“Unhygienic?”
“Make fun if you want, smart guy. You’re the one who’s dumb if you pay Dr. Jay all that money and then don’t even listen to him. It’s not just that it’s unhygienic, it’s downright sick. It stinks. At school, I can remember, I’d be sitting in my carrel, in the library, doing homework or something, minding my own business, and somebody would sit down in the next carrel, with those shoes, and then they’d take them off, and I’d all of a sudden be smelling somebody else’s feet.”
“....”
“Which did not smell good, let me tell you, from constantly being in shoes without socks. I mean I really think foot-smell should be a private thing, don’t you?”
“....”
“What are you grinning at? Are those ridiculous feelings? Does that make no sense at all?”
“Lenore, it makes perfect sense. It’s just that I’d never given the matter that much thought. Never much thought to the ... socio-ethics of foot-smell.”
“Now I can tell you’re being sarcastic.”
“You completely misread me.”
“....”
“Is that why you always wear two pairs of socks? Under constant and invariable sneakers?”
“Partly. Partly because it’s comfortable, too.”
“Stone Dorm, pal.”
“Which one of these is Stone?”
“The one we’re right in front of, pal.”
“I see .... Lord am I stiff.”
“You want to just bolt right in and pee?”
“....”
“Rick?”
“I rather think not, now that the moment has arrived.”
“What does that mean? You did nothing but talk pee, in the car.”
“Have you the bags?”
“You know perfectly well they’re in the trunk.”
“The question really meant, do you suppose you could manage getting them inside yourself, making absolutely sure to take my bag in, too, with my underwear and toothbrush and Old Spice and all essentials?”
“I suppose so, but I don’t get it.”
“Meter’s still running, ace.”
“I think with your permission I will simply leave you, here, for a bit. I feel emotions and feelings washing over me that are perhaps best confronted alone.”
“What?”
“I’m going to go wander among the blasted crags of memory, for a while.”
“Pardon me?”
“I’m going to go take a look around.”
“Oh. Well, OK.”
“Till later, then.”
“You want to just come back here and meet me? We can check in at Howard Johnson’s at five and then go to dinner?”
“Fine. Goodbye.”
“It’s room 101, remember.”
“Righto. See you soon.”
“Are you OK?”
“Yes. Goodbye. Thank you ever so much, driver.”
“....”
“Can you please help me with the bags?”
“I guess so, lady. What’s with him?”
“He gets this way, sometimes, when he has to go to the bathroom.”
/f/
6 September
The sudden strength with which the desire to go see whether the initials I’d carved so long ago in the wood of the stall in the men’s room of the Art Building were still there, the sudden and unexpected and overwhelming strength with which these feelings had washed over me, there at the dormitory, with Lenore, was a frightening thing. As I joined the serpentine line of students walking up the ungentle hill to the Art and Science Buildings, all of us falling into the vaguely floppy, seal-like gait of the hurried hill-climber, most of us seals apparently late for class, one of us late for an appointment with a tiny ocean of his own past, stretching away and down beside the carved dock of his childhood, an ocean into which this particular seal was going to pour a strong (hopefully unitary) stream of his own presence, to prove that he still is, and so was—that is, provided of course the bathroom and toilet and stall were still there—as I joined the line of seals in short pants and loose short-sleeved shirts and boat shoes and backpacks, and as I felt the fear that accompanied and was in a way caused by the intensity of the wash of feelings and desires and so on that accompanied even the thought of a silly men’s room in a silly building at a silly college where a sad silly boy had spent four years twenty years ago, as I felt all these things, there occurred to me a fact which I think now as I sit up in bed in our motel room, writing, the television softly on, the sharp-haired object of my adoration and absolute center of my entire existence asleep and snoring softly in the bed beside me, a fact which I think now is undeniably true, the truth being that Amherst College in the 1960’s was for me a devourer of the emotional middle, a maker of psychic canyons, a whacker of the pendulum of Mood with the paddle of Immoderation.
That is, it occurs to me now in force that in college things were never, not ever, at no single point, simply all right. Things were never just OK. I was never just getting by. Never. I can remember I was always horribly afraid. Or, if not horribly afraid, horribly angry. I was always desperately tense. Or, if not tense, then in an odd hot euphoria that made me walk with the water-jointed jaunt of the person who truly does not give a shit one way or the other. I was always either so unreasonably and pointlessly happy that no one place could seem to contain me, or so melancholy, so sick and silly with sadness that there was no place I could stomach the thought of entering. I hated it here. And I have never been as happy as when I was here. And these two things together confront me with the beak and claws of the True.
One of the trees at the top of the hill, which I stopped to look at as I played with my hat and recovered from the climb, the line of students forking past either side of me and disappearing into buildings to the sound of bells, one of the trees was just beginning to bum, a bit, with color, a flush of hesitant red suffusing the outline of the tree against the southerly sun, the tree’s blood draining out of those leaves most distant from the heart first; and I looked at the flush of crinkled red crowning a body of soft green, with the sunlight winking through the branches as they moved and creaked in the breeze, until I was drawn away by the twin urges to remember and to pee.
And the initials were still there, the tiny carved “R.V.,” near the bottom of the stall. Someone had filled in the carving with ballpoint pen. Near the initials were another set of initials, “S.U.X.,” which I come to see now were to be a joke at my expense. And, near the joke-at-my-expense initials, someone, some tiny soul, probably during exam time, in a gesture the emotion behind which I could completely understand, had put the single word, “Mommy”—which predictably, someone else, a mean person, had altered in a slightly different color to become “Your Mommy hates you.”
“She does not,” I put—still being a really incorrigible graffiti man, I’m afraid—under the cruel alteration, although I had to get on hands and knees in the scum-laden stall to do it, and managed to dip my tie neatly in the toilet bowl in the process; let Jay and Blentner have a look at this. And my present bubbled and frothed in my past, and was borne naturally away.
Out the door of the Art Building and through the courtyard I pass into a quad, the quad, where loosely clothed barefoot boys with liquid wrists are playing Frisbee under the lying leaves, running like deer, throwing the plastic plate every which way. We dinosaurs used to play a similar game here, with trays taken from the dining hall, metal trays back then, with sharp digit-removing edges, so that, I remember, the trays had to be caught in midair by the tweezer of finger and thumb.... We would play and bleed. Now they are only high-tech and beautiful, and the bright disc hangs motionless in the air while earth and trees and lithe slippery boys slide underneath as if on oil to receive it again. I clap my hands a bit, hem and haw, throw my cap into the air, practice some motions, make it clear that I want to be invited to play, but I am ignored.
I walk around the quad, kicking at exposed tree roots, listening to snatches of conversation in langua
ges with which I am unfamiliar. I stay well clear of North Dormitory, to be sure. I make a giant detour around it. Out of the comer of my eye I can see its win dowshades fluttering. I can see its tree-fingers pointing. North Dormitory. Scene of perhaps the single most disastrous, unthinkable moment of my life, thus far.
Actually probably second to my wedding night.
Whom do I see, here, in the quad? Can the present of a past fail to be ugly? But it isn’t so. As I really should have remembered, ugliness is absent from the College. I have visions of it, bound and muffled, its walleyes rolling helplessly, stuffed into the darkest closets and boiler rooms in the deepest basements of the thickest buildings. I think I can hear its soft cries for help. The crazy relative everyone ignores, and denies, and feeds. Ugliness is absent from the quad.
Whom do I see, here? I see students and adults. I see parents, obvious parents, the ones with name tags. I watch the students, and they watch back. Ability To Handle Oneself, elaborate defense structures, exit their eyes and begin to assemble on the ground before them. But the eyes and faces are as always left bare. In the girls’ faces I see softness, beauty, the shiny and relaxed eyes of wealth, and the vital capacity for creating problems where none exist. For some reason I see these girls also older, pale television ghosts flickering beside the originals: middle-aged women, with bright-red fin gemails and deeply tanned, hard, seamed faces, sprayed hair shaped by the professional fingers of men with French names; and eyes, eyes that will stare without pity or doubt over salted tequila rims at the glare of the summer sun off the country club pool. The structures spread out, grow, wave at me with the epileptic flutter of the film-in-reverse. The boys are different, appropriately, from the girls. From each other. I see blond heads and lean jaws and bow-legged swaggers and biceps with veins in them. I see so many calm, impassive, or cheerful faces, faces at peace, for now and always, with the context of their own appearance and being, that sort of long-term peace and smooth acquaintance with invariable destiny that renders the faces bloodlessly pastable onto cut-outs of corporate directors in oak-lined boardrooms, professors with plaid ties and leather patches at the elbows of their sport jackets, doctors on bright putting greens with heavy gold shock-resistant watches at their wrists and tiny beepers at their belts, black-jacketed soldiers efficiently bayoneting the infirm. I see Best faces, faces I remember well. Faces whose owners are going to be the Very Best.
I see the faces of those who belong and those who do not belong. The belonging faces appear in rows, like belts of coins. The coins bob up and down, because belongers swagger. The belonging faces are tiringly complex, the expression of each created and propped up, through processes obscure, by the faces on either side of it. These structures intertwine and mesh, have not yet begun to tear at one another. And the nonbelongers. Of course the faces of those who do not belong are the adjustable dark-eyed faces of Vance Vigorous. Many of these faces are tilted downward, for fear of tripping on a root, for fear of being seen tripping on a root. These are the ones who do not sleep, sleep badly, sleep alone, and think of other things when they hear the sounds through the walls of their rooms. I intuit that the Frisbee players, whom I continue to watch, are nonbelongers. The Frisbee traces faint lines between them, strands that are swept and snapped like spidersilk by the wind off the Memorial Hill and athletic fields to the south. The nonbelongers’ faces are the unfirm faces that are really firm, the self-defined faces, the faces defined by not belonging in a place defined by belonging. These alone are the faces that stare out, protected and imprisoned, from behind the barbed borders of their own structures, the faces that know that, but for the grace of a God distinguished for the arbitrariness of his grace, it is they who would be bound and muffled in the College closets. The faces that are unreachable from this far away, and that look through you and digest you in a moment, against everyone’s will.
Who knows how long I watch. My pantcuffs fill with leaf bits and clippings of hollow-stemmed grass. Parents go by with their name tags. Older men, for whom bellies are burdens wrapped and hefted in checked sportcoats. Older women I have already seen and known in the faces of their daughters. Seals on hills, bright discs in the air. Lovers on stomachs, legs up, ankles lazily crossed against the fluttering approach of the odd falling leaf. The sun moves out over the mountains. I am able to feel it. The ellipse of my quad-orbit absorbs the indentation of North Dormitory.
Oh, why the hate? Why, when a horrible, worse-than-worst thing happens to you, when in all honesty you do something horrible, why is it the situation in the context of which the thing happens, the physical place where it happens, the other people whom it involves, that you hate, the thought of which and whom sends organs leaping inside you and corridors in your brain clanging shut against the assault? Why is it not yourself whom you hate, the mirror away from which you reel in horror? Can Jay explain this? What an entirely inappropriate question. How very far I’ve come.
On 2, soon to be 3, March 1968, North Dormitory, of which I was a resident, sponsored a mixer for the junior class, of which I was a member, and for the residents of our sister dormitory at Mount Holyoke College, an all-women’s institution ten miles away, the institution Lenore’s sister and grandmother—mother, too, I think—had all passed through. In attendance at this mixer was a Mount Holyoke sophomore named Janet Dibdin, a small, quiet, curved girl, straight red hair and blue eyes with tiny, fluffy white diamonds in the irises. Really. A girl about whom I was privately wild. A girl I met at another mixer, another of the year’s endless string, this one at Mount Holyoke; and at this mixer I had met her, and had survived the agony of dancing with her. And so. And so this was a girl in whose presence I was stupid, damp, tongue-tied, and comparatively huge. One of the three females in my life to whom I have been overwhelmingly sexually attracted, the others being Lenore Beadsman and the daughter of my next-door neighbor in Scarsdale, Rex Metalman’s daughter, an objectively erotic young thing who undulated her way into my heart in the summer of her thirteenth year while ostensibly playing with the sprinkler in the lawn.
In any event, there were we, grouped in blue suits and gray suits and slicked-back hair and shiny nervous noses, and there were they, a sweet shifting miasma of wool, shaped hair, cashmere, eyes, cotton, calves and pearls, in the midst of which she stood, by the hors d‘oeuvre bar, in a skirt and monogrammed sweater, talking quietly with friends, conspicuously danceless all night, and it was close to twelve, and there were we, in suits, gathering our saliva for the final assault. And there we were, moving through geologic time, impossibly slowly, imperceptibly, across the cedar floor, the fire in the fireplace doubtless and not inappropriately reflected and dancing in the centers of our eyes. We moved, and I was suddenly beside her, talking to her, good heavens hello, pretending it be by accident lest all dissolve, one or two of her friends standing with towering hairdos off to the side, wary lest they be caught in the ropes of sexual tension that snapped and crackled in the air between Janet and me, the friends watching us, me, for the tiniest error, the Beatles on the record player playing “Eight Days a Week,” and my hands prepared some sort of hors d’oeuvre, what do I mean some sort, a fastened cylinder of bologna on a Ritz cracker, and she declined it, and stared at me kindly, telling me with her eyes that she was willing to play the elaborate and exhausting game, that it was all right, and I put the hors d‘oeuvre into my mouth, and the cracker seemed to explode into deserts of dust, and there was meat, and I recall she was talking about the upcoming election, and the unavoidable and untalkaboutably horrible invitation to dance began its salmon’s migration from my intestine up toward my brain, and my hand was in the pocket of my slacks, soaking through the wool, and in a disastrous flash I thought of something witty to say, to delay the invitation, and my heart leapt, and my throat constricted, and I turned convulsively from myself to say the thing to Janet Dibdin, as she stared with undeserved trust into my eyes, and I tried to say the thing, and as I opened my mouth there somehow flew out of my mouth an enormous glob of
the chewed hors d’oeuvre, the Ritz cracker and bologna, chewed, with saliva in it, with shocking force, and it flew out and landed on the fleshy part of Janet Dibdin’s nose, and stayed there. And the friends were blasted into silence, and the rest of the hors d‘oeuvre in my mouth turned to ice, adhered forever to my palate, and the Beatles sang, “Guess you know it’s true,” and Janet stopped all life processes, virtually killed with horror, which she out of a compassion not of this earth tried to hide by smiling, and she began to look in her purse for a Kleenex, with the obscenely flesh-and-bone-colored glob of chewed food on the end of her nose, and I watched it all through the large end of a telescope, and then the world ceased mercifully to be, and I became infinitely small and infinitely dense, a tiny black star twinkling negatively amid a crumple of empty suit and shoes. This was my taste of hell at twenty. The month following that night is an irretrievable blank in my memory, an expletive deleted. That portion of my brain is cooked smooth.
An unprecedentedly enormous veer around North Dormitory, effected with hands over ears, flings me out past Memorial Hill and into the bleeding forests south of the campus, and I wander, crunching needles and the weak leaves already down, as I used to wander alone for hours as a student, elbowing through the throngs of other students wandering alone, as I elbow students and parents aside now and head for the really isolated, natural part of the New England forest, beyond the road, past dry fields of baking, screaming crickets, out through the wind, elbowing, to find the really secluded places already full, lines of belongers cracking like whips around the sap-sprung trees, sending nonbelongers spinning into the brush. I am outside. And I wait my turn for admission, and smoke two clove cigarettes under the angry eye of a blue-haired mother in a yellow Bonwit pantsuit unfortunately right downwind from me, hissing into the ear of a son with a note concerning laundry pinned to the sleeve of his brand new AMHERST jacket. I buy a hot dog from a vendor and watch the sun glitter faraway against the windows of the buildings on the southern face of the broad ridge, the southern wall of the citadel. One of my R. V. ‘s“ was still here, and I had, in the back of my mind, one other place where I might still be, and these things somehow made me unreasonably happy—as happy as seeing the immoderate curve of Lenore’s hip under her scratchy Howard Johnson’s blanket, here, next to me. I love you, Lenore. There is no hatred in my love for you. Only a sadness I feel all the more strongly for my inability to explain or describe it. My ears rumble still.
The Broom of the System Page 23
