Roy Truitt, visiting lecturer, took great bodily pleasure in his campus office, the enormous desk, the little typewriter stand, the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, the window that looked onto someone else’s window. He enjoyed dominating his leather ottoman with his leather brogues, flinging books to the ground, letting the ashtray fill. His students saw his disorder as a sign of genius. Professor Truitt has read more books than anyone, they said, though this wasn’t true, and he wasn’t a professor, not yet. He was twenty-three. He had inherited his predecessor’s office as it was, with the books and the ottoman, the manual typewriter that reminded him of a skeleton in a natural history museum—a small dinosaur, one so unfortunately shaped it existed mostly as food for larger dinosaurs. An aquatic animal, probably, with an alphabetic spine.
The bowling alley in the basement of the student building was candlepin. Only the students bowled there. Roy Truitt didn’t bowl. Once his ankle had healed, he was left with a ginger step. He had a sofa in his office upon which he napped; he took his meals at a diner a block away. The campus at night was his favorite place. His office was in a small brick building called Archibald Hall, named for the founder of the college, or for his wife, or for their children who had raised the money for Archibald Hall. The Archibalds. There was a painting of Mr. and Mrs. in the entryway, with green-tinged skin and tiny eyes, signed Mary Archibald. Somebody fancied herself an artist.
He had a key to Archibald Hall, issued by the key department. He had a master key left over from his time in the key department, and a series of lock picks if the master key failed him.
Just because you escaped your old life didn’t mean you were all the way into the next: you still had to burgle, slink, steal. What was the first thing civilized man did? Figure out a way to keep others from what he loves. And what did uncivilized man do? Figure out a way to pick the lock.
His brother was not Archibald but Archer, he reminded himself every morning.
The first time Roy let himself into a colleague’s office it was (he told himself) because he knew that the man had a copy of the Loeb Library translation of City of God—there was a sentence he wanted to verify. He’d taken Reggie Clayton’s “Basics of Attic Greek” his freshman year; Clayton was a thin nervous man in his forties whose entire soul lit up when he read Greek. Standing on Reggie Clayton’s Oriental rug, Roy felt he understood Reggie Clayton better. He convinced himself that this was why he’d done it, why he continued to do it, let himself into a different office every night, first in Archibald Hall and then across the quad into Butler. He’d collected his master’s in classics, he’d get a Ph.D. next, but his education was incomplete. For instance, how did people who were brought up in houses live? They hung up their coats and displayed pictures of their families, they knew how to arrange furniture in a room, floor lamp, footstool. How else would he learn? He had invented himself but he couldn’t civilize himself.
In the offices of his colleagues—his former teachers—he indulged in minor mischief of the shipshape sort, straightening framed diplomas, alphabetizing books, tamping down piles of papers. He felt first like a thief and then superior. No, he hadn’t impersonated a ghost at Truitt’s, but here he was, a poltergeist, a revenant. Perhaps he’d leave a message flapping in their typewriters. Boo. I love you. You’re out of athlete’s foot ointment.
Am I even human? Roy Truitt wondered as he chewed a sticky licorice cough drop he’d found in a colleague’s middle desk drawer. On the white cough drop box, the two bearded Smith Brothers, Trade and Mark. He sat at the desk and stuck his knees in the kneehole. These days he let himself into offices without looking at the name on the door, to make himself a detective. He examined the impressions left behind in a leather desk chair, breadth and depth of a colleague’s bottom. He preferred breaking into the offices of male colleagues, who outnumbered the women anyhow. It felt less personal.
During the day he sat in his armchair and listened through the doors to his colleagues letting themselves into their offices. He waited to be caught. Every time somebody knocked on his door, he thought, Here it is. But it was only ever his students. Maybe he would find a wife among them. They were not so much younger than he was, after all. Melora Chalfen. Rose Pearlman. Any one of them might do.
Then one day the knock on the door was not a student, not a colleague who’d tracked him down, but Arch.
Arch sat down, like the students, on the uncomfortable chair on the other side of the desk. He wiggled his hips and nodded, as though he had never sat in a chair but found the experience satisfactory and Roy remembered this particular quality of Arch’s: he always seemed to have just landed, amused and stymied by the customs of this new world. Was it a habit? A running joke? Arch pointed at the shelves. “Books,” he observed.
“Yes. Well, Arch.”
Arch smiled, and it unlocked both of them. “Well, Roy.” He put his hand on the desk. “So, I’ve come to invite you to the wedding.”
“Oh? Whose.”
“You know whose,” said Arch.
“Do I. I didn’t know things had progressed.”
“They’ve progressed,” said Arch, sadly.
He didn’t look like a man who should get married. He wore a dingy short-sleeved shirt with a pattern that looked like canceled stamps and a dirty necktie with a pattern that looked like tarnished coins. Maybe his fiancée was waiting for them to get married before she started to look after him. Interfere. Whatever it was that made husbands comb their hair. Now, as though they were getting ready for the ceremony, Roy tsked and reached across the desk to fix Arch’s tie.
“I thought it might be a tie place,” said Arch. Roy could feel his voice buzz through the botched Windsor knot. “Your job.”
“It is. What’s wrong with you, Arch?”
“Why do people always ask?” said Arch in a mild voice. “Like I know.”
“If you don’t know, who does?”
“Seems like whoever asks the question has a pretty good idea what’s wrong with me. At least they’d like to take a guess. Go on.”
Roy sat back in his chair and looked out the window. Across the courtyard, the neighboring professor sat at her desk and unwrapped what looked like a present but turned out to be a sandwich. He had been in that office. She kept clean underwear in her center drawer. Without looking at his brother, he said, “You had a different girlfriend every week of your life, but you’re marrying Betty.”
“Nobody calls her Betty.”
“I do,” said Roy. “You can’t take that.”
“Roy, for God’s sake. She wasn’t ever really your girl. You dropped her the minute you broke your foot.”
“I know that,” he said irritatedly. “Very clear on that. But didn’t you think—”
“—what?”
“That I might not like it? I might not like making conversation at family events. And I didn’t break my foot.”
Arch scratched his head with all of his fingers. It made him look like the dog he was at heart. “We don’t have family events. This is the first one.”
“Somebody’s bound to die eventually,” said Roy.
“I’m sorry!” Arch cried. “I just—oh God, Roy, really, I knew it was a bad idea. I did. I knew better, but my heart—”
“—who do you think your heart is?”
“Well—”
“You think your heart is separate from you?”
“Yes!” said Arch, as though asked at knifepoint his belief in God.