To Hazel's view, Klug was not only good-looking, mature, and clever, but a source of prestige. This was not just her own notion; the girls and boys at the college concurred. Hazel's status had soared in the past year. For Klug not only taught, he wrote; and what he wrote was printed; usually in bickering small journals, but a few of his pieces had appeared in literary supplements, and in the new popular magazines that featured dense prose and bare girls.
In crowded New York nothing confers more gleam than any public recognition, any thrust however tiny, above the gray human sea. At New York University, where Hazel went, it was not forgotten that Thomas Wolfe had once taught English, an unrecognized genius, walking those very halls. Who could say that Sheldon Klug, at twenty-five, wasn't another Wolfe on his way up? Klug was not from the South, he came from Newark; but he bore himself, and he lectured, with persuasive ironic superiority. He was surely one of the more glamorous faculty members. When he drove up outside a cafeteria near the school late in the afternoon, in T-shirt and blue jeans, and Hazel Paperman got into the bucket seat of his decrepit red Jaguar and roared off under the eyes of her girl friends, she knew a brilliant exaltation far beyond her parents' middle-aged imaginings. And they called him the Sending! Hazel thought she treated them with remarkable forbearance. They were blind.
She treated them kindly this evening, too, ignoring their dour irritation at her sloppy appearance, her lateness, her bringing of Klug. She blew in with a bubbling air, and much kissing, laughing, jokes about the Caribbean, and excitement over Henny's new bracelet. Her parents' glumness soon evaporated. They doted on her. Norman halfheartedly tried, over the champagne cocktails, to make her clean up before dinner, but she overruled him; it would take her hours, everybody was starved, it was pointless. They all gulped two cocktails-except the Sending, who managed three-and Hazel sat down to the twentieth anniversary dinner of her parents looking like a hod carrier; with exquisite eyes, however, and a V-shaped sweet smile.
The dinner got off to a bad start. Klug revealed a surprising appetite, and a cheery willingness to ask for more and yet more. He ate most of the butter rolls in the basket that went around; he filled his salad bowl twice; he drank a lot of wine fast, and he requested a second portion of Henny's barley soup. If this was an attempt to win Henny's heart, it was not a success. She cooked well, she did nearly everything well, but she did not fancy herself as a cook. Henny and Norman kept glancing at each other as Klug attacked the food. Hazel noticed these glances, of course. There is no a priori reason why a great lover and a man of genius should not also be a very big eater; it is a fact, though a little-known one, that Byron had a bad weight problem. Nevertheless Hazel was embarrassed, and she began to chatter.
First she said that she had never been so starved in her life. Painting a room was hard work; my, it certainly gave you a colossal appetite! Maybe it was something in the turpentine fumes. Then she declared that she had great news. This was really a double celebration, because Shel's book had just been accepted by a publisher! Klug stopped eating soup long enough to caution her genially that nothing was certain until the contract was signed, and many wrinkles still had to be ironed out.
"What book is this?" Norman said to him. "I didn't know that you were writing a book. What's the title?"
"I'm afraid that's classified information," Klug said with a smile.
"Oh, I know," Henny said. "It's The Homosexuality of Balzac."
Norman, pouring wine, was so startled that he splashed some on the table. "Balzac?" he said, peering at Klug in disbelief. "Surely not Balzac?"
Klug turned an annoyed look at Hazel, who was blushing. "That wasn't for broadcast, dear. It's a half-finished thesis."
"Oh, mother," said Hazel angrily.
Norman said, "I mean, my dear fellow, Balzac did absolutely nothing but boff women all his life. Surely you know that. I think that was what he died of. That, and eating like a hog."
"It was the women who killed him," Henny said. "Too much shtoop. However, that's Sheldon's theory."
Klug shrugged and smiled, his good humor restored. "The satyriasis was a familiar pattern. Overcompensation, plus a flight from self-knowledge."
"It's an interesting idea, anyhow," Norman said. "Balzac must be about the only one left."
Klug's smile faded into a tolerant, pitying look. He said to Norman, smoothing his hair, "There's always resistance to these discoveries. Read A Passion in the Desert again. And Louis Lambert."
"Thanks. I'll wait for your book. I did Balzac in my twenties. You say this is going to be published?"
"I'm hoping to finish it on a Guggenheim fellowship next year. And I have a publisher interested, yes."
Norman briefly cast his eyes at the ceiling.
Henny carried in the turkey, browned and fragrant. Norman carved it and Henny, dishing out the meat, the stuffing, and the vegetables, piled Klug's plate with an enormous, insulting mass of food. It was not a dinner for a person at all; it was garbage heaped up for a Great Dane. Klug took no offense, and serenely proceeded to eat.
But if the Sending wasn't offended, Hazel was. She kept switching her head this way and that, glaring at her parents with huge hurt eyes. Paperman found himself feeling sorry for her. With her shiny shell of self-confidence, created by her power over boys and by the egotism of an only child, she had been patronizing her parents for years. All at once she was vulnerable, because she really cared about a man. She could not help seeing him this evening, Norman thought, through her parents' eyes; and from that viewpoint, Sheldon did have the clear imperfection of being an eager free-loader.
Hazel's defiant-doe look melted his resentment. She was lovely. She was his daughter. She was all they had. It caused him sharp pain to think that this pudgy, supercilious young man was almost certainly violating her crystalline young body at will and that-manners today being what they were-there wasn't a thing in the world he could do about it. Not a thing. Shotguns were too obsolete even to be funny. No, he had to accept this ravisher at his own table, at his own anniversary dinner -and even smile at him!
"Hazel, turn on the radio." He wanted to shut out these stabbing thoughts.
Henny said, "Oh, please, no, Norman. It's too depressing." Hazel leaped for the portable radio on the buffet, glad of the distraction. It was just past the hour. The announcer was speaking with resonant relish, the voice of oncoming doom:
". offshore islands, the United States Seventh Fleet off Formosa will he ready for all eventualities, the President gravely declared. Meantime Soviet Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev warned that the Soviet Union now has rockets with thermonuclear warheads capable of reaching any target on the planet, including slow-moving fleets at sea, and he added quote any unprovoked aggression against the brave Chinese people will bring down on the aggressors swift reprisals of INCALCULABLE. MAGNITUDE.. Unquote."
There was a short silence. The announcer chirruped gaily:
"In other developments, the nationwide teamsters' strike, now scheduled for Thursday, will totally paralyze the economy of the nation, according to."
"Oh, that's nothing, turn it off," said Henny.
Norman said, "Hell. What I wanted to know was whether the Chinese bombed the Seventh Fleet. They said they would."
"He didn't sound that excited," Hazel said. "I guess they didn't."
"How could they? What bombs have they got?" Henny said. "Chow-mein bombs?"
"Russian bombs," said Hazel. Do you know the best thing about Amerigo?" Norman said to
Henny. "Down there they don't know there's a Chinese crisis. They have no television. You can't buy a paper that isn't five days old. The radio just plays records and commercials. In the three days I was there I heard one news broadcast. The announcer did start to say something once about the Chinese islands, but he couldn't pronounce their names. Do you know what he did? He giggled. I swear, he just giggled and dropped the whole thing, and went on to something else, something about a PTA picnic! And the strange part was, I didn't care. I laughed like hell myself."
"Jesus, let's all move there," said Henny.
Klug had finished his gigantic plateful. He said, "The calculations are that the fallout from the first thermonuclear exchange will poison everybody in the Northern Hemisphere down to latitude nineteen. What's the latitude of Amerigo?"
"Who knows?" said Norman. "It's near the equator somewhere. It's an improvement over Fifty-seventh Street and Seventh Avenue."
"Indubitably. We're probably sitting on Ground Zero, right here at this table, for H-bomb number one," said the Sending. "Cocked and ready at this moment, somewhere on a Siberian tundra, to shoot over the North Pole and land here in about twenty-six minutes. A full hundred megatons."
"Coffee, anybody?" Henny said, her face extremely pugdog-like.
Norman said uneasily, "I'm not really worried. There's not going to be any atom war. Who would be so crazy as to start it?"
Klug smiled at him, as at a student giving a bright answer. "You put the exact question. Who would be so crazy? But, alas, all of history is the case report of a deepening mass neurosis, and at this stage-if one cares to face the truth-the record points straight to an imminent and cataclysmic nervous breakdown of the entire human race."
Norman shrugged. "I suppose the Russians are goofy enough, with their bizarre Dostoevsky make-up, to do almost anything, but even they-"
"Oh, there isn't the slightest danger from the Soviet Union, clearly," Klug said with calm assurance. "It's a naive optimistic society, full of the simple cheery myths of Marx, and quite pacific. It's only the United States that's threatening to destroy the world." Klug smiled blandly at everybody, and drank off a glass of wine. "The United States, you see, has reached the psychoneurotic dead end of the industrial culture. We've actually created the abundant society. We've found that it's a mirage, a dead end, a paralysis of tense frustration. No country in history has ever become so totally polarized to the thanatos instinct, or-"
"The what?" said Henny.
"The thanatos instinct, dear. The death urge," Norman said wearily. "Eros instinct, life urge. Thanatos instinct, death urge. Late Freud."
Klug arched a surprised eyebrow at Norman. "Exactly. Late Freud. And sheer prophecy. Look at us. We build giant highways and murderously fast cars for killing each other and committing suicide. Instead of bomb shelters we construct gigantic frail glass buildings all over Manhattan at Ground Zero, a thousand feet high, open to the sky, like a woman undressing before an intruder and provoking him to rape her. We ring Russia's borders with missile-launching pads, and then scream that she's threatening us. In all history there's never been a more lurid mass example of the sadist-masochist expression of the thanatos instinct than the present conduct of the United States. The Nazis by comparison were Eagle Scouts." The Sending arched an eyebrow again at Norman. "If I were you I'd buy that hotel in the West Indies tomorrow."
"Tell me this," Henny said. "With those ideas, how do you feel about getting married and bringing more vicious, dangerous Americans into the world?"
With a roguish lift of his brow, Klug replied, "Well, there's always some hope in a new generation, and anyway, the life process is its own categorical imperative. I've never been sorry about Russell, for example, and I'm sure he isn't."
"Russell?"
"My son." you have a son?" Henny peered at Hazel, wrinkling her brows.
"Of course." Klug also glanced at Hazel, whose eyes had gone oddly blank. "He's three. Russell lives with his mother in Chicago. I seldom see him, but I'm very fond of him."
This statement brought a pause.
"You're divorced," Norman said.
"No."
"You're still married?"
"My wife teaches. So do I. A divorce is complicated and expensive. I can't just pick up and go to Reno for six weeks. Besides, there are many unresolved things-Anne is still in analysis, and we're both hoping that maybe-"
Hazel said loudly, "It's nobody's business but yours, Shel. Why discuss it?"
"There's a mince pie," Henny said to Klug in brutal tones, "if you have any room left, that is."
Klug hesitated, and grinned. "Well, I can certainly try to do it justice-"
Hazel switched her head wildly at her mother. "I can't eat another bite. Neither can he, so don't go forcing pie on him. We want to see this French movie at the Fifty-fifth. It's late. Let's go, Shel." She started to rise.
Klug laid a hand on her arm. "Your folks seem surprised, Hazel. Surely you've told them about Anne."
"Who cares? What's it got to do with them? Come on."
"Now, now. Calm down." He turned benignly to the glowering parents. "I trust you're not actually upset. I don't have to justify my way of life to you, any more than you have to explain yours to me, but I do have a code. I live by it. It's an honorable code, though it may not be yours. I live by my autonomous choices. I married a bit too young. Well, that's part of my identity now, which I accept and affirm. This doesn't mean I have to forego other feminine company such as Hazel, not in the least. My chief task is to discover and affirm myself, to say yes! to myself. It's a process in which I'm still engaged."
