Passion Play

by W. Edward Blain

  Greg Lipscomb, who watched from the doorway, had arrived just as Cynthia left the room. He saw Farnham throw the brush, then stare, motionless, at the bed in front of him. Greg could see that the man was mad. Damn. He was dying to investigate this tunnel business, but not when Farnham was on the rampage. He would have to pursue it some other time.

  SCENE 24

  The rain had let up by the time Cynthia emerged from Bradley Hall around 8:45 P.M. She moved against a wave of boys and their dates just arriving for the extravaganza. Thomas Boatwright and a cute girl in a yellow rain parka passed her on their way in. Thomas looked cute, too, in his blue ski jacket, plaid flannel shirt, and blue jeans. The hillbilly look had arrived among the preppies. She caught his eye and he greeted her shyly, but he did not stop to introduce his girlfriend. Cynthia had grown accustomed to such mannerisms among the Montpelier boys. They never thought it was necessary to make introductions across generational borders.

  A damp mist permeated the campus. As Cynthia walked toward the gym, a wave of fatigue hit her and nearly knocked her down. She had to stop and lean against a tree. You’re trying to do too much, she thought. Go home and go to bed. Go see your husband.

  But she continued to walk toward the gym. Dan Farnham’s apartment door was on the south end of the building. It was strange to be entering another person’s apartment. Over the square concrete stoop a bulb shone, illuminating harshly the door in the surrounding gloom. As Farnham had promised, the wooden door was unlocked. Inside it was warm. She clicked on a ceiling light; she had not been in this apartment since Ben had moved out and Farnham had moved in. The place was furnished with institutional-grade stuff provided by the school—heavy-legged tables, fake-leather red sofa and chairs, even the generic ducks and hunting scenes framed on the walls. She saw Harper’s and American Film stacked neatly on the coffee table, but aside from the magazines and one small bookshelf containing paperbacks, there was no sign of Farnham’s personal life whatsoever. All his secrets had been tidied and tucked away. She snooped a bit. The efficiency kitchenette was antiseptically clean, only orange juice and beer in the refrigerator. The single bed in the bedroom was neatly made. The bathroom was spotless.

  The attack of lethargy had passed, and so she resisted the temptation to sit and rest in one of the chairs. But at the thought she felt her innards squirm with a startling excitement. I’m like Goldilocks in the house of the three bears, she thought. A voyeur. Or would that be feminine, voyeuse? Who’s been sitting in my chair? She could barely help giggling. Who’s been sleeping in my bed?

  She took the stairs down to explore the rest of his home. A study, another bathroom, a guest room. Everything was so tidy. On the interior wall was a large metallic door. She walked across the beige carpeting and opened it. In front of her, lighted only by the exit signs over the doors at each end of the hall, lay the long, slick concrete flooring of the locker room level of the gym. She found a light switch on the wall and clicked on a row of lamps across the ceiling. Then she entered the hallway.

  The gym is lovely, dark, and deep, she thought. She had never been out here in the locker room level. She was amused at how much it turned her on. It was a schoolgirl fantasy, to be sneaking around in the place where boys took off their clothes and splashed around in the showers. Past the locked glass doors of the darkened locker rooms, past the coaches’ offices and the training room, she approached the stairs at the opposite end of the hall. Two doors on the far wall had clumsy signs taped at eye level. MCPHEE APT., KNOCK 1ST, the door on the left said in black Magic Marker. The other, fifteen feet to the right, said in different writing, BOILER. RED FLAG. KEEP OUT. It was signed ANGUS. Cynthia’s fatigue had disappeared. She felt privy to all sorts of secrets, roaming here in the bowels of the gymnasium. At the same time she felt guilty. Was this why she had insisted upon taking this duty? Did she have some unconscious urge to pry?

  It was time to move upward into the airier spaces.

  The stairs were dark too, lighted faintly at the landings by windows, through which a dim glow from the campus sidewalk lights filtered. One flight up, at the basketball court level, Cynthia saw nothing. Up another flight and she was at the weight room and the practice room for the wrestlers. A padlocked chain secured the door to the weight room.

  The door to the wrestling room was open.

  She did not know that this was the room where Russell Phillips had been killed earlier in the week. She was not even sure of whether the room should have been locked or not. What attracted her was the sight of the soft foamy mats across the floor. A floodlight outside the window threw a soft reflection onto the dark blue vinyl of the mats. Inside the room, other mats, rolled and stored vertically like columns, lined the walls. Three ropes hung from beams on the ceiling, and attached to one wall she saw a pegboard. She felt tired again, now that she had climbed some stairs and had dissipated the adrenaline surge of exploring the lower depths.

  She was unaware that someone was in the room with her. Cynthia took off her plastic scarf and raincoat, folded the coat, and used it as a pillow as she stretched out supine on the mat, facing the window, leaving the door and the rolled columns of mats behind her. Little black scarabs of blindness floated skyward in front of her. She began to weep, not gradually, but at once in one surprising sob. It was so unfair, this waxing and waning of the life force in her. There was so much she wanted to do, and her body was betraying her. She retained the urges but lost the energy, kept the will but lost grip of the means. Self-pity surrendered to anger. She would not succumb to a virus. She would play Desdemona, and she would finish her dissertation, and she would continue with student activities here at Montpelier. Fumbling in the coat folded under her head, she found her handkerchief and dried her face.

  Pulling herself up to her knees, she faced the window as if in supplication, arms out, pleading. She no longer saw spots in front of her eyes. Instead she imagined Othello, advancing on her, carrying a lantern and also a determination to kill her. She spoke her lines from memory:

  That death’s unnatural that kills for loving.

  Alas, why gnaw you so your nether lip?

  Some bloody passion shakes your very frame:

  These are portents; but yet I hope, I hope,

  They do not point on me.

  Behind her she thought she heard a noise. She turned to see what it was.

  “Angus?” she said.

  SCENE 25

  Richard Blackburn sat in demerit hall in the basement of Fleming Hall with two books open in front of him. The book visible to an onlooker was a Dick Francis thriller, still number one on the best-seller list and a perfectly respectable volume for him to be perusing on this Saturday evening.

  It was not, however, the book he was reading. Tucked inside was The Fuck Book, which Richard had found over the Thanksgiving break in the bus station and snagged to bring back to school. It was all about sex, some of it stuff that Richard had never even heard of before. It made him a little uncomfortable.

  It was five minutes until 9:00. Another thirty-five minutes to go. The wooden seat was uncomfortable, and the ancient graffiti carved in the desk in front of him was as familiar as his own fingernails. There were twelve boys in D-hall tonight, a small number. Since it was just after a holiday and the beginning of a new term, fewer people than usual had had the opportunity to build up enough demerits to qualify for Saturday night detention. They were spread over the large study hall room, six rows of desks, twelve desks in a row, all desks bolted to the floor, all facing the proctor’s desk in the front of the room, all perfectly visible under the bright neon lights.

  He looked up from his books at the dark windows splattered with rain. Immediately he heard Chuck Heilman clear his voice at the front of the room. He turned to see Heilman staring him down and shaking his head. They were supposed to study for two solid hours and not behave like normal people and look out the windows. Talk about cruel and unusual punishment. And then they pick the geekiest, stupidest teachers to be t
he supervisors, so if you do look up, you have to look at somebody like Heilman, whose fat fingers delicately flipped through a book of famous quotations as he worked on tomorrow’s undoubtedly tedious sermon.

  Richard was angry at Landon Hopkins for crying about his stupid Shakespeare book and angrier at Daniel Farnham for sticking him in here. That was all right. He was going to get his revenge soon enough. Setting off the alarm in the gym had been just a warm-up exercise. Tonight came the coup de grace.

  Outside in the bushes Richard had hidden a black plastic garbage bag. Inside the black plastic was a brown paper grocery bag. Inside the grocery bag was a dead squirrel.

  He had found the squirrel this afternoon in the middle of the road surrounding the campus. Immediately he had known that the squirrel would end up as a major inconvenience to Daniel Farnham. He had kicked it off to the side of the road, where he had come back after dark with a couple of bags and some sticks and had scooped it up. He’d been planning to leave the squirrel in a burning grocery bag on Farnham’s front porch and ring the doorbell. Farnham would come to the door, see the fire, and stomp it out. He’d get squirrel all over himself.

  The problem was that Farnham was supervising the mixer. So he wouldn’t be home. It was beginning to seem like a silly, risky plan anyway, with all these people all over the campus. Maybe he would just leave the squirrel in Farnham’s car. Or hide it somewhere in the scene shop. By Monday it would stink like hell. What he’d really like to do is leave it in Landon Hopkins’s bed, under the pillow. Too bad he didn’t have two dead squirrels to play with.

  Heilman was clearing his throat again. Richard looked up.

  “There’s a movie on television tonight that my wife and I really want to see,” said Heilman. “You know what I’m going to do with you rascals? I’m going to let you out of here half an hour early. Now scoot.”

  Scoot. Madre de Dios, but Heilman was such a nerd. Still, Richard scooted himself right out that door and down to the mixer at Bradley.

  It was cold and damp outside, but Bradley Hall was steamng. Richard left his coat on anyway. The place was packed. He paused in the foyer and then turned left, toward the art room, and tried to spot Farnham.

  Thomas was in the hallway with his girlfriend, Hesta. She was pretty nice, Richard supposed, but he couldn’t see anything special about her. For Boatwright, she was like Venus. Richard thought girls were interesting in a clinical sort of way, but he didn’t have time to pursue a regular girlfriend. He saw himself as too busy to fool with them. He also found them a little scary.

  “What are you doing here?” Thomas asked him.

  “Heilman decided to act human.”

  “Susie Boardman’s here without a date,” Hesta said.

  “Yeah,” Richard had said. “Well, I’m waiting for some people.”

  Boatwright and his bimbo went inside the art studio to dance.

  Down the hall was the scene shop. Richard could see that the light was on. He unzipped his coat and moved down to scope the place out. There were people constantly in motion in the hallway, so it was easy for Richard to approach the door and take a casual peek inside as he strolled by. Someone was inside, all right. But it wasn’t Farnham; it was Greg Lipscomb.

  Richard walked into the scene shop. “You seen Farnham?” he said. The band on the stage was on break, so they could talk without screaming.

  Lipscomb was pacing around the bed frame in the middle of the room like some guy in the movies whose wife was about to have a baby. “He just left,” he said. He was acting as though Richard were some mosquito.

  “What’s your problem?” said Richard.

  “Nothing. You seen Tom?”

  “Just a second ago. He’s with Hesta.” Richard didn’t have anything against black guys, but he couldn’t stand it when somebody had a secret and obviously kept it from him. “Look, I’m not here to bug you. I just want to find Farnham.”

  “I wouldn’t try talking to him now if I were you.”

  “I don’t want to talk to him. I just want to know where he is.”

  “Farnham went flying out of here,” Lipscomb said, “after doing that.” He pointed to a brown stain on the cinder-block wall and the glistening damp brush on the floor that had made it.

  “What’s he mad about now?”

  “Who knows? Something to do with Mrs. Warden, I guess.”

  “She was in here with him?” Richard could imagine what was going on. Apparently Mrs. Warden was some nymphomaniac, if you could believe what Robert Staines said about finding her on the floor with her husband, but he couldn’t conceive of a wimp like Farnham ever actually doing it with her.

  “She was here, she left, he went crazy, he left. I was here to ask him a favor, but not when he’s throwing paintbrushes.”

  Throwing paintbrushes. Crud. He could be anywhere. Richard should leave Boatwright’s roommate to paint the bed or whatever he wanted to do. Lipscomb sure was jumpy.

  “Why are you so skittish?” Richard asked. He did not really expect an answer.

  Instead of shrugging him off, Lipscomb surprised him. “I’m about to bust to tell somebody,” he said. “Can you keep a secret?”

  Richard said he was practically a priest.

  “I think I’ve found that secret tunnel Delaney’s been talking about.”

  “Bull.”

  Greg told him about the drawing in the library and his theory that the tunnel led from Stringfellow Hall to the basement of the gym. “Do you think it makes sense, with the chimneys and all?” he said.

  “It makes a hell of a lot of sense,” said Richard. Ideas exploded like popcorn. Oh, yes, yes, yes, it was perfect. To think that he had been getting tired of the whole project, that he had been on the verge of leaving the squirrel on McPhee’s doorstep, McPhee who was also a jerk, but the squirrel seemed so right for Farnham, who was so tidy and picky and perfect.

  Richard shrieked with his most contrived mad-scientist-sounding laughter. Several people from the hallway looked inside the scene shop, then moved on.

  The band started to play again, so Richard had to shout. “Show me this blueprint,” he yelled. “We have an early Christmas present to deliver to Mr. Farnham.”

  SCENE 26

  This was the best night ever. All the problems from earlier in the day had disappeared. Hesta looked great, the bands sounded great, everybody was having a good time. Thomas couldn’t believe he was at Montpelier with all of these girls around. They were everywhere: tall girls who stooped over self-consciously, short girls with cute little doll faces, hefty girls who laughed a lot, skinny girls whose eyes dared you to try them out. Thomas loved the way girls behaved, the way they linked arms with each other or danced with each other, the way they sat with their backs so straight, the way they shook their hair back from their faces like beautiful horses. It was almost too much for him, all these curves and mounds and valleys vaguely concealed by a few millimeters of cloth. Even if Hesta had not been there, it would have been wonderful.

  But for Thomas it was as though he and Hesta were the only two people in the room. Or as though the other people in the room were not capable of understanding what kind of electrical connection Thomas and Hesta were making. He had this stupid grin on his face all the time, and she was smiling, too, and they were talking in spite of the loudness of the music about everything in the world. Thomas had never felt so happy.

  The Prodigals were playing a bunch of oldies—stuff by the Four Tops and the Beatles and the Beach Boys. It was as though every song was played for them. He was loose. His body just moved to the beat of whatever tune they were playing, and Hesta, well, Hesta was always a good dancer. He loved to watch her shake her head at him during a fast song while she still kept her eyes on him. And when they played a slow song and he and Hesta got up close and actually touched all the way down their bodies, that was it, that was paradise, that was the ultimate merger of body and soul. Yet the longer they danced, and the more they touched, the more Thomas was aware of the h
eat pumping through his veins, of the quickness of his breath, of the growing, throbbing energy in his loins. He wanted to kiss her so badly, but there was no way here, not with all the guys around, not on the dance floor in front of all the teachers.

  He remembered Robert Staines in the locker room talking about how all girls wanted it really, about how you had to be aggressive, and he thought about how Staines was like some damn dog that needed to mount something every week or so. He wondered confusedly, though, whether maybe Staines could be wrong even if he was successful. Thomas knew what he desired, knew what he was going to do if he got the opportunity, and knew that the moment of truth had arrived. He would ask her a question, and if she turned him down, then fine, it wasn’t meant to be.

  He was going to ask her if she wanted to leave the mixer. She would know that he was asking her to go fool around, and it would be all up to her. Surely she must feel the same way he did, that everything was just so right and so true. Surely she wanted to as much as he did. And if she didn’t, well, that was it then; they would stay here.

  “Do you want to go outside?” he whispered in her ear. Then he pulled back his head and looked at her eyes.

  She looked straight back at him. He knew what she was going to say before she spoke.

  “Yes,” she said.

  His excitement grew.

  SCENE 27

  Richard was sold absolutely.

  “You’re a great detective,” he said. “This has got to be Farnham’s apartment, and this has got to be a tunnel leading to Stringfellow.”

  They were back in the Archives Room looking at the blueprint. Richard was convinced that Greg had made a significant discovery. But the more Richard raved, the more dubious Greg became.

  “It’s just a couple of lines running off a basement,” Greg said. “We can’t be sure it’s the old library.”

  “Of course it is,” said Richard. He pointed out the scrawled identification “GYMNASIUM” on the back of the drawing. “There are three fireplaces in the gym, correct?”