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Chapter One: Soho
The flight attendant, serene in her Donna Karan pants suit, stopped halfway down the aisle. She frowned briefly and then allowed a business smile to play on her face as she pointed an accusing finger at Olga. Her fingers were long and white and on the accusing one she wore a turquoise ring, a terrific gift from her Denver boyfriend, a Thomasite priest.
"Your seat belt," the attendant said, admiring her finger with its big ring.
"Turquoise is lucky," Olga said.
"Oh God, you know!" the attendant said. "Isn't it wonderful!" She looked again at the ring, forgetting her role as flight attendant and becoming for the moment simply what she was, a lucky young woman with a husband and a lover. She bent over and held out her hand to give Olga a better look.
"Lucky," Olga said, her fingertips barely touching the mottled blue-green stone. "Unless it's from a monk. From a monk, turquoise is not lucky. This is true."
"A monk?" The attendant yanked her hand away and hid it behind her back. There was something wrong here. This woman was peculiar. Dangerous maybe. Besides, she had an accent. The attendant stared at Olga for further signs of craziness. Olga stared back, innocent, or maybe just stupid. "Your seat belt," the flight attendant said in a firm voice. "You've got to fasten it."
Olga reached for the belt, perhaps fastening it, perhaps not. "I'm doing my job, only," the attendant said, conciliatory now. "It's the law."
Olga smiled.
The flight attendant stood there in the aisle. She was troubled, uncertain what to do next, tempted--for no reason she could see--to throw herself into this woman's arms and weep and ask forgiveness. One last chance.
As the flight attendant moved away, hand to her hair, Olga added, "Take care with that ring."
Olga had her notebook at the ready, but she did not bother to jot down the flight attendant. The flight attendant was irrelevant. Who could care about this silly woman with her priest lover and her anonymous husband? She mattered to God, of course, if there was a God, and to her lover and maybe even to her husband--but not to Olga, not now, and not in the future, at least not in any narrative conceivable at this point.
Olga sat back to consider the multifariousness of human nature and to endure the flight.
The plane landed in San Francisco at the appointed time. There had been delays, of course, first in New York, then in Denver, but good tail winds and good luck had brought the plane in at exactly 3 p.m.
Inside the terminal a small crowd had gathered, pressed against the velvet rope. Everybody was looking for some one person. Professor Zachary Kurtz would be looking for Olga, so his letter had promised, but nobody approached her even though in her black rain cape and floppy hat she was highly visible. She smiled impartially at everyone, at no one, as if she were a Hollywood star at a premiere. She touched her dark glasses with her free hand and gave the crowd this smile which, if they wanted to, they could understand. Several people turned and looked at her, and Zachary Kurtz also looked. Someone pointed and said, "Isn't she that actress? The homely one that does those serious parts?" "Where?" someone said. And then she was gone.
It was Friday afternoon, rush hour, when luggage is always delayed but Olga's luggage was at the carousel, waiting for her. And, for her, a cab stood ready at the curb, even though rain was falling and important executives stood about, diminished, cursing. Olga ignored them and got into her cab.
"I want to go to the University, to the faculty club," she said.
"S. F. State? U. S. F.? Berkeley? Which?"
"The university," she said. "I know it's a distance, but not to worry."
The cab driver examined her in his rear view mirror. He could not place her accent, which surprised him because he was a student of comparative literature and spoke five languages reasonably well.
"That's gonna be nearly fifty dollars, lady," he said.
"Forty-one," she said, "and a few pennies. But I'll pay you fifty providing you don't talk. I have my thoughts to do."
"Sure thing," he said. "What part of Europe you from? Eastern? Belarus?"
He said, "I thought I heard an accent."
He said, "I'm from Denver myself, but I study languages. My name is Daryl," he said.
Olga said nothing.
"I just wondered about your accent?" he said, his brows up.
Suddenly Olga took off her dark glasses and leaned forward so that her head was almost touching his bushy red beard. In the mirror he could see her face clearly and he could see the hard expression in her eyes. He did not wait for her to speak.
"Okay, lady," he said. "You're the boss."
"Yes," she said, and put her dark glasses on again.
Just outside the city the rain stopped and they drove in silence through the lion-colored foothills toward the green fastnesses of the university. Olga was seen studying the distant mountains as the driver shot her occasional furtive glances in his mirror. She was his age, thirty, maybe more. And she had just the trace of an accent. Rumanian? At some point she took off her glasses and her floppy rainhat and he could see her black hair pulled straight back and knotted in a large bun. Very severe. Very middle European. Though she wore no expression whatsoever, her face seemed somehow tragic. Or perhaps menacing. She sat swathed in her black cape, impassively staring at the speeding landscape, thinking what?
Olga was thinking of the next hours, of her new book, of her task here at the university. Her task was to rescue some lost souls from the effects of their scandals, satisfy a few passions, answer some importunate prayers, and, on the side, to teach a little course in feminist drama and another in literary theory. She did not feel tragic and certainly not menacing; she merely looked that way because she was contemplating the final end of all things and the path that led there. She was wondering what form her invention would take.
As the cab fumed smoothly into the long avenue of palm trees leading to the heart of the campus, and thus to the faculty club, Olga unsnapped her collar and in one deft gesture slipped the cape off her shoulders and from under her body. She pulled a large pin from her hair, and then three small ones; as she shook her head, her long black hair cascaded about her face and shoulders. The cab driver, sneaking a glance in his mirror, was astonished to see that his formidable passenger had completely disappeared and in her place sat this young woman with lots of black hair and a yellow skirt and sweater. The cab lurched to the right and then to the left, but it did not upset Olga who continued removing all traces of lipstick with a tissue. From her large leather handbag she took a pair of beige shoes with flat heels and exchanged them for the black pumps she had been wearing. She ran her tongue over her lips, her long fingers through her hair; she sighed as if she were at last ready to begin.
When the cab pulled up in front of the faculty club, the meter read forty-one dollars and eleven cents. The driver checked the meter and then checked Olga yet one more time. He took her bags from the trunk and would have carried them into the faculty club for her, but she would not let him. Instead she handed him a worn fifty dollar bill and waited for him to leave. He reached in his pocket for change.
"Don't do that," she said. "We made a pact."
"Well, thanks," he said and got into his cab. But he did not drive away. He sat there watching as Olga, ignoring her luggage, went up the stairs, light and quick, a schoolgirl in a yellow outfit with a leather handbag slung over her shoulder. How could he have thought she looked tragic? Or menacing.
"Daryl's the name," he called out. And, to Olga's surprise, he added, "Be seeing you."
She stopped then. At the start of a book you could never be certain which characters would eventually come to matter. She cautioned herself to keep an open mind. She went on.
The young man behind the desk at the faculty club looked as if he had just alighted from his surfboard. He had blond hair and a thick blond mustache and his face was bland and handsome. His features were straight and, in that sense, perfect. His blue eyes and white teeth, his square shoulders and narrow hips: all of it was Californian, scrubbed clean of any imperfection or impediment. He stood, whole and--in a way--wholesome, completely comfortable inside his body.
Olga took all this in, noting with a pang that on his smooth brow nothing had been written, ever.
The young man leaned across the desk as if he had been waiting for her. "How ya doing?" he said, interested, and hinted things with his eyes.
Olga stood with her hands clasped in front of her, passive, accepting but not returning the eyes.
"Everything cool?" he said.
"Well, um, I'm new here," she said, demure.
"A transfer?" he said. "I'm Peter. I can show you around, right? What dorm are you in? Are you in a dorm?"
"No," she said. "I'm not in a dorm," and she slipped him a tentative smile.
He liked that. What he could see from behind the desk looked fine. She had a terrific little body and her face was pretty good, especially when she smiled, and best of all she wasn't taller than he was. He was six feet, but lately all the girls seemed to be gaining on him.
"Grad student?" he said. That would be cool too. "I'm a senior myself."
She looked down, modestly. "I'm going to teach here," she said.
A teacher. His mind raced ahead: had he said anything too forward, had he got himself in deep doodoo, had he just screwed himself by laying the groundwork to screw her?
"But only this quarter," she said. "Only two courses."
"Let me guess," he said, backing away a bit, feeling for the solid ground of student-teacher talk. "Science, right? Statistics? Computer engineering?"
"Feminist drama," she said, "and a little course in theory."
"Aw-right!" he said, in recognition. "So you must be Professor Kominska, right?"
She nodded.
"Foucault? Are you teaching Foucault?"
"Up to a point," she said.
"To me, Foucault is a god. I mean that's really what he is, a god."
"Up to a point," she said.
"So," he said. "Like, this is really something. I mean, I'm in your course and everything. If I'm accepted. But Zachary said I was. Accepted. Practically, I mean."
Her face darkened and she began to look like a professor.
"Zachary Kurtz, but he lets some of us call him Zachary. He's the best teacher in this university, really, and he said you'd let me in. Well, he said he'd talk to you about it."
She only looked at him.
"I mean, it's up to you, Professor. I wouldn't want to seem presumptive." He chewed the corner of his thick blond mustache and gave her the eyes again.
She thought for a moment. Could she, could anyone, print some message on that brow? "Presumptuous," she said, "not presumptive. What is your name, since it is assumed we're going to be in class together."
He relaxed. Maybe he hadn't gone too far. Maybe he wasn't in deep doodoo. Who knows, he might even get to screw her.
His name was Peter Peeks, he explained. Not as in mountain peaks but peeks, like a spy. She looked at him. It was a joke, he said, though he could see from her reaction that it wasn't a very good one, and hey, he wished they could begin all over again because he knew she was a very famous professor and she taught the really newest kind of literary theory and he really wanted to take her course, and now that they'd gotten off on the wrong foot he felt like a complete asshole, if she got what he meant. Right?
"A good beginning," she said, only half-aloud because she was thinking and she wasn't sure where Peter Peeks fitted in, if indeed he fitted in at all. The bit about spying was good, but might turn out to be useless.
"Well, Mr. Peeks," she said, "let us deconstruct ... in the Aristotelian manner: I was told to go to the faculty club and pick up keys for my apartment in Faculty Terrace. Atqui, this is the faculty club. Ergo, where are my keys?"
"Far out," he said. "Excellent." He began rummaging in the top drawer of the desk. "Keys," he said, and he pulled out a small box of loose keys, none of them with identifying tags.
Olga reached across the desk and picked up an envelope propped against the lamp. On it was written "Keys for Professor Kominska, Faculty Terrace."
"You're not much of a spy," she said.
"Jeepers," he said, "we're off on the wrong foot. Don't be hasty about this, Professor. I sincerely believe you're gonna end up liking me. A lot."
Olga laughed, because truly he was sincere. And truly presumptuous. And because, if she decided he mattered after all, his youth and innocence and sheer animal energy might prove both practical and fun, sin being beside the point.
And so, at his insistence, she let Peter Peeks carry her bags the short distance from the faculty club to Faculty Terrace. He used the time constructively, informing her of the income, personal habits, and dispositions of a great many of her neighbors, insofar as he knew them; where he did not, he simply made it up, working from gossip and a rather limited imagination.
Meanwhile Peter's friend, Scott, was also using the time constructively. Scott pushed the lesser drugs on campus, but more recently had moved up to cocaine. At the moment--because of cash flow problems--Scott found himself unable to pay his supplier, and so he was sitting at the faculty club desk waiting for Peter Peeks to return and give him some good advice and maybe some money. He smoked a joint and waited. He was about to light up again when the telephone rang. Scott had begun to feel expansive and so he answered the phone.
"Listen," a voice said, very annoyed. "I want to know if Olga Kominska has arrived. Has she arrived? Is she there?"
"There's nobody here," Scott said.
"Don't be smart with me," the voice said. "This is Zachary Kurtz and I want to know if Olga Kominska is there. She was due in on the three o'clock flight, and either she wasn't on it or else she missed me. And I want to know if she's there. Or not."
"There's nobody there," Scott said. "Here, I mean."
"You're there! Is this Peter Peeks? Who the hell is this, anyway!"
Scott drifted off for a minute. He didn't know Zachary Kurtz but he knew about him. He was brilliant, everybody said, but touchy, touchy, with a tongue like a razor blade.
"Hello? Are you there?"
"Oh yeah," Scott said, drifting back, "but I don't work here, Professor Kurtz. I'm just robbing the place."
Scott began to laugh at that, delighted with the craziness of the idea, of actually saying it to somebody--it would be so great in a film--and then he realized that it wasn't a bad idea at all, and so he hung up and did it. He started with the Power Mac 7500. He disconnected the monitor and carried it out to his car. He came back for the keyboard and the CPU, and again for the laser printer. He lit up a joint and looked around, enjoying his high. After a while he took down and rolled up the rather good McKnight that brightened the foyer. He selected an umbrella from the drying rack; it was a big umbrella, with red and white stripes, and he liked it. He opened it, closed it. Excellent. He put it aside for the moment. After a brief search, he located and emptied out the petty cash box. Enough for a small pizza anyhow. He shrugged, looked around the place indifferently, lit one last joint, and left, twirling his new umbrella as he went.
As a consequence of this little robbery, executed almost accidentally, Peter Peeks would be fired that same evening. But his firing was hours away and no grim thoughts troubled his optimistic mind as he fumed from Apt. 94, his arm still tingling from Olga's touch.
Peter Peeks had no place in this story--he was as irrelevant as the flight attendant or the chatty cab driver--but Olga had been tempted by that empty brow, that lithe young body, that perfect California face. Peter Peeks did not belong, but she had decided she would fit him in.
"I'll be seeing you," she said, her hand upon his arm, planning.
Alone, Olga examined the apartment. Two bedrooms--or a bedroom and a study--a single bath, and in the living room a wall of glass that opened on a tree-lined street. The furniture was Academic Modem: a little leather, a lot of brass and glass, a sofa of Haitian cotton. White walls, a creamy carpet, some Stella prints, two Klees, a Kandinsky. Junk copies.
And so, once again and not for the last time, she was about to begin. Of making many books there is no end. She sat down on the sofa and covered her face with her long hard hands. She had to get some rest. She had to put aside her feelings of insecurity and unreadiness. She had to slow down the process of perception. If only she could stop, for just an hour, for just a moment.
But her mind continued ticking. Foucault insisted that the individual was dead, the author invisible, reality a fabrication. Why, then, could she not cease to be? For even twenty seconds? Still, that was not the problem. The problem was: how to begin?
She lowered her hands to her lap and lay her head back against the cushions. She stayed that way, motionless, for over an hour. She did not think, not consciously, but she knew her subconscious was working on the problem.
Finally in her mind she heard that firm, unarguable voice.
"In the English department of that university," the voice said, "there was a small number of certifiable fools."
She got out her notebook and wrote the sentence down. She put a period after it, changed it to a comma, and changed it back to a period. She paused, suddenly uncertain, and waited for what would happen next.
