Men and Cartoons

Super Goat Man

WHEN SUPER GOAT MAN MOVED INTO THE commune on our street I was ten years old. Though I liked superheroes, I wasn't familiar with Super Goat Man. His presence didn't mean anything, particularly, to myself or to the other kids in the neighborhood. For us, as we ran and screamed and played secret games on the sidewalk, Super Goat Man was only another of the men who sat on stoops in sleeveless undershirts on hot summer days, watching the slow progress of life on the block. The two little fleshy horns on his forehead didn't make him especially interesting. We weren't struck by his fall from grace, out of the world of comic-book heroes, among which he had been at best a minor star, to land here in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, in a single room in what was basically a dorm for college dropouts, a hippie group shelter, any more than we were by the tufts of extra hair at his throat and behind his ears. We had eyes only for Spider-Man or Batman in those days, superheroes in two dimensions, with lunch boxes and television shows and theme songs. Super Goat Man had none of those.

It was our dads who cared. They were unmistakably drawn to the strange figure who'd moved to the block, as though for them he represented some lost possibility in their own lives. My father in particular seemed fascinated with Super Goat Man, though he covered this interest by acting as though it were on my behalf. One day toward the end of that summer he and I walked to Montague Street, to visit the comics shop there. This was a tiny storefront filled with long white boxes, crates full of carefully archived comics, protected by plastic bags and cardboard backing. The boxes contained ancient runs of back issues of titles I'd heard of, as well as thousands of other comics featuring characters I'd never encountered. The shop was presided over by a nervous young pedant with long hair and a beard, a collector-type himself, an old man in spirit who distrusted children in his store, as he ought to have. He assisted my father in finding what he sought, deep in the alphabetical archive — a five-issue run of The Remarkable Super Goat Man, from Electric Comics. These were the only comics in which Super Goat Man had appeared. There were just five issues because after five the title had been forever canceled. My father seemed satisfied with what he'd found. We paid for the five issues and left.

I didn't know how to explain to my father that Electric wasn't one of the major comics publishers. The stories the comics contained, when we inspected them together, were both ludicrous and boring. Super Goat Man's five issues showed him rescuing old ladies from swerving trucks and kittens from lightning-struck trees, and battling dull villains like Vest Man and False Dave. The drawings were amateurish, cut-rate, antiquated. I couldn't have articulated these judgments then, of course. I only knew I disliked the comics, found them embarrassing, for myself, for Super Goat Man, and for my dad. They languished in my room, unread, and were eventually cleaned up — I mean, thrown out — by my mom.

For the next few years Super Goat Man was less than a minor curiosity to me. I didn't waste thought on him. The younger men and women who lived in the commune took him for granted, as anyone should, so far as I knew. We kids would see him in their company, moving furniture up the stoop and into the house, discarded dressers and couches and lamps they'd found on the street, or taping posters on lampposts announcing demonstrations against nuclear power or in favor of day-care centers, or weeding in the commune's pathetic front yard, which was intended as a vegetable garden but was choked not only with uninvited growth but with discarded ice-cream wrappers and soda bottles — we kids used the commune's yard as a dumping ground. It didn't occur to me that Super Goat Man was much older, really, than the commune's other occupants, that in fact they might be closer to my age than to his. However childish their behavior, the hippies all seemed as dull and remote as grown-ups to me.

It was the summer when I was thirteen that my parents allowed me to accompany them to one of the commune's potluck dinners. The noise and vibrancy of that house's sporadic celebrations were impossible to ignore on our street, and I knew my parents had attended a few earlier parties — warily, I imagined. The inhabitants of the commune were always trying to sweep their neighbors into dubious causes, and it might be a mistake to be seduced by frivolity into some sticky association. But my parents liked fun too. And had too little of it. Their best running jokes concerned the dullness of their friends' dinner parties. This midsummer evening they brought me along to see inside the life of the scandalous, anomalous house.

The house was already full, many bearded and jeweled and scruffy, reeking of patchouli and musk, others, like my parents, dressed in their hippest collarless shirts and paisley blouses, wearing their fattest beads and bracelets. The offerings, nearly all casseroles brimming with exotic gray proteins, beans and tofu and eggplant and more I couldn't name, were lined on a long side table, mostly ignored. This was a version of cocktail hour, with beer drunk from the bottle and well-rolled marijuana cigarettes. I didn't see whether my parents indulged in the latter. My mother accepted a glass of orange juice, surely spiked. I meant not to pay them any attention, so I moved for the stairs. There were partiers leaning on the banister at the first landing, and evidence of music playing in upstairs rooms, so I didn't doubt the whole house was open to wandering.

There was no music coming from the garden-facing room on the second floor, but the door was open and three figures were visible inside, seated on cushions on a mattress on the floor. A young couple, and Super Goat Man. From his bare hairy feet on the mattress, I guessed it was his room I'd entered. The walls were sparse apart from a low bookcase, on which I spotted, laid crosswise in the row of upright spines, Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night, Sergei Eisenstein's Film Form / The Film Sense, and Thomas Pynchon's V. The three titles stuck in my head; I would later attempt to read each of the three at college, succeeding only with the Mailer. Beside the bookcase was a desk heaped with papers, and behind it a few black-and-white postcards had been thumbtacked to the wall. These looked less like a considered decoration than as if they'd been pinned up impulsively by a sitter at the desk. One of the postcard images I recognized as Charlie Parker, clutching a saxophone with his meaty hands. The jazzman was an idol of my father's, perhaps a symbol of his vanished youth.

The young man on the mattress was holding a book: Memories, Dreams, Reflections, by Carl Jung. Super Goat Man had evidently just pressed it on him, and had likely been extolling its virtues when I walked into the room.

“Hello,” said the young woman, her voice warm. I must have been staring, from my place in the middle of the room.

“You're Everett, aren't you?” said Super Goat Man, before I could speak.

“How'd you know my name?”

“You live on the block,” said Super Goat Man. “I've seen you running around.”

“I think we'll head down, Super Goat Man,” said the young man abruptly, tucking the book under his arm as he got up from the mattress. “Get something to eat before it's too late.”

“I want to hit the dance floor,” said the young woman.

“See you down there,” said Super Goat Man. With that the young couple were gone.

“You checking out the house?” said Super Goat Man to me once we were alone. “Casing the joint?”

“I'm looking for my friend,” I lied.

“I think some kids are hanging out in the backyard.”

“No, she went upstairs.” I wanted him to think I had a girlfriend.

“Okay, cool,” said Super Goat Man. He smiled. I suppose he was waiting for me to leave, but he didn't give any sign that I was bothering him by staying.

“Why do you live here?” I asked.

“These are my friends,” he said. “They helped me out when I lost my job.”

“You're not a superhero anymore, are you?”

Super Goat Man shrugged. “Some people felt I was being too outspoken about the war. Anyway, I wanted to accomplish things on a more local level.”

“Why don't you have a secret identity?”

“I wasn't that kind of superhero.”

“But what was your name, before?”

“Ralph Gersten.”

“What did Ralph Gersten do?”

“He was a college teacher, for a couple of years.”

“So why aren't you Ralph Gersten now?”

“Sometime around when they shot Kennedy I just realized Ralph Gersten wasn't who I was. He was a part of an old life I was holding on to. So I became Super Goat Man. I've come to understand that this is who I am, for better or worse.”

This was a bit much for me to assimilate, so I changed the subject. “Do you smoke pot?”

“Sometimes.”

“Were Mr. and Mrs. Gersten sad when you gave up your secret identity?”

“Who?”

“Your parents.”

Super Goat Man smiled. “They weren't my real parents. I was adopted.”

Suddenly I was done. “I'm going downstairs, Super Goat Man.”

“Okay, Everett,” he said. “See you down there, probably.”

I made my way downstairs, and lurked in the commune's muddy and ill-lit backyard, milling with the other teenagers and children stranded there by the throngs of frolickers — for the party was now overflowing its bounds, and we were free to steal beers from the counter and carry on our own tentative party, our own fumbling flirtations. I had no girlfriend, but I did play spin the bottle that night, crouched on the ground beneath a fig tree.

Then, near midnight, I went back inside. The living room was jammed with bodies — dancers on a parquet floor that had been revealed when the vast braided rug had been curled up against the base of the mantel. Colored Christmas lights were bunched in the corner, and some of them blinked to create a gently eerie strobe. I smelled sweat and smoke. Feeling perverse and thrilled by the kisses I'd exchanged in the mud beneath the tree, I meandered into the web of celebrants.

Super Goat Man was there. He was dancing with my mother. She was as I'd never seen her, braceleted wrists crossed above her head, swaying to the reggae — I think it was the sound track to The Harder They Come. Super Goat Man was more dressed-up than he'd been in his room upstairs. He wore a felt brocade vest and striped pants. He danced in tiny little steps, almost as though losing and regaining his balance, his arms loose at his sides, fingers snapping. Mostly he moved his head to the beat, shaking it back and forth as if saying no-no-no, no-no-no. He shook his head at my mother's dancing, as if he couldn't approve of the way she was moving, but couldn't quit paying attention either.

My father? He was seated on the rolled-up rug, his back against the mantel, elbows on his knees, dangling with forefinger and thumb a nearly empty paper cup of red wine. Like me, he was watching my mom and Super Goat Man. It didn't look as if it bothered him at all.

MY JUNIOR year at Corcoran College, in Corcoran, New Hampshire, Super Goat Man was brought in to fill the Walt Whitman Chair in the Humanities. This was 1981, the dawn of Reagan. The chair was required to offer one course; Super Goat Man's was listed in the catalogue as Dissidence and Desire: Marginal Heroics in American Life 1955–1975. The reading included Frantz Fanon, Roland Barthes, and Timothy Leary. It was typical of Corcoran that it would choose that particular moment to recuperate a figure associated with sixties protest, to enshrine what had once been at the vigorous center of the culture in the harmless pantheon of academia. It was Super Goat Man's first teaching job since the fifties. The commune on our street had shut down at some point in my high-school years, and I don't know where Super Goat Man had been in the intervening time. I certainly hadn't thought about him since departing for college.

He'd gained a little weight, but was otherwise unchanged. I first spotted him moving across the Commons lawn on a September afternoon, one with the scent of fallen and fermenting crab apples on the breeze. It was one of those rare, sweet days on either side of the long New Hampshire winter, when a school year was either falsely fresh before its plunge into bleak December, or exhausted and ready to give way to summer. Super Goat Man wore a forest green corduroy suit and a wide salmon tie, but his feet were still bare. A couple of Corcoran girls trailed alongside him. He had a book open as he walked — perhaps he was reading them a poem.

The college had assigned Super Goat Man one of the dormitory apartments — a suite of rooms built into Sweeney House, one of the student residences. That is to say, he lived on the edge of the vast commons lawn, and we students felt his watchful presence much as I had in Cobble Hill, on our street. I didn't take Super Goat Man's class, which was mostly full of freshmen, and of those renegade history and rhetoric majors who'd been seduced by French strains of philosophy and literary theory. I fancied myself a classics scholar then — though I'd soon divert into a major in history — and wasn't curious about contemporary political theory, even if I'd believed Super Goat Man to be a superior teacher, which I didn't. I wasn't certain he had nothing to offer the Corcoran students, but whatever it might be it wasn't summed up by the title of his class.

I did, however, participate in one of the late-night salons in the living room of Sweeney House. Super Goat Man had begun appearing there casually, showing up after a few students had occupied the couches, and had lit a fire or opened a bottle of red wine. Increasingly his presence was relied upon; soon it was a given that he was the center of an unnamed tradition. Though Corcoran College was then in the throes of a wave of glamorous eighties-style binge parties, and cocaine had begun to infiltrate our sanctum in the New Hampshire woods as if we were all denizens of Andy Warhol's Factory, the Sweeney House salons were a throwback to another, earlier temperature of college socializing. Bearded art students who disdained dancing in favor of bull sessions, Woolfian-Plathian girls in long antique dresses, and lonely gay virgins of both genders — these were the types who found their way to Sweeney to sit at Super Goat Man's feet. There were also, from what I observed, a handful of quiet superhero comic-book fans who revered Super Goat Man in that capacity and were covertly basking in his aura, ashamed to ask the sorts of questions I'd peppered him with in his room in the communal house, so long ago.

The evening I sat in, Super Goat Man had dragged his phonograph out from his apartment and set it up in the living room so that he could play Lenny Bruce records for his acolytes. Super Goat Man had five or six of the records. He spoke intermittently, his voice unhurried and reflective, explaining the context of the famous comedian's arrests and courtroom battles before dropping the needle on a given track. After a while conversation drifted to other subjects. Cross talk arose, though whenever Super Goat Man began to speak in his undemonstrative way all chatter fell deferentially silent. Then Super Goat Man went into his apartment and brought out an Ornette Coleman LP.

“You know a bit about jazz, don't you, Everett?” It was the first time he'd addressed me directly. I hadn't known he'd recognized me.

“A thing or two, I guess.”

“Everett's father was the one who turned me on to Rahsaan Roland Kirk,” Super Goat Man told a teenager I recognized, a bespectacled sophomore who'd impressively talked his way into a classics seminar that was meant for upperclassmen. “I always thought that stuff was too gimmicky, but I'd never really listened.”

I tried to imagine when Super Goat Man and my dad had spent so much time together. It was almost impossible to picture, but Super Goat Man didn't have any reason to be lying about it. It was one of the first times I was forced to consider the possibility that my parents had social lives — that they had lives.

“Does your father write about jazz?” the sophomore asked me, wide-eyed. I suppose he'd misunderstood Super Goat Man's remark. There were plenty of famous — or at least interesting — fathers at Corcoran College, but mine wasn't one of them.

“My father works for New York State,” I said. “Department of Housing and Urban Development. Well, he just lost his job, in fact.”

“He's a good five-card-stud player too,” said Super Goat Man. “Cleaned me out a few times, I don't mind saying.”

“Oh yeah, my dad's a real supervillain,” I said with the heaviest sarcasm I could muster. I was embarrassed to think of my father sucking up to Super Goat Man, as he surely had during their long evenings together, whoever had taken the bulk of the chips.

Then the squeaky jazz began playing, and Super Goat Man, though seated in one of the dormitory's ratty armchairs, closed his eyes and began shaking his head as if transported back to the commune's dance floor, or perhaps to some even earlier time. I studied his face. The tufts around his ears and throat were graying. I puzzled over his actual age. Had Super Goat Man once spent decades frozen in a block of ice, like Captain America? If Ralph Gersten had been a college teacher in the fifties, he was probably older than my dad.

Eight months later the campus was green again. The term was almost finished, all of us nearly freed to summer, when it happened: the incident at the Campanile. A Saturday, late in a balmy night of revels, the Commons lawn full of small groups crossing from dorm to dorm, cruising at the parties which still flared like bonfires in the landscape of the campus. Many of us yet owed papers, others would have to sit in a final class the following Monday, but the mood was one of expulsive release from our labors. It was nearly three in the morning when Rudy Krugerrand and Seth Brummell, two of the wealthiest and most widely reviled frat boys at Corcoran, scaled the Campanile tower and began bellowing.

I was among those awake and near enough by to be drawn by the commotion, into the small crowd at the dark base of the Campanile tower. When I first gazed up at Rudy and Seth I was confused by what I saw: Were there four figures spotlit against the clock beneath the bells? And where were the campus authorities? It was as though this night had been officially ceded to some bacchanalian imperative.

That spring a sculpture student had, as his thesis project, decorated the Commons with oversize office supplies — a stapler in the dimensions of a limousine, a log painted as a number two pencil, and a pile of facsimile paper clips each the height of a human being, fashioned out of plastic piping and silver paint. I suppose the work was derivative of Claes Oldenburg, but the result made an impressive spectacle. It was two of the paper-clip sculptures that Rudy Krugerrand and Seth Brummell had managed to attach to their belts like mannequin dance partners and drag with them out onto the ledge of the Campanile clock, where they stood now, six stories from the ground. On the precipice at the clockface, their faces uplit in the floodlights, Rudy and Seth were almost like players in the climax of some Gothic silent-film drama, but they didn't have the poise or imagination to know it. They were only college pranksters, reelingly drunk, Seth with a three-quarters empty bottle of Jack Daniels still in his hand, and at first it was hard to make out what they were shouting. We on the ground predictably shouted “Jump!” back at them, knowing they loved themselves too dearly ever to consider it.

Then Rudy Krugerrand's slurred voice rose out above the din — or perhaps it was only that I picked it out of the din for the first time. “Calling Super Goat Man! Calling Super Goat Man!” He shouted this until his voice broke hoarse. “This looks like a job for Super Goat Man! Come out, come out, wherever you are!”

“What's going on?” I asked a student beside me.

He shrugged. “I guess they're calling out Super Goat Man. They want to see if he can get them down from the ledge.”

“What do you mean?”

“They want to see him use his powers.”

From the clock tower Seth Brummell screamed now, in a girlish falsetto: “Oh, Super Goat Man, where are you?”

A stirring had begun in the crowd, which had grown by now to a hundred or more. A murmuring. Super Goat Man's name was planted like a seed. Under the guise of concern for Rudy and Seth, but certainly with a shiver of voyeuristic anticipation, some had begun to speak of going to the Sweeney House apartment, to see if Super Goat Man could be located. There was a hint of outrage: Why wasn't he here already? What kind of Super Goat Man was he, anyway?

Now a group of fifteen or twenty broke out and streamed down the hill, toward Sweeney House. Others trailed after them, myself included. I hid in this crowd, feeling like an observer, though I suppose I was as complicit as anyone. Were we only curious, or a part of a mob? It seemed, anyway, that we were under the direction of Rudy and Seth.

“That's right,” mocked Rudy. “Only Super Goat Man can save us now!”

Those who'd led the charge hammered on Super Goat Man's apartment door for a good few minutes before getting a result. Bold enough to have woken him, they inched backward at the sight of him on his threshold, dressed only in a flowery silk kimono, blinking groggily at the faces arrayed on the hill. Then someone stepped forward and took his arm, pointed him toward the Campanile. Any conversation was drowned in murmurs, and by the sound of sirens, now belatedly pulling up at the base of the tower. Super Goat Man shook his head sorrowfully, but he began to trek up the hill to the Commons, toward the Campanile. We all fell in around and behind him, emboldened at marching to the beat of a superhero's step, feeling the pulse of the script it now appeared would be played out, ignoring the fact that it had been written by Rudy and Seth and Jack Daniels. Super Goat Man's kimono fluttered slightly, not quite a cape. He tightened the sash, and strode, rubbing at his eyes with balled fists.

This success only seemed to enrage Rudy and Seth, who writhed and scorned from atop their perch. “Baaahh, baaahh, Super Goat Man!” they roared. “What's the matter with your goaty senses? Smoke too much dope tonight? Fuck you, Super Goat Man!” Seth lifted his giant paper clip above his head, to shake it like a fake strongman's prop dumbbell.

The campus police began to herd the students from the base of the tower, but our arriving throng pushed the opposite way. In the confusion, the young policemen seemed utterly helpless, and fell back. Straining on tiptoe to see over the heads of the crowd, I followed the progress of the lime green kimono as Super Goat Man was thrust to the fore, not necessarily by his own efforts. Above, Seth was strumming air-guitar chords on his paper clip, then waggling it over our heads like an enormous phallus.

“Bite my crank, Super Goat Man!”

The crowd gasped as Super Goat Man shed his garb — for mobility I suppose — and started shimmying, almost scampering, up the face of the tower. His pelt was glossy in the moonlight, but nobody could have mistaken the wide swath of white above his dusky buttocks for sheen. Super Goat Man was aging. He scurried through the leaf-blobby shade a tree branch cast against the side of the tower, then back into the light. Whether it was the pressure of expectation on a still-sleepy mind, or possibly a genuine calling to heroics, a hope he could do some good here, Super Goat Man had taken the bait. His limbs worked miraculously in ascending the tower, yet one could only dread what would come if he reached the idiot boys at the top, who grew more agitated and furious at every inch he achieved. Rudy had lifted his own paper clip, to match Seth, and now he swung it out over us.

The plummet silenced us. It was over before we could swallow our words and form a cry to replace them. Six stories is no distance at all, only enough. Rudy's paper clip had overbalanced him. Super Goat Man had braced three limbs, and reached out with a fourth — some number of us saw, others only imagined afterward — but he didn't come away with Rudy. Super Goat Man caught the paper clip in mid-flight with the prehensile toes of his left foot, and the sculpture was jerked free from Rudy as he fell. That's how firm was Super Goat Man's hold on the tower's third story: it was left for later to speculate whether he might have been able to halt a human body's fall. Rudy came to earth, shattering at the feet of the policemen there at the tower's base. Now the nude furry figure could only undertake a sober, methodical descent, paper clip tucked beneath one arm. At the clockface, Seth Brummell was mute, clinging to a post, to wait for the security men who would soon unlock the small door in the tower behind him and angrily yank him to safety.

Rudy Krugerrand survived his fall. His ruined spine cost him the use of his legs, cost him all feeling below some point at his middle. Only a junior, he rather courageously reappeared in a mechanical wheelchair the following September, resumed his studies, resumed drinking too, though his temperament was mellowed, reflective now. He'd be seen at parties dozing in the corner after the dance floor had filled — it took very little beer to knock his dwindled body out. If Rudy had died, or never returned, the incident likely would have been avidly discussed, etched into campus legend. Instead it was covered in a clumsy hush. The coexistence in the same small community of Rudy and Super Goat Man — who'd been offered a seat in the social sciences, and accepted — comprised a kind of odd, insoluble puzzle: Had the hero failed the crisis? Caused it, by some innate provocation? Or was the bogus crisis unworthy, and the outcome its own reward? Who'd shamed whom?

I contemplated this koan, or didn't, for just another year. My graduate studies took me to the University of California at Irvine, three thousand grateful miles from Corcoran, now Super Goat Man's province. I didn't see him, or think of him again, for more than a decade.

THE SWEETEST student I ever had was an Italian girl named Angela Verucci. Tall, bronze-skinned, with a quizzical, slightly humorless cast, dressed no matter the weather in neat pantsuits or skirts with stockings, in heavy tortoise-shell glasses frames and with her blond hair knit in a tight, almost Japanese bun, her aura of seriousness and her Mediterranean luster outshone the blandly corn-fed and T-shirted students in whose midst she had materialized. Angela Verucci was not so much a girl, really: twenty-four years old, she'd already studied at Oxford before taking the Reeves Fellowship that had brought her to America. She spoke immaculate English, and though her accreditation was a mess, truly she was nearly as accomplished a medievalist as I was the day she appeared in my class. This was at Oregon State University, in Corvallis, where I'd been given a two-year postdoc after my six years at Irvine. Oregon State was the third stop in Angela Verucci's American tour — she'd also spent a year at Columbia and, as it happened, a term at Corcoran.

What does a single, thirty-year-old history professor do with the sweetest student he's ever had? He waits until the end of the semester, files a Circular of Intent with the Faculty Appropriateness Committee, and in early spring asks her to hike with him to the highest point in the county, a lookout over three mountain ranges called Sutter's Parlor. Angela Verucci arrived in heels, perhaps not completely grasping the sense of the invitation. We forsook the ascent in favor of a glass of Oregon Pinot Noir on a restaurant patio perched on the Willamette River — near enough, for the Brooklynite and the Sicilian, to an expedition.

We were married two years later, on the Italian island itself. The ceremony was deferentially Catholic; I didn't care. The wider circle of my acquaintances learned the happy details in a mass e-mail. Then Angela and I returned to our quiet rented bungalow in New Brunswick, New Jersey. I was at Rutgers then, on a second postdoc, and hungry for a tenure-track position. My job interviews were hardly unsuccessful: I was never summarily dismissed, instead always called back for second and third visits, always asked to teach a sample class. Afterward, polite notes flew back and forth, candidate and committee reassuring one another of how fine the experience had been, how glad we both were to have met. Only I never got a job.

So by the time I got the invitation to interview for a position at Corcoran, the New England pastures of my alma mater didn't appear such a poor fate. It was the week of Halloween, the weather glorious, so at the very least the day of the interview would be a nice jaunt. We left early, to roam a few New Hampshire back roads, then ate a picnic lunch beside Corcoran Pond before I checked in for an afternoon of meetings.

Corcoran looked implacable, though I knew it was changed. The school had been through financial shake-ups and tenure scandals; those had, in turn, purged most of the administrators and faculty I'd known. But the grounds, the crab apple trees and white clapboard, were eternal as a country-store calendar. While Angela took a memory tour, heading for her old dorm, I turned up for my scheduled tribunal. There, I was debriefed by peers, a couple of them younger than myself. The room was full of the usual tensions: some of these people had an investment in my candidacy, some had bets on other tables. No one was in the least sentimental about my status as alumnus — that was reserved, I supposed, for the dinner tonight, arranged in my honor at the president's house. After a finishing round of polite handclasps I was ferried to the president's office. On top of tonight's dinner, she'd also wanted to meet me alone. I figured it was a good sign.

The president asked how I'd liked the interview; we made this and other small talk. She asked about my years at Corcoran, which I painted in rosy tones. Then she said: “Did you know Super Goat Man when you were a student here?”

“Sure,” I said. “I mean, I never took a class with him.”

“He surprised me by asking to join us at the dinner tonight — he usually doesn't bother with faculty socializing anymore.”

“He's still here?” I was amazed Super Goat Man, of all people, had threaded his way through so many personnel shake-ups.

“Yes, though he's reduced to a kind of honorary presence. He doesn't actually teach now. I don't know if he'd be capable of it. But he's beloved. The students joke that he can be spotted strolling across Commons lawn twice a semester. And that if you want to get any time with him, you can join him on the stroll.”

“He recognized my name?”

“He seemed to, yes. You should prepare yourself. He's quite infirm.”

“How — how old is he?”

“Measured in years, I don't know. But there's been an accelerated aging process. You'll see.”

Perhaps superheroism was a sort of toxin, like a steroid, one with a punitive cost to the body. I mused on this as I departed the president's office, crossed the Commons, and headed through the parking lot and downhill, to find the bench beside Corcoran Creek, a favorite spot, where Angela had said she'd wait. I saw my wife before she saw me, her feet tucked up on the slats, abandoned shoes beneath, her body curled around a big hardback biography of Rousseau. In the distance, dying October light drew long saddle-shaped curves on the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Suddenly I could picture us here for a long time, and picture it happily.

“How did it go?” she asked when she noticed me.

“Par: two friends, two enemies, one sleeper.”

“And the president?”

“Nice, but she wasn't giving anything away.” I put my hands on her shoulders. She closed the book.

“You seem distant,” Angela said. “Memories?”

“Yes.” In fact, I was thinking about Super Goat Man. I'd never before considered the sacrifice he'd made, enunciating his political views so long ago. Fruitlessly, it seemed to me. In exchanging his iconic, trapped-in-amber status, what had he gained? Had Super Goat Man really accomplished much outside the parameters of his comics? However unglamorous the chores, didn't kittens need rescuing from trees? Didn't Vest Man require periodic defeating? Why jettison Ralph Gersten if in the end all you attained was life as a campus mascot?

I wanted to convey some of this to Angela, but didn't know where to begin. “When you were here—” I began, then stopped.

“Yes?”

“Did you know Super Goat Man?”

I felt her stiffen. “Of course, everybody knew him,” she said.

“He's still here.” I watched her as I spoke. Her gaze dipped to the ground.

“You saw him?”

“No, but we will at dinner tonight.”

“How. . unexpected.” Now Angela was the one in fugue.

“Did you study with him?”

“He rarely taught. I attended a few talks.”

“I thought you didn't like that stuff.”

She shrugged. “I was curious.”

I waited to understand. Crickets had begun a chorus in the grass. The sun ebbed. Soon we'd need to visit our bed-and-breakfast outside campus, to change into fresh clothes for the dinner party. Ordinarily such gatherings were clumsy at best, with grudges incompletely smothered under the surface of the talk, among tenured faculty who knew one another far too well. Something in me now curdled at the prospect of this one. In fact, I'd begun to dread it.

“Everett.” There was something Angela wanted to tell me.

I made a preemptive guess. “Did you have some sort of something with Super Goat Man?” This was how she and I blundered through one another's past liaisons — we'd never been systematic.

I moved around the bench, to try and look her in the eye.

“Just an — affair. Nothing.”

“What's nothing?”

She shrugged, and flipped her fingers as though dispelling a small fog. “We fooled around a few times. It was stupid.”

I felt the poison of bitterness leach into my bloodstream. “I don't know why but I find that totally disgusting.”

“Oh, Everett.” Angela raised her arms, moved to assuage me, knowing as she did my visceral possessiveness, the bolt of jealousy that shot through me when contemplating her real past, anytime it arose. Of course, she couldn't understand my special history with Super Goat Man. How could she if I didn't? I'd never even mentioned him.

“I was a silly girl.” She spoke gently. “And I didn't know you yet.”

Unsatisfied, I wished her to declare that the encounter had been abusive, an ethical violation. Not that I had any ground to stand on. Anyway, she was Italian in this, as in all things. It was just an affair.

“Do you want to skip the dinner?”

She scowled. “That's silly. He wouldn't even remember. And I don't care. It's really nothing, my darling. My love.”

At the president's house Super Goat Man was the last to arrive, so I was allowed to fantasize briefly that I'd been spared. The sight, when he did come in, was startling. He'd not only aged, but shrunk — I doubted if he was even five feet tall. He was, as ever, barefooted, and wore white muslin pajamas, with purple piping. The knees of the pajama bottoms were smudged with mud. As he entered the room, creeping in among us as we stood with our cocktail glasses, I quickly saw the reason for the smudges: as Super Goat Man's rickety steps faltered he dropped briefly to all fours. There, on the ground, he'd shake himself, almost like a wet dog. Then he'd rise again, on palsied limbs.

No one took notice of this. The guests, the other faculty, were inured, polite. In this halting manner Super Goat Man made his way past us, to the dining room. Apparently he wasn't capable of mingling, or even necessarily of speech. He took a seat at the long table, his bunched face, his squinting eyes and wrinkled horns, nearly at the level of his place setting. So Super Goat Man's arrival curtailed cocktail hour, as we began drifting in behind him, almost guiltily. The president's husband showed us to our places, which had been carefully designated, though an accommodation was evidently being made for Super Goat Man, who'd plopped down where he liked and wasn't to be budged. I was at the right hand of the president, and the left of the chair of the hiring committee. Again, a good sign. Angela sat across from me, Super Goat Man many places away, at the other end of the table.

I actually managed to forget him for the duration of the meal. He was, so far as I could tell, silent at his feed, and the women on either side of him turned to their other partners, or conversed across the width of the table. Toward the end we were served a course of cognac and dessert, and the president's husband passed around cigars, which he bragged were Cuban. Some of the women fled their chairs to avoid the smoke; other guests rose and mingled again in the corners of the room. It was in this interval of disarrangement that Super Goat Man pushed himself off his chair and made his way to the seat at my left, which the president had vacated. He had to collapse to his knees only once on the way, and he offered no evidence of sacrificed dignity as he rose from the floor.

Angela remained in her seat. Unlike any of the American women, she'd accepted a cigar, and now leaned it into the flame of a lighter proffered by an older professor she'd been entertaining throughout the meal. Her eyes found mine as Super Goat Man approached. Her expression was curious, and not unsympathetic.

Super Goat Man prodded my arm with a finger. I turned and considered him. Black pupils gleamed behind a hedge of eyebrows. His resplendent tufts had thinned and spread — the hair of his face had been redistributed, to form a merciful gauze across his withered features.

“I. . knew. . your. . father.” His voice was mossy, sepulchral.

“Yes,” I said simply, keeping my voice low. No one was paying us any attention, yet. Not apart from Angela.

“You. . remember. .?”

“Of course.”

“We. . love. . jazz. .”

I wondered whether he meant my father or, somehow, me. I had in fact over the years come around to my father's love of jazz, though my preference was not so much Ornette Coleman and Rahsaan Roland Kirk as Duke Ellington and Fletcher Henderson.

“. . poker. .”

“He cleaned you out,” I reminded him.

“Yezz. . good times. . beautiful women. .” He struggled, swallowed hard, blinked. “All this controversy. . not worth it. .”

“My father was never involved in any controversy,” I heard myself say, though I knew Super Goat Man was speaking only of himself, his lost career.

“No. . absolutely true. . knew how to live. .”

Angela had leaned back, pursing her lips to savor the cigar. I might have noticed the room's gabble of conversation had dampened somewhat — might have noticed it sooner, I mean.

“So. . many. . hangovers. .”

“But you and I have something in common besides my father,” I told Super Goat Man.

“Yezz. . yezz. .?”

“Of course we do,” I began, and though I now understood we had the attention of the entire room, that the novelty of Super Goat Man's reminiscences had drawn every ear, I found myself unable to quit before I finished the thought. Further, having gained their attention, I allowed my voice to rise to a garrulous, plummy tone, as if I were starring in dinner theater. Before the line was half out of my mouth, I knew that the words, by airing the sort of laundry so desperately repressed in a community as precious as Corcoran, damned my candidacy. But that was a prize I no longer sought. Broader repercussions I could only guess at. My wife's eyes were on me now, her cigar's blunt tip flaring. I'd answer to her, later, if she gave me the chance.

It was the worst thing I could think to say. The impulse had formed in the grip of sexual jealousy, of course. But before it crossed my lips I knew my loathing had its origins in an even deeper place, the mind of a child wondering at his father's own susceptibility to the notion of a hero.

What I said was this: “I once saw you rescue a paper clip.”