Joyce Oates - I’ll Take You There

One day, fever dreams of this time would be transcribed into the formalist prose pieces of what would be my "first book" unknown and unguessed-at, as a galaxy many light-years distant, in this fevered time.

Making my way along the row of carrels. There, Vernor Matheius's carrel! Yet when Vernor glanced up at me, I seemed not to have expected to see him; in my preppy clothes and pink lip gloss, I didn't smile at him until he smiled at me; a smile leapt instantaneously between us, like a lighted match.

His voice was low, gravelly-"You. 'Anellia.' What the hell are you doing here, this time of night?"

His eyes frankly stared; beautiful lashed eyes of an unnatural size, strained and glaring behind the schoolboy glasses, as if the eyeballs were pushing through the sockets. Obviously he knew (did he?) that I was seeking him out and yet he didn't send me away, he didn't express displeasure; eagerly I thought He has taken pity on me, my very need of him . As a master about to kick his dog pauses, seeing in the dog's shimmering eyes a capacity for love, and for hurt, that exceeds the master's wish to give pain. I saw how Vernor took in the pleated tartan skirt that had once been the possession of an American girl whose parents had so loved her, they'd lavished her with expensive clothes; I saw how Vernor took in the angora sweater, which fitted my small chest snug as a child's sweater, which perhaps it had once been. My happy smile Here I am! let me love you! don't deny me! I will cease to exist ! as in an even voice I told Vernor Matheius that I often worked up here, this was my favorite place in the library, I'd discovered it early in my freshman year.

"Especially the periodicals room. As soon as I first stepped inside, and saw, I think it was the Journal of Metaphysics -I knew this was where I belonged."

Vernor laughed. He had no reason to doubt me, yet he was behaving as if he doubted me. Shutting the heavy book he'd been reading, a commentary on Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus , and shoving it away.

"It's late. I better walk you home." Adding, as a point of information, "Your home."

"But it isn't a 'home,' it's just a place I stay." "Any 'home' is 'just a place I stay.' That's its essence." We were leaving the library together. A leeching-wet wind shoved against us. Not a sentimental wind. Not a wind of romance. I loved this wind, it made Vernor Matheius feel protective of me. Sidelong he regarded me quizzically, with a kind of interest. Though not touching me. Propositions came to me, skeins of words. Remarks to make Vernor smile, or laugh. But I couldn't speak. My heart was pounding as rapidly as it pounded sometimes in my sleep.

I had been reading Wittgenstein. There are no philosophical problems, only linguistic misunderstandings. Was this so? If so, -why write at such length about it? I could understand Vernor's attraction to such a philosophy. Spartan, rigorous. Surpassingly skeptical. Well, good: philosophers should be skeptical. (No one else is: the mass of mankind is credulous as a gigantic infant, willing to suck any teat.) In the presence of a man like Vernor Matheius it was wisest to say very little. You could see, Vernor could love only a woman who said very little, for speech makes us vulnerable, exposes us. What Vernor liked about silence was that he could break it when he wished. Saying, after a long pause, "You are a strange girl, Anellia. But you know that. Tell me this one thing: what d' you want?"

"-what do I want from-life? Or-"

"No, girl. From me."

There. It was said.

No playfulness between us. No sexual banter. Though there was (I saw, helpless) the swagger of the man's body, the ease of his knifeblade-body, the incline of his head. He began to whistle in his thin tuneless way; you could see it must've been a terrific way of provoking his elders. And maybe rolling his eyes. Big white-orbed Negro eyes. There was the hand-knitted cap pulled low on his forehead, crinkling his skin. A caption beneath this face might read WANTED.

I was taken by surprise. Yet I could not show it. I would examine my obsession with this man as if it was a problem: an intellectual puzzle intriguing to us both. For we were students of philosophy, engaged in a common quest for truth; for paring back myths and subterfuge in the pursuit of truth; and what is philosophy but the ceaseless and indefatigable invention of and "solving" of problems? I understood that Vernor Matheius was asking frankly What do you want from me that you imagine I can provide you? And what would you presume to provide me, in return ?

By the calendar it was early April. Yet snow remained on the ground like strips of grimy Styrofoam. We walked with our heads ducked against the wind in our common effort; we walked without speaking; Vernor Matheius had posed a question to me which I would not answer glibly; I was in fact stymied by how to answer it at all; his whistling was both companionable and meant to distance him from me; air gusted about us like roiling thoughts. I thought with a smile If the would-be assailant should see me, he would be forced to re-define me . And if my Kappa ex-sisters should see me?

Without asking me, without a word of explanation, Vernor Matheius steered me to Allen Street, to a pub called Downy's. Was he really taking me here? Would we be entering this noisy, crowded campus pub together, like a couple? Vernor Matheius a head taller than the diminutive white girl at his side? In the smoky interior, eyes moved upon us; there was an unmistakable shifting of attention, on the part of a number of individuals; a reflexive instinct, and nothing personal. Of course, Vernor Matheius took not the slightest notice. He was accustomed to being looked-at , and maybe stared-at . He was accustomed to being visible .

Vernor Matheius nudged me toward the rear of the pub. Into a small booth in a corner. On the old-wood walls were orange Syracuse pennants; laminated newspaper pages, SYRACUSE WARRIORS TROUNCE CORNELL. I had never been in Downy's before but it was a place much liked by Kappas, and when Vernor went to the bar to get drinks I saw that I was being observed, eyes shifting on me and away, by several Kappas, in the company of their fraternity boyfriends. Oh my God. Look. And who she's with. I felt a thrill of defiance, vindication. They had known I was a bad girl, and this was the proof.

Vernor Matheius returned finally with two tall glasses of beer. He'd had to wait at the bar, but you could see the bartenders were busy. And finally he was served. And made his way back to the booth. My first taste of beer, and it seemed to scald my mouth. The bitter dank smell. I thought of my vanished father. The delicious poison he'd been able to extract from alcohol. Vernor Matheius drank, and laughed, his chunky white teeth laughing, not at me but-"This place, know what it makes me think of?" I shook my head, leaning forward to hear. The table beneath my elbows was made of old timber, two crude planks varnished to a dark sheen, covered in carved initials, inked phrases, cigarette burns. "Schopenhauer. The Will. The triumph of the Will." He gestured at the crowd, the smoky haze penetrated by shrill voices and laughter. I said, with an air of contrition, that I didn't know much about Schopenhauer; Vernor Matheius shrugged as if he'd have been surprised, if I had; he was a natural teacher, or preacher; hadn't he said, he'd studied in a seminary, he began to speak of Schopenhauer and his "quarrel" with the philosopher who believed that the individual is but the phenomenon and not the thing-in-itself; though he had to concur with Schopenhauer that in strife, sex, reproduction the individual is the dupe of the species-"The unenlightened individual, that is." When he'd been twenty-four, it was philosophy that had opened his eyes; philosophy that was "an ice pick, a scalpel"; philosophy that was a surgical instrument for analysis, dissection, debridement, and comprehension. I listened fascinated. I had never heard anyone speak so passionately. And to me . If I hadn't already been in love with Vernor Matheius I would have fallen in love with him now, within the space of a few minutes; I was lost to him; mesmerized by his voice; his intelligence; the purity of his conviction, and its impersonality. Vernor Matheius's voice amid the drunken clamor of the pub at this, its most crowded hour. How he yearned, he said, for a "life of the mind"; for the clarity of "pure, blazing, fearless thought" to illuminate the murk of history and of time. " 'Better that the world should perish than that I, or any other human being, should believe a lie'-as Bertrand Russell said. Wittgenstein's mentor at first, and then his rival and enemy." When he fell silent, I could not think of a worthy reply; I tried to smile, and didn't succeed; I was overwhelmed by him, like a swimmer who has ventured into a river not knowing how quickly the land falls away, how powerful the undertow. Vernor Matheius saw my perplexity and said it was an irony, wasn't it, he was being trained to teach, yet he hadn't the patience for teaching, at least not undergraduates; probably he wouldn't wind up teaching if he could survive somehow else, there was the example of Wittgenstein who'd been a gardener, for a while; working with your hands is a good antidote for too much thinking; anyway, it wouldn't matter how poor he was; he, Vernor Matheius, was used to being poor; his parents were both dead, long ago; his family was scattered; he himself had no intention of ever marrying, and still less would he sire offspring; he declared he had no interest in perpetuating his precious genes, or the very species Homo sapiens-"They can get along without this fellow's contribution."