Things Beyond Us

She first noticed him because at a loud party, in the babble of strongly watered intellectuals, he was quiet. And he was attractive, soft-featured and blondish and coolly blue-eyed, the only man present in a three-piece suit. His bearing was confidently comfortable, as of one who has come to observe rather than to join, to enjoy the company and not to make himself prominent within it. She thought his hands, now occupied with cigarette and glass of watery bourbon, were striking: short-fingered, not quite pudgy, almost mittenlike; they looked as if they might amuse themselves with finger-painting—a child’s serious play.

When she said, “This gathering is a little overheated,” he replied, “Oh, yes. Always.” Juliet took this as a piece of gallantry, a recognition that his consort often stirred people with her poetry reading, with her assertive attitudes, and with the limited but genuine notoriety that preceded her.

She knew nothing about him except that he was the companion of Andrea Ordway, poet and essayist and champion of aggressive feminist causes. Flamboyant champion: this journalistic formula surfaced in her mind, though Juliet had not found it strictly accurate. The Ordway reading-cum-lecture of an hour past had been direct and forceful and maybe even challenging, if one could have been ignorant of what she would be saying. But it had not been so daring as all that. The poet had not bitterly oppugned the dutiful men in her audience nor spattered her remarks with calculated obscenities. She was tastefully dressed in the casual academic manner, a soft gray sweater with a dark blue blazer and skirt. But of course preeminent in the minds of most of her audience was the dust-jacket photograph for Sins of the Fathers, that noisy first book of poems, in which she aimed a revolver directly at a world embarrassed by its manifold and hapless guilt.

“I’m Juliet Greene, and I’m a graduate student reading history,” she said. She did not offer her hand but noted how gracefully he shifted his drink to his left hand in case she did.

“Hello, Juliet Greene in history,” he said. “I’m Charles Musgrave.” His smile was practiced and easy.

“Your friend has quite a following,” Juliet said.

He gazed into the middle of the room where the poet posed as if listening intently to the red-faced circle of young men and women around her who all talked at once. “Oh, yes,” he said contentedly. “She does indeed.”

“It must be trying to be the object of so much attention.”

“Not for Andrea.”

“I don’t think I could get used to it.”

“Oh, I’m sure you could. Do you write poetry too? Besides reading history, I mean?”

“No,” she said and went on to explain that she had considered English graduate study quite seriously, but as she became more closely acquainted with the discipline as it was taught here at Graves University, she had been put off by the dryness of approach and tediousness of method, all self-involved references and overwrought footnotes. History had appealed as being more humane in some ways and also more intriguing, since she was interested in intellectual history, in the development of social concepts . . . She broke off.

His smile remained amiable. “Why do you stop?”

“I think you can’t be so very interested in my life story.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t see how you could be.”

“I am, though.”

“I’d like to hear about you.”

“There’s nothing to hear.”

“Of course there is.” But she could think of nothing to ask him that did not involve the poet and their relationship, how long they had known each other, how they had come to meet, and all that—questions that could lead but to one impertinent query: What was the function of Charles Musgrave in regard to that notable personage who now had assumed a more public voice and allowed her drink to be replenished?

At last she said, “Are you a writer too?” thinking, And don’t you find me a fatuous idiot...