LITMIR.BIZ

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Tom Stall about? Once, a friend of Stall’s father had asked Stall why he wanted to be a professor. Without thinking much about it, the young Stall, weary from his service in the European Theater of War, had said, “So I don’t have to be a salesman.” College presidents were, above all else, salesmen, and this was another reason to fear the administration building. It was the House of Sales. Stall thought of the English Department as the House of Examined Lives.

      So Stall wanted to talk to his wife before he went to school. He wanted, he supposed in some vague way, her reassurance, her approval. He wanted her to say, if not by word, then by look or touch, You’ll do fine. You are more than up to this.

      He found Maureen leaning on the bathroom sink for what looked like actual support. She regarded him from sunken, shrouded eyes and said, “I’ll never drink again.” It was one of their best old jokes, but this time, he could see, she meant it. He knew that she would drink again (he certainly hoped so; he’d rather not do it alone), but he could see that for now this declaration was the only truth she knew. He went to stand behind her and massage her shoulders. She said only, “Mmmmm.”

      Stall said, “Is that good or . . . ?”

      “Or,” she said, and so he stopped, though his hands departed her flesh reluctantly.

      He had some time, so he contented himself, as he often did, with watching her do what in Victorian novels was called her toilette. She brushed her teeth as though even they hurt, and then let her robe drop to the floor around her ankles. On her way to the shower, she stepped on it. Stall watched her legs, especially her ankles, which were slender and at the same time strong. The ankles of a field hockey star. He loved her ankles. She slowly drew the shower curtain shut, Stall supposed, to make as little of its brutal, rattling noise as possible. Then, modestly, she tossed her panties out through the small aperture between the curtain and the wall.

      Stall loved this too, but with complications. Maureen was no more modest than most women of her generation, but she was plenty modest. Even in their thirteenth year of marriage, Stall had to ask her if he could look at her. It went like this:

      “May I look at you?”

      “Well, of course, dear.” A look of concern for the state of his intellect, if not his sanity.

      “No, I mean look at you.”

      “You mean, without my . . . ? You mean naked?”

      “Sure. That’s what I mean.”

      “Oh,” a little laugh, a little giddy, “you’ve done that plenty of times.” And sometimes a somewhat lurid wink.

      “No, I mean now. May I look at you now? May I see you naked?” This was the gauntlet thrown. There was no ambiguity left here, at least none that Stall could see. They had entered the land of a simple yes or no.

      But Maureen could take the conversation from this simple point to any number of complicated places. She could say, “I don’t like the way I look.” (One of her best.) This had the effect of enlisting Stall on her side in the battle against a woman’s low assessment of her own looks, of her beauty.

      Maureen’s beauty, at least to Stall, was without question. She was, he would say, in the top 5 percent of all possible beauty short of movie stars, which everyone knew was mostly a matter of lighting and makeup. Stall considered himself enormously fortunate because he had married a beautiful woman who had lost none of her beauty after the birth of their only child. He received and Maureen did too, though she never admitted it, almost constant proof of her beauty when other men and women commented on it or, in ways more stealthy, let Stall and his wife know that Mrs. Stall was . . . a goddess.

      But pointing this out to her in the sometimes endless conversations that began with “May I look at you” only led to further complications. “That,” she would say, “only means there’s something about me that’s too . . . I don’t know, too much that way. You know what I mean?”

      Stall thought he knew. That way meant sexual. Maureen Stall was too sexual, too fetching, too lookable, and this could only, to her mind, be another reason for not letting the world look. Stall was not the world, but he was her world at this moment, here in this bathroom, and he wanted his wife to let him look at her.

      He parted the shower curtain.

      Maureen screamed.

      Stall jumped back and closed the curtain.

      Another time, he told himself. Another time she’ll let me have a good long look. The look of a painter, a sculptor, a satyr, a lecher, a fiend.

      FOUR

      Stall entered Anderson Hall by the staircase in the alley, hoping to glide silently down the ancient, linseed-smelling oak floor to his small cell without meeting any of his colleagues. His hungover, haggard face would not be a good thing for them to see until later, after time and more coffee had done their healing work. He had just come through the fire door at the end of the hallway when Amos Harding emerged from his office, head down over a piece of paper. Christ, the old man must have driven all night to get back here from North Carolina. Harding looked better for his journey than Stall did for his night of gin. Stall took a sharp left turn into the first available open door, Sophie Green’s office.

      Oddly, she stood now exactly as she had the last time he had seen her—on his way to investigate the noise that had broken from the throat of Jack Leaf before he hit a sidewalk.

      The circumstance gave him a moment to look at her—the delicate back, the slender fingers touching the spines of books in a way that made Stall think: Loving. And there was more to look at—a small spot of perspiration in the black silk exactly between her shoulder blades, and a lock of curly black hair that had come loose from the comb on the right side of her head. She withdrew her left hand from the bookcase and sent it to the unruly lock, but the hair fought back. She looked a little lopsided and, to Stall, the effect was charming. He stepped back into the hallway, saw that Harding was gone, and decided to knock lightly on Professor Green’s door.

      Sophie Green took a step toward Stall, which seemed to mean that he was invited to enter her office. She had been hired after the retirement of a very old medievalist named Inigo Frasier, and for some reason her arrival had not triggered the usual shuffle of office space. She had been given Frasier’s very fine office rather than the smallest one in the basement, which usually went to a new hire. This departure from tradition had puzzled faculty of greater seniority and angered some of them. Stall had not been privy to any discussions of the office, but he assumed that the decision was of a piece with the fact that Dr. Sophie Green was the first woman to be invited to join the graduate faculty. The powers that were—in this case Harding and probably President Connor—had wisely not wanted to subject their first woman to the usual mild hazing which included basement offices, early-morning and late-afternoon classes, bad classrooms, and the worst committee assignments.

      In the awkward silence, he considered simply welcoming her to the faculty, but he had already done that.

      On her first day in Gainesville, he had met her in the parking lot where she was struggling with boxes of books. He had called the department secretary, Helen Markham, from a ground-floor office and asked her to send a custodian to help with the books. Then Stall and Sophie Green had chatted a little awkwardly while they waited for a middle-aged Negro to arrive pushing a dolly. The building had no elevator, so when the books had been rolled inside, Stall and the black man carried them up two flights of stairs. Throughout this long and sinew-wrenching process, Sophie Green had protested that there was really no need for all this trouble. She could have done it herself.

      She weighed, Stall guessed, ninety pounds soaking wet, and while she probably could have gotten the books up the stairs, he was pretty sure it would have taken her most of the day, with rest periods and trips to an orthopedic surgeon. A Southern woman would have thanked Stall, complimented his strength and virility, and promised to bake him a lemon chiffon cake as soon as she could get to the store for the ingredients. And that would have been that.

      When

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