by Frank Conroy
"Pass the tuna fish," said Dan.
After lunch they all went out onto the lawn for Frisbee. Claude threw himself into the game with fervor—running, catching, leaping—distracting himself so he could pull himself together.
Later, unable to sleep at one in the morning, watching the sky through the square panes of the window at the foot of his bed, he saw a star move. It was quite definitely moving against the static backdrop of the other stars. He grew increasingly excited. A distant spaceship, as in Astounding Stories? (His magazine collection was still in the back room of Emma and Al's basement flat, stacked on top of the white piano.) A flying saucer moving slowly? The very fact of picking out that particular point of light with his eye seemed to bring it closer. Suddenly it moved sideways and Claude jumped to a sitting position. He felt he was looking at something that had never been seen before. He was convinced of it. There was a telephone beside his bed, and with rapid movements he got the number of Dr. Greene, his astronomy professor, and called him.
"Hello?" The voice low, sleepy, and wary.
"Dr. Greene, this is Claude Rawlings. I'm sorry to bother you, but there's something moving in the sky. I've been watching it through my window. It's really moving. Sideways even."
Perhaps a half minute of silence.
"Dr. Greene?"
A brief, soft, but unmistakable sigh. "Okay. Which way does your window face?"
"West. It's due west."
"I see. Did the object move quickly?"
"No, it's still there. I can see it."
"Is it moving now?"
"I'm not sure," Claude said. "But it was before. I saw it."
"Please describe your window."
"It's just a regular old window," Claude said impatiently, "small panes, four on top, four below, like a grid."
"Do you have pencil and paper handy?"
"Sure." Underneath his intense excitement he was puzzled. Why didn't Dr. Greene get up and look for himself?
"Fine. First, pace off the distance between where your head was and where the window is. Second, calculate the angle, in degrees, at which you viewed the object by drawing an imaginary line from the pillow to that pane in the window through which you viewed the object, as against the horizontal floor line. Got it?"
"Yes, sir." Claude collected the figures and was chilled by his awareness of what Dr. Greene might mean. Working together on the phone, they computed the numbers, including a measurement of approximately how far the object had moved since Claude first noticed it. It was now in a lower pane, as seen from the bed, perhaps an inch below the wood strip. Step by step—angles, distances, rotation of the earth, solar orbits—they worked out the inexorable and pedestrian truth.
"What you're looking at is Mars," said Dr. Greene.
"Oh, my God," Claude mumbled. "But what about the sideways it did, I mean, I saw it go sideways," he said.
"A bubble or imperfection in the pane of glass," Dr. Greene suggested.
His last hope gone, Claude knelt and pressed his forehead to the edge of the side table. "I'm terribly, terribly sorry, sir. I feel like the stupidest man on earth."
"That's all right, Mr. Rawlings," said Dr. Greene, an elderly man who tended toward formality. "Isn't it interesting how close the figures are despite the lack of measuring tools? It shows how much you can do with a pencil and paper. See you in class."
Mortified, Claude said goodbye and hung up the phone.
Lying back in bed, he found himself thinking about Catherine. In retrospect he realized that what he had felt, after the initial shock of her disappearance, had been shame. In fact, for years he had been living with a drawn-out, half-buried feeling that wasn't all that different from what he'd just experienced with Dr. Greene. Mortification. How could he have been so self-deluded? Her snobbery and disdain had been right out in the open, and yet he had stupidly thought he could overcome them. He squirmed in his bed. His own excitement, his own yearning for the miraculous, had distorted his perception. He had seen a spaceship where there was only Mars, and he had seen an end to loneliness where there was only a flighty, stuck-up girl. So in fact, he told himself, nothing had really happened. It had been an illusion. He wasn't a kid any longer, and he would discard those useless memories, as he had discarded so many others. He closed his eyes, thought of Lady, and went to sleep.
***
Living off campus had not led Claude into bohemianism, although he was never too sure what the man had really meant. Candles in Chianti bottles? Irregular hours? Taking opium like Coleridge? (Except for a few people in anthropology, no one at Cadbury had yet heard anything about marijuana.) General slackness? Claude had actually worked harder the last two years of college than he had the first two. But now, close to graduation, it seemed that his living arrangements had perhaps speeded things up with regard to Lady. It was strange to think of it that way, but he did.
A large, half-sprung blue couch, which he'd inherited from the previous tenant, sat between the piano and the front windows. Initially, he'd used it while reading scores as his LP's were playing, but eventually Lady's weekday afternoon visits became more frequent, and they would lie there together.
"Muffy's engaged to Harry," she said one afternoon, her chin on his chest. They had paused after a long session of necking.
"Good," he said. "They've been together a long time."
Remaining faithful to one's steady was greatly admired at Cadbury and Hollifield. "Hmm," she said, "seems like everybody's getting married after graduation."
He opened his eyes to look at her, but her manner was casual. "What do you think? A quarter of the class?"
"More like a third at Hollifield," she said.
They were children of their time, and neither one of them thought there was anything odd about these statistics. Rather, the numbers suggested that their friends and fellow students were indeed the good, responsible people Claude and Lady had taken them to be. In the abstract, getting married seemed not only incredibly romantic, but grown-up as well. A serious thing to do, a commitment to optimism and faith, carrying on the grand tradition their colleges had taught them.
The blue couch tested them for more than a month. They kept their clothes on, but their hands and mouths were all over each other. Claude managed to sustain control of himself, but the effort was driving him to distraction. He would reach a point of saturation, his body strained to the limit, lips tender and engorged with blood, pelvis aching, penis numb and hard as oak, heart shaking his chest—and he would pull back, rolling off the couch away from her and onto the floor.
And then one evening, as she lay with him on the blue couch, her brown hair hanging free against his temples as she dipped her head to nibble his mouth, she suddenly reached down with her hands, lifted her skirt, unbuttoned his jeans, took him out, adjusted her underwear, and sank down on him with a shivering moan. He blossomed out of numbness into the sweet warmth of her.
"Don't come," she whispered, "don't come, don't come," as with excruciating slowness she moved up and down. It had happened so quickly—all at once he was inside her—it took his mind a moment to catch up with his body. He controlled himself as long as he could, and then with great speed pushed her hips with the heels of his hand and ejaculated into the air. She fell back onto him, clinging with all her strength. Stunned, they lay together in silence for a long time.
The next evening they were back to necking with limits. She would not take off her clothes and go to bed with him, but insisted on the blue couch as if nothing had happened. As the weeks passed and it became clear to Claude that even her safe time of the month wasn't going to change anything, he began gently to press her. But she didn't want to talk about it. She did not argue but simply stood mute, distracting his attention with kisses. Claude could sense her increasing fascination with the turmoil in his body, an almost experimental curiosity about the forces she had the power to unleash. He could see the wonder in her eyes. Eventually their lovemaking fell into a kind of pattern, a tacit underst
anding. They would neck for hours, and when he could stand it no longer, she applied her hand and her mouth, and he would climax. This calmed his body, but left him always with an odd, enervated sense of emptiness, a confusing mixture of satiation and longing, of gratitude and hidden resentment.
A number of events had conspired to make Claude late. Very late. The basketball game had begun half an hour after it was supposed to, and had gone into double overtime. Claude was the shortest man on the senior intramural team, but he was the playmaker, the strategist, and the third-highest scorer, and hence invaluable in the championship game against the juniors. Toward the end, in an attempt to speed things up, he'd attacked the basket recklessly, weaving between the taller players to throw up hooks, fingertip lobs, and left-handed lay-ups, taking the defense by surprise. His teammates egged him on, ribbing him good-naturedly when he missed. They kept feeding him the ball, rather than the reverse, until the buzzer sounded with the seniors two points up. High spirits. Horsing around in the showers. Illegal consumption of contraband beer behind the field house.
When he got home to change, the telephone was ringing. Otto Levits had chosen this moment to go over Claude's schedule for the next month—two concerts in Philadelphia and one in Princeton—and to describe at length the human and musical idiosyncrasies of the people he'd be playing with. For the third time Levits asked if Claude still wanted to do a certain important engagement that clashed with Cadbury's commencement exercises, and for the third time was reassured. Finally the old man rang off.
Pedaling hard on the way to Hollifield, standing up for speed, Claude felt the cuff of his freshly pressed khaki pants catch in the bicycle chain just before he crashed into a hedge. It took time to extricate himself and sort things out, cursing all the while.
Flushed and disheveled, he arrived at the great lawn behind the Hollifield library and leaned his bike against a tree. Under an enormous striped canvas tent several hundred people sat on folding chairs looking up at the platform, where the last of the graduates were filing past to accept their diplomas. As the names were read out over the public-address system, small groups of people in the audience would pop up, applauding, sometimes giving a shout, and then sink down again. It was a fine, clear, balmy spring day.
Claude walked behind the audience and made his way along the edge of the tent toward the front, where groups of young women in their robes and mortarboards stood milling about. He caught sight of Lady, encircled by her classmates, talking animatedly, turning to look into all their faces. He felt a surge of pride and possessiveness. She was a lovely, good, and serious person, and everyone knew it. She seemed to glow among her friends. He waited some distance away until she noticed him, broke away with a laugh, and came to him. Smiling, she took his hand and pressed up against his side.
"Did you like my speech?"
"I just got here," he said, pointing down to his frayed cuff. "Going too fast. I fell off my bike."
Now she noticed the scratches on his wrist. "My goodness. Are you okay?" Her raspy voice worked its magic, making him almost dizzy.
"I'm fine. I'm sorry."
"Oh, it doesn't matter. The girls gave me a big hand, though, and that was nice." She raised her arm to shield her eyes as she looked at the stage. "At least you'll hear Grandpa."
He had forgotten. Lady was the third generation of her family to attend Hollifield. Her grandmother was dead, but her grandfather had apparently given a great deal of money to the college and was scheduled to speak.
"Where are your parents?" Claude asked. He was curious, since Lady almost never mentioned them.
"In the audience somewhere. The other side, I think. Oh, good. President Hunter is going to introduce him." With a gentle pressure on his arm, they moved closer to the platform and sat down on the grass. Some small children ran by and one of them dropped a program. Claude picked it up and held it out, but the little boy had already turned away. As the slightly cracked voice of Dr. Hunter came over the PA system, Claude spread the program on the ground between his knees. He glanced at it casually until his eyes locked on a name. For a moment his mind raced emptily. Then he looked up to see Senator Barnes approach the microphone. Lady applauded with her hands high in the air, and then turned, smiling, and stopped when she saw Claude's face. "What is it? What?"
"Your grandfather is Senator Barnes?"
"Yes. Him. Up there." She frowned. "I must have mentioned it."
"No," he said. "I would've remembered." He kept his tone calm and light, instinctively concealing the confusion he felt. There was a touch of fear—Catherine, who had so recently haunted him from the inside, was now doing it indirectly from the outside, threatening somehow to expose his shame. Lady was, he finally figured out, Catherine's first cousin. On the face of it an incredible coincidence, and yet somewhere below the level of reason, spookily apt. He stole a quick glance at Lady and felt a moment of unreality as he discerned a faint resemblance, a family resemblance in the eyes and the brow. It both chilled and attracted him. He wanted to hear Lady's voice, the breathy rasp that was so much her, so distinctively her. "Is your stuff packed?" he asked.
"Most of it's already in the station wagon." There was laughter and applause for something Senator Barnes had said. "Isn't he marvelous? They say he was the best speaker in the Senate."
Claude caught the odd phrase from the platform, but he was too jittery to string them together. He lay back, supporting himself on his elbows, and stared blindly at the crowd. He wondered how long he could safely go without telling Lady he had met her grandfather before, and that he knew the Fisk mansion and its inhabitants well. Not very long, he decided, but perhaps the senator would settle it.
But the senator did not. His speech finished, he came directly to Lady and embraced her, raising his arms from his sides, stooping forward. Her hands rested on his hunched old man's back. "Congratulations, my dear," he said, cheek to cheek. "I'm proud of you. Pleased as punch, as Hubert would say." His eyes flicked rapidly over Claude, then closed for the last moment of the hug.
"This is my friend Claude Rawlings," Lady said.
Senator Barnes shook hands. It was clear he didn't remember Claude. "Cadbury man, are you? Fine school. Spoke there some years ago."
Claude decided to plunge ahead. "I believe we've met before, sir. Very briefly, years ago, at the Fisks'."
"At Dewman's?" The old man tilted back his head to look through the bottom of his glasses.
Lady looked at Claude in amazement.
"Yes," Claude said lightly. "I was the piano player accompanying Peter when he played the violin at a big dinner party there. Balanchine was a guest, and the mayor."
"By George," Barnes cried, "that was the night Catherine surprised Dewman with a crown of weeds. She was hell on wheels, that girl." He turned to Lady. "Where is she? Still in Australia?"
"I don't know. They don't talk about her." She was still looking at Claude. "This is strange."
"I guess so." Claude shrugged. "It was a long time ago."
Senator Barnes took her arm. "Let's find Mater and Pater, Lady, before these blue-haired women get their hooks into me. I can feel it building."
Frowning, Lady led them both across the lawn.
Ted and Linda Powers made a handsome couple, standing just outside the tent under a large elm. She was a small, trim woman with delicate features and a vaguely flapper cut to her graying hair. She smiled when she caught sight of her father and daughter. Ted Powers was tall, square-jawed, and solid—something like a darker version of Randolph Scott, Claude thought, although without facial mobility, which gave him a guarded look. He wore a three-piece suit and a striped tie.
"You were both wonderful." Linda stepped forward to give them each a peck on the cheek. She fluttered between them. Ted nodded and stared out over the crowd.
Lady made an attempt to introduce Claude, but was cut off by the arrival of some people eager to shake the senator's hand. Claude felt Ted and Linda Powers's eyes lock on to his own for the briefe
st possible instant. Linda turned to talk to an elderly woman. Ted pulled out his pocket watch and pondered the time.
"Let's go," Lady whispered in his ear. "I want to get that picture out of my room before somebody pinches it."
As they walked to Chesterton, Claude expected Lady to question him, but she did not.
"I'm going to miss Hollifield," she said. "I'm going to miss it a lot."
"These places are like heaven on earth," Claude replied. "We've been lucky." He did a spontaneous cartwheel and brushed the grass from his palms. "But on the other hand, the world awaits."
"For you, maybe. You know what you want to do."
"So will you. It'll come."
She sighed. "I know what I don't want to do, which is go back to Seventy-third Street with my parents. But that's what I'm doing."
"Come live in a garret with me," he said, "if you can stand listening to the piano four hours a day."
She stopped and looked at him. "You'd do it, too."
"Of course!" He smiled. "Why not?"
They continued walking. For a dreadful moment he considered himself to be entirely false—smiles, cartwheels, bravado, when in fact he felt confusion. He sensed it would be dangerous to admit any sort of weakness to Lady, who spoke often of her own ambivalence, which she hated, and of his apparent certitude, directness, and faith in himself, which she loved. But as graduation approached he had felt his own past coming up behind him. During all the years of strolling across green lawns to ivy-covered buildings, of easy fraternity with his classmates, of being part of the benevolent Quaker world, of wearing button-down shirts, he had deliberately put his origins at a distance. An occasional remark about having been a shoeshine boy, delivered casually, may have passed his lips, as if he had no fear of those memories. But to no one, and certainly not Lady, had he ever mentioned the nausea, the sense of being invisible, the loneliness and misery of his childhood. He had been entirely helpless, and of that he was ashamed. With the possible exception of Weisfeld, no one knew that music had saved him, allowed him, as it were, to squeak through. Cadbury graduate or no, he knew that, thus far, without music he was nothing. Without music he would be that vague, weak child again, as insubstantial as a wisp of smoke. Sometimes, playing chamber music in a drawing room, or accompanying a singer in a hotel ballroom, he felt like an impostor. He knew he was a good player, and yet at some deeper level he was amazed to be getting away with it.
