Now and Then

32.

T he neighborhood on Magazine Street, where Lyndon Holt lived with Sheila Schwartz, reeked of graduate student. The gray clapboard apartment building had once been a large single residence. The Holt/Schwartz apartment was a second-floor walk-up that overlooked somebody’s two-car garage.

I rang the bell and waited. In a moment a woman’s voice said, “Who is it?” over the intercom.

“Spenser,” I said. “I called, from Arsenal magazine? I’m here with my photographer.”

“Oh sure,” the voice said. “Top of the stairs.”

“Arsenal?” Chollo said.

I shrugged.

The intercom buzzed. I heard the door lock click and opened it. Chollo and I went into the little hallway and up the stairs. Chollo was wearing a camel-hair overcoat and carrying a camera bag over his shoulder. Sheila was standing in the open doorway. Low jeans, short T-shirt, showing a lot of stomach. If she was going to dress like that, I thought, she ought to do a lot of situps. Lyndon stood behind her in the doorway. The full slacker: white T-shirt, multi-striped dress shirt, unbuttoned with the shirttails out. Jeans, hiking boots. Everything but the boots had obviously been home-laundered.

“Sheila says you’re doing a piece on Perry?” Lyndon said.

“Yes,” I said. “We thought it would make an interesting story the way events in the Middle East have, so to speak, reinvigorated the remnants of the counterculture.”

“Remnants?” Lyndon said.

“The opposition had lowered its voice for a while there after Vietnam.”

“They’d like you to think that,” he said.

“Would you folks like some coffee?” Sheila said.

“That would be swell,” I said. “You don’t mind if my photographer takes some shots? You know, ambience shots, maybe some candids of you folks.”

“No, that’s fi ne,” she said. “You don’t mind, do you, Lyn?”

“I want to see the story before it’s published,” Lyndon said.

“That will be between you and my editor,” I said. “Won’t do any harm to have some pictures, however, in case we need to use them in the story.”

“You mean we might end up in the magazine?” Sheila said.

“Definitely your names, parts of the interview. Pictures is up to the photo editor. We just send in the undeveloped fi lm.”

“I don’t see any harm, Lyn,” Sheila said.

He shrugged.

“Go ahead,” he said. “But I’m not signing any photo release until I see what’s in the story.”

I nodded and looked at Chollo.

“Okay, Casey,” I said. “Just get some informals while we talk.”

“Sí,” Chollo said.

They both stared at him as Chollo took a big 35mm camera out of the bag and began focusing.

“He used to be a crime photographer,” I said.

Chollo clicked off a couple of shots. They kept trying to smile into the camera as he moved around the room.

“Pay him no mind,” I said. “They’ll never use anything smiling into the lens.”

They looked quickly away. I got out my notebook.

“So,” I said. “How long have you known Perry Alderson?”

“Since we started grad school,” Sheila said. “We took his seminar and it blew us away.”

She looked at Lyndon. He nodded.

“Did you two know each other before you came here?” I said.

“No, we met in Perry’s class,” Sheila said.

“Where did you do your undergraduate work?” I said. Chollo drifted around pretending to be Francesco Scavullo.

“Wisconsin,” Sheila said.

“Berkeley,” Lyndon said.

I wrote diligently in my notebook.

“And did you come here because of Professor Alderson?” I said.

“No,” Sheila said. “At least I didn’t. I hadn’t heard of him until I got here.”

“You?” I said to Lyndon.

He shook his head.

“Why did you come here?” I said.

“I liked the college,” Lyndon said. “It had a reputation for, you know, diversity and inclusiveness.”

Sheila nodded.

“I wanted to come to Boston, too,” she said. “You know? See what it was like?”

“Whaddya think?” I said.

The power drive on Chollo’s camera whirred in the background. The shutter clicked.

“It’s not as liberal as I’d heard,” she said.

“More repressive than we thought,” Lyndon said. “But we were naïve, you know? Repression fl ourishes in every climate.”

“Even Cambridge,” Sheila said.

“So what drew you to Professor Alderson.”

“There was a lot of buzz,” Sheila said. “You know? I mean, he’d been in the movement since it began, almost.”

“Movement?”

“The fight against imperialism, and conformity,” Lyndon said. “The struggle for personal authenticity. The man was there. He was there in the sixties. He’s been there.”

I nodded and wrote yikes! in my notebook.

“The sixties,” I said.

“He was at Kent State,” Sheila said. “When they shot those students.”

I wrote 1970? in my notebook.

“He was with SNCC,” Lyndon said. “The Weathermen, everybody.”

“A hero of the counterculture,” I said.

“Exactly.”

“Does Professor Alderson use his experience as a basis for his seminar?”

“He’ll hate it if you refer to him as Professor Alderson, ” Sheila said. “He wants to be called Perry.”

“Titles are elitist,” Lyndon said. “They reinforce an oppressive system.”

“Is there a Mrs. Alderson?” I said.

“If there were,” Lyndon said, “he would not call her Mrs., as if somehow he owned her.”

“Is there anyone with whom he is sharing his life?” I said.

“Perry shares his life with many people,” Sheila said. “I don’t think he’s ever felt any need to limit himself.”

“You folks married?” I said.

“We have committed to each other,” Lyndon said. “We need no stamp of acceptance from the state.”

“Do you fi nd that shocking?” Sheila said.

“No,” I said. “Do you happen to have a syllabus for, ah, Perry’s seminar?”

“See,” Lyndon said. “You just don’t get it. Perry, and by extension we, are no more bound by college structure than we are by governmental structure.”

I wrote no in my notebook.

“Any texts?”

“The texts are being written by events,” Sheila said.

“No textbooks? Grades?”

“The college has imposed pass/fail. But for Perry the only failure is the failure to be free.”

“So what is class like?”

“We talk about life today as it is unfolding,” Lyndon said.

“Perry helps us put it in historical perspective,” Sheila said.

“Drawing upon his own experience,” I said.

“Yes.”

“A woman was recently killed at the college,” I said. “I understand she had been dating Perry.”

“Perry had been seeing her,” Sheila said.

“Did you know her?”

“Casually,” Lyndon said.

“Police talk to you about the killing?”

“Of course,” Lyndon said. “Police. FBI. Any chance they get to bring Perry down.”

“They think Perry was involved?”

“They are trying to make it look that way,” Lyndon said.

“But he wasn’t?”

“Of course not,” Sheila said. “They just want to smear him.”

“We didn’t tell them one damned thing,” Lyndon said. “And you can print that.”

“Name, rank, and serial number.”

“Exactly,” Lyndon said.

“You say you knew the woman casually,” I said. “You ever, ah, what, go out with them?”

“Now and then for a drink after class,” Sheila said. “She was nice. She taught postfeminist literature.”

I wrote postfeminist? in my notebook.

“I’m not comfortable,” Lyndon said, “discussing this. I am not going to participate in any attempt to smear Perry.”

“Of course,” I said. “I don’t blame you a bit. Did you know she was the wife of an FBI agent?”

“Isn’t that delicious?” Sheila said. “We used to joke about it.”

“Sheila,” Lyndon said. He looked at her in a very unliberated way. “I don’t think we should discuss this any further.”

“Oh, Lyndon, don’t be such a prig,” she said.

Lyndon’s face reddened. In my notebook I wrote prig.

“I’m afraid this interview is at an end,” he said priggishly.

“Oh, Lyndon.”

“Damn it, Sheila, be quiet. The interview is over.”

I winked at Sheila.

“Free to be you and me,” I said.