Edgar looked bent, used and ill. In short, perfect, “one of ours” among the faculty, young and old. Even his former “rough time” with drugs and drink worked for him, and his jazz name was never forgotten. Those narcoleptic from two glasses of wine could hardly believe he was alive and were glad he’d got through to bring forth more good things. They trusted him more than he did.
Gradually, though, Edgar did get better. He took to running on the track in the hot sun and at night he slept like a babe. His cough disappeared and his ulcer was cured — he became near lotused-out by well-being. The people around him were good and nothing was ruined by irony, except for Auntie Hadley. He could shake hands and mean it. Little beautiful things. But watch your pious little disease, Edgar, the counselor’s voice had warned. It’ll leap in good times.
Edgar unearthed his notes on the bums. With an appalling gloom he found them well written, though barely legible. They were dangerous, like his horns. He was another man, then, in his whiskey insight. How long could he go on being a mute fraud among these good people? Well, he’d practically whispered to the chairman that he was going to write about bums for his thesis — whether Chicagoan, Russian, or Southern, he didn’t know yet. But were bums all right as a subject? The chairman thought it excellent. Think of the therapy for Edgar, too. This was his life’s inevitable opus, wasting nothing. Hardly any of the profs had experience with a big city. The man was so happy, Edgar felt even more guilty. He did not want to write about bums any more than he wanted to play trombone. This was not how he would be significant.
In the spring the social sciences party was held on the ground floor of a Victorian bed-and-breakfast hotel made over by two bored doctors’ wives who became livelier in the role of perennial hostesses. Both of the wives were flirts, sexually attractive but chaste, fired by their Perdido Bay suntans. They danced their narrow waists, merry calves, and clapping sandals over the swank oak-plank hallways and up to the “boudoirs” above. There Edgar dreamed he might surprise them with the salty fluids of his mouth: desire was grinding awfully on him now, the gates thrown open by his health. He’d have to watch it. The wives served wine and cheese on silver trays worth more than the annual salaries of most La Grange faculty. One wife when asked about her husband shouted, “Oh, that dumb old bum!” Edgar hoped the man would die soon from overwork so she could kneel in front of him with money in hand, dragging on his jeans — holy smoke. Quit. She would find Edgar “darned alive!” He’d show her deep, rare animal need.
Could he awaken her senses, perhaps in a shack by the railroad, with only a naked lightbulb and a soiled mattress on which she struggled rump up? Bum’s dream, sot’s hope. He was waylaid, beyond himself. The faculty men around Sally had looks of civilized attraction, he noticed. She seemed nothing but a pleasant ornament of a rousing spring day, something to break up shoptalk. Oh, Snooky, Snooky.
Edgar’s aunt was at the party, too, hopefully lost in a blockade of deaf people. She’d insisted on coming. He did not know what she expected from the event. Maybe to spy on him, the fraud.
Great hell — Auntie Hadley was six feet away, under the archway, staring straight at him. For how long? He’d been caught in point-blank lust for married Sally. The old woman bored into him with distaste. In his hand he held a glass of nothing, a lemon-lime drink at which he now sipped, mortified. He pretended an aesthetic view of the premises. Whom did she expect, Plato? Since she was not mixing, not having a good time, what exactly did she want? To stalk the territory until she found something appreciably awful, like him?
He slouched away to the cheese. What she liked best, he thought, were fools in authority. Maybe she’d find a dean and nail his moronism for Edgar later. While he was tracking décolletage and secondarily a man who could be a chum like Parton or Smith, anybody but another recovering chemical fraud stuffed with sincerity, their happiness right from the manual, he glanced over the crowd toward Hadley. She was holding her wine glass like a hatchet. Some old cowboy bum wisdom he’d once heard—“Small-breasted women are mean”—could not apply to her with her low great ones. No fury like a woman scorned: by her own parents, seeing their ugly duckling have no reprieve over time; by boys and men making rude comments; beaten back into her shell, sad little ducky, left to suffer among the natural beauties of Savannah; sad in the playroom with her gorgeous dolls, maybe beheading them, and her toy villages, setting them on fire. He was trying to achieve sympathy.
“You saw that lady?” came a girl’s voice below. It was the grad student who had touched him in the hall. He liked her looks, all fresh faced in her green party chemise, above the mode of faculty wives and her peers, who were deliberately nondescript. “She dresses so well. Must be somebody. An older Jackie Kennedy, except for the hump and the dog-ugly face.”
The girl was naughty but risking it, touching Edgar’s arm again for the first time in months, eyes bubbling, needing discipline.
“Ow, I’m sorry. Real rude. I’m half drunk.”
“It’s my aunt. My landlady, too. She’s making things easier for me here.”
“Truly sorry. Let me tell you something better. My friend knows two deaf-mutes who were looking at Pres Reagan one day on television. They began laughing like crazy. Friend asked them what it was. ‘He’s lying!’ they signaled. They knew.”
As for décolletage, this girl Emma Dean was well fixed. Either that or boosted. Her cleavage practically spoke to him and he was positive she knew it. It made him happy.
“I work with the deaf. Lifelong dissertation there, Edgar boy. They know many secret things we don’t.”
“I believe you.”
“I know some of your secrets, too. I’m a busybody, probably bound for sociology, and I can see that you’re not too happy here, believing it’s beneath you and not Northwestern. You know too much about music and life, and worst of all, poor you, fame. You’ve got an honest, seasoned face. But with your slump and the hair in your face, you’re so. . morose. Like you’re expecting defeat any second. . Hate me, then. I’ve been improving the world since I was a little tapper.”
“No. You seem kind.” He straightened up and pulled back his forelock. “I’ve hardly seen you,” he lied, spying her every other day, wishing.
“You looked drunk. That’s why I came over and embarrassed myself. I’m drunk. My glasses are all fogged up, too.” She was even more friendly when she took them off. “Do you expect a lot from yourself?”
“Maybe just the rote stuff, for a while.”
“My parents were nothing. Daddy at the dry cleaners his whole life, and mother had to work — white domestic help. Imagine that in La Grange. We’d drive past all the great white mansions and spreading magnolias. I wanted to be somebody. Even now, I’m not going to be just. . sociology. They’re not going to be able to study me, class me. Hey, I was a virgin till I was twenty-five. You heard of that lately? Not because I was any holy-roly, either. I knew I’d enjoy sexual intercourse with the right person. My orgasms come very easy and I cry out like a panther. But. .”
Her lips were dry and she stopped. She licked them and took a breath. Edgar noticed her eyes were moist. She was almost crying.
“Get me some more wine, please.”
He got it posthaste, hoping she wouldn’t use up her drunkenness on somebody else. He hadn’t been near a woman in five years.
“I’m all ears.”
“See,” she wept a little. “We lived in a brick bunker on a bare yard at the edge of town. There were eight of us with about the money and room for two. I wore my brother’s awful brown shoes in ninth grade when it really, really mattered.”