Stop-Time

by Frank Conroy

  When I awoke the music was different and Christina had entered the room. She closed the door behind her and came to the bed. I could not believe it was she, until she spoke. “They told me you were sick.”

  “How did you ...”

  “It’s all right. Everyone is in the gym. No one saw me.”

  I started to rise up on my elbows but she put her hand on the blankets over my chest. “No,” she said, “stay.”

  I took her hand, a cool, smooth hand, and she sat down on the edge of the bed. “You’ll catch whatever I have,” I said.

  “I don’t care. I leave for Sweden early in the morning and I wanted to say goodbye.” She looked down at our clasped hands and then withdrew hers. I reached up, took her glasses off, and tried them on.

  “They make you look far away,” I said, putting them on the night table. “Can you see without them?”

  “Yes. Do I look different?”

  “A little bit.” I reached out and touched the high cheekbone next to her eyes. She turned her head and kissed my palm. Then she raised her hands behind her head and pulled out the pins holding up her hair. It fell to her waist, long, softly waving blond hair gleaming in the light. It was an astonishing transformation.

  “Do I look different now?”

  “Yes.” I reached up and guided her down to me, holding her face in both hands. When my head touched the pillow her lips touched mine, a warm, sweet mouth pressing gently, motionless except for a single tremor at the end of the kiss.

  She lowered her forehead to my shoulder and said something in Swedish.

  “What’s wrong? What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing,” she said slowly. “Nothing is wrong.”

  “Lie down next to me.”

  She lifted her legs onto the bed without raising her head. I turned her face up and kissed her again, tasting, moving kisses all over her mouth. Her arm came around my neck. I slipped my hand under her shoulder and kissed her harder. She turned away. “I’m frightened.”

  “Don’t be frightened.” I kissed her neck.

  “Wait. Please wait.” She rubbed her cheek against me. “Please.”

  Why did I heed her? I stopped, poised above her, listening to the world within and the world without, waiting for a sign, my soul suspended like an orator caught in a photograph at the top of his breath, his hands in the air, forever about to speak. I was afraid. Some part of me was afraid in the midst of my desire, afraid without my knowing it. I stopped.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  I kissed her eyes. “No, no, no.”

  “I don’t know about these things.”

  “Yes. It’s strange. Strange territory.”

  She put her arms around my neck. “Oh why must I go tomorrow? Why must it be tomorrow?”

  “Hush. It’s all right.” I kissed her and put my hand on her breast, covering it with motionless fingers.

  “My darling boy,” she whispered, hugging me.

  We lay quietly until, under the music from the radio, we heard ghostly applause from far away.

  “The plays must be over,” I said.

  “Yes.” She didn’t move.

  “Can you stay?”

  She waited so long I raised my head to look at her, thinking she might not have heard. She was staring at the ceiling, tears in the corners of her eyes. “No,” she said, and shook her head slowly. “I have to go.”

  Copenhagen. The room was enormous, a monastery dining room with a smooth stone floor and high walls built of granite blocks the size of small automobiles. There were three of us inside—myself at a table facing the south wall, a Danish boy who wanted to go to Michigan State against the north wall (eighty feet away), and the clerical personage in whom the College Board people had invested such trust at a table midway between us. He was surrounded by various cardboard boxes and manila folders from America, whose seals he had broken moments earlier.

  “Now a final check,” he said, his voice reverberating through the gloom. “In front of you you should have your special pencils and the first test, test number one, unopened.”

  “Yes,” the boy said. He was so far away I could hardly hear him.

  “Right!” I called.

  “When I start the stopwatch I will shout BEGIN. You are to break the seals at that moment, and not before. I am instructed to remind you to read all instructions carefully, not to rush, but to pass over any questions you cannot answer rather than waste time in fruitless speculation. Do you both understand?”

  “Yes.” He sounded even fainter, and I hoped it wasn’t fear.

  “Right!” I felt marvelous myself. Nothing to lose and everything to gain. I had of course not prepared for the exams, but it seemed to me that my long absence from math was more than made up for by my recent acquisition of French. I was calm, amused by the deadly seriousness with which the proctor undertook his task. Our preposterous placement in the room, for example. He handled folders, pencils, and notebooks as if they were religious objects, and every word he uttered was weighed beforehand. It was a pathetic spectacle, amusing to me, but undoubtedly unnerving to the Danish boy.

  “BEGIN!” the man shouted.

  I waited a few moments, staring at him as one might stare at an ape in the zoo. Apelike, he began waving his arms at me, afraid to break the holy silence now that the stopwatch was running. I laughed, waved at him, and turned my back. I felt terrific. The world was truly beautiful. Slipping the special pencil into the pages of the booklet, I broke the seal.

  In the bedroom (for the first time) of the spoiled, pouty, incredibly sexy sixteen-year-old Danish girl, I forced open her jaw and tasted her tongue. No hesitation here. I knew her game and she knew mine. We had been wrestling for hours. She couldn’t speak English (she could write a little, her letters full of thees and thines she had learned at school) and I couldn’t speak Danish, but when I tried to feel her breast under rather than through the sweater we understood each other perfectly. She fought me off and I pressed on, both of us drunk with sensation. The maid, a girl her own age and her closest friend, was posted outside the door. Every now and then the girl in my arms would call out to the girl in the hall, they would giggle, and the battle resume. I used force to get under her skirts, but she kept her legs together. At the intrusion of my knee between her thighs a signal was given and the maid rushed into the room. There was more giggling and laughing. In pain, I covered my head with pillows and refused to look at them. After a while they went downstairs to make cocoa.

  There were dinners with my relatives, either at my aunt’s —where I slept when in Copenhagen, an oppressive bourgeois apartment filled with expensive antique furniture paid for by my uncle’s automobile dealership—or at my grandparents’—a lovely house, with a garden, in the suburbs, bought during the fifty years my grandfather had worked as a salesman for the Tuborg Beer company. I called him Morfar (mother’s father) and despite our inability to communicate a certain tenuous bond arose between us. He would talk louder and louder in Danish, as if I were hard of hearing, smile, pat me on the back, and always try to get me to eat more food. After dinner, in the living room, he would gravely offer me a cigar, which I would gravely decline. But he was a very old man, humbled by a long life with his hypochondriacal, neurotically self-centered wife, and I was a very young man, ignorant of a great deal more than the Danish language, and neither of us knew how to break through. I spent hours watching everyone—the aunts, great-aunts, cousins, uncles—knowing I was related to them but unable to believe it. I felt like an impostor when they fussed over me. I could hear them talking about me, hear my name and see them looking at me the special way people look at you while talking about you in a language they know you can’t understand—as if you were dead, or as if you were not sitting in the chair you are in fact sitting in, but had been a few moments earlier. All I could do was smile politely.

  I was one of the first students to return to school. Henri and Albert had never left, amusing themselves in their rooms with two girls
from the Casino who’d holed up with them the entire vacation. “A mistake,” Henri said soberly. “The first few days were fine, but after that, my God. Insatiable! They disregarded me and developed a secret understanding with my tool. As a result I’ll never have a hard-on again. I’m going to become a monk.”

  I spent the afternoon writing my mother. Realizing I couldn’t possibly live in Paris on forty dollars a month, I had asked her for the full hundred she received from my trustee. She had declined, explaining that she was maintaining a home for me. I protested that I’d left home, and that although I understood the necessity of that sort of malarky in her dealings with lawyers and judges, she shouldn’t try it on me. When I wrote a letter making quite clear the impossibility of staying alive on ten dollars a week in the city of Paris and she still failed to respond, I decided I was dealing with simple peasant avarice and threatened to write the trustee directly. The next mail brought a letter in which she agreed to send the full amount, and denied ever having thought of anything else. It was a spooky moment as I sat at my desk with all three of her letters, the two refusals and the disclaimer, and realized, for the first time, how truly thoughtless she was.

  I grew increasingly nervous about Christina’s return. Evenings, recuperating from Hysteria in the common room, I’d look up quickly every time the door opened to see if it was she, my body flushing in anticipation. When it wasn’t, I was relieved. When, finally, it was Christina in the doorway, smiling, her hair loose and the square glasses perched on her nose, walking calmly along the line of seated students, shaking hands, moving closer and closer to me, I wanted to run away. She held out her hand. “Hello.”

  “Hello. Was it a nice time at home?”

  “Yes,” she said, giving me a firm shake, “but I’m glad to be back.”

  She moved past me, shaking hands with the others. I knew she was keeping up a public front, that when she’d said hello to everyone she’d come and sit beside me. I also knew I had to get away. I sneaked out of the room the way I used to sneak out of Stuyvesant for a smoke, and went upstairs, my heart pounding mysteriously.

  The next day in class she sent me a note: “Why won’t you speak to me? Why won’t you look at me? I love you. I would die for you.” I held the folded paper in my hands, afraid to read it a second time. I raised my eyes and looked around the room. A lens clicked in my head and reality shifted to a new position slightly farther away from me. Behind the other students Christina sat staring at me, her face dark with blood. Her eyes were the eyes of a madwoman. They burned, forcing me to look away.

  As the class broke up we remained in our seats. Alone, we sat in silence for several moments. I played with a pencil on the table top.

  “Do you understand?” Her voice was loaded with oblique emotions, barely under control.

  I nodded, not looking up.

  “How can you sit there and do that?” Her accent was suddenly strongly marked with the sing-song rhythms of Swedish.

  I dropped the pencil instantly. “Christina, I’m sorry.”

  She stood in front of me, staring at my chest. Her eyes under the windows. Even her body seemed not to be her own, moving with uncharacteristic awkwardness. Her mouth gleamed as she ran her tongue nervously over her lips. “I love you!” she cried suddenly, “don’t you know what that means? If there was a gun and you told me to shoot myself I would do it. I would do it right now!” She reached out as if for a gun. “I would!” she cried ecstatically, looking past me into space.

  “Christina ...”

  “You must love me. You must! You put your hand on me. That means you love me!”

  I sat motionless, afraid to move a muscle. Some independent part of my brain, ticking away under its own power, made the irrelevant observation that she was beautiful, more beautiful now than before.

  “I’m going back to Sweden,” she said, and started for the door.

  I got up quickly and intercepted her. “No. Don’t do that. Please don’t do that.”

  She stood in front of me, staring at my chest. Her eyes came up and she looked at my mouth. Something happened to her face and I thought she was going to hit me, but she turned away at the last moment.

  “Don’t go. At least now now. Give yourself time to think about it.”

  “Why?”

  “Please.”

  She whirled suddenly, ran to the door, and left.

  She did not go back to Sweden. After a couple of weeks I began to catch sight of her every now and then, always in the distance, standing on the steps of the girls’ dorm, or bringing groceries from the Konditori at the corner. She did not appear at meals, or in the common room after dinner. I would sometimes see her walking along the path below my window with the Frog, but they never looked up.

  A cold day in February. The snow was gone, blown away by a week of high winds. All bundled up in sweaters, scarf, and my heavy leather jacket, I walked down the road toward the corner bus stop. Above, the sky was lead, a pale, pearlish glow over the horizon the only sign of the sun. Ahead of me the small wooden shelter stood isolated in the wind, a loose board in its side knocking sporadically. I quickened my step.

  She was sitting close against the wall, to stay warm, in such a way that I didn’t see her until the last minute. I sat down on the other end of the bench. Motionless, she continued looking straight ahead, hair up tight in the bun at the back of her head, steel glasses gleaming in the pale light. Her hands were folded in her lap. My face burning, I stared at the ground between my feet.

  After a long time she said, “Frank.” I looked up. She watched me calmly. When she spoke again her voice was even, almost mechanical. “You don’t have to be afraid of me.”

  She stood up and stepped into the wind without waiting for an answer. The loose board kept knocking beside me as I watched her walking away toward the town.

  In the spring I went to Paris.

  19

  The Lock on the Metro Door

  I AWOKE at noon in my small room off rue Mouffetard. Sunlight streamed through the open window at the foot of the bed. I got dressed and smoothed the blankets over the straw mattress. Standing at the window, I lighted a cigarette and looked down into the courtyard. The Japanese sculptor from the first floor was squatting carefully on the dark stones, filling a wine bottle from the building’s single water tap. He held the green bottle at a slight angle under the steady flow. When he crossed the courtyard and opened the door to his room I could see the mobiles trembling in the darkness. As he went inside they brushed against his narrow shoulders. I took a final drag on the strong cigarette, already conscious of the effect of the nicotine, and flipped it out the window.

  My room contained a bed, thirty or forty Penguin books stacked on the floor, my duffel bag and suitcase, and a single light bulb of clear glass hanging on a black wire at the exact center of the room. Three strides and I was at the door.

  Going down the small spiral staircase I kept my head bent and my shoulders hunched together. A group of cats scattered at the foot of the stairs as I stepped out into the courtyard. I yawned and stretched in the open air-eighteen years old, six feet two inches tall, one hundred thirty-five pounds, wearing blue jeans, a flannel shirt, and sneakers, and without a haircut for three months.

  I could hear the cries of the Algerian street vendors as I walked through the short alley toward the square. Passing the landlord’s door I quickened my pace automatically. Out in the sunlit street hundreds of people moved back and forth through the market stalls built over the sidewalk. Everything was for sale—flowers, bolts of cloth, candles, fruits and vegetables, shoes, coffee beans, toys, cheap jewelry, canned goods, religious articles, books, kerosene, candy, nylons, towels—all of it spilling onto the street in colorful profusion. I worked my way through the crowd and crossed Place Monge to the neighborhood café.

  The same old waiter brought my breakfast every day. I had only to sit down and a croissant, a cup of chocolate, and a glass of water would appear before me.

  “
Bonjour,” he said. “How is the revolution going?” (His standard line when I wore the bright red shirt.)

  “Fine. But we’re running out of funds.”

  “Send Stalin a telegram,” the old man said, and went inside.

  I checked the other tables to see if anyone had left a newspaper, but I was out of luck. I ate slowly and watched the pigeons cavorting on the roof of the pissoir in the center of the square.

  The American Students and Artists Center on Boulevard Raspail was my mail drop. I shaved there as well, showered periodically, and invariably shat. I practiced on their piano and borrowed books from the small library. Luckily none of it cost any money. After a short, mysterious interview with the bed-ridden Episcopal bishop in charge I’d been issued a membership card and given free use of the luxurious rooms. I came every couple of days.

  The woman at the mail desk took down the C’s, went through them quickly, and handed me two letters. One was from Harvard and the other from Haverford. I resisted the urge to tear them open immediately and walked into the lounge. On the far side of the large room a French boy I knew was at the Steinway playing “Laura.” I sat down on a couch by the window, put the letters face up on the table, and stared at them.

  I hadn’t allowed myself to think of the moment now at hand. I felt insufficiently prepared, and sat quite still waiting for something to happen to my mind, for a subtle shift of gears to occur which would indicate I was ready to include the news, whatever it was, in my conceptual universe. Finally I picked up the letter from Harvard. It had gone from Cambridge to Denmark, Denmark to New York, and New York to Paris. I ripped it open and withdrew a single sheet of paper. I had to read it twice before it made any sense. My application had been rejected, but because of my exceptional performance in the college entrance exams they were prepared to reconsider. It was necessary for me to appear in Cambridge for a personal interview and further testing before a certain date. I put the letter back in its envelope. The date mentioned had passed a week ago.