of that day?
HE
I don't remember what I thought. It was not unusual to be asked to do such a thing. Usually it's a class you're asked to attend. You do it, and then you go home. But why didn't you mention it the other day, when we met?
SHE
Why bring up that I gawked at you once over lunch? I don't know, I wasn't keeping it a secret. We're exchanging houses. I didn't see any reason to talk about when I sat in
an audience and stared at you in college. Why did
you
agree to go and have lunch with a bunch of undergraduates?
HE
I must have thought it might be interesting. The night before I'd just read for an hour and taken some questions. I hadn't met anyone other than the people who'd invited me. I don't remember anything about it except you.
SHE
(Laughing)
Are you flirting with me?
HE
Yes.
SHE
That seems so unlikely it's almost hard to believe.
HE
It shouldn't be. It's not unlikely at all.
On rereading the scene in bed before I went to sleep, I thought: If ever there was something that didn't need doing, it's this. Now you are taken up with her totally.
It was dreadful in New York the next day, a lot of enraged people walking around looking glum and disbelieving. It was quiet, the traffic so thin you could barely hear it in Central Park, where I had gone to meet Kliman on a bench not far from the Metropolitan. There had been a
message from him on my voice mail at the hotel when I got back around midnight from West 71st Street. It would have been easy enough to ignore it and I intended to, until, under the spell of this impetuous reimmersionâand stimulated by the prospect of a meeting with Amy Bellette, whose whereabouts I could probably extract from himâI phoned Kliman the next morning at the number he'd left, despite my having twice hung up on him the day before.
"Caligula wins," he said upon answering the phone. He was expecting someone else, and after a second's pause I said, "So it seems, but this is Zuckerman." "It's a dark day, Mr. Zuckerman. I've been eating crow all morning. I couldn't believe it would happen. People voted for moral values? What values are those? Lying to get us into a war? The idiocy! The idiocy! The Supreme Court. Rehnquist will be dead by tomorrow. Bush'll make Clarence Thomas chief justice. He'll have two, three, maybe even four appointmentsâhorrendous!"
"You left a message last night about our meeting."
"Did I?" he asked. "I haven't slept. Nobody I know has slept. A friend of mine who works at the Forty-second Street library phoned to tell me that there are people crying on the library steps."
I was familiar with the theatrical emotions that the horrors of politics inspire. From the 1965 transformation into a Vietnam hawk of the peace candidate Lyndon Johnson until the 1974 resignation of all-but-impeached Richard Nixon, they were a staple in the repertoire of virtually
everyone I knew. You're heartbroken and upset and a little hysterical, or you're gleeful and vindicated for the first time in ten years, and your only balm is to make theater of it. But I was merely onlooker and outsider now. I did not intrude on the public drama; the public drama did not intrude on me.
"Religion!" Kliman cried. "Why don't they put their trust in crystal gazing as a means of apprehending the truth? Suppose evolution should turn out to be a crock, suppose Darwin
was
nuts. Could he begin to be as nuts as Genesis on the origins of man? These are people who don't believe in knowledge. They don't believe in knowledge in exactly the same way I don't believe in faith. I feel like going outside," Kliman told me, "and delivering a long speech."
"Wouldn't help," I told him.
"You've been around. What does?"
"The senile solution: forget it."
"You're not senile," Kliman said.
"But I've forgotten it."
"All of it?" he asked, providing a glimpse of a possible relationship he might try to work up and exploit: the young man asking the older man for his sage advice.
"Everything," I replied
HE
I don't remember what I thought. It was not unusual to be asked to do such a thing. Usually it's a class you're asked to attend. You do it, and then you go home. But why didn't you mention it the other day, when we met?
SHE
Why bring up that I gawked at you once over lunch? I don't know, I wasn't keeping it a secret. We're exchanging houses. I didn't see any reason to talk about when I sat in
an audience and stared at you in college. Why did
you
agree to go and have lunch with a bunch of undergraduates?
HE
I must have thought it might be interesting. The night before I'd just read for an hour and taken some questions. I hadn't met anyone other than the people who'd invited me. I don't remember anything about it except you.
SHE
(Laughing)
Are you flirting with me?
HE
Yes.
SHE
That seems so unlikely it's almost hard to believe.
HE
It shouldn't be. It's not unlikely at all.
On rereading the scene in bed before I went to sleep, I thought: If ever there was something that didn't need doing, it's this. Now you are taken up with her totally.
It was dreadful in New York the next day, a lot of enraged people walking around looking glum and disbelieving. It was quiet, the traffic so thin you could barely hear it in Central Park, where I had gone to meet Kliman on a bench not far from the Metropolitan. There had been a
message from him on my voice mail at the hotel when I got back around midnight from West 71st Street. It would have been easy enough to ignore it and I intended to, until, under the spell of this impetuous reimmersionâand stimulated by the prospect of a meeting with Amy Bellette, whose whereabouts I could probably extract from himâI phoned Kliman the next morning at the number he'd left, despite my having twice hung up on him the day before.
"Caligula wins," he said upon answering the phone. He was expecting someone else, and after a second's pause I said, "So it seems, but this is Zuckerman." "It's a dark day, Mr. Zuckerman. I've been eating crow all morning. I couldn't believe it would happen. People voted for moral values? What values are those? Lying to get us into a war? The idiocy! The idiocy! The Supreme Court. Rehnquist will be dead by tomorrow. Bush'll make Clarence Thomas chief justice. He'll have two, three, maybe even four appointmentsâhorrendous!"
"You left a message last night about our meeting."
"Did I?" he asked. "I haven't slept. Nobody I know has slept. A friend of mine who works at the Forty-second Street library phoned to tell me that there are people crying on the library steps."
I was familiar with the theatrical emotions that the horrors of politics inspire. From the 1965 transformation into a Vietnam hawk of the peace candidate Lyndon Johnson until the 1974 resignation of all-but-impeached Richard Nixon, they were a staple in the repertoire of virtually
everyone I knew. You're heartbroken and upset and a little hysterical, or you're gleeful and vindicated for the first time in ten years, and your only balm is to make theater of it. But I was merely onlooker and outsider now. I did not intrude on the public drama; the public drama did not intrude on me.
"Religion!" Kliman cried. "Why don't they put their trust in crystal gazing as a means of apprehending the truth? Suppose evolution should turn out to be a crock, suppose Darwin
was
nuts. Could he begin to be as nuts as Genesis on the origins of man? These are people who don't believe in knowledge. They don't believe in knowledge in exactly the same way I don't believe in faith. I feel like going outside," Kliman told me, "and delivering a long speech."
"Wouldn't help," I told him.
"You've been around. What does?"
"The senile solution: forget it."
"You're not senile," Kliman said.
"But I've forgotten it."
"All of it?" he asked, providing a glimpse of a possible relationship he might try to work up and exploit: the young man asking the older man for his sage advice.
"Everything," I replied
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