The Harrad Experiment

by Robert H. Rimmer

  I wonder where this is all leading us? After four years at Harrad, will the five of us, or six of us (we’ve obviously got to find another girl) ... or any Harrad student who has shared this communal approach to life for four of their most formative years ... (communal love, ugh ... somehow I hate that expression. It’s inadequate somehow) ... will any of us be able to settle down into a strictly monogamous relationship? Could I, right now, marry Jack, move into suburbia, have children and exist as a housewife? If I finally manage to get through medical school ... then what? Could I live life where I practiced medicine and lived like Pops in a world of Doctors who know little else but their specialities and the patients they practiced them on? No. I’d want somebody around me like Sheila or Stanley, who’d enrich my world with their very different worlds. If I married Jack, I’m not sure I wouldn’t want to go to bed with Stanley or Harry. Where does that leave us, Phillip Tenhausen?

  I haven’t really led a sane life since I moved in with Jack Dawes. He plays the guitar and sings his Economics homework in crazy rhyming songs I listen to in spite of myself. Jack believes he has been endlessly reincarnated and occasionally slips into complete historical and cultural dissertations on the world circa 500 B.C., or during the Middle Ages, when he claims he was reborn again, as well the specific year, 1778, when he claims that he was eighteen years old and a soldier in the Revolutionary War. He dates his next rebirth sometime in the twenty-fourth century; and if I’m around, he promises to say hello to me. He is a faddist, plunging into the study of things, like Astronomy, Religion, Witchcraft and Alchemy, and then after littering the room with books and talking incessantly on the ideas these pursuits have generated, he drops the whole subject and moves on to something else.

  One thing about Jack: he is never dull. The moments when I’m not trying to reform him and make him come down to earth, I suddenly realize he is making me wonder who I am. Which of the Beths I show the world is the real Beth? Is it possible for anyone to be completely whole and honest with any one single person in the world?

  I, Beth, certainly am not really me so far as my mother and father are concerned. I am their daughter. I look like a composite them. In many ways I can share my overt thoughts with them. I want to be a doctor. So when I talk about medicine I can talk with Pops. I suppose that I will be a wife and mother one day. So I can talk homemaking, children, and cooking with Mother. I can also talk about music with Mother because she is responsible for my taking violin lessons. Mother plays the viola well and belongs to a group that meet once a mouth and play chamber music all night. Pops not only finds chamber music exceedingly boring, he refuses to make any attempt to understand it. Any discussion of his musical deficiencies ends up with him proudly explaining that he has a “tin ear”.

  To Pops, I am Beth who loves medicine. To Mother I am Beth who loves music. To neither of them am I Beth who likes to go to bed with a boy. Beth who likes to have a man’s hands and lips touch and kiss her breasts and her genitals.

  One night a few weeks ago when Jack was gently kissing me between my legs and I was kissing his penis, I started to laugh and couldn’t stop until I almost had hiccoughs. When I asked Jack what his mother would think that after almost twenty years he had his head between another woman’s legs he began to laugh, too. We nearly forgot to make love.

  So, to neither Mother or Pops is Beth a sexy woman. Nor can she ever tell them she is. From Pop’s standpoint, if Beth ever has a child, I am sure, despite all his familiarity with the necessary methods of impregnation. Pops will consider one more immaculate conception has occurred.

  Will Harry Schacht ever know the complete Beth? Yes, on the score of interest in medicine and music. Never, of course, the multiple Beth that could make love with him as well as Stanley Cole and Jack Dawes. Each man I have known releases a different Beth. I have never really been able to be my giddy, zany self with Harry. I just couldn’t be silly or pout or tease him, because Harry would be bewildered. If we were in the act of intercourse and he was having a wonderful metaphysical rapport with me, and I, too, should have been having other-worldly thoughts, and then if he would ask me what I was thinking, instead of replying some heavenly nonsense such as: “I am ecstatically floating on a cloud of love” ... if I dared reply: “I was wondering if I should put my hair in curlers,” or, “I really love you, Harry ... but right now you are crushing my left breast beyond recognition” ... Would Harry have laughed, or thought it kind of funny? No. Harry has a very tender ego. It can’t stand laughter. When it is laughed at, it runs away and weeks are needed to coax it out of hiding.

  What about Stanley? Stanley would soon know Beth, the sex-pot, inside out. In fact Stanley, as a lover, would leave no nook or cranny of Beth unexplored. Stanley’s ego is tougher than Harry’s, so he can laugh at himself a little, too. Not so much as Jack Dawes, because Stanley is essentially the poor boy who has licked his environment but always feels the danger of the past reaching out and clutching him back. He is a man who, even if he becomes wealthy, will always live his life as if one foot is caught in the quicksand of poverty. Would Stanley ever know the Beth who loves medicine? Would either of us ever thoroughly understand the other’s drives? We might live together fifty years, make love regularly, have children, and still neither of us be able to reveal fully the deep-down inside person of ourselves that makes us really tick. So while Stanley would know the Beth who was a hungry sexual animal, he would never know many aspects of the Beth that could really unite us; two separate people.

  What about Jack? Jack is a year older than me, but that doesn’t give him any right to treat me like a wayward child. Yet, I always have the feeling with Jack that I am a little girL Sometimes I am a bad little girl and I yell and scream at him, but he doesn’t yell back. Jack works on the principle that you simply can’t get mad at bad little girls. You just scoop them up in your arms, open their bathrobes, or pull up their dresses, and kiss them very thoroughly from head to foot. If they beat you with their hands and legs, and nearly scratch you to bits while this is going on, well, this is just one of the hazards of dealing with naughty little girls; you just chuckle or sing little songs, such as “Sing hallelujah, hallelujah, put a nickle in the pail, get another piece of tail,” or “Ball of yarn, ball of yarn, it was then I spun her little ball of yarn,” or “ay, ay, yi ay, in China they do it for Chili” ... and pretty soon the bad little girl is a laughing, co-operating little girl.

  Does it all mean everyone in life is doomed to be one-dimensional to everybody else? Margaret Tenhausen told me this wasn’t really the problem. The important goal and what most people failed to achieve is understanding ourselves in three-dimensions.

  I asked her what she meant.

  She said: “When the spiritual, mental, and physical Beth is unified and you are cognidvely aware of your real self, all the many Beths you now perceive will vanish, and you won’t be one-dimensional, to yourself at least.”

  Since April, Harry, Sheila, Stanley, Jack, and I have spent Saturday nights together. We usually go to Boston and eat in Chinatown, or poke around Hanover Street and eat in some Italian restaurant. Last Saturday we had tickets for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? which was being rerun at the Charles Playhouse. We ate in Omonoia, a small Greek restaurant, which Jack had discovered in a very dreary part of Boston. Upstairs we were in another world, enjoying the resin-flavored Greek wine, shish kebab, bakalava, and Greek coffee, all served to a background accompaniment of Greek folk music. We drank two bottles of Pendelli, and to me everybody seemed bathed in a soft halo. I was in my usual I-love-everybody mood when Stanley spoiled it by announcing he wasn’t going to sweat through Albee’s play. He’d read it and listened to it on the original cast recording. To him it was sickening.

  “It presents a very good case for never getting married,” he said. “Two very stupid people who are presumably representative of the typical college faculty, and by definition middle class America, hate each other out loud for about two and a half hours, and then have a
drunken catharsis as a result of shock because they nearly slept with each other’s spouses.” Stanley grinned. “Phil Tenhausen should use it as a good example of the moral bankruptcy of Western society. A sick country that exalts a sick playwright. Anyhow, tonight I feel like going exploring,”

  “Exploring?” Jack asked. “Where ... for what?”

  “For a woman,” Stanley said coolly. “What else? I’ve been celibate for nearly eight weeks. Do you think I’m made of stone?”

  “You mean you’d just go to bed with anyone?” Sheila asked.

  This started a discussion in which Stanley demanded to know why should he be so angelic and other worldly as to not want sexual relations. He asked Sheila if she would sleep with him, and when she didn’t answer, he asked Harry if he would loan Sheila to him.

  “I don’t think you are very nice,” Sheila said stifgy.

  Stanley just shrugged. “There’s any number of people who wouldn’t think you or anybody at Harrad was very nice but wouldn’t give a second thought about a college boy on a fling about town. What I propose to do is the accepted morality. What you and everybody at Harrad is doing is downright illegal and immoral.”

  We knew Stanley was trying to aggravate us, and since we couldn’t dissuade him, we finally persuaded him to meet us in the lobby of the Hotel Bradford around eleven-thirty, after the play.

  I like the Charles Playhouse and its three-quarter stage. Jack bought another bottle of Greek wine, which we drank between the acts in paper cups. Maybe it was because I was in a pleasant state of alcoholic euphoria, but I enjoyed the play. If you don’t take Albee literally, but simply respond to the laughter of an unhappy man and woman excoriating each other, and then watch the surface hatred get out of control and move toward tragedy, it is an interesting experience. Judged from the Harrad viewpoint the whole play is unnecessary. But one thing even the Tenhausens fail to emphasize enough is: Harrad isn’t the world ... yet. We must live our lives with one foot in Utopia and one foot in reality.

  We waited in the Bradford until a quarter of twelve, me defending Albee against Jack, Sheila, and Harry, while we waited for Stanley. We were about to give up. Jack had us convinced that Stanley was probably in bed with some whore, when Stanley walked in looking slightly wan and uncommunicative.

  Jack grinned at him. “As my old man used to say, did you get your ashes hauled?”

  “Let’s not be crude,” Stanley said. He refused to discuss what had happened to him. “I drank five bourbon and sodas and I’m as drunk as a Kentucky Colonel.”

  Back at Harrad, I asked Jack if he’d mind if I went to Stanley’s room and talked with him.

  “Mother Beth is worried about her little boy,” he said, smiling at me.

  “Stanley was kind of moody on the way home,” I said as I undressed and put on my bathrobe. “I think he needs a good listener, someone to talk with.”

  “You mean to sleep with, don’t you?”

  “Are you jealous?”

  “No. I don’t own you.”

  “Do you want to own me?”

  “In a sense, I believe I do own you, Beth. I’m beginning to believe the die is cast, and somehow, you, Stanley, Sheila, Harry and I will always be involved with each other. In that sense, I think we have made a commitment deeper than ownership.”

  “You are serious tonight, aren’t you?”

  He kissed my cheek. “Go see what’s eating Stanley. If you don’t come back tonight, I won’t be angry.”

  I found Stanley sitting at his desk, naked, writing in his journal.

  “Maybe I should have locked my door,” he said disagreeably. “Good God, nobody has any privacy here. Suppose you walked in without knocking and found me masturbating ... or something?”

  “Are you trying to shock me?”

  “Sure ... why not? I have masturbated on occasion.”

  “If I had found you so occupied, I would have helped you.”

  “Happy daysl You can start now!”

  “Not until I find out what happened to you.”

  Stanley closed his journal. “I was going to write it down, but knowing you I might just as well give up and tell you. Only, there’s a catch. If you want to find out what happened, you’ll have to sleep with me.” He stood up and grinned at me.

  “My ... you are quite excited for a man who only an hour ago ... what did Jack say ... ‘had his ashes hauled’.”.

  “Would you make love with me anyway?” Stanley asked.

  “Not until you had scalded your jamoke. Do you think I want to get diseased?”

  “Let’s stop kidding,” Stanley said. “After a year at Harrad I have discovered that I make love with my brain, not my penis. I spent an impotent evening. The title of the play I saw was: Who’s Aftaid of Vapid Vulvas? ... and the answer is me: Stanley Cole.”

  “All right,” I said, taking off my bathrobe. “Let’s get into your bed while we talk.”

  I waited while he kissed my eyes, and lips, and nose, and breasts. I kissed him back gently.

  Finally, he said, “You know, Beth, it’s a God-awful sad and futile world. I found this joint I had heard about. It was filled with men lined up against a long bar, or sitting at tables around it. Behind the bar a continuous procession of girls were going through the motions of stripping ... ending up with their breasts in nets and their mounds covered with triangles of rhinestones. They shook and gyrated dispassionately for a while, and eventually were followed by another girl who went through the same routine. Those poor sad men, drinking and staring, have no other way of seeing a girl naked. They probably have to make love to their wives in the dark. If they are married, their wives are the only women, from their wedding day on, they are supposed to get close to, or touch. Each one of these strip ”acts“ had three phases of teasing, and lasted at least a half hour before this boring denouement was achieved. During the acts and between them, the girls, fully dressed, sold cigarettes and propositioned the men. The price: twenty-dollars for one hour.”

  “Finally, after four bourbons, I decided that I, Stanley Cole the sociologist, would invest twenty dollars to discover the whys, whats, and wherefores. I picked a pretty brown-eyed woman about thirty years old. She had just finished her act. She was quite well-shaped.

  “You were thinking a lot more than the whys and wherefores, Stanley Cole,” I said, interrupting him. “You mean you would have actually resisted a pretty woman who offered herself to you? I don’t believe it.”

  Stanley shook his head. “No girl offers herself without conditions to a stranger, so the question answers itself. The conditions make it possible to resist. Anyway, I followed her around the back of the bar into a kitchen of the joint, and then down a flight of stairs and through a passageway that led into the next building. In the basement, next to the garbage and trash cans, was a service elevator that she explained would take us to her room in the hotel which was next door to the barroom. We got off at the eighth floor. I followed her down a hall that smelled of centuries of sweat and dirty underwear to a room which she unlocked and carefully relocked when we were inside.

  “ ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Twenty-dollars ... in advance.’

  “ I paid her and sat on the edge of the bed, which had been stripped to a mattress and a sheet. In about two movements she was stripped naked and tried to shove her bush in my face.

  “ ‘No tit squeezing or sucking,’ she said, making the rules. ‘I don’t trust you college kids. You think they’re made of rubber. Here’s a safe. Put it on.’ She lay on the bed with her legs open.

  “ ‘I want to talk awhile,’ I said.

  “ ‘Oh, Jesus,’ she said disgustedly. ‘Not that routine. Come on get it over with, then you won’t feel so conversational.’

  “ ‘Why do you do this?’ I asked her. ‘You are pretty enough to have a husband who would support you.’

  “ ‘Kid,’ she sighed, ‘I am married. My husband makes a hundred bucks a week. Some weeks I make six hundred. We have a Cadillac and spend the
winter in Miami. Why don’t you can the Freud approach and do what you paid for?’ She started to rub my pants.”

  Stanley chuckled. “I could see I was playing out of my league. I told her I wasn’t really interested in sex. Quick as a wink she got dressed.

  “ ‘Okay, let’s go,’ she said.

  “ ‘I paid for an hour,’ I told her. ‘I’ve got forty minutes coming.’

  “ ‘Icould have you tossed out of here on your ass,’ she said nastily.

  “ ‘Go ahead.’

  “She sat on the bed and stared at me despondently.

  “ ‘There’s no love in the world,’ she said. ‘Woman is to man a good fuck or a bad fuck. My old man worked in a foundry. He seared his eyeballs. When he was fifty he started to go blind. Every fuck my mother ever had was one more kid until she was finally bedridden. She had fifteen fucks in her life, three of which ended in miscarriages. All I ever wanted for the first fifteen years in my life was something to eat besides potatoes. I found a way. This is a good living while it lasts. If I manage to save up a million dollars from fucking and moved to Newton or Wellesley, society would accept me with open arms. How could anyone complain even if they knew how I earned it? Most of the rich people in the world, or at least their grandparents, fucked somebody one way or the other to get their money.’ ”

  Stanley sighed. “I certainly had gotten in deeper than I had anticipated. You know what she did then? She cried. For the next half hour she sobbed. I stroked her face and tried to soothe her.”

  “ ‘Thanks, kid,’ she said finally. She wiped her eyes and stared sadly at me.

  “ ‘I’m sorry,’ I told her.

  “ ‘Forget it.’ She took me out of the hotel through the lobby, and I found her a taxi. As she was getting in the cab she gave me a kiss on my cheek. ‘You know, something,’ she said. ‘I’m not married, and I was never poor. I read all that crap I told you in some damned book written by an ex-prostitute. I tell it to all the college kids. It will make good reading in your term paper.’