The Name of the World Read Online Free PDF Page B

prying?”
    “You mean, will I vote for Senator Thom?” The Controversial Senator Tom-Tom, he was called by his constituents. The Big Chief, he was also called. I had stayed with the Senator at first in the hope of having influence, later in the hope of being there on the day of his defeat, finally in the hope of gathering evidence to bring him down. But he was clean, and it wouldn’t be fair to omit saying that he was even a good man. It’s just that his principles were small and his horizon was November. He should have been a Republican, but he was a Democrat—why? Why not? I think very little of either party now, and I can’t understand how I ever managed to see any difference between them. Worst of all, somewhere in the middle of my visit to that planet, I’d misplaced my sense of humor about all this. Would I vote for Senator Thom?
    “I no longer vote,” I told J.J.
    The spaghetti and the lasagna came. J.J. changed the subject, wanted to know how I felt about teaching, about students, about the academy. And now I got it—he was conducting an interview after all.
    How many interviews, how many J.J.s winding what quantity of pasta around how many forks, did the future hide? The question dropped me in a pit. Is there any limit, I thought, to how boring this place can be? By the time we’d both turned down dessert and were halfway through our cups of coffee, I’d decided no. No limit. “Do you know what?” I said. “I think I’ll let this next year be my last. I believe I’m through with the life of the mind.” Getting it said felt like a minor thing, but necessary. Like finally taking a second to tie a flapping shoelace.
    “Through with the life of the mind! Now I’m convinced you’re just the guy we need at the Forum.”
    “No. Thanks, but no.”
    A bit of silence between us now. We heard a man and a woman talking at the table just next to ours. The woman mentioned somebody’s funeral. J.J. took an interest.
    He stopped eating. He was clearly eavesdropping. Now the woman said, “I think it’s muggy in Alabama. Isn’t it?”
    “Muggy?” the man said. “It’s Alabama.”
    “I’m sorry,” J.J. said, “excuse me—”
    They both looked over at us. J.J. said to them, “Trevor Watt is dead?”
    They looked at each other for a second, and then back at J.J. “Yes—he’s dead.” It came out of both their mouths at once.
    The man said, “He had a heart attack last Saturday.” J.J. cleared his throat. He looked stunned. “I’m sorry,” he said again. “He was a pretty good acquaintance of mine. Where was he?”
    “He was at Brown,” the woman said.
    The man said, “Well, but he’d retired. He was living in—”
    “Down in Alabama someplace,” the woman said.
    While we paid our bill, J.J. went on chatting with them, and I urged him to take his time. I stepped outside and stood smoking a cigar on the sidewalk. Casually I drop that fact, but actually I’ve never smoked. This one had been given to me. People gave me gifts, people liked me, maybe because they sensed I was virtually dead and couldn’t hurt them.
    I’d been waiting for J.J to take up the subject of his wife, to open a window on his bitterness this day of his divorce. But nothing of the kind had happened. He and his wife had been separated a couple of years. Crossing the legal finish line seemed to have made him pensive today, but I supposed in general he’d mended.
    As a matter of fact, just a few weeks previous I’d met J.J.’s wife. This was at a large dinner party at a Dean’s house, one of those old-fashioned affairs where many had come for dinner but most—the students—would be booted out after cocktails. She’d been traveling through with T. K. Nickerson, the writer who’d won her away from us. Everybody called him “Kit.” Her name was Kelly. Kit and Kelly had been on their way to, or from, Europe in the dead of winter. Kelly was a beautiful woman, striking without having to be glamorous. She