After he had been afraid of disappointing his father, he had been afraid of disappointing his “friends.” He understood now that these people were not friends as the word was ordinarily defined. They were not people he was particularly close to or for whom he felt a particular responsibility. Rather, they were men and women he had grown up with, in that peculiar world where nobody was really rich but private schools and subscriptions to the symphony were assumed as a matter of course. He tried to think of himself outside of that world and couldn’t. It had its own rules and its own language, as any world did, and he knew neither the rules nor the language for any other.
He got all the way across the quad without being stopped. He had expected somebody, parents arriving to take their children if no one else, to insist that he explain it all on the spot. He was grateful that it didn’t happen. He got to President’s House and climbed the front steps. He went into the foyer and down the hall to the study. He had other pictures of Alice, ones he hadn’t burned. He didn’t go looking for them.
He thought, instead, of a man who had taught at Windsor one of the first years he was here. His name had been Steve something. The silly custom of using only first names often meant that he couldn’t remember anyone’s last name. It didn’t matter. Steve was just about to defend his dissertation at MIT in something called “behavioral psychology,” and the school had hired him to teach one half-year course in psychology and three sections of intro biology. If they hadn’t been in a bind, with their regular biology teacher out sick with uterine cancer on no notice at all, they would never have hired him. Steve most definitely did not fit the Windsor ethos. In fact, Peter thought now, Mark DeAvecca reminded him a little of Steve—or at least Mark did when he wasn’t being odd on whatever it was he was being stoned out on. The two of them had the same odd attitude to all things intellectual, and the same air of being absolutely at home with Shakespeare as well as Homer Simpson.
It was the at-homeness that Peter was thinking about now. He was at home in his own world among his own people, butoutside of that he was uncomfortable everywhere. Steve had been comfortable no matter where he was, and in spite of the fact that he didn’t fit and that he must have known that people disapproved of him, he didn’t seem to care. There were teachers here who made it a policy to show enthusiasm for the things “the kids” really liked, as a way of staying relevant. They pretended to love Spiderman and Triple X and the music of Jack Off Jill. The operative word was “pretended.” It was a conscious decision, and it was made on the assumption that these same kids would one day abandon their enthusiasm for all that and choose to like jazz and Robert Altman instead.
Steve had not needed to pretend, not in either direction. In spite of the fact that he was a “science person,” he had a knowledge of English literature that was both wide and deep. He had read Jane Austen and Henry James with insight and understanding. He had also read Stephen King and Isaac Asimov. He made none of the kinds of distinctions Peter was used to seeing academics make when they dealt with popular culture. He didn’t pick out one small esoteric corner of science fiction or horror, one little group of authors most people had never heard of, to heap with praise and compare to Dante. He enjoyed both Stanislaw Lern and space operas.
In fact, Peter thought, “enjoyment” was the word for Steve. Steve enjoyed himself. He enjoyed his research. He enjoyed his teaching. He enjoyed reading and music and politics and debating. There must have been some things that left him cold, but Peter couldn’t remember ever having found any.
I do not enjoy myself, Peter thought, and that was true. He had never in his life enjoyed himself in the way Steve did every day. Steve had successfully defended his dissertation and gone off to the University of California at Santa Barbara to work with a woman named Leda Cosmides, who was the most important researcher in his field. Peter was sure he was enjoying himself there, too. California was the place where everybody was supposed to enjoy himself. Steve enjoyed Big Macs and Whoppers, chain-restaurant tacos, and thebest food in Boston when it was provided by the Board of Trustees. He enjoyed PBS documentaries on the glories of Rome and the continuing advantages of South Park, Colorado. He enjoyed “Song of Joy” and “Sugar, Sugar.”
“He makes no distinctions,” Alice had said, with distaste, at the time—and at the time he had agreed with her and shared that distaste. When he wasn’t sharing the distaste, he was feeling either annoyed or frightened. He was frightened of Steve because Steve was so damned anarchic. He was annoyed with Steve because Steve threatened to undo all the work they did at Windsor to turn their children into serious, successful adults.