The Hair of Harold Roux

by Thomas Williams

  At eleven-thirty his name was called while he was in the showers. He wrapped a towel around himself and went down the hall to the telephone.

  “Hello?” he said to the telephone.

  “It’s me,” she said.

  “Hi.”

  “I don’t know what I want to say to you,” she said.

  “You know I love you,” he said.

  “I just had to talk to you.”

  “Okay.”

  “I can’t talk to anybody about it and it never happened to me before.”

  “It wasn’t that horrible, was it?”

  “I wish I could touch you.”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “All right.”

  A week later they were in the miniature bungalow, where they were supposed to be changing their clothes before going to swim. On his knees, holding her calves in his hands, he tasted her feet. He looked down between her legs at that part of her she didn’t think pretty, and in fact didn’t know much about at all. She saw him looking at her, where no one should look. She saw him looking at her there and her face grew bothered and dark. He spread her legs wider, watching her look at his strange face looking at her wound. She had no places forbidden to him. Nothing was forbidden to him and her life had changed so much she could hardly remember what it was like to have honor and to tell the truth. She would go to hell, where she would burn. As for confession and contrition, she would never speak of her lover to anyone and she was much too intelligent to fake contrition when she knew he would call for her and she would do whatever he wanted her to do. She lied to her father, to her priest, to God. Strangely, the knowledge that she was damned had grown easier to bear. At first she needed her lover’s presence and was sane only when he was there to touch—the tangible, convincing reason for her fall. When he was not there she was in agony. She couldn’t eat, she couldn’t study, she couldn’t sleep. In a week she grew so thin her clothes became baggy on her, her nylons loose on her calves and thighs. She missed two final exams, and if it hadn’t been for her A averages and her puzzled but sympathetic professors she would have failed both courses. Dark places appeared beneath her eyes. She looked older, an experienced woman, a divorcee, making that tragic, half-humorous grimace in the mirror. She tried to think of herself as one of those women who have been ruined for love, used and ruined—the Sorority of Deflowered Virgins. Ex-virgins. But she got no relief from communion with all those teary fallen angels. It had really happened to her. She knew he was lying. She was known by this man. She received him. She was his slave. She knew that she was his slave because she had no right not to do whatever he wanted whenever he wanted. She lied to the housemother; Naomi signed her in when she was not in. The dormitory and the university had no meaning any more. She existed to be with him. She had nothing left of her own, nothing. If he didn’t call for her, she died. Sometimes, when she was riding behind him on his motorcycle, her arms around him, she hoped for the worst, the blackest sin of all—that they would crash and both die instantly, the dead hearts touching. But then that night he would take her and she didn’t know her pleasure from agony. She didn’t know if the moans she couldn’t stop making were moans of pleasure or of terrible fear of the pleasure that came up out of her and became him and burned herself out of herself. It was a stranger to her, a vile corrupted sinner who did it. Far away now were the years when she was at peace.

  And then, in the afternoon in the bungalow, he was empty and she was full. She touched his face that was miraculously pure and clean. He slept and she wanted to bear him like a baby, feed him from her breasts, hold him and protect him. His breath was sweet on her lips. She touched his little nipple as he slept.

  For a minute or two he did drop off to sleep, awaking to find Mary kissing his chest. “Have we swum enough?” he said.

  She laughed, a short laugh that was new to her, as was the ironic twist it gave to her lips. “We ought to be getting back, I suppose,” she said.

  In one week she had changed so much. He had noticed the small bluish places beneath her eyes. For some reason her worries had turned her beautiful, as though she had lost baby fat. Her face had more angles, more character.

  She moved her hand down his belly to his pubic hair and his soft penis, taking it in her fingers. “I can’t believe what I do with you,” she said. She pulled the soft thing up straight and watched it begin to fill, then quickly put it down. “Harold will wonder what happened to us. We’d better go on down.”

  “I imagine he’d disapprove a bit,” he said.

  “I almost feel like laughing but I don’t know what’s so funny,” she said, a grimace twisting her lips.

  “Are you that unhappy?”

  “Yes. I want to be honest.”

  “We’re honest with each other,” he said.

  “Are we? Anyway, come on, get dressed. We’ll go have a glass of Harold’s sherry and pretend I’m a virgin.”

  “Harold is a virgin,” he said as he began to put his clothes on.

  “I’ll tell you something I don’t like. I felt I had to wet our bathing suits in the bathroom so if Harold saw them he’d think we went swimming.”

  “Fuck Harold, Mary. What do you care what he thinks?”

  “Because, whether he wears a wig or not, he’s honest.”

  “He’s a good Catholic,” he said, watching her carefully.

  She was not ready to discuss this. “He’s kind and gentle,” she said.

  “That I’ve got to admit. He’s also a little prissy and fussy.”

  Mary took a breath. “Also,” she said, “there’s something you’ll be relieved to hear. I just found out in the bathroom I’m not going to have a baby.”

  “I wondered why you brought so much luggage today.” She’d brought a wide leather shoulder bag with her.

  “Sometimes your sophistication makes me sick,” she said. He was buttoning his shirt. He turned toward her to find that her eyes were shiny with tears, so he put his arms around her and she leaned into him, snuffing her nose. Her fingernails dug into his back with a fierceness that was just this side of doing real damage.

  “Harold will be expecting us,” he said. She hiccupped within his hands as he lifted her off the floor. “Look, Mary, we are not sinners, you are not a ruined woman. In fact you’re twice as pretty as you were last week. You are definitely not a virgin any longer, true, but who in hell wants to be a virgin?”

  “Impure,” she said.

  “And thank God for that.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  * * *

  Harold met them at the Town Hall. His style of clothes had changed, probably in imitation of Colonel Immingham’s. Gone were the rickety thin-soled shoes and the white or light blue socks with clocks, the printed argyles, the peaked-shouldered suit coats and especially that constricted, trussed and pointed area about the throat that used to be Harold’s center of formality. Today he wore a soft shirt open at the collar and a sweater. Only his usual burden was the same—his crown of fake hair balanced upon his careful head.

  “Did you have a good swim?” Harold asked them.

  Mary said nothing so Allard said, “Marvelous, Harold! Marvelous!”

  “The Imminghams have invited us to have sherry with them,” Harold said. He was looking at Mary, frowning a little, a concerned look.

  “Harold,” Allard said, “you ought to get some sun. All that paper work is making you too pale.”

  Harold smiled as he usually did at Allard’s brashness, and ushered them through the foyer and into the Imminghams’ cluttered, comfortable living room. Morgana sat stiff as a doll in her thronelike peacock fan chair, the rouge spots vivid as little rising suns on her cheeks, her hennaed hair a nest of copper. The Colonel looked up from his decanters and smiled with all his muscles, showing his teeth like a dog. Delighted, formal greetings seemed to clash in the air, glinting and rebounding upon smiles as both the Colonel and his Lady issued them simultaneously.

  “My dear, you look absolutely st
unning,” Morgana said to Mary. “And you look different.” She cocked her little head, bright as a bird, and gave Mary a smiling, speculative look, her eyes flickering to Allard and back. He looked at Mary more closely himself. She was wearing shorts and blouse and a white cardigan sweater, pure white against her light, even tan. She was stunning; he had a surge of proprietary warmth, tempered or made more immediate by the memory of the almost ludicrous bands of whiter skin he had just seen, where her body was not tanned. Those masked areas had made her seem either not quite naked or even more naked, he couldn’t decide which. But here, in her crisp clothing, sipping a glass of the Colonel’s Dry Sack, she did look expensive and stunning. It was pride he felt. This was his woman and he would decide upon the right course for them both. No hurry. During the long summer they would be apart; he had not discussed this with her, but of course there was little to discuss. She had told him several weeks ago she had a summer job as a waitress in a hotel in the White Mountains, and he had decided recently to ride his Indian Pony to Pasadena—a three-thousand-mile trip—where his uncle would get him a municipal laboring job for the summer. Meanwhile, the school year was ending; the dormitories would close in a week.

  It was at that moment he got the idea for the party, a sort of farewell-to-the-school-year party, very nice and sedate but cheery. They would have to get a date for Harold. Naomi? That was an interesting idea. There would be Nathan and Angela, Knuck and his date—which was also a problem because Knuck tended to go out with demimondaines from Litchwood. Oh, well. And maybe even Hilary David Edward St. George and date. The Colonel and his Lady would put in an appearance early in the evening, of course, then leave the young people to their younger boisterousness or whatever. And what better place to have the party than up at the rocky pool, with a cookout at the little stone fireplace and blankets on the ground, beer and wine and maybe a moonlight dip or two?

  He would always remember that the idea for the party was his.

  The Colonel was speaking to Allard in such an animated fashion he spilled a drop of his sherry. “Tools!” the Colonel was saying. “Harold tells me you enjoy good tools.” Allard had once shown Harold his rather complete set of chromium-plated wrenches, gauges and screwdrivers for the Indian Pony. He did take care of them pretty well, keeping the sockets and drives clean and in place in their enameled boxes.

  “Yes, I guess I do,” he said.

  “Then you must see my workshop! Come, I’ll show it to you.”

  Allard followed him to the basement. At the foot of the stairs the Colonel paused. “I’m quite proud of my workshop,” he said, and flicked a wall switch. Before them a long room flickered into bright fluorescent white. The white ceiling and walls reflected so much light there seemed to be no shadows anywhere. The Colonel’s machines on their pedestals or tables were arranged down one wall like exhibits of sculpture in a museum, each one oily clean, some on casters and some sturdily grouted into the cement floor. Allard recognized a bench saw, a lathe of some kind and a drill press, but the functions of others escaped him.

  “Now,” the Colonel said. “Here are my major tools. I’m just as fond of the smaller ones, the hand tools in the steel cases there. A well-balanced hammer, for example, is a thing of great beauty. A set of socket wrenches, clean and in their places, is more beautiful to me than a chest of jewels. For one thing, the proper tool gives us a Godlike gift, doesn’t it? The gift of leverage, of power. And power that never damages the object it is used upon! That is the gift!

  “In the cases upon the left are my inch, or standard wrenches; on the right are my metric ones. The Lilliputown Railroad, for instance, is all metric except for the caboose.”

  The Colonel took two clean white mechanics’ smocks from a wardrobe and handed one to Allard. The workshop was so immaculate Allard supposed these uniforms to be purely ceremonial.

  “Now,” the Colonel said when they were both buttoned properly into their smocks, “first we have a twelve-inch radial arm saw. You see how it can move in any direction, even tilt?” He pulled the saw, which was mounted above its table on a gallows-like moving arm, forward and back, from side to side, the circular blade gleaming silently, teeth just skimming over the table. “With this instrument I can do nearly everything I want to do with wood. I can crosscut, rip, bevel, miter, dado, rabbet, tenon and shape. With certain attachments I could even rout, plane and sand with it, but I have more specialized tools for those purposes. However, as you can see, it is a machine created by men with a real love of craftsmanship. The electric motor developes more than three horsepower. Behind it you will see an industrial drum vacuum cleaner which will pick up three bushels of shavings or sawdust, or eighteen gallons of wet material. I don’t like to kick around in sawdust when using such precise and also potentially dangerous machinery.”

  Next in line was an eighteen-inch bandsaw-sander with, the Colonel excitedly explained, a ball-bearing-gear reduction unit and four speeds, 118 to 3,550 feet per minute, that would cut wood up to twelve inches thick. Then a wood lathe for turning dowels, chair and table legs, banister posts, etc., then a six and one-eighth inch jointer-planer. On its iron pedestal was a fifteen and one-half inch drill press, then a double-wheeled bench grinder with aluminum oxide grinding wheels, its own lamp and safety-glass eye shields. Next was a metal-turning lathe that seemed to sprout cranks, wheels, levers and gauges all over it—accurate, the Colonel said, to one one-thousandth of an inch. A power hacksaw, next, would cut sixty strokes to the minute. The last of the major shop tools were the 295-amp AC arc welder, a big gray steel box, vented on its sides, with huge cables and clamps, and an oxyacetylene welding and cutting outfit, its tall gas cylinders chained into a two-wheeled dolly, the gooseneck torches polished and at attention in their racks.

  “There is almost nothing I can’t do with the equipment in this room,” the Colonel said, waving at the big oily machines, the steel cabinets housing other tools, the racks across the room of wood and metal stock.

  “It’s a beautiful workshop,” Allard said. Memories of childhood’s frustrations and lack of power haunted him in this room full of machines that could actually do things. To be able to weld, for instance, had always been miraculous to him, far beyond his resources. To take two pieces of steel, the seemingly God-shaped hardness of the metal, and to join them together as one unit, as you wanted them to be—a miracle. Or to have any machine with those magical horses inside harnessed and working for you, so that all you had to do was conceive of the design and with calm, unstrained hands guide that power into your service.

  He felt the Colonel’s sense of completeness, of place here. To have everything you wanted in one neat, known place was appealing. But of course he still had to travel. Places called to him, new and strange places where there would be adventures not related to property at all. Later, when he had been everywhere, perhaps. He thought of the apartment he and Mary would share, the calm work he would do. It all seemed now on a far shore, waiting for him warmly and patiently, but it would be some time before he arrived there.

  After a few moments of admiring silence they hung up their white smocks in the wardrobe, took their sherry glasses from the bench where they had put them upon entering the workshop (alcohol and machines don’t mix, Allard seemed to hear) and went back upstairs to rejoin Harold and the ladies.

  Mary was smiling as she listened to Morgana’s loud voice. Allard thought of a parrot, but Morgana’s voice hadn’t that metallic tonelessness; it was just that the voice was too large for the small person it came from.

  “… of course not a thing Hamilcar would have anything to do with,” she was saying.

  “Did I hear my name?” the Colonel said.

  “Can’t I talk about you, Hamilcar?”

  “As long as you don’t bore our visitors, my dear.”

  Morgana laughed at the absurdity of this idea.

  Harold, quite serious all of a sudden, said in an aside to Allard, “I’d like to talk to you.”

  “Okay.”r />
  “Not now. Can you come back?”

  “You mean without Mary.”

  “Yes, exactly.”

  This was high seriousness indeed. A little guilty-feeling, but being lectured to by Harold was for some reason interesting all the same. And then there was the idea of the party, which he would have to broach to Harold with some care.

  “All right. After supper? Say about seven-thirty or eight?”

  Harold seemed surprised that he didn’t ask what their talk would be about.

  When he left Mary off at her dormitory Allard said, “I won’t be seeing you tonight. Harold wants to talk to me.”

  “What about?” She frowned, worried.

  “I don’t know. I didn’t ask. But I imagine it will be Harold the Protector of Catholic Virgins night.”

  “Very funny.”

  “That’s the spirit, Mary. You know, I think you’re getting over the awfulnesses.”

  “I don’t know why I love you.”

  “Because I don’t treat you like the Virgin Mary?”

  “You don’t know anything about the Virgin Mary.”

  “I’m sorry, Mary, but you know I’ve got to convert you to my religion!” He laughed, the sounds coming up unbidden, a kind of mild hysteria.

  He was in nearly the same mood when Harold met him back at Lilliputown that evening. He put the Indian Pony on its stand next to Harold’s Matilda and followed Harold to his room off the foyer of the Town Hall, a comfortable room much larger than Harold’s former room in Parker Hall. Here was his easy chair, a long wooden desk, his books in a bookcase, even a well-worn leather davenport and a glass-topped coffee table. Harold, or someone, had decorated the dark, brownish room with old sporting prints and a Currier and Ives. It might have been a room in Harold’s novel, say a reading alcove off the Ravendon library.

  Harold poured them beers in tall, narrow pilsner glasses.

  “Hey. Fancy,” Allard said. “Cheers!”

  “I wanted to talk to you,” Harold began.

  “Don’t you have a bed? Or is this just your sitting room?”