faint whiff of Cristalle himself now, and the dual memory of Emily and Sara it stirred up inside me seemed particularly cruel. “What did you do?”
“I broke her heart,” I said. “I think she found out about Sara and me.”
“How?”
“I don’t know,” I said. She’d been looking a little lost ever since coming home a few days before from a lunch at Ali Baba with her sister, Deborah, who was working as a research assistant in fine arts at the University of Pittsburgh. Deborah must have picked something up on the academic grapevine and sisterly passed it along. “I don’t suppose we’ve really been all that discreet.”
“Sara?” said Miss Sloviak. “That’s where the party’s going to be?”
“That’s right,” I said. “That’s where the party’s going to be.”
IT was above all a formal exercise in good behavior, the first staff party of the WordFest weekend, a preliminary shaking of hands before they rang the bell and the assembled guests all came out swinging. It was held early in the evening, for one thing, so that people had to keep dinner plates balanced in their laps; and then at around quarter to eight, just when supper was finished and strangers had grown acquainted and the booze began to flow, it would be time to go off to Thaw Hall for the Friday night lecture by one of the two most distinguished members of that year’s staff. For eleven years now the college, under the direction of Sara Gaskell’s husband, Walter, the chairman of the English Department, had been charging aspiring writers several hundred dollars for the privilege of meeting and receiving the counsel of a staff of more or less well-known writers, along with agents, editors, and assorted other New Yorkers with an astonishing capacity for alcohol and gossip. The conferees were housed in the college dormitories, left vacant over the spring holidays, and guided like passengers on a cruise ship through a tightly scheduled program of lit crit shuffleboard, self-improvement talks, and lessons in the New York publishing cha-cha-cha. The same kind of thing goes on all over the country, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it, any more than I find anything amiss in the practice of loading up an enormous floating replica of Las Vegas with a bunch of fearful Americans and whipping them past a dozen tourist-oriented ports of call at thirty knots. I usually had a friend or two among the invited guests, and once, several years ago now, I came across a young man from Moon Township with a short story so amazingly good that on the strength of it alone he was able to sign up an unwritten novel with my agent, a novel long since finished, published to acclaim, sold to the movies, and remaindered; at the time I was on page three hundred or so of my Wonder Boys.
Because WordFest had been conceived by Walter Gaskell, the first party was always held at the Gaskells’, an eccentric, brick Tudor affair, a crooked witch’s hat of a house set back from the street in a leafy pocket of Point Breeze that had been carved, Sara once told me, from the estate of H. J. Heinz. There were vestiges of a massive old wrought-iron fence along the sidewalk, and in the Gaskells’ backyard, beyond Sara’s greenhouse, lay a pair of rusted rails, buried in the grass, the remnants of a small-gauge railroad that had been the childish hobby of some long-dead Heinz heir. The house was much too large for the Gaskells, who, like Emily and me, never had children, and it was filled from crawl space to attic with the inventory of Walter Gaskell’s collection of baseball memorabilia, so that even on those rare occasions when I went over to see Sara and we had the place to ourselves, we were never alone; the grand, dark spaces of the house were haunted by the presence of her husband and by the fainter ghosts of dead ballplayers and tycoons. I liked Walter Gaskell, and I could never lie in his bed without feeling that there was a coarse thread of shame running through the iridescent silk of my desire for his wife.
I’m not, however, going to say that it was never my intention to get involved with Sara Gaskell. I’m a man who falls in love so easily, and with such a reckless lack of consideration for the consequences of my actions, that from the very first instant of entering into a marriage I become, almost by definition, an adulterer. I’ve run through three marriages now, and each time the dissolution was my own fault, clearly and in-controvertibly. I intended to get involved with Sara Gaskell from the moment I saw her, to get involved with her articulate fingers, with the severe engineering of combs and barrettes that prevented her russet hair from falling to her hips, with her conversation that flowed in unnavigable oxbows between opposing shores of tenderness and ironical invective, with the smoke of her interminable cigarettes. We had an apartment we used, in East Oakland, that belonged to the college; Sara Gaskell was the Chancellor, and I met her on my very first day on the job. Our thing had been going on for almost five years now, according to no discernible progression other than the one leading from the crazed fumbling of two people’s hands with a key in an unfamiliar lock to the installation in the Guest Apartment of cable television so that Sara and I could lie on the bed in our underwear and watch old movies on Wednesday afternoons. Neither of us wanted to leave our spouses, or do anything to disturb the tranquil pattern of what was already an old love.
“So is she pretty?” whispered Miss Sloviak as we came scraping up the flagstone steps to the Gaskells’ front door. She gave my belly a poke, reproducing perfectly the condescending but essentially generous manner of a beautiful woman with a homely man. “I think she is,” I was supposed to say.
“Not as pretty as you,” I told her. Sara wasn’t as pretty as Emily, either, and she had none of Emily’s delicacy of skeleton or skittish grace. She was a big woman—tall and busty, with a large behind—and as with most redheaded women what beauty she possessed was protean and odd. Her cheeks and forehead were wild with freckles, and her nose, although cute and retroussé in profile, had a way of looking bulbous when viewed straight on. By the age of twelve she had already reached her present height and bodily dimensions, and I believe it was as a result of this trauma—and the demands of her professional position—that her everyday wardrobe consisted almost entirely of control-top panty hose, plain white cotton blouses, and shapeless tweed suits that spanned a brilliant spectrum from oatmeal to dirt. She imprisoned her glorious hair within its scaffolding of pins, painted a thin copper line across her lips for makeup, and aside from her wedding ring the only jewelry she generally wore was a pair of half-moon reading glasses tied around her neck with a length of athletic shoestring. Undressing her was an act of recklessness, a kind of vandalism, like releasing a zoo full of animals, or blowing up a dam.
“I’m so glad to see you,” I told her, whispering into her ear as she stepped aside to let Crabtree and Miss Sloviak into the oaken foyer of her house. I had to whisper rather loudly because the dog, an Alaskan malamute named Doctor Dee, found amusement in greeting every one of my appearances in the Gaskells’ house, regardless of the circumstances, with an astonishing display of savage barking. Doctor Dee had been blinded in puppyhood by a brain fever, and his weird blue eyes had an unnerving tendency to light on you when his head was pointed in some other direction and you thought, or in my case hoped, that he had forgotten all about you. Sara always blamed the hostile reception I got on his fever-addled brain—he was a loony dog to begin with, an obsessive bur-rower, a compulsive arranger of sticks—but he had also been Walter’s dog before he was Sara’s, and I supposed that had something to do with his feelings about me.
“Hush, now, Dee. Just ignore him, dear,” she told Miss Sloviak, taking the newcomer’s hand with the faintest glint of scientific curiosity in her eye. “And Terry, it’s nice to see you again. You look very dashing.”
Sara was good at the handshaking part of her job and she appeared delighted by our arrival, but her gaze was a little unfocused, there was a tense pleat in her voice, and I saw at once that something was bothering her. As she leaned to accept a kiss from Crabtree, she took a false step and lurched suddenly forward. I reached out and caught her by the elbow.
“Easy
