And besides, Schiff thought, he was alone in the house, he was in enough trouble as it was. He had to think about something that would keep his spirits up.
And not only alone in the house, left alone in the house. Left like some kid babysitting himself for the first time. Face it, he was spooked. Not by ghosts and not by darkness. But by all the hobgoblins of contingency, what Charley called pratfall, a comic term that didn’t fool him for a minute, that he knew all along masked a broken hip. Or worse. Help, Schiff rehearsed over and over in his head, help me, I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.
When he woke he figured from the fullness of his bladder he must have slept for at least two hours. He reached into the nightstand where he’d stashed the basin and pisser and peed into it without even having to Credé himself. Added to what was already there, there’s now about seven hundred cc in the urinal. Jesus, he thinks, and prays that next time it will be his ordinary dribs and drabs again. Ultimately, of course, he would have to risk walking into the bathroom, but he doesn’t think he feels up to it tonight. He’s still spooked, wants to get this first night left alone in the house behind him before he tries anything brave. And Damn, he thinks, feeling hunger pangs, and maybe even a little thirst there at the back of his throat, that son of a bitch. Meaning Claire. Who’d abandoned him to his bare necessities, his basic needs and what to do with his wastes and grimes. That no-good whoreheart! Damn her and all who sail in her!
He takes up the remote control for his television set and turns the power on, not because he wants to watch television but because he needs to see the yellow date and time stretched across the top of the screen like a banner headline. Ten thirty-nine. Figures, he figures. (He’s not particularly superstitious, but he doesn’t like it when numerals add up to thirteen.)
Well, he wonders, knocked back on his own devices, what to do, what to do?
Idly at first, his head and heart not only not really in it but not even aware that that’s what they’re doing, he begins to make up another of his messages for the answering machine he does not yet even own. Please leave a message at the beep, he composes, then, inspired, takes out the “please.” Leave a message at the beep. Yes! he thinks. That’s it! No frills. No chinks in the sheer insurmountability in so imposing a cliff face. What could be simpler, yet pack more powerhouse ambiguity? Thieves, even those professionals cops so loved to brag on and seemed to respect (if not flat- out admire, as if they were so many Sherlock Holmeses confronting so many Professors Moriarity), thugs worthy of them, thugs with mettle, thugs with brains, would be put off. Or would they? Is this guy for real, they might wonder. Who does he think he’s fooling with this bluff? Surely, if they were truly worthy of the professionalism the cops claimed to respect them for, they’d recognize the Mayday appeal in such a communiqué. Oh, oh, the looseness of cripples, mourned buffeted, crippled Schiff, who, on second thought had seen that real professionals, genuine gangsters, or even only revved kids hopped-up on drugs, could read the vulnerable, terrified wimp factors right through such ploys. It was practically an open invitation practically. Why not just come out and say just come out and get it?
Good Christ, Schiff thought, taking another reading off the television screen, it was already eleven twenty-nine (again thirteen). Almost an hour had passed since the last time he’d checked. Was it too late to call his students to tell them the party had been scrubbed? Well, they were graduate students, accustomed, he would have thought, to burning the not-yet-but-almost midnight oil, hitting the books or, sunk in the creases of their own complicated lives, their various affairs and dramatized politicals, even their own ardent lonelinesses (drinking or partying or doing their thing in their stricken privacies), so he was pretty certain he wouldn’t be waking them, ripping their sleep like the torn fabrics over the furniture in their secondhand rooms. Rather, it was still a question of his dignity-meister’s guarded dignity. Full professors didn’t telephone graduate students. Not at this hour. Not at high noon. He couldn’t conceive of a message that would not wait. That’s what campus mail was for, stairways, restrooms, and corridors where you could bump into each other, office hours, those three or four minutes before class started up, the choreographed minute or so afterward when one hefted garments and maneuvered briefcases or bookbags into the fast-closing stream of things at the door. (“A word with you, Bumas, please, when you have a chance.”) It was bad enough when the student called the professor up. Oh, Schiff didn’t mind the kid’s preliminary feint and shuffle, his nerves and courtesy like a bout of flu, was even a little grateful for the tribute of all those deferential, stammered reluctancies. (“I hope I’m not calling you at a bad time, Professor, that I’m not interrupting your and Mrs. Schiff’s dinner or anything. I hate bothering you at home like this, sir.”) But bad enough anyway. Because you had to be on your toes when the phone rang. You had to see to it that the TV was inaudible, had to fumble for the Mute button on the remote control, or turn down the volume on the radio, make certain the silence the kid heard at his end of the line was the pure, unadulterated noise of interruption, the sound of difficult, significant books being read, the quiet of a busted, damaged concentration.
Of course Schiff’s being crippled excused him from a lot of that crap. He didn’t get to campus often enough to use campus mail, he no longer kept regular office hours, people tended to steer clear of him in the corridors, he never went near a stairway, and no longer did choreography in the fast- closing stream of things at the door, don’t ask him. So he could have called. Technically. It was the message that would have compromised his dignity. Announcing at damn near midnight that their — well, his, his now that Claire had blown him off — party would have to be canceled. And not only damn near midnight, but, by the time he’d reached all of them, damn near one o’clock, too, later, the very A.M. of the very P.M. of the party in question. Still, he could have called. Technically. Even, technically, his message notwithstanding. Though then the embarrassment would be on the other foot. He’d be the one breaking the peace, breaking into the peace, calling at a bad time and interrupting God-knew- what, bothering their lovemaking perhaps, disturbing their youth. His own stammered hesitations and uneasiness barely audible over the unturned-down volume of hi-fi and boom box. (“Professor Schiff here. Schiff. SCHIFF!”)
What time was it now? Twelve one-niner. (Again thirteen? This was beyond high odds. This was into fate.)
Still protective of his dignity, he thought, fuck it, picked up the phone and asked Information for the telephone number of Molly Kohm.
Miss Kohm (though this was unclear, she could well have been married; older than his other students, in, he judged, her early forties, and got up always in the costumes, the cloaks, boots, skirts, and dresses of ladies, he imagined, on symphony, museum, and various other arts boards; and something too dramatic, even a little hysterical, about her dark makeup, its etched or engraved character, almost as if it were not makeup at all but a sort of tattoo, a kind of stenciled quality to her enduring tan, something about Miss — or Mrs. — Kohm that suggested, well, weekends spent elsewhere, her passport in her purse as surely as her car keys, coins for tolls; something — he admitted this though she was not his type — vaguely exciting about her, her intelligence grounded — if that was the word — in intimacy and some mysticism of the far, as though — he had no other way of putting this— Schiff was the geographer but she was the traveler) picked up on the very first ring. And, when he identified himself (hemming and hawing, beating about the bush, shuffling with the best of them), pretending — he assumed pretending — she’d been expecting his call.