But Aaron Benham is not created to observe. It is his body and mind he must manipulate against the movement of time. He must make and dominate. If he listens and observes he is, at best, biding and using. If he is in action he is alive.
NOTES ON MARY TOLLIVER
is written on the page before him.
She has a funny smile. Not totally wide perfectly adjusted Pepsodent American Girl. No, a trace of self-mockery there, a small wry bit of self-consciousness. After all, she is New England, and also of the Irish-haunted Catholic Church, the foe of the flesh.
Her green eye-fleck catches the light, so you look at its jade glitter, specifically at it, and the rest of her fades yet grows—the impression of wide, present warmth. Then look carefully at her face. The muscles of her jaw constrict her lips, so that they are precise, almost as if carved, convexly firm, yet the effect when they move is one of generosity, as though her sweetness triumphs over her face’s tension.
Her feet smell cleanly of walking, of shoes, of the faint and touching human vinegar of foot.
Her legs are slim, her knees as small as is, probably, functionally possible, yet when she (somewhat awkwardly) swings at a tennis ball a line of delineation appears in the muscle of her upper leg, running from hip to knee—a reminder of animal necessity. Power there.
Her calves delicately surround bone, saying inside is ivory, or gleaming pearl.
She is pampered by soaps and lotions which, combined with the faintest acridity of life, constitute her perfume.
So long ago.
His study closes in upon him. He remembers with a chill how he was once free to go wherever he wanted, whenever he wanted. He cannot leave right now and go to Paris. He cannot leave his possessions and those who possess him. But he could. Anxious despair flows through his lower body, seeming to dissolve his hips. He sees himself somehow crawling out to his motorcycle, trying to start it, his children crying, fading away from him.
* * *
Allard awoke that Friday morning before his visit to Mary’s home with a quickly identified dread. He had met fathers before and those times had always been haunted by a tense semi-dishonesty in which he’d let his Jack Armstrongish clean-cut look of youth do most of the lying for him. Fathers always gave him a sort of mental blood test which he always passed—with reservations. There had been the hearty fathers with a detective glint in the oblique glance, the upstaging fathers who implied that real men weren’t minted any more, the chummy fathers who implied that all women, including their daughters, were inferior (though precious), and so on. From what Mary had told him, she and her father were very close, which of course intensified his dread. As a free agent, why had he gotten himself into such a boringly anxious situation?
He had two classes that morning. The first was in psychology, which mainly concerned, because of the instructor’s specialty and Allard’s bad luck, the testing of the efficiency of industrial workers. This he sat through in a semi-torpor intruded upon occasionally by apprehension. The second was English, and concerned the much crisper minds of the eighteenth century:
Eves tempter thus the rabbins have expressed,
A cherub’s face, a reptile all the rest;
Beauty that shocks you, parts that none will trust,
Wit that can creep, and pride that licks the dust.
None would trust except Eve, that is. Or perhaps trust wasn’t the right emotion at all.
Mary had a ride home that morning with a girl in her dormitory, and he would leave on his motorcycle that afternoon in time to get there for dinner, which Mary would prepare. To show how good a homemaker she was? He shivered with something like pity. He couldn’t tolerate certain rituals, even those of his own class. Or especially those of his own class. Here was Mary, acting the part of the little mother to her family. Sad and embarrassing that she must peel potatoes and bake a chicken or whatever. Sad that she wanted to please by her domestic skills, and even sadder that she wanted her brother and father to like her boyfriend, her near-fiancé (that word offended especially), Allard Benson. Wit that can creep, and pride that licks the dust. As he left the class building he shivered in the cool spring air.
He met Nathan and his girl at the Student Union. Nathan’s girl, Angela Fitzgibbon, at twenty was a handsome giantess with the natural presence of a duchess. Tall, broad and stately, she represented to Nathan all of the high-class values he admired. With her healthy skin, solid, confident haunches, husky shoulders and patrician jaw, she moved upon the earth as if she owned it. She was really a nice girl who had been born to gleam expensively, no doubt to be the consort of a rich and handsome giant. “Thighs like a wild mare,” Nathan said admiringly (Nathan had just read Darkness at Noon). Allard had a vision of Nathan submerging into all that golden flesh like a wiry ferret. Angela outweighed Nathan by at least thirty pounds, but they were thirty pounds of solid value. She watched Nathan with fascinated admiration as he strutted and vibrated around her. Knuck Gillis admired Nathan’s presumption, too. “Nate,” he’d said, “you got to have balls as big as grapefruit.”
Allard came up to their table with his coffee and Angela moved her coat to another chair so he could sit down.
“So today you’re going to meet the family,” Nathan said.
“Don’t rub it in.”
“Just be sure to use the right fork for the soup,” Nathan said.
Allard said to Angela, “Have you exhibited Nathan to your family?”
“My fatha,” Angela said in her high-class accent, “would take one look at Nathan and gew tewtally ewt of his mind.”
“We’re trying to think of ways to prepare them for the shock,” Nathan said.
“For instance,” Angela said, “we thought of hinting to them that Fm having a liaison with a Negro. After that they might even be relieved to settle for Nathan. Actually, once poor fatha got over Nathan’s ratha classical Semitic characteristics and diminutive stature, I know they’d hit it off quate well.”
“But he’s a big bastard, Angela tells me,” Nathan said. “He could eat me up in one bite. I mean, at least, Allard, you look like one of Mary’s kind, even if you’re not a Catholic.”
“Fatha, Fm afraid, has always been ratha specific about tall men, preferably Scots.”
“You could get Nathan kilts and some elevator shoes.”
“Yeah,” Nathan said, “the Weinstein plaid and ten-inch heels.” He uttered a discouraged groan.
“When I was a very little gull,” Angela said, “I had a little dog I deahly loved, a whippet. Fve often wondered if deah little Samson hadn’t something to do with my preference for vibrant, ambitious, possessive little men like Nathan.”
“You don’t have to be quite that brutally frank, Angela!” Nathan said, laughing his strange laugh.
Allard left those well-matched lovers at eleven in order to meet Harold Roux, who had to buy a secondhand car and needed advice. Harold had in mind a 1936 DeSoto for sale by a speech instructor, who wanted $300 for it.
“I thought I could hitchhike back and forth,” Harold said, “but I don’t think I have the temperament for it. I put out my thumb and most people just look right through me. It’s awfully embarrassing for both of us.”
So Harold had to cash in some of the war bonds he’d saved in the army. They stood in front of the library waiting for the speech instructor’s class to get out. Allard, out of nervousness, he supposed, told Harold he was going to spend the weekend at Mary’s home in Concord.
“Her father’s been very ill, you know, Allard.”
The implied warning—all such wearisome moral warnings—was irritating. “Evidently Mary thinks he can stand the shock.”
“I wonder if Mary is thinking lately at all.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake. Are you my spiritual adviser or something?”
“Maybe I should be.”
“Well, go ahead. Advise, advise.”
“For a start, don’t say ‘For Christ’s sake’ in front of Mr. Tolliver.”
“Cross yourself, Harold. You just blasphemed.”
“I wouldn’t think it was funny if I did.”
“Come on, now. Aren’t you losing your faith, little by little? Consorting with all these godless intellectuals around here?”
“I find I need it more and more.”
Allard leaned back against a sun-warmed fence of decorative ironwork. Harold, beside him, never quite leaned. A girl passed, a plain girl in saddle shoes, bobbysocks and a long tweed skirt. Her pink cashmere cardigan, part of the uniform, accentuated the nervous ungivingness of her face. Soft pink against the heavy strain of defense. She refused to catch Allard’s eye, but as she walked on by, hugging her books, her whole body became so tensely centripetal she seemed to have difficulty walking in a straight line.
“An act of aggression,” Harold said.
“What? For Christ’s sake (pardon me), Harold, all I did was look at the girl. I wasn’t going to goose her or anything.”
“She knew what you were thinking.”
“What I was thinking? I can’t remember what I was thinking. This is unbelievable!”
And yet, in spite of his exasperation, he found pleasure in the intensity of Harold’s disapproving regard. He hadn’t told Harold that he was thinking of marrying Mary. The omission seemed logical and sadly ominous. This frail authority, this moral force who wore something like a crown of thorns—invisible thorns.
Finally the flattish bell in the Ad Building tower struck once, for eleven-thirty, a sound that might have been made by a tire iron on a wheel rim. Shortly after that, threading his way through the students, against the current, came me speech instructor. “Foreman, Geoffrey,” he said, putting a large, firm hand into Allard’s. He was an ordinary-sized man with large appendages, including a large square head made even more rectilinear by a squared off bow tie and a shaped black crew cut.
“Allard Benson,” Allard said.
“Good to meet you, Mr. Allard!” The voice was also large, basso, reverberant, a developed voice handled with obvious pleasure. Harold was about to correct Foreman, Geoffrey, but Allard caught his eye and shook his head slightly. Harold frowned, but accepted.
“I am reminded of the poem ‘O what is so rare as a day in Spring!’” Foreman, Geoffrey, said, slowly raising both arms in tribute to the sun, his face sternly, yet inspirationally, immobile. “But of course you want to see Matilda.” The voice admitted business, virile business, into the poetic day. He laughed, the sounds of his laughter cradled, shaped, almost caressed by the wonderful instrument in the throat. “I call my car ‘Matilda’!”
“Waltzing Matilda?” Allard asked, and received a totally blank look. Nothing. The instructor’s systems had all turned off. But then the machine began humming, gathering strength until it could again define the moment.
“If you two men would be so good as to accompany me, I will take you to Matilda, whereupon you may effect the closest of inspections!” His laugh fascinated Allard; it reminded him, in spite of its ludicrously formal booms and transitional runs, of the memory of fear. Something from childhood—a radio program like Inner Sanctum, or The Shadow. Was a deliberate laugh a laugh at all? Nathan Weinstein had a very peculiar laugh, but was certainly unaware of it. If one even heard one’s own laugh, was that laughter real? He couldn’t think what his own laughter sounded like. In fact the very idea of laughter seemed so ridiculous he could easily believe that the human race never laughed at all. To make garbled, coughing, stuttering sounds just because you were amused was unbelievable. Crying, however, that other un-morphemed noise, seemed perfectly memorable in its sounds and logical in its purposes.
They reached the parking lot and Matilda, who though fairly unrusted about the scuppers was a little dowdy and scruffy in her old age. She seemed, without having been in an obvious wreck, to have lost her symmetry. Her old eyes were somewhat rheumy and unfocused. Allard, posing as the expert consultant, inspected her surfaces and peered into her orifices. Finally, in his gynecological, or perhaps urological, guise, he looked up her exhaust pipe. By the color, she used a little oil. Her odometer admitted to sixty thousand miles, but her engine ticked along in an easy, tappety yet contented way that indicated she would continue to run for a while. Harold drove Matilda up the highway for a mile or so, then back to the parking lot; Matilda was not overheated by the exercise. She even had a radio that worked, and her spare tire, Allard had noted, was nearly new.
“A little long in the tooth but a nice old soul,” Allard said. “Why do you want to sell her?”
“Indeed, I hate to have to sell Matilda, but I am going to Europe directly following commencement, you see, and to keep Matilda would necessitate the procurement of storage facilities.”
“That sounds reasonable.” Allard looked over at Harold, who waited trustingly for his verdict. “I’d say she’s worth all of two hundred,” he said.
“Ah. It was three hundred,” said Foreman, Geoffrey, from the back seat.
“She burns oil,” Allard said sternly.
“A minuscule consumption of oil,” Foreman, Geoffrey, said defensively. “Specifically, one quart of No. 30, SAE, per thousand miles. But shall we say, in order to effect an amicable compromise, two seventy-five?”
Matilda cooled creakily.
“Harold,” Allard said. “Harold …” He laughed, noting the strange, breathless sound, also noting that he was devoid of anxiousness in this affair. Usually he could not bargain because he could not imply that a stranger was not telling the whole truth. But it must be easier to imply mendaciousness, avarice, or whatever it was, to someone whose very instrument of communication had been self-dehumanized. And then there was Harold’s head of lush, false hair. Matilda, surrounding these actors with her worn plush, was the most honest party to the transaction.
Gravely they got out of Matilda in order to view her again from the outside. They examined her thoughtfully.
“Harold, I’d find it against my conscience to recommend that you pay more than two twenty-five for this friendly but spavined old creature.” He patted Matilda on her hinged bonnet.
Foreman, Geoffrey, was again stopped, disarmed, as if he sensed Allard’s powerful distance from involvement. Helpless for those moments without his voice, he looked pitifully inert, like a cutout silhouette. Then, with a shrug that was uncalculated, he accepted the implied final price of two fifty.
Harold’s voice failed as he agreed. He looked fearfully at Matilda, obviously shaken at the prospect of owning all of her. But, bravely, he would join his fate with hers; he and Foreman, Geoffrey, went off to find a notary public.
Allard, feeling somewhat soiled by the ways of the world and at the same time shamefully proud of himself, proceeded to the student parking lot where he’d left his motorcycle.
Naomi was sitting on it, sidesaddle, reading a book. Her long black hair shaded her face from the sun but spread apart when she looked up at him, as though her face came out from dark curtains. She was good news to him, fresh air compared to the nervous inevitable business of visiting Mary’s home.
“Have you had lunch?” she said. She was all dressed up, for her, in a dark green skirt of shiny material and a white peasant blouse with puffed sleeves. Though her arms were dark and smooth against the starched white, legitimately old-worldish and peasantlike, she looked very young in the outfit.
“What’s the occasion?” he asked, indicating her clothes.
“I have to appear before the dormitory disciplinary firing squad this afternoon, which means I have to wear the enemy’s uniform. Bunch of starved little cunts.”
“Oh-oh.”
“Lest I get evicted and lose my room rent, which the filthy fascists made my parents pay against my will in the first place.”
“Oh my, Naomi! What did you do?”
“I stayed out too late a couple of times. Past the devirgin-izing hour, evidently. I also walked down the third-floor hall to the showers stark-naked, not to mention back to the room. I called the housemother a snea
ky fink bitch, to a sneaky fink bitch. There is also the pretty rumor that I’m a lesbian. And I am a communist. I suppose it could be worse. Nobody’s accused me of being an arsonist or a kleptomaniac—yet.”
Though Allard laughed, Naomi wouldn’t even smile. She swung her long leg over the motorcycle and tucked her skirt beneath her so it wouldn’t catch in the spokes, waited while he put their books in the saddlebags and then straightened her leg so he could kick down the starter. The machine seemed hers, or theirs; it had taken them off to so many comradely hours—comradely after their immediate forces diffused within each other. She held him lightly, her hands on his ribs.
“You would laugh,” she said. “You’re so disgustingly apolitical.”
He swung the machine away and they curved, leaning, out of the parking lot to the street, then went down the long hill to the business area, not trying to speak over the wind and the engine. With the engine stopped again he said, “But everything isn’t political.”
“It depends on how you look at it. How aware you are. I can’t understand how you can accept, even laugh, at a system that’s so viciously exploitive.”
“One that doesn’t want you to walk down the halls naked?”
“That’s part of it. That really is part of it. It’s sick, rotten to the core. I mean there really are those poor bitches who’ve been driven out of their fragile little minds by what they’ve been told, and they do go hysterical when they see me naked. Can you imagine how sick they are? And I’m supposed to be the lesbian. Jesus Christ!”
“Well, maybe deep down inside you are a great wild bull dyke, Naomi.” He laughed, and to irritate her still more took her hand to help her off the motorcycle.
“I think you’re hysterical,” she said, pulling her hand away. “I don’t know why I spend any time at all with you. You’re not serious.” They went into the varnished wooden interior of the Coffee Shop, found an empty booth and sat down, their elbows careful among the damp plates, cups, spills and ashes of its previous occupants. Allard took the side of the booth where he could see an always amazing wall panel of marquetry, its wood veneers depicting in warm tones a castle, clouds and mountains in Bavaria, probably—Schloss Wittgenstein or something. The grains of the various woods so precisely gave clouds, meadows and forested hills their reality. The truest precision here was random, accidental. When he looked closely at those lines made by the jigsaw they were not good at all; the perspectives were crude, the human choices bad. But he felt almost inside that wooden world, feeling its heights and depths in his centers of balance.
The Hair of Harold Roux Page 20
