The class was reading Moby Dick and most of them liked it. There was some interesting argument, growing heated toward the end. Bauer was cheered.
Emerson had bombed, save for a mild response to Transcendentalism, Hawthorne had bored them, and he didn't think Poe or Crane would be much to their taste. He had some hope for Twain.
At the end of the hour a handful lingered to keep at it, but they lost momentum before long, reluctant to spend their own, free time this way.
They said Goodbye, Professor Bauer and So long. Alex as they left.
Kathy Lippman was the last. She approached his desk while he was closing his briefcase.
"That was really a good class today," she said. "You got everyone going."
Bauer smiled. "Thanks. It worked out."
Kathy Lippman was pale-skinned and had fine long brown hair. Her breasts were big and she was just slightly overweight. There was an ingenuousness about her. "I like the way you teach. I never thought I could get interested in these people, but you opened them up for me and I am. And I, well, I wanted to thank you."
She seemed to mean it. "I appreciate it," he said. "You're handling the material well."
That pleased her. "I've gone ahead and finished Moby Dick," she said.
"I couldn't wait. But actually, from the first couple of pages I thought it was going to be a dull Christian sermon."
"Dull, no. But it is a sermon if sermons are statements of personal moral vision."
"When Ahab says, "I now know thee, thou clear spirit, and I now know that thy right worship is de france-"' "Yes." It was too curt. She was wounded.
"Am I holding you up? I'm sorry, I just wanted to clear some things…" Her voice ended in embarrassment.
"No," he said. "That's all right."
But she wasn't to be convinced. Or else she saw some value in being aggrieved. He found the speculation ugly of himself. "We'll get to it in class," she said.
"If we don't, make an appointment and we'll talk it over."
"Okay."
It wasn't enough. He was annoyed with himself. You could fuck students up by turning them away when they were excited by something.
"Which way are you going?" he asked. "I'm heading past the Science Building."
"Okay. I've got some stuff to do there. I'll walk over with you."
They went down the stairs and out. Students were sunning in the quad.
A group was playing cards, a few lazed reading books. Kathy was wearing perfume, some kind of musk base. It was pleasant.
"Where did you teach before?" she said.
"I didn't."
He was suddenly sorry he'd encouraged her. He had nothing to say about himself. He appreciated Wintergreen for one reason: it imposed a structure in which he had to speak and express ideas, even if they were the ideas of others. He had little to say from within his own being.
Wintergreen was a small non grading school, a surrogate college, a kind of halfway house for the troublesome, lazy, or slow children of the academically oriented. The school accepted fiunkouts, dropouts, chemical-eaters, freaks, social cripples, and the stunned and unable.
Most left after a term or two and those who did come alive intellectually tended to transfer somewhere else to take their degree.
It demanded enough of Bauer, but not too much. When he was alone he listened to music or he watched television. He slept nine and ten hours a night. Sometimes he read detective novels.
"No?" Kathy said. "Oh that's right, I heard. You used to work for a newspaper or something."
"Yes."
They walked in silence. A boy followed Kathy with his eyes. She was attractive, Bauer realized. She moved with easy fluid coordination.
There was a casual and healthy femaleness about her. Bauer became self-conscious.
He was tall and gangly. The sections of himself seemed in uncomfortable alliance, necessarily vigilant over his next moves, hurrying into ragged cooperation to ensure that he could get around without banging into things or falling on his face. His hair wanted to hang down his forehead so he kept it short. He hadn't lost any, but it was graying, random strands here and there. He had a long, bony, boyish face. When he was younger women had wanted to mother him, and he'd traded on that often enough. He didn't like it now; there were no longer any boyish pleasures. He was thin, and at times he'd gone on months-long caloric orgies trying to hang flesh on his frame. He wore glasses. No matter what frames he tried, the glasses, on his face, made him look intense. That raised specific expectations in others.
In the past he'd sometimes tried to struggle into the jacket of those expectations, but he was never successful, and it made him feel a poseur, and people became disappointed in him.
Kathy was comfortable in the silence. He thought he heard her humming.
He wondered at it.
They came abreast of the Science Building. Kathy said, "Hey, do you smoke?"
"Yes," he said, perplexed.
She took a pack of cigarettes from her pocket and shook out a joint, and then he understood. Lord, the gulfs between people.
"Here." She passed it with little attention toward concealment. "It's very good Jamaican, very up. Thanks for being terrific. You're real.
Have a good time, see you Monday." She went up the stairs of the science building.
He looked at her ass. It was firm, tense even, beneath the taut fabric of her jeans. He imagined a softness of down at the base of her spine, a sharp line of definition at the bottom of her cheeks, where the thighs began. He became partly erect, an exclusively physical response. Germ plasm drove the body, the self was only a hitchhiker.
He walked off the campus down Wolsey Road. His home was a mile away.
He'd bought a ten-speed bike when he'd moved here-good for the heart and lungs, pleasurable use of the muscles-but he walked when the weather wasn't vicious, and even in the cold and rain, because walking consumed more time.
The road followed the Macamook River on his left. Between road and river lay a strip of trees and scrub brush. There was forest on the right, broken by an occasional small meadow, and two little streams passed through conduits beneath the road to enter the river. Mountains rose in the four directions. Scattered clouds were moving in from the west and the falling sun tinted their underbellies pink.
Am I real? he thought. Kathy Lippman thinks so. She gave me dope to prove it. Getting stoned is homage to the real. Is that it? This macadam, the bark of the ash trees, those are real. The hawk or whatever it is up there.
Flags, love, white whales and curved space. Squirrels in rut. Time.
Sit on my face, Miss Lippman, and know the enamel reality of my teeth.
He looked for a distraction. There was nothing credible. He put a blade of grass in his mouth. He chewed, concentrated on the taste, and refused questions. He spat the grass out when it went bland, and finished the distance whistling peppy Sousa marches.
The prefabricated log cabin he rented came with six acres, one acre of which had been cleared of every tree, and it was in the center of that patch of nakedness that the cabin stood. Ornamental shrubs had been planted, but they weren't hardy enough for the climate and were always ailing, piebald with rusty dead needles. The cabin logs were clumsily joined. He'd had to chink them in places and along the ill-framed windows with insulation. Mice carried off pieces of it for nests. Like many others along the Macamook, the leach field of his septic system seeped wastes into the river. The county health board warned that this section of the river would soon be unsuitable for swimming or fishing, but, because of the expense, there was little support for a corrective program. A snowmobile trail had been cut through the nearby woods and machines roared over it through the winter shattering the silence and panicking wildlife. In March, a drunk had plunged through rotting ice atop the Macamook and drowned.