it generally did when he got himself onto his favorite subject. “With Tyrone Power and Frances Farmer.”
“I haven’t seen it.”
“I think Hannah looks like Frances Farmer. That’s why I wanted her to see it.”
“She went crazy, Frances Farmer.”
“So did Gene Tierney. She’s in it, too.”
“Sounds like a good one.”
“It’s not bad.” He smiled. He had a big-toothed, crooked smile that made him look even younger. “I kind of needed a little cheering up, I guess.”
“I’ll bet,” I said. “They were hard on you today.”
He shrugged, and looked away again. That afternoon, as we had gone around the room, there was only one member of the workshop with anything good to say about James’s story: Hannah Green, and even her critique had been chiefly constructed out of equal parts equivocation and tact. Insofar as the outlines of its plot could be made out amid the sentence fragments and tics of punctuation that characterized James Leer’s writing, the story concerned a boy who had been molested by a priest and then, when he began to show signs of emotional distress through odd and destructive behavior, was taken by his mother to this same priest to confess his sins. The story ended with the boy watching through the grate of the confessional as his mother walked out of the church into the sunshine, and with the words “Shaft. Of light.” It was called, for no apparent reason, “Blood and Sand.” Like all of his stories, its title was borrowed from Hollywood; he had written stories called “Swing Time,” “Flame of New Orleans,” “Greed,” “Million Dollar Legs.” All of them were opaque and fractured and centered on grave flaws in the relations between children and adults. None of the titles ever seemed to connect to the stories. There was a persistent theme of Catholicism gone badly wrong. My students had a hard time knowing what to think about James Leer’s writing. They could see that he knew what he was doing and that he had been born with the talent to do it; but the results were so puzzling and unfriendly to the reader that they tended to inspire the anger that had flared up in workshop that afternoon.
“They really hated it,” he said. “I think they hated it more than any of the other ones.”
“I know it,” I said. “I’m sorry I let things get a little out of control.”
“That’s all right,” he said, shrugging his shoulders to regain a purchase on the straps of his knapsack. “I guess you didn’t really like it either.”
“Well, James, no, I—”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “It only took me an hour to write it.”
“An hour? That’s remarkable.” For all its terrible problems, it had been a dense and vivid piece of writing. “That’s hard to believe.”
“I think them all out beforehand. I have trouble sleeping, so that’s what I do while I lie there.” He sighed. “Well,” he said. “I guess you probably have to go back in. It must be almost time to go to that lecture.”
I held up my wristwatch to catch the light. It was nearly twenty-five minutes to eight.
“You’re right,” I said. “Let’s go.”
“Uh, well,” he said. “I—I think I’m just going to go home. I think I can catch the 74.”
“Nonsense,” I said. “Come on inside and have a drink before we go to the lecture. You don’t want to miss that lecture. And have you seen the Chancellor’s house? It’s a beautiful house, James. Come on, I’ll introduce you around.” I mentioned the two writers who were this year’s guests of honor.
“I met them,” he said coldly. “What’s with all the baseball cards, anyway?”
“Dr. Gaskell collects them. He has a lot of memora——oh.” The air before my eyes was suddenly filled with spangles, and I felt my knees knock against each other. Reaching out to steady myself, I took hold of James’s arm. It felt weightless and slender as a cardboard tube.
“Professor? Are you all right?”
“I’m fine, James. I’m just a little stoned.”
“You didn’t look so well in class today. Hannah didn’t think so, either.”
“I haven’t been sleeping well, myself,” I said. As a matter of fact I had, during the last month, been experiencing spells of dizziness and bewilderment that came over me suddenly, at odd moments of the day, and filled my skull with a glittering afflatus. “I’ll be fine. I’d better get my old fat body inside.”
“Okay, then,” he said, freeing his arm from my grasp. “I’ll see you on Monday.”
“Aren’t you coming to any of the conference seminars or anything?”
He shook his head. “I don’t think so. I—I have a lot of homework.” He bit his lip and then turned and started back across the lawn, toward the house, hands jammed once more into his pockets, the fingers of his right hand, I imagined, curled around the smooth pearly handle of his imitation gun. The knapsack pounded against his back and the soles of his shoes squeaked as he left me, and I don’t know why, but I was sorry to see him go. I felt as though he were the only person whose company I could possibly have enjoyed at that moment, awkward and isolate and hopeless as he was, disquieted and bewildered by the proliferating symptoms of the midnight disease. Oh, he had it, all right. Just before James started around the corner he looked up, at the back windows of the house, and stopped dead, his face raised to catch the light spilling out from the party. He was looking at Hannah Green, who stood by the dining-room window with her back toward us. Her yellow hair was mussed and scattered in all directions. She was telling a story with her hands. All the people standing in front of her had bared their teeth to laugh.
After a moment James Leer looked away and started off. His head was absorbed into the sharp black shadow that fell from the side of the house.
“Wait a minute, James,” I said. “Don’t leave yet.”
He turned, and his face reemerged from the shadow, and I walked over to him, flicking the burnt end of the joint into the air.
“Come on inside the house for a minute,” I said, lowering my voice to a whisper that came out sounding so sinister and friendless that I suddenly felt ashamed. “There’s something upstairs I think you ought to see.”
WHEN we walked back into the kitchen, the party was breaking up; Walter Gaskell had already led a large contingent of staff members off to Thaw Hall, among them the shy little elf in the turtleneck sweater who was to address us that evening on the subject of “The Writer as Doppelganger.” Sara and a young woman in a gray service uniform were busy scraping out bowls into the kitchen trash, stretching plastic wrap across plates of cookies, shoving corks back into half-empty bottles of wine. They had the water running into the sink and didn’t hear us as we slipped past into the living room, where a crew of students was gathering up streaked paper plates and ashtrays filled with cigarette butts. I felt very stoned, now that I was inside, light and insubstantial as a ghost, and
