Bay of Souls by Robert Stone Read Free Book Online Page B

real until you make them real. It's not group therapy or social work or an uplift pep rally! How about a little more literary criticism and a little less mutual support?"
    The class sullenly dispersed ahead of schedule. He had failed to make himself clear. They had understood only that their youthful goodwill was being insulted. He had used abusive language. He had employed sarcasm. He had better watch it.
    Rattled, he went over to the pool for a swim. The steamy showers and liquefactious echoes were comforting on that raw winter day. He had the luxury of a lane to himself. He swam hard, trying to outrun the shadow inside him. Some kind of bill had come up for payment.
    He had, it seemed to him, done quite well by randomness. By the day at least, unless one insisted on pondering it all, randomness was no less cruel than some unlikely mysterious providence. He had always considered himself a lucky man.
    Buying himself a cold can of grapefruit juice from a machine in the lobby, he came upon Lara Purcell sipping bottled water beside it. She was wearing a black sleeveless leotard and there was a damp towel around her neck.
    "Doing your aerobics?" Michael asked.
    "Squash."
    "Where do you find opponents?"
    "Oh, there are some formidable women around. I play men too." She drained her plastic bottle and tossed it in the receptacle against the near wall, a rimless shot. "Do you play?"
    "What I play is racquetball."
    "Oh," Lara said. "I can play that."
    "Want to play tomorrow?"
    "What time?"
    "Three?"
    But three might bring him home suspiciously late, if they stopped for coffee. It would be dark by four. They agreed to play at two.
    "If you're good enough," Dr. Purcell said, "I'll teach you squash."
    Back at his office he called Norman Cevic.
    "So Lara Purcell," he told Norman, "invited me to play squash."
    There was a brief silence on the line. "So what can I tell you, Michael?"
    "Is that a pass?"
    "Gamboling half clothed in a sealed chamber? What do you think?"
    "I should say no way," Michael said. "I should decline."
    "Did you?"
    "I accepted. Racquetball, actually."
    "You know," Norman said, "some of our colleagues—I won't mention names—are real screwballs. Disasters in search of a victim. Who knows what games are being played out? I'm not talking about squash."
    "I'll call her," Michael said. "I'll make an excuse."
    "Well," Norman said, "you're a man of the world."
    Very funny, Michael thought. But it was not so. He was a tank-town schoolmarm's son, the grandson of farmhands on four quarterings, married out of high school. An overeducated hick.
    That night the PBS station presented a particularly absorbing documentary about convicted murderers awaiting execution on death row. It left the Ahearns in mild shock. What terror to fall into the hands of a system so cruel and arbitrary as the law, so surreal in its unconcern for any kind of responsibility. It was the kind of thing that made you want to pray.
    Kristin had not allowed Paul to watch because of the warning about graphic depictions. Michael, who would have preferred his son to see it, did not argue. Later he regretted it.
     
    In the morning, he read the class papers on Kate Chopin's
The Awakening.
Many students had not troubled to finish the reading. Several of these compared it to
Madame Bovary,
which was presumably the posted line on it in Cliffs Notes or somewhere. A few apologized for their inability to sympathize with the heroine, vaguely aware that sympathy was the attitude expected. The class feminists abandoned Edna as a flibbertigibbet. Eros and Thanatos were too quaint and reactionary, even embraced in a solitary act of personal liberation.
    It was hardly a surprising response. Solitary acts of personal liberation were what everyone must be spared or forbidden. They represented the failure of everything progressive. The courage to be yourself, a virtue much celebrated on campuses like theirs, lost its luster if you were selfish and boy-crazy and a bad mother, the