Klein, a nervous young man whose overcoat in winter hung down far below his knees, felt shame that he was several years older than his fellow students, felt shame that he was seized often by an inexplicable panic, alone or with others, felt shame that he was poor. He was a graduate student in a state university that serviced thirty thousand students, having come to his life’s work (he realized with shame), after having been frightened out of other, lesser tasks: clerking, work in the Railway Express, work at his father’s filling station. He had slid from one job to another, one segment of his life to another, as if he had been loosed at the top of a great jagged hill and could not control his destiny. Once come to the university, he had known that this was the fate he desired, but he did not feel strong enough to attain it. He imitated others: he bought, he read books (his room was filled with books) he wrote papers for his courses, he studied French and German, he lived alone, lost weight (his mother’s mechanical accusation), had few friends, acquaintances rather, he made his own meals up in the room or had them in drugstores, he took notes hour after hour in the library, he appeared, a gentle weary apparition, on the sidewalk before his apartment house with books in his arm. With shame he was familiar: he had grown up with it. Before his father he had had to be ashamed of his mother, who cried endlessly, was endlessly sick, was insulted by his father’s mother, a stout woman with a coat that had a meager fur collar he had always been fascinated by as a child; before his mother he had had to be ashamed of his father, who begged for work around the neighborhood, offering estimates no one wanted, reading up on modern mechanics so he could compete with other service stations — a desperate attempt that Klein, when no more than a child of eight, knew to be hopeless. At the garage his father scurried about in all weather, checking air in tires, checking oil, his face reddened and forlorn. Of his bony wrists Klein had had to be ashamed, taking the bus downtown to the library: they had stuck out of his shirt sleeves for all to see. Of his sister’s ruthless blond hair, and of her language to their mother he had had to be ashamed. Of their house (they lived over the garage), the stairs on the outside of the building and enclosed by a feeble tar-papered canopy: of his thin arms and legs, in gym class at school: of his shame itself. Now, at twenty-nine, he took assessment of himself in his room five blocks from the great university library, sitting on the edge of his bed, doing nothing, having done nothing all day (it was Sunday), and understood that his shame for his life had grown so great that he must die: but he had ten weeks to go before the semester was over, and he did not like to betray the people who had hired him, trusted him, given him fifteen hundred dollars for the year and the title “emergency help.”
He attended classes during the day and taught two classes of his own, remedial composition, in the late afternoon and evening, three days a week. Before each class he was visited with panic, terror that he would break down before the hour ended. This never happened, but his panic did not end. He was perhaps ashamed of the old building to which his classes had been assigned, and he understood that the dank, dusty air of the basement room had come to suffuse him, had been breathed into him, had come to define him. His students were desperate, doomed young people, many of them from the country, remote incidental rural sections of the state, bewildered at their failure (they were assigned to this course because they were far below average in English), unable to comprehend his teaching, his encouragement, his love. Their failure had widened their eyes, giving them the alert, electric look of animals to whom all movements signal danger. Like animals, they appeared mild and obedient until, knowing themselves trapped, they slashed out at him as if he were the crystallization of the forces that had maimed them — the obscure, mysterious spirit of the famous university itself, so available to them (they, with their high school diplomas) and yet, as it turned out, not so forbidden to them, its great machinery even now working, perhaps, to process cards, grades, symbols that would send them back to their families and the lives they supposed they had escaped.
Standing before his classes, eraser and chalk in hand, Klein sometimes deluded himself into thinking that his students’ grave, attentive expressions were related to his presence; that they were actually learning, changing before his eyes. He wrote sentences on the board in his nervous handwriting: they watched. There in the first row, in the 4:30 class, the usual girls, crowded in close, staring and sightless — the lank handsome girl with the blond braids coiled ascetically about her head, chill and feigning attention, absolutely illiterate; the plump, smiling, perpetually astonished little girl in the pink sweater, also illiterate, with a baby’s tiny handwriting and circled dots over her i’s; the thin bespeckled girl who mentioned often in her compositions that she had been a JV cheerleader back in high school, back in Oriole, whether he, Klein, would believe it or not — he could not take that away from her. Behind them, the three other girls in class, pens poised, and when he asked who could improve this sentence, at once the older girl with the dark, dissatisfied face would shoot her hand up. He thought her part Negro; she was almost pretty, attractive in a hard, frowning way. Beside her one of his troublemakers, a wise guy not from the country but from the city, illiterate despite his handsome sweaters and bored, bland expression; and behind him adolescents with blemished faces, huge hands and feet, educated now into knowing their unworth, torn between despising him (their “Mr. Klein”) or falling before him to embrace his knees, begging aid, magic. The pipes in this basement room groaned with effort; it was too hot; yet the students went on, drugged and brave, improving sentences by hit or miss, staring at compositions shot into vicious clarity by the opaque projector for their criticism (all were interested in this: charmed and hypnotized by the procedure’s resemblance to the form of a movie, which they knew they liked), accepting red-inked papers back, ceremoniously, at the end of each Monday’s class, walking out alone, quickly, or dawdling behind to speak with him, sad-eyed or coquettish or swollen with gratitude depending on their grades. When Klein thought of his life, his essential life, nothing came to him except an image of his class. The classes he himself took, sat in wearily and hopefully, faded away as if they were no more than dreams. He pitied his students and feared them. Of course they hated him, they had no one else, and yet he would have expressed his sorrow for them had he not known they would have rejected it angrily — for he was to them a transparent obstacle, a blemish, something between them and their “careers” (in conferences they talked familiarly of their “future careers” as if these ghosts were real, actually existed somewhere and had only to be located), and he did not possess any meaning in himself. He yawned at the thought of his students, they at the thought of him. If he died they would not mourn him, would not miss him, in a month would be unable to recall his name. And he accepted their justified indifference, and the probable indifference of his professors, as two more reasons why he should die — if no one cared, why keep on?
His room was dirty. He cleaned it but it was dirty just the same. It looked as if no one lived in it as if the clutter had accumulated noiselessly over the years, knocked about by anonymous intruders. His books, which he loved, the seven-dollar Van Gogh print above the desk, the little braided rug he had bought at a sale, these things should have made his room his own, but they did not. The worn, shredding paperback books were not related to the print; the arty print not related to the modest rug; the rug not related to the paint-splashed floor; none of them related to him. The curtains at the window, feebly imprinted with green geometrical designs, could not have been purchased by Klein, who had better taste. A mistake. The wastebasket beside the desk was a glaring blue metal, stamped with the university’s official animal (a kind of rodent he did not recognize): another mistake. His bedspread, costing eleven dollars, had been put away in his closet because it was too much trouble to make the bed. The thought of his room exhausted him, as did the thought of his classes (he met them again tomorrow, the weekends flew by); in fact, the only thought that nourished him was the thought of his death. This he felt to be truly his, as nothing else was. This alone was personal, private. It would perhaps not be magnificent, but no one would laugh. He need not be ashamed of it at least. To insure this he must choose a proper means of suicide: nothing violent, nothing theatrical. He had narrowed his choices down to two, either sleeping pills or hanging. For a while he had considered slashing his wrists (he lingered over the word “slashing”), but it would have to be done in the bathroom and there was no dignity there. Or if he did it in bed, in the landlord’s bed, the blood might seep through the floor and drip from the ceiling below, an ambulance would arrive, and he would wake up in a hospital thwarted and under arrest… He got up and put on his overcoat and went out for a walk.
The sidewalks were deserted. Sundays were tedious, deadly, one had too much time to think on Sundays. He would do it on a Sunday, then, after his final examinations were graded and the grades turned in. Years ago he had supposed Sundays sacred, his family had gone to church, but what happened there seemed to him never related to anything else: a game, a bore. Then his family had stopped going and he had stopped. He had not been told why. Perhaps there had been no reason. … Yet that was what terrified him, he thought angrily, stopping on the sidewalk with his hands clenched into fists: no reason, nothing explained. His childhood was without explanation. Why this particular failure (his father’s poverty), why his mother crying at the kitchen table, why that particular argument, why footsteps up and down the stairs that night? What were these mysteries? Why could he understand nothing? Why was he always the victim, always the silent one, absorbing all blows, all pain, all indifference? Why could he control nothing? And why, now, was he here — standing before a slummy shoe repair shop — what had brought him here? Had he willed it, had he anything to do with it? He was furious at himself. Only his death would be meaningful, yet was he not fearful of this? His most shameful knowledge was that, ugly as his life was, part of him did not want to leave it.
He went back to his apartment house at that moment and his life was changed.
Part Two
On the stairs going up he met the dark girl from his afternoon class. She was alone; she wore a red coat that looked new. Seeing him, she stiffened and her hand rose from the railing, hesitantly, as if the gesture were rehearsed. “Hello, Mr. Klein,” she said in her student’s voice. He greeted her irritably. He had tried to look past her, around her, but had not been able to avoid her gaze. She stepped aside to let him pass and he went by. But, inside his room, he felt oddly agitated and did not want to take off his coat. Something was wrong, something would happen. He went to the window and looked out: below, on the walk, strangers passed by in their gloomy winter coats. In a minute someone knocked at his door.
Klein, turned, arguing with himself. His lips framed words but he went to the door and opened it: the girl. “Yes?” he said coldly. He had been too kind to them in class. He had failed to suggest the distance between them. The girl touched her nose with a tissue, a gesture she might have been hiding behind. “It’s a coincidence meeting you like this,” she said, “but a friend of mine lives upstairs.” She waited; Klein looked behind her, did not help her. “I wanted to see you anyway to explain something.”
He sighed. He surrendered, stepping back. “Come in.”
She looked everywhere and nowhere, the tissue prominent in her hand. “Do you have a roommate?”
“No, none.”
“That’s nice — there,” she said, pointing at the print. She stared at it. Then she turned. “No, my coat’s all right, I’m only going to stay a minute. I’m sorry to barge in like this, I didn’t mean to–” She ran out of breath suddenly.
“Sit over there, the desk chair,” Klein said.
She pulled the chair out and sat as if participating in a ritual. “It’s about the theme I handed in on Friday, Mr. Klein. I thought I better explain it a little, so you don’t get the wrong idea.”
“I haven’t read them yet,” Klein said.
“Haven’t?”
She watched him awkwardly. A peculiar girl, he thought, older than the other students, carrying about with her like a disfigurement the weight of obscure, remote disappointments: she could have been one of the girls he often saw waiting at bus stops, working girls, cheaply glamorous and forlorn. She had a full face, eyebrows too thick, eyes worked over with black pencil, not exactly beautiful but stern and bright enough to attract the approval of random city boys — not college boys. Despite her open, generous face she had a habit of squinting (he recalled from class) that emphasized her deep-socketed eyes and gave her a look of doubt, disbelief. Her hair was black and thick and heavy, not lustrous. From under the cheap red coat her legs emerged muscular and stubborn, crossed primly at the ankles. She came to him in fragments: nervous as he was, and hungry (he had forgotten to eat), Klein fumbled with the buttons of his coat as if she had asked him to stay.
“May I ask if you’re Jewish?” she said.
“I am not.”
Was she disappointed? Her face shifted to show emotion, but Klein wondered if it was not planned. Then she went on, as he had somehow expected, “Some of the kids wondered.” Vaguely she called up the magical, censorious presence of the classroom; Klein was disarmed. He remained where he was, standing, with his coat in his arms.
“Are you from around here?” the girl went on.
“What?”
“Are you from around here? The city?”
“No,” he said. His words were straining up to the surface, pulling themselves up from a great obstinate distance. “Are you?”
She smiled slightly at his question. She had relaxed a little; her legs were now crossed at the knee. “I have a sister that lives here but I don’t see her much. My folks are moved away — I don’t see them much either. I get kind of lonely sometimes.”
“Yes, well.” Klein’s face had grown warm. Despite his irritation, he felt a tenderness for the girl: for this clumsy loneliness, for the clenched tissue that was probably to her a vague, desperate attempt at feminine ornament. On campus, on the sidewalks between buildings, she would walk solidly on her heels, unaccustomed to the aloof competitive grace of the college girls; she would walk with her strong shoulders thrust slightly forward, as if to show her courage. Klein’s voice was abrupt when he spoke. “Did you want to see me about something?”
“Look, I’m sorry to take up your time, I know you’re busy. I just wanted to explain something about the paper, so you won’t think it’s–”
“Yes, what?” He glanced over at the untidy pile of themes on the floor beside his bed. Saddened by the stupidity of the first theme he had looked at, Klein had let them all fall to the floor. “What about it?”
“I guess I’m taking up your time. I’d better leave.”
“No, it’s all right. As long as you’re here–”
“I wouldn’t want to take up any of your valuable time.”
Klein’s heart had begun to pound at the change in the girl’s tone.
“I mean, you’re a teacher and all, you’re pretty important. I wouldn’t want to take up any of your precious time that you don’t get paid for by the school.”
“Look–”
“Look, I’m tired of being treated like dirt by everybody around here,” she said quietly. “Nobody here is better than me. I know that. I’ve been told that enough times. Is it true or not?”
Klein sighed. “True.”
“Yes, like hell it’s true.”
He lay his overcoat on the bed and sat beside it. “Do you want a cigarette?” he said.
“Sure, thanks.”
They lit cigarettes. “What’s your problem?” said Klein.
She was staring at the floor and he feared she would begin to cry. “Well, it’s hard to begin. I– I don’t know. Or which one is the worst one, but anyway that’s not why I’m here — like I said, I happened to be visiting this friend of mine–”
“Should I read your theme now?”
“No, please, that’s all right,” she said shakily. She looked away. “Maybe I better leave. I made a mess of this.”
“A mess of what?” Klein laughed. “What’s wrong? I’ve got time.”
“And I’m grateful for it, I mean I really know you are busy, I didn’t mean what I said before– I’m sort of confused. I never was at college until now.” She looked at him, squinting against the smoke from her cigarette. “This is all pretty new to me. I didn’t finish school when I was supposed to, but had to quit for a reason, and I just got my diploma last year. Went at night.”
“Your writing isn’t bad,” Klein offered.
“Yeah, that’s a surprise. I’m doing better than I hoped,” she said, and Klein felt another absurd rush of tenderness. “I work forty hours, you know, at a store, and I don’t get enough time. You know, it’s pretty hard to come back like this — nobody here cares if you make it or not. Nobody cares.”
“Yes, that’s life.” But the banality of his remark startled Klein, for he had meant to be sincere. “That’s the way life is,” he said, clearing his throat.
“I’m going into psychology.”
“That’s nice–”
“You’re thinking how stupid that is, how I’ll never make it,” she said. “Okay. Maybe I know it myself. But I’m going to try just the same.”
“I don’t think–”
“It’s all right, it doesn’t matter. Maybe I should act like I’m in class and pretend something, I don’t know. I’m too dumb to know what to do. And I guess I better go now, to hell with the theme.” She was dabbing at her eye with the delicate shredded tissue. “If you think it’s worth talking about later, okay, but otherwise I’m just wasting your time, right?”
He was helpless before her heavy, obstinate passivity. She seemed older than he, and stronger; he could not compete with her. All he could do was wave her remarks aside weakly. “Of course not. It’s what I’m here for.”
“Here? Up here in your room?” She stood. The tissue had disappeared; her coat protected her. “I guess I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Yes, tomorrow,” he said. He went to open the door for her. Her slowness, which was not graceful, and her calculating averted gaze made him awkward; he was relieved when she left. Yet he stood, his hand on the doorknob, as if listening for her footsteps to return. Perhaps he should open the door, call her back? But he had nothing to say to her. He stood, he listened. She had left.
He read her theme at once. It was a description, in small slanted proper handwriting, of childbirth. Klein became weakened at her words, his stomach cringed at her dramatic underlined conclusion: “That was how I knew that I was really alone.”
Part Three
Monday he returned the papers. She was there, waiting, and he tried not to watch her. Like the others, she opened the paper to the back, read the grade, and without expression folded it again and left. He was disappointed, though he had not really wanted her to talk to him again; talking with students exhausted him, made him nervous. The prospect of teaching that day for some reason had been terrifying — more than ever his panic had come upon him, for had he not perhaps given away some of himself to that girl, however unwillingly? He had been unable to eat, and now the girl’s behavior disappointed him (he could not deny this), he would take refuge in thoughts of his death: he had decided upon sleeping pills the night before. He would go to a doctor and complain of sleeplessness…
Someone awaited him in the hall. Late afternoon, and stuffy and dark in the basement, the corridor with its cracked plaster and dirty floor — he looked around to see the girl approaching, shy and pleased. His heartbeat startled him. “Well, I guess you didn’t think too bad of it,” the girl said.
She and Klein both looked at the paper she held. “Your writing isn’t bad,” Klein said after a moment.
“Well,” said the girl. Her coquetry was clumsy yet touching: she seemed to release herself to a gesture, a rehearsed mannerism, yet draw back at the last moment as if frightened of her daring. Now she had been about to raise her eyes from the paper to Klein’s face, but she froze with her gaze in mid-air, fixed and surprised. She said, “Are you going out that way?”
“Out that door? Yes,” Klein said abruptly, as if surrendering himself to something grim. They walked down the corridor together, acutely conscious of each other. “I’m going over to the clinic,” Klein heard himself say.
He had not been prepared for this remark, nor had the girl. She frowned as he opened the door for her, leaning against the tarnished brass bar so that the door swung open with a mechanical violence. They ascended the stone steps into a gray afternoon. Limply the girl caught up his words, as if they had been precious: “Going over to the clinic? Is there something wrong?”
“Nothing much,” Klein said.
They walked slowly. Klein did not know where he was going. The girl walked with her gaze downcast, watching her feet perhaps, as if she did not know either and were waiting to be told. “Look,” Klein said, his eyes half shut, “if you want to explain this paper to me, all right. I would like to hear about it.”
She looked up. “What about the clinic?”
“It can wait,” said Klein.
Part Four
They had coffee together and were still in the restaurant, a dingy campus place, at six. Klein offered, as if spontaneously, to buy her dinner. The sudden intimacy of their sitting there, coats off, books aside, had made him a little giddy. While they talked, the girl’s abrasive coarseness ebbed; he felt in her hesitant speech and her occasional abrupt vulgarity something that seemed familiar. Did she remind him perhaps of his sister? But his sister’s grittiness had no humor, no fragility, no hint of being vulnerable. In the presence of his occasional smile, her flirtation lapsed and she looked at him frankly. “Sure, I was married when the baby was born and that made a big difference to my mother,” she told him, a dreary predictable story that seemed to him also familiar, as if it were a memory of his as well as of hers. “I didn’t have any illusions about it and I turned out to be right. I thought maybe it would be a change — not so lonely as before. But it wasn’t, but I wasn’t surprised. I had the baby put out for adoption and we got divorced; he used to bother me for a while, then he quit — went out of town or something. If anything like that happens to me again…” He was sympathetic but not surprised. Nothing about her could surprise him. Her failure made him angry, not at her but at the closed, paneled world that excluded her as it excluded him.
They returned to the same restaurant the next evening, some change in their relations having occurred (she smoking airily; he patient with the clumsy waitress), and he understood that the other people in the restaurant and those who had passed them languidly out on the street constituted for her, as they did for him, one aspect of the enemy, that great impersonal block of humanity whose surfaces were slick and impenetrable. The multiplicity of planes these surfaces suggested did not fool him: he longed to rescue her. “We all feel that way,” he said quietly. Their glances, their kindnesses, their words were unmistakable; Klein felt himself drifting. “We all feel lonely. There are some people…” But he did not want to talk about other people. He veered back to the girl at once, who sat across the table from him listening with her deep-set eyes, the flesh slightly shadowed beneath them, perhaps pleased with her hair, which had recently been washed. “You must understand that it’s nothing to be ashamed of,” he said. “I’ve got to understand it myself. Some people get loneliness as if it were a disease. It makes them sick. I suppose I’m one of them.” She nodded. They looked not at each other but toward each other, their gazes offset, sightless, pretending distraction: someone was arguing at the counter. Suddenly Klein thought of the sleeping pills he had yet to acquire and his heart pounded. He could not eat. “This place is a dump, isn’t it?” he said.
They went to his apartment. He had to teach the next day, he had reading to do, but he did not care. Opening the door, he became dizzy. He had not wanted any of this to happen, yet it had happened; they were mute and warmed before it. The girl was a little nervous and sat at his desk, smoking, with the ash tray on her lap. They talked for hours: Klein could see his raw young voice prod at her eyes, her mouth. “I try not to show it in class,” he said. She was deeply moved, he could see. He sensed in her silence and in the affected mannerisms of her smoking, a generosity he was not accustomed to, which alarmed him because he was not certain he could meet it. “No, you don’t show it, it’s a surprise to me,” she said slowly. He had been telling her of his nausea before classes. “Nobody thinks of teachers like that. Though I had a teacher in high school once, a woman… Most of the teachers here, you know, they separate themselves from you, they take care of your work for the course but outside of that they don’t give a damn. You could be lying on the sidewalk and they’d go around you. They don’t want to waste their time. What they’re afraid of is getting mixed up with you. I suppose I don’t blame them, because somebody like me, somebody that’s out of place here…” “Why do you feel out of place,” Klein said. “I don’t know, I was born that way,” she said. “I was born out of place. He did not know whether the mirroring of his plight in her voice evoked in him contempt or love.
They awoke at three-thirty. Klein had left the meek desk lamp on, channeling its light into a halo on the wall. His room looked different, ghostly and rich: why not? The girl was shy, softened, younger; he believed he loved her. Words suggested themselves to him, but he rejected them, they were not adequate, they would be embarrassing. He wanted to feel that she shared this magical intimacy — that was why she said little, hushed as if at church — yet, walking her to her apartment (in a darkened building on a side street), he was jealous of her distraction when she glanced up at an automobile passing, jealous of her failure to hint to him, however insincerely, that she was at all surprised at what they had done: that they had even done anything extraordinary. Klein felt like a person in a dream. “Good night,” he said, not going up the stairs with her, and was overcome by an impulse to laugh. The girl herself smiled suddenly. Yet he became immediately dissatisfied, for he thought ahead to the next day, the next morning, the girl alone in her room (he imagined it a room exactly like his own, just as anonymous), having forgotten him.
Back home he had time now to feel shame for the soiled sheets he had had for her. Dreamily, his hands trembling as he remade the bed, he recalled that he had planned that morning to do something profound; but he could not remember what it was.
* * *
In class she was no different, though quieter. He could not always count on her to answer the questions he sent out to the class, hopeful and indefatigable. She did not wait for him afterward, but they had dinner together, at his place or at hers: a room smaller than he had imagined, decorated with travel posters. “They’re just junk,” she said of the posters, “but they look like windows or something. It isn’t just the wall there but openings looking out — that’s how I think of pictures.” They were able to work together, as if relieved of the necessity of thinking about each other; Klein did not have to imagine her, and so he was freed. She did not let him read her work for his class until she handed it in, and he read her compositions eagerly, before leaving the classroom, his eyes racing along the neat handwritten lines as if looking for something he could not identify. She wrote of her family, their poverty, and he muttered, “Yes, yes,” to each cliche, each undignified detail of the uninteresting truths by which both their lives had been shaped.
This was November: the last week of the month, one weekday morning, he saw her in a drugstore buying something. She wore the red coat, though it did not look so new any more, was wrinkled slightly behind, and she stood fingering her hair nervously while the clerk reached down to get something beneath the counter. Klein was about to go to her when he stopped. He waited for her to turn around and see him, but she did not; then he stepped aside, out of the way, until she turned to leave. What had she been buying? She had been at the cosmetics counter. Klein strolled by, his eyes dazzled by the gold and silver displays: the tubes of lipstick, studded with rhinestones, the little dressing table mirrors, the pencils, brushes, mysterious tubes. These things were fictions he thought, they were not real. They were fictions, but his own world — he thought of his room, of the girl and her bowed, attentive head — was real and would not betray him.
That night they admitted to loving each other. Klein had been drinking wine, was extremely agitated, not quite himself. The girl looked different: different lipstick? They ate spaghetti she had made. “I was never taught anything, how to cook,” she said. “I learned it all by myself. So don’t be surprised what it tastes like.” Yes, she did love him: he knew now that she had loved him for some time. Why else those frightened glances, that uncomfortably comfortable domesticity here in this room? Her staying with him that first night, far from being casual, had been to her a tremendous event; he saw that now and the knowledge urged him to tell her again that he loved her. He loved her. Suffused with her love for him, he towered above her, protective and kind, his gaze distracted toward the shaded window as if lured to contemplate the future: no sleeping pills, no death after all, only a new life.
Part Five
The first week of December, bitter cold. Klein returned from the library with an armload of books. Excited, he ran up the stairs as if he believed something awaited him in his room, some adventure. He let the books fall on his bed. Lately he had been reading a great deal, sometimes at the girl’s room, sometimes here. His hair had been cut the day before, he had bought new shoes. He and the girl saw each other every evening; but already his interest in her had begun to wane, he wanted to read while she talked, telling him in detail of her life (her trouble with neighbors in the apartment house, with teachers). He was patient with her. That afternoon, after his composition class, he had known that he did not love her and that he had never loved her; that he did not especially want to see her again; that perhaps she had freed him, giving herself and thereby freeing him to himself — he did not quite understand. He was in a hurry. She was to come that evening for dinner, and he sat down to write the note she would find taped on the door: the problem was how to be kind, considerate, to take it seriously (for already his thoughts were running wild, seizing upon the scattered lines of the medieval poetry he was to write an essay on, upon the respectful answer of one of his professors when he had asked a question in class that day). There was too much to think of. He could not concentrate.
She did not come to the next class meeting. Klein, nervously anticipating her gaze, was relieved; his gratitude made him eloquent and he believed he could see some of the students reappraising him. He understood that matters like that between the girl and himself happened often, perhaps daily, at this great university. Pity he felt for her, but not love, not even interest any more (she with her dreary half-smiling recollections of past insults, past pain, which impressed upon him too persistently the shabby detours and stumblings of his own life). If their relationship had begun in a dream, its termination woke Klein into something further: complexity, excitement, a new anxiety about his life, his future, even his personal appearance. He had bought the shoes with money saved week by week; he looked forward to buying something else — a suit, an overcoat. He spoke to his colleagues and appreciated their response to his humor, forced though it sometimes was. The secretaries in the English department knew him; he was able to be heard joking with them carelessly, like anyone else. The girl did not come to class. He did not see her. He contemplated writing another note, a letter this time, but he did not get around to doing it. Too much had happened between them, or perhaps too little had happened. He did not know. Between his classes he joked with the secretaries or dawdled with his colleagues or talked with his professors about things he had just discovered in his reading: ideas he hoped were his own, original ideas that excited him immensely. In his composition class he thought himself eloquent, and the desk at which the girl had once sat became for him not a depressing sight but (though he disliked himself for this) a symbol of something he possessed — perhaps power, the power of his new freedom. He had been loved. He had been worthy of love. The semester ended, the girl did not appear, he was forced to fail her in the course, though he talked the problem over seriously with another teaching assistant, a young married man given to a rather pleasing, keen, intellectual recklessness, popular in the department, talked it over discreetly and without embarrassment or humor, simply as a problem. The young man saw no choice, she would have to be failed, and he reminded Klein that maneuvering for grades was common at the university and that he himself suspected the girl’s motives, really, though perhaps she liked Klein well enough. He said he would have supposed Klein wiser than to have been involved in such a dangerous situation; Klein, chagrined, in a way disappointed to know it was probably true she had only wanted a good grade from him, had to agree. The semester ended and she did not appear, he put an F beside her name (which did not look familiar), and he supposed he would forget her, which he did.
That spring two students committed suicide; one, a girl but not the girl he had known, someone else, the other an Indian student, and Klein was reminded of the peculiar state of his own feelings months before: he recalled them in alarm, as if they had been the insane impulses of a stranger, someone in a novel. The girl had not appeared, he had not met her on the street or anywhere, and he never met her again. Perhaps she left school. In any case he never met her again and went on with his work, doing well, as well as any of the second-best students (for he recognized his limitations honestly), committing much to memory, grateful for and humble to the great academic tradition in which he would live out his life. With his degree he left for a comfortable though not well-known little college, married, had children, achieved happiness, did not seriously join in with his colleagues’ criticisms of their lives, did not call attention to himself, bought a brick home, was proud of his wife for her chic competent womanly look, was proud of his children (two boys), took up sailing as a hobby since there was a fair-sized lake near the college. What possibility of happiness without some random, incidental death?
