I was running. I was attracting some attention. I was not crying, my face shone with righteousness. A pathogen. A pathogen! It was a term from biology; a helpful term; never had I felt so empowered, so certain of myself. Vernor Matheius and I: pathogens. I felt the thrill of the outlaw, the outcast; the object of loathing and taboo; my skin was "white," a camouflage I might wear through life as I wore my costume-clothes; as I wore my "femaleness"; what others perceived as a weakness, I would forge as my strength. How radiant in self-knowledge I was! Crossing a broad, sloping lawn, spongy from recent rain; the afternoon air had turned twilit with thunderclouds obscuring the sun, and glimmered with a peculiar iridescence, like a rainbow; I gloated in my secret otherness no one (not even Vernor Matheius) would ever know. There came gusts of sulphurous air. A rolling of thunder. And an unexpected piercingly sweet odor of lilac from a hedge beside the Music School and I was seeing again the ragged lilac bushes that grew behind my grandfather's ramshackle barn, I drew a deep shuddering breath running now in rainwater and mud splashing my legs, my bare white legs, laughing to myself, my face gleaming with tears of laughter, rage, hurt, determination So I am a nigger-lover, and a pathogen. That is what I aw.

27

Never did I dare tell Vernor Matheius about my adventure in the office of the Dean of Women. I hadn't the courage though continuing to think with childish obstinacy He would love me, if he knew. My courage on our behalf.

But was it so? Would Vernor Matheius have loved me, or even admired me, if he'd known? If he'd overheard? Or would he have been mortified, infuriated, disgusted at my appropriation of his name? My boast of my friend Vernor Matheius which was the first time, and would be the last time, I spoke his name to another?

But I never told him, he never knew.

Nor did the Dean of Women continue in her harassment of me. So far as I knew. My threat of a lawsuit and my evocation of "civil rights" had been a blind strike in the dark, yet inspired; the exact weapon with which to defend oneself against a college administrator in that era of civil rights reform; of a radically new thinking about race, individuals, civil liberties. The Dean of Women would not have cause to speak with me again that year, nor in my remaining two years at the university; ironically, by what seems in retrospect a remarkable fluke, I would be named valedictorian of the class of 1965 and would deliver an idealistic valedictory speech on the subject of civil rights; afterward, on the commencement platform, I would be warmly congratulated by the chancellor of the university and by a succession of administrators in academic regalia, including of course the Dean of Women; I saw that she was one of very few women in the commencement program, and among so many tall, distinguished-seeming men a figure of female uncertainty, her raddled face too lavishly powdered and her black cap unflatteringly bobby-pinned to her grayish-brown hair. Her mouth pursed as I approached; her small damp eyes fixed upon my face as if in sudden dread of my uttering something sarcastic, rude, damning that would be overheard by her male colleagues. But our meeting, which was also our parting, was amicable. I may have been a little nervous, excited, and still high from giving my speech, and being applauded; I was smiling at everyone, and seeing no one; except there loomed the Dean of Women before me, a black tent of a woman, and there was my hard little hand being shaken by her soft boneless hand, and both hands were cold as if drained of blood; the Dean of Women smiled saying, "Congratulations, my dear. You have lived up to your early promise." I said, "Thank you, Dean. And good-bye."

But this was the future, two years away. A future I could not have fantasized with even my wayward powers of imagination.

28

I am not a man for any woman to count on. Not a man who wants to be loved.

But: love me.

Wanting to surprise my lover, to make him happy. For what makes happy the one we adore makes us happy; what not, not; the universe is a void, an unfathomable inkwell otherwise.

How many times drifting through bookstores seeing books I knew Vernor Matheius would prize and thinking I would steal for him- would I? As I would never have stolen for myself: annotated editions of the works of Leibniz, Hegel, Heidegger; a new commentary on Wittgenstein; a new translation of Plato's dialogues; biographies of Kierkegaard and Jaspers; Ernst Cassirer's essays on the mythic nature of language. Holding one of these precious, expensive books in my hand thinking How happy it would make Vernor to own this. Wishing not to think What a transparent ploy to make the man love me.

Never stole a single book. Though I'd been labeled an outlaw, a sociopath, yet I never stole for Vernor Matheius, as I would never have stolen for myself; my pride was such, I couldn't stoop so low; nor could I work out how Vernor might respond if he discovered that books had been stolen for him; and he'd known I hadn't the money to buy them. Frequently he'd expressed disdain for any form of dishonesty, above all intellectual dishonesty; he scorned unoriginal thinking in philosophy; he scorned any form of petty crime.

"Petty crimes require petty souls."

Though I couldn't afford it, sometimes on impulse I bought Vernor gifts. Never in my life until then had I experienced that rhapsody of happiness: buying a gift for someone you love. The adrenaline rush I am the person who can buy this gift. Only I, so privileged.

These were thrift-shop treasures. I was patient, I could look through bins of cast-off things. I discovered a handsome old fountain pen, black with gold trim, that still functioned; a pair of fake-jade cuff links engraved with miniature sphinxes; a crystal paperweight (only just finely cracked, but still charming) that was also a magnifying glass. For Vernor's thirtieth birthday I gave him a silk vest in an elegant hounds-tooth check on a gray background gossamer as smoke; when he unwrapped and opened the box he didn't lift the vest out of the tissue paper for a moment, staring down at it, and I worried that such an item of apparel was too personal a gift and might offend him; but Vernor took it up, slipped it on, and frowned at his reflection critically in his single mirror, above his bedroom bureau-"Hmm. Not bad."The silk vest had come from a consignment shop in downtown Syracuse; it had been marked down numerous times, at last priced at $9.95. How beautiful it had seemed to me, the old-fashioned cut, a row of small black wooden buttons; a vest for a gentleman; for Vernor Matheius. He laughed when I told him it was secondhand; its label had been carefully removed. "What it is, no doubt, is a dead man's vest, recycled to me." "That's only logical," I said, "since you're alive." Vernor laughed again and asked, not for the first time, why I bought him things-"You don't have any money, Anellia." I ignored this saying proudly, "You look very handsome in your silk vest, Vernor, it suits you perfectly." Vernor said reprovingly, "I don't look 'handsome' and it doesn't suit me 'perfectly' and I surely don't need a vest but thank you, Anellia." Smiling at me, and my heart soared.

"A special occasion. And I have something special to tell you."

Vernor wore the houndstooth silk vest beneath his old gray flannel jacket that fitted him tight across the shoulders when he took me out to dinner for the first time (as it would be the last time) at a good, expensive restaurant in the city, the Brass Rail; he was clean-shaven and his face was sharp planes and angles like carved mahogany; his hair hadn't been trimmed in some time, and rose in a woolly penumbra around his head; one of the earpieces of his glasses had broken and was mended with adhesive tape, which gave him a savage yet scholarly look; he was handsome and swaggering in his best ironic style; he wore the vest, the jacket, a greasy-looking dark necktie and dark trousers with a haphazard crease and his shoes were brown leather, badly worn and water-stained. I wore a black silk dress that seemed to have a life, an identity, an idiom of its own; in the style of the Forties it had a flared skirt, long, tight sleeves and a V neck that drooped to show a portion of my narrow, pale chest and the edges of my pale breasts; the dress had a cloth belt that had begun to curl, to show its underside; the woman who'd owned the dress (of course it was secondhand) had had a waist thinner than my own for the belt had been mutilated as if with an ice pick to make extra holes in it, that it might be buckled tighter, and yet tighter; Vernor thought the dress "erotic"-"smelling of grave mold"; with it I wore a thin tarnished gold chain that had once belonged to my mother; at least, this was what I'd been told as a young girl by my grandmother who hadn't wanted it for herself. Nerves had caused my sensitive skin to break out in random rashes yet my face was radiant, I'd applied layers of makeup including rouge; my eyes shone with the glisten of madness; I thought This is the happiest day of my life. Yet could I trust happiness? I could not bear the suspense of what Vernor had to tell me at dinner; immediately he'd made his remark, offhand and casual, I forgot I'd heard it; I looked away, evasive and frightened.