On Your Own and Going Batty in Saint Louis

There is a certain madness that comes over you when you are lonely, far away from home for the first time, and suffering from a cold that never seems to go away.  It is like you are floating through a thick fog, heavy and oppressive, with no end in sight.  A person leaves the place where he has grown up, not for the first time only but so far away and for so long, that he finds himself in a city that is strange in almost every way imaginable. Not Conrad’s Sepulchral City, all gleaming white, but something more mysterious and confusing.  Not the Heart of Darkness, luring and attractive, though what I am going to tell you has some of those qualities of seduction and mind-stealing.   Everyone says, since you are over twenty-one, you are a man, a college graduate, it’s time you made an independent life for yourself.  They are right, but that does not make it easier to bear, especially when you live in a small room in a boarding house, when you do not have a telephone of your own and hardly know anyone well enough yet to call up anyway—and who would telephone you? 

You live and study in that musty room on the third floor by yourself.  The other rooms seem to be for storage.  One is a shared toilet.  You eat breakfast there sitting on your bed and also most nights dinner too.  What is breakfast?  A piece of sliced white bread or two with some butter and maybe a piece of cheese and then a cup of tea.  What is dinner?  Since you have a hotplate and a pot, you cook up popcorn, wash the pot, then heat up a can of chilli and beans, and from that you call a meal and evening snack combined.  You usually go out after breakfast, walk briskly down the few streets to the university, crossing those big boulevards and the smaller streets with their chains to control unwanted traffic and you go to classes.  Later in the day, you sit in the library, and after that you eat something in the cafeteria for lunch, where you try to cram in vegetables and meat, so you can truthfully write home about your healthy habits, then more classes in the afternoon, and again time in the library.  Even in the evening, whether you return to the little room or stay and eat a sandwich in the cafeteria, you go to the library.  No matter what, at the end of the day you read at home. 

In the library, as a graduate student, you have a carrel. It is warm and stuffy in there, surrounded by stacks of books and scholarly journals.  Because of that, you sometimes fall asleep on your folded arms, and then, with your eyes glued shut, you wonder where you are—at home in bed or in the library?  Some deserted island in the midst of a deep, dark sea, far away from everything?  For a while you are afraid you may be exposed to public view, to ridicule, and put off opening your eyes.  Then you give in.  Does it matter?  Sometimes it is best not to know where you are.

            But if one is sick, it is not so easy to make existential choices, and life is not regular—or maybe it is too regular, too propped up in bed by books and studying.  Then one day, you wake up in your little room in the boarding house, but when you try to get up, it is not easy at all.  You feel a heavy pressure on your eyes, the world starting to spin around you, your legs too weak to bear your own body.  You force yourself to wander dizzily down the hall to the shared toilet, and then coming back it is worse than ever, you feel the vertigo down deep into your stomach, you barely are able to open the door, and then nothing.  Furniture flies around the room, around and around. All goes black.  Empty. Maybe an hour later you wake up, and somehow you have managed to fall across the bed.  You still feel sick, heavy, encased in some thick dark atmosphere.  The world is still spinning, though slower now.  Huge birds of prey zoom in towards you and then soar away into the revolving heavens.  You can do nothing.  More hours pass.  You feel a little better and make it to the toilet again, then into bed, and in a matter of seconds the whole day has passed. 

Night is falling.  Dark creatures drop out of the sky, crashing against your eyes.  A little glass of water, and then you sleep away the night and the next morning arrives.  You can read a little and eat a slice or two of bread.  Mostly you sleep.  Is it a dream?  Another day is gone and the night is a void. 

            And then the third day comes.  You think, perhaps I should phone someone.  But the instrument is three flights of stairs down in the entrance hall.  Too far.  Maybe call out if you hear the manager walking in the hall outside your door.  If she does clean the carpets, you don’t hear.  It happens while you are asleep.  Hours of blankness, sleep, and a little reading.  Only as far as the toilet.  A few slices of bread are left.  No more popcorn.  No more chilli.  Something will have to be done.

            Then out of the stultifying blackness you hear something.  You listen again inside your dream and then outside it.  A knocking on the door.  Silence.  Then it comes again.

You say, “Come in,” but you can hardly hear your own voice.  Then you sleep again for you do not know how long.  But the knocking starts again.  This time you use your strength so that your voice can be heard.  Someone opens the door.  

“Hello,” she says, “can I come in?”

“Who is it?” you ask, not recognizing the voice or the face.

“I’m in your seminar, do you remember?”

You cannot remember.

“We were worried because no one has seen you for days.”

“I’m not well,” you say.

“Do you need anything?” she asks.

You don’t know what to say.  The darkness still fills your mind, or is it an emptiness?

“Have you eaten recently?”

You try to answer “A little” but the sounds don’t form themselves into words.

“Better get you to a doctor,” she says.  “Can you get dressed?”

You are not sure what is happening but the next time you can speak and see anything, you are sitting in an office at the university medical center.  Someone is talking to you.  He is taking your pulse.

“A bit of a flu,” the doctor says.  “Bed rest is what you need.”

Then the other one, the mysterious woman who came to your room speaks.

“He hasn’t eaten in days, I’m sure.  He’s all alone in a boarding house.”

The doctor doesn’t think it is a good idea.

“Someone should look in on him, feed him, be there.”

She says she can stop by during the day between her classes and her part-time job.

I try to say something but the thick mantle of darkness remains around me, hardly pierced by these voices.

Then somehow I am back in my room, in bed, and she is there feeding me soup.  The heavy weight of darkness is lifting.  I am able to sit up.  Night, day, no way to know still.

The next day, she is there again, and she has brought more food, made tea, and wipes me down.  I try to say thanks, and ask her name.

Somehow a few hours later, when she comes back, I know that her name is Minrva, that she comes from western Iowa, and that she is a part-time teacher in one of the area’s many private schools.  She is also in my seminar on medieval French literature, along with about six other people.  Minerva, when I look at her out of a disappearing fog, seems to be in her mid-thirties, a hard-looking woman, but with not even a wisp of a smile whenever I speak to her.

A whole week seems to have gone by since she first thumped mysteriously on my door.  By the time I am ready and well-enough to return to classes, she has become a friend, and she offers to stop by to drive me to university if I am not feeling up to it.  Each time I have seen her since I was able to get up and do things for myself, it becomes clear that she has spent a lot of time with me—and a lot of money getting me food and driving me around parts of Saint Louis I had never seen before.  Each time I have seen her, too, her face has seemed softer and more attractive to me.  Maybe she has smiled.

We have started to talk about our backgrounds, and everything she says seems exotic and confusing to me.  A little voice whispers to me that she is the classical older woman, the kind we read about in nineteenth-century novels, who initiates young men into life.  I have a nagging suspicion that I am too naive even for that, and that she only sees me as a helpless Jewish kid from New York, and that she has no interest in me except as a homeless waif. 

Other voices begin to whisper to me, too, but they aren’t  dreamy, romantic voices in my head shaped by archaic literature.  They are other people in our seminar and people who I don’t even know who have seen her paying a lot of attention to me.  Sometimes they merely say, in a low, casual way, I should watch out for her because she has a reputation.  The word has a greyish tinge to it.  Sometimes they say with more intensity, that I should take care of myself because Minerva is known to beguile young men, tease them, and cause rather unpleasant scenes.  The words may not have been used but the intent was there, and I feel squeamish to listen.  Some of the stories oozing around my consciousness suggest she not only likes younger men, such as myself, but also younger women.  Other circulating rumours  are more insidious and come when I look troubled by what is being said, as though it were necessary that I be properly warned and wakened from a bad situation: that she has been seen going around with young students at the high school where she teaches part time and that parents have started to complain.  Week by week, the innuendos and the gossip become cruder and more obscene. 

The way I start to defend her and myself makes these other people angry, and some classmates simply stop talking to me and shake their heads.  A few people who had started to become friendly tell me that if I go on seeing her, they can’t waste their time with me.  The innuendo and the threats mount.  But though I really have nothing to do with Minerva in the way these remarks suggest, I cannot dismiss them altogether, and suspect myself of being really quite stupid when it comes to women, especially these mid-western types, older than I am, and so alien to the nice Jewish community I grew up in back in Brooklyn.  Yet I keep reminding myself that she is a person who saved me from what could have been a very serious situation, was kind when others were indifferent, and has remained friendly and helpful.  To be truthful, my naiveté also played its part.  And my loneliness.  I simply could not accept those nasty stories about her and what they implied about our relationship.  They didn’t match my experience.  Though I could not point to any single inappropriate word she said or gesture on her part, in regard to sexuality, neither could I completely deny the feelings I had which had already changed from mere thankfulness and appreciation of her as a good Samaritan or a friend into something I hoped would become more: my fantasy of her leading me into knowledge of those things that men and women reputedly did with each other in passionate moments.  Since I had no experience in the reality of sex, but only knew about it from books read furtively and from my own dreams, I held firm to the idea that she was gently introducing me to a relationship that I would never have known how to initiate or pursue on my own.

In the second semester, Minerva and I found ourselves together again in another seminar, this one on the theories of courtly love, fin’amor.  For all her supposed experience and hardness, she started to ask me to help her understand the books we were studying, such as Andreas Capellaneus’s De honesti amandi, The True Lover, and Guillaume Machaut’s and Jean de Meun’s La Roman de la Rose, The Romance of the Rose, and a lot of shorter lyrics and tales by Chaucer.  We started to meet alone in the evenings at a small restaurant near the university to discuss these ideas, and after a while she invited me to come to her apartment on a Sunday afternoon to listen to her first draft of a paper she was going to read the next week at the seminar.  I felt both flattered to be seen as an expert in the art of love, realizing that what I knew was based on the scholastic and rational games that these medieval authors were playing, not at all on any real understanding of the physical or emotional intimacies, and also excited by the anticipation of some sort of closeness that might transcend the relationship we had, far more chaste than any of the whisperers could imagine.  I doubted any of them really knew I was still a virgin and had never seen a woman naked in front of me.  But I intuited that Minerva realized this and that she was planning to introduce me to such knowledge.  At the same time, all those terrible stories came back to me, so that I was afraid of what she might do, and hoped deep down that she would only talk about her seminar paper.

Minerva picked me up late in the afternoon that Sunday, early in February, a dark and dreary winter’s day, as they can be in Missouri.  Not much talk in the car as we passed through the more dangerous neighbourhoods of Saint Louis, but then she crossed over into Forest Park and off into a very pleasant middle-class neighbourhood, hardly one where you would expect students to live.  Big houses, wide lawns, clean streets.  Everyone else I was getting to know in the university lived in the small rows of brownstone buildings that were near the campus.  She drove into a small cul de sac, parked part way down a driveway, and said, “Here we are.”  The house was set on a small rise, surrounded by bushes, all bare in February, and already crossed by shadows making weird patterns on the walls.

“Do you live alone?” I asked, looking around the rather clean and tidy front room she ushered me into, just off a dining-kitchen alcove.  These were not qualities I expected, as again my room and the tiny flats shared by other graduate students I had started to visit was a hodgepodge of cheap chairs and cushions, make-do bookshelves, and saggy beds.  Her house was like a Doris Day movie set.

“No,” she answered, “but the others, my room-mates, are off for the weekend.  They won’t be back until late tonight.”

I am not sure I wanted to know more about who they were, particularly whether they were male or female.  In those days, still, mixed flatting was not common, even frowned upon.  But then Minerva was much older than the rest of us.  As I didn’t ask any questions, she didn’t proffer any further information.  I was afraid of what might happen and what I wanted to happen.

“You sit here,” she said, pointing to a table with five chairs around it, ”and I’ll make us some coffee.  Or do you want tea or anything else?”

I said I would prefer tea, and wondered what “anything else” could mean. 

I sat down.  There were books and papers on the big oaken table. Not strewn about, but nearly placed in piles, along with several coloured pencils, erasers, and paperclips.  There was also a rather ashtray containing about half a dozen butts and some broken wooden matches.  Even given those times, I found it odd that people still smoked.  As I looked, I could also see rings stained on the table top probably from glasses of wine or liquor.  The stains bothered me.  The rings were omens of something mysterious.

“Drinks will be ready in a few minutes.  Have some cookies meanwhile,” she said, placing a small platter in front of me.  “Home baked,” she said, ‘from my mother.  She sends them to me every week .  Try one.”

It flashed into my head that these might be made with illicit drugs of some kind.  I had seen a movie about that a few weeks earlier.  I wondered whether I should give them a try.  But I hesitated, and she said, “I’m not trying to poison you.  Or they not good enough for your sophisticated New York pallet.” 

“My what?” I said.

She laughed.  “I’m fooling with you, silly boy.   Don’t get up on your high horse.”

A funny pain went through my chest. 

When she brought a cup of tea for me and coffee for herself, we got down to work.  She started by reading me the opening of her seminar paper written in pencil lines on a long yellow pad of legal paper.

Courtly love is something new in the western world.  Until about the twelfth century, the term for love meant three different things: (1) the power in the universe that binds all things together, and both Plato and Aristotle had variations on this, with Plato’s notion including homosexual relations between men and men and boys, but not between a man and woman, while Aristotle thought of love as something like the attraction of objects to one another in gravity; (2) the sexual energies of procreation amongst all living things, including plants, animals, heavenly bodies and abstract ideas,  and it could also refer to the social bonds in a society, particularly in feudal relationships where different degrees of power meant that subjects loved their liege lords, their king and their God by feeling the attraction of the higher beings as giving them reflected strength and protection, while those in the higher positions condescended in their love in a paternalistic manner; and (3) Christianity saw in love a moral force of forgiveness, salvation and control over the world.

 What happened when writers began to write about refined love, fin’amor or doucie luf, was that they added new dimensions to these older concepts.  Thus the classical concept of natural love now was personalized and given the power to make the participants more spiritual.  As in Neoplatonism, abstract ideas became conscious and volitional creatures, so that the universe was a kind of family, with all the tensions between care and jealousy.  Then the ideal paradigm changed from that of the classical city, the polis, to that of the feudal court, with aristocratic participants, and with women treated as though they had the power once thought to exist in men alone but yet imagined as grammatically feminine entities.  Moreover, what had been acceptable in ancient Greece, homosexual love, was frowned upon by the Church; and rejected as sins, just as the mythical masks and metamorphoses that played with copulation between various species, including gods and humans or humans and plants or animals also was anathematized.

 Yet despite the Christian emphasis on love within marriage and moderated passion for the sake of procreation as almost a necessary evil, courtly poets, to please the newly empowered women, transferred into their relationship the ideals of classical friendship, a relationship, however, made spicy and exciting because it was adulterous and furtive, and very often unconsummated.  Finally, the rules of courtly love were also superimposed on the ideals of chivalry, and the lover sought to win the attentions and the ultimate favour of his Madonna by performances of bravery, dancing, singing, story-telling, and love-talking.  Rather than entering the game of love as a warrior, he sought to be a gentle man, soft and sentimental. 

“That’s as far as I have gone.  What do you think?” Minerva said. 

She handed me her draft of the paper.

As I read it over, I hummed approving noises, sipped my chamomile tea, and stole little looks at her as she observed me perusing the script. 

“Well,” she said, is it going in the right direction?”

She said it in a way that made me feel she didn’t really want adverse or constructive criticism, only approval, and her look actually made me think she might throw me out of the house—and pretty far from where I lived—on my own. 

“I like it.  I do.  Only...” and I hesitated.

“Please, tell me if there is anything you don’t like.  After all, that is why I asked you over.”

I still sensed something hostile in her voice, and I couldn’t help thinking about the awful things people had said about her at the time she was looking after me and going out of her way to help me feel comfortable in Saint Louis.  Nor should I neglect to say that I was also hoping this visit to her house would be more than a study session.  The more I had been with her, the more I felt something growing inside me that was quite different from the callow crushes I had for other girls.  Minerva, after all, was an older woman and she seemed to emanate a kind of sexual allure no one else had ever had around me.

“To be honest,” I said, “there are a few little tiny things here that you might want to sharpen up a little bit.”

She leaned towards me.  Her breath was warm and sweet.  She put her hand on my arm.

“You see, for one, I think you have to distinguish between what someone like Capallaneus the Clerk writes and what the troubadours and trouvères sing, and that, too, from the guys that write the long romances, I mean like Chretien de Troyes and that from Guillaume Machaut and Jeun de Meung with... with....”

Manuscript illumination of the Roman de la Rose

 “Hold on,” she said.  “Don’t just throw names at me.  I have only read some of them.  In fact, most of the time I just read the editors’ introductions and some of the  critics.”

Yes, I thought, that was it.  It now seemed evident by the superficial slickness of her style, the huge generalities or banalities, and the lack of subtlety in her writing.  But it was not something I wanted to say to her myself.  The fog was almost lifting.  Each time some defect in her character rose to the surface and confirmed the stories I had been told about Minerva, the more I had to admit that my intentions became increasingly dishonourable, if I may put it that way.  No one would have noticed, if they were casually looking on, and you would need to check my pulse and blood pressure to measure the changes. 

“Let’s put it this way,” I said, trying to sound at once natural and pompous, “you are dealing with a couple or maybe with three centuries, with different rhetorical genres, and even with different languages, like Latin, French, and English.  So you can’t clump them all together as variations of one another.”

I held my breath, waiting for the explosion of anger, just as barely an hour before I anticipated some kind of sexual advance on my virginity.

“Oh, Amos,” she said, “you really are a clever boy.”

I just didn’t know how much sarcasm she dripped into those words and hoped she was covering her own embarrassment.

“Maybe you better have some more of this nice soothing tea before we go on, or would you like something else, like a glass of wine.  It would smooth over the rough spots we have to deal with, won’t it?”

There it was.  I knew it.  She was on the attack and I wouldn’t be able to resist, unless I collapsed into a silly bundle of giggling. 

“Tea’s fine,” I answered.  “Let’s try to concentrate and finish as much as we can this afternoon.”

Well, I think that’s what I told her.  Perhaps I was much less coherent and mumbled in a way that made her think I was slipping towards an encounter she didn’t want at all.  She also probably said things, partly encouraging, partly teasing, partly seductive, but in all events, she refilled the teapot, poured me another steamy cup of chamomile tea, and leaned more closely as I gave her my critique.  Now, more than just her sweet rhythmic breathing and her hand pressed on my arm, I could feel her heavy rounded chest rubbing against me.  Or was that also a dream?

I spoke to her, waving my arms about as much as I could,  about how the courts of love run by beautiful princesses and queens in Provence and in Catalonia, then about the other kinds of courtly societies in northern France and into the Rhineland, and how different they were from the small fairly primitive households of kings and barons in England, and why the English lords brought over French poets and singers, and what was important about the small Italian towns and cities, all the way from what is now the French Mediterranean region around Avignon to the aristocrats and middle-class elites on the Peninsula,  playing with the ideas of  these new sweet sounds, la dolce vita nuova  As I spoke, I found my own breathing difficult and un-rhythmical, since the whole idea of the naive lover approaching his superior lady was analogous to my own situation.  Minerva, I was sure now, was playing with my emotions, heating me up, then pushing me away, making remarks that seemed innocent in themselves but in context undermined my confidence, little as there was of it, to let me know she was in control of the whole game of love.

“Can I ask you something, Amos?” she said, pronouncing my name with a drawn out first vowel and a voluptuous hissing at the end.

I nodded my assent, and my head’s motions seemed to gently stroke her body by some kind of magnetic power.  I could feel goose bumps on the back of my neck.

“You say that a lot of these poets really didn’t believe what they were talking about and the whole thing is a kind of joke.  So was there any foreplay and then bedding in these sessions?  I mean, did the ladies like these songs and get pleasure from pretending to cuckold their husbands, or did they want more, you know, the real thing?”

“Well, people in those performative games were on display, not really carrying on secret trysts, and the husbands were in on the tricks, even when they really were away, like off to the Holy Land for the Crusades, or dawdling with their mistresses out in the woods in their hunting lodges.  The lovers, that is, the young men singing these ballads and sonnets, and the ladies, perhaps ten or fifteen years older, a lot more experienced, traded jewellery, bracelets and rings, had hearts made of gold that they broke and shared between them, and I think maybe, for God’s sake, the young men found it very hard to control themselves and couldn’t really channel their passions into sweet games of love but sometimes begged the women for some, you know, touching and stuff, and—”

“You are such a funny, fellow,” Minerva said.

I must have looked very troubled.

“Yes, you are.  I think you want to touch me, don’t you?”

I wasn’t sure I hear what she said, or understood all the words, or even heard anything at all, but I so much wanted to that I sat there expectantly.

She gave me a little kiss on my cheek.

“But I am not interested in you that way,” she said.

I blushed horribly.  The heat burned my face.  It was what girls always said.  They liked me as a friend, but as a boy friend—No way, José.

“However,” she said, “if you finish helping me with this essay, I may give you a little reward.”

I stammered something that made no sense to me.  Did she really say that?  She laughed and said I should proceed, please, as it was getting late, if we were to complete the assignment and have time for the present she had in mind.

It took about a half hour for me to plod through the rest of her essay, making pedantic remarks on the tone, the texture and the tensions in the various romances, both the Arthurian characters and adventures in Chretien de Troyes and the two kinds of allegory in The Romance of the Rose, the light psychological analytical view of how to seduce the rose-bud demoiselle and the heavier social commentary of the war of the sexes.  As I was reaching the climax to my peroration and discussing the way the Lover (Amant) confronted the Danger (Daunger) of the Rose’s self-protection and finally broke through the wicker fence that surrounded her rosary to rob her of her little budding flower, Minerva started to blow into my ear, tickle my neck, and wind herself around me.  I could swear she did, at least at the time.  Then I heard her speak further.

“You see, for me it’s not about whether I am love with a man or not, or even, as you probably have heard our dear class-mates whispering behind my back, the occasional young female, it’s the pleasure it gives to me.  If it can relieve you of some of your uptight New York and annoying Jewish prudery, Amos, well, that’s just a bonus for you.  Now all I ask of you is that you keep quiet for the next half hour, and then shut your silly mouth for the rest of your life about what is happening here.”

So it happened.  Or did it?  It was like a dream. 

She was straightening out the pages on the table, looking at her watch and signalling to me that it was time for me to leave her place. 

“Thanks for all your help.  I didn’t take a lot of notes, so I will sit down right after dinner and write out what you said.  Then we’ll have to see what happens in old Grimshaw’s seminar on Tuesday, won’t we?  Help me out, then, too, please, in case anyone starts to ask embarrassing questions. “

I am not quite sure of what she said then.  It was all so banal. 

“And we better keep all this a secret.  Don’t want the professor saying I didn’t do my own work.  Now, Amos, let’s get you home.”

*  *  *

I don’t know exactly how it happened, or rather how it started.  But sometime after midnight, I suddenly woke up and felt a panic of cold shivers up and down my body.  Had someone broke open the window and let the last blasts of winter in?  A silent scream, mouth distorted like a Edvard Munch painting.  Maybe it was something someone said in class earlier in the day or a conversation overheard two or three days before.  But there it was in my head, flashing up like a bright, blinding neon sign: “You better go to Kansas. “ It seemed an absolute command.  She had helped me in my time of need: now it was my turn. Not my turn, my duty.  An obligation.

Within moments, I was dressed, racing down the stairs, and entering the car I had borrowed from a friend in order to do some errands the next day.  After winding out of the small, closed streets, showing my resident pass to the sleepy guard at each gate, I moved into the broad streets of Saint Louis.  There was hardly any traffic at this hour.  A bus, a taxi, and then nothing. Without a road map, unfamiliar with the highways leading away from the city, I realized I didn’t even know which way was west or north, let alone which road to take.  Where did she live?  The name of a small town came into my mind, something she mentioned months before in a conversation in the student union building when we were still getting to know one another.  The words of an old song went round and round, the names of a railway line, rhythmic, insistent.  Odd, until that very moment it had not struck me that the name of the town in the song was also her family name. 

There was a large service station ahead, fully lit up though it was the middle of the night.  I drove in both to buy a map and to fill up with gas, since it would be a long ride, probably hours and hours on those notoriously straight and mesmerizing highways that go out into the prairies.  Overhead I could hear some flapping, like a flock of birds of prey, gathering, homing in for the kill.  As the attendant filled the tank, I walked to the counter, asked for a map that showed the way from Missouri to Kansas, and also mentioned that I was looking for a specific place.  The girl passed over the map but said nothing about the town. On the counter, there were shadows now.  It was not birds, the girl said: “Bats.  They like the bright lights, though it confuses them.  They’ll be gone soon enough.  But watch out,” she said.   

I paid for the map and the gas, and then asked again if she knew how far it was to that place.  She said she never heard of it.  Then she said perhaps I meant another town, one that sounded somewhat like what I asked for. Overhead now, hundreds, maybe thousands of black shapes, flying around, flapping and flapping, around and around, not dipping or soaring, a tornado of weird whirring bats.  Then there was a crash, one, then two, and another smashed into the huge sign on the service station, and the whole contingent suddenly zoomed into the sky, whirled about, and were gone.  The silence sank down again heavy on the street.  It was past 2 a.m.

Back in the car, before turning on the ignition, I opened the map to check the list of towns and cities in Kansas.  It took a while to find, but there they were, two towns at opposite ends of the state with names that were fairly alike.  Not knowing what to do, I thought it best just to get going, at least go in the right direction and when I crossed the state line stop again and think it through.  But instead of that, what happened was that I drove fairly slowly around and around the big traffic circle in which the service station was located.  Round and round.  Like the bats a few moments before.  I opened the window on the driver’s side.  Down on the ground were a few dead bodies: ugly flying rats, their white teeth glinting in the light from the service station.  The cool air seemed to clear my mind a little. I continued to drive slowly. Round and round.  I started to wake up, as though out of a long, mad dream, the kind that seem to last for hours but really just take a few seconds.

As my head cleared, the whole feeling of panic was gone, the sense that there was deep bound of obligation to go to where Minerva had gone, perhaps home, as it now seemed, where her father had died, or so the rumour had travelled through the seminar when she failed to turn up twice running.  Maybe this obligation was something like love, an instinctive  bonding that had taken place when she cared for me during my illness and gradually made me feel more at ease in the strange city and in the strange university.  Maybe a mad passion to show her up, to do something that would make her realize that, while I was grateful, intensely so, for all she had done, I was more angry at her for trapping me in a relationship beyond my comprehension, when she invited me to her house and made me think she was going to seduce me.  Maybe I was more angry with myself for being so naive and never realizing that all the stories told about her were true, though not exactly in the way I had imagined, because my own imagination was shaped by such different experiences than she had known.  The students who whispered those scandalous things about her had not exactly said what I thought they did, though, as I would later find out, what she was said to have done was bad enough.  Maybe I misconstrued the whole situation, expecting things that were really quite ridiculous, and so missing the clues and signs of her own pain, her own need to have me as a friend, someone who wouldn’t be like the men she had known—and the women, or younger boys she was known to have been too friendly with—because she thought she could trust me, and therefore had to test me more and more, never knowing exactly how to approach someone with my background.

Suddenly, the bats returned in their thousands back to the island of light, coming in at top speed, as though on the attack, and swirled around the service station, round and round.  They were on a level as though fragments of a disintegrated moon, one of the unknown rings of Saturn, with the scream of their excitement somewhere between a whirling rush of inanimate objects and the silent danger of unknown creatures.  I pressed on the accelerator and broke out of the zone.  

There was still no traffic on the roads, and only a few articulated trucks racing down the highway, out of the suburbs of Saint Louis and off into the darkness that was the rest of the state of Missouri.  I kept the window open and the cool air calmed me down more.  I was no longer driving to find my way to Kansas, somewhere out there, far beyond where the stars dipped down and rolled along the western horizon, but to find my way out of this mad dream, this compulsive passion to pay back a debt of gratitude to someone I no longer felt attracted to in any way.  By four in the morning, I was back in my room at the boarding house, curled up in the bed and trying to get warm.  At last, a comfortable, soothing sleep covered me, and I slipped into a healing oblivion.  

            Then out of the stultifying blackness you hear something.  You listen again inside your dream and then outside it.  A knocking on the door.  Silence.  Then it comes again.

You say, “Come in,” but you can hardly hear your own voice.  Then you sleep again for you do not know how long.  But the knocking starts again.  This time you use your strength so that your voice can be heard.  Someone opens the door.  

“Hello,” she says, “can I come in?”

“Who is it?” you ask, not recognizing the voice or the face.

“I’m in your seminar, do you remember?”

You cannot remember.

“We were worried because no one has seen you for days.”

“I’m not well,” you say.

“Do you need anything?” she asks.

You don’t know what to say.  The darkness still fills your mind, or is it an emptiness?

“Have you eaten recently?”

You try to answer “A little” but the sounds don’t form themselves into words.

“Better get you to a doctor,” she says.  “Can you get dressed?”

You are not sure what is happening but the next time you can speak and see anything, you are sitting in an office at the university medical center.  Someone is talking to you.  He is taking your pulse.

“A bit of a flu,” the doctor says.  “Bed rest is what you need.”

Then the other one, the mysterious woman who came to your room speaks.

“He hasn’t eaten in days, I’m sure.  He’s all alone in a boarding house.”

The doctor doesn’t think it is a good idea.

“Someone should look in on him, feed him, be there.”

She says she can stop by during the day between her classes and her part-time job.

I try to say something but the thick mantle of darkness remains around me, hardly pierced by these voices.

Then somehow I am back in my room, in bed, and she is there feeding me soup.  The heavy weight of darkness is lifting.  I am able to sit up.  Night, day, no way to know still.

The next day, she is there again, and she has brought more food, made tea, and wipes me down.  I try to say thanks, and ask her name.

Somehow a few hours later, when she comes back, I know that her name is Minrva, that she comes from western Iowa, and that she is a part-time teacher in one of the area’s many private schools.  She is also in my seminar on medieval French literature, along with about six other people.  Minerva, when I look at her out of a disappearing fog, seems to be in her mid-thirties, a hard-looking woman, but with not even a wisp of a smile whenever I speak to her.

A whole week seems to have gone by since she first thumped mysteriously on my door.  By the time I am ready and well-enough to return to classes, she has become a friend, and she offers to stop by to drive me to university if I am not feeling up to it.  Each time I have seen her since I was able to get up and do things for myself, it becomes clear that she has spent a lot of time with me—and a lot of money getting me food and driving me around parts of Saint Louis I had never seen before.  Each time I have seen her, too, her face has seemed softer and more attractive to me.  Maybe she has smiled.

We have started to talk about our backgrounds, and everything she says seems exotic and confusing to me.  A little voice whispers to me that she is the classical older woman, the kind we read about in nineteenth-century novels, who initiates young men into life.  I have a nagging suspicion that I am too naive even for that, and that she only sees me as a helpless Jewish kid from New York, and that she has no interest in me except as a homeless waif. 

Other voices begin to whisper to me, too, but they aren’t  dreamy, romantic voices in my head shaped by archaic literature.  They are other people in our seminar and people who I don’t even know who have seen her paying a lot of attention to me.  Sometimes they merely say, in a low, casual way, I should watch out for her because she has a reputation.  The word has a greyish tinge to it.  Sometimes they say with more intensity, that I should take care of myself because Minerva is known to beguile young men, tease them, and cause rather unpleasant scenes.  The words may not have been used but the intent was there, and I feel squeamish to listen.  Some of the stories oozing around my consciousness suggest she not only likes younger men, such as myself, but also younger women.  Other circulating rumours  are more insidious and come when I look troubled by what is being said, as though it were necessary that I be properly warned and wakened from a bad situation: that she has been seen going around with young students at the high school where she teaches part time and that parents have started to complain.  Week by week, the innuendos and the gossip become cruder and more obscene. 

The way I start to defend her and myself makes these other people angry, and some classmates simply stop talking to me and shake their heads.  A few people who had started to become friendly tell me that if I go on seeing her, they can’t waste their time with me.  The innuendo and the threats mount.  But though I really have nothing to do with Minerva in the way these remarks suggest, I cannot dismiss them altogether, and suspect myself of being really quite stupid when it comes to women, especially these mid-western types, older than I am, and so alien to the nice Jewish community I grew up in back in Brooklyn.  Yet I keep reminding myself that she is a person who saved me from what could have been a very serious situation, was kind when others were indifferent, and has remained friendly and helpful.  To be truthful, my naiveté also played its part.  And my loneliness.  I simply could not accept those nasty stories about her and what they implied about our relationship.  They didn’t match my experience.  Though I could not point to any single inappropriate word she said or gesture on her part, in regard to sexuality, neither could I completely deny the feelings I had which had already changed from mere thankfulness and appreciation of her as a good Samaritan or a friend into something I hoped would become more: my fantasy of her leading me into knowledge of those things that men and women reputedly did with each other in passionate moments.  Since I had no experience in the reality of sex, but only knew about it from books read furtively and from my own dreams, I held firm to the idea that she was gently introducing me to a relationship that I would never have known how to initiate or pursue on my own.

In the second semester, Minerva and I found ourselves together again in another seminar, this one on the theories of courtly love, fin’amor.  For all her supposed experience and hardness, she started to ask me to help her understand the books we were studying, such as Andreas Capellaneus’s De honesti amandi, The True Lover, and Guillaume Machaut’s and Jean de Meun’s La Roman de la Rose, The Romance of the Rose, and a lot of shorter lyrics and tales by Chaucer.  We started to meet alone in the evenings at a small restaurant near the university to discuss these ideas, and after a while she invited me to come to her apartment on a Sunday afternoon to listen to her first draft of a paper she was going to read the next week at the seminar.  I felt both flattered to be seen as an expert in the art of love, realizing that what I knew was based on the scholastic and rational games that these medieval authors were playing, not at all on any real understanding of the physical or emotional intimacies, and also excited by the anticipation of some sort of closeness that might transcend the relationship we had, far more chaste than any of the whisperers could imagine.  I doubted any of them really knew I was still a virgin and had never seen a woman naked in front of me.  But I intuited that Minerva realized this and that she was planning to introduce me to such knowledge.  At the same time, all those terrible stories came back to me, so that I was afraid of what she might do, and hoped deep down that she would only talk about her seminar paper.

Minerva picked me up late in the afternoon that Sunday, early in February, a dark and dreary winter’s day, as they can be in Missouri.  Not much talk in the car as we passed through the more dangerous neighborhoods of Saint Louis, but then she crossed over into Forest Park and off into a very pleasant middle-class neighborhood, hardly one where you would expect students to live.  Big houses, wide lawns, clean streets.  Everyone else I was getting to know in the university lived in the small rows of brownstone buildings that were near the campus.  She drove into a small cul de sac, parked part way down a driveway, and said, “Here we are.”  The house was set on a small rise, surrounded by bushes, all bare in February, and already crossed by shadows making weird patterns on the walls.

“Do you live alone?” I asked, looking around the rather clean and tidy front room she ushered me into, just off a dining-kitchen alcove.  These were not qualities I expected, as again my room and the tiny flats shared by other graduate students I had started to visit was a hodgepodge of cheap chairs and cushions, make-do bookshelves, and saggy beds.  Her house was like a Doris Day movie set.

“No,” she answered, “but the others, my room-mates, are off for the weekend.  They won’t be back until late tonight.”

I am not sure I wanted to know more about who they were, particularly whether they were male or female.  In those days, still, mixed flatting was not common, even frowned upon.  But then Minerva was much older than the rest of us.  As I didn’t ask any questions, she didn’t proffer any further information.  I was afraid of what might happen and what I wanted to happen.

“You sit here,” she said, pointing to a table with five chairs around it, ”and I’ll make us some coffee.  Or do you want tea or anything else?”

I said I would prefer tea, and wondered what “anything else” could mean. 

I sat down.  There were books and papers on the big oaken table. Not strewn about, but nearly placed in piles, along with several coloured pencils, erasers, and paperclips.  There was also a rather ashtray containing about half a dozen butts and some broken wooden matches.  Even given those times, I found it odd that people still smoked.  As I looked, I could also see rings stained on the table top probably from glasses of wine or liquor.  The stains bothered me.  The rings were omens of something mysterious.

“Drinks will be ready in a few minutes.  Have some cookies meanwhile,” she said, placing a small platter in front of me.  “Home baked,” she said, ‘from my mother.  She sends them to me every week .  Try one.”

It flashed into my head that these might be made with illicit drugs of some kind.  I had seen a movie about that a few weeks earlier.  I wondered whether I should give them a try.  But I hesitated, and she said, “I’m not trying to poison you.  Or they not good enough for your sophisticated New York pallet.” 

“My what?” I said.

She laughed.  “I’m fooling with you, silly boy.   Don’t get up on your high horse.”

A funny pain went through my chest. 

When she brought a cup of tea for me and coffee for herself, we got down to work.  She started by reading me the opening of her seminar paper written in pencil lines on a long yellow pad of legal paper.

Courtly love is something new in the western world.  Until about the twelfth century, the term for love meant three different things: (1) the power in the universe that binds all things together, and both Plato and Aristotle had variations on this, with Plato’s notion including homosexual relations between men and men and boys, but not between a man and woman, while Aristotle thought of love as something like the attraction of objects to one another in gravity; (2) the sexual energies of procreation amongst all living things, including plants, animals, heavenly bodies and abstract ideas,  and it could also refer to the social bonds in a society, particularly in feudal relationships where different degrees of power meant that subjects loved their liege lords, their king and their God by feeling the attraction of the higher beings as giving them reflected strength and protection, while those in the higher positions condescended in their love in a paternalistic manner; and (3) Christianity saw in love a moral force of forgiveness, salvation and control over the world.

 What happened when writers began to write about refined love, fin’amor or doucie luf, was that they added new dimensions to these older concepts.  Thus the classical concept of natural love now was personalized and given the power to make the participants more spiritual.  As in Neoplatonism, abstract ideas became conscious and volitional creatures, so that the universe was a kind of family, with all the tensions between care and jealousy.  Then the ideal paradigm changed from that of the classical city, the polis, to that of the feudal court, with aristocratic participants, and with women treated as though they had the power once thought to exist in men alone but yet imagined as grammatically feminine entities.  Moreover, what had been acceptable in ancient Greece, homosexual love, was frowned upon by the Church; and rejected as sins, just as the mythical masks and metamorphoses that played with copulation between various species, including gods and humans or humans and plants or animals also was anathematized.

 Yet despite the Christian emphasis on love within marriage and moderated passion for the sake of procreation as almost a necessary evil, courtly poets, to please the newly empowered women, transferred into their relationship the ideals of classical friendship, a relationship, however, made spicy and exciting because it was adulterous and furtive, and very often unconsummated.  Finally, the rules of courtly love were also superimposed on the ideals of chivalry, and the lover sought to win the attentions and the ultimate favour of his Madonna by performances of bravery, dancing, singing, story-telling, and love-talking.  Rather than entering the game of love as a warrior, he sought to be a gentle man, soft and sentimental. 

“That’s as far as I have gone.  What do you think?” Minerva said. 

She handed me her draft of the paper.

As I read it over, I hummed approving noises, sipped my chamomile tea, and stole little looks at her as she observed me perusing the script. 

“Well,” she said, is it going in the right direction?”

She said it in a way that made me feel she didn’t really want adverse or constructive criticism, only approval, and her look actually made me think she might throw me out of the house—and pretty far from where I lived—on my own. 

“I like it.  I do.  Only...” and I hesitated.

“Please, tell me if there is anything you don’t like.  After all, that is why I asked you over.”

I still sensed something hostile in her voice, and I couldn’t help thinking about the awful things people had said about her at the time she was looking after me and going out of her way to help me feel comfortable in Saint Louis.  Nor should I neglect to say that I was also hoping this visit to her house would be more than a study session.  The more I had been with her, the more I felt something growing inside me that was quite different from the callow crushes I had for other girls.  Minerva, after all, was an older woman and she seemed to emanate a kind of sexual allure no one else had ever had around me.

“To be honest,” I said, “there are a few little tiny things here that you might want to sharpen up a little bit.”

She leaned towards me.  Her breath was warm and sweet.  She put her hand on my arm.

“You see, for one, I think you have to distinguish between what someone like Capallaneus the Clerk writes and what the troubadours and trouvères sing, and that, too, from the guys that write the long romances, I mean like Chretien de Troyes and that from Guillaume Machaut and Jeun de Meung with... with....” 

 “Hold on,” she said.  “Don’t just throw names at me.  I have only read some of them.  In fact, most of the time I just read the editors’ introductions and some of the  critics.”

Yes, I thought, that was it.  It now seemed evident by the superficial slickness of her style, the huge generalities or banalities, and the lack of subtlety in her writing.  But it was not something I wanted to say to her myself.  The fog was almost lifting.  Each time some defect in her character rose to the surface and confirmed the stories I had been told about Minerva, the more I had to admit that my intentions became increasingly dishonourable, if I may put it that way.  No one would have noticed, if they were casually looking on, and you would need to check my pulse and blood pressure to measure the changes. 

“Let’s put it this way,” I said, trying to sound at once natural and pompous, “you are dealing with a couple or maybe with three centuries, with different rhetorical genres, and even with different languages, like Latin, French, and English.  So you can’t clump them all together as variations of one another.”

I held my breath, waiting for the explosion of anger, just as barely an hour before I anticipated some kind of sexual advance on my virginity.

“Oh, Amos,” she said, “you really are a clever boy.”

I just didn’t know how much sarcasm she dripped into those words and hoped she was covering her own embarrassment.

“Maybe you better have some more of this nice soothing tea before we go on, or would you like something else, like a glass of wine.  It would smooth over the rough spots we have to deal with, won’t it?”

There it was.  I knew it.  She was on the attack and I wouldn’t be able to resist, unless I collapsed into a silly bundle of giggling. 

“Tea’s fine,” I answered.  “Let’s try to concentrate and finish as much as we can this afternoon.”

Well, I think that’s what I told her.  Perhaps I was much less coherent and mumbled in a way that made her think I was slipping towards an encounter she didn’t want at all.  She also probably said things, partly encouraging, partly teasing, partly seductive, but in all events, she refilled the teapot, poured me another steamy cup of chamomile tea, and leaned more closely as I gave her my critique.  Now, more than just her sweet rhythmic breathing and her hand pressed on my arm, I could feel her heavy rounded chest rubbing against me.  Or was that also a dream?

I spoke to her, waving my arms about as much as I could,  about how the courts of love run by beautiful princesses and queens in Provence and in Catalonia, then about the other kinds of courtly societies in northern France and into the Rhineland, and how different they were from the small fairly primitive households of kings and barons in England, and why the English lords brought over French poets and singers, and what was important about the small Italian towns and cities, all the way from what is now the French Mediterranean region around Avignon to the aristocrats and middle-class elites on the Peninsula,  playing with the ideas of  these new sweet sounds, la dolce vita nuova  As I spoke, I found my own breathing difficult and un-rhythmical, since the whole idea of the naive lover approaching his superior lady was analogous to my own situation.  Minerva, I was sure now, was playing with my emotions, heating me up, then pushing me away, making remarks that seemed innocent in themselves but in context undermined my confidence, little as there was of it, to let me know she was in control of the whole game of love.

“Can I ask you something, Amos?” she said, pronouncing my name with a drawn out first vowel and a voluptuous hissing at the end.

I nodded my assent, and my head’s motions seemed to gently stroke her body by some kind of magnetic power.  I could feel goose bumps on the back of my neck.

“You say that a lot of these poets really didn’t believe what they were talking about and the whole thing is a kind of joke.  So was there any foreplay and then bedding in these sessions?  I mean, did the ladies like these songs and get pleasure from pretending to cuckold their husbands, or did they want more, you know, the real thing?”

“Well, people in those performative games were on display, not really carrying on secret trysts, and the husbands were in on the tricks, even when they really were away, like off to the Holy Land for the Crusades, or dawdling with their mistresses out in the woods in their hunting lodges.  The lovers, that is, the young men singing these ballads and sonnets, and the ladies, perhaps ten or fifteen years older, a lot more experienced, traded jewellery, bracelets and rings, had hearts made of gold that they broke and shared between them, and I think maybe, for God’s sake, the young men found it very hard to control themselves and couldn’t really channel their passions into sweet games of love but sometimes begged the women for some, you know, touching and stuff, and—”

“You are such a funny, fellow,” Minerva said.

I must have looked very troubled.

“Yes, you are.  I think you want to touch me, don’t you?”

I wasn’t sure I hear what she said, or understood all the words, or even heard anything at all, but I so much wanted to that I sat there expectantly.

She gave me a little kiss on my cheek.

“But I am not interested in you that way,” she said.

I blushed horribly.  The heat burned my face.  It was what girls always said.  They liked me as a friend, but as a boy friend—No way, José.

“However,” she said, “if you finish helping me with this essay, I may give you a little reward.”

I stammered something that made no sense to me.  Did she really say that?  She laughed and said I should proceed, please, as it was getting late, if we were to complete the assignment and have time for the present she had in mind.

It took about a half hour for me to plod through the rest of her essay, making pedantic remarks on the tone, the texture and the tensions in the various romances, both the Arthurian characters and adventures in Chretien de Troyes and the two kinds of allegory in The Romance of the Rose, the light psychological analytical view of how to seduce the rose-bud demoiselle and the heavier social commentary of the war of the sexes.  As I was reaching the climax to my peroration and discussing the way the Lover (Amant) confronted the Danger (Daunger) of the Rose’s self-protection and finally broke through the wicker fence that surrounded her rosary to rob her of her little budding flower, Minerva started to blow into my ear, tickle my neck, and wind herself around me.  I could swear she did, at least at the time.  Then I heard her speak further.

“You see, for me it’s not about whether I am love with a man or not, or even, as you probably have heard our dear class-mates whispering behind my back, the occasional young female, it’s the pleasure it gives to me.  If it can relieve you of some of your uptight New York and annoying Jewish prudery, Amos, well, that’s just a bonus for you.  Now all I ask of you is that you keep quiet for the next half hour, and then shut your silly mouth for the rest of your life about what is happening here.”

So it happened.  Or did it?  It was like a dream. 

She was straightening out the pages on the table, looking at her watch and signalling to me that it was time for me to leave her place. 

“Thanks for all your help.  I didn’t take a lot of notes, so I will sit down right after dinner and write out what you said.  Then we’ll have to see what happens in old Grimshaw’s seminar on Tuesday, won’t we?  Help me out, then, too, please, in case anyone starts to ask embarrassing questions. “

I am not quite sure of what she said then.  It was all so banal. 

“And we better keep all this a secret.  Don’t want the professor saying I didn’t do my own work.  Now, Amos, let’s get you home.”

*  *  *

I don’t know exactly how it happened, or rather how it started.  But sometime after midnight, I suddenly woke up and felt a panic of cold shivers up and down my body.  Had someone broke open the window and let the last blasts of winter in?  A silent scream, mouth distorted like a Edvard Munch painting.  Maybe it was something someone said in class earlier in the day or a conversation overheard two or three days before.  But there it was in my head, flashing up like a bright, blinding neon sign: “You better go to Kansas. “ It seemed an absolute command.  She had helped me in my time of need: now it was my turn. Not my turn, my duty.  An obligation.

Within moments, I was dressed, racing down the stairs, and entering the car I had borrowed from a friend in order to do some errands the next day.  After winding out of the small, closed streets, showing my resident pass to the sleepy guard at each gate, I moved into the broad streets of Saint Louis.  There was hardly any traffic at this hour.  A bus, a taxi, and then nothing. Without a road map, unfamiliar with the highways leading away from the city, I realized I didn’t even know which way was west or north, let alone which road to take.  Where did she live?  The name of a small town came into my mind, something she mentioned months before in a conversation in the student union building when we were still getting to know one another.  The words of an old song went round and round, the names of a railway line, rhythmic, insistent.  Odd, until that very moment it had not struck me that the name of the town in the song was also her family name. 

There was a large service station ahead, fully lit up though it was the middle of the night.  I drove in both to buy a map and to fill up with gas, since it would be a long ride, probably hours and hours on those notoriously straight and mesmerizing highways that go out into the prairies.  Overhead I could hear some flapping, like a flock of birds of prey, gathering, homing in for the kill.  As the attendant filled the tank, I walked to the counter, asked for a map that showed the way from Missouri to Kansas, and also mentioned that I was looking for a specific place.  The girl passed over the map but said nothing about the town. On the counter, there were shadows now.  It was not birds, the girl said: “Bats.  They like the bright lights, though it confuses them.  They’ll be gone soon enough.  But watch out,” she said.   

I paid for the map and the gas, and then asked again if she knew how far it was to that place.  She said she never heard of it.  Then she said perhaps I meant another town, one that sounded somewhat like what I asked for. Overhead now, hundreds, maybe thousands of black shapes, flying around, flapping and flapping, around and around, not dipping or soaring, a tornado of weird whirring bats.  Then there was a crash, one, then two, and another smashed into the huge sign on the service station, and the whole contingent suddenly zoomed into the sky, whirled about, and were gone.  The silence sank down again heavy on the street.  It was past 2 a.m.

Back in the car, before turning on the ignition, I opened the map to check the list of towns and cities in Kansas.  It took a while to find, but there they were, two towns at opposite ends of the state with names that were fairly alike.  Not knowing what to do, I thought it best just to get going, at least go in the right direction and when I crossed the state line stop again and think it through.  But instead of that, what happened was that I drove fairly slowly around and around the big traffic circle in which the service station was located.  Round and round.  Like the bats a few moments before.  I opened the window on the driver’s side.  Down on the ground were a few dead bodies: ugly flying rats, their white teeth glinting in the light from the service station.  The cool air seemed to clear my mind a little. I continued to drive slowly. Round and round.  I started to wake up, as though out of a long, mad dream, the kind that seem to last for hours but really just take a few seconds.

As my head cleared, the whole feeling of panic was gone, the sense that there was deep bound of obligation to go to where Minerva had gone, perhaps home, as it now seemed, where her father had died, or so the rumour had travelled through the seminar when she failed to turn up twice running.  Maybe this obligation was something like love, an instinctive  bonding that had taken place when she cared for me during my illness and gradually made me feel more at ease in the strange city and in the strange university.  Maybe a mad passion to show her up, to do something that would make her realize that, while I was grateful, intensely so, for all she had done, I was more angry at her for trapping me in a relationship beyond my comprehension, when she invited me to her house and made me think she was going to seduce me.  Maybe I was more angry with myself for being so naive and never realizing that all the stories told about her were true, though not exactly in the way I had imagined, because my own imagination was shaped by such different experiences than she had known.  The students who whispered those scandalous things about her had not exactly said what I thought they did, though, as I would later find out, what she was said to have done was bad enough.  Maybe I misconstrued the whole situation, expecting things that were really quite ridiculous, and so missing the clues and signs of her own pain, her own need to have me as a friend, someone who wouldn’t be like the men she had known—and the women, or younger boys she was known to have been too friendly with—because she thought she could trust me, and therefore had to test me more and more, never knowing exactly how to approach someone with my background.

Suddenly, the bats returned in their thousands back to the island of light, coming in at top speed, as though on the attack, and swirled around the service station, round and round.  They were on a level as though fragments of a disintegrated moon, one of the unknown rings of Saturn, with the scream of their excitement somewhere between a whirling rush of inanimate objects and the silent danger of unknown creatures.  I pressed on the accelerator and broke out of the zone.  

There was still no traffic on the roads, and only a few articulated trucks racing down the highway, out of the suburbs of Saint Louis and off into the darkness that was the rest of the state of Missouri.  I kept the window open and the cool air calmed me down more.  I was no longer driving to find my way to Kansas, somewhere out there, far beyond where the stars dipped down and rolled along the western horizon, but to find my way out of this mad dream, this compulsive passion to pay back a debt of gratitude to someone I no longer felt attracted to in any way.  By four in the morning, I was back in my room at the boarding house, curled up in the bed and trying to get warm.  At last, a comfortable, soothing sleep covered me, and I slipped into a healing oblivion.