Selling Out (3 page)

“You're a writer!” old Professor Bryant had said to him seventeen years ago, looking up from Perry's short story in the
Atlantic Monthly
, lifting his hands in a gesture of honor and welcome. With Bryant's influential backing, Haviland had given Perry the time to write as well as teach, and the college community came to regard him proudly as
their writer
. They nested and nourished him, protected and praised him, shared the honor of his books and prizes, put up with his black moods and drinking bouts, stood by him through the busted marriage that sent him into a tailspin at thirty-two and the ragged personal life that followed till Jane came along, like a real-live happy ending, beginning brighter days.

“I only meant a temporary change,” Al said. “I never thought I'd be saying this to you, of all people, but maybe you're
too
comfortable now.”

“Too fat and happy, huh?” Perry grinned. “Maybe that's it. Maybe I do need a change—a challenge.”

Al suggested he apply for a grant or fellowship to go abroad for a while, and Perry pounced on the notion. He sent off to foundations for applications, lined up distinguished sponsors, and with Al's help concocted high-sounding proposals for literary projects. Yet all the time, underneath all the activity, he knew that none of it would really happen because in his heart he really didn't care. The romantic images he had held in his youth of “Paris” and “Ireland”—not the real places but the literary dream about them—had faded, lost their power. Trying to revive his feeling about them was as useless as trying to re-create the passion once felt for an old lover.

Jane did her admirable best at playing the game of enthusiasm for going abroad. She even revived Perry's fantasy of the two of them doing a book together, one of those color-filled coffee-table numbers, a marriage of her pictures and his words:
The Irish Coast–A New View
, or
Sidestreets of Paris Reconsidered
. Perry brought home maps that they spread on the living room floor, bending over to study as assiduously as explorers, but under the bright pretense Jane sensed his real unrest and lack of interest. She was worried about him.

“What is it? What's happening?”

She would ask, with gentle concern, when she woke in the dark hour before dawn to find him noiselessly pacing the room in bare feet, or simply sitting in the old easy chair in the corner, smoking his pipe and staring.

“Nothing,” he answered quietly, or “I don't know.”

He came and kissed her gently on the forehead, wondering himself what it was that distracted him during the day, acting like a subtle itch on his concentration. His senses had never seemed so acute, yet when classes began in September he found himself losing thoughts in midsentence, suddenly standing and staring at the students' familiar faces and wondering who they were and how they got there.

All the girls seemed to be named Michelle now. When he started teaching they were mostly Mary Lou and Cindy and now they were Michelle and Dawn. Of course they weren't girls any more, they were women. It was difficult for Perry to look at the latest crop of rosy-cheeked, milky-skinned, lithe young damsels, some of them teenagers fresh from pubescence, and call them women, just as it was incongruous for him to think of their giggling, pimply male counterparts as men. It was all right to slip now and then and refer to the male species as boys (the football coach called them his kids), but calling the females girls was a real cultural-political gaffe, practically reportable as an incident of sexual harassment.

There was a gorgeous Michelle who sat in the front row of Perry's “Art of the Novel” class who he privately felt was sexually harassing
him
, and certainly contributing to his already acute condition of mental disorientation, by every ten minutes or so tossing back her head in such a way that her long mane of glossy hair swung like a golden curtain across her face and spread itself on her other shoulder. The execution of the movement involved an arching of the neck and back that thrust forward her high, ample breasts, which of course were not confined by the unnatural constriction of a bra, so that, under the low-cut T-shirt-type garment she wore above her skintight jeans, the breasts seemed to be shoved toward Perry like a kind of erotic taunt as he paced in front of the class. He wondered if alleging that this Michelle's breasts were invading his space would be an acceptably current kind of complaint.

As the swing of Michelle's golden mane one morning totally swept from Perry's mind an intricate formulation he was about to present in regard to Henry James's style in
The Golden Bowl
, he stopped and asked, “Excuse me, but do you have some kind of itch that makes you have to throw back your head like that?”

“No,” Michelle said with eye-blinking innocence, “I don't have any kind of itch at all.”

There were giggles beginning now.

“Then why do you do it so often?”

“To develop my breasts,” she explained brightly.

The room cracked up, as Perry felt his face become a beet.

“Class dismissed,” he said.

It was one of those days. He happened to be wearing his treasured old faded Jefferson Airplane sweatshirt, which usually made him feel mellow, if not still youthful. He often wore to class instead of the standard tweed jacket with suede elbow patches one of his colorful collection of sweatshirts emblazoned with images and names of sixties music groups, or offbeat places or events he had been to, like the Fifth Annual Joy Street Block Party held on Beacon Hill, in Boston, and the World Blueberry Capital, which was Union, Maine. Wearing one of those with one of his colorful hats (the brief-billed Chinese worker's cap, the Parisian beret were among his favorites), plus a pair of bright red or green corduroys with hiking boots, made Perry feel happily more like a crazy creative sort than a stodgy professor. It was not only tolerated, he felt it was rather expected of him, part of the fulfillment of his role as the English department's “real writer.”

It of course was on that day, the day of Michelle's coming out with the line about her breast development exercises, that one of Perry's freshman comp students noticed his Jefferson Airplane sweatshirt and asked, with a kind of remote, antiquarian interest, “Were they around the same time as Elvis?”

Perry went home and stared at himself in the mirror before lunch, trying to see himself objectively, the way others saw him. His light brown curly hair had begun to go gray, and the boyish freckles now seemed out of place. Would those marks of youth, those happy daubs of Huck Finn innocence, soon be mistaken for liver spots?

He was, to his amazement, forty-three years old.

He had a sense of time slipping past, faster than intended, like water spilling from a jug that no one notices has tipped on its side.

Now
—that was the word that kept popping into his mind—and then
Now is the time
, almost like a voice speaking, and then he would ask aloud, “For what?” But there was no answer, only the rushing of the leaves, of the hours and days.

Stretched out in front of the fireplace at the Cohens' after the other guests had gone home from one of Rachel's fabulous chili and strudel bashes, Perry felt a welcome respite from the nagging, gnatlike doubts that lately were assailing him. This was his home away from home, was in fact the only place he had thought of as home before Jane came along and made one he felt was his own.

The evening had been especially gratifying, for the Cohens had brought together in the warmth of their hospitality the newest member of the department, a brightly idealistic young man named Ed Branscom and his pregnant wife, Eileen, who were still so new to the place they had not until now met old Professor Bryant, who lived alone in a room at the Faculty Club and was too often taken as a fixture of the place rather than as the honored colleague emeritus and friend he was treated as tonight. In bringing those guests together with Perry and Jane (who was now curled peacefully asleep on the couch) the Cohens had created a sense of a continuum as well as a circle, a feeling of everyone's being a part of an ordered progression within a harmonious community.

“This is the way it s'pose to be,” said Perry, sipping his brandy.

“We're all very fortunate,” Rachel said, lifting her feet up toward the fire.

“The most,” Perry agreed. “So why can't I do my work and be grateful? Why can't I stop worrying I ought to be somewhere else, doing something different?”

Al loomed up to put another log on the fire, looking like a big friendly sheepdog in the shadowy light.

“Maybe you've ‘had too much of apple-picking,'” he said.

“What's that supposed to mean?” Perry asked.

“It's Frost,” Rachel explained. “Don't you know ‘After Apple-Picking'?”

“What the hell has Robert Frost got to do with anything?” Perry shouted, suddenly feeling on the verge of tears and wanting to strike out at someone or something, anything, as he scrambled to his feet and yelled, “We're practically in the year two thousand and you people are quoting me
Frost
, on
apples
, for God sake?”

The next morning he called to apologize profusely to both Al and Rachel. He went to the room where he did his writing to try to think, to try to figure out what was happening to him. From his window he saw distant hills, tall pines, and a rutted dirt road. Sun and shadow, land and sky, were focused and held in the order of rectangular glass framed with wood. This quiet place was more than his study, in fact he sometimes thought of it as the closest thing he had to a soul, if such a thing existed, or had a tangible look. It was, at least, his chosen view of the world—or view of the world he had chosen.

Jane could be seen in it on her way to or from her expeditions to photograph the plants and trees, birds and insects, leaves and flowers of the nearby fields and hills. When she moved up from the city she became absorbed with the land and its everyday treasures, began to make it the subject of her work, not only in traditional pictures she sold to magazines but in the more original, close-up investigations of nature that she brought together in a highly praised exhibit in a Boston gallery that prompted one critic to call her “an upcoming Annie Dillard of photography.” The good reviews and sales resulting from the exhibit not only made Jane feel her work was understood and appreciated, but gave her professional status as an artist in her own right as Perry was in his, which made them both happy, being in reasonable balance in that way as in so many others.

Jane was a crucial element in the composition Perry saw from his window, and in fact had made the whole picture possible, not only emotionally, but practically. When she came up to live she found the old farmhouse and pooled her own savings with his so together they were able to buy it. Perry had never owned a place he had lived in before, and after the initial fears and panic arising from such unexperienced responsibility, he came to love it with a pride he laughingly admitted bordered on patriotism. The sense of ownership added to the tranquility he felt in the house, especially in this room, with its view of the shifting colors of the seasons, its ordered presentation of the world. But now he began to wonder and worry if the whole thing, this house and love, this very life he led, was
too
tranquil, was leading to nothing more worthy or noble than the snoozing peace of pipe and slippers.

He made himself sit at his typewriter every morning, but felt no inspiration or urgency. The new book of stories consolidated a certain cycle of experience in his life and art, and he did not yet see his new direction in this particular form. Ten years ago he would have felt driven to make another stab at the obligatory novel that custom and commerce required of writers of this time and place, but he had come to finally accept the fact that it was simply not his métier, and the security Haviland gave him, both financially and professionally, spared him that artificial compulsion.

Sometimes he toyed with the idea of writing a play because he so enjoyed devising dialogue, but the realistic thought of the odds involved in getting anything professionally produced seemed overwhelming. Worse still, the notion of ending up as one of those fuddy-duddy professors whose dramas are staged by the college Thespian Society was too depressing to even contemplate.

He wrote letters to friends, drank coffee, smoked his pipe, and left his study to pace through the house, poking into corners and rearranging pillows like an absentminded detective in search of a clue. Daydreaming often, he was startled by the voice of his wife in their own house.

“Hey—this guy is looking for
you!
”

Jane had gone out one cold, windy night to make a magazine raid on the drugstore, and she was curled on the couch reading
Time
when she sprang up and pushed the article from the Entertainment section right under Perry's nose.

NEW TUBE BOSS NO BOOB
.

Skimming the story, Perry at first could not figure out why he should care that some hot young whiz had taken over the moribund television department of Paragon Films. Archer Mellis sounded much like any other depressingly young, outrageously successful show biz executive on the make and the way up, except for his fancy and far-ranging cultural credentials: Phi Bete from Princeton, Fulbright scholar, musical director of the Off-Broadway hit
Matchbox Revue
, special advisor on youth to the governor of New Jersey, producer of the low-budget film
Cranks
, which won honorable mention at Cannes, developer of the first holistic medicine cable TV network, and former vice-president of the New York office of I.S.I. (Inter-Stellar Images), the powerful worldwide talent agency.

In the latter position, while packaging colossal deals for his famous clients, Mellis had found time to dash off a provocative piece attacking the new television season that was published on the Op Ed page of the
New York Times
, and so shook up the major networks that the president of one issued a counterattack charging Mellis with “links to Third World rabble-rousers.” The other two networks offered him vice-presidencies. Mellis in fact was swamped with offers from nearly every segment of the industry he had so scathingly attacked, and chose the post at Paragon because it gave him what he called “freedom of quality.”