I must tell you that I find your remarks both alarming and repelling. It is one thing to agree, as we all must for the sake of the study, on the principle of physical relativity. We can accept that they find each other attractive even if we do not find them so. We can do our best to dispose of our own physical standards and prejudices in those areas where they seem likely to cloud the study. We can even remind ourselves that they might find us just as repellent as we find them. But it is quite another thing to speculate as you have just done on their physical intimacies with such specificity of detail. You are in danger of losing your academic detachment and, frankly, I will not be able to allow your continued participation if I see any more evidence of such imaginative and sympathetic absorption. Is that clear?
Yes? No, this is a good question. Of course you have not heard of Redwood City. No one important has ever lived in Redwood City and no one important ever will. The mystery is not that anyone would deny having placed phone calls to such an area; the mystery is that anyone could find someone there to call in the first place.
We are going to skip the fourth and fifth Encounters. They are brief and concern themselves only with a discussion of possible professors and classes. You will remember them, once absorbed. And I’m going to time our approach so that we pick up another critical memory of the period that has lapsed. Are you ready? Stay with me now.
• • •
THE BOYS IN apartment 201 had decided to give a party. Kenneth had come in the evening to extend the invitation. It was to be a small affair, limited to people who lived in the building and a few who could be persuaded to spend the night, since the city of Berkeley was under curfew.
“We’ll just sit out on the terrace and yell ‘Fascist pigs’ at the passing police cars,” Kenneth said. “It’ll give us a chance to meet our neighbors in a relaxed social setting.”
Two days later he invited the entire Cal ROTC on an impulse. Linda hears him arguing with Dave about it as she rises slowly toward the second floor in the sticky elevator. “It’s going to be fine, Dave,” Kenneth is saying. “You worry too much. Getting arrested for violating curfew will radicalize them.” Linda gets out of the elevator and Kenneth catches the door with his hand, batting it back so that he can get in. “Later,” he says cheerfully as the door closes, making him disappear from the left to the right.
Dave looks at Linda sourly. “Did you hear?” he asks. “Can you imagine what our apartment is going to look like after a bunch of cadets have partied there? What if they just don’t go home? What if they pass out all over the place? They’re all going to be physical as hell.” They hear Kenneth’s feet below them, pounding the sidewalk. He has an eleven o’clock class. Linda can see, reading Dave’s watch sideways, that it is 11:02. Dave moves his arm suddenly to brush his hair back with his hand. The watch face flashes by Linda. She likes Dave’s hands, which are large and rather prominently veined. She tries to find something not to like about Dave. “Come on in,” Dave offers. “I’ll make you a cup of hot chocolate.”
“I hate chocolate,” says Linda.
“Of course you do. I knew that. Come in anyway. I’ve got a problem, and I’m surrounded by Zukinis. Did Kenneth tell you that Frank registered Peace and Freedom last Monday? Yesterday he switched to Republican. I don’t even pretend to understand the intricate workings of his mind.”
Linda follows Dave into apartment 201. Her palms are sticky with sweat, which strikes her as adolescent. The whole world is wondering when she is going to grow up, and she is certainly no exception. Linda has hardly seen Dave since the night he went up to Suzette’s. She wishes she could think of an artful way to find out how that evening ended. Or when it ended.
Dave puts a yellow teapot on the stove. Not a stray dish, not a fork left out anywhere. The avocado Formica gleams. Before, Linda believed they were neat. Now she is beginning to feel there may be something unhealthy about it. The neatness seems excessive.
Fred Zukini is sitting at the kitchen table. The wastebasket is beside his chair; every few moments he crumples a piece of paper and drops it in. There is a stack of library books by his left elbow. His arm is bent to support his head. “Please don’t make a lot of noise,” he requests.
Dave lowers his voice. “You want to know his class load? This is the absolute truth. He’s got music for teachers, math for teachers, and volleyball.”
“Is he going to be a teacher?” Linda asks.
“God help us. We spent all yesterday listening to him learn to sing ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ by numbers. I don’t know if it was music or math. Today, at breakfast, he demonstrates the theory of the conservation of milk.”
“The what?”
“How you can pour one large glass of milk into two small ones with no resulting loss of volume. Then he asks me to correct a paper he’s working on. The assignment is for two pages; he’s done ten. I can’t say I was enthusiastic, but I wouldn’t want it said that I discourage initiative. So I look at it. He’s hovering by my elbow, all nervous, because it’s his first college paper and I’m a seasoned junior. Eight pages are a direct quote. Out of one book. I tell him, ‘You can’t do that,’ but he says it’s exactly what he wants to say.”
“How are your own classes?” Linda asks. “Did you get into MacPherson’s?”
“I did, but I had to lie about my major. And you didn’t tell me he threw chalk.”
“Only when he’s provoked. It’s no fun if you’re not surprised. Did he throw it at you?”
“No, but I jumped about a foot out of my chair anyway.” Dr. MacPherson teaches Economic History and is one of Linda’s favorite professors. He can tell you about the Black Plague so that you feel you’re actually there. If you are momentarily overcome, however, and he thinks your attention is wandering, he sends a piece of chalk singing past your ear.
The teapot whistles asthmatically. Dave gets out the instant coffee, makes himself a cup in a green enamel mug, and puts the coffee jar away. They tiptoe past Fred, who groans for their benefit and crumples another piece of paper. They sit on the living room couch at a respectable distance apart. No one’s leg touches anyone else’s. “You said you had a problem,” Linda hints. Please, please don’t let it be Suzette.
“Yeah,” says Dave. He blows on his steaming cup. “I do. It’s Mrs. Kirk up in the penthouse. She hates me. She started hating me Tuesday morning and she refuses to stop. It’s because of the sign I had in our window. Maybe you saw it?” Linda shakes her head. “Well, I’d spent a bad night because a number of our neighborhood cats were out looking for each other. And I made this small and tasteful sign for our window. It said THE ONLY GOOD CAT IS A DEAD CAT.”
Dave blows on his coffee again and takes a quick sip. Linda remembers how silly she always thought it was, as a child, the habit grown-ups had of making drinks so hot they couldn’t drink them and then having to wait until they cooled. Sometimes they waited too long and had to heat the drink all over again. A bad system.
“How can you drink that?” she asks. “Thirty seconds ago it was boiling.”
“You blow right next to the side,” Dave says, “and then you only drink the part you’ve blown on. I could teach you, but when would you use it? Tea? Do you drink tea?” Linda shakes her head. “No, you hate tea. Am I right?”