Questions

She was 31 years old, her lover was 20 years old; should that have worried her? She knew it was a mistake to get involved with him, but she couldn't prevent it from happening. She hadn't known he was suicidal at the time.

His name was Barry, which didn't suit him--he might better have been called Jerzy or Marcel or Werner. He had a look, Ali thought, both American and exotic. He was an undergraduate in the college, not one of her students, a tall, thin boy with lank dark hair, mushroom-pale skin, accusing gray-green eyes, a habitually pinched expression. Two gold studs in his left ear, overlarge shirts and sweaters, Nike running shoes worn without socks. Could you guess he'd gone to Exeter? Or that his father was a State Department official? He had been a prelaw student originally but was now interested in "theater arts." His life would be devoted to acting and to writing poetry, he said; one day--soon--he hoped to be acting in his own plays. Ali regarded him with both affection and skepticism. Didn't he imagine himself, as many undergraduates did these days, as a performer in a film or video of his own life? As Ali, though not of his generation, imagined herself, at times, an actress in a film of unknowable proportions?

Ali had fallen in love with Barry while watching him perform in a campus production of Peter Weiss's The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade. The production was billed as a revival, since the play had been originally performed on campus back in 1968. Barry played the role of the erotomaniac Duperret and played it with near-hysterical intensity; he had no natural gift for the stage that Ali could see, but something about his tall, gaunt, slope-shouldered frame, his bony elbows, his sullen air, quite won her. She was a full-blooded woman of some experience who liked to be "won."

She was high, too; she and her friend Louis (who taught East Asian studies and was faculty advisor to the campus gay organization) were both high, having shared some of Louis' prescription Dexedrine before going to the play. Ali turned to Louis with tears in her eyes and whispered, "Who is that beautiful boy? Is he one of yours?" and Louis whispered back with mock primness:

"Ali, he's too young for you."

Ali thought, That's for me to decide.

•

She was born and baptized Alice; she'd long ago named herself Ali. For a while during their marriage-while they were living (continued on page 172)Questions(continued from page 97) together, that is; they were, in fact, still legally married--her husband called her Alix, the word's second syllable, -ix, given a hissing malevolence he'd thought was amusing. "'Alix, dear, where are you? Alix, darling, why don't you answer?" She had not seen her husband for nearly two years now, though they spoke on the telephone sometimes, as a matter of practical necessity. He lived in their old loft on Greene Street, just south of Houston, where he painted during the day (and taught art at the New School at night); Ali lived in Vermont, where she taught film and film criticism at a small liberal-arts college famous, or infamous, for its experimental curriculum and its unstructured atmosphere. She was a popular, audacious teacher, a campus celebrity of sorts--who else reviewed fairly regularly for New York publications? Who else would organize a film festival of "banned" films?--a fierce, fleshy woman with long, dense curtains of jet-black hair, dramatic slanted eyes, full lips. She dressed and behaved provocatively, though she was an ardent feminist--provocation was simply her style, as meticulously observed as the styles of the great film directors whose work she admired. Certainly Ali Kohl was highly intelligent, but she was also--was primarily--a very physical woman: a ripe, rich Concord grape, as a lover once said of her. Delectable!

Ali had made an early reputation as a bright young film critic--she'd published books and essays on Fellini, Buñuel, Truflailt, Fassbinder, Herzog, Schlöndorff, Bergman and many others; she'd even published her rather abstruse Ph.D. dissertation on André Bazin's ontological concept of the photographic shot as the "deconcealment of Being." For the past several years she had been working, in alternately frenzied and desultory cycles, on "magic realism" in contemporary West German film. In the little college town up in the mountains, all sorts of wild and extravagant rumors circulated about Ali that she rarely troubled to correct; she reasoned they made her appear more interesting. Wasn't she married? Wasn't her husband gay? Didn't she have affairs with colleagues, even with students? Hadn't she once had an affair with the dean of the college (now relocated on the West Coast with his wife and children)? On the door to her office was a large full-color poster of Klaus Kinski in Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God--Kinski's extraordinary face so radiantly composed in madness, one could hardly bear to look at it. Above the poster was Buñuel's militant Nothing is Symbolic in bright-red letters. Although Ali didn't give high grades as promiscuously as many of her colleagues, her classes were jammed with students--for which reason, as he said, Barry Hood had avoided her for two years. He thought too highly of himself to succumb to mass movements. He'd once quoted Nietzsche to Ali in the early days, or hours, of their relationship--"'Where the rabble worships, there is it likely to stink.' "

Ali was both wounded and delighted by the boy. What arrogance! What assurance! She leaned forward impulsively to kiss his mouth; she ran her fingers roughly through his hair. You'll pay for that, you smug little bastard, she was thinking. But really she adored him.

•

Their "friendship," as Ali called it, was sporadic and whimsical on her part, carried on while she was negotiating another, more serious affair with a man, a film director, who lived in New York City and worked on the Coast. Each affair kept the other in perspective--Ali knew the risk of expecting too much from a single source. Barry Hood fascinated her as a presence, a phenomenon, 20 years old yet, in a way, aged, worn out, though in other ways he was much younger than 20--he was shy and arrogant and clumsy, brattish, spoiled, yet, at times, almost unendurably sweet as a child is sweet, in utter unself-consciousness. "A child of his times," Ali said of him, but not to him. They were not to sleep together many times and never (in Ali's secret opinion) altogether satisfactorily, but she was quite taken with his style, as she called it--those distinct, pure, unmistakably American-aristocratic features beneath the sullen, glowering boy.

Much of their time together was spent in talk--passionate talk. The kind Ali never remembered the next morning but quite enjoyed at the time. Barry and Ali and often Barry's black roommate, Peter Dent--black only nominally, since he was as fair-skinned as Ali herself--in one or another of the campus places or in Ali's apartment, smoking dope. Peter Dent's father was a lawyer, too, like Barry's, but he was in show-business law; he divided his time between New York City and the Coast and was evidently very successful. Ali knew that when students spoke with bitter humor of their families, it meant only one thing: success. Scholarship students whose families were relatively poor invariably spoke of them in warmer terms. Then, dear God, you were likely to get heart-wrenching tales of sacrifices, grandmothers, older brothers and sisters, complicated illnesses with difficult names. Ali much preferred her boys Barry and Peter, who dismissed bourgeois convention as "shit" and never spoke of their families except in terms of lofty contempt.

Barry was not as beautiful close up as he'd appeared on stage, but he had remarkable gray-green eyes that darkened or lightened or welled with tears, depending upon his mood. When they made love, he fairly quivered with passion--his ribs rippled beneath his skin; his very skeleton seemed to tremble in ecstasy. Ali liked to stroke his body, running her soft, fleshy hands over his bones, reminded of Bunuel's camera in its erotic glidings and circlings of Deneuve's perfect body in Belle du Jour. Buñuel had understood that sensuality is a matter not of the whole but of parts; the wholeness of the human being--the "human" being--hardly exists at such times.

Barry was moody, capricious, unpredictable. How seriously he took himself, daring to pay Ali the compliment, one night, of telling her she was the first woman in his life who didn't try to make him eat! He wrote poetry of an "experimental" kind and kept a voluminous journal in longhand, which he refused to let Ali read: It was the only place, he said, he could tell the truth. "I feel pure and innocent and redeemed only when I'm writing or acting," he said in a slightly contentious tone, as if he believed Ali might protest. She did not.

She said, "I feel pure and innocent and redeemed only when I'm making love." It was a provocative statement, certainly not true.

Like most of the undergraduates at the college, Barry smoked dope at least once a day and took drugs whenever they were available. Yet he held himself aloof from his classmates; he never went to the parties that were held at different dormitories each weekend and had become famous, or infamous, throughout the Northeast. Barry belonged neither to the druggies, as they were called, nor to the straights--there were only a few people he believed he could trust. Ali was moved and flattered that she was one of them, but how had it happened so quickly? One night he told her in a sudden rush of words that his mother had committed suicide during his freshman year at Exeter and that he often felt her "lure"--even when he was happy. In bright daylight, he said in a voice tremulous with pride, he felt the powerful attraction of night.

Ali had not known how to reply except to say, "How terrible, how tragic"--words that offended with their banality. She knew she was expected to say more, much more, to ask how and why and had they been close and how had his father (continued on page 206)Questions (continued from page 172) taken it, but she resented the boy's telling her, at least at this time, when she'd been feeling so buoyant. They were lying together on a quilt on the floor of Ali's darkened apartment; they'd made love, were sharing a joint; in a few minutes, Barry would leave to return to his dormitory--why had he sprung this ugly revelation upon her? She knew that if she dared touch him, if she dared comfort him, Barry would shove her away with disdain.

•

Not long afterward, Ali broke off with Barry Hood, telling him that she and her husband were working on a reconciliation. He didn't protest or telephone her; but over Thanksgiving break, when she supposed he had gone home to Washington, he tried to kill himself by taking all the pills in his and Peter Dent's medicine cabinet--including Peter's prescription Quaaludes--and slashing his arms. When the news came, Ali was watching a video of Murnau's Nosferatu with friends, which struck her as the most ghastly of coincidences. When she hung up the phone, she was white-faced, giddy, as if someone had knocked her in the stomach. "What is it, Ali? Is it an emergency?" she was asked.

The drama of the scene thrummed and vibrated about her, beat against her, out of her control. "Yes," she said carefully. "It's an emergency. But not mine."

•

When she went to the hospital, she was told that Barry Hood was in the intensive-care ward, in critical condition; he was expected to live but could not receive visitors. Only members of his immediate family would be allowed to see him. A young Arabic intern named Hassan, whom Ali knew from the campus film society, told her what had happened: Barry had taken the drugs, slashed at his arms, collapsed in his room, revived, stumbled out into the hall, again collapsed, in front of the resident advisor's door. The R.A. had telephoned an ambulance at once, and it had come within three minutes. "So he didn't really want to die," Ali said.

The intern said, "Nobody really wants to die, but it happens all the time." His tone was sarcastic; Ali was chilled and chastened but resentful--she'd meant her remark to be an innocent statement of fact.

She told Hassan the boy's mother had committed suicide a few years ago. If it was anyone's fault, it was that woman's fault.

•

Just as well, Ali thought afterward, that they hadn't let her see Barry. She could imagine his bruised, reproachful eyes; she knew how wretched, how aged post-suicidal people looked--she'd visited several in the hospital over the years.

And hadn't Ali been one herself, a long time ago?

It was emotional blackmail, pure and simple. You had to feel sorry for the boy, but you had to feel impatience, too--outright anger. What a trick! What manipulation! She'd taken two Libriums to steady her nerves, and now her nerves thrummed like a radio turned low. "Why, why did you do it?" she would have asked Barry. "Why, why, why?"--no matter that that was precisely the question he wanted Ali, and others, to ask.

Years ago, Ali had wanted to die, and she, too, had taken an overdose of drugs--prescription barbiturates. She'd woken in Bellevue emergency, where terrible things were being done to her: a hose forced down her throat into her stomach, attendants holding her in place as she convulsed. Like the freeze frame at the end of Truffaut's 400 Blows--Ali sprawled helpless and broken on a table, forever and ever. In weak moments she saw that sight. Forever. It might be deferred, but it could never be erased. And the man she had hoped would be devastated by her death, the man she'd actually hoped might want to join her in death--he had broken off with her immediately. Hadn't even come to see her in the hospital.

But that was a long time ago. Ali was a big girl now.

•

Two days later, Barry's father telephoned Ali and asked if he might see her. He sounded hysterical over the phone--speaking in short, staccato phrases Ali could barely understand. She had known he was in town and she had thought perhaps he might call and she'd considered simply not answering her phone but knew that was a cowardly and ignoble thing to do. So she answered it. And there was Mr. Hood, distraught and choked, telling her that his son had slipped into a coma and he was desperate for someone to talk to--someone to explain what had happened. He promised to take up no more than an hour of her time.

"A coma?" Ali asked, frightened. "I hadn't known."

Mr. Hood was speaking so rapidly, Ali could barely follow his words. She wondered who had given him her name and how much he knew. And did he intend to accuse her of--anything?

He insisted he would not take up more than an hour of her time. Ali didn't see how she could refuse to see him under the circumstances.

•

"The last time Barry was in the hospital here, I wasn't able to get to see him," Mr. Hood was saying. "That was his freshman year--did you know him then, Miss Kohl? Of course, it was only mono-nucleosis--which he'd had before, in prep school--but that can be deadly; it can lead to hepatitis. I was in Europe at the time on crucial business and I simply couldn't get back, and my wife--Barry's mother--wasn't able to get up here, either, for personal reasons." Mr. Hood was speaking rapidly and not quite looking Ali in the eye. One of his eyelids was twitching; from time to time, he rubbed his knuckles roughly against it. "I don't led that the boy has ever forgiven me for that--and other things. Though I tried, God knows, to explain my circumstances to him. And I've certainly tried to make it up to him." He paused. He was smoking a cigarette that he stubbed out now, briskly, in the ashtray. He looked at Ali and tried to smile. "Has Barry ever said anything about this to you, Miss Kohl? Has he ever said anything about--me, or his mother? Or. ..." His voice trailed off into the cocktail hubbub around them. (They were having drinks in the Yankee Doodle Room of the Sojourner Inn, where Mr. Hood was staying.) "Has he ever shared any of his feelings about his family with you?"

It was an awkward question, though not awkwardly asked--Mr. Hood was an articulate man. Ali chose her words carefully in reply. She must not upset Barry's father any more than he was already upset, but she must not humor him, or lie. She'd seen at once that he was the kind of man--a Washingtonian, a State Department attorney, intelligent, acute, steely-eyed, hardly a fool--who, for all his anxiety, would see immediately through any ordinary attempt at subterfuge. She said, "I didn't really know Barry that well, Mr. Hood. Only the past few weeks--and then not really well. Your son isn't an easy person to get to know--he doesn't open up very readily. A very private----" Ali was ashamed of the weak, dull, flat tone of her voice, but Barry's father, staring so intently at her, made her extremely self-conscious. She said, "There must be teachers of his who know him better than I do. His resident advisor? And his roommate--he might, in fact, have several roommates."

"Oh, I've talked with the roommate," Mr. Hood said impatiently. "The colored boy with the--what was it? Quaaludes? For schizophrenia, or manic depression, my God! Right there in the medicine cabinet, staring Barry in the face day after day! And he's always been such an excitable, impressionable boy--much less mature than he looks. Yes, of course I've talked with the roommate," Mr. Hood said. He was breathing hoarsely. But he managed to smile at Ali, a reassuring smile showing perfectly capped white teeth. "I wound up trying to comfort him--the poor kid is so scared Barry might die. Nice, sweet boy--Peter's his name. But he doesn't seem to know Barry any better than I do."

Mr. Hood laughed, his nostrils darkly distended, as if he'd said something particularly funny. Ali smiled uneasily. She asked casually, "Was it the roommate who gave you my name?"

But Mr. Hood went on to speak wonderingly of Barry's friends, or lack of friends, in prep school, grammar school, nursery school. How Barry had never seemed to mind their moving from city to city--claimed he looked forward to it.

"Did you ever hear of a child expressing such a sentiment, Miss Kohl--Ali, is it? From the beginning this penchant for"--he stared at the cigarette freshly lit and burning in his fingers--"something you might call irony. If that's what it was."

Marcus Hood resembled his son only slightly, about the eyes--which was a relief. As soon as Ali shook hands with him in the hotel lobby, she knew that her worries were groundless--he didn't appear to be angry with her. He was eminently civilized, civil, a gentleman; an American patrician, in his mid- or late 50s, impeccably well groomed and conspicuously well dressed--camel's-hair topcoat, powder-gray pinstripe suit, Cartier silk tie, gleaming black shoes. He was a handsome man, or had been at one time; now his eyes were raw-looking and his skin sallow. He reminded Ali just slightly of that brilliant actor in Bergman's repertory--Max von Sydow, years ago--the facial structure all verticals; eyes sunken deep in grief and mouth wounded. Sorrow stitched into the very flesh.

After his second martini, he began to speak with some bitterness. He accused himself of having let things slide in his family, of having neglected his only son. He'd been blind to certain danger signals:

Barry's habit of dropping courses or taking incompletes, Barry's disinclination to come home for holidays, Barry's disappointing grades. And although he'd always asked Barry if there was anything he wanted to talk about, Barry never took him up on the offer. And he'd supposed that meant things were all right.

Ali said carefully, "I suppose that at a time like this, the instinct is to blame yourself. But----"

"Who else should I blame?" Mr. Hood said.

He talked, talked. Sometimes not even looking up at Ali, as if he'd forgotten she was there. What had gone wrong? How could he have done things differently? It was the pressure of his job, his jobs, all that moving around the country--New York, Los Angeles, Connecticut, Washington--when Barry was a small child. And his domestic situation, which, he said, was "difficult." His wife, Lynda----

"Barry told me about her, actually," Ali said.

"He did?"

Ali wondered if she had made a tactical error. She said hesitantly, "That she'd committed suicide when he was in prep school. And----"

"Committed suicide? What?"

"Didn't she? Barry's mother----"

Mr. Hood stared at her in utter astonishment.

"Lynda has done some extreme things, she's an extreme personality," he said carefully, "but to my knowledge, she has never attempted suicide. We're separated--not officially but de facto; I don't, in fact, know her precise whereabouts at this moment--but I'm certain that she is alive."

"She's----?"

"Barry must have been lying," Mr. Hood said. "I mean, of course he was lying. Suicide! Lynda! His mother! Of course, it's a symptom of his general disturbed state, but I wouldn't have thought him capable of such a--low thing. Such a--libel."

Now Mr. Hood was terribly upset. Ali could not think of a graceful way out. She said, "Well ...you should probably know that Barry tells his friends that when he feels depressed, he finds himself thinking of his mother--of what she did. And he feels a certain attraction. A lure, I think he calls it."

"That's just self-dramatization," Mr. Hood said dismissively. "It's typical of him--of that kind of highly articulate, highly verbal temperament of his. Barry always had a morbid imagination and, of course, he was always encouraged to express it--every school we sent him to! Without fail! Still, to think he'd deliberately lie like that, saying such a thing about his mother--misrepresenting his own family to strangers. I can see that he might want pity, but----" Mr. Hood paused. His mouth twisted as if, for a moment, he couldn't bring himself to speak. After a pause, he said, "You don't--do you?--think he might be...?"

"Gay?"

Mr. Hood winced at the word. "Homosexual," he said. "Do you think...?"

"No," Ali said.

For a while, they sat in silence. A redheaded youngish man was playing desultory tunes at the cocktail piano; the lounge was gradually filling up. Ali's nerves were beginning to tighten again, and she wondered when she could slip away to the powder room to take another Librium. She always carried a supply of six capsules in her purse and replenished them at frequent intervals.

"Actually, Mr. Hood," Ali said, "Barry didn't seem to want pity. He had--has--too much self-respect. I think you underestimate him."

"Thank you," Mr. Hood said. "I very much appreciate your saying that."

Over a third martini--Ali was having her second margarita, and it was reassuringly strong--he asked her again her personal impressions of Barry. Ali felt distinctly uncomfortable, as if, now, her own interrogation had begun. She explained carefully that she had not known Barry that well. He wasn't, for instance, enrolled in any of her courses.

"But you're involved in the theater, aren't you?"

"I teach film. But Barry hasn't taken a course of mine."

"I see," he said slowly, though it was evident he didn't. He said, "But Barry is very--attached to you, Miss Kohl. I gather you know that?"

Ali said, brazening it out, "There are a number of students who are 'attached' to me, Mr. Hood," she said. "Because of the subjects I teach, primarily. And what they see to be my iconoclastic approach. But Barry is only one of them. And, as I said, he hasn't ever taken a course of mine. He doesn't seem to think that film is a serious subject."

"Well...I guess I'd been led to think something else," Mr. Hood said. He appeared subtly disappointed, perhaps a bit puzzled.

He asked Ali if he might take her to dinner here at the inn, since it was getting late and he'd kept her for so long, anyway. But first, if she didn't mind, he wanted to call the hospital to see if anything had developed.

•

At dinner in the inn's walnut-paneled, candlelit dining room, Ali began to feel more relaxed. She volunteered information about Barry she wouldn't have had to give Mr. Hood. One of his son's "distinctive" traits, she said, was his honesty--which could be abrasive. And he frequently asked questions of a rhetorical nature. '"Why is there Being and not, rather, Nothing?' Heidegger's question," Ali said. Mr. Hood asked her to repeat this but made no comment. "Another question I remember was 'Do we get what we deserve or deserve what we get?'" Ali said. She paused, feeling, for a moment, rather excited. Marcus Hood was staring at her so intently. "It's a profound question, really, when you consider it."

Mr. Hood lit a fresh cigarette, though there was still food on his plate. In the soft sepia-tinted light, his hair looked as crisp as fine hand-worked silver; his eyes were shadowed. He said, exhaling smoke through his nostrils as if sighing, "It is a profound question--I'm damned if I know the answer."

Near the end of the meal, he told Ali a story--something that had happened when Barry was ten years old. It was meant, he said, to illustrate his own failure of integrity. "Just so you know that, when I say I've been a poor father, I'm telling the truth----" His words were just perceptibly slurred.

It happened that his wife, Lynda's, older sister Elise came to stay with them in Rye, Connecticut, where they were living at the time. She was a beautiful, extremely intelligent woman but, unfortunately, irremediably neurotic--"high-strung," the family used to say. "Almost immediately, Elise began to affect our household in various disruptive ways," Mr. Hood said. "She ran up exorbitant telephone bills. She used Lynda's credit card--forged her signature. She cruised bars and hotels and picked up men--went out with blacks from the Third World embassies--stayed away for days at a time. Lynda, who had her own problems, was terrified that Elise would be found dead in a hotel room somewhere. The woman was a pathological liar, yet you couldn't help but believe her--she had a certain charismatic power. But, no--I didn't fall in love with her or have an affair with her, if that's what you're thinking," he said, with an unexpected smile. "In fact, I was away most of the time, as usual; I tried to stay clear of the problem. I hadn't been the one to invite Elise to stay with us, and I didn't feel I could ask her to leave. Still--I should have known it was an unhealthy situation for Barry to be in." He paused, sighed, rubbed at both eyes with his knuckles. "Well--what happened was, it came out one day that Elise had been caressing my son in certain ways. The woman--thirty-five, -six years old!--was undressing a ten-year-old boy and caressing him in an intimate way. Can you imagine anything so perverse? And it had been going on, evidently, for months."

"How did you discover it?" Ali asked.

"Lynda discovered it. Just by accident. She found them in the pool house together--but, of course, Elise denied everything. She's always been a superb liar, cool and bland, while Lynda slips into hysteria at the slightest provocation--what a pair! Elise said she was simply helping Barry with his swimming trunks, and Barry piped up and said that's all she was doing, too. Lynda had had a bit to drink and there was a terrible fight, and by the time I got back home, Elise had gone--moved out. But the damage had been done--Lynda, with her hysteria, had only made things worse."

"But Barry denied it?"

"He didn't know what to 'deny,' he was so young. I didn't have the heart to interrogate him."

Ali said carefully, "Of course, it's a disturbing story--if it really happened as your wife says--but I don't quite see why you have to blame yourself, Mr. Hood." She'd taken a second tranquilizer before dinner; she'd had a fair amount to drink. She was buoyantly high but lucid. "And, for all you know, your sister-in-law might have been innocent, as she said. How would you really know?"

"Lynda swore it happened the way she said. And she was so upset, she must have seen something."

Ali knew better than to fall in with Mr. Hood in what must have been an old dispute. He said, "In any case--hysterical woman aside--the blame lies with me for letting things slide the way I did. For not knowing, or not wanting to know, how disrupted my household was." For a sharp, painful moment, Ali felt the man's self-loathing as if it were her own.

"But how could you have known?" Ali persisted. "You had to be away on business."

Ali was suffused with emotion, ripe with it--her skin felt dewy, moist, warm. She was conscious of her rings' glittering in the candlelight. She said impulsively, "We're all guilty of behaving in ways we don't like from time to time. We're human, after all." She paused, smiling. She tried to imagine how she might look to Marcus Hood. "It's the human condition--fallibility."

"You're very kind, Ali, very generous, but--I don't think I behaved judiciously. And, of course, there had been other times, too--more than I care to remember. He holds them all against me; you can be sure of that."

"Barry doesn't strike me as a punitive person," Ali said, not entirely truthfully.

"As you said--you don't know him very well."

Ali did feel generous. Magnanimous. She decided to tell Mr. Hood a story about something that had happened to her a few years ago: "Just to illustrate my own failure of integrity."

She was married then, living with her husband in a loft on Greene Street. In their wide circle of acquaintances were a sculptor and his wife, both flamboyant personalities, notorious, really--the wife no less than the husband. The wife had tried to befriend Ali from time to time, but Ali kept her distance, fearful of getting involved. She knew the couple had serious problems, and she and her husband had serious problems of their own. (Mr. Hood was listening sympathetically. "You must have married very young," he said.) The sculptor was a violent man, a drinker; it was generally thought he might even be emotionally disturbed; and one night, while they were quarreling, his wife fell, or was pushed, out of a window in their apartment and died in the fall--it was eight stories to the pavement. Ali thought afterward that she'd been a coward to withdraw when the woman had approached her. She felt sick with guilt and self-disgust; but the worst of it was, the sculptor claimed his wile had killed herself, had jumped out of the window during the quarrel, and most of their friends seemed to believe him and rallied around him. That is, the men rallied around him, helped him make bail.

"There was a memorial service for the woman, and I wanted to attend," Ali said, her voice swelling with emotion, "but my husband refused to let me. He said I couldn't appear to be supporting her and not him. 'She's dead, he's alive,' my husband said. 'And you know he's a vindictive man.' We quarreled bitterly; but in the end, I stayed away from the service--the way so many of our friends did. I did what my husband wanted me to do, because I was too cowardly to resist." Ali's heart was beating erratically; in telling the story, she had made herself frightened. She said vehemently, "But I vowed that would be the last time I ever let men push me around. Any men."

Mr. Hood had listened sympathetically. He laid his hand lightly on her arm to soothe her. He said, "I can see that you're upset--it's an ugly story--but I don't see that you were a coward. Aren't you being awfully hard on yourself? You did defy your husband to a degree. And, after all, that maniac might have killed you, too. Don't tell me he's still free?"

"The jury voted to acquit," Ali said, her voice shaking. '"Insufficient evidence,' they said. Imagine!"

They sat staring at each other for a long impassioned moment. Mr. Hood's hand still lay, lightly, upon Ali's arm. His lips moved; his words were nearly inaudible.

" 'Insufficient evidence,'" he whispered.

•

At Ali's apartment, Barry's father telephoned the hospital another time. Ali, making drinks in the kitchen, could hear his questioning, aggressive voice but could not make out his words. When she came out, she saw him standing motionless, staring at the floor with a quizzical smile.

"Is there any news?" Ali asked.

He shrugged his shoulders irritably and took the glass from her. "None at all."

In Ali's fussily decorated living room, he paced restlessly, not wanting to sit down. He examined the framed movie posters on the walls, the many photographs, the aluminum bookshelves jammed with books and video cassettes. Atop Ali's television set was the tape of Murnau's Nosferatu. Mr. Hood picked it up absently and stared at the garish illustration on the box cover. " 'Classic vampire tale'?" he said.

Ali said quickly, "I'm writing an essay on Herzog's Nosferatu--comparing the two," as if that explained everything.

Mr. Hood laid the tape down without comment.

Ali's apartment was on the 12th floor of a new high-rise building a few miles from the college campus. She'd taken it primarily because it overlooked a small lake and an expanse of pine-covered hills, but by night the living room seemed rather narrow and cramped. She wondered how it looked to Marcus Hood in his elegant gray-pinstripe suit, Marcus Hood of Washington and the State Department--Barry's "successful" father--as he strolled about, peering into corners. "Attractive place," he said. "I gather you live here alone?"

Ali told him yes. She lived here alone and always had.

His lips were tightly pursed and his nostrils distended as he breathed heavily, audibly. His skin was unevenly flushed, though, like Ali, he could certainly hold his liquor well.

In a casual voice he said, turning back to Ali, smiling, "You know, Miss Kohl--Ali--I read my son's diary, or whatever he calls it, the other day; I thought I had better. And there's a good deal in there about you. About--you and Barry." He paused, still smiling. "I assume it's mainly fantasy? Or entirely fantasy? A kid's erotic fantasy? That sort of thing?"

Ali said evenly, "Since I haven't read the diary, I don't know what you mean; but I think--yes, I'm sure--it would be something like that. Fantasy." She swallowed a large mouthful of her drink and held the thick, squat glass steady in both hands. "Barry had--has--a strange imagination. A lively imagination."

"A damned morbid imagination," he said with some heat. "But we've already been over that ground."

From that point onward, things became confused. Ali would not remember afterward precisely what happened. They must have talked about Barry a while longer; then Mr. Hood was denouncing his wife, who was an alcoholic of the very worst kind, the kind that doesn't really want to be cured: "I don't even know where she is! She might even be with Elise! Two of a kind!" Then, suddenly, with no warning, Mr. Hood was crying; Mr. Hood was broken and sobbing, gripping Ali in his arms.

He was holding her so tight she was terrified her ribs might crack. She could hardly breathe. She tried to push him away, saying, "Mr. Hood, please----You're hurting me----Please----"

They stumbled together like a drunken couple. Ali's glass fell clattering to the floor. "You're so good, so kind; you're the one good, decent person," Mr. Hood was saying extravagantly, burying his face in her neck, "the one good, decent person in my life. You're so beautiful----" Ali, utterly astonished, tasted both panic and elation. She tried to pry his fingers loose, tried without violence to disengage herself from him, but he held firm. His body seemed enormous, pulsing with misery and heat. He sobbed helplessly, in a virtual frenzy of desire, besotted, whispering, "So good, so kind. So beautiful. Beautiful, beautiful woman----" Gripping her as tight as a drowning man.

So Ali thought, as she'd so often thought, Why not?

•

In her bathroom, 3:20 a.m. She has locked the door behind her, though Mr. Hood is asleep in her bed and will be asleep for a long, long time: Ali knows the symptoms. Slipped sly and sweaty out of his embrace, staggered, swaying across the tilted floor to get to the safety of the bathroom, where, hidden behind a bottle of Maalox, is what remains of a small supply of cocaine her New York lover had brought her the previous week. She also has a small cache of crystal Meth but, even in her disoriented state, reasons that that might be contraindicated here. Psychopharmaceutical error. "Death, my dear," Ali says wisely in a voice not her own. In Mr. Hood's crushing arms, beneath Mr. Hood's thrusting desperate body, she had felt perhaps a pinprick of pleasure that faded almost at once, to be replaced by a churning sensation at the back of her head, churning and screeching like the hundreds of death's-head monkeys overrunning Aguirre's raft at the end. She can still hear them in the bathroom, the door locked.

Only a few grains remaining of the coke, and she thought there'd been more. Spreading the snowy, glittering grains across the mirror, trying not to worry that her hands are shaking so.

What is the difference between something and nothing? Ali wonders, shutting her eyes and sharply inhaling.

After a few minutes, her hands are no longer shaking. Or if they are, it isn't visible.

Naked beneath her untied robe, hair in her face, panting, she kneels on the floor, presses her forehead against the rim of the bathtub. Whispers, "Barry--we are going to save you. Barry--we are going to save you. Barry----"

When she'd held him, she could sec his skeleton shuddering inside the envelope of skin, the way they said the Hiroshima survivors could see their own bones through their flesh when the great bomb exploded. When she'd held him tight, tight, her eyes shut tight in triumph.

Her breasts are aching and she doesn't want to remember why. Her thighs are aching, too. Fatty ridges of flesh on the curve of her hips she can't bear to look at or to touch, but still they say she's beautiful--luscious, ripe Concord grape. Her head is clearing rapidly because of the lovely blizzardy white, and she is able to see things with remarkable lucidity. Methedrine comes in handy if she isn't feeling precisely herself on teaching days; you need that demonic edge, white-hot energy for 50 minutes, not fooling around the way the kids did but for therapeutic reasons, for professional reasons, to get back to the Ali Kohl most truly herself--not some slow, sad, dragging cunt cow. Then a Librium or two to bring her back down if she can't sleep. But there is nothing like coke, and she's half sobbing with relief and gratitude, pressing her forehead against something hard and white and cold and ungiving.

"Barry--we are going to save you. Barry--we are going to save you."

•

Four-ten A.M. and Ali makes her way, groping, back to the bedroom, where a man lies in the center of her bed, breathing in long, deep, chopping strokes--is he asthmatic? Has he a mild heart condition? Will he die one day in her arms? He has told her he loves her; he has told her he is so lonely he can't bear it; can she believe him? A wise voice asserts itself through her own: "He is sleeping the merciful sleep of oblivion; do not wake him." Ali does not intend to wake him.

She stands barefoot in the doorway, her bare toes flexing against the floor. It is early morning but hours still from dawn. The white walls of the bedroom gleam faintly, mysteriously, as if from a distance. She feels good--in fact, very good, back in control and contemplating the options before her. Return to bed? Slip in quietly beside Mr. Hood and try to sleep? Or should she sleep on the living-room couch, or try to, as she has done in the past, never in comfort? Or should she give up entirely on the idea of sleep? She sees herself in that long, brilliant tracking shot at the end of Buñuel's Viridiana. All the cards have been dealt out, but what do they say?

"'Ali liked to stroke his body, running her soft, fleshy hands over his bones."

"She wondered who had given him her name and how much he knew. Did he intend to accuse her of--anything?"