LITMIR.BIZ

      TWO

      Still in his shirtsleeves and feeling the return of the adrenal energy that had poured through him during that long half hour at Murphree Hall, Stall leaned on the kitchen counter and watched his wife slice tomatoes for their salad. The good smell of roast beef came from the oven. Their first martinis stood crystalline on either side of the sink, Stall’s half finished, his wife’s untouched. She had stopped crying, but Stall could see the pathways of her tears in the light dusting of powder she had applied for his homecoming. The two things, the makeup she had put on for him and her tears, moved Stall so much that his own eyes burned. He took a long pull of cold gin and turned away to square himself. He had banished their daughter Corey from the kitchen at the first sight of Maureen’s tears and without any proper explanation for her exile, and he knew he’d have to make that right with her soon. Maureen put down her knife and rinsed red tomato juice from her hands.

      “Jack Leaf. I just can’t . . . How do you understand a thing like this?” She looked at Stall out of swollen red eyes as though she meant the question, as though she thought he could tell her how.

      He shook his head thoughtfully and took another sip of the good cold gin. Gin, he thought, how I love it. It’s one way to deal with the surprising hell of life. He had not told Maureen that, after he had tried the coffee in the CI and found it to be not enough, not by a long way, he had gone next door to the Gold Coast, a student dive, for two stiff shots of bourbon before taking the city bus home. She’d had the martinis waiting when he walked in the door and he’d taken a long sip of gin to cover the bourbon before giving Maureen her first kiss. Then he’d told her about Jack Leaf’s walk in the air.

      Maureen drew in a hiss of breath. “Oh my God, did you . . . did anyone call Sarah?”

       Oh Christ, Sarah. Jack’s wife Sarah.

      Bourbon-stunned, Stall had ridden the bus home to their prairie-

      style house on a hill just up from the construction site for the new law school. They’d bought this house so that he could walk and bus to work and Maureen could keep their Packard at home. She’d told him she’d be a housewife for him, but not housebound like her mother had been. She wouldn’t be without a car for anyone. As the bus had labored up the hill past the vast sprawl of married-student housing, Stall had thought through what he had done for Jack Leaf and for the university. When he’d finished the sad inventory of his actions, he’d said to himself, I did my duty. Now, standing beside Maureen in their kitchen waiting for a second martini, he had to tell his wife that it hadn’t occurred to him to call Sarah Leaf, or even to wonder who would call her. The awful thought hit him that right now Sarah could be standing at her own kitchen sink paring carrots and waiting for Jack to come home.

      “God, Mar baby, I didn’t think of that, what with all I had to . . .”

      Maureen turned and looked at him sharply, and the fear came alight in Stall’s brain that she might cry again. A woman’s tears had always turned Tom Stall into a standing heap of mush.

      His wife’s eyes softened but not into tears. She gave him her frailty-thy-name-is-man look, which, considering her options, was at least in the upper third of good outcomes. He gave her his I’m-very-sorry smile, his only option. “Do you think I should call her now?”

      It was a day of things occurring to Stall and one came to him now: he, they, Tom Stall and wife, would have to visit Sarah Leaf, and soon. They’d have to go to Sarah’s door with food of some kind, probably Maureen’s chicken-and–mushroom soup casserole, and they’d have to say and do the right things. Stall dreaded it, not because he found no meaning in such things, and not because he took the fashionable literary view of bourgeois convention (which right now meant a French existentialist view, the harshest of any available), but because he was no damned good at such things. He was just flat bad at offering human comfort to his fellow man. It was an odd thing, irony, because Stall believed that he loved his fellow man, loved Him with a capital H in the way that Whitman had loved the crowds in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.”

       We fathom you not—we love you—there is per-

       fection in you also,

       You furnish your parts toward eternity,

       Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the

       Soul.

      Stall loved people in the aggregate for their wonderful, messy, preposterous, goofy optimism. Loving his fellow man in his individual, farting, nose-picking, often criminally stupid state was hard, but Stall tried. In the war he’d seen the worst of human doings (blessedly, for a very short time), but he’d come away from that experience with a stronger sense of human goodness. He’d seen incredible valor too. Should he ever realize his dream of returning to Paris with enough money to show Maureen around in style, he knew that Jean-Paul Sartre and his sometime friend Albert Camus would not allow him even to walk past their café, Les Deux Magots, much less have a drink with them. Loving the world was not their cup of absinthe.

      After thinking it over through a sip of martini, Maureen said, “No, don’t call her now. I think it’s better for you to wait until we know more.” She looked out through the kitchen window at their backyard where a pair of cardinals, bright red cock and dull hen, splashed in the birdbath. To the window she said, “I’m sure someone has told her about Jack. Someone from the hospital or the police. We’ll call together tomorrow.”

      By the tone of her voice and the way she surveyed the backyard, beautiful in the falling summer light, Stall knew that she was composing the image in her mind of exactly how to comfort Sarah Leaf. The right way to do it.

      * * *

      After dinner and after Stall and his wife had told their daughter that something bad had happened at the university and this bad thing, the death of a friend, had made her mother cry, their daughter Corey, a hearty, athletic girl of twelve who had not known Jack Leaf except as a man to say hello to as he came and went at the few departmental gatherings the Stalls had hosted, seemed to take the death of Jack Leaf more as an idea (people die), than as anything personal.

      Stall had taken pains to tell her that there was a very good chance that Jack Leaf had accidentally fallen from a window. Corey had asked a few questions, and these matched the logic of accidents, not suicide: Was Mr. Leaf teaching when he fell? Did the students see him fall? Did anyone try to catch him? When Stall could see that she was more or less satisfied with her parents’ explanations, he sent her to her room to finish her homework. Her mother

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