This is about Meinwald, whose office is in Founder’s Hall. My office is one door down from his. Meinwald teaches Western Philosophy here at the university. As a professor he is extremely well versed in the history of thought. But when it comes to other aspects of life, the man is clueless. He eschews coats and ties, forgets to zip his pants, and even on a good day misses a belt loop or two. For years he has existed, as the saying goes, in a haze. Let’s just say that Meinwald wasn’t alert to nuance. And then let’s go ahead and say he wasn’t alert to blatancy, either. He was alert to Greek philosophers and all of their nuances, but he couldn’t tell you if it was a cloudy day, even if he was staring out his window.

            Meinwald and I go way back. We met at Berkeley while both of us were attending graduate school. As a student, he was a soft-spoken young fellow with a solid 4.0 GPA who lived alone in a small flat that was crammed floor-to-ceiling with books and periodicals. He read the works of Hobbes and Spinoza diligently and with great pleasure.

            As far as I know he did nothing else.

            Meinwald had no interests outside of philosophy. Nor did he have a social life. Not once during my stay at Berkeley did I see him in the company of a woman. Even back then, he was something of a recluse, and not what one might call handsome. His nose was pinched and bony, and his mouth came to a curved point like a parrot’s beak. A mildly unpleasant body odor often issued from somewhere in his center, causing one step back while conversing with him. This was of little concern to Meinwald. He was content with his solitude, and his immense stacks of books on Heidegger and Wittgenstein. It seemed to be all he needed.

            I must admit, I was something of a bookworm myself during that period. I still am for that matter. Not on a par with Meinwald, mind you, but neither am I the kind of fellow fond of kneeling at the altar of pro sports, anesthetizing myself in excessive drink, or engaging in the manly arts of hunting and fishing. I have my hobbies, and I enjoy my work here at the university, despite the legions of students with pierced lips, backward ball caps, and oversized pants, who slouch in their chairs and act as if school is penance for a crime soon to be committed. Needless to say, I do not fraternize with those whom I teach. Except for an occasional lunch at the Student Lounge, I distance myself from them much as possible. The life of a philosophy professor is built fastidiously around class time, repartees on existentialism, seminars on Descartes and, sadly, the hair-rending angst of grading papers.

            When Meinwald arrived here I had been teaching for several years. With him, he brought to campus his new wife, Eileen, a mildly attractive woman from a well-to-do family in Chicago. Meinwald? Married? I thought. How could that be? It was nothing short of a shock. A miracle, right up there with the loaves and fishes.

            Meinwald soon became regarded as something of an eccentric by his students, a reputation he did nothing to contradict. He drifted into his classroom, his nose in a book, his shirt mis-buttoned, and lectured until well after the bell had rung and most of the students had departed. He did not know the names of those in his class or how many were present on a given day. He could not hear them poking fun of him even when they did it to his face while handing in a late paper, whining his name, Pro-fes-sor Mein-wald, into five sarcastic syllables and smiling a smile so sugary as to make any other faculty member present avert their eyes.

            Meinwald would probably never change the world of thought with a brilliantly argued thesis. He could not even change the expressions on the faces of the students who sat before him. The man was oblivious. This was apparent to me the first time I saw him with Eileen at the faculty party later that fall. The effect of watching them standing together in the dean’s back yard was shocking. As I said, she was moderately attractive, but as she scanned her husband’s colleagues that evening, it was her eyes-her predatory eyes-that made it clear. Poor Meinwald simply stood beside her, hair afloat, his smile benign and vacant, an expression he’d learned from years of being alone with his books. It was plain to see that their marriage would not last a year.

            Eileen shopped around for a time, and by mid-term she was bedded down with our football coach, a trim and handsome man who drove a Porsche and had a body full of lean muscles. It took Meinwald the entire school year to find out about the affair, and then all of the summer session to decide what on earth it meant. Even then, even after he’d talked to Eileen and she to him, and he’d moved out of the small house they had bought near campus, even then he didn’t really wake up.

            After the divorce his students became even more sarcastic toward him, if that was possible. Observing their behavior was difficult for me, those sarcastic young faces filing into his office with their weak excuses for not being present or prepared, and saying things that, if heard in my office, would win them a failing grade and an audience with the dean.

            It was in that period, just after Eileen’s departure, that Meinwald and I became friends. Our schedules were similar and many afternoons we fell into step as we left the ancient corridors of Gist Hall where we both taught. I would walk outside with Meinwald and ask him if would care to stop at the Student Lounge for a coffee.

            The first time I asked him, he looked at me full of wonder, as if I’d invented French roast, and said, “Why, yes, that sounds like a splendid idea.” But, of course, that was the way Meinwald responded every time I asked him anything. He was like a surprised child, a man without a history.

            When Meinwald and I enjoyed coffee together, we seldom talked about our personal lives. Primarily, we talked shop. He was teaching an upper division class on Kierkegaard. I was leading a seminar on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. We would pour over our subject matter, sharing ideas and bouncing thoughts off of one other before we headed off to our three o’clock classes. Not once did I ask Meinwald how he was holding up under the pressure of his divorce. Philosophy was our sole topic of discussion.

            I wasn’t surprised during this time to see him occasionally lunching with Eileen. He was the kind of man you could betray, divorce, and still maneuver into buying you a meal. But our afternoons together began to reveal his loneliness. He was as seemingly inured to that feeling as any person I’ve ever met, even I, in the life I have chosen. But more and more frequently during our conversations I would see his eyes fall upon a table across the room where a boy and a girl held hands and chatted over their notebooks. And when his eyes returned to me, they would be different. Then he would stand and gather his books and go off, an overweight, fair-haired professor tasting the bitterness of grief.

            He never remembered to pay for his coffee.

            That following semester a new event transpired, and I understood from the very beginning what to make of it. When you fall head-over-heels in love with one of your students several things happen. First you become an inspired teacher, spending hour upon hour going over every tragic shred of your students’ sour deadwood papers, as if holding in your hands a potentially magic parchment, suddenly tapping into hidden reservoirs of energy and vocabulary and lyric combinations for your lectures, refusing to even sit down in class. Second, the lucky victim of your infatuation always receives a mark twice as high as he or she deserves. And third, you have a moment of catharsis during this time in which you see yourself clearly as the fool, a realization that is good for any professor, because in the end it will temper you, seal your cynicism, jade your eye, and make you slink back to your office in temporary embarrassment and shame.

            The object of Meinwald’s affection was a young girl named Vanessa who had not once, but twice flunked my existentialism class. She was lanky and full-lipped, with a proportionate bosom and runway-model legs; the kind of girl one might refer to as “vogue on the outside and vague on the inside”. Ours is a small North Coast university and there are a hundred such beauties prancing about, coeds with the perfect unblemished faces of pretty girls and the round hips of women. These slender young creatures wear short skirts and tight sweaters and keep their streaming hair in silver clips. They sit in the front row and have bright teeth. They look at you unseeing, the way they have looked at teachers all their lives, and when one of these girls suddenly changes that glance and seems to be appraising, you take it upon yourself to wear a clean suit and comb your hair the next day.                          

            That was what gave Meinwald away: his hair. One Monday I met him on the steps of Founders Hall and he looked strangely different, the way people look who have shaved their beards or taken to wearing glasses. That is, I couldn’t quite tell what was different for a moment. Then I saw the comb tracks in the hair plastered to his head, and I knew. He had been precise about it, I’ll give him that. After a lifetime of letting his hair jet like flame-wildfire, really-he had cut a part an engineer would have been proud of. If you’d just met him, I suppose it wouldn’t have looked too bad. But to me he looked exactly like the concierge of a sad hotel.

            There were other signs, too. The pressed shirt, the new tie, and the shiny loafers (after years of grime) that almost hurt the eye. He was animated as he walked to class, tapping the old, worn cover on The Collected Works of Plato with new vigor. And then, the coup de grace: one afternoon during coffee, he picked up the check!

            Meinwald was teaching a night class on logical positivism and an attractive girl named Vanessa was in that class. This was the one he was drawn to. When my colleague began to change his ways, I did my best not to interfere. After all, it was none of my business. But my concern grew as the days passed. Whenever I would see Meinwald on campus, Vanessa would be in lock step with him, fiddling with her hair and giggling at his jokes.

            I could sense trouble approaching, like a wildebeest on the savanna senses the footsteps of a hunter from miles away. My friend, unfortunately, was new to the pitfalls of student romance. He had not been around this particular block.

            Meinwald began to spend more time in the Student Lounge with his young friend, drinking espresso and chatting. He also ceased to read the works of his peers, and the books that had once been his personal bibles, particularly Heidegger and Wittgenstein, languished unstudied. Vanessa, the shrewd, pretty schoolgirl, the young lady who spent more time choosing her blouses than studying the Socratic Method, was manipulating her professor to her advantage.

            I changed my office hours so I cold be around when his evening class broke up, which was about 7 p.m., and I saw Vanessa hanging around my friend, always the last to leave, and then stroll with him-and that is the correct word, stroll-around the rickety corridors of Gist Hall. She would laugh at the things he said and toss her hair just so, and squeeze her books to her ample chest. And Meinwald would simply beam.

            Such young ladies are the Achilles’ heel of college professors everywhere. As I mentioned before, I’ve developed a special radar for them. But not Meinwald. Vultures could have been circling and screeching, but he still would not have seen it. He was that far gone.

            I watched that spring semester as Meinwald fell deeper and deeper in love with Vanessa. The combined hair and shined shoes were a bit much, but then, at mid-term, he showed up in gray-flannel slacks. His old khakis and their constellations of vague grease stains were gone forever. I could also see that he was losing weight, the way men do when they spend the energy necessary to become fools.

            I knew with certainty that there was real danger afoot when, one afternoon, Meinwald leaned forward over his coffee and withdrew a sheet of typed paper from the pages of his textbook. It was a horrid thing to see, the perfect stanzas typed in the galloping pica of his old office Underwood, five rhyming quatrains underneath the title: To My Love.

            The poem was fire, it was flower, it was (despite the rigid iambic pentameter) unrestrained. It was confession, apology, and seduction all wrapped up into one. I clenched my teeth to keep from trembling while I read it. And after an appropriate minute, I passed it back to him. He wanted to know what I thought.

            “It’s very good,” I told him quietly. “The metaphors are apt and original and, on the whole, the poem has a genuine energy, but-” And here I leaned toward his bright face. “-do not under any circumstances give this to a student.”

            “I knew it was good,” he chortled. “I knew it. Do you see? I’m writing again!”

            “Do not,” I repeated, “give this to a student. It will only create a gross misunderstanding.”

            “There is no misunderstanding,” he told me, folding the poem back into the textbook. “It is a verity,” he said. “I am in love.”

            As everyone knows, there is nothing to say to that. I stared into my cup of coffee and saw from how high an altitude my dear friend was about to fall.

            It wasn’t long before Meinwald did fall. I can’t put my finger on the exact date or my thumb on the precise time, but some weeks later Vanessa quit school and ran off to Los Angeles with a young man, an artist I believe he was, without so much as a simple good-bye.