The Most Dangerous Place on Earth(28)

“Do you want to know a secret?” he asked.

—

They were manuscript pages, printed in Courier and scrawled over in red pen. The Beauty and the Darkness, A Novel by Douglas F. Ellison. He was watching her face as she read.

Most of Professor Brent Cumberland’s students at the University of Northern California admired him, many harbored secret crushes, but in the end only one of them made any difference.

It was a Monday morning in September and the clock was striking nine. Cumberland stood in front of his class. Today he was giving a lecture about his own award-winning novel. He was comparing it with Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. (It was not Cumberland himself but numerous literary critics who had introduced this comparison.) A Beauty was his first published novel but it had been enough to earn him a large advance and launch him from the wilds of public high school to the ivory tower of University. Now he had everything. Successful career, full bank account, attractive wife. But when he was alone he wondered: What was the point of it all? What did it all mean?

Cumberland paced in front of his whiteboard. A former athlete, he was tall and broad-shouldered. He had full dark hair and a neatly trimmed beard. He wore stylish jeans and a tweed jacket and a braided leather belt that had been the best he could afford after his college graduation ten years before. His students gazed up at him. Some of them were like adoring fans and others were like deer in the headlights. The girls wore short skirts and ponytails. They leaned over their desks to show their cleavage and bounced their bare legs under their desks. They must know what they are doing, Cumberland thought. Girls like that always knew.

Midway through his class the door opened and a girl barged into the room and took a seat in the front row. Flushed and panting. She was pretty, Cumberland thought. But in a way you had to think about. Her hair was blonde. Her eyes were gray. She had the lithe graceful body of a ballerina. He could wrap his hands around her wrist or neck and snap it like a twig. He did not know—yet—that this was something he would want to do.

After class the girl approached him at the podium. He braced himself for the usual fawning. “Can I ask you something?” she said hesitantly.

“Of course my dear,” Cumberland said grandly. She seemed nervous and most females found it comforting when he spoke this way. “How can I be of service?”

The girl bit her lip. “I wanted to tell you how much I love your novel. Especially the love interest. Rosalie.” When she talked she leaned closer to him. Her breath was lovely although a little rancid—laced with black tea. He pictured her in a disheveled student apartment, on a bed strewn with velvet and silk, reading his book. When she spoke about Rosalie it was clear that this young girl understood him better than his own wife did and better than any critic. The girl was inspired by his words and he was inspired by her passion. Now she put her hand on his arm. Innocently white.

Cumberland cleared his throat authoritatively. “Oh. Yes. Thank you, Miss…”

“Angelica.”

“Angelica,” he intoned in a deep bass that gave her pleasure. He was pleased too. “Call me Brent.”

She giggled. Her gray eyes danced. This girl was young and free. She was not run down by life. Had he really once been like her, so young and unafraid?

Angelica. The name was quite appropriate. He felt his spirits lifting just being near her.



“So?” Doug asked Molly. “What do you think?”

In that moment there was no force on earth that could make her lift her eyes from the manuscript pages to meet his gaze. What could she possibly tell him? Doug, this story is not just technically incompetent, but pathetically implausible.

And yet—Doug’s story was so vulnerable, like a brash child’s handwriting wobbling over a page of lined paper. Amid the delusion and misogyny there were just enough glimmers of intelligent sensitivity to pique Molly’s interest: she wondered which aspect of Doug Ellison’s being would win out in the end. It was like a brief affair she’d had her freshman year of college, with a guy who’d played bass in a campus rock band—ninety-five percent of what she’d known of him had told her she should run the other way, yet she was held captive by the five percent that suggested deeper waters: an impressive vocabulary, a volume of E. E. Cummings poems on the nightstand, the tender way he would pronounce his mother’s name. Now Doug was waiting to talk about his book, wanting to know what Molly thought. Because she could not possibly tell him what she thought, she kissed him.

His kisses were clumsy, or hers were. His breath was beer-bittered, as was hers. They kept missing each other—they clinked teeth, bumped noses, she tongued the corner of his mouth. They caressed each other’s elbows, gripped each other’s shoulders like eighth graders dancing. She wasn’t small, and he seemed not to know what to do with her. He tried to pull her onto his lap; her shins banged the coffee table. She yelped. He apologized, she forgave. She wanted to help him. She stood and led him to the bed.

They sat side by side on the edge of the bed and slid off their shoes: her black flats, a skin of nylon stockings underneath; his battered loafers revealing the surprise of silk socks, finely striped navy and green.

“So fancy,” she teased, pointing toward his feet. “Trying to impress me?”

He looked at her as though she’d caught him shoplifting. “They were a gift,” he said.