by Packer, Vin
“You don’t know anything about me!”
“Here’s the turnoff.”
“I see it.”
“Well, turn off.”
“No!”
“No?”
“No.”
“Where are we going?” “I don’t know.”
“Well, let me know when you decide!” “I will.”
Charles Shepley was not surprised, but he was angry, and at a loss to explain to himself just at what point in their conversation things had taken a turn for the worse. He appreciated the fact that he could seldom explain her; she worked on whim, but it did not stop him from going over whole evenings in minute detail, trying to figure out how her whims worked. He sat sideways in the seat, watching her.
• • •
He had met her his first day at Far Point College, at a mixer. Everybody had black cards pinned to them with their names and their affiliations written across them in gold. “Independent” was written under her name, and while he talked to her, she told him Pi Phi and Kappa had both wanted her to join, but she was not a joiner. She was a short girl with long blond hair, long, thin legs, and a larger bosom than most short girls had, than most medium-sized and tall girls had, for that matter. She was a 36-C. He liked talking to her because she had a certain phony quality, which was so exaggerated it was “pop.” She had a strange little accent; “no” sounded like “now"; “oh” like “ow,” and near the end of the evening when she said she had to go, it sounded like: “Oy haf tew gow.” Her face was glowing, because she was nervous, and her sweater was much too tight, a 34 trying to hold all that back. She had very long Fu Manchu nails, painted Certainly Red, but she wore no facial makeup except for a light pink lipstick; her eyebrows and lashes were unusually dark, and the whites of her eyes were very bright, setting off the vivid blue of her irises.
When Charles asked her if he could walk her back to the dorm, she said she would drive him to his fraternity house, and just when they were about where they were now on Route 9W, she had looked across at him and said, “You think I’m a big phony, don’t you?”
“No.”
“Yes you do.”
Charles had said, “No,” making it sound like “now.”
She’d laughed. “Of course you do. I’m half-Jewish and I hate the Pi Phis and the Kappas, for they know of my tainted blood.”
“You killed our Saviour.”
“But you like my car, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“I was born of a very wealthy family.”
“Were you?”
“No.”
“What else isn’t true about you?”
“My last name. It isn’t Faye. It’s Ginzberg. But that’s a secret.” “Okay.”
“I don’t look Jewish, do I?”
“There is no such thing as looking Jewish. Catholics don’t have special physical characteristics. Methodists don’t.
Seventh-Day Adventists don’t. So why would those of the Jewish faith look any differently from others? … Did you have a nose job?”
“Yes. And it hurt, a lot.”
“Do you want to go somewhere and have a drink?” “Yes. Champagne.”
The “drink” had cost Charles fifteen dollars. They had crossed the Tappan Zee bridge to Tarrytown, and gone to the bar of the Hilton Motor Inn, and while they killed the bottle of Piper Heidsieck, he had made a date with her for the next night.
Charles Shepley’s allowance was fifteen dollars a week. When he got back to the Pi Pi house that night, Thorpe was asleep. His wallet was on the bureau. Charles took a ten from the bill compartment, leaving a five. It was the only time he had ever stolen in his life, but it was not the last time. In seven months, since his arrival at Far Point College, Charles had stolen $367. He had spent all of it on Lois Faye, and $120 of it had gone to the Bluebird Motel for her privilege to change her mind, which she had exercised fifteen times out of twenty-seven. Every time Charles paid for the room anyway, the Bluebird’s clerk had said, “That’s the way the ball bounces.”
The ball was losing its resiliency; the game was wearing thin. Last month the Pi Pis had fired a Negro houseman, convinced he was the thief in their midst. The brothers were keeping their cash in the Pi Pi Mosler. Charles was spending more and more time near coat racks in campus coffee houses, and several afternoons a week wandering around the men’s dorm, watching for empty rooms.
Charles kept a throw-away diary. Every day he wrote down his thoughts, read over what he had written, and promptly destroyed it. The entries were like letters from himself, keeping him up on what was happening to him. The habit had begun with the thefts; it was his way of admitting to himself what he was doing; it was there on paper, he was rational, alert to the dangers, cognizant of the fact he had no way to justify his behavior nor account for it; he logged it as one might watch the progression of a journey or an illness — but when he threw out the daily notations, and before it was time to make another entry, he dismissed it from his mind, the way his mother refused to consider herself a debtor unless she had opened the envelope containing the bill.
Last night’s entry:
I told her that I would get her a Pucci blouse, which is another thing she wants very badly. She said they cost about fifty dollars! She said “I love Pucci and I love Gucci.” (Pocketbooks, etc. — Italian.) She must have a huge inferiority complex. She thinks she will not be attractive if she doesn’t have the car and expensive clothes. By the by, decided not to buy any more toilet articles; better to lift them from the five and dime. I got some after-shave there today; a simple operation. Got into the faculty lounge at noon, but it netted me only five dollars and thirty-six cents. Pi Pi is too alert to fool much around here, but I keep my eyes open. I must stick to dorms, restaurants, etc. I’m glad I’m not her. It would be worse to be the one who actually must have things like a Pucci. In conversation on phone awhile ago I told her I owe a large gambling debt, to prepare her for drought ahead. Cannot keep this up too much longer without getting caught … The Rabbit Hop approaches; between now and then I must get money for rental of tux, flowers, liquor, and dinner … At song fest we learned a new one with these lines:
“If the Chinese drop the bomb
Or I’m sent to Vietnam,
I’ll still feel blessed.
If a Pi Pi pin is on my chest,
I’ll still feel blessed.
If I have to die,
Let my last words be Pi Pi.”
Hagerman was so moved he had tears in his eyes; I pretended to drop something, bumped against him, got his gold lighter from his sweater pocket, but it has Pi Pi crest on it, damn! Who’d buy that?
Lois Faye said, “What are you thinking about?”
“I wasn’t thinking. I was watching the road.”
“Watching us get farther and farther away from the park, huh?” “Yes.”
“You’re angry, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Disappointed, even heartsick?”
“What’s the matter with you? I wonder about you.”
“Aren’t you disappointed, even heartsick?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“You know damn well why!”
“Why? Was going to the park so important?”
“It was to me.”
“It was that important?”
“Yes, it was that important.”
“And you’re seething inside, aren’t you? Your stomach’s in knots.”
“You’re so right.”
“I know I am. I just wanted you to have some idea of how I felt before I got this car.” “What?”
“It’s awful, Charles, isn’t it, when something’s important and you can’t have it?”
“You’re sick, Lois. Did you ever think of that?”
“Am I too ill to go to the park?”
“Oh, my God!” and he began to laugh.
She laughed too. She said, “Tell me when you see some place I can turn around.”
• •
•
One night Charles had double-dated with Thorpe. Pi Pi pledges were required to date four sorority girls a month, during their first semester of membership. That particular night Thorpe and Charles had taken two Tri Delts to Grandview Park in Thorpe’s Chevrolet. Thorpe had taken his date into the woods for a walk, while Charles sat in the back seat with his. She was not a good conversationalist, and she did not smoke; Tri Delt pledges were forbidden to drink. Charles could think of little to do with her but kiss her. He did, and she kissed him back, and there was a lot of tongue involvement, and she let him put his hands up under her sweater and unhook her brassiere, all within the first half hour. In the second half hour when Charles moved his hand down, she took his hand away, and he put it back, and she took it away, and he put it back, and finally she said, “No, really.”
“Okay,” he said.
He smoked a cigarette and complained about having a Saturday class, and she said she was glad she didn’t have one, and then he put his cigarette out and began all over again, minus step three, since he could tell she meant no to that. But he thought of other things while he was kissing her and touching her breasts, and he wished Thorpe would come back, and he remembered Lois. He had been home the weekend before, and he had visited his father’s lab at the Richmond Institute, where his father was involved in an elaborate research project involving the mating habits of invertebrate animals. The lab was lighted only by the artificial daylight lamps in the breeding cases; it was a beautiful effect, green and still and shadowy. He had stood quietly and observed the peculiar fluttering flight of a silver-washed fritillary, with the male in close pursuit, gliding around in rings, as she alighted on a large red flower and spread her wings so wide they lay quite flat, and then he had moved on and watched two dragonflies nestle on the tip of a reed. The female curved her belly into the male, sliding in between his feet, lifting herself gently toward his chest, while they moved very subtly and sensitively together; then they were nearly immobile save for the tiniest fluttering of the male’s wings, and the contractions of his threadlike abdomen.
His father had remarked, “Human intercourse seems so clumsy in contrast to this, so lacking in grace.”
Charles had nodded in agreement, but he had been with Lois Faye by that time, and he had thought that however volatile and unpredictable she was, however much it cost in dollars and patience and strategy to get her to the room at the Bluebird, however drunk they always were by the time they did get there, it was never ordinary or awkward; it was always graceful and natural and good.
“Charles?” the Tri Delt pledge had whispered to him, while he was touching her breasts on the second go-round that night in the back of Thorpe’s Chevy, “Charles?”
He had stopped and asked, “What?”
She had tapped him on the tip of his nose with her finger, smiled coquettishly, and said, “Hello.”
Well, maybe she had no feeling in her breasts.
There had been a girl Charles had dated in high school, who always giggled when Charles touched her there: “I can’t help it! It tickles,” and another who gently reproved him once, “Too much of that can hurt like the dickens!” But Lois would look into his eyes very solemnly and say, “I won’t be able to stop you from doing anything you want to do to me if you keep that up,” which was not true, because she usually stopped him soon after she said it, if she were going to talk at all at a time like that, but he did not feel angry or foolish or clumsy; she was not an artless girl in any situation.
What they did in the park was listen to the songs on the radio and drink and talk; that was 85 percent of it; the 15 percent, the kissing and all that, came at the very end, the last half hour; it was their pre-Bluebird ritual, though there was no guarantee that Charles would get her to go with him to the motel each time. There were times (two) when she had astonished him by saying, “Can we go to the Bluebird?” as though he had not called in advance to reserve the room, and times when they had long arguments in front of the Bluebird, until Charles gave up and got out of the car only long enough to pay for the room; and there were the times he won the arguments, despite her insistence that she had to go back to the dorm immediately (“Now, oy haf to gow!”), when they would leave before closing hour at the dorm, and she would drop him off at Pi Pi, and blow him a kiss, and give her horn a little honk as she drove away, and he would go inside drugged with love, wondering what he could steal next.
• • •
She drank Southern Comfort, because she hated the taste of most hard liquor, and he drank the worst kind of house brand rotgut, which he always poured into a pint bottle of Haig and Haig, and the conversation began pretty much the way it did that night.
“The third song that plays after this one, has a special message for you.” Nancy Sinatra was singing “Boots” and the rain was falling against the windshield and splashing over the roof, and they had cigarettes going and shot glasses they had stolen from the 76 House in Old Tappan, for their drinks.
“A message about what?”
“The kind of man you’ll marry.”
“ ‘Daddy,’ “ she sang, “ ‘I want a diamond ring, champagne, everything — ’ “
“Wait and see what it is,” he said; they played this game over and over: the messages from songs. She sighed and wound her violet chiffon scarf around her hand and said, “You don’t even know where to buy a Pucci, do you?”
“In New York.”
“Where?”
“At their store.”
“See? You don’t know! They don’t have a store!”
“You said they had one on Fifth Avenue.”
“That’s Gucci! You’re really thick!”
“Okay, that’s Gucci.”
“You don’t even know what they sell!”
“Leather. Pocketbooks.”
“Pocketbooks? Where did you get that word?” “Pocketbooks?”
“You don’t say that anymore. You say purse or handbag.” “Oh.”
“You’re really a hick.”
“Where do I get a Pucci then?”
“You won’t get me one. I know that.”
“I said I would.”
“I wouldn’t accept it. It’s too much money.” “That’s for me to decide.” “You can get them at Sak’s Fifth Avenue.” “Them? How many do you want?”
“Lots! I want lots of everything expensive … Charles?” “What?”
“Do you think I’m grabby?” “No.”
“Yes I am.” “Okay, you are.”
“I’ve been told that I am, and I am.” “Did you ever see spiders mate?” “No.”
“I watched these Pisauras when I was home, at my dad’s lab. The male would take a fly and spin it into a round lump, and then he’d carry it with his chelicerae to the female. He’d be — “
“Is that what you’re going to be?”
“What?”
“A zoologist like your father?”
“I don’t know yet … Anyway, the male spider would carry the fly up to the female, with his hind end shaking and his feelers out, and she’d just sit there and watch him. And he’d be all worked up, and he’d present her with the fly, and pffft, she’d scramble away. The damn fly would fall, and the spider would have to go after another one. Eventually, the female would accept it, and then while she was eating it, he’d hop on her; but it all worked on whim. Her whim.”
“Do you like bugs?”
“It’s interesting work. My dad’s lab is one of the most beautiful rooms I’ve ever seen. These breeding cases are all lit up, and there’re a lot of green plants inside that make shadows on the white walls, and instead of a phone ringing, which would disturb things — the noise would distract — there’s a blue light that flashes when a call comes through.”
“I hate my father for being a dentist.”
“I’d love you to see the lab.”
“I’d like to see it.”
“Would you really?”
“Yes.”
“
You know, I think you’d be fascinated by some of the experiments. Do you know, there are some Mexican lizards which reproduce themselves without male partners. What’s their name again? It’s on the tip of my tongue. They’re about ten inches long, very quick-moving lizards. Their way of reproducing themselves is called parthenogenesis. The egg’s developed from a virgin female without fertilization by spermatozoa.”
“You know a lot about zoology, don’t you?”
“Sure. My dad brought me up on it. My brother wasn’t interested in it. Parthenogenesis isn’t as rare as you might think. Certain insects and — “
She said, “What does he do, just lie there all day?”
“Who?”
“Your brother.”
“He’s a vegetable. He just lies there. Certain insects and crustaceans and worms reproduce themselves — “
“It’s depressing,” she said. “Doesn’t it depress you?” “I don’t think about it.”
“If anything like that ever happened to me, I wouldn’t want to live.”
“You wouldn’t know the difference. He doesn’t know the difference. Let me tell you about these lizards. What’s their name? It’s on the tip of my — “
“Here’s my song, Charles! Listen!”
He’s a real nowhere man,
Sitting in his nowhere land
Making all his nowhere plans
For nobody.
She said, “Turn the dial. I hate it!”
“You know something about that song? My roommate — ”
“Please! Turn the dial, Charles!”
“If you’d just listen a minute, I’ll tell you something very funny that Dan Thorpe did with this song and — “
“No! It’s a depressing song, and you said it had a special message for me!”
Charles turned the dial; he got Nancy Wilson singing “More.”
“That’s better, isn’t it?” he said.
“I’m nowhere.”
“Oh, stop, Lois.”
“I’m a real nowhere girl, going nowhere. I’ll probably end up in the suburbs going to Hadassah meetings.” Charles laughed.
“Don’t laugh. It’s not a bit funny! Do you think I’ll meet any rich men here?”
“I’m going to buy you a Pucci,” Charles smiled.
