As She Climbed Across the Table

I was panting. “Don’t I deserve some thanks?” I said. “I did it. I broke up the lynch mob. Like Henry Fonda in Young Mr. Lincoln.”

She turned to me. Her expression was furious. “You want to make Lack yours,” she said. “You think if you describe him he’ll suddenly belong to you. Just like everything else.”

The elevator doors opened and she stepped inside. I stared, struck dumb.

“But this time you’re wrong,” she said. “Lack is mine.” The doors closed over her ravaged face.

15

I paced campus until dark, then stalked back to the apartment. When I saw the blind men were home I got into my car and drove off campus, found a bar, and deliberately had a drink with a woman.

An interesting woman, as it happened. She was dark-haired and tall, with a penetrating gaze and a smile that didn’t show her teeth. She was sitting alone, sheltering a glass of red wine. I told her my name was Dale Overling, and asked if I could sit at her table. She said yes.

“You’re not from the campus,” I said.

“No.”

“Not affiliated.”

“No.”

“Not a graduate of the school.”

“No. No connection.”

“You can’t imagine how that turns me on.”

“Buy me a drink.”

The bar was tame and suburban, a fifties cocktail lounge not yet refurbished by student irony. It was nearly empty, a weekend place on a weeknight. I’d picked it for its distance from campus. But when I flagged the waitress it was a girl I recognized, a dizzy undergraduate, costumed in a yellow apron. Her eyes met mine and I froze her with a look of dread, willing her not to blow my cover.

“Take this wine away,” I said. “Bring us drinks. Margaritas, salt on the glass. Bring us six of them. Line them up on the table.”

“I can bring you a pitcher.”

“I want a line of drinks. I want to see the glasses accumulate. Don’t take away the empties, either.”

She flickered away, pale and mothlike in the gloom.

“You’re a very self-assured man, Mr. Overling,” said my companion, her smile flickering.

“Dale, please. And you’re a very perceptive woman, Ms.…?”

“Jalter, Cynthia Jalter.”

“May I call you Cynthia? You’re a very perceptive woman.”

“Thank you.”

“I like to walk into a bar and find a perceptive woman sitting alone. It excites me. It doesn’t happen that often.”

“I’m flattered.”

“And the fact that you’re not from the campus, that takes it over the top. Because there’s nothing that excites me quite like the idea of perceptive, intelligent women living in a university town yet having no connection with the school. Just living in the same town, right there, not needing to have anything to do with it. The idea of the intelligent woman in the university town. What is she? Why is she there? It’s a stimulating idea.”

“You must be from the school.”

“Me? No, no. It’s true, I’m visiting the campus, I’m a consultant. They fly me in. I spend a lot of time in towns like this, being flown in, flown out. I’ve got enough frequent-flyer points to send quintuplets around the world. But I hate these big university schools. They’re big rotting carcasses. Rotten in the center. If I didn’t just fly in, consult, fly out, I couldn’t live with myself. As it is I take a hotel off campus, eat off campus, and go to bars and look for intelligent people who have nothing to do with the school. Those are the people to talk to in any situation. The ones on the edge, the outside.”

“Like me.”

“Exactly. They offer me a room on campus, you know. But I take a hotel. And I rent a big shiny car so I stand out. The American campus is crawling with these little brown and gray and buff-colored Peugeot cars and little Japanese cars. I get a big bright American car so they know I don’t care. Bright red if I can.”

It didn’t matter if Cynthia Jalter didn’t believe me. At that moment Dale Overling was truer than I was. Heartier, more substantial.

“I sit in a bar in a different city three or four nights a week,” I said. “I always order the same things. I should write a guidebook. A browser’s guide to tequila drinks in college towns.”

“Nonfiction bestseller list,” said Cynthia Jalter. “Position two, holding strong for months.” Her smile was pursed.

“No. An underground guide, a photocopied thing. Little tattered copies passed from hand to hand, with annotations, disagreements scrawled into the margins.”

“Published under a pseudonym.”

“Right. Professor X.”

We drank. Mostly I drank. I needed to bolster the courage I’d already shown, as if it were borrowed in advance against future drinks. Cynthia Jalter sipped.

“Bigger gulps,” I said. “There’s a lot of drinks here.”

She only smiled.

“Don’t be smug. We’re in this together. I can only run the show for so long, then I’m going to need your help. Drink up.”

I finished one and put it aside, and took up the next. The sharp salt clung to my lip. I didn’t bother wiping it away.

“You’re probably wondering why I don’t ask you what you do,” I said. “The truth is I’d rather not know. It’s probably something pretty dry, that’s a safe guess. Despite your lack of connection to the school.”

“It’s a safe guess.”

“And you’d rather not tell me, am I right? You like watching me do these verbal belly flops. And the more enigmatic you are, the farther out on a limb I have to go.”

“You’re right.”

I raised my glass to her, then drank. The tequila was beginning to roil inside me.

“What’s funny is I’m probably getting close. For example, I bet you’re working with funding of some kind. A grant.”

“Maybe.”

“Yeah, you’re definitely funded.” I feigned disappointment. “It’s all coming clear. Whatever you do wouldn’t be possible without a major-league grant.”

She laughed. The first time I saw her teeth, I think. “You’re a very self-assured man, Dale.”

“You said that already. You haven’t said much, and you’re already repeating yourself. I like the way you said my first name, though. Dale. I should say yours more. You’re repeating yourself, Cynthia.”

“You’re repeating yourself, Dale.”

“Right. Very good. That’s the kind of contribution I’ll need from you from here on. Because I can’t go on like this. It isn’t possible. You’re going to have to come down off your heavily funded pedestal and muck around in actual conversation with me here.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“You’re wondering how I sniffed you out about the grant. Well, I’m a consultant. I specialize in feasibility studies. Feasibility and viability, two very important words. To me they’re like pronouns or conjunctions: he, she,