The Harrad Experiment

by Robert H. Rimmer

  “Well, you can’t hang around out here watching Stanley and Ruth. Will you come and sit beside me?”

  You can see, Stanley, that I was finally trapped. I followed Tom cautiously into the bedroom, and he actually did lie down. He looked as if he were not long for this world. I went out in the kitchen, and pumped some water, and put a damp rag on his head. Then when I was being a really good and tender nurse ... he grabbed me. “Oh, Sheila,” he moaned, imprisoning me in his arms and kissing me enthusiastically. “Forgive me. You’re so lovely, I can’t help myself!” With a swift movement he unzipped the back of my dress and released the snaps on my bra. I fought him desperately while he held me in a bear-hug, whispering: “Sheila, Sheila ... I won’t hurt you ... just relax. You knew when you came in here what the score was. Bill and Susan are in the sack right now. You don’t hear her struggling. You can’t go back in the living room, Stanley and Ruth are bound to be in a clinch. Honestly, I promise. I won’t try anything funny.”

  “What you are doing right now is funny enough!” I hissed at him, trying to first unclasp his hand from my breast, and when I succeeded, I discovered that his other hand was prying at my middle. “Take your hand away this instant!”

  “All right,” he said, “But let me take your bra off.”

  At first I refused, and there we lay. Me silently wriggling and trying to escape, and Tom inching his fingers inside my panties. It was time for the coup d’etat ... MINE ... not his!”

  “Tom,” I said, “I’m awfully dizzy. I think I’m going to be sick ... or just pass out.” So saying ... I “passed out” and lay absolutely limp across the bed. I crossed my fingers. Would he be a gentleman? Tom let go of me, jumped out of bed and lighted a lamp. I made believe trying to rise, but instead slipped gracefully to the floor in a heap, breathing as if I were about to toss my cookies. Obviously aghast, Tom lifted me off the floor and dumped me back on the bed.

  “Oh, I’m so dizzy!” I moaned.

  He took the damp cloth I had gotten for him and put it on my face, telling me that I’d be all right. And then what does he do but proceed to thoroughly undress me, telling me all the time that I’ll be just fine ... that I need to unloosen my clothes, and there’s really no need to get my dress wrinkled. In two seconds I was lying like a naked corpse on the bed, not knowing what to do. If I jumped up and revealed I was really quite sober, it would go over like a lead balloon. If I yelled for you to save me, things would be even worse. While I was trying to find a course of action, Tom stripped and jumped in bed beside me whispering that his lovely Sheila would be fine ... just fine. He took my limp hand and folded it around his penis. I was shocked. You can laugh ... Stanley ... but never in my life had I ever touched a man ... not even you, until this morning. After two months at Harrad, a certain naivety in my previous character has vanished. Even so, I never imagined what sizes a man can grow to, and I never really believed that this long heavy apparatus would fit comfortably inside a woman. I snatched my hand away. Murmuring passionately at me, Tom placed my hand back on his weapon. We went through this routine at least five times. All the time Tom moaned lugubriously, telling me to just move it for him.

  Suddenly ... I don’t know why ... I felt very sorry for him. He was obviously quite distraught with emotion. So I held him hard and felt him move against my fingers. After ten seconds and a groan of sheer desperation, it was over.

  I pretended not to know what had happened, I lay there with my eyes closed while he wiped my hand and himself. And then, I got a terrible emotional let-down and started to cry ... sobbing hysterically. I knew I was a little drunk, and I know you were shocked when you burst in to the room and found me lying there naked, and Tom struggling into his pants, in dismay, at the havoc he had created. But what you didn’t know was that I was crying my heart out for the world, and the way it was and the sheer, animal drive that made Tom seek something he so desperately needed ... love ... affection, only to end up with such a hollow triumph. And I wondered if this was what the Tenhausens were trying to achieve at Harrad; a world where men and women can and must relate their sexual drives and needs for one another into a unified whole so that the act of sex is a perfectly wonderful consummation of a much larger ecstasy and pride and joy and respect for the amazing fact that each of us, man and woman, are human beings, and we loved because we liked each other. Overflowingly liked each other as human beings. Didn’t Phil say one day that each individual should live as if he personally were the God who created other individuals? From such a perspective a man or woman could not judge; they could only love. For each person in the world would be each other’s own creation, and be the best creation that he, acting as God could accomplish at the moment. Maybe if there is a God, he has created men imperfect to give them this potential ... and as they realize it they become God themselves.

  But, of course, Tom standing there ... disgusted at me ... at himself ... didn’t know what I was thinking. To him Sheila was a mechanical hand that had done what he had been compelled to do by drives momentarily beyond his control.

  So ... we didn’t breakfast at Tobey’s. There was no way back. The whole thing had taken on a nasty aura. Ruth, Susan, Bill thought I was a typical virgin bitch, and you, as my brother, volunteered to take me back to Boston by bus. Bill drove us glumly to the bus station. I had ruined their week-end.

  But somehow, on that lonely two A.M. bus ride home, walking the empty streets of Cambridge back to our room at Harrad, and the long wonderful night that we held each other, naked, in your bed ... not making love, but just feeling the warmth of each other ... without words, somehow we had swept away the gap that exists between people. Ten weeks ago we were strangers, Stanley. I’m glad that the Tenhausens found us for each other. Can I say I love you? I don’t like to use the word lightly ... it’s beyond love. I just like you immensely. I even like your sideburns, and I’m sorry I teased you so much that you shaved them higher. Only ... only, you really wouldn’t want to sleep with Beth? Could you ... after today?

  FROM THE JOURNAL OF HARRY SCHACHT

  November, the First Year

  A long week-end that went by too fast. Tomorrow, classes. But my mind is not on Chemistry or Physics tonight. I have an uneasy mixed-up feeling I can’t quite pin down.

  For more that an hour, pretending that I have been writing in this journal, I have been watching Beth studying. Her hair is twisted with curlers. “So that you can see how disillusioning living with a girl can be,” she told me grinning. She is wearing a white terzy-cloth bathrobe with nothing under it. I can’t help thinking how her body looks. Seeing right through the bathrobe ... seeing her spine, curved as she hunches over her desk ... seeing her full breasts, one unconcernedly crushed against the edge of the desk as she leans her head on her elbow and ponders the book she is studying ... seeing the curve of her belly which is so flat when she stands up and now must be a warm ripple of flesh merging into curly pubic hairs ... seeing her calves, soft, the muscles relaxed into two graceful mounds firm on her chair and ending in her bare knees, flexed as she impatiently jiggles her legs and digs her toes into the rug in the pursuit of answers to the problem she is working on.

  In a little while she will ask me to talk with her about Chemistry or Biology, and her eyes will flash with pleasure if she has arrived at equivalent solutions, or if she hasn’t we may end up in a long discussion, and I will be listening and carrying on with perfectly sensible answers with one facet of my mind, and at the same time I’ll be thinking ... Beth, Beth, I love you ... the way you are ... your flashing enthusiasm, your breathless intensity, the warm flesh of you ... and I am more than a little frightened that a homely, ordinary man like me has permitted himself such delight ... such an overwhelming feeling of tenderness toward another person. I am very vulnerable, and that vulnerability is predisposed toward ... toward what?

  Stanley and Sheila with Peter Longini and Valerie Latrobe were here a little while ago, and we talked about the English Literature course we’re all taking.


  Something has happened this weekend. I could sense it with them, and earlier at dinner. Not just because it finally happened to me, but something intangible almost ... a deeper sense of affection. Stanley and Sheila seemed wrapped in a little cloud, and they seemed unable to stop a sort of hand touching game between them. While we all talked generally I got the feeling we were all wondering on a subliminal level if we shared this wonderful sense of involvement with each other. How hard it is for people to communicate the feelings that make them what they are. This has been a mating week-end. If Phil and Margaret took a survey tomorrow, and everybody was truthful, I would bet that there are few virgins left at Harrad.

  Not that anyone said anything openly. Love is a private experience ... incommunicable despite the desire ... often the need to communicate it. But you could sense it in the various roommates’ reaction to each other. Most of the sexual flippancy and embarrassment of the past weeks was gone ... the bantering ... the teasing, suddenly seemed superfluous. They have had coitus. They know they will again. No girl or boy (man or woman) at Harrad can ever respond to one another quite so independently again. As if we all had been a brand new litter of kittens, fumbling around for weeks with our eyes closed, we suddenly now see each other for the first time, and for some of us, at least, the other person seems to be wearing a unique halo.

  At dinner those at our table got into a discussion of premarital petting. Some sexologists in the books the Tenhausens have assigned us to read, evidently feel that the gradual, fumbling approaches a boy makes toward a girl, and vice varsa ... weeks ... months ... years of sexual touching ... withdrawal ... exploration ... even finally mutual masturbation when a relationship has proceeded to this point, is a very necessary and important prelude to marriage and that without it the male in particular, might never achieve the necessary practice to create a responsive and happy wife.

  “Maybe,” Dorothy Stapleton said, “but the environment of doing it ... in a car ... on a living room couch ... in a motel ... catch as catch can probably makes the average boy and girl feel guilty. Guilt, because what they are doing is against all religious codes; guilt, because society in general says one should wait ... and mostly fear, because, no matter what the sex books say, it isn’t healthy for a boy and girl to fumble at each other for years and build up repressions against doing what is natural.”

  “Yes, but take our situation at Harrad,” Valerie Latrobe said. “Does the very nature of this environment automatically exclude romance?”

  Everyone at the table smiled in gentle disagreement.

  “Okay, laugh,” Valerie said. “Right at this moment I get the impression that a lot of us are floating in a wonderful multicolored bubble. But how do we know that ultimately, before we are finished with Harrad, that a male and female won’t just jump into bed ... no preliminaries ... no petting, what an ugly word! ... and then just wham bang, with the boy maybe polite enough to wait for the girl; but that’s about alL What I mean to say is: won’t making sex so easy finally devalue the whole experience? Everything you read about marriage indicates that finally in the average marriage sex gets boring ... a sort of ‘oh, hell I’ve done this so many times attitude,’ that the whole business no longer has any meaning.”

  “Do you feel that way now, Val?” Peter asked.

  “No,” Valerie murmured, and I was surprised to see her, so usually composed, blush a little.

  “There is one considerable difference at Harrad,” Beth said laughing. “Namely ... we aren’t married! Hence the area of possessiveness that engulfs and swamps a lot of marriage doesn’t exists here. In a marriage, somebody owns somebody because the magic, legal, and sacred words have been said. Here, unmarried, with no claims except a genuine liking for each other, we must automatically work at retaining that like or love. Mostly, married people don’t bother. The woman says: ‘I’ve got a wedding ring.’ The man says: ‘Without me, you’d starve ... and anyway, who’d want our kids except me?’ They call marriage a tender trap; more likely it’s a barbed-wire, booby trapped. No Man’s Land.”

  “You overlook one thing, Beth,” I said. “The roommate system right here is a trap. How do you get out of it? It is completely unlikely that any given set of roommates are going to arrive mutually and instantaneously at an agreement that they are unhappy or not fully adjusted to each other.”

  “You may be right,” Beth said seriously. “The Tenhausens may ultimately find themselves acting as divorce lawyers for the student body.”

  I suppose it is silly, but the way Beth responded sounded like a complete refutation of the complete amazing surrender of ourselves yesterday.

  “Oh, Beth ... I am really writing this to you. So far I haven’t been a very faithful ”journal keeper” ... but what happened I must write down as best I can. You may never read it. Or maybe someday years and years from now I would read it to you somewhere in another world and you would remember and smile happily as we recalled our wonderful craziness. Do you feel the same way as I do? I keep looking at you, and I want to say, “I wasn’t dreaming ... was I, Beth. Yesterday actually did happen, didn’t it?”

  They call a day like yesterday Indian summer. A blue-sky placid day, soft and balmy, with the temperature climbing almost to eighty degrees. Harrad was deserted. Most of the kids had gone to football games. A gang of them were going over to “A” College stadium. They had invited Beth and me to go along. When I asked Beth why she hadn’t gone with them, she said: “You didn’t invite me. I didn’t want to go alone.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “See, I told you that I was an odd-ball. I guess I don’t really like football. But I would have gone if you wanted to.”

  “Harry,” Beth said, “I’m the cheerleader type ... didn’t you know? Rah ... rah ... har ... rah ... Harrad! Go, Team! Go! Dopey, if I had wanted to see a football game, I would have twisted you around my little finger. But don’t think I haven’t got ulterior motives. You and I, Harry, are going exploring!” Beth’s smile was mischievous, a blonde pixie. “See this box. In it are two ham and cheese sandwiches ... by tomorrow you may be dead mixing milchik and fleischik. In this thermos bottle is some dago red wine that cost me one dollar. See, I have all the ingredients and I’m proposing: ‘A loaf of bread, a jug of wine’ ” ...

  “I’m thou,” I said fervently.

  “No, I am Thou,” Beth said “You’re Omar, the Tentmaker.”

  So we went exploring. Beth held my hand, and I carrried the sandwiches and the wine. She brought a book of Dylan Thomas’ poems which she promised to read to me with my head in her lap.

  “That’s the way it’s done in all the romantic movies,” she said, smiling happily. “I’ll bet you don’t know it, but I found a book about the first John Carnsworth. It tells of the days he lived here in Cambridge. Somewhere in the middle of these grounds, running right through them, is a brook. Years ago they had a fish hatchery, Carnsworth kept it stocked for his millionaire friends. The Tenhausens have been so busy teaching us about love and life, they’ve overlooked the pastoral things.”

  Beth, dressed in a green skirt and white V-necked blouse, skipped along like a six-year old, her blonde hair flying, her face flushed with excitement. She, hastening me along a wooded path, was a reincarnation of Rima, transplanted from a South American jungle ... but now quite real and tangible. I measured my ordinary pedestrian steps to her rhythm and soon I, too, was buoyant as the leaves floating unhurriedly as they glided down from the nearly naked maples and elms.

  “Isn’t this our day, Harry?” she asked me. “For a moment we are the only two humans in the world.”

  And it was our day. It held us in its sunny hands and filled our nostrils with the dry musty odor of millions of leaves, earthy and crumbling beneath our feet. And then we found the brook, about twenty feet across, studded with alluvial rocks and running rapidly with dear bubbly water flowing over a mulch of soft black muck and slippery leaves.

  Near the brook on a dirt road two gardeners who took care of
the Harrad grounds were unloading a Ford pick-up truck piled high with leaves. They waved at us good-naturedly.

  “We’ve found other humans,” I suggested to Beth.

  “Not really humans.” Beth took off her shoes and paddled in the water. “Just a picturesque back-drop to the stage we are acting own.”

  We sat on a rock near the edge of the brook and dangled our feet in the water. The gardeners drove away in their truck and then came back with more leaves. We watched them while we ate our sandwiches and took swigs of wine from the thermos bottle.

  “They must be collecting leaves from all over the grounds,” I said. “Should we go somewhere else? ... Rude practicality has invaded our dream world.”

  Beth shook her head. “It’s Saturday afternoon. They won’t work much longer.” We watched several of the piles grow to more than ten feet high. “What are you going to do with them?” Beth asked one of the gardeners.

  “Too dry to bum them ... We’ll compost them next week,” one of them replied, wiping his brow and looking longingly at the water. “Cripes, if I were a kid I’d strip bollicky and go swimming in this little puddle,” He scooped up some water and splashed it across his face.

  “Come on,” the other gardener said. “It’s twelve-thirty. We’re knocking off. You kids go to Harrad?”

  We nodded.

  “What kind of monkeyshines are goin’ on here? I heard a rumor you kids sleep together. Is that true?” he demanded.

  “Does it sound likely?” Beth asked, her eyebrows raised.

  “Hells bells, with the younger generation anything is likely. I tell my son, I know you won’t be good ... but for godsake be careful.”

  They drove away chuckling, leaving us with the blippety sound of the water and the skeletons of the trees. I stretched out on the ground beside Beth and I looked up at the few remaining leaves wispy and brown against the clear blue sky. Beth read, in a deep throaty imitation of a Welsh voice, Thomas’ Fern Hill, Do not go gentle into that Good Night, Poem in October and In my Craft or Sullen Art while I listened dreamily, charmed as much by her seriousness as the words of the poems.