As She Climbed Across the Table by Jonathan Lethem Read Free Book Online Page B

elevator, tapping impatiently at
down
.
    “Alice.” I was a little drunk with myself. “Alice, wait.”
    She stood facing the elevator.
    I was panting. “Don’t I deserve some thanks?” I said. “I did it. I broke up the lynch mob. Like Henry Fonda in
Young Mr. Lincoln
.”
    She turned to me. Her expression was furious. “You want to make Lack yours,” she said. “You think if you describe him he’ll suddenly belong to you. Just like everything else.”
    The elevator doors opened and she stepped inside. I stared, struck dumb.
    “But this time you’re wrong,” she said. “Lack is mine.” The doors closed over her ravaged face.

I paced campus until dark, then stalked back to the apartment. When I saw the blind men were home I got into my car and drove off campus, found a bar, and deliberately had a drink with a woman.
    An interesting woman, as it happened. She was dark-haired and tall, with a penetrating gaze and a smile that didn’t show her teeth. She was sitting alone, sheltering a glass of red wine. I told her my name was Dale Overling, and asked if I could sit at her table. She said yes.
    “You’re not from the campus,” I said.
    “No.”
    “Not affiliated.”
    “No.”
    “Not a graduate of the school.”
    “No. No connection.”
    “You can’t imagine how that turns me on.”
    “Buy me a drink.”
    The bar was tame and suburban, a fifties cocktail lounge not yet refurbished by student irony. It was nearly empty, a weekend place on a weeknight. I’d picked it for its distance from campus. But when I flagged the waitress it was a girl I recognized, a dizzy undergraduate, costumed in a yellow apron. Her eyes met mine and I froze her with a look of dread, willing her not to blow my cover.
    “Take this wine away,” I said. “Bring us drinks. Margaritas, salt on the glass. Bring us six of them. Line them up on the table.”
    “I can bring you a pitcher.”
    “I want a line of drinks. I want to see the glasses accumulate. Don’t take away the empties, either.”
    She flickered away, pale and mothlike in the gloom.
    “You’re a very self-assured man, Mr. Overling,” said my companion, her smile flickering.
    “Dale, please. And you’re a very perceptive woman, Ms.…?”
    “Jalter, Cynthia Jalter.”
    “May I call you Cynthia? You’re a very perceptive woman.”
    “Thank you.”
    “I like to walk into a bar and find a perceptive woman sitting alone. It excites me. It doesn’t happen that often.”
    “I’m flattered.”
    “And the fact that you’re not from the campus, that takes it over the top. Because there’s nothing that excites me quite like the idea of perceptive, intelligent women living in a university town
yet having no connection with the school
. Just living in thesame town, right there, not needing to have anything to do with it. The idea of the intelligent woman in the university town. What is she? Why is she there? It’s a stimulating idea.”
    “You must be from the school.”
    “Me? No, no. It’s true, I’m visiting the campus, I’m a consultant. They fly me in. I spend a lot of time in towns like this, being flown in, flown out. I’ve got enough frequent-flyer points to send quintuplets around the world. But I hate these big university schools. They’re big rotting carcasses. Rotten in the center. If I didn’t just fly in, consult, fly out, I couldn’t live with myself. As it is I take a hotel off campus, eat off campus, and go to bars and look for intelligent people who have nothing to do with the school. Those are the people to talk to in any situation. The ones on the edge, the outside.”
    “Like me.”
    “Exactly. They offer me a room on campus, you know. But I take a hotel. And I rent a big shiny car so I stand out. The American campus is crawling with these little brown and gray and buff-colored Peugeot cars and little Japanese cars. I get a big bright American car so they know I don’t care. Bright red if I can.”
    It didn’t matter if