At the end of his second semester of idleness he requested a formal counseling session with me. Here it comes, I thought. He’s going to tell me where his work is leading, and he’ll ask me if I think it’s morally proper for him to continue, and then I’ll be on the spot. I came to the session loaded with pills.
He said, “Leo, I’d like to resign from the University.”
I was shaken. “You have a better offer?”
“Don’t be absurd. I’m leaving physics.”
“Leaving — physics — ?”
“And getting married. Do you know Shirley Frisch? You’ve seen me with her. We’re getting married a week from Sunday. It’ll be a small wedding, but I’d like you to come, Leo.”
“And then?”
“We’ve bought a house in Arizona. In the desert near Tucson. We’ll be moving there.”
“What will you do, Jack?”
“Meditate. Write a little. There are some philosophical questions I want to consider.”
“Money?” I asked. “Your University salary—”
“I’ve got a small inheritance that somebody invested wisely a long time ago. Shirley’s also got a private income. It’s nothing much, but it’ll let us get by. We’re dropping out of society. I felt I couldn’t hide it from you any more.”
I spread my hands on my desk and contemplated my knuckles for a long moment. I felt as though webs had begun to sprout between my fingers. Eventually I said, “What about your thesis, Jack?”
“Discontinued.”
“You were so close to finishing it.”
“I’m at a total dead end. I can’t go on.” His eyes met mine and remained fixed. Was he telling me that he didn’t dare go on? Was his withdrawal at this point a matter of scientific defeat or of moral doubt? I wanted to ask. I waited for him to tell me. He said nothing. His smile was rigid and unconvincing. Finally he said, “Leo, I don’t think I’d ever do anything worthwhile in physics.”
“That isn’t true. You—”
“I don’t think I even want to do anything worthwhile in physics.”
“Oh.”
“Will you forgive me? Will you still be my friend? Our friend?”
I came to the wedding. It turned out I was one of four guests. The bride was a girl I knew only vaguely; she was about twenty-two, a pretty blonde, a graduate student in sociology. God knows how Jack had ever met her, with his nose pushed into his notebooks all the time, but they seemed very much in love. She was tall, almost to Jack’s shoulder, with a great cascade of golden hair like finespun wire, and honey-tanned skin, and big dark eyes, and a supple, athletic body. Beyond a doubt she was beautiful, and in her short white wedding gown she looked as radiant as any bride has ever looked. The ceremony was brief and nonsectarian. Afterwards we all went to dinner, and toward sundown the bride and groom quietly disappeared. I felt a curious emptiness that night as I went home. I rummaged among old papers for lack of anything else to do, and came upon some early drafts of Jack’s thesis; I stood staring at the scrawled notations for a long while, comprehending nothing.
A month later they invited me to be their guest for a week in Arizona.
I thought it was a pro forma invitation and politely declined, thinking I was expected to decline. Jack phoned and insisted I come. His face was as earnest as ever, but the little greenish screen clearly showed that the tension and haggardness had been ironed from it. I accepted. Their house, I found, was perfectly isolated, with miles of tawny desert on all sides. It was a fortress of comfort in all that bleakness. Jack and Shirley were both deeply tanned, magnificently happy, and wonderfully attuned to each other. They led me on a long walk into the desert my first day, laughing as jackrabbits or desert rats or long green lizards scuttered past us. They stooped to show me small gnarled plants close to the barren soil, and took me to a towering saguaro cactus whose massive corrugated green arms cast the only shade in view.
Their home became a refuge for me. It was understood that I was free to come at any time on a day’s notice, whenever I felt the need to escape. Although they extended invitations from time to time, they insisted that I avail myself of the privilege of inviting myself. I did. Sometimes six or ten months went by without my making the journey to Arizona; sometimes I came for five or six weekends in a row. There was never any regular pattern. My need to visit them depended wholly upon my inner weather. Their weather never changed, within or without; their days were forever sunny. I never saw them quarrel or even mildly disagree. Not until the day that Vornan-19 careened into their life was there any gulf visible between them.
Gradually our relationship deepened into something subtle and intimate. I suppose I was essentially an uncle figure to them, since I was in my mid-forties, Jack was not yet thirty, and Shirley hardly into her twenties; yet the tie was deeper than that. One would have to call it love. There was nothing overtly sexual in it, though I would gladly have slept with Shirley if we had met some other way; certainly I found her physically attractive, and the attraction increased as time and the sun burnished from her some of the charming immaturity that made me at first think of her as a girl and not as a woman. But though my relationship to Jack and Shirley was a triangular one, with emotional vectors leading in many paths, it never threatened to break down into a seamy experiment in adultery. I admired Shirley, but I did not — I think — envy Jack his physical possession of her. At night, when I heard the sounds of pleasure sometimes coming from their bedroom, my only reaction was one of delight in their happiness, even while I tossed in my own solitary bed. One time I brought a woman companion of my own to their place, with their approval; but it was a disaster. The chemistry of the weekend was all wrong. It was necessary for me to come alone, and oddly I did not feel condemned to celibacy even though my sharing of Shirley’s love with Jack fell short of physical union.
We grew so close that nearly all barriers fell. On the hot days — which meant most of the time — Jack was accustomed to going about in the nude. Why not? There was no one in the neighborhood to object, and he scarcely needed to feel inhibited in the presence of his wife and his closest friend. I envied him his freedom, but I did not imitate it, because it did not seem proper to expose myself in front of Shirley. Instead I wore shorts. It was a delicate matter, and they chose a characteristically delicate way to resolve it. One August day when the temperature was well above one hundred degrees and the sun seemed to take up a quarter of the sky, Jack and I were working outside the house, tending the little garden of desert plants they cherished so warmly. When Shirley emerged to bring us some beers, I saw that she had neglected to don the two strips of fabric that were her usual garments. She was quite casual about it: setting the tray down, offering me a beer, then handing one to Jack, and both of them totally relaxed all the while. The impact of her body on me was sudden but brief. Her ordinary daily costume had been so scant that the contours of her breasts and buttocks were no mysteries to me, and so it was purely a technicality, this crossing of the line between being covered and being revealed. My first impulse was to look away, as if I were an unexpected intruder coming upon her by surprise; but I sensed that this was precisely the inference she wished to destroy, and so I made a determined effort to equal her sangfroid. I suppose it sounds comic and preposterous, but I let my eyes travel deliberately down her bareness, as though some fine statuette had been presented to me for my admiration and I was showing my gratitude by examining it in detail. My eyes lingered on the only parts of her that were new to me: the pinkish mounds of her nipples, the golden triangle at her loins. Her body, ripe and full and lustrous, gleamed as though oiled in the bright midday sun, and she was evenly tanned throughout. When I had completed my solemn, foolish inspection, I downed half my beer, arose, and gravely peeled away my shorts.