The Evening News Page 4

  “She’s passed,” Dr. Scarr said, not looking at Maria.

  In his dark brown corduroy sports jacket, khaki shirt, and tan corduroy pants, Paul teaches aggressively and well. His peer evaluations say he is dynamic. Dynamic is their euphemism for controversial. Paul’s methods are the subject of many mailroom gossip sessions. He knows the hush that sometimes falls around the white alphabetized boxes when he enters the room means that the old men were discussing him. What should be done with the young assistant professor? The consensus leans toward granting him tenure; his colleagues feel it will settle him down. Paul thinks of his colleagues as “the old men.” He thinks of most of them as brontosaurs waiting to sink into the mud and die. They’re a turgid lot, going through the same motions, reading the same yellowed lecture notes semester after semester. They are predictable and therefore safe. Students tolerate them. Paul is erratic, daring. Students either love him or hate him. His troubles with the old men and the higher administration began the day he threw the portable desk.

  He didn’t throw the desk very far—actually, he only shoved it—but the portable desk toppled and clattered and the noise woke his dreaming students and rang out through the silent halls. Paul shoved the desk for emphasis, to make a point, to drive home an idea. There is nothing safe and predictable about ideas, he believes. Sometimes ideas should strike you with thunder. He wants to make thunder, to knock the complacent off their high horse. He wants the exchange of ideas to firebomb the world.

  The Dean called Paul into his office. The Dean said he was aware that any number of instructional techniques could, in the proper circumstances, be viable, but the abuse of university property was at best an unorthodox method that was untenable and certainly was not to be encouraged by administrative personnel. The Dean smoked a large cigar while he spoke. Hundreds of ceramic and mahogany toads covered his bookshelves and desk. The Dean had once been a biologist who led an excursion into South America in the search for new subfamilies of toads. Some of the toads’ backsides were covered with bunches of ceramic eggs. On the Dean’s desk was a plaque that read BUFO AMERICANUS. Paul reassured the Dean that his actions did not damage the desk. He said he chose an especially sturdy-looking desk to shove, aware of the appropriate respect university employees should afford university property. The Dean did not recognize Paul’s sarcasm. Nevertheless, Paul said, the instructional technique would not be used by him again.

  “Then we’re eyeball to eyeball on this,” the Dean said, puffing on his cigar and standing and extending his hand.

  “Yes,” Paul said. “Thank you for your counsel.”

  Paul wasn’t unlike his students when he first entered college. But the climate of campus life was different then. There was an undeclared war in Asia, riots in the cities’ ghettos, angry women who wore buttons that read OFF OUR BACKS. There were people who argued about DDT and ecology. Paul read Silent Spring, One-Dimensional Man, Soul on Ice, Sisterhood Is Powerful. He listened to lunchtime debates in the boisterous Student Union. The ideas made a firestorm in his mind. When the National Guard invaded the campus, and students and professors went out on strike, and peaceful demonstrations were tear-gassed and scattered—legs tripped by nightsticks, heads and ribs clubbed—Paul felt a sudden spiritual manifestation, what he learned in Soph Lit was called an epiphany. He didn’t have to be frightened. He could matter. So he became an active student radical. He helped coordinate teach-ins. He petitioned City Hall for permits to demonstrate, to march. He organized his thoughts. He felt he was a part of something and agreed with the student at Radcliffe who in 1968 said, “We do not feel like a cool, swinging generation—we are eaten up inside by an intensity that we cannot name.” Paul read The Guardian, Ramparts, Zap Comics, The Berkeley Tribe. He was making decisions that would affect him for the rest of his life. He joined a group that put on guerrilla theater. He rapped with guardsmen, lent them magazines to read, brought them coffee from Dunkin Donuts. After he was arrested during a demonstration in his senior year, the university attempted to withhold his degree. There was a month of hearings about all those who’d been arrested. Paul read Isaac Deutscher’s book on Trotsky’s early life, The Prophet Armed, during much of the hearings. A lower court overruled the university’s findings to expel. Paul was graduated in good standing.

  He returned to the city and for two years worked in factories. Then he went to graduate school. He met Maria. They fell in love. He completed the work on his dissertation.

  The old men crabbed about growing course loads and static pay scales. They swapped stories about how ignorant their students were. Stories about absurdly ignorant students earned the loudest mailroom laughs. When one old full professor retired, he mimeographed a booklet of quotes from his years’ worst student essays. Paul didn’t find it funny. “If they’re so damn dumb,” he told the laughing old men, “why in hell don’t you teach them?”

  The retiring professor scratched the side of his grotesquely large bald head. “That’s why we hired you, you naive fool. Waste all your juice on the comatose shits. Gentlemen, I’m going fishing.”

  Paul wears the story like a badge. He tells it whenever the untenured faculty gathers to complain. The young assistants nod, sip white wine or Lite beer, repeat their stories, shake their heads.

  Yet Paul cannot really empathize with his students. They seem to him to be hedonistic, concerned mainly with copping highs and getting laid. Today’s students are into escapism, he tells the young assistants. Their primary contribution to American society has been to make “party” into a verb. Where SEIZE THE TIME used to be written, now was scrawled PARTY DOWN. The students seem too close to the old men, Paul thinks. It’s as if the students realized that the smorgasbord of good times was running out, but instead of working and struggling to replenish the tables they jostled only to load up their empty plates before it was too late. At his most cynical, Paul confesses to Maria that what the students need is a good taste of repression. The spur to the side of the sleeping horse. Then he immediately says, “No, I don’t really mean that. Listen to me, I’m talking crazy. I must be getting old.”

  Maria was in junior high when Paul experienced his epiphany. World events bore her, though on principle she is against all forms of violence and war. She is glad she came of age when she did. She has an active imagination. She doesn’t need to experience directly the burning pain of pepper gas to know it makes you sneeze and choke. Government plays for keeps, Maria believes. Authority is brutal because brutality is endemic to authority. Maria doesn’t like pain. She is wary of dentists, always polite to policemen. The major issues when she was in school were dress codes and whether the seniors could have a smoking lounge. Her ninth-grade class helped put together a rally for peace in the school auditorium; Maria neatly lettered a rainbow sign that read WORLD PEACE—LET’S TRY IT! She was attentive in class and did most of her homework, and each afternoon, after riding in a girlfriend’s mother’s car to a girlfriend’s house where the girls sipped Tab and talked about clothes and boys and new records, she got high. Maria is an expert smoker of grass. She can smoke a joint down so close to her lips it resembles a half-moon sliver of fingernail, and that’s not even using a roach clip. On the weekends she worked in a department store, selling mascara and lip gloss and cologne to large, overdressed women who already used too much perfume and makeup. Maria seldom uses makeup. She is naturally pretty, with good cheekbones, her eyelashes naturally thick. When Paul met her at a party after a Grateful Dead concert, she smelled like Ivory soap and marijuana smoke.

  Demonstrations frighten her, as do most overt displays of emotion. Why can’t people be civilized and just talk things out? Maria thinks. War belongs to another world, like boxing. She cannot see any sense in people hitting each other, even if they’re being paid millions of dollars to do it. It’s stupid, she thinks, and the people who watch it and cheer are stupider, and in most arguments she leaves the room or concedes. “You’re absolutely correct,” she agrees. But of course she isn’t con
vinced; her surrender is only a ploy that helps her get past the time when someone else wants to argue. She knows that Paul finds her behavior irritating, but that is his problem. Maria loves Paul because of it, because he is what she isn’t. Yin and yang. Though she tells him to change, to see life as more than mere sets of social and political theories, she realizes that his personality is set as granite. If she were a nation she’d be Switzerland. Neutral. Protected by snowcapped mountains. Maker of watches, peace talks, chocolate. No taste fills the mouth as darkly, as completely, as chocolate. When Maria studied European geography in tenth grade she turned in so many extra-credit reports on Switzerland that her teacher raised the white flag and gave her a 101 on her report card.

  In college she received a degree in library science. She is very serious about libraries. She finds them civil, even better than churches because in libraries you can move about. Everything has its place in a library. The Dewey Decimal System was as great an advancement as the discovery of the wheel. Everyone is equal in a library, and everyone knows it is improper to raise your voice. Whenever there’s any unnecessary noise, all a librarian has to do is say, “Shhh.” People are usually grateful when you help them find a book.

  The sole imperfection, Maria thinks, is the copying room. There the coin exchangers clank; the Xerox machines groan and whir. The copiers break the spines of books. The area is somehow impure, as sacrilegious as a Coca-Cola machine in a cathedral.

  Maria is fond of sitting on a ladder in the graduate stacks, surrounded by books, reading. The gentle hum of the building’s ventilation system is the only sound she hears. She imagines that she is the keeper of ideas, the custodian of civilization, and outside the walls of her fortress the barbarians wage war against the vandals, but the library walls keep her safe. All of the explosive issues rest quietly on their shelves. Sometimes Maria thinks of herself as a monk, sheltering the written word, in the darkest days of the Dark Ages. Except for celibacy, she might have liked the life of a nun. She is often overwhelmed by the brash cacophony of life. In traffic jams, when others around her impatiently inch forward and blow their horns, she shifts into neutral and slowly idles, concentrating on the stutter of r’s her engine continues to pronounce. Sometimes she smokes a joint in the library’s third-floor ladies room. Marijuana pacifies her. Good marijuana puts a warm coat of varnish on her eyes. Then she is glazed, safe, protected by the haze the reefer gives her; the flow of life’s madness is slowed down, and she can cope.

  Maria accepts her Hispanic roots matter of factly, and she thinks that in a past life she once was Swiss. Though she claims she doesn’t believe in organized religion, she wears a gold crucifix on a chain around her neck and makes the sign of the Cross whenever she hears an ambulance. Maria believes in tarot cards, palm readings, astrology, the interpretation of dreams. Death always comes in threes and always knocks on the door or wall. One morning when she was sixteen she was brushing her hair, getting ready for school, when her grandmother rushed in to ask if she had heard the knocks. That afternoon her grandmother died. Then an uncle died, then Maria’s cousin. Maria is proud of the story. When Paul hears her repeat it and criticizes her for not being rational, she says, “Paul, you’re so limited I could laugh.”

  Maria is very aware of how tentative human life on the planet is. Secure on her ladder in the graduate stacks, she reads the predictions of Nostradamus. She studies the teachings of Edgar Cayce. She believes in good and evil, and she knows she has had many past lives. In at least one of them she knew Paul; that is why he seems so comfortable to be around. Their unconsciousnesses recognize each other. Maria can’t remember any details of her past lives. The fact that she has lived before is enough.

  People are born, she believes, and they live and do good and evil. Then they’re born again and again and again, until they do mostly good. Until they don’t have to work through anything anymore. She knows she has many more lives to live.

  She believes the body growing in her womb is just that, a body. It will become complete later, when a soul floating in the cosmos selects it. When a soul chooses her and Paul. So she and Paul need to be very good because many souls are judging them. Paul needs to fight against some of his rigidity. She needs more backbone, more courage to stand up, to define. She knows that this spring is a very special time, tentative as an interview. But if Nostradamus is correct, the world will end during the child’s lifetime. This worries Maria.

  Sometimes she sits by herself late at night, arms around herself, rocking, weeping. She weeps for the future her child will see. What a bitter world, she thinks. What an obscene, violent, horrible mess. Don’t come down to us if you’re frightened, she tells the souls in the cosmos. We have very little to offer, so wouldn’t it be better if you wait? If none of the souls choose to come down, Maria prays to God, let me miscarry. I’m not forcing you, she tells the soul of her baby. Choose me and Paul, if we are what you need. Come to us—we welcome you—even though I know your death will break my heart when the world ends, when the ground is shaken by earthquakes, when the end comes and death falls like a rain of hailstones from the broken sky.

  So Paul and Maria watch the evening news because it seldom fails to reaffirm their separate beliefs. Paul turns up the volume, adjusts the color, then settles on the couch. The best minds of the sixties had foreseen all of this, he thinks. But being right gives him little solace. He hopes the world can resolve its problems. He is tired and wants to grow old in relative stability and peace. Is that too much to ask for? he thinks. He knows the answer. Of course it’s too much, because he and the rest of America are still so damn privileged, and because order naturally deteriorates into chaos and chaos makes fertile ground for discontent, insurrection, and war. The next war will be with nuclear weapons, he believes. Has man ever made a tool he didn’t use eventually? It’s the bottom of the ninth inning, he thinks, and there are no runners on base; the good guys are ten thousand runs behind, and the final pitch is on its way. Soon it will explode in the catcher’s oversized mitt, and somebody will fire a nuclear warhead, and in a cloud of fire the world as we know it will be gone.

  Even schoolchildren can recite the scenario, Paul thinks. No wonder they smoke angel dust and impregnate one another by the time they are thirteen. Carpe diem. He knows it is insane. It is insane to sit in the faculty dining room of the student cafeteria and actually discuss with the young assistants how the world will end. His theory is that the planet itself will remain intact after the bombs are unleashed, but mammals, reptiles, birds, and most of the fish will be destroyed; plant life will be devastated, but some insects will survive, and some fish, so deep in the oceans that they continue to defy discovery. These forms of life will be left. So it will not really be the end of the world, Paul argues. Only the end of us. Then the analogy is humanity as dinosaur—human as extinct, lumbering beast. Our skeletons will adorn the insect museums of the future, he jokes, and future praying mantis larvae will ask their mothers what happened to the mammals, the reptiles, the birds, the large fish. Mommy, why did they become extinct? Oh, the wise praying mantis mother will say, we have any number of theories. They might have been destroyed by a supernova. Maybe large meteors fell from the sky and raised so much dust it erased the sun. Perhaps they burned too much fossil fuel and as a result of the greenhouse effect the polar icecaps melted. Some think man learned nuclear fission, but that’s an extreme viewpoint. Even the ignorant aphids know not to experiment with that.

  The ground ball skips back to the pitcher. He picks it up easily and scoops it underhand to first. Out. The ball game’s over.

  Maria leaves the room now that the news is on. She leaves, but cannot help but listen. “Paul,” she says, “do you have to watch it?”

  “What would you rather I do?” he says. “Shut my eyes? Turn on ‘The Beverly Hillbillies’?”

  “Anything,” Maria says, pouring a glass of valpolicella in the kitchen. She touches her growing abdomen, is aware of the fullness of her breasts. Everything ma
kes her think of the fate of her coming baby. The face of the Argentine widow staring grimly at the flag-draped coffin. The Irish children throwing back canisters of tear gas in the Ulster streets. Women wearing babushkas in food lines in Poland. The crack of automatic rifles in EI Salvador. The very worst are the pictures of the starving children in Africa. Arms like wooden spoons, distended stomachs, flies crawling on their nostrils and open lips. Why can’t the news limit itself to the weather? she thinks. Cars abandoned in ragged rows on a highway after a blizzard, homes that shouldn’t have been built on mountainsides in the first place sliding down a lake of mud. These are the things Maria can watch, can understand. Hurricanes. Floods. A tragic fire. Children playing with matches. Her baby will never play with matches. Already she has started to childproof the house.

  Can the world be childproofed for her and Paul? she wonders.

  They always end the evening news with a light note, a humorous touch. Exit laughing. A story about the grandmother in Florida who opened her house trailer to hundreds of foster children over the past thirty years—“There Was an Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe.” The Oklahoma cowboy who lived in a cage full of rattlesnakes for several months but who now wouldn’t be listed in The Guinness Book of World Records. Pathos and irony. In Virginia Beach a man hacked his mother-in-law to death with a hatchet and claimed as his defense that he thought she was a raccoon.

  Absurd. A commercial for something called Intellivision begins, and a shill praises it over other video-game systems because only Intellivision offers the total destruction of a planet. So their gravest fear is now a feature on a video game? The glass of red wine falls from Maria’s hand. It shatters on the linoleum like a destructing planet. Paul rushes into the kitchen. And that’s the way it is—