iv
Lily Lee

Charles Creed’s flippant comment to his wife notwithstanding, the Laird demonstration nearly finished Jack. As the actions of his men suggested, Riverton Police Chief Kenny Jennings had known every detail of the students’ plans weeks in advance of the march. On the day before the demonstration he and three of his captains had met for over two hours with Busiris Security Head Carter Carruth, who had received detailed reports on the meeting in Jack’s apartment and all subsequent meetings. (It was Carruth who ran the co-ed cat house until 1976, when two Black Students Alliance women infiltrated his operation and blew the whistle on it. What goes around comes around.) Old Main had instructed Chief Jennings to give the demonstrators one warning and then bust everyone. All demonstrators were to be arrested and charged, although not all were to be fined, jailed, fired or expelled. The sorting out was to take place on October 26 and 27. A list had been drawn up of persons who, if arrested, would be hit with everything the court could cook up, then purged from the university.

Charles Creed was on that list, as were Ben Allan Browne, Lou Feracca, and Billy Jo Allen. I was apparently not. When this list was drawn up, or who the stool pigeon was, I have never been able to determine. Nor can I say whether Ted Jones knew about the list, as his admonitions at the rally might, in retrospect, indicate.

What saved us all on the 25th, of course, was Marcus DeLotta’s instinct for smelling trouble, the Jefferson Avenue Shift, and Jack’s talent for outguessing the opposition. Jennings spent the 27th and 28th conferring with federal agents and reviewing photographs of the teach-in and march. He and Carruth met the entire afternoon of the 30th. Carruth brought instructions from Old Main; Jennings’ instructions came from very high levels in Washington. Both Washington and Old Main concurred on the short-term solution: delay. Washington wanted to avoid the appearance of unduly harsh reprisals. It figured that “the student riot” attendant on Secretary Laird’s address in Riverton had resulted in a net Republican gain among the farmers and the businessmen of downstate Illinois. President Stoddard found himself outguessed on numbers. Five hundred students and over a dozen faculty were just too many to discipline, and the sixteen actual arrests contained only one of the ring-leaders on his hit list. Even Martin Stoddard understood that you couldn’t arrest a popular white American professor or a popular black student leader for the opinions they had expressed in the quad.

Then Richard Nixon won reelection by eighteen million votes, and everyone in Washington and Old Main was feeling very, very generous. The “Riverton Riot” faded from state and local newspapers and the minds of all but a few B. T. U. students and faculty. The radical moment was clearly waning. Carter Carruth would watch and wait, and Ken Jennings too. Martin Stoddard would be prepared, and Charles Creed would not, and somewhere down the road. . . .

So Charles Creed was not fired. Not in November 1972, not by President Martin Stoddard.

What finally saved Jack, however, was a contract from Charles Scribner’s Sons for Age of Faith, Age of Folly. It showed up in his mailbox three weeks to the day after the march on the Hilton, rescuing him not only from the Old Main’s fiendish plot, but from a deep case of post-election blues.

Charles was offered the contract on the strength of a three-page prospectus and the first draft of what would become chapter two of the book. This material he had written late in the summer, during a one-week stay at Rose Marié’s family home on Long Island.

“The in-laws and I have achieved a state of mutual toleration,” he explained. “They’re decent people who mean well, especially by their daughter and grandson, but basically we’ve nothing to say to each other, and we all know it. Her father’s head is nothing but cars and money. Her mother’s is strictly shopping, restaurants, and television. And money. I don’t give a shit about any of the five. On the other hand, I couldn’t in twenty years explain to them what a college education is all about. Their precious daughter put in four years at a pretty fair liberal arts college, and their grandson, they are certain, will attend an Ivy League school. But basically they don’t think about colleges. Like the rest of the world, they’ve never heard of Busiris. I’m a paycheck that supports their blood; they’re Christmas and birthday presents that keep the kid in summer and winter clothing. I drive the loved ones east; they feed me while we’re there. The grub is good and the bed comfortable. Rose Marié releases half a year’s pent up gab. Timm visits the beach. The in-laws can tell their neighbors their son-in-law the college professor is visiting. I hang out with old friends, read books, maybe spend a day in the City, down in the Village . . . although I hate the goddamn place more and more, and I can really no longer tolerate even my old undergraduate friends. I can’t explain West of the Appalachians to East Coast types any more than I can explain college to my in-laws.

“Usually I read books. I should have left at least some of my Afro-American preparation for the long week in Hempstead, although I can just see my mother-in-law picking up Invisible Man some night when the news got boring. Not to mention my father-in-law, although he hasn’t looked at a book in fifteen years. But I’m an honest son-of-a-bitch, except for speed limits and income taxes: if Busiris pays me eight weeks’ salary to prep English 340, I spend those eight weeks prepping English 340.

“By the time I head east, my reading is done. Bad call.

“But hold on a minute there, Bucks fans, it’s a good call! I’ve run out of books to read, so I figure I’ll write one. The in-laws are going down to the Jersey shore for a week. Irving got his buddy a tremendous deal on some cream-puff, power-blue Cadillac pussymobile, electronic everything, crushed velour interior. The guy is reciprocating with six days’ use of his summer place in Margate or Ventnor or some such hellhole. This special surprise they have saved for Rose Marié and Timm.

“ ‘Would you want to join us?’ they want to know, knowing I do not. They’re doing the correct thing by asking, because despite our differences, I am still their son-in-law, and they are correct people. What they expect me to answer, I don’t know. They never know what to expect of me, god bless them both.”

Jack reflected a moment.

“You ever been to Atlantic City, Tucker?”

I indicated I had not.

“Quite the place. Once upon a time there was a beach and it was good. The water was pure and warm, the sand was white, and the shoreline was rugged and desolate. The goodness attracted people intent on escaping the heat, filth, and smell of places like New York and Philadelphia in the summer. These people had enough dough to build nice places of their own, if not directly on the ocean, within walking distance of the water. So those people came to Jersey for the summer—wives and children for three months or four, their husbands for one week or two. And it was still good, because the beach was still lovely and these were classy people. Strictly upper class, with a few artist types mixed in.

“Inevitably the less classy followed their betters, renting a room or apartment from some local entrepreneurs. The place got a little crowded, but it was still pretty much good, a comfortable, laid back life of water and sun. You ate burgers and shakes for breakfast, lunch and dinner, swam for free at the public beach, talked to a lot of babes, played a lot of baseball, got a great tan, came home with some terrific stories. That’s the way Jersey was when I was a kid. I knew it when it was still sort of good. As a kid, Tucker, I loved Jersey. The summer after my junior year in high school I got a job down there with a little hot dog stand—Jimmy’s Ball Park Franks. Spent just about exactly what I earned, but man, the stories I could tell you about that summer! Found my first true love Under the Boardwalk. . . . Don’t get me started! I thought that summer would be the highlight of my life all my life. In some ways it still is. In some ways I’m still in love with Margate, New Jersey, 1961.

“Anyway, it didn’t take long until long the real entrepreneurs figured out that summer vacationers represented a largely untapped resource, and began to devise means of separating money from people in really great quantities: restaurants, salt water taffy shops, amusement parks, souvenir and gift shops, more gift shops and even more gift shops. They built a bigger and better boardwalk. Glitzier restaurants. The vacant lots filled with summer homes, and the beaches filled up with fat mothers from south Philly and their snot-nosed little kids. The scene was a lot less good, but it was definitely The Scene. Rockaway was full of sleazebags and perverts, and radio promoted Jersey as the new place for summer fun. Somebody made a song about it, which WABC in New York and WFIL in Philadelphia played about a million times each summer.

“Then the corporations moved in, and things really started developing. They bought up summer homes on ocean-front property, leveled them, and erected in their stead multi-story hotels, motels and rental properties. They replaced the homes one and two blocks from the water with more hotels, motels and rental properties. From any place my family could afford, you couldn’t see or smell the beach. Parts of it were actually fenced off by the big hotels—public beaches and “private beaches,” like in Florida. Farewell to moonlight strolls on deserted sands. As for serious necking, you were more alone in Central Park than under the boardwalk, day or night.

“To fill all their motels, the corporations hyped seashore vacations even harder. More hype brought more people. More people demanded more gift shops, restaurants, bowling alleys, arcades, pizza parlors . . . all the filth and smell they left behind in the city when they escaped to the Jersey shore. Today you can’t hardly find a place on the beach to spread your towel, which is okay really, because people don’t go to Jersey for the sun or the water, they go there to shop and eat pizza and get picked up by the same guys they wouldn’t give the time of day to back on the Island or in South Philly. For this they pay $100 a day. After a week they go home and talk for a year about how wonderful the shore is.

“Last time I was there, we’d gone down with Rose Marié’s folks, and some beer-bellied slob from Camden is lying on his beach chair, half in the water and half on the beach, eating oranges from a plastic bag at his side, tossing the peels in the ocean. His two-year-old kid has pulled his swimsuit down and is taking a leak ten feet from where Timm is wading.

“Would I care to join them for a week in Jersey, Irv wants to know.

“Well, shit. I can’t hide out with my folks. They’re in Trenton visiting my sister and my goddamn Armenian brother-in-law, which is someplace else I would just as soon not be. So I am honest. I tell them no thanks. Save your money on me. You do Jersey up brown, I’ll stay here and guard the house. Won’t eat nothing but deli sandwiches, which I will buy myself.

“Rose Marié is even grumpier than she’d been during her pregnancy. ‘You never want to spend any time with my family,’ she says. ‘You’d rather sit alone in this house than go with us to the shore?’ she accuses. ‘Don’t you think they can sense your contempt?’ she wants to know. ‘What will my dad’s friends say about that? Don’t you ever think about his feelings? What about my feelings? You should spend more time thinking about what makes others happy. What about your son? Don’t you want to spend time with him? If you don't care about my folks, think how Timm feels. Just yesterday he came crying to me, ‘I don’t think daddy loves me.’ How can you say you love your son the way you treat their mother and grandparents?’ Rag, rag, rag.

“So I invent a book. ‘I got this idea for a book I want to work on,’ I tell Rose Marié. ‘It’s not something I can do in Riverton. Riverton is too busy. Can’t do it next week at my folks’ either, you know how that is. This would be the perfect opportunity: absolute peace and quiet. You guys have a ball at the shore, I work my ideas out here. I send off a proposal to New York, get a contract, write a book. Bingo, we’re rich.’

“A book is as much of a mystery to the in-laws as a college education, but money they can understand. It was the perfect scheme.

“It was only half-bullshit, really. I did have an idea. The sixties are over, Tucker, every place but Riverton. The Sixties died at Altamont and Kent State. It’s time for a summing up.

“So I spent a week at the Hempstead library, and they spent a week in Margate. They end the week with a few memories and $1,000 in the red. I end the week with $2,000 check . . . just about what Busiris paid me for eight weeks of research on Afro-American literature, and you for teaching two summer school classes. Another check for two grand follows, incidentally, upon completion of an acceptable manuscript. All in all, a very successful summer, I’d say.”

News of the contract touched off endless analysis of the relationship between Age of Faith and Jack’s behavior throughout the academic year, especially during the Laird visit. Was Jack absorbed by his own historical characters? Did Age of Faith create the crisis from which Age of Faith (temporarily) rescued its author? What would have become of Jack’s career at Busiris had he imagined, that summer of 1972, not Act of Faith, but Song of the North Country? Or a coffee table edition of some passages from Thoreau? My own belief is that John Charles Creed was in 1973 the same crazy son-of-a-bitch he always had been, and always would be. Jack was a polestar. His character changed very little over the years.

I found myself in half a dozen analyses of Charles Creed. Then one afternoon Ted Jones ended a conversation with something like, “Shows what can happen when you get odd notions and write a book.” The unspoken conclusion, I realized, was: “Be more like me. Do nothing.” Jack would have said it aloud. I did not. But I abandoned thereafter such broad and random speculations.

Charles announced his triumph at the November department meeting. He requested that we wish him well, and further requested further that we share in his good fortune by partaking of the six bottles of New York Gold Seal champagne on ice in a cooler in his office, which he would be opening after the meeting’s conclusion. Percy Thompson coughed. Virgil Cutter’s jaw dropped three inches. Lucy Kramer wished Charles “publishing success to match his teaching success,” then reminded him that the Busiris Code of Conduct forbad consumption of alcohol on University property. “Faculty should not set a bad example for the students,” she warned. “As Geoffrey Chaucer says, ‘If gold rusts, what will iron do?’ “

Back in the office, Jack fumed and railed. “I’m living in Lilliputia, surrounded by midget minds full of half-inch ideas. A footnote here, a query there. A good twelve-inch idea would crack their skulls. They think they’ll build their monument half an inch at a time. A hundred and fifty little doggie turd ideas making nothing but a big pile of doggie turds that smell bad.”

The champagne had to wait for the celebratory party Charles and Rose Marié threw that weekend. Everyone was invited, from President Stoddard to Chairman Thompson to the full department to a dozen students. As Charles had expected (their flat would have accommodated thirty guests maximum), only the students and younger faculty showed up. And Ted Jones. “The invitations were announcements,” a very drunk Charles Creed told Lou and me that night. “A cork up Martin Stoddard’s ass, and salt in Virgil Cutter’s wounded ego.”

I have seen no written evidence to contradict Charles Creed’s subsequent statement that he received not a single written word or act of commendation from B. T. U. for Age of Faith, Age of Folly—not a single letter of congratulations, not a reading, not a University press release, not a spoken commendation from any Busiris administrator. Nothing when he signed the contract, nothing when the book appeared, nothing when the Pulitzer was announced.

Not that Jack cared. As the Convocation Center Compromise saved his ass in 1971, when he was reappointed by a 6-5 vote of the tenured faculty, the Scribner’s contract saved his ass in 1972, when the vote was 7-4. By 1973 Afro-American Literature was a resounding success, and Jack’s second article had appeared in print, as well as a few poems and his first short story. A flood of research materials poured through the Interlibrary Loan Office at McKinley Library, and every third week Jack spent at libraries in Evanston, Chicago, or Champaign-Urbana. Colleagues were jealous but impotent. Charles Creed’s career was mapped out for him . . . and a comfortable career it promised to be. He would spend another year or two at Busiris writing and teaching. Once the book appeared, he would hit the conference circuit, then accept a position at some Big Ten school. (Jack understood that his Ph. D. from Kent State barred him from positions at any Ivy League school, including Princeton, for which Rose Marié constantly campaigned, but Jack had no real desire at all to return East of Appalachians). There would be more articles and books, witty conversation among learned colleagues, promotions, raises, sessions chaired at the Modern Language Association, and a golden retirement with a rocking chair and a festschrift filled with essays by famous and admiring students.

In August 1973, Charles Creed stood on the threshold of the career every academic dreams of.

In September, Lily Lee Martin walked into Busiris Hall 313 and rearranged his life.

“I need to see Professor Creed about his Afro-American literature class,” announced the woman in the pink tank top, Levi cut-offs, scuffed white tennis shoes, and gypsy earrings. Her fingers folded around a silver cross that dangled above her breasts. Her Afro and high cheekbones gave the impression of a woman taller than she actually stood . . . and she stood with a Playboy figure, skin like silk, face like glass. Her voice, to adapt a phrase, was full of music, and she carried herself with the untutored grace of a natural model, the fine nervousness and temper of Vanessa Redgrave in the film Blow Up. She was the type of achingly beautiful woman whose presence literally strikes a man dumb and causes constrictions in his chest and abdomen.

It was not, however, the complexion, the 36Ds, or the twenty-inch waist which most struck the observer. It was Lily’s Bambi eyes, great moonlit whirlpools that drew one in not with vulnerability, really, but with a vague yet palpable sadness. All the mysteries of love and life swam in Lily Lee’s dark eyes. A man could dive into those eyes, I remember thinking, and never come back.

“I need to see Professor Creed about his Afro-American class,” Lily Lee announced a second time.

“English 340 is an undergraduate course,” I said, mistaking her for an M.A. student.

“I’m a freshman,” she replied, “and I need in. The lady at registration say I couldn’t get in because they don’t ‘llow no freshman to take it.”

“Technically freshmen are not allowed to register for upper division courses. You might get special permission from Dr. Creed.”

“You not the man to see?”

Once again I was not the man. “Professor Creed had an 11:00 class. It’s nearly noon. He usually stops here between class and lunch.”

Lily Lee Martin stood suspended in the doorway . . . and with her, I have often thought, Jack’s life. Maybe not. Maybe events would have unfolded as they unfolded had she walked down the hall and signed up for American National Government. Jack and Lily would have crossed paths somewhere, sometime. I like to think, however, that this was one of those small moments that leverage an entire life.

“If he’s not here in five minutes, he’ll probably not return until 1:00.”

“I give him five minutes,” she said.

“I’d sign an override for you myself,” I said by way of conversation and explanation, “but we don’t sign overrides for other professors’ classes. All I can offer you is nineteenth century British Literature. Or freshman composition.”

“I can wait,” she said, declining the chair I offered. “This office be cosmic.”

“It’s mostly Professor Creed’s stuff,” I began. Then Jack himself arrived, attended by his usual retinue of coeds.

“I have at least one more reading list somewhere. Maybe the secretary can photocopy it for you,” he was saying when his sentence ended abruptly, his attention suddenly focused on the silhouette in the doorway.

“This woman is looking for an override for Afro-Am,” I said by way of introduction.

“Let me find a few more reading lists,” Charles mumbled to the others, his eyes still on Lily. “Here’s two, you take one for keeps, that’s yours, and you take the other, go down to the center of the hallway there and ask the department secretary to make four more copies, one for each of you. Tell her to put it on my account. And don’t forget to return the original to me.” He shooed the flock perfunctorily out the door and turned to Lily Lee.

“My name Lily Lee Martin, I a transfer freshman in here, and I need into your Afro-American Literature course,” the woman with the great sad eyes told Jack. It was more a command than request.

Her directness confused him as much as her beauty.

“You’re a first semester freshman? That’s a junior level class. Prerequisites are freshman composition and junior standing.”

“Not a problem. I got all A’s in high school and at com. college. I be here on a honors scholarship. I pre-law and I can take any courses I want.”

“All A’s in which high school?”

“And 1400 total on the SATs.”

“1400 is impressive.”

“You damn right. Look, Mr. Creed, I can go to any fucking school in this country I want, and I at Busiris. I be here to get the classes I want, and graduate, and get to law school. One course I want is Afro-American Literature, and the jiveass at registration sent me here to get some form from you.”

Lily Lee had just admitted herself to Jack’s class (who among us could have resisted her?), but he strung the argument out, mainly to test her resolve and prolong the conversation.

“The real reason you need the permission is that the course is full. A lot of people want in that class. If I admit a freshman, how can I refuse a junior? Or a senior? If I open the doors, I got fifty people in the room, and I can’t teach fifty people anything. Besides, if you take this class as a freshman, what will you take as a junior, as a senior? Save it for later. You’ll get more out of it as a junior.”

“Mr. Creed,” Lily answered, “I haven’t read all the books for your class—I know I read some of them already—but I guarantee you I can teach the rest of the kids in that class more about Blues for Mister Charlie than you can, right now, today.

“And by the time I be a junior, this school be offerin’ a whole mess of classes I want, I guarantee you that too. I here to see those classes get offered, and I here to see I get to take ‘em. Startin’ with yours.”

“Well, you’re free, white, and twenty-one in my book,” Jack said, reaching for a blue override form. “You can do whatever you want. I’ll sign this and you can fill in the rest. Registration is closed for the noon hour, but that’s just about enough time to get back to your dorm, eat lunch, and return to Old Main.”

“I got a ‘partment,” Lily Lee told him. “I don’t eat on campus.”

“You like pizza?” Jack wanted to know.

Lily’s brown eyes blinked. Jack blushed.

“Professor Creed, I from East St. Louis, Illinois.”

“Home of the Cosmo Club and Chuck Berry.”

“The Cosmo ain’t East St. Lou, honkey cat. In my East St. Lou, white folks and black folks don’t be eat no pizza together. Usually they shootin’ each other.”

“You came to Busiris to get out of East St. Louis. You’re in college now.”

Lily Lee measured Jack carefully. “Professor Creed, assumin’ you read Soul on Ice, Mr. Cleaver dead on right ‘bout that ebony an’ ivory shit.”

“People obsessed with the past are condemned to repeat it. You’re in college now. Leave East St. Louis in East St. Louis.”

“I know where I come from. I also know where I goin’, and how I gettin’ there.”

“If it doesn’t work, you can go back to East St. Louis.”

“I don’t never go backwards, Professor Creed. ‘Specially I ain’t goin’ back to no East St. Lou with the child of some hoodlum wrapped in my arms.”

“I said nothing about kids.”

Lily Lee studied Jack’s face more than his argument. “Yeah,” she said finally. “I like pizza. And you are buying. Lunch.”

“I’m buying,” Jack answered, “because I make more money than you do. One day you will be a rich lawyer, and you will buy the pizza. Today? I’ll even buy lunch for Andrew.”

“Cardboard pizza when I have Linda’s bologna sandwiches?” I answered, raising my brown paper bag. “I have to pass.”

“Pizza Hut has the best goddamn smorgasbord ever,” Jack was telling Lily Lee as he reached for his jacket.

“Your kids are cute,” Lily was saying as they walked out the door, “But who that black chick pasted to your wall, and what with that ‘black is beautiful’ bullshit?”

“Those two conjoined would blow holes in the Van Allen Belt,” I was thinking when the coeds returned with their reading lists.

“Where’d Dr. Creed go?” one of them wanted to know.

“Lunch,” I told them. “And not, alas, with you.”

“Not, alas, with us,” giggled one of the four.

“Tell him thanks. We’ll see him tomorrow,” said their leader, nearly bumping into Ted Jones.

“Who’s Charles’s latest?” Jones wanted to know.

“Not the foggiest.”

“Dangerous game in these missionary times. Chas better watch his step.”

“Thank god for academic freedom.”

“The Melvin Laird stunt was no exercise in academic freedom. Neither are the coeds. Your office partner had better quit chasing women and tend to business.”

“I haven’t the vaguest idea whereof you speak, Professor Jones. I do know, however, that Charles Creed doesn’t have to chase anyone: they flock all over him, as you have apparently noticed. I also know that what consenting adults do on their own time is their own business.”

“Not around this school.”

“Old Main touches a hair on his head, and the Alliance will torch this place.”

“You fellows are too naive,” Jones warned, shaking his head. “The B. S. A. can be bought cheaper than any of us. If Old Main decides Charles goes, he’ll go like anybody else, articles or no articles, book no book, Alliance or no Alliance. I personally know a lot of faculty and a few students around here who would grease the chute that dumps him.”

“ ‘Then I’ll know who to thank, she said, and give me a straight look.’ ”

“Nobody is outside the law,” Jones said finally, “not even Charles Creed. Chas has got more enemies than Richard Nixon, only he’s too dumb to know it.”

Ted Jones never did say what, if anything, he wanted . . . beyond Lily Lee Martin’s name.

“T. J. to the Min,” Charles quipped when I told him the story.

I heard no details of Jack’s first Pizza Hut date with Lily Lee. I don’t know what they talked about, what Jack said or did to win her favor, but clearly things went well. She returned the following day with Lynette Taylor, her roommate, as striking in her own way as Lily, another streetwise freshman transfer from some other Cannery Row who also wanted in to Afro-American. Charles signed another blue form and the rest of us got another case of the blue balls. In the weeks that followed, Lily and Lynette haunted the office, every male prof’s dictionary definition of desire. The two sat together in the first row of Jack’s class, miniskirts showing a good deal of very fine thigh and occasional shots of matching floral bikini panties in usually successful attempts to break their teacher’s concentration. Together they drove Jack nuts.

More than once, I admit, I stashed Linda’s bologna sandwiches in the desk drawer and joined Charles, Lynette, and Lily Lee for pizza. In my mind’s eye I still see the two women together, in identical skirts, white blouses, golden hoop earrings, full of sass and self-assurance and youth . . . and Charles and I, ourselves also so callow, so full of the future. Five years off the end of my life I would trade for one more day in B. Hall 313, to lunch at the Riverton Pizza Hut buffet with Charles Creed, Lynette Taylor, and Lily Lee Martin.

Even as I write, I can hear the three of them coming down the hall just before noon, trailing leftover class talk.

“So this chick be breathin’ these last fifteen years, or what?”

“Check for a pulse, girl.”

“Better you than me set her straight. Some things I can’t say.”

“She better sure enough not be givin’ me no more of that ‘my hard life as a colored broad’ jive. Weep, weep, weep. I was ready to bust her.”

“She really thinks she’s exploited. She thinks her life has been full of pain and abuse. Maybe it has—for her. Suffering is relative.”

“Shit. Lemme tell her a thing or two ‘bout exploitation. You be as exploited in this life as you let yourself be.”

“Yeah, an’ that chick gonna be plenty exploited all her life, ‘cause she expectin’ to be exploited. Take that sign off her forehead say, ‘Hit me here,’ an’ put up one say, ‘Don’t fuck with me, nigger.’ Then she won’t have so much pain an’ abuse.”

“So for lunch today,” Jack would say, entering the office and dumping his books. “You on, Tucker?”

“Whatever, wherever.”

“Lily calls, I drive.”

“We should do what makes you happy,” Lily would say to Jack. “You the always worryin’ ‘bout what other folks needin’ and wantin’. Start lookin’ out for number one. You the boss.”

“Not after that last bell rings,” Jack insisted.

But Jack was the boss. You could see it in Lily’s eyes, and Lynette’s as well, in their body language and the pitch of their voices. Conversation revolved around his classes, his family life, his book. I learned more about Jack’s life in a couple of one-hour lunches with Lily, Lynette, and Charles, than I had in the year previous. I learned almost nothing about the women, except that Lily came from a broken home, and both she and Lynette had survived in their high school years a lifetime of strange affairs which left both of them book smart, street wise, and independent.

“I don’t need nothin’ from nobody,” Lily told Charles one day. “I pay my own rent, and I can pay this bill, too. This ain’t class no more.”

Several times Lily did pick up the tab. One of my life’s finer memories is heading for the cash register, and overhearing an old fellow who had been eying us all meal as he whispered to his companion, “Jesus H. Christ, will you look at that. And the broads are payin’.”

Eventually I realized that I was a fourth wheel and began to decline the luncheon invitations. I was not ready for either Lynette or Lily, and neither was especially interested in me. Both had their eyes on Jack.

That much I knew early. Lynette was quite up front about the whole business. A month into the semester, she came alone to visit me in the office . . . to inquire about Charles’ tastes in food and his home life.

“The word is, he gets around,” she told me bluntly.

“I really can’t say anything about that.”

“This is the 1970s, Dr. Tucker, not the 1870s. Although you wouldn’t know it to be around here.”

“What I meant was, if Jack were the sort to get around, he is certainly not the sort to talk about it. And I, of course, wouldn’t discuss Jack’s private life with you, even if he did discuss it with me. Which he doesn’t. We’re the strong, silent types. And your sex life is your private business. Remember that.”

“That’s good to know,” she said. “I admire that in a man.”

Two days later Lynette was in to see Jack, soliciting help in dealing with something or another related to the apartment, a busted sofa or leaky faucet. He promised to see what he could do for her and Lily. She gave him an address. He promised to stop by on his way home from school. She said, “Cool.”

After she left, we sat a moment or two in silence.

“How much you betting on the leaky faucet?” Jack wanted to know.

“She didn’t invite me, Jack. It’s your call.” I saw no reason to repeat my earlier discussion with Lynette.

“I asked what you think.”

“I’m cool. So is Lynette. Other people around here are not so cool. I know you are not an easily intimidated man, but no immunities have been granted. You might want to watch your behind.”

Jack rocked back in his seat, legs stretched stiffly in front of him, hands folded behind his neck, more pensive than I had seen him before. He understood that a visit to that apartment would commit him to something very large in his life. While he had no idea what that something might be, he sensed this was not one of those casual adventures. Jack was the most intuitive individual I ever knew.

“So we all know Old Main would love to fry my ass,” he meditated aloud, “these days more than ever. But they really couldn’t, not on something like this. I mean, they could, I suppose, but they couldn’t. Anyway, it’s not a question of the job. Not the job as a job. It’s more a question of . . . the whole . . . situation. Rose Marié. Timm. Jenny Lynn. Supporting Rose Marié, Timm, Jenny Lynn.

“It’s also a question of the other half of that apartment. Lily is twice the woman Lynette Taylor is. Although Lynette is three times the woman your average Busiris co-ed imagines being.”

I thought I saw his main concern.

“Lily Lee didn’t invite you. Lynette did.”

“On the other hand, Tucker,” he argued, resuming his composure, “there is the sound advice of Alexis Zorba: ‘One sin God does not forgive. If a man calls a woman to her bed, and he will not go.’ That’s the rule. I’m with the Greek.”

Charles seemed to want a judgment of some sort.

“Jack, I can’t say what you should do. Don’t lay this trip on me. I can’t even say what I would do, but we both know we’re very different. All I can say is that discretion is quite called for these days.”

“Could be a set-up,” Charles thought aloud. “Lily Lee is very cool. Lynette . . . she’s a different type of chick. Fuck, man, I get in there and Billy Jo Allen or some big spade jumps out from behind the not very busted sofa with a camera, my ass is 120% pure Acapulco Gold grade A grass. Remember Aaron Finkelstein. Remember Ben Allan Browne.”

Ben Allan Browne had been busted for a $100 hash deal, set up by his own student, or by a University plant posing as a student. The kid showed up in his fiction workshop, a junior English major that nobody in the department knew. When a suspicious Browne phoned the registrar, he was told, “student records are confidential.” Unfortunately Browne had not been suspicious enough and was out of Busiris and out of Riverton.

“Lynette and Lily are not setting you up,” I told Charles. “How could you ever mistake them? Lynette likes you and Lily Lee likes you, and if you don’t know that, ‘What’s the use of all your damned books?’ ”

“One of the first things Lily ever told me was that Cleaver is right on about black-white relationships.”

“Hey, buddy, ‘Life is trouble. To be alive. . . .’ ”

“ . . . ‘is to unbuckle your belt and look for trouble.’ You see where it got Zorba.”

“Not to mention his lady friend.”

“Every man,” Charles said thoughtfully, “can be had at some point in his life by any woman who happens by. And every man can be had at any point in his life by one, maybe two very special women.”

“I can’t tell you what to do, Jack. Whatever you decide, I don’t know a thing about it. Make sure nobody else does either. For your sake and for Lynette’s.”

Jack was silent for some time.

“Maybe I’m making too big a deal of this,” he said at last. “Maybe it’s just a busted sofa or a leaky faucet.”

“Check out the sofa, Chas.”

“Maybe earlier in the afternoon. There’s a better chance that they’d be home together. I don’t think Lynette and Lily would pull anything wild together.”

“Fool!” I laughed. “The shit they pull in your classes? I’ve been to lunch with you three.”

So Charles Creed kept his word, and at 2:00 that afternoon, eyes mostly over his shoulder, hands clammy, throat dry, blood pressure about 210, he presented himself at the gate of Lily Lee Martin and Lynette Taylor.

Lily Lee opened the door.

Confusion on both sides.

“Lynette asked me to stop by,” Jack said stupidly.

“Lynette gone to the laundromat, and then to the A & P for some stuff.”

“She said something about a broken sofa.”

Lily Lee didn’t know nothing ‘bout no broken sofa.

“Or a leaky faucet.”

Lily Lee didn’t know nothing ‘bout no leaky faucet either.

Lily did know perfectly well that Lynette knew perfectly well there was no leaky faucet, and she strongly suspected that Jack knew there was no leaky faucet.

“You comin’ in, or you just gonna leave your stuff by the gate?” Lily wanted to know.

Jack hesitated.

Finally, taking him by the hand, Lily Lee Martin led Dr. Charles Creed into the apartment . . . took him by the hand and drew him into the apartment and into her life. Brought him across the threshold and closed the door behind him. She was wearing skin-tight blue jeans and a cotton blouse. Her dark blue bra showed clearly through the white cotton.

“I can show you the place,” she went on. “This is the living room. We have two chairs, a stereo, a bookshelf, a sofa that is not broken, and a coffee table.”

On the table lay a copy of Soul on Ice, a set of keys and a deck of Bicycle playing cards. Nervously Charles fingered the deck.

“We play a lot of five-card stud,” Lily said with a sly smile. “Except this deck missin’ the jack and ace of hearts.”

Absentmindedly Jack fiddled with the cards, cutting to the queen of diamonds. “Third queen to the pair living here,” he joked.

“Wild card give you four of a kind. You a joker, Professor Creed? Or you my missin’ jack of hearts?”

“I’ll be your jack of hearts, if you be my queen of diamonds.”

“I be your queen of diamonds any day. But a busy man like you didn’t come here to play no cards.”

“No, I came to fix a leaky faucet.”

Lily led him to the kitchen. “This the kitchen. Small, but we got a refrigerator and a oven. Mostly we eat out at Church’s, or order pizza. We got Coke and beer. You like a beer, Professor Creed?”

Jack declined.

“Busy man like you didn’t come here to drink no beer, either. You too busy to take off your jacket and stay awhile? Lynette done just left. And black folks don’t do no fifteen-minute laundry.”

Lily removed Charles’ jacket and hung it on a kitchen chair. He surveyed the living room. There was only one door, closed, but not locked.

“This apartment got two bedrooms,” Lily Lee told Charles. “That one over there Lynette’s. This one here mine.” She opened one of the two doors.

“This my bed. A very comfortable bed. And very strong. Sometimes when I really tired, I just fall asleep with all my clothes on. But usually I sleep with my clothes off.” Looking straight into Jack’s eyes, Lily began unbuttoning her blouse.

“May I kiss you?” Jack asked.

“Don’t talk. Just do.”

It was not, Charles told me later, the 19-year-old Playmate body inside the hiphugger jeans. Not the blue bra beneath the white cotton. Not the taut nipples, or the dark cleavage below the open blouse. It was her eyes, those smokey recesses of sadness, mystery and possibility. He thought once, fleetingly as he kissed her, of Eldridge Cleaver. He thought twice as he unfastened her blue bra, of the front door. He thought maybe three times, as they fell naked onto the bed, of Lynette.

He gave no thought at all to condoms, birth control, Rose Marié, his job, his career, or the rest of his life. “Completely spontaneous, and completely unconditional,” he wrote in his novel; “just a male and a female locking onto each other as easily and naturally as a pair of magnets. Instinctual, the way sex ought to be. Unpremeditated, unsanctified, unpoliticized, unapologetic, and unintellectualized. A reflex action, like breathing, turning around, catching a baseball.”

No talk. Just sheets of orange flame, oceans of green salt water. Fire in the eyes, electricity in the groin. A great cosmic discharge of energy.

Half an hour later, spent, Jack and Lily rolled apart, naked beside each other.

“I didn’t think it would happen like this,” Lily told Jack.

“I’m supposed to say, ‘I love you,’ ” Jack told her.

“I suppose’ to light a cigarette. Then we talk for half an hour analyzing things. ‘Was it good for you?’ ‘Magical. Was it good for you?’ ‘Never better.’ Blah, blah, blah. Lynette might not be gone all of an hour, though. Maybe we better get our clothes on. Then I can light a cigarette and we can talk.”

Lynette, Lily allowed, was not doing laundry after all, had merely gone for a few groceries, could easily have returned, possibly with friends, at any time.

“Okay, so I love you,” Jack told her, after they were dressed.

“It was magical.”

“At school we have to be what we have to be.”

“You don’t have to say that.”

“I apologize.”

“Don’t be gettin’ no big ideas.”

Jack kissed her again. “Thank you. You’re tremendous.”

“Thank you too, Mr. Fixit Man. I ‘spect we’ll have another busted faucet soon . . . like about tomorrow afternoon? Seem like somethin’ always bustin’ around here.”

“Any time, any place.”

“Now get your honkey ass out of here ‘fore my roommate come back.”

Jack kissed her a third time.

“I didn’t care at all,” she told Jack later. “I just knew what I wanted when I saw it, and I took it. You can’t analyze things like that. Ain’t no such thing as an intellectual fuck.”