The torturous tenderness I had always felt for Annette gained new poignancy from my feelings for our little child (I «trembled» over her as Ninella put it in her coarse Russian, complaining it might be bad for the baby, even if one «subtracted the overacting»). That was the human side of our marriage. The sexual side disintegrated altogether.
For quite a time after her return from the maternity ward, echoes of her pangs in the darkest corridors of my brain and a frightening stained window at every turn—the afterimage of a wounded orifice—pursued me and deprived me of all my vigor. When everything in me healed, and my lust for her pale enchantments rekindled, its volume and violence put an end to the brave but essentially inept efforts she had been making to reestablish some sort of amorous harmony between us without departing one jot from the puritanical norm. She now had the gall—the pitiful girlish gall—to insist I see a psychiatrist (recommended by Mrs. Langley) who would help me to think «softening» thoughts at moments of excessive engorgement. I said her friend was a monster and she a goose, and we had our worst marital quarrel in years.
The creamy-thighed twins had long since returned with their bicycles to the island of their birth. Plainer young ladies came to help with the housekeeping. By the end of 1945 I had virtually ceased visiting my wife in her cold bedroom.
Sometime in mid-May, 1946, I traveled to New York—a five-hour train trip—to lunch with a publisher who was offering me better terms for a collection of stories (Exile from Mayda) than good Lodge. After a pleasant meal, in the sunny haze of that banal day, I walked over to the Public Library, and by a banal miracle of synchronization she came dancing down those very steps, Dolly von Borg, now twenty-four, as I trudged up toward her, a fat famous writer in his powerful forties. Except for a gleam of gray in the abundant fair mane that I had cultivated for my readings in Paris, more than a decade ago, I do not believe I could have changed sufficiently to warrant her saying, as she began doing, that she would never have recognized me had she not been so fond of the picture of meditation on the back of See under. I recognized her because I had never lost track of her image, readjusting it once in a while: the last time I had notched the score was when her grandmother, in response to my wife’s Christmas greetings, in 1939, sent us from London a postcard-size photo of a bare-shouldered flapper with a fluffy fan and false eyelashes in some high-school play, terribly chi-chi. In the two minutes we had on those steps—she pressing with both hands a book to her breast, I at a lower level, standing with my right foot placed on the next step, her step, and slapping my knee with a glove (many a tenor’s only known gesture)—in those two minutes we managed to exchange quite a lot of plain information.
She was now studying the History of the Theater at Columbia University. Parents and grandparents were tucked away in London. I had a child, right? Those shoes I wore were lovely. Students called my lectures fabulous. Was I happy?
I shook my head. When and where could I see her?
She had always had a crush on me, oh yes, ever since I used to mesmerize her in my lap, playing sweet Uncle Gasper, muffing every other line, and now all had come back and she certainly wished to do something about it.
She had a remarkable vocabulary. Summarize her. Mirages of motels in the eye of the penholder. Did she have a car?
Well, that was rather sudden (laughing). She could borrow, perhaps, his old sedan though he might not like the notion (pointing to a nondescript youth who was waiting for her on the sidewalk). He had just bought a heavenly Hummer to go places with her.
Would she mind telling me when we could meet, please.
She had read all my novels, at least all the English ones. Her Russian was rusty!
The hell with my novels! When?
I had to let her think. She might visit me at the end of the term. Terry Todd (now measuring the stairs with his eyes, preparing to mount) had briefly been a student of mine; he got a D minus for his first paper and quit Quirn.
I said I consigned all the D people to everlasting oblivion. Her «end of the term» might bend away into Minus Eternity. I required more precision.
She would let me know. She would call me next week. No, she would not part with her own telephone number. She told me to look at that clown (he was now coming up the steps). Paradise was a Persian word. It was simply Persian to meet again like that. She might drop in at my office for a few moments, just to chat about old times. She knew how busy—
«Oh, Terry: this is the writer, the man who wrote Emerald and the Pander.»
I do not recall what I had planned to look up in the library. Whatever it was, it was not that unknown book. Aimlessly I walked up and down several halls; abjectly visited the W.C.; but simply could not, short of castrating myself, get rid of her new image in its own portable sunlight—the straight pale hair, the freckles, the banal pout, the Lilithan long eyes—though I knew she was only what one used to call a «little tramp» and, perhaps, because she was just that.
I gave my penultimate «Masterpieces» lecture of the spring term. I gave my ultimate one. An assistant distributed the blue books for the final examination in that course (which I had curtailed for reasons of health) and collected them while three or four hopeless hopefuls still kept scribbling madly in separate spots of the hall. I held my last Joyce seminar of the year. Little Baroness Borg had forgotten the end of the dream.
In the last days of the spring term a particularly stupid baby-sitter told me that some girl whose name she had not quite caught—Tallbird or Dalberg—had phoned that she was on her way to Quirn. It so happened that a Lily Talbot in my Masterpieces class had missed the examination. On the following day I walked over to my office for the ordeal of reading the damned heap on my desk. Quirn University Official Examination Book. All academic work is conducted on the assumption of general horror. Write on the consecutive right- and left-hand pages. What does «consecutive» really mean, Sir? Do you want us to describe all the birds in the story or only one? As a rule, one-tenth of the three hundred minds preferred the spelling «Stern» to «Sterne» and «Austin» to «Austen.»
The telephone on my spacious desk (it «slept two» as my ribald neighbor Professor King, an authority on Dante, used to say) rang, and this Lily Talbot started to explain, volubly, unconvincingly, in a kind of lovely, veiled, and confidential voice, why she had not taken the examination. I could not remember her face or her figure, but the subdued melody tickling my ear contained such intimations of young charm and surrender that I could not help chiding myself for overlooking her in my class. She was about to come to the point when an eager childish rap at the door diverted my attention. Dolly walked in, smiling. Smiling, she indicated with a tilt of her chin that the receiver should be cradled. Smiling, she swept the examination books off the desk and perched upon it with her bare shins in my face. What might have promised the most refined ardors turned out to be the tritest scene in this memoir. I hastened to quench a thirst that had been burning a hole in the mixed metaphor of my life ever since I had fondled a quite different Dolly thirteen years earlier. The ultimate convulsion rocked the desk lamp, and from the class just across the corridor came a burst of applause at the end of Professor King’s last lecture of the season.
When I came home, I found my wife alone on the porch swinging gently if not quite straight in her favorite glider and reading the Krasnaya Niva («Red Corn»), a Bolshevist magazine. Her purveyor of literatura was away giving some future mistranslators a final examination. Isabel had been out of doors and was now taking a nap in her room just above the porch.
In the days when the bermudki (as Ninella indecently called them) used to minister to my humble needs, I experienced no guilt after the operation and confronted my wife with my usual, fondly ironical smile; but on this occasion I felt my flesh coated with stinging slime, and my heart missed a thump, when she said, glancing up and stopping the line with her finger: «Did that girl get in touch with you at your
