From "Fin—Three Novellas" by Juan Alonso

Pavanne For The Selfish Gene

I had no idea, as I drove for hours toward tiny Longfellow College over the nearly empty, snowy back roads in New England, the kind that are very thin and pale blue on road maps, like nearly forgotten veins of receding importance, how bloodied by murder dear old and effete American academia was. And, remarkably often, with the passionate hammer as the expressive instrument of choice, too.

Of course, it was not surprising that I, like most people, should not have been aware of it, because, as with the periodic epidemics of suicides both among students and faculty, the caretakers of these institutions, in the tradition of clergy, try not to publicize the occasional homicides, but to hush them up. They tend to treat them as unspeakable anomalies, and indeed don’t speak about them, but let time pass, leaving the details to become vaguer and vaguer before becoming lost altogether, which is the right thing to do. After all, it is in their most vital of interests to maintain their image of utopian, nearly pastoral worlds—even in the teeth of being surrounded by dangerously decaying, low-rent urban neighborhoods—where lofty academic (read: pointless) things are discussed and where you can safely park your adolescent kids at currently more than $50,000 a year (in 2008 dollars), before retrieving them to send them off again to their law schools and med schools and so on, from whence to dive head first into the earliest shallows of their own invisibly looming middle age.

So, when I finally arrived at Longfellow College way the hell up in Vermont, near the shores of Lake Champlain (which, to its credit, has long boasted about one “Champ”, its own version of the Loch Ness monster), I was still under the secular impression that I was visiting the usual pastoral kind of utopia where the mostly rich kids could have their sex, beer and drugs and their elders their ambitions and booze to see them through the winters, while their high priesthood of administrators expounds on how their enterprise should be as a guiding light unto the less enlightened, townie world.

I have never liked anything that tried to be utopian, by the way. Such places made me instantly claustrophobic.

But, I was there for the long weekend to visit a dear old friend, New York City’s own Joey Correlli, né José Correlli, who was on the faculty, and up for tenure. Actually, Joey, as he was now known even to himself, had come from La Boca, Buenos Aires’ Little Italy, at age seventeen escaping the increasing possibilities—and it did not take much—of torture, of being ‘disappeared’ and the general horror of the Argentine Dirty War. So, by the age of twenty five, escaping Joey had translated himself seamlessly and absolutely, new accent and all, into what passed for a natively grown, gregarious Italian-American High School graduate (and formally no more) musician with lots of long, wavy crow-black hair. This transmutation was easiest, probably, if one came from a Buenos Aires’ Little Italy and went right into a New York one. And when I say ‘absolutely’, it was because by then he had begun to experience considerable anxiety whenever forced to contemplate the prospect of breathing outside of his adopted NYC (as he had once felt, he confessed to me long ago, about the asphyxiating prospect of breathing outside of his native Buenos Aires when Joey had to leave Argentina on the run).

Urban, Joey, who to me had so much of the gregarious crow about him (perfect for his world of mostly gregarious, fellow-crow musicians), certainly was. Therefore, from the moment after he started at Longfellow College up in the vast and deep Vermont early autumn green, Joey began desperately hoping to be able to escape one day, and eventually alight in some other place in a city, preferably back in NYC, though with less and less hope. Because, with the passage of time and a growing family, and a shrinking academic job market to be faced without many credentials, things would become so dire for Joey (though he still longed for The Big Apple that had become his natural habitat) that he now even more desperately was hoping to be granted tenure at tiny Longfellow U.

I had come to provide support because I had received a mailed invitation to hear Assistant Professor Joseph Correlli, whom I had not seen in at least six years, perform one of his compositions for the saxophone and piano, and it really was on my way, more or less, to Montreal, where I was going anyway.

He would not be the only one on stage, of course. Two other Assistant Professors, also showing their wares (not all musical) to an audience that included members of their feared Tenure and Promotion committee, were to perform too. Each and every one of them, Joey had scribbled in pen on my invitation, “with their balls on the anvil” (that haunting Academia hammer again). The performance was scheduled for early the very evening of my arrival.

II

As instructed, I parked my venerable Mercedes up on the snowy hill where the Longfellow College Administration building sat suggesting the Ivy League as best it could, next to the surprisingly small Warren G. Harding Library that suggested a 1940s, small-town red-brick high school. I opened the car door and stepped out into the colder air and immediately saw, after the many years, Joey running toward me, transformed by age (his once-thick black hair receding, body thickening), as if forcing himself back against the head winds of Time, puffing out his white breath, his Latin arms and heart spread to better embrace me. (I thought he must have been looking out from some window for a long time, waiting and waiting for me to show up. His great eagerness to see me suggested great solitude). He was crying out, “Hey, Fin!” adding as he finally loudly hugged me, slapping my back, “I thought maybe you got lost! Glad you made it, man!” making me remember what a hungrily sociable kind of kid he had been. And then, stepping back to better look at me with his enormous and extraordinarily sensitive black eyes—which made me think as they always did: ‘Picasso had huge, luminously dark Mediterranean eyes, just like that’, he laughed what struck me as the anxious laugh of the damned.

Back when I first knew him he had looked like a blade-slender and remarkably handsome, big-eyed kid (even long after he was a kid) of the Sicilian variety, with no sign of vanity about him. Now, the early middle-aged guy I saw was neither slender nor remarkably handsome, nor remarkably anything, though still without giving off any sign of vanity, which was understandable now. As opposed to when I first knew him, when that absence of vanity came off as a naturally elegant and manly virtue. He was maybe five feet nine, and that had not seemed to have changed either, nor had his big black eyes, now full of warmth and gratitude for my having troubled myself to get there.

He dressed differently, I thought as I contemplated him. True, Joey’s costuming had never been anybody’s idea of some Greenwich Village wild jazzman, but now, on the contrary, what stood out beneath his open overcoat was his mid-level bank employee blue suit to go with his lifelessly white shirt and blue tie. His once shoulder-length hair was now mid-level bank employee length, too. It made me suspect that he, consciously or unconsciously, for the sake of inspiring confidence in the Longfellow authorities, was under-emphasizing that he had once been a fully gigging musician in the NY club scene, that is to say, a member of a distrusted criminal underclass.

“Joey!” I said, “You look so respectable I have to resist asking you for a loan. I’m impressed!” Actually, I also thought he had something about him now of the tamed model prisoner.

The academic specialty field he claimed, incidentally—not that he really was academic, but I guessed he had to claim something beyond teaching an instrument—was Jazz. The sophisticated, evolved kind we called, once upon a time, Modern Jazz, as opposed to the older, old-time atavistic stuff, loved as it was by Joey too—first played by and for the black musicians, when free of their white customers, because they liked it—that had come floating out very late into the night from even the most high-toned and venerable New Orleans’ whore houses.

“Yeah, well…what are you gonna do, Fin,” he shrugged smiling as if apologetically, showing his very, very white teeth, just as he always had, with the same gently ironic, slanting Sicilian smile that I remembered (the irony, I’d always thought, was not personally his, but anciently racial, from confronting any of the many invader authorities that had descended upon his people through the centuries), and he said more softly (he usually did speak softly, always had), “I’m dealing with the Man, right? So I can’t be walking around looking like a pimp with all these little white chicks all over the place,” and he laughed. “But, Jesus, thanks a million for coming all the way out here, man. Really. It had to be a huge pain in the culo to drive here. I really appreciate it,” and he paused to appraise me more fully. “It’s been a long time…five years, right?”

“Closer to six, I think, because the last time I saw you,” I said, “you were coming up here with Donna to start this job,” to which, shaking his head, he said, “Wow...”

“I know,” I said (now I thought he did look a little shorter than I remembered, he looked less than five feet eight, as if Time-hammered down and thickened). “But believe me, getting here was not a problem. I just took a small detour on my way up to Montreal, my old hometown, you know, and here I am.”

“Well, thanks anyway,” he said and again smiled the slanting white smile. “You look so good, man. What’s your secret? Look at me. I’m a fat toilet now.”

“Well, I wouldn’t say that about you, Joey. But, I have to admit that, thanks to being a man of means, I do live in philosophic repose, and I only drink good booze. And then,” I added as I always do, “there’s the blood of innocents, of course.”

Joey shook his head, and regarding me again with those black Picasso eyes so huge I could almost see myself in them, he said softly, “Blood of innocents…Man, you haven’t changed…like, at all. Good for you.”

“Family okay?” I asked, for Joey was very much a family man. His wife, Donna, didn’t like me, never had. I sensed—and Donna made sure that I did—that she always distrusted Joey’s friends for openers, me included, and maybe especially. Donna, from the first moment she laid her narrowing, long-lashed dark eyes upon me, long before their two daughters had come into this world, had sized me up as a dangerously smart-ass, older, rich bachelor bohemian (this was only partly true—I did like jazz, though not as a religion, and not all jazz, but I did have nine years on Joey), just the kind of guy who might well lead most un-bohemian, family guy Joey astray. But I could understand why Joey looked vulnerable, in her eyes, since he so joyously basked in the tribal masculine camaraderie of his musician’s world, something close to a fish splashing back in its native waters. He was plainly out of that now, though.

“They’re good, real good,” Joey nodded, and then shrugged. “The girls don’t know the difference, they don’t know anything else, and Donna likes it up here.” I could tell he still didn’t. However, I assumed that, as a Catholic family man he was stoically soldiering on for the three women in his life, though again giving off that earlier air of his Vermont solitude. And then, quickly changing the subject away from his family, Joey shook his smiling head at the wonder of my presence after all this time and said, “No shit, you really haven’t changed, man! It’s unbelievable! Same old Fin. Saying the same old kind of jive. You don’t even have a pot belly yet, like me. Jesus, I’m glad to see it. It gives me hope, is what it does,” which told me hope had been slipping away from him. (Hope for what, I wondered. Hope for a life where, freer, he could be more himself?)

So we embraced once more, now with much more effusive slapping of each other’s back, and I said, “Well, you look good too, man! (Normally I did not say ‘man’ like that, so often, practically for rhythmic purposes, but it was inevitable now with Joey again) I don’t care what you say. Vermont must agree with you somewhere, man,” fully aware that when he had first taken the job at Longfellow—after years and years of gigging in NYC dives, and wanting to believe (against all his instincts) that Longfellow would be a good, sensible gig for a married musician with kids on the way—he had done so with much apprehension. Because, as I mentioned, Joey back when I first knew him was truly not altogether sure he would be able to survive psychologically outside of NYC, hence his non-breathing anxieties. A very serious matter indeed. As a matter of fact, the one time he had tried it before (and very unsuccessfully) was during his little stint in the Navy, where he was a twenty two year old medic, before his own blessedly early medical discharge after just one year.

“Listen,” said Joey, his huge black eyes shining anew, “Let’s get the fuck out of here for a while and go for a couple of beers. I bet you need it after all that driving.”

“Gee, man…I don’t know, drinks now?” I said, thinking of him and his coming important performance of his composition that very evening, not wanting to lead him astray and prove Donna right. “Shouldn’t you be practicing or something? It’s at seven thirty, right? And it’s four thirty now.”

“Don’t worry about it. I’m not going to get tanked or anything. I need the break.”

“Okay. You point the way,” I said as I turned and got back into my car.

And almost before I knew it, I was already escaping downhill, driving away from the detestably Ivy-toned Longfellow administration building and the, in truth, bleakly mediocre-looking, red-brick Warren G. Harding Library, which could have been revealing too much to any attentive visiting parents about the richness, or lack thereof, of the psyche of tiny Longfellow College, when Joey said, “There’s only two bars in this town.”

“Talk about cultural poverty,” I said.

“You have no idea, man. See, there’s the bar,” Joey further explained, “where the faculty always goes, every damn day, so you always see the same damn fucking faces just getting older and older, and then there’s the townie bar, which is where we’re going.”

“Is that where the kids go?”

“Nah…, if they did they’re afraid they might get the shit kicked out of them, which is true. They drink in their frat houses, they do everything there. It’s kind of like their Baghdad Green Zone.”

We were soon ensconced comfortably in a booth, at a Formica table, at ten of five in the afternoon in the almost empty bar, having just ordered our second glass of beer, when Joey’s cell phone rang. It rang as if it felt it had the royal right to ring, breaking in on us.

Even before flipping it open in one motion as Joey pulled it out, he let out an annoyed, sotto voce “Shit”, evidently sure who was calling him. It was someone, I could see, Joey hated, and I did not remember him as particularly a hater. Not that he was always bland, of course. Unimposing as he was physically, I had seen him once, back in New York, be an instantly ferocious and effective fighter against a bigger guy.

(It was unforgettable. The bigger guy, during a break where Joey was playing with a group, had called him out, after—who knows for what reason—having been riding Joey’s tail all night. The two finally went out to the sidewalk, with me trailing as, I suppose, Joey’s second, trying to be a peacemaker, and not being listened to. And once outside, most awe-inspiring of all, the first moment they started to tangle Joey let him have it with his unhesitating head-butting, smashing right up into the bigger guy’s face and bringing him bloodily right down. Joey went back into the club, and the other guy did not, heading instead for a hospital emergency room with the help of his own second.)

American as he had become, Joey’s fighting style had instantly struck me as an atavistic un-American eruption, up from early on in the Buenos Aires mean streets (and which was probably the one permanent streak inside of him that was never going to get naturalized). Because from what I (still Canadian) had seen, Americans did not usually fight like that. But I was confident it was an ability that served Joey very well indeed, every once in a while, in the late night world of music and bars.

But, passionate as Joey had been when aroused to fight, there were some nights he could get even more passionate with his alto saxophone, which I had greatly admired, because they revealed what I saw as a hell of a musician.

He played normally enough when fitting in with a group of other jazz musicians. But I now began remembering the few times (not many, just four, I think) when he got loose, solo, when I had seen him throw himself into playing his saxophone like some wild un-American wind instrument that was very different than the saxophones I was used to hearing (I’d learn that the complicated rhythms in his head were not always black American, either, but maybe South American Indian, or Arab, or who knows what), making one fellow musician in my presence the first night he did it smilingly say to him, “Where you coming from, man?”

The familiar playful honks and squeaks and splats which Joey could produce in the company of other musicians while taking his usual solo turn, were not really a part of his own sax vocabulary because, the nights he got loose, they were soon dropped behind as if they had been like earthly shackles as he took off, propelled by some kind of desire-fueled, strange clarity that became increasingly desperate-sounding (and anxiety-producing) bucking, galloping and often jagged, but still a most definitely lyrical breath.

And, when that strange, wild music and its breath were suddenly gone—most suddenly gone, every time—my starkest sense was that the all-but slapped-silent audience, when suddenly that silence seemed even louder than the preceding music (those nights, his applause always came late), had been made to feel much too close to the experience of a real death. It was as if something indecently real and dangerous—not merely tolerable acoustical theatre—had been opened up by his sounds into that enormously loud silence. And it was far beyond just that a burning moth had popped going into the flame. It felt more as if some big, sacrificial mammal had unmistakably, even heroically, breathed his last with a bursting heart. And then it truly seemed as if Joey’s now spent, mute body before them, after all that, ought to be dead—even if still standing—and thus, if I may be excused my frankness, not worth a piss anymore. Certainly not in comparison to that startling, escaped music, and music is what it was, that had been—to some of us—so much more thrilling (if wild bursts of nakedly death-driven electricity can be called thrilling) than Joey’s invariably modest presence now was. He never looked the equal, not by a long shot, to what could come out of him (which I thought was maybe not always nice, and maybe some times even awful, but certainly great, greater than anything else musical normally coming our way).

As that applause came, slapping slow and late, it was as if he were taken by the audience to be not so much the source of an impressive and most unusual creative force—that great musician’s talent that was his—but as its tray-bearing waiter. Joey’s natural modesty helped in his being sold short. To his innocent credit, he did not seem to take offense.

(Or, since this encounter with death—and it truly and unapologetically crudely felt like that—was not a horrible experience, despite everything, maybe what really stood out in the audience’s silence was how spectacularly alive that crazily-shaped galloping, howling breath had been, and then how much more alive at least some of us suddenly felt.) But either way, my sense was that what Argentine-raised Joey (born after all to a people often described as “half European and half Cannibal”) had was what the Spaniards called ‘Duende’, a way flamenco’s raspy singing can have of calling up both the world of the dead and of the living which could make one’s hair at the back of one’s neck stand on end, the skin to crawl and the gut to wrench, in a strangely raw, satisfying way, the way I suppose tragedy is raw and satisfying. One thing it was not was academic, but, bizarre to most folks, yes, monumentally bizarre (even monstrously, often atonally so, though I never found it monstrous, not completely). And what I did come away with, those few nights Joey got loose like that, was the certainty that I had been in the presence of a great musician. (There was something else, important, that I would eventually learn Joey was not just improvising on the wing and out of the void, as was said of the great Charlie “Bird” Parker, riding the Pegasus of heroin; what Joey played, and improvised on was his own compositions, which were his spring boards, but then that Romantic bar-room 1950s myth aside, so did Parker play from his compositions, mostly.)

Not, as I said, that Joey played like that all the time, just some times, for if he had played like that all the time most customers would have surely split and the cautiously intolerant mental health authorities of NYC might have put him away, which would have been wrong.

Suddenly, sitting at that Formica bar table in that lost little Vermont town I’d never visit again and looking at now balding Joey holding his cell phone to his ear, still listening to a man he hated, I wondered—with a surprisingly sharp pang—if maybe he didn’t play like that anymore. And it was a very sharp pang. He surely didn’t have an audience for it, not that he’d ever had much of one. But it had been larger than just me.

And I remembered my discovering how I loved it, frankly. Well, usually I had, maybe not always, because I also began remembering how there was one time it had turned incredibly sweet, painfully, even anti-socially so, enough to make me want to look away, even want to leave the immediate area. The time he went off like that, it had been far, far from cliché, but romantic to the point of maybe even something close to criminality—odd as it may seem for me to say, though I’m sticking to it—to a point somewhere beyond shamelessness anyway, right to the edge of that precipice, even tumbling over it.

He was obviously enormously skillful, but at the same time hardly in control, willfully so, since it certainly seemed he was letting himself be completely carried off by whatever came rushing out of him, and this kind of over-the-cliff, total self-abandonment could actually seem, well, I’ll say it: to some, not me, possibly somehow off-color, certainly disturbing.

I never did mention any of these theoretical reactions of mine to him in the old days, including the positive Duende notion, because it might have sounded pretentious of me. Or, worse, be something that caused him to reveal—his being a great musician notwithstanding—his general illiteracy and cultural ignorance at the time, which was vast, and make him defensive and uncomfortable to the point of saying, “Aw, Fin?…What the fuck are you talking about, man? Duende…Shit…”

(Now I understand something I did not before, neither at that Vermont Formica table, nor back in our New York days. Joey’s music was like a language that was simply not ours. It tried as in a wild prison break to escape the conventions of music to reach something maybe forbidden that was often intolerable without those conventions. His music was not theatre of the mind. It was not, as I said before, theatre. It had escaped from off the stage and was loose among us like a beast out of its cage. His was, I’ll say it, a kind of saurian saxophone. We dimly, partially understood his language, but somehow, rushing out in its innocence, it simply could not help deeply, even maybe mortally offending our rules.)

Whereupon, looking at Joey, I felt myself—condescending as this will sound—before a solitary representative of an endangered exotic species one had a duty to protect, because its disappearance would forebode ill for us all.

But, maybe I was already too late. Because there was nothing visible any more at our table of the often-wild richness I’d known in Joey, without his saxophone now, reduced as he was to something far more meager as he listened to whomever was calling, the person he hated. That person had Joey cowed, making him produce a forced, slavish smile as he nodded, and nodded, occasionally saying, “Yes, Primo. Yes, Primo.” And then, “Yes, Primo, that was my friend’s Mercedes. I’ll ask him, sure. Yeah, sure, I can bring him to Magda’s place; sure, I can drop him off, right.”

And then the call was over, the cell phone flipped closed and put away (I could tell he was hating his cell phone, too. It reminded me that I had known him, from my distant Greenwich Village days as a matter of fact, long before the great, universal cell phone infestation, a time which now almost felt as if it were Eden before the Fall). Joey looked up at me with his huge black eyes, most miserably unhappy.

“Who was that, Joey?”

“Primo fucking Solar.”

“Primo fucking Solar,” I repeated mechanically, as the first and last two words rang a clear bell. It was hardly an unknown name, as I thought, ‘Primo fucking Solar? That Primo fucking Solar?’ Because Primo Solar was on the famous side lately, true, not like a super showbiz star but, nevertheless, often a favored talking head on TV because of his irreverent, witty charm. And this was especially so on the nation’s most right wing cable channel. There, while very swiftly clicking by, I had come across Professor Solar being consulted most deferentially as a beloved if naughty politically incorrect uncle by the heavily made-up anchors of both genders who, for several minutes at a crack, gratefully lapped up (or at least so pretended) his wisdom. He was obviously regarded as a cultural treasure by their Neo-Conservative masters (I had no idea if Solar was one or not, suspecting that in any case he would have felt himself above them. But certainly Neo-Conservatives did not seem to repulse him, nor did, I assumed, their pay checks).

Actually, I had noticed him earlier than that several times, in recent years, interviewed on the more politically neutral C-Span, where he first managed to still my ruthless television remote (and professors rarely if ever stilled my remote), and hold my interest for a while as an interestingly contrarian, bald and bearded kind of Professor talking about Charles Darwin. He was promoting his own book, of course, about ants, as it happened, but he struck me as an unusually lively piece of work, magnificently dismissive of the opinions of lesser mortals, and basically a clever phrase-making, gad-fly entertainer confidently ready to explain most everything in this life, in the light of the True (his) Darwin. Back then on C-Span, what I saw could have been, for openers, say, Professor Solar on the subject of free will and human consciousness (laughable, since apparently we were all unknowingly working like his slave ants for an admittedly mindless Higher Power he called the Selfish Gene), or maybe that all-but exhausted, venerable target of the right, feminism (alas, in his view a touching but still infantile and pathetic rebellion), and even war (it was still early in Iraq, and Professor Primo Solar’s eyes brightened at this topic, nostrils flaring, as he declared war a natural and very healthy thing), etc.

I remembered my thinking, when first I saw him talking away on TV, that I caught his drift—that we humans were, like all living things, being played for saps by this here Selfish Gene—but what I didn’t quite understand was why he seemed to like it so much, since it was so devastating to our human pride.

But enjoy it he surely did, surely pissing off most everybody, certainly humanists, and quick to guffaw through his long, and upon reflection, outrageously anachronistic beard which looked like something out of the mid-Victorian 19th century. In fact, much of him did, and eventually I’d figure out why.

At the insistence of a friend who loaned me a best-selling book by Solar—about ant behavior, predictably—I found myself reading him, and liking it. I think what I admired most was its verve and energy, without my feeling the need to convert to Primo Solar’s absolutist world view (I remained unshaken, for example, in my intuition that ants were a lot easier for the Selfish Gene to jerk around than us humans).

But what I was most taken by was the book jacket photograph of Primo Solar, posed in profile, as if indifferent to what we thought of him. This was very rare, at a time when everybody is supposed to try to look right at the camera, with a bit of a smile, like an approachable, mediocre game show host. And Primo Solar, in that admirably arrogant profile, bust-like, I realized was parading himself proudly bald, with no shame, head tilted back, preceded flag-like by his longish, Victorian-looking, and no-doubt vanity-filled beard, thus looking a hell of a lot like the historical Charles Darwin (and in the end maybe too showbiz for a Man of Learning). Because, I realized, the man Joey called Primo fucking Solar had consciously and carefully made himself look like Charles Darwin, I presumed so as to take on his mantle exclusively for himself now that the Original Darwin was gone, and beat the other New Wave Ultra-Darwinistas to the top. (There were, it turned out, many such Darwinistas lying out there in the academic weeds, soon to launch an early 21st century, locust-like volley of anti-religious books, managing to sound as if they were bringing urgent, deicidal news). It was therefore not difficult to perceive about bald, bearded and laughing Primo Solar (What a name! I began to suspect he picked it out himself) that he had an ego that took no prisoners, nor left many standing.

But I had not found his presence alarming—just amusing if anything—because I assumed he would always be safely boxed away inside electronic TV, and not out loose among us in life, at least in my life, pumping with red blood and oxygen. This was to come.

“Primo,” joey at our Formica table glumly explained to me, “was watching us from his office up in the administration building when you pulled in. He watches everything from up there, he’s like a hawk or something waiting to come down and scoop up squirrels. He wants you to come over to the President’s House for dinner tonight.”

“Please tell him I said thanks, but no thanks,” I said, finding the invitation strange. “I didn’t come all the way here to see him; I came here to hear you on your horn one more time, man.”

Joey sighed, looked at me, shook his head and said, “Thanks, man. But if you want to do me a favor, have dinner with him and his crowd, because I really can’t afford to piss him off right now. I’m up for tenure, remember? You and me can get together later.”

“What is he here?” I asked, sad to see Joey having to accept being Primo Solar’s prisoner, and not liking the notion of being one myself. “The president or something?”

“Nah, Magda’s the Acting President, Primo’s ex-old lady. She was up there with him in his office. She’s up there all the time. Primo is just God here, that’s what he is.”

“How come? How did he get to be God?”

“He’s the most famous guy here. The one name we got. He is the guy who talks to the Alums and gets the money, makes them feel proud they went to Longfellow, all that stuff, so he can do whatever the hell he wants here…except fuck the students, which he also does, the graduate students anyway.”

“But not the undergraduate students.”

“No, man. Nobody gets to fuck the undergraduates anymore, like I hear it was back in the day, except for the other students. They’re the customers here, see, we’re the wait staff, and the customer is always right. To tell you the truth, Fin, this place is really like a luxury hotel for these kids, a kind of college theme park. But if you’re wondering if Primo can fuck the faculty, there is no doubt about that, man. He’s been getting first draft pick for years, ever since I’ve been here. Before that, even. The new teacher girls come in, and if he digs them, he’s their new best friend, real up close and personal. That’s the real tenure path here, right up the tubes. So the odds are bad enough for me, is what I’m saying, Fin, which is why I don’t want to piss him of right now.”

“I understand,” I said. “I do. So okay, I’ll have dinner with the son of a bitch,” and I smiled as I fell off into silence. Joey just clamped his lips in his big-eyed, humiliated face and watched me with a ‘what can you do’ air, as I wondered if just maybe all this was going to end up with Joey giving Primo Solar his Italo-Argentine La Boca head-butt right in the middle of Primo’s Darwinian, bearded face, rather hoping it might. And then, to break the silence, for want of anything else, I said, “Uh…Does it at least work for the girls, this tenure path?”

“No, not always, man. But I don’t think there’s any other tenure path they can try, because he has the last word on any Tenure and Promotion stuff. There’s a vote, but his is the only one that counts. Like, right now, with me, I happen to know I have a majority of the committee ready to vote for me. But it doesn’t matter, because he has the last word on anything he wants. Like down to the janitors. And the trustees are scared to lose him to some big school, so they are always kissing his butt, telling him he’s God.”

After some cogitation, I said, “Okay, but…, what I don’t understand, Joey, is why in hell he wants me to come over for dinner. He’s never met me; he doesn’t even know my name.”

“It’s like with the teacher chicks, Fin. Around here he gets first pick on the guests, too, when he wants it.”

“Oh…” I said, wondering why this should be so.

“What it is, man,” Joey said wearily, “is that his crowd, and him especially, is always looking for new people, because they are bored out of their skulls with each other. See, we are all locked up together all year, year after year, the same faces every day, you know what I’m saying?”

I did. He gave me the sudden vision of tiny Longfellow College as a little, old-time ocean liner eternally and infernally voyaging upon the Vermont green, and the even more endless Vermont winter white, something along the lines of The Flying Dutchman, condemned never to land, nor even to die.

I could see that invitations to the nightly captain’s table—where Primo evidently reigned first among the damned, which he obviously preferred to be over the last in heaven—were not enough to relieve their endless boredom. But I could also see how there was an equally endless hunger for the hope, at least, even for Primo, that new arrivals might help endure the infinite boredom of their local hell for a while. At least while these arrivals were still new, which I imagined was a very short period indeed.

And suddenly Joey started getting up, and saying, “Come on, man. Let’s get to my place before Donna goes to work. She’s filling in for half a shift at the Emergency Room, but she really wants to say hello to you before she goes to her gig.”

“Sure,” I said, standing up too, but not so sure Donna would be especially excited to say hello to me, never having looked upon me warmly and welcomingly before, suspicious and narrow creature that Donna was, at least in the old days. I had no idea she had become a nurse during these last six years.

III

There was donna, standing in her modest kitchenette over her sink, with her still slender back to us, already in her lime green nurse’s uniform, when she turned (her full breasted figure, I couldn’t help but remark, also still noteworthy) to see who was coming through her door.

And Joey cried out a celebratory, “Hey, Donna, look what I got here!”

Donna’s dark, dark eyes met mine, and she, suddenly smiling most widely and most warmly, instantly shot her out-spread arms and out-spread hands straight up into the air, calling (most uncharacteristically) for a hug, which we did. Her change in policy towards me, and I assumed toward most his friends, was so radical it shocked a bit, but I was glad.

“Gee, it’s great to see you, Fin,” she said, “Jesus! Joey doesn’t see anybody from the old days anymore.” Her voice, with its faint rasp, was still purest Italo-New York. I could almost hear the NYC subway.

“Well,” I said, “My life is like that too, I guess. I don’t see many people from the old days either,” which she received with an understanding, indulgent smile testifying that, indeed, that’s how life goes, friends move, vanish.

And I stepped back from the hug, saying, “But Donna! You look beautiful, you look great, even in that nurse’s uniform!” And she, looking down to check it out, unconvinced, shrugged. But she instantly took my compliment as standard masculine jive for the ladies with amused, brightening black yes, and said, “You think?” And she laughed, “You were always like that, Fin, which is probably how you stayed single. You still are, aren’t you?”

“Last time I looked.”

“Keep the faith,” Donna deadpanned, dropping her voice, maybe a touch darkly (was it, I hoped not, about marriage?).

And then she gestured down the length of her lime green nurse’s uniform, “Yeah, well…what can you do,” she said, “Yeah, I’m a nurse now. E.R. Emergency Room. The pits, right?” she added, shrugging again, “But the girls are in school, so I can go to work now. Hey, for Christ’s sake, come in and sit down, Fin, come on, let’s have a drink and celebrate you finally made it here. Joey honey,” she said over to him while she continued to look so fondly at me, “Let’s get the man whatever he wants.”

Her once-long straight black hair was a bit shorter now, having undergone a professional, business-like permanent, and she wore more make-up than I remembered, but which came across not so much as festive or glamorizing, but more along the lines of a dutiful office receptionist. Nevertheless, she currently emanated—was it just me?—more sex appeal than I recalled too. This, despite her having a slender, most Catholic-looking cross hanging from a chain sinking into her bosom, an ornament I certainly did not recall in connection with Donna from the old days, either. It made me wonder if Donna had turned to the faith of her ancestors, which might not be good news for Joey. But, welcoming as she was to me (still so surprisingly so), and for all her smiles, I still sensed a fundamental, unsinkable, suspicious sternness within Donna (not necessarily in conflict with that sex appeal, which now I also imagined darkly) that was something like the unbending-unbendable core of her being, and possibly her curse. But which I thought she was making a gallant effort to put to one side, bless her heart—not to be disapproving of most everything, at least for a while—by welcoming me, because it was good for Joey. So she wanted me there, I was now confident of that. After all, it might give Joey some peace, maybe even fun, a reprieve from the pressures of his isolated Longfellow world and his coming performance before the dreaded Tenure and Promotion committee, where he most certainly felt he would be placing, to use his terms, his balls upon the anvil.

We did not have far to go to sit down, maybe four steps.

From their small couch, the kind called a love seat—with Donna slipping in inevitably ass-to-ass beside me—I looked around the place, trying to do so approvingly.

Their apartment was inside a somewhat battered Victorian off-campus house that had been refurbished to take in several clumps of, I assumed, younger faculty members by Longfellow College, obviously their landlord. This sense permeated the air. It was inexpensively ‘modernized’, so to speak, appliances included. And though it was clean enough, not trashed by food, children and pets (here I speak as the bachelor I will always be), there was still an impersonal awfulness about the place, worthy of an efficient, remorseless motel with constant turnover. Maybe it was mostly the un-Victorian wall-to-wall coco-grey carpeting that gave it its inhuman keynote, to go with the soul-less furniture that sat upon that equally inanimate, corporate-totalitarian carpeting, topped off on the white walls by framed prints of un-peopled, inoffensive New England landscapes, clearly selected for the tenants by the institution’s hired decorators. The rent, I was confident, had to be very low, probably as a compensation for the also low salaries.

The place also felt, despite their six years living at Longfellow, as if almost nothing there belonged to Joey and Donna, except for their clothes and similar immediacies, and that all their traces would be swiftly vacuumed into oblivion the day they were replaced by newer low level Longfellow employees. It was all, in a word, oppressive. But not because I found the place decorated in bad taste (which I might not necessarily mind, for I had known in my life some joyously exuberant bad taste, which at least had been a taste, take say Las Vegas). Rather, because I found it decorated in no taste, neither good nor bad, and in some dreary, arrogant sense aggressively trying to be inoffensive, as with the New England landscapes, therefore, in the end, becoming offensive.

I would have thought that Joey at least—after all an extraordinary artist in his way—would suffocate in this setting, even if Donna might not be offended as I expected him to be. But Joey did not seem to mind, as if insensitive to it all, making me think that maybe outside of music (luckily for him) he did not have a developed aesthetic sense, making him capable of surviving on the visual equivalents of the kind of pre-sliced white bread that could last for weeks in the fridge without molding, resisting the erosion of time and Nature through the leveling miracle of industrial chemistry.

Joey, suddenly taking to posing himself a bit like a lord enjoying the view of his domain, was now, proud of place, standing before the vista of his just-opened liquor cabinet. It was arrayed with rows and rows of bottles of booze, surely among the few things, at last, that represented something of their inner selves. “Hey, Fin,” he said over his shoulder. “Want a scotch?”

“Sure,” I said, and Donna beside me piped up with a laughing, raspy, “Screw it, honey! I’m going to have one too!” and I recalled that Donna did not drink when I had last seen her. At least, not scotch. I chose not to remark on her drinking before going on duty as an Emergency Room nurse. She did not, however, look alcoholic to me. And I do believe I would know.

“Okay, you got it, babe!” Joey said, “Hey, you want water in it, Fin?”

“Sure,” I said, and saw him grin wickedly over to Donna as he grabbed a particularly large, green and red bottle.

“Don’t give him that!” Donna said, and Joey chuckled, “I was just kidding,” and he walked over and handed me the big green and red bottle for my examination. “Can you dig it?” and he laughed, as Donna smiled along too.

The bottle’s label read, Tijuana Tap Water, and below that, ¡¡Auténtica!! There were, around the print, lots of drawings of things Aztec, and below those it said, ¡La Venganza De Moctezuma!

I handed the bottle back to Joey, who said, “See? It’s never been opened. My brother-in-law gave it to us as a gag.”

“Is it really authentic?” I asked, thinking that bottle of Tijuana Tap Water should be treasured for future ages, maybe at some Smithsonian museum, as a historical sample of one nation’s purest, joke-store, rubber fart-bag, brother-in-law humor.

“I guess,” Donna said. “My brother bought it down in Texas himself. So, anyway, did you have a nice trip over?”

“Yes,” I said. “And I’m looking forward to Joey’s performance, too.”

“You’re a sweetheart,” Donna said, and patted the back of my right hand.

“And,” I said, “I thought I was going to have supper with both of you, but…”

“Hey, I know all about it,” Donna said. “Primo called here too, wanting to find out about you. He said he’d invite me, but he knows I’d never go. My job is a good excuse, you know, better than not finding a baby sitter.” I did note that while Joey had not been invited, Primo evidently felt no reservations about inviting Donna, but I let it pass, as Joey did, as if he were used to a minor irritation. Whereupon Donna added, “And he also called to tell you, Joey, that they’re putting off your performance, maybe for tomorrow, the day after. He said he’d tell you as soon as they’d decided.”

Joey exhaled, now quite irritated, and he said, “Sons of bitches. Fuck, I hope you can stay to catch it, Fin, but I figure you got other plans.”

“Not firm ones, I can stick around for a couple of days, minimum, but,” I said, brightening my tone, “we’re definitely having dinner together tomorrow night, right? And in the best place in town and on me, unless, Donna, you’re working tomorrow night too. So screw Primo and his crowd.”

Donna sighed, and then said, “Fin, you just might find it’s part of the program when you go over there. But yeah, I’m free tomorrow night. That would be great.”

“Uh…” I said. “Uh…You did imply that screwing Primo and his crowd might be part of the program, didn’t you, Donna? Because, I can only go so far to be helpful.”

“Yeah…I did. Probably not Primo himself, though, he is straight, but yeah…Joey can tell you all about it. They get all tanked up and high and then they might start swinging, isn’t that right, honey?”

“It sure is.”

“Oh…” I was able to say, but recoiling within me, I must admit. It was not that from an amateur theologian I had finally gone and turned into an old time moralist. My reaction was possibly a worse modern sin, plain old, sexually elitist, aesthetic horror at the prospect of finding myself at a sexual orgy involving American academic women, a subspecies which, on average, to put it gently, did not awaken such desires in me.

“Joey,” I said. “Do I really have to go?” I was, of course, already planning to plead impotence or maybe some dread disease, because I doubted that either personal morality or claiming fidelity to some special someone would be respected.

“If you don’t want them to get pissed off at me for you dissing them.”

“Do they do it every night?” I asked glumly.

“I don’t think so,” Joey said. “Maybe you’ll get lucky.”

“Yeah,” said Donna, amused, but, then I thought it was with a touch on the sadistic, wicked side (again surprising me about her) that she added with a teasingly straight face, “But it is Saturday night, Fin.”

“Okay,” I said to Joey, “I’ll go, but get ready for a phone call from me to get me the hell out of there.”

“Hey!” Donna said, still amused. “Who knows? Maybe you’ll like it.”

Moments later, with Joey having hurried out for a very quick errand, I found myself silently alone with Donna on that small couch, holding our scotches on our laps.

Conversation, which was normally easy for me with Joey, had come to a dead stop without him. Donna evidently did not have much to say to me, so, for the sake of sociability, I said, “Joey tells me you like it up here in Longfellow College.”

“Yeah, pretty much,” Donna said, then going to the practical, not being much for conversations that, as she put it, “solved world problems”, my favorite kinds, of course, she added, “If Joey gets tenure, the girls can go to college free here.”

“Well, that’s certainly a consideration,” I said. “And it sure seems that Joey has adjusted to living outside New York and the music scene.” (Instantly I thought, ‘Why did I ever say that?’ It was painfully obvious he still suffered his kind of solitude up there in Vermont. Why had I been unable to not to just shut up and mind my own business?)

I knew immediately it was a mistake. It was.

Donna turned and looked me square in the eyes, identifying me instantly as the kind of guy who blames everything on ‘little wifey, the kill-joy pill’—back to it’s Eve’s fault—and after a one count pause she said, “Listen, Fin. I’m going to tell you the truth. I know all about musicians and the club scene and the women and the booze and the dope and the late at night stuff. My dad was a musician, my oldest brother Dino is too, and I couldn’t stay married to Joey if he was living like that.”

“Maybe, though,” I said, “he wouldn’t be living like that.”

“Don’t give me that, okay? Men are all the same, we all know that. Men are men. I told Joey a long time ago that I just couldn’t live with it, that he could go back any time he wanted to, but he had to choose. And he did. He chose me,” she added with a smirkingly victorious, squinting chin lift, with a touch of ‘up yours’. “But if we were back in New York with him out at night every night and me at home with the kids, I know it would only be a matter of time before he was doing like the other guys.”

“Oh, I don’t know…”

“Hey, Fin, please,” Donna said, “I’m just a realist. Listen, if I was a man, I’d probably be doing the same too, just like my dad and my brother.” Whereupon Donna got up from the couch, put her drink down at the side table, and to show she was not terminally at war with me, smiled and shrugged as she—her lime green nurse’s outfit notwithstanding—rather majestically (for she had a special walk with a touch of the show horse) went on in her high heels off to the bathroom. Her Mediterranean womanly walk invariably made me think of Sophia Loren, which I always enjoyed.

IV

It was already night, but with a very bright and full Vermont hunter’s moon, when Joey drove me over to the Longfellow Presidential House, which turned out to be the opposite of the battered Victorian warren for lower employees where Joey and Donna lived.

It was a showily modern, grandly roomy place with many vast and surely double plate glass windows, all under right-thinking multiple spans of solar panels. From the car I could see a swimming pool covered over, no doubt to prevent Vermont animals and children from falling in, and in the case of the children, from suing, with bits of snow still upon the canvass. And not far from the pool, in that moonlight, I could see a well-tended clay tennis court, with no snow upon it at all, and with the net up, ready for play, announcing that some very dedicated people played upon it even in the winter weather.

There was also a small, wooden shack not far from the Presidential house, which, from the driver’s seat, Joey indicated with a nod, and said, “Watch out for that one, Fin. It’s the sauna.”

“What do you mean, watch out?”

“Yeah,” Joey said, “When they get a few drinks in them some times Primo and his ex-old lady Magda start telling everybody to get undressed because they are all going to the sauna, and after that they want to roll in the snow and smack each other with branches. No shit.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No, I’m not. But you’re lucky, because we don’t got much snow yet.”

“Did you do it?”

“Well…” said Joey, shrugging, “I was new, my first night there, you know, and Primo said to me, in front of everybody, real nice, ‘Are you concerned about being nude in front of strangers? Don’t worry about any comparisons, please, not a problem, because, believe me, I’m hung like a mouse’.”

“Wow,” I said. “What a host! Is that a host or what? What thoughtfulness, Joey, when you think about it, putting guests at ease. Hung like a mouse! Primo is definitely a prince among men. Maybe a prince of darkness, but…Was Donna there?”

“Nah. She was pregnant and about to deliver any time.”

And a few minutes later Joey had driven off and left me alone under that bright moonlight to walk up to the Presidential House’s very high, wide and haughty front door virtually with its nose up in the air.

I rang. By now, I have to admit I was expecting—and with no pleasure—to meet, in the person of the man Joey called Primo Fucking Solar, a far more dreadful, flesh-eating monster than the reputed “Champ”, Lake Champlain’s local answer to the more famous Loch Ness beast from dear old rainy and murderous Macbeth Scotland.

(Can I also embarrassedly admit now that, despite being fifty, I felt nakedly aware that I had never been to an orgy before?)

The light went on behind that large, wide door, and an unusually tall, and I must say, sexually dramatic looking, if almost skeletally slender woman in her early fifties appeared, with large, sensual facial features, dressed splendidly all in white, white slacks and white blouse—thin shoulders bare, winter or no winter, muscles and skin not one bit withered yet—with her silver hair on the longish side, looking at me with brilliantly silver eyes (at least in that light). “You must be,” she pronounced deeply as if amused and from on high with what I call a University accent that came tumbling out from out of a quite large, and very red mouth, “Joey’s theologian. I’m Magda,” and she put out her long right hand, not to be kissed, but to shake mine. (Such things as theologians, evidently, were a source of amusement in her circles. She couldn’t know, of course, that so they were to me too, the reason I had claimed, from time to time, to be one myself, but still, she got under my skin a little.)

And so Magda the Acting President of Longfellow stood before me, hand extended, radiating a metallic air of proudly entitled, smiling amorality, both careerist and sexual, in which I instantly sensed a white, serpentine ability to suddenly, out of a stone’s stillness, flash out striking in any advantageous direction. ‘Perfect presidential material’, I thought, and not just academically, but even for the national stage (and yet, a moronic voice inside me pled, ‘but women like that weep too—even if it’s secretly, metallically, nihilistically, after having caused great pain—probably curled up somewhere dark and out of sight, because of now feeling especially unloved.’ Whereupon I felt myself in the vivid presence of both great poverty and—I know how horrible this sounds—a potential suicide, despite all her red-smiling, front-runner air).

Music was playing, elegant, Brazilian cum American jazz from the very distant past which I identified as an old Stan Getz/Jao Gilberto, Bossa Nova record. Maybe that music should not have surprised me, but it did, right into thinking, ‘Jazz…! Maybe there is hope for Joey!’ But I already knew how savagely different Joey’s music could be from this pretty, soft-spoken, house-broken Bossa Nova, dampening my hope.

“Hello,” I said, “I’m Fin,” and shake Magda’s hand and step in I did, even if not liking being ‘Joey’s theologian’, any more that I was liking Magda who, up on her high heels (for she obviously gloried in being tall) had struck me as the condescending kind. But, to be fair, who also continued to strike me, nevertheless—ultra thin as she was, reminding me of the old upper crust saying (not that I thought she was necessarily upper crust, but most likely from out of middle crust) that one can’t ever be too rich or too thin—as far and away among the better looking academic females, metallically silvery as she was, that I’d come across in my time. This was a possibly important consideration, should we wind up in an orgy. She might well, I imagined, heatedly arouse some of my worst instincts, even in that night’s Vermont chill. (And then I noted once more how it was that visibly ruthless women whom I did not like, like Magda, who did not touch my heart, did not threaten me at all, when you’d think they might. It was the other kind that should have been identified as the dangerous ones; the kind that by however lightly touching my heart could make me suddenly go rolling and flapping out of control. For the likes of Magda, in truth, I admitted to myself, offered me a kind of icy freedom, which tempted me a lot less, of course, than the much greater, tender danger. This, I knew, was one of my most mediocre but most hidden secrets.)

And as she took my overcoat to hang it up, the phone rang, right beside her on a side table. She picked up and said deeply and throatily into it, both theatrically and cannibalistically, “Nina! Tell me how it went! Tell me!!” and looked over at me, lip-sinking silently but enormously, “my daughter, at Yale” to which I nodded. And then, still holding my coat in the crook of her left arm, she let out a triumphant, mirthless hyena laugh, the kind they might emit when they have made off with some carcass hunk ahead of the rest of the pack, and back out of that phone, loud enough for me to hear, came that same mirthless, fuck-the-rest-of-the-world hyena laugh, from her daughter. My heart felt as if it literally sank inside my chest as I heard how that laugh that said so much to me had passed to the next generation, with the horrifying prophecy that if Nina bore daughters, that triumphant, mirthless, but ultimately miserable, self-pitying hyena laugh would ride on, bravely, as long as it could, accepting the cruelty of life and practicing that same cruelty, before being ridden into the ground by, I could only imagine, other predators (only, of course, cursed to keep flaming up into our world again and again, imprisoned by a compulsive reincarnation).

“Fantastic, dear! Fantastic!!” said Magda, “All right, call me tomorrow. I have to go now, guests.” And she hung up. Even before Magda finally put my coat in the hall closet I found myself very glad that daughter Nina would not be attending any potential orgy. Mother was quite enough, and suddenly not at all sexually alluring. (I assumed, oddly without horror, that in a family featuring such parents, Nina might not be excluded).

Then it began descending upon me that with that awful, signature mirthless hyena laugh of hers (that life-long tactical error she prized enough to display to the world), that Magda had been, among other things, showing herself off to me as a highly dangerous person, campaigning for the Presidency, as it were. She wanted to be admired for it, which struck me as odd, because she did not seem to know how it might be more than potentially repellent—humanly, not merely sexually—which meant that Magda, Acting President or not, got things wrong, important ones, and I suspected she always would, and had. My earlier electric sense of her great poverty and her stubborn misery returned, along with the helpless feeling that neither I nor anyone could do anything about it, nor about her favorite, wrong-headed mistakes.

I heard the joyfully pounding steps of a man coming down the stairs, sounding out with the confidence of, I thought, the Man of the House. Maybe Magda presently resided there quasi-presidentially, but that man striding down was obviously the unquestioned Supreme Being (quite ready, too, I guessed, if need be, to put down any Satanic Angelic insurrections—like Milton’s God had to do from time to time—by the women).

It was, needless to say, Primo Solar, coming down those stairs, but a Primo Solar transformed, still bald, but more youthfully. And his beard, or what was left of it, was no longer 19th century, nor Victorian, but much modernized, reduced and trimmed, and not what I had seen on television or on his book’s dust jacket. I had expected a man in his imperiously nasty sixties, at least, but he was in his fifties, sporty, surprisingly fit and more slender than I was prepared for and for sure also a far pleasanter-seeming guy than what I expected. I was confident he was one of the winter tennis players.

He was also maybe almost a head shorter than Magda in her high heels, which seemed to bother him not at all, nor interrupt his jaunty, bald-headed air of supremacy as he said, “Hello, hello!” looking straight at me (he had, I thought, from that angle something of a seal’s round, inquisitive face I had not seen either on television or when profiled heroically for his book jacket) with friendly, unusually engaging eyes the color of lucid cognac around very black, focusing pupils. And he shook my hand strongly, warmly, not at all the disdainful, laughing, contrarian ultra-Darwinista Professor on television, pissing on all humanists. He was offering no condescension whatsoever toward me, unlike Magda in her opening self-presentation. “I see you have already met Magda?” he said as she now glided in between us, pausing there for a moment, her back to Primo. And now that he found himself standing immediately behind her (he was indeed easily a head shorter) I noticed that he, as if unobserved, took the opportunity to swiftly amuse himself with her ass (of which there could not be much).

Magda noticed that I had noticed, which caused her to produce a red smile over her lunar-white shoulder at me. Because, far from taking Primo’s behavior in front of a new guest as insulting her dignity, she instead bore it as a personal triumph of hers, and was not displeased that I had witnessed it, as she now walked on ahead of us (though not like an earthy, amused Sophia Loren, of course, not like Joey’s Donna, but importantly.) And I thought, ‘uh-oh…Primo’s feeling frisky enough to play with the ass of an ex-wife’. Immediately I suspected cocaine—something about his aura—having already come into play, maybe as a natural pre-orgiastic hors d’oeuvre? (And then I remembered something I’d heard about 21st century orgies, from a guy I knew was a regular aficionado. Lots of condoms and Viagra would be visibly on hand. But since I could not see any sign of them, I figured no such an event was planned for the evening, after all. It was with relief, even if one tainted by a surprising, tiny sense of loss.)

Waiting in the large living room, looking small under a vast cathedral ceiling, sitting on the long pale green couch as if providentially placed there to help me adjust to my new non-expectations about any orgy, was a very prim looking young woman I guessed to be in her early twenties, with short, red-brick colored hair and unlovely skin, which did not make her terminally unattractive, in my opinion, what with her soft brown eyes sensitive as a doe’s. Her light green cotton blouse was closely buttoned at the throat, which added to her air of sexual modesty, especially in comparison to the exposed shoulders and arms of Magda and her general aura of post-moral entitlement.

“This,” said Primo indicating both Penny and that we should sit down, “is Penny.”

“Hello,” I said, and Penny nodded at me, not unfriendly, but silently. Her small smile confirmed she did not hate me at first sight. True, Magda was more ostentatiously, possibly criminally sexy, to which I had responded. Neither was traditionally beautiful, but something about Penny which I had not yet deciphered made her far more erotically interesting for me than Magda had been (before the hyena laugh, to be sure, which had finished off my initial enthusiasm, imagining her letting it loose during intercourse).

I was glad, therefore, that Penny didn’t find me odious, an easy possibility with our differences in age. It was a difference, I thought to myself, which guaranteed I would make no first advances toward her, ‘even if,’ I further thought to myself, ‘things should get orgiastic’ (ah, untamable hope!). ‘But’, I further thought to myself, ‘there ain’t gonna be no orgy,’ just when I felt myself so close to finally overcoming my sexual prejudices against academic females. Because I was sure Penny was academic.

“I am directing Penny’s master’s thesis,” Primo began telling me comfortably, sitting down opposite me and next to Penny, as Magda appeared with a waiting tray with glasses of wine of a whiteness that was so transparent they made me realize I had begun to think of ultra-thin Magda as virtually transparent herself. And voice inside me said, ‘Primo is at the very least intending to direct her thesis.’ Pleasant as Primo had been to me so far, I nevertheless regarded this smiling announcement about Penny’s thesis as something akin to a dog’s compulsively and even mechanically raising his rear leg to better mark off his territory out of ancestral habits against rivals he might never see. Because dashingly bald, seal-faced Primo, to be blunt, every time the black pupils of his cognac brown eyes fell upon Penny, now visibly radiated the hots for her, and he did not seem to mind it was obvious.

Primo was clearly taking full advantage that the wife present was an ex-wife. But, though I was not sure what their relationship was, I could not escape feeling there was still a partnership between Magda and Primo, possibly a more until-death-do-us-part and a more binding one all the way into hell than mere marriage, at least in Magda’s mind. I suspected their coupling was, or at least had been, one of those gothic, power-seeking at all costs ones, twenty four hours a day, that one hears about in both academia and politics, where Faustian lust for advancement far and away trumped all other passions.

Doe-eyed Penny, motionless, did nothing to challenge his territoriality, not even with the slightest gesture. Was she, I wondered, docile in her primness, at least to Primo?

Magda had sat herself next to me, and putting her wine glass down before her, turned and took my right hand into both of her long ones, and held it. Then, with no condescension this time, but somewhat coyly, while rather miraculously, tall as she was, getting smaller against me (for she was actually, I was finding, a small-bodied woman, but with very long legs and arms and hands), she said deep-voiced, “Well now, Fin…Joey said your name is Fin…Tell us what you do, I mean, I know he said you were an amateur theologian, but what is that? And then we can all reveal ourselves to you.” (This ‘reveal’ talk did kick up sudden, alarmed echoes of ‘Okay, everybody take their clothes off!’, but I attributed them to my Donna-and-Joey-induced paranoia, rounded off with Donna’s final, “Maybe you’ll like it.”)

For a moment I hesitated to say anything about my being any kind of theologian, even one who used it mostly as an existential cover story, especially knowing that Primo was an evolutionary philosopher, or an evolutionary ultra-Darwinista, Cognitive something or other, who wrote on ants and against organized religions. I did not want to get into a stupid debate defending any religions against the new scientific attack, especially since I didn’t much care one way or another about them, either.

“Oh,” Primo said, laughing easily, sportingly. “We mustn’t do that, Magda, reveal ourselves to our guest, not so quickly.” Needless to say, the very word, ‘reveal’, coming out of Primo again made me think of his comparison to a male mouse. But what did keep me somewhat serene was that he did not seem to be intending to spend the evening pouncing on me as a representative of Ancient and Repressive Obscurantist Superstitions.

“Well, Fin, is what Joey said,” Magda pressed on, smiling away, “really true? You know, my very first husband was a theologian. He still is, down at Yale.”

“And a very nice man he is, too,” said Primo benignly in passing. It did seem not so much that he was beyond jealousy toward men who had had sex with Magda, being a sophisticated man of the world, so much as made totally indifferent to that historical fact because of his current thermally much greater interest in Penny.

“Ah, well…,” I said. “Your fist husband also sounds as if he is much more respectable as a theologian than I am, because all I claim is that I am an amateur, really.”

“Good!” Magda said, squeezing my hand, “I much prefer theologians who are not respectable!” And it already seemed clear too that if an orgy was indeed going to break out, who it was that I would find was my initial dancing partner, when I would have rather hoped for Penny, despite my being sure Primo was not about to allow that. After all, just for openers, a man does not hold an orgy to engage with a former wife, I didn’t think.

“But just what is it you do,” Magda again pressed on, “in that pass-time of yours, there are other pass-times, you know,” and she caressed my right hand more warmly, reassuringly, even a touch intimately. No one, it seemed, was going to be laughed at this evening. Not even amateur theologians. Primo continued smiling warmly at me, as he had from the first. Indeed, since my hostess and host seemed so hell-bent on putting me at ease, it now had me sensing, incredibly, with all my bristling antennae, that the orgy truly might yet be in the cards for the evening, as Primo’s legendary Primo-mouse comparison now began to loom ahead of me with an air of inevitability, because I began to suspect he came out with it to new guests at every orgy he hosted.

“Well, what I do is,” I said, suddenly feeling myself a bit awkward, absurd, therefore smiling, “you might say that, if asked, I might try to explain, without any certitude, and without trying to justify them morally, either, what used to be called the ways of God to men…uh and, uh to women too, of course.”

“Oh, but we all do that, come to think of it!” Primo put in very cheerfully, welcomingly, as it certainly seemed that they had both already started in with what is known as ‘breaking the ice’ (even though, I suddenly thought, novitiate that I was, as a pathetic protest, ‘but…but…we don’t really have enough people for a proper orgy, with just the four of us’).

“Oh, but Primo darling, what in the world,” Magda indulgently protested in that deep, cigarette voice of hers (for she was now smoking one), “are you talking about? We’re not one bit theologians, you and I, not even Penny.”

I quickly glanced at Penny, but despite her name having come up, she was looking off, not especially interested, but in any case, not nervous, as opposed to me. Noticing I had glanced at her, she produced another small, friendly smile, like a nice kid, but in no way advancing upon me the way Magda was. Because Magda, clearly, was the evening’s prime mover towards things becoming sexually collective and bacchanalian. Primo obviously would have preferred to simply withdraw to delight with Penny all by himself, probably without much caring whatever Magda did with me, maybe even glad to be temporarily rid of her (but was this, I thought, how Magda stayed in the game with Primo?).

As for Penny, her prospects for the evening seemed to her to be about as far from the excitingly bacchanalian as looking at television. And suddenly I thought, Of course she has to know what Magda and Primo are inclined to, being around them so much, hard to believe she does not. Penny smiled brown-eyed again at me, again rather like a nice kid, without vamping (Magda’s territory). And this was the first time I sensed the remarkable possibility that Penny had no sense of evil, a quintessential sense without which any orgy would be ruined for Magda and Primo, and, I realized, for me. (Until that moment I had no idea that I regarded orgies as necessarily evil, either, and I could not at first understand why, exactly, not liking to think of myself as a puritan. But soon, surprisingly, I did understand, because it turned out I saw them as a collective ritual—complete with a sacrificial ritual murder—of illusion-killing nihilism about anything being sacred, including true love, in which I did not usually believe, of course, except during the moments when I did.)

Now that I had no sexual interest in Magda whatsoever, I dreaded the very thought of that possible orgy, because of what simple politeness would be implacably demanding of me, since I knew myself incurably flawed by having been brought up as a Canadian gentleman (laugh if you will). And I could already tell that Magda—once she discovered she was inspiring no lascivious desires, but the contrary, especially from being compared with some other woman present, such as Penny—was going to feel herself both lacerated and humiliated—and not for the first time in her life. Because, dramatic looking as Magda was, tall and with her very large eyes and mouth to go with her long cheek bones, she could also strike one, and especially herself, as off-putting and ugly. It was the kind of humiliation, particularly for a woman, that would be intolerable for me to countenance and surely drive me to doing my very best to save her from experiencing, particularly in public, as small a public as we four were. And I was not pleased about the prospect.

“Of course we are a kind of theologians, Penny and I,” Primo cheerfully insisted, as I realized I had all but forgotten whatever we had been talking about. “And so are you, Magda, as a historian. Of course we all are engaged in the suspect business of explaining to mortals what is going on, the invisible secrets behind everything, even if we are just guessing, naturally,” Primo, with his live, cognac brown eyes, again laughed pleasantly toward me, conspiratorially including me on his, our, masculine side, “As a historian, Magda, you of all people should know that priesthoods have always been guessing, what else can we do? It’s just that we have different gods, that’s all.”

“And who is the god you represent, you life-long atheist?” Magda said to him, laughing as if amused (now I felt it was both theatre and war that I was watching between them, Magda’s wifely attack being that he, Supreme Being, was full of crap, while his impregnable defense was admitting it, but as a triumph),

“I suppose,” said Primo, again looking over at me almost as if I were both audience and jury, “the case can be made that the god Penny and I interpret for humans is really the dear old, mindless Selfish Gene, who we say is everywhere and nowhere, and whom I must confess I have never met, personally, though our faith in his existence is great,” to which he added, laughing, “and growing by the book contract.”

“Ah, I see,” said Magda. “But you are its Vicar on earth, like the Pope of the Selfish Gene. Well, I can see that, dear, but how in the world is Penny already a theologian? She’s not a Pope in your church yet, not even a Cardinal, is she?”

“She will be, when her thesis is published as a book, isn’t that so, Penny?” said Primo, and she half shrugged at him as he went on, over to me, “Penny’s thesis, I can tell you, is pure poetry, filled with charm, and that is why I think I can get her a publisher if she does it right.”

“And what is that thesis, Penny?” I heard myself asking her, jumping into the conversation, which was getting closer and closer to a Primo cocaine-spiced monologue. I was hoping to finally get Penny to talk, and engage with us, or at least with me. I wanted to hear her voice; I still had not, not once. Again she smiled at me, but obviously preferred leaving the talking to Primo, as if it all was his ideas, and they probably were.

“I will tell you for her, because of Penny’s modesty,” Primo said, not surprisingly. “We humans share food, do we not? Often facing each other? And we cook it, too, don’t we, pre-digesting it, while the beasts do not. In fact they neither cook nor share, because when they eat together they usually fight to see who gets the most.”

“Okay,” I said, smiling, “I won’t dispute any of that,” but most disappointed I had not been able to get Penny to talk.

“Right,” said Primo, “And when we cook and pre-digest it becomes easier to get more energy from our smaller gut, isn’t it, Penny, which is then also linked to the evolutionary greater growth of the larger human brain, and, Ta-dah! And to our mastery of the Universe!”

“Look,” Magda said, “I think Penny is adorable, but can any of that be, well, proven? Have you let yourself follow the facts, Penny, used the good old scientific method, all those good things, or did you know where you were going all along, which is where Primo was taking you?” This seemed to be, in her opinion, the bedroom.

“Oh, Magda,” Primo protested, “don’t you know that even Einstein didn’t follow the facts where they led him?” (Penny was so far from trying to say anything, it was if speech had been long squeezed out of her by graduate student life with Primo, but speech at the moment did not seem to be necessary for her, since it was obviously all about them). I began to notice Primo’s light brown eyes had turned very bright indeed, and now more than ever I suspected cocaine as he declared most confidently, “Einstein didn’t do that stuff any more than he followed the evidence of his senses, for Christ’s sake. He basically turned his head away from what we call facts and imagined, that’s what he did, because he was a man of genius, not a dreary nerd. He had a poetic vision, coherent and satisfying, just like Penny, even if often later he was proven wrong, I grant. But that is just the history of human thought, I’m afraid. Hasn’t most everything in the past been proven wrong? Penny let herself be driven by good Darwinian sense, and dreamed her way forward. Who knows, she may be right, or considered right, anyway, for a while. It’s really all we theologians can hope for.”

The door bell rang loudly. ‘Uh-oh…’ I thought, ‘more people, damn… maybe finally enough for the orgy.’

Magda went to get the door and soon returned cheerfully towing a tall and long-boned, even gravely Lincoln-esque, serious-looking young guy with thinning brown hair and tortoise shell spectacles, she all smiles and he mostly shy gravitas. He seemed barely in his thirties and was wearing a necktie, as neither Primo nor I did, but despite the social shyness he already had the aura of an older, chronically disapproving Conservative of some kind.

“Look who we have!” said Magda. “It’s our Dr. Sam Boone!” to which Penny reacted silently, motionlessly, but unenthusiastically while Primo sprang up from the couch beside her saying, “Welcome, welcome Dr. Sam! I’ll get you a bourbon and water, and I’ll get myself one too! I never drink without a doctor present any more, so thank God you are here. This nice gentleman you have not met is Fin, by the way.”

We nodded at each other and he said over to Primo, “Yes, thank you, Primo. I shouldn’t have a drink right now but I will. And I see Penny is here too.” Dr. Sam Boone was now half-smiling, though that with difficulty, almost as if it were something he should not permit himself too much of, but for which, with Penny, he indulgently made an exception, as if revealing a weakness to her, hopefully an endearing one.

Despite his being only a few years older than Penny—who came across as the far more youthful spirit—I could not help seeing him as forever wearing, and having worn, that same older, usually grumpy aura of the chronically displeased Conservative (a breed, in my experience, constantly irritated by so much of self-indulgent humanity’s failure to adhere, which was causing the world’s swiftly decaying, putrid collapse).

I could easily imagine young Dr. Sam Boone as a surgeon, demanding unquestioning obedience as the first virtue in his staff, and as a Head of State (or Hospital), young as he was, putting some eager-beaver, crusading idealist who had just pounced on him for making a mistake in his or her place with a patriarchal, “One day you will learn that order is more important than truth.” This is to say, ‘one day you will learn what matters is the boss being boss’.

But, much as I disliked the type, I piously decided that I should really try to give him more of a chance, even though dislike-at-first-sight had rarely failed me before. Young and stiff Dr. Sam Boone certainly did not seem a good candidate for a Primo-Magda kind of evening, which might have had me wondering why he was there in the first place, if I didn’t almost immediately see that he was in love with Penny, or at least something along those lines, probably having identified her as the woman who was going to ruin the rest of his life, to whom he would of course helplessly devote himself.

Primo was at the bar, doing his bourbons and water, ice cubes included, as finally Magda, obviously after restraining herself, came out with, “I hate to nag, but you know you shouldn’t drink, Primo dear,” to which a laughing Primo answered, “No one should, should they, Sam?”

“A little isn’t so bad,” answered Sam.

“But there isn’t much point in drinking just a little, now is there, Doctor,” Primo answered. “Don’t worry; I’ll just have one for now, and renegotiate later.” The booze banter was leading me to believe that there was an issue about Primo’s drinking which was public knowledge.

Whereupon Primo looked at me discerningly, and as if seeing right through me he said, “I have a condition, Fin, a syndrome, so important it has two names, Mallory-Weiss, and it is so serious that I can fight it by chewing little sour-gut TUMS tablets you can buy right over the counter.”

“Ah…” I said, as Dr. Boone took his long, bony frame over to sit on the couch next to Penny, he now smiling ashamedly (never did the term ‘shit-eater’ seem so apt), almost blushing for being there. (It made me remember that some ancient Greek said—may I be forgiven for quoting an ancient Greek—that a blush was the color of virtue surprised, with which I never agreed, firmly believing a blush was unmistakably the color of a secret inclination to vice, unmasked.) It seemed clear; he wanted her to believe he really had not followed her there on purpose. Penny looked away from him. But he was obviously pursuing her, and obviously among the things he had currently to be a displeased Conservative about had to be Penny’s relationship with Primo. Though it was clear that he had not received any permission from Penny whatsoever to pass judgment on whatever she did, with anybody, which he accepted with bowed head. Arrogant as I could imagine him with the rest of humanity, I could see it would be the opposite for him with Penny, quiet as she was, for the rest of his life. But I could also see he was the silent sufferer kind of martyr when it came to whatever woman might be currently ruining his life. And my guess was that she would always be replaced by another, similar partner. (Surely I have mentioned that I am a bachelor.)

“I’m sorry to drop in like this, everyone,” said Dr. Boone, looking around to all of us, as if pleading his case, “but my car broke down about a mile from here and I stupidly left my cell phone at the hospital.”

“So you walked here?” Primo asked, to which Dr. Boone nodded, and Primo said, “Good! You can stay for dinner and join our party if you like,” while I simultaneously thought, ‘Damn, we don’t need another guy if we’re going to have an orgy! I’m going to get the hell out of here if Boone stays!’

But fortunately Dr. Boone said, “Thanks. I’d love to, but I just can’t. I’m filling in for somebody at the hospital tonight.”

“How many hospitals are there around here?” I asked, because Donna in her nurse’s uniform was also supposedly filling in for somebody tonight too, also after having a stiff drink before going on duty.

“Just one,” said Primo, making me think it must be a very small world around there, with everybody who knew Primo probably knowing about his Mallory-Weiss Syndrome, and probably even knowing what that thing was, which I did not.

Not fifteen minutes later I was silently alone next to Magda beneath the vast cathedral ceiling on the long pale green couch, trying not to listen to that mocking voice in my head that asked, ‘What does one do with Magda? And what does Magda do with one?’ It was so quiet I realized jazz had been playing all the time; Duke Ellington now.

Primo had gone off to drive Dr. Sam Boone to his ailing car, having called the American Automobile Association to rescue it, and Penny, who to my great surprise had moved in with Magda and Primo, had decided to go up to ‘her room’ for a brief nap. (Her having ‘her room’ with them, to go with her general, possibly alienated kid, passive silence, now gave her, for me, something of the air of being their dispirited adolescent child.)

So there we were, Magda and I just sitting, after her having gratuitously assured me that Primo would take at the very least half an hour before being back (as if this delightful windfall were also an ideal amount of time). We had nothing much to say to each other after that, to which she smiled understandingly, and in a way that communicated she would be most understanding about most anything.

The last thing in the world I wanted was to suddenly clinch with Longfellow’s Acting President, a notion which seemed to be floating heavily around us and upon me. We remained in stillness. Duke Ellington played the softly floating, ‘Flahh-meeng-go-o-oh…where the sun meets the sea…’

Finally, with the music sailing behind us, from a little desk drawer on the end table beside her, she produced the makings of a joint, rolled it expertly, licked it closed, lit it, inhaled deeply, and then offered me a toke, which I virginally declined.

She smiled at this, then reached back into the same little desk drawer, and produced a little plastic bag with cocaine, saying, “Primo likes this much better, maybe you would prefer that too?” which I found myself accepting, saying, “It must be twenty years since I’ve had any of this stuff, but I have to tell you, it’s wasted on me, because it never seemed to do a thing for me, back in the day.”

“I have seen it do wonders for Primo,” Magda laughed. I did my best to grin not too stupidly.

As I watched Magda prepare a white line for me on the glass coffee table, complete with a rolled-up twenty dollar bill obviously reserved for this very function, I did wonder why, in truth, I was accepting the cocaine. I guessed I did out of a weak politeness, and my having wanted to avoid whatever awkwardness would be caused by my presenting myself as a drug teetotaler, making me look like an idiot and possibly clamming up their party. I should have been above it, I knew, as I nevertheless, bent forward arching myself over the coffee table, snorted up the line.

And then, as I awaited to feel whatever I would, to my surprise, Magda suddenly smiled at me with a maternal, playful kind of minor wickedness offering forbidden sweets as she said, squinting most encouragingly, “Why don’t you go up to Penny? She’d love it.”

“Oh…I’m not sure, better not.” One more temptation I should have been above.

“I know her very well,” she said deeply, “She just loves sex, most every kind, and I could tell she likes you.”

I was going to say something else such as, ‘Oh…I don’t know’, but out of me came, “She does?”

“Absolutely, Fin. She does, and its just good fun, anyway. It doesn’t hurt anyone, not really, unless they are idiots. Really, it’s just good fun,” she went on, “and it’s beautiful, too. I can tell you, Penny wouldn’t mind if I wanted to watch you. Come on now. Go up there, first door on your left, next to the bathroom. Go on now. Of course you want to. Who wouldn’t?”

I didn’t know what or who to blame for my getting up on my feet, as if impelled by the truth. I began suspecting that the cocaine maybe wasn’t being wasted on me after all, because truly before I knew it I was walking up the stairs, until I stopped before her closed door, finally thinking, ‘Wait a minute. This isn’t going to do Joey’s tenure case any good. Not if Primo finds out. He’ll crucify him! What the hell am I doing?’

And I was in the act of turning around to go back downstairs when Penny materialized beside me in her soft, pink kid pajamas, not out of her bedroom but from out of the bathroom door, not a bit alarmed by the sight of me. “Hi…,” she said, “I knew Magda was going to send you up here,” and we began kissing, in a why-not kind of way, as easily as if we had been doing so for weeks. But what struck me most was that there was no special sense of newness.

I found it almost supernatural that Magda could be so right in telling me what Penny’s response to me was going to be as Penny in her pink pajamas was now leading me by the hand, most un-dramatically, into her room.

“What about Primo?” I said, and she answered with a shrug, “He thinks he owns me, but he doesn’t. He wants to marry me.”

“Oh…” I said, and she shrugged at the notion, I gathered not particularly interested in it. Although I was also not sure that she would not marry him, in her docility, if crazed Primo insisted. There was, it seemed to me, in Penny’s unresisting gentleness, something of the yielding quality of sea grass. It was as if nothing was to keep her from being sea grass, because her saying Primo did not own her had only sounded as if she were asserting her nature’s right to yield and yield to the movements of whatever psychological waters she was inhabiting. (Even though we had not yet had sex, it did strangely feel almost as if we already had.)

As destiny would have it I heard the front door open and close, and Primo’s bounding steps headed for the living room. Primo, before the surprise that awaited him, followed by an awful silence.

I gently extracted myself, gave Penny my silent excuse, which she received with her silent nice kid smile, and I headed out for the bathroom.

My nerves were taxed, to say the least. I tried to recompose myself while I stood above the toilet bowl urgently urinating, absurdly recalling I had once wanted to call my memoirs, ‘This Was Not a Precision Instrument’. And I soon found myself thinking, in this dreadful situation, on how curiously wrong—was it curiously?—Magda had been about how long it might take Primo to get back.

I was aware that cocaine could make one a bit more paranoid than usual, but Magda had, it seemed, been criminally cavalier in taking a dangerous chance, exposing Penny and me like that. Decent, law-abiding people had been known to spill blood over such things, especially, I thought, when losing all control under the spell of the mindless, almighty Selfish Gene.

Maybe for Magda we had been like balls in a pool game, where she, wanting to get at Primo and his little girlfriend Penny with just one shot, had found the opportunity to knock one to smack into another, both into side pockets and out of the game, using me as her own white cue ball.

I remembered Penny’s saying to me (how could I not?), ‘I knew Magda was going to send you up here’. Maybe, I thought, Magda was not displeased with Primo’s walking in on his Penny being so engaged with some other gent. Possibly she might have even enjoyed the prospect of sitting in the living room with Primo, waiting around for us while we went at it.

I descended the stairs back to the living room with its grand, dwarfing cathedral ceiling, and to Magda’s side, as serenely as possible, as if the bathroom had been my premier destination.

Primo, who before, had been nothing but pleasant, now tried not to glare suspiciously at me (I welcomed the ‘suspicious’ part, with some relief and hope, because it meant he was not absolutely sure). But his aura had turned toxic. The back of his neck, as he looked away from me, tended to vermilion in color, as I assumed his round, seal face and indeed all of him also did. I couldn’t blame him. But he had decided, I could tell, it was best for him to say nothing, if possible, at least for the time being. It was much the best for everybody.

Magda just looked down to the floor and tried not to smile (or was it that she was trying to be seen trying not to smile), while I tried my best not to look moronically—that is, unconvincingly—innocent. Actually, it was very hard to know what one should look like, but fortunately Primo continued to look away, at the floor, at the ceiling, possible at anywhere that did not contain either Magda or me.

“Well,” Magda said with a tone of finality, “You certainly came back quickly.”

“Oh…” I said, “Well, I found the bathroom quickly.”

“I think,” said Primo, “Magda was addressing me, weren’t you, Magda.”

“I’ll take either one or both, but Fin has had his turn, so I’ll take your answer.”

“I came back so quickly because by the time we got to Sam’s car, the garage people already had Sam’s car running, and he drove himself off to the hospital.”

It certainly seemed to me that, just as Penny had guessed that Magda would be sending me up to her room, Primo had guessed the very same thing. Hence his swift return.

I don’t know what lemming impulse propelled me to open my mouth and say, all too helpfully, “Penny has been napping since the moment you left,” which made him turn to me with those rather large, now unbelieving cognac brown eyes of his. He managed not to shake his head at me, but finally produced a forgivingly wry smile, as a kind of ‘all-clear’ after an air raid, as his face lost almost all of its vermilion coloring. My optimistic guess was that Primo now figured he had gotten back in time, before I had gotten to Penny.

Then, slowly, he declared with the trace of a smile, “Veritas odium parit”, as he seemed—to my admiration, because in his place I could not have achieved it—to finally be turning quite as calm as the sea can look after a storm, and looking upon me relatively benignly again.

“Fin,” he said, “Let us you and I have a celebratory drink and call in dinner, shall we? Magda, go see to dinner, please?”

And much as I attributed to her some degree of generational Feminism quick to take offense, she got right up to go, without any complaint, but not before stopping and turning to ask, “But what in the world did you say, dear? It was Latin. That much I could tell. But you know I can’t read any of my diplomas since high school. Can you read Latin, Fin?”

“No,” I said.

“One day, then, I will translate,” said Primo, and he got up to make our drinks.

We were alone now, I went to stand next to him, saying, “I’ll have bourbon and water too,” to which he nodded pleasantly enough, which encouraged me to further ask, “But what did you say in Latin?”

“Oh, yes, right. Veritas Odium Parit. That just means, ‘Truth breeds hatred’. Words to live by. What realists those old time medieval church men were, right?” And he handed me my drink.

As if invaded by some previous, medieval incarnation of mine, I thought that that bourbon and water might be poisoned. This bit of mercifully fleeting paranoia had come accompanied by the equally fleeting unpleasantness of déjà vu, as I took my first sip and smiled at him.

V

Dawn, vastly pink, was spreading fast across the sky like a silent wild fire, and descending upon us surprisingly soon, making me wonder what ever had happened to the night (which I blamed on the cocaine, of which I had done a bit more. I did remember some cocained nights vanishing, exactly like that, once upon a time.)

Primo and I were about to let ourselves in to Longfellow College’s very private beach on Lake Champlain—a forbidden secret, evidently, for the rest of mankind—having rolled in his BMW through a trail in the woods, up to the closed metal gate, to which he had his private and probably exclusive key. His smile to me as he turned it in the lock suggested so.

Magda and Penny, left behind, had long gone to sleep, by preference to joining us, and we had stayed up talking away in his vast, many great-windowed living room, until all those windows had begun to give trembling signs of changing from darkness, coming alive and energizing Primo.

And almost before I knew it we were passing through the now opened gate and onto another path in the woods, soon to arrive at a very small beach with dark sand the color of muddy charcoal, to confront the enormous, glittering, rose-and-silver Lake Champlain reflecting the sky as far out as the eye could see.

The beach—which barely existed beyond the intellectual notion of a beach—was no more than fifteen yards long and no more than three yards deep. It was more like the space for a few front row seats to the real show, which was the vast, now flat waters and the sky above.

We sat ourselves on a fallen log, just looking at the sea-sized lake before us, inhaling the chill air which seemed delicious. Primo turned to me with his smiling face illuminated both by the new light of day and another from within him, and he said to me, as if it were not given to everyone, as if it were the confession of a hotly beloved, unashamedly selfish sin, “I love dawn over the lake, Fin! I love it! I love it!” From its warm sound, I accepted it as a sign of developing friendship. After all, he was sharing something apparently intimate with me, though clearly without surrendering his personal ownership of the dawn over the lake.

Primo now seemed far past passionate sexual vengeance, as he did not back when he turned vermilion in his living room when he suspected me of having visited Penny, in the Biblical sense, during his absence.

“Well, thanks for showing it to me,” I said, “because on my own, I’d never be up at dawn.”

“I used to hate it here, you know,” Primo allowed, less ecstatically, nodding his head up and down to confirm his former hatred.

“That surprises me,” I said, “because it’s so magnificent, so, I don’t know…beyond human laws, maybe, but beautiful, awe-inspiring stuff, in my opinion.”

“It is great stuff, and definitely beyond human laws, decent ones, anyway. But one reason I love it now, Fin,” he rolled on, expansively again, “is that here is where I have learned to commune with Champy, my fellow monster, my inner Champy, you might say,” and he laughed good-naturedly, or at least, pretending it was so. “I know I’m regarded as a monster, you know.”

“No, I didn’t,” I lied, recalling his veritas odium parit, almost the only Latin I knew, and which was very recently learned.

“Of course you do,” Primo said, very easily, “Joey and Donna must have told you. I don’t mind. There is a lot of truth in it.” And he shrugged, accepting, at peace with his own monstrosity, not censoring himself for it, in fact, I thought, implicitly giving himself a basically affectionate permission to be a monster.

I did not tell him, however, that if not quite as a monster, he was very much regarded as an absolute and merciless prick by Joey and Donna, and probably by everyone else who knew him.

But at that pleasant moment I was not interested in either ‘truth’ or ‘hatred’. So I said, “Whatever you say, Primo,” adding, “But I thought the other monster’s name was Champ, not Champy.”

“Not to his fellow monsters, Fin. I even have his name on my license plate.”

“Have you ever seen Champy?”

Primo gave me a wickedly amused look, playful as maybe an executioner, and he paused, before saying, “On the likely condition that we never meet again, I will tell you the truth, if you want.”

“Okay, we’ll never meet again, I promise. I do want. Shoot.”

“Well, Fin, and, by the way, I will miss you, because you seem like an unusually good guy to talk with…I don’t get many of those in this place,” he said, surprisingly open, vulnerably evoking (without much self-pity) a confession of his monster’s solitude, which oddly managed to touch me some, without my losing sight of his earned reputation as a merciless prick. “But,” he went on, “that is the price I must pay for telling you the truth, isn’t it. Either that or kill you, right?”

“So they say. So let’s stay with the first option.”

“All right then. Here goes, please know, that yes, I have had the terribly, and I do mean terribly, bad luck of having seen a couple of them, as a matter of fact, frolicking, or was it fucking, or trying to kill each other, it was hard to tell because I took off for the woods as fast as I could. But there they were, long necks and all. Young ones, I would guess. I saw them twice, maybe not the same ones or maybe they were. And at dawn, too, both times, right on this beach, not far from where we sit now.”

“You’re kidding me. On this little beach?” Which was alarming. I certainly did not want to suddenly see a similar eruption of Paleolithic Champies come exploding onto the little beach right out of the currently motionless, enormously mirroring waters in front of us. (I think I always thought there might be monsters swimming behind ancient mirrors.)

“No, I’m not kidding,” he said, archly enjoying my amazement, as if it gave him the dominant pleasures of an upper hand in a way I took to be his Professorial deformation. “And I’ll also have you know I’ve never told anyone else, either, not even Magda…certainly not Magda, who would surely club me with it for the rest of our lives, at the worst moments. You are the first and probably the only person I will ever tell. What do you think of that?”

“I do feel honored, Primo, in a nervous kind of way. Were they…enormous?”

“Well, the first time I saw them, they did seem huge, maybe more than ten feet long, gigantic, all brownish grey, glittering wet, slimy, I don’t know, but disgusting, right up from inside life’s bloody and stinking bowels. But the first time people see things like that they always remember them as enormous. Small rodents, in the woods, at night scampering in the dark, can sound like charging elephants to novitiate campers. But they didn’t look to be thirty feet long or anything like that. Just the same though, much too damn big for decency, if you know what I mean or I wouldn’t have taken off like I did.”

“And the second time?” I asked, curiously drifting away from disbelief. I think it was because of his having said that he had had the ‘terribly, terribly bad luck’ of seeing the monsters, along with his muted but obviously sincere confession of his own monster’s solitude, which had seduced my normally suspicious senses, having given Primo the credibility of the complaining unfortunate asking for pity.

“The second time,” he went on, “I would guess they were, say, maybe four or five feet long or so, which was still much too damn big for my comfort. Some people around here claim they are just giant otters, but they didn’t look like otters to me. Saurian is what they looked like. And that second time they certainly were trying to tear each other apart, even if it might have included fucking, their horrible, bloody kind of fucking, that is.”

“My God…and you really never told anybody.”

“Nope, and here’s why, having told you, I would normally have the further bad luck of having to shoot you, whether I liked it or not, but which fortunately is off the table,” and he smiled at me. “You see, if I did tell people I’d seen not one but several Champies, my entire scientific credibility would implode, everything would. I’d be known as a nut. I’d be ruined financially too, and fast. I’d certainly never get to go on television to plug my books anymore. I wouldn’t get those nicely paid speaking engagements from the Right Wing think-tanks, either. They have a huge weakness for Darwinism, by the way, because they love cruel gods, gods they can believe in, like the merciless Market God that devours the weak. The Market God ‘talks’ to them, you know…,” and he paused, before concluding more dimly with, “I might even never get laid again.”

He stopped and watched me now, as I tried to absorb all this.

Primo couldn’t know, as he kept watching me, that his having said he might never get laid again, his being quasi-castrated, as it were, was suddenly making me think—because you can’t beat back an old-style classical Canadian education, or, at least I couldn’t—of Tiresias (eventually a blind seer and I assumed a cruel ruler, but weren’t they all, wasn’t Primo a cruel ruler too?) who saw two great serpents copulating, attacked them with a stick as I remembered, killing the female, and got punished for it by the cruel gods by being turned into a woman, hence his famous tits.

Finally, as he continued watching me so intently, I came out with, “I don’t know, Primo. But I wouldn’t say that about your never getting laid again, because, for one thing, you might get very lucky at, say, a UFO convention. In fact, I’m sure of it. You would be a sensation.” (I do think now that I came out with that sassy UFO convention bit because I had stopped believing his Champy story, although, curiously enough, I still believed he was not lying, without yet believing he was nuts. But then again, as a female sage once said to me, ‘my definition of a sane person is somebody I still don’t know very well.’)

“I never thought of that!” he said, laughing, his cognac brown eyes more visible in that dawn light, getting bigger at this new prospect. “I’m impressed!”

“That’s because you don’t think like a bachelor, like I do.”

He looked at me, newly appraisingly, then shook his head a bit sadly, saying, “God almighty, you have no idea how right you are about me. I have never been able to think like a bachelor, and that is a confession I never expected to make to you. It’s really more embarrassing than telling you about seeing the Champies. It shows me up as being so fucking needy with the women, doesn’t it.”

His question didn’t require an answer.

There now was another pause in our conversation, which then turned into a lull, and then into a suddenly deep, depressive pit on his side. His voice changed from its up-beat triumphalist tones and, looking at me inquisitively big-eyed with his round seal face (making me wonder if his Champies had faces, at the end of their long necks, similar to his), he said in a more intimate voice, “I didn’t tell you the worst thing about seeing the Champies doing whatever they were doing…can I tell you the worst thing? It was years ago, and I’m over it now but…”

“Sure,” I said. “What was it?”

“Well, the worst thing was that after I saw them I got nastily depressed for a while. But I refused to go to a shrink because I did not want to tell anybody, but anybody about what I saw. Especially a shrink, because I had known too many of them to trust to their respect for confidentiality, especially if they have a few drinks in them and it makes for a good story about somebody, no matter how destructive it is. And especially if it’s destructive. I mean, just imagine their being able to tell people about some famous Darwinist philosopher, that’s what I am, you know, getting delusional and maybe psychotic with hallucinations about Champy and sex and destruction. It would be just too good to pass up, wouldn’t it? The writing shrinks would rush to be the first to put it into print somewhere, I guarantee it.”

“I can see it, Primo. It really would make for a good story, too good to pass up, from their point of view, for sure.”

“Exactly, much too good a story for those cheap shot artists,” he said, shaking his head a bit, now smiling at me about that medical subspecies with evident loathing masked as mere disdain. “They’re a bunch of bastards. Are they ever. And believe me, I know bastards. I think they’re worse than lawyers,” before going on with, “But that was why it was imperative I didn’t tell a soul, especially one of them, or I was going to pay a horrible price. I tell you, Fin, I felt more alone than at any other time in my life, because what I saw with my own eyes on this very beach was nothing but horrible and unbelievably ugly to me. Unbelievable…except I believed it. I don’t know why it had to be that I took it that way, but it was like that, how I took it. I kept having bad dreams about them doing whatever horrible things they were doing to each other. I’d have flashes, flash backs during the day, anywhere, any time. I just could not escape the Champies. It was as if they had invaded my inner lake and fucked it all up. I didn’t want them residing there, but there they were, like it or not. I’m sure not everybody would have reacted the way I did, maybe you wouldn’t have.”

“If it’s any comfort, I think I might have.”

“Well, this was years ago. I only have a flash back or a dream once in a while. Like I said, I’m better now…and even better after having told you.” He bowed his bald, confessing head a bit at me and smiled by way of his saying ‘thank you’. He did seem to feel better than what he described of himself at his worst. But at that moment, after his telling his story, the aura of his old sadness from being invaded by re-emergent saurian monsters appeared to be just on the edge of making a cameo appearance, possibly taking a little bow, before submerging again.

Then, Primo said, “Anyway, now you see why I used to hate it here, before coming to terms with my inner Champy, that is,” and he shrugged. “I accepted. I coped. Now I can love, even myself, which was harder than you might assume.”

Another silence followed. He seemed a bit down again, who knows why.

Feeling that the conversational ball was in my court, I heard myself say, trying to cheer him up, “I’ve seen you on television several times.”

“Really?”

“Yes. You are entirely different from what I saw. You even look different.”

He managed to smile at me—and at my innocence—without condescension. “It’s a performance, Fin. I play a character, in costume, complete with a beard and the Darwin look. Everything you see on TV or places like that is a performance. The anchormen are an act, the ladies, all of it. Nobody is ever what you see, or hardly ever.”

“I kind of knew it. But I have to say you were very convincing.”

“Thank you, Fin. The more provocative I am, the better, as the producers and publishers always tell me. But I haven’t confided one other thing to you, though, and I want to. May I? Don’t want to overload. I must be nearing overloading you.”

“There’s still room. You wouldn’t overload, but…I do wonder why you are telling me these things.”

Whereupon he beamed softly at me, downright affectionately, “I am telling you, passing friend, because there is something about you that downright inspires confiding. Really, it’s as if you might be that one passing stranger who has come to take away my secret burden, something like that. I mean, we do know that chances really are that we will never see each other again. So it is wonderfully delicious to tell you my secrets. It’s a situation that does allow me, no, more than allows me, it tempts me is what it does, with the deeply sensual, incomparable pleasures of confession I remember, Fin, from my Eastern Orthodox boyhood in Romania. After confession, back then, I always felt a freedom, at least for a little while, that has never been matched in my life since. And confessing is a lot like sex, in a way, you know, often best with a passing stranger.”

“Romanian…?” I asked, as if this put a different light on things.

“Yes, Fin. Despite my marvelous American English, I am Romanian by birth and by experience all the way to age fifteen. Now, of course, I am as American as Henry Kissinger on the fourth of July!” He laughed, his spirits were returning, as he added, not at all tragically now, making me think that perhaps Primo the Prick might not be far away. “But you don’t get a name like Primo Solar on this continent all that easily.”

“You know, I did wonder about that,” I said, having suspected it was a completely made-up name.

“Yes, I don’t tell everyone I’m Romanian either, although I don’t deny it, but somehow telling people you are Romanian does not inspire confidence. And there I go again, confessing more to you. I think when you tell people you are Romanian they see clouds of buzzing, thieving Gypsies about to surround them like attacking bees.”

“Could be,” I said, “It would in Canada, where I’m from.”

“Canadian…” Primo said, looking at me, laughing again. “You are also trying to confess, aren’t you? It must be because of what I told you about the incomparable sensual pleasures of confession. But confessing you are Canadian just does not come up to the level of toxicity, or sensuality, of saying you’re Romanian, does it.” Primo was now obviously feeling better, enough to flash his compulsively competitive nature, putting me in my place with how much more toxic Romanians were than Canadians.

“I guess not, sorry to say. We Canadians are just regarded as too bland, I guess. But it’s true; I did like what you said about those deep sensual pleasures of confession, even if I don’t understand it. But that’s probably because my childhood was atheist, and nobody in our house admitted much of anything to anybody, especially my father. Actually, my mother wasn’t that bad at admitting nothing herself, either.”

“I see. Well, then, let me tell you. A full confession is a little like touching that subway third rail you are not ever to touch, when you’ve been told the power is off, and you can’t be absolutely sure it’s really off, just like I can’t be completely sure it is safe to tell you about my Champies. But it is still the very best chance I’ll ever get to do it. That’s why it’s irresistible.” And then he laughed, full of beans again, saying, “You do inspire confession in me, goddamnit, Fin. Not everybody does, that’s for sure. I think it must be because you are a faux priest, the best kind, a theologian, as we agreed we all are. And you know, I really have to tell you, you have made me re-think my whole racket. I was blinded to what it was because I assumed my side was in a war with religions. It’s been an important part of our posture, you know, us scientific modern provocative materialist Darwinists against the old time bullshitters, waving around their incense. It’s our edge on them. But here we are, all of us together in show biz, us with our Darwinist religion attacking everybody, which I will never publicly admit either. And the psychoanalysts are next, you know.”

“I didn’t.”

“Oh, yes indeed. Out with Freud and in with Darwin in the future shrink biz. It’s going to be, ‘it wasn’t your mother, it was the genes.’ Believe me. You know,” he went on, suddenly even more expansively, changing direction, “Another reason I’m here every chance I get now, which is often, is because I don’t require much sleep.”

“You don’t?”

“No,” he said, stretching both his legs straight out together from his sitting position on the log beside me, “Jean Paul Sartre is my role model. Fifty books, sustained by amphetamines and scotch, and he lived to be damn near eighty whatever, an ugly little wall-eyed bastard fucking different grateful, good looking women all the way, and, as opposed to me, never once suckered into weakly signing on to monogamy!”

“Okay, but, I hear that he had the advantage of living with his mother most of that time.”

Primo smiled at me. The way he did so made me think that he suddenly realized he had a similar relationship, in a way, with Magda, then confirming it by saying, “Magda willingly satisfies my every desire, Fin, except one, the desire for another woman, but fortunately she knows this. May I now make my final confession of the new day to you?”

“Sure.”

“I’m leaving Magda, tomorrow. I’m going into a house I’ve just rented, on the other side of the campus, and I’m taking Penny with me.” He again looked at me most directly with his large, inquisitive seal eyes to evaluate my reaction, almost as if he were ready for my opinion. Actually, I did think he wanted my opinion, but once more recalling veritas odium parit, I decided not to give it. Not that my opinion was that he should not leave Magda (I assumed he did it often), or that this was going to bring out the suicide in her (possible as I thought that was, since Magda probably did that from time to time too, with varying degrees of firmness of intent).

My opinion was that, for him, the worst part of this prospect was his leaving with Penny, less that half his age and, I was convinced, composed sexually and psychologically, of something like endlessly, maddeningly yielding sea grass. Except that she importantly refused to surrender her yielding nature to anyone, which was a certain recipe for a hell such as he had probably never known. But I withheld this too, because I was sure he would have hated hearing it. Just as I sensed he was obsessed by and getting lost in Penny’s tepidly passive morass of yielding and yielding to every touch, however slight, all the way to infinity.

Which is to say, I believed Primo was intent on the illusion of possessing her and changing her, not understanding her natural defenses against hunters, which I thought would be very hard on him indeed.

He continued looking at me, waiting for me to say something.

I said, “I guess you know what you are doing.”

“Ha!” he barked in disdainful protest. “With women, I’ve never known what I was doing!” And now he stared at me, challenging me to do better.

We fell quiet again, for several beats, and then several more.

Finally, in the interests of politeness, I mustered, “Well, one thing I can say, Primo, is that you obviously are still not thinking like a bachelor.”

He looked at me suddenly mirthless, as if stung, until he managed a rather defeated and shamed version of a smile, and he said, “You are right again.” And he then laughed some, but to put me at ease. “It’s true, I don’t think like a bachelor. I just can’t get there. What I do is think like a compulsively adulterous husband. But, Jesus Christ, am I ever a husband, no matter what I do! How this shames me, Fin. It turns out that like all great adulterers, I’m an incurable family man, a hopeless believer in marriage, because I’m going to marry Penny. Can’t seem to live without it, or without the adultery. ”

“Even with Penny.”

“Even with Penny. As a matter of fact, I’ve got another thing going right now that I’ll be visiting tomorrow. A fantastically sensuous arrangement I’ve had for several years, which I will also be discontinuing, by the way, after one last time, and on this matter I really should say no more.”

“I assume she is on the faculty?”

He shrugged and smiled without further comment, and I thought that he was definitely back to living up to his billing as an absolute and unhesitating prick with some particular lady academic, firing her, girl friend or not. Maybe even because of it.

And yet, for all of that, we had, it felt like, become the best of friends for the moment, because there was a warmth between us, and I did find him sincere. Or, at least, we were losing ourselves in playing the parts of friends, something which I had imagined most unlikely back when he turned vermilion with rage at me over Penny back in his living room.

Our warm rapport, suspect and superficial as it might be under the influence of drug and drink, suddenly allowed him to say, “I have to tell you how much, how very much I hate being reduced by jealousy. I hate it more than anything…because I have done incredible things out of possessiveness and jealousy, marriage included, damn near ruining my life. Do you think I’m doing it again, like a stupid kid again?”

I shrugged my ‘I don’t know’, and then said, “It’s human enough…”

“Human enough, no, more sub-human, because it’s the stuff that put us out of our own control, violating our humanity, in my opinion. That’s when we really are the humanoid puppets of the dear old, moronic Selfish Gene, or whatever you want to call it.”

“We aren’t?”

“Not me, if I can help it. Besides, at best, it’s a question of degree, and it really is hard to tell to what degree. Actually, it’s impossible. Uh, I take it, from the look on your face, that my saying this surprises?”

“Well, yes. I thought you liked telling people how they were kidding themselves about free will and all the other non-Darwinian stuff. You did look to me on television as if you enjoyed rubbing the Selfish Gene in their faces.”

He laughed, glinting, “I do! Every time! I guess it makes me feel like a Savonarola fire-and-brimstone type, ecstatically telling everybody they’re kidding themselves because they are all damned, and loving telling them, even if he’s supposedly damned too. I guess you can’t know what fun that can be, maybe second only to being the God himself that damns them, especially when all kinds of people get pissed at you, the more the better, and on top of that, buy your books.”

“Hmm…,” I said, then paused reflectively, until I produced, “Then, Primo, what you really do, so that I may understand it better within my limitations, is a lot like playing the villain in pro wrestling?”

“Absolutely! “ He laughed. “Now you’ve got it!” and then, “Let’s go back, shall we? I don’t think the Champies are coming on the beach this morning, and I want to take a little nap before I tell Magda.” To be followed, I understood, by his going to the ‘incredible sensuous relationship’ colleague for one last time, before breaking off with her too.

We got off the log where we sat and walked on the path through the woods to his car.

We got in, he behind the wheel, and he turned to me and said, most easily and calmly, “You didn’t believe my story about seeing the Champies, did you, in the end. I could tell, just now.”

I was so taken by surprise I did not know what to say.

He went on, not offended, but quite sincerely, “Whatever you think, Fin, I can swear to you it was the truest, most real experience of my entire life. But maybe sometimes it’s best not to be believed. Then you belong to normal humanity, although by now I don’t know why I would want that particularly.”

I still did not know what to say, except something in me prevented me from trying to reassure him that of course I did believe him. This was probably due to my sense that I would have failed at it.

“Well, Fin, I hope not, but maybe one day,” Primo went on, “you too will be cursed to learn something that you never wanted to learn, the kind of thing you would be glad not to be believed, even if you were unwise enough to tell anybody, because it would make life much easier.”

“I think you are right, if I ever had that kind of bad luck,” I said, “if I could get away with it, I wouldn’t tell anybody, just to be sure.”

“Exactly, Fin. Exactly. Fuck veritas! What did veritas ever do for you? Nothing much, I bet. ” And he laughed, we both did. But maybe I shouldn’t have.

I did not know at that moment, nor could he have known, he had just been prophetic. I would indeed find out something I did not ever want to know, and I did not learn it by any kind of detective work. I stumbled upon it after making a gaffe. A magical mistake, but of negative magic.

And when I first saw it, I mistook it for merely something other than what it was, also disturbing, painful, life-changing, but not nearly as much as what I had seen without understanding.

VI

I woke up at one in the afternoon (because I needed far more sleep than Primo, not just a nap) with a call from Donna, telling me that Joey was finally to perform at seven p.m. that very day for the much-feared Tenure and Promotion Committee and any interested observers. It would take place in the auditorium of the Warren G. Harding Library, the red-brick building that had suggested to me a mediocre 1940s, small-town high school.

“How is he doing?” I asked her.

“Okay, I guess. He’s nervous, he’s got to go to his mandatory office hours until four, but then he wants to get his head together, go over stuff, rehearse some more with the pianist because he’s got a couple of new ideas, you know, well…that kind of stuff.” The stoic way she said ‘that kind of stuff’, her tired tone, seemed to contain an unspoken ‘as if it’s going to make a difference’. I hoped her fatalism was just superstitiously self-protective, womanly pessimism against any high expectations. I did recall Joey telling me he knew he had at least a majority in his favor on the Tenure and Promotion Committee (and I also recalled his telling me the only vote that counted was Primo’s).

“Okay, wish him luck for me,” I said, “and I’ll see him after the show, and then we can go out for dinner, to the best joint in town, my treat, okay?”

A pause followed, the kind that sometimes is taken as meaningful.

And then Donna, in her purest Italo-New York tones, answered me with what I first heard as, dare I say, a quiet but lambent (though it could also have been mechanical and depressed), “What ever you want, luh-vah.” And we hung up.

It did something to me, I confess. A devil’s tickle. I got up out of bed.

Following the traditions of the celibate clergy, when shamefully aroused, I decided to put on my jogging outfit to go for a run, eat a donut or some such for breakfast on the wing, and maybe try to find a book to read somewhere in that town, realizing that among other things, I was badly in need of reading material.

I jogged my way through the tiny, two block shopping center and I saw no sign of anything claiming to be a book store, just a pharmacy with, at best, newspapers, magazines, and tabloids. Quite often those tabloids, I well knew, featured articles with blurry, grainy photographs of the Loch Ness monster. It made me wonder if they would also do similar stuff on Champy. But then I thought not, because Champy, unfairly it now seemed to me, had long been dismissed as a second rate monster at best, judging from what little, if any, media attention it received.

And then a new thought (would that it had not!) passed through my brain: why not go to Donna’s and Joey’s place and see if they have anything I could borrow to read, not that Joey read books or that Donna was likely to read books that would catch my fancy, but still…I was only half a mile or so from their place, so why not drop in? (This, despite being in violation of my possibly sternest self commandment: Thou shalt never, ever, ‘drop in’.)

About a block away from their place I saw, from the back, a black BMW parked on the street with a Vermont license plate that, in part, read, CHAMPY-LOVE. With a bit of a shudder, though without interrupting my forward jog, I remembered Primo telling me that the word CHAMPY was part of his vanity license plate. Could there really be more than one person in the area with that word on their license plate, on the back of their black BMW?

I should have turned around, gone the other way, but on I went, like a salmon upstream, until I was before the battered, big old Victorian house where Donna and Joey lived with their two daughters. ‘Oh, well,’ I said to myself, ‘I’m here’, and up the steps I went to ring their door bell.

After a bit of a wait (a fairly long wait, actually, considering how tiny their place was) the door opened. And there was Donna, without make-up, in a terry cloth bathrobe, her black, black hair wildly uncombed, discovering it was me with no enthusiasm whatsoever, and then, suddenly looking bitter, angry, as if she were about to swallow a horrible defeat, forced by my arrival.

I had never seen her—so uncombed and unmade-up—look so atavistically Sicilian, so Medusa-like, and almost as if her black and tumbling hair could explode into hissing and striking snakes in her anger at my being there. She glared at me, as if wanting to turn me forever into stone. If she could have, she would have.

I immediately saw why.

Behind her, looking only slightly surprised by me while leaning back on his shoulder blades on their loveseat sofa in the little living room, was none other than up-and-early Primo—he who needed so damned little sleep—now trying to peer around her hips at me, nude except for his briefs which were black, fancy silk and bikini-like. Those briefs made me realize he kept himself ever presentable for whatever formalities might come with unexpected socio-sexual encounters. White cotton was not up to his level.

Nevertheless, however surprised he was, Primo remained very relaxed indeed, holding a glass with booze of some kind upon his naked tummy. The light in his cognac-colored eyes flickered just maybe once with a helpless amusement he tried to repress as he half-smiled a greeting. And then he looked off, up toward the ceiling, having decided to leave this public relations problem to Donna.

I cannot ever express how ashamed and miserably repentant I felt for being there in Donna’s doorway, unannounced. And then my shock at seeing Donna and Primo as they were, au naturel, turned intensely painful and infantile (this, at my age. Will I ever progress? Suddenly, I understood Tiresias’ childishly moral impulse of attacking the copulating great serpents—which he really was not meant to see—with a stick, for which the indignant gods, defending nature against most suspect human morality, would unman him and deservedly pop him those woman’s tits).

And what I understood now in that awful, toxic silence of ours (that is, Donna’s and mine), what shocked me the most was they had not been merely sexual opportunists, which I could more easily accept, but lovers. Lovers! At the very least, in Donna’s mind.

Donna, straightening her back and bravely raising up her unmade-up face to confront me—with not a leg to stand on but as if daring me to judge her—of course looked neither relaxed, nor particularly informal, despite her bathrobe, but curiously not one bit post-coital either (perhaps because she was already well post-post coital), as Primo did. In fact, in his great ease, he radiated that post-coital condition triumphantly, testifying that his life was worth living.

“Sorry…” I said, and was about to turn and jog myself away when Donna eased some and said, “Crap. Okay. What the hell. Come on in. Come on in. You’re here. So, you want a drink too? I was just going to get Primo some…room temperature (this last specification was said acidly)…water for his bourbon.”

“Do you really think I should?”

“Yeah…it might look better for the neighbors, because somebody probably saw Primo come in, but they know enough to shut the fuck up about it, at least to Joey and me.” Suddenly I wondered if Joey knew about this too, but could not believe it. But anyway, to my greater horror, even if he did not, there was no doubt everybody else at Longfellow did.

She held the door open for me and I stepped in, as Primo without changing his posture now infinitesimally shrugged at me, obviously also preferring I had not dropped in (though I sensed he was glad that at least I had not turned up at Donna’s door even earlier and thus been even more inconveniently interruptive). He was not, of course, anywhere near as stoic or tragic as Donna now seemed. His response to the situation belonged to comedy, not to tragedy. (Who was it that said that passionate Romantics weep and rational Classics laugh?)

Donna, turning mutely angry, now continued on her way to get that specified glass of water for Primo and a drink yet to be specified for me.

“I’ll just have some cold water, if you have it, thanks,” I said, assuming I was the rightful object of her rage as I bowed my head, again wanting to run away. (I was wrong about her rage, but I didn’t know it at the time. Her anger, which had silently taken possession of all of her, was for Primo, whom she hated with her whole being, which did not prevent her from remarkably managing to smile over at him, nastily—which he did not notice—her nostrils pinching but hostess-like.)

I sat myself on the available easy chair and moronically added, “It’s too early in the day for me to have a real drink,” as if this piety might normalize our situation.

I then watched Donna pour a glass of cold water from a jar out of the refrigerator. She came to me with it, then turned and went back to the open liquor cabinet and took a large green and red bottle with Mexican designs over to the sink.

I instantly remembered that bottle—advertised as ‘authentic’ Tijuana tap water, which of course immediately made the word ‘authentic’ questionable—as the ultimate sample of brother-in-law, joke store, rubber fart bag humor.

“This is the only room temperature water I have,” she said with a shrug. “All the way from San Antonio, where my brother bought it.” And she poured it into a glass as a self-pleased Primo, smiling at me unrepentantly self-indulgent, like a spoiled little boy who will not be denied, said, “I do like it room temperature with bourbon. It’s one of my things.”

“I know how you like it,” said Donna, and came back with the glass for Primo. Then she went to the refrigerator, pulled out a can of beer for herself and snapped it open.

She plumped herself down on the love seat next to Primo and raising the can she said, most un-cheerfully, “Cheers.” For her, it was all ashes.

Primo sighed and compressed his mouth, shaking his head a little, and then explained over to me, ever in his black silk bikini while showing no need to cover up any further, “Donna is very unhappy, Fin, because Joey won’t be getting tenure. I did have to tell her, you know.” I did not churlishly observe to him, though I felt like it, that he did not have to remove his clothes and fuck her or whatever to do so.

“So I understand,” I said, having identified at last the mystery woman with whom Primo had said earlier that very dawn, while we were at the lake, that he had had a ‘long standing, sensuous relationship’ he was about to terminate (he also ‘had to tell her’ that, I assumed). It was still hard for me to believe, though less and less, that that woman was Donna. But, she was, she certainly was, and of long standing.

“Joey doesn’t know about that yet, of course, but that’s the decision,” Primo said, sipped some bourbon and then chased it down with some of his preferred room-temperature water.

(Again I did not know what I was seeing. Again I was wrong. I did not understand that the very worst—which I was of course also not meant to see—was hiding immediately behind what I’d thought was the worst.)

“No matter how he does with his performance,” I said.

“It goes beyond that,” said Primo. “There’s been all kinds of evaluations.”

“Right. Way beyond that,” Donna said, dead-pan (which I knew she favored for sarcasm), which I understood as her telling me Primo, with one move, was getting rid of both Joey and her. It must have been a remarkable day, even for Primo, I thought, since last I’d heard he would be starting off, after a restful nap, with telling Magda he was leaving her too.

“But,” Primo said to me, brightening, far more interested in what he was about to say than in our peculiar and painful situation, “I’m actually looking forward to seeing what Joey does tonight, because he is doing variations on Ravel’s Pavanne For A Dead Princess, do you know it?”

“Vaguely,” I said, “which means I don’t, but I must have heard it.”

“Well, it is one of my very favorite pieces of music, in the world, when it’s not crapped up with too many sappy violins, that is. Because then I hate it. I get homicidal. Because then they turn the Pavanne into the opposite of what it is supposed to be.”

“And what would that be…?” I asked, not very interested, instead miserably wondering what in hell I could possibly do to make Donna feel better. She could not have been less interested in what Primo had to say about his pavannes or his princesses, either.

To me, now feeling ridiculously exposed in my absurd jogging suit (while Primo, all skin in his tiny black silk bikini briefs, gave no sign whatever of feeling ridiculously exposed in any way) it was as if Donna, covered up in her terry cloth bathrobe, still felt her misery was oozing shamefully out of her mortally wounded soul in a transparent, spectral gray psychic matter which her bathrobe simply could not contain.

“Well, it’s about a dead girl, of course, the princess,” comfortably nude Primo went on, untroubled, with his music lover’s chatty enthusiasm, either insensitive or (monstrously) indifferent to Donna (I was sure that her pride would not let her cry until she was alone). And Primo blithely continued to me, both as if Donna was not there and as if we were not in her home, with, “and it’s about aristocratic restraint and elegance, and wonderfully elegiac woodwinds, which is what lifts the piece up into real beauty precisely by being far above the crap of the schmaltzy violins. Honest to God, if Joey goes in that direction with his saxophone, all tear-jerky and schmaltzy and kitschy, I just might throw up.”

“I bet you anything,” I said, “that Joey will not go schmaltzy.”

“It doesn’t matter anymore,” said Donna—the woman dumped—beyond glumly, looking progressively feral Sicilian, unlovely, and no princess, nor a girl. But by now Primo, as if only distantly taking notice of her anymore, was not the least glum as he picked up again on Ravel’s Pavanne For A Dead Princess, his ideal and true love, (which, as it happened, now contrasted vividly with all the things Donna was not) with that music lover’s glee of his, “I can’t tell you how much I love that piece, Fin, which is why I get so angry when it’s fucked up. It’s sadness at a death, sure, and it’s a tribute to her youthful beauty, but it’s contained and that’s what makes it beautifully aristocratic and wonderfully elegant and…well, it’s just the best of Europe as a civilization, is what it is, Fin. I mean,” he continued, “it’s the miraculous creation of beauty and order, of cosmos, as Pythagoras called it, out of the pain of that girl’s death, and I admit I’m a terrible elitist for loving it so much, but can you see what I mean?”

“I guess…” I said. “Maybe if I remembered the piece.”

There was a small silence, whereupon Donna finally stood up and said, unceremoniously, “Okay, both you guys have to get out of here. I’ve got stuff to do.”

Primo and I looked at each other, he near ready to laugh at Donna’s throwing us out, but knowing better.

Moments later with Primo finally dressed again, we were walking to his BMW a block away, for I had accepted his offer of a ride back to my bed-and-breakfast.

It was still only quarter of two. The day was still vast ahead and threateningly young. I had a sinkhole foreboding—what more could happen?

“By the way,” said Primo as we strode side by side, “Why did you show up at Donna’s just now?”

I almost could not think of an answer. “I guess,” I said, even though it hardly sounded true any more as he looked at me with amused, enlarged and waiting cognac eyes, “I guess I was hoping that I could borrow something to read from them.”

“Really…” he said. “What a bad idea (to which I could only nod). You should have gone to Magda’s Presidential Palace. She has a very nice and wide selection, of all the best stuff, I would say.” And we were at his car.

During the brief ride, Primo’s enthusiasm for his beloved Pavanne For A Dead Princess and its ‘uniquely European high sense of beauty and spiritual aristocracy’ continued to gush forth unabated. He went on so idealizing that piece of music that I—feeling trapped and resentful inside his BMW—could see there really was no way imaginable that Joey could have ever played the Pavanne to Primo’s satisfaction. Joey would have violated that piece, as far as Primo was concerned, simply by having touched it with his profane and proletarian hands, no matter how wonderfully he did with his variations.

It simply didn’t matter any more, just as Donna had said, how Joey played it. Or so I thought.

VII

The auditorium of the Warren G. Harding Library was also very much like what one would expect of a 1940s small-town high school. The seats, covered with some approximation of red silk, were like those in an old movie house.

A mid-sized proscenium stage holding up a black concert piano on its old floor boards waited for those ‘whose balls were on the anvil’, as Joey had memorably put it, to come and perform. The program notes said that—aside from Joey—a poet would read from her forthcoming book, Among The Hysterias, and an historian would explain “What I’m trying to do: Hegel, Marx and Me”, each with a ‘firm’ (and arrogantly dismissive, I thought) twenty minute limit.

Magda was not there, but her Presidential absence was so enormous a vacuum as to be dominating everyone’s attention. Because, everyone surely knew by now in the tiny world of Longfellow College that Primo had moved out on her, taking Penny with him.

And of course Magda would know that everybody would know, and would be staying out of sight, feeling shattered and too humiliated to countenance the general schadenfreude that could not or would not be hidden as the lower academic orders used the occasion to comment among each other. (What else was there to do at Longfellow? Murmuring clearly served as a kind of mini-rebellion of the slaves.)

Magda’s absence and imagined misery had upstaged the evening’s awaited performance, blood sport that it might be, and put it into second place. Smiles and malice twined and multiplied, spreading in the communal auditorium air like an air-borne virus.

Donna and I looked up at the long table with a white table cloth and five microphones that faced the audience at an angle from up-stage of the piano, to the left. Four academics were already there at their mikes, two of them women—the dreaded Tenure and Promotion Committee—waiting for Primo, the Grand Inquisitor, to appear and take his place at the center mike.

Their facial responses, most visible to us in the audience, was evidently an important part of the show. They were to be enjoyed if not as once Romans might have at the Coliseum watching the facial expressions of Christians being tossed singly and seriatim to the crocodiles, then, more like it, enjoyed as the facial expressions of the receiving crocodiles.

Donna beside me was stone-faced, mute, as she had been from the moment we met again since very early afternoon at her place.

She was of course wearing makeup now, and hardly in a terry cloth bathrobe, but a dark blue dress, with her black hair done up in a properly orderly, matronly pile I had never seen before. But it all seemed on the defeated, funereal side.

Then, she began squinting at the stage (Donna obviously preferred not to put on glasses), silently taking the measure of the judges for a while, those who would pronounce themselves on Joey’s fate (as if it were really up to them), until she finally leaned her head over closer to my ear and, in something more like a low growl than a whisper, she uttered her very first words of the evening to me, “Look at those assholes up there,” she said. “Like they think they’re the judges on American Idol.” And I nodded and smiled at her, for it did all smack of imitation of that kind of ‘talent search’ television show, whether conscious or not. I wondered if it would complete the imitation with an ultra-bitchy Brit judge, too, or some American variant.

I looked around us. There were no students; it seemed all faculty and family, and no more than thirty people in attendance. I assumed they were all, in one way or another, a captive audience.

And Primo at last came in striding, no necktie, but somehow magnificently bald, virile and dashing in a light rose shirt and a pale olive suit exorbitantly beyond both the means and elegance of any of his faculty, as was proper of his higher order of being. And, all who could, being in his visual path as he went toward the stage, smiled and nodded, indicating a willingness to stand up and be seen showing their deference (evidently such deference was, if not rewarded, still believed to be well advised to practice) until he was past them.

He went to sit himself at the open seat and mike at the center of the table and the atmosphere in the Warren G. Harding auditorium now quickened. The show was about to begin.

The three candidates, invisible until now, materialized on the stage walking out from the darkness behind the wing opposite the judges’ table, and they sat down on the three straight back chairs at the right side of the stage to wait their turn.

In what seemed a monumental error in costuming, the brown-haired, nearly skeletal and bespectacled poet of Among The Hysterias, looking completely out of place, wore a backless, off the shoulder, white evening dress, poor thing. But no flowers. She was not industrially coiffed (as Donna was), in fact—academically—hardly coiffed at all, but with a willing, pleasantly horsy smile as she looked around at the audience. (That willing, horsy smile almost made it seem possible that her almost bridal white evening dress was meant as a gag, and that she was not seriously trying for glamour, but I felt she was caught stranded in between). The historian, a graying, already souring young guy (it might have helped the poet in the white evening dress if he had turned up in a tuxedo) who wore a lifeless tan jacket and a pink tie and brown corduroy pants, was also inclined to smile around at faces he knew, but he seemed tenser than the poet, less willing to trust his fate to the mercy of the judges, but obviously without a choice.

And Joey, who had sat himself down without a smile but with the self-enclosed composure of a professional musician while placing his shining saxophone—his ‘ax’ as he called it—across his lap, depressingly wore—no Primo he—a blue suit, white shirt, and a blue tie, looking like a bank teller. Within his lower middle-class professional dignity, Joey was once more doing his best to present himself as a non-criminal conformist and unthreatening model prisoner, still innocently believing he had a chance. Therefore, I could assume, he would not be letting loose with his inimitable saxophone as I so wished he might, especially when it was a why-the-hell-not moment in his life, since the cards had already been played.

From the judges’ table, an elderly, white-haired and red faced guy with a red turtle-neck sweater under his salt-and-pepper herringbone tweed jacket announced, “Mr. Joseph Corelli, of our Music Department, will be first.” Whereupon a young guy not seen before came out of the wings wearing merely a grey sweater and tan slacks and went walking to the concert piano—Joey’s accompanist—and sat down. All was silence, there was no “Let’s welcome Mr. Joseph Correlli and his accompanist with a round of applause!” Academic gravitas loomed. I could imagine it was in the spirit of how they would descend on classes being taught, to evaluate the instructors.

And the nameless young sitting pianist ducked his head down to the right once, let it rise up once again and started softly rolling in on Ravel’s Pavanne For A Dead Princess. Indeed, I had heard the piece before.

I can’t say I shared Primo’s infatuation with it, but it was nice, stately, simple in its sentiment, the clean way the pianist did it, without a touch of schmaltz, of anything cheap, progressing I would say in an admirably feminine way, slowly upwards in feeling, but contained, and even when it had risen to its most affectionate height, it remained, just as Primo said, aristocratic and European, but without being detestable, without anything about it that would make one want to bring out the guillotine to get rid of the abusive bastards those aristocrats surely were (except, we could assume, for the late, gentle young princess). As the music went forward, with its elegiac charm and breath and tempo, I remembered one thing about it, which surprised me to remember, that Ravel’s Pavanne ends much as death often is. It just stops and vanishes without decrescendo, and people almost never notice that. But that final, gentle death-like silence of that which ‘is no more’ was still ahead when the pianist had finished for the first time stating the themes, building up from them. The second time, now that the audience was familiar with them, the pianist was joined by Joey’s saxophone, gently playing along, joining the elegant, well-behaved funeral cortege, until Joey began to rise with the theme of the dead Princess and sail up and away with what soon began to seem like a climbing desperation, while the pianist fell to silence, left back down on earth, and watched as Joey wildly dove back down—unwilling or incapable of stopping himself—as he took every single part of the Pavanne and turned it somehow inside out and eviscerated the formalities, ever more desperate as if looking for her vanished soul, her departed life. And back out of his saxophone came that crazily-shaped, galloping, howling breath that made his savage and strange music turn into Joey’s flying cry of the heart. And the Pavanne was left hollow, exposed as just pretty, just kitsch and in the end false. What now stood out as genuine, and genuine as red blood (surely I was not alone in feeling this) was Joey’s—as they now struck me once more as saurian—cries of the heart, not Ravel’s reassuring and perfumed but, frankly, in comparison, lifeless crap.

Joey, I realized, must have had a sudden seizure of integrity from which he had refused to escape. A fatal seizure, as integrity so often is. He had suddenly refused to go on existing as the model prisoner after all.

I have to admit, I felt enormously proud of him for his self-destruction (after all, he didn’t know he was already done), even elevated. (Never mind it could well mean he would have to play his saxophone in the underworld of the New York subways, begging for tips for some time to come if not forever, because the much diminished New York jazz scene, as was well known, was far, far from what it once was.)

I looked at the judge’s table, and now all of us were looking at Primo, whose face hand gone dead grey, drained, as if a successful attempt—perhaps a deep stabbing into his guts—had been made on his life, his eyes flaming with rage. I had never in my life seen what I took to be such a sensitive, offended aesthetic response in anybody. I knew Primo was partial to the piece, but I would have never imagined he would take what he saw as Joey’s artistic offense so hard, virtually as a capital crime. (Again I was wrong about what I was seeing, very wrong about why Primo looked as awful as he did, but I would not find this out for another day.)

And then suddenly, in one motion, Primo got up while simultaneously pushing back his chair and the long table forward, loudly and violently scraping the stage’s old floor boards. Then he turned and hurried off, running out of the Warren G. Harding Auditorium in all the possessed frenzy of a damned soul recently arrived in hell looking for an exit.

Everything came to a silent stop. Then, with Primo gone, the rumoring began like a sudden river, getting louder as the shocked assemblage started commenting to each other, asking, answering, asking more and more, the river rising.

On stage the other (I can’t help myself calling them that) contestants looked in awe and horror at Joey, who just stood there, holding the instrument he called his ‘ax’ now silent and at hip level, not looking particularly penitent but aware the other two contestants believed he had criminally (if understandably) attacked Primo with that very ‘ax’, and that they were, in their mixture of awe and pity, already beyond fearing for him.

Everyone in the auditorium focused on Joey now, and everyone already knew for sure that as far as Longfellow College’s reality was concerned, Joey was a dead man, which he didn’t seem to mind at all.

Donna beside me remained stone-faced.

Joey hopped down from the stage, youthful and athletic as I had not seen in a long, long time, and walked to where Donna and I sat.

We looked up at him and he said, “I’m glad I sang my little song,” showing his almost forgotten slanting, insubordinate and white Sicilian smile. Again—and I feel I have to say it even if it hardly brings me honor—I felt that special pride (though now with a touch of what is called survivor’s guilt) a father might, sending his freshly uniformed, willing son off to his probable doom in no matter how distant and pointless the war.

Donna looked up from her seat at him for what seemed forever, until she finally said, “I’m glad you did, too. I want to get out of this place anyway.”

“You do?” Joey asked.

“Yeah,” said Donna. “You know, everybody needs some excitement, some real, good attention. Everybody wants to feel special. Me too. We’re all human. And you can’t get much of that here, just grief.”

“Right!” said Joey, who surely was hearing Donna differently than I was (because I was hearing her explain her having had—all too humanly—an affair with Primo, the local alpha male). But, Joey was simply glad and surprised she was taking it so well, considering her previously fierce views on the importance of his getting tenure at Longfellow and the tuition-free, future education of the girls.

“Yeah, and I wouldn’t mind,” Donna further said, “going back to New York, either, to tell you the truth.”

“Let’s celebrate!” Joey said suddenly, looking almost as if afraid this moment would evaporate like a dream. There was no doubt now that Joey had no idea about Donna and Primo, for which I suddenly was immensely glad and relieved, as if maybe I could forget knowing something I had not wanted to know about Donna and Primo. My Champies, I suppose.

(Again, there I was—I see it now, despite my fifty years of age—deep down rooting wildly and childishly for the preservation of their marriage, even if, for all I knew, it would soon prove better for both of them to break up and live their own lives separately instead of bitterly together. All because it would keep me from feeling troubled and the world in the order I tyrannically wished, as instinctively tyrannical as any little moralizing Tiresias angrily attacking the coupling great serpents with a stick. Moralists, I have always believed in my better moments, should always be greatly suspected.)

“Let’s!” I said. “Just show me the way!”

And celebrate we did, eating and drinking and laughing, telling stories from long ago in New York. We were not yet aware that Primo, after responding to the first violent assaults within his guts while on stage, when his face went dead grey, drained, his eyes flaming with rage (with what I had mistakenly assumed to be an extraordinarily offended aesthetic response to Joey’s performance, instead of to the volcanic violence in his organic plumbing that had suddenly eclipsed everything else in his life) had driven off back to his beach on the lake, where he would die vomiting blood.

Primo the philosopher would, one might say, die a philosopher’s death, like the great Aristotle himself—as I once heard Aristotle did, be it lore or truth—also retching blood helplessly on a beach, though in Primo’s case it was on a black, muddy lake shore and at night; and not under a Mediterranean sun on golden sands, or even just on a lot of black and grey Mediterranean pebbles, as I had imagined with Aristotle.

But we would learn, more privately, that there were other, most inglorious details about Primo’s death, which if Aristotle had to undergo them too, they were not mentioned by his legend either. I would understand why. They were gross.

Primo’s body would be found on his tiny beach shortly after midnight, accidentally, by a couple of undergraduate students, surely up to no good if I remember my own student days correctly, who had somehow gotten themselves a forbidden key to get through the gated fence.

(When Joey, Donna and I heard about his death, by the way, Joey would confess he felt a little bit as if he had killed Primo, to which Donna said, “You didn’t, but it would have been great if you had!” to which Joey modestly smiled and said, “You think?”)

In any case, it was a horrible, painful, humiliating and not swift death, as I found out the next day, when I went to present my respects to Magda, because I felt I should.

VIII

Magda sat waiting for me in her vast and high living room wearing some sort of blue silk lounging robe as if she had just left her sick bed. With her white hair uncombed, in the light of day she looked awful (as opposed to the sexually dramatic, elegantly slender woman of just one night ago), mortally pale and devastated, with heavy dark circles around her eyes.

She had made no effort to glamorize herself, as if signaling that she was already beginning to withdraw from life, no longer giving a damn about it. And now that she did not glamorize herself, but the opposite by aggressively, downright antisocially displaying her ugliness—indeed, her spectacular ugliness because of her nearly giant features—in what became a kind of protesting visual weeping in itself (making me think how often weeping was protest), her ugliness—both her undeniable physical and spiritual ugliness—I must say, touched me, because she had not chosen either one, in the Great Unfairness of Things. They had been randomly dealt to her (maybe by Primo’s moronic god, the Selfish Gene, for all we knew). And she was painfully well aware of this, obviously having spent much of her life trying to transform her twin curses somehow into magnificently attractive assets. Not any more.

She had stopped that battle now—terminally at least for the moment—bitterly conceding she was a big, ugly, female monster, and no longer cared who knew it. In fact, she was even assaulting the world with it, staring challengingly at me from off her left shoulder over her unpleasantly jutting chin.

If, suddenly, while looking at me through her embittered watery-blue eyes (which only the night before had seemed brilliantly silver) and let loose with a desperately weeping, trapped version of her mirthless hyena laugh, I might have wept myself. Fortunately she did not, instead now just continuing to stare at me with a silent and otherwise defeated ‘what did I want’ sneer, worthy of the caged beast at the human visitor.

I had been led in to her by young and most grave, blond and balding Dr. Sam Boone, who clearly had stepped forward to take charge, which was a good thing, because Magda did seem helpless now.

She lifted her eyes up at me, now standing closer in front of her and before I could say a word, in her deep, deep voice, now much deeper and more hoarse than what I had heard before, no doubt from the hours of weeping and wailing, she said to me passionately, “He was such a selfish…bastard…” her voice cracking at ‘bastard’. And she broke helplessly sinking into a baritone crying, her face distorting grotesquely as she turned away from me as if not wanting to be seen crying. But now she was off crying unstoppably, and roaring out of her chest like a mortally wounded lioness, making me wonder what her response to Primo’s death might have been if she had not hated him so, but liked him.

But just the same, whatever betrayals must have come between Magda and Primo, anyone could see that Magda’s for Primo was truly a monumental passion (I honestly admit I had never seen another quite like it), and remained so. He was uniquely her grief and endlessly open wound. Neither death nor hatred was strong enough to eliminate that, nor time, the opposite was probably true (making me wonder: what lasts longer, love or hatred? Hatred probably, I thought, because it’s made of meaner, tougher stuff.) I was sure she would hate Primo, focusing on him until her dying day, as she repeated, “He was always a selfish…bastard!”

“I’m so sorry, Magda,” I said, to which she just nodded through her crying, and again turned her face away.

Normally, I would have further paid my respects for the deceased by telling the bereaved widow, here truthfully, that I had liked Primo (prick that he was), that I had found him an interesting guy possessing considerable charm, even if I would not propose him for sainthood. But then, to his credit, neither would he, having, as he explained, come to terms with his inner saurian Champy. But I did not, because it did not seem in keeping at the moment; because she clearly did not want to hear any of that kind of thing, as I found Dr. Sam Boone back at my elbow, ready to lead me away, back to the front hall.

There he said to me in his own grave and controlled voice, “Thanks for coming, Fin. She’s been like this since we heard. I’ve tried to give her something to take, but she refuses.”

It was then I saw Penny, all the more surprising for being barefoot and wearing a green sweater and jeans, coming down stairs from ‘her room’. She looked paler and drawn, but on the bitter side too, if not anywhere near as tragically as Magda, who along with all her hatred of Primo the Bastard, seemed to see her own life as over, virtually as if she were an old style Hindu widow who now, with no option, might as well soon be throwing herself onto her dead husband’s funeral pyre, bastard that he was.

Together Penny and Magda outwardly communicated, through a kind of communal, sisterly anger that Primo the Selfish Bastard had betrayed them both, one last time and terminally, with his worst betrayal of all by his dying and thus ruthlessly abandoning them.

Without saying a word to me (for Penny was the kind that did not always need to speak, which now made her a spooky kid) Penny drifted to the living room, to keep Magda company.

When she was past earshot, Dr. Sam Boone said to me, “Magda asked her to stay, if she wouldn’t mind. Penny’s worried sick about who is going to direct her thesis, now that Primo’s gone. She’s got it in her head that nobody else can really do it for her. ”

It was clear that Primo, still ‘The Man of the House’ even in death, had left behind what amounted to two widows, even if he had not currently been married to either one of them, though ready at one time or another to have married each. Indeed, as he had said of himself, ‘I can’t help myself. It turns out that like all great adulterers, I’m an incurable family man, a hopelessly banal believer in marriage.’

“What happened to Primo?” I asked Dr. Boone. “”Do you know?”

He sighed, shook his head, and said, “No, but that is what I would like to know. I mean, I know what happened, but I can’t understand why it happened.”

“What do you mean? Can you tell me what happened?”

“Well, yes I can, technically. Primo had a problem with a chronic reflux, a very controllable one, as a matter of fact, called the Mallory-Weiss syndrome. He used to drink a lot, but lately he drank a lot less, because he did not want to have that chronic reflux result in a pernicious persistence that gets a tear in the lining just exactly at the point where the stomach and esophagus intersect. That’s how we got both the uncontrollable vomiting of blood, you see, and the terrible diarrhea. That’s what happened.”

“Ah…” I said, confronted with all that medical inside-baseball talk, taken aback by the ‘terrible diarrhea’ detail I had not known about.

“But, as I said, what I really don’t know is why it happened,” Dr. Sam said, “because it didn’t have to happen. Yes, he did a lot of cocaine, which is not a good thing, but not the same problem for him, not like too much booze, or some other irritant, do you see what I mean? I can’t imagine what set it off.”

“Ah…,” I said again.

“And I can’t believe it was Primo who set it off, himself.” The implication was clear. Young Dr. Sam Boone smelled a rat.

“Hmmm…” I said, looking down at the tops of my shoes, while suddenly I was descended upon by horribly silent but vivid memories of Donna in her terry cloth bathrobe pouring into a glass from the ‘authentic Tijuana tap water’ bottle—for Primo who wanted it room temperature—which I did not want to see.

My stomach knotted up as I was in the process of understanding at last what I had really seen her do.

As I resisted what I witnessed so clearly in my mind’s eye, desperately stupid, escapist thoughts came to me, such as, ‘but maybe that Tijuana water wasn’t authentically from Tijuana, after all. Maybe she didn’t do it.’ Then I wondered (suspecting the answer): but could that glass of water really have done it to Primo?

I did not want to ask Dr. Sam Boone his opinion about this small medical possibility, nor if he suspected anybody in particular. But if he was not on somebody’s scent yet, I was confident he soon would be. He would surely learn, if he didn’t already know, about Primo’s visits to Donna’s from the neighbors, and even when the last, fatal one was. Then Joey would also know about the visits, etc, etc plus more and more horrible etceteras.

Then I realized, almost happily for a crazy moment—as if it were some protection for Donna from the police, that the number of people at Longfellow who might enjoy killing Primo was surely a lot, and those who would rejoice at the news even greater. And among that first group, you could certainly include the righteous young Dr. Sam, considering his carnal longing for Penny, who was being carnally done unto by Primo. Some might even include Magda in that first group. Police usually start with spouses, I had often been told. (To say nothing of Sicilian Joey, whose innocence I could not doubt, because I simply could not take in that he knew about Donna and Primo.)

Thinking about this made me almost believe Donna might be able to lose herself in that crowd of suspects and disappear.

But, try as I might to celebrate the number of people the police would be considering, I kept thinking of Donna, seeing her in my mind’s eye, ever profiled, head down, with that great stillness in her terrycloth bathrobe, pouring out the implacably moving, deadly water out of the Tijuana bottle for Primo, who waited for it with grinning self-indulgence.

Not only did I then feel a chill shoot through all my body, but also felt a chill, dark loneliness such as I had never felt before in my life. Here I was with something I could not tell anyone on earth, or rather, did not want to tell anyone on earth, and it was a secret that somehow (why? And yet…) threatened to separate me—as a participant criminal due to my silence—from the rest of humanity. And maybe I would only be able to rejoin the rest of the living by telling that secret, with the price of my re-admission being ratting out the other sinner, the murderer, Donna, the sacrificial victim to the gods of Righteousness. Dr. Sam Boone’s gods, I assumed, and I certainly did not want to do that.

I looked up at Dr. Boone and said, “Well, at least I leave knowing that Penny and Magda are in good care.”

“You don’t look very well right now,” Dr. Sam Boone said, most seriously knitting his brows at me both as if concerned and as if having detected a possibly sinful condition in me (much as dentists detect our sins). “Are you sure you are all right?”

“Yes, I’m okay. It’s just a tough day.”

“Well, thanks again for coming,” he said, and we shook hands.

Actually, I was not feeling very well.

IX

I was in Joey’s and Donna’s apartment to say goodbye, to promise we would get together in New York a lot more often than we had these last six years.

The two daughters were in school. Joey was on an errand from which he would return very soon, and Donna sat before me in her lime green nurse’s uniform, in preparation for filling in at the Hospital again.

The liquor cabinet was open, but the big red and green bottle with the fake Aztec designs was gone.

A silence developed between us, the kind that is referred to as an angel passing through the room. Which kind of passing angel, the fallen and on-the-run kind, or the other, righteously avenging kind with the flaming sword would have been the question for Donna.

Donna well noticed that I had looked over at the liquor cabinet.

She tensed, but tried not to show it, though, when she upraised her face I could see it about her graceful but momentarily contracting throat. She was aware of what caused the silence between us. Then, with some difficulty, she broke that silence with, “So, you went to Magda’s place?”

“Yes,” I said. “She’s a train wreck about now. Fortunately Dr. Sam Boone is there, taking care of things. Do you know him?” He was still the one person that worried me most, more even than the imagined local police, because he would know what kind of thing to look for in what I could be sure was an inevitable autopsy.

“Yeah, sure. I know him. From the hospital. You know about doctors, right? They all got the same first name.”

“They do?”

“Yeah, sure,” she said in her dead pan, “They’re all called ‘Doctor’. Doctor this, Doctor that. Get it? They even call each other ‘Doctor’.” And I realized she had tried a minor joke, from her nurse stand point, about their natural, authoritarian inclination to pomposity. I smiled. Tense as she had to be, she was trying to skate as lightly as possible on our very thin ice, as if this offered the only hope of her not breaking through down into the endless dark beneath.

“Right,” I said, remembering when I first discovered how very much nurses inclined to resent doctors, which the doctors never seemed to know, though their wives, often former nurses, did. “He was telling me about that Mallory-Weiss business with Primo. I didn’t really know about it, exactly. Did you?” I asked.

“Sure. Everybody did,” Donna said, finally squaring up (if stoically), seeing we were about to confront the inevitable. She, of course, having had an affair with Primo for years, surely knew about that better than most, especially being a nurse. There was no escaping that.

Another silence followed. I simply did not know what to say next.

Donna first pursed her mouth, and then shook her dark haired head a bit, raising her face again, and again with difficulty, managed to utter, “So, you saw me do it, right?”

“I did,” I said. “Very sorry to say.”

“What are you going to do about it? I mean, you’re not going to turn me in to the cops, or, Jesus, God forbid to Joey, are you?” She tried smiling but her eyes instantly reddened and welled-up.

“No. Neither one,” I said. “I’m not in that game.”

Joey came in; we both smiled most warmly at him, very happy to see him, it even seemed to surprise him how much, and Donna and I dropped the subject.

Twenty minutes later I was alone in my car driving to Montreal, with a long road ahead.

As I drove, I thought of course about Donna, a lot, particularly such things as, can there be—sometimes—something irresistible about a murderess, and if so why would that be? Normally I wouldn’t think so. But, I kept thinking, couldn’t there occasionally be a preternatural saurian purity about some murderesses, which we might feel if not understand? Maybe, I began to suppose, if, say, they can sometimes also remind me of Sophia Loren when they walk.

Whereupon, as I drove on that bare highway north, the notion, ‘Would that a merciful god…’ suddenly streaked like a comet across the empty skies of my surprised mind—with a voice that did not sound like mine—concluding with, ‘…cut some slack for the unattractive ones too!’

I never did hear, incidentally, that Primo’s autopsy turned up anything indicating foul play, and I am sure I would have.

Anyway, as time went by I did not regret not playing the moronically punishing angelic enforcer with the flaming sword for one second. It made me feel confident that in the whole history of humanity, real or legendary, there was at least one person who had been a bigger idiot than me: Tiresias.