Timothy Culver - Power Play

The two years of post-graduate work ground slowly along, and only afterwards did Robert understand that Kit had never accepted this as a permanent resting place. Robert had come to Lancashire prepared to spend the rest of his life here, whereas for Kit it was a campsite, a place to rest and catch one’s breath and decide what one was really going to do with one’s life.

Her final disillusionment with Robert was really a long time in coming. He could remember her look of disbelief when he’d gotten his master’s and showed no inclination to spend that summer looking for something better to do with his life. “You’re going to stay here ?” “Of course. That was the idea all along, wasn’t it?”

But it hadn’t been. Not her idea, anyway. That was the summer he was twenty-six, and the marriage lasted two years longer, ending in June three years ago, nine days shy of his twenty-eighth birthday, twenty-seven days shy of their sixth wedding anniversary.

It ended sloppily, which was unfortunate. But Kit, though she needed a strong man, was not strong enough in herself to strike out on her own. She’d had to wait until there was someone to take Robert’s place, and he had turned out to be another faculty member, married, with five children. He and Kit had a semi-clandestine affair going for several months — it seemed to have required the under-cover collaboration of half the faculty at one time or another — but at the end of the school year that became unsatisfactory, and they wrote notes to their respective spouses and headed for New York.

The man came back that September, rejoined his wife, and was still teaching at Lancashire. Kit never came back at all. From New York she went to Nevada for the divorce, then home to Atlanta, and the following June married an executive of Delta Airlines.

As for Robert, the sense of failure that had been growing in him since college reached its fullest flowering when Kit left, and he’d been living with it ever since. In the three years since, he’d had no involvements with other women, he’d continued to live on alone in the small rented house he and Kit had shared in town, and he had made no plans to do anything ever with his life but go on teaching history at Lancashire University.

It was at the time of the divorce that he first got to know Sterling at all well. Previously, there had been little social contact between them, partly because of the differences in their ages and stations, but also because Robert had to a great degree avoided Sterling, plagued in this way too by his sense of failure.

But with the campus scandal of Kit’s departure, Sterling had sought Robert out, and what had begun as a tentative meeting between strangers faced with a difficult social problem to be straightened out had soon deepened into friendship. Sterling too was a solitary man, though it didn’t seem to be a sense of failure that did it in his case. What it was Robert didn’t know, only that he and Sterling seemed to comprehend something in one another, some kinship that had nothing to do with familial relationships. They could relax with one another.

Now Robert thought of Sterling as his closest friend. The two of them lunched together frequently on campus, as often as their schedules permitted, and in fact they had just come back from lunch today when their comments about the protesters herded into the parking lot had led to Sterling’s offer to arrange a meeting for Robert with ex-President Bradford Lockridge.

Now Robert said, “I’m sure he has better things to do than explain himself to a history teacher.”

“Quite the contrary,” Sterling said. “If I know Brad, and I do, he’d enjoy every minute of it.” Then he glanced in sudden concern at Robert, as though belatedly realizing he might be pushing into areas where Robert would prefer to be left alone, and he said, “Of course, it’s up to you. If you want, I can ask him. If not—” He shrugged, to mean that it wasn’t important.

Next month I’ll be thirty-one, Robert thought. It wasn’t an entirely irrelevant reflection. “Why not?” he said aloud. “If he’s willing to risk it, I certainly am.”

Saturday was housecleaning day. All week the little five-room house on South Donnally Street was allowed to go its own way, accumulating dust and dirt, garbage and unwashed laundry, while Robert saw to his classes and corrected assignment papers, drank beer with his few bachelor faculty friends and sat up too late watching television, and by Saturday the house was always a complete mess. So Saturday was housecleaning day, and by late afternoon the house was always bright and clean and neat again. Except during football season, when the job took two days, all the odd moments available between the televised weekend games.

But this wasn’t football season. This was May 12th, and one of the softest and warmest springs in memory, and Robert did his housecleaning today with every window flung wide.

He was on his knees in the bathroom, de-ringing the tub, when the phone started to ring. He looked at the green cleanser suds all over his hands and grimaced, of half a mind not to answer at all. But there’s something about a ringing telephone that very few people are strong enough to ignore, so Robert sighed, rinsed his hands under the running cold water, and heaved himself to his feet.

He was still a tall man, and he was heftier now than in his football-playing days, and when he stood up he filled the small bathroom the way he filled every room in the little house. He had a strong, commanding, self-confident look that didn’t jibe at all with his self-image. He’d started wearing his brown hair in a crewcut in the Army, when long hair was the style, and now with crewcuts proliferating on campus it looked as though fashion had circled all the way around to meet him. Unfortunately, the short hair styles had their political implications just as had the long, and there were those who now took it for granted on seeing Robert that he was a Bircher, which bothered him a bit, but not enough to change his hair style.

He trotted now across the hall and into the bedroom, drying his hands on the front of his T-shirt, and picked up the phone beside the bed. “Hello?”

The voice was instantly recognizable as Sterling. “Robert? We’ll be there in about five minutes. Are you ready?”

For just a second his mind was a blank, and then a chute opened inside his head and the trip to meet Bradford Lockridge came popping out into the open.

For God’s sake, he’d forgotten all about it! Monday there’d been the apparently casual conversation with Sterling, and Bradford Lockridge had been mentioned, and Sterling had offered to arrange a meeting between his brother and Robert. On Wednesday Robert had been surprised when Sterling said, at lunch, “Well, it’s all set.”

“What’s all set?”

“We’re driving down Saturday to see my brother. You and Elizabeth and me. Saturday’s all right, isn’t it?”

He’d said sure, Saturday was all right, and Sterling had said he’d come by for him about eleven, and now here it was about two minutes to eleven on Saturday and he’d gotten out of bed this morning without a thought in his head. It had just been a normal Saturday, the usual routine. The plan to meet a former President of the United States had gone straight out of his mind.

“Uh,” he said. He half-turned and sat down heavily on the bed.

“Is something wrong?”

“I’m a little slow today. Could you give me ten minutes?”

“Of course, of course. Elizabeth isn’t really ready yet anyway.”

“Fine. Ten minutes.”

Robert hung up, and at first he just sat there, stunned. From this position he could see himself in the mirror on the closet door, and didn’t he look like something to go visit celebrities with. Stained T-shirt, ripped and paint-smeared and generally filthy Army fatigue trousers, and white tennis shoes without socks. He looked sweaty and dirty, and he was sweaty and dirty.