And what Prescott had said was perfectly
true: as long as Guinness continued to allow himself to be
approached, he had not really said “no.” He had merely said “not
yet,” which is not the same thing. If the pressure were kept up, it
would only be a matter of time.
Tuttle shaded his eyes with his left hand and
looked off down the slope of the hill into which most of the
college’s buildings had been embedded, on down to the tennis courts
and the playing fields that occupied a narrow strip of flatland.
Perhaps it wasn’t such a bad life to be a professor and spend your
time correcting essays; in a sense, he could see Guinness’s point.
After all, wasn’t it his own ambition to come in out of the cold
and join the charmed circle of the paper pushers?
In a way, it made him feel a little guilty,
what he was trying to do to Guinness—but not very. He was tired of
all the rough stuff; he had never been anything beyond merely
proficient at it, and it was only a matter of time before he would
meet another somebody like Guinness behind a gas station men’s
room, somebody who had been born a thug the way Paganini had been
born to play the violin—and that time it would probably be for
keeps. Guinness was his ticket to safety, and if one or the other
of them had to go out into the cold, cruel world and get shot at,
then it was damn well going to be Guinness.
And who could say, in his present temper,
that it might not be the best thing for him? He needed something to
keep his mind occupied; perhaps it was necessary for him to begin
risking his life again in order to be reminded that it was worth
living.
Sometimes, in the evening, they would sit
together in Guinness’s room (Tuttle had gotten into the habit of
inviting himself and Guinness hadn’t objected, hadn’t even seemed
to notice), and for periods of twenty or thirty minutes Guinness
would not even move. He would stare at some object in the middle
distance that only he could see, hardly seeming to breathe. What it
was he thought about, whether it was simply the death of his wife
or the neurotic little tragedy of Misha Vlasov or the whole ugly
coil of earthly destiny, he never said. Perhaps he didn’t think
about anything; perhaps his mind was too numb with what had
happened for him to think at all.
So perhaps it would be the best thing for
him. God knows, if he kept up like this much longer, he’d either
blow his brains out or end up in one of those loony bins that
seemed to line the south side of Ralston Avenue. There might be no
limit to what a man could stand, but there was to what he could
bear to brood about.
So perhaps, for Guinness, getting back in
would be what getting out was for Tuttle: a way to survive. It
wasn’t absolutely out of the question.
Anyway, Guinness was a big boy. At one time
he had been at the very top of their highly competitive profession,
so it wasn’t as if anyone were seducing the innocent. If he went
back—and he would go back—it would be because that kind of life was
something he needed the way other men need air, something finally
impossible to evade.
If not today, then tomorrow. Finally,
however, it would happen, just the same. In three days Tuttle would
take a plane back to Washington, so that was the deadline for both
of them. Guinness might hold out until the last possible moment,
but in the end, like a man of sense, he would perceive the
necessity of the thing.
Room 244, Humanities Building. That was what
the little girl who answered the English Department phone had told
him, and she should know.
About the
Author
NICHOLAS GUILD was born in 1944 in Belmont,
California. He received a B.A. degree in English from Occidental
College in Los Angeles and an M.A. in Comparative Literature and a
Ph.D. in English from the University of California at Berkeley.
Since then he has divided his time between teaching and writing. He
is the author of critical articles on 17th Century poetry and 20th
Century fiction, along with twelve novels, several of which have
been international best sellers and which have been translated into
German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Russian, Greek and Czech.
Presently he lives in Frederick, MD
Visit his website:
http://www.nicholasguild.com/
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