the two talking in a confiding way, Tom Stall and Ed McPhail stood looking at Stall’s blazer wadded in the pool of blood. The blood was hard and black now on the hot sidewalk.
Stall said, “Who cleans this up?”
McPhail showed Stall his radio. “I’ll get somebody.”
“Soon?”
“Yeah.” McPhail sighed. “Poor guy. You knew him?”
“I knew him.” A little, Stall thought. Too well or not well enough. It was a mystery.
McPhail touched the sleeve of Stall’s blazer with the toe of his shoe. “Yours?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, maybe a dry cleaner . . . ?”
“No.” Stall picked up the coat by the back of the collar and dropped it into the nearest trash can.
* * *
Tom Stall didn’t want to go back to work, and he didn’t want to go home—though he was already framing the words of the story he would tell Maureen over their first martini. He needed to clear his mind, to think—he wasn’t sure about what. He retraced his steps to Anderson Hall, skirted the front entrance, and slipped down the alley between the old redbrick building and Matherly Hall, a newer sandstone structure that housed the College of Business Administration. Across the busy four-lane that divided the campus from the town was a restaurant and general hangout known as the College Inn, CI for short.
Traffic was light in August. In two weeks, it would increase to a temporary madness when hordes of parents arrived to help their sons and daughters carry the trunks and suitcases, the freshly laundered clothes and the desk lamps and electric fans and boxes of books and hotplates and coffee pots for the long nights of cramming that would come in cold November. Stall was in the middle of the street waiting for a Merita Bread truck to pass when he saw the two men come out of the CI. A brown suit and a dark-blue one. No badge that he could see, but the taller man carried a worn brown leather satchel. It was four fifteen and the lowering sun poured its hot light down University Avenue, which ran east and west as true as the flight of a bullet.
The two men stood talking on the sidewalk in front of the CI, only two lanes away from Stall. For some reason, Stall could not make himself walk toward them. He stood on the two yellow lines, a few inches of safety in the middle of the street, watching them until they noticed him. The man in the blue suit, the taller of the two, a man with an athletic build, short blond hair, and a handsome face that reminded Stall of the actor Alan Ladd, nodded to Stall. Then the two men walked east toward the intersection of University Avenue and 13th Street, where the citizens of Gainesville crossed from the town to the campus. University was an avenue of clothing stores, restaurants, bars, and theaters that gave way eventually to the old downtown and the buildings that housed justice, religion, and commerce. Crossing the remaining two lanes in long strides, Stall watched the men go. Before he entered the College Inn, one of the few air-conditioned buildings in the town, he looked down at his shirtsleeves and remembered pulling on the new blazer that morning.
Stall was alone in the place except for the counterman who was stacking silverware in racks for the coming dinner rush. The coffee Stall ordered was a gooey reduction that had sat thickening since lunch. He thought with longing of the glittering bottles that lined the bar at the Gold Coast next door and then noticed the phone booth in the corner. Should he call Amos Harding? Harding, the aging department chairman, was Stall’s boss and the man he hoped to replace someday. In late August, Harding vacationed in the mountains of North Carolina, a place he loved for the isolation and the trout fishing, and for the absence of his wife who stayed in Gainesville with her sister. Why bother the old man with bad news? He’ll be back soon . . . soon enough to hear of death.
TWO
Still in his shirtsleeves and feeling the return of the adrenal energy that had poured through him during that long half hour at Murphree Hall, Stall leaned on the kitchen counter and watched his wife slice tomatoes for their salad. The good smell of roast beef came from the oven. Their first martinis stood crystalline on either side of the sink, Stall’s half finished, his wife’s untouched. She had stopped crying, but Stall could see the pathways of her tears in the light dusting of powder she had applied for his homecoming. The two things, the makeup she had put on for him and her tears, moved Stall so much that his own eyes burned. He took a long pull of cold gin and turned away to square himself. He had banished their daughter Corey from the kitchen at the first sight of Maureen’s tears and without any proper explanation for her exile, and he knew he’d have to make that right with her soon. Maureen put down her knife and rinsed red tomato juice from her hands.
“Jack Leaf. I just can’t . . . How do you understand a thing like this?” She looked at Stall out of swollen red eyes as though she meant the question, as though she thought he could tell her how.
He shook his head thoughtfully and took another sip of the good cold gin. Gin, he thought, how I love it. It’s one way to deal with the surprising hell of life. He had not told Maureen that, after he had tried the coffee in the CI and found it to be not enough, not by a long way, he had gone next door to the Gold Coast, a student dive, for two stiff shots of bourbon before taking the city bus home. She’d had the martinis waiting when he walked in the door and he’d taken a long sip of gin to cover the bourbon before giving Maureen her first kiss. Then he’d told her about Jack Leaf’s walk in the air.
Maureen drew in a hiss of breath. “Oh my God, did you . . . did anyone call Sarah?”
Oh Christ, Sarah. Jack’s wife Sarah.
Bourbon-stunned, Stall had ridden the bus home to their prairie-
style house on a hill just up from the construction site for the new law school. They’d bought this house so that he could walk and bus to work and Maureen could keep their Packard at home. She’d told him she’d be a housewife for him, but not housebound like her mother had been. She wouldn’t be without a car for anyone. As the bus had labored up the hill past the vast sprawl of married-student housing, Stall had thought through what he had done for Jack Leaf and for the university. When he’d finished the sad inventory of his actions, he’d said to himself, I did my duty. Now, standing beside Maureen in their kitchen waiting for a second martini, he had to tell his wife that it hadn’t occurred to him to call Sarah Leaf, or even to wonder who would call her. The awful thought hit him that right now Sarah could be standing at her own kitchen sink paring carrots and waiting for Jack to come home.
“God, Mar baby, I didn’t think of that, what with all I had to . . .”
Maureen turned and looked at him sharply, and the fear came alight in Stall’s brain that she might cry again. A woman’s tears had always turned Tom Stall into a standing heap of mush.
His wife’s eyes softened but not into tears. She gave him her frailty-thy-name-is-man look, which, considering her options, was at least in the upper third of good outcomes. He gave her his I’m-very-sorry smile, his only option. “Do you think I should call her now?”
It was a day of things occurring to Stall and one came to him now: he, they, Tom Stall and wife, would have to visit Sarah Leaf, and soon. They’d have to go to Sarah’s door with food of some kind, probably Maureen’s chicken-and–mushroom soup casserole, and they’d have to say and do the right things. Stall dreaded it, not because he found no meaning in such things, and not because he took the fashionable literary view of bourgeois convention (which right now meant a French existentialist view, the harshest of any available), but because he was
