I contemplated this koan, or didn't, for just another year. My graduate studies took me to the University of California at Irvine, three thousand grateful miles from Corcoran, now Super Goat Man's province. I didn't see him, or think of him again, for more than a decade.
THE SWEETEST student I ever had was an Italian girl named Angela Verucci. Tall, bronze-skinned, with a quizzical, slightly humorless cast, dressed no matter the weather in neat pantsuits or skirts with stockings, in heavy tortoise-shell glasses frames and with her blond hair knit in a tight, almost Japanese bun, her aura of seriousness and her Mediterranean luster outshone the blandly corn-fed and T-shirted students in whose midst she had materialized. Angela Verucci was not so much a girl, really: twenty-four years old, she'd already studied at Oxford before taking the Reeves Fellowship that had brought her to America. She spoke immaculate English, and though her accreditation was a mess, truly she was nearly as accomplished a medievalist as I was the day she appeared in my class. This was at Oregon State University, in Corvallis, where I'd been given a two-year postdoc after my six years at Irvine. Oregon State was the third stop in Angela Verucci's American tour — she'd also spent a year at Columbia and, as it happened, a term at Corcoran.
What does a single, thirty-year-old history professor do with the sweetest student he's ever had? He waits until the end of the semester, files a Circular of Intent with the Faculty Appropriateness Committee, and in early spring asks her to hike with him to the highest point in the county, a lookout over three mountain ranges called Sutter's Parlor. Angela Verucci arrived in heels, perhaps not completely grasping the sense of the invitation. We forsook the ascent in favor of a glass of Oregon Pinot Noir on a restaurant patio perched on the Willamette River — near enough, for the Brooklynite and the Sicilian, to an expedition.
We were married two years later, on the Italian island itself. The ceremony was deferentially Catholic; I didn't care. The wider circle of my acquaintances learned the happy details in a mass e-mail. Then Angela and I returned to our quiet rented bungalow in New Brunswick, New Jersey. I was at Rutgers then, on a second postdoc, and hungry for a tenure-track position. My job interviews were hardly unsuccessfuclass="underline" I was never summarily dismissed, instead always called back for second and third visits, always asked to teach a sample class. Afterward, polite notes flew back and forth, candidate and committee reassuring one another of how fine the experience had been, how glad we both were to have met. Only I never got a job.
So by the time I got the invitation to interview for a position at Corcoran, the New England pastures of my alma mater didn't appear such a poor fate. It was the week of Halloween, the weather glorious, so at the very least the day of the interview would be a nice jaunt. We left early, to roam a few New Hampshire back roads, then ate a picnic lunch beside Corcoran Pond before I checked in for an afternoon of meetings.
Corcoran looked implacable, though I knew it was changed. The school had been through financial shake-ups and tenure scandals; those had, in turn, purged most of the administrators and faculty I'd known. But the grounds, the crab apple trees and white clapboard, were eternal as a country-store calendar. While Angela took a memory tour, heading for her old dorm, I turned up for my scheduled tribunal. There, I was debriefed by peers, a couple of them younger than myself. The room was full of the usual tensions: some of these people had an investment in my candidacy, some had bets on other tables. No one was in the least sentimental about my status as alumnus — that was reserved, I supposed, for the dinner tonight, arranged in my honor at the president's house. After a finishing round of polite handclasps I was ferried to the president's office. On top of tonight's dinner, she'd also wanted to meet me alone. I figured it was a good sign.
The president asked how I'd liked the interview; we made this and other small talk. She asked about my years at Corcoran, which I painted in rosy tones. Then she said: “Did you know Super Goat Man when you were a student here?”
“Sure,” I said. “I mean, I never took a class with him.”
“He surprised me by asking to join us at the dinner tonight — he usually doesn't bother with faculty socializing anymore.”
“He's still here?” I was amazed Super Goat Man, of all people, had threaded his way through so many personnel shake-ups.
“Yes, though he's reduced to a kind of honorary presence. He doesn't actually teach now. I don't know if he'd be capable of it. But he's beloved. The students joke that he can be spotted strolling across Commons lawn twice a semester. And that if you want to get any time with him, you can join him on the stroll.”
“He recognized my name?”
“He seemed to, yes. You should prepare yourself. He's quite infirm.”
“How — how old is he?”
“Measured in years, I don't know. But there's been an accelerated aging process. You'll see.”
Perhaps superheroism was a sort of toxin, like a steroid, one with a punitive cost to the body. I mused on this as I departed the president's office, crossed the Commons, and headed through the parking lot and downhill, to find the bench beside Corcoran Creek, a favorite spot, where Angela had said she'd wait. I saw my wife before she saw me, her feet tucked up on the slats, abandoned shoes beneath, her body curled around a big hardback biography of Rousseau. In the distance, dying October light drew long saddle-shaped curves on the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Suddenly I could picture us here for a long time, and picture it happily.
“How did it go?” she asked when she noticed me.
“Par: two friends, two enemies, one sleeper.”
“And the president?”
“Nice, but she wasn't giving anything away.” I put my hands on her shoulders. She closed the book.
“You seem distant,” Angela said. “Memories?”
“Yes.” In fact, I was thinking about Super Goat Man. I'd never before considered the sacrifice he'd made, enunciating his political views so long ago. Fruitlessly, it seemed to me. In exchanging his iconic, trapped-in-amber status, what had he gained? Had Super Goat Man really accomplished much outside the parameters of his comics? However unglamorous the chores, didn't kittens need rescuing from trees? Didn't Vest Man require periodic defeating? Why jettison Ralph Gersten if in the end all you attained was life as a campus mascot?
I wanted to convey some of this to Angela, but didn't know where to begin. “When you were here—” I began, then stopped.
“Yes?”
“Did you know Super Goat Man?”
I felt her stiffen. “Of course, everybody knew him,” she said.
“He's still here.” I watched her as I spoke. Her gaze dipped to the ground.
“You saw him?”
“No, but we will at dinner tonight.”
“How. . unexpected.” Now Angela was the one in fugue.
“Did you study with him?”
“He rarely taught. I attended a few talks.”
“I thought you didn't like that stuff.”
She shrugged. “I was curious.”
I waited to understand. Crickets had begun a chorus in the grass. The sun ebbed. Soon we'd need to visit our bed-and-breakfast outside campus, to change into fresh clothes for the dinner party. Ordinarily such gatherings were clumsy at best, with grudges incompletely smothered under the surface of the talk, among tenured faculty who knew one another far too well. Something in me now curdled at the prospect of this one. In fact, I'd begun to dread it.
“Everett.” There was something Angela wanted to tell me.
I made a preemptive guess. “Did you have some sort of something with Super Goat Man?” This was how she and I blundered through one another's past liaisons — we'd never been systematic.