'I'll query L.A. State. A former student of mine is teaching in the French department there.'
'I can get in touch with him. What's his name?'
'Allan Bosch.'
He spelled the surname for me. 'But I think it would be better if I made the contact. We university teachers have certain ah - inhibitions about talking about our students.'
'When can I check back with you?'
'Tomorrow morning, I should think. Right at the moment I'm on a very tight schedule. My wife is expecting me for lunch and I have to get back here in time to look over my notes for a two o'clock class.'
I must have showed my disappointment because he added, 'Look here, old chap, come home with me for lunch.'
'I can't do that.'
'But I insist. Bess would insist, too. She took quite a liking to you. Besides, she may recall something about Cervantes that I don't. I remember she was impressed with him when he came to our party. And people, frankly, are not my metier.'
I said I would meet him at his house. On the way there I bought a bottle of pink champagne. My case was starting to break.
Bess Tappinger had on a good-looking blue dress, fresh lipstick, and too much perfume. I didn't like the purposeful look in her eye, and I began to regret the pink champagne. She took it from my hands, as if she planned to break it over the prow of an affair.
She had covered the dinette table with a fresh linen cloth cross-hatched with fold marks. 'I hope you like ham, Mr. Archer. All I have is cold ham and potato salad.'
She turned to her husband. 'Daddy, what do the wine books say about ham and pink champagne?'
'I'm sure they go together very well,' he said remotely.
Tappinger had lost his effervescence. A glass of champagne failed to restore it. He chewed fitfully at a ham sandwich and asked me questions about Cervantes-Martel. I had to admit his former student was wanted on suspicion of murder. Tappinger shook his head over the young man's broken promise.
Bess Tappinger was excited by the champagne. She wanted our attention. 'Who are we talking about?'
'Feliz Cervantes. You remember him, Bess.'
'Am I supposed to?'
'I'm sure you remember him - the Spanish young man. He came to our Cercle Francais icebreaker seven years ago. Show her the picture of him, will you, Archer?'
I put it down on the linen cloth beside her plate. She recognized the busboy right away. 'Of course I remember him.'
'I thought you would,' her husband said meaningfully. 'You talked about him afterwards.'
'What impressed you, Mrs. Tappinger?'
'I thought he was good-looking, in a strong masculine way.'
There was bright malice in her eyes. 'We faculty wives get tired of pale scholarly types.'
Tappinger countered obliquely: 'He was an excellent student. He had a passion for French civilization, which is the greatest since the Athenian, and a wonderfully good ear for French poetry, considering his lack of background.'
His wife was working on another glass of champagne. 'You're a genius, Daddy. You can make a sentence sound like a fifty-minute lecture.'
Perhaps she meant it lightly, as her consciously pretty smile seemed to insist, but it fell with a dull thud.
'Please don't keep calling me Daddy.'
'But you don't like me to call you Taps any more. And you are the father of my children.'
'The children are not here and I'm most definitely not your father. I'm only forty-one.'
'I'm only twenty-nine,' she said to both of us.
'Twelve years is no great difference.'
He closed the subject abruptly as if it was a kind of Pandora's box. 'Where is Teddy, by the way, since he's not here?'
'At the co-operative nursery. They'll keep him till after his nap.'
'Good.'
'I'm going to the Plaza and do a little shopping after lunch.'
The conflict between them, which had been submerged for a moment, flared up again. 'You can't.'
He had turned quite pale.
'Why can't I?'
'I'm using the Fiat. I have a two o'clock class.'
He looked at his watch. 'As a matter of fact I should be starting back now. I have some preparation to do.'
'I haven't had much of a chance to talk to your wife'
'I realize that. I'm sorry, Mr. Archer. The fact is I have to punch a time clock, almost literally, just like any assembly worker. And the students are more and more like assembly-line products, acquiring a thin veneer of education as they glide by us. They learn their irregular verbs. But they don't know how to use them in a sentence. In fact very few of them are capable of composing a decent sentence in English, let alone in French, which is the language of the sentence par excellence.'
He seemed to be converting his anger with his wife into anger with his job, and the whole thing into a lecture. She looked at me with a faint smile, as if she had turned him out: 'Why don't you drive me to the Plaza, Mr. Archer? It will give us a chance to finish our talk.'
'I'll be glad to.'
Tappinger made no objection. He completed another paragraph about the occupational sorrows of teaching in a second-rate college, then retreated from the shambles of the lunch. I heard his Fiat put-put away. His wife and I sat in the dinette and finished the champagne.
'Well,' she said, 'here we are.'
'Just as you planned.'
'I didn't plan it. You did. You bought the champagne, and I can't handle champagne.'
She gave me a dizzy look.
'I can.'
'What are you,' she said, 'another cold fish?'
She was rough. They get that way, sometimes, when they marry too young and trap themselves in a kitchen and wake up ten years later wondering where the world is. As if she could read my thought, she said: 'I know, I'm a bee-eye-tee-see-aitch. But I have some reason. He sits out in his study every night till past midnight. Is my life supposed to be over because all he cares about is Flaubert and Baudelaire and those awful students of his? They make me sick, the way they crowd around and tell him how wonderful he is. All they really want is a passing grade.'
She took a deep breath and continued: 'He isn't so wonderful, I ought to know. I've lived with him for twelve years and put up with his temperament and tantrums. You'd think he was Baudelaire himself, or Van Gogh, the way he carries on sometimes. And I kept hoping it would lead to something, but it never has. It never will. We're stuck in a lousy state college and he hasn't even got the manhood to engineer a promotion for himself.'
The shabby little cubicle, or maybe the champagne that had been drunk in it, seemed to generate lectures. I made an observation of my own: 'You're being pretty hard on your husband. He has to go out and cut it. For that he needs support.'
She hung her head. Her hair swung forward like a flexible ball. 'I know. I try to give it to him, honestly.'
She had reverted to her little-girl voice. It didn't suit her mood though, and she dropped it. She said in a clear sharp voice she had used with her son the day before: 'We never should have married, Taps and I. He shouldn't have married at all. Sometimes he reminds me of a medieval priest. The two best years of his life came before our marriage. He often tells me this. He spent them in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, not long after the war. I knew nothing of this, of course, but I was just a kid and he was the white hope of the French department at Illinois and all the other sophomores said how wonderful it would be to be married to him, with his Scott Fitzgerald good looks, and I thought I could finish my education at home.'
