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'Good morning, Professor,' he said. 'What are you doing here?'
'It's a good place to think,' I said.
'Yes, it is,' said Bender.
'I was thinking about Severin Winter,' I said. 'And Edith. I miss them.' I watched him closely, but there were no revelations in his dead-gray eyes.
'Where are they?' he asked; he didn't seem interested.
'Vienna.'
'It must be very nice there,' he said.
'Just between you and me,' I said, 'I'll bet Edith Winter is the best-looking piece of ass in all of Vienna.'
His reptile calm was untouched; his face showed only the faintest trace of life as we know it. He looked at me as if he were seriously considering my opinion. Finally he said, 'She's kind of skinny, isn't she?' I realized, with revulsion, that George James Bender was actually smiling, but there was nothing about his smile that was anymore accessible than his blank eyes. I knew once again that I knew nothing.
So I am going to Vienna, and I'm going to try the Brueghel book again. But of course there are other contributing factors. ('There are always contributing factors,' Severin used to say.) It's a way to be near the children, and I admit that I want to assure Utch of my availability. We historical novelists know things take a little time. And Vienna has a fabulous history of treaties; the truces made there over the years run long and deep.
And I'd like to run into Edith and Severin sometime. I'd like to see them in a restaurant, perhaps dining out with another couple. I would know everything about that other couple at a glance. Utch and I would be alone, and I would ask the waiter to send a note from us to that couple. 'Watch out,' it would say. And the husband would show the note to his wife, and then to Edith and Severin, who would suddenly scan the restaurant and see us. Utch and I would nod, and by then I hope I would be able to smile.
Some other time, there's a question I would like to ask Severin Winter. When it rains or snows, when the heat is unrelenting or the cold profound - whenever the weather strikes him as an adversary - does he think of Audrey Cannon? I'll bet he does.
Yesterday Utch wrote that she saw Edith sitting in Demel's eating a pastry. I hope she gets fat.
So. Today I bought a plane ticket. My mother gave me the money. If cuckolds catch a second wind, I am eagerly waiting for mine.
READ ON FOR AN EXTRACT OF
IN ONE PERSON
THE BREATHTAKING NEW NOVEL FROM BESTSELLING AUTHOR JOHN IRVING
A compelling novel of desire, secrecy, and sexual identity, In One Person is a story of unfulfilled love - tormented, funny, and affecting - and an impassioned embrace of our sexual differences.
Chapter 1
AN UNSUCCESSFUL CASTING CALL
I'm going to begin by telling you about Miss Frost. While I say to everyone that I became a writer because I read a certain novel by Charles Dickens at the formative age of fifteen, the truth is I was younger than that when I first met Miss Frost and imagined having sex with her, and this moment of my sexual awakening also marked the fitful birth of my imagination. We are formed by what we desire. In less than a minute of excited, secretive longing, I desired to become a writer and to have sex with Miss Frost--not necessarily in that order.
I met Miss Frost in a library. I like libraries, though I have difficulty pronouncing the word--both the plural and the singular. It seems there are certain words I have considerable trouble pronouncing: nouns, for the most part--people, places, and things that have caused me preternatural excitement, irresolvable conflict, or utter panic. Well, that is the opinion of various voice teachers and speech therapists and psychiatrists who've treated me--alas, without success. In elementary school, I was held back a grade due to "severe speech impairments"--an overstatement. I'm now in my late sixties, almost seventy; I've ceased to be interested in the cause of my mispronunciations. (Not to put too fine a point on it, but fuck the etiology.)
I don't even try to say the etiology word, but I can manage to struggle through a comprehensible mispronunciation of library or libraries--the botched word emerging as an unknown fruit. ("Liberry," or "liberries," I say--the way children do.)
It's all the more ironic that my first library was undistinguished. This was the public library in the small town of First Sister, Vermont--a compact red-brick building on the same street where my grandparents lived. I lived in their house on River Street--until I was fifteen, when my mom remarried. My mother met my stepfather in a play.
The town's amateur theatrical society was called the First Sister Players; for as far back as I can remember, I saw all the plays in our town's little theater. My mom was the prompter--if you forgot your lines, she told you what to say. (It being an amateur theater, there were a lot of forgotten lines.) For years, I thought the prompter was one of the actors--someone mysteriously offstage, and not in costume, but a necessary contributor to the dialogue.
My stepfather was a new actor in the First Sister Players when my mother met him. He had come to town to teach at Favorite River Academy--the almost-prestigious private school, which was then all boys. For much of my young life (most certainly, by the time I was ten or eleven), I must have known that eventually, when I was "old enough," I would go to the academy. There was a more modern and better-lit library at the prep school, but the public library in the town of First Sister was my first library, and the librarian there was my first librarian. (Incidentally, I've never had any trouble saying the librarian word.)
Needless to say, Miss Frost was a more memorable experience than the library. Inexcusably, it was long after meeting her that I learned her first name. Everyone called her Miss Frost, and she seemed to me to be my mom's age--or a little younger--when I belatedly got my first library card and met her. My aunt, a most imperious person, had told me that Miss Frost "used to be very good-looking," but it was impossible for me to imagine that Miss Frost could ever have been better-looking than she was when I met her--notwithstanding that, even as a kid, all I did was imagine things. My aunt claimed that the available men in the town used to fall all over themselves when they met Miss Frost. When one of them got up the nerve to introduce himself--to actually tell Miss Frost his name--the then-beautiful librarian would look at him coldly and icily say, "My name is Miss Frost. Never been married, never want to be."
With that attitude, Miss Frost was still unmarried when I met her; inconceivably, to me, the available men in the town of First Sister had long stopped introducing themselves to her.
*
THE CRUCIAL DICKENS NOVEL--THE one that made me want to be a writer, or so I'm always saying--was Great Expectations. I'm sure I was fifteen, both when I first read it and when I first reread it. I know this was before I began to attend the academy, because I got the book from the First Sister town library--twice. I won't forget the day I showed up at the library to take that book out a second time; I'd never wanted to reread an entire novel before.
