I moved around the bench, to try and look her in the eye.
“Just an — affair. Nothing.”
“What's nothing?”
She shrugged, and flipped her fingers as though dispelling a small fog. “We fooled around a few times. It was stupid.”
I felt the poison of bitterness leach into my bloodstream. “I don't know why but I find that totally disgusting.”
“Oh, Everett.” Angela raised her arms, moved to assuage me, knowing as she did my visceral possessiveness, the bolt of jealousy that shot through me when contemplating her real past, anytime it arose. Of course, she couldn't understand my special history with Super Goat Man. How could she if I didn't? I'd never even mentioned him.
“I was a silly girl.” She spoke gently. “And I didn't know you yet.”
Unsatisfied, I wished her to declare that the encounter had been abusive, an ethical violation. Not that I had any ground to stand on. Anyway, she was Italian in this, as in all things. It was just an affair.
“Do you want to skip the dinner?”
She scowled. “That's silly. He wouldn't even remember. And I don't care. It's really nothing, my darling. My love.”
At the president's house Super Goat Man was the last to arrive, so I was allowed to fantasize briefly that I'd been spared. The sight, when he did come in, was startling. He'd not only aged, but shrunk — I doubted if he was even five feet tall. He was, as ever, barefooted, and wore white muslin pajamas, with purple piping. The knees of the pajama bottoms were smudged with mud. As he entered the room, creeping in among us as we stood with our cocktail glasses, I quickly saw the reason for the smudges: as Super Goat Man's rickety steps faltered he dropped briefly to all fours. There, on the ground, he'd shake himself, almost like a wet dog. Then he'd rise again, on palsied limbs.
No one took notice of this. The guests, the other faculty, were inured, polite. In this halting manner Super Goat Man made his way past us, to the dining room. Apparently he wasn't capable of mingling, or even necessarily of speech. He took a seat at the long table, his bunched face, his squinting eyes and wrinkled horns, nearly at the level of his place setting. So Super Goat Man's arrival curtailed cocktail hour, as we began drifting in behind him, almost guiltily. The president's husband showed us to our places, which had been carefully designated, though an accommodation was evidently being made for Super Goat Man, who'd plopped down where he liked and wasn't to be budged. I was at the right hand of the president, and the left of the chair of the hiring committee. Again, a good sign. Angela sat across from me, Super Goat Man many places away, at the other end of the table.
I actually managed to forget him for the duration of the meal. He was, so far as I could tell, silent at his feed, and the women on either side of him turned to their other partners, or conversed across the width of the table. Toward the end we were served a course of cognac and dessert, and the president's husband passed around cigars, which he bragged were Cuban. Some of the women fled their chairs to avoid the smoke; other guests rose and mingled again in the corners of the room. It was in this interval of disarrangement that Super Goat Man pushed himself off his chair and made his way to the seat at my left, which the president had vacated. He had to collapse to his knees only once on the way, and he offered no evidence of sacrificed dignity as he rose from the floor.
Angela remained in her seat. Unlike any of the American women, she'd accepted a cigar, and now leaned it into the flame of a lighter proffered by an older professor she'd been entertaining throughout the meal. Her eyes found mine as Super Goat Man approached. Her expression was curious, and not unsympathetic.
Super Goat Man prodded my arm with a finger. I turned and considered him. Black pupils gleamed behind a hedge of eyebrows. His resplendent tufts had thinned and spread — the hair of his face had been redistributed, to form a merciful gauze across his withered features.
“I. . knew. . your. . father.” His voice was mossy, sepulchral.
“Yes,” I said simply, keeping my voice low. No one was paying us any attention, yet. Not apart from Angela.
“You. . remember. .?”
“Of course.”
“We. . love. . jazz. .”
I wondered whether he meant my father or, somehow, me. I had in fact over the years come around to my father's love of jazz, though my preference was not so much Ornette Coleman and Rahsaan Roland Kirk as Duke Ellington and Fletcher Henderson.
“. . poker. .”
“He cleaned you out,” I reminded him.
“Yezz. . good times. . beautiful women. .” He struggled, swallowed hard, blinked. “All this controversy. . not worth it. .”
“My father was never involved in any controversy,” I heard myself say, though I knew Super Goat Man was speaking only of himself, his lost career.
“No. . absolutely true. . knew how to live. .”
Angela had leaned back, pursing her lips to savor the cigar. I might have noticed the room's gabble of conversation had dampened somewhat — might have noticed it sooner, I mean.
“So. . many. . hangovers. .”
“But you and I have something in common besides my father,” I told Super Goat Man.
“Yezz. . yezz. .?”
“Of course we do,” I began, and though I now understood we had the attention of the entire room, that the novelty of Super Goat Man's reminiscences had drawn every ear, I found myself unable to quit before I finished the thought. Further, having gained their attention, I allowed my voice to rise to a garrulous, plummy tone, as if I were starring in dinner theater. Before the line was half out of my mouth, I knew that the words, by airing the sort of laundry so desperately repressed in a community as precious as Corcoran, damned my candidacy. But that was a prize I no longer sought. Broader repercussions I could only guess at. My wife's eyes were on me now, her cigar's blunt tip flaring. I'd answer to her, later, if she gave me the chance.
It was the worst thing I could think to say. The impulse had formed in the grip of sexual jealousy, of course. But before it crossed my lips I knew my loathing had its origins in an even deeper place, the mind of a child wondering at his father's own susceptibility to the notion of a hero.
What I said was this: “I once saw you rescue a paper clip.”
The National Anthem
1/12/03
Dear M,
Our long letters are pleasing to me, but they do come slowly. Lulled by the intrinsic properties of e-mail, I've been willing to let most of my other correspondence slide down that slippery slope, into hectic witty ping-pong. But our deep connection, for twenty years or more now unrefreshed or diluted or whatever it would be by regular communications in person or on the phone, is precious to me, and demands more traditional letters, even if those mean long gaps. I suppose three-month breaks are not so much in a friendship once treated so casually that we let nearly a decade go by, eh?
You asked about A. We've finally broken it off, the end of a nearly three-year chapter in my life, and a secret chapter as well. For, apart from you, safely remote in Japan, I've confided in no one. Her horrible marriage survived us, a fact that would have seemed absurd to me at the beginning, if some time traveler had come back to whisper it in my ear. The break was mutual — mutual enough to give it that name — and I'd be helpless to guess who is the more scarred. We won't be friends, but we were never going to be. Dissolving a secret affair is eerily simple: A and I only had to quit lying that we didn't exist.
Did I tell you about “The National Anthem”? I don't think so. This was the first night we stole together from her husband, the first intentional rendezvous, at a bed-and-breakfast outside Portland, Maine. A always traveled with a Walkman and a wallet of CDs, and that night, as we lay entwined in a twee canopy bed, she insisted on playing me a song, though there was no way for us to listen to it together. Instead she cued it up and watched me while it played, her ungroggy eyes inspecting me from below the horizon of my chest, mine a posture of submission: James Carr singing “The Dark End of the Street.” I recognized it, but I'd never listened closely before. It's a song of infidelity and hopeless love, full of doomed certainty that the lovers, the love, will fail.