Stoner

XIII

In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart.

The hours that he once had spent in his office gazing out of the window upon a landscape that shimmered and emptied before his blank regard, he now spent with Katherine. Every morning, early, he went to his office and sat restlessly for ten or fifteen minutes; then, unable to achieve repose, he wandered out of Jesse Hall and across campus to the library, where he browsed in the stacks for ten or fifteen minutes more. And at last, as if it were a game he played with himself, he delivered himself from his self-imposed suspense, slipped out a side door of the library, and made his way to the house where Katherine lived.

She often worked late into the night, and some mornings when he came to her apartment he found her just awakened, warm and sensual with sleep, naked beneath the dark blue robe she had thrown on to come to the door. On such mornings they often made love almost before they spoke, going to the narrow bed that was still rumpled and hot from Katherine 'ssleeping.

Her body was long and delicate and softly fierce; and when he touched it his awkward hand seemed to come alive above that flesh. Sometimes he looked at her body as if it were a sturdy treasure put in his keeping; he let his blunt fingers play upon the moist, faintly pink skin of thigh and belly and marveled at the intricately simple delicacy of her small firm breasts. It occurred to him that he had never before known the body of another; and it occurred to him further that that was the reason he had always somehow separated the self of another from the body that carried that self around. And it occurred to him at last, with the finality of knowledge, that he had never known another human being with any intimacy or trust or with the human warmth of commitment.

Like all lovers, they spoke much of themselves, as if they might thereby understand the world which made them possible.

"My God, how I used to lust after you," Katherine said once. "I used to see you standing there in front of the class, so big and lovely and awkward, and I used to lust after you something fierce. You never knew, did you?"

"No," William said. "I thought you were a very proper young lady."

She laughed delightedly. "Proper, indeed!" She sobered a little and smiled reminiscently. "I suppose I thought I was too. Oh, how proper we seem to ourselves when we have no reason to be improper! It takes being in love to know something about yourself. Sometimes, with you, I feel like the slut of the world, the eager, faithful slut of the world. Does that seem proper to you?"

"No," William said, smiling, and reached out for her. "Come here."

She had had one lover, William learned; it had been during her senior year in college, and it had ended badly, with tears and recriminations and betrayals.

"Most affairs end badly," she said, and for a moment both were somber.

William was shocked to discover his surprise when he learned that she had had a lover before him; he realized that he had started to think of themselves as never really having existed before they came together.

"He was such a shy boy," she said. "Like you, I suppose, in some ways; only he was bitter and afraid, and I could never learn what about. He used to wait for me at the end of the dorm walk, under a big tree, because he was too shy to come up where there were so many people. We used to walk miles, out in the country, where there wasn't a chance of our seeing anybody. But we were never really—together. Even when we made love."

Stoner could almost see this shadowy figure who had no face and no name; his shock turned to sadness, and he felt a generous pity for an unknown boy who, out of an obscure lost bitterness, had thrust away from him what Stoner now possessed.

Sometimes, in the sleepy laziness that followed their love-making, he lay in what seemed to him a slow and gentle flux of sensation and unhurried thought; and in that flux he hardly knew whether he spoke aloud or whether he merely recognized the words that sensation and thought finally came to.

He dreamed of perfections, of worlds in which they could always be together, and half believed in the possibility of what he dreamed. "What," he said, "would it be like if," and went on to construct a possibility hardly more attractive than the one in which they existed. It was an unspoken knowledge they both had, that the possibilities they imagined and elaborated were gestures of love and a celebration of the life they had together now.

The life they had together was one that neither of them had really imagined. They grew from passion to lust to a deep sensuality that renewed itself from moment to moment.

"Lust and learning," Katherine once said. "That's really all there is, isn't it?"

And it seemed to Stoner that that was exactly true, that that was one of the things he had learned.

For their life together that summer was not all love-making and talk. They learned to be together without speaking, and they got the habit of repose; Stoner brought books to Katherine's apartment and left them, until finally they had to install an extra bookcase for them. In the days they spent together Stoner found himself returning to the studies he had all but abandoned; and Katherine continued to work on the book that was to be her dissertation. For hours at a time she would sit at the tiny desk against the wall, her head bent down in intense concentration over books and papers, her slender pale neck curving and flowing out of the dark blue robe she habitually wore; Stoner sprawled in the chair or lay on the bed in like concentration.

Sometimes they would lift their eyes from their studies, smile at each other, and return to their reading; sometimes Stoner would look up from his book and let his gaze rest upon the graceful curve of Katherine's back and upon the slender neck where a tendril of hair always fell. Then a slow, easy desire would come over him like a calm, and he would rise and stand behind her and let his arms rest lightly on her shoulders. She would straighten and let her head go back against his chest, and his hands would go forward into the loose robe and gently touch her breasts. Then they would make love, and lie quietly for a while, and return to their studies, as if their love and learning were one process.

That was one of the oddities of what they called "given opinion" that they learned that summer. They had been brought up in a tradition that told them in one way or another that the life of the mind and the life of the senses were separate and, indeed, inimical; they had believed, without ever having really thought about it, that one had to be chosen at some expense of the other. That the one could intensify the other had never occurred to them; and since the embodiment came before the recognition of the truth, it seemed a discovery that belonged to them alone. They began to collect these oddities of "given opinion," and they hoarded them as if they were treasures; it helped to isolate them from the world that would give them these opinions, and it helped draw them together in a small but moving way.

But there was another oddity of which Stoner became aware and of which he did not speak to Katherine. That was one that had to do with his relationship with his wife and daughter.

It was a relationship that, according to "given opinion," ought to have worsened steadily as what given opinion would describe as his "affair" went on. But it did no such thing. On the contrary, it seemed steadily to improve. His lengthening absences away from what he still had to call his "home" seemed to bring him closer to both Edith and Grace than he had been in years. He began to have for Edith a curious friendliness that was close to affection, and they even talked together, now and then, of nothing in particular. During that summer she even cleaned the glassed-in sun porch, had repaired the damage done by the weather, and put a day bed there, so that he no longer had to sleep on the living-room couch.

And sometimes on weekends she made calls upon neighbors and left Grace alone with her father. Occasionally Edith was away long enough for him to take walks in the country with his daughter. Away from the house Grace's hard, watchful reserve dropped away, and at times she smiled with a quietness and charm that Stoner had almost forgotten. She had grown rapidly in the last year and was very thin.

Only by an effort of the will could he remind himself that he was deceiving Edith. The two parts of his life were as separate as the two parts of a life can be; and though he knew that his powers of introspection were weak and that he was capable of self-deception, he could not make himself believe that he was doing harm to anyone for whom he felt responsibility.

He had no talent for dissimulation, nor did it occur to him to dissemble his affair with Katherine Driscoll; neither did it occur to him to display it for anyone to see. It did not seem possible to him that anyone on the outside might be aware of their affair, or even be interested in it.

It was, therefore, a deep yet impersonal shock when he discovered, at the end of the summer, that Edith knew something of the affair and that she had known of it almost from the beginning.

She spoke of it casually one morning while he lingered over his breakfast coffee, chatting with Grace. Edith spoke a little sharply, told Grace to stop dawdling over her breakfast, that she had an hour of piano practice before she could waste any time. William watched the thin, erect figure of his daughter walk out of the dining room and waited absently until he heard the first resonant tones coming from the old piano.

"Well," Edith said with some of the sharpness still in her voice, "you're a little late this morning, aren't you?"

William turned to her questioningly; the absent expression remained on his face.

Edith said, "Won't your little co-ed be angry if you keep her waiting?"

He felt a numbness come to his lips. "What?" he asked. "What's that?"

"Oh, Willy," Edith said and laughed indulgently. "Did you think I didn't know about your—little flirtation? Why, I've known it all along. What's her name? I heard it, but I've forgotten what it is."

In its shock and confusion his mind grasped but one word; and when he spoke his voice sounded to him petulantly annoyed. "You don't understand," he said. "There's no—flirtation, as you call it. It's—"

"Oh, Willy," she said and laughed again. "You look so flustered. Oh, I know all about these things. A man your age and all. It's natural, I suppose. At least they say it is."

For a moment he was silent. Then reluctantly he said, "Edith, if you want to talk about this—"

"No!" she said; there was an edge of fear in her voice. "There's nothing to talk about. Nothing at all."

And they did not then or thereafter talk about it. Most of the time Edith maintained the convention that it was his work that kept him away from home; but occasionally, and almost absently, she spoke the knowledge that was always somewhere within her. Sometimes she spoke playfully, with something like a teasing affection; sometimes she spoke with no feeling at all, as if it were the most casual topic of conversation she could imagine; sometimes she spoke petulantly, as if some triviality had annoyed her.

She said, "Oh, I know. Once a man gets in his forties. But really, Willy, you're old enough to be her father, aren't you?"

It had not occurred to him how he must appear to an outsider, to the world. For a moment he saw himself as he must thus appear; and what Edith said was part of what he saw. He had a glimpse of a figure that flitted through smoking-room anecdotes, and through the pages of cheap fiction—a pitiable fellow going into his middle age, misunderstood by his wife, seeking to renew his youth, taking up with a girl years younger than himself, awkwardly and apishly reaching for the youth he could not have, a fatuous, garishly got-up clown at whom the world laughed out of discomfort, pity, and contempt. He looked at this figure as closely as he could; but the longer he looked, the less familiar it became. It was not himself that he saw, and he knew suddenly that it was no one.

But he knew that the world was creeping up on him, up on Katherine, and up on the little niche of it that they had thought was their own; and he watched the approach with a sadness of which he could not speak, even to Katherine.

The fall semester began that September in an intensely colorful Indian summer that came after an early frost. Stoner returned to his classes with an eagerness that he had not felt for a long time; even the prospect of facing a hundred freshman faces did not dim the renewal of his energy.

His life with Katherine continued much as it had been before, except that with the return of the students and many of the faculty he began to find it necessary to practice circumspection. During the summer the old house where Katherine lived had been almost deserted; they had been able thus to be together in almost complete isolation, with no fear that they might be noticed. Now William had to exercise caution when he came to her place in the afternoon; he found himself looking up and down the street before he approached the house, and going furtively down the stairs to the little well that opened into her apartment.

They thought of gestures and talked of rebellion; they told each other that they were tempted to do something outrageous, to make a display. But they did not, and they had no real desire to do so. They wanted only to be left alone, to be themselves; and, wanting this, they knew they would not be left alone and they suspected that they could not be themselves. They imagined themselves to be discreet, and it hardly occurred to them that their affair would be suspected. They made a point of not encountering each other at the University, and when they could not avoid meeting publicly, they greeted each other with a formality whose irony they did not believe to be evident.

But the affair was known, and known very quickly after the fall semester began. It was likely that the discovery came out of the peculiar clairvoyance that people have about such matters; for neither of them had given an outward sign of their private lives. Or perhaps someone had made an idle speculation that had a ring of truth to someone else, which caused a closer regard of them both, which in turn . . . Their speculations were, they knew, to no end; but they continued to make them.

There were signs by which both knew that they were discovered. Once, walking behind two male graduate students, Stoner heard one say, half in admiration and half in contempt, "Old Stoner. By God, who would have believed it?"—and saw them shake their heads in mockery and puzzlement over the human condition. Acquaintances of Katherine made oblique references to Stoner and offered her confidences about their own love-lives that she had not invited.

What surprised them both was that it did not seem to matter. No one refused to speak to them; no one gave them black looks; they were not made to suffer by the world they had feared. They began to believe that they could live in the place they had thought to be inimical to their love, and live there with some dignity and ease.

Over the Christmas holiday Edith decided to take Grace for a visit with her mother in St. Louis; and for the only time during their life together William and Katherine were able to be with each other for an extended period.

Separately and casually, both let it be known that they would be away from the University during the Christmas holiday; Katherine was to visit relatives in the East, and William was to work at the bibliographical center and museum in Kansas City. At different hours they took separate buses, and met at Lake Ozark, a resort village in the outlying mountains of the great Ozark range.

They were the only guests of the only lodge in the village that remained open the year around; and they had ten days together.

There had been a heavy snow three days before their arrival, and during their stay it snowed again, so that the gently rolling hills remained white all the time they were there.

They had a cabin with a bedroom, a sitting room, and a small kitchen; it was somewhat removed from the other cabins, and it overlooked a lake that remained frozen during the winter months. In the morning they awoke to find themselves twined together, their bodies warm and luxuriant beneath the heavy blankets. They poked their heads out of the blankets and watched their breath condense in great clouds in the cold air; they laughed like children and pulled the covers back over their heads and pressed themselves more closely together. Sometimes they made love and stayed in bed all morning and talked, until the sun came through an east window; sometimes Stoner sprang out of bed as soon as they were awake and pulled the covers from Katherine's naked body and laughed at her screams as he kindled a fire in the great fireplace. Then they huddled together before the fireplace, with only a blanket around them, and waited to be warmed by the growing fire and the natural warmth of their own bodies.

Despite the cold, they walked nearly every day in the woods. The great pines, greenish-black against the snow, reared up massively toward the pale-blue cloudless sky; the occasional slither and plop of a mass of snow from one of the branches intensified the silence around them, as the occasional chatter of a lone bird intensified the isolation in which they walked. Once they saw a deer that had come down from the higher mountains in search of food. It was a doe, brilliantly yellow-tan against the starkness of dark pine and white snow. Now fifty yards away it faced them, one forepaw lifted delicately above the snow, the small ears pitched forward, the brown eyes perfectly round and incredibly soft. No one moved. The doe's delicate face tilted, as if regarding them with polite inquiry; then, unhurriedly, it turned and walked away from them, lifting its feet daintily out of the snow and placing them precisely, with a tiny sound of crunching.

In the afternoon they went to the main office of the lodge, which also served as the village's general store and restaurant. They had coffee there and talked to whoever had dropped in and perhaps picked up a few things for their evening meal, which they always took in their cabin.

In the evening they sometimes lighted the oil lamp and read; but more often they sat on folded blankets in front of the fireplace and talked and were silent and watched the flames play intricately upon the logs and watched the play of firelight upon each other's faces.

One evening, near the end of the time they had together, Katherine said quietly, almost absently, "Bill, if we never have anything else, we will have had this week. Does that sound like a girlish thing to say?"

"It doesn't matter what it sounds like," Stoner said. He nodded. "It's true."

"Then I'll say it," Katherine said. "We will have had this week."

On their last morning Katherine straightened the furniture and cleaned the place with slow care. She took off the wedding band she had worn and wedged it in a crevice between the wall and the fireplace. She smiled self-consciously. "I wanted," she said, "to leave something of our own here; something I knew would stay here, as long as this place stays. Maybe it's silly."

Stoner could not answer her. He took her arm and they walked out of the cabin and trudged through the snow to the lodge office, where the bus would pick them up and take them back to Columbia.

On an afternoon late in February, a few days after the second semester had begun, Stoner received a call from Gordon Finch's secretary; she told him that the dean would like to talk with him and asked if he would drop by that afternoon or the next morning. Stoner told her that he would—and sat for several minutes with one hand on the phone after having hung up. Then he sighed and nodded to himself and went downstairs to Finch's office.

Gordon Finch was in his shirt sleeves, his tie was loosened, and he was leaning back in his swivel chair with his hands clasped behind his head. When Stoner came into the room he nodded genially and waved toward the leather-covered easy chair set at an angle beside his desk.

"Take a load off, Bill. How have you been?"

Stoner nodded. "All right."

"Classes keeping you busy?"

Stoner said dryly, "Reasonably so. I have a full schedule."

"I know," Finch said and shook his head. "I can't interfere there, you know. But it's a damned shame."

"It's all right," Stoner said a bit impatiently.

"Well." Finch straightened in his chair and clasped his hands on the desk in front of him. "There's nothing official about this visit, Bill. I just wanted to chat with you for a while."

There was a long silence. Stoner said gently, "What is it, Gordon?"

Finch sighed, and then said abruptly, "Okay. I'm talking to you right now as a friend. There's been talk. It isn't anything that, as a dean, I have to pay any attention to yet, but—well, sometime I might have to pay attention to it, and I thought I ought to speak to you—as a friend, mind you—before anything serious develops."

Stoner nodded. "What kind of talk?"

"Oh, hell, Bill. You and the Driscoll girl. You know."

"Yes," Stoner said. "I know. I just wanted to know how far it has gone."

"Not far yet. Innuendos, remarks, things like that."

"I see," Stoner said. "I don't know what I can do about it."

Finch creased a sheet of paper carefully. "Is it serious, Bill?"

Stoner nodded and looked out the window. "It's serious, I'm afraid."

"What are you going to do?"

"I don't know."

With sudden violence Finch crumpled the paper that he had so carefully folded and threw it at a wastebasket. He said, "In theory, your life is your own to lead. In theory, you ought to be able to screw anybody you want to, do anything you want to, and it shouldn't matter so long as it doesn't interfere with your teaching. But damn it, your life isn't your own to lead. It's—oh, hell. You know what I mean."

Stoner smiled. "I'm afraid I do."

"It's a bad business. What about Edith?"

"Apparently," Stoner said, "she takes the whole thing a good deal less seriously than anyone else. And it's a funny thing, Gordon; I don't believe we've ever got along any better than we have the last year."

Finch laughed shortly. "You never can tell, can you? But what I meant was, will there be a divorce? Anything like that?"

"I don't know. Possibly. But Edith would fight it. It would be a mess."

"What about Grace?"

A sudden pain caught at Stoner's throat, and he knew that his expression showed what he felt. "That's—something else. I don't know, Gordon."

Finch said impersonally, as if they were discussing someone else, "You might survive a divorce—if it weren't too messy. It would be rough, but you'd probably survive it. And if this— thing with the Driscoll girl weren't serious, if you were just screwing around, well, that could be handled too. But you're sticking your neck out, Bill; you're asking for it."

"I suppose I am," Stoner said.

There was a pause. "This is a hell of a job I have," Finch said heavily. "Sometimes I think I'm not the man for it at all."

Stoner smiled. "Dave Masters once said you weren't a big enough son-of-a-bitch to be really successful."

"Maybe he was right," Finch said. "But I feel like one often enough."

"Don't worry about it, Gordon," Stoner said. "I understand your position. And if I could make it easier for you I—" He paused and shook his head sharply. "But I can't do anything right now. It will have to wait. Somehow . . ."

Finch nodded and did not look at Stoner; he stared at his desk top as if it were a doom that approached him with slow inevitability. Stoner waited for a few moments, and when Finch did not speak he got up quietly and went out of the office.

Because of his conversation with Gordon Finch, Stoner was late that afternoon getting to Katherine's apartment. Without bothering to look up or down the street he went down the walk and let himself in. Katherine was waiting for him; she had not changed clothes, and she waited almost formally, sitting erect and alert upon the couch.

"You're late," she said flatly.

"Sorry," he said. "I got held up."

Katherine lit a cigarette; her hand was trembling slightly. She surveyed the match for a moment, and blew it out with a puff of smoke. She said, "One of my fellow instructors made rather a point of telling me that Dean Finch called you in this afternoon."

"Yes," Stoner said. "That's what held me up."

"Was it about us?"

Stoner nodded. "He had heard a few things."

"I imagined that was it," Katherine said. "My instructor friend seemed to know something that she didn't want to tell. Oh, Christ, Bill!"

"It's not like that at all," Stoner said. "Gordon is an old friend. I actually believe he wants to protect us. I believe he will if he can."

Katherine did not speak for several moments. She kicked off her shoes and lay back on the couch, staring at the ceiling. She said calmly, "Now it begins. I suppose it was too much, hoping that they would leave us alone. I suppose we never really seriously thought they would."

"If it gets too bad," Stoner said, "we can go away. We can do something."

"Oh, Bill!" Katherine was laughing a little, throatily and softly. She sat up on the couch. "You are the dearest love, the dearest, dearest anyone could imagine. And I will not let them bother us. I will not!"

And for the next several weeks they lived much as they had before. With a strategy that they would not have been able to manage a year earlier, with a strength they would not have known they had, they practiced evasions and withdrawals, deploying their powers like skillful generals who must survive with meager forces. They became genuinely circumspect and cautious, and got a grim pleasure from their maneuverings. Stoner came to her apartment only after dark, when no one could see him enter; in the daytime, between classes, Katherine allowed herself to be seen at coffee shops with younger male instructors; and the hours they spent together were intensified by their common determination. They told themselves and each other that they were closer than they ever had been; and to their surprise, they realized that it was true, that the words they spoke to comfort themselves were more than consolatory. They made a closeness possible and a commitment inevitable.

It was a world of half-light in which they lived and to which they brought the better parts of themselves—so that, after a while, the outer world where people walked and spoke, where there was change and continual movement, seemed to them false and unreal. Their lives were sharply divided between the two worlds, and it seemed to them natural that they should live so divided.

During the late winter and early spring months they found together a quietness they had not had before. As the outer world closed upon them they became less aware of its presence; and their happiness was such that they had no need to speak of it to each other, or even to think of it. In Katherine 'ssmall, dim apartment, hidden like a cave beneath the massive old house, they seemed to themselves to move outside of time, in a timeless universe of their own discovery.

Then, one day in late April, Gordon Finch again called Stoner into his office; and Stoner went down with a numbness that came from a knowledge he would not admit.

What had happened was classically simple, something that Stoner should have foreseen yet had not.

"It's Lomax," Finch said. "Somehow the son-of-a-bitch has got hold of it and he's not about to let go."

Stoner nodded. "I should have thought of that. I should have expected it. Do you think it would do any good if I talked to him?"

Finch shook his head, walked across his office, and stood before the window. Early afternoon sunlight streamed upon his face, which gleamed with sweat. He said tiredly, "You don't understand, Bill. Lomax isn't playing it that way. Your name hasn't even come up. He's working through the Driscoll girl."

"He's what?" Stoner asked blankly.

"You almost have to admire him," Finch said. "Somehow he knew damn well I knew all about it. So he came in yesterday, off-hand, you know, and told me he was going to have to fire the Driscoll girl and warned me there might be a stink."

"No," Stoner said. His hands ached where they gripped the leather arms of the easy chair.

Finch continued, "According to Lomax, there have been complaints, from students mostly, and a few townspeople. It seems that men have been seen going in and out of her apartment at all hours—flagrant misbehavior—that sort of thing. Oh, he did it beautifully; he has no personal objection —he rather admires the girl, as a matter of fact—but he has the reputation of the department and the University to think of. We commiserated upon the necessities of bowing to the dictates of middle-class morality, agreed that the community of scholars ought to be a haven for the rebel against the Protestant ethic, and concluded that practically speaking we were helpless. He said he hoped he could let it ride until the end of the semester but doubted if he could. And all the time the son-of-a-bitch knew we understood each other perfectly."

A tightness in his throat made it impossible for Stoner to speak. He swallowed twice and tested his voice; it was steady and flat. "What he wants is perfectly clear, of course."

"I'm afraid it is," Finch said.

"I knew he hated me," Stoner said distantly. "But I never realized—I never dreamed he would—"

"Neither did I," Finch said. He walked back to his desk and sat down heavily. "And I can't do a thing, Bill. I'm helpless. If Lomax wants complainers, they'll appear; if he wants witnesses, they will appear. He has quite a following, you know. And if word ever gets to the president—" He shook his head.

"What do you imagine will happen if I refuse to resign? If we just refuse to be scared?"

"He'll crucify the girl," Finch said flatly. "And as if by accident you'll be dragged into it. It's very neat."

"Then," Stoner said, "it appears there is nothing to be done."

"Bill," Finch said, and then was silent. He rested his head on his closed fists. He said dully, "There is a chance. There is just one. I think I can hold him off if you—if the Driscoll girl will just—"

"No," Stoner said. "I don't think I can do it. Literally, I don't think I can do it."

"God damn it!" Finch's voice was anguished. "He's counting on that! Think for a minute. What would you do? It's April; almost May; what kind of job could you get this time of year —if you could get one at all?"

"I don't know," Stoner said. "Something . . ."

"And what about Edith? Do you think she's going to give in, give you a divorce without a fight? And Grace? What would it do to her, in this town, if you just took off? And Katherine? What kind of life would you have? What would it do to both of you?"

Stoner did not speak. An emptiness was beginning somewhere within him; he felt a withering, a falling away. He said at last, "Can you give me a week?—I've got to think. A week?"

Finch nodded. "I can hold him off that long at least. But not much longer. I'm sorry, Bill. You know that."

"Yes." He got up from the chair and stood for a moment, testing the heavy numbness of his legs. "I'll let you know. I'll let you know when I can."

He went out of the office into the darkness of the long corridor and walked heavily into the sunlight, into the open world that was like a prison wherever he turned.

Years afterward, at odd moments, he would look back upon those days that followed his conversation with Gordon Finch and would be unable to recall them with any clarity at all. It was as if he were a dead man animated by nothing more than a habit of stubborn will. Yet he was oddly aware of himself and of the places, persons, and events which moved past him in these few days; and he knew that he presented to the public regard an appearance which belied his condition. He taught his classes, he greeted his colleagues, he attended the meetings he had to attend—and no one of the people he met from day to day knew that anything was wrong.

But from the moment he walked out of Gordon Finch's office, he knew, somewhere within the numbness that grew from a small center of his being, that a part of his life was over, that a part of him was so near death that he could watch the approach almost with calm. He was vaguely conscious that he walked across the campus in the bright crisp heat of an early spring afternoon; the dogwood trees along the sidewalks and in the front yards were in full bloom, and they trembled like soft clouds, translucent and tenuous, before his gaze; the sweet scent of dying lilac blossoms drenched the air.

And when he got to Katherine's apartment he was feverishly and callously gay. He brushed aside her questions about his latest encounter with the dean; he forced her to laugh; and he watched with an immeasurable sadness their last effort of gaiety, which was like a dance that life makes upon the body of death.

But finally they had to talk, he knew; though the words they said were like a performance of something they had rehearsed again and again in the privacies of their knowledge. They revealed that knowledge by grammatical usage: they progressed from the perfect—"We have been happy, haven't we?"—to the past—"We were happy—happier than anyone, I think"—and at last came to the necessity of discourse.

Several days after the conversation with Finch, in a moment of quiet that interrupted the half-hysterical gaiety they had chosen as that convention most appropriate to see them through their last days together, Katherine said, "We don't have much time, do we?"

"No," Stoner said quietly.

"How much longer?" Katherine asked.

"A few days, two or three."

Katherine nodded. "I used to think I wouldn't be able to endure it. But I'm just numb. I don't feel anything."

"I know," Stoner said. They were silent for a moment. "You know if there were anything—anything I could do, I'd—"

"Don't," she said. "Of course I know."

He leaned back on the couch and looked at the low, dim ceiling that had been the sky of their world. He said calmly, "If I threw it all away—if I gave it up, just walked out—you would go with me, wouldn't you?"

"Yes," she said.

"But you know I won't do that, don't you?"

"Yes, I know."

"Because then," Stoner explained to himself, "none of it would mean anything—nothing we have done, nothing we have been. I almost certainly wouldn't be able to teach, and you—you would become something else. We both would become something else, something other than ourselves. We would be—nothing."

"Nothing," she said.

"And we have come out of this, at least, with ourselves. We know that we are—what we are."

"Yes," Katherine said.

"Because in the long run," Stoner said, "it isn't Edith or even Grace, or the certainty of losing Grace, that keeps me here; it isn't the scandal or the hurt to you or me; it isn't the hardship we would have to go through, or even the loss of love we might have to face. It's simply the destruction of ourselves, of what we do."

"I know," Katherine said.

"So we are of the world, after all; we should have known that. We did know it, I believe; but we had to withdraw a little, pretend a little, so that we could—"

"I know," Katherine said. "I've known it all along, I guess. Even with the pretending, I've known that sometime, sometime, we would . . . I've known." She halted and looked at him steadily. Her eyes became suddenly bright with tears. "But damn it all, Bill! Damn it all!"

They said no more. They embraced so that neither might see the other's face, and made love so that they would not speak. They coupled with the old tender sensuality of knowing each other well and with the new intense passion of loss. Afterward, in the black night of the little room, they lay still unspeaking, their bodies touching lightly. After a long while Katherine's breath came steadily, as if in sleep. Stoner got up quietly, dressed in the dark, and went out of the room without awakening her. He walked the still, empty streets of Columbia until the first gray light began in the east; then he made his way to the University campus. He sat on the stone steps in front of Jesse Hall and watched the light from the east creep upon the great stone columns in the center of the quad. He thought of the fire that, before he was born, had gutted and ruined the old building; and he was distantly saddened by the view of what remained. When it was light he let himself into the hall and went to his office, where he waited until his first class began.

He didn't see Katherine Driscoll again. After he left her, during the night, she got up, packed all her belongings, cartoned her books, and left word with the manager of the apartment house where to send them. She mailed the English office her grades, her instructions to dismiss her classes for the week and a half that remained of the semester, and her resignation. And she was on the train, on her way out of Columbia, by two o'clock that afternoon.

She must have been planning her departure for some time, Stoner realized; and he was grateful that he had not known and that she left him no final note to say what could not be said.