Whatever its point, the drawing pleased him aesthetically and he took it home with the idea perhaps, if he could get the creases out, of mounting it for framing. He hadn’t intended to show it to Carolyn, who had (she once told him) perfect taste, but she found it in his briefcase, foraging, she said, for something to read.
“Who did it?” was her first question.
“What do you think of it?”
“It’s not art,” she said, disdainful of his question, “if that’s what you think. Who did it?”
Angry at her snobbery, he tried to get the picture back and succeeded only in claiming half, groaning in rage at his failure.
“Are you out of your mind? If you had asked for it, Curt, I would have given it to you.” Taking a roll of Scotch tape from the top drawer of the secretary, mending the drawing while Curt, feeling useless, looked on.
“It’s a good likeness,” she said in a conciliatory tone, “though frightening.”
He was thinking, still angry, of twisting her arm but, recalling that he was a pacifist, restrained his rage. “A good likeness of whom?” Her remark struck him as idiotic.
“Isn’t it supposed to be you?” She looked from the drawing to her husband to the drawing again. “Without being literal, it does capture something about you.”
“It doesn’t look anything like me.” He took the drawing back and, without even glancing at it, returned it to his case.
“It does, Curt. It does.”
“You horror,” he muttered, and went to the bathroom to look at himself in the mirror. His reflection surprised him — an acquaintance though no one he knew well, sadder and older than he remembered. A face he had seen recently in a drawing of a soldier, dove coming out of mouth, in Civil War uniform. How could he not have known who it was?
Committed to some notion of himself as an honorable man, he went back to the living room and apologized to Carolyn, who, though she didn’t laugh at him, looked as if she wanted to. As a further gesture — she had asked, hadn’t she? — he told her that the drawing was the work of his tutorial student, the one who had written the remarkable paper. Though she seemed no longer interested, he went on, telling her about him, all that he had not mentioned in his fear of being mocked during the past few weeks. Carolyn listened politely, restraining a natural skepticism, but when the rhetoric got more extravagant than she could bear, interrupted. “Don’t you see that he’s making fun of you in that drawing?”
“I see that,” he said, furious, “but it’s also affectionate.”
“It’s about as affectionate as poison gas,” she said. “About as loving as a knife in the back.”
“You project your own malice,” he said, and waited, his guard up, for a return punch. Her silence, a new weapon in her arsenal, hit him where he was unprotected, left him feeling lonely, in the wrong. Wronged. He thought of asking Christopher about the drawing — what he intended by it — but was afraid the question might frighten him away.
As the war in Asia got worse — a new record each week of deaths on both sides, bombs dropped, missions flown, villages destroyed — Curt began writing daily letters of protest to the President. The war, the violence of it, obsessed him. He felt responsible for its enlarging, for its increased savagery, as if it had some arterial connection to his own transgressions. In his classes, in his sessions with Christopher, he talked of almost nothing but the war, saw almost everything in terms of it. “Meaningless violence,” he told Christopher, “out of the dead prick of our national boredom.” The boy shrugged, looked bored, said even if it were true, there was nothing they could do about it. Curt argued against defeatism, said there was no hope unless one committed oneself to fighting for what one believed. “Isn’t that what the President is doing?” the boy asked disingenuously. Curt explained again (and not for the second time, either) that the President, having got stuck in the war through dishonorable advice, had to rationalize its horrors with specious ideology, justify the unjustifiable, to live with himself. “And you have to protest to live with yourself,” the boy said. Curt sighed, said he couldn’t live with himself until the war was over.
At Curt’s urging, Christopher attended a few anti-war marches, though he seemed more interested in the anti-antiwar protesters shouting obscenities at the marchers from the sidelines — a crew of eyeless malcontents who followed them wherever they went, red-necked with rage, looking for a fight.
Curt noticed him talking to one of them during a rally and asked him later what it had been about. “Nothing. We were just talking.”
“What could you possibly find to talk to him about?”
“If you’re on the side of peace,” the boy said angrily, “don’t you have to include him, too?”
Curt thought about it, for a moment accepted the boy’s rebuke. “If that fellow you were talking to had his way,” Curt said, “he’d kill us both.”
“It’s people like you who have made all the wars, not him. He’s never had his way. He’s only doing what he feels is right.”
“Don’t make a virtue of stupidity.”
And just as the argument was about to get hot — it was standard procedure between them — the boy withdrew, acknowledged with straight-faced irony, like defaulting a match he had won, that his teacher was in the right. At such times Curt wanted to shake him into admitting what he was doing, but didn’t. Didn’t dare.
He was ten minutes late for their next meeting.
“Our appointment was for three,” Parks said, in a black mood. He had been reading the Times while waiting for him. “Not three-five or three-ten. You’ve missed this week’s class as far as I’m concerned. I’ll see you next week.”
He got to his feet, his face burning.
“Do you want to say something?”
“No.”
“And I don’t want to be followed anymore. To follow a man is to violate him. Do you understand that?”
As if carrying something on his back, the boy backed slowly to the door, though he seemed, hunched forward, to be coming toward him. “No one’s following you. No one wants to follow you. There’s nothing to follow. Who are you …?” He turned sharply — almost a military gesture — and went out.
How helpless he felt, how responsible! As if there were a direct correlation, each time he got pleasure in Rosemary’s bed, the war got worse. It was madness to believe it. Yet when he spent a day away from her — abstinence becoming harder and harder — the war seemed that day to abate, peace talks were rumored, hints of secret negotiation, which would die the natural death of denial the next day. Worse than the madness of his fantasy was that even if he thought it would end the war, he wouldn’t have given her up. Sex before peace — his shame. Need taking priority over principle. Love, his need. Love? He didn’t kid himself. His desire for her in recent weeks a fever, an obsession. As the war got worse, he saw himself in the maddest of his dreams screwing the world — each thrust a detonation — to cataclysm.
On the whole she treated him kindly, acted as if the balance of power had not shifted radically to her advantage, for which he was grateful and frightened. He moved in constant fear that she would give him up. And so in anticipation he imagined, exiling himself in a kind of monastery of the spirit, what it would be not to have her anymore. Sometimes it seemed possible, but it was like conceiving a future of nothing. Paralysis. Impotence. Death. Was fucking all? It was madness. His hope was that it would pass, that he would wake up one day well again, the fever gone, his own man. He envied himself the dull ease he had lost. The good old days of mild dissatisfaction. At least he had behaved like a gentleman then. He hated what he had become.