The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  “But come ye back, when summer’s in the meadow,

  Or when the valley’s hushed and white with snow.

  It’s I’ll be here…”

  But he faltered then and asked, “What comes next? How does the resht of that line go?” and handed you your pen and one of his cards.

  But you did not know what to write. Making Cathlin into a very good Scotch-Irish lass who would know not only the tune of “The Londonderry Air” but all the words to “Danny Boy” was going to take you a while. All you could write was: I am too drunk to remember.

  “Really? Well.” Ah moved closer to you on the sofa, draping one arm over the back of the sofa as if to embrace you. You got yourself ready for the touch of his arm on your shoulders. Preparing the nerve ends of your shoulders, you were caught by surprise when his touch came not there but on your bare knee. He put his other hand on your other knee and then began to slide it up your thigh.

  “Ot!” you exclaimed.

  “Say! You aren’t mute,” he observed. He removed his hand and looked at it. “Ish my hand hot? Did you say hot’?”

  You nodded your head.

  “Ah wish you could take off those glasshes, so’s I could see your purty ahs. Couldja maybe closh your ahs tight and then take ’em off!”

  You shook your head.

  He lifted his glass, bourbon and branch on the rocks, and after draining it, he held the glass with its cubes in his hand for a while, then said, “Now my hand’s not hot.” And he slid the hand up your thigh again, almost to your bud.

  “Ot!” you said.

  “No, it’s not,” he protested. “It’s cold. “Why’re ya sayin ‘hot’?”

  You took card and pen and wrote: Excuse. I am not uttering “hot.” I am vocalizing “och,” which is Scottish expression of surprise.

  Ah stared at you, long and lovingly, and then he declared, “You fashcinate me, y’know it? And y’know, you’d be a ravishing creature without all that makeup and that getup. That hat and hair and dressh and jewelry and sunglasshes.” You drew back from him as if he’d insulted you. “I mean, really,” he tried to elaborate, “didn’t anybody ever tell you that you’re sort of too much?”

  Identifying so completely with the poor mixed-up kid that Cathlin was, you felt humiliated. Cathlin couldn’t be blamed for her honest attempt to express her personality through her attire, and it certainly wasn’t her fault that the photodysphoria required her to wear the sunglasses. You took a fresh card, and you spent a while with it, scribbling furiously on both sides, and then you stood up from the sofa and thrust the card at him. No, nobody ever told me that. And you are very rude to do so. Do I tell you that you dress shabbily and haven’t bathed recently and you don’t even comb your oily hair? No, but it’s true. And you smoke too much, and drink too much, and your breath reeks. I hope this isn’t going to affect my grade in your course, but I wanted very much to talk to you about Bolshakov and a novel I want to write, and all you’ve got on your mind is your prick. You’ve hurt my feelings. Good night.

  Then you grabbed your coat and the paperback of Pale Fire he’d lent you, and you stormed out.

  Ah made only a feeble, drunken effort to follow you, to stop you, to apologize, to get you back. Probably he was still sober enough to realize that you’d have to walk home alone in the dark, wherever you lived, and he ought to offer to accompany you. But you fled from the mansion and gained the street before it dawned on you that you did not know where Cathlin lived. And this time of night, you weren’t about to walk all the way to your office to change out of your costume.

  You waited in the dark street for a time, casting an occasional glance upward at the windows of Ah’s room, hoping his lights would go out and he’d go to bed, but knowing that he wouldn’t. Finally you let yourself back into the mansion very quietly and went up to your apartment and quietly entered and removed your costume and your makeup and went to murphybed.

  Chapter twenty

  February was your busiest month ever. In addition to giving and grading quizzes for each of your classes, attending departmental meetings, and finding yourself elected to the chairman’s advisory committee, which would consume large chunks of your free time, you actually began, without quite knowing it yourself, the long story that would become Cathlin’s first novel, Geordie Lad. What started as merely an attempt to fulfill one of Professor Ah’s peculiar assignments—“Observe and describe a place, and through description of the place alone attempt to evoke the person(s) whose place it is”—became Chapter One of the novel because the place you chose to describe, from memory more than invention, was Dr. Bolshakov’s office in the Serbsky Institute. Without any mention at all of the man himself, except to note and translate the diplomas on the wall, you began spinning a web of depiction all around him, so that the reader already knows him before first meeting him.

  But it was a chore. You did most of the writing not in your office but in your apartment; the meager accoutrements and auras of your office would have spoiled your vision of the office of Bolshakov. Thus the questions of Kenny and I. were not Where have you been all day? and Where’ve you been keeping yourself? but rather When can you come out and play? and Are you doing anything in there that I could help you with? You were not able to find much time for them. You could pretend, to Ah, that you were indeed a bit miffed over his relationship with this red-headed student of his: he had clearly tried to make you jealous in his full “report” on the visit of Cathlin to his apartment, embellishing the truth of what had happened that night. He claimed that he and Cathlin had sung a duet of “Danny Boy,” and that she trilled her R’s thrillingly. He claimed that Cathlin had spent the night with him. “Well, since you can’t ‘chosh,’” he said, “it was either her or Edith Koeppe. I’m a horny man.”

  For Valentine’s Day, I. gave Cathlin a copy of the hardback (not a first edition) of Nabokov’s Lolita. But he also gave you, for Valentine’s Day, the same thing. Thus you had two copies, and you managed eventually to read one of them, the only novel you finished while in this city.

  Although you could avoid I. because he was “two-timing” you with Cathlin, you had no pretense or excuse to offer to Kenny other than “work.” Kenny had been all too eager to let you know, in case you didn’t, that Professor Ah had brought “some dishy broad” up to his room, and Kenny wondered how you liked that. You told Kenny that I. wasn’t your boyfriend. “You are my boyfriend,” you told him, and he blushed and screwed up his face, and said, Well, if you were his girlfriend then you ought to “make time with” him.

  “Soon I will make time with you,” you promised.

  One of your greatest problems with the chapter was describing Bolshakov’s dolls truthfully. He had a large collection of matryoshka dolls, the peculiarly Russian playthings made of hollow wooden shells, one doll inside another, like Chinese boxes, ever smaller. Some of his matryoshki were quite large and made of exotic woods; some of them were cheap lacquered lathe turnings. All of them had in common that the outer doll, the one containing all the others, was a man, shaped somewhat like a bowling pin; inside him was a woman wearing a babushka, round spots of rouge painted on her face (the source, you suddenly realized, of Cathlin’s overdone makeup); inside the woman, yet another doll, a lad of not-yet-puberty; and inside of him was the smallest, most reducible of the dolls, a little girl.

  Bolshakov had used the dolls didactically, to illustrate his theory that males have females inside themselves, and that females have males inside themselves, and that grown-ups have children inside themselves, and that you, Yekaterina Vladimirovna, have inside yourself both a little boy wanting to be seduced by an older woman and a little girl wanting to grow up and acquire a penis.

  Contrarily, you had seen Bolshakov’s dolls as a manifestation of his problems with “reality”: For him, your external personality was only a disguise, an outer shell covering up an inner self that was not your own but a creature of his invention.

  Your big problem, now, for Cathlin�
�s chapter, was whether or not to prop the dolls hither and thither around Dr. Bolshakov’s office. If you stressed the Russianness of Bolshakov’s dolls and explained their historical significance, mightn’t you make the reader (I.) suspicious that Cathlin might actually be Ekaterina? You tried to find out if there were a Scottish or Irish equivalent of the matryoshka, but a thorough search in Hillman Library failed to uncover any. It was too late to change Bolshakov’s name, but you considered Anglicizing (or Scotticizing) his first name and patronymic, which were Vasili Timofeyevich, into something—William T., perhaps calling him Wullie, a Scottish diminutive of William. But finally, late one night with the help of a large quantity of vodka and some Tchaikovsky coming from WQED (and from me), you convinced yourself to leave Bolshakov’s names as they were and to let him keep his dolls-within-dolls, although you did not call them matryoshki, and to have certificates on the walls licensing a man of Russian origin and Viennese training to practice psychiatry in Ulster. You finished a brilliant first chapter without any human characters, just objects in a room.

  That was when you discovered that a good novelist, finishing a good day’s work, often feels not only elated but horny.

  There was a timid knock at your door. Not like Bolshakov’s. Not like Ogden’s. Not like Ah’s.

  Chapter twenty-one

  “Come in, Kenny,” you called quietly, because on both sides of you there were professors grading papers or gone to murphybed. You turned down the volume on WQED.

  “How did you know it was me?” he asked, coming into the room. He was in his plaid bathrobe, it covering his pajamas.

  “I wanted it to be you,” you said.

  “Huh?” he said.

  “In Svanetia, there is superstition, tval, that if you want something and call it by name before it appears, it will appear as you called it. Please sit.”

  He sat on your sofa. “Teach me how to talk Svanetian,” he requested.

  “This late at night?” you said. “I love to, but it would take many lessons.” You were thinking of how Knox Ogden taught you English.

  He sniffed the air, your breath. “Have you been drinking a lot?”

  “Some,” you admitted. “How can you work and drink at the same time?”

  “Drinking helps me think,” you said. “You should try it sometime.”

  He made a face. “No, thanks,” he said. “But I could sure use a cigarette.” You gave him your pack, took one for yourself. He gallantly lit yours for you, after only two attempts at igniting a book match. “Mom and Dad are both fried. I could be gone all night and they wouldn’t know it.”

  “Be gone all night,” you echoed, suggested.

  He studied you, to make sure your repetition wasn’t a mockery. “Are you working hard again?”

  You lifted the stack of pages, flourishingly handwritten in Georgian and yet to be translated into English, that would constitute Chapter One of Geordie Lad. “I am done,” you announced.

  “Well, that’s good,” he said. “We could play chess or something.”

  “Or something,” you said.

  “Or you could, like, teach me a few words of Svanetian.”

  “You point at something, I give you the word,” you offered. He pointed at your dining table. “Table? Tabog. Say it.” He tried to say it, then pointed at a chair. “Chair? Skom.” He pointed at himself. “Boy. Nafvzhur.” It took him two tries to pronounce it, then he pointed at you. “Girl or woman? Dina or Zurail.” He spoke the first, but moved his pointing finger closer, almost touching your breast. “This? My lisv.” You touched it and smiled and told him, “In Svani, the word for breast is very like the word for ‘to dance,’ lisvbi, perhaps because”—you stood and held out your arms as if to dance, and I arranged for WQED to be playing something slow and soft and shuffling, and he eagerly stood and put out his cigarette and came into your embrace—“because we dance breast to breast, see?” It was not exactly breast to breast: His breast mashed against your stomach, yours against his chin. Kenny did not know how to dance, and neither did you, but you took enough slow drifting dance steps around the room, tightly in each other’s arms, to illustrate the relation of lisv and lisvbi, and to have all the excuse you needed, for the first time since Knox died, to hug, and this embrace, just as it did that time, began to straighten and stiffen his qvem, and if he could feel your breast mashing against his cheek you could feel his qvem mashing against your thigh.

  He tried to whisper, and it made his cracking voice drop a register. “How do you say ‘kiss’?”

  You honestly did not yet know the word in English. “Point at one,” you requested. “Or touch one.” He touched your lips. “Face? Mouth? Vishkv?” He touched his own lips, then transferred the fingertips to your lips. “Oh, patchy!” you said, in a transliteration of the Svanetian child-language word pači. “Kiss-kiss.”

  “Let’s patchy,” his cracked voice croaked. You puckered and gave him a little peck on his mouth. Quick and light as it was, it was enough to turn your knees to jelly, and you had to let go of him and fall on the sofa. He stood over you, his face warped into an expression of disappointment. “That’s the way they kiss in Svanetia?” he demanded. He dropped down to sit beside you.

  “They who?” you said. “Babies patchy. Little boys and girls patchy. Men and women lickwhál.”

  “Then let’s lickwhál,” he hoarsely whispered.

  You showed him how they do it in Svanetia, men and women, or nineteen-year-old girls with boys of eleven in the top of the abandoned towers, which was your only Svanetian experience with it. You and Islamber had stood beside the embrasure looking out over the valley of the Ingur. You and Kenny sat side by side on the sofa with your arms awkwardly shifting for a comfortable embrace. You and Islamber had eventually wound up on the stone floor. You and Kenny would wind up in your murphybed, where anything that can go wrong will go wrong. But nothing would, except in the sense that it may be very wrong for a twenty-seven-year-old woman to sleep with a twelve-year-old boy.

  A patchy is quick and light; lickwhál goes on and on, and involves all parts of the vishkv, inside and out, especially the nin. Kenny had kissed girls before but never touched tongues with them, let alone entwined tongues, wrestled tongues. Boys this age can do this sort of thing for only a short time before becoming uncomfortable. It was he who broke the lickwhál with an exaggerated panting as if he’d run a verst. In his lap some fruiting body had pitched its tent, which peaked beneath his robe. “I know one,” he said, thinking to tell you something that would lighten the heaviness of the lickwhál, like coffee after a liqueur. “It goes, What’s dry and hard when I put it in, but soft and sticky when I pull it out?”

  You stared at him for a while before asking, “Is this another riddle?”

  He nodded, and smirked, and waited. You thought. After a suitable time, you announced, “I give up.”

  “Chewing gum!” he cried, and roared with laughter.

  “Chvotirk!” you hushed him. “Shh! You’ll wake Dr. Koeppe.”

  “Aw, she never sleeps,” he declared.

  “How do you know? Have you been in her murphybed?” You nudged him with your elbow.

  “What if I have?” he said.

  “So you are not…a virgin?” you said, teasing, not believing that he had ever slept with anyone, and certainly not wanting to believe it.

  “Nope,” he said, proudly.

  You hoped he was kidding. You would not be able to bear it if he was not kidding. “Truth?” you said. “Did you put it in dry and hard and bring it out soft and sticky?” And you laughed, nervously, though not loud enough to be heard beyond the confines of the sofa.

  His face grew thoughtful, and he decided to stop kidding. “No,” he admitted. “I can’t even, like, imagine, like, what it’s like. Did you?”

  “I have nothing dry and hard,” you said.

  “Aw, shoot, you know what I mean. Did you ever ‘chosh’?”

  You stared at him, and your mouth fell open. “Kenny!
I did not teach you that word! Where did you learn it?” He hung his reddening head and wouldn’t let you see his eyes. You wondered if he had been talking to I. Or maybe he’d just been listening outside your door, which is what you asked him, giving him a way out: “Have you been putting your ear to my door?”

  “Yeah,” he gladly confessed. “That’s it. I was just, like, getting ready to knock one time when you were talking to Professor I.”

  “Bad boy!” you said, feigning a severe reprimand. “Snoop! You said you would never snoop. I ought to spank you.”

  “So spank me,” he requested.

  Laughing, you grabbed him and turned him face down over your lap. You pulled up his robe and tugged down the bottoms of his pajamas, exposing his samt’rock, buttocks, the sight of which made you abruptly all moist in your groin. You began to give his buttocks mild slaps with your hand, not hurting him at all. His qvem was extending down between your knees, and by closing your thighs you could squeeze it as you spanked him. He was making murmurs and groans and occasionally speaking the name of Jesus. You stopped and said, “Okay. Enough. You can sit up,” and you hoped that when he sat up he would not reclothe himself.

  “Don’t stop,” he said. “That feels way rad.”

  But you could not strike your hand against his buttocks again. You could only rub your hand over them, slowly, with much love, all over, allowing your fingertips to wander to the wonderful place beneath his scrotum and even to touch the small, hairless, crinkly balls.

  Abruptly he sat up, but he did not pull up his pajamas. He sat there studying his qvem, which was exposed to your full view for the first time. It was longer than Islamber’s, but not as thick or erect as Dzhordzha’s. It was a tower of Svanetia, a mushroom of the forest, but it was made of human flesh. And it was very hard, but not quite dry: A dewdrop glistened on its tip. Kenny stopped studying it and began to study your face, which must have been in some kind of trance. “Do you want to hold it?” he asked you in his hoarse whisper.