Ghost Traps

Lawless in New York

Lawless in New York Ms. Reinquist did not want to be falling in love with Professor Potter, but it was already happening, and after only two Manhattans. He was awful, really, in his damned light gray herringbone jacket and bow tie, the white hair at his temples closely shaved, his mustaches neat as a car salesman's, his rimless glasses and, yes, his poor bald pate, both reflecting the glum lights of the bar. Everyone was drinking too much and talking too loudly, and of course they were making a spectacle of themselves as unsophisticated hicks in this elegant bar where Susan Sontag and Norman Mailer had no doubt insulted each other,- where Max Perkins surely bought a drink for Thomas Wolfe andBennett Cerf had counseled Katherine Anne Porter. Maybe Hemingway had slugged somebody here, and Dorothy Parker, of course, had left some poor fool's ego in bloody ribbons. Ms. Reinquist squeezed her eyes shut a moment to get a grip on things, and then she gave up. Well, what of it, her paper had been a wonderful success and she deserved a little release of tension. The problem was with Potter. What was going on? She had barely noticed him around the department before and, as always, he was being very correct toward her as a colleague. "Your paper has them buzzing/7 he had said immediately afterward. "Wonderful!" Now she washaving some startlingly pornographic thoughts about him. He's a jogger, she thought, he's probably got a 58 Ghost Traps little stamina, and then she was depressed:My mind is going straight to the Devil. "You're looking so serious, Alice/' BobSanders said to her. "Having second thoughts about your paper?" She forced a smile. "I just realized how tired I am." "Any offers to publish that thing?" Potter asked. He would ask that, she thought. "Yes," she said. "What do you know about the Massachusetts Review7 ." "It's published in Massachusetts," Sanders said. Ms. Reinquist thought the remark gratuitous, but Sanders, with red hair and a neatly trimmed red beard, was young and could be forgiven. He had also been undergoing a series of job interviews, and after a full day of making those rounds anyone might become a little unhinged. "Strictly neoabolitionist," Potter said. "If we published anything like it in Illinois, we'd be shot for a bunch of commies." The fourth member of the party, Professor Silver, swiveled around in his wheelchair and grabbed Potter fiercely by the elbow with his mechanical hand. This device looked so terribly much like a coat hanger that in bad moments Ms. Reinquist imagined stashing Silver in a closet during one of her many parties as a kind of living silent valet. He had been a long-standing provocateur on any faculty committee she'd ever endured, and was once both ineptly and adequately described as a "paraplegic rakehell." Silver was not a paraplegic. That was the inept part of the description. He had had an accident of some kind, which no one ever talked about, a few years before Ms. Reinquist moved to Illinois. Sheimagined, though Potter was responding warmly to it, Silver's battery-powered grip must hurt terrifically. "Did I hear the dread word spoken?" Silver asked. "Unhand me, you Red Menace," Potter said. "The Domino Theory lives," Silver said. "First we come to Law/ess in New York 59 New York to an MLAconvention where we are contaminated with liberal Eastern ideas . . ." "But/' Potter said seriously, "isn't it true that youwere originally from New Jersey?" "Agh!" Silver cackled, releasing Potter and covering both his eyes with his mechanical forearm. "My secret is out. Next, my cell will be destroyed." Ms. Reinquist grimaced. They were acting like schoolboys, Potter who was what?—forty-seven? forty-four?—and Silver who was probably the most unparaplegic rakehell linguistics professor in existence. They were building a special platform for him in the Gondolier Room so he could wheel in and baffle everyone in the profession, and here he was indulging in hackneyed old departmental stuff about Midwestern conservativism and anticommunism. No doubt about it: New York had them all on the defensive. Joseph McCarthy's border was contiguous with theirs,- and after all, they were eight hundred miles closer to the shrines of the Ivy League now than they had ever been in Skibab, Illinois. Alas, no one from Harvard or Columbia had...