I’ll Take You There

1

The danger of falling in love, in winter.

2

… a voice of logic, reason, conviction; a voice of irony, cajoling; a seductive voice; an arrogant voice; a young impetuous voice; a voice of occasional hesitation, uncertainty; a voice that provoked, annoyed, beset like the bared teeth of an attack dog; a shrewd voice; a Now just listen to me, I'm the one to tell you voice; a voice of humility; a voice of (mock) humility; a voice sharp and cruel as a knifeblade; a voice like warm butter; a low throaty trombone voice; a voice of hurt; a voice of sorrow; a voice of pain; a voice of yearning; a voice of rage; a voice sinewy and sly as a glimpsed glittering snake; a voice I would have wished for myself if I'd been born male, and not female; a voice I did wish for myself though born not male but female; a voice that so seeped into my consciousness that it began to emerge in the late winter of my second year at the university in my most vivid, ravaging and exhausting dreams.

3

Deceptive from the start: he lived in the most ordinary of places. Very quickly I saw, I'd tracked him to his lair. A second-floor rear apartment in a squat three-story lard-colored stucco apartment building at 1183 Chambers Street, Syracuse. In this "mixed" neighborhood beyond the showy complex of university hospital buildings; in the harsh shadow of new, cheaply stylish high-rise buildings and multi-level parking garages; a sublunary region of small storefront businesses, shamefaced wood frame houses partitioned into rooms for university students, many dark-skinned and foreign. There can be no beauty here, therefore no hurt and no hope.

Chambers Street was one of the most cruelly steep hills in the vicinity of the university; cars parked with their wheels turned shrewdly inward to the curb; the pavement was cracked and potholed and littered; a number of the curbside elms, blighted by Dutch elm disease, had been chainsawed into oblivion, only their stumps remained. Yet Chambers Street was a place of fascination and romance. Yet Chambers Street had entered my imagination. Imprinted in my brain like an ink stain on something white, moist, boneless as a mollusc was the facade of the stucco building at 1183 Chambers: I understood that it was not beautiful, nor did it possess even the diminished melancholy of those dream-like city buildings painted by Edward Hopper; it was a purely functional setting, a place of mere expediency; the sign beside the front entrance never changed, as if to confirm its futility-apts for rent inquire within. My sharp eye took note of a row of badly stained and battered metal garbage cans at the curb; a shingled roof that looked as if it must leak; a fractured concrete walk leading to the front entrance, but also forking around the side of the building to the rear, and to a flight of outdoor steps that led to the second floor of the building; a stairway of raw planks with a makeshift roof. Up those stairs he sometimes climbed.

I told myself I am only just passing through this neighborhood, I have a true destination.

In those months I walked everywhere, I was restless, a prowler. Never did I walk on University Place, though. I'd been cured of the Kappas. I'd been cured of my Kappa-yearnings forever. My walking, wayward and seemingly improvised, took me often to the eastern edge of the sprawling campus, though my residence hall was in another direction. Sometimes I passed 1183 Chambers twice: there might be a plausible reason for twice. Sometimes I passed 1183 Chambers three times, for which there could be no plausible reason. And so I walked swiftly, guiltily. Eyes averted from the object of my interest. I had no way of knowing if he was home unless light shone through his windows, and I had no way of knowing if light shone through his windows unless I went around to the rear of the building, at twilight or after dark; though solitary walking by young women in this part of Syracuse was discouraged. (Once, a patrol car slowed at the curb, its occupants stared at me without expression as quickly I continued to walk glancing toward them with a small frightened smile I am a good girl, I am a university student, don't arrest me!) To linger in the vicinity of 1183 Chambers was tricky, for he might be on his way home and might recognize me; if he recognized me, I might not know since, given his secrecy and arrogance, he would not have allowed me to know that he'd recognized me; and so I would not know if in his eyes I'd been exposed, or if, in fact, he'd taken not the slightest notice of me, and so I remained innocent. Sometimes, seeing a man approaching on the sidewalk, I panicked and fled into the trash-littered alley; sometimes this was the very alley beside 1183 Chambers, and I was forced to pass close by the outdoor wooden stairs; so suddenly tempted to climb those stairs, or to sit on the lower stairs as if I belonged there. Usually he entered the building from the front, to get his mail I supposed, for there were rows of battered metal mailboxes just inside the foyer, with names inked onto adhesive tape to identify them; but if luck ran against me, as I could not assume it would not, for possibly I deserved luck to run against me, behaving as I was, he might decide to enter the building from the rear, for the stairway was for the convenience of tenants like himself who lived on the upper floors of the building at the rear; he was a tenant like any other, most of them dark-skinned and foreign with smiles that seemed uniformly flashing-white and eyeballs of unnatural glistening whiteness; if these young men saw me, sometimes they paused to stare as if they hoped I might know them; they hoped that there was some reason for me to be where I was, and that this reason might extend to them; what they'd been told of American college girls intrigued them, perhaps, though surely I didn't fit any likely description of an American college girl. Behind his building, if no one was around, and if I dared, I lifted my eyes to the windows I had reason to believe were his, the windows of apartment 2D; I'd learned that his was apartment 2D by examining the mailboxes in the foyer where, on a grubby strip of adhesive tape on the box for 2D, V. MATHEIUS had been inked. It intrigued me, his blinds were so often drawn to the windowsills. Sometimes I saw a shadow passing behind a blind, the fleeting silhouette of a man; yet so indistinctly, I knew that I was gazing at the idea of V. Matheius and not at the man himself; I thought of Plato's allegory of the cave, and of how mankind is deluded by shadows; mankind is infatuated by shadows; and yet, what solace is there, otherwise? And his not knowing that I am here, that I exist. For I am invisible to him.

My naked face, raw female yearning.

4

… that voice.

In my Ethics class. In a large lecture room on the topmost floor of an ancient and revered building, the Hall of Languages. It was not the classroom in which the sickly girl in the soiled coat, smeared eyeshadow and bitten lips made such a fool of herself some weeks before, it was another, larger room; it was a place of hope. At the conclusion of his lecture on Plato, the professor made a show of inviting questions, perhaps truly he wanted questions, hoped for questions, intelligent and provocative questions, to alleviate the unnatural stillness of the lecture hall; perhaps, on his raised platform, behind the podium, as an avatar of long-vanished Plato, he was lonely. Questions from undergraduates interested him far less than questions from the several graduate students who were taking, or auditing, the course, for these were fellow professionals; clearly he was enlivened when one or another of these voluntered to speak.

"Yes, Mr. ____________________" the professor would say, with an expectant smile, pronouncing a name that sounded like "math"-"mathes."The young man who'd raised his hand sat at the back of the hall, out of my range of vision; when he spoke, as he did nearly every class period, I noted how students around me turned, to frown; with disapproval, and yet with admiration; with curiosity, interest, and resentment. "-how Plato can promote the strategy of the 'noble lie'-as if any lie can be anything other than ignoble-" And the professor tried to smile, to argue in defense of Plato: "The Republic is best understood as a myth, a dialogue about justice," and he at the back of the hall objected, "'Justice'? How can there be 'justice' in a totalitarian state?" Like a musical instrument, a horn of subtle modulations, clarinet, trombone, the voice was both respectful and insolent; the voice was searching, and earnest, and yet (almost you could hear this) quavering with indignation. Where the professor argued, "-myth, allegory, parable-" the younger voice argued, "-nightmare fascist state-slave-state-" The professor frowned, not liking it that he was in danger of losing the allegiance of the class to an interloper thirty years younger than he, "That's a common fallacy, Mr.____________________. To interpret Plato literally. When clearly the entire dialogue is a metaphor, a-" By this time few in the class were listening to the professor, we were listening avidly to him.

The curious proportions of that lecture hall: imprinted in my memory like any space in which our lives have been altered. There were fifteen rows of seats in steeply rising tiers that curved far to each side in the shape of a crescent, so that the room was much wider than it was deep. The ceiling was extremely high, and water-stained; fluorescent tubing hummed and quivered overhead like racing thoughts. Beside tin professor's podium was a ten-foot leaded-glass window that yielded pale wintry glare. On a badly scuffed hardwood platform the professor sometimes paced, lecturing on Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquina Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Locke; he was in his early sixties, perhaps his manner congenial, but authoritative; his near-bald head like an eggshell, his mouth like something that has been mashed; his eyes watery but shrewd, alert, deep-set beneath kindly grizzled-gray eyebrows

An attractive man, I thought, for his age; though I did not wish to judge the appearances of those of my elders whom I revered. For what were appearances, as the Greek philosophers taught, but illusory, deceiving? Who but the very young, and fools, put their faith in "appearances"? Nor did I want to be reminded of my father, by contemplating a man who was my father's age, or a little older; my father who'd disappeared into the West as if following the passage of the sun, beyond the western range of mountains and into oblivion.

As if I could compare them! I thought with a smile. This learned man and my poor uneducated alcoholic and embittered father.

One morning following the professor's lecture on philosophic idealism there was a protracted exchange between the professor and an articulate if rather dogged young man who sat at the back of the room; I felt a collective wave of dislike directed toward the young man, from my fellow students; but I simply listened in fascination, excitement and apprehension; thinking Who is that, what kind of person is that? Like no one of us. Behind me a male voice muttered sullenly, "Oh for Christ's sake shut up," and another what sounded like "N'ggg shut yo mouth," and both laughed unkindly. By this time the professor was speaking defensively and at length; he would punish the entire class by keeping us behind the end of the hour. I thought We should not have such power over one another. When finally the class dispersed I was slow to rise to my feet, and to stumble into the aisle; still I had not allowed myself to look at the back of the room; I did not yet understand that I was in love; I'd fallen in love with a man I did not know; with a man's mere voice; and that was a kind of illness; not a radiant idea as I'd imagined but a physical notion, like grief.

That night in February 1963, the night his voice first entered my world.

5

You! You are capable of any thing. My brother Hendrick once told me.

Any thing. How strange these words: any thing and not anything. As if that of which I was capable was a thing, a palpable thing, and not an action.

It was at my grandfather's funeral that Hendrick told me this. Yet my brother had no idea what I was capable of, nor did anyone in my family. They distrusted me; around me there glimmered a dark, mysterious aura; I carried both the fact and the possibility of doom. He blames her. We all do. For Ida's death. I escaped from them, yet I bore their condemnation. Perhaps I accepted it. I was so lonely! Yet I thought Loneliness is my due. It's only just.

I was nineteen years five months old when I fell in love for the first time. This seemed to me a profound, advanced age; never can we anticipate being older than we are, or wiser; if we're exhausted, it's impossible to anticipate being strong; as, in the grip of a dream, we rarely understand that we're dreaming, and will escape by the simplest of methods, opening our eyes. At nineteen, to my disgust, I continued to look much younger. I would be mistaken for a high school student through my undergraduate years. I went in my winter boots (not of the leather of a kind worn by my better-dressed classmates but clumsy rubberized boots from Sears, wonderfully practical for deep snows and torrential spring rains.) I stood about five feet three inches. I never weighed myself but, at the time of my "crisis," when I departed the Kappa Gamma Pi house, I was put on a scale by a nurse in the university infirmary, and my weight noted as ninety-six pounds. "Have you stopped eating? Do you vomit up your food? This isn't your normal weight, is it?" the woman asked disapprovingly. I told her I didn't know what my "normal" weight was; I wasn't interested in my "normal" weight; I had other things on my mind, matters of pressing significance. The meaning of life. The possibility of truth. The analysis of consciousness as if it were a question of lines, of planes, and of solids. I did not wish to consider that I was a body, and that I was in some way responsible for this body. (And what in fact is a body? Descartes had hypothesized that a mysterious and unknowable substance constituted mind, and an entirely other mysterious and unknowable substance constituted body.) In the infirmary I was forced to look at myself as an act of penance. I avoided the sunken eyes in the face, but looked frankly at the rest of myself: the papery-thin tallow-colored skin stretched tight upon slender bones, breasts the size of Dixie cups and hard as unripe pears, nipples the size of wizened peas and nothing at all like the warm roseate aureole of those girls' breasts I presumed to be "normal"; the heavy, full breasts of other girls which looked as if already they held liquid, sweet milky precious liquid, the shy elixir of life. I remembered how in junior high I saw older girls in locker room laughingly peeling off their outer clothes, yanking sweaters over their heads in a single quick gesture that exposed their boobs even as their heads and faces were obscured; you could see that these girls were sisters; these girls were "female"; standing defiant or proud or indifferent in their burgeoning bodies while I turned away in embarrassment, not that I felt inadequate or inferior in my spindly body, but of another species altogether. I stood outside their category entirely, a marginal sub-species, girl.

When I was growing up, there were relatives who, at a distance, felt sorry for me. Feeling sorry was their permanent attitude toward me. The women would admonish If you'd smile more often, not frown. (What then? I'd be loved, as I wasn't loved for myself?) Such remarks cut me to the quick, though I showed not a ripple. But I am smiling, smiling constantly. Laughing in your faces!

I wanted none of their pity, sympathy, or solicitude. They felt sorry for me because they took a certain pleasure in feeling sorry for one so deprived, so disfigured; because I had no mother, alone of the girls of my generation in Strykersville I had no mother; sometimes it seemed to my horror that my mother had actually died before I was born, not after; if such a fairy tale could be, it would apply to me as the cruellest of curses: The Girl Whose Mother Died Before She Was Born.

No: I remembered Ida. I did remember Ida. More than just the snapshots. I did.

My three older brothers. I was intimidated by them, and I feared them, and my secret may have been that I adored them, at a distance. Always I looked up to them: literally! Up at their handsome faces. Up at their unreadable eyes. They fascinated me even as I dreaded them. "You? What do you know? We know." They were custodians of memories; Dietrich had been twelve when our mother died, Fritz had been eleven, Hendrick eight; I'd been a baby, and helpless.

By the time I went away to college, both Dietrich and Fritz were married, and had become fathers; they'd inherited our grandparents' farm, and were specializing, like many small farmers in Niagara County, in pears, apples, and peaches; Hendrick was more of a loner like myself, though never easy with me, resentful of me, my high school success, my college scholarship, for he'd gone to a vocational school in

Olean to study electrical engineering, and he'd had to pay his own way. Now he boasted of a good job with a division of General Motors in Lackawanna. I most keenly remembered my brothers when they were growing up: their crude, derisive talk of girls and women, which invariably involved jokes; as if girls and women were jokes; from my brothers I learned that the male is all eyes; his sexuality is fueled through the eyes; he assesses through the eyes; judges swiftly and without mercy through the eyes. Sometimes, laughing coarsely, speaking of a girl or a woman of their acquaintance, my brothers would rub their crotches gleefully. You could see that the male's eyes and his penis are connected, perhaps identical; except the one is hidden from view.

I understood that even when a man is alone, his sympathies are with other men, and with maleness. He doesn't feel himself alone as a woman might. His swift, unerring judgments are forged in boyhood and are a collective judgment. He has the power to see with others' eyes, not just his own.

I did not expect mercy from those eyes. By the age of thirteen I'd been trained to shrink from their pitiless gaze.

I understood that my body was not a body to be loved; and so I was not a girl to be loved. Had not my own father shrunk from me, with a look of faint revulsion? When I was thirteen, overnight it seemed to happen that brown tufts of hair fine as cornsilk sprouted in my armpits and in tight curls at my groin; my slender but hard-muscled legs, disproportionately long for my torso, were covered in a feathery down which, through high school and while living with the Kappas, I'd scorned to shave off, as other girls made such a fuss of doing. When I sweated, my smell was sharp and rank; there was something secret about it, and satisfying; I liked it that I could turn into a foxy little creature, with a creature-smell. After I left Strykersville and learned what it was to be alone, no family to define me, amid thousands of strangers who knew neither my name nor my face, let alone where I lived, whose daughter or granddaughter I was, I came to think of my body as invisible; a body to hide inside clothing; a body that was a continuous shrinking from being seen, defined; a body my brothers and other men could not jeer at, for they could not see it; a body from which, I believed, the great dead male philosophers -whom I revered would not turn in disgust. A body in the service of Mind.

Impulsively I cut off my hair when I was eighteen. The summer following high school graduation and my valedictory speech; the week after my father, only just returned home after years of absence, had departed again abruptly with a vague promise of "keeping in touch." My hair was thick and wiry and inclined to snarl; it had become an animal-hair, a kind of pelt; a drab-dark brown enlivened here and there by streaks of lighter brown or dark red; heavy and inert it pressed against my back; heavy and inert it pressed against my soul; when I tried to comb it, my eyes filled with tears of annoyed pain; when I ran a brush through it, the brush sprang out of my hand and clattered to the floor. On the street, men looked at my hair; boys looked at my hair; women and girls looked at my hair; I was vain about my hair, at the same time I was deeply ashamed of my hair, and one hot-humid summer day I took my grandmother's sewing shears, the big shears used for cutting thick fabrics like felt, and I ran off to my room and began cutting; slowly at first and then with mounting glee, almost a kind of gloating, click! click! just missing my ears, and with each greedy click! of the shears I felt lighter, freer. And with each greedy click! I laughed aloud as a rebellious child might laugh. I threw away the clipped-off strands of hair like trash. I had no sentiment, I vowed I would never be so burdened again.

As it happened, I had to attend my grandfather's funeral in a few days. He'd been driving a tractor in hot sunshine and had keeled over with a heart attack; he'd died almost immediately; it was shock more than grid the family felt; he and my grandmother had been emotionally estranged for some time, though of course they'd continued to live together and even to share a bed; my grandmother's reaction to me, to my Jagged cut hair, at such a public time, when others would see us, and comment upon us, was Isn't that just like you.

The funeral was held at the Lutheran church. My grandparents, particularly my grandmother, had begun attending services there; she was a stoic with an unsentimental vision of life, and no doubt death, and yet she wanted to "be" a Christian, like her neighbors; like most Americans; in addition to being a Christian, you had to "be" some denomination, and the Lutheran church was the most logical choice, for those of German descent. And there was the fact that her daughter-in-law Ida was buried in the churchyard, as a kind of pledge that the rest of us would find our ways back there, too. I was made to wear black; a lumpy black nylon dress borrowed from an aunt; it was several sizes too large for me, which suited me; a sullen-faced brat who might have been thirteen, not eighteen; frightened of what had happened to my grandfather, and not wanting to think about it; not wanting to think about death, dying; not wanting to think about the burial in a grave site close by Ida's, in the cemetery that was only just a field, a place suited for tall grass and weeds. My female relatives stared at me appalled. Oh how could you! Your hair. The aunt who'd lent me the dress said At least let me trim it for you? I turned coldly away. I wasn't about to defend myself. My brothers looked at me and shrugged. This only confirmed their suspicions of me: I was weird, I was a freak, I would only get worse when I went away to college. Until leaving the cemetery my brother Hendrick nudged me saying in an undertone, almost admiringly You!--you are capable of any thing. Now you really are ugly, that must make you feel just great, right?

6

VERNOR MATHEIUS.

How many times in a trance that winter writing VERNOR MATHEIUS VERNOR MATHEIUS on sheets of notebook paper, in midnight-blue ink. VERNOR MATHEIUS traced with a fingernail in my flesh, the soft inside of a forearm, the palm of a hand. VERNOR MATHEIUS the mere sound of the syllables, like a melody distantly heard, immediately memorized if not understood. VERNOR MATHEIUS VERNOR MATHEIUS spoken in an interior voice in the presence of others, even as I was smiling, nodding, speaking quite normally with others who could have had no idea how distracted I was, how indifferent to them and even to myself. VERNOR MATHEIUS: what a strange, wonderful name! a beautiful name! a name like no other! VERNOR MATHEIUS like one of those riddle-names in a fairy tale, you had to guess the name, or what it might mean, to save your life; to become the fair young princess, his bride.

I hadn't the courage to ask others in our Ethics class about him. The articulate and argumentative graduate student at the back of the room. He was clearly a "personality"-everyone knew him, or was aware of him. I dreaded strangers reporting my interest to him. They'd smile in my direction. See that girl? She's been asking about you.

Now when our professor spoke his name-"Mr. Matheius?" -I heard the name perfectly. I could not comprehend how I'd ever misheard.

I looked up the name in a university directory, and so noted the Chambers Street address. Never would I be so reckless as to visit that address I told myself.

7

It was a morning in March when I first dared speak to Vernor Matheius. Unbidden, unwelcome, yet unable to resist, I entered a stranger's life.

You are capable of any thing. This was now a prophecy, an encouragement, and not an insult.

By this time I'd visited Chambers Street not once but several times. I'd passed the house, I'd lingered in the alley, I'd ventured into the foyer to examine the mailboxes, I'd contemplated his windows at the rear of the building, I was without shame as I was without hope. For it didn't seem to me at that time that I would ever actually make contact with Vernor Matheius; it was enough simply to contemplate him, at a distance.

Yet I'd moved my seat in the lecture hall. Now I sat nearer the back, in such a position where I could turn my head unobtrusively and look at him, or in his direction; when he spoke, many in the class turned to look at him, and I was one of these; I didn't believe I was calling attention to myself; I was no lovesick high school girl.

That morning climbing three flights of stairs and entering the cavernous lecture room breathless and hopeful; several minutes before the professor arrived, and class would begin; I seemed to be stepping into a roiling, treacherous space, a space of vertiginous unease, like a room in a fun house that's tilted, or spinning upside down; for what if he was already there, and might glance casually at me, the lenses of his glasses winking like sparks of flame? (For so they winked in my imagination.) Most mornings, Vernor Matheius wasn't in the room so early. I timed my arrival to precede his so that I could take my new, strategic seat at the end of a row on the center aisle; the experience of the class had become for me, virtually overnight, an emotional and no longer an intellectual one. I felt the way I'd felt as a girl about to dive off the high board at the YWCA in Strykersville; I wanted to dive, I intended to dive, I was thrilled at the prospect of diving, yet frightened as well; as I strode to the end of the board, readying my arms and head, bending my knees, I would hear a malicious little voice Don't! You'll regret it. But on the high board, you couldn't turn back.

There were perhaps forty students in Ethics, concentrated in the front rows and scattered elsewhere. Vernor Matheius sat by himself in the last row, beneath a wall clock. It may have been accidental that he sat beneath the clock. It was not a position one would wish, who liked to check the time. One of those old-fashioned institutional clocks with plain black numerals and black hour and minute hands, a moving red second hand, against a blank moon face. As a child I'd gazed at such clocks on the walls of classrooms. The inexorable forward-movement of time. My heartbeat. All the heartbeats in the room. Linked by mortality. And now seeing Vernor Matheius, I was seeing also the clock.

Vernor Matheius's face. Covertly and slantwise I contemplated that face. To me it was beautiful as something carved out of mahogany; though it may have been, to another's cruder eye, ugly. It was not a comforting face. It was a face crinkled and even mutilated by thinking. Thinking as a physical, muscular act. Thinking as an act of passion. It was a face that, though technically young, the face of a man in his early thirties, had never been youthful. A mask-face. A flattish nose and wide, deep nostrils that looked like holes bored into flesh. A head that seemed too large for his narrow, somewhat sloping shoulders. Eyes hidden behind scholarly glasses except when abruptly he removed the glasses to rub the bridge of his nose with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. My heart contracted, seeing Vernor Matheius without his glasses. His face so suddenly naked, exposed.

Negro. "Negro." A word, a term, that had come to fascinate me, too.

Vernor Matheius's features were "Negroid" features, and Vernor Matheius was, if you were compelled to categorize the man in blunt racial, or racist, terms, "Negro." For his skin was the color of damp earth; sometimes it was dull, and without lustre; at other times it was rich and smooth with something smoldering inside; a coppery-maroon; skin I imagined would be hot to the touch. (Unlike my pale winter-chapped skin that felt cold to me, the tips of my fingers often icy.) Vernor Matheius's hair was a Negro's hair, unmistakably: dark, somewhat oily, woolly-springy, trimmed close to his head that looked to me wonderfully hard and resolute, a work of art.

Because I had come to him through his voice, his language, his obvious intelligence, Vernor Matheius's race was not his predominant characteristic to me. I supposed that, if I'd seen him in the Hall of Languages previously, or on campus or in the city, my eye would have glided over him and my brain would have categorized him as Negro; but now the fact of his race (if "race" is a fact) was no more remarkable to me than other of his qualities. On the contrary, these qualities were remarkable because they were Vernor Matheius's. I may even have thought, with the primitive logic of one so deeply and so newly in love that her powers of reason have weakened, that Vernor Matheius had chosen his qualities. In which case, they were remarkable and valuable not in themselves, but because he had chosen them.

In philosophy, you're trained to distinguish between -what's essential and what's accidental; in our personalities, it's believed that there are essential qualities and accidental qualities; yet so powerful a presence was Vernor Matheius, unique in my experience, it didn't seem that there could be anything accidental about him, as there is about most people. (My own life seemed to me a haphazard sequence of accidents.) I would not have isolated Negro-ness from any other of his qualities. True, it was a fact of his being, the first thing that struck the eye, but it wasn't a defining or definitive fact.

Any more than I was a white girl, a Caucasian. What did that mean?

If Vernor Matheius was Negro, and there was nothing accidental in his personality, then somehow he'd chosen Negro-ness. As I had not chosen my skin, or anything in my life.

I believed this! For already I idolized the man, who was all that I could never be, nor even imagine.

Vernor Matheius and the professor were having one of their spirited exchanges. You could see that the professor was flattered by this brilliant young man's attention; at the same time, the professor was wary of being outpaced, like a middle-aged man playing tennis with a man forty years his junior. They were discussing "idealism"; which, in philosophical terms, differs considerably from ordinary usage; "idealism" vs. "realism"; the subtly argued idealism of Immanuel Kant in contrast to the less subtly argued realism of Plato. The professor pronounced X, and Vernor Matheius at once rebutted with Y; not impudently, though almost so; with a lightness of touch that discomforted the older man, and provoked a ripple of laughter in the room. The professor visibly recoiled; he realized his blunder; his authority had been challenged, if only in play; he'd surrendered that authority, if only for a moment; he had to reclaim his authority, or lose the respect of the class; or so it might have seemed to him, in his quivering vanity. He was a flush-faced man with a skin that appeared loosened, as if he'd lost weight too quickly; his graying-brown hair parted on the left side of his head and brushed damply over his skull. In the philosophy department, which was one of the strongest departments in the liberal arts college, this professor was perhaps the most highly regarded; he had an advanced degree from the University of Edinburgh, his books were published by distinguished university presses, he reviewed for the Times Literary Supplement. (An English publication to which Mrs. Thayer hadn't subscribed.) Even his undergraduate courses were frequently audited by graduate students. Yet he felt the sting of Vernor Matheius's irreverent wit, and spoke coldly and curtly to him-"Mr. Matheius! Your sophistry ceases to amuse." So the indulgent father at last chides the favored son, revealing that, maybe, the favored son isn't so favored after all.

I saw the hurt and humiliation in Vernor Matheius's face. I saw him shut up his face as he might've clenched a fist. In a quick, rough gesture he shoved his glasses against the bridge of his nose, slouched in his seat, shoved out his lower lip. Which was a fat, fleshy lip. His skin was so dark, so without light or lustre, you couldn't imagine it darkening with a rush of hot blood. There was a moment's pained silence before Vernor Matheius politely muttered, "Sorry, sir."

The rest of the class looked on, thrilled and vindicated.

Even I, infatuated with Vernor Matheius, felt that mean little thrill.

Thinking He has been wounded to the heart. He, too!

It was as if, an intimate witness, I'd had a hand in that wounding.

After class, I found myself standing in the aisle beside Vernor Matheius's row of seats as, tall and lanky and slope-shouldered, whistling a faint, just subtly derisive tune, Vernor Matheius was making his way into the aisle. He didn't see me. He wouldn't have seen me. He seemed oblivious to, indifferent to, every undergraduate student in the room. I wanted to-what?-offer words of sympathy and commiseration. Even as I knew (of course I knew) that Vernor Matheius didn't want words of sympathy and commiseration; not from anyone, and certainly not from me. There was a roaring in my ears. The hardwood floor tilted. Of course I didn't dare utter his name-"Vernor." I had no right to that name, I shouldn't have known that name. For a moment, staring at him, I couldn't speak at all. The man's physical presence confused me; his height; he was at least a head taller than I, towering over me; a powerful throbbing heat lifted from him, as if he were sweating inside his clothes; his skin dark and smoldering with blood; close up, his skin was darker and coarser than I'd imagined. Behind the smudged lenses of his wire-rimmed glasses his eyes were damp and glaring. He wore a white shirt and even a necktie, both rumpled, not-clean; with an air of sullen dignity he was shrugging into the bulky sheepskin jacket and with rapid deft motions winding the crimson wool scarf around his neck; as if, in his fury, he would have liked to strangle himself; his fingers remarkably long, his hands rather narrow, the palms curiously pinkish-pale as if they might be soft, even tender to the touch. I saw that he wanted only to escape the lecture hall, the last thing he wanted was to speak with anyone who had witnessed his public humiliation, yet I followed beside him as he pushed into the aisle, I stammered words meant to console; to my astonishment I saw my hand reach out timidly to touch his-his hand; but at the last second I dared touch only the soiled cuff of his jacket; if I'd touched his skin he might have flung my hand off in sheer nervous reaction; and all the while I was smiling, trying to smile, a fixed ghastly grin, in longing and terror seeking the very source of terror for solace, protection. I can love you, I am the one who can love you. Who am I except the one whose sole identity is that she can love you?

Vernor Matheius was staring at me. It was as if he'd heard, not my shy halting insipid speech, my well-intentioned words in imitation of such gestures of commiseration made to me by women or girls who'd hoped to console me for whatever hurts, deprivations, but my desperate thoughts. I, I can love you! He had seen, not felt, the brush of my fingers against his sleeve; how near I'd come to touching him. Sharply he said, "Yes? What?"-still staring at me, as if I'd accosted him; yet at the same time he was turning on his heel to escape; rudely giving me no time to answer, had I had an answer; he bounded up the steps to the rear exit, and was gone.

Yet: I have done it, touched you. And now you know me.

That morning, unlike most mornings, I did not follow Vernor Matheius out of the building and across the snowy quadrangle; I did not follow him at all; in confusion, a kind of delirium, I descended the stairs to the first floor of the Hall of Languages; the corridors, the stairs were crowded at this hour, just before eleven o'clock; I took refuge in anonymity. Now you will know me, the connection has been made. I could not believe my recklessness, my daring. I could not believe I had done such a thing, and not only dreamt it. Around me on the stairs were students from the class, familiar faces though we didn't know one another's names; with childish zest we spoke of the humiliation of the formidable "Mr. Matheius"; even I who adored him spoke in this way, smiling, greedy, not wanting the subject to be dropped; a hatchet-faced boy who was a senior in pre-law said, grinning, " 'Math-e-ius'-who's he think he is, anyway?" and another boy said vehemently, "It's weird a Ne-gro caring so much about-that kind of stuff." I did not object, I listened intently, it may even have been that I seemed to concur. For whom we love helplessly we love, too, to betray: any connection is thrilling.

Even to hear brilliant Vernor Matheius called "Ne-gro" so carelessly, crudely-to hear his name spoken at all-thrilling.

I found myself in the basement of the Hall of Languages where there were additional classrooms, cramped and ill-lit and melancholy rooms; low-ceilinged corridors and a sharp smell, in winter, of wet wool, rubber boots, a perpetual haze of cigarette smoke. In a remote corner of the basement there was a women's lavatory; often I used this lavatory, for it was always empty; a sickly odor of drains and disinfectant wafted from it. Here was a space that seemed older than the aging building that loomed above it, lodged deep in earth with only a small window to emit a wan, spent light. I remember this dismal place as distinctly as any place of those years and wonder if perhaps, in those dreams of mine that rake my soul and leave me, in the morning, exhausted yet curiously revived as if I have harrowed Hell, that region of the grindingly mundane, and survived, I dream of it often. For it was a place in which to hide; a place in which to weep; a place of inexplicable shame and melancholy; a place in which to use the antiquated toilet, and pull a chain flush that reluctantly and somberly released water from a rust-stained overhead tank into a yet more stained bowl; a place in which to check worriedly if, finally, my period had "happened"-as rarely it did, for I was twenty pounds underweight and experienced brief though painful periods no more than two or three times a year. For I was not truly female in certain crucial ways and both anguished and gloated in this fact. In the water-speckled mirror above a row of sinks I was struck by my face-was I smiling? I'd behaved with Vernor Matheius as I had never behaved in my life; approached a man I didn't know, and dared to touch him; almost, I'd touched the back of his hand, his skin; I'd forced him to look at me; to see me; I'd spoken directly to him; I'd offered him words of sympathy ("He didn't mean it, he spoke without thinking, he admires you very much, anyway there's nothing wrong really with being a Sophist- Protagoras was a Sophist and really so was Socrates") that were genuine, heartfelt if breathless; I'd acted without premeditation, not so much as an instant's premeditation, as one might rush forward to save another from harm.

Almost it seemed to me, and would seem increasingly to me with the passage of time, that Vernor Matheius had somehow drawn me to him, physically, I'd had no real power to resist.

In such involuntary acts, there is innocence.

"But now you must leave it at that. You must not pursue him."

These words were uttered in my voice. I was staring at the floating pale oval of a face in the mirror and so happy!-the face on this side of the glass, my living face, ached with happiness. I was feverish, I touched my fingertips to my lips, I kissed my fingertips that had touched the soiled sleeve of Vernor Matheius's jacket. Never again would I sleep. I might have died on the spot, I was so happy. Deep in the interior of the subterranean mirror with its discolored surface splotched from the sink, its lead backing corroding the glass like leprosy: how many generations, how many decades of girls since the building had been constructed a hundred years before, had gazed into such depths as I did, stark yearning eyes, female eyes, our reflections tangled together as in the marshy bottom of a pond, or a common grave.

Yet I smiled, smiled-I was happy.

8

"Not following me, girl, are you?"

The voice, his voice-not irritable but brash and teasing, as unexpectedly, to my embarrassment, Vernor Matheius halted on the sidewalk; turned abruptly to me, so I hadn't time to sidle away; I'd imagined myself invisible following him at a discreet distance, sometimes walking close beside others as if I were in their company; I had not seen him so much as glance over his shoulder as he'd strode along whistling; in this way I had followed him from the university library across the quadrangle and down a steep hill to College Place, from College Place to Allen Street, a business district of fast-food restaurants, bookshops, supplies stores, from Allen Street out to University Avenue and along University Avenue to the area of the medical center; of course I was in no hurry to overtake Vernor Matheius and when he slowed his pace, I slowed mine; he must have noticed me somehow; or sensed the intensity of my concentration upon him; my gaze so fixed upon him; and now he'd stopped at a curb, turned to me and laughingly called out, "Not following me, girl, are you?-eh?" This was meant to be playful; a flirtatious joke; yet the joke (of course) was that he wasn't joking, he knew very well I'd been following him, yet he could not absolutely know, he could not be one hundred percent certain (for we both knew Hume's indisputable argument regarding causality); yet there was the probability that I'd been following him; yet I could not acknowledge that I was, for-what a shameful admission! And what could Vernor Matheius have said in reply? So I had to protest as I did, my face burning as if it had been slapped, "Oh, oh no-I'm just-walking this way."

"And what way is that, exactly?"

Rapidly I invented a plausible destination: the University Health Services office which was about a block away. I had to return a form, I said.

Vernor Matheius, towering above me, sucked at his mouth in a show of mock disappointment. "Just a coincidence, eh?"

"A-coincidence."

"Just 'atoms and the void,' eh?"

Democritus was a philosopher of ancient Greece who was famous for a single axiom-In reality there is nothing but atoms and the void. I wasn't sure if he'd been a Sophist; he was one of those who, at the very start of philosophic inquiry, had handily reduced the mysteries of existence to shreds. For that was the way of philosophy: to reduce existence to pitiful shreds, or to inflate it to gigantic, smothering proportions. Either way, existence became unrecognizable.

I laughed uneasily, and did not disagree. Somehow we were walking together on University Avenue; we crossed a wide windy expanse of pavement as a yellow DON'T WALK! sign flashed.

I was overwhelmed and confused by Vernor Matheius's nearness. Hearing his voice, the voice, the voice that had so entered my consciousness, his voice like a roaring in my ears. His height, his quizzical bemused skeptical eyes, his habit of grinning to bare uneven yellow predatory teeth with a prominent gap between the two front teeth.

Slyly thinking Don't imagine I can't see through you, girl: your skin is transparent.

It would be a matter for me to contemplate afterward: how rapidly, how irrevocably I'd stepped out of invisibility into visibility once Vernor Matheius had sighted me. How, one moment, I had been lost in my concentration upon him; I'd been anonymous, unseen; the next moment, I was forced to speak, to act, to be; forced to quickly improvise and invent, as in a game of rapid motions and counter-motions, like badminton (at which, as a high school girl, I'd won county tournaments). My very way of carrying my body, my facial expressions, the movement of my eyes, my hands, my legs; the way in which I walked, needing to keep stride with the man's loping gait; the way in which I displayed my "self"-all were a surprise to me, a revelation. As if a blinding spotlight were suddenly shining on me, and I had no choice but to perform.

Yes you see through me, you know me. This must all have happened before.

Since the morning of the professor's insult, Vernor Matheius had ceased attending the class. Suddenly, irrevocably-he was gone. At the back of the hall was the row in which he'd sat, there was the desk in which for weeks he'd sat, beneath the clock; but now he was gone, and would not (I seemed to know, with resignation) be back; though I glanced over my shoulder repeatedly during class as if with a nervous tic, needing to check the time; for the hour between ten and eleven was interminable now, and empty of meaning. How dull, disappointing European Ethics was without Vernor Matheius to enliven it!-I wasn't the only person who felt the loss. Even those students who'd disliked Vernor Matheius intensely regretted his absence. And most of all the professor who seemed to me sad, elderly, reading from his lecture notes, adjusting his glasses and clearing his throat; in the harsh glare from the leaded-glass window his creased, windburned-looking face exposed; like me glancing frequently toward the empty desk beneath the clock. I glared at him, doodling in my notebook. Now you see what you've done, you ridiculous old man. Out of vanity.

I had no choice, I had to comment on his absence from the class, it would have been unnatural for me not to; and Vernor Matheius shrugged indifferently, and said, "I wasn't enrolled, just auditing. Not much in it for me, frankly." So I said, hesitantly, "It's very-quiet now, without you," and Vernor Matheius said, "Good. I was intrusive, I think," and quickly I said, "Oh, no-not at all," and he persisted, "Yes, wasn't I? Come on: I always talk too much," and I said, almost vehemently, "No. You made the class come alive." At this, Vernor Matheius made a curious sucking sound with his teeth, as if sucking spit through his teeth, a comical-mocking sound I'd never heard before but interpreted as an expression of extreme doubt, and grinning sidelong at me he said, "So now it's dead without me, eh?" and I found myself backed into a corner by the logic of his argument, forced to say, "Yes."

Vernor Matheius was not walking me to the University Health Services but the office happened to be in the direction in which (by chance and coincidence) we were walking. So it happened that we walked together; people on the street, glancing at us, might have imagined us as a couple; an interracial couple, of whom there were a few at the university; not many, for there were not many non-Caucasian students, but a few. I was carrying a duffel bag, and was in horror it would bump against Vernor Matheius's side; yet I didn't want to switch it to my other arm, for that would remove the buffer between us; and he might misunderstand; or understand too well. We weren't talking now; Vernor Matheius had resumed his whistling. I had sometimes noticed how, striding across campus, making his way through slower-moving groups of students that seemed to part, like molecules, for his swifter passage, he often whistled; frowning and smiling to himself, lost in thought; yet his eyes moving continuously, restlessly-you could see that nothing eluded him. How tall the man was, six feet three or four; how lean, like a knifeblade; his handsome head disproportionately large for his shoulders and body, as if the rest of him had failed to keep pace with his intelligence. There was a slight lurching hunch to his left shoulder as if he had an old injury, and carried himself guarded against pain; yet never registered pain; in fact he was in buoyant good spirits, whistling through his fleshy purplish-plum pursed lips. It would not have occurred to me in my naivete to wonder Am I a factor in this man's happiness? Is there invariably something sexual in a man's happiness? Pulled down tight over his head was a grimy knitted navy blue cap with white starburst designs, that looked handmade; the crimson wool scarf looped around his neck, also moderately soiled, flapped in the wind; the khaki sheepskin jacket flapped open, the zipper broken; his hands were bare in the 10°F. cold-he'd lost his gloves. Vernor Matheius was one of those older, driven students perpetually distracted by thought, or by some mysterious urgency that made it impossible for them to get their clothes on right; I suppose I was perceived in this way myself, for I'd long been careless of my "personal appearance"-my "grooming" as it was called-though now, in recent weeks, I'd made a concerted effort to improve. For how do you make yourself visible, to one who has no awareness of your very existence?

At the Health Services building Vernor Matheius waved good-bye to me without breaking stride, or breaking off his whistling; blindly I turned in to the building on my fictitious errand; wandered the corridors for five, ten minutes before daring to return to the street; to a pearlescent-gray, windy March day; and when I did, stepping out onto University Avenue, to my astonishment there stood Vernor Matheius, waiting.

His mouth smiled at me, a sly-glistening gap-toothed smile, and said, "Find what you were looking for?"

9

Aged eighteen I'd left home, Strykersville, New York, with no idea of who I was or who I might be; knowing only who I was not, and did not wish to be: all that, until that time, I'd known. At Syracuse, I haphazardly cobbled together a personality out of scraps; like my grandmother's quilts made of mismatched scraps of cloth. You don't inquire into the origin of scraps but only of the shrewd use of which they are made.

From my brother Dietrich (who'd been a Marine immediately out of high school, before returning to farm) I borrowed a way of carrying myself with dignity; from my high school history teacher, a way of questioning others' remarks without being rude (though in fact, I suppose I was sometimes rude); from a girl named Lynda who'd been my closest friend in high school, a way of being "good"-"generous"-without seeming silly; from the Lutheran minister's grown daughter, a way of regarding people with flattering widened sincere-seeming eyes, not the narrow, veiled eyes natural to me; from my father I borrowed a habit of skepticism and doubt, the loser's distrust of anyone who has more money than he has, or even the appearance of more; yet from my father, too, a contradictory impulse, for he had a weakness for card playing and gambling, which attests to reckless optimism. The gambler's philosophy is a simple one. So little hope of things going right for you, why the hell not bet all you've got?

At Syracuse there were so many new models for me. At any rate, possibilities.

My most articulate, persuasive professors (who were exclusively male); scattered residents in my freshman dorm, known to me only by name; a number of the Kappa girls who now, when they saw me on campus, stared through me with expressions of undisguised loathing. (The more inventive of the Kappas had spread fanciful rumors of my "congenital leprosy"; my "mixed racial background"; my "disgusting" grooming habits; my "selfishness" is not tutoring them; my "public nervous breakdown" in the presence of Kappa alums. Of these outrages, the last was truly unforgivable.) My so-called personality had always been a costume I put on fumblingly, and removed with vague, perplexed fingers; it shifted depending upon circumstances, like unfastened cargo in the hold of a ship. Periodically in high school I would make a desperate effort to be "nice"-"normal"-"well-liked"- "popular." When I was once elected to a class office, vice-president of my senior class, I resigned in a panic. I couldn't explain that the sunny-seeming good-girl citizen my classmates had elected to office wasn't me, but an experiment I had not expected to succeed.

The personalities I assembled never lasted long. Like quilts carelessly sewn together, I periodically fell apart. Sometimes the collapse was brief, a siege of exhaustion, nausea and sleeplessness that left me stunned, but purged; at other times, and such times were becoming more frequent, the collapse was more serious, involving a period of manic, nervous behavior followed by a physical breakdown-"flu" I would call it, or that popular undergraduate malady "mononucleosis." I was too weak to get out of bed, too weak and demoralized to read, write or think coherent thoughts; my bowels churned and ached with diarrhea, though I hardly ate; all appetite for food vanished; my body burned with fever and my head with pain. Yet there was a curious solace in such a collapse, a sharp, sour pleasure; for I would be compelled to think Now you know what you are, now you know. Stark and simple and beautiful as gleaming white bones picked clean of all flesh. Now you know. Yet I lived in dread of the one day I would fall utterly and irrevocably into pieces and would lack the strength, the will, the purpose, the faith to reassemble myself another time.

I never doubted that others, those others I admired, were solid and whole, not made of scraps and pieces like me. I never doubted their natural superiority, only that I could emulate it. Yet there were those like me with whom I felt a surreptitious kinship. One morning in the Ethics class after Vernor Matheius had ceased attending, the professor had been lecturing with a strained, forced energy on "the perennial problem of good and evil"-the "tragedy of man's divisiveness"-and of how such great thinkers as Augustine, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel had dealt with this "problem"; and it came to me-how hollow, how halting the man's voice; how little any of this mattered, without Vernor Matheius to respond. The wintery glare from the tall leaded-glass window beside the professor's podium fell upon the aging man so cruelly it looked as if his skin was about to crumble into bits, and his eyes that were brave and hopeful were about to dissolve into water. I heard his old-man's voice as he must have heard it himself and felt a rush of confused emotion for him, and pity: for the arc of his life was waning, and even had Vernor Matheius remained in our midst it would not have mattered for long.

To win Vernor Matheius's attention, I understood that I would have to make myself visible to him, and "attractive"; I would have to reinvent myself; I shopped for secondhand clothing in the city, choosing things I myself would never have wished to wear, or dared: a lime-green suede jacket in a bygone style, only slightly worn at the cuffs and elbows; a ruffled red long-sleeved silk blouse that looked like an explosion on my narrow torso; a tartan plaid wool skirt several sizes too large for me made of an exquisitely beautiful fabric; a sleek-sexy black linen dress with a V neck and a dropped hemline and an unraveling hem. Out of bins marked $3-$5 I pulled a sweater, a gauzy scarf, a belt made of linked silver ornaments. Each of the items had been many times reduced-the suede jacket, for instance, had been marked down from $95 to $43 to $19-and was certainly a bargain; these were quality clothes of the kind I could never have afforded new; but I could not really afford even these bargains, and had had to borrow money from girls in my residence, even as I suspected I would never be able to repay it-I'd become reckless, shameless. And my hair that had grown out unevenly and fell now to my shoulders in an untidy rippled-curly mass needed attention: trimming, shaping, "styling": I found myself one Saturday morning in a neighborhood beauty salon spending $ 12 on my hair; staring amazed at the transformed girl in the mirror as the beautician (a heavily made-up, glamorous woman of approximately the age my mother would have been had she lived) said cheerfully, "Some improvement, eh?"

10

" 'Anellia'-a strange name. Never heard it before."

Frowning, with a skeptic's habitual narrowing of his eyes, Vernor Matheius uttered this name as if doubting it.

I said nothing, and the moment passed.

In the gloomily romantic coffeehouse Vernor Matheius spoke almost exclusively of philosophy. It was his true passion. It might have been his only passion. Such a ferocity of commitment and concentration excited me, for I felt the same way, or nearly; I'd grown to distrust all that was mere emotion, fleeting and ephemeral; the world of sliding, collapsing surfaces; the world of my father's drifting cigarette smoke, vanishing into the ceiling of my grandparents' old farmhouse; the world of clock time. And there was the thrill of a common language. A common religion. Almost, I could think, As if we were a couple. Lovers. Vernor was known in this place, and seemed not to mind when his name was spoken familiarly; it struck my ear as risky, and wonderful, that others, strangers to me, could call out "Vernor" so readily, and Vernor Matheius would smile and wave a greeting. Beside a wall of hammered tin squares painted the hue of pencil lead, we sat in a booth with a sticky tabletop; Vernor ordered coffee for us both-very strong, black, bitter-almond coffee of a sort I had never tasted before; swift as a shot to the heart caffeine flew through my veins; my pulse quickened, my very eyeballs began to throb. As if. Lovers. Long ago I had sternly instructed myself that sexual yearning is impersonal; though it may seem so, it is not; sexual yearning is the yearning of nature to reproduce itself, blindly.

Vernor asked nothing more about my name, or my background. In a voice that seemed to me, in my state of heightened nerves, both aggressive and seductive, he quizzed me about philosophy: for it was strange to him that "a girl like you" would be drawn to philosophy since "so few girls" were. He spoke of Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza. Wittgenstein and Cassirer were his special interests. "The universal laws of structure and operation"-that was the only really worthwhile concern of mankind, in Vernor's opinion. When he'd first enrolled in college he had thought he might be a teacher, but soon discovered, to his disgust, how vacuous, how ignorant, how deadly-dull education courses were; he'd dropped out of college and entered a seminary, hoping to learn of God, the pathways to God, and how he might serve mankind in the effort of discovering God, but soon discovered, to his even greater disgust, only a human, confused and contradictory God- " 'Yahweh' like a collective comic nightmare of mankind." And so he returned to college, and enrolled in humanities courses, but soon discovered he couldn't tolerate history-"For what is 'history' except contingency, a mess of accidents." Most of these were bloody; history was mostly war; an appalling record of mankind's cruelty; cruelty compounded by ignorance, unless it was compounded by a malevolent intelligence; mankind no more rational than ants of differing races, creeds, languages ceaselessly battling one another for dominance; for mere anthills; what is politics but rabid self-interest and aggression, even the current civil rights movement-Vernor uttered the words civil rights movement with a purely neutral detachment as if it were a foreign phrase-was a distraction from the purity of the philosophical quest: to know what is. "Every year, every moment must be equal to every other," Vernor said, frowning as if warning me not to interrupt and argue, for philosophers are trained to argue. "The only truths that can possibly matter, that can really matter, are truths that transcend time." How emphatic Vernor Matheius's voice. A voice of seduction, a voice of pleading. A voice of logic, reason, conviction. A voice like a caress, that left me weak, gripping the coffee mug between my fingers. Vernor Matheius's large head, dark-tinctured face; his eyes showing pale crescents above the iris. His warm yeasty bodily odor mixed with the sharper smell of the coffee and rushed along my veins making me begin to perspire inside my showy clothes. I would be late for my cafeteria job. I would not arrive at the cafeteria at all. Though thinking calmly I can leave. I can stand, turn away. At any time.

Then somehow we were outside. My eyes blinked against the cold, tears stuck to my lashes. Vernor Matheius was leading me-where? We must have spoken of where. He must have invited me, I must have accepted. Close beside me he walked, nudging me. With what strange familiarity his fingers gripped my green suede jacket at the elbow. We came to Chambers Street. We descended the icy sidewalk. I am free to turn away, to run. At any time. Inappropriately, I recalled my Kappa sister Chris; how, the rumor was, she'd been taken upstairs in the fraternity house, drunk; eager and loving, you had to suppose; and what happened upstairs, how many fraternity men had sex with her, no one would know; Chris herself would not know, and would not wish to know; she'd dropped out of school, and was gone. I had no reason to think of Chris. I am not Chris, I am not a Kappa. Though if I seemed to be drifting from Vernor, his fingers gripped my elbow just a little firmer. " 'Annul-ia'? That's your name?"

There, the stucco building of the indefinable hue of lard. This place I should not have recognized. I was smiling a small, fixed smile; I was certain that I had chosen this; though I did not know what exactly I had chosen; to what I'd agreed when Vernor Matheius had spoken the name "Anellia" in the coffeehouse and stared at me across the sticky tabletop. Free to leave, to turn away. To run. As we were climbing the stairway; the stairway I should not have known of, and seemed not to know of; the stairway of my dreams that was a crude wood-plank outdoor stairway with a roof but otherwise open to weather, the steps beginning to rot, swaying slightly beneath us. Vernor Matheius was close behind me, I was just ahead of him; I thought He is herding me the way a dog herds sheep and the thought made me laugh. Vernor was joking nervously about his "living quarters"-he was "an underground man aboveground"-there was the surprise of his icy-cold fingers encircling my right leg just below the knee; they were quick, strong, deft fingers; I tried to shake them off as if this was a game; of course it was a game; we behaved as if it was a game, playful and laughing; I thought He would not hurt me- would he? There was a garbagey smell, a smell of rotting wood. I opened my mouth to speak yet could not, the words tangled together. I had to leave, I was late for my job in the cafeteria, I had no money, I was desperately poor and would never be able to repay the girls to whom I owed money, a total of $87.50, a sum that might as well have been $10,000. I could not say these things; I could not say that I loved him but was terrified of him; that I had never been with a man or a boy like this; I was terrified of becoming pregnant; "becoming pregnant" was a thought that terrified me though I had no sexual experience; I could not exert any will contrary to Vernor Matheius's will, the playful grip of his fingers at my knee; as in a dream we are unable to exert any will contrary to the inscrutable will of the dream. It might have been (I thought) that whatever was to happen had already happened; in philosophy there was the theoretical possibility of the isomorphic universe, symmetrical in both space and time; a strictly determined universe that could run forward, and backward; to exert will in such a universe was not possible; to be blamed would be unjust. And so now I was climbing the outdoor stairway at 1183 Chambers Street exactly as I'd wished in my dreams; and yet this was not at all the dream I'd wished; I was frightened, and felt sick; I was trembling badly, as if freezing; the bitter black coffee of which I'd had only two or three sips now rose acid and bilious in my throat. It's the green suede jacket that has brought me here I was thinking. It's the smiling-lipsticked girl in the mirror I was thinking. Biting my lip to keep from laughing, thinking This is what a pretty girl does, it's time you knew. This is what a "desired"girl does, this is what is done to a "desired"girl.

Vernor Matheius fumbled with the key trying quickly to open the door to apartment 2D before we were seen, and pushed me inside. For once wordless.

11

And now how lonely.

How alone, and how lonely.

Where once I'd walked into the residence hall cafeteria as soon as it opened at 7:00 a.m., and took a tray, and got my breakfast, and sat alone at a table near a window where I could read and dream in seclusion, now, in love with Vernor Matheius, I felt such acute loneliness, the physical shock and panic of loneliness, I could not bear to be by myself; eagerly and desperately I sought the company of girls whom I scarcely knew, girls I'd previously scorned, superficial chattering good-natured girls with whom I had nothing (or so I imagined) in common. It was like the nightmare of the sorority again where I'd blindly sought "sisters" yet it was not the company of girls I yearned for but the company of Vernor Matheius whom I feared I would never see again. Even with others, safely (if temporarily) with others, I could not concentrate on them but was thinking of course of him; only of him; my fingernails cruelly etched Vernor Matheius Vernor Matheius in the soft flesh of the inside of my forearm.

My cafeteria laughter was shrill as coins tossed against the floor, my voice strident. Yet as soon as my "friends" were gone the smile died on my lips, not a smile but a twitch; the manic spark in my eyes was extinguished like a light switched off. Alone, alone. I pushed away into the void like a solitary swimmer pushing out into freezing water; for all swimmers are solitary in such bitter regions of the soul.

Seeing something in my face, what pain what humiliation what despairing hope, one of the older girls waited for me; waited outside the cafeteria for me; hesitantly she inquired, "Is something wrong? You seem so"-tactful, kindly, not meaning to pry-"so sad, somehow." And I was astonished, so exposed. Flaring up like a struck match, "I'm not sad. I'm not sad in the slightest. What an ignorant thing to say. I've been laughing, haven't I?" I said, offended. Unless in fact I burst into tears. The girl, a tall broad-shouldered girl whose name I did not know or out of arrogance did not remember stood in such a way to shield me from the staring, curious eyes of others. My hot tears spilled out onto my cheeks; my nose ran; was this passion, was this romance, this-? Incensed as an older sister she asked, practicably, "Is it some guy?" and called me by my name, not "Anellia" but my true, ordinary name, the name by which I was commonly known. Some guy! As if she'd reached out to tickle me with rough fingers-some guy! The word so slangy, vulgar, commonplace-guy! Was Vernor Matheius for all his arrogance, brilliance, power over me in essence merely a guy? I had not time to absorb such a revolutionary thought, though such a thought might have saved me; I perceived my benefactor as my enemy, backing away in dislike, stammering, "I-resent such a question. I don't know you and you-you don't know me at all."

Following that exchange I avoided the dining hall. I ate in my room, or skipped meals altogether.

How lonely, I wanted to die. To cease to exist. For he had rejected me, repudiated me; sent me away; he had not loved me nor even "made love" to me; my anxiety had been proven causeless, and so contemptible; I was contemptible; he'd sent me away almost as soon as we'd entered his apartment. That was the secret of my hurt over some guy.

What memory of Vernor Matheius's apartment I'd seen for such a brief period of time, scarcely minutes… Shelves of neatly arranged books; a narrow cot with a thin dark corduroy bedspread pulled up in apparent haste; a flattened pillow in a white, not-very-clean case; curtainless windows, the cracked and stained blinds I'd seen from the outside, from the safety of the ground. And now I am here, now in apartment 2D with Vernor Matheius, how has such a miracle occurred? And if a "miracle" has occurred, is it a "miracle" after all? Beneath my feet were bare, badly worn floorboards upon which a cheap, stained pile rug had been laid; the color of the rug was a vague blurred fleshy-gray of the hue of certain kinds of mold; the very floor was uneven, tilted; like the floors of my grandparents' old farmhouse beneath which the earth had shifted in a way to suggest indifference, or scorn; a child's marble, laid experimentally upon such a floor, would roll unhesitatingly until impeded by a wall. At the rear was a shadowy alcove with a single counter; a sink so small as to seem a child's sink; a dwarf refrigerator set upon the floor. The apartment was airless, smelling of cigarette smoke, coffee, grease; the yeasty odor of a man's body; soiled clothes, bedclothes. In such airlessness my nostrils widened in a kind of swoon; a wave of dizziness washed over me; perhaps I was trespassing into forbidden territory, shocked at my own audacity. This is what a "desired" girl does, this is what is done to a "desired" girl. Staring smiling at a desk which was the most premeditated and accomplished piece of furniture in the sparely furnished room; it had about it an aura of the sacred, the not-to-be-touched, like an altar, and beside it on the wall was a likeness of Socrates as a sculpted head with blind exophthalmic eyes, and another likeness of a stolid bewigged man I believed must be Descartes. The desk itself exuded stolidity and character; how wholly unlike the cramped, battered, uniform aluminum desks issued by the university; it consisted of a large piece of wood set upon filing cabinets, wonderfully expansive for any desk, measuring perhaps five feet by four and a half feet; its sectors might have been marked off by invisible grids for neat piles of books, journals, and papers were placed at intervals, the highest at the rear and the lowest at the front, spines facing outward for ready identification; there was a clay bowl crammed with pens and pencils; there were much-eroded erasers; there was an Olivetti portable typewriter pushed back to clear a space directly in front of the desk chair, grooves in the desktop marking how the typewriter was pushed back, pulled forward, pushed back and pulled forward again. Rolled into the typewriter was a sheet of paper upon which a tight little paragraph of prose had been typed:

The claim that philosophy is a battle against "the bewitchment of intelligence by language" & this very claim postulated in the syntax & content & contours of Language-

which I would identify at a later time as an argumentative allusion to the early work of Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Perhaps Vernor Matheius was speaking to me through the pulsebeat in my ears, perhaps he was not; perhaps he was indicating he would help me remove my jacket, perhaps he was not; perhaps he was fumbling with his sheepskin jacket, bulky on his tall, lanky frame like protective armature; perhaps he was not. He will touch me now. Now it will happen. Nervously he was tugging down a window shade, and the frayed material began to tear; he muttered a jokey profanity-"Shit!" And this word, this blunt mechanical brainless expletive in another man's voice: not Vernor Matheius's eloquent voice. As if another, more commonplace and thus more practicable man not Vernor Matheius stood in his place, cursing a frayed window shade. Yet I didn't hear, exactly; I heard but didn't acknowledge; my heart was beating rapidly as I stood rereading the enigmatic paragraph typed on the sheet of stark white paper as if it were a secret, coded message meant solely for me which even its author could not have fully comprehended. It was then that I realized I had been hearing Vernor Matheius's breathing. His breathing like panting. Like a dog's panting. And I smelled the alarm, the fear lifting from his body like heat. "Why'd you come here with me?"-a voice that was raw, harsh; very male; like sandpaper scraping across a splintery wooden surface; a frightened voice; a disdainful voice; not the musical, seductive voice of the lecture hall; not the voice of logic, reason, conviction, irony; not the voice of Vernor Matheius as I'd heard it in my dreams; but a stranger's voice, any-man's voice. I stared at him now, struck dumb; he was frowning, such a frown shifting the glasses on the bridge of his nose, and the lenses of his glasses were opaque with reflected light (as soon as we'd stepped inside the room Vernor had switched on an overhead light and shadows were cast downward on our faces, like appalled skulls we regarded each other out of astonished shadowed eye-sockets); he was saying: "Look, Anellia, you don't want to do this, and I don't, either." We were still in our outer clothes; I had not begun to unbutton the green suede jacket, and Vernor's bulky sheepskin jacket looked more resolutely on his body than it had been outdoors. Yet he touched me, his forefingers gently prodding me toward the door, swiftly he unlocked the door, opened it, murmuring, "-sometime, some other time, Anellia, good-bye-" his voice choked and abruptly then I stood outside the room, in a drafty hall opening onto the stairs, I was blind, blundering down the swaying wooden stairs which only a few minutes before another girl had boldly, tremblingly ascended. Not knowing where I was, or why; not knowing if I was deeply wounded or whether in fact I was relieved, I'd been saved, like one pulled from a rushing river to safety lying spent and exhausted and dazed on the river-bank but safe, saved. It hasn't happened yet.

12

He called me Anellia, he'd remembered that name.

Driven from Vernor Matheius's door like a stray dog yet I had not the moral strength to keep away from him. The more he cast me from him with disdain-You don't want to do this!-the more I was drawn to him. I could think of no one else. I wished to think of no one else. In a delirium of yearning feeling the angry impress of his fingers against my arm; seeing his blood-darkened face, that look of exasperation and alarm. Don't, you don't want, Anellia you don't want to do this.

He was begging me. He was commanding me. He was instructing himself as well as me. And this not out of principle but instinctively.

I began to reason then, with a logician's certainty: it was possible, in the sense that it was not impossible, that Vernor Matheius might love me someday.

Or, allow me to love him.

"Anellia"-a name, a riddlesome sound, that had leapt to my lips as if it were Vernor Matheius who'd named me and not myself.

For each of our lovers invents us anew. Names us anew. The old is erased utterly. Struck dumb.

My own name was so common, ordinary, I'd begun to detect irony in its sound when it was spoken aloud. Since childhood I'd told myself Differently named, you'd be a different person.

Yet I worried that, repudiating my baptismal name at the age of nineteen, I was inadvertently repudiating my mother Ida. For Ida had named me.

"Anellia"-strange name. Never heard it before.

Well. You've never met me before.

I did not return to 1183 Chambers Street. More shrewdly I returned to the coffeehouse. In that grungy-romantic interior amid clouds of smoke and black-coffee fumes I wore the green suede jacket with its air of bygone, frenetic glamor; I wore the gauzy scarf that was the color of opalescent pearl; my hair had been shampooed, and was glossily combed; my thin chapped lips were transformed by crimson grease; I was not I but Anellia, drawing glances of interest from strangers. Anellia appeared to be a pretty undergraduate girl with a flattering curiosity about chess-"Oh no, I don't play! Just like to watch good players." It happened that Vernor Matheius was playing chess with a Dutch chemist with whom (I gathered) he often played in the coffeehouse, and so he could ignore me if he wished as I could ignore him. A young man befriended me; bought me coffee, offered me a cigarette; we murmured together in admiration of certain of the chess players; when he mentioned Vernor Matheius's name, innocently I inquired, "Who is he?" and my new friend said, "A philosophy Ph.D. student, supposed to be brilliant, but-" making a vague bemused gesture with his fingers, meant to indicate-what? That Vernor was too brilliant, or only just supposed to be brilliant? That Vernor was in some way eccentric? To be the only dark-skinned individual in most settings in which he found himself, to behave as if this were not a fact visible to all, requires a certain degree of self-definition, which might be mistaken for eccentricity. To my new acquaintance I said, as Anellia might have said, innocently ironic, playful, "Whoever he is, he's beautiful."

Nearly everyone in the coffeehouse was smoking. This was an era of smoking. An era permeated by the haze-dreams of smoking. Blown-up photographs of the heroic, heraldic figures of "French existentialism"-our secular saints-Camus, Sartre, de Beauvoir gazed down upon us from the hammered-tin walls of the coffeehouse through romantically drifting clouds of smoke, cigarettes in their hands, or drooping from their lips. I could not smoke: I hated tobacco: the thought of defiling my lungs, that I knew with my fatalist's certainty would be more vulnerable than the leathery lungs of others, filled me with revulsion. Yet I felt the erotic undertow of smoking. I conceded its cheap movie-screen glamor. There was Vernor Matheius lighting a cigarette distracted by a move of his opponent on the chessboard, I saw the forehead creased in concentration, the squinting eyes, the way in which, negligently, the burning match is shaken out, and tossed toward an ashtray. I saw again my father smoking his endless cigarettes; my doomed, drunken father squinting upward at a light fixture in the ceiling of the old farmhouse, and grinning foolishly; he'd managed to take a snapshot of himself in this strange pose, timing the shutter of the old Brownie Hawkeye camera to click after a count of three; why such a comical pose, for "whom was it taken? Was this evidence of a man I'd never known? Before I'd left for college I had looked in secret through my grandmother's few mementos, searching for further evidence of my lost father, but I'd found nothing that I had not already seen many times. I would wonder if Vernor Matheius was right: we have no personal identities because we have no personal histories, all that is "personal" must be lost, repudiated. Watching Vernor covertly I saw that his facial bones were sharper, crueller than I recalled.

The schoolboy glasses flashed with malevolent intelligence. I felt again, in a sudden faint swoon, the impress of his fingers on my arm. I alone of these people have been touched by him. I alone, intimately touched by him. Naively I prayed for Vernor to win his chess game for If he wins he will glance up elated and pleased with himself and he'll see me and smile, in that instant Anellia will be invited to join that happiness; if he lost, I seemed to know that with a sullen smile he'd mutter a few words to his Dutch companion, praise for the other's game, an expletive of disgust for his own, and avoiding all eyes he'd simply walk out. He would take no notice of Anellia at all and if he did, Anellia would be one more reason for his self-disgust, and for his escape. But Vernor and his heavyset opponent were so evenly matched that their game seemed never to be ending; though each had few pieces remaining, their brooding moves required many minutes' concentration, and I was forced to leave the coffeehouse at a quarter to eleven. I would not believe afterward that I'd squandered two and a half hours of my life; desperately, recklessly I'd hung around the coffeehouse like a small thin candle burning wanly, unseen and unknown; if proof of my rational deterioration was required, this was it; yet I felt disappointment only that the game would end, and it might end happily for Vernor Matheius, without me to witness.

"Vernor, good night."

These words I dared whisper, only just loud enough for Vernor Matheius to hear if he wished to hear, or to ignore if he wished to ignore, and leaving the coffeehouse I saw him glance up in my wake frowning, unsmiling, without recognition, yet without an expression of annoyance or rejection either.

I ran back to my residence hall, breathless and elated.

He doesn't hate me. One day, he will love me.

The drama of such sightings. Where panels in the world's opacity slide open unexpectedly, a brilliant blinding sunshine floods us with warmth. Often in the university library I observed Vernor Matheius at a discreet distance. In so busy a place, the observation of another isn't at all difficult; isn't risky, or not very risky; there were very good reasons for me to prowl about the library's third level which was the domain of philosophy, religion, and theology; before I'd come to know Vernor Matheius, I'd spent hours reading philosophy journals in a cramped little lounge with a single long smudged table and a half-dozen chairs usually occupied by graduate students in philosophy (you could recognize them instantly: many were older, worn, bewhiskered, graying as if they'd been questing truth for a long time, decades and centuries and their faces had grown parched as soil in a time of drought); nothing excited me more than to open the pages of such publications as Ethics, The Journal of Metaphysics, Philosophical Review, even Thomist intrigued me; though after I'd fallen in love with Vernor Matheius, the periodicals room held less of an enchantment. Of course it was in exciting proximity to Vernor Matheius himself. Of course I knew exactly where Vernor Matheius's carrel was, amid a row of fifteen carrels assigned to advanced graduate students; on this crucial evening I was wearing a pale yellow angora sweater and a pleated tartan plaid skirt that swung at my hips, it was so large for me, and yet (I reasoned) so very classy; what others might call preppy; I believed that I looked attractive; mirrors assured me, my somewhat feverish face had been made into an attractive female face; my hair had not been shampooed for several days perhaps but I'd taken care to comb it in a provocative style as my Kappa sisters had once taught me; my facial expression, too, was subtly calibrated, a thoughtful look neither piously somber nor annoyingly cheerful. As if a comforting voice had assured me You are worthy of being loved, you are not a clown and a fool and a garbage-digger and shameless offering yourself to this man like a whore not knowing how even to offer herself. It had been thirteen days since Vernor Matheius had brought me to his apartment, and within five crushing minutes sent me away again. Thirteen days of shame, remorse, mortification, and hope: hope craven as a kicked dog who whimpers with pleasure at the mere presence of his master. Thirteen days of waking in a coffin-sized bed too exhausted and heavy-hearted to push myself out of bed, unless I woke exhilarated and manic, my pulses racing. He has made me so happy. By existing he has allowed me to exist. In such a nerved-up state I was inspired to write: the outermost layer of my skin had been peeled away, now the very air hurt me, and wakened me.

One day, fever dreams of this time would be transcribed into the formalist prose pieces of what would be my "first book" unknown and unguessed-at, as a galaxy many light-years distant, in this fevered time.

Making my way along the row of carrels. There, Vernor Matheius's carrel! Yet when Vernor glanced up at me, I seemed not to have expected to see him; in my preppy clothes and pink lip gloss, I didn't smile at him until he smiled at me; a smile leapt instantaneously between us, like a lighted match.

His voice was low, gravelly-"You. 'Anellia.' What the hell are you doing here, this time of night?"

His eyes frankly stared; beautiful lashed eyes of an unnatural size, strained and glaring behind the schoolboy glasses, as if the eyeballs were pushing through the sockets. Obviously he knew (did he?) that I was seeking him out and yet he didn't send me away, he didn't express displeasure; eagerly I thought He has taken pity on me, my very need of him. As a master about to kick his dog pauses, seeing in the dog's shimmering eyes a capacity for love, and for hurt, that exceeds the master's wish to give pain. I saw how Vernor took in the pleated tartan skirt that had once been the possession of an American girl whose parents had so loved her, they'd lavished her with expensive clothes; I saw how Vernor took in the angora sweater, which fitted my small chest snug as a child's sweater, which perhaps it had once been. My happy smile Here I am! let me love you! don't deny me! I will cease to exist! as in an even voice I told Vernor Matheius that I often worked up here, this was my favorite place in the library, I'd discovered it early in my freshman year.

"Especially the periodicals room. As soon as I first stepped inside, and saw, I think it was the Journal of Metaphysics-I knew this was where I belonged."

Vernor laughed. He had no reason to doubt me, yet he was behaving as if he doubted me. Shutting the heavy book he'd been reading, a commentary on Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and shoving it away.

13

"It's late. I better walk you home." Adding, as a point of information, "Your home."

"But it isn't a 'home,' it's just a place I stay." "Any 'home' is 'just a place I stay.' That's its essence." We were leaving the library together. A leeching-wet wind shoved against us. Not a sentimental wind. Not a wind of romance. I loved this wind, it made Vernor Matheius feel protective of me. Sidelong he regarded me quizzically, with a kind of interest. Though not touching me. Propositions came to me, skeins of words. Remarks to make Vernor smile, or laugh. But I couldn't speak. My heart was pounding as rapidly as it pounded sometimes in my sleep.

I had been reading Wittgenstein. There are no philosophical problems, only linguistic misunderstandings. Was this so? If so, -why write at such length about it? I could understand Vernor's attraction to such a philosophy. Spartan, rigorous. Surpassingly skeptical. Well, good: philosophers should be skeptical. (No one else is: the mass of mankind is credulous as a gigantic infant, willing to suck any teat.) In the presence of a man like Vernor Matheius it was wisest to say very little. You could see, Vernor could love only a woman who said very little, for speech makes us vulnerable, exposes us. What Vernor liked about silence was that he could break it when he wished. Saying, after a long pause, "You are a strange girl, Anellia. But you know that. Tell me this one thing: what d' you want?"

"-what do I want from-life? Or-"

"No, girl. From me."

There. It was said.

No playfulness between us. No sexual banter. Though there was (I saw, helpless) the swagger of the man's body, the ease of his knifeblade-body, the incline of his head. He began to whistle in his thin tuneless way; you could see it must've been a terrific way of provoking his elders. And maybe rolling his eyes. Big white-orbed Negro eyes. There was the hand-knitted cap pulled low on his forehead, crinkling his skin. A caption beneath this face might read WANTED.

I was taken by surprise. Yet I could not show it. I would examine my obsession with this man as if it was a problem: an intellectual puzzle intriguing to us both. For we were students of philosophy, engaged in a common quest for truth; for paring back myths and subterfuge in the pursuit of truth; and what is philosophy but the ceaseless and indefatigable invention of and "solving" of problems? I understood that Vernor Matheius was asking frankly What do you want from me that you imagine I can provide you? And what would you presume to provide me, in return?

By the calendar it was early April. Yet snow remained on the ground like strips of grimy Styrofoam. We walked with our heads ducked against the wind in our common effort; we walked without speaking; Vernor Matheius had posed a question to me which I would not answer glibly; I was in fact stymied by how to answer it at all; his whistling was both companionable and meant to distance him from me; air gusted about us like roiling thoughts. I thought with a smile If the would-be assailant should see me, he would be forced to re-define me. And if my Kappa ex-sisters should see me?

Without asking me, without a word of explanation, Vernor Matheius steered me to Allen Street, to a pub called Downy's. Was he really taking me here? Would we be entering this noisy, crowded campus pub together, like a couple? Vernor Matheius a head taller than the diminutive white girl at his side? In the smoky interior, eyes moved upon us; there was an unmistakable shifting of attention, on the part of a number of individuals; a reflexive instinct, and nothing personal. Of course, Vernor Matheius took not the slightest notice. He was accustomed to being looked-at, and maybe stared-at. He was accustomed to being visible.

Vernor Matheius nudged me toward the rear of the pub. Into a small booth in a corner. On the old-wood walls were orange Syracuse pennants; laminated newspaper pages, SYRACUSE WARRIORS TROUNCE CORNELL. I had never been in Downy's before but it was a place much liked by Kappas, and when Vernor went to the bar to get drinks I saw that I was being observed, eyes shifting on me and away, by several Kappas, in the company of their fraternity boyfriends. Oh my God. Look. And who she's with. I felt a thrill of defiance, vindication. They had known I was a bad girl, and this was the proof.

Vernor Matheius returned finally with two tall glasses of beer. He'd had to wait at the bar, but you could see the bartenders were busy. And finally he was served. And made his way back to the booth. My first taste of beer, and it seemed to scald my mouth. The bitter dank smell. I thought of my vanished father. The delicious poison he'd been able to extract from alcohol. Vernor Matheius drank, and laughed, his chunky white teeth laughing, not at me but-"This place, know what it makes me think of?" I shook my head, leaning forward to hear. The table beneath my elbows was made of old timber, two crude planks varnished to a dark sheen, covered in carved initials, inked phrases, cigarette burns. "Schopenhauer. The Will. The triumph of the Will." He gestured at the crowd, the smoky haze penetrated by shrill voices and laughter. I said, with an air of contrition, that I didn't know much about Schopenhauer; Vernor Matheius shrugged as if he'd have been surprised, if I had; he was a natural teacher, or preacher; hadn't he said, he'd studied in a seminary, he began to speak of Schopenhauer and his "quarrel" with the philosopher who believed that the individual is but the phenomenon and not the thing-in-itself; though he had to concur with Schopenhauer that in strife, sex, reproduction the individual is the dupe of the species-"The unenlightened individual, that is." When he'd been twenty-four, it was philosophy that had opened his eyes; philosophy that was "an ice pick, a scalpel"; philosophy that was a surgical instrument for analysis, dissection, debridement, and comprehension. I listened fascinated. I had never heard anyone speak so passionately. And to me. If I hadn't already been in love with Vernor Matheius I would have fallen in love with him now, within the space of a few minutes; I was lost to him; mesmerized by his voice; his intelligence; the purity of his conviction, and its impersonality. Vernor Matheius's voice amid the drunken clamor of the pub at this, its most crowded hour. How he yearned, he said, for a "life of the mind"; for the clarity of "pure, blazing, fearless thought" to illuminate the murk of history and of time. " 'Better that the world should perish than that I, or any other human being, should believe a lie'-as Bertrand Russell said. Wittgenstein's mentor at first, and then his rival and enemy." When he fell silent, I could not think of a worthy reply; I tried to smile, and didn't succeed; I was overwhelmed by him, like a swimmer who has ventured into a river not knowing how quickly the land falls away, how powerful the undertow. Vernor Matheius saw my perplexity and said it was an irony, wasn't it, he was being trained to teach, yet he hadn't the patience for teaching, at least not undergraduates; probably he wouldn't wind up teaching if he could survive somehow else, there was the example of Wittgenstein who'd been a gardener, for a while; working with your hands is a good antidote for too much thinking; anyway, it wouldn't matter how poor he was; he, Vernor Matheius, was used to being poor; his parents were both dead, long ago; his family was scattered; he himself had no intention of ever marrying, and still less would he sire offspring; he declared he had no interest in perpetuating his precious genes, or the very species Homo sapiens-"They can get along without this fellow's contribution."

But how sad, was my immediate thought. I said, "Oh, I understand."

He laughed for some reason, I hoped not at me; and I laughed with him. He was a man, I saw, who liked to laugh; yet didn't have much opportunity to laugh; for the professional study of philosophy doesn't inspire laughter, nor any degree of mirth; just as the earthy smell of death is excluded from the philosophical examination of finitude and death, so too laughter is excluded; it was a somber, sobering vocation. I thought I will help him to laugh. Inspiration, fueled by the giddiness of the moment. Several awkward swallows of beer. Trying not to gag. Yes, I would inspire laughter in this man; I refused to be one of the women who diminish, not increase, a man's laughter; I refused to be a woman who made Woman my life. Quickly I told Vernor what was only true: I agreed with him, I didn't want to marry, didn't want to have babies. (But was this so? Ida had married, Ida had had babies.) Vernor laughed carelessly saying he'd never met a "female" who wasn't maternal-"In her heart, if you could penetrate it. Or another organ." Hotly I said, "There are exceptions." "No exception 'proves the rule.' Only disproves it." I was left behind in all this. Vaguely I smiled lifting my glass. Vernor drained his glass, went to buy another. I sat basking, or dazed, in the aftermath of his words. Had he praised me? Had he made an exception of me?

A couple now. Perceived as such.

It hurt me to recall how, in the Kappa house, I'd overheard my Kappa sisters speak of "niggers." Not meanly, not with malice, but matter-of-factly. One of our house boys was a Negro, that's to say a "nigger." There were categories of girls whom Christian sororities automatically cut: "niggers," "Jews."

A fractional Jew, I could pass.

And there was Vernor Matheius. I am who I am, none of you can trap me with your language.

Returning to our booth, Vernor began speaking in a new way. As if, standing at the bar, he'd glanced back in my direction and hadn't liked what he saw. For now he was antagonistic; asking me again what I wanted from him; what I thought I was doing, chasing after him- "Girl, don't wince. 'Chasing after' is it." I felt my face heat; I could not defend myself; I could not say that it was Vernor Matheius who drew me to him, not I who had the volition to be drawn. I could not say But I fell in love with your voice, your mind, before I even saw you. For it was preposterous, it would make him laugh in derision. He stared at me, frowning. Saying maybe I was just naive? inexperienced? too trusting? "There are men who'd take advantage of you, you must know. You're an intelligent girl, Anellia." I heard his words, I was thrilled by the sound of Anellia in Vernor Matheius's voice. I had no reply to his statement for it was not a statement that could be refuted. I liked it that I was being presented to myself as a problem to be solved; my face was hot with embarrassment and pleasure; it was like being teased by my brothers when they weren't being cruel, exactly; simply to be noticed was a thrill. In noisy Downy's there was happy brainless laughter for which I was grateful, I couldn't be expected to raise my voice against it. I smiled at Vernor Matheius shyly. Yes but I love you. That is the problem to which all other problems can be reduced. As if he'd heard my thoughts Vernor frowned again; he removed his glasses and polished the lenses with a tissue; without the glasses his face loomed above me with sudden startling intimacy; the contours in the oily dark skin around the eyes, the somewhat sunken sockets, the lashes long as a child's, the exaggerated flatness of the nose that would have been (I thought this without thinking) disfiguring in a Caucasian face. When Vernor Matheius shoved his glasses back onto his face, adjusting the wire frames behind his ears, he seemed to be glaring at me, seeing me more distinctly.

Without a word he rose. Immediately I followed.

In a haze of not-knowing what would come next I followed Vernor to the door as he shrugged on his sheepskin jacket, pulled his wool cap down on his head. He'd left me to struggle with my own coat. Not out of rudeness (I was certain), he just hadn't noticed. It was time for us to leave, ergo it was time for us to leave. The actual process of making our way through the crowd, to the door and out, was a secondary matter.

Yet, at the door, he remembered me; he paused, to let me pass through the doorway ahead of him; I felt his fingers lightly on my shoulder; again, I had the sense that he was herding me; impatient with me; I didn't think at the time It's a gesture of possession in this public place. Even if no one is looking. Not that Vernor Matheius wants me sexually or in any other way but he wants to make a public claim, a proprietary gesture. Behind us I felt the net of eyes and disapproval and I laughed stepping out into the cold; into a damp wind bracing as a slap in the face when you've been a little dazed, giddy. I would have expected Vernor Matheius to say good-bye to me on Allen Street but instead he walked me to my residence hall, several blocks away, an old brick building undistinguished as an old shoe, and no words passed between us; I could think of nothing valuable to say, and nothing I dared say; Vernor Matheius seemed to have run out of words, too; for there are problems that may be too snarled to be solved. At Norwood Hall, outside the lighted front entrance, Vernor Matheius said, "I won't come in. I'll say good night here. I want you to know, Anellia, you're not new to me." He smiled at my look of confusion. I said, stammering slightly, "Not n-new?To you?" He said, backing off, "I saw you a while back. It was you. Scavenging in the garbage behind the Mohawk Bakery." Vernor laughed at my look of distress. How long he'd been waiting to tell me this, I would have to wonder. My face burned with shame, I had no defense.

"Hope you're not scavenging with me, girl."

Vernor walked off. He knew I would stand stricken behind him, staring as he strode away. Other girls and their escorts passed by me, I had no awareness of them. There went Vernor Matheius in his sheepskin jacket taking long strides across the street, away from me without a backward glance to see how I gazed after him.

Yes but I love you, nothing can shame me.

14

I'd wanted to be independent. I'd wanted to earn money, at the age of fourteen. So I could say like my brothers that I worked, I had a job. If my father telephoned, and if he asked to speak to me, I would tell him about my work, my job. For work on the farm and in my grandmother's house didn't count, earned me no money or the small respect that comes with earning money. And so I did housework for several Strykersville women, well-to-do by local standards, exhausting daylong jobs arranged for me by a great-aunt of my father's who lived in town and whose relationship to my rural, diminished family was sympathetic, though condescending; one of the women for whom I worked was Mrs. Farley the doctor's wife, an entire Saturday in June just after school ended for the summer; there I was vacuuming, sweeping, scrubbing, mopping, and scouring through the Farleys' six-bedroom Colonial on Myrtle Street; Myrtle Street was Strykersville's most prestigious street; I'd never been inside one of the houses on that street; and now my heart beat in resentment, and yet in admiration and envy. There were classmates of mine who lived in this neighborhood and I'd never thought so clearly of what it might mean in one's soul to live on Myrtle Street as if one were entitled to Myrtle Street .

Mrs. Farley's soul had been plumped up living on Myrtle Street, like a hen's breast feathers.

As I worked inside, I could see the Farleys' lawn bay working outside. In fact he was no boy but a hump-backed Negro in his fifties with a skin coffee-colored like Joe Louis; he had something of Louis's furtive, watchful manner, carrying his arms high, as if like the boxer he was practiced in the art of self-defense. From the kitchen I could see him; from the upstairs windows I could see him; from the laundry room I could see him; from the rear porch I could see him; he was spading and weeding in Mrs. Farley's flower beds, and not once did he see me; he never glanced toward the house; he worked in the sun fully absorbed in his own consciousness like a man who knows that, if you happen to glance at him, you won't see him. You'll see the lawn boy.

Mrs. Farley was a fussy, watchful employer. She'd had problems with other cleaning girls and would have, she seemed to know, a problem with me. She was concerned that I might break one of her pieces of Wedgwood china, or a Dalton "figurine"; grimly she oversaw me as I sat, dirtied and bored, at the dining room table polishing silver: silverware, silver candlestick holders, absurd little cream and sugar bowls, heirlooms as Mrs. Farley called them; how she and Mrs. Thayer would have liked each other, in their common passion; still, I didn't hate Mrs. Farley until I heard from her thin-lipped mouth the expression, which was the first time I'd ever heard it-Negro-lover. She didn't say nigger-lover; this wasn't a term a woman of her pretensions would have said. Instead she said Negro-lover in reference to something that had been reported that morning on the radio; the acquittal of white murderers of a black man in Georgia, by an all-white jury; the protests by a scattering of church leaders and politicians in the wake of the acquittal.

Negro-lovers these individuals were, in Mrs. Farley's vocabulary. In Strykersville, there were few Negroes; in our county there was no "civil unrest"; in nearby Buffalo there'd been "race riots" some years ago, following the end of World War II; but there was no threat of racial strife in Strykersville, and so Mrs. Farley uttered Negro-lover in a bemused voice, as one might speak of garbage-lovers, mud-lovers. I said at once, in my bright girl-student manner, "Christians are supposed to love everybody, aren't they, Mrs. Farley?" The stab of emotion I felt was mixed in my memory with the stink of bright pink silver polish and the greasy, disgusting feel of rubber gloves; it was mixed with the startled expression on Mrs. Farley's face as she stared at me, half-smiling as if uncertain whether I was joking. Her cheeks mottled; her eyes filled with hurt; I was rubbing savagely at a badly tarnished little spoon; I was thinking how, as Mrs. Farley watched, I might push the handle into a crack in the table and bend it, at the same time splintering the beautifully polished rosewood table; yet I did nothing like this, nor did I say another word; perhaps my courage had run out abruptly. Mrs. Farley left the room, and when we next spoke she was curt and polite and cool; if she'd been trying to like me, thinking to befriend me as a poor farm girl lacking a mother, she would try no longer. I'd offended her, and just possibly I'd frightened her. For never again was I hired to clean the Farleys' six-bedroom Colonial on Myrtle Street for eighty-five cents an hour.

I was glad of this. I told my father's great-aunt so. She said, annoyed with me, that Mrs. Farley was spreading the word in Strykersville, I wouldn't be offered housework anywhere-"She says you're sloppy and careless and arrogant. She says you're too smart for your own good."

It was true: I was too smart for my own good, or for anyone else's.

Negro-lover, nigger-lover. That epithet of the times believed to be unspeakably obscene. Like cock-sucker which was an expression of abuse also used exclusively by men in speaking of, or to, other men; like-minded men; men who understood one another because they "were men; and not cock-suckers who might resemble men but who were not men. No woman would be called a cock-sucker though the practice (I had only the dimmest, repelled notion of what this practice might be) was not limited to men. Would a woman be called a nigger-lover? When, in fact, many women loved Negroes? It had not escaped my notice that in most interracial couples, the woman is white, the man black. Was I now a Negro-lover, was I a nigger-lover? When the color of Vernor Matheius's skin was to me of no more significance than the color of a shirt he wore, or the color of his vivid red scarf.

15

Above the gorge of Oneida Creek a mile from the university campus, north and east of Auburn Heights, there was a footbridge made of raw wooden planks. The footbridge was approximately fifty feet across. The gorge was approximately thirty feet below. To look down into the gorge was to feel a wave of dizziness that seemed to rush up from the folds and creases of rock below. The footbridge was maintained by the city and led to a wilderness area at the crescent of which, approached from the other side of the hill by a lane, was a tall water tower. Often that winter, when I had time, I went for walks on that hill, to clear my head; to clear my head of Vernor Matheius; to lose myself in a dream of Vernor Matheius; to replay in compulsive detail each of our conversations and to see again, more vividly in memory than I'd seen in life, every nuance of expression on Vernor Matheius's face. I would wake from a trance and find myself on the bridge, gripping both railings; gazing down at the creek-bed below. Always on the footbridge I thought of Vernor Matheius, and always on the footbridge I thought of Ida. What linked them was a riddle. What linked them was the terrible loss to the world of their deaths: the one a possibility, the other a fact. On cold mornings thin columns of tendril-like mist rose from the creek like mysterious exhalations of breath. To stare at such vaporous columns was to stare into emptiness. Between one and none there lies an infinity. So Nietzsche had written tenderly of Schopenhauer. It was the most profound statement of love and of the possibility of loss I had ever encountered.

In April, the frozen creek began finally to unlock. Roiling black water rushed below like a furious artery. The artery was narrow but deep; above the creek, leaning on the railing, I couldn't determine in which direction it flowed. I thought I should be facing that direction. Facing the future. If I fell by accident, I should have liked to know in which direction my body would be carried.

16

In the very place of seductive death. A miracle.

One day nearing sunset, a bright balmy April afternoon erratically splotched with rain, I saw, or believed I saw, Vernor Matheius a short distance ahead of me on the dirt path descending to the Oneida Creek footbridge; I was suffused with excitement, and dread; for it was by chance that I was here yet if Vernor Matheius saw me surely he would think I'd been chasing after him-wouldn't he? And I was innocent (I believed I was innocent). It had been eight days since we'd been together in Downy's and I had promised myself that I would not pursue the man further; would not chase after him like an infatuated schoolgirl; though in fact I was an infatuated schoolgirl, and could not perceive a time when I would be anything other than an infatuated schoolgirl. As, in the throes of nausea or the delirious lassitude of fever we are unable to imagine other states of being. I had vowed never again to humiliate my-self and annoy and embarrass Vernor Matheius-telling myself I must wait for him to call me, or approach me; knowing as if it were a death sentence that he would neither call me nor approach me. It was true: I'd returned once or twice to the coffeehouse, relieved to see that Vernor Matheius was not among the chess players; nearly every day I worked in the library and often I found myself on the third floor; but like an early Christian ascetic renouncing all worldly life that gave pleasure I refrained from approaching the graduate students' carrels and did not know whether in fact Vernor Matheius was there in his carrel seventh from the aisle; I may have weakened and passed by the apartment building at 1183 Chambers Street once or twice, but only at such hours when Vernor Matheius couldn't have been there; and I didn't pause to stare openly at the building, still less did I prowl the alley behind it. So it was purely chance that Vernor Matheius and I had come to the gorge at the same time: never had I seen him in the vicinity before, and never had I mentioned to him that I came here. (If I had a life apart from my attentiveness to Vernor Matheius, neither he nor I would have thought it worth mentioning.) I saw him stroll out onto the footbridge; I saw his lips pursed, in a tuneless whistle; he was wearing a rumpled stone-gray sport coat that fitted his shoulders tightly, as if he'd outgrown it, and russet-brown trousers with a crease. He began to slow his pace, as if realizing where he was. High in the air on a wind-rocking footbridge. He shaded his eyes: this view captured his attention. To the north, a small mountain, outcroppings of granite dense and convoluted as if to some mysterious purpose, like folds in the human brain. I saw Vernor Matheius lean against the railing and stare down; lean over the railing and stare down; a thrill of horror touched me-What if he Jails? I was frightened suddenly and stepped out onto the footbridge. I knew this might be a mistake, he'd think I had been following him, but I couldn't resist; I told myself I would pass behind him, as if unaware of him (for his back was to me, I might not have identified him in ordinary circumstances), and maybe he would notice me, and maybe he would not; in that way, our meeting was left to pure chance. But my heart was beating so hard, the very footbridge must have vibrated! I will not, I will not speak. Will not reveal myself. The wind buffeted us on the footbridge as if in mockery. Vernor Matheius, leaning far over the railing, holding his wire-rimmed glasses with both hands as if concerned they might fall off, wasn't going to notice me… except my shadow must have brushed against him; and with the instinctive reflex with which one would glance back at someone or something passing close behind him on a swaying footbridge thirty feet above a gorge, Vernor Matheius glanced back at me; I saw his worried face, his creased forehead; I thought naively He doesn't trust the world! I lacked the insight to realize He doesn't trust the white world. But in the intoxication of the moment neither of us had time for such revelations: our eyes locked, recognition shone in his like a lit match. "Anellia. Again."

My hair was whipping in the wind. I pulled a strand out of my mouth. Vernor Matheius's gaze dropped to my waist, to my hips, legs and ankles and lifted again with masculine ease, lingering on my breasts and face; as if I'd positioned myself on the footbridge, a few feet away, to be so contemplated. Around my waist was the belt of linked silver medallions; I wore a ribbed black cotton-wool top with long sleeves and tight wrists, and a black-and-lavender skirt in a crinkly Indian material that fitted me loosely, like a gown falling to mid-thigh. These were secondhand clothes, costume clothes. "I-I come here sometimes. It's so-" meaning to say beautiful but the obvious, over-used word stuck in my throat. Nor could I explain I wasn't following you, Vernor. Except in my thoughts. How can I be blamed? He seemed bemused by me. Possibly he didn't hate me. Between us was the memory of the last time we'd spoken, on the sidewalk in front of Norwood Hall. Between us, the humiliating memory of when Vernor Matheius had first seen me.

Scavenging in a trash can!

Yet now Vernor was smiling, smiling at me, if still there was an air of reserve and even reproach in his face. We were talking about what?- ordinary things. My heart that had been pounding absurdly now began to ease. My thoughts of death of only a few minutes before had vanished as if blown by the wind. Between one and none there lies an infinity.

It may have occurred to me that in my charmingly funky gypsy-clothes I was pretty again. I would be desired.

It may have occurred to me that whatever the consequences of such costuming, I would accept them.

Thirty feet above the black-rushing artery deep in rock as if suspended in time.

There was a subtle but vital change in Vernor Matheius, in his manner which was animated, alert, even edgy; in the timbre of his voice, which was higher-pitched than usual; in the way his forehead creased almost too urgently as he spoke. That noon at the university there'd been a civil rights demonstration in front of the chapel that would be denounced in local newspapers as the work of "outside agitators" but given extensive, sympathetic coverage in the Daily Orange, the student paper; in the gusty spring day in which a phantom rainbow shimmered in a washed-blue sky there'd been the distraction of amplified voices on the green, disturbing voices where ordinarily there were no voices; these were voices that upset some students and professors; voices that thrilled others; some classes had been canceled so that students could attend but most classes continued; I saw more black faces than I would have believed there were at the university, and individuals who obviously weren't students but organizers. I'd been hurrying from one classroom to another when I heard the speakers, raised voices interrupted by applause, and by some jeers and boos. Of course, I knew of civil rights activism in the South; the arrests and martyrdom of Martin Luther King Jr. and his co-demonstrators during a peaceful march in Birmingham, Alabama; yet if pressed, I could not have said whether the United States government was protecting the rights of the protestors, or the rights of local authorities to arrest them. Two weeks before, there'd been an even more disruptive demonstration on campus, a rowdy gathering of about thirty SANE (STOP ALL NUCLEAR EXPERIMENTATION) pickets of whom all were white, defiantly ill-groomed older students; these pickets, undergraduates had loudly heckled; fraternity men wrested some of their handmade signs from them and broke them into pieces; the SANE demonstrators were denounced as "Communists" or "Communist dupes"; campus police finally routed them off with a threat of arrest. I'd arrived too late; I found a sign in the mud-BAN THE BOMB FOR MANKIND'S SAKE!-and would have carried it away except it was taken from me and torn. The civil rights demonstration had been organized by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and was better attended, and better respected; I looked for Vernor Matheius in the crowd gathered in front of the chapel steps though knowing I wouldn't see him, for such public displays were not compatible with the quieter, more circuitous strategies of philosophy to transform the world. And now on the footbridge above Oneida Creek I sensed how I must not bring up the subject. I must not allude to what had happened, or was happening, back on campus; I wasn't one who knew much about contemporary politics, for I rarely read a newspaper, never saw television; like Vernor Matheius, I was absorbed in the life of the mind; of this indifference, I may have been proud; though that day I'd have liked to carry a picket sign in support of civil rights, for the demonstrators seemed admirable to me, courageous and articulate, and their opponents were embittered and ugly. Vernor wanted to hear nothing about this, I sensed; he was leaning with his back against the railing now, arms outstretched; it was something of a shock to see the man in daylight, in the open air; his youthful-ness, his edginess; the faint yellow tinge of his eyeballs; the smudged lenses of his glasses. He was speaking of his work, a new problem in his research; he was hoping to explore the classic problem of "ontological proof" from a purely linguistic perspective. He'd come under the spell of the early Wittgenstein, the lacerating, revolutionary Tractatus-"It's almost too banal, to be enthralled by Wittgenstein. Yet, just possibly, there's no one quite like him." I shut my eyes and saw the flattened pillow on Vernor Matheius's bed, I could imagine its scent, the smell of his hair; I could not recall whether in fact I'd seen the pillow and the bed or whether Vernor had so quickly changed his mind about me, and herded me out of his apartment, I'd seen nothing; I'd had to imagine. How strong now the impulse to press myself into Vernor Matheius's arms; to press my face against his throat. No: you must not. You will disgust him.

Vernor saw me shivering, and said, "Are you cold, Anellia?" and I admitted, "Yes, I'm cold," for this was true; the sun was obscured by clouds, and about to set; it was spring by the calendar, but high above the gorge the air retained a wintry chill. Vernor Matheius shifted his arm as if to protect me; it was an invitation to move into the crook of his arm; yet I stood paralyzed, uncertain. Oddly he asked, "Is that why you're here?" and I heard myself say, "Yes, that's why." He said, "This seems to me a dangerous place. D' you know, Anellia, this is a dangerous place?" He peered into the gorge below, frowning, yet with satisfaction. I said, weakly, "Yes, it's dangerous. People have jumped." Vernor removed his coat to drape around my shoulders; it was the most intimate gesture that had ever passed between us, and I swallowed hard, I was stricken to the heart. Under the coat Vernor wore one of his white, long-sleeved shirts, rumpled as if he'd been wearing it for days. This is the Platonic idea of a white shirt. This is not an actual shirt. He had no woman to launder and iron and cook for him; he wanted no woman to launder and iron and cook for him; I understood this, for in his place I would not have wanted a woman either. Yet how grateful I was, that Vernor Matheius wasn't married: for at the onset, when I'd gazed at him longingly across rows of strangers, I had seemed to see, glinting on his hand, a wedding band; in fact, there was no wedding band; no rings on his fingers; Vernor Matheius didn't even wear a watch, boasting he was no slave to clock-time. He was saying, "I'm not a nature person. I think nature is overrated. Nature is what you turn to when your brain fails. But I like coming here, when I have time. Because it is a dangerous place. I like the footbridge, seeing through the slats. I like the wind making it sway. I've caught god-awful colds out here. I like being alone here knowing there's an instinct in us to push ourselves over a railing like this; an instinct to die to which I'm never going to succumb. I like the mastery of not succumbing and of knowing I won't succumb. I like knowing what I won't do, and what I will do. If I want to do it." I was gripping the lapels of the coat that was much too large for me; I felt overwhelmed by Vernor Matheius's closeness, and the confiding way in which he spoke. He said, "You're right, people have jumped from this bridge. And it's kept quiet. Because dying, especially to no purpose, is contagious. Every year a number of persons will 'commit suicide' as it's called, as if fulfilling a statistical prophecy, though they know nothing of one another or of the prophecy. I like knowing that I, Vernor Matheius, will never be one of these; I don't behave in any way that others can predict; that's not my nature." I could hardly bear loving him so much, it was all I could do to stammer, "No, V-Vernor, that's not in your nature." Had I ever dared call him "Vernor" before? He stared at me, he framed my face in his hands. I was a puzzle to him and he could not determine whether the puzzle was worth it, to solve. At this moment someone stepped onto the footbridge and began to cross; we could feel his footsteps, his weight; oddly, I understood that this intrusion would not evoke a response in Vernor Matheius, or rather it would not evoke a normal response; Vernor Matheius was not one to be affected by the accidental intrusion of a stranger into his privacy. The stranger approached us, and passed close to us; a man in a bulky sweater, who glanced at us only briefly; Vernor paid no heed to him as if he didn't exist; Vernor kissed me, not on the lips which would have been a warm, moist kiss, a kiss of yearning and of promise, but on the forehead, just below my wind-whipping hair where my skin and his lips were taut with cold.

" 'Anellia.' Is that scavenged, too?"

I am not a man for any woman to count on, I am not a man who wants to be loved.

As it was not in Vernor Matheius's nature to be predicted, so it was not in Vernor Matheius's nature to be held to any promise. Even the vaguest promise. It was not in his nature to fall into any routine, however casual. Such as: meeting "Anellia" when the library closed and walking with me across the campus which was near-deserted at that hour; in the romance of spring, when even a fine feathery rain was fragrant with renewal. Though sometimes he'd grip my hand, my bare hand, squeezing the fingers so that I winced without his noticing, talking of his work, his ideas; always he was on the edge of a "breakthrough" regarding the ontological problem, Wittgenstein, and language. Yet he would not plan such meetings even a day beforehand. They must be accidental, or seeming so. He might telephone to invite me to meet him at the coffeehouse but if I wasn't in, he would not leave a message; he would not leave even his name. Once or twice a week he dropped in at the coffeehouse to play chess, but there could be no pattern here, either. His chess companions could not depend upon him. Sometimes, sighting me, they would ask, "Is Vernor coming?" and I would tell them with a smile I had no idea. "Only Vernor Matheius knows where Vernor Matheius is, and only Vernor Matheius knows where Vernor Matheius is going." Yet, by chance, if we met, Vernor would seem genuinely happy to see me; perhaps I'd become like the footbridge, not dangerous but a possibility of something undefined; he would ask if I "was "free" for a meal, as if, always, I was not "free" for Vernor Matheius; we would enter a darkened Italian restaurant near the hospital, Vernor's hand on my shoulder as if I might need guidance; we might enter Downy's, to sit in a rear, shadowy booth whispering together like any couple; I would reason If in others' eyes we are a couple, then that is what we are. Except in the coffeehouse, among Vernor's friends, there were invariably people observing us, curious and hostile eyes; these were the eyes of whites exclusively. Are they lovers? Those two? Not that there were no interracial couples in Syracuse at that time. Surely there were. (Though I rarely saw them.) But something in Vernor Matheius's manner was too visible, provoking. And maybe I looked too young.

Most days I did not see Vernor. These were days so defined: as an insomniac night is defined by the absence of sleep, so these days of nullity and edginess were defined by the absence of Vernor Matheius.

Didn't I warn you: don't love me. Don't even try to know we.

Because it can't be done. Knowing we.

Because identity is within. A man's self is within where the rest of you can't measure it.

18

Yet: we were crossing a city street late one evening, gripping hands, in a playful mood, and a crazed car, a carload of drunken kids, not university students but local young-male whites, provoked by the sight of us and yelling "Nigger!"-"Nig-ger!"-"Nig-ger's bitch!"-swerved in our direction; a jeering horn, beer cans flung at us spraying beer like urine. I would remember with a thrill of emotion that Vernor didn't release my hand but gripped it tighter. "Don't look at them. Don't turn around. They don't exist." Vernor spoke coldly, furiously; we walked swiftly along the pavement, and turned a corner; the car was gone; the incident was over; even the flung beer hadn't touched us. I was too shocked to have been frightened, but now I began to tremble. Vernor was trembling, too. But he said nothing further until, shortly afterward, climbing the wooden steps outside his apartment building, his hand still gripping mine, he murmured, "Stay with me for a while." It was not a question nor even a commandment but rather a statement of fact. I said yes, I would. Inside his apartment a single lamp was burning. He said, quietly, "Anellia, take off your clothes."

With that air still of quiet, subdued fury he fumbled to remove his trousers, tugging and yanking impatiently at his white shirt, flinging his clothes toward a chair; I was slow to remove my clothing, my lingers numbed and without sensation, so he turned to me, wordless, thumbs digging into my shoulders; he seemed almost to be lifting me, breathing hotly and impatiently into my face, pushing me toward his bed in a darkened corner of the room; a narrow, hastily made-up bed with a flattened mattress sagging in the center, a flattened pillow of which how many times I'd dreamt swooning in absurd yearning, now inhaling the strong scent of Vernor Matheius's oily hair, the scent of his heated body, the dark crook of his neck, his underarms springy with hair, his flat belly, his crotch, and his feet; his mouth was pressed against mine for the first time, as if to silence me; his mouth larger, fuller, fleshier and more demanding than mine; and his tongue forcing itself into my mouth; quickly, before I could open to receive it; Vernor Matheius did not want me to take him, he wanted me to be taken by him; his tongue an agent of his cold, purposeful fury; for the jeering white boys in the careening car were vanished, and only I remained; I was seized with panic, unable to breathe; I couldn't kiss Vernor Matheius because his mouth mauled mine, and his fingers mauled, kneaded, squeezed, and stroked my body; I was limp and unresisting tasting his enormous tongue, the beery-acidic saliva of his mouth that was so hungry, moaning as if in pain, and I thought, dazed Now it will happen, at last: he will love me. I felt his penis swollen and blood-engorged pressed against my belly, it was like a living, groping, demanding thing; I tried to whisper, "Vernor, I I-love you-" as in such erotic fantasies I'd whispered these words, in my fantasies these were magical words, words with the power to transform an urgent, clumsy, graceless act into an act of profound meaning; a prayer with the power to make sacred an act of which crude, callous, and derisory things were said, my brothers saying such things, laughing, secret jokes and signals girls weren't supposed to understand; mustn't allow them to know she understands; but my words were choked, I couldn't draw breath to speak; Vernor didn't hear; Vernor didn't want to hear; this wasn't a time for words, from me. He wants to fuck you. Nothing more. Kneeling over me hunched and tremulous, his narrow rib cage heaving with the effort of breath; the bones defined against the tight, sweat-gleaming skin; skin scintillating with tiny beads of sweat like mica I wanted to lick with my tongue; but I could not, I was pinned to the bed by Vernor's weight, a hand pressing my shoulder to the bed so I was barely able to touch him, to reach for him, to slip an arm around his neck. As he'd removed his clothes hurriedly and tossed them aside, he'd removed his glasses, and his eyes were deep-socketed and glistening; without his glasses he was a man I didn't know; the flying skeins of beer like urine had defiled us both, though not touching us; jeering ugly white-man voices Nig-ger! in this room with us struggling in the dark so Vernor Matheius grunted what sounded like "Nig-ger! who's a nig-ger?" He was touching me between the legs, where no man had ever touched me; my skin contracted at his touch, as if with sudden cold; in panic; his fingers were sharp, prodding, impatient where my body had shut up tight; in helpless physical dread I'd shut up tight; to my dismay I'd shut up tight though I wanted to love Vernor Matheius; though wanting to love him, to open myself to him, I could not; I heard him curse; I heard him laugh; his laughter had the sibilant sound of a curse. "You-!" As if there was no worse curse. "Jesus Christ, girl-you." Vernor Matheius took pity on me, and abandoned me. Damned if he was going to force me. Kneeling above me he held his penis and with quick expedient strokes brought himself wincing to climax; his face contorted like a muscle in spasm, against his will; eyes glazing so he wasn't seeing me, wasn't seeing anything. He collapsed then beside me, nudging my head with his. And still I dared to say, biting my lower lip, "Vernor, I I-love you."

Vernor said nothing. Didn't move. His breath in long erratic shud ders. Through my damp eyelashes I contemplated the length of him, this man lying beside me in a rumpled, sweaty bed, his long hard-muscled legs, and my pale legs beside his; I could not say Forgive me, I knew he would laugh. The fury in his laughter would be devastating. So we lay for some minutes in silence except for Vernor's breathing which by degrees began to slow, yet still a harsh sibilant sound, the despair of the spirit locked inside the body, the spirit that can be defined only through body, and defiled.

"Go wash up. It's through here."

This was a command, not bullying or unkind but forceful. Vernor was on his feet, and again restless. His naked eyes avoided mine. Avoided even my face, my body. That girl's body glimmering pale and insubstantial before him in the twilight of a room that seemed no longer his, or no longer his exclusively. Wordless, like a rebuffed child I took up my clothes, these scattered forlorn things flung down onto bare floorboards; my costume-clothes, which had worked their magic, until the magic ran out. And how abruptly and rudely it ran out. Stooping, I lifted the belt, ornamental silver medallions that tinkled faintly together like coins of small denominations. For the first time I wondered who'd originally owned this beautiful and utterly impractical belt: my lost twin, a girl with a twenty-three-inch waist. She'd be grown up by now. If she was still alive.

I went into Vernor Matheius's cubbyhole of a bathroom. I groped for a light switch: above the sink, an unshaded forty-watt bulb came on. Out leapt a startled white face in the cabinet mirror; a face I didn't recognize at first; a face both wan and radiant in a kind of triumph. He did love me. Wanted to love me. We were naked together. Our bodies. Even if he sent me away forever, such facts couldn't be changed. The bathroom door was made of a cheap warped wood and didn't shut completely. The space contained a sink layered in grime, a toilet and a stall shower with a torn plastic curtain partly mended with adhesive tape. Above the toilet tank was the likeness of a brooding, somber man of young middle age, dark curly hair, a narrow intolerant nose, thin lips. These lips were shut tight with a look of stubborn intensity. I recognized Ludwig Wittgenstein, the "piercing" dark eyes, the military manner; he wore a tweed coat, his shirt unbuttoned at the throat. Clutched in both hands at waist level was a bamboo cane. Wittgenstein had not succumbed to madness, nor to suicide; given the fates of others in his tragic family, this alone was a triumph. I understood why the philosopher was a hero to Vernor Matheius: he'd negated the very premises of his apparent destiny, to re-invent himself as pure, disembodied intellect. It took me another beat or two to realize that Vernor had placed Wittgenstein's likeness above the toilet so that, standing to urinate as he would be doing frequently, he could meditate upon his hero in a posture both submissive and blasphemous.

Beside the sink was a towel rack holding two neatly arranged but not very clean towels. And a washcloth stiffened with use. I was thinking Vernor Matheius placed those there, not foreseeing how I would observe them. In my agitated state, this was a consoling thought. Vernor couldn't have foreseen this incident. That I, an intruder, would be in his cubbyhole of a bathroom washing at his sink, taking careful note of the white, chipped-porcelain sink and the soap on the sink rim; the toilet with its ill-fitting tank top and its badly worn plastic seat, the stained bowl within, water quivering as if something had touched it, or the building were vibrating. And there was the pale green plastic shower curtain, a dime-store curtain practicably mended with tape, the mending itself meticulously done, so I could imagine Vernor frowning as he applied himself to the task, with the identical precision and stubbornness with which he applied himself to philosophy. Inside was a stall shower so narrow and foreshortened I wondered how Vernor Matheius could fit inside without stooping. (But of course he'd have had to stoop, if he wanted to take a shower.) None of these could Vernor Matheius have anticipated I would see.

I washed myself quickly, lathering soap in my hands, not wanting to use Vernor's -washcloth or one of the towels. Washing quickly between my legs, and my belly, where his semen was still damp, and sticky; clots of it, transparent and gluey; I felt this in wonder and in dread; how a man's semen leaps from his body, as if it were meant to bridge an abyss; like the clotted seeds of cottonwood trees, meant to be carried through space; I was thrilled at the new intimacy between us, which could not be revoked; though I knew that Vernor might repudiate me as a consequence; and I knew that there was a possibility that I could be impregnated, even if his seed hadn't been shot up into my body. Unlikely, yet I knew it was possible. We are lovers now.

Now that Vernor Matheius had made love to me, however incompletely, I felt a new tenderness for my body. Washing, I cupped my hand lightly between my legs; marveled at the prickly, wiry hairs; how distinct the hairs, and how distinct the flesh they shielded; a part of my body I hadn't cared much to consider; not out of shame so much as indifference, impatience; for what have I to do with my genitals, what identification with my sex? Yet I felt now this tenderness for myself; for Vernor Matheius had wanted to make love to me; he had in fact made love to me; we were bound together forever. I dried myself using toilet paper. Dressing then in the cramped space because I knew I must reappear fully clothed to Vernor Matheius. The silver-medallion belt was tricky to fasten, my hands were shaking. Yet I didn't believe that I was upset any longer, or frightened. And when I returned to the other room, there was Vernor seated at his desk as I'd known he would be; at the desk I so admired, twice the size of my own; beneath the noble, ascetic faces of Socrates and Descartes. Vernor, too, was fully dressed; his white long-sleeved shirt buttoned to the throat. Those shirts were cotton, he'd have had to take them to a dry cleaner's to have them laundered and ironed and so it was an indulgence, clearly a necessity. He must have washed himself quickly at his kitchen sink. Washed away the smells of our bodies. Sweat, semen. My desperation. His face looked burnished as if he'd scrubbed it hard. The round lenses of his glasses gleamed. He was himself again, Vernor Matheius.

To protect himself from me he'd lighted a cigarette. He'd pulled the Olivetti typewriter to him as if I were interrupting him in the midst of work; a sheet of paper cranked into the typewriter, a pile of handwritten notes beside it. There, he's happiest. He won't need you now. Vernor spoke often of working at night, sleeping for an hour or two and waking and returning to work refreshed, with new ideas; invigorated, excited. The thought of such a method made me tired. I didn't approach him, I understood how he wanted me to keep my distance from him. How badly I would have liked to touch him; slide my arms around his neck; as lovers did, so easily; I would have liked to kiss him, his cheek, his fleshy mouth; I would have liked to bury my warm face in his neck, inhale his fragrance another time, the yeasty-almondy-oily scent of Vernor Matheius's body. But I didn't dare touch him of course. Knowing how he'd have recoiled. Even my shadow brushing against him would lacerate his nerves. So quietly I said, "Good night, Vernor," and went to the door unlocking it, opening it myself; not wanting him to feel obliged to escort me back to my residence hall, nor even stir from where he sat; I didn't want him to feel a tinge of guilt; I didn't want him to feel resentment for that guilt; I didn't want him to feel that I was thinking these things, as if I had a right to think such things; I did not want to provoke him, and endanger our love.

My behavior surprised him-did it? He turned to stare at me as I prepared to leave him. At the door murmuring, softly, shyly so that the man might hear or not hear, as he wished, "Vernor, I love you. Good night."

I fled. I was partway down the outdoor stairs when I heard Vernor call after me in an undertone, protesting, "God damn you, girl, you do not love me. You do not know me."

19

The sleeping man. His face wasn't one of repose but of torment, anguish. His forehead knotted, his mouth twisted into a grimace. The eyeballs moving beneath the shut lids. A quivering of his dark lustrous skin like a rippling in water. If I could see him as ugly, unattractive. If I could see him as unloved. I was a child bringing her fingertips to flame, inviting pain; daring pain; disbelieving pain. Trying to imagine my life without Vernor Matheius at its center. My life without loving him.

A hole in the heart through which the bleak cold of the universe might whistle through.

Strange to me, who stared at Vernor Matheius as he slept, on rare occasions when I was privileged to see him sleep, that there were others, Caucasians, a category of individuals to which in theory I belonged, who might gaze at Vernor Matheius in his unfathomable complexity and think merely Negro. And dismiss as Negro. What madness!

I came to believe that the unexamined life, the life that's led without continuous self-scrutiny, and a doubting of all inherited prejudice, bias, "faith," was madness. In our civilized lives we are surrounded by madness while believing ourselves enlightened.

In May of that year in our windswept northerly city there were cold driving rains like nails blown against flesh; the rush of happiness in the morning's sunshine would fade by midday when thunderheads gathered like artillery above Lake Ontario and moved south to spill themselves on our heads. Great bruised clouds swollen to bursting. The tumescence of nature. The bursting of nature. My lover's skin smoldered, infuriated. His eyes glancing away. He said I have no people, no parents, no brothers or sisters; I have no god; I have no home except in the mind. My thoughts are my home. And I asked Isn't it lonely there, Vernor? And he said simply No. It's lonely here.

20

"Anellia! Let's examine this. You've told me that you pledged a 'sorority' "-the very word uttered with bemused disdain-"without knowing it discriminated against certain persons? Jews, 'Negroes'?"

It was an examination rough as sandpaper. Vernor Matheius rubbing sandpaper briskly and gloatingly on my bare skin.

I stared at my feet. At the ground. Brittle gravel mixed with mud. I tried to remember: had I known? What had I known? The individual who'd been myself the previous year, before Vernor Matheius, had become a stranger. I could not respect her, only just pity her in her ignorance. Softly I said, like a guilty child, "I would guess-I hadn't known."

"Hadn't known! How is that possible?"

How was it possible? My impetuous, infatuated, unexamined act.

"I-didn't think to know."

"There! You're approaching it, girl. You didn't think."

And Vernor laughed heartily, shaking his head. A schoolteacher exasperated and delighted by his star pupil. As if his fingers were running over my body, tickling, if hurting; hurting just a little; and my body eager for this attention, as a puppy eager to be touched. This was Vernor Matheius in a playful mood. Vernor Matheius in his Socratic mood. (For all philosophers yearn to be Socrates, even those who dislike Socrates on principle, and have repudiated his bizarre metaphysics.) He loved it that Anellia who, so smart, such a smart little girl, should also be, frequently, so stupid.

Why had I confessed to him. My sordid Kappa past. My piteous Kappa past. Perhaps I'd wanted to amuse him by describing how I'd been voted out of the chapter almost unanimously-a single vote abstaining. (Whose vote? Never would I learn. Oh, that was unfair: unfair for me to be told such an astonishing fact, but no more.) I'd become deactivated from both the chapter and the national sisterhood of Kappa Gamma Pi. Telling Vernor of the experience, I didn't explain that I'd desperately petitioned for release; I'd been instructed how to proceed, sending letters to chapter officers and to the national executive board and to the Dean of Women (a powerful figure in such negotiations) explaining that I wanted to withdraw from the sorority. I could not explain to Vernor that I had never believed it was the fault of my Kappa sisters that I'd been such a failure, and so deeply unhappy, but my own fault; I was a freak in the midst of their stunning, stampeding, blazing female normality; if by magic I might have been transformed into a true Kappa, maybe in my desperation I'd have whispered-"Yes"? Still, they would not have released me for such a trifle as not fitting in. In my ignorance I'd signed documents I hadn't quite understood were legal contracts; I, who'd never signed such documents in my life and had glanced through these with misted-over eyes, scarcely pausing to read a line. To join a national sorority was a bold act binding one to financial obligations; this, I hadn't known. In my letters begging for release I'd explained that I was of Jewish ancestry and had failed to tell the truth about myself. I'd explained that I could not afford the sorority, and was already in debt for nearly three hundred dollars; under the irrefragable bylaws of the sorority I would have continued to be fined for missing meetings, I "would have continued to accumulate interest as a result of this debt, and yet I could not belong to the sorority or even attend the university without working during those hours when meetings were scheduled, and so on ad infinitum unless I was granted a legal release, or died.

Are you threatening suicide, I was asked in alarm.

And so they'd expelled me, unanimously. Except for a single mysterious abstaining vote I wished to think had been Dawn, who'd seduced me into the sorority with the hope (and it wasn't an unreasonable hope) that I would help raise the house's grade-point average.

Mrs. Thayer had been released from her contract, too. With rude expediency, immediately after the alumni reception.

I told Vernor Matheius nothing of Agnes Thayer. No longer did I think of Agnes Thayer.

Not truth but the uses to which we put truth. What is done, in the service of desire.

Walking to the Oneida Creek footbridge. It was a day for such a walk: even Vernor Matheius conceded. A strange mood, Vernor's mood. He'd had some good news, reported in the university newspaper; Vernor Matheius was one of four doctoral students awarded a research grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, to complete his Ph.D. dissertation the following year; when I congratulated him, he frowned and looked away evasively; of course he was pleased, yet he didn't seem to approve of his pleasure; he had to examine the roots of such a small, craven pleasure; taking delight in mere professional, public "success"-something that had to do solely with "career" and not the pursuit of truth. Especially it embarrassed him that in the philosophy department the professors congratulated him and shook his hand as if such a fluke pleased them, too; and this forced him to reconsider his estimation of them. "Oh, Vernor," I said. "Please stop. This is an infinite regress."

He said, quite seriously, "It is. An infinite regress. Next week I'll be thirty years old."

I could not see the connection here. I could not tell him I'd assumed he was older.

This balmy May afternoon in the hills above the university Vernor had reverted to his playful mood. I'd grown to anticipate his shifts of mood: like the sky above Lake Ontario. He believed himself stable, unvarying, a personality like Kant's you could set a watch by, in his temperament if not in his behavior; he believed he was a man devoted sheerly to the intellect, like Wittgenstein. Yet he was volatile, mercurial as the most capricious of the Kappa girls. I was fearful of him. I adored him.

We were walking with Vernor's arm around my shoulders, pulling me against him; an awkward way of walking; we were laughing, for my Kappa story had been intended to amuse; I would not have told any story of my life to Vernor Matheius that wasn't intended to amuse. In my feverish brief collapse after being expelled from the Kappas, one miserable day and a night in the university infirmary, I'd had a waking dream of the clinic in a Buffalo suburb in which (it had been pointed out to me once, years ago by a relative) my mother had gone for chemotherapy after her cancer operation, and this building had been old, regal and forbidding, with a half-dozen columns at the top of a flight of broad stone steps; the roof of the building had been a wet-looking dark blue slate; much of the building had been covered in ivy that needed trimming: the Kappa house: the original. Of such a revelation, and its impact like a rock tossed into my face, I could not have told Vernor Matheius who, in his buoyant Socrates-mood was saying, "So, Anellia, you of all people admit you hadn't thought." I said, "In fact I did think, Vernor, but mistakenly." "How so?" "I'd wanted-sisters. I was lonely away from home"-though I'd been lonely all my life at home, hadn't I?-"and I thought I wanted sisters, I wanted a family to like me." Vernor said, "But you didn't know these girls, did you?" I admitted, "No." Vernor said, "You wanted to be liked, Anellia, by individuals you didn't know? Why?" I said weakly, "I admired them, at a distance. Some of them." Vernor said, "Out of what did this admiration arise?" Like any dupe of Socrates I saw where I was being herded, but could not escape. "Well-they were attractive. They had personalities. They were so very different from me." Vernor said, "You mean they were good-looking? Sexy?" I was embarrassed and didn't answer at once. Saying finally, "Some of them." Vernor said, "But were they intelligent? Did you respect their intelligence?" and I laughed and said, "No," and he said, "Did they value intelligence?" and I said, uncomfortably warm beneath his heavy arm, "I don't suppose they did, no. Except in some way that might be useful to them." Vernor asked, "Useful how?" and I said, my embarrassment deepening, "Sometimes they asked me, some of them, to help them with their academic work; to revise their papers, or write them-sometimes." Vernor chuckled as if he'd suspected this all along; seen what I'd been too blind to see. "You, Anellia, wanted to be 'liked' by individuals you didn't know. Individuals of no special worth or achievement. Racists and bigots. Tell me why."

Oh, why did he pursue this? His voice low, throaty, seductive; cruel and caressing; the voice of my early dream of an unknown man at the periphery of my vision; the voice of the man who was my first love, the first to penetrate my tight drum of a body. The voice I would hear through my life like the murmur of my blood. Your first love, you'll never outlive. After that first love you will never love another in that way.

I said nothing. Vernor spoke frankly, "Yet you were the one who lied to them, Anellia. You were the hypocrite posing as someone you were not. 'Anellia'-she-who-is-not."

This wasn't an accusation but a statement. I'd told Vernor my true name one evening. Still he called me "Anellia"-I supposed he couldn't be troubled to learn another name.

We were in the park, no longer on the path. There were voices close by but Vernor seemed not to hear. He framed my face in his hands another time; in this way positioning me, "seeing" me; his strong thumbs bracketing my eyes, pulling the skin taut at the corners. My natural reflex was to shrink away, to free myself; what if he shoved his thumbs in my eyes; what if he gouged out my eyes; I knew of course that Vernor Matheius wasn't about to gouge out my eyes, yet there was the panicky wish to push away from him. At the same time I felt sexually aroused. His lightest touch, his closeness, the intimacy of his gaze. The threat of those strong thumbs. It was like standing beside a tall upright flame: you could not withstand the flame by any act of will. "Why'd you come here with me? What's your intention?" Vernor said. His words were teasing but his expression was intense as if every nerve in his face had tightened. Leading me farther off the trail. Still it was a public place, and in bright sunshine. I stumbled as if intoxicated. A wave of apprehension rose in me, what we might do. I felt the distance between us and this place; the natural world; the world beyond the net of human language; beyond the province of philosophy; for here was the puzzlement of which Wittgenstein spoke; puzzlement the inevitable human condition of those who try to think. Vernor Matheius's thumbs tugging at my eyes, the authority in his superior strength. I understood how a predator might run his prey to earth and that prey would go limp in acquiescence, once the jaws had closed about it; once it was clear there could be no escape.

Overhead, a chattering of jays like monkeys in a jungle.

21

The way out. To show the fly the way out of the bottle was the life's hope of Ludwig Wittgenstein but the truth is that human beings don't want a way out of the bottle; we are captivated, enthralled by the interior of the bottle; its glassy sides caress and console us; its glassy sides are the perimeters of our experience and our aspiration; the bottle is our skin, our soul; we're accustomed to the visual distortions of the glass; we would not wish to see clearly, without the barrier of the glass; we could not breathe a fresher air; we could not survive outside the bottle.

Or tell ourselves, in the glassy-echoing language of the bottle, that this is so.

22

As the ancient Jewish people, persecuted by their enemies, interpreted history and the random events of nature moralistically, believing that catastrophes even of weather and geology were consequences of man's evil, so in times of emotional distress we're inclined to ascribe moral significance to whatever happens. We cease believing in chance and cling to a belief in design; we can't accept that we don't deserve what happens to us; we prefer a wrathful, capricious god to no god at all. Like children we try to influence what can't be influenced; we beg to be treated mercifully. We become superstitious. We lose our moorings, we drift into madness.

When I was in love with Vernor Matheius, I did not believe that I could live without Vernor Matheius; with the clarity of thought of a geometrician I believed that to live without Vernor Matheius was to live a life so broken and depleted, it could not have been endured. That season of my life when I became twenty years old and passed out of girlhood forever. That season when it seemed to me (sometimes!) that Vernor Matheius might to some inscrutable degree love me in return; at the very least, there was that possibility. That season when I carried myself in the world like glass so fragile it might shatter at any moment.

That season when I understood that my euphoria, my grief, my fear, my hope were symptoms of madness. Yet I couldn't alter my behavior: I didn't want to alter my behavior; for that would have been to abandon the madness, the hope of being loved by Vernor Matheius; that would have been to abandon the bottle in which the fly was trapped; that would have been to die.

I was convinced that the connection between Vernor Matheius and myself was a force outside my volition as it was outside his; it would consume us both like wildfire. Therefore every glance-every facial expression-every word-every gesture of mine, however casual- had to be controlled. Always I watched myself. Always I judged myself. From childhood I'd known that there is a way of behaving that is good, decent, virtuous, and blameless; yet I had not much cared; for the worst had already happened to me, my mother had died; as a child I could not perceive otherwise than My mother's death happened to me; it was difficult to perceive that my mother's death had in fact happened to her. So now I reasoned: if I was good, decent, virtuous, and blameless I would be rewarded with Vernor Matheius's love; if not, not. There was no god monitoring such behavior; no more a Jewish god than a god of the Strykersville Lutheran church. But there was no need for a god. I'd become increasingly superstitious: as in the childhood of the race spirits and demons were believed to populate the invisible world, obsessively and absurdly concerned with human affairs, so it seemed to me in my love for Vernor Matheius that invisible forces were on my side, or against me; at all times I had to placate them; I couldn't ignore them or refute them; I couldn't risk defying them; I had to guard against impulsive wishful thoughts; as a young adolescent I'd first realized If you want a thing to happen, that is the thing that will not happen. Thinking for instance Vernor will call me tonight, we will make love in his bed fatally assured that this would not happen. My thoughts had no power to control my fate yet my thoughts were omniscient. How could this be? And yet it was. To counter these forlorn wish-thoughts all my thoughts had to be strictly monitored. To counter wish-thoughts all my behavior had to be strictly monitored. When I was reading, working, my mind wholly concentrated on mental effort, I was safe; I was relatively safe; my zeal as a student had never been greater because I had never been more driven; I understood too that Vernor Matheius could respect only an intelligent woman, a woman of academic accomplishment approaching his own; this was the root of my motivation, of my high grades. If my lover admired Wittgenstein, I must learn all I could of Wittgenstein. Though not daring to think He will love me Jot my intelligence, he will have no choice.

I was required to be "good." I smiled often, I was gracious, courteous, patient, kind. Even when the effort was exhausting. Even when my heart was breaking. Even when I wanted to die, to extinguish myself completely, to be free of my sick, radiant love for Vernor Matheius, to be free of love.

Is something wrong? is something wrong with your face? one of them was asking. A girl in Norwood Hall who'd seemed to be my friend. I was hurt, I was angry; I stared at her, eyes shining with tears like shards of glass. What do you mean? what is wrong with my face? and the girl who'd only meant to be kind said, embarrassed Your face seems stiff and frozen sometimes, you smile with just one side of your face.

23

"Anellia, lie down."

So that day he'd urged me. For the first time entering my body as a lover.

Making love clumsily, frantically in the grass; in the spongey earth; we two who'd come together to an impasse where language would fail us. Nothing but this. This! Veins stood out in Vernor's neck; a vein at his temple; he breathed quickly as if running; as if struggling; with his strong fingers he gripped my thighs as he pushed himself into me, kneading, squeezing my flesh that would be marbled with bruises for days afterward. I refused to cry out in pain, though I had never felt such pain; I refused to cry Oh! Vernor I love you because I knew he expected it of me. He hadn't removed any of his clothing, only opened his trousers, with quick practiced fingers he'd lifted my skirt, pushed aside the crotch of my underwear, guided himself into me. This, this and this! And done. Vernor said nothing as he made love to me, and would say nothing when he finished; at the end a soft, drawn-out moan of astonishment; a sound of helplessness and even incredulity. He'd collapsed then on top of me as if we'd fallen together from a height, with no knowledge of how we'd been injured. I was proud that I hadn't resisted; that I hadn't flinched in pain; the pain was a brightly flaring flame into which I thrust myself willingly; I was hammered, pounded, driven into the earth; overhead the sky reeled crazily, I could not have stammered the words for sky, cloud, pain, love.

24

Now we were lovers, now I would become familiar to him. Now there could be silence between us. The silence that allows us to forget that another is near, or exists.

When Vernor was bored, depressed, restless; when philosophy failed him, and his thoughts backed up like sewage he could taste, then he wanted a girl, he wanted a female body, by chance he wanted Anellia-C'mon girl: sing for me. Grinning at me like a death's head. Unshaven. Damp carnivore teeth. And not very white or very even teeth. I tried to object, what gave him the idea that I could sing? Was he mistaking me for someone else? Now glaring at me like a pasha Vernor said Sing, girl. You can save your life if you sing the right song. So, barefoot on the floorboards of Vernor's apartment (grimy shades partway drawn, windows shoved upward to dispel the airlessness) I sang what flew into my mind, haphazardly, shut my eyes singing imperfectly recalled song lyrics I'd heard on the radio as a girl, unmediated, shameless female longing for love, and Vernor laughing would clap loudly Faster, girl! Speed up the beat! Move that skinny little white ass of yours. I too laughed, for it was funny; out of my mouth burst crazy snatches of song, fragments of my torment in the Kappa house, the simpleminded maddening tunes of the Kingston Trio certain of the girls played repeatedly, and the pop-calypso

Hey c'mon Kitch let's go to bed

I gotta small comb to scratch ya head

which made Vernor burst into louder laughter, hearing such idiocy, such stupid smut, and of course it was black calypso from the Caribbean in a degraded bastardized form, so funny I sang again

Hey c'mon Kitch let's go to bed

I gotta small comb to scratch ya head

as Vernor rose to take hold of me, to pull me to him, with an expression almost of tenderness.

"Girl, you surprise me. Sometimes."

Desire rising in a man's eyes like a swiftly lit flame.

Like a swiftly lit flame, desire rising in a man's eyes.

When he was bored and depressed. When he was (he frankly acknowledged) in one of his shitty moods.

Two kinds of mood: the Inspired and the Shitty. Swinging between them like a monkey on bars.

He would write a treatise on it: The Epistemology of the Inspired and the Shitty; a Prolegomenon to Any Future Metaphysics.

On principle Vernor Matheius disapproved of moods. Was there acknowledgement of mood in Descartes, Spinoza, Kant? Mood as a category of human mental experience didn't exist in serious philosophical inquiry. Succumb to a mood and you're no longer a philosopher but something wounded, diminished. Like a violinist who breaks his violin. In such moods Vernor Matheius despised himself and in a way remarkable to me (who observed him sympathetically, if mostly in silence) did not seem to know himself.

Bored and depressed! And the spring so rich, rife with smells, even the night air of the city so fresh it made me yearn to walk for hours. But Vernor's thoughts were backed up and he didn't want to see newspaper headlines, pushing away scattered pages of the Syracuse paper left behind on a table in the coffeehouse or in a restaurant where we'd arranged to meet, didn't want to know of the civil rights marches that spring in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, the police attack dogs, Ku Klux Klan bombings, arrests of civil rights volunteers; Vernor wished the volunteers well, hoped they would succeed he said but he hadn't time to spare for politics, activism, even the contemplation of such activism. Time is an hourglass running in only one direction he said. I did not say I think they must he very brave, some of them very reckless living in time, in history for these thoughts hadn't yet crystallized in my mind, the words weren't there.

Love for any one thing is barbaric (so Vernor quoted Nietzsche back to me, but giving the aphorism a personal twist) yet more contemptible is lust, yet more contemptible than lust the habit of lust, the addiction. The body's odd compulsion, to grovel in another's flesh. As if redemption, meaning, one's own identity, might be found in another's flesh. That warm eager leap of seed, the promise in it. (Even if thwarted, by Vernor's technique of coming on my belly, not inside me; or tugging a condom on his erect, bobbing penis.) The habit of drinking (yes, Vernor admitted he was drinking more than he wanted to). And smoking (yes, Vernor was certainly smoking more, a foul filthy ridiculous and expensive addiction resulting in overflowing ashtrays and a perpetual bluish haze in the apartment). When his thoughts backed up. When he was in one of his moods. Shouldn't (he knew!) blame Anellia, poor sweet Anellia who loved him when he didn't deserve love, nor even respect; when his work wasn't going well; when he was praised wrongly (by, among others, his dissertation advisor, a professor twenty years Vernor's senior) though his work wasn't going well; and now the Humanities fellowship, which intensified his sense of how his work wasn't going well; yes, his work was adequate, his ideas were moderately original (if it's possible to be moderate in originality), but it wasn't the revolutionary treatise he'd intended to write. When he lost faith in himself, and in philosophy as a discipline to transcend the self; when he fell beneath the spell of philosophical puzzlement; beneath the spell of the tragic, lacerating Wittgenstein for whom the posing of unanswerable riddle-questions was a strategy for the postponement of Wittgenstein's suicide (of his four brothers, three had killed themselves) as the nightly storytelling of Scheherazade was a strategy for the postponement of the storyteller's murder; when he lost faith not in philosophy but in the very concept of faith; when he despised all who admired him; when he despised me for adoring him; when he despised himself for being adored; for how like any addiction was a man's sexual desire; a man's bluntly physical sexual need; that weakness of imagination he believed he'd conquered years ago in the seminary; yet now it seemed to have returned; how like a sickness that need for Anellia whose true name he declined to recall, the thin palely gleaming body, a Caucasian female body into which he might fall as in a dream without limits. Removing my clothes as if I were a child to be undressed. Studying me with scholarly objectivity adjusting his wire-rimmed glasses. Some of this was joking, playful; yet beneath the playfulness a strange sobriety; like a philosopher in a medieval woodcut gazing upon a skull, in wonder-merit; brushing away my crossed arms where I tried to hide myself, embarrassed by his scrutiny.

Don't pretend, Anellia. It's too late for that.

Whispering words not meant for me to hear, words of angry endearment or obscenities or curses; the voice was hoarse, cracked; the voice was not Vernor Matheius's voice; it was not the voice I'd originally loved; a voice of helpless, furious desire; a voice of backed-up drains; a voice choked by desire, and by the resentment of desire; but often Vernor would say nothing at all, nor did he seem to trust himself touching me except in a proprietary measuring way, running his thumb against a small vein by my hairline, framing my face in his hands and bringing both his thumbs dangerously close to my eyes. Such beautiful eyes, Anellia and this was part of the puzzlement for he'd scarcely been aware of me in the early weeks of our affair, it was as if (but could this be possible?) he'd been blind to me, and therefore ignorant, misled; saying How can you trust me, who could gouge out your eye in an instant but of course (of course!) I trusted him, winced but never protested when he squeezed my breasts as if hoping to squeeze liquid from them, squeezed my bruised thighs, my small buttocks smoothly cupped in his hands as he began to make love to me in jagged, pumping spurts, whispering what he wished not to say aloud Your tight stingy little cunt your skin the color and texture of your skin are repulsive to me don't you know? don't you know? can't you guess? can't you guess? guess? guess? as he pumped himself into me in accelerating rhythm How can you love me? how can you be fucked by me? how can you so debase yourself? Never would I have dared to say But I love you; though often in my dreams I said But I love you: my lover would cover my mouth with his to suffocate my speech; as his pleasure mounted he would grind his mouth, his teeth, against mine, groaning and cursing; if I began to feel sexual pleasure rising in me, with sudden stealthy swiftness, as a candle flame may be stirred by an invisible breeze, if an overwhelming and obliterating sensation burst between my legs, I dared not scream; he didn't want his neighbors to hear me scream; if he closed his fingers around my throat he didn't want to hear me scream; if he spat into my mouth that seemed to him, in orgasm, ugly and gaping as a fish's mouth, he did not want to hear me scream; he would fill my small mouth with his tongue; he would fill my small gagging mouth with his cock; my dry mouth filled with his immense tongue; my dry mouth filled with his immense cock; he would spill all that had been jealously hoarded of himself into me, that I might choke and drown; yet whimpering almost saying Oh Jesus! almost saying my name almost saying Love, love you as if such forbidden words were snatched from him as his milky seed was snatched from him in the obliteration of orgasm always so much more powerful than one can anticipate, almost then he would say I love you Anellia. In his spidery fingers he would grip my back, my hips and buttocks so that the imprint of his fingers would remain for days, overlaid upon earlier bruises; lying above me, he'd arch his backbone like a bow, he would collapse upon me half-sobbing and delirious from that fall; from that height; he would bury his face in my neck; his groaning mouth, his teeth against my neck; he would press his hot face between my breasts that were chafed, aching; my nipples erect in arousal and fear; exhausted he would lie in my arms, defeated; I would stroke his hair I loved; his nubby tightly curly oily hair that was mine to stroke; I would cradle his heavy, carved-looking head that was mine to cradle; my lover's thoughts came in slow languid waves now; the agitated surf had broken and was now waves; warm shallow waves; gazing slantwise at his face, from slightly above as I held him, I saw his tremulous eyelids; the life in those eyelids; the life of the eye, the vision, the brain inside those eyelids; I understood that it is only in such intimacy that we know another person; it is only in such intimacy that we know ourselves, in proximity to another person; the nakedness of lovers is the nakedness of a mother and her infant; the nakedness of lovers is that first nakedness, or it is nothing; which is why lovers will kill for it, to attain it and repudiate it; at last I would begin to speak, as Vernor's soul subsided and his eyelids stilled, drifting toward sleep; I spoke softly and quietly in the aftermath of lovemaking; I spoke wonderingly to my lover of things I had never seen but only imagined, a bright blue sea rippling in sunshine where on an extraordinary wide, white beach of a kind unknown in my experience, sand fine as confectioners' sugar, I ran splashing in the warm surf and cut my foot on a sea-shell of remarkable coral-pinkness and my mother who'd been running just behind me lifted me in her arms and kissed me as I cried more in surprise than in pain; though the pain came swiftly, throbbing through my foot; and my mother took me away to wash, and to kiss, the hurt little foot, and made it well; I told him of my mother who'd been only a girl embarking on a voyage, there in the waves I saw her but a hundred yards from shore, alone in a small rowboat, alone with a single oar, how had this happened? why was my mother so far away, and I was screaming for her on shore? my mother whose face was beautiful and loving though I could not see it clearly, a face flimsy (like all faces perhaps) as rice paper to be marred, torn almost by accident; I told Vernor of my father whose body I had not seen, in life (it seemed to me) as in death; a man with a heavy flushed face and his heart heavy inside him; the burden of that enlarged, heavy heart; yet he'd had a handsome face once; a face very different from Vernor's carved-wooden face; a face that seemed boneless, of muscle, gristle, and fat; a face smudged as in a charcoal drawing deliberately ruined; once I'd drawn my father in charcoal, at school; I'd drawn him from memory, brought it home to show the others and they'd been surprised at my skill, showed it to my father and he'd laughed shaking his head You got me there an expression I did not comprehend, and later that evening he'd asked to see it again and this time tore it in two; always I would recall my shock, the hurt of it, as my father tore his own face in two; always I would remember his angry laughing; yet if I cried, my tears were insincere for I'd guessed beforehand that I shouldn't have done it; shouldn't have drawn my father's face; it's a transgression to replicate your father's face if you reveal too much. Yet he'd seemed to love me, that day at high school graduation. Don't let no fuckers out there sell you short. I told my lover how at night in the country sometimes I would wake suddenly to hear Death outside in the cornstalks in the wind of late autumn; I heard Death entering my grandparents' farmhouse which was too flimsy to keep Death out; I lay awake in my bed too frightened to breathe listening to Death moving across the creaking floorboards downstairs; I prayed that Death would pass me by, and that Death would pass by the others in the house; my three tall brothers, my grandparents and, if he was home, my father; I saw that all who live lie very still in terror of Death at such times; waiting for Death to pass by, or waiting for Death to take another; as in a herd of beasts terrorized by predators there must be the single instinct-wish Take another! take another and not me! This was a secret of which adults would not speak; this was a secret known by children, and forgotten by adults; a secret of which the great philosophers would not speak because it is so stark, so simple; a secret lacking revelation.

These things and others I told my lover Vernor Matheius when he lay in my arms, sweaty and spent and at peace; temporarily at peace; Vernor Matheius warm, heavy, and unresisting in my arms; his eyes shut; his face shut; gently I stroked his hair, his head, his shoulders, his arms; this was the great happiness of my life, holding Vernor Matheius in my arms; Vernor Matheius who had once been a disembodied voice in a lecture hall; I thought Only what we don't deserve justifies our lives. For I could not believe that I deserved Vernor Matheius. I knew that I did not deserve Vernor Matheius. Sharing in clumsy intimacy in his narrow bed, the mattress flat and sagging in the center like a broken-backed beast of burden; the sheets damp from our bodies and suffused with our sweat, the smell of Vernor's hair, underarms and feet, the smell of his stopped-up semen liquid and milky in the condom drooping from his shrunken penis; Vernor Matheius subdued after sexual triumph which was to him indistinguishable from sexual defeat; we would share this uncomfortable bed, and this hour or hours, but we would not share sleep; we would not share dreams; for where Vernor Matheius drifted in sleep I did not know, could not guess, as I floated on the surface of sleep like froth on water and sank a little, and rose and sank, and sank, my sleeping fingers in the man's hair as I drifted off at last to sleep, knowing where he'd gone I could not follow.

25

And what of my life in those months that was not Vernor Matheius, what of the vast incalculable world not Vernor Matheius, what of a girl whose body I inhabited who was not Anellia but another individual entirely, what connection, what vision seen through her skeptical eyes, had she no future, had she no hope, did no other possibility exist?

Yes. But no.

26

She would not utter the word Ne-gro. You could see her approach and retreat from Ne-gro. You could see the fierce ice pick centers of her eyes as she considered, and hurriedly rejected, Ne-gro. Saying in her voice of mock-solicitude, "And what is your relationship to, to-to this person of another race?" at last uttered, with an intake of breath, frown lines deepening in her pouchy bulldog face so incongruously peachy-powdered, and her marble-eyes drifting downward in a semblance of feminine modesty, decorum,"-graduate student I believe he is, in philosophy, many years older than you? I have heard troubled reports, I mean I have heard troubling reports, Miss-" pronouncing my name in identically stressed syllables as if in this way she might disclaim her responsibility in making sense of a name so clearly foreign; she spoke with a stoic dignity; her high moral worth of herself prevailed; her title was Dean of Women at the university and it was a title she did not take lightly. Listening, I was stunned into silence; I could think of no reply; long ago I'd muttered Oh I hate you! running from my German grandmother and possibly the old woman had heard me, and possibly not; but I could not mutter such a phrase now, I was twenty years old and an honors student at the university. Thinking with a stab of guilt She knows, knows what we have done together, how can she know? I'd been summoned to the office of the Dean of Women amid one of my crowded weekdays, between classes and my part-time job (now in the cafeteria); I hadn't had time to think, even to dread; I'd given up thinking of anything much beyond Vernor Matheius and my studies, the two inextricably conjoined for my mind was sharply honed in imitation of Vernor Matheius's flashing mind, my work was written as if to Vernor Matheius's unsparing judgment, my concentration was monomaniacal and in its way satisfying as that of a tightrope walker making her way across an abyss; the abyss was Death; the abyss was my doomed love for Vernor Matheius. And so I hadn't had time to think, to prepare myself for this unexpected attack. Sitting dazed and humiliated and by degrees resentful listening to the Dean of Women lecture me in her drawling insinuating voice; a voice practiced in scolding, chiding, abrading and humiliating young women; a voice quavering with its power, and with the unspeakable pleasure of power. This is jot your own good such voices assure us. You are of an age often blind to its own good. Several times this semester I'd been summoned to the dean's office and each time had been a painful ordeal. I'd petitioned to be freed from the tyranny of Kappa Gamma Pi but the dean strongly disapproved of any sorority girl departing any sorority for any reason, however desperate; evidently there wasn't enough housing at the university for upperclassmen, and sororities and fraternities were crucial to the university. Yet this pragmatic fact was never uttered. All was couched in terms of commitment, loyalty, contractual agreements; being true to your pledge. The prevailing ethic was You've made your bed, now lie in it but the dean wouldn't have spoken so bluntly and honestly. In those excruciating sessions with the dean I'd had to convince the woman that I wanted to leave the Kappas for reasons of financial hardship as well as moral repugnance; it wasn't enough that my Kappa sisters disliked and ostracized me (and, I knew, complained to the dean wanting to be rid of me); it wasn't enough that I was wretched in their midst and irrevocably estranged from them; it wasn't enough that I was not Episcopalian as I'd misrepresented myself but had "Jewish blood"; that a non-Christian had lied her way into a Christian sorority; it also had to be demonstrated that I couldn't continue for financial reasons and was already in debt; I'd had to show the Dean of Women financial statements, the most embarrassing a notarized statement from a Syracuse bank; I'd had to defend myself as a pauper. That I was still an honors student despite my difficulties was used against me by the dean; since I'd continued to receive high grades, and reports from my professors were uniformly excellent, how could I claim, as I was, that Kappa Gamma Pi was detrimental to my academic work? You, a young woman of superior intellectual gifts, don't you feel an obligation to offer aid to your sorority sisters, wouldn't that be a generous, selfless thing to do?Yes? So the dean tormented me, and revelled in her tormenting; reduced me to exhaustion, and almost to tears; but I'd vowed I would not be provoked into crying; we both knew she hadn't any choice but to approve the petition since my sorority sisters had voted to expel me, I was no longer one of them. And now, a few months later, here I was back in the dean's office again.

It was ironic to be charged with a relationship with a person of another race when, in fact, I had not heard from Vernor Matheius in three days. For all I knew, I would not hear from him again. We'd parted awkwardly, Vernor in one of his sudden sunken moods not bothering to rise from bed, lying naked with an arm across his forehead staring at the ceiling; as I emerged from the bathroom, and uncertainly prepared to leave, Vernor said in his grim-jocular voice Schopenhauer said it: Life is a struggle against sleep and eventually we lose. That morning I'd violated our unspoken agreement and gone to Vernor's apartment, concerned that I hadn't heard from him in a while; I'd decided I must go, and risk his anger; he'd said he would call me when he wanted to see me and I knew (I think I knew) that he was punishing me; my punishment had something to do with my admiring remarks about the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee and the demonstration on campus; I hadn't concurred in Vernor's dismissal of politics, activism, history; I'd disappointed him, and he meant to punish me; but I'd dared to go to him anyway, as if in ignorance. And he'd been there, and let me in; and we'd made love eventually, if not entirely satisfactorily; and I'd gone away again and had not heard from him for another three days balanced on the high wire above the abyss and determined not to fall. And the Dean of Women summoned me, I hadn't any choice but to obey. I would soon be twenty years old. Twenty! It seemed to me very old; never could I imagine living another twenty years. The Dean of Women had the power to expel me from the university, or so I was led to believe. A woman in her mid-fifties perhaps with a large sliding bosom and that lavishly powdered peach-tinted face, a face that pretended to know what it didn't know, and pretended not to know what it did know; a face that had never been a mother's face; a face of spite and gloating. "-This adult graduate student, this-person of a, another background-" pursing her lips with a show of concern, and fixing me with her hard marble-eyes, "-have you given serious thought to-paused to consider the wisdom of-is your family aware of such behavior-the responsibility of my office is-is such-" I listened with mounting shame, and with mounting anger; I supposed it was the resident advisor in my dormitory who'd reported me, though I could not imagine why; or how she knew about Vernor Matheius. As I listened to the dean I became increasingly angry; I was frightened of my anger; from Vernor Matheius's tension-filled body I'd absorbed anger; the low hum, the accelerating pulse, the throbbing beat of anger; thinking She believes white skin is sacred, you've defiled it and her. I was expected to defend myself but I sat in silence, stubborn and resistant; the dean began to speak more forcibly, in disapproval,"-you seem to have quite a history, Miss-" with grave eyes contemplating the opened folder on her desk, "-your unfortunate experience at Kappa Gamma Pi-your 'troubled peer relations'-'difficulty in cooperating with others'-your 'sociopathic tendencies'-" and at this I spoke, I interrupted her in a voice sharp as Vernor Matheius's, "Excuse me, what did you say-'sociopathic'? Did you actually say-'sociopathic'?" and the dean drew herself up to her full seated height, her bulldog face darkening with blood, "Yes, I'm afraid so, one of our respondents has noted 'sociopathic tendencies'-'inability to adjust'-'continued opposition'-" and I said, "You have no right to be spying on me," I was speaking quickly, angrily, "-I can see a man if I want to; I can love a man if I want to; no one can stop me," and the dean frowned at my sudden crude words, such unfeminine behavior, saying, "That's quite enough. Your behavior will be duly noted on your record," and I said, trembling, "Why is it your business or anyone's business if I am seeing a black man? If I am in love with a-black man?" and at this the dean stared at me as if I'd spoken obscene words, clearly she wasn't accustomed to mutinous young women in her office, "Miss, you've gone too far. You will not speak to me in such a manner. You-" but I'd jumped from my chair and snatched the folder off her desk, saying, "I have a constitutional right to see what's been written about me," and the dean was so taken by surprise she couldn't reply, her powdery face dissolving in shocked awe as I leafed through the folder, transcripts of my grades through three semesters, photocopied forms, high school letters of recommendations and test results, a copy of a document from the New York State Board of Regents in Albany awarding me a state scholarship-quiet, very mature for her age, highly intelligent-reports from my university professors-brilliant but very young, immature-an outstanding student blessed (or accursed) with a skeptical imagination; and in the stilted backhand of Agnes Thayer which I recognized immediately these con demning words-willful, troublesome, unattractive girl, rude and sociopathic in tendencies, inability to adjust with others and disrespectful toward her elders. NOT RECOMMEND FOR ANY FUTURE EMPLOYMENT IN ANY FIELD OF ENDEAVVOR. These phrases passed in a rapid blur before my astonished eyes yet I had time to note the errors recommend, endeavvor, and to realize the extent of Mrs. Thayer's emotional upset; by now the dean had heaved herself to her feet, a heavyset panting middle-aged woman, though much larger than I, she appeared frightened of me; a girl of such wild sociopathic tendencies, what might I do next? With as much poise as I could summon, I dropped the folder back onto her desk; I said, "How dare you spy on me? You and Mrs. Thayer-you know what a disturbed woman she was, you know what happened to her. If I am in l-love with a-" and now I too faltered, hardly knowing how to speak of Vernor Matheius, for any words assigned to him that dissolved his individuality in a category, a class, were false; worse than false, traitorous. Even to speak of him neutrally, in such a context, was traitorous. I said, stammering, "-if I am in love with any man of any background you have no right to interfere. You have no right to intimidate me. I am twenty years old, an adult! My friend Vernor Matheius is associated with the American Civil Liberties Union and we'll sue you, you and the university both, if you continue in this racist persecution, we know our rights as-American citizens!" and I was out of the office of the Dean of Women and hurrying through her outer office in a blaze of righteousness, retaining a blurred and dream-like image of the dean's stunned face, rushing down the stairs of Erie Hall exhilarated, my blood up thinking If Vernor could have heard!-he would love me wouldn't he? Thinking in giddy triumph Am I sociopathic, am I a pathogen to society? Is that who I urn-my essence?

I was running. I was attracting some attention. I was not crying, my face shone with righteousness. A pathogen. A pathogen! It was a term from biology; a helpful term; never had I felt so empowered, so certain of myself. Vernor Matheius and I: pathogens. I felt the thrill of the outlaw, the outcast; the object of loathing and taboo; my skin was "white," a camouflage I might wear through life as I wore my costume-clothes; as I wore my "femaleness"; what others perceived as a weakness, I would forge as my strength. How radiant in self-knowledge I was! Crossing a broad, sloping lawn, spongy from recent rain; the afternoon air had turned twilit with thunderclouds obscuring the sun, and glimmered with a peculiar iridescence, like a rainbow; I gloated in my secret otherness no one (not even Vernor Matheius) would ever know. There came gusts of sulphurous air. A rolling of thunder. And an unexpected piercingly sweet odor of lilac from a hedge beside the Music School and I was seeing again the ragged lilac bushes that grew behind my grandfather's ramshackle barn, I drew a deep shuddering breath running now in rainwater and mud splashing my legs, my bare white legs, laughing to myself, my face gleaming with tears of laughter, rage, hurt, determination So I am a nigger-lover, and a pathogen. That is what I aw.

27

Never did I dare tell Vernor Matheius about my adventure in the office of the Dean of Women. I hadn't the courage though continuing to think with childish obstinacy He would love me, if he knew. My courage on our behalf.

But was it so? Would Vernor Matheius have loved me, or even admired me, if he'd known? If he'd overheard? Or would he have been mortified, infuriated, disgusted at my appropriation of his name? My boast of my friend Vernor Matheius which was the first time, and would be the last time, I spoke his name to another?

But I never told him, he never knew.

Nor did the Dean of Women continue in her harassment of me. So far as I knew. My threat of a lawsuit and my evocation of "civil rights" had been a blind strike in the dark, yet inspired; the exact weapon with which to defend oneself against a college administrator in that era of civil rights reform; of a radically new thinking about race, individuals, civil liberties. The Dean of Women would not have cause to speak with me again that year, nor in my remaining two years at the university; ironically, by what seems in retrospect a remarkable fluke, I would be named valedictorian of the class of 1965 and would deliver an idealistic valedictory speech on the subject of civil rights; afterward, on the commencement platform, I would be warmly congratulated by the chancellor of the university and by a succession of administrators in academic regalia, including of course the Dean of Women; I saw that she was one of very few women in the commencement program, and among so many tall, distinguished-seeming men a figure of female uncertainty, her raddled face too lavishly powdered and her black cap unflatteringly bobby-pinned to her grayish-brown hair. Her mouth pursed as I approached; her small damp eyes fixed upon my face as if in sudden dread of my uttering something sarcastic, rude, damning that would be overheard by her male colleagues. But our meeting, which was also our parting, was amicable. I may have been a little nervous, excited, and still high from giving my speech, and being applauded; I was smiling at everyone, and seeing no one; except there loomed the Dean of Women before me, a black tent of a woman, and there was my hard little hand being shaken by her soft boneless hand, and both hands were cold as if drained of blood; the Dean of Women smiled saying, "Congratulations, my dear. You have lived up to your early promise." I said, "Thank you, Dean. And good-bye."

But this was the future, two years away. A future I could not have fantasized with even my wayward powers of imagination.

28

I am not a man for any woman to count on. Not a man who wants to be loved.

But: love me.

Wanting to surprise my lover, to make him happy. For what makes happy the one we adore makes us happy; what not, not; the universe is a void, an unfathomable inkwell otherwise.

How many times drifting through bookstores seeing books I knew Vernor Matheius would prize and thinking I would steal for him- would I? As I would never have stolen for myself: annotated editions of the works of Leibniz, Hegel, Heidegger; a new commentary on Wittgenstein; a new translation of Plato's dialogues; biographies of Kierkegaard and Jaspers; Ernst Cassirer's essays on the mythic nature of language. Holding one of these precious, expensive books in my hand thinking How happy it would make Vernor to own this. Wishing not to think What a transparent ploy to make the man love me.

Never stole a single book. Though I'd been labeled an outlaw, a sociopath, yet I never stole for Vernor Matheius, as I would never have stolen for myself; my pride was such, I couldn't stoop so low; nor could I work out how Vernor might respond if he discovered that books had been stolen for him; and he'd known I hadn't the money to buy them. Frequently he'd expressed disdain for any form of dishonesty, above all intellectual dishonesty; he scorned unoriginal thinking in philosophy; he scorned any form of petty crime.

"Petty crimes require petty souls."

Though I couldn't afford it, sometimes on impulse I bought Vernor gifts. Never in my life until then had I experienced that rhapsody of happiness: buying a gift for someone you love. The adrenaline rush I am the person who can buy this gift. Only I, so privileged.

These were thrift-shop treasures. I was patient, I could look through bins of cast-off things. I discovered a handsome old fountain pen, black with gold trim, that still functioned; a pair of fake-jade cuff links engraved with miniature sphinxes; a crystal paperweight (only just finely cracked, but still charming) that was also a magnifying glass. For Vernor's thirtieth birthday I gave him a silk vest in an elegant hounds-tooth check on a gray background gossamer as smoke; when he unwrapped and opened the box he didn't lift the vest out of the tissue paper for a moment, staring down at it, and I worried that such an item of apparel was too personal a gift and might offend him; but Vernor took it up, slipped it on, and frowned at his reflection critically in his single mirror, above his bedroom bureau-"Hmm. Not bad."The silk vest had come from a consignment shop in downtown Syracuse; it had been marked down numerous times, at last priced at $9.95. How beautiful it had seemed to me, the old-fashioned cut, a row of small black wooden buttons; a vest for a gentleman; for Vernor Matheius. He laughed when I told him it was secondhand; its label had been carefully removed. "What it is, no doubt, is a dead man's vest, recycled to me." "That's only logical," I said, "since you're alive." Vernor laughed again and asked, not for the first time, why I bought him things-"You don't have any money, Anellia." I ignored this saying proudly, "You look very handsome in your silk vest, Vernor, it suits you perfectly." Vernor said reprovingly, "I don't look 'handsome' and it doesn't suit me 'perfectly' and I surely don't need a vest but thank you, Anellia." Smiling at me, and my heart soared.

"A special occasion. And I have something special to tell you."

Vernor wore the houndstooth silk vest beneath his old gray flannel jacket that fitted him tight across the shoulders when he took me out to dinner for the first time (as it would be the last time) at a good, expensive restaurant in the city, the Brass Rail; he was clean-shaven and his face was sharp planes and angles like carved mahogany; his hair hadn't been trimmed in some time, and rose in a woolly penumbra around his head; one of the earpieces of his glasses had broken and was mended with adhesive tape, which gave him a savage yet scholarly look; he was handsome and swaggering in his best ironic style; he wore the vest, the jacket, a greasy-looking dark necktie and dark trousers with a haphazard crease and his shoes were brown leather, badly worn and water-stained. I wore a black silk dress that seemed to have a life, an identity, an idiom of its own; in the style of the Forties it had a flared skirt, long, tight sleeves and a V neck that drooped to show a portion of my narrow, pale chest and the edges of my pale breasts; the dress had a cloth belt that had begun to curl, to show its underside; the woman who'd owned the dress (of course it was secondhand) had had a waist thinner than my own for the belt had been mutilated as if with an ice pick to make extra holes in it, that it might be buckled tighter, and yet tighter; Vernor thought the dress "erotic"-"smelling of grave mold"; with it I wore a thin tarnished gold chain that had once belonged to my mother; at least, this was what I'd been told as a young girl by my grandmother who hadn't wanted it for herself. Nerves had caused my sensitive skin to break out in random rashes yet my face was radiant, I'd applied layers of makeup including rouge; my eyes shone with the glisten of madness; I thought This is the happiest day of my life. Yet could I trust happiness? I could not bear the suspense of what Vernor had to tell me at dinner; immediately he'd made his remark, offhand and casual, I forgot I'd heard it; I looked away, evasive and frightened.

It was a giddy thing, to appear so publicly with Vernor Matheius; the two of us dressed for the evening; his carved-wooden face, my beaming-bright face; his mismatched, rakish clothes and my black silk witchy dress; we walked along the sidewalks, crossed streets, and drew all eyes to us like magnets; I wondered if Vernor was making a declaration about me, about us, at last; we walked hand in hand sometimes, and at other times Vernor seemed almost to forget me; yet there was the glitzy facade of the Brass Rail, where my Kappa sisters' parents took them for dinners, there was Vernor opening the door for me, and the trepidation of stepping inside as if stepping out onto a stage, or into a pit. Vernor had made a reservation; as the maître d' frowned through his book, Vernor winked at me and said I looked the part; what part, I asked nervously; Vernor said, "The part of a young writer celebrating her first sale." And my heart contracted in disappointment for I'd believed he would say something else.

(The special occasion we were celebrating was my having placed a short story in a distinguished literary magazine; one of my flukes of good if improbable luck; I'd written a first draft of this story, back in December, miserable with insomnia in the basement of the Kappa house; because I'd been so desperately unhappy, I had made the story comic; bleakly, savagely comic; it was an excursion into madness even as flames of madness licked at my feet, hands, hair. When I shyly told Vernor this good news, which embarrassed me as winning a lottery would have embarrassed me, Vernor stared at me in frank surprise for a moment then smiled, whistled a congratulatory tune, and told me he "wasn't surprised" at anything I might do. I would wait for him to ask to read the story, but Vernor never asked.)

In the cool, tinted interior of the Brass Rail we were led to our table by the maître d' in his tuxedo; there was in the restaurant a ripple of, not sound, but the immediate absence of sound; a collective indrawn breath. The maître d' with an expression stiff and somber as a mortician's seated us at the very back of the dining room; a small table near the hallway to the rest rooms; yet it was an attractive table, with a lighted candle on it, and a small vase of carnations; the restaurant was beautiful, if undersea and dim; as soon as we were seated, Vernor reached over to take my hand and lifted it, as he'd never done previously, to kiss my fingertips; a gesture I supposed was meant to be playful, theatrical; yet I was moved by it; I was made uneasy by it; for I was aware of other diners observing us; eyes that, if I glanced around, shifted immediately away. Some time was required before our waiter arrived, and blindly I took from him an enormous menu; there was some fuss about our candle, whose flame had gone out; Vernor insisted it be relighted; a couple at a nearby table stared openly at us; middle-aged, very well dressed and white-skinned (of course); I was beginning to feel the oppression of white; the ubiquity of white; for everyone in the Brass Rail was white except the busboys in white (dazzling white!) uniforms, and these busboys were black. (And how steadfastly they looked away from us. Through the ordeal of our meal, they would not see us at all.)

You! Aren't you ashamed of yourself I heard subterranean murmurs of disapproval, the woman at the table next to ours, our automaton waiter, and I thought No! No I am not. Some time was required before our drinks were brought, wine for Vernor, a club soda for me (I was underage), and during this time Vernor gave no sign of noticing how we were being watched; this was the Vernor Matheius of campus pubs and restaurants who never so much as glanced at other people; this was the Vernor Matheius of Oneida Park who'd made love to me a few yards from a public trail; this was the Vernor Matheius of the lecture hall; except this evening he laughed frequently, and sometimes loudly; he seemed very relaxed; I laughed with him, though there was something forced and feverish in his laughter; I thought Is this a man I know, or a stranger? Yet how exciting to be in the presence of such a stranger. For much of the meal Vernor interrogated me in his playful-serious Socratic manner; a relentless questioning that was like rough tickling; it made me laugh, and squirm; a rash on the underside of my jaw throbbed; in his eloquent professorial voice Vernor Matheius spoke just distinctly enough to be overheard at other tables; speaking of Heidegger's Being and Time, that "untranslatable text" which he was reading in German; in Heidegger it's the weight of language that is as significant as meaning; yet the paradox (Vernor argued, or was this Heidegger?) of language is that there can be no single language, only languages-"The tragic paradox is, each of us speaks and hears a language unlike any other." I said, clumsily, "But people understand one another, usually; at least, they get along," and Vernor said, "But how do you know?-the conviction that you 'understand' and that you 'get along' might be a delusion." He spoke then of Plato's famous allegory of the cave. Though I'd studied it, I seemed not to know Vernor's special interpretation. He was then speaking of his own "cave-origins"-his "ancestry"; Vernor Matheius who'd seemed until this moment to have had no personal history, no "ancestry" at all. Matter-of-factly he told me that his ancestors, those he could trace, had been the luckiest of Africans brought to North America as slaves because they'd been sold up north into Connecticut in the 1780's; and in 1784 slavery was outlawed in Connecticut; there'd been no significant history of slavery in Vernor's background; the name "Matheius" had been chosen by his great-grandfather, from a stranger's gravestone (as family legend had it); which was why, Vernor said, he'd been born with a free soul and not a slave soul. He addressed me as if I were silently arguing with him and needed to be convinced; he smiled, sipped wine, said belligerently, "Why the hell then should I spend my life being 'Negro' for anyone's sake? I have a higher calling." I was moved that Vernor should confide such things to me; never before had he spoken except vaguely of himself, and never had he asked me about myself; though he was interested in my courses, in what I was studying and writing, he had not been interested in who I was; nor had I been interested in telling him; for who I am has never greatly interested me set beside who I might become. I asked Vernor where in Africa had his ancestors come from and he said, with a moment's hesitation, " Dahomey -a place I know virtually nothing about, even its location."This seemed unlikely to me; or unnatural; yet I wasn't about to argue with Vernor Matheius. He changed the subject, and we talked now of families; of identities; not specifically but as abstractions, ideas; I realized that since I'd known him, Vernor had never left Syracuse or spoke of visiting his home, nor had anyone visited him; he never received personal mail so far as I knew, or telephone calls; he had a few friendly acquaintances in the Philosophy Department, there were professors and fellow graduate students who invited him occasionally to their homes, but of course Vernor made no effort to reciprocate, and would not have been expected to reciprocate; he'd once told me, his home was in the mind and I saw now that was literally true. His mind was his home, and only one person lived there. "You are free to choose identity by choosing a course of mental action that excludes other courses," Vernor said. Again he reached across the table in his atypical gesture, to take my hand; squeezing my fingers as if I were slow, obstinate; as if I required being coerced into acknowledging. "I will try to believe that," I said; and Vernor said, severely, "But you don't try hard enough, Anellia. Even Wittgenstein worked at thinking. It isn't a pastime like eating, chatting, copulation." I was hurt by this remark for I knew it was calculated to hurt; yet Vernor continued, "In your thinking, Anellia, you disappoint me." I said, "I'm sorry, Vernor." He said, baring his chunky teeth in a smile like pain, "Anellia, there's something I want to tell you." I knew it could not be happy news. Even as I reasoned Do you believe you merit happy news?-of course not. This is good-bye. We'd been eating our dinners without seeming to taste them; Vernor had ordered for both of us, the least expensive dinners on the very expensive menu, chicken; still, the cost of the meal would be exorbitant; there seemed an oblique irony in the very fact that Vernor had brought us to the Brass Rail, a place of the kind he'd have ordinarily scorned. I knew I must ask Vernor what he meant, like a character in a Kafka parable who must, so cruelly, participate in his own execution; yet the words stuck in my throat, like the food I was eating, or trying to eat. Vernor said, in his professor's voice, "Better yet, there's something you can tell me." I lifted my eyes to inquire, what? and Vernor said, "What do you want from me, Anellia?"

What did I want from Vernor Matheius!

I pondered this. I may have smiled, slightly. A girl in a black silk dress with a neckline that exposed her pale smooth chest, a white-skinned girl being spoken to, lectured to, earnestly by a sharp-faced black man in a gray jacket, silk vest, greasy dark necktie. I hoped to sound like a girl practiced in sexual wiles, seduction. In the eyes of those diners covertly watching us, a mysterious girl. "Only to be with you, Vernor. If-" He squeezed my fingers harder, as if he felt pity for me, and impatience. As if wielding a piece of chalk, working out a syllogism on a blackboard in Introduction to Logic. "Anellia, there is not the opportunity for that." He might have been making a statement about weather; a self-evident fact; a fact not to be questioned; a fact not to be modified; he chose his words, as usual, as if each word had a price; he was parsimonious with words, and shrewd. Sipping the last of the wine, the dark red liquid he hadn't offered to me to taste. My mouth ached with its unaccustomed smiling; a public display of smiling; a roaring in my ears like the sound of the surf in a dream imperfectly recalled; I could not hear the rest of Vernor's words; Vernor's dark fisted hand enclosed mine as if protectively, lifting so that his knuckles lightly grazed my left breast; the shock of being touched ran through me; I felt my nipples harden, absurd and piteous inside the black silk dress of a dead woman; it was a caress meant to comfort, not to arouse; nor even intimidate; there was nothing sexual in the gesture except in the display of it, and perhaps that display was unconscious; still I felt strangers' eyes upon us, cold and infuriated; I hadn't the strength to confront them, and drew back from Vernor's casual touch. I thought This is a life: these minute particles of sensation, emotion. I thought But can I live this life? Am I strong enough? Our waiter had departed, and had not approached our table for a long time; he'd prepared the check, and placed it conspicuously near Vernor's elbow; now the maître d' in his tuxedo stood above us imperial and frowning; disapproving; explaining in a tone of perfunctory apology that our table had been reserved for another party at nine; it was now past nine; we would have to leave as quickly as possible; the check could be paid at the front. Vernor lifted his eyes widened in mock solicitude to the maître d', a white man in his fifties with an oblong fattish face, insolent eyes; Vernor seemed about to protest, then said nothing, and with deliberation pushed back his chair and stood, abruptly; in such a way that the maître d' stepped back; not that Vernor had threatened him; a tall knifeblade of a man with very dark, chiseled face and fisted hands. I'd gotten quickly to my feet, wanting only to escape from this terrible place; for the restaurant was air-conditioned, and uncomfortably cool; it was a temperature for men in suits, not for girls in low-cut silk dresses; I'd been shivering through most of the meal. Vernor took my hand and tugged at me, saying to the maître d' in a tone of icy politeness, "Fine. We are leaving, and you needn't worry we'll be back."

And there we are walking through the Brass Rail as diners stare at us wondering was there a confrontation? between the maître d' and that arrogant black man? I try to see us: but there's a blur, a merciful haze; as in a dissolving dream; the gray silk vest, the black silk dress; a face frozen in anger, a face stricken in embarrassment. Can I live this life, am I strong enough? I waited outside the Brass Rail as Vernor Matheius settled the bill.

And later. In Vernor's bed in those sheets smelling of our bodies; in Vernor's arms that didn't close about me, but held me loosely rocking as one might comfort a small child; I was trying not to cry for nothing's so banal as crying in a lover's arms, banal and futile; as Vernor said, with unnatural gentleness, "Didn't I warn you, girl, I'm not a man for any woman to count on? Eh?" and, more gently, "I wish I could love you the way you deserve, a girl like you, but I can't, you know I can't, I have never lied or misled you, Anellia, have I?" These earnest words like a pronouncement of death and yet I was pleading, "Vernor, I can I-love enough for us both. Give me a chance!" My absurd makeup had begun to melt on my sallow little face. My hair I'd shampooed that afternoon, brushed to a sheen, now disheveled as if I'd been wakened from sleep. And Vernor saying in that soft resolute voice, "Anellia, maybe you should go away now. Maybe this should end." I held myself very still, very still, not hearing.

To purify myself utterly, how? To become nothing, bare picked white bones. And then I will be free.

29

On June 12, 1963, three days after our evening at the Brass Rail, a young NAACP field secretary named Medgar Evers entered history; he was shot in the back by a white racist as he was about to enter his home in Jackson, Mississippi. Even Vernor Matheius who avoided the news like a bad smell could not avoid learning of this.

Fuck. Fuckers.

It was a sign of Vernor's debasement, that so common, you could say so clichéd a vulgarity sprang to his lips.

Beginning now to drink in the early afternoon. At midday. Waking late, groggy and still drunk from the night before; dragging himself to work at his desk, or try to work; beer, rot-gut wine, cheap jug wine; refused to leave his apartment, even to wash, put on fresh clothes. He was feverish, he had no appetite. Now the raw sewage was backing up on him. Stay away he warned me but I would not. I took advantage of his illness, his weakness; every day, twice daily, I climbed the outside stairs at the rear of Vernor Matheius's building where the door might be locked against me and no amount of pleading could induce Vernor to open it, or the door might be unlocked, might swing open when I pushed against it and an odor of defeat and fury would fill my nostrils so that my instinct was to flee even as, stubbornly, I would not. Why! Why d' you come here when I don't want you was Vernor's silent accusation. As I pleaded, in silence taking his hand and lifting it, the sweaty unwashed palm, to my cheek. I've told you: I can love enough for us both.

Through that long winter and into the spring there'd been a flu epidemic in upstate New York. Vernor had boasted of being immune to such weakness, but at last he succumbed; joking that he'd been poisoned at the Brass Rail. Within a week he'd lost so much weight I could see his breastbone sharp as the edge of a shovel outlined through his filthy shirt when he lay flat on his back; I saw that his cheekbones had grown sharper, his eyes were sunken and glowed meanly as the candlelit eyes of a deranged Hallowe'en pumpkin. I was frightened for him. I worried he would starve himself to death out of spite like those recluses we'd hear of sometimes in the countryside of my childhood, who hadn't enough to eat during the winter or were too poor or too proud or too stubborn or too deranged to ask neighbors for help. Of the martyred Medgar Evers whose assassin had not yet been named Vernor said That's what happens when you step into history: history grinds you flat beneath its boot heel. The remark seemed to give him pleasure.

There were times when he seemed delirious; there were times when he ranted, cursed; once when I let myself in, with a key I'd appropriated from him, I was shocked to see that he'd thrown books and papers onto the floor in disgust, he'd torn down the likenesses of Socrates and Descartes; in the smelly little bathroom, it looked as if he'd urinated onto the likeness of Wittgenstein with his enigmatic bamboo cane. Trying to lower his window shades he'd dislodged them from their rollers and they dangled in strips and shreds I could not repair, and so I removed them; there was broken glass underfoot, there were cigarette butts, ashes; the room stank of beer and cheap jug wine and of smoke and of scorched fabric; there were scattered burn marks in the bedclothes; I worried that Vernor would set fire to his bed, burn himself and his fellow tenants in the night.

Let me love you. Let my love heal you.

Vernor Matheius heard me perfectly well. He fell into a fit of coughing and lay his head on his arms, on the kitchen table.

On his ransacked desktop the portable typewriter had been shoved back against the wall. There were gouge marks in the wallpaper. A sheet of paper looked to have been torn out of the typewriter carriage, and on this paper there were numerous XXX's and a single legible paragraph-

Axiom: if (following LW) the propositional sign is assigned a protective "relation" to the world does it therefore follow that the use of the perceptible sign of a proposition (spoken or written) is a projection of a possible situation? (See LW, 3.11)

I understood that "LW" was Ludwig Wittgenstein; the rest of the argument, which must have been part of the treatise Vernor was writing for his doctoral dissertation, was lost to me. Nor did I dare to ask Vernor about it since he'd have been furious to know I was looking through his papers. My task was to care for him, and this I did with energy, resolution, and good humor; I would not fall sick myself but would be his nurse, and he would see how I loved him, and did not judge him; for you don't judge the sick, you nurse them back to health; you nurse them back to sanity; you nurse them back to their true selves. I brought food to Vernor's apartment to prepare for him; on his sickest days he hadn't any appetite, food disgusted him and he could tolerate only soup; a thin broth of a soup in which I cooked sliced vegetables; I

hummed and smiled as I cooked in his tiny kitchen; it was an old European tale in which a love potion is mixed with a man's food; a maiden who adores him mixes her blood with his food, he eats it and falls in love with her forever; I smiled thinking I would secretly cut my finger on a paring knife and let a drop or two of my blood fall into Vernor's soup; so powerful was my fantasy, I would come to think I'd actually done such a bizarre thing; perhaps in fact I did it; but no crude wishful magic would work on a man like Vernor Matheius. I had to be content with being tolerated in his presence; I had to take pride in what he might eat that I'd prepared; I convinced him to eat a piece of whole-grain toast; I convinced him to drink a half-glass of orange juice; I sat close beside him at the little kitchen table and watched as he ate, close as an anxious mother; Vernor's face was drawn and haggard; he looked like a man suffering from grief; grief indistinguishable from rage; rage indistinguishable from grief; he wore a sweat-soaked undershirt, and sat slump-shouldered, his hard little muscles prominent in his upper arms; his jaws were covered in an ugly black stubble; fascinating to me, every harsh breath he drew; when I held him, to help him stand, or walk, I was disturbed to feel his erratic heartbeat; I was panicked thinking he might be seriously ill; if I suggested taking him to a doctor, or to the emergency room of the hospital a block away, he cursed me; he removed his glasses, drew his forearm roughly across his eyes, and cursed me. Sick to death, my guts are sick, fuck you leave me alone can't you see I don't want you, your cunt, the color of your skin repulse me.

I waited to become sick like Vernor. In his bathroom mirror my eyes shone with jaundice; the interior of my mouth was coated with something clammy and sickly sweet; Vernor's sickness eased into me like something clammy and sickly sweet; I did not resist, I entered into his delirium; if he didn't repel me, I lay beside him in his bed gripping his bony hand; it was a big hand, the knuckles prominent, though bony; I curved his fingers around mine so it seemed as if he was gripping my hand; as in the Brass Rail he'd boldly nudged his knuckles against my breast; my breathing quickened, or slowed, with Vernor's breathing; like carved funerary figures we lay together in a suspension that might have looked, from a distance, to a neutral observer, like peace, tranquility; the aftermath of love.

Why why are you doing this?

Because I am strong enough. Because I can love enough for both.

In his soft, soiled underwear Vernor Matheius lay on his couch like a fallen prince amid soiled sheets; he smoked cigarettes I'd had to buy for him, despite my disapproval; he scattered ashes like seed everywhere. When one day in June, a hazy early-summer heat suffusing the apartment, he rose to stagger into the bathroom to shower, not wanting me to help him, I thought This is the turn, he will be himself again. (As if I weren't terrified of that self.) Six days and six nights had passed since the onset of Vernor's sickness; seven days and seven nights since the murder of Medgar Evers; and still Evers's murderer went unidentified; for Evers's murderer was ubiquitous in the South, and elsewhere; in that pattern of crazed accelerating cruelty and violence against civil rights activists that would culminate in April 1968 in the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.; in that future blowing toward us like a dark, ravening wind. When you step into history, history's boot steps on you. I did not think at the time If you fail to step into history, history erases you for at the time I was thinking only of Vernor Matheius and of his health; while he was in the bathroom showering I began hurriedly to clean the apartment; stripped the soiled bedclothes from the bed with the intention of taking them to a Laundromat; I'd taken a few of Vernor's things to a Laundromat near the hospital a few days before, and brought them back undetected; when Vernor finished his shower, I would add his towels; I would add as many of Vernor's clothes as he would allow. I found a broom in a kitchen closet and swept the littered floor; emptied dustpans of cigarette butts, ashes, crumpled papers and bits of dried food, dirt and hairs into a brimming wastebasket; collected the empty beer cans and wine jugs; trundled the trash downstairs to a Dumpster at the rear of the lot. As if I live here. I live here now, with Vernor Matheius in apartment 2D. Now that Vernor seemed to trust me, now I might stay with him through the night; I had the key to his apartment and could come and go as I wished; I wished I would encounter another tenant of the building so that I might have exchanged greetings in a neighborly fashion, another young woman, a young wife, or one of the foreign graduate students. The midday sun blazed overhead; my hair burst into flame; I was made to think of Nietzsche's mad prophet Zarathustra, and of Zarathustra's blazing noontide. What is wan? cries Zarathustra. A ball of wild snakes. Despite the heat of the sun I was energized, excited; I took happiness in such simple physical tasks as hauling trash, sweeping and cleaning floors. I saw the grinning teeth of those who despised me. Negro-lover! Nigger-lover! I laughed, and ran back upstairs where the door was opened, as I'd left it.

Vernor was still showering. I listened outside the bathroom door and heard his thin tuneless whistling beneath the sound of the shower and I thought He is himself again. I set about restoring order on his desk; that desk I'd so admired, now strewn with papers; except for the Olivetti portable everything had been knocked about; I thought I would rearrange scattered pages (from Vernor's treatise?) into their original neat stacks; but I failed to make sense of them, and gave up. I opened a filing cabinet drawer, curious about what was inside; these cabinets were made of metal painted a pale green, but badly scratched; Vernor had bought them, he'd boasted, for five dollars apiece at a fire-bankruptcy sale of office supplies; the drawer was crammed with manila folders containing typed papers and note cards; some of the folders were meticulously clean, and others were strangely soiled as if they'd been stepped on. You should not, should not be doing this, this is wrong a small frightened voice cautioned me but I saw no harm in glancing through the folders; a treasure trove of old, yellowing papers; neatly typed outlines of books of the Bible including such obscure books as Jeremiah, Hosea, Philippians, Thessalonians as well as most of the books of the New Testament; in a large and passionate hand not immediately recognizable as Vernor's were written in columns the names of magical-biblical figures-Moses, Jacob, Joshua, Elisha, Job, Jesus, Mark, Paul, Mary Magdalene-as if these names belonged to individuals known to Vernor Matheius. In other folders, farther back in the drawer, were more notes and outlines; theology, philosophy, ethics; most of these written in a bold, rapid hand, no more than a dozen lines to a page, as if thoughts had spilled out of Vernor's teeming mind onto the paper, scarcely contained in language. I smiled to see his college papers: neatly typed, held together with rust-stained paper clips; with such titles as "The 'Problem of Evil' in Milton's Paradise Lost" "The Concept of 'Virtue' in Epicureanism," "The Concept of 'Mind' in Bertrand Russell"; if there were red marks on these papers, the marks indicated enthusiasm, praise; Vernor Matheius's grades were uniformly A and A+. I tried to summon up a younger, vulnerable Vernor Matheius, an undergraduate hoping to impress his professors; how difficult to imagine arrogant Vernor Matheius perceiving himself in a position inferior to anyone. Then staring into another folder I'd carelessly opened, at what appeared to be razored-out pages from magazines and books; an essay on Plato's Laws removed from an issue of The Journal of Philosophical Inquiry, Fall 1961; a chapter from a study of Spinoza; a chapter from a study of Kant; several diagrammed pages from an essay on symbolic logic; had Vernor Matheius removed these from library materials? But Vernor wouldn't do such a thing. Not him. Pushed against the back of the drawer was a folder containing packets of much-folded letters and creased snapshots; some of these were in black and white, the rest in bright color; I found myself staring at brown-skinned strangers, a family; and there was a young, boyish Vernor Matheius in their midst; sixteen or seventeen, tall and lean and smiling; and in other snapshots he was perceptibly older, with a thin moustache, still tall and lean but without expression standing beside a much shorter, plump, happily smiling young woman with a baby in her arms and a boy of about two beside her clinging to her skirt; the young woman, I knew, was Vernor's wife, a good-looking woman in her mid-twenties with full fleshy lips and a wide pug nose; the little boy was cocoa-colored, with Vernor's beautiful long-lashed eyes and narrow face; the snapshot blazed with color, having been taken in a grassy outdoor setting, a wood frame cottage in the background; flowering fruit trees, dogwood and forsythia; there was a strange, stark, preacherly look to Vernor in his tight dark suit, long-sleeved white shirt and dark, tightly knotted tie; the very tie Vernor had worn with his new silk vest at the Brass Rail; his glasses weren't wire-rimmed and round but black plastic and oval; he stood slightly apart from his happily smiling little family and he was staring moodily at the camera and beyond the camera as if already Vernor Matheius was edging out of the frame, planning his escape. May 1959. So he's married, has been married. Has a family, young children. He lied.

I meant to replace the snapshots but my hand trembled. Several fell onto the floor. When I groped for them, my vision blurred. My love for Vernor Matheius was contracting like an outstretched hand contracting into a small, hard fist.

There was a sudden swift sound behind me: Vernor's bare feet slapping against the floor. I felt the angry vibrations of his footsteps before I turned to see him, partly dressed, in trousers and undershirt, rushing at me. He grabbed my arm, shoved me away from the opened filing cabinet; he slammed the drawer shut, and cursed me-"God damn you, Anellia! Get out of here!" His face was contorted in fury, and in chagrin; it was the chagrin I would remember; the lenses of his glasses were faintly clouded with steam from the bathroom; his skin had darkened ferociously with blood. To protect myself, I pushed at Vernor's hand; he pushed back at me, catching the side of my head with his fist; I felt the sharp, hard edge of the filing cabinet cutting into my thigh; blindly I half-crawled away, stumbling to my feet and ran for the door, which opened off the tiny kitchen; Vernor didn't pursue me, but cursed after me as I ran panting and sobbing on the stairs, sick with guilt, and fear of what Vernor might do to me. I ran down the outdoor stairs and heard his voice above me, a furious lowered voice like a wail of grief. I pressed my hands over my ears to stifle-Get out of here don't ever come back God damn you! Fuck you! fuck you white bitch!

30

At the foot of the wooden stairs. My thoughts beat like moths against a screen. I sat hunched, hugging my knees; staring out at the rain. Vernor Matheius had driven me away as you'd drive away a dog yet there I sat huddled at the foot of the wooden stairs at 1183 Chambers as night came on.

How long I'd been there, I could not have said. Night now, and steadily raining. A steamy mist rose from the pavement. I was sick with grief and chagrin of my own; I'd run away from Vernor Matheius and wandered in the rain and at last returned, hair dripping in my face, my clothes soaked, I was stunned, I was sick, yet a part of my brain continued to operate as always What did you expect, wasn't it freedom from him you wanted. From a distance came the sonorous tolling of the bell tower of the Music School on its drumlin-hill; Chambers Street was on lower ground, in a virtual gulch; the air was heavier here, more viscous and oppressive; the mist rising from the pavement had become fog; my face and throat ached as if I'd been crying, but I didn't remember crying; tears are a child's desperate ploy, and futile. I thought I will never cry again, no one will ever have the power to hurt me again; and this would be so. I felt Vernor's hard fingers grabbing my arm, the hard blow of his fist against my head; I saw again the man's look of rage, disgust, yet guilt; something like shame; I'd peered too deeply into his soul for him to forgive me; I'd gone too far; he had loved me or had almost loved me or (I would tell myself) had begun to allow himself to consider that he might, in his way, love me; or that he might have begun to allow himself to consider that he might allow me to love him without irony; and I'd destroyed that, I'd destroyed my own meager hope of happiness, I'd destroyed the purity of my own love for him; I'd destroyed Anellia, who was such a fool. The idolator is always a fool. It was Anellia's wet hair dripping into her face, Anellia's lean arms, lean-muscled legs pressed tight against her shivering body; though the season was summer by the calendar, the air was cold; the rain was cold; Anellia whose soul quavered at the brink of extinction; about to be sucked into the void, which was Nothingness; the bliss of Nothingness; for what was there after all, as Vernor Matheius had once wittily declaimed, except atoms-and-the-void at the start of human time, which was the start of human thinking, and that effort of human futility to which the name Philosophy has been assigned. Yet I saw with a stab of certainty what I would do: I would return to my room and toss my costume-clothes into a heap, my cheaply glamorous secondhand things purchased with such misguided hope; I would cut these things into pieces with a scissors; as once I'd cut my long, bristling hair; to hurt oneself sometimes is a balm; to hurt oneself sometimes is the only way of healing; debridement was a term of Vernor Matheius's, and it would be a term of my own; even the silver belt I would tear at until its silver medallions broke apart and clattered to the floor; my heart beat hard with the certainty of all I would do, and would not regret doing; I would step into history, as Vernor had scorned; I would join demonstrators marching and chanting and waving handmade signs; I would join CORE, I would join SANE; I would find a way of bringing my intense inner life, my questing life, into balance with history; I would be fearless, or give that impression; I would be fearless, though frightened; I would march with Negroes and whites and confront the race-hatred of my race; I would expose my heart, as I would expose my body; I would make myself vulnerable, I would expiate my guilt; I would remake myself another time, empowered by loss, grief. No longer Anellia. Waiting to see who I might be, after Anellia.

And there came at last Vernor Matheius's voice above me. And it was a voice of sobriety, and not reproach; a voice still lowered with emotion; a raw voice, a voice of hurt and dismay. "Anellia, is that you?" A pause, a beat. My heart continued to beat calmly with the certainty of what I would do, and what I would not do; what I would not ever do again; and I didn't turn to look up the steep steps at Vernor Matheius. I heard him mutter, "Jesus!" I heard him descend the stairs slowly, like a man just awakened from sleep; he was breathing quickly, audibly. When on the step above me he paused, I had a childish fear he would kick me; and very possibly that thought ran through his head, too; but he said, "Anellia, you shouldn't be here. You'll only be hurt." I might have said I've already been hurt. But I said nothing. Vernor stepped down to sit beside me, with a sigh; a sigh like a shudder; stone cold sober the man was, and shaky; I had to ease aside to make room for him, as if it was the most natural thing in the world for us to sit together here in the dark, in the rain; Vernor lit a cigarette and expelled smoke through his nostrils, and after a moment said, thoughtfully, "I don't have a black soul. Because I don't have a black soul, I don't have any soul at all." I said, "Vernor, I thought you didn't believe in 'soul.' I thought you didn't believe in personal identity, history." He said, "I don't. The way a colorblind person doesn't believe in color because he hasn't experienced it." There was bemusement in this remark, and melancholy; a melancholy I'd never heard in Vernor Matheius before. I said, "You have a family, I guess? Young children?" and he said, "No longer," and I said, "What do you mean, 'no longer'?" and he shrugged and said nothing; and my voice quavered with indignation I hadn't known I would feel, since the initial feeling I'd had, seeing the big-boned smiling woman in the snapshot, had been jealousy, "You left your wife and children? Left where? Where are they? How could you do such a thing, Vernor?" and Vernor said quietly, "It's none of your concern who or what I've left behind me or who or what I am. Or what you or anyone else expects of me." And I said nothing, for this was so; this statement of fact could not be contested; I said nothing, but I didn't acquiesce; and Vernor sucked at his cigarette and released clouds of stinging smoke which was the smell of guilt; and it crossed my mind that I would not miss this: the smoke, the stink of cigarettes, my poor father's smoking habit, my father's mysterious dying, the perverse romance of addiction; I would not miss this at all. We watched a car pass in the rain, it must've been a police squad car with a red light on its roof, driving fast along Chambers splashing through puddles; there were rivulets of rainwater rushing down Chambers Street, the steep hill from the university hospital complex. And at last Vernor said in a flat voice, a voice from which all pretension had drained, "My ancestors from Dahomey were tribal people, they were captured and brought to North America as slaves in the 1780's; but they'd been slave traders themselves. They'd captured and sold other black tribes as slaves. This was a secret imparted to me by my mother's grandfather, a minister, when I was twenty-one years old. This was our handed-down secret, handed to me. That my ancestors, his ancestors, had sold other black Africans, other tribes, to white European slavers." I turned now to look at Vernor; I looked at him in astonishment; for this was a man out of whose mouth revelations emerged, and always unexpected. I had believed I could predict him at last, and yet I could not have predicted this; never could I have predicted the sadness in his voice, and the resignation. As if, for him too, something had ended. Yet there came his wry humor, his sidelong grin and squint as if (after all) he and I were allies in this predicament; this problem; as if Vernor Matheius were an intellectual puzzle we might contemplate together as colleagues and attempt to solve; like those students of philosophy devoted to logical analysis; enjoined in a singular quest for truth which is the philosopher's life's work. He said bitterly, "But why judge them? My putative ancestors? They were human beings and like all human beings they were cruel, exploitative, xenophobic; they were primitive people in a tribal society in which members of other tribes aren't perceived as fully human; you can kill them, you can sell them into slavery, you can practice genocide like the Germans of the Third Reich, and someone will absolve you-it's 'natural,' it's 'Nature'; it's instinct. So my ancestors sold their brother and sister Africans into slavery and they flourished for a while until it came their turn to be slaves. White men's trading ships sailed from Liverpool to the west coast of Africa and traded textiles, arms, and other cargo for black men and women; the ship sailed across the Atlantic to Jamaica where the black men and women were traded for sugar, which was brought back to England to be sold; for what would the English do without sugar in their tea and pastries; what would the white man's civilization be without sugar in their bloodstream; again the ship sailed from Liverpool to the west coast of Africa and loaded up with black men and women; and so on, and so forth; it was a prosperous business, these were boom times, everyone flourished except those with the bad luck to be branded 'slaves.' " Vernor spoke with the mildest irony; this was a recitation of facts, of history; yet every syllable was damning; every syllable was an outcry of pain. Hesitantly I touched his arm, and said, "Vernor, you aren't your ancestors any more than I am my ancestors," even as my voice faltered, for maybe this wasn't true; and Vernor said practicably, "Then I'm no one. I don't know who the hell I am." I said, "But why should it matter?

Why-now?" For hadn't we faith in pure rationality, pure logic and language pruned of all sentiment, all tribal history; wasn't the dream of philosophy possible, even now? Vernor said, for even at such a moment Vernor Matheius was one to have the final word, "Yes, why should it matter? Yet it does." How strange to be sitting beside this man on these wooden stairs smelling faintly of rot, at such a time; gazing out toward the rain; a couple seated together gazing out into the rain; they live upstairs and have come outside for fresh air, the man smoking and the woman seated close beside him; a harsh, sibilant rain blowing along the pavement beneath streetlights, with a look of antic excitement. Another time we heard the remote sonorous tolling of the Music School bell tower; more chimes than I could count, it must have been midnight. How strange, how uncanny and how wonderful, what elation flooded my small gnarled heart on the eve of my twentieth birthday as I sat beside Vernor Matheius on the stairs at the rear of the shabby stucco building at 1183 Chambers Street, Syracuse, New York on the rain-swept night of June 18, 1963.

If you'd driven by, and noticed that couple, wondering who they were, they were us.