For as I have said, I am not a professor: not even, to be truthful, a “sort-of” professor. I am an instructor. An instructor of the last gasp.
Automobiles, especially my own, make me irritable and prone to accidents of temperament. Each man sits alone in his six-foot metal coffin, and traffic jams are like noisy graveyards. (I may be mechanically incompetent, but I can reduce death to a metaphor — the day after dreaming of it!) I am likely to “see” things, whereas normally all my hallucinations enter through another organ — I mean my nose. (Some people see things, I smell ‘em.) In Massachusetts once, during a time when I was teaching Tom Jones, I was driving late at night on a country road well out of Boston. The familiar roadsign picked out by my headlights indicated a sharp curve. Entering it, I saw the road begin to ascend steeply, and pushed the accelerator down hard to the floor. I like to go up hills as fast as possible. When I had swung fully into the curve and had begun to ascend — little Schnauzer engine barking furiously — I heard a terrific clatter from the brow of the hill. A second later, my blood thinned: just beginning to careen down the hill was a stagecoach, obviously out of control. I could see the four horses racing in the straps, the carriage lamps flickering, the driver hauling uselessly on his reins. His face was taut with panic. The high wooden box of the coach jounced down at me, veering crazily across the road. It seemed like my last moment on earth. I fumbled in fear at the controls of my car, not knowing whether to change gears, shut off the engine, or risk my luck on speeding past the plunging carriage. At the last moment my mind began to work and I turned sharply to the right. The coach sped past me, missing the car by four or five inches. I could smell the sweat of the horses and hear the creaking of leather.
When I had calmed down, I continued up the hill. It must have been a fraternity or club prank, I thought, college madmen from Harvard or B.U. But after I had gone on no more than a quarter mile, I realized that it was very late for that sort of prank — past three in the morning — and that you don’t race stagecoaches downhill. They crash. And I could not be sure that I had seen it at all. So I turned around and went back. I followed the road five miles the way I had come — long enough to catch up, more than enough to find the wreck. The road was empty. I went home and forgot about it. A year later, idly listening in my bath to a phone-in program about the supernatural, I heard a woman say that while she had been driving on a country road well out of Boston, she had turned up a hill late at night and seen a careering stagecoach racing toward her. My asthmatic heart nearly folded in half with shock. Driving, I still remember this. When the other world comes up and slaps me in the face, it will happen when I am in a car.
Teagarden’s the name, pomposity’s the game.
I was sweating and in bad temper. I was perhaps thirty miles from Arden, and my engine was rattling, and on the back seat noisily shook a carton of books and papers. I had to do that book or the Advancement and Promotions Committee — seven well-padded scholars on Long Island — would fire me. I was hoping that my cousin Duane, who lives in the newer farmhouse on what used to be my grandparents’ farm, would have got my telegram and had the older wooden house cleaned up for my arrival. Duane being himself, this seemed unlikely. When I reached a town I knew called Plainview, I stopped at a lunchroom for chili, though I was not hungry. Eating is affirmation, greed is life, food is antidote. When Joan died, I stood up beside the refrigerator and gobbled an entire Sarah Lee creamcake.
Plainview is where my family always stopped for lunch when we drove to the farm, and I had to make a longish detour to get there. In those days, it was a hamlet of one street lined with feed stores, a five and ten, a hotel, a Rexall pharmacy, a tavern, our diner. Now I saw that the town had grown, and the second feed store had been replaced by the Roxy cinema, which itself had bankrupted so that the marquee read C ARLTO HESTO IN HUR. Good work, Carlto! The diner was externally unchanged, but when I stepped inside I saw that the churchy wooden booths along the wall had yielded to new banquettes padded with that plastic luncheonette leather which is forever gummy. I sat at the far end of the counter. The waitress idled over, leaned on the counter staring at me and missed a few beats with her gum while I gave my order. I could smell baby oil and tooth decay, mostly the latter.
Though she smelled of nothing of the kind. As I’ve said, I have olfactory hallucinations. I smell people even when I’m talking to them on the telephone. In a German novel I once read about this phenomenon, and there it seemed almost charming, pleasant, a sort of gift. But it is not charming or pleasant, it is disquieting and unsettling. Most of the odors I catch hook the nerves.
She wandered away, scribbling on a pad, and rejoined a group of men attending to a radio at the other end of the counter. The men were huddled together, ignoring their plates of hash and steaming cups of coffee. I could see it was a matter of serious local interest, both by the men’s attitudes — anger in those, hunched shoulders, anger and bafflement — and by the broken phrases which came to me from the radio. “No progress in the shocking… discovery of the twelve… a bare eight hours since…” Some of the men glanced sullenly at me, as if I hadn’t the right to hear even so much.
When the waitress brought my bowl of chili I asked, “What the devil’s going on?”
One of the men, a skinny clerk in rimless glasses and a shiny double-breasted suit, clapped his hat on his elongated pink head and left the diner, slamming the screen door.
The waitress blankly watched him go and then looked down at her stained blue uniform. When she brought her gaze up to my face I saw that she was older than the high-school girl I had taken her for; her sprayed white bubble of hair and bright lipstick rode uneasily on her aging face. “You’re not from around here,” she said.
“That’s right,” I said. “What happened?”
“Where’re you from?”
“New York,” I said. “Why does it matter?”
“It matters, friend,” came a male voice from down the counter, and I swiveled to look at a burly young moonface with thinning blond hair and a high corrugated forehead. The others grouped behind him, pretending not to hear, but I could see their bicep muscles tensing in their short-sleeve shirts. My friend with the football forehead leaned forward on his stool, palms on knees so that his forearms bulged.
I deliberately took a spoonful of chili. It was warm and bland. Greed is life. “Okay,” I said, “it matters. I’m from New York. If you don’t want to tell me what’s happening you don’t have to. I can hear it on the radio for myself.”
“Now apologize to Grace-Ellen.”
I was dumbfounded. “For what?”
“For swearing.”
I looked at the waitress. She was leaning against the wall behind the counter. I thought she was trying to look offended.
“If I swore at you, I apologize,” I said.
The men sat staring at me. I could feel violence thickening about them, not sure which way to flow or whether to flow at all.
“Get the shit out of here, wiseass,” the young man said. “Wait. Frank, get the number of bigshot’s car.” He held up a massive palm in my direction while a small man in suspenders, a natural flunky, jumped up from his stool and ran out and stood in front of my car. Through the window I saw him pull a piece of paper from his shirt pocket and write on it.