wide lapels, and it looked as though it had been trying for many years to keep the rain off the stooped shoulders of a long series of hard cases, drifters, and ordinary bums. It emitted an odor of bus station so desolate that just standing next to him you could feel your luck changing for the worse.
“I’m not supposed to be here, in case you were wondering,” he said. He shifted his shoulders under the weight of the knapsack he carried, and looked me in the eye for the first time. James Leer was a handsome kid; he had eyes that were large and dark and always seemed to shine with tears, a straight nose, a clear complexion, red lips; but there was something blurry and indeterminate about his features, as though he were still in the process of deciding what kind of a face he wanted to have. In the soft light radiating from the Gaskells’ house he looked painfully young. “I crashed. I came with Hannah Green.”
“That’s all right,” I said. Hannah Green was the most brilliant writer in the department. She was twenty years old, very pretty, and had already published two stories in The Paris Review. Her style was plain and poetic as rain on a daisy—she was particularly gifted at the description of empty land and horses. She lived in the basement of my house for a hundred dollars a month, and I was desperately in love with her. “You can say I invited you. I ought to have, anyway.”
“What are you doing out here?”
“I was about to smoke a joint, as a matter of fact. Would you care to join me?”
“No, thank you,” he said, looking uncomfortable. He unbuttoned his overcoat, and I saw that he was still wearing the tight black suit and skinny tie he had seen fit to wear to the discussion of his story that afternoon, over a faded glen plaid shirt. “I don’t like to lose control of my emotions.”
I thought that he had just diagnosed his entire problem in life, but I let it pass and took a long drag on the joint. It was nice standing out in the darkness, in the damp grass, with spring coming on and a feeling in my heart of imminent disaster. I didn’t think James was all that comfortable standing next to me this way, but at the same time I knew he would have felt much worse inside, on a sofa, with a canapé in his hand. He was a furtive, lurking soul, James Leer. He didn’t belong anywhere, but things went much better for him in places where nobody belonged.
“Are you and Hannah seeing each other?” I said after a moment. Lately, I knew, they had been palling around together, going to movies at the Playhouse and Filmmakers’. “Dating?”
“No!” he said immediately. It was too dim to see if he blushed, but he looked down at his feet. “We just came from Son of Fury at the Playhouse.” He looked up again and his face grew more animated, as it generally did when he got himself onto his favorite subject. “With Tyrone Power and Frances Farmer.”
“I haven’t seen it.”
“I think Hannah looks like Frances Farmer. That’s why I wanted her to see it.”
“She went crazy, Frances Farmer.”
“So did Gene Tierney. She’s in it, too.”
“Sounds like a good one.”
“It’s not bad.” He smiled. He had a big-toothed, crooked smile that made him look even younger. “I kind of needed a little cheering up, I guess.”
“I’ll bet,” I said. “They were hard on you today.”
He shrugged, and looked away again. That afternoon, as we had gone around the room, there was only one member of the workshop with anything good to say about James’s story: Hannah Green, and even her critique had been chiefly constructed out of equal parts equivocation and tact. Insofar as the outlines of its plot could be made out amid the sentence fragments and tics of punctuation that characterized James Leer’s writing, the story concerned a boy who had been molested by a priest and then, when he began to show signs of emotional distress through odd and destructive behavior, was taken by his mother to this same priest to confess his sins. The story ended with the boy watching through the grate of the confessional as his mother walked out of the church into the sunshine, and with the words “Shaft. Of light.” It was called, for no apparent reason, “Blood and Sand.” Like all of his stories, its title was borrowed from Hollywood; he had written stories called “Swing Time,” “Flame of New Orleans,” “Greed,” “Million Dollar Legs.” All of them were opaque and fractured and centered on grave flaws in the relations between children and adults. None of the titles ever seemed to connect to the stories. There was a persistent theme of Catholicism gone badly wrong. My students had a hard time knowing what to think about James Leer’s writing. They could see that he knew what he was doing and that he had been born with the talent to do it; but the results were so puzzling and unfriendly to the reader that they tended to inspire the anger that had flared up in workshop that afternoon.
“They really hated it,” he said. “I think they hated it more than any of the other ones.”
“I know it,” I said. “I’m sorry I let things get a little out of control.”
“That’s all right,” he said, shrugging his shoulders to regain a purchase on the straps of his knapsack. “I guess you didn’t really like it either.”
“Well, James, no, I—”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “It only took me an hour to write it.”
“An hour? That’s remarkable.” For all its terrible problems, it had been a dense and vivid piece of writing. “That’s hard to believe.”
“I think them all out beforehand. I have trouble sleeping, so that’s what I do while I lie there.” He sighed. “Well,” he said. “I guess you probably have to go back in. It must be almost time to go to that lecture.”
I held up my wristwatch to catch the light. It was nearly twenty-five minutes to eight.
“You’re right,” I said. “Let’s go.”
“Uh, well,” he said. “I—I think I’m just going to go home. I think I can catch the 74.”
“Nonsense,” I said. “Come on inside and have a drink before we go to the lecture. You don’t want to miss that lecture. And have you seen the Chancellor’s house? It’s a beautiful house, James. Come on, I’ll introduce you around.” I mentioned the two writers who were this year’s guests of honor.
“I met them,” he said coldly. “What’s with all the baseball cards, anyway?”
“Dr. Gaskell collects them. He has a lot of memora——oh.” The air before my eyes was suddenly filled with spangles, and I felt my knees knock against each other. Reaching out to steady myself, I took hold of James’s arm. It felt weightless and slender as a cardboard tube.
“Professor? Are you all right?”
“I’m fine, James. I’m just a little stoned.”
“You didn’t look so well in class today. Hannah didn’t think so, either.”
“I haven’t been sleeping well, myself,” I said. As a matter of fact I had, during the last month, been experiencing spells of dizziness and bewilderment that came over me suddenly, at odd moments of the day, and filled my skull with a glittering afflatus. “I’ll be fine. I’d better get my old fat body inside.”
“Okay, then,” he said, freeing his arm from my grasp. “I’ll see you on Monday.”
“Aren’t you coming to any of the conference seminars or anything?”
He shook his head. “I don’t think so. I—I have a lot of homework.” He bit his lip and then turned and started back across the lawn, toward the house, hands jammed once more into his pockets, the fingers of his right hand, I imagined, curled around the smooth pearly handle of his imitation gun. The knapsack pounded against his back and the soles of his shoes squeaked as he left me, and I don’t know why, but I was sorry to see him go. I felt as though he were the only person whose company I could possibly have enjoyed at that moment, awkward