Victor knew that if he turned around, the boy would immediately begin to speak to him. Incoherently. Words tumbling out of his mouth. Hand and facial gestures adding to the confusion of the words and to Victor's discomfiture. It had happened every morning since he first had seen the boy. The encounters had added to his feelings of malaise, feelings made of nothing as specific as cancer or a heart condition but gray with fears. And with so many regrets. So very many. The kind of watershed that comes when one is old and doesn't want to admit it. When a man wakes wondering why he feels lost, as if he's in a deserted subway station and there isn't any sign to tell him where he is. It wasn't a complaint. It was a fact. Some people never feel secure. Never "win" no matter how hard they try. He wasn't a winner. Three wrecked marriages proved that. His fault? Her fault? What did it matter whose fault it was? There were faults. A bottom line thing. A column, the sum of which wound up in the red. As in the Bible--"Mene, Mene, Tekel, Uphersin--Thou art weighed in the balances and found wanting. . . ."
The feeling of abandonment was so powerful his chest heaved and his throat tightened. He desperately needed succor. Something to give his life meaning. A place in the cosmic scheme. Clutching this thought, as he had been clutching it for months, perhaps even years, he was able to regain his composure after awhile. And when he looked at the boy's reflection, it was no longer there. He turned in time to see the boy exit the building and move onto the campus.
###
Victor lunched in the Faculty Dining Room, usually with no particular group of colleagues. Although there were various cliques, as in every organization, he steadfastly refused to align himself with any specific one and was always welcomed to lunch with any one of them, though he sometimes had the uneasy feeling that he was the topic of conversation--perhaps laughter--after he left the table. Whether this was a reality stemming from his independence, as he referred to his policy of non alignment, or was part of his developing sense of personal anguish, he did not know.
This time he chose a table close to the far wall, where two members from the Psychology Department, Dr. Larry Owen and Dr. Peter Bird, and one from the English Department, Dr. Elizabeth Porter, already had staked out a claim. Faculty members were fiercely territorial, as was he, once they occupied a specific table. There was a distinct separation between the cliques, the appointed members of the faculty and adjuncts, and the administrative staff.
Of all of the tables, the one used by grounds keepers, the maintenance personnel, and the security force was the most democratic. Supervisors and workers sat side by side, often engaging in exchanges of humorous mockery or mild ribaldry. Over the years, Victor had weighed the idea of sitting at their table. But somehow the scale never tipped far enough in that direction for him to have done it. The best he could manage was to smile or nod at them. And that, he knew, was more of an acknowledgment than they received from the other professors.
"Anything special on the menu?" Victor asked, as he deposited a worn, brown leather briefcase next to the wall.
"The usual," Larry answered, with a small nervous laugh that punctuated most of his sentences. A short, heavy set, baby-faced man, he was the youngest person at the table and the most recently tenured.
Victor glanced at what Elizabeth was eating. He believed that women, because of their role in the procreative process and years of nurturing that followed, were endowed with a better food sense than men. Though men were more creative chefs. But she munched on a sliver of carrot, and her plate was filled with green salad and few florets of a raw broccoli. Nothing terribly exciting there. As for the two men--Larry stuffed an oversized sandwich into his mouth, while Peter sliced something red and gooey-looking on his plate.
"It looks as if it's a Hobson's choice day," Victor commented.
"The Eggplant Parmesan isn't too bad," Peter said. "There's sliced steak too, but that's too spicy for my taste."
"The Parmesan is worth a try," Victor answered and walked to the buffet, which was against the wall and only a few feet from the table. In the shape of an inverted L, the buffet offered two main courses, pasta of some sort, a vegetable or a "melody" of vegetables, a selection of cheeses, cold meats and salad dressings of various kinds. Even soup, from a large, black, electrically heated pot. The pies, cakes and other deserts occupied the smaller portion of the L. Victor hoped one of the choices would be cheese cake. He was especially fond of it. For him it contained just the right amount of "dolce," and it blended beautifully with a cup of coffee.
The cheese cake was indeed there, and he carefully cut half of a regular slice. He was far from a gourmand, and because of his relationship to Bernadette, a woman half his age who had been his student several years before, he made a conscious effort to look as youthful as possible. Even to having his nose bobbed, a hair implant, and his nearsightedness corrected by laser surgery. He maintained a strict regimen of morning pushups and arm exercises with hand-held weights to maintain the tone of his biceps. He considered it his responsibility to the relationship to remain as "youthful looking" as nature would permit and for as long as nature would allow. Like Dorian Gray, he knew precisely what lay beneath the image of a "youthful looking" older man. His aches and pains, his bowel movements, and his recurring sexual dysfunction were not transferred to a painting. They were always with him, keen reminders that he was a seventy-year-old man.
###
At the table, Larry spooned chocolate cake into his mouth. At one of the pauses between ingesting and masticating, he said, "I have this really weird student in my Psych One class."
"How weird is weird?" Elizabeth asked.
Victor noticed her erect nipples were clearly defined beneath her sweater and bra and concluded that her bra must be very thin. Because he was looking at her nipples, the rest of her breasts took shape. Still youthful looking, though she was in her forties. Half moons with the nipples on the tips of their lower cusps. Like his first wife's.
"Delusional. Speaks to himself. Gibberish, mainly." He ended with his usual nervous laugh.
Victor began to cut his Eggplant Parmesan and commented, "I have seen him in the cafeteria early in the morning."
"I heard some talk about him," Peter said. "Supposed to be a genius. Whatever that means?" Peter was also stout. But old enough to have lost the baby fat and to have grown a beard to replace it. With his glasses, he looked like a caricature of a college professor.
"I'm wary of the word 'genius.' Especially when it's used as an appellation," Elizabeth said.
For several moments, Victor considered that. But in those nanoseconds his maternal grandmother--a massive woman to a child of five or six--bellowed in Italian, "You thick-headed, stupid, boy." To have been labeled that way by the harridan became his cross and his mother's. They lived with his grandmother because his father, a doctor, was a medical officer with the Italian Army in Ethiopia.
"Victor?"
He heard the sound of his name and was confused. The people at the table looked strange. He had a momentary glimpse of himself on the balcony of his grandmother's house in Naples. Waving the Italian flag as the booted troops marched rhythmically along the cobblestoned street below.
"Sorry," Victor apologized, coming quickly back to the reality of the situation. "I was thinking about something else."
"Intently," Elizabeth laughed.
She had some loud, cawing laughs. The sound of a crow or a seagull. Her most unattractive characteristic.
"Mark asked what you thought about the word 'genius' being applied or being used to describe a person?" she said.
"A student in particular," Larry added. Licking chocolate off of a spoon.
"Especially by a member of the faculty," Elizabeth said. To further clarify the question.
"Not very much, I'm afraid," Victor answered and proceeded to explain that "such a designation sets the student apart from all other students and denies him--"
"Or her," Elizabeth added. With feministic authority.
Victor nodded in her direction and continued. "It denies the student his or her place among the other students, and they, feeling inferior because of the position granted to him--" He paused, looked at Elizabeth, and smiled before he said, "or her, refuse to admit him or her into their society."
"And the faculty--how does it affect them?" Mark questioned.
"A challenge to some, I would suspect, to their own feelings of expertise or inadequacy. A threat to either."
Several moments of silence passed.
"One thing is sure; he doesn't pose a threat--at least not an intellectual one--in my class," Larry said. Ending with a nervous laugh.
"I'm glad to hear that," Victor responded. He speared a piece of eggplant with his fork and lifted it to his mouth.
Both Mark and Elizabeth flicked their eyes toward Victor. But he pretended not to be aware of them and swallowed what he had chewed.
###
Just before the Christmas break at the college, Victor drove Bernadette to Newark Airport. The day was gray with the promise of rain or snow, depending on how much colder the afternoon would become.
Bernadette was off to see her mother in Ireland. She described the village where she was born and raised as a wee place on the storm-wracked west coast. She made the trip twice a year. Like the solstice, six months a part. This was her Christmas pilgrimage. If not a holy one, certainly a dutiful one.
Victor glanced at her after he turned onto the Staten Island Expressway. She was slender, taller than he by at least two inches. Fair skinned, blue-eyed and spotted with freckles on her breasts and the insides of her thighs. She wore her long honey colored hair in a braided bun on the back of her head.
That she could love him was one of the mysteries of his life. That he loved her was not a mystery at all. Sexuality enveloped her. He knew other men were aware of it from the way they looked at her.
"Are you going to tell your mother about us?" It was his oblique way of asking whether she would agree to marry him. Not that he was at all sure he wanted to marry a fourth time. But neither did he want to risk losing her as he felt he was losing everything else. It was comforting to wake up next to her, whether in her apartment or in his. More often at his, which was his preference. A place for everything in contrast to her apartment which was chaos. Plaster all over. Tubes of clay. Tubes of paint. Brushes. Acrylic smells. And boxes. She created non-representational sculpture. He did not understand how something non-representational could represent something. Just another enigma of modernity, akin, no doubt, to deconstructionism, where the apparent meaning of specific words in a specific syntactical arrangement could have different meanings or no meaning, depending upon who the reader was.
"I don't think I'll bring the subject up. If I did, it might lead to questions," Bernadette said.
"Yes. The questions provoke the answers and even before the answers, truths we may not be willing to look at," Victor responded. But what he said was drowned out by a 747 coming directly over the highway before it landed at Newark.
They were only a few miles from the terminal.
"I'll be back in ten days," she said, patting the side of his face. "I'll hardly be gone at all before I'll be back."
Victor sensed she was already gone, anticipating being with her family. But he said nothing. Whatever he might say would be tinged with jealousy. Perhaps anger? He felt like the small boy he once was. Full of desperation. Full of loneliness. In a matter of minutes they would separate, each returning to a unique shell, like a hermit crab. To himself, he said, "Ten days is not a very long time. . . . No. It is a very long time. . . ."
###
The semester wound down. The tree limbs were bare and great mounds of red, brown and yellow leaves dotted the campus.
A restlessness threw its snakelike coils around the students and faculty. Concerned about grades the students plunged into finishing their papers, studying for their exams, and catching up--or trying to catch up--on reading assignments they should have read weeks ago. And the teachers, pressed by numerous meetings, grading papers and preparing final examinations, were emotionally and psychologically taut. Both the students and the faculty were anticipating the long break that extended from the day before Christmas to the third week in January.
Victor could not completely separate himself from the tensions swirling around him, but he managed to arrange his work load so that he escaped the uncomfortable feeling of being overwhelmed
On two occasions, while he was at breakfast, the boy came directly toward him, and he immediately pretended to be searching for something in his briefcase. It was, he acknowledged, a cruel thing to do. On both occasions, the boy stood very still for a few moments and then left. But the second time Victor looked up just as the boy turned away and started to walk, dragging his left leg.
"Jesus!" he muttered and almost crossed himself. Something he hadn't done in years. Yet the inclination was there. In his youth, he had a sense of his relationship to God and to the Church. But his formal relationship to the Church came to an end with his first divorce. Then, it seemed as if, with Herculean effort, he finally broke the chains that shackled him to an unloving wife and an unforgiving Church. But his relationship to God was a different matter. It never altered. He never stopped believing in Him. And now, when his life was almost over, something of his former belief in the Church began to manifest itself in his thinking. The Church, for all its faults, was an organization based on a logical structure and the premise that through Christ lay the way to salvation. For the past two thousand years, the Gospels had brought this message to millions of people. Victor believed it with every fiber of his being. But there was a problem. Simply, what was His purpose? A question exemplified by the boy. Why would perfection create imperfection? What purpose would it serve? And, by extension, what was his purpose? Where did he fit in the Divine plan? When his final summing up came, how would his life be defined? By the years he spent teaching? By his too few accomplishments? By his three failed marriages? By his obvious lust? He could have gone on. But what would have been the point? If he did not know the purpose of his own life, how could he presume to define God's. Yet that very problem occupied practically all of his thinking.
He drank the remainder of his now tepid coffee. It was time for him to amble over to Main Hall for his first class of the day.
###
Victor never enjoyed the twenty-seven minute ferry ride from Staten Island to Manhattan. It made him feel vulnerable, the way he did in an airplane or in the subway, which he would have to take to go up town. Ordinarily, he would drive to Manhattan and park in a garage as close as possible to Sachs, the department store where he intended to do most of his Christmas shopping. But to avoid becoming caught in the pre-holiday gridlock, he chose to travel by the ferry and the subway.
He had forgotten how long twenty-seven minutes could be, especially when the overheated air smelled of hot buttered popcorn and several unidentified scents equally unwholesome. To pass the time, he tried reading Kugel's "The Bible As It Was," but gave it up because two young women were loudly discussing the clothes they intended to wear at their office Christmas party, and he was beginning to feel a head-achy. He considered going outside, but decided against it because it would have been too cold.
Never interested in the activity of the harbor, Victor moved his eyes over the people in front of him and almost to the forward part of the deck. Most of them were blue-collar types or office personnel of one kind or another. The well dressed were executive types. And there were also students. The two directly in front of him were young men. The tall, thin one read the Tuesday Science Section of the New York Times. The other, heavy set and wearing white metal frame glasses, intently studied several pages of photocopied material.
"Says here," the tall thin one said, "our galaxy is on the edge of a black hole."
"So," the other one answered, without looking up from his papers.
"So, not so good for our universe," the other answered. "Everything will become nothing."
"When?" the heavyset young man asked. Still not looking up from the papers he held.
"Not to worry. About a hundred million years."
"I wasn't worried. Just interested." He looked at his friend. "It sure as hell blows the shit out of the idea of a God with a plan. I mean--what would be the purpose of creating everything only to destroy it?"
The thin one nodded. "The ultimate end is to be sucked into a black hole."
A leer spread over the heavyset young man's round face. "You sure would like your end to be sucked into a juicy black hole."
Both laughed and slapped each other's palms.
###
To confirm what he had heard, Victor bought the New York Times and read the article. He sat in the back of a coffee shop on lower Broadway. The newspaper was spread out on the table.
From where he sat, Victor could see the people and the vehicles on the street. Why were they there? Each individual had a specific place to which he was going. Each would perform a specific task or numbers of tasks. Each had a life, albeit with a lowercase "l," just as his was. But the ultimate end, the final act, for them as well as himself, would be dying. And through that door God provided salvation and by extension meaning. Purpose.
Enraged, he glared at the newspaper and with his right hand crumpled the page. The hypothesis was an attack against him. Against God and the Church. How could his life have a purpose if in the end everything would be obliterated? If the hypothesis proved true, then everything else was some sort of demonic joke. Not even that.
Victor suddenly realized he was on his feet. Tearing the newspaper in shreds. And a smallish man with a large black moustache was looking at him with an expression of utter bewilderment on his face.
"You sick, mister?" the man asked.
Victor grasped the significance of the question. "No. No. Thank you for your concern. I'm all right." He forced a smile to prove he was all right, gathered up the crumpled newspaper, paid for the coffee, and left.
###
Though it was colder now than it was when he entered the shop, he felt as if he had to walk. At least for a while. He couldn't abide the prospect of being cooped up with hundreds of other people in a subway car. Oblivious to the hustle and bustle, he walked north up Broadway, stopping and going with the changing of the traffic lights. If the hypotheses were true, then his own reasoning would be false. The perfection he ascribed to God was one in which even the boy would fit. A perfection that each and every human being could share. A perfection manifested by the cycle of the birth, death and resurrection of Christ. For him the Gospels took on the aura of history, a way of explaining what was inexplicable--how God provided through Christ a means for human beings to give meaning to their lives.
Victor worked it all out. God wanted to give humanity proof of His being. It was part of His plan. A plan that was now about to be turned into an existential statement. Suddenly, he stopped. Which is: There is nothing else. No purpose to anything other than what each of us give to it. An absurdity.
"An absurdity!" he grumbled. "An absurdity!"
###
When Victor reached Sachs, it was the shank of a cold gray afternoon. The Christmas tree in Rockefeller Plaza glowed with the light from thousands of multicolored bulbs. There were lights everywhere. A double line of wire sculpture angels stretched from Fifth Avenue to the ice-skating rink. Throngs of people crowded the streets and the Plaza. Some were looking at the street. Others gaped at the Christmas display in the department store's windows. The usual seasonal carols blared out of loudspeakers. He was "a stranger in a strange land." Except for having been jostled several times, he felt he lacked the solidity of existence.
Victor made his purchases quickly, without giving them his usual careful considerations with regard to cost and quality or to matching the gift to the person. He wanted to be done with it. Finally, he was. He left the store carrying a red metallic shopping bag with gifts for his children and Bernadette.
Outside, the crowds, the lights, and the noise were still there.
Victor crossed the street and considered going into St. Patrick's Cathedral. But to seek solace in prayer would have been hypocritical. He hadn't knelt in prayer for more than a quarter of a century. Yet he desperately wanted to pray. But what would he pray for? That God existed. There was an absurdity in that. To pray presupposes that you pray to someone for something. He'd have to find a different way. Faith, blind faith, was out of the question. He couldn't just believe. His belief had to be a reasoned structure. That was the way he saw God's plan. A plan in which he tried to find a reasonable explanation for his life, his purpose.
Victor moved into the crowded subway station and waited for the train that would take him to Bowling Green. From there, it was a short walk to the ferry terminal.
###
He found a place to sit near the window. The boat was even more crowded than the one he rode earlier. He placed the shopping bag between his legs. Somewhere along the way, he had lost his book. But even if he had it, he would not have been able to read it. He was too exhausted. Too shattered. Too numb. He wanted the quiet and comfort of his apartment. A glass or two of wine. Maybe something stronger, like scotch or bourbon. He would have settled for either one. Something to revivify him or to dull the inner ache he so keenly felt.
A single blast from the ferry's fog horn signaled it was about to get underway. The vibration from its engines increased, and the boat began to move.
Victor closed his eyes. Weariness, like a heavy dark viscous liquid seemed to well up from deep inside him. He dozed and dreamed . . . first the exquisite comfort of Bernadette's body, which though so slender, gave him enormous delight; then he heard his father's voice, heavy with its Italian accent, telling him he was fool. A man who spent his life reasoning himself in and out of the eye of a needle. Bernadette returned, this time laughing and tried to put him into one of her non-representational boxes. Then the boy appeared, coming closer and closer. . . .
Victor felt his head loll to one side and awoke with a start in time to hear the ferry grind against the pilings as it made its way into the slip. People were already lined up to disembark. He would wait until most of the people left before he would move. There wasn't any need for him to rush.
###
"Victor?"
Even before Victor turned his head in the direction of the voice, he knew who called him from the signature laugh that followed.
Larry lifted his red metallic shopping bag. "Sachs?"
"Sachs," Victor answered, as he stood. Larry was not one of his favorite people. Young. Arrogant. Doubtless brilliant. But in his opinion, of little substance.
"We were probably there about the same time," Larry said.
Victor nodded and moved out into the aisle.
"I thought it might be you when I first saw you. But you looked like you were dozing. I didn't want to disturb you."
"I was. Shopping tires me," Victor said, as they walked toward the front of the boat.
"It's kind of fun," Larry responded, punctuating it with a laugh.
Victor didn't answer.
They crossed the gangway and were inside the terminal when Victor asked, "Do you need a lift?" He made the offer because it was the polite way of acting.
"No. But thanks anyway. I drove from the college to the parking lot." Punctuated with a laugh.
They walked down the steps to the outside walkway that lead to the parking area. It was cold and overcast. Manhattan looked magical. Thousands of lights gleamed in the distance.
"My car is somewhere in the middle of the lot," Victor said.
"Mine is a bit further," Larry answered. Then, he said, "There were police and detectives all over the campus when I left."
"I wasn't aware--"
"Remember that weird student--John Dobson--you mentioned at lunch the other day?"
"What about him?" Victor asked. Suddenly he recalled dreaming about him while he dozed.
"The way I got the story, he was the victim of a practical joke that turned bad."
Victor almost stopped. "I don't understand."
"I don't know all the details. But he was so badly beaten that he had to be taken to the hospital."
For an instant, Victor did stop. "Hospital?" he questioned and began to walk again.
"St. Vincente."
"A practical joke?" Victor asked, unable to mask the anger in his voice.
"Sounds crazy . . . I mean what would have been the purpose?"
"Purpose, indeed," Victor said vehemently. "When was a purpose needed to do something stupid?"
"A few of the students I spoke to said they didn't think that he should have been allowed to attend the college."
"By extension that says the beating was justified," Victor said angrily.
"I don't think they meant it in that sense," Larry answered.
Impatient now to end the discussion because it could have easily turned argumentative, Victor said, "My car is somewhere around here. I'll see you tomorrow on campus. Have a good night."
"See you. Have a good night," Larry said. Punctuated with a nervous laugh.
###
Feeling the cold cut of the wind more than he had before, Victor turned down one of the lot's smaller roadways. The boy now had a name. An identity. A reality that he could not ignore.
Victor found his car more quickly than he expected, opened it and put the shopping bag on the floor in the rear before he slid behind the wheel. It felt good to be out of the biting wind. Overcome by emotional and physical exhaustion, he did nothing for several minutes. He felt as if he had lost his bearings. Once, a long time ago, he went for a walk in the woods and after a few minutes became lost, confused, and certainly bewildered. Luckily, he blundered into a group of people who knew which way to go. But now, he would have to find his way on his own. He could not depend on anyone to help him. Not even Bernadette.
The day had been a disaster. Not the worst in his life--that occurred when he made the decision to divorce his first wife, Maria, and leave his three teen-age children. He was being suffocated. He did what he had to do to survive. His other wives wanted more of him than he could give. Only Bernadette seemed satisfied with who and what he was. What he could or could not give. But she was, admittedly, young.
Victor uttered a deep sigh. What, indeed, was his anguish all about? Could he be satisfied with blind faith? Had there been a purpose to John having been beaten? How could he accept that? It was a cruel and brutal act perpetrated by cruel and unthinking people.
Again Victor uttered a loud sigh. The deep mystery of purpose had to lie waiting somewhere. But for him, perhaps, it lay too far away to reach. Still, here--here he knew there was a purpose he could reach. The hospital was only minutes away.
