Another You (6 page)

“Flunked the physical during the Vietnam War,” Marshall said. “Mental illness.”

“That aside,” President Llewellyn said. “I can count on you?”

“Sir, where Spanish sherry is poured, I am never far away.”

“We have red wine, too,” President Llewellyn said, sounding more on the offensive than he had when he spoke about serving in Korea.

“Beaujolais?” Marshall asked.

“Good one. Three-thirty, in the Irving T. Peck Room. I appreciate it.”

He hung up.

For a while, Marshall considered taking some poetry books with him, reading aloud from them whenever he could pretend a stanza or so was pertinent, watching the President squirm. To add to the impression of preoccupation and self-absorption, he could wear the black beret Sonja had found—something that had been mysteriously left hanging on the car aerial in the grocery store parking lot, she said. She had thought about putting it on someone else’s aerial, assuming that it must be a lost hat someone had wanted to call attention to, but as she was walking toward the nearest car with an antenna, she realized that a man was sitting inside, watching her. She had pretended to be looking for someone, then quickly returned to her car with the hat still in her hand, feeling as guilty, she had said, as if she’d been caught about to spray graffiti. So: the poetry books; the beret. And perhaps he could bring a bottle of Beaujolais, if there was one in the house. Draw a mustache over his top lip, call her Madame. Such ideas were what Sonja called
not funny
and also
self-defeating
. “You’re not one of the college kids,” she often reminded him. “Why do you have to let the nonsense get to you so much?”

Because it was what he did for a living. Because he hadn’t published a book when he should have, which would have been his ticket out of Benson College, and the possibility of a serious academic career. And now it was too late, because all anyone cared about was theory. No one read books and got excited about them anymore; they argued that transparent plots were murkily opaque and incomprehensible, they projected political interpretations onto literature, then decried the offensive political implications. The day before, while he was getting a drink of water, Susan Campbell-Magawa had tucked a pamphlet in his back pocket—hey: what if he cried sexual harassment?—announcing a conference she knew he wouldn’t want to attend: Natty Bumppo and the Postmodern Predicament. Susan Campbell-Magawa and her husband would be renting a Rent-A-Wreck to drive through Southern California in order to go to an air-conditioned conference room in a windowless building, to express outrage, with other academics, concerning the improper politics and convoluted neoconservatism of a fictional character named Natty Bumppo. Mr. Magawa did not live in New Hampshire. He lived in Ann Arbor, where he had a job at the University of Michigan. He
and his wife commuted: one weekend a month he would fly to New Hampshire; one weekend she would fly to Michigan. With their frequent-flier miles, they vacationed every summer on Maui, where this year, no doubt, they would continue their discussion of Natty Bumppo while walking the beach with leis around their necks, and eating suckling pig, as Susan Campbell-Magawa continued to try to conceive a child. He knew this because Susan Campbell-Magawa, who had no use for him, was fond of Sonja. They had talked in September, at the welcoming party for new faculty. Mr. Magawa, who applied every year for a job at Benson and who was inevitably rejected because he was overqualified, was not in attendance. One year, he had distinguished himself by fainting while talking to President Llewellyn and later sending a note of apology, saying that his hectic life of commuting had recently begun to cause his physical collapse. Behind Susan Campbell-Magawa’s back, Jack McCallum and Darren Luftquist had worked up howlingly funny imitations of her husband passing out. The idea was to enact this as soon as possible after Susan Campbell-Magawa left the room, to try to make whoever remained in the room laugh, which usually meant that she would return to see if they were laughing at her. Once, Jack McCallum had almost been caught. From the floor, he had pretended to be tying his tennis shoe, and Dr. Gerold Ziller (as he always signed his memos) had appeared peculiarly cruel, to be laughing so hard at a man down on one knee, having trouble tying a shoelace, as Susan Campbell-Magawa reappeared and stood frowning in the doorway.

When Marshall first got the job, he had worked harder and been more collegial. But his real friends had moved on, publishing books that got them better jobs, or dropping out of teaching and going to business school, and as far as he was concerned, the serious study of literature had gone out the window when the theorists marched in. As he got older, the students got younger. Enrollment fell, and more local students began to enroll. Now he routinely taught a course in composition, as well as his poetry seminar and his survey course on modern American literature. He was considered stodgy, but admirable. The newer people taught Third World literature and women’s studies. McCallum taught a seminar on the unreliable narrator in twentieth-century fiction, as well as offering a course in popular fiction, informally known as “shit lit.” Well, he thought: as one student
had recently written, “It’s a doggy dog world.” He was a mutt, and the purebreds were at Stanford or Columbia or Harvard. So, he wondered, who else would be at the sherry fest? Dr. Gerold Ziller was only on campus one day a week, on the orders of his proctologist. Susan Campbell-Magawa had probably already left for the City of Angels, to fly among her airheaded own. McCallum. Would they bring out that wild card? Or would it be other people in the department, or people from the administration? Someone from campus parking, perhaps, to explain why Mrs. Adam Barrows had had to park half a mile away, since the mudflat that was once visitor parking had been paved over to provide an area for safer Rollerblading?

At exactly three-thirty, his hands empty of books, his head bare, Marshall walked into the Irving T. Peck Room. Barbara, the voice on the phone, was there, emptying ice cubes into an aluminum ice bucket beneath the portrait of Professor Emeritus Irving T. Peck. In the portrait, Peck’s long neck stretched high, like a chicken or turkey looking for a way out. The folds of skin, relentlessly detailed by the portrait painter, added to the impression of the man as a startled fowl. He had retired the year before Marshall came to Benson, though questions about his sexual preferences still remained, indelibly, in the men’s room.

Barbara greeted him with delight. She was younger than he’d thought from her officious voice on the phone—young and, it turned out, quite pleasant. The President was showing Mrs. Barrows around the library, she told him. He wondered aloud whether Mrs. Barrows would be shown the easily jimmied-open window in the history stacks, through which books could easily be dropped from the second floor. Barbara blushed, as if she had personally arranged the book drop. She emptied the ice cubes into the bucket, shook the ice cube tray over the floor, and dropped the tray in her backpack. She set the sherry bottle in place—there was no red wine—and put out plastic glasses and paper napkins on the mahogany drop-leaf. Today, the table was protected by a series of place mats imprinted with pictures of wolves running along under grapevines or through snowy fields, or leaping in midair, about to pounce on a frightened rabbit. Barbara surveyed everything and announced that she would take her leave,
lifting the backpack from the floor, shrugging her shoulders to center it on her back as she inserted her long, thin arms.

“I won’t drink it all before they show up,” he said.

“Oh. No,” she said, blushing again, as if she’d actually had such a concern.

Then she was gone, relieved to be away from him, no doubt. He looked around. The barometer on the wall indicated rain or snow, the needle right on the line between the two. Outside, the sky was gray. It didn’t look like a snow sky. He sat in one of the brown leather chairs, thinking how inelegant all of this was. The room was a shabby, cheap imitation of an English library, with bookshelves that contained more magazines than books, and a rug that looked like Jackson Pollock had been recruited, in the last thirty seconds of the rug’s creation, to drizzle some color over its grayness.

“Hello, hello,” President Llewellyn said, extending his hand. “It’s just terrific that you could make time in your schedule to see us. Marshall, may I introduce Mrs. Barrows. She’s the mother of Darcy Barrows, whom I know you remember fondly. Mrs. Barrows, Marshall Lockard.”

“Oh, this is such a pleasure,” Mrs. Barrows said. “All of it. The library. Dean Llewellyn’s lovely office with that magnificent sunlight streaming in. I hoped it would last, too, but the weather can’t be trusted this time of year. Hello, Professor Lockard. You have inspired my daughter and made her the art-conscious young woman she is today. Not a day passes that she doesn’t read to me and to Adam from her poetry manual.”

“That’s—”

“It’s a wonderful thing. That’s what it is,” President Llewellyn said, gesturing for Mrs. Barrows to sit. “What’s that song?” President Llewellyn said. “ ‘It’s a great big wonderful world we live in’?”

“But it isn’t!” Mrs. Barrows said, as excited as if it were. “How does anybody get along now, with so many pressures from within and from without?”

Marshall looked at President Llewellyn. President Llewellyn looked at the sherry bottle and moved so quickly Marshall had the feeling the bottle might be knocked out of the field if the President didn’t stop it. It was a quick catch. In seconds, the cap was unscrewed.

“Ice, Mrs. Barrows?” the President asked.

“ ‘Some think the world will end in fire, some think in ice,’ ” Marshall recited.

The President shot him a dirty look, but it faded when Mrs. Barrows said, “Robert Frost!”

“ ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,’ ” Marshall said, as if Frost’s name were an association test.

“ ‘My little horse must think it queer!’ ” she called out.

“ ‘Whose woods are these? Whose woods these are I think I know,’ ” President Llewellyn said, not to be outdone.

But what he said ended the exchange. Marshall sat with his hands on the chair arms, smiling. He had decided to pretend that this was a 1940s movie and that he was a famous, wealthy man in his study, and that two mad people had come to call. The movie would be a comedy.

“Now tell me,” Mrs. Barrows said, turning to Marshall, as the President put a glass of sherry on the table near her chair. “Harvey sucks” was carved on the tabletop, but Mrs. Barrows didn’t see it, because Barbara had placed a doily over the scratched words. “Tell me if there is even a teeny, tiny chance that you remember Darcy Barrows.”

“Do you have a photograph?” he said.

The President glared at him, slightly upset, slightly encouraging. It was the look of someone who had bet a lot of money on a horse, watching that horse mysteriously and improbably come to a complete stop.

“She used to say that Bob Dylan was a poet, but I never did believe that,” Mrs. Barrows said, nodding as if she had adequately answered Marshall’s question.

“Then whom do you most like to hear sing?” Marshall said. (Butler! Please show these delightful people out now.)

“Kiri Te Kanawa,” Mrs. Barrows said.

She went up a notch in his estimation. As did the President, for dropping out of this Theater of the Absurd conversation as quickly as possible.

“And what do you think of the plays of Harold Pinter?” he asked, gesturing behind him as if they were shelved in the bookcases, instead of what truly interested college students: old
Time
magazines and books of Garfield cartoons.

“The inability of people to communicate,” Mrs. Barrows said. “It is a challenging problem.”

“If you were to offer us the funds to hire a poet,” Marshall said, “I would insist that you, personally, introduce that poet at the reading he or she would give when they arrived on campus.”

“My goodness!” Mrs. Barrows said. “Why, I have no training. I only know what I like.”

“Then I’d be happy to help you focus your ideas as you’re writing the introduction,” Marshall said.

President Llewellyn watched this volley as if he were watching a tennis match in slow motion. His own glass of sherry was empty.

“Tell me the truth now: Do you remember my Darcy?” Mrs. Barrows said.

“If you don’t have a picture, I don’t have a story,” Marshall said, smiling, as if he’d made a great joke.

She shook her finger at him and picked up her purse. She un-snapped it and unzipped a pouch inside. From the pouch she took a small leather folder. Inside, behind the plastic on the first page, was a photograph of a rather plain, round-faced, brown-haired girl. It was only her headband that made him remember her. Darcy Barrows: that tall, shy girl who sat front row center, never speaking unless called on. The girl who wore headbands with little plastic animals on them, or sparkling stars. Five or six years ago: Darcy Barrows.

“I see from your eyes you remember,” Mrs. Barrows said. “The eyes can never hide a lack of recognition.”

“She sat in the first row. I guess she did like my class,” he said.

“And do you know, she lives one and one quarter miles from my husband and me, and every day she doesn’t visit—with my grandchild, I might add!—she phones and reads us a poem.”

“You couldn’t ask for more as a teacher,” he said.

“Inspirational,” the President said.

“I think Darcy Starflyx should give the introduction!” Mrs. Barrows said.

“Her married name?” the President said.

“Her stage name?” Marshall said.

She ignored the President and poked her finger at Marshall: her sign that he was being funny, but naughty.

Which he continued to be for another ten minutes, before the
President, who was still puzzled about how things had gone so well when they had seemed so bizarre, stood and announced that they must “firm up the details” in his office and have Mrs. Barrows on her way well before dark.

(Butler! See that these people are pointed in the right direction.)

On the way out, Marshall picked up his mail. Maybe he should be an actor, he thought. But his performance had only been so good because Mrs. Barrows had been so good. Probably, if he had tried this act without her, he would have been about as funny as the Marx Brothers with no foil. In her way, Mrs. Barrows had been as charmingly perplexed as Margaret Dumont. All in all, a surreal afternoon. He looked at the junk mail and decided that no, the perfect finale to the day would not be having radial tires put on the car at a 10 percent faculty discount.