And then he added, “That’s like trying to get from here to San Francisco with a road map that stops at Dubuque, Iowa.”
I was angry now. “Kimberley,” I asked, “did you by any chance tell the Board of Trustees that I said these things? Is that what they want to see me about?”
“Maybe,” she said. She was acting cute. I thought this was a dumb answer. It was in fact accurate. The Trustees had a lot more they wanted to discuss than misrepresentations of my Chapel lecture.
I found her both repulsive and pitiful. She thought she was such a heroine and I was such a viper! Now that I had caught on to what she had been up to, she was thrilled to show me that she was proud and unafraid. Little did she know that I had once thrown a man almost as big as she out of a helicopter. What was to prevent me from throwing her out a tower window? The thought of doing that to her crossed my mind. I was so insulted! That would teach her not to insult me!
The man I threw out of the helicopter had spit in my face and bitten my hand. I had taught him not to insult me.
She was pitiful because she was a dimwit from a brilliant family and believed that she at last had done something brilliant, too, in getting the goods on a person whose ideas were criminal. I didn’t know yet that her Rhodes Scholar father, a Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton, had put her up to this. I thought she had noted her father’s conviction, often expressed in his columns and on his TV show, and no doubt at home, that a few teachers who secretly hated their country were making young people lose faith in its future and leadership.
I thought that, just on her own, she had resolved to find such a villain and get him fired, proving that she wasn’t so dumb, after all, and that she was really Daddy’s little girl.
Wrong.
“Kimberley,” I said, as an alternative to throwing her out the window, “this is ridiculous.”
Wrong.
“All right,” I said, “we’re going to settle this in a hurry.”
Wrong.
I would stride into the Trustees’ meeting, I thought, shoulders squared, and radiant with righteous indignation, the most popular teacher on campus, and the only faculty member who had medals from the Vietnam War. When it comes right down to it, that is why they fired me, although I don’t believe they themselves realized that that was why they fired me: I had ugly, personal knowledge of the disgrace that was the Vietnam War.
None of the Trustees had been in that war, and neither had Kiinberley’s father, and not one of them had allowed a son or a daughter to be sent over there. Across the lake in the prison, of course, and down in the town, there were plenty of somebody’s Sons who had been sent over there.
12
I met just 2 people when I crossed the Quadrangle to Samoza Hall. One was Professor Marilyn Shaw, head of the Department of Life Sciences. She was the only other faculty member who had served in Vietnam. She had been a nurse. The other was Norman Everett, an old campus gardener like my grandfather. He had a son who had been paralyzed from the waist down by a mine in Vietnam and was a permanent resident in a Veterans Administration hospital over in Schenectady.
The seniors and their families and the rest of the faculty were having lunch in the Pavilion. Everybody got a lobster which had been boiled alive.
I never considered making a pass at Marilyn, although she was reasonably attractive and unattached. I don’t know why that is. There may have been some sort of incest taboo operating, as though we were brother and sister, since we had both been in Vietnam.
She is dead now, buried next to the stable, in the shadow of Musket Mountain when the Sun goes down.
She was evidently hit by a stray bullet. Who in his right mind would have taken dead aim at her?
Remembering her now, I wonder if I wasn’t in love with her, even though we avoided talking to each other as much as possible.
Maybe I should put her on a very short list indeed: all the women I loved. That would be Marilyn, I think, and Margarçt during the first 4 years or so of our marriage, before I came home with the clap. I was also very fond of Harriet Gummer, the war correspondent for The Des Moines Register, who, it turns out, bore me a son after our love affair in Manila. I think I felt what could be called love for Zuzu Johnson, whose husband was crucified. And I had a deep, thoroughly reciprocated, multidimensioned friendship with Muriel Peck, who was a bartender at the Black Cat Café the day I was fired, who later became a member of the English Department.
End of list.
Muriel, too, is buried next to the stable, in the shadow of Musket Mountain when the Sun goes down.
Harriet Gummer is also dead, but out in Iowa.
Hey, girls, wait for me, wait for me.
I don’t expect to break a world’s record with the number of women I made love to, whether I loved them or not. As far as I am concerned, the record set by Georges Simenon, the French mystery writer, can stand for all time. According to his obituary in The New York Times, he copulated with 3 different women a day for years and years.
Marilyn Shaw and I hadn’t known each other in Vietnam, but we had a friend in common there, Sam Wake-
field. Afterward, he had hired both of us for Tarkington, and then committed suicide for reasons unclear even to himself, judging from the plagiarized note he left on his bedside table.
He and his wife, who would become Tarkington’s Dean of Women, were sleeping in separate rooms by then.
Sam Wakefield, in my opinion, saved Marilyn’s and my lives before he gave up on his own. If he hadn’t hired both of us for Tarkington, where we both became very good teachers of the learning-disabled, I don’t know what would have become of either of us. When we passed yet again like ships in the night on the Quadrangle, with me on my way to get fired, I was, incredibly, a tenured Full Professor of Physics and she was a tenured Full Professor of Life Sciences!
When I was still a teacher here, I asked GRIOT™, the most popular computer game at the Pahlavi Pavilion, what might have become of me after the war instead of what really happened. The way you play GRIOT™, of course, is to tell the computer the age and race and degree of education and present situation and drug use, if any, and so on of a person. The person doesn’t have to be real. The computer doesn’t ask if the person is real or not. It doesn’t care about anything. It especially doesn’t care about hurting people’s feelings. You load it up with details about a life, real or imagined, and then it spits out a story about what was likely to happen to him or her. This story is based on what has happened to real persons with the same general specifications.
GRIOT™ won’t work without certain pieces of information. If you leave out race, for instance, it flashes the words “ethnic origin” on its screen, and stops cold. If it doesn’t know that, it can’t go on. The same with education.
I didn’t tell GRIOT™ that I had landed a job I loved here. I told it only about my life up to the end of the Vietnam War. It knew all about the Vietnam War and the sorts of veterans it had produced. It made me a burned-out case, on the basis of my length of service over there, I think. It had me becoming a wife-beater and an alcoholic, and winding up all alone on Skid Row.
If I had access to GRIOT™ now, I might ask it what might have happened to Marilyn Shaw if Sam Wakefield hadn’t rescued her. But the escaped convicts smashed up the one in the Pavilion soon after I showed them how to work it.
They hated it, and I didn’t blame them. I was immediately sorry that I had let them know of its existence. One by one they punched in their race and age and what their parents did, if they knew; and how long they’d gone to school and what drugs they’d taken and so on, and GRIOT™ sent them straight to jail to serve long sentences.