A Single Man Read online

  The Cafeteria is crammed. George stands at the door, looking around. Now that he is a public utility, the property of STSC, he is impatient to be used. He hates to see even one minute of himself being wasted. He starts to walk among the tables with a tentative smile; a forty-watt smile ready to be switched up to a hundred and fifty watts, just as soon as anyone asks for it.

  Now, to his relief, he sees Russ Dreyer, and Dreyer rises from his table to greet him. He has no doubt been on the lookout for George. Dreyer has gradually become George’s personal attendant, executive officer, bodyguard. He is an angular thin-faced young man with a flat-top haircut and rimless glasses. He wears a somewhat sporty Hawaiian shirt which, on him, seems like a prim shy concession to the sportiness of the clothes around him. His undershirt, appearing in the open V of his unbuttoned collar, looks surgically clean, as always. Dreyer is a grade A scholar, and his European counterpart would probably be a rather dry and brittle stick. But Dreyer is neither dry nor brittle. He has discreet humour, and, as an ex-Marine, considerable toughness. He once described to George a typical evening he and his wife Marinette spent with his buddy Tom Kugelman and Tom’s wife. ‘Tom and I got into an argument about Finnegans Wake. It went on all through supper. So then the girls said they were sick of listening to us, so they went out to a movie. Tom and I did the dishes and it got to be ten o’clock and we were still arguing and we hadn’t convinced each other. So we got some beer out of the icebox and went out in the yard. Tom’s building a shed there, but he hasn’t got the roof on yet. So then he challenged me to a chinning-match, and we started chinning ourselves on the crossbeam over the door, and I whipped him, thirteen to eleven.’

  George is charmed by this story. Somehow, it’s like classical Greece.

  ‘Good morning, Russ.’

  ‘Good morning, Sir.’ It isn’t the age-difference which makes Dreyer call George ‘Sir’. As soon as they come to the end of this quasi-military relationship, he will start saying George, or even Geo, without hesitation.

  Together they go over to the coffee machine, fill mugs, select doughnuts from the counter. As they turn toward the cash-desk, Dreyer slips ahead of George with the change ready. ‘No – let me, Sir.’

  ‘You’re always paying.’

  Dreyer grins, ‘We’re in the chips, since I put Marinette to work.’

  ‘She got that teaching job?’

  ‘It just came through. Of course, it’s only temporary. The only snag is, she has to get up an hour earlier.’

  ‘So you’re fixing your own breakfast?’

  ‘Oh, I can manage. Till she gets a job nearer in. Or I get her pregnant.’ He visibly enjoys this man-to-man stuff with George. (Does he know about me, George wonders; do any of them? Oh yes, probably. It wouldn’t interest them. They don’t want to know about my feelings or my glands or anything below my neck. I could just as well be a severed head, carried into the classroom to lecture to them from a dish.)

  ‘Say, that reminds me,’ Dreyer is saying, ‘Marinette wanted me to ask you, Sir – we were wondering if you could manage to get out to us again, before too long? We could cook up some spaghetti. And maybe Tom could bring over that tape I was telling you about – the one he got from the audio-visual up at Berkeley, of Katherine Anne Porter reading her stuff —’

  ‘That’d be fine,’ says George vaguely, with enthusiasm. He glances up at the clock. ‘I say, we ought to be going!’

  Dreyer isn’t in the least damped by his vagueness. Probably he does not want George to come to supper any more than George wants to go. It is all, all symbolic. Marinette has told him to ask, and he has asked, and now it is on record that George has accepted, for the second time, an invitation to their home. And this means that George is an intimate and can be referred to, in after years, as part of their circle in the old days. Oh yes, the Dreyers will loyally do their part to make George’s place secure among the grand old bores of yesteryear. George can just picture one of those evenings in the nineteen nineties, when Russ is dean of an English Department in the Middle West and Marinette is the mother of grown-up sons and daughters. An audience of young instructors and their wives, symbolically entertaining Dr and Mrs Dreyer, will be symbolically thrilled to catch the Dean in an anecdotal mood, mooning and mumbling with a fuddled smile through a maze of wowless sagas, into which George and many many others will enter, uttering misquotes. And Marinette, permanently smiling, will sit listening with the third ear – the one that has heard it all before – and praying for eleven o’clock to come. And it will come. And all will agree that this has been a memorable evening indeed.

  As they walk toward the classroom, Dreyer asks George what he thinks about what Dr Leavis said about Sir Charles Snow. (These far-off unhappy Old Things and their long-ago battles are still hot news out here in Sleepy Hollow State.) ‘Well, first of all —’ George begins.

  They are passing the tennis courts, at this moment. Only one court is occupied, by two young men playing singles. The sun has come out with sudden fierce heat through the smog-haze, and the two are stripped nearly naked. They have nothing on their bodies but rubber gym-boots and knit shorts of the kind cyclists wear, very short and close-fitting, moulding themselves to the buttocks and the loins. They are absolutely unaware of the passers-by, isolated in the intentness of their game. You would think there was no net between them. Their nakedness makes them seem close to each other and directly opposed, body to body, like fighters. If this were a fight, though, it would be one-sided, for the boy on the left is much the smaller. He is Mexican maybe, black-haired, handsome, catlike, cruel, compact, lithe, muscular; quick and graceful on his feet. His body is a natural dark gold brown; there is a fuzz of curly black hair on his chest and belly and thighs. He plays hard and fast, with cruel mastery, baring his white teeth unsmiling, as he slams back the ball. He is going to win. His opponent, the big blond boy, already knows this; there is a touching gallantry in his defence. He is so sweet-naturedly beautiful, so nobly made; and yet his classical cream marble body seems a handicap to him. The rules of the game inhibit it from functioning. He is fighting at a hopeless disadvantage. He should throw away his useless racket, vault over the net, and force the cruel little gold cat to submit to his marble strength. No, on the contrary, the blond boy accepts the rules, binds himself by them, will suffer defeat and humiliation rather than break them. His helpless bigness and blondness give him an air of unmodern chivalry. He will fight clean, a perfect sportsman, until he has lost the last game. And won’t this keep happening to him all through his life? Won’t he keep getting himself involved in the wrong kind of game, the kind of game he was never born to play, against an opponent who is quick and clever and merciless?

  This game is cruel; but its cruelty is sensual and stirs George into hot excitement. He feels a thrill of pleasure to find the senses so eager in their response; too often, now, they seem sadly jaded. From his heart, he thanks these young animals for their beauty. And they will never know what they have done to make this moment marvellous to him, and life itself less hateful —

  Dreyer is saying, ‘Sorry, Sir – I lost you for a minute, there. I understand about the Two Cultures, of course – but, do you mean you agree with Dr Leavis?’ Far from taking the faintest interest in the tennis players, Dreyer walks with his body half turned away from them; his whole concentration fixed upon George’s talking head.

  For it obviously has been talking. George realises this with the same discomfiture he felt on the freeway, when the chauffeur-figure got them clear downtown. Oh yes, he knows from experience what the talking-head can do, late in the evening, when he is bored and tired and drunk, to help him through a dull party. It can play back all of George’s favourite theories – just as long as it isn’t argued with; then it may become confused. It knows at least three dozen of his best anecdotes. But here, in broad daylight, during campus-hours, when George should be onstage every second, in full control of his performance! Can it be that talking-head and the chauffeur are in league?
Are they maybe planning a merger?

  ‘We really haven’t time to go into all this right now,’ he tells Dreyer smoothly. ‘And anyhow, I’d like to check up on the Leavis lecture again. I’ve still got that issue of The Spectator somewhere at home, I think. . . . Oh, by the way, did you ever get to read that piece on Mailer, about a month ago – in Esquire, wasn’t it? It’s one of the best things I’ve seen in a long time —’

  George’s classroom has two doors in its long side wall: one up front, the other at the back of the room. Most of the students enter from the back because, with an infuriating sheep-obstinacy, they love to huddle together confronting their teachers from behind a barricade of empty seats. But, this semester, the class is only a trifle smaller than the capacity of the room. Latecomers are forced to sit farther and farther forward, to George’s sly satisfaction; finally they have to take the second row. As for the front row, which most of them shun so doggedly, George can fill that up with his regulars: Russ Dreyer, Tom Kugelman, Sister Maria, Mr Stoessel, Mrs Netta Torres, Kenny Potter, Lois Yamaguchi.

  George never enters the classroom with Dreyer, or any other student. A deeply-rooted dramatic instinct forbids him to do so. This is really all that he uses his office for; as a place to withdraw into before class, simply in order to re-emerge from it and make his entrance. He doesn’t interview students in it, because these offices are shared by at least two faculty members, and Dr Gottlieb, who teaches the Metaphysical Poets, is nearly always there. George cannot talk to another human being as if the two of them were alone, when in fact they aren’t. Even such a harmless question as, ‘What do you honestly think of Emerson?’ sounds indecently intimate, and such a mild criticism as, ‘What you’ve written is a mixed metaphor and it doesn’t mean anything’ sounds unnecessarily cruel, when Dr Gottlieb is right there at the other desk listening or, what’s worse, pretending not to listen. But Gottlieb obviously doesn’t feel this way. Perhaps it is a peculiarly British scruple.

  So now, leaving Dreyer, George goes into the office. It is right across the hallway. Gottlieb isn’t there, for a wonder. George peeps out of the window, between the slats of the venetian blinds, and sees, in the far distance, the two tennis players still at their game. He coughs, fingers the telephone directory without looking at it, closes the empty drawer in his desk, which has been pulled open a little. Then, abruptly, he turns, takes his briefcase out of the closet, leaves the office and crosses to the front classroom door.

  His entrance is quite undramatic, according to conventional standards. Nevertheless, this is a subtly contrived, outrageously theatrical effect. No hush falls as George walks in. Most of the students go right on talking. But they are all watching him, waiting for him to give some sign, no matter how slight, that the class is to begin. The effect is a subtle but gradually increasing tension, caused by George’s teasing refusal to give this sign and the students’ counter-determination not to stop talking until he gives it.

  Meanwhile, he stands there. Slowly, deliberately, like a magician, he takes a single book out of his briefcase and places it on the reading-desk. As he does this, his eyes move over the faces of the class. His lips curve in a faint but bold smile. Some of them smile back at him. George finds this frank confrontation extraordinarily exhilarating. He draws strength from these smiles, these bright young eyes. For him, this is one of the peak moments of the day. He feels brilliant, vital, challenging, slightly mysterious and, above all, foreign. His neat dark clothes, his white dress shirt and tie (the only tie in the room) are uncompromisingly alien from the aggressively virile informality of the young male students. Most of these wear sneakers and garterless white wool socks; jeans in cold weather and in warm weather shorts (the thigh-clinging Bermuda type; the more becoming short ones aren’t considered quite decent). If it is really warm, they’ll roll up their sleeves and sometimes leave their shirts provocatively unbuttoned to show curly chest-hair and a Christopher medal. They look as if they were ready at any minute to switch from studying to ditch-digging or gang-fighting. They seem like mere clumsy kids in contrast with the girls; for these have all outgrown their teenage phase of Capri pants, sloppy shirts and giant heads of teased-up hair. They are mature women, and they come to class dressed as if for a highly respectable party.

  This morning, George notes that all of his front-row regulars are present. Dreyer and Kugelman are the only ones he has actually asked to help fill the gap by sitting there; the rest of them have their individual reasons for doing so. While George is teaching, Dreyer watches him with an encouraging alertness; but George knows that Dreyer isn’t really impressed by him. To Dreyer, George will always remain an academic amateur; his degrees and background are British and therefore dubious. Still, George is the Skipper, the Old Man; and Dreyer, by supporting his authority, supports the structure of values up which he himself proposes to climb. So he wills George to be brilliant and impress the outsiders – that is to say, everyone else in the class. The funny thing is that Dreyer, with the clear conscience of absolute loyalty, feels free to whisper to Kugelman, his lieutenant, as often as he wants to. Whenever this happens, George longs to stop talking and listen to what they are saying about him. Instinctively, George is sure that Dreyer would never dream of talking about anyone else during class; that would be bad manners.

  Sister Maria belongs to a teaching Order. Soon she’ll get her credential and become a teacher herself. She is, no doubt, a fairly normal and unimaginative hardworking good young woman; and no doubt she sits up front because it helps her concentrate, maybe even because the boys still interest her a little and she wants to avoid looking at them. But we most of us lose our sense of proportion in the presence of a nun; and George, thus exposed at short range to this bride of Christ in her uncompromising medieval habit, finds himself becoming flustered, defensive. An unwilling conscript in Hell’s legions, he faces the soldier of Heaven across the frontline of an exceedingly polite cold war. In every sentence he addresses to her, he calls her ‘Sister’; which is probably just what she doesn’t want.

  Mr Stoessel sits in the front row because he is deaf and middle-aged and only lately arrived from Europe and his English is terrible.

  Mrs Netta Torres is also middle-aged. She seems to be taking this course out of mere curiosity, or to fill in idle hours. She has the look of a divorcee. She sits up front because her interest is centred frankly and brutally on George as George. She watches rather than listens to him. She even seems to be ‘reading’ his words indirectly, through a sort of braille made up of his gestures, inflections, mannerisms. And this almost tactile scrutiny is accompanied by a motherly smile; for, to Mrs Torres, George is just a small boy really, and so cute. George would love to catch her out and discourage her from attending his class by giving her low grades. But, alas, he can’t. Mrs Torres is listening as well as watching; she can repeat what he has been saying, word for word.

  Kenny Potter sits in the front row because he’s what’s nowadays called crazy, meaning only that he tends to do the opposite of what most people do; not on principle, however, and certainly not out of aggressiveness. Probably he’s too vague to notice the manners and customs of the tribe, and too lazy to follow them, anyway. He is a tall skinny boy with very broad stooped shoulders, gold-red hair, a small head, small bright blue eyes. He would be conventionally handsome if he didn’t have a beaky nose; but it is a nice one, a large humorous organ.

  George finds himself almost continuously aware of Kenny’s presence in the room; but this doesn’t mean that he regards Kenny as an ally. Oh, no – he can never venture to take Kenny for granted. Sometimes, when George makes a joke and Kenny laughs his deep rather wild laugh, George feels he is being laughed with. At other times, when the laugh comes a fraction of a moment late, George gets a spooky impression that Kenny is laughing not at the joke but at the whole situation; the educational system of this country, and all the economic and political and psychological forces which have brought them into this classroom together. At such times,
George suspects Kenny of understanding the innermost meaning of life; of being, in fact, some sort of a genius. (Though you would certainly never guess this from his term papers.) And then again, maybe Kenny is just very young for his age, and misleadingly charming, and silly.

  Lois Yamaguchi sits beside Kenny because she is his girl friend; at least, they are nearly always together. She smiles at George in a way which makes him wonder if she and Kenny have private jokes about him; but who can be sure of anything with these enigmatic Asians? Alexander Mong smiles enigmatically, too; though his beautiful head almost certainly contains nothing but clotted oil paint. Lois and Alexander are by far the most beautiful creatures in the class; their beauty is like the beauty of plants, seemingly untroubled by vanity, anxiety or effort.

  All this while, the tension has been mounting. George has continued to smile at the talkers and to preserve his wonderful provocative melodramatic silence. And now, at last, after nearly four whole minutes, his silence has conquered them. The talking dies down. Those who have already stopped talking shush the others. George has triumphed. But his triumph lasts only for a moment. For now he must break his own spell. Now he must cast off his mysteriousness and stand revealed as that dime-a-44 dozen thing, a teacher – to whom the class has got to listen, no matter whether he drools or stammers or speaks with the tongue of an angel – that’s neither here nor there. The class has got to listen to George because, by virtue of the powers vested in him by the State of California, he can make them submit to and study even his crassest prejudices, his most irresponsible caprices, as so many valuable clues to the problem: How can I impress, flatter or otherwise con this cantankerous old thing into giving me a good grade?

  Yes, alas, now he must spoil everything. Now he must speak.

  ‘After many a summer dies the swan.’

  George rolls the words off his tongue with such hammy harmonics, such shameless relish, that this sounds like a parody of W. B. Yeats reciting. (He comes down on dies with a great thump to compensate for the And which Aldous Huxley has chopped off from the beginning of the original line.) Then, having managed to startle or embarrass at least a few of them, he looks around the room with an ironical grin and says quietly, schoolmasterishly, ‘I take it you’ve all read the Huxley novel by this time, seeing that I asked you to more than three weeks ago?’