Hartwell

This is about Hartwell, who is nothing like me. I have sometimes told stories about people, men and sometimes a woman, who were like me, weak or strong in some way that I am, or they shared my taste for classical music or fine coffee, but Hartwell was not like me in any way. I'm just going to tell his story, a story about a man I knew, a man not like me, just some other man.

Hartwell just didn't get it. For years he existed, as the saying goes, out of it. Let's say he wasn't alert to nuance, and then let's go ahead and say he wasn't alert to blatancy, either. He was alert to the Victorian poets and all of their nuances, but he couldn't tell you if it was raining. This went back to when he was at the University of Michigan and everybody was preparing for law school, taking just enough history, political science, things like that, but Hartwell majored in English, narrowing that to the Victorians, which could lead to only one thing: graduate school. As a graduate student, he was a sweet guy with a spiral tuft of light hair that rose off his head like a flame, who lived alone in a room he took off campus and who read his books, diligently and with pleasure, and ate a steady diet of the kind of food eaten with ease while reading, primarily candy.

When I met him, he had become a sweet, round man, an associate professor of English who taught Browning and Tennyson, etc., etc., and who brought to our campus that fall years ago his wife, Melissa, a handsome woman with broad shoulders and shiny dark hair cut in a pixy shell.

I say our campus because I, too, teach, but Hartwell and I couldn't be more different in that regard. I know what's going on around me. I teach rhetoric and I parse my students as well as any sentence. My antennae are out. I can smell an ironic smirk in the back row, detect an unprepared student in the first five minutes of class, feel from the way the students file out of class what they think of me. Hartwell drifts into his classroom, nose in a book, shirt misbuttoned, and reads and lectures until well after the bell has rung and half the students have departed. He doesn't know their names or how many there are. He can't hear them making fun ofhim when they do it to his face while handing in a late paper, whining his name, Pro-fes-sor Hart-well, into five sarcastic syllables and smiling a smile so fake-sugary as to make any of us avert our eyes. He is oblivious.

This was apparent to me the first time I met him with Melissa at the faculty party that fall. The effect of seeing them standing together in the dean's back yard was shocking. Anyone could see it: They wouldn't last the year. As I said, she was attractive, but as she scanned her husband's colleagues that evening, it was her eyes, her predatory eyes, that made it clear. Poor old Hartwell stood beside her, his hair afloat, his smile benign and vacant, an expression he'd learned from years alone with books.

Melissa shopped around for a while, and by mid-term, she was seeing our 20th Century drama professor, a young guy who had a red mustache and played handball. It took Hartwell the entire year to find out about the affair and then all of summer session to decide what it meant. Even then, even after he'd talked to Melissa and she to him and he'd moved out of the little house they had bought near the college, even then he didn't really wake up. The students were more sarcastic to him now that he was a cuckold, a word they learn as sophomores and then overuse for a year. Watching that was hard on me, those sunny young faces filing into his office with their million excuses for not being present or prepared, saying things that, if heard in my office, would win them an audience with the dean. Things I wouldn't take.

I, however, am not like Hartwell. There isn't a callow hair on my head. I am alert. I am perspicacious. I can see what is going on. I've become, as you sense, a cynical and thoroughly jaded professor of rhetoric. My defenses are up and, like it or not, they are not coming down.

It was in the period just after Melissa that I became friends with Hartwell. Our schedules were similar and many afternoons at 4:30, we fell into step as we left the ancient Normal Hall, where we both taught. Old Normal was more than 100 years old, the kind of school building you don't see anymore: a red-block structure with crumbling turrets, high ceilings and a warped wooden floor that rippled underfoot. I'd walk out with Hartwell and ask him if he'd like to get a coffee. The first time I asked him, he said, "What?" and when I repeated the question, he looked at me full of wonder, as if I'd invented French roast, and said, "Why, yes, that sounds like a good idea." But, of course, that was the way he responded every time I asked him. He was like a child, a man without a history. His experience with Melissa certainly hadn't hurt him. He thought it was odd, but as he said about the drama teacher one day over two wonderful cups of Celebes Kalossi at the Pantry, "He had vigor." But we primarily talked shop: semantics. Hartwell was doing a grammatical study of Gerard Manley Hopkins, and I offered my advice.

I wasn't surprised during this time to see him occasionally lunching with Melissa. He was the kind of man you could betray, divorce and still maneuver into buying you lunch.

But our afternoons together began to show me his loneliness. He was as seemingly inured to that feeling as any man I'd ever met—even myself in the life I have chosen—but more and more frequently during our conversations, I would see his eyes narrow and fall upon a table across the room where a boy and a girl chatted over their notebooks. And when his eyes returned to me, they would be different, and he would stand and gather his books and go off, a fat fair-haired professor tasting grief. He never remembered to pay for his coffee.

•

The next thing happened, and I knew from the very beginning what to make of it. When you fall in love with a student, three things happen. One: You become an inspired teacher, spending hours and hours going over every tragic shred of your students' sour deadwood compositions as if holding in your hands magic parchment, suddenly tapping into hidden reservoirs of energy and vocabulary and lyric combinations for your lectures, refusing to sit down in class. Two: The lucky victim of your infatuation receives a mark twice as high as he or she deserves. Three: You have a moment of catharsis during the denouement in which you see yourself clearly the fool, a realization that is probably good for any teacher, because it will temper you, seal your cynicism and jade your eye, and make you sit down hard and frequently thereafter.

The object of Hartwell's affections was a girl I kind of knew. She had been in my class the year before, and she was a girl you noticed. Ours is a small Midwestern college and there are a dozen such beauties, coeds with the perfect unblemished faces of pretty girls and the long legs and round hips of women. These young creatures wear plaid skirts and sweaters and keep their streaming hair in silver clips. They sit in the second row and have bright teeth. They look at you unseeing, the way they've looked at teachers all their lives, and when one of these girls changes that glance and seems to be appraising, you wear a clean shirt and comb your hair the next day.

That was what gave Hartwell away: his hair. I met him on the steps of Normal and he looked funny, different. It was the way people look who have shaved their beards or taken to wearing glasses; that is, I couldn't tell what was different for a moment. He simply looked shorter. Then I saw the comb tracks in the hair plastered to his head and I knew. He had been precise about it, I'll give him that. After a lifetime of letting his hair jet like flame—wildfire, really—he had cut a part an engineer would have been proud of and then formed perfect furrows across the top of his head and down, curling once to disappear behind his ear. If you'd just met him, I suppose, it wouldn't have looked too bad. But to me, God, he looked like the concierge of a sad hotel. He had combed his hair and I knew.

There were other signs, too: his pressed shirt, the new tie, his loafers so shiny—after years of grime—that they hurt the eye. He was animated at coffee, tapping the cover of the old maroon anthology of Victorian poetry with new vigor, and then the coup de grâce—one afternoon at the Pantry, he picked up the check.

Hartwell was teaching a Hopkins-Swinburne seminar at night that term and the girl who was the object of his affections, a girl named Julie, was in that seminar. When Hartwell began to change his ways, I simply noticed. It was none of my business. One's colleagues do many things that one doesn't fully appreciate or understand. But Hartwell was different. I felt I should help him. He had not been around this particular block, and I decided to stay alert.

I could see, read and decipher the writing on the wall. This shrewd pretty schoolgirl was merely manipulating her professor to her advantage. I knew she was an ordinary student from her days in rhetoric, an officer in Tri Delta sorority who wore a red kilt and a white sweater and who spent more time choosing her blouses than studying verb phrases, and now she was out for poor Hartwell.

I changed my office hours so I could be around when his class broke up, which was about nine P.M. Tuesdays and Thursdays, and I saw her hang around my old friend, chatting him up, always the last to leave and then stroll with him—and that is the correct word, stroll—down the rickety corridor of Normal, the floor creaking like a fools' chorus. She would laugh at the things he said and toss her hair just so and squeeze her books to her chest. And Hartwell, well, he would beam. From the door of my office, I could see the light bounce off his forehead, he was that far gone.

In most cases, these things are not really very important—some passing infatuation, some shrewd undergraduate angling to raise his or her grade-point average, some professor's flagging ego taking a little ride—but I watched that spring term as it went further and further for Hartwell. The shined shoes were a bit much, but then at mid-term, he showed up one day in gray-flannel slacks, his old khakis and their constellations of vague grease stains gone forever. And I could tell he was losing weight, the way men do when they spend the energy necessary to become fools.

Melissa, his ex-wife, now uneasily married to our drama professor (who had since developed his own air of frumpiness), came to my office one day and asked me what was going on with Hartwell. I hadn't liked her from the beginning, and now, as she sat smartly on the edge of the chair, her short carapace of hair as shiny as plastic, I liked her even less, and I did what I am certainly capable of doing when required: I lied. I told her that I noticed no difference in her former husband, no change at all.

•

I knew with certainty that there was danger when, one afternoon in April, Hartwell leaned forward over his coffee and withdrew a sheet of typed paper from the pages of his textbook. It was a horrid thing to see, the perfect stanzas typed in the galloping pica of his office Underwood, five rhyming quatrains underneath the title: To Julie. It was fire, it was flower, it was—despite the rigid iambic pentameter—unrestrained. It was confession, apology and seduction in one. I clenched my mouth to keep from trembling while I read it, and after an appropriate minute, I passed it back. He had begun to beam everywhere. He wanted to know what I thought.

"It is very, very good," I told him quietly. "The metaphors are apt and original and the whole has a genuine energy." Here I leaned toward his (continued on page 157)Hartwell(continued from page 118) bright face. "But, Hartwell, don't ever, under any circumstances, give this to a student."

"I knew it was good," he said to me. "I knew it. Do you see? I'm writing again."

"Do not," I repeated, "give this to Julie. You will create a misunderstanding."

"There is no misunderstanding," he told me, folding the poem back into the old maroon book. "It is a verity," he said. "I am in love."

As everyone knows, there is nothing to say to that. I stirred my coffee and saw from how high an altitude my friend was going to fall.

•

April is a terrible month on a campus. This, too, is a verity. Every pathway reeks of love newly found and soon to be lost. It is one of the few times and places you can actually see people pine. The weather changes and the ridiculous lilacs bloom at every turning, their odor spiraling up the cornices of every old brick building in sight, including, of course, old Normal. Couples lean against things and talk so earnestly it makes you tired. Everywhere you look, there is some lost lad in shirt sleeves gesturing like William Jennings Bryan before a coed, her dreamy stare a caricature of importance. This goes on round the clock in April, the penultimate month in the ancient agrarian model of the school year, and as I walked across campus that spring, I kept my eyes straight ahead. I didn't want to see it, any of it.

•

Of course, Hartwell and I couldn't be more different. That's clear. But I had a sensation after he'd left that afternoon that reminded me too strongly of when I had had my troubles, such as they were. Years ago—a lifetime, if you want—a student of mine became important to me. She wasn't like Hartwell's Julie at all. Her name isn't important, but it wasn't a pretty name and, in fact, she wasn't really a pretty girl, just a girl. She came to my notice because of an affliction she carried in her eyes—a weight, a sorrow.

This is not about her, anyway, but about me, in a sordid way. I saw what I wanted to see. What I needed to see. She was frail and damaged somehow and I was her teacher. Well, who needs details? It was the same story as all these other shallow memories—some professor off balance and a young person either willingly or unwillingly the victim or beneficiary of it all. My student, this strange girl, received an A for B work, and I waited for her to pick up her term paper a week after the semester ended. Let me explain this to you: There was no reason for me to be on campus, sitting in my office in Normal Hall, no reason whatsoever. I had my door cracked one inch and I waited. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. On Friday afternoon I was still on the edge of my chair. Just having her paper (which I read and reread, held in my lap as I waited) was enough, and undoubtedly, it would have powered me through the weekend. I am the kind of professor who is in his office more Saturdays and Sundays than he will ever admit. On Friday evening, when I was preparing in my routine way to leave and go home, she came. I heard a step on the stairs—the first step that was not the janitor's step—and I knew she was coming. How long could it have taken between the sound of those beautiful footsteps and their pausing at my opened office door? Twenty seconds? Ten? Whatever the time, it was the aeon between my young and my old selves. I had a chance, as the old scholars put it, to know my tragic flaw. Not that I'm any more than pathetic, and certainly not tragic, but I came to know in that short moment that I was a fool. The girl came to my door and paused and then knocked. She acted surprised to find me there. She acted as if she had expected to retrieve her paper in a box outside my door. I told her no, that I had it. I handed it to her, still warm from my lap. She nodded and averted her eyes and said something I'll never forget. "This was a good class for me," she said. "You made it interesting." And then she turned and touched the rippled floor of Normal Hall for the last time. Without her paper and with no reason to be on earth on Friday night, I became a fool and, in a sense, the guardian of fools.

Like Hartwell.

•

But what could I do? This Julie was as shrewd as any I'd seen come along. Not only had she accepted his poem, she'd commented on it. I quizzed him on what she had said, but he just shook his head and smiled until his eyes closed. He was so far gone that I had to smile, too.

But Julie hadn't stopped there. With no reason whatsoever, she had invited him to the spring carnival. There was no reason to do that. She'd already won her grade and her victory. Hartwell was absolutely incandescent about it. He was carnival this and carnival that. I should go, he said. Oh, come with us, he said. It was as if they were engaged. I told him no. It was a sunny spring afternoon in the Pantry—too hot, really, to be drinking coffee—and I told him no, to go ahead, but for God's sake be careful. If you want to know the meaning of effete, just say Be careful to a fool in love. My advice didn't get across the table.

The spring carnival on our campus is a bacchanalian festival. It is designed with clear vengeance: Victory over winter has been achieved and this celebration is to make sure of it. Years ago, it was held on the quad and consisted of a few quaint booths, but it has grown—exploded, really—to the point where now every corner of campus is covered with striped tents and the smell of barbecued this and that clouds the air. I haven't been in years.

But Hartwell's invitation was tantalizing and was made even more so by something that happened the last week of classes. I was packing my briefcase in my office in Normal when the door opened. There wasn't a knock or a hello; the door just swung open and Hartwell's Julie was hanging on it, half out of breath, her hair swinging like something primeval. "Oh, good," she said. "You're here. Listen, Downey," she said, using my nickname without a hesitation, "Hart and I are going to the carnival and he mentioned you might like to go. Please do. You know it's Friday. We're going to eat and then take it all in." Julie looked at me and smiled, her tan cheeks not 23 years old. "It's going to be fun, you know," she said and left.

Well, an encounter such as that makes me sit down, and down I sat. I took the old bottle of brandy out of my bottom drawer—a bottle so old my father had bought it in Havana on one of his trips—and I had half an ounce right there with the door wide open. Downey. I was jangled. So she and Hartwell called me Downey when they called me anything. The prospect of being talked about set part of me adrift.

•

To the carnival I went.

But I didn't go with them. I told Hartwell that I might see him there but to go ahead without me. It was the last week of classes and I had a stack of rhetoric papers on my desk when—outside my window—I heard the gypsy parade, the kazoos and tambourines that signal the commencement of festivities. A feeling came to me that I hadn't had in years. I had heard this ragtag music every spring of every year I'd been in Normal Hall, but that year, it was different. It called to me. I felt my heart begin to drum, and I put down my pen like a schoolboy called outside by his mates. It was the last Friday of the school year and I was going to the carnival.

Part of all this, naturally, was a sympathetic feeling I had for Hartwell. After all, Julie had invited him to the carnival. I was—and I'll admit this freely—happy for him. At the corner, I stopped and bought a pink carnation and pinned it to my old brown jacket and I thrust my hands into my pockets and plunged into the carnival. Crowds of shouting and laughing merrymakers passed me in the alleyway of tented amusements. It was just sunset and the shadows of things ran to the edge of the world, giving the campus I knew so well an unfamiliar face, and I had the sense of being in a strange new village. Bells rang, whistles blew and a red ball bounced past. I saw Melissa, Hartwell's former wife, on the arm of one of our Ph.D. students, eating cotton candy. By the time I'd walked to an intersection of these exotic lanes, I had two balloons in my hand and it was full dark.

I bought some popcorn and walked on beneath the colored lights. Groups of students passed in twos and threes. They didn't see me, but I knew that I had taught some of them. I felt a tug at my arm and it was Julie, saying, "Downey. Great balloons!" She had Hartwell by the other arm.

"Yes," I said, smiling at both of them and tugging at the two huge balloons. "They're big, aren't they?"

Hartwell was in his glory. He looked like a film actor. Confidence came off him in waves. He wore a new white-flannel jacket and a red-silk tie. "They're absolutely grand!" he said, his face shining with affection. "They're the best balloons in this country!"

Julie pulled us over to a booth where, for a dollar, a person could throw three baseballs at a wall of china plates. The booth was being managed by a boy I recognized from this semester's rhetoric class, though he wouldn't make eye contact with me.

"I want you two to win me a snake," Julie said, pointing to the large stuffed animals that hung above our heads.

"Absolutely," Hartwell said, reaching in his pocket for the money. He was going to pitch baseballs at the plates. It was a thrilling notion—and when he broke one with his final throw, that was thrilling, too.

"Well," I said, "if we're going to ruin china, I'm going to be involved." I paid the boy a dollar for three baseballs, smashing one plate only.

We stayed there a while, until, on my third set, I broke three plates and the boy, looking as shocked as I did, handed me a huge cloth snake. It was pink. Hartwell was right there, patting my back and squeezing my arm in congratulations, and I imagine we made quite a scene, Julie kissing my cheek and smiling as I handed her the prize. I'll say this now: It was a funny feeling there in the green and yellow lights of the carnival—I'd never been patted on the back before in my life. I am not the kind of person who gets patted on the back, which is fine with me, but when Hartwell did it there, calling out, "Amazing! Magnificent!" it felt good.

We floated down the midway, arm in arm after that, until I realized we had walked all the way down to Front Street, which is the way I walk home. I said good night to them there, Hartwell and I bowing ridiculously and then shaking hands and smiling and Julie kissing my cheek lightly one more time and calling, "Good night, Downey!" I turned onto Front Street and then turned back and watched them walk away, Julie hanging tightly on Hartwell's arm. They stopped once and I saw them kiss. She put her hand on his cheek and kissed his lips.

As I moved down Front Street, the noises of the carnival receded with every step and soon there was just me and my two balloons in an old town that I knew quite well.

•

It was not like me to enter houses uninvited. I had never done it. But I was in a state. I can't describe the way I felt walking home, but it was about happiness for Hartwell and a warm feeling I had about Hartwell's Julie. I had begun to whistle a lurid popular tune that I'd heard at the carnival. And when I came to Old Tilden Lane, where all the sorority houses are lined up, I turned.

I'd been to all of the Greek houses at one time or another. Each fall, the shiny new officers invite some of the faculty out to chat or lecture or have tea in the houses, and we do it when we're younger because it counts as "service" toward tenure or because we're flattered(we're always flattered), and I had done my canned English Department presentation at Tri Delta years ago.

I found Tri Delta halfway down the winding street, tucked between two other faded mansions. It was almost ten o'clock. The lights were on all through the house and the windows and doors thrown open. I walked up the wide steps and into the vestibule. Everyone was at the carnival at this hour and I felt an odd elation standing in the grand empty house.

This was among the strangest things I have ever done as a college professor—wander into a sorority house. But I did. I went through the living room and up the wooden stairway to the second floor and I went from door to door, reading the name plates. The doors were all partially open and I could see the chambers in disarray, books scattered on the beds and underthings on the floor. The hallway smelled musty and sweet, and the doors were festooned with collages of clippings and photographs and memorabilia, so that many times, I had to read the notes to discover whose room it was. It was kind of delicious there in the darkened hallway, sensing that hours ago, a dozen young women had dressed and brushed their hair in these rooms.

At the end of the corridor, on a dark paneled door, there were several sheets of white typing paper, and I saw instantly that this was Julie's room, even before I went close enough to read any of it. It was, of course, Hartwell's poetry. The poem I had seen was taped there, along with five others he had typed and not shown me. Now, however, each was scrawled with red-ink marginalia in the loopy, saccharine handwriting of sorority girls. Their comments were filthy, puerile and inane. Obscene ridicule. My heart beat against my forehead suddenly, and my eyes burned. Through her open door, I saw Julie's red-plaid kilt on the floor next to a black slip. I felt quite old and quite heavy and very out of place.

I fled. I rattled down the stairway, taking two steps at a time, across the foyer and back into the night. A couple, arm in arm, were coming through the door. They were drunk and I nearly knocked them over. I recovered and hurried into the dark of Old Tilden Lane, where I found something in my hand, and I released the two balloons.

I am a man who lives in six rooms half a mile from the campus where I teach. I like Chopin, Shostakovich, Courvoisier and Kona coffee. I have a library of just over 1000 books. After these things, my similarities with Hartwell end. He has his life and I have mine, and he is not like me at all. We are lonely men who teach in college. I'll give you that.