Student Body, Sample 4 |
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From Chapter 8 and Chapter 9
Yes, how simple and common these environs were, and yet how comfortable and lived-in and right. He remembered the slow, stairstep-like organ tones of Procul Harum’s “Whiter Shade of Pale” as Anna had turned it up whenever that song came on the radio, and Cream’s “White Room” that always seemed to be playing on the classic rock station back then, and bits of crazy swirling music from Iran or India or someplace piping in distantly on the wind. And there were the sounds of the leaves rustling over the winding lanes, and their swaying shadows, too, and all the strange and wonderful spices floating in the air at dinner time.
Finally having to move out someday from what he once had thought would be merely a low-budget roach trap but was in fact a place of belonging and happiness and memory was disquieting somehow, like turning his back on it all—his home and his life and the past he shared with Anna and the kids and the big black cat. Sure, he knew it wouldn’t be like that, not really. But he just never wanted to feel that way. Not again...
Of course— Well, Rick reminded himself with a grim little headshake, the idea of finishing the Ph.D. presupposed that he was going to be able to get through this mess he was in now, didn’t it? For at his back he could always hear Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near, and yonder all before him lay deserts of vast eternity… But he would get through it, he tried to tell himself, he would. All he had to do was get his hands on the class papers in question and shove ’em right up the long-faced Koryzwic’s smug, fucking nose...
CHAPTER NINE
Rick closed his eyes for a moment. He let out his breath, took another, and opened his lids once more as, with his heart still thudding from the unremitting pace of his half-hour trek and from the near-run up three stairs at a time, he reached automatically for the handle of the screen door of his apartment. Home again. Suddenly, though, as he yanked the thin metal door wide, he checked its motion swiftly, and when he stepped in, he eased the thing back with care so it would not slam—for he didn’t see the children anywhere, and the door to their bedroom was closed, and he knew how desperately needed the respite of their naptime was for the mother of three. As had become their custom, like that of the Pakistanis around the corner, he toed off the sneakers that had tromped across untold germs and worms and oil-slicked asphalt and chewing gum, and left them by the door.
Anna, stretched out on the couch with her ankles crossed and a Parents magazine open upon her full chest, blinked up at him in surprise. “Hey, honey,” she smiled, “didn’t think I’d see you this early! When you called me back, you didn’t say anything about coming home so soon.” She lifted her feet as he plopped his backpack onto his desk and came across to drop into the couch, and then she set her heels placidly across his lap.
He licked his lips. “I just got tired of working at the office,” he attempted in casual tones, “and I really didn’t feel like spending the rest of the goddamned day sunk in the library, so I figured...” He gave a vague, equivocal little gesture with one hand. “Well, why not come home? I just read an article,” he asserted what he hoped was a faintly self-deprecating humor, “which said that people outside of the ivory tower actually live in such places.”
“Do tell!” Anna batted the lashes over her surprised-looking green eyes.
“Yeah, well, the true scholar does tend to forget such things...” Feeling tired, he patted his wife’s bare ankle absently, his eyes unseeing on the second-hand black-and-white television sitting upon the familiar swap shop coffee table straight ahead, on the wall behind it that was hung with old National Geographic maps he liked to pick up at Curious across the street from his office, on the kitchen table around the corner where the wall ended when the bathroom did, on the sink and counters and cabinets and stove to the right, the children’s closed bedroom door to the left of the refrigerator, and their own open bedroom door just to the left of that, and beyond, a small scrap of sky which he could just see through the window there, empty and gray and somehow lonely looking...
Anna was silent for a moment. “Anything wrong?” she asked at last.
Rick blinked. “No,” he said quickly. He turned to look at her, affecting mild curiosity. “Why?”
Again she regarded his face, and he tried not to squirm. “I don’t know, you look...sort of beat.”
He forced a crooked grin. “Naw,” he said airily. “Just got a problem student who’s starting to get pissed off, and some late papers I need to grade, and of course I’m trying to keep up with my load so that my professors don’t come home and talk to their wives about me the way I have to come home and talk about my little shits. The usual.”
Anna smiled, and Rick was surprised, actually, at how much it warmed him. But it warmed him, and it scared him a little, too, for that smile which he had taken for granted for far too long was in more danger now than she could know.
He was reminded suddenly of an old War Department poster which he had seen in a big book of propaganda art in the library. Seen from above, at an angle, so that the onlooker could view no details or distractions beyond this particular patch of comfortable green lawn, three children played on an idealized summer afternoon—a taller lad in slacks and sweater and tie who carried a toy bomber in his hand, a smaller girl in a knee-length dress sitting with her dolly, and a boy younger still who wore a triangular hat of folded newspaper and waved a little 48-star American flag at the end of a pole he had made from lashing together two short lengths of wood.
The light, however, was ever so slightly ominous somehow, like the faintly unnatural illumination that comes before a brewing storm. The smaller boy appeared suddenly scared, and the little girl had just noticed a crooked inky shape brushing the edge of her doll, while their older brother put one hand protectively in front of his sister and began to look warily into the sky. For beneath their feet, not quite impinging upon the children, and yet ready to engulf them with but the slightest rotation which seemed inevitable, lay the menacing shadow of a sinister black swastika, and the caption beneath the picture read, Don’t let that shadow touch them!
And Rick frowned within himself, feeling the same nervous sense of impending doom which that unknown artist had captured so melodramatically and yet so feelingly. There were terrors all around, secret threats that crept and stalked, while innocents played, trusting that somehow someone could make everything right. He loved his dear wife—he did, no matter her faults, and no matter his—and suddenly he just wanted to protect her and hold her, and to cling to her, too, even for his own sake. Blinking, he swallowed, caressing the bare skin of the soft calf below the cuff of Anna’s Capri pants.
Yes, how simple and common these environs were, and yet how comfortable and lived-in and right. He remembered the slow, stairstep-like organ tones of Procul Harum’s “Whiter Shade of Pale” as Anna had turned it up whenever that song came on the radio, and Cream’s “White Room” that always seemed to be playing on the classic rock station back then, and bits of crazy swirling music from Iran or India or someplace piping in distantly on the wind. And there were the sounds of the leaves rustling over the winding lanes, and their swaying shadows, too, and all the strange and wonderful spices floating in the air at dinner time.
Finally having to move out someday from what he once had thought would be merely a low-budget roach trap but was in fact a place of belonging and happiness and memory was disquieting somehow, like turning his back on it all—his home and his life and the past he shared with Anna and the kids and the big black cat. Sure, he knew it wouldn’t be like that, not really. But he just never wanted to feel that way. Not again...
Of course— Well, Rick reminded himself with a grim little headshake, the idea of finishing the Ph.D. presupposed that he was going to be able to get through this mess he was in now, didn’t it? For at his back he could always hear Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near, and yonder all before him lay deserts of vast eternity… But he would get through it, he tried to tell himself, he would. All he had to do was get his hands on the class papers in question and shove ’em right up the long-faced Koryzwic’s smug, fucking nose...
CHAPTER NINE
Rick closed his eyes for a moment. He let out his breath, took another, and opened his lids once more as, with his heart still thudding from the unremitting pace of his half-hour trek and from the near-run up three stairs at a time, he reached automatically for the handle of the screen door of his apartment. Home again. Suddenly, though, as he yanked the thin metal door wide, he checked its motion swiftly, and when he stepped in, he eased the thing back with care so it would not slam—for he didn’t see the children anywhere, and the door to their bedroom was closed, and he knew how desperately needed the respite of their naptime was for the mother of three. As had become their custom, like that of the Pakistanis around the corner, he toed off the sneakers that had tromped across untold germs and worms and oil-slicked asphalt and chewing gum, and left them by the door.
Anna, stretched out on the couch with her ankles crossed and a Parents magazine open upon her full chest, blinked up at him in surprise. “Hey, honey,” she smiled, “didn’t think I’d see you this early! When you called me back, you didn’t say anything about coming home so soon.” She lifted her feet as he plopped his backpack onto his desk and came across to drop into the couch, and then she set her heels placidly across his lap.
He licked his lips. “I just got tired of working at the office,” he attempted in casual tones, “and I really didn’t feel like spending the rest of the goddamned day sunk in the library, so I figured...” He gave a vague, equivocal little gesture with one hand. “Well, why not come home? I just read an article,” he asserted what he hoped was a faintly self-deprecating humor, “which said that people outside of the ivory tower actually live in such places.”
“Do tell!” Anna batted the lashes over her surprised-looking green eyes.
“Yeah, well, the true scholar does tend to forget such things...” Feeling tired, he patted his wife’s bare ankle absently, his eyes unseeing on the second-hand black-and-white television sitting upon the familiar swap shop coffee table straight ahead, on the wall behind it that was hung with old National Geographic maps he liked to pick up at Curious across the street from his office, on the kitchen table around the corner where the wall ended when the bathroom did, on the sink and counters and cabinets and stove to the right, the children’s closed bedroom door to the left of the refrigerator, and their own open bedroom door just to the left of that, and beyond, a small scrap of sky which he could just see through the window there, empty and gray and somehow lonely looking...
Anna was silent for a moment. “Anything wrong?” she asked at last.
Rick blinked. “No,” he said quickly. He turned to look at her, affecting mild curiosity. “Why?”
Again she regarded his face, and he tried not to squirm. “I don’t know, you look...sort of beat.”
He forced a crooked grin. “Naw,” he said airily. “Just got a problem student who’s starting to get pissed off, and some late papers I need to grade, and of course I’m trying to keep up with my load so that my professors don’t come home and talk to their wives about me the way I have to come home and talk about my little shits. The usual.”
Anna smiled, and Rick was surprised, actually, at how much it warmed him. But it warmed him, and it scared him a little, too, for that smile which he had taken for granted for far too long was in more danger now than she could know.
He was reminded suddenly of an old War Department poster which he had seen in a big book of propaganda art in the library. Seen from above, at an angle, so that the onlooker could view no details or distractions beyond this particular patch of comfortable green lawn, three children played on an idealized summer afternoon—a taller lad in slacks and sweater and tie who carried a toy bomber in his hand, a smaller girl in a knee-length dress sitting with her dolly, and a boy younger still who wore a triangular hat of folded newspaper and waved a little 48-star American flag at the end of a pole he had made from lashing together two short lengths of wood.
The light, however, was ever so slightly ominous somehow, like the faintly unnatural illumination that comes before a brewing storm. The smaller boy appeared suddenly scared, and the little girl had just noticed a crooked inky shape brushing the edge of her doll, while their older brother put one hand protectively in front of his sister and began to look warily into the sky. For beneath their feet, not quite impinging upon the children, and yet ready to engulf them with but the slightest rotation which seemed inevitable, lay the menacing shadow of a sinister black swastika, and the caption beneath the picture read, Don’t let that shadow touch them!
And Rick frowned within himself, feeling the same nervous sense of impending doom which that unknown artist had captured so melodramatically and yet so feelingly. There were terrors all around, secret threats that crept and stalked, while innocents played, trusting that somehow someone could make everything right. He loved his dear wife—he did, no matter her faults, and no matter his—and suddenly he just wanted to protect her and hold her, and to cling to her, too, even for his own sake. Blinking, he swallowed, caressing the bare skin of the soft calf below the cuff of Anna’s Capri pants.
