Another You by Ann Beattie Page A

had told her that some faculty member had apparently mistreated a student, and that the student’s visit to a psychologist at student health had only compounded the problem; what was the name of the woman in her book discussion group who worked at student health? He did not want the poor student to blunder into an inadequate counsellor a second time.
    “Jenny Oughton,” Sonja had said. “I can’t believe you’ve forgotten the name of my best friend.” She flipped open her address book to write down Jenny’s work number. “She’s hard to get in to see, though, because she’s in charge of a yearlong research project—which I’ve told you about and you’ve no doubt forgotten. So be sure to remind her that you’re my husband. Never thought I’d be so helpful, did you? Knowing me is like knowing the doorman at a hip new disco.”
    Were there still discos? Did anyone use the word “hip” anymore? He’d wondered that when Sonja said it, and he wondered again as he pulled his robe off the hook on the back of the bathroom door and walked downstairs, heading toward the kitchen telephone. Raves, that’s what the students talked about: going to a rave. He had no image for raves, except that the idea of them made the kitchen look ridiculously banal, bleached as it was by morning sunlight, crumbson the floor, white dishtowel dangling from the handle of the refrigerator so that the refrigerator seemed to be offering itself in surrender. He called student health and asked to speak to Jenny Oughton.
    “Dr. Oughton?” the young woman who answered replied. “She’s not available. May I take a message?”
    “I know she’s involved in research,” he said. “I’m the husband of her friend Sonja Lockard. I teach at the college. I need to speak to her about”—how to phrase it?—“a private matter.”
    “Certainly,” the voice said. He could almost sense the young girl drawing herself up to full height: responsive; businesslike. “Let me put you on hold.”
    He waited. He pulled up a stool and sat at the counter by the wall phone, resting his arm on a pile of newly laundered underwear Sonja had not yet taken to their bedroom. He found himself wondering if the women’s socks corresponded to their underwear. Perhaps, because Sonja’s usual socks, navy-blue knee-highs, seemed a practical accompaniment to her white cotton pants. She had gotten rid of her bikini briefs, she had told him when he asked, because she could easily tuck the T-shirts she wore under blouses and sweaters into her pants when the pants rose to her waist, but the T-shirt would work its way up if she tried to keep it in place anchored under bikini briefs. It shocked him, sometimes: how mundane, but how compelling, were the things his wife told him. Was it because he loved her that he could retain such information—even conjure it up apropos of almost nothing, while sitting on a stool and glancing over his shoulder, thinking about eating a banana? He wondered, idly, if there was any poem that contained the word “banana.” “Peach,” certainly: what Magritte had done for the green apple, Eliot had done for the peach. For a moment he thought how different, how absurdly different, the whole poem would be if Prufrock had wondered whether he dared to eat a banana.
    “Sonja’s husband?” a woman’s voice was saying on the phone. “Hello, Marshall. I’m on a speakerphone; that’s all there is in this room, and several people are here with me. I just wanted you to know.”
    “That’s fine,” he said. Was he talking to the woman with the socks patterned with roses, or the heavy-duty gray ones that men and women alike wore, with the band of red around the top?
    “What can I do for you?” Jenny said.
    The gray ones.
    “I’m actually wondering if there’s any time today I could stop by to talk to you briefly. It’s about a student—a slightly complicated situation, and I’m calling to ask you a favor, having to do with her seeing