Last night after supper I walked with Sheila to her room. She seemed unusually quiet, remote and withdrawn into her own world. I noticed she’d bought a painter’s easeL On it stood a strange painting of shadowy, blue-black houses with window shades drawn nearly to the bottom, revealing pale yellow lights behind them, and in the sky a moon, mostly obscured by black-edged clouds.
“I didn’t know that you were an artist.”
“I’m not,” Sheila said. “I’ve been taking a course in art. We learn to appreciate by attempting to paint. It’s far more enlightening than just looking at a picture- You learn how difficult it is to handle oils, or water colors, and express yourself at the same rate.”
“This looks pretty good to me.”
“It’s neither good nor pretty. It’s symbolic.”
“Symbolic of what?”
“I don’t know ... loneliness.”
“Well, symbolic things irk me! Why does everything in art have to be symbolic, or have hidden meanings, or be written on two planes? Why does man want to be so damned subtle and put a shroud around the world? Life itself has so much mystery that man should spend his life trying to uncover it rather than muddying it up with symbols. Why don’t you and I say what we think with each other?”
Sheila smiled. “All right. Here’s what I’ve really been think ing in the past few minutes. I have cramps. I got my period this morning. Why do I flow so much? Will Harry leave soon ... or will I tell him I have a headache? I really have to go to the bathroom. I’m sure that the tampon isn’t working. I think I better use sanitary pads for the first two days. Do I have an odor? I know I do. I really have a headache. I think I’ll lie down. I feel like crying. I think I’ll put a heating pad on my belly. I’d like to snuggle against Harry. Maybe his hand would feel good on my stomach.”
“Hey,” I said, delighted. “That’s much more fun. Now that I really know what you are thinking, the way you’ve been acting makes more sense.”
Sheila shrugged. “What I told you is only a part of what I’ve been thinking. No human being dares lay himself completely open to another person. You’d better go, Harry, I really feel quite messy and unconversational tonight.”
“What about wanting me to snuggle against you? I’d be happy to warm your stomach.”
Sheila looked at me with tears in her eyes. “When I told you that I was thinking, Harry ... I was really thinking Stanley.”
“Oh,” I mumbled. “Well, I’ll see you tomorrow.”
A few hours later I told Stanley what Sheila said. “She’s miserable. Why don’t you go see her? She really wants you.”
Stanley shook his head. “Harry, you have absolutely no confidence. You should have put your arm around her instead of bumbling off like a ninny.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Stan. Why should I comfort her when she is thinking about you?”
Stanley laughed. “You know what would happen if I went to her? She wouldn’t be happy at all. She’d start a long discussion on how I would rather be with Beth than with her. In ten minutes she’d make herself more miserable than she is.”
“Brother,” I said. “I just decided to hell with women. They’re too complicated for me.”
“What Sheila and you both need is some laughter.” Stanley looked at his watch. “It’s twelve-fifteen. Sheila has gone to bed. She never stays up beyond eleven-thirty. Come on. We’ll both jump in bed with her stark naked. We’ll tell her we’ve come to warm her belly. It’s high time Sheila stopped being so damned exclusive.”
Sheila’s door was locked, but Stanley was not to be deterred from his idea. We ploughed through the snow to the maintenance shop, got a ladder, and propped it against Sheila’s study window. Stanley went up first. Shushing and shirring each other, we finally eased the window open and squeezed through, into the study. Hastily undressing, we tried to orient ourselves without turning on the light. I tiptoed silently behind Stanley toward the bedroom door, and then he bumped into the easel, tripped and fell against it with an ear-shattering crash.
Sheila, in a shorty night-gown, opened the door, snapped on the lights, and stared at us unbelievingly.
“Oh, my good lord,” she gasped, unable to stop laughing. “Look at the two of you! Naked as jaybirds.”
“We came to warm your belly.” Stanley said, trying to look dignified as he ruefully rubbed his knee.
“See,” I said. “No subtlety. No symbols. No secrets.”
Stanley grabbed her and pushed her into the bedroom. “Since you really can’t make up your mind, get in bed. We’re both going to sleep with you.”
And we did ! Wedged between us, Sheila finally stopped laughing and solemnly kissed us each good-night.
“Thank you, Harry. Thank you, Stanley.” she said.
“For what?”
“For caring.”
FROM THE JOURNAL OF BETH HILLYER
April, May and June, the First Year
Last night when Jack came back from the lecture at “D” University, I told him I had made love with Harry Schacht.
That’s nice,” was all he said. “I hope Harry is smiling again for a change.”
“Aren’t you jealous?” I demanded.
“Nope,” Jack said “I know you like Harry.”
“It means I can’t make love with you for a month.”
“That’s nonsense,” Jack kissed my ear and then took a little bite on my neck. “You’ve been taking those pills religiously. How could you get pregnant? Anyway, you know the only reason that the Tenhausens set that once a month rule with one boy was really just to slow everyone down a little until they could brain - wash us.”
“Supposing somehow I did get pregnant?”
“I’d marry you. What else? You’d be a doctor and I’d be an economist and we’d live happily ever after.”
“Supposing it were Harry’s baby?”
“If you buy a cat or a dog, is it your cat or dog?”
“Sure, I guess so.”
“Why?”
“Because you love it and feed it and take care of it and it loves you back.”
“Quod erat demonstrum,” Jack laughed. “It’s a wise father that knoweth his own child, anyway. Harry and I both have brown eyes, and brown eyes are dominant.”
“Do you really believe all this Tenhausen stuff?” I asked him. “Everyone here spouts it, but when the chips are down, then what? Don’t you really think I’m immoral? In less than a year, I’ve made love with three different Harrad boys. You’ve only made love with me.”
“I’m happy. Besides, we’ve got three years to go.”
“Would you want to marry me even if you didn’t have to?”
“Do I have to?”
“Not Damn you!”
While this conversation was going on, Jack undressed. I followed him into the bedroom and watched him get into bed. “Open the window, like a good kind,” he sighed, and closed his eyes.
“I’m not a good kind,” I said. “I really didn’t make love with Harry Schacht.”
Jack looked at me amused. “I could have guessed that. If you had, you wouldn’t be so discursive. Really, Beth, your basic nature is that of a big, hungry, affectionate mother. You want all your boys to love you. Harry, Stanley, Jack. You want to hold us fiercely against those lovely tits of yours, pat us on the po-pos, pin on our mittens, and send us to school with tears of sheer joy in your eyes- You go around with the notion that you want a man to dominate you. You think you could be a slave to some willful man, but the few times I have tried the masterful approach on you, you act as if I’m some kind of nut. The plain and simple truth is that you need at least three men and a dozen children to absorb your overflowing affectionate nature.”
I snuggled beside him in bed. “I’m really bad, aren’t I?”
“No,” he said, burying his face in my breasts, “I find you comforting.”
The nice thing about Jack is that he doesn’t take me seriously. I told him I would only be serious about studying. I was going t
o medical school come hell or high water, just to prove to Pops that I could do it. But I wasn’t going to take anything else seriously. If I live to seventy, I have fifty years to be serious, so I’m not starting until I get at least half way.
Jack pointed out that I was serious about love. I admit it. I’m in love with Jack, Harry, and Stanley, and that’s nothing to laugh about. Still, it makes me bubble with laughter. Lately, I’ve been falling in love with Sheila, too.
Somehow, since early in March, we all seem to have crossed the troubled waters and landed on a quiet island. It started when Harry and Sheila decided to room together. Then Valerie moved in with Stanley. That lasted four weeks. The other night at dinner Stanley told all of us at our table that he and Valerie had decided to give up the Experiment.
“We like each other better,” Valerie said, grinning at him. “But we have both discovered that not everybody can room together, even if they get along in bed.”
She wouldn’t tell us any more, but that night Sheila, Harry, and Stanley visited with Jack and me, and we gradually pumped the story out of Stanley.
Jack and I bought a hot plate, and though it is against dormitory rules, he was making coffee, and warming up some pizzas Sheila brought from her refrigerator. Because all of our rooms are at the end of the corridor, and because we’d become more sexually involved with each other than with the rest of the Harrad kids, the six of us had got into the habit of meeting around ten o’clock to discuss the world in general and us in particular. For the past four weeks Valerie had arrived with Stanley and joined in the discussion. Now, since Valerie had decided to room with Peter again, Stanley was alone. Dressed in a sweat suit he’d used for cross country running, and ignoring my coments that he definitely had a gymnasium odor, Stanley sprawled on the floor doing a bicycle exercise with his feet.
“My last night with this group,” he said puffing.
“Just because Valerie has left you?” Jack asked.
“Sure ... no room for a Onesie among you Twosies.”
“That’s silly,” Sheila said. “After all, we do know each other quite well.”
“Yeah,” Stanley grunted as Jack handed him a wedge of pizza. “The last time I slept with you, Harry was on your other side, staring at me all night. Not conducive to romance in my book.”
“What are we going to do about you?” I asked Stanley. “Obviously, the Tenhausens overlooked this in their calculations ... one person of the opposite sex too many.”
“They can even it out with the freshman class in the fall,” Stanley chuckled. “I’m patient.”
Jack suggested that Sheila and I share the problem of Stanley. He proposed Sheila and I work our way around a circle, week by week, composed of the three of them.
“That would give Sheila the dubious pleasure of sleeping with me every third week,” Jack said, grinning at Sheila, who looked quite shocked. “Well, you did say a minute ago that we were all well acquainted, Sheila. I seem to be the only male who hasn’t experienced nuptial delights with all the females present.”
“Why do men think that every female is different in bed?” Sheila demanded.
“I pass,” Jack said. “I am a Harrad neophyte. Ask Stanley or Harry.”
“Don’t answer,” Harry laughed. “Next thing, she’ll want to know qualitative differences.”
Stanley chewed a second piece of pizza philosophically. “My own opinion is that the variation in experience in bed is only limited by the number of women in the world and the male’s willingness to appreciate the infinite and subtle differences which are not truly sexual but mental ... hence while the physical characteristics and the physical movements may be similar, like the notes in a scale, you can compose anything from concertos and symphonies to low down Basin Street ... but usually not with the same woman.”
I shrugged. “Most women seek security in love. How did the world ever get created so that women are perfectly content all their lives with one good man, while most men would crawl in the sack with as many different women as possible? The best solution is for Sheila and I to room together. Then these three males will all be equally deprived.”
Though I was jesting, Sheila immediately agreed with me. “I think that’s a very good idea. Sometimes, this whole business gets me worried. When I stop to think what I have done and what is going on here, I can’t believe it. I never thought I’d actually make love with two boys and not be married to either of them. The idea of rotating among three men isn’t nice at all It would make me feel cheap ... like a sexual object rather than a person.”
I wondered if Sheila were right. Here were two girls and three boys, all unmarried, sitting around a room in their night clothes, drinking coffee and eating pizza. Sheila’s breasts were dearly visible through her nightgown. My legs and the lord knows what else were exposed under my bathrobe. Jack was in jockey shorts. Harry wore pants but no shirt. And Stanley had calmly decided his exercise had made him so warm that he had removed the bottom of his sweat suit. Any stranger to Harrad seeing us would condemn our semi-nudity as extremely immoral. But is it immoral? After eight months of seeing boys and girls naked in the gym and in the communal showers of the dormitory, I not only don’t usually give it a second thought, I simply can’t conceive being naked as anything but an interesting fact of life.
Are there really any absolute standards of morality? Maybe there is one. Sheila skirted the fringe of it when she said she didn’t want to be a sexual object. Once any of us in this room ceased to care deeply for each other, we would move into the category of object, not person. The moment that occurred, we would be behaving immorally. I tried to evoke this idea.
Harry agreed. “But none of us knows whether a human being is capable of maintaining a sexual relationship with several persons without having the whole business become casual and devalued.”
Jack flopped on the floor beside Stanley. “Most of the early writers on love, from Ovid to Balzac to Stendhal, feel that all human love proceeds inevitably to the phase of boredom and casual-ness, and that even great lovers like Romeo and Juliet, or Paul and Virginia, or Heloise and Abelard, if they had entered into any long relationship, or, God forbid, marriage, the charm they would have had for each other would soon have vanished.” He shook Stanley who was, lying on his back, staring at the ceiling. “Now here we have an authority who can throw some light on the subject,. How come you and Valerie petered out so fast?”
“You know,” Stanley said, “it’s amazing. Even the students at Harrad get the surface idea that everyone here is doing nothing but climbing in the sack night and day. Yet, I’ll wager that the actual amount of sexual intercourse to a climax is relatively small. Before I answer your question, Jack, tell me how many times you have had intercourse with Beth in the last two weeks?”
Jack grinned at me. I blushed. Conversations at Harrad between males and females and even nonroommates have become very matter-of-fact and blunt. But I’m still devious enough to think everybody shouldn’t know everything.
“All right,” I said finally. “Twice.”
“How many nights did you sleep with each other?”
“Six or seven.”
“There you are.” Stanley said triumphantly. “In case you don’t know it, here in a free sexual environment we are all functioning on a much lower quantitative sexual level than the Kinsey statistics for newly-weds.” He looked at Sheila. “What about you?”
“Once,” she said shyly.
“Now how in hell do you figure it?” Stanley demanded. “I roomed with Valerie two weeks and we had intercourse twice. If any of us had functioned as normal married men, we would have considered it our moral duty to ‘knock it off’ every other night, at the very least. Why is Harrad different?”
“We aren’t married!” Sheila and I chorused.
“It’s not only that,” I continued. “Without realizing it most of the girls want to be very sure of love, and the security I mentioned, before they are psychologically able to surrender themselves. I
think the continual hammering by the Tenhausens that our love motivations evolve on a rational basis ... that I love Jack because he has a pimple on his behind and I know it hurts him, or that I love Stanley because he, or his gym suit, or both, need to take a shower, that I love Sheila because she is timid, that I love Harry because he looks so absent-minded and can’t find his money to pay a restaurant check ... all these new evaluations we are learning about ourselves in relation to people make everything about the sexual relationship at Harrad more mature. We are learning, early in life, to evoke what people long married may know but can’t even put into words.”
“It’s the difference between the thrill of a roller coaster ride,” Sheila said, “and the pure joy that exists between two people when they are simultaneously reacting to experiences outside themselves in an identical way. Not that I don’t enjoy the roller coaster ride, too.” Sheila laughed.
“The reason that Valerie and I decided not to room together,” Stanley said, “was because there never was any capitulation. Basically Valerie believes in complete equality between a man and a woman, I don’t. I need a woman to protect. Valerie is completely self-sufficient. Peter is able to coexist with her. I desire interpenetration of my personality with a woman. Anyway, while we decided we could love each other as surface friends, we knew we could never work out our lives together.”
“Have you found any girl who meets your qualifications?” Sheila asked.
“Yes ... you and Beth.”
“Good God,” I said, “where does that leave us?”
We couldn’t arrive at any solution either for Stanley or for our composite futures, but I think there is one thing we could all agree on: The five of us were developing an inter-dependency and need for each other. I have noticed, many similar groupings of friends have occurred at Harrad. We’ve discovered that the roommate system is greatly enhanced by multiplying our relationships on a discussion level. In this way, we share the thinking of several minds. In the process of pooling our reactions to the world, to our experiences, to our fears and hopes, we expand the horizon of our own life on a level not usually achieved by ordinary friendships.
The Harrad Experiment Page 13
