moment that he should have been frank. He should have met Wendy’s offensive head-on; made it clear at once that he wasn’t the sort of professor who encouraged, or even allowed, the emotional fixations of students. He should have recommended that Wendy either unfix her feelings or stop coming to see him. Instead he chose to pretend that nothing had happened, to treat what she had said as unimportant. He assured Wendy in a light, humorous tone that it would pass; that she was confusing appreciation of his ideas with something else. He waffled—the word was accurate, suggesting something cooked up, full of little square holes.
In effect, on November 11 of last year he had given Wendy Gahaghan permission to be in love with him, and to add this to the list of problems she came to discuss with him, two or three times a week now. The convention was maintained, on his part at least, that the attachment was a sort of mild delusion from which she would eventually recover, and which was therefore to be treated with humorous tolerance. Wendy accepted this convention to some extent. She refused to admit that she was deluded in loving Brian, or that a cure was likely; but she preserved a certain detachment from her infatuation. In his presence, at least, she took the sort of ironic, stoical attitude toward it that he had known older people to maintain toward a chronic disease.
In the weeks that followed it came to be assumed that when Brian asked, quite routinely, how she was, he was inquiring about the state of her disease, her hopeless passion for him. “Well, I thought I was a little better, until I heard you talk at the Department Colloquium last night. What you said about Cordell Hull was so beautiful, I couldn’t stand it,” she would report. Or, “I’ve really been trying to get over it. I was rapping with Mike Saturday night; he said what I needed was a good fuck, that was all. So we tried it ...Uh-uh. It didn’t work. I mean, it was okay: Mike’s a nice guy, and he’s very physical—But this morning it was like it never happened, sort of.” Wendy would have gone on; but Brian, with a sense of moral scrupulousness, always changed the subject—whereas the truth was that he should never have allowed it to come up at all.
This state of things continued for about three weeks. Then two events of little apparent importance, but far-reaching effect, occurred. First, on December 3, Wendy contracted the Asian flu. For over a week she did not come to Brian’s office. His first reaction was slight relief, followed in a day or so by concern. He thought back to their last meeting, and remembered her complaint that every single time she saw him she adored him more. “Well,” he had replied jokingly, “in that case perhaps you’d better see less of me.” Unaware that Wendy was in the infirmary with a fever of 103 degrees, he told himself that she must have taken his advice; that this would be hard for her, but that it was probably the right decision. In the days that followed, he found these thoughts repeating themselves in his head with irritatingly increasing frequency.
The second event of slight apparent importance involved the Sayle Chair of American Diplomacy—not in the symbolic, but in the physical sense. Six years ago, when Brian inherited the Sayle Chair, he had also inherited an actual piece of furniture: an ancient, battered Windsor armchair with a high round back and a cracked leg, which had been presented to the first incumbent by some waggish students about 1928, and bore a worn label in imitation nineteenth-century penmanship: “Wm. M. Sayle Chair of American Diplomacy.” This object now occupied a corner of Brian’s office, which was already too small in his opinion, without serving any useful purpose. Nobody could sit on it safely; you could not even put many books on it.
Gradually, Brian had begun to feel that the Sayle Chair did not like him; doubtless it thought he was not of the stature of its
In effect, on November 11 of last year he had given Wendy Gahaghan permission to be in love with him, and to add this to the list of problems she came to discuss with him, two or three times a week now. The convention was maintained, on his part at least, that the attachment was a sort of mild delusion from which she would eventually recover, and which was therefore to be treated with humorous tolerance. Wendy accepted this convention to some extent. She refused to admit that she was deluded in loving Brian, or that a cure was likely; but she preserved a certain detachment from her infatuation. In his presence, at least, she took the sort of ironic, stoical attitude toward it that he had known older people to maintain toward a chronic disease.
In the weeks that followed it came to be assumed that when Brian asked, quite routinely, how she was, he was inquiring about the state of her disease, her hopeless passion for him. “Well, I thought I was a little better, until I heard you talk at the Department Colloquium last night. What you said about Cordell Hull was so beautiful, I couldn’t stand it,” she would report. Or, “I’ve really been trying to get over it. I was rapping with Mike Saturday night; he said what I needed was a good fuck, that was all. So we tried it ...Uh-uh. It didn’t work. I mean, it was okay: Mike’s a nice guy, and he’s very physical—But this morning it was like it never happened, sort of.” Wendy would have gone on; but Brian, with a sense of moral scrupulousness, always changed the subject—whereas the truth was that he should never have allowed it to come up at all.
This state of things continued for about three weeks. Then two events of little apparent importance, but far-reaching effect, occurred. First, on December 3, Wendy contracted the Asian flu. For over a week she did not come to Brian’s office. His first reaction was slight relief, followed in a day or so by concern. He thought back to their last meeting, and remembered her complaint that every single time she saw him she adored him more. “Well,” he had replied jokingly, “in that case perhaps you’d better see less of me.” Unaware that Wendy was in the infirmary with a fever of 103 degrees, he told himself that she must have taken his advice; that this would be hard for her, but that it was probably the right decision. In the days that followed, he found these thoughts repeating themselves in his head with irritatingly increasing frequency.
The second event of slight apparent importance involved the Sayle Chair of American Diplomacy—not in the symbolic, but in the physical sense. Six years ago, when Brian inherited the Sayle Chair, he had also inherited an actual piece of furniture: an ancient, battered Windsor armchair with a high round back and a cracked leg, which had been presented to the first incumbent by some waggish students about 1928, and bore a worn label in imitation nineteenth-century penmanship: “Wm. M. Sayle Chair of American Diplomacy.” This object now occupied a corner of Brian’s office, which was already too small in his opinion, without serving any useful purpose. Nobody could sit on it safely; you could not even put many books on it.
Gradually, Brian had begun to feel that the Sayle Chair did not like him; doubtless it thought he was not of the stature of its
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