Read Online The Bookman's Tale by Berry Fleming - Free Book Online Page A

two).
    Then X gets the message and calls Donna from the lab that he will be detained at the office and not to hold dinner for him, he will get a snack at the cafeteria. And don’t wait up for him; he couldn’t tell how long this might go on. Then he calls Meg, asks to speak to Oscar, is told Oscar is in Washington, and asks Meg if he may stop in for a minute on his way home to leave some notes for Oscar. “But certainly. How thoughtful of you!” says little wife to husband’s boss.
    And, “Certainly, oh what a nice idea!” when he finishes his drink and proposes “driving out for a bite” at a new place one of his people has told him of.
    Incidentally, he laid all this before me later on the plane to Georgia, really upset and finding me, I suppose, perhaps the only one knowing everybody concerned. I listened, all ears as many little details fell into the blank spaces in what I already knew, or guessed. He wanted to talk, needed to, might have gone to a shrink if as a scientist he hadn’t been contemptuous. And he probably felt, too, that I would understand, sensing, I believe, my own down-the-years love—not quite love, of course, just a seedling—for the fresh, smooth-cheeked, quickly smiling Mrs. Tuckwell, Meg (a teetering smile, as if waiting).—But talking to me came later. Our paths didn’t usually cross.
    It doesn’t take much imagination to see the attraction, Meg half his age (or less) wanting to please the boss to further husband’s career, rather flattered too by the old man’s attention to her as individual, possibly concerned in her own mind that her newly started pregnancy might spoil her appeal, not aware, I should say, that biology had more than taken care of that by toning her cheeks and hair and body the way a musician perfects the pitch of his violin before a recital. She could never have looked better.
    For him there were other angles too, as he admitted later (hurrying over them). He had put this and that together and come out with Donna, turning forty, handsome as ever in his eyes, or more so, but wanting reassurance from someone besides him, wanting some fresher proof of her appeal than his fifteen-year-old attentions. Not the first time he had ticked off such guesses, her forays usually leading to jealousy on his part and after a while ending in renewed devotion (possibly supplemented by inherent surprises in the forays themselves), and back to forbearance and a not-intolerable makeshift ecstasy. He had even been half prepared to find she wasn’t home when he phoned from the lab, had gone to Washington with Tuckwell; ridiculous of course but jealousy paints with a nonobjective brush. He was not at all prepared, the next time Tuckwell’s name came up between them, to find she was indignant: “He is annoying me, this young man. Can you imagine!”
    X making light of it with, “Well, after all, baby, you’re quite a temptation, you know.”
    She said, Thank you, but she hadn’t descended to high-school dropouts yet, and he shouted, “Dropout!” and they both laughed—the clouds circling round and away.
    He didn’t quite believe her; she was blowing up something insignificant, misinterpreting something. But he did believe there might have been something to blow up, to misinterpret, and it changed the way he felt about Meg, or not the way he felt but the way he might express it. If the boy had the nerve, the self-confidence, to “annoy” X’s wife then X would have the nerve to do the same to the boy’s (not that he hadn’t thought of it before—dreamed of it).
    But of course it came to nothing, except that it created a sort of frosty coating over the mentor-student relationship with Tuckwell—husband and obstacle to X’s interest in Meg (which grew stronger against the impediment), and also an object of jealousy because of what X believed was Donna’s