Still at the window, Brookman watched the quad. The only color was of the autumn-yellowed grass on the lawns; the sky matched the sidewalks and the Norman tower of New Chapel. There was faint snow, salting a drizzle. It was slightly cheering because the month had been gray and wet, more chill than truly cold.
He saw that the man with the bags had reversed direction. The man was now walking as fast as he could, fleeing a noisy group of students excited by the powdering of snow. He was dull-eyed, chin down, jaw clenched. He didn’t like the snow on his fair balding skull, didn’t like the happy youths. In a moment he would turn again and walk back to his own voices. It was so much work to be crazy, Brookman thought.
There sounded a knock against the dark paneling of Brookman’s office door, a loud single rap followed by a pause, then two rapid knocks. It was a d-delta in toneless Morse code, a little of Brookman’s obsolete nautical education that he had passed on to Maud, an impractical skill for some decades but useful at that moment.
Tiny snowflakes rested on the locks of her hair that showed around the edges of her watch cap. Brookman took a quick look right and left along the hall. Maud noticed his display of guilty stealth. She brushed back the hood she wore over the cap and laughed at him. He drew her into the room, gathering her up by her jacket and yanking her, somewhat violently, into his office. The containers of cold coffee at her feet went over.
“Help,” she said.
“If you don’t mind,” he said, walking to the inlaid window to close the dusty curtains. Lux in umbras procedet. Then he kissed her and found himself in his Maud transport. He felt as if he could drain her, overwhelm and consume her, all her scents and silky turns, the firm athlete’s body. Or else that he was the one being consumed, confused and incapable of escape.
“Oh,” she said, “you’re hard.”
“Don’t be coarse,” he said. It had taken him a moment to get the reference. She didn’t care for this reproach.
“Coarse. What?” She demanded an answer of him in the agitated adolescent manner of the time. “You think that’s coarse? You’re such a middle-class prude.”
“Working-class prude.” He had been around the world at least once and had never thought of himself as a prude. “Maybe just lower class.”
Before long he was sitting at his desk and she was more or less under it, down on him, and he could only think of those long lips and those all-at-once — on a single day it seemed — suddenly knowing eyes. He bent to twist her long black silky hair into a coil and ran his fingers, wrapped in it, down the back of her neck.
He sat in a dazzled aftermath, watching her every move. She brazenly blew him a kiss, lips to fingers.
“Oh, baby” was all he could think of to say.
Not poetry. Perhaps inappropriate? Certainly not the older-brotherly chat he had had in mind for this particular visit.
“I love you,” she said. “I love your brains and cock and knees and eyes. I love your hokey dipshit tattoos. I don’t scare and you don’t scare, but I’m shit terrified that I so adore your bones, Professor Brookman. Aren’t you scared of loving me?”
“Maybe I don’t love you, Maud. Maybe I’m just obsessed with you, body and soul.”
“Now,” she said, “you’re scaring me.”
“What we have is fearsome. We’re both going to live in dread.” He saw that she was at the point of tears.
“But,” she said, “with your wife, with that shepherdess creature, the Albigensian or whatever — that’s all cozy sweetness and light, right?”
“That’s right. But you’re a little tart. A little Kerry gallows bird of an outlaw. Maybe we’ll swing on a rope in the rain for each other.”
She put a lock on him, held him as hard as she could. She was trembling.
“You’re scaring me, Steve.”
“Because I love you,” he said. Yet love was not really what he felt for her. In times to come he would long ponder what he had been trying to say.
“I thought what you said about Shakespeare and Marlowe was on the money,” Brookman told her when all was in order. “Faustus and hell and so on. Well observed.”
“Think I’m right?”
“I do.”
“Why?”
“You tell me why,” Brookman said.
“Because Shakespeare would never have said the world was hell. It would have been blasphemous.”
“Shakespeare made some defamatory statements about the world.”
“Yeah. But he wouldn’t have Mephisto be right. Not with hell right there. They both know a single drop of Christ’s blood could save him.”
“What a wicked creature you are,” Brookman said. “Get out. What are you doing here anyway?”
“I want to see you. Is your wife, like…?”
Brookman’s wife and daughter were returning early to keep their Christmas at home with him. Ellie’s parents were of a Mennonite sect that more or less rejected Christmas, but they still expected a winter visit from their daughter and grandchild. Watching Maud, Brookman saw a cloud of resentment cross her brow. She did not like hearing about his domestic arrangements.
He cut her off.
“We don’t know yet when she can get back. There’s a storm in western Canada. Planes may not fly. On the other hand, they may.”
“But I want to see you.”
“We’ll see each other.”
“I’ll call you later, Steve,” she said. “Have to buy a pretzel and get to class.”
When she was out the door, he went to the window, drew the curtains open again and watched her walk across the quad. Frozen rain clung to the coats of students passing by. The man Brookman had seen earlier was standing by the street gate, staring at Maud as she passed.
He closed his heraldic curtains again and turned out the lights. Such domesticities served to bring Maud closer to him, because that was what he did when she came to his office outside of hours.
Brookman’s appointments were about to begin, and he wanted a break between the stream of Maud’s frantic consciousness and his first actual student of the day. He kicked his rolling chair back against the wall and put his feet up. The room was still scented with Maud’s perfume and the soapy schoolgirl odors of her body, and Brookman found it difficult to banish her from his mind.
3
CROSS INN, WHERE Maud and Shell lived, afforded beautiful views of city and campus. In the twenties and thirties it had been the best hotel in town. Over time, like everything else downtown, it degenerated, eventually becoming a ratty dope-and-suicide hotel. In the end, the college acquired and renovated it for a dormitory, keeping some of the art nouveau pieces and paneling of the original. To Shell it still looked depressing. She liked to say that the place accommodated as much dope and nearly as many suicides as a dorm as it had as a welfare hotel. This was an exaggeration. But the dim-lit hallways, dusty mirrors and portraits of scholarly immortals were, Shell thought, a bringdown. She knew a cheapo hotel when she saw one. One tip-off was the smell of insecticide and garbage awaiting incineration. Shell and her mother had lived for a while in a welfare motel on the edge of a river running brown across from a stretch of woodland.
On her way back from her poetry class, Shell had gotten a call on her cell phone from her ex-husband, John Clammer. She promptly switched it off. Then he called her on the college’s automated service line. It seemed humiliating to go through the business of taking the phone off the hook and trying to ignore the cacophony and wanga-wanga that would ensue. And she would be goddamned if Crazy John Clammer would drive her into the cold weather.