She reminded Jo of someone she had once known. A pale man, eyes black as blood at night. Jo put the thought of him out of her mind.
She gripped her own shoulders to keep from trembling. She remembered the excuses the well-educated people, native and foreign, had made for the movement. All of them she had tried to believe when belief had come more easily. The effort of belief, the replacement of it with sheer terror and a sense of what she thought of as her own cowardice, had cost her. One price she had paid was the almost nightly reliving of awakening to find abomination in the stars. Her favorite stars too, the brightest and most beautiful she had ever seen. Spying out the heart of evil in the sacred lines of heaven made her suspect that perhaps the religious life was not for her. On the other hand, she thought, maybe it was.
6
A FEW DAYS LATER, Maud turned up at Brookman’s office door and tapped her secret signal. She had an envelope with some kind of printout inside. “You have to read this. I need your reaction.”
“I haven’t time now, love.”
He thought her look was suspicious. “Why?”
“I have a meeting,” he told her falsely. He was anxious for news of Ellie.
She stamped her foot a little. She looked genuinely pleading. Childlike.
“Really,” Brookman said, “I have to hurry…”
She handed it to him with what appeared to be a blend of anxiety and self-satisfaction. “Call me, Steve,” she said. “Tell me what you think.”
When she was gone, he locked up and went home without a thought of the envelope. She was always insisting he preview her writings.
In the Brookman house on Felicity Street — the larger half of what had been the marble-fronted Federal-style home of a single family — Steve Brookman prepared to grade and comment on his student essays. He was not particularly a drinking man but on this afternoon he poured a half snifter of Courvoisier, an expensive concession to his own self-pity.
Smart kids were wonderful if they could keep it all together, he was thinking, if nothing bad happened, though every year, somewhere in the college, something did. Whereupon Dean Spofford would call the parents, and you had to give it to the guy who had to do that. There were always casualties, of drugs or madness in general.
He was thinking of Maud and how utterly demure and innocent she appeared. These terms reflected the attitudes of his generation and she would probably be insulted by them. The young, young texture of her skin always astonished him. He was also wondering how he might be able to break things off with her, in spite of the fact that she was his advisee and had given up a junior year abroad for him. It was late in the semester. They were working on her undergraduate thesis.
Beyond anxiety, he was aware of feeling a kind of reckless, mindless joy.
Brookman had no native talent for intrigue. He had been careless and forgetful all his life. In twenty years of teaching he had never slept with a student before. College kids flirted, boys as well as girls. How could they not — the students had been the apples of their elders’ eyes from preschool. During what happened to be Brookman’s first semester with Maud, without intending any personal reference, a younger colleague of his had observed that innocent coquetry now led to innocent fucking. There was also innocent frenzy, innocent passion, the innocent, impalpable knife through the heart. Brookman was the one more experienced with consequences, and to that degree he had thought he could take care of her. Innocent love was not possible, love the least innocent of all things. For a long time he had believed he knew as much as anyone about love but that it had no nameable qualities.
He drank more than he ought have done if he intended to drive. He’d accepted an invitation to a party that evening, given by the college’s famous resident artist. She was not truly in residence; she commuted by plane from New York but maintained a rustic roost with a Franklin stove and a picture window up in the hills for use on teaching days. A never-to-be-seen friend would fly her from Long Island in a vintage DC-3, the kind of plane in which Ingrid Bergman and Paul Henreid escape from Casablanca. It didn’t get any hipper than that.
The artist, a tall woman in her fifties, affected a brunette style and black dress that suited her slim figure and large, expressive brown eyes. Brookman liked her work, which had Piero della Francesca — shaped women who were confined in some way — up against walls or prison bars, sometimes dead, sometimes portrayed as mounted condottieri in period breeches, cuirasses and greaves. The paintings invited narrative speculation from the viewer. There were some portraits too, of both men and women. Some of these pictures were in the college museum, which had given her a show. None of her work hung in her rustic hilltop house, however; there it was all West African art — masks, bronzes, elaborately worked cloth-and-feather fetish compositions, baskets, a lightning snake. These objects had been set up in dramatic ways in every public room in the house.
There were maybe thirty people at the party, most of whom he’d seen around the college. Two of the people he knew pretty well but rarely saw, a young female philosophy professor who had a history with Brookman and was present with her husband, and a frail, long-haired history professor named Carswell, who’d been working on his third volume of the origins, flourishing and destruction of Carthage. Carswell went to Tunis every year, and his first book was highly praised in the New York Review. His second volume was trashed by a rival and not noticed by supporters. He was still going to Tunis but looked a bit discouraged; years were passing without volume three. He told people he was rewriting too much. Behind his back, people were calling him Mr. Casaubon.
Brookman wished him well; he felt he had been in the same situation. He had a few drinks without paying attention to how many and went over to the historian.
“Hey, Dan, I ever tell you how much I liked your first book?”
It was true that Brookman had read and enjoyed the first volume on Carthage. But that had been pretty much enough Carthage for him.
“Yes, you did, and I’m grateful.”
“I really liked it.”
“Actually, the first volume on Carthage wasn’t my first book.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“No,” said Carswell, “I realize that. I hope you’ll like the next. Maybe I should say I hope you’ll actually read it.”
“Hey, I’m waiting.” He put his hand on Carswell’s shoulder, which was lower than his own. “But don’t give yourself a hernia.”
He had not meant to say that. It had come out wrong. He had meant to compliment and encourage. He looked back at Carswell, who was staring into his own drink. Best not to apologize. Anyway, Carswell had been insufferable. Brookman thought it was time for him to be going. He took one more round of the African art and found his hostess, the painter, at the door.
“This is the greatest collection of African art I’ve ever seen,” he told her.
“Then you haven’t seen many,” she said.
Brookman looked at the woman in surprise.
“Buy it over there?” he asked her.
“Of course.”
“Did you buy any slaves?”
No, no, he thought, driving home. Not what he had intended to say at all. There was some bitter herb under his tongue that night. Had there not been a contemptible figure in the days of Emily Post called The Guest Who Is Never Invited Again?