by Max Shulman
“And so do I!” I cried, waving a clenched fist in the air.
Mr. McCandless gaped at me. “What’s going on here?” he demanded. “A minute ago you said nothing appealed to you less than chemistry.”
“A minute ago it was true,” I replied. “But this young lady has opened my eyes.” I grasped her hand in both of mine. “Miss Frith, may I say what’s in my heart?” I asked.
“Please do,” she said with a warm smile.
“Scarcely a moment ago,” I said, “I was a man without a purpose, a ship without a rudder. But you have shown me the way. I know what I want. I want to take chemistry with you, make discoveries with you, lighten mankind’s burden with you. You and I together, test tubes in hand, from this day forward!”
“Gee,” she said. “Just like Marie and Pierre Curie.”
“Precisely,” I agreed. “You must call me Pierre and I will call you Marie.”
“Pierre,” she breathed.
“Marie,” I breathed.
We stood clasped silently, lost in the magic of the moment.
“There is a university policy,” said Mr. McCandless severely, “about undergraduates embracing in scholastic buildings.”
I released Helen—Marie, I mean—and Mr. McCandless made out our programs. Then we went over to the Kozy Kampus Korner to get better acquainted.
There, over two Varsity Vooms (one scoop vanilla, one scoop chocolate, one scoop coleslaw, hot fudge, and rolled anchovies), I learned that chemistry had not always been the driving force in Marie’s life. It was, in fact, only a recent preoccupation. In previous years she had embraced numerous other causes. At age twelve she had been a militant suffragette. This came to an abrupt end when she found out that women already had the vote. The following year she took up yoga exercises and practiced them with great fidelity. These she gave up at her mother’s earnest entreaties when her biceps got somewhat larger than Rocky Graziano’s. It took a year of enforced indolence to make her arms girlish again. Later there were, successively, bird-walking, playing the timpani, vegetarianism, and arrowhead collecting, all of which palled in their turn. Now it was chemistry.
My heart went out to her as I listened. All her life the poor girl had been seeking, groping, striving for her proper niche. Now she thought that chemistry was the answer, but one look at her and I could tell that it was not. She would soon tire of chemistry and embark once more on her endless quest for fulfillment, only to find disappointment again.
Had our paths not crossed, I thought, she might have spent her whole life in this feckless search. But I knew what she wanted. I knew the one pursuit, the one cause, that would bring her the genuine, soul-deep satisfaction that had so long eluded her. I refer, of course, to hedonism.
For it was obvious to my practiced eye that this girl was made for hedonism. The eagerness of her, the bubbling enthusiasm, the way she walked and talked and smiled—all these were indications that could not be misinterpreted. Beyond cavil she was meant to be a hedonist.
And my heart sang with the joy of this knowledge. Already I could see the two of us in pursuit of pleasure—dancing together, tobogganing together, roasting frankfurters together, seeing movies together, just being together. I could scarcely confine my enthusiasm. Practicing hedonism alone, as I had been, was well enough, but a hedonist without a mate is really only half a hedonist.
I was about to start converting her when I was struck by a sobering thought: it was too soon. Hedonism required complete concentration, and right now her mind was filled with all that chemistry nonsense. Better to wait until she tired of chemistry before I began my missionary work; certainly it would not be very long.
In the meantime, while chemistry was her preoccupation, I would string along. I would do better; I would pretend to match her enthusiasm for the subject. In this way I would persuade her that we were truly soulmates and make it easier to sell hedonism to her later.
So I took her to the Knoll, the campus trysting place, and there we sat under a fine old oak, her head on my shoulder, her hand in mine, and for six unbroken hours we talked of finding cures for cancer, leukemia, elm blight, and the discoloration of chocolate in hot weather.
Classes began the following morning. My first glimpse of chemistry lab filled me with foreboding. It was all so grim and scientific, and I am so ungrim and unscientific. I shuddered as I looked at the row on row of high worktables, each littered with a terrifying assortment of beakers and vials and flasks and test tubes and Bunsen burners. Were it not for the comforting sight of Marie at the next table, somehow looking chic in a rubber lab apron, I would have bolted immediately.
After the class was assembled, two men in white smocks walked in. One was tall and crotchety-looking. The other was short and crotchety-looking. The tall one stepped to the lectern at the front of the class. The short one took a chair over at one side.
“This class is called Fundamentals of Chemistry,” said the tall one to the students. “I am Mr. Fitzhugh. That”—he nodded to the short one—“is Mr. Obispo. I do the lecturing. Mr. Obispo supervises the lab work.
“You are all freshmen,” continued Mr. Fitzhugh, “and you may not be familiar with the term ‘pipe course.’ A pipe course is a course where students can get passing grades without doing much work. This is not a pipe course. You have never worked as hard in your lives as you are going to work here. If any of you is looking for something easy, I’d advise you to leave now.”
I looked longingly at the door.
“This course,” said Mr. Fitzhugh, “is dedicated to the idiotic proposition that you can be taught the fundamentals of organic chemistry, inorganic chemistry, qualitative analysis, quantitative analysis, physical chemistry, and biochemistry all in one semester. The odds against any of you passing this course would be staggering to contemplate if there were any time for contemplation. However, there is not. Get out your notebooks.”
I think I was moaning aloud, because several students turned to look at me. What had I gotten myself into? All I needed was one flunk to end up in my father’s bakery, and if I was ever face to face with a flunk, this was it. My nostrils were suddenly filled with the smell of baking bread. I gathered up my books. I was getting out even if it meant losing Marie. Then I looked at her sitting at the next table with her pencil poised over her notebook, her face flushed, her eyes shining, the tip of her pretty pink tongue sticking out of the side of her mouth in concentration, and my bones turned to water. I couldn’t leave her. I just couldn’t. Heaving a mighty sigh, I put down my books and got ready to take notes.
For the next hour Mr. Fitzhugh, speaking a little faster than Clem McCarthy when he is announcing the Kentucky Derby, delivered a lecture about matter, elements, mixtures, compounds, reagents, the periodic table, atomic weights, ionization, valence, and other improbable topics. At the end of the hour I had nineteen pages of notes, all illegible.
After class at the Kozy Kampus Korner Marie was brimming with joy. “Isn’t it wonderful, Pierre?” she gushed. “All that work, work, work. And there’ll be more. Oh, the chemist’s life is a busy one.”
“Yeah,” I mumbled, toying dejectedly with my Freshman Frappé (lemon sherbet, grenadine, and diced lamb).
She noticed my funk. “I know it may seem a little boring at first,” she said sympathetically. “I mean just taking lecture notes isn’t very exciting. But wait till we start lab work.” Her eyes grew dreamy. “Mixing stuff in test tubes and burning things and pouring things … Wow-dow!” she cried in a transport of delight.
Lab work began the following week. First Mr. Fitzhugh explained the experiment. We were each to put three grams of red mercuric oxide in a test tube, connect it to a water trough by means of a bent glass tube, and heat the mercuric oxide with a Bunsen burner until bubbles rose from the water trough into a gas bottle above it. The gas that bubbled up, said Mr. Fitzhugh, would be oxygen. “See that the bubble don’t come up too fast,” he cautioned.
We all started working while Mr. Obispo, the la
b assistant, circulated among us. “Watch those bubbles,” he kept warning.
I must confess that I rather enjoyed this first experiment, but my enjoyment was as nothing compared to Marie’s. She was beside herself with rapture. “Look, look, look!” she squealed as the mercuric oxide changed color. “Bubbles!” she shrieked as the bubbles started to rise in her water trough. “Look how fast they’re coming! Oh, Pierre, isn’t it marvy? Oh, look, look, they’re coming faster now. And still faster! And still fas—”
Her last observation was interrupted as her gas bottle exploded, sending a spray of water and glass shards to the ceiling ten feet above.
Mr. Obispo materialized behind Marie, an expression of great pain on his face. “Little girl,” he said, “perhaps you ought to transfer to home economics. You can’t hurt yourself with fudge.”
Marie bridled, but said nothing. After class, however, she confessed to me that she thought Mr. Obispo was icky.
Her opinion of Mr. Obispo deteriorated progressively in succeeding weeks as he made comment on her destruction of various tubes, retorts, beakers, burettes, funnels, pipettes, pestles, Liebig condensers, and Erlenmeyer flasks. Marie’s trouble was twofold. First she had a notable lack of manual dexterity. Second, and more important, the sight of chemicals changing color and fluids bubbling would make her take leave of her senses. She would become powerless with delight. She would stand transfixed, breathing heavily through parted lips, until the crash of breaking glass brought her out of her trance. It got so all the students in her vicinity moved to other tables—except me, of course. Such was the greatness of my love.
Mr. Obispo’s reactions evolved from heavy sarcasm through genuine annoyance to black rage. The day she broke seven jars, six delivery tubes, and a Florence flask in a single chlorine-making experiment, he was near apoplexy. He called her a murderess that day.
I was pleased with the way things were going. I knew that if her breakage continued at its current rate—and there was no reason to suppose it would not—her attachment for chemistry would soon be over. Mr. Obispo’s outbursts were making her more and more miserable, and before long I knew she would be at the end of her tether. Or if that didn’t happen, her father would eventually cool her enthusiasm for chemistry. She had to keep writing home for more money to pay for all the things she broke, and the old boy was getting livid.
In any case, her infatuation with chemistry could not last much longer, and nobody would be happier than I when it ended. The combination of Mr. Obispo’s experiments and Mr. Fitzhugh’s lectures was making me old before my time. Mr. Fitzhugh had not exaggerated when he promised us that we would work harder than we ever had in our lives.
The great day finally came around the middle of the semester. Marie broke a carboy that day. Nobody in the long history of the university had ever broken a carboy. Even at Dupont, I understand, where thousands of carboys are handled daily, it is a rare event. It is by no means easy to break a carboy; they stand as high as a man’s waist and their glass is like steel. But Marie did it.
Obispo turned white, then red, then purple, then white again. He hopped on one leg, then the other, then both. For upwards of five minutes only strangled sounds came from his throat. Then he found his tongue and with it delivered an oration on Marie’s unfitness for chemistry, for college in general, and for the human race as a whole. At length he collapsed in the corner in a twitching heap.
Marie was pretty broken up herself and I took her to the Knoll to comfort her. She sobbed for a spell while I drummed sympathetically on her shoulder blades. Then she composed herself. “Pierre,” she said, averting her eyes from mine, “you’ll hate me for this.”
“I couldn’t hate you,” I said truthfully and gave her a squeeze as an earnest.
“I’ve failed you,” she said miserably. “You wanted for us to be great chemists together, but I can’t, Pierre. I’m through with chemistry. You’ll have to go on alone.”
“No,” I said stoutly. “We’ll find something we can do together.”
“I can’t let you, Pierre. I know how badly you want to be a chemist.”
“It would be meaningless without you.”
“But could you be happy doing anything else?”
“You,” I said in a voice husky with tenderness, “are my happiness.”
“And you’d give up chemistry for me?”
“Yes,” I said simply.
She vaulted into my arms. “Oh, Pierre!” she cried.
I fondled her for a longish interval and then I sprang my trap. It was like taking candy from a baby. It was like shooting fish in a barrel. It was easy as pie. Nobody was ever converted to hedonism more readily than Marie.
In fact, she wanted to become an all-out hedonist right away. She was for immediately giving up everything that we didn’t like—chemistry specifically—and throwing ourselves without delay into the full-time pursuit of pleasure. Mindful of my father’s bakery, I persuaded her that we should complete the semester in chemistry. “Next semester,” I told her, “we’ll choose all pipe courses that won’t interfere with our hedonism. But for now we’ll have to continue with chemistry. Of course, we don’t have to go to class as often as we have been. We can cut it occasionally.”
And, truly, I meant to cut chemistry only occasionally. But once we started hedonizing, it became more and more inconvenient to go to classes. In a very short time, we were not cutting class occasionally, we were attending occasionally.
I worried about it sometimes. I would get a sudden vision of flunking chemistry, being yanked out of college and stuck in my father’s bakery. But this disquieting thought did not come often. I was too happy to worry. The joys of hedonism simply blotted out unpleasant thinking. There were too many blessings to count.
The first blessing was that we didn’t have to call one another Marie and Pierre any more. This was a great boon because we had quite forgotten our real names in the preceding weeks. I had had to look in my wallet whenever somebody asked my name. It was worse for her; she didn’t carry a wallet.
Now, properly identified as Helen Frith and Dobie Gillis, we embarked on an excruciatingly pleasurable program of movies, dancing, skiing, skating, tobogganing, smooching, and allied pursuits. We laughed and played the livelong day; we whooped and hollered; we pranced and cavorted; we leaped and spun; we drank the headiest draughts that life offered.
One Friday morning—it was sleeting and really too cold for outdoor activity—we decided to drop in on our chemistry class. Mr. Obispo greeted us with elaborate courtesy. “So nice,” he said, “to see you after all these weeks.”
“Nice to be here,” I replied politely.
“What’s this bottle for?” asked Helen, pointing at a tightly corked brown bottle on her table. A label on the bottle said SOLUTION K. On my table was a similar bottle labeled SOLUTION L.
“During your long absence,” said Mr. Obispo pleasantly, “each member of the class was given an unidentified solution. You are supposed to analyze your solution and turn in a report on its contents.”
“How do you analyze a solution?” I asked in honest ignorance.
“Mr. Fitzhugh explained the process in some detail while you were gone,” he replied, still smiling.
“When are our reports due?” asked Helen nervously.
Mr. Obispo’s smile broadened. “First thing Monday morning.”
We blanched. Here it was Friday, and the reports were due Monday morning. That meant we had only two sessions to make our analysis—today’s and Saturday’s. And we didn’t have the vaguest idea how to make an analysis.
“Tell me,” I said in a frantic treble, “how long does it take to analyze this stuff?”
Mr. Obispo beamed. “That depends on your grasp of the technique. Most of the students have been working on their solutions for two weeks. Of course, it can be done in a shorter time—say ten days, or even eight days if the student is exceptionally talented.”
“I suppose,” I said in a dry croak, “that yo
u flunk the course if you don’t turn in your report on time.”
“Right,” he answered cheerily. “Well, I’ll be moving along now. I don’t want to keep you from your work.” He started away and then turned. “Oh, incidentally, in case you were entertaining a notion of copying somebody else’s report, I think I should tell you that each student has a different solution.” With a merry wave, he walked away.
“Oh, Dobie, what’ll we do?” wailed Helen.
“The important thing is to keep our heads,” I said, although I didn’t know what I would do with mine even if I kept it. It contained not one iota of information about chemical analysis.
“How are we ever going to find out how to do this stuff?” she cried in anguish.
“We’ll borrow somebody’s lecture notes,” I said. “You ask the kids on this side of the room, I’ll take the other.”
Rapidly we canvassed the whole class in the hope that somebody would lend us his lecture notes. It was no use. Everybody was still working on his solution and needed his notes. We returned to our tables and sat staring gloomily at our solutions until the bell rang. Mr. Obispo cast us a delighted smile from time to time.
After class we went to the Kozy Kampus Korner and examined our problem in all its aspects. After several dark, unfruitful hours an answer finally came to me. It was a desperate answer, but so was our problem.
“Listen, Helen,” I said. “Tomorrow is Saturday. The chemistry class is over at noon. There are no classes Saturday afternoon. There are also no classes on Sunday. The chemistry building is locked from Saturday noon until Monday morning.”
“So?”
“So at the end of class tomorrow morning, we’ll borrow somebody’s lecture notes. They’ll all be finished with their analysis tomorrow so there won’t be any trouble borrowing the notes. Then when the class files out of the room tomorrow, you and I will duck into the broom closet and close the door. If you recall, there’s a broom closet right across the aisle from my desk.”
