After class, I found myself standing in the aisle beside Vernor Matheius's row of seats as, tall and lanky and slope-shouldered, whistling a faint, just subtly derisive tune, Vernor Matheius was making his way into the aisle. He didn't see me. He wouldn't have seen me. He seemed oblivious to, indifferent to, every undergraduate student in the room. I wanted to-what?-offer words of sympathy and commiseration. Even as I knew (of course I knew) that Vernor Matheius didn't want words of sympathy and commiseration; not from anyone, and certainly not from me. There was a roaring in my ears. The hardwood floor tilted. Of course I didn't dare utter his name-"Vernor." I had no right to that name, I shouldn't have known that name. For a moment, staring at him, I couldn't speak at all. The man's physical presence confused me; his height; he was at least a head taller than I, towering over me; a powerful throbbing heat lifted from him, as if he were sweating inside his clothes; his skin dark and smoldering with blood; close up, his skin was darker and coarser than I'd imagined. Behind the smudged lenses of his wire-rimmed glasses his eyes were damp and glaring. He wore a white shirt and even a necktie, both rumpled, not-clean; with an air of sullen dignity he was shrugging into the bulky sheepskin jacket and with rapid deft motions winding the crimson wool scarf around his neck; as if, in his fury, he would have liked to strangle himself; his fingers remarkably long, his hands rather narrow, the palms curiously pinkish-pale as if they might be soft, even tender to the touch. I saw that he wanted only to escape the lecture hall, the last thing he wanted was to speak with anyone who had witnessed his public humiliation, yet I followed beside him as he pushed into the aisle, I stammered words meant to console; to my astonishment I saw my hand reach out timidly to touch his-his hand; but at the last second I dared touch only the soiled cuff of his jacket; if I'd touched his skin he might have flung my hand off in sheer nervous reaction; and all the while I was smiling, trying to smile, a fixed ghastly grin, in longing and terror seeking the very source of terror for solace, protection. I can love you, I am the one who can love you. Who am I except the one whose sole identity is that she can love you?
Vernor Matheius was staring at me. It was as if he'd heard, not my shy halting insipid speech, my well-intentioned words in imitation of such gestures of commiseration made to me by women or girls who'd hoped to console me for whatever hurts, deprivations, but my desperate thoughts. I, I can love you! He had seen, not felt, the brush of my fingers against his sleeve; how near I'd come to touching him. Sharply he said, "Yes? What?"-still staring at me, as if I'd accosted him; yet at the same time he was turning on his heel to escape; rudely giving me no time to answer, had I had an answer; he bounded up the steps to the rear exit, and was gone.
Yet: I have done it, touched you. And now you know me.
That morning, unlike most mornings, I did not follow Vernor Matheius out of the building and across the snowy quadrangle; I did not follow him at all; in confusion, a kind of delirium, I descended the stairs to the first floor of the Hall of Languages; the corridors, the stairs were crowded at this hour, just before eleven o'clock; I took refuge in anonymity. Now you will know me, the connection has been made. I could not believe my recklessness, my daring. I could not believe I had done such a thing, and not only dreamt it. Around me on the stairs were students from the class, familiar faces though we didn't know one another's names; with childish zest we spoke of the humiliation of the formidable "Mr. Matheius"; even I who adored him spoke in this way, smiling, greedy, not wanting the subject to be dropped; a hatchet-faced boy who was a senior in pre-law said, grinning, " 'Math-e-ius'-who's he think he is, anyway?" and another boy said vehemently, "It's weird a Ne-gro caring so much about-that kind of stuff." I did not object, I listened intently, it may even have been that I seemed to concur. For whom we love helplessly we love, too, to betray: any connection is thrilling.
Even to hear brilliant Vernor Matheius called "Ne-gro" so carelessly, crudely-to hear his name spoken at all-thrilling.
I found myself in the basement of the Hall of Languages where there were additional classrooms, cramped and ill-lit and melancholy rooms; low-ceilinged corridors and a sharp smell, in winter, of wet wool, rubber boots, a perpetual haze of cigarette smoke. In a remote corner of the basement there was a women's lavatory; often I used this lavatory, for it was always empty; a sickly odor of drains and disinfectant wafted from it. Here was a space that seemed older than the aging building that loomed above it, lodged deep in earth with only a small window to emit a wan, spent light. I remember this dismal place as distinctly as any place of those years and wonder if perhaps, in those dreams of mine that rake my soul and leave me, in the morning, exhausted yet curiously revived as if I have harrowed Hell, that region of the grindingly mundane, and survived, I dream of it often. For it was a place in which to hide; a place in which to weep; a place of inexplicable shame and melancholy; a place in which to use the antiquated toilet, and pull a chain flush that reluctantly and somberly released water from a rust-stained overhead tank into a yet more stained bowl; a place in which to check worriedly if, finally, my period had "happened"-as rarely it did, for I was twenty pounds underweight and experienced brief though painful periods no more than two or three times a year. For I was not truly female in certain crucial ways and both anguished and gloated in this fact. In the water-speckled mirror above a row of sinks I was struck by my face-was I smiling? I'd behaved with Vernor Matheius as I had never behaved in my life; approached a man I didn't know, and dared to touch him; almost, I'd touched the back of his hand, his skin; I'd forced him to look at me; to see me; I'd spoken directly to him; I'd offered him words of sympathy ("He didn't mean it, he spoke without thinking, he admires you very much, anyway there's nothing wrong really with being a Sophist-Protagoras was a Sophist and really so was Socrates") that were genuine, heartfelt if breathless; I'd acted without premeditation, not so much as an instant's premeditation, as one might rush forward to save another from harm.
Almost it seemed to me, and would seem increasingly to me with the passage of time, that Vernor Matheius had somehow drawn me to him, physically, I'd had no real power to resist.
In such involuntary acts, there is innocence.
"But now you must leave it at that. You must not pursue him."
These words were uttered in my voice. I was staring at the floating pale oval of a face in the mirror and so happy!-the face on this side of the glass, my living face, ached with happiness. I was feverish, I touched my fingertips to my lips, I kissed my fingertips that had touched the soiled sleeve of Vernor Matheius's jacket. Never again would I sleep. I might have died on the spot, I was so happy. Deep in the interior of the subterranean mirror with its discolored surface splotched from the sink, its lead backing corroding the glass like leprosy: how many generations, how many decades of girls since the building had been constructed a hundred years before, had gazed into such depths as I did, stark yearning eyes, female eyes, our reflections tangled together as in the marshy bottom of a pond, or a common grave.
Yet I smiled, smiled-I was happy.
8
"Not following me, girl, are you?"
The voice, his voice-not irritable but brash and teasing, as unexpectedly, to my embarrassment, Vernor Matheius halted on the sidewalk; turned abruptly to me, so I hadn't time to sidle away; I'd imagined myself invisible following him at a discreet distance, sometimes walking close beside others as if I were in their company; I had not seen him so much as glance over his shoulder as he'd strode along whistling; in this way I had followed him from the university library across the quadrangle and down a steep hill to College Place, from College Place to Allen Street, a business district of fast-food restaurants, bookshops, supplies stores, from Allen Street out to University Avenue and along University Avenue to the area of the medical center; of course I was in no hurry to overtake Vernor Matheius and when he slowed his pace, I slowed mine; he must have noticed me somehow; or sensed the intensity of my concentration upon him; my gaze so fixed upon him; and now he'd stopped at a curb, turned to me and laughingly called out, "Not following me, girl, are you?-eh?" This was meant to be playful; a flirtatious joke; yet the joke (of course) was that he wasn't joking, he knew very well I'd been following him, yet he could not absolutely know, he could not be one hundred percent certain (for we both knew Hume's indisputable argument regarding causality); yet there was the probability that I'd been following him; yet I could not acknowledge that I was, for-what a shameful admission! And what could Vernor Matheius have said in reply? So I had to protest as I did, my face burning as if it had been slapped, "Oh, oh no-I'm just-walking this way."
"And what way is that, exactly?"
Rapidly I invented a plausible destination: the University Health Services office which was about a block away. I had to return a form, I said.
Vernor Matheius, towering above me, sucked at his mouth in a show of mock disappointment. "Just a coincidence, eh?"
"A-coincidence."
"Just 'atoms and the void,' eh?"
Democritus was a philosopher of ancient Greece who was famous for a single axiom-In reality there is nothing but atoms and the void. I wasn't sure if he'd been a Sophist; he was one of those who, at the very start of philosophic inquiry, had handily reduced the mysteries of existence to shreds. For that was the way of philosophy: to reduce existence to pitiful shreds, or to inflate it to gigantic, smothering proportions. Either way, existence became unrecognizable.
I laughed uneasily, and did not disagree. Somehow we were walking together on University Avenue; we crossed a wide windy expanse of pavement as a yellow DON'T WALK! sign flashed.
I was overwhelmed and confused by Vernor Matheius's nearness. Hearing his voice, the voice, the voice that had so entered my consciousness, his voice like a roaring in my ears. His height, his quizzical bemused skeptical eyes, his habit of grinning to bare uneven yellow predatory teeth with a prominent gap between the two front teeth.
Slyly thinking Don't imagine I can't see through you, girl: your skin is transparent.
It would be a matter for me to contemplate afterward: how rapidly, how irrevocably I'd stepped out of invisibility into visibility once Vernor Matheius had sighted me. How, one moment, I had been lost in my concentration upon him; I'd been anonymous, unseen; the next moment, I was forced to speak, to act, to be; forced to quickly improvise and invent, as in a game of rapid motions and counter-motions, like badminton (at which, as a high school girl, I'd won county tournaments). My very way of carrying my body, my facial expressions, the movement of my eyes, my hands, my legs; the way in which I walked, needing to keep stride with the man's loping gait; the way in which I displayed my "self"-all were a surprise to me, a revelation. As if a blinding spotlight were suddenly shining on me, and I had no choice but to perform.
Yes you see through me, you know me. This must all have happened before.
Since the morning of the professor's insult, Vernor Matheius had ceased attending the class. Suddenly, irrevocably-he was gone. At the back of the hall was the row in which he'd sat, there was the desk in which for weeks he'd sat, beneath the clock; but now he was gone, and would not (I seemed to know, with resignation) be back; though I glanced over my shoulder repeatedly during class as if with a nervous tic, needing to check the time; for the hour between ten and eleven was interminable now, and empty of meaning. How dull, disappointing European Ethics was without Vernor Matheius to enliven it!-I wasn't the only person who felt the loss. Even those students who'd disliked Vernor Matheius intensely regretted his absence. And most of all the professor who seemed to me sad, elderly, reading from his lecture notes, adjusting his glasses and clearing his throat; in the harsh glare from the leaded-glass window his creased, windburned-looking face exposed; like me glancing frequently toward the empty desk beneath the clock. I glared at him, doodling in my notebook. Now you see what you've done, you ridiculous old man. Out of vanity.
I had no choice, I had to comment on his absence from the class, it would have been unnatural for me not to; and Vernor Matheius shrugged indifferently, and said, "I wasn't enrolled, just auditing. Not much in it for me, frankly." So I said, hesitantly, "It's very-quiet now, without you," and Vernor Matheius said, "Good. I was intrusive, I think," and quickly I said, "Oh, no-not at all," and he persisted, "Yes, wasn't I? Come on: I always talk too much," and I said, almost vehemently, "No. You made the class come alive." At this, Vernor Matheius made a curious sucking sound with his teeth, as if sucking spit through his teeth, a comical-mocking sound I'd never heard before but interpreted as an expression of extreme doubt, and grinning sidelong at me he said, "So now it's dead without me, eh?" and I found myself backed into a corner by the logic of his argument, forced to say, "Yes."
Vernor Matheius was not walking me to the University Health Services but the office happened to be in the direction in which (by chance and coincidence) we were walking. So it happened that we walked together; people on the street, glancing at us, might have imagined us as a couple; an interracial couple, of whom there were a few at the university; not many, for there were not many non-Caucasian students, but a few. I was carrying a duffel bag, and was in horror it would bump against Vernor Matheius's side; yet I didn't want to switch it to my other arm, for that would remove the buffer between us; and he might misunderstand; or understand too well. We weren't talking now; Vernor Matheius had resumed his whistling. I had sometimes noticed how, striding across campus, making his way through slower-moving groups of students that seemed to part, like molecules, for his swifter passage, he often whistled; frowning and smiling to himself, lost in thought; yet his eyes moving continuously, restlessly-you could see that nothing eluded him. How tall the man was, six feet three or four; how lean, like a knifeblade; his handsome head disproportionately large for his shoulders and body, as if the rest of him had failed to keep pace with his intelligence. There was a slight lurching hunch to his left shoulder as if he had an old injury, and carried himself guarded against pain; yet never registered pain; in fact he was in buoyant good spirits, whistling through his fleshy purplish-plum pursed lips. It would not have occurred to me in my naivete to wonder Am I a factor in this man's happiness? Is there invariably something sexual in a man's happiness? Pulled down tight over his head was a grimy knitted navy blue cap with white starburst designs, that looked handmade; the crimson wool scarf looped around his neck, also moderately soiled, flapped in the wind; the khaki sheepskin jacket flapped open, the zipper broken; his hands were bare in the 10°F. cold-he'd lost his gloves. Vernor Matheius was one of those older, driven students perpetually distracted by thought, or by some mysterious urgency that made it impossible for them to get their clothes on right; I suppose I was perceived in this way myself, for I'd long been careless of my "personal appearance"-my "grooming" as it was called-though now, in recent weeks, I'd made a concerted effort to improve. For how do you make yourself visible, to one who has no awareness of your very existence?
At the Health Services building Vernor Matheius waved good-bye to me without breaking stride, or breaking off his whistling; blindly I turned in to the building on my fictitious errand; wandered the corridors for five, ten minutes before daring to return to the street; to a pearlescent-gray, windy March day; and when I did, stepping out onto University Avenue, to my astonishment there stood Vernor Matheius, waiting.
His mouth smiled at me, a sly-glistening gap-toothed smile, and said, "Find what you were looking for?"
9
Aged eighteen I'd left home, Strykersville, New York, with no idea of who I was or who I might be; knowing only who I was not, and did not wish to be: all that, until that time, I'd known. At Syracuse, I haphazardly cobbled together a personality out of scraps; like my grandmother's quilts made of mismatched scraps of cloth. You don't inquire into the origin of scraps but only of the shrewd use of which they are made.
From my brother Dietrich (who'd been a Marine immediately out of high school, before returning to farm) I borrowed a way of carrying myself with dignity; from my high school history teacher, a way of questioning others' remarks without being rude (though in fact, I suppose I was sometimes rude); from a girl named Lynda who'd been my closest friend in high school, a way of being "good"-"generous"-without seeming silly; from the Lutheran minister's grown daughter, a way of regarding people with flattering widened sincere-seeming eyes, not the narrow, veiled eyes natural to me; from my father I borrowed a habit of skepticism and doubt, the loser's distrust of anyone who has more money than he has, or even the appearance of more; yet from my father, too, a contradictory impulse, for he had a weakness for card playing and gambling, which attests to reckless optimism. The gambler's philosophy is a simple one. So little hope of things going right for you, why the hell not bet all you've got?
At Syracuse there were so many new models for me. At any rate, possibilities.
My most articulate, persuasive professors (who were exclusively male); scattered residents in my freshman dorm, known to me only by name; a number of the Kappa girls who now, when they saw me on campus, stared through me with expressions of undisguised loathing. (The more inventive of the Kappas had spread fanciful rumors of my "congenital leprosy"; my "mixed racial background"; my "disgusting" grooming habits; my "selfishness" is not tutoring them; my "public nervous breakdown" in the presence of Kappa alums. Of these outrages, the last was truly unforgivable.) My so-called personality had always been a costume I put on fumblingly, and removed with vague, perplexed fingers; it shifted depending upon circumstances, like unfastened cargo in the hold of a ship. Periodically in high school I would make a desperate effort to be "nice"-"normal"-"well-liked"- "popular." When I was once elected to a class office, vice-president of my senior class, I resigned in a panic. I couldn't explain that the sunny-seeming good-girl citizen my classmates had elected to office wasn't me, but an experiment I had not expected to succeed.
The personalities I assembled never lasted long. Like quilts carelessly sewn together, I periodically fell apart. Sometimes the collapse was brief, a siege of exhaustion, nausea and sleeplessness that left me stunned, but purged; at other times, and such times were becoming more frequent, the collapse was more serious, involving a period of manic, nervous behavior followed by a physical breakdown-"flu" I would call it, or that popular undergraduate malady "mononucleosis." I was too weak to get out of bed, too weak and demoralized to read, write or think coherent thoughts; my bowels churned and ached with diarrhea, though I hardly ate; all appetite for food vanished; my body burned with fever and my head with pain. Yet there was a curious solace in such a collapse, a sharp, sour pleasure; for I would be compelled to think Now you know what you are, now you know. Stark and simple and beautiful as gleaming white bones picked clean of all flesh. Now you know. Yet I lived in dread of the one day I would fall utterly and irrevocably into pieces and would lack the strength, the will, the purpose, the faith to reassemble myself another time.
I never doubted that others, those others I admired, were solid and whole, not made of scraps and pieces like me. I never doubted their natural superiority, only that I could emulate it. Yet there were those like me with whom I felt a surreptitious kinship. One morning in the Ethics class after Vernor Matheius had ceased attending, the professor had been lecturing with a strained, forced energy on "the perennial problem of good and evil"-the "tragedy of man's divisiveness"-and of how such great thinkers as Augustine, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel had dealt with this "problem"; and it came to me-how hollow, how halting the man's voice; how little any of this mattered, without Vernor Matheius to respond. The wintery glare from the tall leaded-glass window beside the professor's podium fell upon the aging man so cruelly it looked as if his skin was about to crumble into bits, and his eyes that were brave and hopeful were about to dissolve into water. I heard his old-man's voice as he must have heard it himself and felt a rush of confused emotion for him, and pity: for the arc of his life was waning, and even had Vernor Matheius remained in our midst it would not have mattered for long.
To win Vernor Matheius's attention, I understood that I would have to make myself visible to him, and "attractive"; I would have to reinvent myself; I shopped for secondhand clothing in the city, choosing things I myself would never have wished to wear, or dared: a lime-green suede jacket in a bygone style, only slightly worn at the cuffs and elbows; a ruffled red long-sleeved silk blouse that looked like an explosion on my narrow torso; a tartan plaid wool skirt several sizes too large for me made of an exquisitely beautiful fabric; a sleek-sexy black linen dress with a V neck and a dropped hemline and an unraveling hem. Out of bins marked $3-$5 I pulled a sweater, a gauzy scarf, a belt made of linked silver ornaments. Each of the items had been many times reduced-the suede jacket, for instance, had been marked down from $95 to $43 to $19-and was certainly a bargain; these were quality clothes of the kind I could never have afforded new; but I could not really afford even these bargains, and had had to borrow money from girls in my residence, even as I suspected I would never be able to repay it-I'd become reckless, shameless. And my hair that had grown out unevenly and fell now to my shoulders in an untidy rippled-curly mass needed attention: trimming, shaping, "styling": I found myself one Saturday morning in a neighborhood beauty salon spending $ 12 on my hair; staring amazed at the transformed girl in the mirror as the beautician (a heavily made-up, glamorous woman of approximately the age my mother would have been had she lived) said cheerfully, "Some improvement, eh?"
10
" 'Anellia'-a strange name. Never heard it before."
Frowning, with a skeptic's habitual narrowing of his eyes, Vernor Matheius uttered this name as if doubting it.
I said nothing, and the moment passed.
In the gloomily romantic coffeehouse Vernor Matheius spoke almost exclusively of philosophy. It was his true passion. It might have been his only passion. Such a ferocity of commitment and concentration excited me, for I felt the same way, or nearly; I'd grown to distrust all that was mere emotion, fleeting and ephemeral; the world of sliding, collapsing surfaces; the world of my father's drifting cigarette smoke, vanishing into the ceiling of my grandparents' old farmhouse; the world of clock time. And there was the thrill of a common language. A common religion. Almost, I could think, As if we were a couple. Lovers. Vernor was known in this place, and seemed not to mind when his name was spoken familiarly; it struck my ear as risky, and wonderful, that others, strangers to me, could call out "Vernor" so readily, and Vernor Matheius would smile and wave a greeting. Beside a wall of hammered tin squares painted the hue of pencil lead, we sat in a booth with a sticky tabletop; Vernor ordered coffee for us both-very strong, black, bitter-almond coffee of a sort I had never tasted before; swift as a shot to the heart caffeine flew through my veins; my pulse quickened, my very eyeballs began to throb. As if. Lovers. Long ago I had sternly instructed myself that sexual yearning is impersonal; though it may seem so, it is not; sexual yearning is the yearning of nature to reproduce itself, blindly.
Vernor asked nothing more about my name, or my background. In a voice that seemed to me, in my state of heightened nerves, both aggressive and seductive, he quizzed me about philosophy: for it was strange to him that "a girl like you" would be drawn to philosophy since "so few girls" were. He spoke of Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza. Wittgenstein and Cassirer were his special interests. "The universal laws of structure and operation"-that was the only really worthwhile concern of mankind, in Vernor's opinion. When he'd first enrolled in college he had thought he might be a teacher, but soon discovered, to his disgust, how vacuous, how ignorant, how deadly-dull education courses were; he'd dropped out of college and entered a seminary, hoping to learn of God, the pathways to God, and how he might serve mankind in the effort of discovering God, but soon discovered, to his even greater disgust, only a human, confused and contradictory God- " 'Yahweh' like a collective comic nightmare of mankind." And so he returned to college, and enrolled in humanities courses, but soon discovered he couldn't tolerate history-"For what is 'history' except contingency, a mess of accidents." Most of these were bloody; history was mostly war; an appalling record of mankind's cruelty; cruelty compounded by ignorance, unless it was compounded by a malevolent intelligence; mankind no more rational than ants of differing races, creeds, languages ceaselessly battling one another for dominance; for mere anthills; what is politics but rabid self-interest and aggression, even the current civil rights movement-Vernor uttered the words civil rights movement with a purely neutral detachment as if it were a foreign phrase-was a distraction from the purity of the philosophical quest: to know what is. "Every year, every moment must be equal to every other," Vernor said, frowning as if warning me not to interrupt and argue, for philosophers are trained to argue. "The only truths that can possibly matter, that can really matter, are truths that transcend time." How emphatic Vernor Matheius's voice. A voice of seduction, a voice of pleading. A voice of logic, reason, conviction. A voice like a caress, that left me weak, gripping the coffee mug between my fingers. Vernor Matheius's large head, dark-tinctured face; his eyes showing pale crescents above the iris. His warm yeasty bodily odor mixed with the sharper smell of the coffee and rushed along my veins making me begin to perspire inside my showy clothes. I would be late for my cafeteria job. I would not arrive at the cafeteria at all. Though thinking calmly I can leave. I can stand, turn away. At any time.
Then somehow we were outside. My eyes blinked against the cold, tears stuck to my lashes. Vernor Matheius was leading me-where? We must have spoken of where. He must have invited me, I must have accepted. Close beside me he walked, nudging me. With what strange familiarity his fingers gripped my green suede jacket at the elbow. We came to Chambers Street. We descended the icy sidewalk. I am free to turn away, to run. At any time. Inappropriately, I recalled my Kappa sister Chris; how, the rumor was, she'd been taken upstairs in the fraternity house, drunk; eager and loving, you had to suppose; and what happened upstairs, how many fraternity men had sex with her, no one would know; Chris herself would not know, and would not wish to know; she'd dropped out of school, and was gone. I had no reason to think of Chris. I am not Chris, I am not a Kappa. Though if I seemed to be drifting from Vernor, his fingers gripped my elbow just a little firmer. " 'Annul-ia'? That's your name?"
There, the stucco building of the indefinable hue of lard. This place I should not have recognized. I was smiling a small, fixed smile; I was certain that I had chosen this; though I did not know what exactly I had chosen; to what I'd agreed when Vernor Matheius had spoken the name "Anellia" in the coffeehouse and stared at me across the sticky tabletop. Free to leave, to turn away. To run. As we were climbing the stairway; the stairway I should not have known of, and seemed not to know of; the stairway of my dreams that was a crude wood-plank outdoor stairway with a roof but otherwise open to weather, the steps beginning to rot, swaying slightly beneath us. Vernor Matheius was close behind me, I was just ahead of him; I thought He is herding me the way a dog herds sheep and the thought made me laugh. Vernor was joking nervously about his "living quarters"-he was "an underground man aboveground"-there was the surprise of his icy-cold fingers encircling my right leg just below the knee; they were quick, strong, deft fingers; I tried to shake them off as if this was a game; of course it was a game; we behaved as if it was a game, playful and laughing; I thought He would not hurt me- would he? There was a garbagey smell, a smell of rotting wood. I opened my mouth to speak yet could not, the words tangled together. I had to leave, I was late for my job in the cafeteria, I had no money, I was desperately poor and would never be able to repay the girls to whom I owed money, a total of $87.50, a sum that might as well have been $10,000. I could not say these things; I could not say that I loved him but was terrified of him; that I had never been with a man or a boy like this; I was terrified of becoming pregnant; "becoming pregnant" was a thought that terrified me though I had no sexual experience; I could not exert any will contrary to Vernor Matheius's will, the playful grip of his fingers at my knee; as in a dream we are unable to exert any will contrary to the inscrutable will of the dream. It might have been (I thought) that whatever was to happen had already happened; in philosophy there was the theoretical possibility of the isomorphic universe, symmetrical in both space and time; a strictly determined universe that could run forward, and backward; to exert will in such a universe was not possible; to be blamed would be unjust. And so now I was climbing the outdoor stairway at 1183 Chambers Street exactly as I'd wished in my dreams; and yet this was not at all the dream I'd wished; I was frightened, and felt sick; I was trembling badly, as if freezing; the bitter black coffee of which I'd had only two or three sips now rose acid and bilious in my throat. It's the green suede jacket that has brought me here I was thinking. It's the smiling-lipsticked girl in the mirror I was thinking. Biting my lip to keep from laughing, thinking This is what a pretty girl does, it's time you knew. This is what a "desired"girl does, this is what is done to a "desired"girl.
Vernor Matheius fumbled with the key trying quickly to open the door to apartment 2D before we were seen, and pushed me inside. For once wordless.
11
The limits of my language are the limits of my world.
WITTGENSTEIN
And now how lonely.
How alone, and how lonely.
Where once I'd walked into the residence hall cafeteria as soon as it opened at 7:00 a.m., and took a tray, and got my breakfast, and sat alone at a table near a window where I could read and dream in seclusion, now, in love with Vernor Matheius, I felt such acute loneliness, the physical shock and panic of loneliness, I could not bear to be by myself; eagerly and desperately I sought the company of girls whom I scarcely knew, girls I'd previously scorned, superficial chattering good-natured girls with whom I had nothing (or so I imagined) in common. It was like the nightmare of the sorority again where I'd blindly sought "sisters" yet it was not the company of girls I yearned for but the company of Vernor Matheius whom I feared I would never see again. Even with others, safely (if temporarily) with others, I could not concentrate on them but was thinking of course of him; only of him; my fingernails cruelly etched Vernor Matheius Vernor Matheius in the soft flesh of the inside of my forearm.
My cafeteria laughter was shrill as coins tossed against the floor, my voice strident. Yet as soon as my "friends" were gone the smile died on my lips, not a smile but a twitch; the manic spark in my eyes was extinguished like a light switched off. Alone, alone. I pushed away into the void like a solitary swimmer pushing out into freezing water; for all swimmers are solitary in such bitter regions of the soul.
Seeing something in my face, what pain what humiliation what despairing hope, one of the older girls waited for me; waited outside the cafeteria for me; hesitantly she inquired, "Is something wrong? You seem so"-tactful, kindly, not meaning to pry-"so sad, somehow." And I was astonished, so exposed. Flaring up like a struck match, "I'm not sad. I'm not sad in the slightest. What an ignorant thing to say. I've been laughing, haven't I?" I said, offended. Unless in fact I burst into tears. The girl, a tall broad-shouldered girl whose name I did not know or out of arrogance did not remember stood in such a way to shield me from the staring, curious eyes of others. My hot tears spilled out onto my cheeks; my nose ran; was this passion, was this romance, this-? Incensed as an older sister she asked, practicably, "Is it some guy?" and called me by my name, not "Anellia" but my true, ordinary name, the name by which I was commonly known. Some guy! As if she'd reached out to tickle me with rough fingers-some guy! The word so slangy, vulgar, commonplace-guy! Was Vernor Matheius for all his arrogance, brilliance, power over me in essence merely a guy? I had not time to absorb such a revolutionary thought, though such a thought might have saved me; I perceived my benefactor as my enemy, backing away in dislike, stammering, "I-resent such a question. I don't know you and you-you don't know me at all."
Following that exchange I avoided the dining hall. I ate in my room, or skipped meals altogether.
How lonely, I wanted to die. To cease to exist. For he had rejected me, repudiated me; sent me away; he had not loved me nor even "made love" to me; my anxiety had been proven causeless, and so contemptible; I was contemptible; he'd sent me away almost as soon as we'd entered his apartment. That was the secret of my hurt over some guy.
What memory of Vernor Matheius's apartment I'd seen for such a brief period of time, scarcely minutes… Shelves of neatly arranged books; a narrow cot with a thin dark corduroy bedspread pulled up in apparent haste; a flattened pillow in a white, not-very-clean case; curtainless windows, the cracked and stained blinds I'd seen from the outside, from the safety of the ground. And now I am here, now in apartment 2D with Vernor Matheius, how has such a miracle occurred? And if a "miracle" has occurred, is it a "miracle" after all? Beneath my feet were bare, badly worn floorboards upon which a cheap, stained pile rug had been laid; the color of the rug was a vague blurred fleshy-gray of the hue of certain kinds of mold; the very floor was uneven, tilted; like the floors of my grandparents' old farmhouse beneath which the earth had shifted in a way to suggest indifference, or scorn; a child's marble, laid experimentally upon such a floor, would roll unhesitatingly until impeded by a wall. At the rear was a shadowy alcove with a single counter; a sink so small as to seem a child's sink; a dwarf refrigerator set upon the floor. The apartment was airless, smelling of cigarette smoke, coffee, grease; the yeasty odor of a man's body; soiled clothes, bedclothes. In such airlessness my nostrils widened in a kind of swoon; a wave of dizziness washed over me; perhaps I was trespassing into forbidden territory, shocked at my own audacity. This is what a "desired" girl does, this is what is done to a "desired" girl. Staring smiling at a desk which was the most premeditated and accomplished piece of furniture in the sparely furnished room; it had about it an aura of the sacred, the not-to-be-touched, like an altar, and beside it on the wall was a likeness of Socrates as a sculpted head with blind exophthalmic eyes, and another likeness of a stolid bewigged man I believed must be Descartes. The desk itself exuded stolidity and character; how wholly unlike the cramped, battered, uniform aluminum desks issued by the university; it consisted of a large piece of wood set upon filing cabinets, wonderfully expansive for any desk, measuring perhaps five feet by four and a half feet; its sectors might have been marked off by invisible grids for neat piles of books, journals, and papers were placed at intervals, the highest at the rear and the lowest at the front, spines facing outward for ready identification; there was a clay bowl crammed with pens and pencils; there were much-eroded erasers; there was an Olivetti portable typewriter pushed back to clear a space directly in front of the desk chair, grooves in the desktop marking how the typewriter was pushed back, pulled forward, pushed back and pulled forward again. Rolled into the typewriter was a sheet of paper upon which a tight little paragraph of prose had been typed:
The claim that philosophy is a battle against "the bewitchment of intelligence by language" & this very claim postulated in the syntax & content & contours of Language-
which I would identify at a later time as an argumentative allusion to the early work of Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Perhaps Vernor Matheius was speaking to me through the pulsebeat in my ears, perhaps he was not; perhaps he was indicating he would help me remove my jacket, perhaps he was not; perhaps he was fumbling with his sheepskin jacket, bulky on his tall, lanky frame like protective armature; perhaps he was not. He will touch me now. Now it will happen. Nervously he was tugging down a window shade, and the frayed material began to tear; he muttered a jokey profanity-"Shit!" And this word, this blunt mechanical brainless expletive in another man's voice: not Vernor Matheius's eloquent voice. As if another, more commonplace and thus more practicable man not Vernor Matheius stood in his place, cursing a frayed window shade. Yet I didn't hear, exactly; I heard but didn't acknowledge; my heart was beating rapidly as I stood rereading the enigmatic paragraph typed on the sheet of stark white paper as if it were a secret, coded message meant solely for me which even its author could not have fully comprehended. It was then that I realized I had been hearing Vernor Matheius's breathing. His breathing like panting. Like a dog's panting. And I smelled the alarm, the fear lifting from his body like heat. "Why'd you come here with me?"-a voice that was raw, harsh; very male; like sandpaper scraping across a splintery wooden surface; a frightened voice; a disdainful voice; not the musical, seductive voice of the lecture hall; not the voice of logic, reason, conviction, irony; not the voice of Vernor Matheius as I'd heard it in my dreams; but a stranger's voice, any-man's voice. I stared at him now, struck dumb; he was frowning, such a frown shifting the glasses on the bridge of his nose, and the lenses of his glasses were opaque with reflected light (as soon as we'd stepped inside the room Vernor had switched on an overhead light and shadows were cast downward on our faces, like appalled skulls we regarded each other out of astonished shadowed eye-sockets); he was saying: "Look, Anellia, you don't want to do this, and I don't, either." We were still in our outer clothes; I had not begun to unbutton the green suede jacket, and Vernor's bulky sheepskin jacket looked more resolutely on his body than it had been outdoors. Yet he touched me, his forefingers gently prodding me toward the door, swiftly he unlocked the door, opened it, murmuring, "-sometime, some other time, Anellia, good-bye-" his voice choked and abruptly then I stood outside the room, in a drafty hall opening onto the stairs, I was blind, blundering down the swaying wooden stairs which only a few minutes before another girl had boldly, tremblingly ascended. Not knowing where I was, or why; not knowing if I was deeply wounded or whether in fact I was relieved, I'd been saved, like one pulled from a rushing river to safety lying spent and exhausted and dazed on the river-bank but safe, saved. It hasn't happened yet.