OK. For thirty years, you and I would meet in the corridor on the seventh floor of Murkington Hall with all the offices on either side. Salvidor Dali might have painted the doors progressively smaller and made the lines that describe the corridor converge on a distant point. The title? "No End in Sight", "Bureauperspective", "Seventh Heaven"...

Did it look like that when we met?

It didn't look like that to me.

In a locker room.

I remember.

Perhaps I am making up for those thirty years.

I am not sure that your metaphor is appropriate, but it was clear from the outset that you and I had nothing in common. I saw that any discussion would result in endless disagreement. Perhaps worse.

Ha! Ha! Ha!

I am afraid your question seems naïve to me. People are different, Gus. Particularly PhDs and more particularly PhDs in the humanities because their specialization takes them even further away from each other. Everything separates us, everything.

You are being stubborn.

I already said you have to work like hell to get the truth.

... Your background...

I didn't say that.

I didn't say that.

I didn't say any of that.

Gus, you are doing exactly what I meant when I said any discussion between us would result in endless disagreement. Let's clean this mess up. I never thought you were half of what you just said. As for the other half, I could hardly blame you for being a straight with a southern accent even though I am just the opposite.

Weren't they? Weren't you?

Are you an idealist?

No, but I am skeptical. Are there any true idealists? Again, I am skeptical.

And you suspect me of enjoying unearned and undeserved privileges?

I am afraid that sounds a little arrogant. What privileges?

You know as well as I do that all of those things are decided by standard procedures. Each professor has the right to know the reasons for the raise he receives and to appeal the decision if he thinks he has been treated unfairly. Faculty committees participate in the decisions on tenure, promotions, grants, lecture invitations, teaching awards...

The dean appoints the committees on tenure and promotion. His influence ensures that his friends predominate on the Research Grant and Salary Appeal Committees. Lecture invitations often go to friends at other institutions who have already invited the inviter or will invite him back. Half of the money allocated for lectures is wasted on mediocrities. Although the Faculty Council elects the Teaching Awards Committee and we elect the Council, the dean controls the Council. No wonder teaching awards usually go to his friends. That's how you got one.

That's an outrage!

There is a difference and the difference is important. Both render services that the university could ill afford to do without, but why should I explain all that again?

Your ignorant contempt for administration misleads you into taking effects for causes.

If you had really wanted to reform the administration, you would have run for the Council and, if you had been elected, you could have advocated the changes you deemed necessary. You would have had to negotiate with the other members of the Council to get some of them enacted, but you don't have the patience to do that. You and too many others don't want to sacrifice the time and energy it takes to make such changes, yet you reserve the right to find fault with our efforts. If a significant majority of the faculty participated in Council elections and took an interest in the proceedings, the Council would have more influence on the dean.

Professors who refuse to support the only representative assembly available to them are either too selfish or too lazy to do their part. They enjoy the luxury of more time at their disposal. Why shouldn't the enormous amount of work that has to be done earn compensation?

Because most of it is job creation. Many do the work of a few. Committees multiply to accommodate the mediocrities eager to serve on them. The mediocrities push down and pull up on the pump inflating the bureaucracy, which swells like an innertube. Eliminate a third of the committees, replace another third by an administrator and keep the final third. Fire two thirds of the vice presidents, deans, other officers and their secretaries. The savings would pay the salaries of enough additional professors to lower the number of students per professor to twenty-five. Maybe common sense would finally establish the fact that teaching requires contact between fellow human beings, which machines may be able to facilitate but never to replace. It takes an office environment to incubate the foolish notion that reducing the number of professors will increase the efficiency of education. The university is not an industry like the others. You can't educate people the way you produce cars.

The principle is unquestionable and the end you seek is desirable, but the means you advocate will never achieve that end.

Do you realize the chaos that would result from the elimination of two thirds of our administrators and committees?

Are you calling me a parasite?

No secretary ever lied about my whereabouts.

I was available every morning.

I had research to do.

officers responsible for their decisions. I could have appealed to it, for instance, to fire you for tampering with my tenure dossier.

What?

You must be out of your mind! Those procedures guarantee the rights of the candidates and shield committee members from attempts to influence their decisions.

You dare...!

... Gus, you are raving again. How do you know what happens at cocktail parties when you attend so few of them?

I can assure you that such leaks are rare.

What can I say?

I would be insincere. Your dreams rise like smoke from resentment over incidents that offended you, but you have had little experience with administration.

lady beloved of all who knew her. The committee approved her proposal the next semester when the chairlady, who was an associate dean, replaced me without even telling me. At the time, I attributed this replacement to a letter from the history professor with copies for the president and the governor. The chairlady had read the letter to me and I saw that the author was trying to scare me. You are smiling.

You never watch your step.

I was the chairperson then. I heard about your objections to Mary-Ann Spencer's course on classroom plants and Steve Wannamaker's Holocaust course. A lot of people disagreed with you on their academic value and they found that you were disrupting the proceedings of the committee. I thought Dean Chatinski's solution of the problem was adroit. She soothed hurt feelings and did you no harm. You had more time to devote to research.

She consulted me. 

Partly. Some people thought you were a bull in a China shop.

I'm not in biology.

As chairperson of the French Department, I had no right to judge the academic value of a course in biology.

I would tell my niece or nephew that I am not sure such a course would serve his or her needs.

... Do you promise never to tell anyone?

... I would tell him not to waste his time.

Peace costs a few exceptions to the rule.

If we had dealt with all issues strictly by due process, we would have had a war.

Let's hear some examples.

Of course! You were accusing them of injustice.

Proving guilt is complicated. They probably didn't agree that the projects were worthless. Such decisions are made by committees to ensure balance. Although you haven't heard of him, the poet, whose name is John Skelty, is well-known statewide and poets who publish 

frequently

What's wrong with that?

I resent that. Marvin Spratly may be one of my friends, but he doesn't do me or anyone else any favors when he evaluates manuscripts. That is an irresponsible accusation and the sociologist

That's malicious. I heard his speech. He clearly meant that the writers he publishes become his friends and not vice versa.

I'm afraid you sound a little paranoid. The sociologist, who is not my friend, is Lilly Likely and, even by your standards, she is distinguished because she has published extensively on the feminist movement.

Indeed, study of the trend she and her friends have promoted hardly accommodates a scholarly perspective, as some of her colleagues in sociology complain. On the other hand, you were offending people unnecessarily when you served on the Research Grant Committee. No committee can make much progress without the cooperation of its members and one obstructionist

One obstructionist on a committee can waste a lot of time or even, in flagrant cases, stall the proceedings. Abe faced the same problem as Chatinski and used the same solution, which I approve of. A row serves no one's purposes.

Corruption is a big, nasty word.

If it's any comfort to you, others control the university now and Lilly Likely is one of them. I remind you: she is not my friend and she wastes no opportunity to remind me. And my friends.

So you eventually lost the competition for the gravy. They will too when a new trend emerges and the new charlatans elbow the old ones out of the way, except for those who know how to flip-flop. You used to flip-flop with the best of them. Age must have rusted your hinges.

If you don't moderate your language, I am going to leave.

Of course I deny it! There's a difference between bending and snapping.

If you had not always used that language, I would be tempted to say "sour grapes."

I can guess.

I am glad you did. It was a successful and useful career. If you had dedicated yourself to such a foolish ideal, you wouldn't have achieved any more than Don Quixote and your career would have ended in early frustration.

As usual, you are making abstract distinctions in practical matters that require flexibility. No organization can function unless the employees cooperate with their employers. My cooperation with the administration and my service as an administrator were useful. Do you begrudge me the compensation they gave me for it?

I am controlling myself.

It's not because I agree with you.

No, the stakes were higher then. We had an entire career in front of us.

You are being optimistic.

What would you say if I replied that it isn't reasonable to negotiate when you have nothing to gain.

You have a way of simplifying things to your advantage.

I would say that you are titting for my tat... It is my turn to ask you: "What's wrong?"

We discussed them in faculty meetings.

The actual performance pales by comparison with your description. No one else stands up in faculty meetings. Why does Sinkovitch stand up to speak when only twenty people are listening? He must have gone to a military school.

Not really. I don't see much of them anywhere except in "Seventh Heaven." We don't go anywhere together, invite each other over, have lunch together... They drink beer, listen to rock, watch basketball and football, laugh at sitcoms... Perhaps that is why they are such good teachers.

Yes. Sinkovitch and Mumpet do that by showing their students that people just like them can benefit from culture.

How do you know how much research they have done? They haven't published very much, but that doesn't prove that they haven't done a lot of reading.

Listen to rock.

Remember: they are not my friends. If they are answering students' questions about which courses to take, they are wrong. I inquired when I was the chairperson and I found no evidence of that.

I consulted the dean. There was really nothing I could do as long as students packed their courses and praised their teaching.

I would have had to explain why.

People dissatisfied with their raise are hard to convince.

That is very unfair.

Ramming it down their throats would have justified their protest against injustice. We would have had endless bickering over how much is productive.

They were not the only ones opposed to that measure.

Definitely not.

Yesss!

Me too.

I have observed unusual bias and cunning.

I have always thought that he is a very clever demagogue. He and Sinkovitch have that in common.

No.

Of course not. The process selects the best potential professors and not the best potential preachers. Any moral standard would undermine the essential standards of intelligence and competence. Shouldn't education expose students to all kinds of professors just as life will expose them to all kinds of people?

Damn!

You asked me and I told you.

I would give him a crooked straight answer.

Excellent analogy!

I would advise him or her to go to one where some of the faculty were popular with the students and some had distinguished themselves by their research.

I am substituting practical reality for your theoretical abstraction. What faculty doesn't include both kinds and even a few who are both distinguished and popular?

I would recommend the one with the highest proportion of scholar-teachers.

No, but concurring testimony by colleagues who have visited a professors' classes and students who have taken those classes is convincing evidence.

It will convince others if corroborated by reputable scholars and practically all of the students in the professor's classes.

Yes I did too!

I might be tempted to concede the point.

That has happened to me, but you are describing boys running after Sinkovitch and girls running after Mumpet.

Do you have any doubt about the cause?

Given the circumstances...

So have I.

Yes, there is a regrettable symmetry between the two of them, but I should think you would allow them a little fun as long as no one gets hurt. You mentioned subtlety and I would add decency. I would feel more comfortable if all our colleagues indulged themselves with more discretion and greater elegance. You agreed that the university attracts all kinds of people. Shouldn't our profession too?

Martin for the movies, Randy for a restaurant, Greg for a basketball game... Why feel sorry for them?

That sounds like cruel and unusual punishment.

Did it sound like the Comédie Française?

I wish you had recorded it.

I love ballet, but at that age...

A blushing Auguste! How did she do it?

I feel sorry for the young men who fall in love with her.

True, and men a lot more handsome. All I knew was that you had a family.

For me, it's exactly the opposite.

Ha! Ha! Ha!

I rather enjoy the zoo. The monkeys make me laugh and I admire the bear. I play with the garter snakes and watch the anaconda from a safe distance.

Sinkovitch? Someone must have yanked his fangs.

I don't like going home.

There's no one there.

I only do that when my obligations exceed the possibilities of groups from three to five once a week in any month. I rarely have overnight guests for more than twenty-four hours. Even if we have not seen each other in a long time, we will have told each other all we want to hear by then.

I go out only once a week too. When my schedule is full, I decline almost all invitations. I have a repertory of suitable excuses, which also come in handy for people who need a bachelor... Why am I telling you all of this? I never told anyone else.

Don't ask me. Your friends, your real friends, must have guessed it all by now.

I'm sure they have, but they sympathize with me enough to say nothing. I would feel insecure if I let the chips fall.

Yes, I do sometimes, but I try to anticipate it by planning trips. New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Montreal... Since I travel alone, I have no trouble meeting interesting people. Individuals, couples, both sexes and all ages. I watch and listen carefully without appearing to until I think they are worth talking to, then I ask their opinion about something intriguing. In a plane, it might be the color of clouds in the light of a setting sun; in a theater, an actor's ironical interpretation of a certain line; during a concert, the playful execution of a cello passage; in a restaurant, the herb in the slice of the baked potato.

You congratulated me on my dry tone of voice. I combine it with a frigid politeness that I have developed to extricate myself from unpromising situations. It was particularly useful when I served as a chairperson and later as a dean. 

Surprises nearly always have that effect on me. I once had a bad surprise, so bad that I decided I would never run the risk of such a surprise again. The more experience I acquired, the more it enabled me to reduce the risk, but computers accelerated the process. Now I program nearly everything I do, distinguishing between activities that I can foresee a year, a month and a week in advance. I review my calendar every evening before I go to bed.

Where did they send you?

I couldn't do that. It would disrupt my planning, I would lose control and something unpleasant might happen.

Don't unpleasant things happen anyway?

... Yes, they do, but only one as unpleasant as my divorce. You have heard about my divorce?

I don't know why I am telling you all of this.

Why did they call her that?

How would you like another Martini?

You were going to tell me why they called her Murma.

How about her heart?

I thought you didn't believe in prayer.

The second event seems more like a miracle than the first. What is it exactly about Murma's laugh? I have never heard her laugh. I hope you don't mind my calling her Murma?

My wife's name was Melody.

Serously, we called her Mel. 

You said you met a pretty girl who made you forget the others. I don't think I had ever noticed any others. We were scarcely old enough to realize why we were different from each other.

There was an advantage to that. I feel sorry for teen-agers now. They know too much already.

Mel knew too much already. You say it was the way Murma laughed. It was the way Mel looked at me. Everyone was looking at her and she was looking at me, and looking at me in that peculiar way I never could understand. We were married as soon as our parents would let us, as soon as we had graduated from college.

Yes, but Hollywood told only half the story, the half that sold. We had been behaving as if we were married all through high school and college. We were careful, but, no matter how careful you are, parents, friends and others will guess. They guessed, said nothing and did nothing, thank God! Did nothing? They did tacitly conspire to let us keep on doing what we could no longer do without. They must have understood that, if they had tried to stop us, they would only have antagonized our determination.

I'm sure it does. Mel had an insatiable appetite. She would lose her head and I would try to keep her quiet, but people must have heard her, perhaps even in the street. I would struggle to satisfy her, but she was never satisfied. She exhausted me, yet I have never known such pleasure. It was so intense that it inspired a foreboding that spoiled it. I was riding a runaway horse.

Yes and no. We went to graduate school together and got an MA in French although she had majored in Chinese. I was appalled when she gave Chinese up, but she insisted on taking the same program that I did. No one has ever had a more dedicated wife!

And never found one, not even a French-Chinese comparison.

She was Chinese-Jewish or Jewish-Chinese, if you can imagine that.

Her mother was Chinese. Mine was French. Our fathers were Jewish.

I told you: everyone was staring at her.

In the library at first and then away from the library. I would come home and she wasn't there, so I would go and look for her. At first, I would find her, in tears, and we couldn't get back to the appartment fast enough. Then one day, after a course I was teaching, I passed a graduate student who had never paid any attention to me before. This time, he looked at me. Meanwhile, it was harder and harder to find Mel. Finally, I felt desperate enough to call the campus police, then the city police. They were very discreet, which made me feel even worse, and they didn't know anything. I wandered around in the dark and, if you can believe it, it was a beautiful night with a slender crescent moon. When the sun began to light up the horizon, I wondered if I were just watching a movie, but then something tore apart inside of me.

They rely on metaphor, such as tearing a sheet of paper, but the manipulation of sound has become an end in itself.

So can I. Too bad Hollywood never learned how to make a movie without a romance full of sugary platitudes! 

I thought it was a great southern dish.

They made me stand in a corner at Passover because I couldn't swallow sweet wine. I still can't, it turns my stomach.

Yes, I know.

me. The more she resisted, the more I wanted to hit her and I finally managed a glancing slap at her cheek, which she took with triumphant satisfaction. Only then did I realize that she had wanted to make me hit her, wanted to drive me to do what I least wanted to do, wanted to force the serpent to bite its own tale. She inflicted this humiliation on me as punishment for the humiliation I had inflicted on her by enjoying the company of another woman so much that I had failed to notice her.

Revenge.

I bet she would tell the story differently.

Mel and I never quarreled. Perhaps that was why we broke up. When she staid out all night, I didn't ask her where she had been and she didn't say. Instead, we had ever more desperate reconciliations at greater intervals. Our friends were always in a rush to do something that couldn't wait. The more I buried myself in my research, the more I felt the ground crumbling under my feet.

Yes. I had always felt as if I had had an endless amount of time at my disposal, but, suddenly, it seemed to be slipping away.

I wasn't even thirty. One day, I was talking to my dissertation director, Félicien Mausabre. He was still in his thirties then and women were cooing over him. We would spend more time than either of us could afford discussing seventeenth-century poetry. He had published several books in that field and you probably remember that my dissertation was on sensual pleasure in Saint-Amant. It was like tennis: I would mention an aroma, he would compare it to the taste of the corresponding fruit, I would admire the shape of that fruit and he would praise the color. We would hit the ball back and forth like that for over an hour. Suddenly, he would raise his wrist and look at his watch, so I would apologize for keeping him and get up to leave, but he would regret that we didn't have more time.

He said he had something else to tell me, so I sat down. It was the job I have now. Morph, whose dissertation he had also directed, was chairing the department. Mausabre told me I couldn't find a better job, I would have a good library at my disposal and I would have no trouble 

finishing my dissertation. He had already talked to Morph about salary, Morph had given him the range and, although Mausabre had promised not to repeat the exact figures, he assured me that I could negotiate a good salary.

Yes, but I didn't know what to say because of Mel. I was hoping he would say, "Of course, you will talk it over with your wife. Let me know what you decide." He didn't, though, and the silence had become embarrassing before he added that, while Morph had to go through the screening process to satisfy his administration, "he will hire you."

No, that is what he was telling me.

She was waiting for me. For the first time, she avoided my gaze.

As for her, she would have to stay and get her dissertation started, but we could take turns flying back and forth to see each other on weekends.

It never started. I was having some coffee in the library, trying to stay awake, and some young men, who kept reminding each other that they had met to study for a test, got off on the subject that young men always get off on. It was as if I didn't exist. I was about to leave when I thought I heard one of them say something about Mel Goldstein. I don't remember what he said exactly, I am not even sure he said it, but I can still hear them laughing, it wakes me up in the middle of the night and I will hear them laughing as I lay dying.

How could they laugh at her without laughing at me? The last time I saw her, we met on the sidewalk in front of our residence on a sunny day. I was coming home after my class and she was leaving. She was wearing a purple miniskirt in fake leather that barely... You know what I mean. She had always dressed modestly, but, this time, she was showing more of her legs than she ever had before away from swimming pools and beaches. She had extraordinary legs. She hadn't covered her top much either. She was wearing a pink halter that looked like it would fall off if she wiggled her shoulders. She had never worn 

lipstick before and here she was smeared with a dark red that was coming off on a long cigarette dangling from her lips. Neither of us had ever smoked. There was perfume in the air all around her and she knew I hated perfume. It reminded me of the stuff they put in public toilets. She must have calculated, staged and timed the whole performance, although I didn't realize it then. How could I? I felt eyes looking at us from the windows on every side.

I came to the same conclusion years later. I was so stunned at the time that I didn't even ask myself, "What have I done to deserve this?" I just wanted to disappear and there was nowhere to go without crossing an area where everyone would continue to see me. The space and the time that separated me from disappearance seemed impassable. Years later, when I returned to the spot, I saw that the entrance to our building could only have been ten yards away, only a few seconds...

Mel threw her cigarette on the ground without taking a last big suck on it like smokers in the habit of throwing cigarettes away. It was probably the first one she had ever put in her mouth. Once she had complained that Mausabre smelled of tobacco. She came up close to me, without touching me or looking at me, and whispered, "I'm sorry, Si."

Never. Her belongings disappeared in phases from the appartment at times when she knew I was teaching or working in the library. A few years ago, a friend of ours told me that she had been through four mariages and as many jobs. He insisted on reassuring me, although I tried to change the subject, that he had never touched her. He must have realized he was really telling me that nearly everyone else had. He knew that I knew he was gay, even then.

... How could I have been during my ten years with Mel? Once she had removed most of the things in the appartment that reminded me of her, I got rid of the rest. Without giving it any thought, I found myself determined never to risk such a humiliation again. Mel had spoiled the very memory of my life with her. I was lurching back and forth between nostalgia and disgust. Whatever she had intended -- Did she know herself? -- she jolted me into what I have become and, although it has never satisfied me, I can't imagine myself otherwise. My friends, who admire my independence and tranquillity, take me for a happy man...

 

55 of 65 (C)

So did I.

And so I am, until I come home to an empty house. Sooner or later, I sit down and play...

I play for Mel. She used to sit beside me and I would play until I felt the bench shake, ever so slightly. I find myself waiting for the bench to shake.

Everyone I can remember from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. Schubert especially.

So did Mel. You are not going to tell anyone?

Murma doesn't like me!

That custom was even more revolting than ridiculous. I did nothing to encourage it. It seems to have arisen from Julie-Anne's habit of continuing her lecture wherever she went.

They expected me to say something. I was trying to be conversational.

Vaguely.

I must have been very unpleasant.

I had forgotten that incident. In fact, I didn't even think of it as an incident. So Murma never forgot?

How could she? I wondered what rule of etiquette I had broken, but she reminded me that etiquette itself had exposed us to the most arrogant insult either of us had ever suffered.

Interesting... The humiliation inflicted on me by Mel seems to have embittered me against all beautiful women. Having a circle of my own must have gone to my head too. It took me a few more years to reach a level of dignity and elegance that I have tried to maintain ever since. Did Murma notice the difference?

There was no proof that anyone had dissuaded graduate students from taking your course. I investigated.

Yes, I gave up trying to reason with you a long time ago. But don't you think there was some exaggeration in all of this prophesy? I thought you didn't believe in prophecy.

Listening doesn't necessarily imply agreement. I have always wondered why things seem so different to different people. I understand your opinion and your point of view. I even sympathize with you, but I don't think you have ever understood ours or sympathized with us.

People are different from each other, they can't achieve anything without working together and that requires endless compromise. The university lives only because it lies on a bed of compromise, explicit and tacit. You have always refused to compromise.

themselves, as you say, to working together and making compromises. You forget, however, that they work together mostly for mutual advantage and their compromises are deals that sacrifice the interests of all who do have ability but refuse to compromise themselves. You and your friends keep that bed to yourselves.

You are distorting my metaphor.

Look! We could go on for hours like this without agreeing on much more than we do now, which is not very much. You have a plenty of imagination: imagine my rebuttal of your rebuttal. Are you tired?

No.

I'm leaving tommorrow morning.

This is our last chance.

Further than that.

I only have six months.

I told you: I am on medication.

I don't feel too badly. You were knocking medical science for eradicating old diseases so we can die from new ones that are much worse.

No. They call it Edgehammer's Syndrome. Only a hundred cases are diagnosed in the world every year.

I would be less lucky if I had Alzheimer's, AIDS, cancer, multiple sclerosis...

No one has survived much longer than that.

No. I have discussed it exhaustively with doctors. I would rather talk about something else. Metaphysics, for instance.

I had read some of your books and articles, and I reread them recently. You have given some thought to dying.

Indeed! The doctors tell me that they can dose my medication so that there will be little discomfort or pain. No one knows what night I will go to sleep and not wake up the next morning.

They have seen it happen.

If I didn't know that, I wouldn't know that there will be little discomfort or pain.

Of course, but that isn't possible, Gus. One difference between us is that you see everything from a theoretical viewpoint and I see everything from a practical viewpoint.

I don't know whether I can take this.

You were dead five or ten minutes.

Some would object: How do you know that, if your death had resulted from a more lethal cause, you wouldn't have waked up in an entirely different place?

Just a minute: some have claimed that they or others have come back. I think they were lying or deluded, but there are hundreds of millions

When they told me I was going to die, I had a bad week. It was like a continuous nightmare. I wonder whether roasting over hot coals as devils pricked me with their pitchforks wouldn't have made me laugh. I had been through something similar after Mel met me in front of our residence with her miniskirt, halter, lipstick and cigarette.

I never saw one. Friends tell me that they enjoy watching things happen to others and knowing that it will not happen to them. This was happening to me.

No. I will try to tell you how it felt... The idea of my own destruction relentlessly invaded my conscience spreading its ramifications in every direction. One by one, it smothered the memories that formed my identity, beginning with the most recent ones, so that I was shrinking back to my earliest self. Have you ever wondered what it would be like to forget everything that has happened in recent minutes? hours? days? months? years? I became a reverse baby shrieking with terror, when the phone rang. The habit of reaching for the receiver brought me back to my senses. The next-door neighbor was alarmed. I told him that I had been having a nightmare, thanked him for waking me up and apologized for waking him up.

You are the only one who knows except for doctors.

I didn't intend to tell you, I didn't intend to tell anyone. I must have told you because I could see that you wouldn't weave the usual cocoon of distraction around me.

I have done it myself. I was afraid to bring up the only subject that mattered and I suppose the others were too, especially the one on the bed. We were indulging in a tacit conspiracy to make the worst kind of small talk. Yet the thought that we were frustrating his most urgent need kept nagging at me. We were aggravating his despair.

Ha! Ha! Ha! If you had been a Catholic priest, you would have confirmed the poor sinner's worst fears.

Neither could I.

My! How persistent you are!

After all I have said, you still want to know why I avoided you all those years and refused to discuss issues of interest to both of us. It won't be easy to satisfy your curiosity because the reasons are complex and some of them are inaccessible.

Poets and psychoanalysts.

Like an occult science? I would never agree for fear that you might quote me.

You want to know why I persistently avoided and opposed you for thirty years?

All right, take the example of psychoanalysis. How many of your fellow professors

have committed themselves to psychoanalysis, whether they really believe in it or not? How many others would side with them, for one reason or another, if you made war on psychoanalysis?

Who knows? I would guess that all of the social sciences and a third of the humanities belong to the first category. Maybe another third of the humanities and a third of the experimental sciences belong to the second.

Only a third of the experimental sciences?

You know more about that than I do, but, according to your own estimate, a war on psychoanalysis would antagonize an overwhelming majority of the faculty.

No, but merely refrain from expressing an opinion on the subject.

Our duty? Not mine!

How are you going to confound them? Even if you dropped everything and dedicated yourself to the study of psychoanalysis...

You took the words out of my mouth.

You are painting in black and white again. The subject has many colors and each has many shades. For someone as sensitive to visual art as you are, how can you ignore the diversity of attitudes among administrators and professors?

Aren't you ignoring a majority who deplore the greed and the corruption as much as you do, but who see no point in provoking the perpetrators and collaborate with them only to turn them in a better direction?

Certainly not! I paint them dark too, but less dark than the campus mafia. Why excuse cowards who, though afraid to indulge in evil themselves, profit from the evil that others do? Evil is rare, expediency is rank.

And evil has more influence than moderation?

What you call expediency, I call moderation.

Apparently we are not going to settle that one.

Perhaps it's time for me to ask you something that has kept my head spinning for some time now. I wouldn't ask it if I didn't think you would be as sincere as usual!

Once you had overcome the surprise of seeing me come up to you a few hours ago, you were treating me like an old friend. It seemed spontaneous to me. We have been kidding each other as if we had always known each other well enough to do that. Yet you have been telling me all the wrong that you think I have done to you. I should think my company would make you feel uneasy.

The experience has been somewhat the same for me, except that I wouldn't describe you as my worst enemy. I don't know what words I would use... Tell me: how would you have responded if your worst enemy had implored your forgiveness, whether he looked you in the eyes or groveled tearfully before you offering to do any penitence you wanted, such as crawling on his knees from Concordia to Mapleton?

And in the first case?

Your response comes as no surprise. I anticipated it, including the violence with which you would have reacted to such a spectacle. In fact, I applaud, although I probably would have had a different reaction myself... Listen: How would you respond if your worst enemy told you: 

"You are convinced that I have been doing great harm to you for the last thirty years. I don't agree with you, but I am willing to leave you enough wealth when I die so that you will no longer feel like a victim."

Yes, I did that on purpose.

Possible. Why not?

Why couldn't you? I inherited some wealth from my parents and I haven't done too badly myself. In addition to TIAA-CREF, I have a portfolio that few humanities professors ever achieve. My niece and nephew are wealthier than I am. What I could leave them might give them more trouble than comfort. Name your price. How much do I owe you by your own reckoning? I will have to see my lawyer anyway and I will ask him to add a codicil to my will.

I expected to meet with determined resistance. It's amusing to hear you cling to conventional morality. What can I say or do to convince you?

You just jumped through my hoop again. I had foreseen that you would have practically the same reaction that you did. But shouldn't we leave the scholarship open to all minorities?

How about women?

Why name it after me? We could call it the Augustus South Scholarship.

I'm a free man, Gus. Who has greater freedom than someone who knows he will die six months from now? If I named it the South-Goldstein Scholarship, you couldn't even sue my estate. There are too many other people named South.

... You are trying to put one over on me, Si. You have no intention of going through with it. Even if you did, you would change your mind as soon as you heard from your niece or nephew.

I haven't heard from either in years. I will send you a copy of the will with the codicil.

I thought you didn't care what people think!

Remember, you think he was just a man. Perhaps even a rabble-rouser.

Joke? You will be remembered as a victim reconciled with his worst enemy.

You don't believe in him either.

Ha! Ha! Ha!

Including the possiblity of good will among men. I didn't believe in that until we had this discussion. I will follow your advice all the more eagerly because I had already thought of it myself, except for naming it after both of us.

Because it is, as you say, a wonderful joke, because half of the investment is yours anyway, by your own reckoning at least, and because we may be the first human beings who ever agreed to disagree for the rest of eternity. Isn't that worth a monument of some kind to edify posterity?

Rather that you want to change them and I think that would make them worse.

It's the best possible solution for one of the mysteries in my life. I suppose everyone has such mysteries. Once I had survived the crisis of discovering that I only had six months left, I decided to dedicate the time to solving these mysteries, to the extent that they can be solved.

I don't know.

I hadn't thought of that. Perhaps you are right. You see, I don't reject all of your ideas.

Well, now it is late. If I said that knowing you has enriched my life, you would be tempted to call me a hypocrite. I will only say that, if we are wrong about an afterlife, I will be waiting for you and the pleasure of disagreeing for the rest of eternity.

Thanks for the French Martini, Gus!

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