It was ten minutes to six. I walked down Garden Street toward Cambridge Common, listening to the unaccustomed click of my high heels on the brick sidewalk, slippery with melted snow and patches of dirty ice. In the darkness around me, students riding bicycles or walking with book bags were returning to dinner from classes in Harvard Yard. The sky over the dark buildings and narrow streets was a deep lustrous blue, streaked at the edges with pinkish light, and the air was cold and damp. Near Follen Street a small battered Datsun was trying unsuccessfully to park between a jacked-up Riviera and a Volvo plastered with psychedelic stickers. The sound of grinding gears made me think of the time during my sophomore year when a precursor of my boyfriend Hopalong had gotten very stoned at the Dartmouth game and had pursued me along Garden Street by backing up his car for a whole block, all the while declaiming the words from the Temptations’ song “My Girl.” The incident had infuriated me at the time, but now I thought of it as something gay and romantic, the sort of thing that happened constantly to a woman destined to exercise a fatal influence upon men.
My feeling of agitation increased as I approached the Common. The usual shouts and guffaws were coming from the war monument in the middle, where Cambridge townies liked to hang around smoking dope and drinking wine, but they seemed far away. I looked through the rows of leafless maples at the university towers and traffic lights clustering ahead of me, and felt an unreasonable, blissful happiness to be walking in high heels and a fur coat on a clear evening to a meeting with a man who was likely to mean trouble—the kind of trouble that mothers and magazine articles particularly warned against. I felt a bit like Anna Karenina, burning with a sinful glow; and as if someone beside me in the darkness had spoken a few passionate, muted words, it seemed to me that I was ravishingly beautiful. I began to pretend that someone was walking with me: a lover who didn’t resemble my boyfriend, or even Geoffrey Knacker. This imaginary lover, in fact, didn’t have much of any appearance at all, only a compelling simplicity of character that granted every dangerous wish I had ever had. As I walked through the Common, giving a wide berth to the monument, where two long-haired girls were giggling beside a guy who looked like Jimi Hendrix, I crooked my fingers very slightly inside the pocket of my fur jacket, as if I were holding hands with someone. And then I did something I never afterward admitted to anyone, not even Margaret: I recited a poem to my invisible companion—Donne’s “The Flea.”
By the time I got to the Pamplona, I had almost forgotten Geoffrey Knacker, who rose from his tiny table to greet me, with an air of being slightly startled by my appearance. He was a tall, thin man with a mournful, rather handsome face and gray halfmoons of skin under his eyes; in the white-tiled, low-ceilinged interior of the Pamplona, surrounded by graduate students chatting over cappuccino, he appeared curiously yellowish and misanthropic, as if he’d lived most of his life in a remote tropical outpost. He helped me with my coat, and I ordered an ice cream. Then the two of us began to talk, rather constrainedly, about metaphysical poetry until Geoffrey began paying me heavy-handed compliments.
“I always felt that behind your reserved manner in class was a rare sensitivity of nature,” he said, giving me a slow, gloomy smile, and I, who had been attracted by just that smile in the seminar, found myself filled not with rapture but with an inexplicable annoyance. It occurred to me that this meeting was just like a coffee date with any callow comp lit major, who would begin by throwing out portentous hints about his ideal woman and end, ritually, by suggesting we drop mescaline and swim nude in the Adams House pool. I tried to think of the romantic fact that Geoffrey Knacker was an instructor, and that both of us were flouting lovers in order to meet, but all I could seem to feel was irritation at a flat, straw-colored mole that Geoffrey had where his jaw met his neck, and at the way that as he talked, he joined the tips of his fingers together and pumped them in and out in a tiny bellows-like motion. We were sitting at an inconspicuous table in a corner, but it seemed to me, in my hypersensitive state, that all the other students in the Pamplona could see the mole and the working fingertips, and were laughing discreetly at them.
As I rattled my spoon in my ice-cream dish, some demon prompted me to say, “But certainly you must have seen hundreds of exceptional students in all your years as a teacher.”
“Hundreds?” repeated Geoffrey Knacker in an injured tone. “Why, no. I finished my dissertation three years ago. I am only thirty-one.”
We didn’t really have much to say to each other. It was clear, in fact, that our initial attraction had become puzzling and abortive, and that this meeting was one of those muted social disasters that can be devastating if one cares. I didn’t care much; nor, it seemed, did Geoffrey Knacker. We shook hands and parted outside the Pamplona without even the polite device of mentioning plans to get in touch. When he zipped up his jacket and, with one last unhappy smile, trudged off in his L. L. Bean boots toward Central Square, I clicked off back to Radcliffe in my high heels, feeling positively elated. Geoffrey Knacker, I decided, was a bore, but the fact of Geoffrey Knacker was exciting. As I came into Harvard Square and threaded my way through the slush and evening traffic on Massachusetts Avenue, the romantic
