The Name of the World Read online

  “Drunk? And you’re driving?”

  “All over the road like a goddamn maniac. We’ve got plenty of room,” she said. “Hop right in.”

  Actually her grad-student Japanese hatchback was crowded with boxes, books, clothing, trash. I cleared a space on the passenger side by shoveling junk over the back of the seat.

  “I’m sorry it smells funny,” she said. “It needs to go through the car wash sometime with the windows open.”

  She started the car after a couple of tries. “Wasn’t there somebody else?” I asked.

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know. Who’s we?”

  “We?”

  “You said we. Who’s we?”

  “I don’t know. You and me.”

  “Okay. I just didn’t want to forget someone.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Fuck ’em,” she said, “whoever they are,” and we swooped out of the lot.

  I’d stayed in Riverside no more than two hours, probably less, been conveyed there swiftly and stayed briefly to be assaulted and now was conveyed back again over the flat landscape where the fields lay in perfect sterile rows of dust. I felt wonderful in a way. But my head ached.

  “I missed your act,” I told her. “What was the alias you performed under?”

  “‘O. O. O’Malley,’” she said.

  “And you won.”

  “I sure did.”

  “Very good.”

  “You take it all off, you get the prize. Gynecology triumphs.”

  “I missed that.”

  “‘Skin to win.’”

  “Excellent.” I couldn’t really converse. I worried about Flower’s driving. She didn’t give it her full attention. She took her eyes off the road whenever she addressed me and had a trick of jamming the gas suddenly and accelerating up into the seventies for no good reason. In a sports car she’d be a demon. I could feel the cogs and guys of the steering about to snap. I worried about the tires, certainly they were the cheapest. Yes, sometimes part of me wanted my life to end like this, in a bad wreck, as a way of sharing the horror of Anne and Elsie’s last moments. But the rest of me was just inordinately afraid in a car.

  Flower dropped me at the gate to the Humanities Building parking lot.

  “Are you going in?” She shut the engine off and turned herself toward me.

  “Going in. Yes. Why wouldn’t I be going in?”

  “I don’t know. I thought maybe your car was parked here or something.”

  “I don’t have a car. I’m going in.”

  What do I see when I remember her face? Those eyes. In fact they were mind-wrecking. Blue and pitiable and sweet, in their deep dark sockets, though I wish for some other word than sockets. When I looked into them my thoughts just stopped.

  “Well, fix your face first. You’re smudgy,” she said. She had a funny way at the ends of her sentences. Rather than a pause, she created a plunge.

  “How much was the prize for your dance?”

  “One-fifty.”

  “That’s not bad.”

  “It’s two fifty on the Fourth of July.”

  “Maybe I should try to be there,” I told her.

  “Sure. I’ll give you a lift,” she said. “Since you don’t have a car.”

  I went in through the basement entrance and checked my reflection in a mirror in the men’s room. The wild punch had dented my forehead near the scalp. I didn’t look like a brawler so much as a man who forgot to watch where he was going. I wet my hair and pasted a forelock over the red area and went upstairs to the monthly Department of History coffee klatsch. I was pretty much the last to arrive, and as I entered the small lounge, always to me somehow reminiscent of a prison’s visiting area, they all looked up from their conversations. Then the dozen or so of them welcomed me almost as a reception line, one by one. As if I’d done something special I didn’t know about.

  This was curious, even slightly disorienting. I sipped coffee and ate a cookie until their attention drifted away from me and I was left dusting powdered sugar from my fingers.

  Tiberius Soames greeted me with a sort of wise and happy weariness. He put his hand on my shoulder. “You’ve been worried about me. And I appreciate that. But no. I’m fine. Yes.”

  “You sound all right,” I said. And we went together toward the pair of urns and drew ourselves more completely unnecessary coffee.

  Soames seemed to discover the Styrofoam cup in his hand, gulped at it gratefully. “I’ve just got no more stomach for the bitter charade. When my mother died her body was eaten by dogs.”

  I tried to think of some words to say. I tried, but I couldn’t. “Dogs?” was the best I could do.

  “That’s my message to the world. Why should it be otherwise? Should I disguise the facts concerning our universe?”

  “Tiberius—” Many people called him Tibby, but I didn’t know him that well, and anyway he might be going crazy right before our eyes. The situation seemed to call for full names.

  This thought brought back the moment I’d had with the patient at the Swan’s Grove campus, with his head trauma and his upraised invisible flame. It seemed just the kind of remark the patient might have made. When my mother died her body was eaten by dogs. Instead the man had given me his name and address and I still had them somewhere among my notes. Robert Hicks.

  Tiberius said, “All right then. I’ll stop alarming you and say something trivial and muy apropos. For instance, do you have any German? No. Okay then. You’ll be interested to know that in German klatsch means ‘gossip.’ Here is our wonderful hostess; sprechen zie Deutsch?” he asked as Clara Frenow approached, whisking crumbs from her bosom and getting frosting on her neckline in the process. “At du klatsch we are torn by dogs.”

  “I think you said,” she said, “did you say—?”

  “Yes, in an attempt to be appropriately trivial and at the same time Germanic just somewhat. Clara. My goddess. Are you the originator of the idea that we should occasionally klatsch together?”

  “Uh. Yes,” she said. “Rather I mean—no, Tibby. It’s been a tradition since the seventies.” Clara had completed her round of chemotherapy. She didn’t wear a wig, but covered her patchy baldness with an assortment of caps, baseball caps, knit caps, hats of felt, of straw, a sailor’s hat, today a jaunty blue beret that made her look like an English schoolgirl. For a few weeks her battle had shot her full of fire. She’d been running over with new ideas and seemed to be viewing the materials of her life from a mountaintop. The fight had apparently been successful, the cancer was driven back, and now Clara seemed her sad self again.

  And weren’t we all just as sad? These little gatherings where you can smell the sugar, the small cakes. Ours were come-as-you-are, but you couldn’t make these occasions any more bearable by wearing shorts and tennis shoes. Stainless steel urns on brown institutional tables hidden under white paper lace. Professor Frenow in her pitifully jaunty headgear, Tiberius Soames with his fingertips at a floating braille, looking as if the air hurt his skin. He stayed near me but was silent. He smiled a wide terrified distracted smile. I couldn’t tell if he was pained for me or for himself.

  The History Department was thriving, thanks entirely to Soames. As a young diplomat in the Haitian government, I believe an assistant to the President’s Chargé d’Affaires, he’d been implicated in a coup conspiracy, quite accurately, he said, and I didn’t doubt him. He escaped to France and received political refugee status, which protected him from extradition. He claimed to have been spirited to Paris by the British MI-6. When he talked of his past he had a habit of stating somewhere invariably in the tale, “All the boys in MI-6 went to the same school and shared a horrible adolescence.” This information meant something to him. He was always turning it over in his mind, apparently, but as far as I know he never got its significance across to any of the rest of us. The kids adored his personal reminiscences, stories that sometimes hijacked whole lecture periods but which
he tied to the study of history in a way that illuminated it as the very medium of our lives. Here, after all, stood a man who lived under sentence of death in the land of his fathers. History had done that. He would never return. He’d written half a dozen books, contributed frequently to Foreign Affairs, and had a good exile. Still, it was exile.

  Clara rang her spoon against her cup and delivered a toast. A toast to me. The purpose of today’s gathering was to celebrate me. Because I was leaving. Everyone applauded politely.

  Apparently they weren’t going to renew my contract. This was news. I’d expected one more appointment, and then the gate. Clara and I had chatted at the end of the previous year and left the subject open; somehow it had closed all by itself. Here I’d been wondering what would happen to me year after next, and it was happening now.

  I wondered if, in the shuffle of medicines and sorrows through her recent life, Clara had simply forgotten to discuss this with me. As I tumbled it all over in my mind, smiling and faking my thanks, bitter and relieved, I considered she’d probably at first simply hoped, and finally just presumed, that no discussion was necessary. Out of sheer personal cowardice she may have decided to let that one conversation serve as the final and necessary acknowledgement that, as far as History was concerned, I was history. But that was the style in our Department, and, as far as I knew, in all the other Departments. We conducted our business with a nonconfrontational vagueness which, in the world I’d been formerly a part of, the political realm, had been saved for communication with the voters (the Senator had called them “the votes”). To constituents we equivocated, but behind closed doors nobody minced words.

  I heard a female campaign manager say to an aide once, “Do you want to know how a loser stinks? Put your nose in your armpit. Then empty your desk.” Maybe in the academy a distaste for causing pain kept us from shafting one another quite so mercilessly, but I don’t think Clara’s way of firing someone was very much more adroit, and I doubt the young aide clearing out his desk drawers had felt any more astonished and red-faced that day than I did at the moment.

  Suddenly Soames was lucid: “Are you secretly ready to get out of this place?”

  “I can feel the whole experience withering around me.”

  “Perfect! You understand me perfectly. Do you remember the dead skins of the Pulitzer Prize winner? Right. His books—dead skins! How could he say that? Do you think he was being stupidly provocative or simply imitating a colossal human anus?”

  “He treated me okay, Tiberius. But I wasn’t chasing his girlfriend around the living room.”

  “Oh, my friends and foes! That night! Later! You have no idea how violently I masturbated!”

  Let that be the last word of any description of the conversations among our Department members.

  But no, I couldn’t let it. A few minutes later I trailed Clara Frenow into the hallway and called her name as she struggled with her office door.

  “I’m surprised I even feel irritated with you,” I told her.

  She looked surprised herself, then unsurprised, then incapable of surprise. “You want to come in?” she said.

  It was visible and plain, the oppressiveness stealing back over her life. And all she had was her blue beret. She looked prehistoric. I could see her in the rags of animals, lifting up a small harpoon against the storm.

  “Nah,” I said, “forget it, no.”

  Tiberius hadn’t had his last word, either. He turned up beside me now and put both hands on my arm: “Michael, we must get out of this flatness. The flatness and the regimented plant life. The vastly regimented plant life. Nothing matters but that we get out of here.”

  He walked away toward the hallway’s end. He hadn’t even glanced at Clara. In the stairwell he became a swaying silhouette and disappeared six inches at a time, descending.

  “Clara, I thought we had an understanding.” But I might as well have been saying, I understood we had a thought.

  “Well, I don’t know about that.”

  “Then I guess we didn’t. It’s probably silly of me to be talking about it. Anyway—come on. What happened?”

  “The position’s gone tenure track. It was kind of sudden, Mike.”

  We both knew I’d done nothing to build a case for getting tenure.

  “We assumed it was coming, but it came without warning,” she explained. “The fact is Marty blessed us suddenly with the tenured slot when Tiberius got all that publicity. Look, we’ve got to move Tiberius over to a tenure track. In fact we’d better give him tenure right away or we’re going to lose him.”

  “If you haven’t already.”

  “He’s not as around-the-bend as he acts. He’s just lighting a fire under us. And having fun at it, too, I might add.”

  Marty Peele was the Dean of Liberal Arts (and the man at whose house Tiberius had been so pleased to meet Kelly Stein). The History Department was barely on Marty’s radar, but apparently he’d been galvanized by a series of interviews Tiberius had done with somebody on PBS. Soames had been brilliant. That which excellent teaching couldn’t do for him, the impression that he’d become famous had managed to do. And good for him.

  “Good for him. And, really: good for the Department. And good for the whole institution. It just comes kind of abruptly—as you say.”

  “I would have shuffled you over to Tibby’s position for a year, but the truth is, we had to restructure the budget, too. In effect his line isn’t there, not for a year or two anyway.”

  “You mean it isn’t there at all?”

  “Well, it’s sort of there. There just isn’t much money for it.” Tiberius had probably gotten a whopping raise, in other words.

  “I could maybe do with that. Just for the one year.”

  “Well, of course, Mike. If you want the position—uh.” She finished off by saying, nearly wailing, “Oh, Mike!”

  “Oh, Clara!” It was impossible. I’d been wrong to ask. “All right. I feel like a fool. I know you’ve done whatever you could. I’m out of line. I owe you thanks, and that’s all.”

  “You’ve been wonderful here,” she said.

  “It’s been good for me.” I was sincere in saying it.

  I took the stairs to the parking-lot entrance. When I reached the street I didn’t know whether to go right or left. Soon I’d have to start acting like a person who cared about what happened to him.

  Not a lot happened. The following day I carried a cardboard box to the office and emptied my desk into it. Over the next two weeks I brought several such boxes into the house I rented. Slowly I packed, as yet without a destination. I watched the weather turn.

  Just before the end of the academic year I took a trip to upstate New York to attend the Conference on Emerging Democracies. I flew by jet to New York City, and from there I rode a train. I had no preparations to make, no real role to play at the Conference, a gathering sponsored by the Giddings Policy Studies Foundation and an annual tradition since the days when “democracy” had meant “socialism,” a roundup of intellectuals currently undertaking a project of cool-headed, not to say bald-faced, retrenchment. I spent a very long three-day weekend among a lot of people who, I was sort of glad to see, had no intention of abandoning their earliest and most hopeful assumptions. Sixteen weeks before, the Berlin Wall had come down. Nobody mentioned this. The term “Marxist” flew all around the place, but none of the speakers ever referred to The Left or The Revolution or The People. On panels, behind podiums—so tiny in nearly empty auditoriums—they displayed the vivid, liberated staunchness of spinsters in old novels. What they’d mistaken for a political philosophy had always amounted, they were seeing now, to an aesthetic, and the divorce it was undergoing from its previous claim to relevance could only serve to purify it. They were no-nonsense about being all nonsense. This didn’t preclude a certain shift in personal style. The men no longer smoked pipes of tobacco, and the women no longer drank sherry or wore bright lipstick inexpertly applied. I don’t know why I went. I think I wanted
something to happen to me there but nothing did.

  Except that I spent a couple of days in the city and was struck as always with how dirty and beautiful New York is. The gray light is a song. And the grafitti alongside the Amtrak: The rails head north out of Penn Station under the streets, almost as through a tunnel, alongside the passing logos of gangs and solitary hit-artists who use the patches of sunshine that fall into the brief spaces between overpasses, their fat names ballooning into the foreground of their strange works, switched on and off in alternating zones of light and dark. They make the letters of our own alphabet look like foreign ideograms, ignorant, rudely dismissive, also happy: magical bursting stars, spirals, lightning. And I realized that what I first require of a work of art is that its agenda—is that the word I want?—not include me. I don’t want its aims put in doubt by an attempt to appeal to me, by any awareness of me at all.

  What brought Flower Cannon to mind right then I don’t know, but I have to say the passing parade put my recent experiences with her into a kind of persective. The experiences were mostly about seeing her, laying eyes on her—not about hearing her words, certainly not about touching her. And now I think this narrative might cohere, if I ask you to fix it with this vision: luminous images, summoned and dismissed in a flowing vagueness. The difference being that I didn’t take Flower for a message, but a ghost, the ghost of my daughter—yes, and for a while she came and went in the flow of events like my Elsie in the silent cataract of memory.

  The picture I’ve been giving here is that of the most circumscribed and uneventful period of my life. In the last few weeks, more had happened to me than I’d experienced in years—developing a small but impossible crush on a student, getting socked in the head, losing my job a year earlier than I’d expected, taking a pointless journey. I needed one more aberration in the round I’d been following, one more liberating aberration, before I broke gently free and continued on a new path. I’d say I was almost conscious of needing it. Almost consciously looking for trouble.

  The final event on my calendar would be the expiration of my lease at the end of June. I should get out of town before then. I had no summer classes, no business here, no people keeping me—my time was up. But when classes ended in the spring, I didn’t go.