The three-course meal was prepared by the professor himself, a salad of mixed greens, duck confit with rosemary potatoes, and a flaky tarte Tatin, preceded by martinis, accompanied by pinot noir, and finished off with single malt scotch. All was served in the meticulously restored dining room of the professor’s Craftsman bungalow in Pasadena, everything from the double-hung windows, to the art deco chandelier, to the brass hardware of the built-in cabinetry either an original from the early twentieth century or a faithful reproduction. Every now and then the professor rose from the dining table and replaced the record on the turntable, choosing a new selection from his extensive jazz collection. Over dinner, we talked about bebop, the nineteenth-century novel, the Dodgers, and America’s upcoming bicentennial. Then we repaired with our scotch to the living room with its massive fireplace of river rock and its stately Mission furniture of angular wooden frames and leather cushions. Books of all heights, widths, and colors lined the walls in a democratic parade of individualism, arranged as haphazardly as they were on the walls of the professor’s campus office. Ensconced thus by letters, words, sentences, paragraphs, pages, chapters, and tomes, the evening was a pleasant one, memorable for the exchange that took place after we assumed our seats. His nostalgia stimulated, perhaps, by the literature around him, the professor said, I still remember your thesis on The Quiet American. That was one of the best undergraduate theses I’ve ever read. I smiled demurely and said thanks while Claude, sitting beside me on the sofa, snorted. I didn’t care too much for that book. The Vietnamese girl, all she does is prepare opium, read picture books, and twitter like a bird. Have you ever met a Vietnamese girl like her? If so, please introduce me. All the ones I meet can’t keep their mouths shut in or out of bed.
Oh, Claude, the professor said.
Oh, Claude, nothing. No offense, Avery, but our American friend in that book also happens to look suspiciously like a latent homosexual.
It takes one to smell one, Stan said.
Who wrote that one for you? Noël Coward? His name is Pyle, for God’s sake. How many jokes can you make with that name? It’s also a pro-communist book. Or at least anti-American. Same thing, anyway. Claude waved his hand at the books, the furniture, the living room, presumably the whole well-appointed home. Hard to believe he was once a communist, isn’t it?
Stan? I said.
No, not Stan. Were you, Stan? I thought not.
That left the professor, who shrugged his shoulders when I looked at him. I was your age, he said, putting his arm around Stan’s shoulders. I was impressionable, I was passionate, I wanted to change the world. Communism seduced me like so many others.
Now he’s the one doing the seducing, Stan said, squeezing the professor’s hand, a sight that made me squirm just a little. For me, the professor was a walking mind, and to see him as a body, or having a body, was still discomfiting.
Do you ever regret being a communist, Professor?
No, I do not. Only by making that mistake could I be what I am today.
What is that, sir?
He smiled. I suppose you could call me a born-again American. An irony, but if the bloody history of the past few decades has taught me anything, it’s that the defense of freedom demands the muscularity only America can provide. Even what we do at the college has its purpose. We teach you the best of what was thought and said not only to explain America to the world, as I have always encouraged you to do, but to defend it.
I sipped my scotch. It was smoky and smooth, tasting of peat and aged oak, underscored by licorice and the intangible essence of Scottish masculinity. I liked my scotch undiluted, like I liked my truth. Unfortunately, undiluted truth was as affordable as eighteen-year-old single malt scotch. What about those who have not learned the best of what was thought and said? I asked the professor. If we can’t teach them, or if they won’t be taught?
The professor contemplated the copper depths of his drink. I suppose you and Claude have seen more than your fair share of those types in your line of work. There’s no easy answer, except to say it has always been thus. Ever since the first caveman discovered fire and decided that the ones still living in darkness were benighted, it’s been civilization against barbarism. . with every age having its own barbarians.
Nothing was more clear-cut than civilization versus barbarism, but what was the killing of the crapulent major? A simple act of barbarism or a complex one that advanced revolutionary civilization? It had to be the latter, a contradictory act that suited our age. We Marxists believe that capitalism generates contradictions and will fall apart from them, but only if men take action. But it was not just capitalism that was contradictory. As Hegel said, tragedy was not the conflict between right and wrong but right and right, a dilemma none of us who wanted to participate in history could escape. The major had the right to live, but I was right to kill him. Wasn’t I? When Claude and I left near midnight, I came as close as I could to broaching the subject of my conscience with him. As we smoked farewell cigarettes on the sidewalk, I asked the question that I imagined my mother asking of me: What if he’s innocent?
He blew a smoke ring, just to show he could. No one’s innocent. Especially in this business. You don’t think he might have some blood on his hands? He identified Viet Cong sympathizers. He might have gotten the wrong man. It’s happened before. Or if he himself is a sympathizer, then he definitely identified the wrong people. On purpose.
I don’t know any of that for sure.
Innocence and guilt. These are cosmic issues. We’re all innocent on one level and guilty on another. Isn’t that what Original Sin is all about?
True enough, I said. I let him go with a handshake. The airing of moral doubts was as tiresome as the airing of domestic squabbles, no one really interested except for the ones directly involved. In this situation, I was clearly the only one involved, except for the crapulent major, and no one cared to hear his opinion. Claude, meanwhile, had offered me absolution, or at least an excuse, but I did not have the heart to tell him I could not use it. Original Sin was simply too unoriginal for someone like me, born from a father who spoke of it at every Mass.
The next evening I began reconnoitering the major. On that Sunday and the following five, from May until the end of June, I parked my car half a block from the gas station, waiting for eight o’clock when the crapulent major would leave, walking slowly home, lunch box in hand. When I saw him turn the corner, I started the car and drove it to the corner, where I waited and watched him walk down the first block. He lived three blocks away, a distance a thin, healthy man could walk briskly in five minutes. It took the crapulent major approximately eleven, with myself always at least a block behind. During six Sundays, he never varied his routine, faithful as a migratory mallard, his route taking him through a neighborhood of apartments that all seemed to be dying of boredom. The major’s own diminutive quadriplex was fronted by a carport with four slots, one vacant and three occupied by cars with the dented, drooping posteriors of elderly bus drivers. An overhanging second floor, its two sets of windows looking onto the street, shaded the cars. At 8:11 in the evening or so, the morose eyes of those bedroom windows were open but curtained, only one of them lit. On the first two Sundays, I parked at the corner and watched as he turned into the carport and vanished. On the third and fourth Sundays, I did not follow him from the gas station but waited for him half a block past his apartment. From there, I watched in my mirror as he entered the carport’s shadowed margin, a lane leading to the bottom apartments. As soon as he disappeared those first four Sundays, I went home, but on the fifth and sixth Sundays I waited. Not until ten o’clock did the car that parked in the vacant spot appear, as aged and dinged as the others, the driver a tired-looking Chinese man wearing a smeared chef’s smock and carrying a greasy paper bag.