“There’s more to it than their material circumstances. Nowadays — in your books nowadays — somehow they’re kind of morally — uh.” He was wilting. “Morally aloof.”
“Uh-oh! Wait a minute!”
“That sounds stupid. Maybe I don’t know what I mean.” Seth shook his head, embarrassed.
“No. No. Please. Don’t chicken out. What do you mean? Why should this accusation prick me?”
“Or, okay, I’ll say the characters are morally uninstructive—”
“Hey, come on, Seth. They’re fictional. Do you really hope to get your moral lessons from people who don’t exist?”
“You don’t challenge them to get down in the muck of themselves and find out what’s right and what’s wrong. Not like you used to — like you once did.”
Kit, who seemed in general a charming man, became at this moment, while his admirer tried to explain himself, suddenly very unattractive, somehow elongated and parsonlike. One corner of his mouth twitched with cartoonish villainy, I have to say, as if he’d arrived first all by himself at this dinner party and set traps around the place and Seth had just sprung one. And the kid did have the nauseated look of someone dangling upside down.
“Look,” Kit said. “You talk about my books as if they’re artifacts. Maybe yours are. Maybe your books are artifacts and maybe for you they serve as currency in various transactions I can’t guess about because I don’t know you. It’s up to you to decide whether those transactions are corrupt or not. I can’t accuse you.” But he said this as if he was in fact leveling some sort of accusation that none of us, nobody other than Seth himself, could understand. I think it was just a conversational ploy, and I don’t think Seth understood the charge any more than the rest of us. It was just that Kit had been in this corner before and he knew how to duel his way out of it without having to say anything that actually made sense.
Having leaned across the table to get right in the guy’s face and put this sinister turn on the conversation, he sat back.
Seth said, “My book…there’s only one, and I don’t know if it’s really worth talking about.”
“Then we won’t talk about your book.” By now the whole table was silent, and as he clearly sensed he’d sounded too harsh a note, Nickerson limped on. “Andrew, Andrew, my books aren’t artifacts. They’re sloughed off behind me like dead skins. They’re organic to the life.”
“Well…okay, I guess.” Seth didn’t have quite enough steel left now to tell him his name wasn’t Andrew.
The table was silent. Kit’s gaze drifted toward Kelly’s end, maybe seeking some touchstone of support. It stopped at Tiberius Soames, who looked bloated with emotion, in fact whose face in the candlelight seemed to change size and shape rapidly. Soames managed to say: “Dead skins.” He coughed violently several times, sighed with exasperation, looked away from us, from all of this. “Dead skins!”
“They’re detritus,” Nickerson said of his books.
This was right around the end of the meal, whether before or after dessert I can’t remember. Whenever the liqueur is served. I happened to glance in through the briefly open kitchen door where Joan, Mrs. Martin Peele, wife of the Dean of Liberal Arts and the woman of the house, consulted with Eloise, who catered almost all the faculty dinners. Eloise was a character, a very small, rapid woman, perpetually sardonic, and always smoking. She had a round Peter Lorre face and a thin-lipped Peter Lorre mouth. All she needed in this world was a foot-long holder for her cigarette. Mrs. Peele looked flushed and happy. Geniuses were fighting at her party. Directly behind our hostess’s back, Flower Cannon tilted a jug of what looked like Drambuie to her mouth, gulped down a quick one, exhaled, and set the bottle on a tray. I believed she was looking right at me. I expected her to wink. But she didn’t.
Sixteen of us surrounded the dregs of the meal at a long wooden trestle table without a tablecloth. The floor and the walls around us were also of wood, all of it brilliantly finished and gleaming as if this room had just emerged from under a rain cloud. For a few long seconds I stopped bothering to hear — sometimes this happens to me — and just observed how the group of us sat in a big, wet place.
“So, okay,” Kit Nickerson went on, “okay. I hope I’ve got books out ahead of me that do the work you’re asking for, but I have to live my way to them, and through them. That’s what I mean when I say they’re not artifacts. There’s no turning back, that’s for sure. I can’t reassume my former shape. Put it like that.” Now he sat back farther, relaxing, and let us all off the hook by addressing everybody so that we were no longer spectators at what in Washington we’d always called a pissing contest or a dick-off. “They aren’t incidental, unimportant — I’m not saying they’re garbage — listen, I know they’re books, I know I’ve made them, I hope they’re beautiful. But I have to leave them behind me as I move along the life.”
“There’s no looking back,” Seth agreed. “Like Emerson—‘Say what you think today in hard words, and if you have to, contradict it tomorrow in words just as hard.’”
Everybody was relieved to hear him arguing Kit’s side of it now, as Flower and Eloise came around with three liqueurs.
“Exactement!” Kit said. “Let’s drink to it!”
Maybe the celebrated author took such criticism more seriously than I give him credit for, because later, while people sat around the table, having broken up into tiny conversations, he still wasn’t finished, though Seth was — Seth had left. “Well,” Kit said to a couple of us, “I might be an old hack…At least I’m not an old hack with nothing better to do than imitate his earlier stuff. The ground I break might not be new to everybody else, but it’s new to me, and that’s how I keep myself interested.” He paused. “And if you don’t get your hand off my woman’s knee,” he told Tiberius Soames, “I’m going to knock your head out from between your ears.”
Soames looked bored. He repeated his previous remark: “Dead skins,” he said.
He was dressed in a white single-breasted suit with wide lapels and vivid burgundy stripes and looked like a Mississippi minstrel. All night he’d managed to be quietly, yet wildly, inappropriate. This was just at the start of March, two months after his stint in the psychopathic ward.
As I left that night, a bit early so as to avoid the others, I reflected that even if I hadn’t liked Kit Nickerson’s performance very much I still had to agree with him, particularly from the perspective of advanced middle age, about the dangers of imitating oneself, repeating old moves, clinging to routines and rituals long after they’ve stopped holding us up, and we’re holding them up instead. About the danger in hiding oneself away from the nauseating vastness of a conscious human life. I was excited, glad I’d come tonight, glad I’d come to the University in the first place.
I looked back toward the lighted kitchen window and I saw Eloise the caterer with her face tilted up, laughing and exhaling a cloud of smoke. Of Flower Cannon I saw only her back and shoulders as she swayed in her gray outfit, wiping down the kitchen counter.
Now, outside the Italian restaurant, by calling back the scene into my mind’s eye, I managed to conjure one almost exactly like it: a solitary moment in the dark, a warm window…and now, right now, as I puffed experimentally on my big Churchill, the woman herself, Flower Cannon, appeared before me in a cloud of cigar smoke.
I stood on a pedestrian walkway. The walkway passed between two buildings, a hotel and a boutique. Framed in a tall ground-floor office window of the hotel was Flower Cannon. She sat in a swivel chair before a computer console, apparently daydreaming at her task, arching back with a weary air, her right arm limp and distended, dangling a pen.