At their next meeting, as a gesture he felt had to be made, Curt invited him to his house for dinner. He was noncommittal, looked burdened rather than pleased.
“You know, you can bring a date if you want,” Parks said later, interrupting himself in the middle of a lecture on military tactics of the Civil War. “Though of course you’re welcome to come alone if that’s what you prefer.”
“What would you prefer?”
“I don’t have any preference, Christopher. If you want to come alone …” It struck him that he was repeating himself, that he had already said what he was saying, though it made him nervous leaving the sentence unfinished. “You’re welcome to come alone.”
“I mean, if you were in my place, what would you do?”
The question made him aware that his chair, the same one he had been sitting on for three years, was uncomfortably hard. “I’ve never been in your place,” he said. “No faculty member ever invited me to his house for dinner. I’ll answer your question this way: if I had a girl I was seeing regularly and was fond of, I think I would want to bring her along if someone invited me to dinner.”
“When you were my age did you have a girl you were seeing regularly you were fond of?”
“I really don’t remember. A more relevant question, Christopher, is do you?” Parks, despite himself, looked at his watch, suffered the minutes they were losing.
“No. Not really,” he said, drawing something in his notebook, his absorption intense. “No, I don’t. Do you?”
“Look, Chris, if there isn’t anyone special you want to bring, then come alone. There’s no point making more out of it than necessary.”
He looked at Parks, narrowing his eyes, then back at what ever he was drawing, his mouth curled grudgingly into a smile. “You didn’t answer what I asked.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Swinging his arm impatiently, Curt knocked a pile of books off his desk. “What didn’t I answer? If I missed the question …” Curt tried to see what he was drawing, but his hand, like a fat policeman, stood in his way.
“You didn’t answer the question the first time because you didn’t want to,” he said matter-of-factly. “When there’s something you don’t want to talk about you pretend not to hear me.
“It’s possible,” Curt admitted, annoyed at having a student criticize him, restraining his annoyance. “If I don’t tell you what you want to know, you can always ask your question again.”
Watching Curt without looking at him, he tore the page from his notebook and crumpled it into a ball. “I know,” he said, and asked a question about treatment of prisoners during the war — something Curt had been talking about at the beginning of the session.
“Is that the question you think I avoided answering?”
Playing with it, he balanced the paper ball on the corner of the desk, flicked it forward with his index finger. Curt sensed, tensed with curiosity, that it was being left there for him like the flower. A voice interrupted his distraction. “Do you have a girl you see regularly that you’re fond of?” it asked. Curt groaned inwardly, his stomach knotting.
“What kind of question is that? I’m a married man,” he heard himself answer, knowing all the time that he knew about Rosemary, had seen them together.
Someone laughed, a jagged sound jumping from his throat. When it was gone, it had never been. The silence testified to itself. “Damn it,” Parks said, pounding on his desk. “Don’t be so hard on me.”
“I have to go.” He jumped up from his chair, and as if in answer to something unsaid in the air, shrugged.
Curt was tempted to confess, felt he ought to admit his evasion, if only to set his student a better example, but couldn’t. If he confessed, it would be because he had been caught in a lie and therefore not a real admission. As he looked to see what was wanted of him, willing to unburden himself if necessary, he discovered that there was no longer anyone there to hear him out. His office empty. I was in the wrong, he told himself. It won’t happen again.
And then he thought, What business is it of his? He had been out of order (as Curt’s father would have put it) asking such a question. Nevertheless, Parks should have told him that the question was rude and presumptuous — out of order, in fact — and it would have ended there, their embarrassment avoided. And what if the student, smiling darkly to himself, had said, “How can you expect me to answer your questions if you refuse to answer mine, Mr. Parks?” He would have had to say lamely that they both had a right not to answer questions they felt violated their privacy. Even in his imagination he felt himself defeated by the student’s stance.
It was some time later — driving Rosemary home — that Parks remembered the crumpled sheet of paper on his desk, tempted to go back to see if it was still there. He resisted, though resistance intensified curiosity, while Rosemary punished him with her silence. As soon as they had met, he had told her that they had been gossiped about, that they would have to be more circumspect in the future — Christopher’s vision of his behavior fretting him. She had accepted it without complaint, amused (she told him) at the ingenuousness of his saying it. But then, brooding over it, she had turned sour. “You don’t want to be responsible for what you do,” she had said.
He had said he was tired of being criticized by her.
Sitting across from him in her aunt’s living room, Rosemary announced — Curt absorbed with the notion of returning to his office — that she wanted to see him at night sometimes.
He said he couldn’t without making things too difficult for himself.
“What you’re really saying is that you don’t want to.”
He admitted, wanting to end things, that there was some truth in her assumption, though he thought it tactless of her to mention it.
She threw a book at him, hitting him in the knee. Though recent with them, he felt the fight as an old one in his life. Some dream terror he had long ago set aside. In that he had been through it before, painful as it was, it was comforting. He was a man who had from the beginning hated conflict, but never knew how to avoid it. (A theory of his: Once you discovered the needs war satisfied, it was irresistible.) As he was anticipating her loss, imagining painlessly what it would mean to him, she came over, head bowed, said (whispering it) that she forgave him. When he leaned forward to kiss her, she slapped his face hard. He turned his head. A big girl, she threw her weight against him, knocking him on his back. “Defend yourself,” she said, butting him. “Coward. Teacher.” He threw her off. Furious, she returned. They wrestled briefly, ended up making love — Rosemary unrelentingly fierce — on the floor. The sound of her pleasure sung in his ears like a dirge, touching him to the heart. She burned through his detachment and he knew, as never before, what terror loss held for him. It was like a wound had opened in him that could only be healed by having her. And that each time after having her, each time, no matter how satisfying in itself, the wound would be larger. Whatever else he felt for her, the black appetite of his need seemed all. He made love to her again, dreaming his freedom in her death. He went off like a gun with a plugged barrel.
As he was leaving she said she would try, if that’s what he wanted of her, to be circumspect, laughing at the word.
It was his pattern, his fate — women began by admiring him and ended up (after disillusion) laughing at him.
The next day, as though something from a long-forgotten past, he discovered the paper ball Christopher had left for him, discovered it on the floor next to his chair, scrunched flat as if trampled on. Perhaps in coming in he had walked over it himself. It was a drawing, though not what he expected. A sketch of a man in a soldier uniform — the details remarkable — with a dove leaping it seemed from the man’s mouth. The dove was holding in its beak a branch which on closer inspection turned out to be a rifle. The soldier, his uniform more Civil War than modern, was standing over a body, sketchily drawn, of a woman — in her hair a flower with human face staring forlornly like a lost child. He studied the dust-stained sketch, trying to determine what message it held for him. From one of the soldier’s pockets a book protruded, God’s Word printed almost microscopically on it. There were clouds in the sky and a satanically grinning sun.