The Harrad Experiment

by Robert H. Rimmer

  “Cut it : out, you two! What the hell are you fighting about?”

  “I told him to leave her alone,” Sir Launcelot said. “Get the hell out of my way.”

  “You crazy bastard, I’ll kill you” King Arthur snarled. He pushed Sir Galahad away and lunged at Sir Launcelot. Then he fell back, screaming in agony, clutching himself.

  “You slashed me,” King Arthur sobbed. “Jesus, I’m bleeding. I’m going to bleed to death.”

  “Why in hell did you do that?” Sir Galhad demanded. He examined King Arthur with a flashlight. “He’s bleeding like a pig.” “He’s a pig, all right.” Sir Launcelot said grimly. “It’s only a slit on his belly. He’s lucky I didn’t slice his prick off.” Sir Launcelot grabbed me by the arm and pushed me out of the truck. “Come on, get the hell out of here before things get rough.” He rushed me down the garage stairs. At the bottom of the stairwell he pushed me against the wall. I was shivering so hard that I could scarcely stand.

  “Are you going to run to the cops?” he demanded.

  “No! No!” I shuddered. “Just let me go. Please!”

  He still held the open knife in his hand. “Aren’t you going to thank me for saving you”

  I really looked at him for the first time. He had a sunken, pock-marked face. Except for his eyes, which seemed sad, he was frighteningly ugly. He couldn’t have been more than nineteen. Trying to stop sobbing, I shrank against the wall. An open light bulb glowed dully on the staircase landing. Frantic with fear, I was certain I was going to faint.

  “Maybe you didn’t care. Maybe you wanted him to do it.”

  “Please. I thank you. Please. Let me go.”

  “Are you afraid of me?”

  I nodded dumbly.

  “Don’t you want to know why I saved you?”

  To rape me yourself, I thought, but said nothing.

  “I would have liked to screw you,” he said. “I never had a girL Girls wouldn’t have anything to do with me. I can’t help my face. But I wouldn’t ever want a girl that didn’t want me. Do you think a girl like you would ever make love with me?”

  “Yes,” I said, and my teeth were chattering. “If you were nice to her, and protected her, a girl would want to make love with you.”

  He stared at me for a minute, trying to determine if I meant it. “Okay, you can go. I’m sorry about your money and your clothes.”

  I’ll never know why, but I kissed him.

  “Thank you, thank you,” I said, and I ran. Afraid that he might be following me, I looked back. He was just standing there. Sir Launcelot.

  Somehow, I got through the lobby of the Astor without attracting attention. I looked at the clock unbelievingly. It was only twelve-thirty. Less than forty-five minutes ago I was holding Harry’s head while he spewed out his stomach in the toilet. None of the Harrad kids had returned from The Last Gurgle. Harry was sleeping where I had left him.

  I stared at myself in the full length door mirror. Tears were pouring down the face of the girl who looked back at me. Her hair was disheveled, her lipstick smeared, the top of her dress was ripped open, and her stockings were ravelling around her ankles. As I looked at the stranger in the mirror, the full horror and shock of what had happened struck me. I ran into the bathroom and threw up.

  As I leaned over the sink, I felt a hand on my back. I screamed, and then recognized Harry’s face in the mirror. He was naked ... skinny; looking at me worriedly. I rushed into his arms and he held me while I sobbed uncontrollably.

  “I’m so lost, Harry ... so very lost. I just can’t face anyone else tonight.”

  “We’ll lock ourselves in the bedroom,” Harry said softly. And we did. Harry washed my face and helped me take my dress off. Tenderly, he washed the caked blood from the scratches King Arthur’s knife had left on my stomach. Shivering in his arms, crying my heart out; I told him what had happened.

  “I just can’t believe it, Harry. Those boys must feel some love toward some girL Maybe they’ve even held a girl close to them, protecting her, soothing her fears, caring for her. If they’ve loved someone in their lives, cared for someone once, how could they deliberately hurt a stranger?”

  “You haven’t been reading your history lately,” Harry said. “Has man made any progress in the last twenty years? Really? The Nazi and Commissar mentality is still rampant. Man’s an emotional infant. When it comes to love, we are all strangers.”

  “I don’t feel strange lying here naked with you.”

  Harry held me close to him. We didn’t talk. Though his penis felt big against my belly, he didn’t try to make love. I wondered if we would be lovers one day, and I was glad we could be quiet with each other and still be happy and secure. When the rest of the Harrad kids came back to the room and banged on the door, Harry refused to open it. “Go away,” he yelled, “I feel anti-social. There’s plenty of room to sleep on the floor.”

  No one asked where Sheila was. Perhaps no one cared.

  FROM THE JOURNAL OF HARRY SCHACHT

  February, March, the First Year

  Four weeks ago I was determined to quit Harrad. I told Phil Tenhausen it was the only sane thing to do. I would take a room in Cambridge or Boston, finish out the year, and then in the fall transfer to a regular college ... preferably male.

  “You are giving up at your first crisis,” Phil said. “Somehow, it doesn’t sound like you, Harry. I thought you were a pretty clear thinking young man.”

  “Not when it comes to love, Phil,” I told him. “I’ve thought a lot about it. I have two counts against me. I’m homely ... maybe ugly, and I’m Jewish. That not being sufficient, I lowered my guard, and let myself fall in love with a WASP (White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant). It’s not your fault there are no Jewish girls at Harrad. I’d bet there will never be any ... nor any Catholic girls. The whole idea is too much in conflict with traditional beliefs and theology. Really, in a way, it’s a good thing for me that Beth didn’t play me along. When I went home for vacations I suddenly saw my family through Beth’s eyes. My mother and father are not really orthodox, but they respect our customs. I could imagine Beth’s home with a Christmas tree, holly, a big turkey dinner, Christmas carolling ... all the excitement that goes with Christmas, and I contrasted it with Chanukah, and my mother lighting the candles in the menorah for eight nights, our token gifts, and our endless procession of relatives joining us for latkes. As I listened to all the excited conversation, interspersed with Yiddish slang, and Yiddish jokes I knew that if Beth had been there she would have felt foreign ... a shicksa, and while my mother and father would have tried to make her welcome, Beth would never feel a part of this life ... anymore than I could ever be honest with myself singing Hark the Herald Angels Sing... or what have you? What I would like to know, Phil, is why? Why did you ever put Beth and I together as room-mates?”

  Phil smiled. “We chose you as two potentially intelligent people who have a great deal to offer each other. We expected and hoped a switching of roommates would occur. In all probability, even the current shifts will not be final All Harrad students are in a unique position. They have the opportunity to know and understand more than one person of the opposite sex intimately and develop emotional relationships with them that are far more mature than any similar relationships occurring in what we term a normal premarital environment. While we have suggested that the best approach to each other would be for roommates not to particularize their love; we guessed that inevitably, having been raised in a culture which believes that love between male and female must be specific excluding all others, that many of you would repeat the same role at Harrad; demanding exclusive love in return for exclusive love.

  “I was never demanding of Beth,” I said, angrily.

  Phil chuckled. “You expected because you loved her ... that she would love you in an identical way, didn’t you? That’s an extremely demanding idea. It can lead to the following conclusions. You either blame yourself, telling yourself that Beth didn’t love you because you are ugly or
you are Jewish or any of a host of masochistic ideas that you may dream up to whip yourself with; or you take a more positive approach and tell yourself that Beth is really not a good person because she didn’t respond to your good love. The first approach will destroy your identity and probably lead to insanity, the second approach which is more typical, will ultimately bring you to the following: ‘I really dislike Beth. She is promiscuous and will never love any one except herself.’

  “Depending on how strongly you react, it is a simple step to move from her apparent rejection of you to your rejection of her. This makes life simple. You reduce your problems to black and white. In this case: ‘I hate Beth.’ All of this is extremely unrealistic thinking. You are planning to be a doctor, aren’t you Harry? In our opinion many of the illnesses that you will encounter will have been triggered by this type of thinking. Hating is a self-indulgence that eventually leads to self-destruction. Where are you at the moment, Harry?”

  “I guess I’ve already arrived at the second phase. Yesterday, Beth had the cool nerve to ask me if we could study some Chemistry problems together. Jack is planning to major in economics and he is only taking a bare minimum in sciences. So you need me after all, I thought. I may not be a smooth operator like Jack Dawes, but you are glad to pick my brains. I almost told her no; then, I agreed. We studied in her room. Jack had gone to an evening lecture at “D” University. After dinner, when I went to their room, Beth greeted me dressed in her terry cloth bathrobe. She knew that I knew she never wore anything under it.

  “She was shy and formal. ‘I appreciate your coming, Harry. I’m glad you aren’t angry with me.’

  “I tried not to look directly at her. We reviewed several chapters and solved two of the problems that were bothering her. I started to leave.

  “ ‘Can’t we just talk, Harry?” she asked.

  “You must be crazy,” I said angrily. “What do you think I am? Nothing but a Great Stone Face? In a few hours Jack will be here, and you’ll take that damned bathrobe off. I’ll be back with Stanley, imagining you making passionate love with Jack. What are you trying to do ... drive me insane?

  “Then do you know what she did? She took off the bathrobe and sat in my lap, naked, and kissed me. ‘I like you, Harry,’ she said, ‘I always will. Take me in the bedroom and make love with me.’

  “Why don’t you screw a red light over your door and go into business?” I asked. “How many men do you want, anyway?”

  “Beth stood up and put her bathrobe back on. ‘I finished my period yesterday. If I had made love with you tonight, I would have told Jack,’ she grinned at me. ‘See, I’m a good Harrad girl. If you should get me pregnant, I wouldn’t want Jack to think he was the father. Honestly, Harry. You have no sense of humor. Look at how grim you are. You think I’m promiscuous. I have had sexual intercourse with three men at Harrad, and you are one of them. From each person I’ve made love with, I learned something ... mostly that the act of sexual congress is simply not so damned death-defying, all encompassing serious. It is not the alpha and omega of love or marriage. It’s fun. The really wonderful thing about it is, if you come to the act of love defenseless, willing to give yourself to another person, and the other person shares this feeling, then for a few moments in your life it’s possible to be wholly and completely the real you. If two people make love this way, and stop playing roles with each other, and can enjoy and accept each other for the frightened little people they really are ... then sexual intercourse becomes a way of saying ‘I am for a moment no longer me. I am youl’ ”

  “I like that,” Phil said thoughtfully. “What did you say?”

  “Nothing,” I went back to my room. Truthfully, for the moment I hated Beth. If I had made love with her it wouldn’t have been nice, I just wanted to conquer her. I wanted her to admit that she was wrong ... that she couldn’t love me and Jack and Stanley. Why did I ever fall in love with her, Phil?”

  “Supposing you could have perfection?” Phil asked. “Supposing Beth reacted just exactly as you wished.”

  “I would love her forever.”

  “Wouldn’t you really be loving your own reflection. Narcissus gazing in the pool, enamoured with himself. You are too smart for that Harry. You would get bored. I’m sure that if you stay at Harrad you will find another girl. When you do ... love her for her uniqueness as an individuaL Love her as a particular female with all the wonderful attributes and mystery of the generalized female and human being. Stop worrying about whether she loves you. One thing is fundamental; if you give love instead of asking for it, if you love openly, defenselessly discarding forever the proposition ‘I’ll love you if you’ll love me,’ which most people live by, then you will discover a wonderful serenity in your life. Give love, tenderness, affection, warmth, interest, be unafraid to share your fears and worries, show people that you need them, too, and you will have love in abundance.”

  “Sounds Christian to me,” I said. “Turn the other cheek.”

  “It was a Jew who said it.”

  When I told Stanley, he said: “Harry, I think Beth has you bugged. Why didn’t you make love with her? I would have. You enjoy your suffering. You’re so convinced you’ve failed with a woman that the failure is more real to you than Beth. Yet it hasn’t thrown you entirely. I’ve watched you studying. If Beth is affecting you so much, how can you concentrate and prepare your courses so thoroughly? Not to mention the fact that every night you go across the hall and visit with Sheila for at least an hour. On the other hand, take the sad case of Stanley Cole. Sheila doesn’t find me an exciting conversationalist the way she used to. Beth will argue with me on any subject at dinner. Yesterday, I went skating with her. She gave me a great big hug when I laced up her skates, but she didn’t invite me to study with her.”

  “Maybe it’s deprivation,” I said. “If we were going to a regular college we probably would never have made out on a regular basis with any girL But here at Harrad we have both experienced the delights of the bed. After a wonderful idyll, it’s hard to go back to the reality.”

  “What is reality?” Stanley asked. “If someone from some other college or university around here had been listening at the keyhole to our discussion, I wager he wouldn’t consider it reality. It would sound like a pipe dream. Anyway, since both Beth and Sheila seem to have lost interest in Stanley Cole, Valerie Latrobe has decided that she might like to room with me for a month or two. Next week Peter Longini is going to move in with you.”

  I looked at him, astonished. “This sounds like a kid game of musical chairs. You mean to say that Peter isn’t angry?”

  “He suggested it. He wants to see what will happen when an irresistible force meets an immovable object Meaning that Valerie needs a mental spanking, and I’ve been elected to give it to her.”

  “This place is getting pretty damned casual about the whole business,” I said. “I wonder where it’s all going to end up. It looks to me as if we are all building our future on sand. After four years at Harrad no one will really love anyone very much, and none of us will have a secure love relationship.”

  “I think you’re wrong, Harry. I agree with the Tenhausens that a rapid shifting of sexual partners in the outside world would certainly devalue the sexual and interpersonal relationships, but here at Harrad we are very much a contained community. All of us are developing on a high intellectual plane and simultaneously being indoctrinated into a much saner view of the male and female relationship. I am much more than the Stanley Cole who arrived at Harrad seven months ago. I am me plus Beth and plus Sheila and plus all the other influences that I have absorbed as well as the courses I am studying. Not one minute that I have spent with Beth or Shelia has been casual. When we made love it was not sex for the sake of sex. It was because we liked each other and wanted to share the depth of that like in a natural release of our affections. The real joy in the act of love is when the normal human defenses are down, when role playing and posturing are gone. This is the key to everything I’
ve learned at Harrad. Most people go through their whole lives and never learn that in the act of love the great catharsis is not the orgasm. That’s too short-lived. It’s the simple, blinding revelation that you and this female you care for are both small fumbling creatures needing to be loved. The world, man in aggregate and the blind forces of nature which man will never understand, are not hostile; they’re rather disinterested. So the only peaceful harbor is the warm, bubbling laughter of individual man’s love for each other and for his wonderful, ridiculous humanity.”

  “Everybody at Harrad spouts the Tenhausen gospel,” I said. “I’m still provincial. How could you make love to Beth now ... knowing she made love with me as well as Jack Dawes? That’s all I would think about.”

  “Why not? Is she less a person? If she still retains the delight of love and doesn’t become bored and casual, which she won’t if she has any real intelligence, then she may actually have become more rather than less. You know, Harry, there’s one amazingly beautiful thing about the act of love freely given between a man and woman who trust each other. If they understand what is happening, they’re no longer just existing; each one is becoming. You are you, extended in the delight and confidence of the other person. It would be a wonderful world if what the male and female could learn in this interaction could be extended to embrace every human interrelationship. As Phil Tenhausen says, ‘We are living in a world that sneers at idealism, or sentimentalizes it. The mission of Harrad is to make all of us practical idealists]’ ”

  As I try to write down this conversation between me and Stanley, I suddenly realize that many of the words I put into the mouth of Stanley are really my own words, but if I read them back to Stanley, he’d accept them as his. It’s interesting and somewhat frightening. Since most of us come to Harrad without any real philosophy of life, after four years most of us probably will have absorbed the Harrad philosophy. God help us if the Tenhausens are wrong and the tried (and true?) ways of society are right.