“You do.”
“You need a shave!” She giggled, rubbing her cheek on mine. “All these little white ones like grains of sugar make you look like old man Moses. Lucky for you, your hair’s still brown. You look young and juicy when you shave.”
Now she reared up over me, straddling my back.
How like a Sphinx in her nightgown.
“It is a man,” I said.
“Excuse me?”
“A man goes on four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon and three in the evening.”
“Ah, but you didn’t wait for my question. Now I shall eat you by the gates of Thebes.”
“I’m game.”
“But I really do have a question.”
“Okay.”
“Are you happy? I know we’re getting on well. We always get on well. But are you… content?”
“Alright, this sounds serious. Get off me so I can see you.”
She flopped down beside me and I got my spectacles from the nightstand. One of the candles guttered behind her. I tried to see her eyes in the poor light.
“Yes,” I said. “Unreservedly happy.”
“It’s just that we’ve been running ever since Ann Arbor. I feel like Adam and Eve, thrown out of the Garden of Eden, just barely making it. Sponging off your brother in Chicago. Now you come into this house and that’s swell, really it is, and I have work… but something’s wrong.”
“Are you ashamed of me because I haven’t been working?”
“Oh, no. Not at all. Everybody’s got it tough now.”
“Are you afraid I won’t write?”
“Maybe I’m afraid that you will.”
“What does that mean?”
“Your great-grandfather, the one who owned the plantation near here.”
“Lucien Savoyard.”
“Yes. I don’t like him.”
“He’s dead.”
“Not if you write a book about him.”
“There are books about Napoleon, and he’s still dead.”
“But not completely. And I’m not sure a man who killed his own slaves for sport deserves that kind of resurrection. Even if he was a general.”
“Brigadier general.”
“I beg his pardon.”
“Then don’t think of it as a book about him. It is, of course, but it’s also about the slaves who rose up against him.”
“And killed him.”
“Yes. As he deserved.”
“With hammers and axes and homemade spears. It’s all so brutal. Only men care about these things.”
“I disagree. And it wasn’t just the men who overthrew him, at least according to the Union soldiers who spoke to the slaves when it was all done. The women took up weapons the same as the men. All of them rushed the house.”
“I would have, too, considering what he was doing. But then I wouldn’t talk about it. Or read about anything like that. Violence like that is private, don’t you think? You don’t like to talk about France.”
“No.”
“So what’s the difference?”
“There’s something to be learned here.”
“And not France? Why don’t you write about France?”
“I can’t. Someone else will, later.”
“I see. You’ll write theirs and someone who’s in diapers now will write yours.”
“It sounds silly when you put it like that.”
“Maybe not. Maybe I understand a little.”
“Think about it… A Confederate military man who refuses to free his slaves and fights off a Union detachment, only to die at the hands of a blacksmith and half-starved field hands. I think the title will really make people want to read it.”
“The Last Plantation.”
“Yes.”
“It’s good. You’ll be the boy-king of States’ War historians.”
“Yes! By God, you get it!” I laughed.
“And get a fresh start at a new university. I know how much a book will help you with that. I’m just so sorry I spoiled everything for you.”
“Dora.”
“If you’d never met me, you’d still be in Ann Arbor.”
“Lonely.”
“But a professor.”
“Cold.”
“With nice coats and firewood.”
“And some dull wife.”
“Who could give you babies.”
“I’m indifferent to babies, and they sense it. They cry at me in protest. This isn’t helping.”
“No, it’s selfish. Poor whore-of-Babylon me.”
“You’re not from Babylon.”
“I know you liked it better before. And I ruined it. I ruined your career.”
“We don’t need to talk about it, Dora-Dora. Tabula rasa, remember? Everything shiny and new. I lost one job and I took one licking. If you and I stay together, I paid cheap.”
“I don’t know if we’re done paying,” she said.
She closed her eyes and I imagined the film she was playing in her head.
BLACK AND WHITE. Jerky. A silent picture. Organist at the side. Stephen Chambers, professor of British literature, steps into the office of O. F. Nichols, professor of American history, a short walk from his own office in Angell Hall. He flings the door open. The adulteress, surprised, takes a step back from the desk of her lover. Stares at her husband. Does he know? Why else would he be here?
“STEPHEN…” in white letters on a black screen.
The husband, a shorter man than me, is breathing hard through his nostrils. Dora’s mouth opens now.
White letters, black screen: “HE KNOWS.”
Organ music. Stephen raises his pointed finger, his mouth a hole beneath his neat mustache.
“THIS IS HOW IT IS DONE IN THE HIGHER CIRCLES OF LEARNING.”
I stand up. My height goads the smaller man, who leaps around the desk as if he were playing tennis.
“NO, STEPHEN!” from Dora.
The husband strikes the lover, knocks my glasses off, strikes me again and knocks me awkwardly to the floor. Keeps striking. The lover does not raise his hands. My hands. My tie hangs over one shoulder like a tongue. Dora speaks. Please remember the white letters on the black screen.
“STEPHEN… IT IS MY FAULT!”
The camera takes my perspective now, looking up at my attacker, teeth bared under the civilized mustache, wild eyes enhanced by eyeliner, too much powder on the face.
“I WILL KILL YOU!”
My nose breaks. I have time to wonder if I have lost a tooth. The adulteress rises up behind her husband now and begins to strike him hard with the heel of her pump, and this is funny. This is so funny I laugh hard with blood on my teeth. Again and again the cuckold’s small fists flash. The shoe rises and falls. I laugh. Other professors appear at the door, assemble themselves into a totem pole of surprise; the one on top has his hands on his cheeks, his mouth a huge oval.
“STOP THEM!”
They pull the smaller man off. His hands are too badly broken for him to unmake his fists. He looks at the camera, holding his ruined hands up as evidence.
“DO YOU SEE? DO YOU SEE WHAT YOU HAVE DONE?”
The organist turns to look, too.
“EUDORA… TABULA RASA.”
She opened her eyes.
CHAPTER THREE
BY AND BY I slept.
And, alas, I dreamed.
Not of the trench fight; that was the worst.
And not of Metzger’s death, which was nearly as bad.
But I did dream of the trench.
Something about a gas attack, and I couldn’t find my mask. But there was a dead guy half in the mud gripping his mask in his hands, and I couldn’t get it loose. I was holding my breath and jerking at it, and pulling at his fingers, but they were like iron, even though his head was lolling. He was being stubborn. I was going to die. I woke up gasping.
But I hadn’t yelled; Dora was still sleeping.
Morning?
Yes, morning.
It was dark, but the roosters were going at it.