The Name of the World - Denis Johnson [3]
“Terrific. I look forward to it.”
Ted MacKey, a tall, elegantly graying man, stood in the amber warmth behind his windowglass, both hands uplifted in farewell. Ted wasn’t quite as he first appeared. Over the rest of the winter he included me in a couple of other gatherings at his home, much less formal ones, and it turned out that he was a hipster, a gifted trumpeter who enjoyed a connection with all sorts of suave, tight-lipped, soft-spoken jazz musicians from up and down the Mississippi who ate his food, drank his booze, and improvised with him in trios and quartets. Not condescending to him in the least, I might add, but plainly honored to be playing with him, these men, sometimes women, who sent out their souls through their instruments, and otherwise expressed themselves, I noticed, only by tipping their heads, shrugging their shoulders, or slightly lowering their eyelids.
This was also Ted MacKey’s style. Out of context it had seemed professorial. And just as people tended to get him wrong, he and our colleagues tended to get me wrong. I’d come among them as a man in shock, sickened by politics and at that time freshly, as opposed to recently, widowed. In the four years of our very slight acquaintance Ted had reinterpreted my ongoing paralysis as detachment, maybe irony. I was hip, I was beat. I could have sat in with Chet Baker, if I’d known how to play an instrument. As for my fellow teachers of history, they mistook my numbness for terror. They looked at me and saw somebody like J. Alfred Prufrock—looked at me and saw somebody like themselves.
The gatherings at Ted’s were something of a relief. And not just from the meetings and occasional grim dinners with the stick figures we in the Department of History had made ourselves into, but also from the bleakness of my fourth winter here. The monthlong Christmas break was hard on the Department. I stayed in the empty college town, as I’d done every Christmas, and when classes resumed it seemed the other teachers had each, over the holidays, taken on some fearful form of suffering. Clara Frenow, the Chairperson, had been diagnosed with cancer and begun chemotherapy. Meanwhile our only colleague of color and the only one of us with something like a personality, a man named Tiberius Soames, an almost pathologically brilliant West Indian who conducted his large undergraduate lectures with such flourish he’d doubled the number of History majors since his advent here, tumbled suddenly into a psychic abyss and was hospitalized with severe depression. Two weeks after the winter break he was back, fragile and foreign, perpetrating a painful imitation of himself. Others fell under their own bad luck: a son arrested for drugs, a summer home burned to the ground with heirlooms inside, a case of writer’s block and a textbook contract dissolved, and trouble between the young married couple who shared a full-time position.
Myself, I continued as I had for years. I showed up where I was invited. I read a great deal in the library. I went to the movies by myself. I watched the skaters on the campus pond. Quite a bit more than I’d have liked it known, I held imaginary conversations with a man named Bill, in which I went over the same ground I’d been going over since the deaths of my wife and daughter. While I went around looking paralyzed or detached, my thoughts ripped perpetually around a track like dogs after a mechanized rabbit.
Maybe this is why the young skaters looked so comfortable, even on the coldest days. In the daylight hours on what was called the Middle Campus, between the School of Law and the School of Social Sciences, from a dozen to as many as a hundred boys and girls glided around a pond with a tiny unscalable island in its center, a monolithic, rock island with a sculpture on its peak—red sheet-metal shapes—the pond marked off by a railing. Everybody skated around it in one direction. “Pond” may not be the right word. People told me it wasn’t eight inches deep. A reflecting pool, I’d guess; about twice the area of a football