LEE DUFFIN WAS DRESSING but had gotten only as far as panties and a half-slip. She sat at her dressing table looking at herself in a triple mirror. Bill Duffin sat across the room in a cheap but comfortable green armchair reading a book catalogue and whistling happily from time to time.
“Happy, are you?” Lee said. Her hair was blond and cut very short. She was thinking of having it streaked.
“You’re happy and I’m well preserved. I am, don’t you think?”
“In the face. There was never much of the rest of you to preserve.”
“Better thin than fat,” she said.
“Books I picked up for four bits are now worth forty and fifty dollars,” he said. “My prescience is making us rich.”
“If books could only screw, it might even make us happy,” Lee said, turning slightly. She was so small breasted that she seldom wore bras.
“What a trite complaint,” Bill said. “I’m happy enough.”
“Sure,” Lee said. “I’m happy because I’m well preserved and you’re happy because you’ve got six thousand books. Once every ten days or so we even have a pleasant conversation. I wish the girls were still at home. At least they talked to me.”
“Find you a chum,” Bill said. “There’s bound to be a faculty wife or two who has similar problems.”
“Nobody not married to you could have anything in common with me,” Lee said. “When do the kids arrive?”
“Shortly. Want a drink? It might inspire you to finish dressing.”
“Vodka and tonic,” she said.
She finished while he fixed the drinks, and when the graduate students began to come nervously in, the Duffins were there to dazzle them. They had bought a house in Southampton, on Dunstan Street, an old high-ceilinged house with a long living room that had been shelved to hold four thousand of Bill’s six thousand books. The Duffin library started with Henry James and came forward and included almost every modern writer of note, English, Irish, or American. Most of the books were fine bright copies and the collection shone brilliantly against the dark-stained bookcases. Among the nervous poorly dressed graduate students and their self-conscious wives the Duffins shone just as brilliantly—Bill tall and very confident and condescendingly amiable, ready with drinks and high-level academic gossip; Lee just as confident, quite impenetrable but poised and friendly and in a wild yellow dress. She moved from wife to wife inquiring about progeny and schools and the like. There was a Rolling Stones album on the phonograph, turned rather loud, a fact that unsettled many of the graduate students. The novelty of a professor who played the Stones was a little disquieting—almost frightening. In the past they had all done their level best to be conservative and unobtrusive at faculty gatherings, and it was unnerving to think that they might suddenly be expected to loosen up and be swingers. The Carpenters came in slightly late. Patsy was the only graduate wife with enough dresses to make brooding over what to wear a problem, and in any case she thought it ill-mannered to get to a party precisely on time. She had chosen a black and white dress with thin shoulder straps, so her arms were bare. Jim was as nervous as the other graduate students, and as soon as he got in the door and collected his drink he slipped over to the knot of males who were standing by the bookcases talking scholarship and admiring Duffin’s books without quite daring to touch them.
Patsy was not at all nervous. Instead she was feeling happy and expectant and was just at that stage of her pregnancy when she seemed all bloom. She was looking splendid and knew it and was very in the mood for a party. The Duffins kept her a few minutes, exchanging pleasantries, and then she went over and stood chatting with Emma. Bill Duffin went to the bar and from that hostly vantage point stood watching her. He was impressed—a fact not lost on his wife.
“You look like a spider who’s just come upon a fly,” Lee said mildly. “Have another martini. It will blur your vision.”
“Lovely girl,” he said. “I saw her at the drugstore and never dreamed she was a graduate wife. I think I’ll sit down and discuss profound issues with my students while I watch her.”
“Try not to let your tongue hang out,” Lee said.
Instead of sitting down, Bill took several of the students from his Eliot seminar over to the bookcases and showed them his Eliot collection, which numbered one hundred and thirty items. “It’s not a bad author collection,” he said modestly. “I was lucky and got my ‘Prufrock’ years ago, before it went out of reach. I wasn’t so lucky with The Waste Land—I’ll probably never own a first issue. Some of these magazine appearances are extremely hard to come by now.”
He showed them some of the little magazines, English, American, or Continental, each magazine in a separate cellophane cover. The students scarcely knew what to say and handled the magazines fearfully, very afraid of damaging them. Only Jim was really at ease. He was fascinated. He had never seen such books or such curious magazines. A number of the books had Eliot’s neat signature in them, and one or two of the late ones had short inscriptions to Duffin. Long after the other students had murmured their awe and gone back to their drinks Jim lingered by the bookshelves, Duffin with him. It had never occurred to Jim that books could be collected in that way or that they could look so attractive in a room. William Duffin, quick to respond to someone who responded to his taste, brought Jim another drink and continued to show him books. “My Pound collection is probably my best,” he said. “I only know of one better in the world, and his bibliographer owns that. Did you know we’re both from Idaho—Pound and I? I think that’s what got me started on him. I even collect Vardis Fisher, another old Idaho boy.”
Lee Duffin had come over and stood at her husband’s elbow. She looked lovely and seemed in very good spirits. “I’m thinking of starting a collection of penises, myself,” she said. “I’m planning to have them all in beautiful condition. I may even have a few rebound. I don’t think I’ll start with Idaho penises, though.” She turned and left. Jim was very surprised, but Bill Duffin seemed not in the least ruffled.
“She doesn’t suppress her resentments very well,” he said. “It sometimes startles people. Let me show you my Faulkner.”
They turned back to the books. Duffin noticed that Jim’s clothes were better cut than the clothes of the other graduate students. “You collect?” he asked.
“No,” Jim said. “I buy a lot of books but I never thought seriously of collecting them. Maybe I should.”
“It takes money but it’s very interesting,” Bill said. “I better circulate. Look all you want to.”
A little later, while Jim and one or two other graduate students were cautiously looking at the books, Patsy found that she wanted a drink of water and went to the kitchen to wash out her whiskey glass. Lee was talking to Emma, and Patsy was rather glad to get away from the wives for a minute. Her high spirits had flattened a little. For one thing, the Duffins both put her off. They were obviously sizing everyone up but doing it very slyly and, Patsy felt, not so much for political reasons as for their own exalted amusement. It was impossible to talk easily to the other graduate wives, largely because the Duffins kept the music a little too loud. The Stones or some other rock group were always hearable and were a difficult background to conversation. She had hoped that Hank Malory would be there and was disappointed that he wasn’t. He was the only one of the new graduate students whom she found interesting. All in all it was not as good a party as it might have been, and she felt slightly wasted and a little bored.
When she turned around with the glass of water in her hand William Duffin stood in the kitchen doorway watching her. She felt embarrassed, as if perhaps she should not have entered the kitchen without asking. Duffin had loosened his tie and was clearly a little too warm, even though the house was centrally air-conditioned. He was a very tall man and looked more formidable alone than he had in the living room.
“Oh, hi,” she said. “I needed a drink of water.”
“You’re awfully pretty,” Bill said. “Let’s go out in the back yard and neck.”
Patsy was so surprised and shocked that for a moment she couldn’t speak. She simply looked at him. He smiled good-naturedly.
“Don’t look so surprised,” he said. “Really. Why should I stand around dispensing social and professional banalities when what I really want to do is drag you out in the back yard and kiss you? I might as well be my licentious but attractive self.” He had dropped his portentous lecturer’s tone and spoke quietly and directly. For some reason the change in tone helped Patsy to recover her poise.
“Who says you have an attractive self?” she asked.
“Every woman I’ve ever slept with. Everyone except my wife, at least.”
“Evidently your wife knows you best,” Patsy said, setting her glass down. “I don’t think you’re so attractive. If you were two feet shorter and if your hair was curly instead of being too straight you’d look exactly like Eddie Fisher. Can you sing?”
Bill Duffin looked at her silently, as surprised by her remark as she had been by his proposition. She was looking at the Klee print that was thumbtacked over the stove.
“I guess I underestimated you,” he said. “Sorry.”
“Surely,” she said, thinking perhaps he was drunker than he looked. She was in no mood to make a scene. The insult had actually pepped her up a little—it was a break in an otherwise boring evening. But Bill Duffin didn’t move out of the door.
“Are you and your husband wealthy?” he asked. “That’s a nice dress you’re wearing.”
“We’re not starving,” she said, standing up. “Excuse me, please.”
“Sit a minute,” he said. “I don’t think you really considered my invitation on its merits.”
“Oh, come on,” she said. “Enough’s enough. You know I’m married.”
“He doesn’t have much of an identity, does he?” Bill said, looking her in the eye. Patsy colored.
“If this is identity you’re exhibiting I’m glad he lacks it,” she said.
Bill was an excellent judge of how far was far enough, and he raised his glass to her. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll excuse you if you’ll excuse me. I’m just impulsive and you looked kissable. My perceptions are probably dulled by drink.”
Patsy went straight to Jim and told him she wasn’t feeling well—could they go? Once they had paid their respects and were outside he asked her what was the matter.
“I just met the Sonny Shanks of the scholarly world,” she said.
“Duffin? What do you mean?”
She told him as they walked. It was a clear pleasant night and their apartment was only a few blocks away. When she finished, Jim said nothing. Silence grew between them. It grew and grew until they were home. He sat on the couch, she sat in her chair.
“Probably drunk,” Jim said finally.
“I knew you’d say that,” she said. “He wasn’t drunk, he was quite cold-blooded. No wonder she looks so uptight. Living with him she’d have to be.”
Jim regarded her unhappily. “Do you think I’m cold-blooded?” he asked.
Patsy began to take off her hose. “No,” she said. “You’re nice. I wasn’t comparing you to him, for god’s sake.”
“I’m just bothered,” he said. “I was thinking of asking him to be my major professor. He seems to like me.”
“Well don’t,” she said. “He likes me more.”
Jim was silent, very depressed. Talking books with Duffin had excited him. He watched Patsy take off her hose, at a loss as to what to do. Marriage seemed to flatten his every expectation, but it had seldom flattened one so quickly. He looked at the shelf of quality paperbacks with dull dissatisfaction and went to get himself a glass of milk.
When the students were gone, Bill Duffin wrote out an order for two books, one by Lawrence Durrell and one by Oliver St. John Gogarty. He put an airmail stamp on the envelope and put the book catalogue in a neat stack he kept on the bottom of the bookcase near his desk. Lee came into the study in a white cotton nightgown and stood watching him.
“You look like Joan of Arc,” he said. “It’s your hair.”
“I feel like her too. I know what it is to burn.”
“Play with yourself,” he said, smiling up at her. “I don’t mind.”
“What’ll you be doing?”
“Reading ‘Gerontion.’”
“My god,” she said, yawning. “I’d think you’d be as bored with it as you are with me.”
“‘Gerontion’ is ever fresh,” he said. “Maybe I’ll just listen to the record.” He went to the living room and put on the record of Eliot reading and listened to “Gerontion.” Lee went to bed and tried to read The Hobbit. Their oldest daughter, Melissa, was just then very big on it. She went to Mills College, in California, and they were practically certain that she had begun to smoke pot.