nine

On New Year’s Eve afternoon Katherine had stepped into his study, wringing her gloves. “I need some air,” she said. “I think I’ll go out for a drive.” He hardly looked up at her. “I’ll be back before supper,” she added, and then she left, very slowly, while he scratched his head and frowned down at his work.

When he was sure she had gone he went and pulled the cover off his own car, found the keys lying next to the brake pedal, and experimented with the engine. It started after several false tries, shuddered, and settled into an unhealthy-sounding idle. He generally hated to drive. He had always avoided it, walking wherever he could, even as far as Monteagle and in the worst kind of weather, and when Katherine had come back to Sewanee he gladly gave up driving entirely and let her take him everywhere, because she enjoyed it so much and because he enjoyed watching her. He loved watching her whenever she was completely absorbed and content, folded up with her chin in her hand, watching a bird or a rainstorm, driving, listening to another person talk. He loved watching her whenever she was disregarding him and the uneasy, searching look had left her eyes. Then she didn’t seem to need him.

He got the car out of the garage and down to the road, fighting it the whole way, and drove with dangerously exaggerated caution to Chattanooga, where he bought a case of champagne. Carrying it out to the car he began to worry about having time to chill it, and on the way back to Sewanee he sped, careering wildly. He was a terrible, terrible driver. He wished that Katherine was sharing this errand with him. It would have been less nerve-racking, but then, of course, he couldn’t have surprised her. He had never tried to surprise her before, although he had known her system of holidays for years. Valentine’s: loathsome. July Fourth: an occasion for ironical fun. Halloween: irrelevant. Thanksgiving: painful. Christmas most loathsome of all and then New Year’s Eve was absolutely crucial. She would be looking for her omen. He had never tried to surprise her before because he’d never fought to keep her. He had always wanted to believe that she was a casual visitor to his life and that his love meant very little to her. He remembered telling her years ago what a sophisticated girl she was, how jaded, how scornful of him. She graced his bed by virtue of her throaty sense of humor. She liked to believe in this fiction as much as he did, but it was grossly unfair to her. It left her no way to state her unhappiness. He did not want to shoulder the responsibility for making her happy. He knew he would fail.

He was briefly worried that she would already be home when he returned, but she wasn’t. He filled the sink with chipped ice and cold water and submerged the whole case to make it chill quickly, and this was also accomplished before she got home. He uncorked a bottle, aiming it at a closed window, and cracked the glass. The small disaster pleased him. He dropped into a chair with a full flute—he had bought these, too; he’d been shocked to find he didn’t own any—and began to drink, watching the western light slant through his windows. Soon he was drunk. He was halfway through his second bottle, and found it easy to imagine drinking the remaining ten without her. Champagne seemed to evaporate. It was the cotton candy of alcohol. It was not at all like Scotch; Scotch, he thought with a flash of boyish happiness, was the chewy caramel of alcohol. That was a perfect idea. It fit precisely. Good for you, darling, he thought. Here’s your fucking omen. His throat swelled. The instant she came he would hand her a flute and fire another cork at the window. She had always loved him for his hard sheen. He never cried, he never begged, he never needed her. That was why she couldn’t leave.

He knew something Katherine could not imagine he knew, although he had no proof, and had never demanded any from her. But he had never felt any tremor in his conviction, which had initially come to him with such ease, unbidden, in the first months of the resumption of their affair. She had never been with anyone but him. Until he realized this, it had never occurred to him that this was a condition to be wanted. Once he did realize it, it became a condition he could not imagine being altered. He had been certain of her faithfulness because he had his own version of it. While he had never suffered from an absence only she could satisfy, his desire somehow coincided with her. He was attracted to women in general, and felt the constant need to circle them, attend to them, be acknowledged and flattered by them, but in the same way that he never wanted to move house and in the same way that he ate, essentially, the same meal again and again, night after night, finding it gratifying as nothing else was, he wanted no other body beneath him but hers. It wasn’t that he’d grown used to her. His own body was satisfying to him, not merely familiar. He knew what his own hand tightening around the base of his cock accomplished, he knew where to locate his orgasm, and the inevitable and untiring incremental escalations of his pleasure that marked the way through a narrowing space. His orgasms were more powerful when he was alone than when he was with her, because every cell of his body understood itself, but in the same way his pleasure was far more complete with her than it could be with anyone else, because he knew her, he had carved her out and no one had followed to alter his work. He had slept with many other women since becoming her lover, and they were distractions. Their demands, or their simple differences, diluted his own pleasure and opened what he felt as a slight, maddening space between his body and theirs. With her it was a precise, unalterable fit. He had never imagined that there could be yawning spaces opened in her by the very completeness of that fit, that the completeness in itself created space, like a miracle, created something by force of its power of exhaustion, and that it was in that space that she was marking out her distance from him, testing it, and testing her capacity to hurt him.'

After leaving Strake in the morning she went home again, to pull another armful of clothing off the hangers in her closet. Her home had only grown more complicated, in part because of the many explicit difficulties it presented, but mostly because the greatest difficulty of all was not explicit but undefined and disturbing, a difficulty for which she suspected the house only stood as a symbol she could not even read. Going up the stairs she averted her eyes from the library, and in her bedroom she averted her eyes from the bed. She dropped her dirty clothing in her hamper and chose new things. She would have to have the laundry done soon, but she kept putting off calling the service. She had the irrational idea that the boy who picked up and delivered would somehow perceive that she hadn’t been living here.

Charles had asked her what she wanted to do with her house. At first she’d felt relieved to have that problem to solve. It was a symptom of change, a way in which to bring this period of her life to a close. But soon she was uneasy. She had always had a fiercely proprietary attitude toward this house, even in her childhood, feeling that the small drama of her life was its sole occupant, and that it was her sole audience. She had taken for granted that it would one day be her property. Then her father had willed her the house and she’d been mortified, both by the fresh proof of his ignorance of her affair and by his inadvertent acknowledgment of it. The house had always seemed like a silent accomplice, enabling her liaison with Charles. But over time its significance changed. She began to associate her property with ideas of extenuation and independence, the slim space between disaster and survival. Although she knew Charles had asked her about her house to reassure her of his seriousness, she began to think that his assumptions about her would not accommodate the private hoard she felt she couldn’t do without.

She considered selling the house and putting the money away for herself, but the fluidity this implied, at first inviting, soon seemed precarious. If she turned her house into money, what would keep the money from leaking away? She would clean it out and rent it as a summer house. Then the reality of having the house occupied by strangers, if only for three months of the year, presented itself. What if she were to want to go into the house, and sit in her room? What if she wanted to doze with a book on the screened-in porch, or dig ineptly, as she sometimes had, in the yard? What if she wanted to be alone and out of sight for some reason? There would be people in her house, moving the furniture, impregnating the curtains with unfamiliar cooking smells, discovering forgotten artifacts of her family’s life in the attic. The idea became repellent to her, and her flirtation with it even more repellent. She didn’t need the money; there was no reason to force the house, like a loyal old animal, to earn a living for the first time in its life. She would keep it as it was.

After she carried the fresh clothes to the car she went back inside, trying to understand this way in which the house now seemed to insist itself at her. What is it? she thought. The right thing to do—she didn’t know where these arbitrary, overarching notions of right and wrong were coming from—the right thing to do, she suspected, involved gliding around in an elegiac way, touching things, settling into chairs not settled into for years so as to better bathe the house in her gazes. Some calm ritual of departure. Instead she had absconded from her own house in a fit of embarrassment. It was a strange, self-dividing condition to have returned to a childhood home as a grown woman, and to have stepped into that home both as if she had never left it and as if she had never been there before. She shouldn’t have done it, she thought. How many things had she lost track of, plunged into this familiar murk? All around her were squandered opportunities for documentation, abandoned realizations, evidence of nothing consistent apart from her own inattention. Several years ago, after her father’s death, she’d come across an old butane lighter of his in the back of a drawer. There was detritus like this sown all through the house, his abandoned sweat-stained workshirts and thumb-softened mildewing mystery novels, and she had been seized by the desire to gather this trashy legacy together and force the loss of her father through the disorderly workings of her understanding until it emerged in some distilled and eternal form that she could treasure, but she hadn’t.

She finally went into the library. The vase lay in pieces on the rug, in the center of a tea-colored stain. She got down on all fours and tried various cleaning assailants, and the enormity of what had happened to her dissipated in the irritation of the chore. It seemed mundane, all mundane. She was always the one who threw something. Charles would only recede further and further within himself, watching her steadily. She could see the mark on the wall where the vase had struck and broken. How drunk had she been? She remembered the drive back from Nashville as fizzy with her own sense of indecision and the thrill of knowing that a weighty shifting and rearranging was taking place at the outer edge of her field of grasp. She thought love required the total absence of logic to be authentic. There could never be ulterior motives, justifications discernible to the impartial observer. To the outsider her chosen love must seem inconceivable or she couldn’t value it highly enough. She was only drawn to choices that seemed to undermine her rationality. She had to aim this far from the agreed-upon center of things to find the real, utterly uninfluenced shape of her desire, and perhaps sometimes she went too far, seeking to define her love in terms of everything another thought it should not be, and mistaking this contrariness for a pure impulse of her own.

In her adulthood all these tendencies had become clear to her just as they seemed to have reached the point of being incurable. Twenty-eight felt like an ungraceful, unhappy age to be. It was overshadowed by the nearness of the subsequent decade, and the realization that, while she’d been finally lulled by the seeming youthfulness of any number in the twenties, a small death had crept up on her unawares. She felt now that daring and indifference to the social norms of her class were a function of age, and not character. She found herself wanting things she had never wanted before. Not necessarily marriage or the friendship of women her age or the thoughtless routine of a social life, but a sense of conclusiveness in whatever form it took. She had spent half her life immobilized by the fear she would lose Charles, and her unhappiness, she realized now, had been passive, and essentially hopeful. If he didn’t love her, there was always the hope that he would. If he abandoned her, there was the hope he would return. So long as the power to withhold her happiness lay outside herself, she could wait, and stoke her despair with the intensity of imagining its opposite. But now she was suddenly sure of him, and for the first time free to wonder whether she was sure of herself. She looked into her heart and found a hall of mirrors instead of the simple chamber that contained the irreducible fact. Nothing singular yielded itself. There was the chasm her loneliness measured, or the fear of the chasm reopening, and there were comparisons between moments at which she had felt herself undoubtedly in love, and this moment. But plain certainty, if it had ever existed, was gone. Her investigation was inseparable from what she hoped to find, and so she ceased to trust any of her assessments of herself. It was only in moments of rare thoughtlessness, like pushing the door open with the heel of her hand and walking out of the house, that she would be visited by a flash of pure feeling: the pressure of her hand briefly printed by the texture of the door, the curtain’s filigree of lace before her eyes, the sharp breeze, the brilliant glitter of the afternoon sun—a flood of mundane precision and hovering within this, like a momentary ghost, the real knowledge that she was unhappy. She had gained the one condition upon which she thought all her happiness hung, and found she was wrong. There had always been a distant, unlikely prospect, for which she lived, and this was gone.

When she arrived at his house the five champagne bottles were lined up side by side against the baseboard in the kitchen, labels facing out, as sober as if they’d held milk. She went quickly to the icebox and found the other seven. Her heart climbed into her throat and stayed there. The house was perfectly still, already losing the blaze from the morning light. It was nine o’clock, very late for him to not be awake. He rose every day at six, no matter when he’d gone to bed, and often went straight to his desk without washing. When she got up, hours later, she would find him there, humming to himself over Virgil, and bring him a poached egg sliding in a teacup, or a stack of dry toast he barely touched. He never ate anything substantial until late in the day. When his thoughts hit a snag he wandered through the house, unseeing, mumbling lines from epic poems with no awareness he was speaking aloud. She knew everything about him, she knew he spoke seriously to the plants when he thought she was gone, she knew he was secretly sentimental about dogs. No one had ever studied her so closely, but sometimes his attention swept over her and she felt it powerfully. “Tell me,” he would say, his gaze settling comfortably back into itself as if into an armchair. She would have had a dream, or made some arbitrary decision, or spoken with some irritating person. At these moments she had sometimes felt she was not being loved but consumed, idly, for his pleasure. But she would see the pleasure in his eyes as she slid further into chatty self-indulgence. “Tell me,” he said. His taking pleasure in her felt like love. She went upstairs and found him in bed, gazing at the ceiling. His eyes were bloodshot. He swallowed hard and smiled weakly at her. “This is your punishment,” he said. “Seeing me looking like this.” She had imagined his accusations, her derision. As she crossed the room toward him, all that slid off her like a daydream, forgotten. “What have you done here?” she murmured, touching his forehead. “You’ve had women here. There have been dancing and drinking.”

“And song.”

“Yes, song. I forgot about song.” When she nudged him he shifted and made room for her on the bed, wincing. She took his head in her lap.

“I have a terrible hangover,” he whispered.

“No, no, we’ll scare it away.” One fat tear fell before she could catch it and struck his face.

“Katherine,” he said, warningly, and then she began to cry in earnest.

“I wasn’t here,” she said.

He craned to look at her. “You weren’t required to be here.”

“Of course I was.” She pulled her wrist across her eyes, impatiently.

“It was a just a small surprise for you. Champagne.”

“I don’t know,” she began. She pressed a pillow to her face and it came away wet. She took a ragged breath and sighed.

“Tell me.”

“Can I?”

“I think you’d better.” He pulled her down beside him and they lay face to face, sharing the dry pillow. She could smell the sweet stench from the alcohol, sweating off him.

“I went to visit Chang. I cooked him some supper. Then I showed him Mrs. Wade’s brandy stash and we got tight. I had to sleep there. I slept in some boy’s grimy dorm room.”

He laughed. Then he said, too quickly, “Not his.”

“I like him, Charles.”

“I know you do.” He touched her cheek. “Sweet Katherine.”

“You’re so sure of me.”

“I’m not sure of you at all. I’m nervous.” He imagined sleeping in a cold bed, knowing someone else was making love to her.

“I didn’t mean to stay there. I never decided to stay.”

“Perhaps that was your omen.”

She was silent. She tried to stare past him, and sank one hand in his fine mane of hair. How often had she thanked God for this? Bald men made her clammy.

“Are you having second thoughts?”

“No.”

“Did you make love to him?”

She sat up. “Is that all you care about?”

“That,” he said crisply, “is what I care a great deal about.”

“Sometimes I think you’d like me to go off with someone else.”

“You’re very wrong there.”

“Have my nasty business with somebody else and then tell you about it.”

“That would kill me.” His calm gaze seemed sunk deep within him.

“Because I’m yours?”

“Don’t you want to be?” he said.

She walked away and left him lying helplessly in bed. When he was this hung over he wouldn’t even dare to sit up. It made him nauseated and he was terrified of vomiting. He would sooner faint from being poisoned than vomit. She sat down on the stairs outside his room and peeled off her dirty stockings. Their knees were torn through and the soles were gray. These were the stockings she’d driven to Strake in, and walked to the chapel, and sat in the kitchen without her shoes, and run across the hall when he was crying. She pulled them through her fingers. All that hapless travel was recorded here. She had gone to Strake to see him because she was frightened of what he thought of her. She didn’t remember the last time she’d cared what a person thought of her. The preoccupation was painful and urgent, like a numb limb stirring. She didn’t want him to think she was a careless, self-indulgent woman. She didn’t want him to think that she was idly toying with him for her pleasure. But then she had to tell him about the engagement, and this very simple declaration, which she had rehearsed to herself in the car, giving it the inflection of flat statements of fact like “I have a new car” or “I come from New Orleans,” began to snarl on itself. She couldn’t tell him when this had happened without explaining what fourteen years of living through it hadn’t helped her understand, but if she implied it was an engagement of long standing, would it be wrong that she had taken him to dinner? Every third thought she had was disgust with these labyrinthine proprieties. If she said she’d been engaged all along, would it seem strange that she hadn’t told him sooner? Not having told him might appear like a presumption he would care. Every time she imagined that he would care she reproached herself for vanity, and returned to the original idea: I have a new car, I’m engaged, I was born in New Orleans. And then he had punished her, sensing the contorted weight of what she hadn’t said, and not allowing her to say it at all.

When she looked into the bedroom again he was faking sleep. The way his arms lay by his sides on top of the blanket reminded her of an invalid’s. She knew he wasn’t really sleeping. When he slept his breaths seemed drawn from the furthest depths of his body like draughts of water from a well. He couldn’t have imitated that sound even if he’d ever heard it. She went downstairs silently, in her bare feet, and began to make him a tray. Was this what it would be like, someday? When she turned forty he would be sixty-eight. But then, herself at forty was an inconceivable figure on the other side of an abyss. She loaded the tray with a poached egg, a stack of dry toast, a pitcher of tepid water, the Tabasco bottle, and the aspirin box and carried it upstairs. “I thought you’d left me,” he said when she came in.

She spent the rest of the afternoon reading to him while he lay gulping and sighing uncomfortably. She only read him things he knew by heart, and wouldn’t think too hard about. “I feel like Dorothea Brooke,” she joked.

“That’s nice for me. Dorothea Brooke felt like Milton’s daughter.”

“But she was an insufferable square.”

“As I recall it, she was a noble young girl who made the mistake of marrying an old man she grew to loathe.”

She kissed him. “It’s lucky I loathe you already.”

She thought there had to be a moment at which a decision was irrevocably made, and after that the worst was over. Now this moment kept receding. She could no longer believe she’d ever been a bold, thoughtless girl who had pursued a disastrous affair because she’d wanted to, who had accepted her mother’s vilification as perfectly consistent with things she had done and not regretted, who had burned up her family’s affection and walked away from her education and returned to this place, forsaking every other goal. Each of those decisions had been unsought and absolute and she had discharged them with an almost ruthless satisfaction, because no matter how damaging the result might be, to herself or someone else, the thing had to be done. But now she felt she could only arrive at a decision sideways, and by accident. She performed minor ceremonies of decisiveness in the hopes that she would exit the stage by a newly formed door and find the decision there, made. When Chang cried out in his sleep for a moment she’d thought he was crying for her. The thought belonged to half sleep, but even after she was fully awake, it didn’t entirely leave her. Sometimes she was sure that the distance she felt between them wasn’t difference, but a wariness they both turned toward the world. That they turned it toward each other was mistaken, the thing they shared camouflaging itself. She was oppressed by her inability to know what she wanted and say what she meant, but now she saw that he might be the same. He was only able to speak in the throes of his dream. And then she answered, and he made her go away.

Crane returned, in an explosion of new shorts and socks and other undervalued Christmas presents that effaced the slight trace that her body had left in his bed. He went and watched Crane unpack his luggage by the fistful. Shouts and greetings shook the floor below them. Everyone had returned on the same day, as if by common consent, although it was only Saturday. “One half-assed Christmas,” Crane said. Mrs. Wade came and squeezed their faces between her palms. “I missed you!” she said. “Did your mother notice how bad you’ve been spoiled?” and then she turned to Chuck and said, “Louis tells me you came by for one meal and never again.”

“I make meals here,” he said.

“Out of what? Lint?”

“Count your cats, Mrs. Wade,” Crane said, laughing.

“Why did you keep so scarce?”

“I study,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“You thought you were trouble to them,” and when he nodded she snapped, “I wish you hadn’t thought that way. Everybody here wants to be kind to you, especially those boys. You won’t find a better bunch of boys.”

“I am glad.”

“They won’t know it unless you let them fuss over you. Receiving hospitality is hard work. It’s harder than doling it out. Ask Mr. Crane. I’m sure his mother taught him right. Accept everything you’re offered with grace.”

Crane said, “And you won’t get off either, Mrs. Wade, I have a box of broken pralines from Mother for you,” and so his cross-examination was over. He went back to his room and moved Katherine’s note again. It had been marking page fifty-six of his calculus book. The obviousness of this placement embarrassed him. He pushed his door shut, still hearing Mrs. Wade’s voice. His room was no more safe than a sieve. Kneeling, he slid the scrap of paper between a bedframe slat and the underside of his mattress. And then he couldn’t rise. He tipped his face into the bed. It had become a dreaded object. Since New Year’s Eve he had slept only the way a night sentry would, stumbling into unconsciousness after a desperate struggle and immediately jerking awake again. The shame he felt when he thought of Katherine was violent, and ultimate. He did not even imagine that it would diminish. It was a final judgment, not resisted because it had been so expected. He had never wanted anyone to know that he was a madman, and a coward. And yet, because he’d feared this so intensely, he’d never doubted he would be exposed. He thought of Katherine’s revulsion to punish himself. He cherished the small note she had left him but he couldn’t look at it. He had folded it in half.

Crane came and sat on his bed and he thought with disgust of Crane’s weight pressing down on the small piece of paper, that precise rendering of her voice in shapes drawn by her hand. “Tell me all about it, Ace,” Crane said. Crane had a terrible habit, one of a constellation of terrible habits, Chuck reflected, of coming unbidden into a room and then looking around irritably at the upper corners, as if impatient to get away quickly.

“Tell about what?” Chuck asked.

“The break. What all did I miss?”

“Nothing happens here. It has been very quiet.”

“You can’t have been sitting with your books this whole time. You’re tricky, aren’t you. As soon as I’m gone I’ll bet you’re up to all sorts of high jinks.”

“No.”

Crane gave him a long, assessing look, to make it clear he wasn’t being taken in, but he tired easily of questioning other people and returned to discussing himself. “Look at this,” he said, derisively fingering the pricey cashmere scarf he still had slung around his neck, although the heat had come rumbling on again full force just in time for the return of the students, and the building was roasting. “From the minute I get home my mother’s following me around poking at my neck and trying to look in my mouth because do you know what she says? I must have a cold. The woman is loony-tunes. She says, ‘Does it ever frost on the mountain?’ and I say, ‘Liza’”—Crane called his mother by her first name to be particularly cruel—“‘It snows,’ and she shrinks up like I’ve said we all go around nude. Look at this,” he repeated, and he lifted the scarf to Chuck’s face. “It’s always got to be the fanciest thing for her.” Crane went on speaking at great length about the unique manias of his mother and Chuck listened, and responded periodically, but he heard almost nothing.

The semester resumed in all its stupid specificity and he hated it; he hated the walk to class, he hated sitting in class, he hated rising again and walking out of class, he hated propelling his pencil across the page. There were brief, sickening moments at which he realized he was even more unworthy of Katherine than he had ever thought, because she was gone, and he continued to live, like a monster. First-term grades were posted; he got an A in calculus, a surprising B in history, and the gentleman’s C from Charles Addison. This last grade made him sneer. For history he had written an impassioned, grammatically reckless paper on the mistreatment of the American Indian which his professor had lavishly praised. Seeing it again he didn’t recognize it. If he had been accused of plagiarism at that moment he would have surrendered. He had lost all interest in the English language and spoke less than ever, ate alone in the dining hall staring fiercely at a page of mathematics, the universal language that nobody spoke. He stopped browsing his thesaurus, and sank into monosyllables. His lust to master the language had never been abstract, no matter how fastidious and intellectual his approach might have seemed to observers like Peterfield, or Kim. It had always been utterly, ruthlessly pragmatic, driven by his faith in its power to transport him. It had gotten him into USIS, and across the ocean to Sewanee, and then, just as he was in danger of becoming apathetic from accomplishment, it had brought her within view. Every possibility of speech had been a possibility of speaking to her.

Now he lapsed into brutish inarticulateness. His walks with Charles Addison had ceased with no more incident than if they’d never occurred. He saw the professor on occasion in the dining hall, or walking to his lecture, but they weren’t brought into the sort of proximity that would have required them to either speak or deliberately ignore each other. He did not see Katherine at all, although he looked for her everywhere, his heart pounding each time he left Strake’s front door. His eyes swept compulsively over the knots of students smoking on the quad, now that the weather had begun to grow mild, and the snow had shrunk to a few dirty crescents in the shadows of buildings, and the daffodils were blooming and falling flat beneath poundings of rain. She would be a slender, solitary figure, an anomalous woman striding unselfconsciously through the awkward crowds of black-robed or blue-jacketed young men, in a narrow gray suit or a bright green sundress, her car keys swinging in her hand. He never saw her. Walking alone, he would hear the steady tear of a small motor climbing the road behind him, and his head would snap around to watch the car pass, but it was never hers.

Crane had done so poorly the first term that his father threatened him with disinheritance and military service and he vanished, into a new, frightened seriousness, from which he only emerged when completely resourceless. These became the sole times Chuck saw him. The odd comfort Crane had derived from Chuck’s presence in their first semester dissolved. Crane resented a foreigner’s doing better than he did, and because Crane was doing his worst work in math he grew suspicious of math for the distasteful foreignness of its appearance, which he began to see as the root cause of Chuck’s facility with it. Math was a pernicious, useless system controlled by pernicious, inscrutable persons, like his malevolent professors and his Oriental floormate. When Crane came to demand Chuck’s help with algebra he flickered with resentment and impatience, and ascribed the difficulty Chuck subsequently had in helping him to Chuck’s inability to communicate in the manner of a clear and normal person. Their friendship may have already died by the time Crane spoke his mind on a point which had been irritating him since the fall. “I see your friend doesn’t come around here anymore,” he said. They were bending tensely over a sheet of problems Crane refused to really look at. He had come in and thrown the paper down before Chuck and he’d be damned if Chuck wouldn’t just do the work for him. He wasn’t interested in clumsy explanations. He stood and paced the room. Chuck had begun quietly working the page but when Crane spoke he stopped.

“What friend?” he said.

“You know. Your lady friend.”

“You mean Miss Monroe,” he said, stiffening.

“I don’t care what you call her so long as you’re not swooning anymore. You were starting to embarrass me, Junior.”

“Miss Monroe is a good friend to me.”

“Oh, horseshit. She wanted some sick business with you and you didn’t have any of it or I’d be pretty sick of you. I would have said something about it, but it was none of my business.”

“About what?”

“What she is.”

“What is that?” he snapped.

“A whore. She’s Addison’s whore. Everybody knows that.”

He sat staring at Crane, one hand lying flat on the algebra. Then he pushed the sheet forward.

“You’re not going to work those?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, to hell with you. I’m not telling you anything you shouldn’t have known.” He slapped the door frame with the palm of his hand as he left. Chuck got up and slammed the door shut.

He and Crane had a system for cutting daily chapel services, the kind of arrangement only close friends and roommates consented to make with each other. Attendance at the service was enforced by a set of five lists containing all the students’ names, nailed to the inside doors of the chapel like the articles of faith. Each student placed an X beside his name, beneath the watchful eye of God, as he entered every morning. Marking more than one name was a risky hassle and hardly possible on more than one list, and Bill Crane had considered it a magical dispensation of their friendship that they were both on the A through E list, “along with Jesus H. Christ,” he had joked. As a result they had never gone to chapel together, or more than every other day. Now they each went every day, and marked their separate X’s without speaking. Chuck sat in his pew, gripping the hard, smooth, palm-polished wood of the pew back in front of him, or cradling the soft leather hymnal, one finger following the music. He stood, sat, hummed quietly within the great shape of singing. Once he had bridled at the idea of an enforced faith, but now he lost himself in its upward-hurtling words, its bending flames, its instruments of martyrdom. He gazed across the glossy rows of water-combed heads and felt the hot glare of his Taskmaster’s eye beating down. Outside it was April. The doors stood open, letting in the sliding breeze and the eager confidings of birds. The sunlight falling through the stained glass threw bright lozenges of color on the cool stone floor. Everyone stood, rippling upward, and he stood with them, his body easily obeying the complex rhythms of the service. The choirmistress raised her stick and slashed out the hymn’s martial beat:

I am living, on the mountain, underneath a cloudless sky (praise God)

I am drinking, at the fountain, that never shall run dry

and when the singing was over and they sat down again he saw her, a glimpse of her back and bare shoulders in a blue summer dress, before she sank out of sight.

He stood waiting for her on the far edge of the quad lawn. When the shadow from the spreading oak shifted slightly with the breeze she saw him, standing deep within it, leaning on the trunk. Charles had fallen into a conversation with a colleague and she hovered by him uncomfortably. She hugged her arms, although the morning had grown hot. When she looked again he was still there, waiting for her. She excused herself and Charles cupped his hand around her shoulder and held it as she moved away, as if he meant to restrain her. When she looked back the arm stretched absently after her, but he was still turned toward the man he was speaking to. She crossed the blazing lawn and when she stepped into the tree’s shadow she was momentarily blinded. Then her vision cleared and he was there, watching her.

“I want to see you,” he said.

“You could have come to see me.”

“I don’t think you would want me to.”

“Of course I wanted you to.”

“I am very stupid, then.” His hands began a sentence and abandoned it. He had thought if she forgave him he would hate her. “I hoped you would come.”

“I can’t come anymore.”

“Why?”

“I’m engaged to him.”

He kept very still, looking at her. The line her arm made, descending from her shoulder. He wanted to put his mouth against the soft space in the shadow of her jaw. He would have to tilt her head back to see it. He caught his breath suddenly and she started toward him, but he had only forgotten to breathe. He hadn’t moved at all. If he did he’d have to feel what she had said. “For how long?”

“Is that important?”

“No.”

“I tried to tell you before. I didn’t know if it mattered to you.”

“It isn’t.” He touched his forehead, dizzy suddenly. He looked at the ground and then raised his head, gazing past her. She turned and saw Charles facing in their direction, one hand held up to block the glare.

“Not at all?”

“No.” He placed his palm on the tree’s trunk and closed his eyes. The heat soaked his jacket and crawled against his skin. When he opened his eyes again mercury blotches exploded in his vision. Beyond them he saw Charles Addison crossing the lawn.

“Tell me quickly,” she said, turning back to him. The color in her cheeks stood out as if she’d been slapped. “I’ve put it off and put it off. I want to see you, too. I think about you. But I don’t have anything, I don’t know anything.” Past her shoulder he could see Addison growing larger, striding easily over the grass. “Could you imagine loving me?”

“Then what?”

“I could break it.”

“Don’t do nothing like this for me.”

“But there’s something,” she said angrily. “Isn’t there?”

“No.”

“Don’t look over there. Don’t look at him, just tell me.”

“Congratulation,” he said evenly.

“Damn you!”

He put out his hand and Katherine wheeled away from him, covering her mouth. He was gone when the other man reached her.