Cliff squatted on the sand, eyeing Gordon. “Jest walkin’ along. My day off. Got a job in Oceanside.”
“And you saw us here?” Penny said happily. “How long have you been down this way? You should’ve called me.”
“Yes,” Gordon said dryly, “a remarkable coincidence.”
“Little over a week. Got me a job in two days flat.”
Cliff hunkered down, not sitting on the sand but resting with the beer in both hands between his legs and his buttocks only an inch from the beach. Gordon remembered seeing Japanese perched like that for hours, in a movie somewhere. It was a curious pose, as though Cliff did not wish to commit himself to fully sitting with them.
Penny burbled on, but Gordon was not listening. He studied Cliff’s sun-baked ease and looked for something behind the eyes, something that explained this improbable coincidence. He did not believe it for an instant, of course. Cliff knew that Penny surfed and that this was the nearest good beach. The only interesting question was whether Penny had known this was going to happen as well.
There was no sign between them, no small inexplicable smiles, no gestures, no false notes that Gordon could see. But that was just it—he wasn’t good at that sort of thing. And as he watched them talking with their slow and easy grace they seemed so alike, so familiar from a thousand movies and cigarette ads, and so strange. Gordon sat, white as the underbelly of a fish in comparison, a flabby dirty alabaster with black swirls of hair. He felt a slow flush of emotion, a wash of feeling he could not quite name. He did not know if this was some elaborate, cute game they were playing, but if it was—
Gordon surged up, lurched to his feet. Penny watched him. Her lips parted in surprise at his stony expression. He struggled for the words, for something to fill the ground between knowledge and suspicion, something just right, and finally mumbled, “Don’t, don’t mind me.”
“Hey, sport, I—”
“Goy games.” Gordon waved a hand in dismissal, face hot. It had come out more bitter than he planned.
“Gordon, come on, really—” Penny began, but he turned away and broke into a trot. The rhythm picked him up instantly. He heard her voice, raised above the crunch of breakers, but it was thin and fading as she called to him.
Not ending the sentence, not wanting to think about any of it any more, he ran toward the distant carved hills.
CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN
“I’M THINKING OF GOING INTO INDUSTRY,” HE SAID to Penny one evening over supper. They had shared their small talk already, in what had become a thin ritual. Gordon refused to discuss the meeting on the beach, refused to have Cliff over for a drink, and felt his withdrawal would, ultimately, settle the matter. Only dimly did it occur to him that the refusals were the cause of the curiously stale conversations they now had together. “What’s that mean?”
“Work in a company research lab. GE, Bell Labs—” He launched into an advertisement for the virtues of working where results counted, where ideas evolved swiftly into hardware. He did not, in fact, believe the industrial labs were superior to university groups, but they did have an aura. Things got done faster there. Helpers and technicians abounded. Salaries were higher. Then too, he enjoyed the unavoidable smugness of the scientist, who knew he could always have a life beyond academe. Not merely a
“Gordon, this is just plain old bullshit.”
“Huh?” It stalled him for a moment.
“You don’t want to go work for a company.”
“I’m thinking very seriously—”
“You want to be a professor. Do research. Have students. Give lectures. You lap it up.”
“I do?”
“Of
“You overestimate the pleasures of the job.”
“I’m not
“Uh.” His momentum blunted, he ruefully admitted to himself that she knew him pretty well.
“So instead of talking up some temporary escape hatch like industry, you ought to be
“Like what?”
“Something
“Another approach,” he finished for her.
“Exactly. Thinking about problems from a different angle is—” She broke off, hesitated, then plunged ahead. “Gordon, I could tell what was going on there with Cliff. I could reassure you and do a whole routine, but I’m not sure any more that you’d believe me.”
“Uh.”
“Remember this,” she said firmly. “You don’t own me, Gordon. We’re not even married, for Chrissake.”
“Is that what’s bothering you?”
“Bothering
“—’cause if it is, maybe we ought to talk about that and see if—”
“Gordon, wait. When we started out, moved in together, we agreed we were going to try it out, that’s all.”
“Sure. Sure.” He nodded vigorously, his food forgotten. “But I’m willing, if it’s making you play games like this thing with Cliff—and that was really childish, Penny, arranging that meeting, just childish—I’m willing to talk about it, you know, ah, getting—”
Penny held out her hand, palm toward him. “No. Wait. Two points, Gordon.” She ticked them off. “One, I didn’t arrange any meeting. Maybe Cliff was looking for us, but I didn’t know about it. Hell, I didn’t even know he was
“Well, I feel that—”
“Because I don’t want to, Gordon. I don’t want to marry you at all.”
He came up out of the muggy press of late summer in the subway and emerged into the only slightly less compacted heat of 116th Street. This entrance and exit were relatively new. He dimly remembered an old cast-iron kiosk which, until the early ‘50s, ushered students into the rumbling depths. It stood between two swift lanes of traffic, providing a neat Darwinian selection pressure against undue mental concentration. Here, students with their minds stuffed chock full of Einstein and Mendel and Hawthorne often had their trajectories abruptly altered by Hudsons and DeSotos and Fords.
Gordon walked along 116th Street, glancing at his watch. He had refused to give a seminar on this, his first return to his Alma Mater since receiving his doctorate; still, he did not want to be late for his appointment with Claudia Zinnes. She was a kindly woman who had barely escaped Warsaw as the Nazis were entering it, but he remembered her impatience with late students. He hurried by South Field. To his left students clustered on the
