Poetic Justice by Amanda Cross Read Free Book Online Page A

was beloved of Aphrodite, but one would not call him a lover.’ Nor is that all,” Reed said, turning the pages. “We have all agreed we live in uncertain times. Indeed, says Auden:
    How much half-witted horseplay and sheer bloody misrule
    It took to bring you two together both on schedule?

If equal affection cannot be,   
Let the more loving one be me.
Three
    S ATURDAY morning, and Central Park free for human beings to move at the speeds they might have attained at the turn of the century: horses, bicycles, and the almost forgotten pleasures of walking. Kate and Reed, whenever they considered the incredible series of disasters to which living in New York City regularly exposed one—strikes, garbage uncollected, snow unremoved, no transportation, no heat, no safety in the streets—or whenever they heard others complain of city living, would always think: they have taken the automobiles out of Central Park on weekends. It was the one urban blessing the decade had conferred.
    “To return,” Reed said, “to the conversation of last night, why has misrule and horseplay brought you to such a state of discombobulation? Or, since it has, may Ioffer my help in recombobulation? Does the University matter that much?”
    “On Thursday, when the semester began,” Kate said, “I asked myself that question—not, perhaps, whether it matters, which it so clearly does, but why?” Kate stopped to pat a puppy who came loping up anticipating admiration. “I can remember many stages of the revolution or insurrection or whatever it might be called. The exhilaration of the week when the buildings were occupied, the sense of absolute aliveness which, despite all the problems, one did so ringingly feel. I remember being shoved against a building by a plainclothesman with a club and thinking, this is it. I remember hearing the endlessly repeated obscenities from the students who stood about on the ledges and roofs of the buildings like acroteria, and wondering if indeed, as one of the characters in one of Forster’s novels notes, they were out of fashion. I remember watching the flowers and grass being trampled, distinctly noticing as the last tulip was crushed. I remember, on the first day when they occupied the President’s Office, walking by the administration building and thinking: so that’s where the President’s Office is, and never wondering, then, why in all the years I had been associated with the University I had never learned where the President’s Office was, nor cared to learn. Later on, of course, we heard that the guards had entered the office, not to try to bounce the students but to rescue a Van Gogh which hung there, and I did muse then to think that I had never known the University possessed one of the world’s great paintings.
    “But none of that was the worst, you know; it only seemed the worst to those on the outside, who were appalledat the actions of the students, or appalled at the actions of the police—when what I became so suddenly struck with was the fact that there had never really
been
a university. That a bunch of half-baked, foul-mouthed Maoist students could bring a great university to a standstill, could be followed in their illegal acts by nearly a thousand moderate, thoughtful students, but above all could reveal that the University had never really been administered at all. We had a president whom no one ever saw, whose understanding of the true condition of the University could not have been more inaccurate if his job had been running a yacht club in East Hampton; we had a Board of Governors who had never, literally never, spoken to a student nor visited the University except for the monthly meetings, when their chauffeurs drove them to the campus; we had a faculty so busy with its own affairs that it had not troubled to observe that there was no university, only separate egos, departments, schools, programs all staking claims.
    “Do you know, Reed, my brothers, who needless to say were