"Why Do You Hoard? Why Do You Squander?"

Copyright 2015.

Cambridge, Nineteen Eighty-something.

In a basement bar in Cambridge, down an alley, off the Square, R.J. Whittier liked to play chess, work on his dissertation, and drink a brand of beer brewed in Alsace-Lorraine.

The bar was a hang-out for grad students and local literary types who liked it because it offered them seventy-five cent drafts, dollar shots, and a space to read their work. Although it was below street-level, there was nothing cellar-like about the feel of the place. The owners had even refrained from giving it some clever subterranean name. It was warm and snug. A bright maplewood bar ran the length of one wall and a large open fireplace took up the whole of another. The round checker-clothed tables were packed so tightly together that there was barely room to squeeze sideways between them or space to shift a chair. A chess set with white and red pieces floated continually from table to table.

R.J. usually sat in the far corner, under the windows, which were at street level, right under the rafters, so that the shadows of people passing by on the sidewalk trudged endlessly back and forth across the pages of his notebook. R.J.'s dissertation examined Dante's influence on Joyce, and all this melancholy shuffling inspired him. It reminded him of Dante pitying the march of the damned across the sands of Malabolge. The irony of it appealed to him too, as the pages of his notebook were transformed into a blistering desert in hell.

He wrote completely absorbed in his work. He hated to be interrupted or to interrupt himself. If he filled up a notebook, he continued writing on whatever scrap of paper was at hand. This evening he was so wrapped up that when he covered the last page of his yellow legal pad, he didn't bother to hunt up a dry napkin or a matchbook or an old menu—he finished his notes right on the tablecloth. Then a friend, a poet, who wore a vest armored with campaign buttons and pins, sat down with a metallic clatter and the chessboard.

"Choose for white."

The poet had been drinking and was excited about a reading he was going to give later. R.J. dispatched him in eight moves. But he was as single-minded about chess as he was about his work. By the end of the disappointingly short game he'd forgotten what he'd been working on before the poet sat down. Then his watch alarm chimed and, in case he hadn't heard it, one of the waitresses, another friend, stopped by his table to remind him that it was his own private last call, time for him to go to his office and prepare his lecture for his class the next morning.

He swallowed his beer, slipped his notepad and books into his backpack, and took a last anxious look around. His habits of concentration were a mixed blessing and he lived in fear of the day when he would absent-mindedly leave a complete manuscript behind. The poet sat staring glumly at the chessboard, pondering his defeat. The board covered most of the tabletop. R.J.’s eyes swept the table but he saw only that the poet could have saved his queen by interposing a bishop.

Patting his jacket pockets, R.J. found his scarf and beret and put them on. The beret was a gift he had been too shy to give. It would have lain forever in his dresser drawer, wrapped in tissue paper, a souvenir of his cowardice attacking him every time he reached for a change of socks, had not his friend the waitress made him vain about the thinning circle of hair on his crown: One night, bending over his shoulder to pour him a beer, she had counted the freckles on his scalp. R.J. glanced at his chair, stooped a bit to see under the table, and, still not satisfied that he hadn't forgotten anything, shouldered his backpack and headed for the door.

The flight of stairs that led out of the bar was as narrow as a ship's gangplank, without room enough for two people to pass abreast, but the press of the crowd frustrated politeness. Traffic on the stairs did a perpetual stutter-step tango as patrons went up and down laterally, passing cheek to cheek, back to back, chest to shoulder blade. R.J. climbed the stairs one step at a time as the ascending and descending knots of customers danced their woozy ways up and down. He was not impatient with the slow progress because he hardly noticed it. He was busy untangling the hermeneutical threads in the horseflies and wasps of Canto Three. R.J. could dive deep into his own thoughts and swim among them happily for hours. But suddenly the uneasy feeling that he had left something behind hauled him to the surface. He stopped dead, his awareness rising at the very instant Isobel Klein was crushed up against him, and his hand, reaching into his jacket to check for his silver pen and pencil set, was pinned between Isobel’s breasts.

Like dolphins R.J.'s thoughts had to lift their backs every once and a while to breathe. Breaching to come eye to eye with Isobel, they took great gulps of her and heaved out of the sea of self-absorption.

The curls of her hair tickled the underside of his chin as she threw back her head and tried to say hello. But before she could get a word out, the people on the stairs behind her pushed her to move on. R.J. hesitated about chasing after her and in that moment of indecision the crowd caught him and carried him up the stairs and out the door.

He had always had a hard time believing in his own luck. Whenever fortune showed herself more kind than was her custom, it seemed so improbable to him that he dwelled on avoided alternative disasters to the point that imagined catastrophes seemed more real to him than any actual success and happiness struck him as a dream he would awake from shortly. Out in the alley it seemed much more plausible that he had not looked up at the right, lucky instant, had never felt Isobel's breast under his hand, had never heard her call him back. Achingly, he stared back at the doorway as if years and miles and not twelve steps kept them apart.

"Why are you grinning like an idiot?"

R.J. cocked his head, unsure of what direction the voice was calling from.

"Over here."

The kitchen door, which was at the bottom of a concrete areaway at the end of the alley, was propped open with a milk crate, and his friend Sophie, the waitress who kept track of his schedule, hair loss, and freckles, stood at the top of the stairwell, backlit in the light coming up from the kitchen, her hands and the tip of her nose glowing orange as she cupped a match to a cigarette. From the kitchen came the clatter of glassware and flatware and dishware and the voices of the kitchen help shouting to be heard over the splush of water in the sinks. It was a warm early spring night, but the breeze carried the damp of melting snow and Sophie wore a bulky cardigan half-shrugged off her shoulders in a world-weary way.

"Come here." She motioned for R.J. to join her and put a cigarette between his lips and lit it for him when he'd settled himself on an empty beer keg beside her. "Did you see Isobel?"

she asked.

R.J. nodded. "Michael's inside, though."

"I thought Michael's removed himself from the picture."

"He broke it off with her. He says."

"You can't break it off with someone you're not actually dating. He just remembered he's already involved. Michael, as you know, is a gentleman." Sophie cultivated a cynical, bored with life attitude, and her posture was always a half-slouch as if existence was so crushingly dull that she might collapse in despair at any moment. It was a pose. Underneath seethed a storm of neuroses. Sophie lived on cigarettes and coffee and a thousand insecurities. She went without sleep, bit her nails, and chewed her lips until they bled. The veins stood out on her hands, which seemed to be always balled into fists. R.J. imagined that if he put his ear to any spot on her pallid skin he would hear the nerves sing underneath like wire in the wind. She was thin and dark-eyed and sometimes she posed for artists and photographers and sometimes she took classes in drawing and photography. She was in her mid-twenties, the same age as the grad student crowd that filled the bar, but she hadn't earned even her BA yet, which made her defensive. The obvious allusions and bits of philosophy with which she peppered her conversation had an ironic backspin, her way of hinting that she was unimpressed with her own smarts and, by extension, with the intellectual pretensions of her academic friends.

R.J. tried to explain why he thought Michael Drury was sincere about not becoming involved with Isobel. Sophie yawned.

"So he tells me. Michael's been confiding in me for two weeks now so I can tell everyone how noble and anguished he's been. So I'm telling you. He's noble and anguished."

Last night, with Drury's blessing, R.J. had taken Isobel out. Drury himself had pretty much set it up and had even seemed relieved this morning when R.J. had reported in. But R.J. had not shown him the thank you note Isobel had sneaked into his mailbox. He was afraid to hear that she had left many similar notes for Michael. Suddenly R.J. became terrified that it was Isobel's letter that he'd left behind. He stabbed his hand into his breast pocket to reassure himself that the little baby blue sheet of stationery with the embossed buttercups on the border was still there. With his hand on the paper over his heart, he debated the wisdom of telling Sophie about his date with Isobel. He decided not to risk any of her sarcasm.

"I'm sure Michael's made things clear," he said.

"I know he has. He made a big speech. There was a lot of crying. She threw a little tin watering can at his head. It was all very dramatic. Isobel told me."

The chronology wasn't clear and R.J. worried about it. He didn't like the possibility that Isobel and Michael had had their fight after he'd asked her to the movies. It would have meant that Isobel had given Drury the opportunity to stop her from going. And the detail of the watering can proved that the scene hadn't taken place on campus. There were no plants to water in the office R.J. shared with Michael. They must have been in Isobel's apartment. Probably it had not been Drury's first visit. Probably—

A frightening image flickered in and out of R.J.'s mind's eye.

"Do you think they ever...?"

Sophie blew smoke up into light shafting down from an upstairs window. "Hands under shirts. Fingers. Technically short of adultery."

"She told you that?"

"She's hinted. You jealous?"

"Of what?"

"Nothing. You look jealous."

As a matter of fact he was jealous. But jealous too of Sophie, of her recent intimacy with Isobel.

"I feel sorry for them," he said.

"If you say so."

R.J.'s glasses had slipped. Sophie pushed them back up his nose, taking the opportunity to search his eyes. "You going back in?"

He tried not to look as though he was considering it. "There'll be more appropriate times."

"That's you, R.J.: BA, MA, ABD, DDG."

"DDG?"

Sophie flicked her cigarette away. "Doctor of Delayed Gratification."

"I have a lot of work to do for morning." R.J. hopped off the keg. The feeling of having lost something returned. He patted his pockets, searched through his backpack, went through his pockets again. This hunt was more talismanic than expectant. He hoped that the delay would bring Isobel up out of the bar.

"I forgot something," he said at last, sighing.

"Of course you did." Sophie plucked his cigarette from his mouth to finish for him.

He followed a crowd and took his place in the polymorphic dance down the stairs.

Happily he noted that Isobel was not sitting anywhere near Michael Drury.

Michael was holding court at a corner table and Isobel was across the room over by the fireplace, her chair turned toward the fire, brooding, with her back to Michael, as far away from him as she could get without climbing up the chimney. She sat with her knees drawn up to her chin and her hands locked around her ankles. R.J. could not see her expression, but then neither could Drury.

He did not go right over. He angled by his usual table to scan for anything recognizably his and to his dismay saw that the table had already been bussed. Pulling up to the bar, he asked the bartender if some stray item with his name attached to it had been turned in. It was embarrassing not to be able to say what the lost item might be, but it didn't matter to the bartender, who chuckled knowingly at R.J.'s absent-mindedness. Everybody said R.J. walked around in a fog. It wasn't true. His gaze was steady, focused, but turned inward. He saw what he needed to see. Still, his friends liked to call out warnings to him about hazards in his path as though he was always in danger of walking into lamp posts, open manholes, and the paths of oncoming cars. Nothing had been found at his table, but the bartender let him dig through a box behind the bar marked "Things Lost and Things Regained," which contained, among other evidence that R.J. was not the only amnesiac who drank there, a number of gloves, mated and unmated, two umbrellas, a paperback anthology of Romantic poetry, a checkbook with no checks in it, and a green and gold striped scarf. He was pretty sure that none of it had ever belonged to him, although he instinctively felt his neck to make sure he was wearing his own scarf and then checked the ends of it to remind himself of its color.

That mission a failure, he still did not go over to sit with Isobel. He ordered a beer and a glass and made his way over to Drury. Isobel spotted him and gave him an inviting smile. R.J. lifted his glass in salute, winked, and kept going the other way.

There wasn't much room at Drury's table. Taking care not to spill his beer, R.J. elbowed his way through the crowd. Michael saw him coming, picked up a free chair from a neighboring table, angled it in next to his own, and signaled for R.J. to sit.

Drury always managed to draw a crowd. Colleagues, students, local artistic types—Michael had many friends and they would knot around him in a cloud of cigarette smoke to do a great deal of yelling and a fair amount of drinking. Sometimes Drury just sat back and listened, sometimes his was the most vehement voice in the debate. Michael loved to talk. Talking was his genius. He had a restless imagination; it roved everywhere, exploring every terrain it came in contact with and settling on no one place long enough to make any detailed maps. He had a hundred talents, but he invested them all and increased none. R.J. had but one talent. Fortunately, it was the one of highest value and most currency in their circle. He was the star of the department.

At least, he had been.

R.J. had begun to worry that he had taken his one talent and buried it. He was on the eighth draft of his dissertation. Professors had begun to look puzzled when they saw him in the halls, as if he was something out of context, something they'd read once but couldn't remember where. Paranoia, Sophie assured him. Maybe. At any rate, around Drury, he downplayed his accomplishments. Our age wants specialists, he would say, and I can specialize because I'm a boring drone.

Drury had his hands full with the poet in the vest stuck full of campaign buttons. They were going at it over the meaning of Hindu myths. As the poet shouted about Jung and Coomaraswamy and Michael shouted back about Campbell and Heinrich Zimmer, R.J. was content to sit quiet and listen with half an ear, sipping his beer and staring dreamily into the cigarette smoke. He was calculating how many minutes had to pass before he could approach Isobel and have it seem nonchalant.

The poet said something that offended three feminist post-structuralists at the table and they took over the argument from Drury. Michael leaned close to R.J.'s ear in order to be heard over the din. "What are you doing here?"

"I forgot something. I think."

"No. What are you doing here?" Drury nodded at the there where he thought R.J. ought to be. R.J. looked up and saw that Isobel was looking back. She smiled, distantly, and dropped her eyes. R.J. worried that she was annoyed at him for ignoring her, but that worry, instead of shooting him over to her side, drilled him into his chair. Then he realized that she was not mad at him, she was embarrassed because Drury had caught her staring.

"Did you see if I left anything here when I went out?" R.J. asked.

Drury sat back in his chair. He put his hand to his forehead, a characteristic gesture that Sophie said was contrived to call attention to the feature he seemed to be hiding, a certain darkening in the blue of his eyes "Wanted," she said, "in seven states for the cold-blooded murder of a dozen women undergraduates," shook his head, and laughed softly, seemingly at his own expense. "You're not going to help me out on this at all, are you?"

R.J. made a wry face and tipped his glass back to drain it.

Drury was normally very careful around women undergrads. Besides being an energetic and witty teacher, he was tall and athletic and he looked a little bit like a young Harrison Ford, the effect heightened by his also always appearing sunburnt and windblown, as if he had just got back from some desert adventure. It was said that students in his classes didn't study American Lit so much as they studied Michael Drury, and every term there were four or five female students who, needing a lot of extra help in that course of study, took up most of Drury's office hours. With them, Michael was courteous and amiable, always helpful, but reserved. He never seemed to notice if a student was particularly pretty or flirtatious, and on his desk, in plain view, he kept framed snapshots of Cynthia, the woman he was seeing when he could scrape together the plane fare to North Carolina where she was doing her doctoral work by day and editing an historicist newsletter by night.

But Isobel had ignored every hint and made him pay attention to her in a way he had successfully resisted paying attention to all his other bright, pretty students. And even though she knew all about Cynthia, she seemed to believe that in the distance between here and Duke there was plenty of room for impulsive hugs and late night phone calls and little kitschy gifts left anonymously on Michael's unattended desk.

So last weekend when Michael had insisted that he come along with them on a drive out to Walden, R.J. had assumed that Drury wanted him there as a warning to Isobel that the trip was not a date.

Drury parked the car in Concord and led them out to the pond along the B & M Railroad tracks. He stepped easily from tie to tie and pretty soon he'd left R.J. and Isobel way behind, stumbling along on the gravel railbed. It was Isobel's idea to try walking on the rails. They moved down the tracks cautiously, one on each rail, arms outstretched like tightrope walkers. At one point Isobel lost her balance. R.J. caught her by the fingertips, and she left her hand in his until they reached the pond.

Fifty yards ahead, Drury veered into the woods, and it dawned on R.J. that Michael had planned all along to leave him and Isobel alone together.

They were already friends. Her sophomore year she had taken his course, "The Pantheistic Avoidance: Hardy, Yeats, and the Decline of Romanticism," and aced it without breaking a sweat. At the end of the term, she had given him a poem she had translated from the French, inscribed, "Pour mon bon instructeur et beau ami." Whenever she was at the bar she made a point of sitting and talking with him, and she visited him in his office, even when Michael was not there.

She was beautiful in a way that the Romantics would have called oriental, that is Middle Eastern, Semitic, with a heart-shaped face, almond eyes, a long nose and a short chin. She carried herself gracefully, a touch self-dramatically, with a sense of style sorely lacking in most literature majors. She could be petulant and sulky. At times she seemed to think that the world turned for her. But why shouldn't she? She was young and beautiful and full of brilliant promise, the most intelligent woman in a milieu where even the women waiting tables had read Kristeva and Derrida. Of course she would think that she was the hub around which all things light and wondrous spun. R.J. had known too many neurotics in his day to be bothered by such healthy solipsism.

He found it attractive. A little daunting. But attractive.

But R.J. was twenty-nine. He knew how he must appear in Isobel's eyes. Back in his undergraduate days when he had played lacrosse he had never lacked for dates. Neither tall nor handsome, but knotty and fierce, he had been attractive to women. His grades had suffered for it though and he had squeaked into grad school. Resolving to make-up for an inauspicious beginning with monk-like self-discipline, he had sacrificed a social life right away. It wasn't until he had finished his course work that he'd begun to make his nightly appearances in the bar. He had won a fellowship, made a reputation, but suddenly here he was, stalled on the brink of his Ph.D., and he had grown soft, shy, and clumsy from lack of exercise. He felt that he had aged quickly in just the last year, right before Isobel's eyes. His knees ached from old injuries, he wore heavy sweaters to hide his thickening waist, and he cringed beneath his bald spot whenever he turned his back to his students to write on the blackboard. He needed a stronger prescription for his glasses but kept putting off making an appointment with the eye doctor, so he squinted through his lenses, wrinkling his nose like somebody aiming an experimental sniff at a carton of milk he’s pretty sure has gone sour.

Listening for any cracks from his knees, he stood up to get another beer. He hoped that on his way to the bar he would develop the courage to go veering off in Isobel's direction. He checked to see if she was watching, but she was just sitting there, with her chin in her hand, frowning moodily, and it was hard to tell what she was looking at. It did not seem to be Drury, at least.

At the bar he met Sophie back from her break.

"Where are you going?" she asked, signaling for the bartender to draw her two drafts.

A stool opened up to R.J.'s right and he slid onto it. "I think I'll just stay here and talk to you."

Sophie said she was thinking seriously of braining him with her serving tray, but decided he wasn't worth the effort.

They had spent the day hiking around the pond. Drury slowed up every now and then to knock apart the doughy pie plate of a mushroom sticking to a birch, listen to the madwoman's laugh of a nuthatch, and peel the bark from dead pine to trace for them the intricate tunnels of engraver beetles in the wood. Isobel tried to tease him by pretending he was giving a quiz. After each lesson, she shouted out quotes from Thoreau, like a Marine recruit answering the DI—“He came to the woods to live deliberately, SIR!" "The mass of men live lives of quiet desperation, SIR!" "Simplify, SIR! Simplify!"—which he ignored. He marched off and in a few strides had left them so far behind that he was as good as alone in the woods. At dusk he let them catch up with him as he sat on a rock overlooking the water, brooding on a mallard tipping out in the pond. They hiked back into town and sat before the fire at the Concord Inn to warm themselves because it had been cold in the woods and snow still lay in the shadows of the pines. They ordered Red Cap Ales and drank themselves sleepy. Isobel slipped her feet—small feet in thick apricot-colored socks—out of her shoes and put them in Drury's lap. Michael, impassive, closed his hands around her toes.

But at dinner she sat much closer to R.J. and took his side in an argument about Emerson and Hawthorne. She even cribbed from one of his lectures. And on the drive back to Cambridge, all three of them in the front seat, Isobel in the middle, she had fallen asleep, resting her head on R.J.'s shoulder. Drury said nothing, but several times he glanced over at R.J. and grinned.

"Shut up," R.J. said, as happy as he'd ever been. The next day he had called her up and asked her out.

R.J. wheeled around and leaned back against the bar, folding his arms across his chest. A space by the fireplace was being cleared of tables and chairs for the upcoming poetry reading. The pins and buttons on the poet's vest clanked next to R.J. The poet was nervous about his reading, and, talking to distract himself, began to ramble on about R.J.'s dissertation. Normally this was R.J.'s favorite topic, but he hardly said a thing in reply. Out of the corner of his eye he was watching the slow circling of Isobel's foot as she crossed her legs and stared into the fire.

Last night had been clear and warm, an advertisement for spring, and after the movie Isobel had wanted to walk all the way to Davis Square for ice cream.

The pressure of performing in front of students made R.J. a comic in his classes. His jokes weren't ad-libbed. He wrote them out as he prepared his lectures, so that sometimes he felt like an actor reciting somebody else's lines. Outside of the classroom he was serious to the point of being dull. He loved his subject and could talk about it with an intensity that exhausted listeners. Students who enjoyed his lectures left his office after a conference looking disappointed. But walking with Isobel he had become inspired, and in the line at the ice cream parlor he was practically Robin Williams. He did scathing impressions of fellow grad students, improvised cynical parodies of poets who read their work at the bar, and told stories about some professors and friends' wives and unlucky combinations of vanity, alcohol, and available bedrooms. It was as though he spent all of his time reading Boccaccio and Balzac instead of Dante. The people in line around them laughed as wickedly as the ladies and gentlemen on the hill above Florence, and Isobel was flattered by his telling her things that a naive undergraduate ought not to know about her teachers. He had impressed his date.

His date?

Isobel's table was carted away to make room for the reading. She went to stand against the wall. Sophie caught R.J.'s eye and with a toss of her head signaled that he ought to relocate too. R.J. grinned weakly and shrugged. Sophie took hold of a pipe of air and throttled that in place of R.J.'s throat.

"That chick wants you bad, man."

R.J. hurt his neck snapping his head around to stare aghast at the poet. What did he know about Isobel? But the poet had been introduced. He pushed himself off the bar with a tin can-rattle from his buttons and stepped into the circle cleared for him to read.

His date.

They had decided to eat their ice cream outside. R.J. spread his jacket on the hood of a parked car for Isobel to sit on, facing the moon. She asked for a taste of his sundae. Ignoring the skinny long-stemmed red spoon he held out for her, she stuck her finger in his sundae, ran it around the lip of the cup, and swirled up a slender bulb of vanilla and hot fudge. Her eyes bright with mischief, she pressed his nose like a button, left a dot of ice cream and chocolate sauce between his nostrils, puckered her lips around her finger, and slid it slowly and deeply into her mouth.

The poet began with a parodistic riff on Virgil. Aeneas goes to hell and finds that hell is grad school. Anchises sits on his thesis committee. Stumped by his father on a question splitting semiotic hairs, Aeneas cries out, "I carried you on my back, man!"

The single amber-gelled spotlight trained on him lit the poet’s face like a gibbous moon. He recited from memory. He chanted his poem at the ceiling and wagged his head back and forth, as if reading the lines off the rafters. For twenty minutes he sang out his work in a voice, he explained to his audience, he had learned from recordings of Pound and Eliot and psalm-singing monks and drunken street people keening their insane hopelessness, prayer sounds of the mad, sainted, and damned, he said with a soulful and angry look that told his audience that he too knew what it was like to be mad, sad, and consigned to hell, and didn't they all envy him for it? While he performed, Isobel drifted to the far end of the bar and then to a table right in front of R.J., practically at his knee. R.J. forgot the poet and meditated on the space between his leg and Isobel's back.

At the subway station he had bought her token and followed her through the turnstile, an act he felt needed explaining.

"I've got a T pass," he said, which didn't explain it. Isobel looked perplexed. He said, "It'll be a while. The trains don't run all that often at this hour. I'll just keep you company."

This time she blinked her eyes and looked baffled, as if he had started speaking Mandarin Chinese.

Eight or nine minutes passed before a train came. Isobel paced the edge of the platform with a pensive air while they waited. Neither spoke. R.J. was too happy to mind the silence. When the train pulled into the station, with a cataclysmic rattle and clanking and shrieking of brakes that caused Isobel to put her fingers in her ears and squinch up her face, R.J. shouted that he'd had a really nice time and hoped they could do it again sometime, and Isobel stared as if he had switched from Mandarin to Pig Latin.

"Good night!" he yelled over the train's howling motors.

She paused a second, about to say something, but the train gave a hydraulic sigh, and he pointed out to her that she had better make a dash for it. Isobel cried good night and jumped through the closing doors on the nearest subway car.

R.J. waved as the train pulled away. Isobel frowned out the window at him, tilting her head the way she had often done in his class, as though trying to puzzle out a very strange piece of abstract sculpture. Walking home, R.J. tried to reconjure Isobel's face as she'd stolen the taste from his sundae, the way her eyes had widened as she'd slid her vanillaed finger between her lips. But all he could see was her puzzled expression as the train shot away into the tunnel.

Moron!

He stopped dead in his tracks and slapped his forehead.

Idiot!

She had expected him to see her all the way home! She'd wanted him to walk her to her doorstep and say goodnight on the front stoop, not shout it out over the roar of the subway. She probably would have invited him in for coffee. He'd have declined, of course, just to show her that he was not looking for too much too soon, but that wasn't the point. He had missed his chance for a good night kiss! All night long as he lay in his bed unable to fall asleep he felt the warmth of Isobel's lips inches from his own.

The chanting stopped. The poet walked off. His baffled audience, caught thinking he was still in the middle of a verse, took a full minute to applaud. R.J. racked his brain for an incisive comment to attract Isobel's attention. He thought of beetles, felt a circle of icy cold on his nose, remembered Isobel's face as the subway rolled away. He looked down at her circling foot. The applause died. He stabbed his hand into his jacket pocket and fumbled for her note. If she saw it in his hand, saw the tenderness with which he held it...

Isobel swept up her wine glass and scurried away. Michael Drury was on his way to the bar. R.J. sat there, forlornly smoothing her note on his knee.

Drury almost snarled as he ordered a beer. He glanced at R.J. and at the paper in his hand. His look was mean. He thought that Isobel's letter was just more notes for R.J.'s dissertation. R.J. slipped it back into his pocket before Michael recognized the handwriting.

Drury leaned on the bar and stared into a shelf above the cash register, glowering as if he could smash the bottles by reading their labels.

"You're letting me down, Mister Whittier."

"She just went to the bathroom. It's not exactly the gentlemanly thing to do to try to flirt with a woman while she's indisposed."

Drury shrugged.

R.J. said, "That's where we're different. You don't stand on form. You'd bang right in there, kick down the door, and with women shrieking, mirrors shattering, soap dispensers exploding, toilet paper unrolling like banners, you'd knock on the stall, and say, 'Pardon me, Isobel, doing anything Saturday night?' Then, after waiting for her to wash her hands and fix her make up, you'd sling her over your saddle and ride out of there like Lancelot."

"Goddamn hero, that's me."

"Now, I, on the other hand, like to take a more tactful approach. Patience is the key. I'm willing to wait. I figure in about seventeen years, she'll be putty in my hands."

Drury studied him for several long seconds, then pushed off the bar and made his way to an empty table in a far corner.

R.J. sat down in the chair Isobel had fled. He tried to imagine it was still warm.

Sophie brought over two bottles of beer. She turned a chair around backwards and straddled it, her knee touching R.J.'s as she filled his glass. R.J. mused outloud about Drury's seeming indifference to his date with Isobel.

"What did you expect him to do? Challenge you to a duel? You think Michael's going to have this sudden revelation, what a great thing he's passed up just because Isobel tattooed your nose with vanilla ice cream?" She pushed the end of his nose like a doorbell. R.J. gaped at her. He hadn't told her anything about last night. Sophie shrugged. "I made her confess all the gory details."

"You rooting for me?"

"I'm rooting for true love to take its course." She dug into her sweater for one of the sticks of lip balm she always carried and gave her bitten lips a good orange-flavored glossing, pressing hard as if disciplining her mouth to form words other than the ones about to come out. "Look, R.J. Suppose Michael's only doing the noble thing for form's sake. You know? So he can pat himself on the back for having tried to be good? Only Christ and the Buddha pass all three temptations. Here you come along, and Michael realizes that Isobel didn't know how to keep count. They were only up to two. Did you see him during Gordon’s reading? The whole time he sat slouched in his chair with his arms folded. He didn’t join in the applause, didn’t even clap once or twice out of politeness. What do you think was eating him? He was watching you and Isobel not watching each other. And he didn't look all that sanguine when he was in here last night, knowing you two were out painting the town vanilla. I'm telling you, R.J. You'd better bundle that baby into the sack as fast as you can, before Michael takes the candy store back."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, you know the old joke about the king going off to the Crusades who locks his wife in a chastity belt? He's worried about who to trust with the key in case he gets killed. He picks the oldest and ugliest of the knights. The king's not halfway to the border of his kingdom when the ugly old knight comes riding up after him, shouting 'Your majesty! Your majesty! You gave me the wrong key!'"

"You're saying that Michael was looking for a way to keep Isobel out of his hair but safe in case things blew up with Cynthia? God, that's cynical of you."

Sophie rested her cheek wearily on her outstretched arm. "You think so?"

"It doesn't become you. You know what you sound?"

"Jealous."

"That's right."

She pulled her arms in and lifted her chin onto her fists. For once she did not sound so jaded. "Well, maybe I am."

She took a napkin, wiped the foam from the corner of his mouth, and went back to work.

Drury was still alone at his table when R.J. approached, carrying Isobel's note before him like a proclamation. Most nights Michael couldn't buy time to himself, but here he sat, alone with his thoughts, exuding a mood that beat back company, with six empty chairs standing sentinel around him. Drury liked to wear khaki fatigue pants with boxy pockets into which he could slide a paperback so that whenever he was caught bored someplace he could draw the book like a gun. He had out a Penguin edition of Leaves of Grass.

"'Leap up! Leap up and contend for your lives!'" R.J. roared, forcing the good humor. Drury raised one eye from his book. His expression was indignant, ferocious even.

R.J. gestured toward the space where the poet had read. "What did you think of Gordon’s reading?"

Drury frowned. He seemed to consider an answer, then broke out into a sneering smile and shook his head.

“Did you think his poems were any good?"

RJ did not want to commit himself to an opinion that Drury would shoot full of holes. He tried to affect a note of ironic detachment. "I'm not sure."

"Of course not. None of us was. None of us knew what to think. There's no book to tell us. Is this good? Is this bad? Who knows until we look it up!" Drury slumped back in his chair. "What an amazing, gutless, sexless, joyless bunch of androgynes we all are, wandering castrated around academia, people who have had every ounce of originality beaten out of us by various ideologies. I don't know who I'm supposed to be today. Let's see how I feel after reading a little Lacan." He thumbed the pages of his paperback, speed-reading. "Wow! That's appalling! I guess I'm a feminist. I better check. I know! I'll read Adrienne Rich. Gee, I hope that's still politically correct."

Sophie, serving drinks at the next table, overheard. She turned around to listen further, her arms folded, her head cocked, and a smile of bored disdain on her face.

Drury continued, "We're all living at second hand. We read the right books, polish the right apples, write our little dissertations, and run off to safe little academic jobs where we spend the rest of our lives picking nits off each other's articles in which we've picked nits off of people who've picked nits off of...Ahhh!" He threw up his hands. Sophie applauded sarcastically.

Drury stood up and holstered his paperback Whitman. "Excuse me. I have to go make a phone call." On the stairs the dance up and down continued. Michael did not wait his turn. He pushed up through the shuffling bodies, taking the stairs two steps at a time.

"What did I tell you?" Sophie said. "Nobody makes it past all three temptations."

R.J. heard her but the words did not register.

"He's right."

"He is not right."

"He's nailed us all. Pinned us, and labeled us, and put us away in a museum drawer."

"Are you taking that as a personal indictment? Everything he said, that's just jealousy."

"Sure. It can be dismissed as jealousy. But only by a hack, a bloodless, gutless, sexless, androgynous hack." All of R.J.'s insecurities about himself, all his doubts about his dissertation, had been unloosed by Michael's tirade. It was as if Michael had broken the lock on some kennel within R.J. and set a pack of hungry dogs on his ego. "And I'm the chief hack. The chief disemboweled, castrated, hermaphroditic grind. A drudge among drudges. The hack's hack."

Sophie was furious with him. "Don't you see what he was doing?"

R.J. didn't. What he did see was the chessboard, all set up for a game, gliding in for a landing on the table. He looked up at the pilot. Isobel held her hands out, a red and a white pawn hidden in her fists.

"Choose for white."

"Just a minute," he snapped. Isobel looked hurt but he didn't notice. He was intent on proving Michael's case against him to Sophie.

Coleopatra. At Walden, Drury had told him that that was the scientific name for the biological order of beetles. It struck him as the perfect word for himself. Himself and his work. Coleopatran. Beetle-like. "And not anything so artistic or marvelous as bark beetles. I'm a dung beetle. I collect my bits of offal and roll them up into neat little balls of shit. It's low, obsessive work we do, isn't it? Slogging away, dawn to dusk, reading, reading everything, regardless of its real value, storing it away like misers. And I'm the worst of all. A dull pedant over-cultivating a shrunken, exhausted patch of dirt, ignorant and helpless outside its borders, ohsocareful about keeping inside my fence, ohsojealous of trespassers. The dung beetles' dung beetle!"

He slammed his glass down so hard that the chessmen dither-danced on the board as if in anxious embarrassment and Isobel jumped in her chair.

"Here we all are, rolling these great weights of shit about in circles, frantically pushing after this fad, that theory, snowballing our dungballs, irritably bumping into each other and stopping only to yell back and forth, 'Why do you hoard? Why do you squander?'"

"What are you talking about?" Isobel asked plaintively.

R.J. turned on her. He told her everything that Michael had said, except that he forgot to say that it was Michael who'd said it. Sophie tried to warn him to shut up. Isobel's lips parted in dismay. She looked, R.J. noted, like a novice nun whose father confessor had just told her not to be such a sap, God is dead and ecstasy a psychosomatic manifestation of repressed sexuality. And he said so.

Isobel dropped her eyes and toyed with one of the chess pieces. After a long silence, she said, "That's the most hateful thing I've ever heard you say. And I don't understand why you'd think I'd want to listen to it."

"I'm sorry." But he didn't sound it.

She pouted at the red queen, which she twirled by its crown between her thumb and forefinger in an abstracted manner. "Do you want to play chess or not?"

In the romantic chess game they'd been playing all night, she was red, he was white; having grown impatient waiting for him to make up his mind on his opening gambit, she had moved out of turn. She shouldn't have had to, but she was being magnanimous, and she would see it through. Wasn't she ohsoadult?

"Do you still want to play?"

"I asked you, didn't I?"

"I'm not going to force you into playing any games you don't want to play."

Her eyes flashed, and in their light R.J. caught a glimpse of his future. He could see himself growing fat, going sour, an old squint-eyed eunuch, imprisoned in a little cloud of chalk dust. Joyless himself, he would come to hate joy in others. He would despise the brilliant, beautiful girls like Isobel, and they would hate him and make fun of him and avoid his classes.

"Forget it."

"What?"

"Look. Go away. You don't want to be here. I'm a downer. I'm sorry. I apologize for the fact that I can't strew your path through life with rose petals so your little feet don't have to tread upon the ugly earth. I can't pave your way through life with flowers like your goddamn woodsprite Michael Drury! Excuse me. Michael Thoreau. Henry Goddamn David Drury!"

The lights in the bar were tucked into corners where the rafters joined the ceiling, and under their dim, slanted beams faces were curiously shadowed, so that it was nearly impossible to read the expression of the person across the table from you, let alone determine the exact shade of red that suffused her cheeks. But R.J. had no doubt that whatever color Isobel's cheeks had become, it was exquisite.

She threw down the queen, jumped from her chair, snatched up her purse, snatched at her jacket—needing two stabs to snag it—and stomped to the stairs, where she joined the throng in its tango, and went from partner to partner until R.J. could not tell her body from the others and lost her.

Several more beers made his head spin. He felt sick and irritable as he walked home across the Yard. A wind had come up, and the trees shook, working their branches up and down with the steady beat of human labor. The gray limbs were as pale and smooth as flesh, and R.J. could almost see the naked arms of men, and the thighs of women, tossed through the treetops on the wind.

His thoughts were muzzy. He kept patting his pockets and touching his beret, but he couldn't think why he needed to make the motions, which, he'd become aware, traced the sign of the cross over and over. For what was he praying?

That the night could begin again?

There didn't seem to be any reason for that prayer. None of the evening's events appeared connected in his memory. The various conversations between himself and Drury, himself and Sophie, himself and the tin-plated poet, were as vague as pieces of a dream, and when he tried to recall them, they sounded as artificial as fiction, the way dreams do when you try to render their symbolic vocabularies into rational language. That last argument with Isobel seemed the most artificial of all, entirely the work of a paranoid imagination.

Usually he had trouble believing in his own good luck. Now he refused to believe in disaster.

It could not be that after struggling so long to find the right poetry to use with Isobel he had been inspired by images of shit and beetles! It could not be that he had chased her away like that! He could see too clearly what should have happened, what was supposed to have happened, how he went straight to her table and thanked her for her note, letting her know how much it meant to him, how they spent the whole night together, talking, having fun, heads close together, the width of a kiss apart. It was what Sophie had kept pushing him toward, what Drury had planned. It was what Isobel must have been wishing for when she'd called to him from the bottom of the stairs. He could not have, would not have, squandered such a chance! He felt these images to be so much truer than what had occurred that it seemed as though he could rush back to the bar and catch himself and Isobel leaving there arm in arm.

Reflex steered him homeward—all of his thoughts were concentrated on his blown opportunity. He was trudging down an alley behind the rows of three-decker houses that made up his neighborhood, unconscious of where he was. The backyards he passed were small boxes of icy shadows, and suddenly, out of one of these boxes, a huge dog leaped at him. The hound pounced against a chainlink fence, its paws bulging out the metal mesh, and it bayed wildly. R.J. ran away in tears. He ran all the way to Isobel's house.

The sky paled from black to sooty pewter as storm clouds rose in place of the sun. The wind rattled the window panes over his desk. Winter had returned overnight. He rolled out of bed, reaching for his jeans and a sweater, muttering, "I better get to work."

He sat down at his desk and began to copy his notes off the tablecloth.

The bedsprings creaked as she lifted herself up on her elbow. Shyly, she asked if he minded if she stayed. He shook his head. His lack of enthusiasm was almost worse than if he'd asked her to leave. He could feel her embarrassment.

What did she expect? How thankful did she think he'd be to see her standing triumphantly at the top of the stairs, unrolling the infernal tablecloth stained with his crabbed cursive like bunting? What made her think he'd rejoice to have back the lost notes which he'd used as his excuse to chase Isobel back into the bar, the false grail that had led him to disaster?

"Ta da! Look what I found in the laundry!"

Didn't she know why he hadn't been there when she arrived? What did she think had caused the knotted muscles she'd massaged, the tears she'd kissed dry, the derelict mast of his shipwrecked hopes that she'd discovered, unloosed, and bent her head to?

But the damned are blind to the present moment, although they can predict the future, which is why he should have known, flogging himself to Isobel's, what he'd find there, should have known without having to see them what emotions would play across Isobel's face.

She had come to the door looking very tiny in Michael's shirt, with its tails hanging to her knees and her hands lost in the sleeves. As soon as she opened the door, R.J. began to back off the porch and into the shadows on the sidewalk. He had felt shoved back, scorned for having tried to rise above his sentenced depth. When all the other feelings, horror, embarrassment, anger, had left her, and pity had settled in her eyes, he had staggered away.

"I'll make us some coffee?"

"Fine."

"You're sure you don't want me to go?"

"No, please, make the coffee."

"'Cause if I'm keeping you from your work..."

"No, really, it's fine. You're not bothering me at all."

Sophie was silent for a minute. If he looked up into the window he could have seen her face reflected there. He kept his head bent to his work. Why was she so quiet? Why didn't she make a joke? Did you hear the one about the two masochists who wound up in bed together?

Hearing her climb out of bed, he resisted the temptation to watch her naked reflection bend down to sift among her clothes for her Chapstik. He listened to the sound of her footsteps on the rug, heard the sounds of jars being shuffled in the kitchen cabinet, heard the cups rattling on the countertop.

The notes weren't as useful as he would have thought, considering how their loss had tortured him. The same ideas would have occurred to him again when he re-read the Third Canto. He smiled at the thought of the neutral angels and those souls who had lived lives of neither praise nor blame moaning on the outskirts of hell and envying even the damned for at least having earned a fate.

He heard the kettle bottom bang on the stove, heard the hiss of the gas and the whoosh-thump of the flame as it caught, heard the burning jet begin to shake the water in the kettle.

He listened to Sophie sigh, listened to another sigh catch in her throat, listened to her breath heave into sobs.

He thought of showing her his notes, of explaining to her how the irony applied to the both of them. It would make her laugh. Stop her crying, at any rate. And that way, he could work in peace.