Ghost Story

wasn't in love with him.'

Even then I recognized that she would find it very easy to lie. This did not repulse me; instead it was proof of how lightly her life had touched her, and was a part of all that I already wanted to change in her. 'He was in love with you,' I said. 'Was that why you wanted to leave Chicago?'

'No it was already over by then. Alan didn't have anything to do with it He made a fool of himself. That's all.'

'Alan?'

'Alan McKechnie. He was very sweet.'

'A very sweet fool.'

'Are you determined to know about this?' she asked, with her characteristic trick of adding a soft, almost invisible irony which denied the question any importance.

'No. Just a little curious.'

'Well.' Her eyes, full of that shattered light, met mine. 'It's not much of a story. He became… infatuated. I was in a tutorial, with him. There were only four of us. Three boys and myself. The tutorial met twice a week. I could tell he was getting interested in me, but he was a very shy man. He was very inexperienced with women.' Again that soft, lobbing deflection in her voice and eyes. 'He took me out a few times. He didn't want us to be seen, so we had to go places not in Hyde Park.'

'Where did you go?'

'Hotel bars. Places like that. Around the Loop. I think it was the first time he'd ever done anything like that with a student, and it made him nervous. I don't think he'd had much fun in his life. Eventually I became too much for him. I realized that I didn't want him in the way he wanted me. I know what you're going to ask next, so I'll answer it. Yes, we slept together. For a while. It wasn't much good. Alan was not very -physical. I began to think that what he really wanted to do was go to bed with a boy, but of course he was too whatever to do that. He couldn't.'

'How long did it last?'

'A year.' She finished her meal and dropped her napkin beside the plate. 'I don't know why we're talking about this.'

'What do you really like?'

She pretended to consider it seriously. 'Let's see. Really like. Summer. Movies. English novels. Waking up at six and seeing very early morning out of the window-everything is so empty and pure. Lemon tea. What else? Paris. And Nice. I really do like Nice. When I was a little girl, we went there four or five summers in a row. And I like very good meals, like this one.'

'It doesn't sound like the academic life is the one for you,' I said. It was as though she had told me everything and nothing.

'It doesn't, does it?' She laughed, as at something of no importance. 'I suppose what I need is a Great Love.'

And there she was again, the princess locked in the tower of her own self-regard. 'Let's go to a movie tomorrow night,' I said, and she agreed.

The next day I persuaded Rex Leslie, whose office was down the hall from mine, to exchange desks with me.

The art cinema was showing Renoir's La Grande Illusion, which Alma had never seen. Afterward we went to a coffee shop, a place packed with students, and bits of conversation from adjoining tables filtered through into our own. For a moment after we sat down, I experienced a flash of guilty fear, and recognized a second later that I was afraid of seeing Helen Kayon. But it was not her sort of place; and anyhow at this hour Helen usually was still at the library. I felt a moment of intense gratitude that I was not there too, grinding away at a discipline that was not only my own but merely a condition of employment.

'What a beautiful movie,' she said. 'I still feel like I'm in it.'

'You feel movies very deeply, then.'

'Of course.' She looked at me, puzzled.

'And literature?'

'Of course.' She looked at me again. 'Well. I don't know. I enjoy it.'

A bearded boy in a lumberjack shirt near us said in a carrying voice, 'Wenner is naive and so is his magazine. I'll start buying it again when I see a picture of Jerry Brown on the cover.'

His friend said, 'Wenner is Jerry Brown.'

'Berkeley,' I said.

'Who is Wenner?'

'I'm surprised you don't know. Jann Wenner?'

'Who is he?'

'He was the Berkeley student who founded Rolling Stone.'

'Is that a magazine?'

'You're full of surprises,' I said. 'You mean you've never heard of it?'

'I'm not interested in most magazines. I never look at them. What kind of magazine is it? Is it named after that band?'

I nodded. At least she had heard of them. 'What kind of music do you like?'

'I'm not very interested in music.'

'Let's try some other names. Do you know who Tom Seaveris?'

'No.'

'Have you ever heard of Willie Mays?'

'Didn't he used to be an athlete? I'm also not very interested in sports.'

'It shows.' She giggled. 'You're getting even more intriguing. How about Barbra Streisand?'

She pouted charmingly, self-parodyingly. 'Of course.'

'John Ford?' No. 'Arthur Fonzarelli?' No. 'Grace Bumbry?' No. 'Desi Arnaz?' No. 'Johnny Carson?' No. 'Andre Previn?' No. 'John Dean?' No.

'Don't ask me any more or I'll start saying yes to everything,' she said.

'What do you do?' I asked. 'Are you sure you live in this country?'

'Let me try you. Have you heard of Anthony Powell or Jean Rhys or Ivy Compton-Burnett or Elizabeth Jane Howard or Paul Scott or Margaret Drabble or-'

'They're English novelists and I've heard of all of them,' I said. 'But I take your point. You're really not interested in the things you're not really interested in.'

'Exactly.'

'You never even read newspapers,' I said.

'No. And I never watch television.' She smiled. 'Do you think I should be stood against a wall and shot?'

'I'm just interested in who your friends are.'

'Do you? Well, you are a friend of mine, aren't you?' Over it, as over our entire conversation, was that veneer of disinterested irony. I wondered for a moment if she were actually entirely human: her nearly complete ignorance of popular culture demonstrated more than any assertion how little she cared what people thought of her. What I had thought of as her integrity was more complete than I could have imagined. Maybe a sixth of the graduate students in California had never heard of an athlete like Seaver; but who in America could have avoided hearing of the Fonz?

'But you do have other friends. You just met me.'

'I do, yes.'

'In the English Department?' It was not impossible: for all I knew of my temporary colleagues, there might have been an extensive cell of Virginia Woolf fanciers who never looked at the newspapers. In them however this remoteness from their surroundings would have been an affectation; of Alma the reverse would have been true.

'No. I don't know many people there. I know some people who are interested in the occult.'

'The occult?' I could not imagine what she meant. 'Seances? Ouija boards? Madame Blavatsky? Planchettes?'

'No. They're more serious than that. They belong to an order.'