He drove to his office and stood at the window. The night before had brought him terrible dreams. In squash games with Lara and Kristin, two furies, he struggled for breath. Most fearsome of all was a Lara-Kristin figure, a goddess enraged. Loaded guns were used in the form of squash they played; the court was fouled with dirty snow. A painted man with a wheelbarrow watched. Everything in the dreams was somehow true. There was a voice to tell him that, or if not a voice, an informing narration that commented on the dreams.
In real-life waking squash he was beating Lara as often as not. There were games that he put every fiber of his strength into winning.
"Stalingrad," he had said once, taking a long hard point from her.
Michael's office window commanded a view of the main college plaza. The day outside was insipid, gray and chilly with the foreclosing of a brief thaw that had brought buds to the beech trees along the walks. Students, dressed down to hurry spring, kept their eyes on the path, all of them headed somewhere they would rather not be. The ugly brick block of the campus bell tower showed a length of painted sheeting advertising a party. As he looked at the tower its carillon bells began to play "Abide with Me."
He had always enjoyed his office. There was a fireplace, rectory lace curtains, a high stamped-tin ceiling. There were family pictures on the mantelpiece and a northern pike displayed on a wooden plaque — something had possessed him to mount it. How idiotic it was. Rural idiocy, said Marx. Or someone.
Late, she rang him.
"Meet at Chequers at four, yes?"
She was half an hour late; she was always late, he had discovered. The bar was filling by the time she arrived, but in spite of that, in spite of the dimness and the gloom of afternoon outside, her presence ignited a slight charge in the room. He knew the effect. As a young man, his own physical attractiveness had cast its modest spell, though awareness of that had come to him late.
She had on the dashing fur and tailored faded jeans that resembled no other pants in the state. She stood in the doorway for a moment and then came to the banquette where he sat boozing. He helped her off with the coat. She ran her lips against his cheek.
The day's confusions cleared in that instant. He was very glad to be with her. He went to the bar, picked up a plastic basket of chicken wings and sauce and brought them to the banquette.
"Want some?" he asked her.
She daintily lifted a wing on a plastic fork and made an insulting face at it. "How can you?" she asked. "Merciful God."
"They're not that bad." He polished one off and wiped his fingers. Cheering up.
She shrugged. "One day I'll explain to you about food."
"Pointless. I lack the necessary standards." He looked into her tolerant disdain and laughed at her. "You're so arrogant," he told her. "You're absurd."
"Am I? You think so?"
She put her hand on his thigh, in his lap, and stroked him, looking cool as midnight. "We'll have to play squash again, eh?"
"We must."
He called for another drink, ordered her a martini.
"We're off for this weekend," she told him matter-of-factly. "I have to go to Washington."
"Why Washington?" he asked.
"Oh," she said. "Business with my brother's estate."
"Too bad," Michael said. "Me with my ready excuses and all."
"Remember what they were, Michael. You're not a good liar. No doubt we'll need them again."
Back home, he let himself in as quietly as possible. He stood listening for a while without turning on the light. The house was quiet; he concluded they had gone to bed. Guided by the embers in the fireplace he eased himself into a living room chair. As he did, his foot kicked over what turned out to be a half-finished glass of beer. It was unlike her to leave half-consumed comestibles around. There was an open book straddling an arm of the chair. He looked at the title in the dying glow: An Introduction to Kierkegaard. Kristin approached everything with native caution. The book was open to page vii, so she seemed to have stalled on the introduction to the Introduction. But she would get there.
An intermittent sound outside caught his attention. Drawn by it, he put on his jacket and went out to the garage. Standing by the garage door, he heard the noise again. A muffled thud, a resounding of metal followed by something like a scattering of rain. Cars went by. The sound came again, followed this time by the screech of brakes and a skid. A car door opened and slammed.
"Motherfucker!" a male voice shouted. "I'll kick your fuckin' ass."
He heard the crunch of running footsteps in the snow and another chainsaw burst of profanity. Then the car dug out in a series of squeals and the driver gunned the engine. Michael zippered up his jacket and went in the direction of the footsteps.
The night outside was cloudy and there was no moon. A line of evergreens separated the quarter-acre of yard beside the house from the road it fronted. He walked to the closest tree and saw a figure motionless against the pale phosphorescence of a soiled snowbank. Immediately he recognized the figure of his son.
The sight of Paul in the snow triggered unreasoning panic. Yet instead of calling him, Michael watched and waited. Paul was crouching behind the bank, chipping away at the side of it, gathering up the icy snow and packing it into snowballs.
When the next pair of high beams lit the road, Paul raised himself for a quick look over the jagged parapet. As the car approached, he pressed himself against the snow wall, cradling a supply of snowballs like an infantryman with a string of grenades. At the crucial moment, he stood up and let go with the chunks, passing them left hand to right, hurling them sidearm at the passing car. After each throw, he shouted something Michael could not make out.
Michael took a few measured steps over the snow toward the boy's position. Another car came up; he hung back. Watching Paul, he could tell even in the darkness that the boy was in distress. After releasing the last snowball of his fusillade, he would crouch and clench his fists and utter the little cry. Then the last car went by untouched and Paul was out of ammunition.
"Paul?"
His son stiffened as though struck. He spun around and took a false step as if to run, first to one side then to the other.
"Hey, buddy. Just be cool."
Paul doubled up, weeping. Michael walked out and put an arm around his shoulder and started walking him inside.
"Don't you think you could cause an accident doing that?" He spoke gently and his easiness was unaffected; he was not angry. "Do you want someone to run off the road?"
Paul pulled away from him.
"Ice can break a window, man," he said. Paul broke for the house and vanished into it.
Michael followed him in, waited a few minutes and then went upstairs to Paul's room. The room was dark and Paul was huddled under the quilt. All of his bedtime rituals had gone unobserved. No time for a read from the books neatly tucked beside the lamp, no notes to himself in his mother's scrupulous hand. His teeth went unbrushed and there were no evening prayers. Michael was not about to push it.
"I hope you know," he said, "that you can talk about anything with me. The troubles you have are very likely to be similar to the ones I had. Often it helps to talk." He did not really expect a reply and he did not get one. "And of course your mother is here for you too."
All the same, he could not keep from trying again.
"Sometimes you think, Why me? But we all make the same mistakes usually. Everybody feels awkward sometimes."
At Paul's age, he thought, he would have been told: Offer it up. Redeem the world through your humiliations. He had always thought that brutal, but all at once it did not seem so bad. It was a way of making children believe their suffering could mean something.