Starting Over (11 page)

She shrugged, and went to the living room.

Potter went busily about his preparations, but couldn't help being a little annoyed that Marilyn wasn't sitting back and reading the Sunday paper. She just smoked a cigarette and looked out the window, and occasionally paced around the room, like she was nervous.

Potter tried to concentrate on the omelettes. He was just doing cheese this time, nothing too fancy or outrageous. Just plain cheese omelettes, and a very nice chablis.

They ate in the living room, on the coffee table. Potter played a Vivaldi record. The sound of order, tradition. Sunlight streamed in the room, as if Potter had ordered it. He felt expansive.

“How's that for an omelette?” Potter asked.

“Oh—it's fine. Just fine. Really it is,” she said in an unconvincing abstract voice.

Potter wondered if he'd put too much Tabasco into the mix.

He swigged from his glass of chablis, and tried to concentrate again on his own omelette. It seemed quite fine to him, but you never knew about other people's taste; some people simply liked things bland. A little too much Tabasco could put them off entirely.

Marilyn picked her way through about a third of her omelette, then put down her fork. There were tears in her eyes. Jesus. Potter knew he hadn't put
that
much Tabasco into the thing.

“What is it?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Nothing.”

Potter took a deep breath, and exhaled very slowly. Trying for calm. He lit a cigarette. Marilyn wadded her paper napkin and dabbed at her eyes.

“I'm sorry,” she said.

“But why?” he asked gently. “Why are you sorry? Why are you sad? Isn't everything OK?”

“Yes,” she sniffed. “It's fine.”

“So?”

“So—I don't know. I guess that's it.”

“That everything's fine?”

“Yes—I mean—no. It's that it has to end, sooner or later. Sooner or later it won't be fine. It'll be lousy, and it'll end.”

“Well, I guess everything has to end,” Potter said. “But Marilyn. For godsake. Why spoil the beginning by thinking about the end?”

“I don't know,” she said. “I don't mean to.”

They sat for a long time, while the music played on, and then finally it stopped and the needle slipped onto the black interior circle of the record, scratching.

Potter had to make himself lift off the arm of the player.

Marilyn blew her nose, and forced a smile. “I'm sorry,” she said.

“It's OK, really it is.”

“No, it's my fault for thinking that way.”

“Goddamn it, will you just forget about it!”

“You don't have to yell at me!”

Potter closed his eyes, and breathed deeply. “I'm sorry,” he said.

“It's OK. I'm sorry too.”

“OK,” he said.

“OK,” she said.

Potter decided that instead of meeting Marilyn after her Existentialism class Wednesday night, it might do both of them good if he just went out on his own, and he arranged to have a beer with Gafferty. The beer became many beers.

“Why is it,” Potter asked, “that a man and a woman can't just get along?”

“Trouble in paradise, eh?”

In the first flush of his affair with Marilyn, Potter had told Gafferty he had found just the woman he was looking for.

“Nothing big, yet. Just the old warning signs.”

“Ah, well. Maybe it'll all blow over. I've ridden out many a storm myself.”

“Jesus, I guess so. That must really be rough. I mean, with nine kids, you can't just walk out.”

“Oh, you can take a walk all right, but you damn well better hike back pretty quick.”

“Jesus. I don't see how—well, with me anyway, I don't think I could take it.”

“Ah, well. We take what we get. And get what we ask for.”

“But why is it always so goddamn fucked up and complicated?”

“But man, why did we ever think it would be otherwise? Didn't the Old Testament tell us? Didn't the Greeks tell us? Haven't all the wise folks down through history told us? Isn't that what all art and philosophy and literature is about? The
why
is, why are we surprised?”

“Maybe it was going to movies and reading magazines,” Potter said. “At an impressionable age. Remember, when you and I were growing up the stories all had happy endings.”

“I was fortunate enough to be reading the Irish poets, even then.” He raised a finger for attention and recited:

All men live in suffering

I know as few can know,

Whether they take the high road,

Or stay content on the low.…

“Yeats,” he said.

“That's your favorite, isn't it?” Potter said. “Yeats.”

“Ah, he's my man.”

“Is that who you did your thesis on?”

Gafferty's head jerked back, as if Potter had taken a swing at him. “My
thesis
,” he said.

“You know—your Ph.D.”

Gafferty let out a long breath. “Ah, you don't know then.”

Gafferty belched, and called for another round.

The fifth round.

He explained to Potter how he had first tried to do his thesis on Yeats, then O'Casey, then Synge, failing each time, crossing the adviser each time because he couldn't bring himself to treat his subjects with the required academic attitudes of distance and dissection. He kept writing lyric appreciations of the men and their work, which were judged to be “fine as far as they went” but they never went far enough into the sort of sterilized, surgical, symbol-seeking operations that were wanted.

“I couldn't do it to them,” he said. “So I figured maybe I could do the deed on a writer I didn't love. For the last three years, I've been trying to write a proper thesis on Pope.”

“Why Pope?”

“Because I find the bastard dull. Always have. You see, if I'm to grind out a dull exercise I feel I might have a better chance with a subject I think is matching.”

“How's it coming?”

“Lousy. It's so dull, I can't hardly make myself work on it. But I work on it anyway every weekend. Made a little study in the basement, and I go down there regular, like spending time in jail.”

“Jesus. What happens if you don't finish?”

“Ah, my friend. Then I don't teach much longer. Not in a college, anyway, not likely.”

Potter damned the injustice of it all, and they had more rounds. On the eighth round, as Potter began to reel, Gafferty glanced at his watch and jumped out of the booth.

“Jesus, man, speakin' of trouble, I'm an hour late for dinner already. And got me a forty-minute drive yet.”

“Shit, I'm sorry. Listen, blame it on me.”

Gafferty smiled, and said, “Thanks, but it doesn't work that way. That easy.”

“No, I guess not.”

Potter felt too bloated from the beer to want to eat anything, so he went home and drank Scotch and sodas. Around ten, he opened a can of cashews, for sustenance. He didn't put on the TV or the phonograph, but sat in a kind of trance, thinking of Gafferty's plight with academia, and realizing he hadn't faced up to his own. The present year of teaching was like a joyride, but soon, if he wanted to continue, if he wanted to make it a permanent thing, he would have to face up to working for his own academic union card, his own advanced degree. That would mean going back to school and taking courses, writing papers, eventually grinding out a thesis.

He couldn't imagine doing it. Nor could he imagine doing anything else. He took the bottle of Scotch to bed with him, sipping on it, like medicine, till he finally blotted out.

The electric buzz of the alarm clock, a steady, insistent, one-note harangue, woke Potter to a clammy grey morning. Thursday. He had no classes, but had to go in for office hours. Student visitation. When the term began he had scheduled his office hours on the days of his classes, M—W—F, because he had to go into Gilpen anyway, and it left the other days completely free. But when he discovered this “freedom” led to late, troubled sleep and a yawning vacuum, he changed his office hours to the “Free” days, which meant that he had to get up and dress and go out into the world. Even if no one came he had to be there, sitting in his office.

It was on the fifth and top floor of the walk-up building, a floor that had once been used for storage but had been remodeled into makeshift offices. They were furnished with anonymous grey metal desks and khaki metal bookcases that you put together with screws. Potter had Scotch-taped a poster of Humphrey Bogart on the wall. It was the best he could figure out, for decoration. The lower left-hand corner of it had come unstuck, and curled upward. Potter meant to tape it down again.

He took up a styrofoam cup full of hot black coffee from the cafeteria, and set it on his desk. From the bottom right-hand drawer, he drew out a pint of Cutty Sark, and splashed some into the coffee. He took a few sips and then went to the bookcase. Only two shelves had books, and they were mostly texts—ones that were used in his courses, or ones that publishers sent in hopes of having some teacher put them into their curriculum. Book salesmen “called,” like guys who sold aluminum siding for houses door-to-door.

Potter pulled out one of the freebie texts that a salesman had left. It was called
A Drama Casebook
. He opened it, and the smell of fresh paper struck his nose like a perfume. He flipped through the book, seeing fairly soon it was composed only of the shreds of plays, with long, accompanying “exercises,” tests and questions and “study proposals.” Most of the textbooks were like that. Collections of snippets of real things, and made-up crap strung after them like tin cans tied to a dog's tail.

Potter closed the book, and slipped a little more Scotch into his coffee.

Traffic quarrelled below on Beacon Street, slowed by rain and fog. Potter went to the window and swiped a clearing of moisture he could see through. To other town-house buildings across the street. He sat back down, wishing to hell a student would come. Any student. No, perferably a girl. Not for any sexual fantasy, just for comfort. There was some kind of comfort that Potter could feel in the presence of a woman, a girl, that not even his best male friends could give him. No doubt it was some other goddamn aspect of Male Chauvinism. He'd never admit it to the militant Lib girl in his PR seminar. He would swear to her it was all the goddamn same to him; otherwise she'd have his balls.

There was a rap on his half-open door, and Potter said brusquely, “Yes, come in.”

He couldn't help smiling, with pleasure and relief. It was Rosemary Korsky.

“You busy?” she asked.

“Absolutely sunk in work, tied up with phone calls from New York and Washington, students bugging me and a couple of big producers pleading to get my opinion on their new shows.
However
. Miss Korsky, for you, I will gladly put it all aside.”

“Yeah?”

She grinned and sat down.

Potter started to take a sip of his doctored coffee, but instead pushed the cup aside. Miss Korsky gave him enough of a glow.

He wasn't even quite sure why.

She was attractive, but certainly no great beauty. Dyed light-blonde hair with the darker roots showing where it parted in the middle. Not even long, it just came down to her neck and then curled back upward, like Doris Day. She wore too much makeup, partly no doubt because of what seemed a semi-bad skin. A nicely proportioned body, but nothing to send to Atlantic City. She dressed nicely, wearing mostly sweaters and long skirts and boots, nothing flashy or ostentatious for this flair-conscious time. Nor was it her brilliance or even any interesting, offbeat turn of mind that caught Potter's imagination. She was a solid B student who answered test questions with methodical, information-filled persistence, done in a clear, well-trained hand that was easily readable.

And yet, she was one of the students to whom Potter realized he was talking when he lectured. When, one Wednesday during the third week of classes she was absent for the first time, Potter was rattled and grouchy, and let the students free twenty minutes early.

“Crummy day,” Miss Korsky said.

She plunked her lapful of books on the cold cement floor and wriggled out of her coat, letting it fall on the back of her chair. She was wearing a plain maroon sweater with short sleeves, and she rubbed her hands vigorously up and down her forearms.

“Ah,” Potter sighed. “Miss Korsky.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

He smiled. “What can I do for you?”

Miss Korsky activated a wad of chewing gum that had evidently been put to rest temporarily behind a molar, and slowly, contemplatively, began to mash it around in her mouth.

“Oh, I was wondering, sort of. About this paper you want us to write.”

“The thing on Symbolism?”

“Well, that—” She turned to the rain-streaked window.

“Yes?”

“And—”

“Yes?”

Her brown eyes looked straight into him and her mouth made a partial smile that expressed a kind of sorrow, and an unfeigned weariness that is not usually associated with young people, not because it isn't common among them but because their elders would rather not see it there.

“I guess I just didn't want to go out into that yet. Outside.”

“It's pretty mucky,” Potter said.

“Oh, I don't just mean the weather. You know. The world, I guess. The whole thing that's out there.”

“Yes,” Potter said.

He found himself, much to his surprise and embarrassment, fighting back tears. He cleared his throat, and managed to look straight at her. “I know just what you mean,” he said.

“I know you do.”

They sat for some time in a comfortable, communicative silence, listening to the radiator gurgle, and then a class bell rang, and Miss Korsky put her coat on. Potter stood up. “I'll walk you to the subway,” he said.