A Single Man (8 page)

Again, George’s office comes in useful; he goes into it to escape from Mrs Torres. He finds Dr Gottlieb there.

Gottlieb is all excited because he has just received from England a new book about Francis Quarles, written by an Oxford don. Gottlieb probably knows every bit as much about Quarles as the don does. But Oxford, towering up in all its majesty behind this don, its child, utterly overawes poor little Gottlieb, who was born in one of the wrong parts of Chicago. ‘It makes you realise,’ he says, ‘
the background
you need, to do a job like this.’ And George feels saddened and depressed; because Gottlieb obviously wishes, above all else in life, that he could turn himself into that miserable don and learn to write his spiteful-playful tight-assed vinegar prose.

Having held the book in his hands for a moment and turned its pages with appropriate respect, George decides that he needs something to eat. As he steps out of the building, the first people he recognises are Kenny Potter and Lois Yamaguchi. They are sitting on the grass under one of the newly-planted trees. Their tree is even smaller than the others; it has barely a dozen leaves on it. To sit under it at all seems ridiculous; perhaps this is just why Kenny chose it. He and Lois look as though they were children playing at being stranded on a South Pacific atoll. Thinking this, George smiles at them. They smile back, and then Lois starts to laugh, in her dainty-shamefaced Japanese way. George passes quite close by
their atoll as a steamship might, without stopping. Lois seems to know what he is, for she waves gaily to him, exactly as one waves to a steamship, with an enchantingly delicate gesture of her tiny wrist and hand. Kenny waves also, but it is doubtful if
he
knows; he is only following Lois’s example. Anyhow, their waving charms George’s heart. He waves back at them. The old steamship and the young castaways have exchanged signals – but not signals for help. They respect each other’s privacy. They have no desire for involvement. They simply wish each other well. Again, as by the tennis players, George feels that his day has been brightened; but, this time, the emotion isn’t in the least disturbing. It is peaceful, radiant. George steams on toward the cafeteria, smiling to himself, not even wanting to look back.

But then he hears, ‘Sir!’ right behind him, and he turns and it’s Kenny. Kenny has come running up silently, in his sneakers. George supposes he will ask some specific question, such as what book are they going to read next in class, and then leave again. But no, Kenny drops into step beside him, remarking in a matter-of-fact voice, ‘I have to go down to the bookshop.’ He doesn’t ask if George is going to the bookshop and George doesn’t tell him that he hasn’t been planning to.

‘Did you ever take mescalin, Sir?’

‘Yes, once. In New York. That was about eight years ago. There weren’t any regulations against selling it, then. I just went into a drugstore and ordered some. They’d never heard of it, but they got it for me in a few days.’

‘And did it make you see things – like mystical visions and stuff?’

‘No. Not what you could call visions. At first I felt
seasick. Not badly. And scared a bit, of course. Like Dr Jekyll might have felt after he’d taken his drug for the first time. . . . And then certain colours began to get very bright and stand out. You couldn’t think why everybody didn’t notice them. I remember a woman’s red purse lying on a table in a restaurant – it was like a public scandal! And people’s faces turn into caricatures; I mean, you seem to see what each one is about, and it’s very crude and simplified. One’s absurdly vain, and another is literally worrying himself sick, and another is longing to pick a fight. And then you see a very few who are simply beautiful, just because they aren’t anxious or aggressive about anything; they’re taking life as it comes. . . . Oh, and everything becomes more and more three-dimensional; curtains get heavy and sculptured-looking, and wood is very grainy. And flowers and plants are quite obviously alive. I remember a pot of violets – they weren’t moving, but you knew they could move; each one was like a snake reared up motionless on its coils. . . . And then, while the thing is working full strength, it’s as if the walls of the room and everything around you is breathing; and the grain in woodwork begins to flow, as though it were a liquid. . . . And then it all slowly dies down again, back to normal. You don’t have any hangover. Afterwards, I felt fine. I ate a huge supper.’

‘You didn’t take it again, after that?’

‘No. I found I didn’t want to, particularly. It was just an experience I’d had. I gave the rest of the capsules to friends. One of them saw pretty much what I saw, and another didn’t see anything. And one told me she’d never been so scared in her whole life. But I suspect she was only being polite. Like thanking for a party —’

‘You don’t have any of those capsules left now, do you, Sir?’

‘No, Kenny, I do not! And even if I had, I wouldn’t distribute them among the student body. I can think of much more amusing ways to get myself thrown out of this place.’

Kenny grins. ‘Sorry, Sir. I was only wondering. . . . I guess, if I really wanted the stuff, I could get it all right. You can get most anything of that kind, right here on campus. . . . This friend of Lois’s got it here.
He
claims, when he took it, he saw God.’

‘Well, maybe he did. Maybe I just didn’t take enough.’

Kenny looks down at George. He seems amused. ‘You know something, Sir? I bet, even if you
had
seen God, you wouldn’t tell us.’

‘What makes you say that?’

‘It’s what Lois says. She thinks you’re – well, kind of cagey. Like this morning, when you were listening to all that crap we were talking about Huxley —’

‘I didn’t notice
you
doing much talking. I don’t think you opened your mouth once.’

‘I was watching you. . . . No kidding, I think Lois is right! You let us ramble on, and then you straighten us out, and I’m not saying you don’t teach us a lot of interesting stuff – you do – but you never tell us
all
you know about something— ‘

George feels flattered and excited. Kenny has never talked to him like this before. He can’t resist slipping into the role Kenny so temptingly offers him.

‘Well – maybe that’s true; up to a point . . . You see, Kenny, there are some things you don’t even
know
you know, until you’re asked.’

They have reached the tennis courts. The courts are all in use, now; dotted with moving figures. But George, with the lizard-quick glance of a veteran addict, has already noted that the morning’s pair has left, and that none of these players are physically attractive. On the nearest court, a fat middle-aged faculty member is playing to work up a sweat, against a girl with hair on her legs.

‘Someone has to ask you a question,’ George continues, meaningly, ‘before you can answer it. But it’s so seldom you find anyone who’ll ask the right questions. Most people aren’t that much interested —’

Kenny is silent. Is he thinking this over? Is he going to ask George something right now? George’s pulse quickens with anticipation.

‘It’s not that I
want
to be cagey,’ he says, keeping his eyes on the ground and making this as impersonal as he can. ‘You know, Kenny, so often I feel I want to
tell
things,
discuss
things, absolutely frankly. I don’t mean in class, of course – that wouldn’t work. Someone would be sure to misunderstand —’

Silence. George glances quickly up at Kenny and sees that he’s looking, though without any apparent interest, at the hirsute girl. Perhaps he hasn’t even been listening. It’s impossible to tell.

‘Maybe this friend of Lois’s didn’t see God, after all,’ says Kenny abruptly. ‘I mean, he might have been kidding himself. I mean, not too long after he took the stuff, he had a breakdown. He was locked up for three months in an institution. He told Lois that while he was having this breakdown he turned into a devil, and he could put out stars. I’m not kidding! He said he could put out seven of them at a time. He was scared of the police,
though. He said the police had a machine for catching devils and liquidating them. It was called a MO-machine – MO, that’s OM – you know, Sir, that Indian word for God – spelled backwards.’

‘If the police liquidated devils, that would mean they were angels, wouldn’t it? Well, that certainly makes sense. A place where the police are angels has to be an insane asylum.’

Kenny is still laughing loudly at this when they reach the bookshop. He wants to buy a pencil sharpener. They have them in plastic covers; red or green or blue or yellow. Kenny takes a red one.

‘What was it you wanted to get, Sir?’

‘Well, nothing, actually.’

‘You mean, you walked all the way down here just to keep me company?’

‘Sure. Why not?’

Kenny seems sincerely surprised and pleased. ‘Well, I think you deserve something for that! Here, Sir, take one of these. It’s on me.’

‘Oh, but – well, thank you!’ George is actually blushing a little. It’s as if he has been offered a rose. He chooses a yellow sharpener.

Kenny grins: ‘I kind of expected you’d pick blue.’

‘Why?’

‘Isn’t blue supposed to be spiritual?’

‘What makes you think I want to be spiritual? And how come you picked red?’

‘What’s red stand for?’

‘Rage and lust.’

‘No kidding?’

They remain silent, grinning almost intimately.
George feels that, even if all this double talk hasn’t brought them any closer to understanding each other, the not-understanding, the readiness to remain at cross-purposes, is in itself a kind of intimacy. Then Kenny pays for the pencil sharpeners, and waves his hand with a gesture which implies casual undeferential dismissal, ‘I’ll see you around.’

He strolls away. George lingers on in the bookshop for a few minutes, lest he should seem to be following him.

If eating is regarded as a sacrament, then the faculty dining-room must be compared to the bleakest and barest of Quaker meeting-houses. No concession, here, to the ritualism of food served snugly and appetisingly in togetherness. This room is an anti-restaurant. It is much too clean, with its chromium and plastic tables; much too tidy, with its brown metal wastebaskets for soiled paper napkins and used paper cups; and, in contrast to the vast human rattle of the students’ dining-room, much too quiet. Its quietness is listless, embarrassed, selfconscious. And the room isn’t even made venerable or at least formidable, like an Oxford or Cambridge high table, by the age of its occupants. Most of these people are relatively young; George is one of the eldest.

Christ, it is sad, sad to see, on quite a few of these faces – young ones particularly – a glum defeated look. Why do they feel this way about their lives? Sure, they are underpaid. Sure, they have no great prospects, in the commercial sense. Sure, they can’t enjoy the bliss of mingling with corporation executives. But isn’t it any consolation to be with students who are still three-quarters
alive? Isn’t it some tiny satisfaction to be
of use
, instead of helping to turn out useless consumer goods? Isn’t it something to know that you belong to one of the few professions in this country which isn’t hopelessly corrupt?

For these glum ones, apparently not. They would like out, if they dared try. But they have prepared themselves for this job and now they have got to go through with it. They have wasted the time in which they should have been learning to cheat and grab and lie. They have cut themselves off from the majority – the middlemen, the hucksters, the promoters – by laboriously acquiring all this dry, discredited knowledge; discredited, that is to say, by the middleman, because he can get along without it. All the middleman wants are its products, its practical applications. These professors are suckers, he says. What’s the use of knowing something if you don’t make money out of it? And the glum ones more than half agree with him, and feel privately ashamed of not being smart and crooked.

George goes through into the serving-room. On the counter are steaming casseroles from which the waitresses dish you out stew, vegetables or soup. Or you can have salad, or fruit pie, or a strange deadly-looking jelly which is semi-transparent, with veins of brilliant green. Gazing at one of these jellies, with a kind of unwilling fascination, as though it were something behind glass in a reptile house, is Grant Lefanu, the young physics professor who writes poetry. Grant is the very opposite of glum and he couldn’t be less defeated; George rather loves him. He is small and thin, and has glasses and large teeth and the maddish smile of genuine intellectual passion. You can easily imagine him as one of the terrorists back in Czarist Russia,
a hundred years ago. Given the opportunity, he would be that kind of fanatic hero who follows an idea, without the least hesitation and as a matter of course, straight through to its expression in action. The talk of pale burning-eyed students, anarchists and utopians all, over tea and cigarettes in a locked room long past midnight, is next morning translated, with the literalness of utter innocence, into the throwing of the bomb, the shouting of the proud slogan, the dragging away of the young dreamer-doer, still smiling, to the dungeon and the firing-squad. On Grant’s face you often see such a smile – of embarrassment, almost, at having had to express his meaning so crudely. He is like a shy mumbler who suddenly in desperation speaks much too loud.

As a matter of fact, Grant has recently performed at least one act of minor heroism. He has appeared in court as a defence witness for a bookseller caught peddling some grand old sex-classic of the twenties; it used to be obtainable only in the lands of the Latins but now, through a series of test-cases, it is fighting for its right to be devoured by American youth. (George can’t be absolutely sure if this is the same book he himself read as a young man, during a trip to Paris. At all events, he remembers throwing this or some other book just like it into the wastebasket, in the middle of the big screwing-scene. Not that one isn’t broad-minded, of course; let them write about heterosexuality if they must, and let everyone read it who cares to. Just the same, it is a deadly bore and, to be frank, a wee bit distasteful. Why can’t these modern writers stick to the old simple wholesome themes – such as, for example, boys?)