Bobcat and Other Stories Part 8

"It's a hearing," I said, "I don't think you'll really meet him, exactly."

"Well, we can still make eyes at him," said Terrance.

I had met Stewart Applebaum about a month earlier, at a library benefit, and had been surprised by what a cheerful, relaxed person he was. I'd expected someone darkly muttering, or angry, or a blowhard of some sort. But he had been actually really charming and fun. And I was still clinging (pathetically) to a little thing he said to me, that we ought to have coffee one day together. I had even mentioned it to Liv, hoping she could help me scrutinize it for any romantic content.

"Couldn't you tell by the way he said it?" she had asked.

"Not really. I mean, normally I would think yes, but it just seems so unlikely. He's about ten years younger than me."

"Some brave women overcome that."

"You have to be really on top of your game."

"Yes. You've got to keep it all together."

What had struck me about that night was the sudden return of an old feeling, what Rilke called the "calling to vast things." I had been so involved in the march of time-my marriage, Teddy's birth, his troubles, my work, my divorce-that I'd forgotten this feeling entirely. I was stepping back inside the library from its big balcony, which is held by huge white pillars and whose view is the entire hissing, southern campus, with the deep turbulent ocean visible in the distance. Stewart Applebaum and I had just had a brief conversation, mostly about some work a colleague of mine was doing on the various economies of Central America, and we had already said goodbye, but then he said to me as I was walking away, We should have coffee sometime soon. I realized it wasn't the most stunning suggestion any man has said to any woman, but it so genuinely surprised me that it was as if the feeling itself-of attraction or whatever-just appeared as a person appears. I was like a woman at a drawer, putting away her party dresses between tissue paper, and there he stood in the doorway-not Stewart Applebaum, but this feeling-gentlemanly, feral, breathtaking, peaceful, something very close to life itself, asking me for one more dance down in the meadow.

THREE.

The meeting was across campus. Since the day was so bl.u.s.tery, there was a strange, exciting, hurricaney feel to it, and as we stepped into the quad, a wind was whipping around some tiny raindrops. In one corner some students were setting up a makes.h.i.+ft stage and there was a disorganized crowd gathering. Their signs were face down on the ground to prevent the rain from wrecking them, so we couldn't read what they would be protesting. I suspected it was Stewart Applebaum's group but wasn't sure until I heard a young man shout out as he walked under the clocktower, "While in life," and a couple guys working on the sound stage stood up and called back, "To fight for life." These were references to a Stephen Spender poem that the group used as a call and response. It was a beautiful poem-"I Think Continually of Those Who Were Truly Great," which was written in 1942.

"So it's them," I said to Terrance.

"Yes. I guess they may be protesting the hearing itself."

"Yes."

Early in the semester, our chancellor, who was quite sick with a rare form of late-stage leukemia but still working, suggested in a way I found plaintive and sweet, especially from a man so close to death, that perhaps the students should use these "gatherings" not as a time to protest but rather to celebrate what they appreciated about their country and their university, and this had enraged the students and sent them spiraling into the quad with signs aloft protesting the chancellor himself.

I had one quick detour before the meeting, as Teddy's teacher had sent home a little note asking us to bring along a "healthy dessert" to World Party tonight. So Terrance accompanied me to Moon's, a tiny cozy convenience store on the edge of campus, run by Mr. Moon and his wife Liliane. They had Fig Newtons, which I knew were not exactly healthy but they were faintly educational and maybe even sort of biblical. And anyway, I was in the habit of just setting the food down quickly and then disowning it entirely, even in my own mind. And since my ex-husband, Ted, and his wife, Elizabeth, and their two little children-a beautiful blond fairy family-would be there, it would be important not to place my package of cookies anywhere near Elizabeth's offering, which would be something homey and exquisite, lemon squares or warm flaxen oatcakes.

We had about five minutes to get to the meeting after we exited Moon's. As I was telling Terrance about my newest concerns about Teddy-he was refusing to dress up as a character from a book for the party tonight and instead wanted to dress up as death, or a disease, or a rat-I saw that across Great Lawn, the white clover flowers had sprung up everywhere, ten thousand of them. It was my favorite sight-the field suddenly white instead of green. "Well, he's testing the hypothesis," Terrance said. "Is it a World Party or not? Is everything really invited?"

"I guess," I said. "Maybe. I just wish he wanted to be w.i.l.l.y Wonka or something."

"Well, what is he going to be after all?"

"We compromised with a black hole. He's going to be a black hole."

Just the night before, the n.o.bel Prize had gone to the Bulgarian writer Elias Canetti for his book Crowds and Power, which I happened to have read (crowds as wildfire, crowds as birds, crowds as a hillside of trees), but it was a lesser play of his-called Their Days Are Numbered-that I recall when I think back to that day, walking across the wildish, newly white field with Terrance. In the play, every person wears a medallion with the day, month, and year of their death on it, so that you know while talking to somebody when it is they will die. I don't know what I would have done differently if I'd known how soon Terrance would die. I suppose clutch his arm, and stay close to him, try to see things a little longer his way, which was generous and serious, but I was already doing that, holding on to his muscley, tattooed arm.

As we were making our way up the stairs I saw Stewart Applebaum just standing there, waiting for his time to go in and appear before us. "Oh hey," I said to him. "It's you," he said. Terrance smiled and opened the door for us both.

FOUR.

Of all the college committees, this one-the Faculty Hearings Committee-was the greatest. If a faculty member did anything suspect-threatened the dean with a gun, gave their cla.s.ses all A's, denied the Holocaust-it was referred to us, the most unskilled tribunal ever a.s.sembled.

When Terrance and I arrived, Dana Fisher, our committee chair, who looked like maybe a handsome Ichabod Crane with a salt-and-pepper mustache, was already there seated at the table, behind which there was a big window letting on to an enormous, two-hundred-year-old oak tree. All of our deliberations over the past two years had taken place in the measured, gorgeous aura of this tree. It had turned in the last few days a bright and otherworldly bronze.

Dana, who was a nonvoting member of the committee, had laid out at each of our places a little packet of information about Applebaum including, strangely, a big glossy picture of him, as if we were considering him for a part in a movie. In the photo, Applebaum looked serious but kind, handsome in a dark, feathered-hair sort of way. His CV was there too: BA from Berkeley, MA from Wharton, PhD in economics from the University of Michigan.

Within moments, our last member, Geraldine, arrived, bearing poppy seed m.u.f.fins. Geraldine was a formidable woman-brave, ethereal, intelligent, tall, fragile, and frequently contemptuous of our committee. She was already in her sixties, and had been in that first wave of feminists who had to be absolute warriors.

Dana decided to invite Applebaum into the meeting right from the start, so he could help us understand the situation, before we began our deliberations. When Applebaum entered he apologized quickly to us all, for taking away our Friday afternoon.

Dana was a Quaker, so ran our meetings in an atmosphere of almost total silence, out of which speech was supposed to arise like a revelation of some sort. So we all sat quietly for a while, looking over the materials. Finally, Dana said, "We have a crisis. We have a young student in the hospital, after refusing to eat for three days, and we have two more following in his footsteps. They are members of this group, Harvest."

"What specifically are they protesting?" Terrance asked Applebaum.

"Well, we've discovered that one of our board members-Dean Forenter, in fact-is the head of a waste company that is currently violating state regulations and dumping waste every day in a waterway that feeds into the Atlantic. These boys cannot tolerate that."

"Did you instruct them to strike?" Geraldine asked. I could tell she was angry.

"No. But we frequently talk about nonviolent means to protest."

"But this is quite violent," I said. "It's a type of terrorism. It's a method of force."

"I suppose. But for me the question is always whether it matches the activity it is meant to address. We've been reading A. S. Mill, The Uses of Obedience and Disobedience, as well as some old Emerson essays. The students who are involved in this particular action are intelligent, free-thinking adults. I don't tell them what to do. One of them-Griffith Tran-has been studying quite carefully the essays of-"

"Forgive me," I said, "but you sound supportive of what they are doing."

"Let me put it this way," he said. "I will be happy if they stop, but I can't help but be proud of them."

"Hmmm," Dana said. And we all fell silent again for awhile.

My mind was pa.s.sing back and forth promiscuously between the matter at hand and a deep inner discussion on the difference in Applebaum's age and mine. If you squinted we were almost the same age. We were of the same generation, at least. He was thirty-five to my forty-four, which I couldn't decide if it was vast or negligible. We were on earth at the same time, and maybe that's all that mattered. Still, how would it all go? I would be fifty when he was forty-one, which would be okay I guess, but then I would be sixty when he was fifty-one, when he could still conceivably date, for instance, a thirty-five-year-old, which would put me at sixty in compet.i.tion with women in their thirties. Forget it! Dana was going over some by-laws, while I suffered through my breakup with Applebaum fifteen years hence.

Geraldine leaped in. "You keep referring to these students as 'adults,' " which I think is your unconscious way of removing yourself from any responsibility. Anybody who has had a child of that age knows that they are hardly functioning with the same judgment they will hold in the future when they are thirty and forty."

"Well," Applebaum said, "they are more pa.s.sionate, yes, and energetic. But I've found that people at that age can have a kind of intuitive sense of justice that disappears after people's lives take on more responsibilities to their children and to their communities."

"But the power differential seems to escape you," Geraldine said. "You have power over them whether you choose to acknowledge it or not."

It was three p.m. and the day was already getting darker. There was no rain but an intense afternoon darkness. The tree outside our window registered this by getting brighter, turning its inner light up, and its wet, golden leaves shook with delight at all this weather. My thoughts ran to Teddy and to World Party. I was not late yet, but darkness always signaled to me that I had to get to Teddy, wherever he was. He had a little tic that deepened as the day progressed, and if he got tired especially. Not that it seemed to bother him. We almost never spoke of it. I didn't want to make him self-conscious. But then I worried that by not mentioning it, I was ignoring something that was distressing him, or just leaving him to manage something on his own when I should be accompanying him in some way.

When I was young, my family often spent weekends at our old family homestead up in Southern Saskatchewan. Every Sunday we went to a small, beautiful Lutheran church, whose pastor had a severe tic that ran all the way from his temple down across his left cheekbone, over his jaw, down his neck, affecting even his left shoulder. The tic occurred every thirty or so seconds, without fail. You could have timed the pa.s.sage of the sun and moon with it. And to this day I can't hear any of those old Bible stories-the exile from Eden, Noah's flood, the binding of Isaac, Jesus on Calvary-without picturing and even feeling in my own face that great quake, that grave, magnificent revelation of fragility. His name was Glademacher, and he had a beautiful old man's face, G.o.d and time and mortality working its way over it.

By the time we all stepped out, two hours later, we each-Terrance, Geraldine, and I-had a tiny slip of paper in our pockets, with yes and no written on it. We were to check the box beside yes or no, regarding whether we should allow Applebaum to continue to direct Harvest. A no vote meant that Harvest should be disbanded immediately. We had to return this to a little mailbox outside this building by 6:30 tonight. I was pretty sure Geraldine would check no, they shouldn't be allowed to continue, and Terrance would check yes, they should of course be allowed to continue, to let everybody's destinies play out as they will. So that left me.

FIVE.

The Quaker Day School was so cozy, I just wanted to curl up in the reading corner, on its huge alphabet pillows, and read away into the night, the wind and rain swirling all around. Maybe The Borrowers, or some Beverly Cleary. Of all the books I've read since childhood, of all the civilizations risen and fallen, none of them described the futility and fun of life so accurately as The Jumblies, by the great epileptic and depressive Edward Lear, the twentieth child of his parents.

They went to sea in a Sieve they did, In a Sieve they went to sea: In spite of all their friends could say, On a winter's morn, on a stormy day, In a Sieve they went to sea.

The parents, all of us soaking wet, battered, nearly ruined by our days, crowded around the outside of the room and watched the quiet processional of children to the banquet table, which was laid with quince, pomegranates, squash, lemonade. My Fig Newtons were actually turning out to be quite appropriate. The teacher, Dominique, had swiftly arranged them in a complicated circle/maze design around a huge platter. She was a magician, who took all of life into her and there transformed it into something that a seven-year-old would love.

The children were solemn at first-Mother Earth with her elaborate headdress, Daffy Duck, a Moon and a Star, a Lightbulb, and then Teddy, with his cape of nothing. Dominique had us all bow our heads and then she said this little Quaker nonprayer based on an Emily d.i.c.kinson poem: "Who comes to dine must bring his feast, or find the banquet mean. The banquet is not laid without till it is laid within."

Ted was across the room from me, with Elizabeth and their two toddlers. Elizabeth waved. Ted didn't not wave. It just didn't occur to him that we should wave at each other. He had a little bit of Teddy's efficiency with emotion, or maybe inability. It actually made me love Ted, too, a little. He had an animal's straightforward relations.h.i.+p to life, though, as with Teddy, this was coupled with a genuine, very interesting, and companionable intelligence. Still, I worried, basically every second of every day, about Teddy, who seemed farther out on the limb than his father. For instance, the banquet table was kidney shaped, with a big bulge at one end, and then a slim curve, with a tiny bulge at the other end. Teddy was down there, alone. The other children were jostling with each other, laughing, smiling, arguing, and Teddy was sitting there by himself, thinking and eating. n.o.body seemed to notice but me-it was just a natural configuration to them, like the inevitable placement of stars in the sky.

I knew for a fact that Teddy wasn't thinking about it-he would be thinking about subtraction, or Fibonacci, or maybe about the Hilbert Hotel, which was a hotel with an infinite number of rooms to which an infinite amount of guests kept appearing and asking for rooms. This was a thought experiment that there were whole books written about, and whole careers devoted to.

Still, the sight of him-a black hole at the end of the table alone-made me almost unbearably sad. I went to crouch down in the crook of the table and talk to him. "How are you, Teddy?" I tried to close the distance between Teddy and the other kids, chatting with the little girl Betsy Charter, Mother Nature, about her feathers and the jewels in her headdress. I suppose I looked ludicrous, trying to horn in on the World Party. But I didn't care. I'd sit there forever. In my mind I'd sit there all night, and into tomorrow and the weekend, trying to bridge the gap between Teddy and everybody else.

But it ended, thankfully, within the hour, and we were on our way. Back to campus, where I still needed to place my vote. Teddy and I walked across those same white fields of clover, and just the thought of Terrance even existing (he was out at a restaurant with his lawyer love right now), casting his generous eye on everything-he's testing the hypothesis-made me happy to be alone with Teddy again, thinking about everything.

"So if the Hilbert Hotel can accommodate any subsets of infinity, like busfuls of new people, infinite busfuls of new people, then there are different types of infinity. There are subsets of infinity," Teddy said.

"Yes. Apparently they finally proved that."

"The Hilbert Hotel proves it."

"Yes."

I'd had this conversation with Teddy many times, and each time I found myself wondering if anybody except a mother would find his austere intelligence companionable. When I think back on my childhood and young adulthood it seems the whole enterprise was awash with attempting to understand other people and get them to understand you, loving them and getting them to love you. Teddy's path would be so different from that: I couldn't even quite imagine it. He just didn't care about that. He was alone with the Alone.

The one sermon I'd never heard and needed now, needed every day of Teddy's life, was regarding Abraham and Isaac. But who can bear it? Who could bear to speak of it-Abraham, one of the kindest, most soulful characters in the Bible, being asked to carry his beloved only child, Isaac, up Moriah, where the child would be sacrificed. The story is made doubly terrifying because of Isaac's innocence and trust in his father. But the Bible is clear; children will have a destiny, and they will have a mountain, and all you can do is accompany them with the terrible knowledge of all the difficulties they will encounter. They skip beside you, or in Teddy's case, they walk carefully through the wildflowers, dreaming of infinity.

So at the end of the day, with Teddy beside me, I slipped a little yes vote into the mailbox. Everybody would just have to live with that.

Fialta.

From where I stand, on the bridge overlooking the Chicago River, the city looks like a strange but natural landscape, as if it arises as surely and inevitably from the hands of life as does a field of harvest wheat or a stand of red firs. After all, the city was designed by country boys-Mies van der Rohe, Burnham and Root, Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Sullivan-all wild and das.h.i.+ng, dreaming up the city in the soft thrum of the countryside.

But the buildings that most reflect nature, at least midwestern nature, in all its dark and hidden fertility, are those by Franklin Stadbakken, the so-called architect of the prairies, that great and troubled mess of a man I once knew.

THREE YEARS AGO, WHEN I was a senior at Northwestern, I sent Stadbakken a packet of drawings and a statement of purpose. Every year Stadbakken chooses five apprentices to come live with him on the famous grounds of Fialta, his sprawling workshop, itself an architectural dream rising and falling over the gentle hills of southwestern Wisconsin. My sketches were of skysc.r.a.pers, set down with a pencil on pale blue drafting paper. They'd been drawn late in the night, and I knew hardly anything about how to draw a building, except that it ought not to look beautiful; it ought to be spare and slightly inaccessible, its beauty only suggested, so that a good plan looked like a secret to be pa.s.sed on and on, its true nature hidden away.

Two months later I received back a letter of acceptance. At the bottom of the form letter there was a note from Stadbakken himself that read, "In spite of your ambition, your hand seems humble and reasonable. I look forward to your arrival."

I had been reading, off and on, that year, a biography of Stadbakken, and this moment when I read his handwriting was one of the most liberating in my life-in fact, so much so it was almost haunting, as if a hand had leapt out of the world of art-of books and dreams-and pulled me in.

MY FIRST EVENING AT Fialta was referred to as orientation but was really a recitation by one of the two second-year apprentices, named Reuben, of What Stadbakken Liked, which was, in no particular order, mornings, solitude, black coffee, Yeats, order, self-reliance, privacy, skits, musicals, filtered light, thresholds, lightning. "Pina coladas," the woman sitting beside me-Elizabeth-said quietly. "Getting caught in the rain."

"Fialta," Reuben continued, "is dedicated not to the fulfillment of desire but to the transformation of desire into art." We were sitting in the commons, a beautiful, warm room that doubled as our dining room, our office, and our lounge. There was an enormous fireplace, windows streaming with slanted and dying light, and a big wooden table, whose legs were carved with the paws of beasts at the floor. There was a golden s.h.a.g carpet and stone walls. It was high up, and the views were spectacular, but the room was intimate. So this statement regarding desire seemed almost heartbreakingly Freudian, since the room and all of Fialta, with its endless private corners and stunning walkways and fireplaces, seemed to ask you at every turn to fall in love, yet that was the one thing that was not permitted. Reuben went on to say, "Stadbakken does not tolerate well what he calls overfraternization. He sees it as a corruption of the working community if people, well. . . ." And there was a nervous moment. Reuben seemed to have lost his footing. n.o.body knew what to say until a tall woman in the back, whose name would turn out to be Indira Katsabrahmanian, and whose beauty would turn out to be the particular rocks on which Reuben's heart would be dashed, spoke up: "Sodo-sudu." Reuben raised his eyebrows at her. "Fool around," she said, with a slightly British accent. "It means to not fool around."

Reuben nodded.

So, no love affairs. As soon as this was declared, it was as if a light had turned on in the room. Until this point, everyone had been so focused on the great absent man himself and his every desire that n.o.body had really looked around that carefully. But at this mention that we could not fall in love, we all turned to see who else was there. Each person seemed suddenly so interesting, so vital, a beautiful portal through which one might pa.s.s, secretly. And this was when I saw Sands, who was, with Reuben, returning for her second year at Fialta. When I try to call forth my first impression of Sands, it is so interpreted by the light of loss that what I see is somebody already vanis.h.i.+ng, but beautifully, into a kind of brightness. And as Stadbakken's beloved Yeats said of Helen, how can I blame her, being what she was and Fialta being what it is?

As we left that evening, I talked briefly to Reuben and to Elizabeth, whose nickname became Groovy in those few moments, owing to her look, which had a hundred implications-of Europe and Asia, of girls, of tough guys, of grannies. And I then fell in step beside Sands as she walked outside. It was slightly planned on my part, but not entirely, which allowed me to think that the world was a little bit behind me and my desire. It was mid-September, and in this part of the country there were already ribbons of wintry cold running through the otherwise mild evenings. We had a brief, formal conversation. We discussed Fialta, then Chicago. I had thought I was walking her home, but it seemed that we were actually, suddenly, winding up a pathway toward Stadbakken's living quarters.

"Oh," I said. "Where are we going?"

"I'm going up to check on him." She pointed way up to a sort of lighthouse circling above us.

"Stadbakken?"

"Yes." There was light pouring out the window.

"Oh sure, go ahead," I said.

She smiled at me and then walked off. And I turned to walk back to my room, slightly horrified at myself. Go ahead, I repeated to myself. Oh, hey, go ahead. This is the whole problem with words. There is so little surface area to reveal whom you might be underneath, how expansive and warm, how casual, how easygoing, how cool, and so it all comes out a little pathetic and awkward and choked.

As I walked home, I turned back and saw through the trees again that window, ringing with clarity and light above the dark grounds, the way the imagination s.h.i.+nes above the dark world, as inaccessible as love, even as it casts its light all around.

THAT EVENING I LAY in bed reading Christopher Alexander, the philosopher-king of architects: "The fact is, that this seeming chaos which is in us is a rich, rolling, swelling, dying, lilting, singing, laughing, shouting, crying, sleeping order." I paused occasionally to stare out the large window beside my bed, which gave way to the rolling hills, toward Madison's strung lights, and, had I the eyes to see, my hometown of Chicago burning away in the distance. Reuben knocked on my door. We were roommates, sharing a large living room and kitchen. Reuben was the cup full to the brim, and maybe even a little above the brim but without spilling over, as Robert Frost put it. If one of the skills of being properly alive is the ability to contain gracefully one's desires, then Reuben was the perfect living being.

"I forgot to give you your work a.s.signment," he said.

The literature on Fialta I received over the summer had mentioned grounds work, which I had a.s.sumed meant carpentry or landscaping, but now Reuben informed me that I would be in charge of the cows and the two little pigs.

"There are animals here?"

"Yes. Down in the barn."

"There's a barn?"

"Yes. At the end of the pasture."

"Of course," I said.

He was already bowing out of the door when I asked what I was to do with them.