teaching how to submit to the reversals of fortune, to take whatever adversity God sends with “virtuous sufferance.” Griselda was a gauntlet tossed down from the fourteenth century; she roused in us something deeper than even the philosophers had done.
The story opens with the young marquis Walter being chastised by his subjects for not taking a wife to ensure his lineage. The idea of marriage does not thrill him. “To that I nevere erst thoughte streyne me. I me rejoysed of my liberte.” But he bows to the greater good. The wedding day is set, the feast prepared, and still Walter’s choice is kept secret: the lowliest maiden in the kingdom, Griselda, lowly in station but not in virtue. In the home of her father (widowed? no mother is in evidence, and cleverly so), Griselda tends the sheep, picks herbs, and keeps house, never idle, never sheltering a mean thought from dawn to dusk; in the breast of her virginity, says Chaucer, was enclosed “rype and sad corage,” which does not mean ripe and sad courage, as well it might, given the circumstances, but a mature and sober heart. In one of her frequent surges of humility, she hopes to steal a moment from her chores to watch the wedding procession pass by. But lo, the marquis stops at her very doorstep! With some distaste, attendants strip Griselda of her poor garments and outfit her as a fine lady. She makes an excellent and unpretentious marquise, appeasing all discord and rancor with her mature and sober heart. Soon she bears a daughter; well, at least she is not barren, and everyone hopes for a better issue the next time around.
Now, Walter is possessed of a strange urge (a “merveillous desir,” Chaucer calls it) to test his wife’s sworn obedience. He tells her, falsely, that his people resent her and her daughter for their lowly birth. He sends a sinister man to carry the baby off. Griselda agrees with no complaint. She and the baby, she tells her husband, are “Youre owene thyng; werketh after youre wille.” She asks only to kiss the child, and begs the sinister man to bury the body rather than leave it to be shredded by wild beasts. Four years later she bears a son. Again Walter feels the “merveillous desir” for a test, and the son is snatched away. “Whan I first cam to yow, right so,” says Griselda to her husband, “Lefte I my wyl and al my libertee.” Walter’s third test involves forging a papal bull that permits him to put aside his wife and take another, of more fitting birth and rank. Patient Griselda wishes him luck. But she utters a sentiment of regret:
O goode God! How gentil and how kynde Ye semed by youre speche and youre visage The day that maked was oure mariage!
She has one request. Walter has said she may take with her the dowry that she brought him. But all she brought, she reminds him, was her body, and surely he would not wish her to leave the palace naked. In a career of passivity it is her single brilliant moment. What she says, in modern English, is, “You could not do so shameful a thing as to have that very womb where your children lay be displayed all bare, as I walk before the people.” Such moments confounded our indignation. How could it be—a great poet with an offensive theme! In any case, Walter allows Griselda a “smok” in fair exchange for the virginity she brought him but cannot take home with her. Strictly speaking, he was generous—the smock is much bigger than that membrane he punctured. We brooded over the smock at length in the dorm. I thought it must be a kind of nightie, but Esther said it would look more like a slip. Nina saw it as something sack-like to cover the naked body; the defining garments of femininity, bodice, corset, and so forth, would go on top.
The highborn young bride and her little brother are on their way. Walter needs some woman to straighten up the palace and arrange the bedrooms exactly to his tastes. Who knows his tastes better than Griselda? She comes willingly, glad to be of service. During the wedding feast he calls her away from her sweeping to present his bride: “Griselda ... How liketh thee my wyf and hire beautee?” Griselda likes her right well. She has a word of counsel, though: that he not “prikke” this young maiden with “tormentynge” as he has done to others. Others! At last, however faintly, the unmistakable note of wifely acrimony. Because, suggests Griselda, a tenderly bred maiden could not endure adversity so well as a creature of lowly birth. A creature!
And lo again, Walter’s strange urge, his “merveillous desir,” is satisfied! Perhaps it is satisfied because she diluted her saintliness with that note of wifely acrimony. He embraces Griselda and reveals that the young bride and her little brother (twelve and seven years old) are their children, not shredded by wild beasts after all but raised by Walter’s sister, a countess in Bologna. When she recovers from her faint, Griselda is dressed once more in garments befitting a fine lady. It does not say what becomes of the “smok.” They all live happily ever after. It cannot be without irony that Chaucer opens his Envoi: “Griselda is dead, and her patience with her, And both buried together in Italy.”
Esther’s wrath was not focused: Chaucer, Walter, God, Griselda, and Professor Mansfield all came in for a share.
Professor Mansfield tried to placate her. “Didn’t you read the Envoi, Miss Brickman? Chaucer clearly dissociates himself from the story. ‘Don’t let humility nail your tongues,’ he tells all noble wives. ‘Don’t give anyone cause to write this kind of story about you.’” He smiled in a conciliatory way. “Now isn’t that enough?”
“Too late, too late,” she grumbled. “By that point the damage is done. And the poetry’s better in the main part anyhow, isn’t it?”
“Miss Brickman, the entire tale illustrates a moral thesis. These are not real people. You must try to read with the sensibility of Chaucer’s age and suspend your modern judgment.”
Esther said fiercely, “I will never suspend my judgment!”
In the privacy of her room she vowed revenge. In the privacy of her room we all vented our disgust. Walter was unspeakable, but it was Griselda who mortified us. I still had the quote from Spinoza tucked in my mirror: “The effort by which each thing endeavors to persevere in its own being is nothing but the actual essence of the thing itself,” and I blamed Griselda for neglecting to persevere in her own being. I was wrong, however. The essence of Griselda was what Chaucer calls Patience and we call self-abnegation. She persevered. Not that it makes her any more appealing.
It was Esther’s turn to recite her memorized stanzas in class. She was flushed and jittery as she walked to the front, but that was not unusual. She hadn’t spoken more than two lines when I began to pay closer attention. I watched Professor Mansfield to see what he would do. He sat at his desk with his customary wys and wel ytaught expression, spinning his swivel chair gently from side to side. His glasses were pushed up and resting on a receding hairline, his fingers raised in a little church steeple, softly tapping, as Esther recited:
Whan that Grisilde’s doghter was ytaken She silently devysed hire a planne
For to revenge swich deed she wold not slaken Though Walter bynne a markys and a manne. Whil in hir veynes the fury swifte yranne, To Walter’s chambre stoleth shee by nighte, And whispred, “Yor dere wyf namoore I highte.”
Up reysed she hir axe as up he sterte
And cleved she his manhood righte in tweyne.
“Ye be nat fitte to lyve, withouten herte,”
Said she, whil Walter clutch’d himself in peyne.
“Next comes your nekke; the blood will flow like reyne!
Me liketh not to soffre as ye heste.
Yor kyngdom now is myne!” She axed his breste.
When the applause died down, Professor Mansfield rose to the occasion. Genial, Chaucerian, he praised Esther’s near-faultless iambic pentameter and Middle English delivery. He asked to see her verses and she went and fetched a ragged notebook page. She was awesome standing in front of the class, thin this week, her hair pulled back and lashed into a long ponytail, two splotches of pink on her broad cheekbones—the stance of a martyr to conscience facing the gallows.
Professor Mansfield inspected her paper and put a few errors in spelling and diction on the board for the edification of us all. Writing Chaucerian verse was a fine way to understand the poet; he recommended it. He also recommended a dictionary and handbook of Middle English usage, of which he was one of the four compilers. However, we must try to understand the spirit as well as the letter. The spirit of Chaucer was not vindictive.
“And now the two stanzas you memorized, if you would, Miss Brickman.” She wouldn’t, couldn’t, having stayed awake for two nights preparing her revenge. He marked her down as unprepared. Esther’s mouth opened in shock but she did not protest.
After class she was surrounded. A genius! And she had never let on! Wasn’t he a bastard to mark her unprepared! She shrugged that off. As the girls drifted away the boys approached in a phalanx, at the center their evident spokesman, who looked a bit older, with a clever, bearded face. George.
“That was a wonderful addition to a moral tale,” began George. “Deeply affecting. But poor Walter. After all, he was only a personification of higher powers.”
“Oh yeah?” said Esther curtly and breathlessly. Her chest rose and fell, she was pale now, and her eyes were like emeralds. “Tough luck, then.”
So we laughed together, and they induced us to cross to the other side of Broadway, to a retreat called the Lion’s Den, where they entertained us with coffee and doughnuts and the brand of wit Columbia men were known for—sharp and supercilious. Great names wafted through the air like badminton birdies. They were mostly seniors, with a year of Contemporary Civilization, CC, behind them—every great book since the world began. A man who has taken CC at Columbia, rumor had it, is, like Odysseus, never at a loss. We kept up as best we could. Our initiatory course, The Individual and Society, had been gossipy, personal, feminine. But we knew our Greeks, and we relied on pure mother wit.
“Don’t blame it all on Chaucer,” said Ray Fielding. “Griselda started in Boccaccio.”
“And then she turns up in Petrarch,” said another.
“Evidently,” remarked Esther, “she had a certain appeal for all the fellows.”
I watched Victor Rowe. In his light eyes was the most critical expression I had ever seen. Anybody who scanned the world that way, I thought, must be the most clever, the most supercilious. And if he knew how striking he was, it would be so much the worse. He was tall and rangy and moved with the coordinated, weird grace of a giraffe. His hair was straight and sandy, his forehead high, and his eyes bluish-ivory and liquidy. Did they weep with disdain?
“The only profitable way to read Griselda,” he said, “is as comedy. Chaucer’s answer to medieval soap opera. Or a takeoff on Job.” His tone was not at all disdainful, only detached in a way I found intimidating.
“Female version,” I said. “He ranted to heaven and she keeps her mouth shut.”
“Yes,” said Victor, “but they both get it all back in the end. That’s why it’s comedy.”
There were hollows around his cheekbones, and a feeling of impatience around his mouth. His whole face was a study in planes and shadows, extra shadows because he needed a shave. He had clean white sneakers on, and red wool socks, and tiny flecks of paint studded his tan chino pants. His hands were flecked with paint too, especially the cuticles: large, hairy hands, strongly articulated. They looked older than he did.
We talked about courtly love, and Victor said the vestiges of courtly love were still with us. “Unfortunately. Knights and ladies, sacred virginity, tests of devotion. It’s all part of a structure to maintain the status quo. Falling in love. You don’t think falling in love is natural, do you? It’s a learned response. Every society in history had lust, sure, but not too many have had falling in love, the way we do.”
My pride was offended. I took it as a proclamation of invulnerability. I would have liked to appear invulnerable that way too.
George, on the other hand, loved the idea of courtly love. He was ready to do anything for a lady, he said, provided someone gave him a good horse, and a sharp sword, and a pretty coat of arms. The other boys all laughed, but I wasn’t sure why. They were pleasant boys behind the show of cleverness, and George was something more: not quite a boy, for one thing. He had been in the army before college, so was a few years older than the rest. George’s cleverness was ingratiating and inclusive. He liked to joke about his shortcomings: couldn’t master Latin case endings, couldn’t learn to dive, couldn’t have three drinks without falling asleep or throwing up. When our little party dispersed he drew Esther aside and asked her to go to a movie that evening.
Once we crossed Broadway all was changed. We made friends, we accepted the company of men. Esther’s stanzas inspired a spate of Griselda parodies, recited aloud and with hilarity in the Lion’s Den. Steffie Baum published them in the student paper in a special box near the editorials, one at a time for two weeks running. In Ray Fielding’s, Griselda chopped up her daughter herself rather than yield her to the sinister man. When Walter reveals that he meant merely to hide the child at his sister’s, it is too late. He rends his royal garments. In another, Griselda went mad in the manner of Ophelia, drifting through the palace in her smock, intoning lyrical non sequiturs in Middle English. But these evaded the point. The best, though I hated to admit it, was Victor’s. Five stanzas long—he must have labored for days. After the kidnapping of the children, Victor had Walter chop pieces off Griselda—her toes, one each day, then her fingers, hands, arms, legs. In a few weeks she is a stump. With each blow of the ax she repeats, “I am youre owene thyng; werketh after youre wille.” Victor asked me to have a beer in the West End Bar, but I was afraid my own cleverness wouldn’t fill an hour alone with him. I said I was busy.
I was. I spent hours working on Beethoven sonatas and the prescribed Haydn and Mozart trios. On my own I was practicing Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet, which the Chamber Music Society would present at its spring concert. The auditions were not till April; I had begun preparing in September, trying to make it an inseparable part of me. I wanted to be chosen with a passion. The quintet entranced me, most of all the fourth movement, a theme and variations using the melody from Schubert’s song about a trout. Aside from its sophisticated pleasures, the melody pierces the heart, and the variations, like prisms, candid and relentless, flash the heart’s exposed facets. It may be nothing more magical than the symmetry of the intervals—a fourth up, third up, third down and fourth down, the unexpected fifth, and then the descending, syncopated scale, like someone skipping down a flight of steps. But that explanation sounds like Nina, decanting magic.
A pianist needs another instrument, and the only free time I had to learn the oboe was late at night. Music did not touch Melanie; play away, she said. So, many evenings I sat on my bed piping halting scales, while Melanie slept curled in her Dr. Dentons. We continued peacefully to coexist. And for comic relief I had joined the Gilbert and Sullivan Society, a suitably zany bunch that needed an extra accompanist for rehearsals. The regular accompanist, Henrietta Frye, was a slender senior with milky skin who resembled the lovesick maidens Gilbert and Sullivan immortalized. In fact she was a hiker and tennis player as well as an excellent pianist, better than I. Only if something happened to Henrietta Frye—not something awful, I hoped, but something minor and incapacitating, like spraining a finger on the courts—could I get to play for the performances, Patience in the winter and The Yeomen of the Guard in the spring. But I suppressed my visions. Henrietta was deserving and I was a bit superstitious, like my mother.
“George is okay, he’s very nice,” said Esther, “but he’s not right for me. Or me for him, either. Lots of times we just kind of miss each other. You know what I mean? Like paper airplanes. At home we used to try to make them crash but it’s hard, they’re so light.”
We were swimming in the college pool, nearly empty at five in the afternoon. Esther swam daily to stay thin, but she found it too boring alone. Nina and Gaby and I took turns. I swam laps to set a good example, but Esther mostly treaded water and talked.
“Too clever. Always has a ready word.” She swam a few lazy yards and returned. “He’d be much better for you, Lydia. Much more your type.”
I frowned and swam away.
“Oh, and there’s another thing,” she called after me. “All he cares about, mostly”—she dove underwater to tantalize me, and rising, shook droplets from her face—“is going to bed.”
“Aha! Well?”
“What do you mean, aha, well?”
“Esther, you know exactly what I mean.”
She giggled, floated on her back. “I did, once.”
“Just once?”
“Yes. He’s a little distressed about that, understandably. You remember Fecundity, in the Calculus?” Since Gaby’s outburst of last year, Bentham’s Hedonistic Calculus had become a dormitory joke. Everyone knew it by heart. Intensity, Duration, Certainty or Uncertainty, Propinquity, Fecundity, Purity, and Extent, how far can the pleasure be shared with others? “It seems if you do it once it’s supposed to lead to the next time, and the next, ad infinitum. But frankly, I don’t like him that much. Oh, he was all right. He did quite well, actually.”
She was so blithe—I could hardly believe it. “How do you know? You have nothing to compare him to.”
“That’s true, but I could tell he put on a good show. Interesting. I just don’t have that feeling for him.”
“And what makes you think I would?” What did a good show consist of, anyway? Interesting? I swam four laps to seem indifferent, but she waited, paddling around.
“I know you, Lydia. You’re so restless. And you could fit him very easily, ha ha, into your busy schedule, I mean. He’s diverting. Like in Pascal. A divertissement.”
“You have to do at least six laps or else it’s a complete waste of time. Come on, Esther, your fat cells are multiplying.” I swam furiously to elude my fantasies, vivid now that they contained a specific person. Last week she had handed me the new loafers that squeezed her instep. And now this. A friend was another self indeed.
Early December, a still-mild day, a bunch of us were finishing a paper-bag lunch on the boys’ campus. One by one people straggled away until only Esther and George and I were left. I gathered up my debris. “Don’t rush off, Lyd,” she said. “You don’t have your quartet till three.” George told us how he had enlisted in the army to feel distinct from his father and uncles, who were all rabbis, but now he was a pacifist. “How could you ever think a uniform would confer distinction?” Esther asked. “And now I’ll leave you two to your own devices. I have an appointment with my French teacher. Good-bye!” George watched her run down the steps and across the campus till she was out of sight. Then, like a salesclerk shifting to a new customer, he turned his attention to me.
“Esther seems to feel we should get to know each other better.”
“You certainly don’t beat around the bush, do you?”
“And I thought I was being indirect. ...Oh good, I made you laugh.”
“That’s not very difficult. I’m a sucker for silly jokes. At home they used to call me the giggler.”
“I’ve always been curious about you, Lydia. Can I ask you a personal question?”
“What?” I felt leery already.
He pointed to the paper bag on the grass. “You just had one and a half hamburgers, a doughnut, and coffee. How can you eat so much and stay thin? It’s phenomenal. You know how Esther is always dieting.”
“I burn it up. That’s what they told me when I had a metabolism test. You know that Shelley line, ‘I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed’? Gabrielle showed it to me. She says I fall upon the food of life, I burn.”
He liked that one. This was a kind of performance too, like the simpler duets in the Chamber Music Society. I studied him, his body, and wondered what it might be like.
“Esther says you can sing. I didn’t know. In Gilbert and Sullivan you just play. There are other things I would like to know, but ... well, I don’t like to pry.” He looked around at the dry fountains, the concrete, the bare December trees.
“I would tell you most things you would ask. I’m not mysterious, like Nina or Gabrielle.”
“Oh, them!” George raised both hands as if fending something off. “They scare me. They would take ages.”
“And you think you could know me in a flash?”
“No, it’s only that you don’t offer so much resistance. You talk. The fact is—” He gave an earnest glance, or perhaps an imitation of an earnest glance. “I could use a person like you.”
“Use? What for? Bluebeard?”
“Oh, come on.” He reached out and touched my arm. “I only meant to hone my wits.”
“Wit, or wits?”
“Exactly. To make distinctions. Either. Both.” He paused and smiled. “I might have my uses too.”
I tore strips from my cardboard coffee mug. “Oh yes, I remember you would do anything for a lady. But where are you going to get a horse?” I looked at my watch. “I have to go now. Telemann calls.”
“Would you like to go to the movies Saturday night?”
“Aren’t you still going with Esther?”
“No. She won’t go.”
“I see. Well, in that case ... what movie?”
When he kissed me the first time, after the movie, in one of those apartments rented for assignations, what I felt most was the beard and the mustache. In 1958 a beard was an affectation, not yet a political statement. George’s was chestnut-brown, small and well-trimmed. When the kiss was over I said it felt like kissing a rabbi. “No,” I amended, “more of a rabbi’s son. Or a rabbinical student. You make me feel I’m the one leading you into sin.”
“My family are not Orthodox rabbis. They have no beards.”
“So why, then?”
“For distinction. I feel undistinguished.” In fact he was distinguished. The beard and the thick glasses with tortoiseshell rims gave his benign face a highly decorated look. George wore bright colors in a dim age. He was rococo, a bit of a dandy.
“You mean you feel indistinguishable.”
“Good girl.” He clapped me on the shoulder like a pal, then moved to kiss me again. I backed off.
“I want to look around the place. Do you mind?”
“Go right ahead.”
The apartment had two bedrooms. In the other one were Victor’s painting things. Most guys came here to ... relax, George explained, but Victor came to paint. Victor, he said, grinning, was ... “Aesthetic, did you say?” “Ascetic,” he enunciated. It was a square, dusty room with no furniture, only a bare striped mattress on the floor, but it had large windows facing north and west. There were rolled canvases on the floor, a stained easel, jars and rags and the stinging smell of paint. Three stretched canvases, one with a gray shirt hanging over a corner, leaned against the west wall: abstract, blue and brown, dun-colored blotches that seemed to be jostling each other for more space. They were incommunicative paintings, the artist mumbling to himself, and I did not care for them. George said, “He’s trying things out. He’s very versatile. You would have liked what he did last year better. Melons and eggplants. Come.” He took my hand and pulled me towards the other bedroom, which was cleaner, and furnished in a neat, nondescript way. He sat down on the bed. I stood in the doorway. I was having a strange, disoriented sensation. I remembered being blindfolded and whirled around, years ago, at birthday parties.
“I’m not sure why I agreed to come here.”
He smiled. “Urgent curiosity.”
“Is that it?”
“I imagine, from what I know of you. You don’t like mysteries.”
“Is that enough reason?”
“Well.” He laughed again. “More reason than some people have, and less than others.”
“I think I ought to feel ... well, you know, something more.”
“It’s not always easy, nine feet away. If you came a little closer, maybe ...”
George was a cheery epicure, while I undertook it in a spirit of quest, just like The History of Philosophy. Between us there was affection, but not any question of love—we wanted experience and excitement in safety. The caution of the age was deep in our bones. (Only later, as friends, did we come to love each other, without excitement.) We would meet in the apartment two or three times a week, never after curfew hours. I was no Steffie Baum. My daring was all within limits. I was careful also never to miss a session of the Chamber Music Society or cut my practice hours to be with George. I felt my dignity rested in such bargains, because with him I didn’t feel I had much dignity at all. Just pleasure and profound confusion.
I was taken with some essential flimsiness about him, in which the intelligence and charm were wrapped like jewels in tissue paper. He was taken with my combination of bold and bashful. Adorable. Adorable was a word I hated, I told him. It certainly did not describe me. “Not all of you, Lydia. Just that particular mix. That careful eagerness. Will you at least allow me my tastes?” “Your tastes! Your tastes are so catholic. If I allow you your tastes everything gets in.” “No, it’s that I want to get into everything. Could you come a little closer?” “You also make it sound so crude, and I don’t like it.” “No? I don’t see you struggling.”
We were both thorough and methodical people. He had read widely on the subject—he liked literary erotica—and he was conscientious too. The certainty of the pleasure became more reliable. Fecundity increased; intensity, extent, all of the categories. But I was unsatisfied in my mind, just as in The History of Philosophy.
“Nice as it is, this is not the answer,” I told him one evening, on his smooth sheets. He always brought clean sheets, in a briefcase; he said he didn’t know who might have been in the bed before us. He was a domestic creature, even dusted and swept occasionally.
“What is the question?”
“The answer to anything. It couldn’t be a religion, for example. It has no content. And it lasts so short a time.”
“Some groups have made it a religion. There are cults ...” He looked at me curiously. “How long does it last?”
“What, you mean just the momentary ... ?” I was still shy about the words.
“No, no, I know how long that lasts. I mean after. The feeling. Aura. How far can it take you? How long can it keep you floating?”
I was taken with that in him too. He pondered over obscure, intangible things. The floating. He was asking about Duration. “Oh, a pretty long time.”
“How long is a pretty long time?”
“Eighteen hours, maybe? I’ll feel it all evening and sleep in it and when I get up I might still have it. Then gradually it’ll slip away and I’ll feel alone again, wide awake.”
George beamed. “That’s very nice to know, Lyd.”
It was far nicer than he knew. The feeling I took away with me was a nimbus of warm air around my skin, weather I carried with me, a lush spring in January. I didn’t tell him how fine it felt—I was not yet so willing to give. I begrudged him the knowledge because I felt he had made my life bizarre. My friends had what girls our age were supposed to have: flirtatious phone calls in the dorm, leading to dates—movies, walks in the whitened park. Snowball fights. I was almost as bad—or as good—as Steffie, except Steffie didn’t think having a sexual life was bizarre. I could keep my eyes wide open in bed, but when I dressed I had to turn away. And when I tossed my book bag over my shoulder and became a college girl again, rushing off to make her curfew, the apartment felt like a sea of confusion I had to fight my way out of.
“But even so,” I said, “even if I were part of a cult where you made love so often that the feeling never lapsed—still it wouldn’t work. Can you see spending a lifetime? It would be boring.”
“I don’t think so. Maybe I bore you.”
“You don’t bore me. Yet. I would like something sustaining and fixed, though. Like an idea. Do you believe in anything?”
“What an embarrassing question. Do you know, that makes me feel the way questions about sex must have made our grandparents feel. No, I guess I don’t, really. You can’t ever get any notion to stand still. Every configuration changes the minute you fix it in your eye.”
“That’s only the way things appear, though.”
“The way things appear is the way they are.”
“George. Four years of being a philosophy major and that’s all you’ve arrived at?”
“I’m not alone. You remember Heraclitus?”
“Yes indeedy. Fire.”
“He had a disciple, Kratylus. Kratylus took very seriously what Heraclitus said about everything being in constant flux. When he was asked to explain his ideas he waved his hand in the air. His point was that a statement can’t even remain true for as long as it takes to say it.” George waved his hand in the air to demonstrate, a graceful, rueful wave; it came down ruefully on my breast.
“But we can’t stay with that. The mind instinctively seeks more.”
“It may seek, but that’s our problem, love. Yes, I know, the structure of the mind reflects the structure of the universe. But that’s the epitome of wishful thinking.”
“You are nothing but a Sophist. Professor Boles would be scandalized if she knew I was with you.”
“I’ll tell you something. I think they got a raw deal. They made Socrates nervous, so he gave them a bad name in the agora and nobody’s taken them seriously since. Yet what is so terrible about taking money for your teaching? And as far as teaching strategy rather than substance, well, it’s presumptuous, in a way, to try to teach anything but strategy. They were right about a lot of things. Change is the only stable element. You’re not the same person today that you were yesterday. You especially, kiddo. Six weeks ago you were an innocent.”
“This”—I glanced down at our bodies—“doesn’t change my basic identity.”
“What basic identity, my sweet? Show me where it is. I see everything else, but I don’t see that.”
“There is something. There’s got to be. Something abides, you accumulate a self. By experience, even this, okay. And memory. You endure. The changes you’re talking about are on the surface.”
“Memory is not a live thing.” He slid his hand along my leg.
“Memory is the livest thing of all. Without it you’re nobody. An amnesiac. It’s too frightening.”
“I’m nobody, who are you?” he whispered in my ear.
“George, you are so ... you’re a facade. There’s nothing to you. I mean, you won’t let there be.”
He stopped moving his hands. His whole body seemed to wilt.
“Sorry,” I said. “Sorry, sorry.”
He moved off so he could see me—without his glasses he was farsighted—and he flashed his wide, ingratiating smile. “You won’t have to remember me,” he said. “We’ll be friends for life. Won’t we?”
“Sure. Friends for life. But what hypocrisy. You say it at a moment when you’re hating me. You don’t even want to touch me because I said that.”
“I want to touch you. It was momentary.” He touched my face to prove it. Then he rolled over on his side, away from me. A moment later he rolled back, smiling again, and sang, “‘Prithee, pretty maiden—prithee tell me true (Hey, but I’m doleful, willow willow waly!), Have you e’er a lover a-dangling after you? Hey willow waly O.’” They were lyrics we heard three times a week at the Gilbert and Sullivan rehearsals, and we delighted in them. Everything about Gilbert and Sullivan was so gloriously inane—the best possible respite from our studies and our studious sex. “Come on, Lydie. Do it.”
I gave him the response. “‘Gentle sir, although to marry I design (Hey, but he’s hopeful, willow willow waly!), As yet I do not know you, and so I must decline. Hey willow waly O!’” It made us laugh like kids, and forget for the moment that as a pair we were hopeless.
At the end of January we all went to see Patience. Henrietta Frye, the wan slender pianist, having sustained no minor injury, I was free to sit in the audience with Nina and Esther and Gabrielle, with Victor and the other pleasant boys, watching George and Ray in the chorus of Dragoons. They hammed without stint and we cheered them on. But Steffie as Patience was a revelation. It was a comic role and she got her laughs, but she also managed to make the absurdity believable and tender. Her versatile hair shone in two thick plaits; she wore a blue and white checked, ruffled milkmaid’s dress, with a milk pail on her arm—a commonsensical maiden baffled by the bunch of heartsick aesthetes—and the image was perfectly credible. Steffie of the shady midnight escapes sang, with the utter sincerity that the inane role demanded, “‘Love that no wrong can cure, Love that is always new, That is the love that’s pure, That is the love that’s true!’” In the audience were the three junior high school students she tutored, along with their families, the only black faces present. I had had it all wrong—she was far more sensible than the rest of us. She gave herself fully to what claimed her feelings. As a matter of fact she had said no to George—he told me so himself. I felt a sudden twang in my gut, as if a spring had snapped. I wished I were like Steffie. I had been with George only a few hours earlier—quickly, for he had to get dressed and made up. Lying on top of me, he had joked that real opera singers weren’t allowed to do this before a performance; he hoped I appreciated the risk he was running. I kept the feel of him, and the nimbus of warm air. At the finale, as he embraced the lovesick maiden assigned to him, I felt his arm around my waist, and that ocean of confusion, salty, dark, fishy.
I passed the rest of the winter dazed, by the love-making and by the music. I shuttled from one to the other, living for the feeling of levitation, like a junkie. Unlike a junkie I worked hard to get it—the same high in both, only one means was sanctioned and reputable. I lived high, ate hugely, and felt my insides burning it up, a revved engine. When I was alone I heard music and felt his body, and those live memories of sensation carried me through the routine drudgeries. I was isolated from my friends, with their approved snowball fights. I could never tell them how I had presented myself to George and that though I was free to walk out at any moment I didn’t feel free. I felt wet and waiting for the next time.
“Something is wrong. You don’t look right”—Gaby, one night as we stood washing over adjacent sinks. “You’re not pregnant, for God’s sake, are you?” I brushed her off, hid my face in a towel. “Of course not. I wouldn’t be so stupid.”
I did feel pregnant, though. I was gestating the “Trout” Quintet, practicing it hours every day. The auditions were in a few weeks. I took Schubert’s songs out of the library and brought them to the apartment—George could help. Faltering over the German, which we read only phonetically, we sang the one about the trout, which Schubert borrowed for his piercing fourth movement.
“What does it mean?” George asked. “It’s hard to sing without knowing the meaning.”
“Oh, it’s totally asinine. A pretty fish gets caught, that’s all, and the person watching gets very worked up about it. But it’s peculiar, with that bouncy music, kind of tongue-in-cheek.”
“Can’t we sing it in English? Let’s see the translation.”
“No, the words don’t match the music too well.”
He insisted, and so I read it to him, though it embarrassed me to be so captivated by a melody with these lyrics:
The brook was sparkling brightly
And dancing all about,
And by me like an arrow,
There flashed a lively trout.
I stood upon the brook-bank
And saw with joyous heart,
The brook so gaily rippling,
The fishes dash and dart.
But soon there came an angler
With rod and line and hook
To catch the fish that swam there,
So happy in the brook.
As long, as now, the water,
I thought, is bright and clear,
The man can never catch him,
The trout need never fear.
But in the end the robber
No more could wait.
He made the water thick and muddy.
The trout snapped up his bait.
He twitched his rod and caught him,
What pity, poor little trout, thought I,
And sad at heart and grieving,
I saw the victim die.
“Well, there. I knew you’d think it was silly.”
“It’s not silly. The death of a beautiful thing. Too young.”
“It’s just a fish ...”
“But the angler is death, you see. The narrator has seen how death works. He gets his victims by trickery, making the water muddy.”
“Oh, you’re getting as bad as Gabrielle. Since she’s an English major she sees symbols in every little thing.”
“That trout was so easy to get. He should have been more alert. Put up more of a fight, at least.”
“I just want to put up enough of a fight to get picked. The only real competition is Henrietta Frye. And she never even catches a cold. Healthy as a horse.”
“Henrietta’s very nice, actually.”
“I know. I don’t really mean it. ... You haven’t slept with her too?”
“No, Lydia. Can’t I say someone is a nice person without—”
“Sure. I was just curious.”
“Do you know what that song reminds me of? Freud says somewhere that what we call the instinct of self-preservation might be nothing but an organism’s wish to die in its own way, in its own time. That’s why it fights off any outside danger. It’s funny, isn’t it? We like to think we persevere because of the will to live, but maybe it’s really the will to die our own kind of death. A fitting death.”
“Sometimes I feel if I don’t get to do the ‘Trout,’ I’ll die. I mean it—I’ll want to die, I want it so badly. I’ve spent seven months—”
“Now that is truly asinine.” His voice was new to me, harsh. “How can you even think that? People spend years and years. There’ll be plenty of other times if you don’t make this one.”
“It’s because of you I’m like this. Everything is too ... heady. Before, I didn’t use to feel I would die if I didn’t have what I wanted.”
“Oh, it’s a sexual thing? Is that what you’re telling me?” He slammed the book of songs shut and tossed it to the floor. “Should I apologize for waking you out of your, uh, prolonged latency? Did I do too good a job?” I had never heard him nasty either, only rueful.
“George! Take it easy. Sensual, I meant. All cravings are the same, the object isn’t important.”
“All cravings are the same, huh? Tell me something. What if I tied you to the bed and I sucked you, licked and licked, and at the moment before you were about to come I got up and walked away. Would you feel you would die?”
I looked away. Those words. “What an awful thing to say. How disgusting you can be.” I moved across the bed, as far away as I could.
“All right, I’m aware of that. But would you?”
“I don’t know. I might.” There was an unpleasant, perverse silence. “You couldn’t tell the moment, though.”
“Oh no?”
And then he did it. Of course without tying me to the bed. That was hardly our style, nor was it necessary. I let him. I was curious. I didn’t think he would really stop. He got up and walked to the window, wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and lit a cigarette. I said, “I don’t believe this.”
“Wait it out. See if you die. Or if you’re afraid to die you can do it yourself.”
“I’m not Patient Griselda, you know. I don’t have to go along with your strange urges, your marvelous desires.”
“You’re not tied to the bed either. The door is unlocked.”
I didn’t die. I put on my clothes and left. He caught up with me an hour and a half later, coming out of a theory class, and he apologized.
“Go away. I didn’t want a teacher. I wanted a lover.” That was hard enough to say. I ran on ahead.
He ran too, and stopped me. “Listen. My mother died. You throw that word around so lightly. But she really died. I was four. I don’t think I ever told you. They said she had to go on a long trip. Later, when I understood what had happened, I thought I would die if I couldn’t have a mother like everyone else. But I didn’t die. It’s not so easy to die. I grew up and did without. It makes me very angry to hear people magnify small things, their little needs. Whether you play the ‘Trout’ this year or next, whether you come today or tomorrow, is of very small consequence, and it’s about time you knew it.”
That was the most intimate thing he ever said to me. I treasured it, not because I liked it or liked his tone—I hated his tone—but because of its intimacy. I knew that for George it was a great deal to part with.
“I’m sorry about your mother. I wondered, but I didn’t like to ask. Still. That is no reason to humiliate a person. Some pacifist you are.”
“I’m sorry.” He hung his head like a four-year-old. “Are we still friends?”
“I don’t know.”
“You said friends for life.”
“Did I?”
“Yes, in a moment of weakness.”
“I guess I’ll have to stick to it, then. But for the moment would you just go away?”
The issue became academic. I was chosen to do the “Trout.” Henrietta didn’t try out for it; she preferred to do Bach. I went downtown to Carnegie Hall to hear what Rudolf Serkin made of it: he liquefied it, gave it fluidity and luminescence. I listened to other pianists in the library till I was mesmerized. Nina would come to fetch me, tapping gently on my shoulder, making me jump in my seat. I moved an earphone aside. “Come on, Lydia. Esther’s making a pot of spaghetti.” Or chili. Curried chicken. We were tired of dormitory food. Esther cooked every few days, in one of the apartments the boys rented, sometimes in the apartment I slept in with George and in which Victor kept one room for his work. I wondered whom he made love to on that bare mattress, if anyone. He didn’t look ascetic. But why should I care? I was hearing the quintet in my sleep, waking to it. I played it on classroom desks and on my pillow, I sang it to the sleeping Melanie amid the banana peels. But when I practiced I didn’t allow myself my fill of emotion. I was ascetic. I played the notes slower than their proper tempo, with a metronome, and concentrated on accurate dynamics and fingering and phrasing. I was hoarding it, trusting that on the night of the performance the suppressed emotion would find its way out, steadily and serenely controlled, all the more resonant for having been suppressed. I knew the “Trout” so well I almost felt I had composed it. It was a fertile, exuberant work of perfect balance—the themes were balanced, and the contribution of each instrument. The story goes that Schubert composed it on request, to while away an evening in his patron’s drawing room. A diversion, like a romantic novel. And yet it seemed to me the rich exuberance was a screen for its poignancy, a sense of loss and nostalgia amid plenty, of death in the midst of fertility. If you gave in to the poignancy, though, you lost the exuberance, equally important. Neither could exist without a reminder of the other; the two qualities hung in dependency, a mobile. I resolved to remember, also, that lively and beautiful fish, too innocent for the angler, an image I would never tell the other four doing the quintet, all boys and all more experienced performers than I.
Music students dropped in on the rehearsals, mostly to hear Professor Duffy’s astute comments. I didn’t mind the traffic. I never suffered greatly from stage fright, which I suspect is a form of pretension. I felt unassuming, simply making a small contribution to a vast fund. (Yet Victor called that unassuming feeling arrogance, or pride, the special careless and secretive pride of the anonymous donor.) I didn’t mind Professor Duffy’s public corrections either—he told me I was a good ensemble player, but I must be sure to stand forth and claim my own in the solos. I was perhaps too comfortable merged with the group, he suggested. I would nod calmly and sometimes mark places to remember. But I did get uneasy the afternoon Victor walked in and took a chair at the back. He was not a music student. I knew quite well he had not come to hear Duffy or even Schubert but to hear me, that self I thought each person accumulated but George said didn’t exist.
After the rehearsal he came up and, with a strained smile, asked, “Would you come have a beer with me?” He was wearing a maroon sweater and the usual tan chinos and sneakers with red socks. His eyes were not blue but slaty. He didn’t look ascetic, only drawn and tense as if he needed a good night’s sleep, but still unnervingly beautiful. I said yes because I didn’t know how to refuse smoothly. His body moved with a proprietary sense of space. Walking alongside him, fast, to keep up, I felt I was on his territory.
“Where are we going, the Lion’s Den?”
“No, you meet everyone you know there.”
“How about the West End?”
“Too crowded.”
He took me to a dim, warm neighborhood place on Amsterdam Avenue, near the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, magnificently Gothic but unfinished. It would remain unfinished, the minister once explained, to symbolize the unfulfilled aspirations of the people in the ghetto it bordered. I was determined, once we sat down, to establish my own territory. But it was not a student hangout—men in work clothes, a couple of stout old women, black teen-agers, Spanish girls with sharp voices. There was a world outside of school, close by. And in it Victor didn’t look like a student. He ordered two beers.
“I hate beer. I’ll take a coffee.”
“Oh. I should have asked.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“No? Look, I’ve wanted to talk to you alone for a long time.”
“Yes, I remember you did suggest it once.”
“I did once, and you said you couldn’t. I wanted—” This time the smile was genuine. “I wanted to go out on a real date. Hold hands in the movies, walk in the park, all that kind of thing.”
“You like all that?”
“Yes, why not?”
“I don’t know. I had the impression ...”
“What impression?”
“Nothing. It doesn’t matter.” I paused. “But now I’m seeing George.”
“Now you’re seeing George.” He stopped talking while the waitress brought the beer and coffee. “But not for long.”
“What do you mean, not for long? Did he say something to you?”
“Oh no. He doesn’t talk about you.” My alarm amused him. “All he ever says is that you like to eat. He has to go to the grocery before you come over. No, I just have a feeling. I know him, and you, a little.”
“Very little.”
“That’s the point. I would like to know more.”
“Oh. What is this, an interview?”
“No.” He stretched his hands out flat on the table. “The position is yours, if you want it.”
“Oh Lord! I’m ... I’m ...”
“Touched?”
“Touched! No! Just the opposite.”
“I’m sorry, then. You must have misunderstood.”
“I’m not sure. If George is such a good friend of yours, how come you’re doing this?”
“Esther is your friend.”
“Oh, but that was different,” I burst out. “She said—” I glanced up at Victor. I had a horrible thought.
“It’s nothing like that. This hasn’t been engineered. I’m being openly underhanded. I got tired of waiting till you got tired of him.”
“I see.” I had no footing at all, no words. “Do you always operate this way?”
“No. I thought I’d take a chance.” He gave a wistful look. He would never be at a loss.
“Well, I don’t know what to say. I know even less than you do. Tell me something. Tell me about the painting.”
“All right, that’s fair enough. There’s not a lot to tell, though. I’m going to do it as soon as I’m out. For the rest of my life. I don’t care about much else.”
“Why did you bother going to school, then? Why didn’t you just stay home and paint?”
“I wanted to. But my parents were very insistent, my father in particular. For these four years we have a bargain. Then I’m through pleasing people.”
“What’s the bargain? Oh, I know. The apartment.”
“Yes. I need a place to work. I get the degree, they pay seventy-five bucks a month towards the apartment. I also get to hear Meyer Schapiro and the others. It’s not a bad deal.”
“I don’t suppose they know what else they’re paying for?”
He grinned. “They only pay half. I’m not responsible for what goes on in the other rooms.”
“They must be rich.”
“Not very.”
“It’s more than my parents could afford.”
“Why, what do your parents do?”
“My father sells insurance in Hartford and my mother is a mother. Very good at it. I have a little sister who’s graduating from high school this spring. Evelyn. She’s a bit of a sylph. The White Rock Girl, you know? I’m the practical one.”
“My father is a lawyer. Workmen’s compensation, but he’s usually not on the side of the workmen. My mother is a mother too. She also does good works and takes elevating courses. Ethical Culture, things like that. She’s very, oh, fashionable, but still I like her a lot. She’s more ethical than cultured. I bet you would like her too. I have an older sister, Lily. She’s a chain-smoker at twenty-four. They didn’t make her finish college because she married a urologist. Now they’re buying a house in Westchester, which a year of prostates will pay for, I suppose. Lily is pregnant—soon I’ll be an uncle. How do you like that? Uncle Victor.” He grinned with pleasure.
Each fact seemed to amuse him in a fresh, kindly way. His face was mobile and expressive—it altered for every sentence, every nuance. And the nicer he got, the more wary I felt. “Where did you grow up, Park Avenue?” I asked.
“Will you hold it against me?”
“Probably.” I risked a smile.
“I’m never going to use a penny of their money, after college. I don’t believe in inherited wealth.” He waved to the waitress for another beer. His wave, it struck me, would have been equally at home in a downtown restaurant with waiters in starched, ruffled shirts and cummerbunds, as it was in this Upper West Side bar where the waitress wore an aqua uniform like a hospital orderly. “Besides, it wouldn’t be right to use their money for things they don’t believe in. They think it’s peculiar to be a painter. They’d rather someone else’s son did it, if it has to be done. I have it all worked out. I can work in a bar or something, nights. Would you like a person who worked in a bar better than a person from Park Avenue?” His eyes were teasing.
“That one hit home, I see.”
“Well, it was a switch. In the old days girls didn’t want to marry men who were poor. Well, would you?”
“What, marry you when you’re poor?”
He started to laugh. “Like me better poor. To begin with, anyhow.”
“I hardly know you. I’m not sure I would like you under any circumstances.”
“You might get to like me. It’s been known to happen.”
He had a terrific scriptwriter, I thought, smooth, much better than mine. “I guess I shouldn’t be so surprised at this. I remember you once said you didn’t like the vestiges of courtly love. It figures that you wouldn’t bother with any proprieties.”
“On the contrary. I imagine this is how the knights did it, more or less. Don’t you think? They certainly didn’t suggest going to the movies.”
“But you said the feelings were all instilled by custom.”
“So what? I didn’t say I was immune, did I? Anyhow, when you major in anthropology, it gets to you.” He poured his beer. “Look, why are you so bristly? I know I’m not very good at this. But am I being so presumptuous?”
“It reminds me of Walter and Griselda. You’ve chosen me in my humble surroundings. It never occurs to you that I might not care to go along. I might like things as they are.”
“That Walter and Griselda idea is baloney and you know it.” He said it quite serenely. “But suppose I did pick you out. Someone has to pick someone out, don’t they? Is it only that you didn’t do the picking? What do you find unacceptable about me?”
“This is absurd!” I put the coffee cup down sharply. Some splashed over the rim and I wiped it up with a napkin—Victor seemed so well-bred. “I mean the way you talk. What is unacceptable about you? Asking that question is what’s unacceptable. Your whole approach. You expect me to feel what you feel because you feel it. And on the spot! You’re distorting all the ordinary ways of ... of ...”
“Only by saying what I mean. And you’re enjoying it!” He tossed his head back in a swift movement, a blend of weariness and delight, a very private gesture. I watched the pulses in his throat. “Confess you’re enjoying it. Say something straight, Lydia. You haven’t said one straightforward thing since we sat down. Except that your father sells insurance.”
“Okay! The novelty and the flattery I enjoy. But against my better judgment.”
“Oh, the hell with your better judgment.” He leaned over the table towards me. “We’re alike, don’t you see? We’re the same. We could understand without saying a word. We seem unapproachable, but we could approach each other easily.”
“I am not in the least unapproachable. ... Why, do I seem that way?”
“Yes. Proud. Confident.”
“Me!” I forgot about sounding well-bred. “You’re the one who’s proud. I am an ordinary nice person.” Even I had to laugh at that.
“You are.’ But you have great potential for pride. Great hidden reserves. I don’t mean in the bad sense. Not haughty. I mean you’re not afraid to think very well of yourself, what you can do. It’s lovely. I love it in you.”
“Don’t, please. You’re embarrassing me terribly. ... Why didn’t you say that in the first place?”
“I don’t know. I thought you were more subtle.”
“I guess I’m not.”
“No. But anyhow, the way you played the ‘Trout’ was subtle. I don’t know what Schubert had in mind, but ...”
“Tell me. Tell me anything about it, really, good or bad. I’m not sensitive. I just want to do it well.”
“I can’t tell you how to do it well,” he said softly. “I don’t know anything about it. But I loved the way you did it.” He reached out his hand as if to place it over mine, then drew back. “I loved what you kept back as much as what you put in. I know it was only a run-through and you’ll give more when you really do it. Still, the suggestion ... When I could look up again his face was transformed, transparent. It was hard to keep my eyes on him, as if I were seeing more nakedness than I should in a stranger. “You made it very poignant,” he said.
“Poignant?” That was my word. “Tell me, I’m curious, do you know what poignant literally means?”
“Of course. Piercing.”
“Piercing, yes.” He was piercing too, for that brief moment. “Well, thank you.” I watched him pour more beer. “Your hand is shaking. What’s the matter?”
“Do you think this is easy? I mean, to talk to you like this? Do you think I do it every day?”
He shocked me. He didn’t raise and lower barriers or play safe. We were not alike in that. “Look, I have so much work to do—I can’t. ... And George.”
“I have work to do too. And George will always take care of himself.”
“Stop, please. I don’t like being pushed. It doesn’t feel right. You’re ... Okay, I see you’re different from what I thought. But still, this whole talk is your show, your script, isn’t it? My lines are very limited. Yes or no is all you leave for me to say. It’s not ... It makes me feel like ...”
“I should have asked you if you wanted to go to the movies. It would have sounded better. I don’t know how to pursue girls, really. I don’t have time. Look, next time it can be your show. I’m democratic. I’d like to see what your show would be like, actually.”
“I’ve got to go now. No, hold it. I’ll pay for my own coffee, thanks.”
“Fine!” said Victor. “Give me—let’s see, two coffees—thirty cents. No, make it ... forty-two and a half, with tip. Pay for the beer too, if you like. Do you want to pay for the beer?”
“Oh, all right, go ahead and pay for it all.”
He walked me back to the library, where we said good-bye.
He interfered with the way I saw George. I thought I had no illusions about George, that I understood his charm and his usefulness. But the memory of Victor and his insistence hung over me, and in the silent clarity of late nights, as I practiced the oboe under the small bedside lamp with Melanie curled asleep, I saw that whether I liked him or not, Victor was emblematical of the world, dense and insistent and intractable. George, with all his cavalier sex, his beard, and his years in the army, gave off something dry and academic, like the odor of library stacks. Even the loving he had learned from books.
“What is in there?” I asked him, lying in bed.
“In where?” He was resting his head on my breast.
“In here.”
“Blood,” he said, “and gray matter.”
“You know what I mean, George. You seem so apart. What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking nothing. Can’t you just enjoy it?”
“I don’t know what it is. I want to be somewhere else. Outside of me, I mean.”
“Oh, Lyd,” he groaned. “You are so awfully adolescent. And as of last week you’re not even a teenager any more.”
“What do you feel urgent about? There must be something.”
“Nag, nag, nag.”
I smiled. I was being unfair: my fingers drew designs on his belly as I asked. “Come on, tell me,” I teased, “what your real passion is for. You know what I mean ... there’s God, Art, Revolution, Nature.”
“If you must know, Cunts,” he said.
A week before I was to perform the “Trout” a most unlikely event occurred. On an outing in the New Jersey Palisades with the Mountain Climbing Club, Henrietta Frye tripped and broke her wrist. The call imploring me to substitute in The Yeomen of the Guard left me faintly guilty, even though I had not envied Henrietta since the “Trout” auditions. I cut my Friday classes to practice the score. The Yeomen of the Guard was my favorite among the operettas because it ends sadly, a last-minute sadness casting into high relief the inanity of the rest. Our production played up the sadness for all it was worth. The purported hero, Colonel Fairfax, played by George, was a stiff, selfish nobleman, a “peacock popinjay,” who steals the girl from the true hero, the jester Jack Point, a man of the world. Ray Fielding was our jester, and miraculous: he gave Jack Point the verve and ambiguity of a Shakespearean fool—fey yet earthly, a sprite yet a man, obtuse and barbed in his wit, yet poignant, quite like the “Trout,” in his sorrow over lost love. Ray brought tears to my eyes even as I accompanied him, singing of the merryman whose soul was sad and whose glance was glum as he sighed for the love of a lady. George did very well as the peacock popinjay, very natural. He stood suitably pompous and triumphant with the girl nestled under his arm, while the jester, the artist, cast aside, fell to the ground in misery as the curtain came down. I worked up to the final chords wondering which of them was more real; with which would I find myself in the presence of real life? I didn’t think about love.
The next weekend I played the “Trout.” Backstage the string players looked unfamiliar dressed in their dark suits. They were tense as they wiped their palms and foreheads with big white handkerchiefs. I was excited and curious. I had the feel of every phrase stored in my fingers like gold in a vault; all I had to do was unlock and it would undulate out—I hoped. Everyone was there, Nina, Esther, and Gabrielle, Melanie and Steffie, George, Victor, Ray, and the other clever boys, as well as my parents and Evelyn, down from Hartford for the occasion. I thought of none of them. If I thought of anything at all besides the notes, it was of the lissome, iridescent qualities of skimming fishes. But mostly I listened to the others and let the stored phrases shed from me into the communal sound we made. It felt like molting. I remembered Professor Duffy telling me not to be afraid to come forth and claim my own during the solo parts, and though I was afraid, for there was such a bare lonesomeness about standing forth by myself, I did it. That was more than molting; it was revealing the naked nerves. I did it for the other four—it wouldn’t have been fair to hold back.
It was good. I was satisfied in my mind as never before.
We all went out for pizza to celebrate, three big tables pushed together in the smoky back room of the West End Bar. I hadn’t seen my parents in several months. I noticed they were beginning to go gray, my father in streaks at the temples, my mother in patches. Their bodies were beginning to soften, yet their eyes were as eager and beneficent as in those long-ago summers at the beach. They were paying special attention to George. I prayed that my father would not say anything to embarrass me, such as, My little Paderewski, which he was quite capable of doing, with all his beneficence.
“And what are you studying?” he asked George.
“Philosophy.”
“Philosophy. Well, well. And what do you do with that when you graduate?”
In his charmingly evasive answer, George managed to mention the family of rabbis, which he knew my parents would find impressive. No doubt they assessed him as a sociable, sensible young man despite the philosophy and the beard. I think they would have been surprised and vaguely distressed, though, to know I was sleeping with him. Esther took a fancy to my mother and got herself invited to Hartford for two weeks in June. Gabrielle focused on my father, for whom she summoned up the evanescent French accent. Nina, who was beginning to don glamor like a costume—black silk blouse and gold chains around her neck—was flanked by a few of the hopeful boys. Steffie and Ray were persuaded to do, a cappella, “I Have a Song to Sing, O!” from last week’s Yeomen, and afterwards Steffie politely excused herself—it was close to midnight and she had an appointment. Ray moved his chair closer to Evelyn’s. Evelyn said little but smiled gnomically. She wore her smooth fair hair back in a knot like a ballet dancer’s, though she did not dance. She used to fly down the dunes but lately she had grown languid; she took long, slow walks, my parents had told me. She said little, but I knew she was saving every perception for later dialogues with herself, or with flowers, or whomever she was telling her secrets to these days. Evelyn would know what George was right away. Laughing and eating pizza, I experimented; I tried to see him through her uncanny instincts. Yes, I had been right when, taking my bows after the “Trout,” exulting in that rare satisfaction of the mind, I decided to finish with him. Even though what George offered measured high on Bentham’s Hedonistic Calculus. The only category where it fell short was number six, Purity. The pleasure was not unalloyed—it was mixed with unease and self-doubt. I suspected other pleasures might yield more, and more purely: they were pleasures connected with working at music, with the density and tremulous candor Victor had shown, and with freedom from that dizzy levitation. They were connected, imprecisely, with the quote from Spinoza still tucked in a corner of my mirror, reminding me morning and evening that the effort by which each thing endeavors to persevere in its own being is the actual essence of the thing itself, and causing me discomfort when I returned from my endeavors with George. Those other pleasures had to do, too, with my wish to grasp what abides beneath the daily ephemera; George was part of the ephemera. And also, in a totally impenetrable way, with Thales’ waiting, and waiting, to measure the pyramid by the measure of a man and the shadow he casts. But I had said friends for life and meant to keep my word. I would do without the rest. In the crowd of family and friends, all busy eating and looking each other over, Victor and I gave no hint of our strange talk in the bar on Amsterdam Avenue near the unfinished cathedral. For all I knew, we might never talk again, but he had had his effect. I was feeling a bit sad and cruel about George, stirred by the romance of my own cruelty as the very young can be. Till it struck me, watching him assist Ray in amiably trying to “draw out” Evelyn (hopeless task if she was unwilling), that George would not be devastated. Almost anyone clever and athletic enough would do. I surveyed the table, flushed with my success, and thought, I will give him Nina, cleverer than I, and virginal.