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Two

ONE YEAR LATER

“IT’S NOT YOU,” LESLIE FENWICH EXCLAIMED, SPRINGING from his desk at DePewe State University in Chicago. He offered his hand, politically correct-wise, even though the last time he saw Diane they were both as naked as mole rats. “Tell me it’s not literally you.”

“In the flesh. More flesh than ever.” She glanced around his messy office, ran her eyes over his rumpled corduroy blazer, threadbare polo shirt, crinkled Dockers. His still-thick reddish mane now sported distinguished gray streaks over his ears. She shook his hand politically correct-wise back, hoping he couldn’t detect her nervousness. He pumped it once and dropped it quickly, as if afraid of a sexual-harassment lawsuit, and nudged his half-reading glasses back from the tip of his nose.

“So,” she said, not quite sure what to do with her cantilevered arm. “Head of the English Department. Big-time scholar. I’m not the least bit surprised.”

He motioned for her to sit. “How long has it been?”

“Twenty-seven years, five months, three weeks—roughly.”

He plopped into his high-backed chair. He cleared his throat. “I moved back to Florida,” he bumbled, apparently referring to his having sneaked out in the middle of the night, twenty-seven years, five months, three weeks before, leaving her a note saying he’d call her later that day. “I had a superlative job offer. Tenure track position at—”

“It’s okay, Les. I forgave you a long time ago. I’m cool with it.”

“You did? You are?”

“We were both young. I didn’t take it personally.”

“I was peripatetic. In the Aristotelian sense of the word.”

“I moved on, too.”

“Think of me as Auguste Rodin, in a manner.” He spoke more formally than she had recalled, more carefully. And where did he get that Cary Grant faux-British accent? “I saw my future in this giant block of academic marble, and it was my calling to chisel it out. As the German philosophers would say, gesamtkunstwerk. I speak metaphorically, of course.”

“I’m not going to sue you.”

He stared at her worriedly, his thumb stabbing his chin cleft. If he had smoked a pipe, he would be puffing like mad. But when she broke into a smile, he relaxed—a little. On his credenza, his CD player was spinning Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen. He reached over, brushed aside some administrative detritus, and turned down the volume.

“In the old days, it would have been the Beatles,” she said.

“And rusted-out VWs and love beads,” he sniggered. “Well, some of us grew up.”

She pictured him stark naked, except for his Viking horned warrior helmet and fringed vest, running around the motel room role-playing Leif Ericsson discovering Newfoundland.

“Please, have a seat. Care for some tea?”

Instead of sitting, though, she padded in her Birkenstocks to the window. She gazed down at the campus triangle, its budding maple trees, newly green grass, and the DePewe State student center casting a rhomboid shadow over the lily pond, from which two maintenance men were dragging off plywood sheeting.

“Carl is still here,” she said, nodding at the older janitor. “Everything’s the same.” She nodded at the student union building. “Is the bowling alley still here? The ‘balling’ alley?”

“Diane, I—”

“I’m not here to blackmail you, Les.You know me better than that…don’t you? Students and professors did it all the time.”

“Times are different, trust me.”

“Those days were groovy.”

“It meant a lot to me, too,” he added, unconvincingly. “I’ll never be sorry about what we had.” He gazed at her dreamily, batting his lashes. Cynics might have taken his rapid blinking as a sign of deception, but for Diane it was a look that transported her back to the sensitive poetry-class lecturer she had fallen head-over-heels for all those years ago, and suddenly she was embarrassed by her own wrinkles, neck flesh, too-wide, middle-aged hips.

What torture it had been to contact him, although she promised herself to show nothing of her torment. She would be thoroughly decent. After all, it had been her choice not to have come forward sooner—and, for that matter, her choice not to do…certain things…in the first place.

And, as she had feared, now that she saw him again—officially, anyhow, for she had watched him several times from behind sunglasses in back seats of lecture halls—she fell in love with him all over again. He was still handsome and brilliant and thin and, though his writing had morphed from poetry to literary theory—whatever that was—when he spoke, he was hypnotizing. His long, complex sentences, stitched with discursive subordinate clauses, phrase slathered upon phrase, digression after digression, turned on themselves like eddying pools, only to eventually emerge into grammatical Valhalla—the syntactical equivalent of rapids rushing over a waterfall before settling into a placid alpine lake. She adored the way he used compound adjectives, convoluted modifiers that precariously dangled, metaphysical tropes, and Latinate roots with Anglo-Saxon appendages. She swooned at the way his nose twitched when he pronounced mellifluous four-syllable, hyphenated French verbs and manly, guttural German nouns. Her heart tangoed when he wielded obscure Middle-English words like a halberd, at his fearless defiance of verbal simplicity, his swashbuckling abstractions, protracted introductory gerund phrases, arcane predicate-nominatives. Her eyes rolled into her forehead when he fell into his dreamy—some would say monotonous, tedious, and wearying, but, then, they weren’t in love with him—professorial cadence. She melted when he would say things like “variegated” instead of “different,” “perambulate” instead of “walk,” “Homo erectus” instead of “dude,” “matrix of reproductivity” instead of “crotch.”

And even though one part of her—the brain part—suspected he was now saying nice things only because he was terrified she had come back to shake him down, another part—the heart (or as Les would say, the “cardio-muscular, arterial-vascular exchange”) part—tantalized her with the notion that he was sincerely glad to see her. In his deer-in-headlights way, he was darn cute. Maybe, just maybe, despite her fleshy neck, she turned him on again too, after all these years.

“So what have you been up to?” he asked, rocking squeakily. “Still writing poetry?”

“You remember.”

“Of course I remember.You were damned good, too. I had high hopes for you.”

“I haven’t written much lately—over the past, oh, twenty-seven years or so.”

“Why not? You have talent.”

She sighed. “But lack artistic courage.”

He puffed out his chest. “It certainly does require more than a soupçon of self-affirmation.”

“Maybe I’ll take it up again sometime.”

“I’d be delighted to render my opinion.”

“So,” she said, finally sitting, tapping her thighs with her fingertips. “Corner office and everything.”

“A superficial homage to bourgeois hegemony. An insult to the intelligence. They give us this instead of practical emoluments. Still, all these windows are somewhat salubrious.”

“They don’t teach actual literature anymore, I hear.”

“It’s far more enlightened this way, really.” He had slipped again into his Cary Grant accent. “No dead white males dictating our syllabi.”

“I know. I read your last book.”

“Shakesqueer? Marvelous! You always were more perspicacious than your peers.”

“You gave me an A,” she reminded him saucily.

“Yes, well,” he stammered. “Say, how about that tea? I can get Margie to run down—”

“I brought my own tips and strainer.”

He intercommed his secretary, even though her desk was ten feet away through an open door. “Can you bring Ms.”—he turned to Diane—“I assume it’s not ‘Doctor’?”

“No, but I did get my M.A. at night school.”

While they waited, they quickly brought each other up to date on their personal lives, with Les, rocking hobby-horselike, apparently trying hard to stay interested. Diane still lived in Rogers Park, had a grown daughter, Karma, the love of her life, who was going to be married this June. Les had given up his Wicker Park two-flat to his parasitic, unimaginative, flaccid, passive-aggressive ex-wife during their ugly divorce (she having felt threatened by his success, having let herself get flabby, and having had low self-esteem—though he couldn’t imagine why). Thank heavens they’d had no kids. “I say ‘heavens’ metaphorically, of course—being a proud atheist. Nothing’s changed there, all right.”

His secretary came in and handed Diane a cup of steaming water and a napkin. On her way out, she left the door ajar. Diane plucked a strainer and an envelope of chai buds from her purse, tapped out about half into the little colander, and poured the steaming water. She blew on it, whiffed deeply, and sipped. For several minutes, neither she nor Les spoke.

Finally, swiveling, his knee whacking the desk, he coughed, “So, what brings you back to DePewe after all these years?”

She took another sip, got up, and closed the door, testing it to make sure it was latched.

“We need to talk, Les.”

He turned white—even paler than he already was.

She sat again. “This wasn’t easy, I want you to know that. I’ve been thinking about it for a very long time. Twenty-seven years, five months, three weeks, to be exact. Even as recently as this morning I wondered if I’m doing the right thing.”

He peered over his glasses. “Really, Diane, if there’s something—”

She exhaled. “You know when you said thank heavens you don’t have any kids?”

The glasses slipped off his nose.

“Well,” she whispered, “that thing about not having kids isn’t exactly true. I hope the ‘thank heavens’ part too.”

He fumbled with his glasses, trying to flip them back on but poking himself in the eye.

“Remember that night after the Paul Simon concert, when we went back to your office to toke and get wild? Remember how you put your reserve condom next to the ashtray, and your joint fell and burned the package? How you thought it would be all right because foil doesn’t burn? Well…foil does burn, apparently.”

“Good goddamn God.”

“Karma’s your daughter, too. She’s a cool young woman, Les, and I think you’ll dig her.”

“You’re not kidding, are you?” His knee thudded against the desk. “This isn’t a joke.”

“I’m so sorry to intrude on your life, I truly am. Truly, truly. But something’s come up, and I think I should tell you so you’ll be prepared.”

He shot a look at the door, making sure it was closed. Still, he lowered his voice. “You mean something besides this?” He sprang up and paced. The office began to smell of sweat and toxic exhalations. Every few seconds he dinged her a glance and bleated, “You aren’t kidding, are you?” and she shook her head glumly, and he resumed pacing and looking at the door. He yanked open a desk drawer, found a gnarled pack of Kool cigarettes and a lighter, torched himself a smoke, and finally collapsed back into his chair, raking his fingers over his scalp.

“I knew in those days you didn’t like kids, and after you stopped calling me, I—”

“How can you be sure she’s mine?”

“You’re the only guy I was getting it on with.”

“Yes, yes, but what I mean is—”

She put her cup on the edge of his desk and took her wallet from her purse. “For one thing, look.” She handed over Karma’s picture. “Recognize anyone?”

He studied the picture. “Oh, God. God.”

“It’s her real hair color, too,” she said of her daughter’s flaming red mop, glancing at Les’s own rusty lid.

“God, God.”

“I’m not here to hassle you,” she repeated. “Only to let you know.”

He wasn’t listening. He was deep into his panic. “Twenty-seven, you say?”

“No financial support required or sought.” Despite Diane’s renewed crush on him, she was getting a little vexed. “Les, listen up for a second. She doesn’t need money from either of us.” She grimaced. “She’ll soon have plenty. I mean plenty.”

“You mean I actually have a child? A daughter, you say?”

“Karma. And she’s a good, devoted daughter, even though sometimes she’s…misunderstood.”

“God, God, God, God.”

“Les, something happened. I was always afraid it might come up. When she was little I told her her father was a brilliant man whom I loved and who loved me, but that he had another life now, and she understood. She never asked about you. She’s always been very mature and basically a decent person, even though some people might get the wrong impression.” She took a sharp breath and let out a gurgle. “But now that she’s getting married, something”—tea spilled into her napkin—“changed. I know how middle class it is, how utterly bourgeois, but”—she winced—“she wants her father to walk her down the aisle.”

Autistically he rocked and swiveled, swiveled and rocked.

“She’s become obsessed with the idea, and I can’t seem to talk her out of it. She says it’s a ‘family values’ thing.”

He slathered her a basset-hound look. “Family values?”

She lowered her head. “I’m so ashamed.”

He tugged his dewlap, scratched one ear, then the other. He licked his lips. He rubbed his nostril red. He seemed to swirl into a mental abyss, as if trying to translate Marcel Proust. Finally, he said, “You told her who I am?”

“Absolutely not,” Diane assured him. “But if she’s determined to find out, she will. Karma can be very…focused. Anyhow, she’s now got the”—she paused—“resources to find out whatever she wants.”

“Why not tell her I was a one-night stand?” he offered frantically. “You know, a hippie passing through? Or that I’m dead? That’s it, I’m dead.”

“Because, for one thing, I don’t lie to my daughter. And she’d find you anyway, trust me.”

He returned to rocking.

“I thought I should prepare you, that’s all. It seemed the right thing to do.”

He bellowed his shirt to circulate air.

“In the name of full disclosure,” she stuttered, “there’s something else I need to tell you. Could you please sit still for a second?”

He stopped, and, before putting out the first, lit another cigarette.

“I did my best to bring her up with good values,” she went on, wiping her palms on her jeans. “When she was a teenager she was a strict vegan—totally organic. Never wore leather, let alone fur. Wouldn’t step on an ant. Volunteered at hospitals, was a big sister to underprivileged kids, helped out at a nursing home. She was a totally far-out, out-of-sight chick. Wore Earth Shoes, recycled, shunned Styrofoam, always chose paper over plastic—”

He started slapping his head.

“—refused to spray fluorocarbons, rode her bike instead of depleting earth’s unrenewable resources, worked the phones for PBS, passed out fliers for Bill Clinton and—” She sighed. “Then something happened, Les. Something weird, and I don’t know what to do. I did my best with her. I thought she was going to be all right. But now—” She began to cry. She pulled a wad of recycled tissue from her purse and covered her face. “Oh, Les,” she sobbed, “we’ll need all your brain power now.”

He raced around with his box of Puffs, handed her a half-dozen with which to smother her hysteria, all the while glancing nervously at the door. “Diane, listen to me,” he whispered. “Please. Control yourself. Listen, listen.” He paused until she nodded. He knelt in front of her. “The fact is,” he said measuredly, “I’m currently dating the chancellor, and any hint of a scandal would destroy—” He shook his head and started over. “What I mean is, I’ve worked assiduously to advance in the department and, hopefully, beyond. I have a chance of becoming dean of Liberal Arts, and it all depends on her, the chancellor, Leona Beebe.”

Diane peered up, dark-faced, from the tissue.

“I know, I know. I used to belittle the whole administrative infrastructure,” he said. “But practicality being what it is, I—”

“He’s a Republican,” she whimpered.

He looked around, as if to be sure no one was in earshot of such language. “Please, Diane, you’re distraught—”

“Karma’s fiancé. Angus.” She choked back a sob. “A conservative. And now she’s one, too.” She pulled the tissues from her face, squeezed them into an even tighter ball, drew a mournful breath, and moaned,“They’re both Republicans!”

He reeled as if shot. He tried to get up, staggered, collapsed into a lump of corduroy blazer.

“Karma’s become one of them!”

“Have mercy.”

“Now she’s working their phones! Passing out Newt Gingrich fliers! Volunteering for the Republican National Committee! Oh, Les, Les. Maybe if she’d had a father in her life—”

But Professor Fenwich wasn’t even pretending to listen anymore. He returned to his desk, buried his ears under his elbows, and curled into himself like a dying spider, kicking his desk rhythmically, possibly to the beat of an old Peter, Paul, and Mary song. Kick, kick, kick.

“She watches conservative TV,” Diane stammered. “Sean Hannity…The O’Reilly Factor…Mad Money with Jim Cramer…Tucker Carlson…Joe Scarborough…. She reads Charles Krauthammer, George Will…” She gulped dryly and reburied her face in the tissue. “Michelle Malkin!”

Kick, kick, kick.

“Oh Les, Les, Les…”

Kick, kick, kick, kick, kick. “Oh God, God, God…”