The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  “How long have I known you?” you asked him.

  He thought. “Over two months,” he said, breathing hard. “Why?”

  “Is enough,” you said, and reached a hand over and wrapped your fingers around his qvem. His whole body shuddered. His pelvis jerked upward, and he gripped the sofa cushions tightly in both fists and clenched shut his eyes, and a great gasp came out of him just an instant before his dwvis exploded out of him, shooting onto the floor, the sofa, his legs, your hand.

  When the last gush had subsided, he sighed, “Nobody ever held me before. Except me, I mean. I guess it was, like, just too much.”

  Dzhordzha, the first time, had lasted only a little longer and had, you recalled fondly, been ready again within minutes. “Do not worry,” you said. “It will now be soft and sticky.” You laughed. “But soon will be hard again. And”—you drew your nin over your lips—“and I will lick it dry.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Kenny said again.

  Chapter twenty-two

  Kenny stayed all night. Of course there was penetration, eventually, and more than once, but that was not your goal, just as your goal was not the orgasm that you failed to have. What mattered most was not consummation but recreation: a good time of exploration and discovery, of experiment and play, greatly enhanced by the multitude of reflections in the mirrors on the walls. For you the very best phase of it all, as you had tried unsuccessfully to explain to unbelieving Bolshakov, was not the actual sequence of coital wrenchings and plungings, which any animal can do, but rather the explorative quests of eyes, fingers, hands, tongues, an abandonment to the wonder of discovery, a marvelous sexual hide-and-seek in which the seeking is always more fun than the finding. You became Kenny. As you would learn to become your readers, as you had already become your readers in the opening of Geordie Lad, you wanted the slow, playful reconnaissance of the room to be more important than the inhabitance of the room. “You cannot believe in real fucking,” boorish Bolshakov had said to you in Russian. “You can only contrive infinite fanciful foreplays.” You had attempted a retort: that one never gets pregnant from such; and you had to explain to Kenny, this night, answering his fears, that it was unlikely you would bear his baby because the moon’s stage of ripening was not yet. “Do not worry about it,” you whispered to him. “I can take all of your dwvis inside me, in my vishkv as well as through my bud, and it will not tonight make me liffnavy. But we must get you some balloons to wear on your qvem for the next time, so that I do not become liffnavy.”

  And sure enough, Kenny snitched some balloons the next time he came to spend the night. Where had he snitched them from? you asked. From his father? No, somewhere else, he said; his father couldn’t even “get it up” anymore. How did Kenny know? Did Kenny snoop on his father and mother? No, his mother had told him. Did he and his mother talk a lot about such things? Sometimes. He wasn’t going to tell his mother about this? Of course not. Never. What did you take him for? Did you think he didn’t know from nothing? “Do you think I’m a mushroom?” he demanded.

  “Yes,” you said.

  “I mean, like, no, that’s not what I mean. A mushroom is a nerd, a goofus, who doesn’t know jack shit. I may not be a rocket scientist but I’ve got sense enough not to rat to my mom and dad.”

  The balloons, a brand named after an Egyptian pharaoh, didn’t fit Kenny; they were too large for his qvem, and they easily slipped off afterward; so you had to be careful, especially when the moon’s stages were very ripe, not to let any of the dwvis spill before he could withdraw.

  When he came to you one night, one of the many nights that he was certain his parents were bombed into such deep slumber they would never notice him missing, he had a package of a whole dozen of the pharaonic balloons, and you demanded to know where he had been snitching them. “From a drugstore, of course,” he said, and you told him that stealing was bad and he ought to let you give him some money to pay for them.

  But Kenny continued to steal from the drugstore, not only the balloons but candy and, eventually, items he did not need, women’s things, useless medicines, greeting cards for occasions he would never have for greeting.

  One night when Kenny was with you, a graduate student on the third floor was holding a party that was becoming increasingly noisy and drunken, with loud music from open doors and drunks wandering down to the second floor, and Kenny got up and dressed and said, “I guess I got to go do something about it.” That was only the first of many occasions when Kenny would have to leave your murphybed to handle his duties as “super.”

  Another time, you and Kenny were just drifting off to exhausted slumber together when you smelled something burning. It smelled like—the only resemblance you could recall was from an incident at Ishimbay—like human hair burning. Kenny went to investigate, and he returned to ask you to go with him, as he had when he went to find dead Ogden, and you followed him down the hall to Edith Koeppe’s door, which he opened with one of his keys. She was sprawled out in a drunken stupor up against the wall’s built-in gas heater, her hair and one side of her face badly burned, but she was alive, although unconscious. Kenny phoned for an ambulance, and Dr. Koeppe spent several days in the hospital.

  “This is a terrible town,” I. said to you once, over drinks in his room, and waved a stack of student stories. “These kids write endlessly about this city’s murders, divorces, muggings, rapes, child deaths, wife beatings, suicides, infidelities, betrayals, and endless dope addictions. The only student who doesn’t write about this city is Cathlin, and she writes about killings in North Ireland and a psychopathic psychoanalyst.”

  Kenny couldn’t stand having you talk to I., but he always seemed to know when I. was in your room, and he would interrupt rudely. As if his stealing and increased truancy from school weren’t sufficient manifestations of his becoming what Knox Ogden had called a “punk,” Kenny began to act increasingly tough, coarse mouthed, and mean, and his manner toward I. became as hostile as it had been toward Knox Ogden. You experienced an uncomfortable déjà vu: Here was your next-door neighbor drinking too much, coughing too much, almost on the verge of whatever terminal debility had required Knox to cancel his remaining classes the previous term (I. insisted he didn’t have cirrhosis but admitted to “some problems with pancreatitis”), and here was Kenny openly hostile toward him. You did not see I. all that much—not as Ekaterina; you saw him more often as Cathlin—but you had to be very careful when you saw him that Kenny not discover you, because Kenny would become furiously jealous if he did. “I wish the old fart would hurry up and die off, like Ogden did,” Kenny blurted.

  “Kenny!” you replied.

  One day Kenny brought home a stack of pamphlets from somewhere, and giving you the first one and telling you to be sure and read it, he went from door to door throughout the mansion, slipping one of the pamphlets under every door. It was entitled 20 Questions for Alcoholism, and it began, If you can answer ‘yes’ to half of the following questions, you should seriously consider joining Alcoholics Anonymous. The questions each had drink as their verb, and out of curiosity you decided to score yourself on them: Do you ever crave to drink at a definite time daily? (No.) Do you feel under tension much of the time while not drinking? (No.) Do you need to drink the next morning? (No.) Of the twenty questions, the only ones which you answered positively were Do you drink to escape from worries or troubles? and Are you at times possessed with unreasonable fears?

  At the end of each pamphlet was scrawled in pencil, If you scored more than 10 yes’s, please see me for free book, Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. Kenneth Elmore, Jr., Superintendent. Half-jokingly, the next time you saw Ah, you asked him if he’d taken the test and what his score was. Seventeen, he said; you? Two, you said. Good girl, he said. After a week, Kenny admitted that only one person in the building had asked for a copy of the book, and “it sure wasn’t that asshole who lives in the next room.” But he gave you a copy of the book and asked you to make sure the asshole read it.

 
Late one night, when Kenny was “staying over,” you had a bad scare when you answered a knock at your door and there was Loretta, who was supposed to be bombed. She was somewhat drunk, and half-asleep, but lucid enough to ask if you had seen Kenny, who had crawled under your murphybed. You feigned drunkenness and sleepiness and said you hadn’t seen him since “before murphybedtime.” Loretta apologized for waking you and declared, “Well, that brat’s probably taken up running around with street gangs.”

  Kenny did not take up running around with street gangs, but his tendency to juvenile delinquency escalated from his shoplifting the drug-store and supermarket to the cultivation of a new hobby: amassing a considerable collection of automobile hubcaps. His room was filled with the ones he couldn’t sell, and his complaining mother was told that he’d found them in the street, which was partly true.

  If, sweet Kat, you were inclined to blame yourself for his descent into delinquency, truancy, and punkdom (and there is a small but substantial body of recorded cases of such effects of older women’s seductions of youths), you did not consider that his premature assumption of a full sexual life was what corrupted him. You thought, rather, that he had been corrupted because you were not able to accept, and had thus declined, his proposal of marriage.

  Kenny had made a mistake in falling in love with you and proposing marriage. He never used the word love, but he began to exhibit all the symptoms. Falling in love wasn’t so bad—both Islamber and Dzhordzha had professed the same condition, liltuneh for Islamber, vlyubeetsya for Dzhordzha—but Kenny had become obsessed with making you into Mrs. Elmore, Jr. You had laughed when he first brought the subject up, and you thought he didn’t mean right away but eventually, when he grew up, but he was serious and wanted to “run away” with you as soon as you consented to it. You couldn’t consent. You tried to explain to him that you had a job that you would have to keep, even if you married him, and that meant not running away. “Aw, you said your job would be over in April,” he insisted. Yes, but then you had to find another job somewhere, and you couldn’t take him with you.

  “Why not?”

  “It is against the law, I think,” you said.

  “So? Lots of things are against the law, but people still do ’em.”

  “I cannot marry you, Kenny,” you said. “You are very sweet to ask, but when you are truly old enough to be married, according to the law, I will be…Let me think…I will be in my midthirties, much too old for you.” And you told him about Svanetia, how the women there, although they often live past 100 (you had a great-aunt who was still living, the last you’d heard from home, at the age of 123), often become “old” by the time they reach their midthirties.

  “I don’t care,” he said. “I’m still going to marry you.”

  Chapter twenty-three

  You began to understand, as you reached the chapters of Geordie Lad in which Dzhordzha (or Geordie) first appears, that poor Kenny Elmore, for all his simple attraction and likability, was nothing at all like Dzhordzha. Would Kenny have devised a plan to get himself into the prison camp and extricate you from it? Would Kenny have been able to stand up to the bogeyman Bolshakov and humiliate a man four times his age? Would Kenny know how to drive a truck over a tract of bezdorozhye to get you from Ishimbay (Armagh) to the road to Tbilisi (Londonderry)? Could Kenny, for all his toughness and his devotion to you, kill the three guards who tried to stop you and the five who followed you?

  Be careful here, Professor Ah scribbled in the margin of your (Cathlin’s) manuscript. You are “telescoping.” Or is it “telegraphing”? Whatever, you are telling the reader too much information too early about this boy, Geordie. You want to make him into a superhero, but too much extravagance and exaggeration too early can only lead to disbelief.

  For all of his increased drinking, Ah still somehow managed to read his students’ submissions dutifully, slowly, and critically, and he continued to give Cathlin’s ever-expanding Geordie Lad an honest appraisal and sufficient suggestions and encouragement to keep her going, and to keep her coming back to class each week with another twenty or thirty pages of new material. Ah’s assignments to the class had taken an erratic turn, an eccentric sequence of directions on experimenting with flashbacks, “collages,” “lucky accidents,” and shifts of tense and person that confused many of them and that he privately told Cathlin to ignore or follow, as she wished.

  Ah no longer made any pretense of assigning stories from the Stegner anthology or other outside readings. He told Cathlin, again in private, that he simply didn’t have time to keep up with the readings himself, because he spent all his hours reading student stories. The last reading he was able to assign, Edgar Allan Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher,” fascinated you, Kat, (although you had already known a bad Russian translation of it) and enthralled you, Cathlin; and you both hoped, for different reasons (Kat for its supernatural elements, Cathlin for its fear and trembling), that Ah would discuss it in class, but he never did. A student in class handed in a question, What are we supposed to be reading? and Ah ungraciously lost his temper and lectured them on the use of supposed to—as if creative people are supposed to do anything. Eventually he announced, “Y’all just read whatever y’all want to. It hardly matters. I never did like for anybody to tell me what to read.”

  One night in late March when Kenny was out somewhere stealing hubcaps, Ah knocked at your door and you let him in and did not need to offer him a drink because he brought his own. In his other hand he held a sheet of paper, a piece of stationery, a letter that he showed you. “This was forwarded to me from my most recent residence,” he said.

  The stationery bore the letterhead of something called bow: Bodark Organization of Writers; and Ah himself was not certain whether it should be spoken as something you do from the waist or a weapon you hold. The letter, from a woman named Agnes Roundtree Mazzarelli, secretary of bow, said some flattering things about his “famous” novels set in the Bodark Mountains and then invited him to be the main speaker at bow’s eleventh annual conference, to be held in the Halfmoon Hotel at Arcata Springs on April 27. BOW would pay his transportation, provide lodging for the three days and two nights of the conference, and offer him an honorarium of one thousand dollars.

  “Frankly,” Ah said to you, “I long ago made up my mind that I would never attend a writers’ conference, for any reason. But until this letter came in the mail today, I had, really, nothing much to live for. So I’m ready to swallow my scruples…provided, that is, that you will go with me.”

  Me? you scribbled hurriedly. Why should you want me to go with you?

  “Because you are so homesick for Svanetia,” he said. “Of course, you’ll find that the Bodark Mountains are nothing at all like your homeland. They are mere pimples on the arse of the midcontinent, the highest of them less than three thousand feet, not to be compared with your eighteen-thousand-foot Mount Elbrus. But some of the valleys of the remotest parts of the Bodarks may remind you of your Ingur Valley. There are no towers, of course, but this Halfmoon Hotel, if I remember it correctly, has stone towers that may resemble your Svanetian strongholds.”

  You were greatly attracted, or at least intrigued, by his invitation, but you wrote, I should think you’d rather take your girlfriend, Cathlin.

  “I considered that,” he admitted. “Although to call her my ‘girlfriend’ may not be accurate. We’ve never gone out on a date. I’ve never been to her place. She’s under constant medical supervision for some problems, photo—phototropism, or some kind of eye disorder, and a severe personality problem called hebephrenia or something like that. Maybe her doctors wouldn’t let her take a trip with me. But the main reason I can’t take her is that she’d look terribly out of place there. Do you know, she’s never changed her hat or her dress since I’ve known her? She looks weird.”

  You controlled yourself, did not wince, and made a mental note to take Cathlin shopping for a new outfit. You wrote, But perhaps it would crush her if she knew that you were ask
ing me. I think you should invite her.

  “Okay. But if she won’t go, or can’t go, will you?”

  You wrote, I would have to give that some careful thought.

  At the next meeting of the Narrative class, the instructor was visibly surprised to discover that his star pupil was wearing a new dress and a new hat and had left off some of those cackling bracelets, and that her earrings were pendulous but not noisy, and that she did not have quite so much rouge on her cheeks, and that although her lipstick quite obviously attempted to redraw the entire shape of her mouth it was not a gaudy orange but a relatively modest pink. She may still have seemed too weird to be in the company of the ladies of bow, but she was no longer a caricature.

  And whatever her appearance, she had been knocking herself out doing the work for the course, not only writing, diligently, a new chapter each week (with the help of much Hillman research into the history, folkways, and features of North Ireland), but also assigning herself the readings that the instructor had been neglecting: many chapters of the Booth, many stories of the Stegner. As but one example of her conscientious devotion, she had made an honest effort to locate, and learn, the words to “Danny Boy,” so that if the instructor ever sang it to her again, drunk or sober, and wanted to know any of the words, she would be able to tell him.

  But try as she might, Cathlin had not been able to find the words to that song. Even with the help of three reference librarians at Hillman, one of whom said, “Sure, everybody knows that song,” but had been able to sing only six lines and hum the remainder, Cathlin could not find any book in Hillman that contained the lyrics.

  I am yours, precious Kat, and I did not feel obliged to perform any favors for this alter ego you had fabricated to permit the mycologist to study writing undetected. But Cathlin’s beating her brains out trying to find the words to that song finally got to me, and I decided I’d better give her a hand. So I arranged for her to stop off, on apparent impulse, at a back-street secondhand bookshop, where I arranged for a dusty volume to fall off a shelf into her hands, and for her to flip through it and chance upon, on page eighty-nine, “Danny Boy.” The book was Songs that Changed the World, edited by Wanda Willson Whitman, Crown, 1969. Cathlin bought it for two dollars. It would also furnish her, if she needed them, with the words and music to “Old Folks at Home,” “Loch Lomond,” and “The Blue Bells of Scotland.”