Jane Smiley - Golden Age

THE ONLY DIFFERENCE Henry could perceive between his former self and his present self was that he could not stand the cold anymore. A week after his sixty-third birthday last October — perfectly aware that Frank had been struck by lightning, had been seventy-four, had been unique in many ways — Henry had gone to his doctor and asked for a full workup. He was not one of those old men who dressed carefully in the morning in classic styles, who shaved twice a day, who got hundred-dollar haircuts to make the best of the bald pate, and then, when passing a plate-glass window, noticed that the hems of his trousers were above his ankle bones. When Henry passed a plate-glass window, he recognized his perennial self, trim, clean, coordinated, up-to-date. The doctor had told him, after two days of tests, that appearances were not deceiving. His blood pressure was 110/62, his lungs were clear and his heartbeat was regular, his reflexes were normal, his PSA was between 3 and 4, and his prostate was lump-free. He had good circulation in his toes. His LDL was 115, his HDL 62, his triglycerides 145. His blood type was O negative. His height was 6′½″ and his weight 158. But winter bore down upon him like an arctic blast. When his students were showing up for class in sweaters, he was wearing a down coat; when they donned ski jackets, scarves, and mittens, Henry wore all of the above, plus long underwear and thermal socks from Lands’ End. His boots were insulated, and he had the heat in his place up to seventy-eight — Claire and Carl couldn’t stand to come over, and didn’t dare invite him to their place.

The most unfortunate result was that he completely lost interest in everything he had ever loved. He could not teach his Old English students The Wanderer , much less The Seafarer. Beowulf made him shake in his boots — not because Grendel was a monster, but because the mead hall was freezing and Wealhpeow was wearing a dress. Norse literature was out of the question — he didn’t want to read the usual passages of Grettisaga, not because Grettir cut off several heads, but because he threw off his clothes and swam out into the winter ocean. Even the Song of Roland was difficult, because Roncevaux Pass was at three thousand feet, windswept and barren. He didn’t mind Orlando Furioso , because Ariosto did not successfully imagine snow and cold, but they wouldn’t be getting to that until spring. He was almost finished with his book of essays about Gerald of Wales, but he set it aside, not wanting to imagine St. David’s, thrusting like a thumb into the North Atlantic. Toulouse was not warm enough, Béziers was not warm enough, Rome was not warm enough.

And he was too much of a tightwad to make last-minute reservations for St. Thomas, too much of a snob to go to Miami, too unimaginative to go to Maui, where, it turned out, Miles, the guy who had the office next to his, went for two weeks, even though his specialty was the Victorian novel. He told Henry that they went to Hawaii every year. Why go to London? They could do that in the summer. How stupid was I, thought Henry, that I have spent every vacation of my entire life doing homework?

And, he discovered, you could lie in your bed under flannel sheets and two down comforters, in pajamas with socks, your hands under the small of your back, a pillow over your face, and still feel the chill creeping over and around your shoulders and neck and the arches of your feet, across your belly, into your nostrils. You could decide very rationally that you were crazy, that the cold was something you were emanating rather than experiencing, you could sit up and take your own temperature and read that it was 98.8 and still shiver. Better to be one of those manic women who threw off all their clothes and ran naked into the street — at least those women were expanding rather than shrinking. To be freezing yourself to death was embarrassing by contrast.

However, it was not as though Henry didn’t know Freud had existed, or Jung, or Adler, or Beck. He had read Freud’s case studies of the Wolfman and Little Hans, though he didn’t have them on his shelves. He had read The Undiscovered Self and Man and His Symbols , but had tossed them, thinking that Jung’s take on literature was imprecise. There was, in fact, no book on his shelves that could help him; he had read too much, and grown too self-confident. And so he bundled up, went to the college bookstore, and bought a book about freezing to death, then read it under the covers, by flashlight. How did you revive someone whose body temperature had dropped below eighty-five degrees? Dry clothing, gradual warmth (he was sorry to discover that the old technique Frank had told him about — putting the chilled one in a sleeping bag with a warm naked person — could not work, because the chilled person would sweat and get colder). What you must not do under any circumstances was put the chilled person in a hot bath, which could cause sudden dilation of the circulatory system and probably a heart attack. And so Henry crept to his bathroom as across frozen tundra, turned on the hot water, waited until the tub was three-fourths full, shrugged off his layers of clothes, and slipped in, something he hadn’t done in years, since he preferred to shower. Possibly he felt a distinct contrast between his core temperature (cold) and his peripheral temperature (hot), but possibly he was simply remembering the time his colleague Marie, who taught structural linguistics, told him about taking a long walk and getting so cold that she had this very feeling. His problem was that he remembered everything, wasn’t it? That his mind was a library of images and interpretations, none of which helped him get over his lifelong solitude. Or perhaps his problem was that when Marie had told him this story — a little excited and scared — he had been less than sympathetic. He had stood still for a moment, said, “How peculiar,” and continued into his office, closing the door — in her face? He had been preoccupied with something. In faculty meetings, he eavesdropped (with a superior look on his face?), but did not contribute. When Harold, the chairman (Irish Renaissance, specialty J. M. Synge) called the meeting to order, Henry would give his report on budgeting, faculty salaries, potential new hires, take questions, then sit back and ignore the rest of the meeting. For years he had taken an interest in students — quite an interest, in fact, though nothing sleazy, he told himself — but then Ralph Markson (Keats, Shelley) was fired for sleeping with two young women and raising their grades; the policy that forbade this was not new, but, the department came to realize, it had to be enforced. Henry retreated immediately — stopped closing the door when students came for conferences, stopped even looking directly at his male students when they spoke in class. He had always called them “Miss So-and-So” and “Mr. So-and-So,” but now avoided even learning their given names. He was invited to the departmental Christmas party and the departmental Labor Day party, but he knew, and everyone else knew, that he didn’t care for children, so he was left quietly in some corner or other, self-satisfied and neat.

Claire had moved out the year before. Frank had died. Joe was ill now with something undefined but debilitating. Lillian was long gone. Arthur — well, Arthur was alive, but, to hear Andy tell it, he was more or less mummified in the chill of Hamilton; better not to think of that. Henry slid down in the bathtub and turned the hot water on again with his toe. He was about to be the oldest something-or-other in his family, in his department, in his tiny world; he had nothing to offer and no experience with offering.

—

CLAIRE HAD LEARNED not to worry about Henry, but after New Year’s, she did start, though not enough to overcome her fear of pestering him. Before Christmas, she’d asked him to dinner on the 23rd and to brunch on the 26th — she had parties to put on over the real holidays. There was no response to her messages; maybe he had gone to Europe after all. She called the college and asked when the new semester would begin: the 22nd. On the 17th, she was standing in the front hall of Carl’s house, talking to Charlie. Charlie was telling her about his very strange and amusing wedding to Riley, so when the phone rang she didn’t pick it up. Henry’s voice came on the answering machine; she stopped laughing, lifted her finger, and listened: “I need to talk to you, is all.” She didn’t grab it in time, and when she called right back, he didn’t answer.