Stoner

"God damn it!" Finch's voice was anguished. "He's counting on that! Think for a minute. What would you do? It's April; almost May; what kind of job could you get this time of year --if you could get one at all?"

"I don't know," Stoner said. "Something . . ."

"And what about Edith? Do you think she's going to give in, give you a divorce without a fight? And Grace? What would it do to her, in this town, if you just took off? And Katherine? What kind of life would you have? What would it do to both of you?"

Stoner did not speak. An emptiness was beginning somewhere within him; he felt a withering, a falling away. He said at last, "Can you give me a week?--I've got to think. A week?"

Finch nodded. "I can hold him off that long at least. But not much longer. I'm sorry, Bill. You know that."

"Yes." He got up from the chair and stood for a moment, testing the heavy numbness of his legs. "I'll let you know. I'll let you know when I can."

He went out of the office into the darkness of the long corridor and walked heavily into the sunlight, into the open world that was like a prison wherever he turned.

Years afterward, at odd moments, he would look back upon those days that followed his conversation with Gordon Finch and would be unable to recall them with any clarity at all. It was as if he were a dead man animated by nothing more than a habit of stubborn will. Yet he was oddly aware of himself and of the places, persons, and events which moved past him in these few days; and he knew that he presented to the public regard an appearance which belied his condition. He taught his classes, he greeted his colleagues, he attended the meetings he had to attend--and no one of the people he met from day to day knew that anything was wrong.

But from the moment he walked out of Gordon Finch's office, he knew, somewhere within the numbness that grew from a small center of his being, that a part of his life was over, that a part of him was so near death that he could watch the approach almost with calm. He was vaguely conscious that he walked across the campus in the bright crisp heat of an early spring afternoon; the dogwood trees along the sidewalks and in the front yards were in full bloom, and they trembled like soft clouds, translucent and tenuous, before his gaze; the sweet scent of dying lilac blossoms drenched the air.

And when he got to Katherine's apartment he was feverishly and callously gay. He brushed aside her questions about his latest encounter with the dean; he forced her to laugh; and he watched with an immeasurable sadness their last effort of gaiety, which was like a dance that life makes upon the body of death.

But finally they had to talk, he knew; though the words they said were like a performance of something they had rehearsed again and again in the privacies of their knowledge. They revealed that knowledge by grammatical usage: they progressed from the perfect--"We have been happy, haven't we?"--to the past--"We were happy--happier than anyone, I think"--and at last came to the necessity of discourse.

Several days after the conversation with Finch, in a moment of quiet that interrupted the half-hysterical gaiety they had chosen as that convention most appropriate to see them through their last days together, Katherine said, "We don't have much time, do we?"

"No," Stoner said quietly.

"How much longer?" Katherine asked.

"A few days, two or three."

Katherine nodded. "I used to think I wouldn't be able to endure it. But I'm just numb. I don't feel anything."

"I know," Stoner said. They were silent for a moment. "You know if there were anything--anything I could do, I'd--"

"Don't," she said. "Of course I know."

He leaned back on the couch and looked at the low, dim ceiling that had been the sky of their world. He said calmly, "If I threw it all away--if I gave it up, just walked out--you would go with me, wouldn't you?"

"Yes," she said.

"But you know I won't do that, don't you?"

"Yes, I know."

"Because then," Stoner explained to himself, "none of it would mean anything--nothing we have done, nothing we have been. I almost certainly wouldn't be able to teach, and you--you would become something else. We both would become something else, something other than ourselves. We would be--nothing."

"Nothing," she said.

"And we have come out of this, at least, with ourselves. We know that we are--what we are."

"Yes," Katherine said.

"Because in the long run," Stoner said, "it isn't Edith or even Grace, or the certainty of losing Grace, that keeps me here; it isn't the scandal or the hurt to you or me; it isn't the hardship we would have to go through, or even the loss of love we might have to face. It's simply the destruction of ourselves, of what we do."

"I know," Katherine said.

"So we are of the world, after all; we should have known that. We did know it, I believe; but we had to withdraw a little, pretend a little, so that we could--"