“It’s like he’s gone into a cocoon,” Claire Hadderly had said, leaning against the coffee cart in the faculty lounge at the end of this very corridor. “Maybe when he emerges, he’ll be a butterfly that doesn’t stink.”
He still stinks, Marta thought. She had seen him this morning, walking across the quad by himself and looking for god only knew what. He was so aimless. He was so useless, really. If she had been a different sort of person, with different priorities, she would have wanted to shake him.
Now she walked out of her office into the corridor and listened. It sounded as if half of everybody had gone home. James Hallwood was still in his office. Marta could hear the sound of opera coming out his open door. It wasn’t turned up full blast the way it often was when he was in his apartment—all the students in his house complained about it—but it was clear enough so that Marta could even identify the opera under way. It was Aida, with Leontyne Price in the lead, singing at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. James would call it a “venerable recording,” and then explain why it was so much better than the more modern recordings made in Germany and Spain. That had been among the hardest things she had ever had to learn. It wasn’t enough to prefer opera and classical to hip-hop and early sixties movie music, or Italian films to Hollywood blockbusters, or serious literature to best sellers. You had to be able to distinguish between even the supposedly important. You had to prefer Paganini to Beethoven, Leontyne Price in Aida to Beverly Sills in Aida, the novels of Paul Auster to the novels of Jonathan Franzen. Taste was an intricate web, and the first rule for surviving inside it was never to admit that you knew you were talking about “taste.”
Marta went back into her office. Her books were neatly stacked on her desk. Her correcting was arranged in folders. There was nothing she needed to do about either. The rest of the week stretched in front of her like an abyss. She hated having time to think. She put the correcting folders into her cordovan leather tote bag and got her coat off the back of her chair. If she’d seen herself walking down Main Street in Windsor, she would have dismissed herself as being just another one of those NPR ladies, those women who infested every upscale suburb on the East Coast. High boots with stack heels. Long, wool skirt in the winter that changed to a long, cotton one with a print in every other season. Good cashmere twinset under a good wool coat. In spring and summer, the twinset would be made of heavy cotton, in carefully calibrated colors. This was a uniform, just as the fondness for opera and Paul Auster was a uniform. It was important to have your cotton sweaters in watermelon and teal instead of red and blue.
I’m driving myself crazy, Marta thought. She slung her tote bag over her arm and went out, down the corridor toward the front of the library where the door opened onto the quad. She thought about the night Michael had died and about Alice Makepeace going out the wrong door when she said she was going home. She let herself into the big, open front foyer and waved to the women at the desk. She could never remember their names, although she’d probably talked to both of them dozens of times, in the library and out. She went out the front door into the quad. It looked deserted. The lights were on along the pathways. It was already getting dark.
If she went back to her apartment now, she’d have one ofthose nights when she just wanted to throw something, hit something, do something. She did not understand people like Michael Feyre, who committed suicide, but she did understand people who committed murder. She could cheerfully have murdered two dozen of the students on this campus and called the world a better place for it.
There were lights on in some of the faculty apartments. She stopped where she was and looked toward Martinson House, the house she herself had always wanted to live in because it was closest to the library’s front door and the largest and most elaborate in its design. Not only were the lights in Philip Candor’s room on, she could see Philip himself pacing back and forth in his living room, his head bopping from side to side. He wouldn’t be listening to opera either. He wouldn’t even be listening to the Beatles or Chuck Berry, who had become the standard guilty pleasures for people who taught in places like Windsor Academy. That was the power of the Baby Boom. There were so many of them, they could incorporate their music even into the halls of Intelligent Taste.
Marta did not stop to wonder why, when she had a problem or needed to feel steadied in a storm, she always went to Philip Candor. She didn’t stop to wonder why everybody on campus went to Philip in the same circumstances, so that he served as the unofficial anchor of Windsor Academy. It had been going on for so long, it felt natural. Philip Candor was a very steady and straightforward person.