“The thing is,” she said, waving her wand of smoke in the air, “the one thing I am not going to do tonight is go back to that place to eat. Assuming it’s even open. If that David Markham person has any sense, he’ll have sealed it up.”
“If he has, he isn’t going to leave it sealed for long,” Gregor said. “He intends to eat breakfast there tomorrow.”
Bennis took a deep drag, tilted her head back, and blew smoke at the ceiling. “Marvelous,” she said. “I love macho. I just love it. However, being a girl, I do not have to display it, which is fortunate. I want to go out to dinner.”
“Bennis,” Tibor said tentatively, “there is so much food here. All these picnic baskets. There is so much food, I should distribute it to the poor. I will never eat it.”
“Well, Tibor, distribute it to the poor if you want, but don’t distribute it to me tonight. Honey cakes. Doritos nacho-flavored tortilla chips. For God’s sake.”
“I like Doritos nacho-flavored tortilla chips,” Tibor said. “You open the bag, you put it in your lap, you go on reading. Then in a little while you have finished the bag and you are full, and you have not been distracted.”
There was a column of ash an inch long on the end of Bennis’s cigarette. She tapped it into the saucer Tibor had left on top of the picnic basket for her to use as an ashtray and said, “Tibor, over there on the couch I have a pocket-book. In that pocketbook I have a wallet. In that wallet I have an American Express Gold Card on which I have charged not one single thing this month. I say we get the van, take the Gold Card, and go find the kind of place where a glorified lounge singer interprets Joni Mitchell music all night and you can drop three hundred dollars on a bottle of wine.”
“Bennis, please, you are at the edge of what is called Appalachia. There is no such place here.”
“Oh, yes, there is. Trust me. With this college sitting here and the tuition at eighteen thousand dollars a year—I saw it in the catalog I was looking through when we were waiting for you to get ready to go to lunch—trust me, there is. Just get me the phone book. I’ll find it.”
“Bennis, I do not have a phone book.”
“Yes, you do.”
And, Gregor thought, she was undoubtedly right. In this mess of books and periodicals, pens and pencils and notepaper scribbled over in six languages, there would be a phone book, and probably an entire Encyclopaedia Britannica as well. He had been standing near Tibor’s chair. Now he moved away and went to the window, to look out on the quad. It got dark so early in Pennsylvania, once the switch from daylight savings time had been made. The only light below him came from the globe lamps spaced out along the quad’s sidewalks and the “ghost wands” that so many of the students carried. The ghost wands glowed greenly phosphorescent in the puddles of darkness where the light from the lamps didn’t reach, seeming to move on their own.
“What’s going on down there?” he asked. “What is it exactly everybody thinks they’re doing?”
Bennis had found the phone book and was looking through it, sitting cross-legged on the floor and running her index finger across the large square restaurant ads that crammed the yellow pages. Tibor was sitting shriveled up in his chair, looking more defeated than ever. Gregor’s question seemed to give him heart, and he stood up to join his friend at the window.
“You should have read the material I sent you,” he said. “It is the thirtieth of October. They are having a Halloween advent.”
“Advent?”
“It is not meant as sacrilege, Krekor. It is just students having fun. They have a little later a kind of street fair without a street. Students who juggle. Students who mime. Students who do magic tricks. Then they will have a voice vote and give one of the performers a prize, for talent.”
“Well, that seems harmless enough.”
“Yes, Krekor, it is harmless enough. It only bothers me that they do it now, with Miss Veer in the hospital and possibly dying. I cannot make it feel right to me.”
“You ought to try,” Gregor told him. “You were the one who said she didn’t know much of anybody on campus but the people in your Program. There are hundreds of students down there. Most of them wouldn’t have been in the dining room this afternoon and most of them probably would never have met her.”
“Yes, Krekor, I know. But I will tell you who else will be down there. Jack Carroll and his friend Chessey Flint. And they were in the dining room and they have met her.”
“What makes you so sure they’ll be there?”