Death of the Black-Haired Girl by Robert Stone

what happened to be Brookman’s first semester with Maud, without intending any personal reference, a younger colleague of his had observed that innocent coquetry now led to innocent fucking. There was also innocent frenzy, innocent passion, the innocent, impalpable knife through the heart. Brookman was the one more experienced with consequences, and to that degree he had thought he could take care of her. Innocent love was not possible, love the least innocent of all things. For a long time he had believed he knew as much as anyone about love but that it had no nameable qualities.
    He drank more than he ought have done if he intended to drive. He’d accepted an invitation to a party that evening, given by the college’s famous resident artist. She was not truly in residence; she commuted by plane from New York but maintained a rustic roost with a Franklin stove and a picture window up in the hills for use on teaching days. A never-to-be-seen friend would fly her from Long Island in a vintage DC-3, the kind of plane in which Ingrid Bergman and Paul Henreid escape from Casablanca. It didn’t get any hipper than that.
    The artist, a tall woman in her fifties, affected a brunette style and black dress that suited her slim figure and large, expressive brown eyes. Brookman liked her work, which had Piero della Francesca–shaped women who were confined in some way—up against walls or prison bars, sometimes dead, sometimes portrayed as mounted condottieri in period breeches, cuirasses and greaves. The paintings invited narrative speculation from the viewer. There were some portraits too, of both men and women. Some of these pictures were in the college museum, which had given her a show. None of her work hung in her rustic hilltop house, however; there it was all West African art—masks, bronzes, elaborately worked cloth-and-feather fetish compositions, baskets, a lightning snake. These objects had been set up in dramatic ways in every public room in the house.
    There were maybe thirty people at the party, most of whom he’d seen around the college. Two of the people he knew pretty well but rarely saw, a young female philosophy professor who had a history with Brookman and was present with her husband, and a frail, long-haired history professor named Carswell, who’d been working on his third volume of the origins, flourishing and destruction of Carthage. Carswell went to Tunis every year, and his first book was highly praised in the
New York Review.
His second volume was trashed by a rival and not noticed by supporters. He was still going to Tunis but looked a bit discouraged; years were passing without volume three. He told people he was rewriting too much. Behind his back, people were calling him Mr. Casaubon.
    Brookman wished him well; he felt he had been in the same situation. He had a few drinks without paying attention to how many and went over to the historian.
    “Hey, Dan, I ever tell you how much I liked your first book?”
    It was true that Brookman had read and enjoyed the first volume on Carthage. But that had been pretty much enough Carthage for him.
    “Yes, you did, and I’m grateful.”
    “I really liked it.”
    “Actually, the first volume on Carthage wasn’t my first book.”
    “I didn’t know that.”
    “No,” said Carswell, “I realize that. I hope you’ll like the next. Maybe I should say I hope you’ll actually read it.”
    “Hey, I’m waiting.” He put his hand on Carswell’s shoulder, which was lower than his own. “But don’t give yourself a hernia.”
    He had not meant to say that. It had come out wrong. He had meant to compliment and encourage. He looked back at Carswell, who was staring into his own drink. Best not to apologize. Anyway, Carswell had been insufferable. Brookman thought it was time for him to be going. He took one more round of the African art and found his hostess, the painter, at the door.
    “This is the greatest collection of African art I’ve ever seen,”