“Thoreau didn’t even like schools.”
“He didn’t like the schools he was used to. He wanted to encourage creativity and expressiveness and getting in touch with the greatness of the universal spirit, or however he put it. It was all very vague. We’re like that, aren’t we, Alice? We’re very vague. We don’t know what we’re talking about; we only want to feel special.”
“I don’t think it’s a small thing to celebrate diversity, do you?”
“No,” Peter said. The photographs were almost gone. Nobody would be fooled if they came to look, however. There were ashes in the grate now, and gas fires didn’t leave ashes. He stood up. “It’s not a small thing to ’celebrate diversity.’ It’s just that to the extent that we know what it means, wedon’t do it; and to the extent that we don’t know what it means, it doesn’t matter. We haven’t got the faintest idea of what it means to live with the differences in people. We’re very careful, every year, to make sure we have the right number of African Americans and the right number of Hispanic Americans and the right number of students from abroad, and we pick them all very carefully to make sure that they fit this place just as much as we do. When we’re faced with someone we really don’t understand, we don’t behave too well. Do you know how I know that?”
“Please,” Alice said.
“I know that because I realized, in the middle of this afternoon, while I was panicking about what was going to happen now that Jimmy Card has arrived and Liz Toliver would very much like to shut us down—realized that Mark DeAvecca is the first student we’ve had here for years whom I cannot anticipate. I have no idea what he’s going to do next I have no idea what he thinks. I have no idea what he’s going to say. And I further realized that there are lots of people out there whom I do not understand, but none of them are connected to this school in any way. Unfortunately, a lot of them are essential to this school’s surivival.”
“You’re not making any sense,” Alice said.
“It’s Ralph Waldo Emerson’s two hundredth birthday this May twenty-fifth. We ought to get the school to celebrate it, if we’re still here and the school’s still here. We can mount events around the lives of Emerson and Thoreau. We can stage readings from Emerson’s essays. We can show the world how little we’ve changed since that man was bleating on about all the drivel we’ve since adopted as dogma. Back to nature. Eastern religions. The all-compassing wisdom of the Oversoul. We even use the same language.”
“You really aren’t making any sense,” Alice said, and now she was finished. She pushed the drawer back into place and stood up. “We’d better get over to dinner. We’ve both been ducking appearing in public for days. Wouldn’t you usually call that irresponsible?”
Peter didn’t know if he was being irresponsible or not. Hedidn’t think he cared. She had been really beautiful, Alice. When he’d first known her, she’d been as perfect as the miniature Renaissance madonnas he had loved to go to see at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Exquisite and rare, she had been her own reason for existing; and like all truly beautiful people she had been almost a force of nature, like a hurricane or a tornado. Beauty is a compelling thing, and he had been compelled, unable to look at anything or anybody else, unable to reason calmly about who and what she was under that flawless exterior shell. Now the shell was no longer flawless, and it stunned him to see just how small the imperfections needed to be to wreck the majestic power of the whole. She was still a beautiful woman, in the sense that the lines and angles and shadows of her face and body made up an aesthetic ideal, intellectual and cold. She was no longer a beautiful woman in the sense of beauty as power. In the half-light cast by the study’s lamp, he could see darkness and hollowness under her eyes, under her cheekbones, along her jaw. Even surgery could not replace what she had lost because it depended so heavily on the impression that she carried within herself the secret to eternal life, lived as someone forever young.
If she wondered what he was thinking, she gave no indication of it. She just brushed by him and went out the door, into the hallway and the rest of the house. He thought she might be going to the cafeteria. He didn’t care.
2
The first thing James Hallwood had done after his conversation with Marta Coelho was to take the rest of the crystal meth out of its hiding place behind the medicine cabinet and flush it down the toilet. There wasn’t much of it left, and for the time being it would be safer to indulge in that sort of thing at David’s apartment rather than here. David would have said it served him right for insisting on staying here, where he was treated as a child almost as much as the students were. For James, the issue was more complicated. He’d seen his share of true crime documentaries. If there was an investigation and he became the target of it, they would surely find traces of crystal meth in his apartment and probably traces of cocaine, too. It was nearly impossible to erase all evidence of the stuff once you had used it because powders scattered. Their individual grains were too small to be seen, but not so small they couldn’t be discovered by chemical tests. At first this seemed to be his biggest and most important problem: the possibility that they might find the drugs and along with the drugs the things he was not so proud of, the things that he at once associated with his own homosexuality and rejected on account of it. This was not something he could talk to David about because this was not something David had much sympathy with. David’s tastes in sex were strictly vanilla, the way his tastes in music were strictly for the bourgeois classical. If he had been born in England instead of the United States, he might have ended his life as an Anglican bishop. James had never had vanilla tastes in much of anything. The homosexuals he had sympathized with, in literature, while he was growing up had been the ones like M. de Charlus in Proust, who had been first and foremost men of great dignity and culture. There was something to be said for those Anglican bishops. The world was not worse off for having men in it who understood the human drive for perfection in form and language. The problem was, he himself could never have been one of those men because he himself could never force himself to be attracted only to the nobility of the human being. In private, what he was attracted to was anything but nobility. He thought he might be the only man in history to suffer from a madonna/whore complex about himself.