Ghost Story

get away from Berkeley. This was typical of David's thoughtfulness; but a kind of perversity had kept me from using the house. I did not want to have to be grateful to David. After the lecture I would take Helen to Still Valley and kill two scruples at once.

On the morning of the lecture I reread D. H. Lawrence's chapter about Hawthorne and saw these lines:

And the first thing she does is seduce him.

And the first thing he does is to be seduced.

And the second thing they do is to hug their sin in secret, and gloat over it, and try to understand.

Which is the myth of New England.

That was what I had been looking for all along. I put down my cup of coffee and started to restructure my remarks. Lawrence's insight extended my own, I could see all the books in a new way. I discarded paragraphs and wrote in new ones between the crossed-out lines… I forgot to call Helen, as I had promised to do.

In the end I used my notes very sparingly. Once, straining for a metaphor, I leaned on the lectern and saw Helen and Meredith Polk seated together in one of the last rows, up at the top of the theater. Meredith Polk was frowning, suspicious as a Berkeley cop. When scientists hear the kinds of things that go on in literature classrooms, they often begin to look that way. Helen merely looked interested, and I was grateful that she had come.

When it was over Professor Lieberman came up from his aisle seat to tell me that he had enjoyed my remarks very much, and would I consider taking his Stephen Crane lecture in two months' time? He was due at a conference in Iowa that week, and since I had done such an 'exemplary' job, especially considering that I was not an academic… in short, he might find it possible to extend my appointment to a second year.

I was stunned as much by the bribe as by his arrogance. Lieberman, still young, was a famous man, not so much a scholar in Helen's sense as a 'critic,' a generalizer, a sub-Edmund Wilson; I did not respect his books, but I expected more of him. The students were filing up toward the exits, a solid mass of T-shirts and denim. Then I saw a face lifted expectantly toward me, a slim body clothed not in denim but in a white dress. Lieberman was suddenly an interference, an obstacle, and I agreed to give the Crane lecture to get rid of him. 'Very good, Donald,' he said, and disappeared. As quickly as that: one moment the seersuckered young professor was before me, and the next I was looking into the face of the girl in the white dress. It was the graduate student who had stopped Helen and me on the stairs.

She looked completely different: healthier, with a light golden layer of tan on her face and arms. The straight blond hair glowed. So did her pale eyes: in them I saw a kaleidoscope of shattered lights and colors. Her mouth was bracketed by two faint lines of irony. She was ravishing, one of the most beautiful girls I'd ever seen-no small statement, for Berkeley was so populated by beauties that you saw two new ones every time you looked up from your desk. But the girl before me had none of the gaucheness or assertive, testing vulgarity of the usual undergraduate knockout: she simply looked right, perfectly at home in herself. Helen Kayon didn't have a chance.

'That was good,' she said, and the faint lines beside her mouth twitched as if at a private joke. 'I'm happy I came after all.' For the first time, I heard the Southern accent: that sunny drawl, that lilt.

'So am I,' I said. 'Thank you for the compliment.'

'Do you want to relish it in private?'

'Is that an invitation?' And then I saw that I was being too quick, too self-consciously flattered and one- dimensional.

'A what? No, I'm not aware that it was.' Her mouth moved: what an idea.

I looked up to the top of the lecture theater. Helen and Meredith Polk were already in the aisle, going toward the door. Helen must have begun to move as soon as she'd seen me look at the blond. If she knew me as well as she had said she did, she had known just what I was thinking. Helen went through the exit door without turning around, but Meredith Polk tried to assassinate me with a glance.

'Are you waiting for someone?' the girl said.

'No, it's nothing important,' I said. 'Would you join me for lunch? I never did have lunch, and I'm starving.'

I was behaving, I knew, with appalling selfishness; but I also knew that the girl before me was already more important to me than Helen Kayon, and by letting Helen go at once-by being the bastard Meredith Polk said I was-I was eliminating weeks, perhaps months of painful scenes. I had not lied to Helen; she had always known that our relationship was fragile.

The girl walking beside me across the campus lived in perfect consonance with her femininity; even then, moments after I had first seen her in good light, she seemed ageless, even timeless, beautiful in a nearly hieratic and mythic way. Helen's separation from herself had kept her from gracefulness, and she was blatantly a person of my own blink of history; my first impression of Alma Mobley was that she could have moved with that easy grace over an Italian piazza in the sixteenth century; or in the twenties (more to the point) could have earned an appreciative glance from Scott Fitzgerald, flying past the Plaza Hotel on her devastating legs. Set down like that, it sounds absurd. Obviously I had noticed her legs, I had a sense of her body; but images of Italian piazzas and Fitzgerald at the Plaza are more than unlikely metaphors for carnality. It was as though every cell of her possessed ease; nothing less typical of the usual Berkeley graduate student in English can be imagined. The gracefulness went so deep in her that it seemed, even then, to mark an intense passivity.

Of course I am condensing six months' impressions into a single moment, but my justification is that the seeds of the impression were present as we left the campus to go to a restaurant. Her going with me so willingly, with such unconcern that it resounded with unspoken judgments, did contain a whiff of the passive -the ironic tactful passivity of the beautiful, of those whose beauty has sealed them off inside it like a princess in a tower.

I steered her toward a restaurant I had heard Lieberman mention-it was too expensive for most students, too expensive for me. But the ceremony of luxurious dining suited both her and my sense of celebration.

I knew immediately that it was she I wanted to take to David's house in Still Valley.

Her name, I learned, was Alma Mobley, and she had been born in New Orleans. I gathered more from her manner than from anything explicitly stated that her parents had been well off; her father had been a painter, and long stretches of her childhood had been spent in Europe. Speaking of her parents, she used the past tense, and I gathered that they had died some time ago. That too fit her manner, her air of disconnection from all but herself.

Like Helen, she had been a student in the Midwest. She had gone to the University of Chicago-this seemed next to impossible, Alma in Chicago, that rough knock-about city-and had been accepted as a PhD student at Berkeley. From what she said, I understood that she was just drifting through the academic life, that she had none of Helen's profound commitment to it. She was a graduate student because she had a talent for the mechanics of literary work and was bright; it was better than anything else she could think of doing. And she was in California because she had not liked the Chicago climate.

Again, and overwhelmingly, I had the sense of the irrelevance to her of most of the furniture of her life; of her passive self-sufficiency. I had no doubt that she was bright enough to finish her thesis (Virginia Woolf), and then with luck to get a teaching job at one of the little colleges up and down the coast. Then, suddenly and shockingly, she lifting a spoonful of mint-green avocado to her mouth, I had another vision of her. I saw her as a whore, a 1910 Storyville prostitute, her hair exotically twisted, her dancer's legs drawn up-her naked body was very clear for a moment. Another image of professional detachment, I supposed, but that did not explain the force of the vision. I had been sexually moved by it. She was talking about books-talking not as Helen did, but in a general-reader way- and I looked across the table and I knew that I wanted to be the man who mattered to her, I wanted to grab that passivity and shake it and make her truly see me.

'Don't you have a boyfriend?' I asked her.

She shook her head.

'So you're not in love?'

'No,' and she gave a minute smile at the obviousness of the question. 'There was a man in Chicago, but that's finished.'

I pounced on the noun. 'One of your professors.'

'One of my associate professors.' Another smile.

'You were in love with him? Was he married?'

She looked at me gravely for a moment 'No. It wasn't like what you're thinking. He wasn't married, and I