“Hubba hubba,” said Owen. “Who’s that?”
“Ha-ha.” Affenlight shifted in his chair. He realized that Owen was using a different one of Mrs. McCallister’s coffee mugs: DON’T TAKE YOUR ORGANS TO HEAVEN—GOD KNOWS WE NEED THEM HERE. “What happened to KISS ME, I’M IRISH?” he asked, taking care to sound nonchalant.
Owen glanced up from the photo, his expression not unkind. “I just grabbed this one,” he said. “I can wash it when I’m done.”
“No, no. No need,” Affenlight said. “You just seemed to be growing attached to that IRISH mug, that’s all.”
“Mm-mm-mm.” Owen pointed to the photograph, just below the roll of Affenlight’s sleeves. “Check out those forearms.”
“That’s just because I’m gripping the handlebars.” Affenlight couldn’t resist glancing down at the current version of those same forearms: not nearly as impressive.
“This is what, your senior year?”
“Junior.”
“Junior year. My goodness. You must have had the whole campus in a kind of choreographed group swoon. Boys and girls alike.”
“Not really,” Affenlight said. “I was awkward, behind the times. A bit of a loner.” It sounded like false modesty, considering the stately swagger of the kid in the photo, but it was true.
“Sure you were.” Owen flipped to the back, failed to find an index. “Are there any more like this?”
“I don’t think so.”
Owen, hungry for more, paged through the entire register. Then he pulled down the registers from Affenlight’s other three years and piled them in his lap. He smiled at Affenlight’s football pictures, his crew cut and shoulder pads and tight pants; chuckled at the Whitmanesque beard he began to cultivate senior year; couldn’t resist returning, in the end, to the photo with the bicycle. On most occasions Affenlight sensed a hint of irony in Owen’s attentions; now he seemed thoroughly absorbed. Affenlight sipped his cooling coffee and shifted in his spindle-backed chair. Why was Owen using a different mug? Why was he staring at pictures, when the real-life Affenlight was right there? Maybe he should have been flattered by Owen’s oohing and ahhing, but instead he felt cut out of whatever emotional transaction was passing between Owen and the young man on the page. “I wish I’d known you then,” Owen said wistfully.
“Then instead of now?”
Owen, eyes still on the page, reached out to give Affenlight’s socked ankle a squeeze. “Then and now,” he said. “Always.”
“I was different then. You might not have liked me.”
“I’m sure I would have liked you plenty. What’s not to like?”
“I was different,” Affenlight repeated. For some reason he felt keen to get this point across. The kid in the photograph wasn’t simply his current self with better forearms and flowing hair. Hell, he could grow that hair now, and it’d look all the more striking for being flecked with silver. But the hair was not the point. “Back then,” he said, “I wasn’t me. Not like this. I… I could never have fallen in love.”
“Well, sure.” Owen, still looking at the photo, continued absently to caress Affenlight’s ankle. “Look at you. Why would someone like that bother to fall in love?”
Why indeed. Owen asked if he could borrow that junior-year register, said he’d like to try making a copy of the photograph, and Affenlight had little choice but to say sure, why not, go right ahead. And they smooched awhile and read aloud a bit from Lear, and Owen left. And that was yesterday. And now today the chapel bells were tolling five, with no Owen. Affenlight stared again at the bold type on the baseball schedule, hoping in vain that another home game would materialize. He pushed back his heavy chair and went to the window, looked up toward Phumber 405. It had begun to rain in fierce sheets, a potent spring storm. Affenlight saw no movement behind the herbs and twisting miniature cacti that lined the sills of Owen’s room. He pulled open his office door—he would make the coffee himself, Owen be damned. Standing there in the hall, sopping wet, fist poised to knock, was a bearded man Affenlight had never met before but recognized instantly, from the photograph on his firm’s website.
39
Affenlight didn’t hate David, not anymore. Not that he had much regard for the man, but he’d spent more time thinking about David in recent years than about anyone in the world besides Pella and Owen, and that kind of constant mindfulness, over time, could mellow into sympathy. He would never forgive David, but David had become a part of life, and Affenlight had achieved a grudging acknowledgment of the fact that David would continue to live and breathe whether he wanted him to or not. He used to think of him as a selfish lothario and borderline pedophile; now he thought of him more as a man with whom he had a quarrel. Almost—perish the thought—as a son-in-law, albeit an unpalatable one.
Even Affenlight’s moral indignation had cooled recently, for obvious reasons. He himself had always observed a strict rule against liaisons with students, both as a sought-after boyish section leader and as a sought-after dapper professor, and even during that period of CNN-level celebrity when the Crimson ran his photo with the caption HEARTTHROB OF THE HUMANITIES. This resistance to constant, often blatant temptation had given him a strong footing from which to criticize someone like David, a grown man who’d seduced a vulnerable, huge-hearted girl. But what could Affenlight say now? How could he know that David hadn’t succumbed to something similar, a feeling as sweet and fortuitous that steamrolled him just as fully? Plus, of course, Pella claimed that their marriage was over, and victory could make a man magnanimous.
And so Affenlight felt almost sorry for David when he found the latter in the hallway outside his office, fooling with his cell phone, looking forlorn and agitated. He naturally thought of Menelaus, come to reclaim Helen, but David suffered a bit in the comparison. It was pouring outside, and though he was wearing galoshes and a waterproof jacket, his head and trousers were soaked. Affenlight wondered what kind of man brought galoshes on a mission of this nature.
“David,” he said. “Guert Affenlight. You look like you could use some coffee.”
“Where’s my wife?” David said.
Affenlight felt suddenly calm. It was a situation he had often seen in dreams: his nemesis here, in his office, on his terms. But the desire to assert and avenge himself had subsided.
“Did you call the line upstairs?”
“Repeatedly.”
“She’s probably still at work.” Affenlight nodded toward his open office door. “Come in. Have a seat.”
In person, David looked less substantial than the fellow in the photo on his firm’s website, who wore a turtleneck beneath his sweater and leaned back from his drafting table, mechanical pencil in hand, smiling benevolently. He had, at least in the picture, the punctilious self-possession that Affenlight associated with a certain kind of evangelical Christian, tightly groomed beard and all. Today he looked significantly less composed.
“I suppose you’re pretty pleased about all this,” David said, his voice soft but strident, as Affenlight, having made the coffee whether David wanted it or not, handed him a steaming mug.
The room contained another Westish-crested chair of the sort David was sitting in; when Affenlight wanted to make a guest feel equal and at ease, he arranged himself in it. Now he slid behind his vast desk, which was cluttered with paper. His job performance lately had been decidedly second-rate. “Depends what you mean,” he said. “I’m worried about Pella.”
“She’s my wife,” David said, shivering and still dripping. He set the full mug of coffee down on the edge of Affenlight’s desk with an air of finality. Perhaps he was exercising his right to refuse hospitality, or maybe he took milk. “We’ve been married four years.”
“I know. Though of course I wasn’t invited to the wedding.”
“I have a right to speak to her.”
“She’ll be here,” Affenlight said.
Spring thunder grumbled softly, sans lighting, quite unlike the violent whipcracks of July and August. Davi
d lifted his mug from the corner of the desk, taking care not to slosh any coffee onto Affenlight’s papers, and took a tiny, temperature-gauging sip. It seemed to relax and compose him. He looked around the room, eyeing the framed diplomas and accolades, the spines of the books that lined the walnut shelves. “Nice woodwork,” he said.
“Thanks.”
“They don’t build them like this anymore. Too expensive. These shelves are from the twenties?”
“Twenty-two, I believe.”
David nodded. “The year Ulysses was published. And Moncrieff’s translation of Du côté de chez Swann. And The Waste Land, natch.”
Affenlight wasn’t sure whether this represented an attempt to engage him on his own terms, or was the way that David habitually talked. “Correct,” he said.
“Is she okay?” David asked, helping himself to another, fuller sip. “You said you were worried.”
“She’s fine,” Affenlight said. “Much better than when she arrived.”
“What was wrong when she arrived?”
Affenlight was surprised by the question; he’d meant the remark as a mild dig at David, not a topic to be pursued. “Well, you know. She looked pretty… beat-up.”
David sat up indignantly, gripped the armrests of his chair. “Surely you’re not suggesting—”
Affenlight held up a placative hand. “No no no.”
“I would never.”
“Of course,” said Affenlight. A knock at the door—could it be Owen? Better late than never. Of course Owen couldn’t stay, not with David here, but that didn’t matter, what mattered was that he’d chosen to come. Affenlight pushed back his chair, but the door swung open before he could reach his feet.
Pella stood in the doorway, still dressed in her dining-services uniform. Affenlight hadn’t seen her in a baseball cap since she was a child. Maybe that was what made her seem suddenly young, or maybe it was the way she hovered anxiously in the doorway, as if waiting for the grown-ups to finish. “No blood on the floor,” she said. “That’s a good sign.”
Affenlight smiled. “We went outside for the messy stuff.”
David was up out of his chair. “Bella.” He took a step toward her. Affenlight tensed, ready to hurl himself between them, but he was still behind his desk and it was a silly impulse anyway. They kissed on both cheeks like good cultured people while Affenlight studied his daughter’s face for signs of love.
David held Pella at arm’s length by the shoulders. “What happened to your finger, Bella?” His tone was that classic romantic-parental blend, as admonitory as it was solicitous.
“I walked into a tree.”
“I suppose that’s a common hazard here,” David joked. “Too many trees. At least it’s turned a pretty color.” He was still holding her by the shoulders, observing her proprietarily. He looked pointedly at her stained collared shirt. “I thought we were going to dinner.”
“We are.”
“Am I overdressed, then?”
Affenlight was familiar with the kind of man who wilted around men but bloomed when dealing with women—supremely heterosexual, indifferent to or disdainful of or afraid of other men, but also supremely attuned to women’s needs and interests. David had bloomed just that way when Pella walked in.
“I have to get ready,” Pella was saying. “Did you check into your hotel?”
“No, Bella. I came straight to you.”
“I made a reservation for eight o’clock at Maison Robert. I’m sure you’ll hate it, but it’s all we’ve got.”
“I’m sure I’ll find it delightful,” David said.
“Right.” Pella looked at Affenlight. “So should David come back and pick us up? Or what?”
“Us?” said David.
Us? thought Affenlight. During their early-morning tête-à-tête Pella had said she needed him during David’s visit, but Affenlight hadn’t figured that that would involve eating dinner with the man. Not that he was unwilling; if Pella wanted him there as a buffer, he was glad to comply. It was flattering, a hopeful sign, that she wanted him there.
“Us,” Pella said. “My father and me.”
“Bella,” David began to murmur in low pouty tones meant to exclude Affenlight, “I mean, really—”
Affenlight’s eyes flicked out to the quad and saw through the dwindling rain that the twin dormered windows of Phumber 405 were alight. Someone was home, Henry perhaps—but then that unmistakable slender silhouette appeared against the windowlight, lifted the window with two hands, leaned out appraisingly over the misty quad. He disappeared into the room, reappeared with two small slender items between his fingers. One he placed between his lips, the other he sparked between cupped hands and used to solicit a prick of orange light from the first. And Owen leaned out over the darkened quad, elbows against the sill, and commenced to smoke his joint. Seeing him there made Affenlight terribly sad. Not only because Owen hadn’t come but because he looked so satisfied and self-contained as he leaned and smoked and thought his thoughts, as needless of help or company as some gentle animal feeding in the wild. It made Affenlight feel not only superfluous but also, by comparison with such wholeness and serenity, hopelessly agitated in his soul. He needed Owen, but Owen—being himself whole, or never farther than one well-rolled joint from whole—would never need him.
40
David went to the hotel, Pella upstairs to change. Affenlight dialed the five digits of an intracampus call. It rang once, twice, three times. Owen might have been in the shower—but, no, there went his shadow past the lamp.
Four rings. Five. The machine picked up.
Maybe he’d been a terrible lover. He’d been told he was a good lover, or, by his British lovers, of whom there had been a few—women were always trafficking back and forth between the Cambridges—a brilliant one. Back in the day, British women were always rolling apart from him and sighing: Brilliant! But he was older now. And those women, whether British or American or whatever else, were all women. It wasn’t a given that the skills would translate. A good friend didn’t necessarily make a good father, a good professor didn’t necessarily make a good college president, and a good performer of oral sex on women couldn’t necessarily turn around and start giving blow jobs without submitting to the logic of learning curves.
Oh boy.
Affenlight listened to the answering machine’s message all the way through, just to hear the wry mellow tones of Owen’s recorded voice, but he couldn’t leave a message. It would seem pathetic, for one thing, to chase after Owen after a single day’s absence—and what if Owen declined to listen, and Henry heard it instead? Why, why, didn’t he know Owen’s cell phone number? The fact that they didn’t communicate by cell phone, didn’t chat or text, could reasonably be chalked up to the fact that they didn’t need to, they lived fifty yards apart and saw each other five days a week, but then again the students did little but chat and text, text messages were their surest form of intimacy, and to never have texted or been texted by Owen, not to know Owen’s number even for emergency purposes, not that this was an emergency, seemed suddenly to expose a great gulf between them. Affenlight set the receiver down in defeat. The shadow went past the lamp again.
He walked out of his office and into the quad. Half-lost in anxious thought, hardly aware of what he was doing, he found himself entering Phumber Hall and climbing the stairs, precisely at the dinner hour when traffic in and out of the dorms was at its peak. He encountered no one on the staircase, thank goodness, passed no doors propped open in neighborly cheer, though anyone at all could have seen him crossing the quad and ducking inside.
“Guert,” Owen said when he opened the door. His eyes were glassy from marijuana, but he also seemed startled or surprised. Affenlight realized it was a reckless thing to do, coming here, and not just because he might get caught. At least in his office he maintained some semblance or illusion of control over the situation. Not here. Here he was bound to seem absurd. He couldn’t bear to wonder how old, how unfit he looked in thi
s harsh undergraduate hallway light. “Hi,” he said.
“How are you?”
“I’m okay.” A door swung open and closed on the floor below. Feminine shoes swift-clicked down the stairs. “Do you mind if I come in?” Affenlight asked. “It’d be a little awkward if anyone…”
“Of course.” Owen closed the door behind him, gestured to the rose-upholstered easy chair that straddled the room’s imaginary center line, the one unique, neutral piece of furniture nestled among the mirror-image school-issue desks, beds, dressers, bookshelves, and closets. Affenlight remained standing, admired the paintings on the walls, the climbing tendrils of the hook-hung plants, the collection of wines and scotches on the mantel. He could smell the way Owen’s life and habits—weed and gingery cleaners; bookbinding glue; stiff white soap and the garlicky tang of his skin; hardly a trace of Henry except for a faint bouquet of ribbed gray sock—had ingrained themselves deep in the walls and floorboards of the place. He’d made the place home. By comparison Affenlight’s own quarters, which he’d lived in three times as long, reeked of bachelor transience. His whole life had been bachelor transience, rootlessness, one noncommittal night after another in the cosmic boardinghouse. Life was temporary, after all. But to live with Owen, to let Owen make his home their home—that would really be the thing.
Owen plugged in the electric teapot that sat above the squat refrigerator, set about making tea.
“I tried to call,” Affenlight said. This was somewhere between an accusation and an apology for showing up unannounced. “You didn’t pick up.”
“I just got home a few minutes ago.”
“I saw you in the window while I was dialing.”
Owen’s eyebrows lifted in what Affenlight hoped was genuine puzzlement. “You did?”