Yet it was not truly him that Evelyn, sitting down, saw. Acoustics in the Kingdome whirlpooled the noise of the crowd, a rivering of voices that affected her, suddenly, like the pitch and roll of voices during service. It affected the way she watched Rudolph. She wondered: Who are these people? She caught her breath when, miscalculating his distance from his opponent, her husband stepped sideways into a roundhouse kick with lots of snap — she heard the cloth of his opponent’s gi crack like a gunshot when he threw the technique. She leaned forward, gripping the huge purse on her lap when Rudolph recovered and retreated from the killing to the neutral zone, and then, in a wide stance, rethought strategy. This was not the man she’d slept with for twenty years. Not her hypochondriac Rudolph who had to rest and run cold water on his wrists after walking from the front stairs to the fence to pick up the Seattle Times. She did not know him, perhaps had never known him, and now she never would, for the man on the floor, the man splashed with sweat, rising on the ball of his rear foot for a flying kick — was he so foolish he still thought he could fly? — would outlive her; he’d stand healthy and strong and think of her in a bubble, one hand on her headstone, and it was all right, she thought, weeping uncontrollably, it was all right that Rudolph would return home after visiting her wet grave, clean out her bedroom, the pillboxes and paperback books, and throw open her windows to let her sour, rotting smell escape, then move a younger woman’s things onto the floor space darkened by her color television, her porcelain chamber pot, her antique sewing machine. And then Evelyn was on her feet, unsure why, but the crowd had stood suddenly to clap, and Evelyn clapped, too, though for an instant she pounded her gloved hands together instinctively until her vision cleared, the momentary flash of retinal blindness giving way to a frame of her husband, the postman, twenty feet off the ground in a perfect flying kick that floored his opponent and made a Japanese judge who looked like Odd job shout “ippon”—one point — and the fighting in the farthest ring, in herself, perhaps in all the world, was over.
ALĒTHIA
God willing, I’m going to tell you a love story. A skeptical old man, whose great forehead and gray forked beard most favor (when I flatter myself) those of that towering sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois, I am hardly a man to conjure a fabulation so odd in its transfiguration of things, so strange, so terrifying (thus it now seems to me) that it belongs on the pale lips of the poetic genius who wrote Essentials and that hallucinatory prose-poem called Cane. But even though I’m an old man (I know my faults: failing memory, an infernal Faustian leer), I can still tell a first-rate tale of romance.
The girl always came late to my evening seminar — Kant this semester — sashaying seductively, pulled into the room by rental-library books held close to her chest, clomping in black leather boots around the long table to sit, her brown knees pressed together, left of my lectern. When she first “appeared” to me, I believe I was stalking Kant, thumbs hooked in my vest, by way of a playful verse attributed to Bishop Berkeley:
There was a young man who felt God
Must find it exceedingly odd
When he finds that this tree
Continues to be
When there’s no one about in the Quad.
“Dear sir, your astonishment’s odd;
I am always about in the Quad.
And, therefore, this tree
Will continue to be
As observed by yours, faithfully, God.”
Lecturing, I seldom noticed her, only a dark blur, a whiff of sandalwood, but this winter, after thirty years of teaching, years as outwardly calm as those of a monk or contemplative, devoted to books, my study of Kant led to a nearly forgotten philosopher named Max Scheler, who said — and this shook me deeply—“Contemplation of essence, the fundamental approach to Being peculiar to metaphysical knowledge, demands an attitude of loving devotion,” so yes, I did see Wendy Barnes, but with the flash of clear vision, the focus, the gasp of recognition that slaps you, suddenly, when a tree drawing in a child’s book (the dome of leaves, I mean) recomposes itself as a face. My mouth wobbled. If I had been standing, I would have staggered. I forgot my lecture; I sent my Kant scholars home.
Legging it back to my office in Padelford Hall, a building as old—so I put it to myself—as a medieval fortress, I could not pull my thoughts together. Shame, I thought. O shameful to have hot flashes for a student. My room of papers (half-finished books that had collapsed on me in mid-manuscript, or changed as I was chasing them), closed ’round me comfortably when I slumped behind my desk, flipping through my gradebook. The girl Wendy, an Equal Opportunity Program student, was failing — no fault of mine — but it saddened me all the same, and now I suppose I must tell you why.
Time being short, I must explain briefly, hoping not to bore you, that a Negro professor is, although reappointed and tenured, a kind of two-reel comedy. Like his students, like Wendy, he looks back to the bleak world of black Chicago (in my case), where his spirit, if you will, fought to free itself — as Hegel’s anxious Spirit struggles against matter — from a life that led predictably to either (a) drugs, (b) a Post Office job, (c) Marion Prison, (d) Sunset Cemetery (all black), or (e) the ooga-booga of Christianity. And what of college? There, like a thief come to table, he hungrily grabs crumbs of thought from their genuine context, reading Hume for his reasoning on the self, blinking that author’s racial slurs, “feeling his twoness,” as Du Bois so beautifully put it in a brilliant stroke of classic Dualism, “an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two warring ideals in one dark body.” Regardless, he puts his shoulder to the wheel, pushing doggedly on as I did: a dreamy, first-generation student in a paint-by-numbers curriculum, fed by books for Negro uplift — the modern equivalent, you might say, of Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians (which I swore by). Not exactly biography, these odd books from the Negro press, and with titles like Lives That Lift—written by blacks to inspire blacks — but myths about men who tried, in their own small way, to create lives that could be, if disciplined, the basis of universal law. He embraces — and this is the killing part — the lofty balderdash of his balding, crabbed-faced teachers about sober Truth and Science when they, shaken by Wittgenstein, had in fact lost faith and were madly humping their teaching assistants.
So, I mean to say, that Scheler, the night before in my study, pulled me up short. Lately, I live alone in three untidy, low-ceilinged rooms I rent in Evanston near Northwestern University. I get up at three each morning, read Hebrew, Greek, or Sanskrit at my roll-top desk, but no tabloids or lurid newspapers. Nights, I soak in a hot bath of Epsom salts, never forget my thought exercises — perceptual tricks pulled from Husserl’s Ideen—and eat my dinners (no meat or eggs) in a nearby diner, slowly because I have an ulcer, bad digestion, and a bathroom cabinet spilling open with pills for migraines, stomach cramps, and potions (Dr. Hobson’s Vegetable Prescription, McClean’s Tar Wine Compound) for rest. At fifty, I sleep poorly. So it has been for years. Barricaded in by books, bleary with insomnia, I read Scheler’s Philosophical Perspectives, my medicines beside me on my desk, and it came to me, sadly — I felt sad, at least, as if I’d misunderstood something any salesgirl knew instinctively — that living for knowledge, ignoring love, as I had, was wrong, because love — transcendental love—was knowledge. True enough, “love” is on the lips of every sentimental schoolgirl (or boy), and cheapened by maudlin songwriters. A thoughtful man doubts, and rightly so, these vulgar reports.