The Music School: Short Stories

by John Updike

  The dancing gathered strength. The floor became crowded. From her high vantage at the corner of the bar, the schoolteacherish girl studied with downcast eyes the dancing feet. They seemed to be gently tamping smooth a surface that was too hot to touch for more than an instant. Some females, of both races, had removed their shoes; their feet looked ugly and predatory, flickering, spread-toed, in and out of shadows and flashes of cloth. When the music stopped, black hands came and laid, on the spot of floor where her eyes were resting, two boards hairy with upright rusty nails. A spotlight was focused on them. The band launched into a fierce limbo. The young Negro with the handsome rubbery back leaped, nearly naked, into the light. His body was twitching in rhythm, he was waving two flaming torches, and he was clad in knit swimming trunks and orange streamers representing, she supposed, Caribbean slave dress. His eyes shut, he thrust the torches alternately into his mouth and spat out flame. Indifferent applause rippled through the tables.

  The Baron, drunker than anyone had suspected, pushed off from the bar and, as the young Negro lay down on a board of nails and stroked the skin of his chest with the sticks of fire, lay down beside him and kicked his trousered legs high in parody. No one dared laugh, the Baron’s face was so impassive and rapt. The young Negro, his back resting on the nails, held one torch at arm’s length, so that the flame rested on the Baron’s coat lapel and started a few sparks there; but the Baron writhed on obliviously, and the smoldering threads winked out. When the Negro stood, now clearly shaken, and with a great mock-primitive grimace leaped on one board of nails with his bare feet, the Baron leaped in his sandals on the other, and through sandy eyelashes blindly peered into the surrounding darkness of applause, his earring glinting, his shoulders still seeming to have a coat hanger in them. Two black waiters, nervous as deer, ventured into the spotlight and seized his upraised arms; as they led him out of the light, the tall figure of the white man, gasping as if he had surfaced after a shipwreck, yet expressed, in profile, an incorrigible dignity. There was murmuring at the tables as the tourists wondered if this had been part of the act.

  The music pitched into an even fiercer tempo. The young Negro, handing away his torches, was given a cloth sack, which he dropped on the floor. It fell open to reveal a greenish heap of smashed bottles. He trod on the heap with both feet. He got down and rolled in it as a dog rolls ecstatically in the rotten corpse of a woodchuck. He rested his back on the pillow of shards and the heavy mulatto left the bass boom and stood on his chest. There was applause. The mulatto jumped off and walked away. The Negro got up on his knees, cupped a glittering quantity of broken glass in his palms, and scrubbed his face with it. When he stood to take the applause, the girl observed that his back, which gleamed, heaving, a foot from her eyes, indeed did bear a few small fresh cuts. The applause died, the music halted, and the bright lights went on before the pseudo-slave, hugging his nail-boards and bag of glass, had reached the haven of the door behind the platform. As he passed among them, the members of the steel band cackled.

  Now there was an intermission. The bartender, his hands trembling and his eyes watering, it seemed, on the edge of tears, scuttled back and forth mixing a new wave of drinks. More tourists drifted in, and the families containing adolescents began to leave. The traffic on the airport road had diminished, and the bumping of the boats on the wharf, beneath the moon that had lost its reflection, regained importance. The people on the decks of these boats could see the windows burning in the dry hills above Charlotte Amalie, lights spread through the middle of the night sky like a constellation about to collide with our planet but held back, perpetually poised in the just-bearable distance, by that elusive refusal implicit in tropical time, which like the soft air seems to consist entirely of circles. Within the bar, the German boy wandered over and spoke to the homosexual, who looked up from under the brim of his antic hat with alert lips and no longer preoccupied eyes, all business. The German boy put two dollar bills on the bar, to cover the unpaid drink. The very English-appearing man left his place behind the undiminishing planter’s punch, sauntered around the bar, and commenced a conversation with the now deserted Nordic father; the Englishman’s first words betrayed a drawling American accent. The Baron laid his handsome head on the bar and fell asleep. The dachshund licked his face, because it smelled of alcohol. The woman slapped the dog’s nose. The beefy man abruptly pulled the pen from the neck of his T-shirt, removed the cardboard coaster from under his beer, and wrote something on it, something very brief—one word, or a number. It was as if he had at last received a message from the ghostly trucking concern that had misplaced him here. The ping-pong sounded; the music resumed. The young Negro, changed out of costume back into his yellow pants and candy-striped boat-necked shirt, returned. Flexing his back and planting his palms on his hips, he again asked the strange girl at the corner of the bar to dance. This time, with a smile that revealed her slightly overlapping front teeth, she accepted.

  The Christian Roommates

  ORSON ZIEGLER came straight to Harvard from the small South Dakota town where his father was the doctor. Orson, at eighteen, was half an inch under six feet tall, with a weight of 164 and an IQ of 155. His eczematous cheeks and vaguely irritated squint—as if his face had been for too long transected by the sight of a level horizon—masked a definite self-confidence. As the doctor’s son, he had always mattered in the town. In his high school he had been class president, valedictorian, and captain of the football and baseball teams. (The captain of the basketball team had been Lester Spotted Elk, a full-blooded Chippewa with dirty fingernails and brilliant teeth, a smoker, a drinker, a discipline problem, and the only boy Orson ever had met who was better than he at anything that mattered.) Orson was the first native of his town to go to Harvard, and would probably be the last, at least until his son was of age. His future was firm in his mind: the pre-med course here, medical school either at Harvard, Penn, or Yale, and then back to South Dakota, where he had his wife already selected and claimed and primed to wait. Two nights before he left for Harvard, he had taken her virginity. She had cried, and he had felt foolish, having, somehow, failed. It had been his virginity, too. Orson was sane, sane enough to know that he had lots to learn, and to be, within limits, willing. Harvard processes thousands of such boys and restores them to the world with little apparent damage. Presumably because he was from west of the Mississippi and a Protestant Christian (Methodist), the authorities had given him as a freshman roommate a self-converted Episcopalian from Oregon.

  When Orson arrived at Harvard on the morning of Registration Day, bleary and stiff from the series of airplane rides that had begun fourteen hours before, his roommate was already installed. “H. Palamountain” was floridly inscribed in the upper of the two name slots on the door of Room 14. The bed by the window had been slept in, and the desk by the window was neatly loaded with books. Standing sleepless inside the door, inertly clinging to his two heavy suitcases, Orson was conscious of another presence in the room without being able to locate it; optically and mentally, he focused with a slight slowness.

  The roommate was sitting on the floor, barefoot, before a small spinning wheel. He jumped up nimbly. Orson’s first impression was of the wiry quickness that almost magically brought close to his face the thick-lipped, pop-eyed face of the other boy. He was a head shorter than Orson, and wore, above his bare feet, pegged sky-blue slacks, a lumberjack shirt whose throat was dashingly stuffed with a silk foulard, and a white cap such as Orson had seen before only in photographs of Pandit Nehru. Dropping a suitcase, Orson offered his hand. Instead of taking it, the roommate touched his palms together, bowed his head, and murmured something Orson didn’t catch. Then he gracefully swept off the white cap, revealing a narrow crest of curly blond hair that stood up like a rooster’s comb. “I am Henry Palamountain.” His voice, clear and colorless in the way of West Coast voices, suggested a radio announcer. His handshake was metallically firm and seemed to have a pinch of malice in it. Like Orson, he wore glas
ses. The thick lenses emphasized the hyperthyroid bulge of his eyes and their fishy, searching expression.

  “Orson Ziegler,” Orson said.

  “I know.”

  Orson felt a need to add something adequately solemn, standing as they were on the verge of a kind of marriage. “Well, Henry”—he lamely lowered the other suitcase to the floor—“I guess we’ll be seeing a lot of each other.”

  “You may call me Hub,” the roommate said. “Most people do. However, call me Henry if you insist. I don’t wish to diminish your dreadful freedom. You may not wish to call me anything at all. Already I’ve made three hopeless enemies in the dormitory.”

  Every sentence in this smoothly enunciated speech bothered Orson, beginning with the first. He himself had never been given a nickname; it was the one honor his classmates had withheld from him. In his adolescence he had coined nicknames for himself—Orrie, Ziggy—and tried to insinuate them into popular usage, without success. And what was meant by “dreadful freedom”? It sounded sarcastic. And why might he not wish to call him anything at all? And how had the roommate had the time to make enemies? Orson asked irritably, “How long have you been here?”

  “Eight days.” Henry concluded every statement with a strange little pucker of his lips, a kind of satisfied silent click, as if to say, “And what do you think of that?”

  Orson felt that he had been sized up as someone easy to startle. But he slid helplessly into the straight-man role that, like the second-best bed, had been reserved for him. “That long?”

  “Yes. I was totally alone until the day before yesterday. You see, I hitchhiked.”

  “From Oregon?”

  “Yes. And I wished to allow time enough for any contingency. In case I was robbed, I had sewed a fifty-dollar bill inside my shirt. As it turned out, I made smooth connections all the way. I had painted a large cardboard sign saying ‘Harvard.’ You should try it sometime. One meets some very interesting Harvard graduates.”

  “Didn’t your parents worry?”

  “Of course. My parents are divorced. My father was furious. He wanted me to fly. I told him to give the plane fare to the Indian Relief Fund. He never gives a penny to charity. And, of course, I’m old. I’m twenty.”

  “You’ve been in the Army?”

  Henry lifted his hands and staggered back as if from a blow. He put the back of his hand to his brow, whimpered “Never,” shuddered, straightened up smartly, and saluted. “In fact, the Portland draft board is after me right now.” With a preening tug of his two agile hands—which did look, Orson realized, old: bony and veined and red-tipped, like a woman’s—he broadened his foulard. “They refuse to recognize any conscientious objectors except Quakers and Mennonites. My bishop agrees with them. They offered me an out if I’d say I was willing to work in a hospital, but I explained that this released a man for combat duty and if it came to that I’d just as soon carry a gun. I’m an excellent shot. I mind killing only on principle.”

  The Korean War had begun that summer, and Orson, who had been nagged by a suspicion that his duty was to enlist, bristled at such blithe pacifism. He squinted and asked, “What have you been doing for two years, then?”

  “Working in a plywood mill. As a gluer. The actual gluing is done by machines, but they become swamped in their own glue now and then. It’s a kind of excessive introspection—you’ve read Hamlet?”

  “Just Macbeth and The Merchant of Venice.”

  “Yes. Anyway. They have to be cleaned with solvent. One wears long rubber gloves up to one’s elbows. It’s very soothing work. The inside of a gluer is an excellent place for revolving Greek quotations in your head. I memorized nearly the whole of the Phaedo that way.” He gestured toward his desk, and Orson saw that many of the books were green Loeb editions of Plato and Aristotle, in Greek. Their spines were worn; they looked read and reread. For the first time, the thought of being at Harvard frightened him. Orson had been standing between his suitcases and now he moved to unpack. “Have you left me a bureau?”

  “Of course. The better one.” Henry jumped on the bed that had not been slept in and bounced up and down as if it were a trampoline. “And I’ve given you the bed with the better mattress,” he said, still bouncing, “and the desk that doesn’t have the glare from the window.”

  “Thanks,” Orson said.

  Henry was quick to notice his tone. “Would you rather have my bed? My desk?” He jumped from the bed and dashed to his desk and scooped a stack of books from it.

  Orson had to touch him to stop him, and was startled by the tense muscularity of the arm he touched. “Don’t be silly,” he said. “They’re exactly alike.”

  Henry replaced his books. “I don’t want any bitterness,” he said, “or immature squabbling. As the older man, it’s my responsibility to yield. Here. I’ll give you the shirt off my back.” And he began to peel off his lumberjack shirt, leaving the foulard dramatically knotted around his naked throat. He wore no undershirt.

  Having won from Orson a facial expression that Orson himself could not see, Henry smiled and rebuttoned the shirt. “Do you mind my name being in the upper slot on the door? I’ll remove it. I apologize. I did it without realizing how sensitive you would be.”

  Perhaps it was all a kind of humor. Orson tried to make a joke. He pointed and asked, “Do I get a spinning wheel, too?”

  “Oh, that.” Henry hopped backward on one bare foot and became rather shy. “That’s an experiment. I ordered it from Calcutta. I spin for a half hour a day, after yoga.”

  “You do yoga, too?”

  “Just some of the elementary positions. My ankles can’t take more than five minutes of the Lotus yet.”

  “And you say you have a bishop.”

  The roommate glanced up with a glint of fresh interest. “Say. You listen, don’t you? Yes. I consider myself an Anglican Christian Platonist strongly influenced by Gandhi.” He touched his palms before his chest, bowed, straightened, and giggled. “My bishop hates me,” he said. “The one in Oregon, who wants me to be a soldier. I’ve introduced myself to the bishop here and I don’t think he likes me, either. For that matter, I’ve antagonized my adviser. I told him I had no intention of fulfilling the science requirement.”

  “For God’s sake, why not?”

  “You don’t really want to know.”

  Orson felt this rebuff as a small test of strength. “Not really,” he agreed.

  “I consider science a demonic illusion of human hubris. Its phantasmal nature is proved by its constant revision. I asked him, ‘Why should I waste an entire fourth of my study time, time that could be spent with Plato, mastering a mass of hypotheses that will be obsolete by the time I graduate?’ ”

  “My Lord, Henry,” Orson exclaimed, indignantly defending the millions of lives saved by medical science, “you can’t be serious!”

  “Please. ‘Hub.’ I may be difficult for you, and I think it would help if you were to call me by my name. Now let’s talk about you. Your father is a doctor, you received all A’s in high school—I received rather mediocre grades myself—and you’ve come to Harvard because you believe it affords a cosmopolitan Eastern environment that will be valuable to you after spending your entire life in a small provincial town.”

  “Who the hell told you all this?” The recital of his application statement made Orson blush. He already felt older than the boy who had written it.

  “University Hall,” Henry said. “I went over and asked to see your folder. They didn’t want to let me at first, but I explained that if they were going to give me a roommate, after I had specifically requested to live alone, I had a right to information about you, so I could minimize possible friction.”

  “And they let you?”

  “Of course. People without convictions have no powers of resistance.” His mouth made its little satisfied click, and Orson was goaded to ask, “Why did you come to Harvard?”

  “Two reasons.” He ticked them off on two fingers. “Raphael Demos and Wern
er Jaeger.”

  Orson did not know these names, but he suspected that “Friends of yours?” was a stupid question, once it was out of his mouth.

  However, Henry nodded. “I’ve introduced myself to Demos. A charming old scholar, with a beautiful young wife.”

  “You mean you just went to his house and pushed yourself in?” Orson heard his own voice grow shrill; his voice, rather high and unstable, was one of the things about himself that he liked least.

  Henry blinked, and looked unexpectedly vulnerable, so slender and bravely dressed, his ugly, yellowish, flat-nailed feet naked on the floor, which was uncarpeted and painted black. “That isn’t how I would describe it. I went as a pilgrim. He seemed pleased to talk to me.” He spoke carefully, and his mouth abstained from clicking.

  That he could hurt his roommate’s feelings—that this jaunty apparition had feelings—disconcerted Orson more deeply than any of the surprises he had been deliberately offered. As quickly as he had popped up, Henry dropped to the floor, as if through a trapdoor in the plane of conversation. He resumed spinning. The method apparently called for a thread to be wound around the big toe of a foot and to be kept taut by a kind of absent-minded pedal motion. While engaged in this, he seemed hermetically sealed inside one of the gluing machines that had incubated his philosophy. Unpacking, Orson was slowed and snagged by a complicated mood of discomfort. He tried to remember how his mother had arranged his bureau drawers at home—socks and underwear in one, shirts and handkerchiefs in another. Home seemed infinitely far from him, and he was dizzily conscious of a great depth of space beneath his feet, as if the blackness of the floor were the color of an abyss. The spinning wheel steadily chuckled. Orson’s buzz of unease circled and settled on his roommate, who, it was clear, had thought earnestly about profound matters, matters that Orson, busy as he had been with the practical business of being a good student, had hardly considered. It was also clear that Henry had thought unintelligently. This unintelligence (“I received rather mediocre grades myself”) was more of a menace than a comfort. Bent above the bureau drawers, Orson felt cramped in his mind, able neither to stand erect in wholehearted contempt nor to lie down in honest admiration. His mood was complicated by the repugnance his roommate’s physical presence aroused in him. An almost morbidly clean boy, Orson was haunted by glue, and a tacky ambience resisted every motion of his unpacking.