The Harrad Experiment

by Robert H. Rimmer

  “Have you told Harry how you feel?”

  “No. Harry and I can talk endlessly about our studies ... but when it comes to our intimate feelings, we can’t seem to communicate.”

  “God,” Stanley sighed. “The Tenhausens are right. Man is at a low level in the art of expressing himself.”

  “How is it that we talk together so easily? I don’t really know you the way I do Harry.”

  “Because I love you as a person. I’m not afraid of you so I can accept you as Beth for whatever you are or may be. Such an attitude creates a magnetic field of compulsive attraction.” Stanley smiled at my look of disbelief.

  “Stanley ... you’re not for real,” I said. “You’re too good to be true.”

  We arrived at Niagara Falls at eight o’clock. It was Stanley’s idea of an appropriate place to spend the night together. At a Holiday Inn Stanley registered us as Mr. and Mrs. Cole, and with great enthusiasm insisted in carrying me across the threshold of our room.

  “This is nutty,” I giggled as he tumbled me on one of the beds. “We’re not married.”

  “We might be,” he grinned, and tossed a pillow at me.

  I flung it back, and for ten minutes we engaged in a free-for-all pillow fight which left the room in shambles and me stretched out on the bed, weak with laughter and lack of breath.

  “Come on,” Stanley said, puffing while he undressed. “We’ll take a shower together and then eat. I saw a candle-lighted dining room as we drove in.”

  In the bathroom he horsed around in the shower. Dripping wet, we covered each other with soap from head to foot, then walked around the room admiring ourselves in the mirrors. Stanley took great delight in soaping my breasts and pubic hairs and behind. I responded by thoroughly soaping his penis until he pleaded “uncle.” Then we let the needle spray shower restore our equilibrium.

  Rubbing my back with a towel, Stanley kissed me between the shoulders and whispered, “You are very beautiful Beth ... and fun.”

  At dinner, while slowly drinking a bottle of red wine we ate veal parmesan. I asked Stanley how he resisted making love to me before we ate. “I was ready,” I said softly. “So were you.”

  “I’m making love to you now, ”Stanley said happily. “Just talking with you, feeling that glow that emanates from you is an exhilarating experience.”

  “It is for me, too,” I said. “I know what you’re trying to say. How can we sustain this moment? If we lose it, how can we make it come again?”

  “Did you read Maslow’s book, Motivation and Personality? Remember when he talks about peak experiences. The last hour with you, Beth, has been like that ... an experience of sheer wonder at the loveliness of you as Beth a physical person, and you as an ineffable mystery ... a mystery that even now makes your eyes glow and trembles on your lips. I think I could recapture this feeling with you thousands of times ... even though I knew you a lifetime.”

  “Have you had the same feeling with Sheila?”

  “Yes.” Stanley noticed that I seemed more subdued. “Beth, it doesn’t lessen the moment with you, it heightens it. I’m becoming gradually aware that such a feeling as Maslow describes is not wholly mystical. I think it can be recaptured at will. It means simply developing a willingness to respond to all the infinite mystery of life and do it from a perspective of joyous humility at just being alive and able to participate.”

  “To see the world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wild flower,” I said, grinning. “William Blake said it ... the Tenhausens are saying it. Will the world itself ever listen?”

  “Are you?”

  “Yes, I think so, Stanley. Anyway, right or wrong it is a positive philosophy. It is better than the apathy that seems to have most of our generation in its grip. I read an article yesterday that said dissent has largely vanished from America ... that the average American is in an emotional vacuum with an overwhelming feeling of uselessness engulfing everybody. Everyone is demanding something worthwhile from the world and can’t seem to discover it. Maybe Harrad College will succeed in ushering in the Age of Positive Dissent.”

  “It’s dissent, all right,” Stanley said, “but it is going to take some awfully good minds to encompass it ... believe in it ... and make it work in a general way. For example, would you be able to explain Harrad up until now ... or tonight, to your father and mother?”

  “No. Would you?”

  “Absolutely not!”

  Back in the room as I was undressing, I told Stanley I was expecting my period. “I’ve got twinges already ... so I may be an uncomfortable mess by tomorrow.”

  “Should we make love?”

  “It’s not that,” I said. “You know the Harrad rule ... no more than one boy a month. I’ve been with Harry this month.”

  Stanley smiled. “I guess Phil overlooked the fact that proper timing would make it possible for a girl to negotiate two men in a month without risk of pregnancy.”

  “I doubt that most of the girls would be interested. Anyway, in most cases events wouldn’t coincide to make it possible.”

  We lay on the bed, naked, and watched television for awhile. I held Stanley’s hand and nibbled his finger-tips; and then we didn’t hear the television, though it continued to play; and the light it made danced on the ceiling, and when our ecstacy was over Stanley laid himself half across me, his face against my breast. I suddenly felt very tender toward him, and caressed his back softly while he dozed. For awhile I wasn’t sure whether I held Stanley or Harry. Did it really matter? I guess that somehow or other I loved them both ... and I ... me ... whoever Beth was, was destined to be the archetypal mother to her men.

  FROM THE JOURNAL OF STANLEY COLE

  January, the First Year

  Recapitulation is in order. I haven’t written in this journal for more than a month ... and small wonder. Events have moved faster than Stanley Cole, the historian, could record them. Historian. That’s me all right. Historian of my own demise ... the man who wrote his own obituary.

  As the moment, according to Phil, I simply lack perspective. Someday, through the soft mists of time, I will be able to look back and laugh at Stanley Cole’s miseries. Maybe. But I doubt it.

  I’m writing this as though I am bursting with laughter ... the truth is that I am punctured, deflated, with the last hiss of despair emerging from the balloon that was Stanley Cole. In the chessboard that is Harrad I have been put in check not by one queen but by two. Check and mate! All my queens have vanished. I have a new roommate ... Harry Schacht! Some difference! Beth has moved in with Jack Dawes, and Sheila is living alone. In fact, right after the Holidays I would guess that about twenty-five percent of the Tenhausen’s house of cards went through an internal reshuffle. This probably taxed the Tenhausen’s patience to the breaking point, and must have made them think the whole structure was in danger of collapse.

  How did it all happen? I’m not sure I know, myself. I suppose it stems back to me, blithely accepting Sheila’s car for the Holidays. But that’s only the surface factor. Eventually I would have slept with Beth, somehow. Anyway, I am firmly of the opinion that Sheila was guilty of testing me. Did she really expect me to act like some kind of mediaeval hero and sleep beside Beth encased in steel armor? The simple truth of the matter is that Sheila is jealous. Unnecessarily, of course.

  “Not particularly of you,” she told me very coolly. “I just can’t adjust to the idea of sharing any man I might love with another woman. I might have loved you very much, Stanley ... but my love is possessive. I discussed it with Margaret and Phil, and they finally suggested that I live alone, for awhile, at least.”

  “Why don’t you let Harry Schacht move in here?” I suggested. “He needs solace from his wounds.”

  “I’m not going to make a career of mending hearts that Beth Hillyer has broken,” Sheila said stiffly. “Thank you just the same.”

  “My heart is not broken,” I grinned at her. “I love you, too, Sheila.”

  “Ugh!” she said.

/>   So ... I’m not sorry. I slept with Beth twice. Once in Niagara Falls, my own very good idea (and of course Beth had to tell Sheila), and once in New York City, in the Astor Hotel, which was undeniable, anyway, because Sheila found us in bed together.

  Just in case I ever become your roommate again, Sheila Grove, and you get the idea that you should read my journal, I’ll tell you right here and now that I am not mad at Beth, and I love her. Beth is confused. She is determined to find the ideal man, and then, very practically when that has been “taken care of,” get on with equally valuable parts of her life ... such as being a doctor. Beth is very practical ... except in bed, and there her body takes over and Beth is a feverish, passionate woman; and not all subdued like you, Sheila. Where you surrender, Beth wants to be conquered. My own male reaction is that you both need a little of each other. But why am I bothering to write you words you will probably never read? If you do, they’ll no doubt make you even more angry. But I would do it all over again. Even if it were a foregone conclusion that I would end up living with Harry Schacht!

  Christmas was sticky. Arriving home with Sheila’s car convinced Ma that I wasn’t really going to college in Cambridge, that I must have fallen in with cheap gangsters. When she occasionally dropped the subject, it gave my old man (who has a vague idea of what is going on at Harrad) an opportunity to try to discover if I really had a female roommate and if I had slept with her. I told him the whole business was strictly chaperoned and I really wasn’t nearer to going to bed with a girl than I had been with Joan Austin.

  This pleased him. He admitted that a young man couldn’t avoid chasing “skirts.” God made him that way, and all that, but that I should keep in mind that the chase was more fun than the capture.

  My sisters invited me to a Polish Christmas dance with their husbands, and I spent one god-awful night dancing polkas with a big-breasted, high school senior who was overly impressed at dancing with a boy who went to college. Breathlessly, she introduced me to her father and mother, and I could see a picture of me marching down the aisle in all their eyes.

  On December 29th I drove back to Columbus and stayed overnight at Beth’s house. Beth’s family is very nice, but her mother and father are in complete disagreement over Harrad. I was subjected to a third degree and was glad that I wasn’t Beth’s roommate. I think I would have been embarrassed to discuss the fact that I was sleeping with their daughter, which from their standpoint I wasn’t, but, of course, I actually had and was planning to do again.

  Beth’s mother believes the entire Harrad program is quite impossible ... that her daughter is certain to regret it ... that they have a family understanding that no one in Columbus nor anyone outside the family will ever know about it ... that Beth is a headstrong girl, too much indoctrinated with modern ideas of feminine achievement ... that Beth’s father is much too easy with her ... that all modern parents are letting their children dominate the family, which is decidedly wrong, etc., etc., and what did I think about it? Beth’s father listened quietly to all the discussion, a little smile on his face. I have the feeling that he really isn’t so much dominated by Beth, but he has a great deal of confidence in her. Anyway a lot of things were left unmentioned in detail such as the fact that Beth’s roommate is Jewish. To them, insulated Mid-Westerners that they are, this was somewhat surprising. Oh well, they would be even more surprised if they read the details that follow.

  After much hugging, and various admonitions and restatements of the fact that they loved her very much, and to please be careful driving, Beth and I finally left Columbus about three o’clock in the afternoon on December 30th. I suggested to Beth that we could stay overnight again in Niagara Falls and get to New York by noon on the 31st.

  “Never go back to a place where you had fun,” she advised. “You can’t recapture it. Let’s drive straight through to New York City and sleep in the suite at the Astor. We should be able to get there by nine or ten o’clock tomorrow, and sleep until three or four. We’ll have it all to ourselves. None of the Harrad kids will show up until seven-thirty or so at night. Jack Dawes said the Astor was right in the middle of Time’s Square.”

  It seemed like a logical idea. We split the assignment and drove right through the night and finally arrived in New York City, got the car parked, and were in the Astor, looking red-eyed and somewhat beat, by ten-thirty in the morning. A bellboy brought us to the suite and started opening connecting doors. Jack had reserved two connecting suites. Despite the fact that there were three bedrooms, two baths, and two living rooms, it was going to be a good question where ten couples were going to sleep. Beth’s reaction was, “Who wants to sleep on New Year’s?”

  “You must be expecting a gang,” the bellboy commented.

  I nodded, feeling somewhat glum. I pictured a noisy all night blast ... a lot of drinking, and tons of drunken conversation. At the moment at least, a big feather-bed with Beth, snowed in somewhere in the North Woods for several days seemed a lot more interesting.

  By the time I tipped the bellboy, I had to search through the bedrooms to relocate Beth. She had pulled down the shades and was undressing.

  “I’m too pooped even to shower,” she sighed. “All I can see before my eyes is miles of super highway ... like a bad dream of hell where you might enter a purgatory condemned to drive an automobile forever and ever.” She plopped into bed naked. I joined her.

  “I can’t keep my eyes open,” she said, “and I’m probably somewhat smelly.”

  “But you wouldn’t mind being kissed,” I said, kissing her belly and then her breasts. “It’s been torture sitting beside you for twelve hours and not being able to touch you for fear we’d both end up highway statistics.” I slowly sniffed her from head to toe. “You smell surprisingly nice to me.”

  “On second thought,” she said sighing happily, “if we didn’t waste too much time, it might calm our nerves.” She rolled on top of me. “Let me be the man.”

  “I thought you were exhausted?”

  “Don’t worry, Stanley,” she whispered, kissing me enthusiastically. “It will only take a minute.”

  Well, maybe it took three. Joyously satiated, she collapsed on top of me, pretended to snore; and then she really was asleep.

  I awoke slowly ... certain that I was dreaming. Suspended over our heads was a giant balloon. I stared at it through slit-open eyes, trying to make up my mind what strange dream I was immersed in. Beth was sprawled on her stomach, one arm across my chest. Her face was half turned on the pillow. She was softly breathing in my ear. I closed my eyes tight, convinced it was a dream, and then the balloon broke. Several tons of water cascaded down on our heads. Sputtering and yelling angrily I knew it was no dream. Almost simultaneously the room was filled with an explosion of laughter, and Beth and I, dripping wet, were surrounded by Jack Dawes, Peter Longini, Herb Snyder, Valerie Latrobe, Dottie Stapleton, Jane Atterman, Roger Wilnor, and at least a dozen others, all screaming and choking with laughter. As I wiped the water that was dripping from my hair into my eyes, I recognized Harry Schacht and Sheila Grove in the background. Valerie was doubled over with laughter.

  “Look at them! They look like two half-drowned cats.”

  “We thought that damned condom would never break,” Peter Longini said, gasping with delight. “We’ve been tiptoeing around this room for more than twenty minutes filling it, trying to find a good way to hang that safe full of water over your heads. If you two hadn’t been sleeping under it like there’s no tomorrow, you would have heard us.”

  “Of all the god-damned fool kid tricks,” Beth yelled at him. She sat up in the bed, clutching the soaking wet blanket around her. Her wet hair was plastered against her head. Her blue eyes were wide with murderous rage. “What crazy, bastardly son-of-a-bitch thought this one up?”

  “Me,” Jack Dawes said, smirking. “I just wanted to prove a properly made contraceptive could hold the semen of a Gargantua. Not to change the subject, Beth, but you look as if you’ve been had by St
anley-the-Giant-Killer. How long have you kids been at it ... since Christmas?”

  “Five days in bed!” Roger Wilnor groaned. “Obviously a world’s record. Stan ... what will your roommate think?”

  I didn’t have to answer ... Sheila standing at the foot of the bed ... speechless. The tears in her eyes, living testimony to what Sheila thought. I saw Harry Schacht standing near the door. His face quivered a little. Then he walked out of the room. Sheila followed him.

  Jack, obviously feeling the effects of several drinks, tried to yank the blanket off the bed. Beth struggled to hold it, and then gave up. We were both sitting in bed naked.

  Beth jumped out of bed. “Now that you’ve had your nasty little fun,” she snarled, “please have the decency to get the hell out of here while Stanley and I take a shower and get dressed.”

  Beth had more aplomb than I. Still sitting on the bed I watched all of them leave, listening to their giggling and crazy laughter. Slightly stunned, I tried to figure out what to say to Sheila ... or Harry. We had been caught ... how do they say it in law courts? ... “in flagrante delicto.”

  Leaning dejectedly against the washstand in the bathroom, I watched Beth calmly take a shower.

  “What is the matter, Stanley? Are you sorry for your sins?”

  “No, I’m only sorry that Sheila thinks they are sins ... and so, obviously, does Harry.”

  “I know,” she said. “Three months at Harrad hasn’t reversed tried and true morality ... for them, at least.”

  “Has it for you?”

  “Heavens, Stanley,” Beth said, stepping out of the tub. “Dry my back and stop being mournful. It’s New Year’s Eve. We are the cynosure of Harrad’s eyes. Everybody in the other room is probably ducking about it ... We are the first promiscuous ones.”

  “I can still see the expression on Sheila’s and Harry’s face. They were shocked.”

  “I know,” Beth said, and shrugged. “But I’m simply not worried about it. We made love. We like each other ... quite a lot, I think. Isn’t that what the Tenhausens expected would happen?”