“Billy!” Charter begins, “This sandwich is—”
“Isn’t it! Charter, dear boy! Isn’t it!”
The two take their ease, companionable, happy. For the first time Billy speaks of his teaching, his passion for the French poets: the cell of myself fills with wonder. . the whitewashed walls of my secret. .
“What is his secret?” Charter wonders aloud.
“He’s speaking of the deeper self, I think. The one we embodied when we were little children. When we could reinvent the world undisturbed.”
“For days at a time,” Charter whispers. “As outside the snow falls hour after hour.”
“Yes. That is it. Exactly. . I had a student once,” Billy says, “who translated Jouve brilliantly. He died the night he graduated, stupidly, in the river — although he knew how to swim. The entire campus mourned for months.”
On the way home, Charter dwells on the loss of the young man. The faculty and students mourning together as one moves him deeply. And he feels the familiar pang of loss, feels the old longing to have lived in this place as those students did, the place he had abused — yes, this is the word that comes to him — and is abusing still. He fears it is because he is twisted, he is strange. Sitting in the comfort of the car, the windows open to the day’s benevolence, Charter feels the full force of this chronic strangeness once again.
After they return, Charter spends what remains of the afternoon wandering the campus he knows so well, yet not at all. He recalls the many times he has sat on the grass in the sweet nights of Indian summer once classes had begun, listening to chamber music spelling the air around the chapel, or the sound of someone playing a horn, a piano, in the little music studio tucked away in a grove of pines. Such things he recalls. .
In all those years he only once dared step into a classroom. When the professor asked his name he fled. And once he dared creep into the theater, crouched in the wings, watching the rehearsal of a play. He recalls now the pain of that moment, a feeling of such isolation it had been almost untenable. Fearful of discovery, he had remained frozen in the shadows for hours, so crushed by the weight of his own singularity he could barely stand after everyone was gone. He had unfolded his limbs like a crushed Jack rising from a rusty box. Making a terrible joke at his own expense, he had sputtered between his teeth: Screek! Screek!
Now, approaching the Circle, he thinks: I must find a way to be — to be what? True to life. Real. Why was it so hard? It was impossible. Insurmountable. He was an impostor through and through, a coward and a liar. He was one hell of an evasive, secretive, spooky sonofabitch!
In the early light of evening, the campus is resplendent. Somehow unfathomable, so much grander than his own aspirations. Aspirations? Has he aspirations? He who is living such a small life, something cramped and reduced (how is this possible?) despite the promise this place provides him to live out a wealth of dreams? Yet here he is, as always, on the perimeter of that promise, soaking up a lonely man’s many kindnesses, embroiled in the frustrations of the soused faculty wives and their brats — but no! It is not as simple as that! Because. .
Watching Asthma. Those transcendent moments when everything dissolves and something epic takes over, something coherent, a thing that again and again surpasses itself. The moments surpassing themselves — as once, when he was a tiny child, his father had opened his little valise and one by one taken out the packages of seeds and taught him the names of things.
Much later, long after Billy has gone to sleep, Charter once more dozes off on the screen porch. He awakens to the sound of Dr. Ash wandering and is afraid that if she ever wandered away and was forever lost, the Circle would be intolerably still. As she passes in the shadows not far from him, he understands that all it would take is a few small steps from the porch to the yard to find her. And so he does this, he takes those steps, and as soon as he does, Dr. Ash stops her pacing and stands perfectly still. And he finds that he is holding her, that she is holding him. They cling to one another for dear life. Silently, she begins to cry, her tears spilling from her eyes like rain. The front of his shirt is wet where her face presses against his chest.
After a time she lets her arms fall, and stepping back, her hair clouding her face, smiles at him. It is a moonless night but the sky has a glow. He sees this smile of hers and returns it. Thank you, she says, turning away, waving once with a sweet, small gesture of her hand. Off she glides; he hears her enter her dark house, sees her move through the house as she illuminates it room by room; he stands there alone taking this in, strangely moved, a profusion of blue shadows and lustrous scents pressing around him.
Dr. Ash is beautiful. But Charter is desireless; desire is a thing unknown to him. In some vague way he thinks the best lives are somehow disembodied, suspended. . not bruised by imperious need or weakened by the renouncements of day-to-day living. Perhaps Dr. Ash shares this idealism. Maybe idealism is the place from which she stands, scorched and lonely. Not without desire, clearly—Beloved, she had said the other night, my dearest heart. But her desire has become idealized — or so he imagines — a perfect thing, perhaps too perfect to endure. (Of course he knows nothing of what she has endured. He does not know, cannot know, that she was speaking of a child.)
The world is a riddle, quarreled and tormented. It is threaded through with darkness, or, worse, its fabric is dark through and through. Rarely does a bright thread work its way into the weave.
He retires early. He takes the coin out from under his pillow and gazes at it for a long time. It is an unsettling thing, as old as time, he thinks. Yes. It’s like holding a small slice of time between his fingers. Made of copper yet with the weight of lead. Its unsettling little figure is familiar; looking at it now he feels an old malaise. And then he recalls a drawing of Vanderloon’s that had served as a frontispiece for Rules of Rage, his most disquieting book. A book so disquieting Charter had never managed to finish it.
He decides he must rid himself of the coin at once. He pulls on some clothes and slips into the night, walking in the deepest shadows until he reaches the woods beyond the library, and there, finding two good stones, hammers the coin between them, smashing it to bits. After, he returns to Billy’s and sleeps, but the little coin continues to exert some influence, or so he fears, and he thinks he must undo this nefarious influence by taking something of Asthma’s — an animal from her tabletop town. He will replace the coin with one of the many creatures she rules over with such devotion. He begins to watch her house differently, like a man in a fairy tale whose life depends upon a treasure he knows is just within reach. But the weather turns — thunder and all the rest — and everyone is caught in place. Asthma in her room, Blackie at her typewriter, and Blackie’s Rod glued to his stamp collection.
He is weary. He has been watching for too long and has torn open a can of worms. He is fractured and leeched. Because today, as he stands in the shadows, the ornithologist’s binoculars burning his eyes, he sees Pea Pod and Asthma at play — an enigmatic game that involves scolding and finger wagging; it involves shouting. Something savage is unfolding, savage and absurd. It is as if Blackie and Goldie are straddling the rafters and tugging at their offspring’s strings.
The game intensifies and accelerates. The girls are shouting with such force their voices carry across the Circle and into the woods. He sees Pea Pod raise her fist in the air, throw herself at Asthma, and pummel her heart. He sees Asthma slap Pea Pod across the face with such force Pea Pod stumbles and falls, vanishing as if swallowed by the floor — only to rise again and fly at Asthma and, like a wild thing released from its cage, bite her arm.