Eye of Flame (5 page)

Patti started. “You’re Tad Braun?”

He nodded. Jacqueline now recalled the last time she had seen those grayish green eyes, but they had looked out at her from the flaccid, pimply face of a fat, awkward boy. Tad Braun had transformed himself. The awkwardness was gone, the oily hair golden, the fat turned into muscle; perhaps a plastic surgeon had chiseled his face and smoothed his skin.

“You sure have changed,” Dena said.

Tad shrugged. “So have all of you. You were attractive then, but you look even better now.” That might be true of the others, Jacqueline thought, but it couldn’t be true of her. “Maybe I’ll see you again.” He moved away into the shadows before any of them could speak.

Patti let out her breath. “Who would have thought Tad Braun would turn into such a hunk? I wonder what he’s doing now.”

“I barely remember him,” Louise said. “Wasn’t he that awful boy who we—”

Jacqueline did not want to remember. “We were pretty cruel to him, weren’t we? But we were cruel to a lot of kids when they didn’t meet our standards.”

Dena’s dark eyes widened. “Oh, come on. That was a long time ago. Nobody remembers things like that.”

“The victimizers probably don’t,” Jacqueline said. “The victims do.”

The night air was colder. The four walked back into the empty room and settled around the coffee table. The shrimp and raw vegetables were nearly gone; Jacqueline stubbed out her cigarette as Patti lit a joint.

“Maybe we should have asked him up,” Louise said. “Of course, I have to be careful about the guys I see.”

“Herpes,” Patti muttered.

“No, visitation rights. I wouldn’t put it past my goddamn ex to use any excuse to cut them back. I see Chris little enough as it is.”

“He has custody?” Jacqueline asked, surprised.

Louise’s mouth twisted. “I guess you professors don’t read
People
regularly. I needed the settlement, and if I’d fought for Chris, I might have gotten much less.”

Jacqueline said nothing. “Look, I couldn’t have raised him without a good settlement. You need at least thirty thousand a year here just to stay off the streets. And just try to go up against one of the NFL’s former golden boys in court.” Louise poured more wine. “Bob’s been born again, you know. I suppose he’ll marry that Baptist bimbo he’s been going to Bible study with.” The blonde woman glanced at Dena. “Well, there’s nothing to stop you from seeing old Tad.”

“There’s Sadegh,” Dena replied, “but I don’t know how long that’ll last. I’m too old for him—he’s forty-two and I’m thirty-six. Trouble is, he likes eighteen-year-olds.”

“And I’m an old married lady trying to get pregnant.” Patti took another toke on her joint. “Guess I should give this up. I don’t even know if I really want a kid, but Joe does. Anyway, what else can I do?”

“Jackie could ask Tad over for a drink,” Louise said.

“I’m living with somebody.”

“Yeah, but he’s three thousand miles away.”

Patti propped her elbows on the table. “You told me it was no strings with you and Jerome.”

No strings, Jacqueline thought. She had fashioned the strings and turned them into cords. Except for a brief trip to Chicago for a classics conference, she had not even been on a plane without Jerome until now. She could not even tell if she still loved him or was only afraid of being alone.

Lately he made her feel old. Neither of them even went through the motions of trying to find positions at a better school. They had their tenure, published enough to keep up the reputation of scholarship, and revised lectures each of them had given several times before. Each year, they were confronted by a sea of ever-younger faces. At night, suspended in the moment between consciousness and sleep, Jacqueline often imagined that she was suddenly an old woman, that the years had flown by and had left her ill and weak with no one to tend her, no one to care what became of her.

“I can’t imagine why Tad Braun would want to see any of us.” Jacqueline looked around at the pretty, ageless faces of the other three women, certain that they would not understand what she was about to say. “Tad was a gentle, sensitive boy, but we didn’t care about that, couldn’t see it. Now, at least, his beauty reflects the truth about what he was inside.”

Patti finished her joint; the others were silent.

“Well,” Patti said after a moment, “I’ve got an early day tomorrow. Listen, why don’t you all come to the house on Saturday? Joe’s going to be out. Come over around noon. We’ll sit around and swill wine and go out to dinner.”

Dena nodded. “I think I can take the day off.”

“Fine with me,” Louise said.

“Sure,” Jacqueline murmured. “It’ll be fun.”

It was admitted near the beginning of the
Philebus
that pleasure and intelligence are both parts of the good life, and yet we cannot decide which is closer to the good (or which determines the character of the good life) without concerning ourselves with what “the good” is.

Jacqueline looked up from her typewriter. This was hardly a concern of the people out here, who had their own ideas about the good life. They would have taken Callicles’ position in this dialogue and argued for pleasure. She ruffled through the pages of the manuscript she was retyping, unable to concentrate; the intellectual pleasures Plato valued so highly could not overcome her restlessness.

She glanced at her watch. She had not called Jerome last night, but he might be in his office now. Sarita Ames was teaching at UCLA; she could get together with her old classmate and bitch about how many philosophy departments still held Aristotle’s view of women. Giles Gunderson was at Irvine; there were a number of colleagues she might contact out here. They might draw her out of the spell Patti and her friends had cast, remind her that she was no longer a high school girl who envied the pretty and popular.

She stood up and crossed to the bed. Telephone directories lay next to the telephone on the floor. She was leafing through the B’s before she realized that she was looking for Tad’s number. No Thaddeus Braun was listed in the local directory, and the Los Angeles book seemed a formidable obstacle.

She went to the bedroom window and peered out. Tad was standing near the beach; she felt as though she had summoned him somehow. She hurried into the living room, but hesitated in front of the sliding glass door before she opened it.

Tad strolled up the street, then halted below the terrace and raised a hand in greeting. “Hello, Jackie.”

“Tad.” She tried to think of something to say. “Are you vacationing, or do you live out here?”

“I’ve been out here for a while.” He had not really answered her question. Was he unemployed, looking for a position? Tad had been one of the better math students when she knew him; perhaps he did freelance consulting work for computer firms. “You’re visiting, aren’t you?”

She nodded.

“Mind if I come up for some coffee? You can tell me what you’ve been doing.”

“I’ll come down,” Jacqueline said hastily. She backed away, closed the glass door, and hurried to the bedroom for her jacket. Better, she thought, to talk to him outside; she might have known him once, but he was a stranger now.

As she came outside, he took her arm and led her toward the Strand. She almost pulled away, surprised at how ill at ease she felt.

“How are all of you doing?” Tad asked. “You know—you and the other members of the Bod Squad.” She glanced at him sharply. “Come on, Jackie—a lot of guys in school called you that. Not the ones you went out with, just the ones who didn’t have a chance with you.”

“Oh, we knew. We didn’t much care for the term.” She paused. “You might have read something about Louise’s ex-husband; he used to play for the Rams. He gave her a good settlement. Dena’s selling houses to rich people and going out with an Iranian millionaire from Beverly Hills.”

“What about you?”

“I’m just a philosophy professor on sabbatical. Patti invited me out when she and her husband were moving into their house, said their condo would be free until their new tenants moved in. Her husband’s a car dealer, kept pointing out his showrooms all the way in from LAX.”

Two women cycled by as they came to the Strand. Tad gripped her arm more tightly. “Let’s walk down to the water.”

She was about to refuse. Except for a couple of surfers in wet suits near the pier, the beach was nearly deserted. She was suddenly afraid of being alone with him, but he could hardly harm her there, in sight of the houses lining the Strand.

He led her through the opening in the wall onto the sand. A group of gulls alighted near them, watching with beady eyes as they passed. She shivered; Tad, in a tweed jacket and jeans, did not seem to notice the chill. “It’s colder than I expected,” she said. “I guess all that propaganda made me think you have an endless summer out here.”

“I was surprised to see you,” Tad said. “I wanted to speak to you on the pier, but then I thought you might not want to see me. I was thinking of the last time—”

“I was hoping you’d forgotten that,” she said quickly.

“Oh, I can’t blame you. I must have seemed pretty hopeless.”

She slipped her arm from his and walked toward the ocean. It was all coming back to her now, more vividly than she had ever recalled it before.

He had been the fat, pimpled boy who sat next to her in geometry. She had paid little attention to him, but he had surprised her by calling her up one day to talk about their homework.

Tad did not ask her out; she doubted he had ever dated anyone. But she pitied him a little and could talk to him about her ambitions, the books she read, the interests she usually cloaked. She did not ask him to her house, but occasionally met him in places where her friends were not likely to see them—at the playground for small children near her street, or at a delicatessen in the city adjoining their suburb. They met only to talk; she did not think of their meetings as dates. She might have guessed that Tad would assign more importance to them.

He called her early one Friday evening. He had walked two miles from his house to her neighborhood and was calling from a pay phone; he wanted to come over. Carelessly, she agreed.

Patti, Louise and Dena arrived only moments after she hung up. Her face burned as she listened to the babble of her friends and tried to think of how to get rid of them. Patti was saying something about a party; Jacqueline could guess what her cousin would think when she saw Tad.

Her friends were unusually perceptive that evening and noticed her nervousness almost immediately; she had to speak. “I can’t go,” she blurted out. “Someone’s coming over.”

“Who?” Patti asked.

“It’s—well, it’s Tad Braun. It’s just—he’s supposed to help me with some homework.”

Dena rolled her eyes; Louise looked disgusted. “Tad Braun?” Patti shrieked. “You’re going to see Tad Braun on a Friday night?”

“It’s almost like having a date with him,” Dena said.

“I need some help in geometry,” Jacqueline mumbled. She knew it was a poor reason to give as soon as she spoke. The other girls were aware of her grades; they had copied her homework often enough.

“Maybe Jackie likes him,” Louise said maliciously. “Wait until I tell—”

“I don’t!” Jacqueline cried, terrified of what the other girls might do. She was in the middle of denying Louise’s suspicions when Tad came to the door.

She knew that she should have sent him away quickly, tried to tell him she would call him later, but that hadn’t been enough for her friends. They pulled him through the door, ushered him to the sofa, and made the bewildered boy sit down as they grouped themselves around him.

Their words, their callous remarks and cruel comments about his weight, his complexion, his clumsiness, awful clothes, and wretched personality had been designed to show him his place and rob him of any shred of self-esteem. His face grew mottled with humiliation; Jacqueline saw the message in his pained eyes as he looked at her. Tell them I’m your friend, his eyes said; tell them that you hate what they’re saying, that I mean something to you.

But she said nothing; she even laughed with her friends. He shot her one last glance before he fled the room; she had been surprised to see no anger, only despair.

She had made her choice and betrayed him. Tad had disappeared from school after that amid rumors he was ill; she had not even called his parents to find out how he was, and found out only later that his parents had sent him to another school elsewhere.

The sand shifted under her feet. She turned as Tad came up to her side. “What are you thinking about?” he asked.

“How heartless I was before.”

He adjusted the collar of his jacket. “I thought I was in love with you back in high school. I think I had a crush on all of you in a way, but you were the only one who would talk to me. I kept hoping, I thought I’d never get over—” He paused. “Well, that’s past. I doubt the others even remember.”

She looked up at his handsome, even-featured face. At close range, his features were almost too perfect, as if he were hardly human at all. “You’ve changed a lot, Tad. You’ve probably had plenty of opportunities to forget us.”