Fool on the Hill

by Matt Ruff

  “So where do you get your inspiration?” Cathy Reinigen asked him during dinner. This was a not untypical question for someone first meeting him, and George gave his not untypical response: he made something up on the spur of the moment.

  “Roses,” he told her. “Every morning I have a half dozen fresh-cut white roses brought to my house. Of course when I was younger I couldn’t afford roses, so I kept a window box full of poppies instead, but I’ve moved up since then.”

  “Roses? What do you do with roses?”

  “Sniff them, naturally. Your olfactory cortex—your smelling center—is located just off the Dinsmore lobe in the right hemisphere of your brain, which is where all creative thinking takes place. You studied this in Bio, didn’t you? The idea is if you stimulate the old olfactory, it sort of gives a jump start to the Dinsmore lobe, and all at once you’re coming up with story ideas faster than you can write them down. Now I know how strange that must sound, but it’s documented fact; Hemingway did African violets three times a day, except when he was boxing.”

  “That’s amazing.”

  “That’s reality,” said George, keeping a poker face. He took a side-glance at Aurora and saw from her smug expression that she wasn’t buying any of it, but she seemed amused by the tale, which was just as good.

  “So tell me,” Cathy went on. “Your latest novel, The Knight of the White Roses . . . is that title an allusion to—”

  George nodded. “Clever. You found me out.”

  “Well,” Cathy smiled, feeling enlightened. “I guess that just shows how limited critical analysis really is. I never would have figured that out in a classroom.”

  “That’s why I, don’t trust English teachers,” George confided. “Did you read the book?”

  “The Knight? Yes, that one I read. It’s a shame my roommate isn’t here—she was going to eat with us, but she’s out on a date—and she’s in love with every one of your novels.”

  “What did you think of the one you read?”

  “Me? . . . I . . . that is to say . . .” She hesitated, as if groping for a polite response.

  “She thought it was great,” Aurora spoke up. “She told me so. It got her Dunsmore lobe all excited.”

  “Dinsmore,” George corrected.

  “No, no,” Aurora recorrected. “Dunsmore. That’s the lobe in the left hemisphere that enjoys the story. You must have learned about it in Bio; it’s due south of the optic cortex. If you stimulate it with enough good literature your nose starts to grow longer.”

  “Oh yeah,” George said. “Now I remember.”

  “I liked your novel,” Cathy inserted, glancing confusedly at the both of them. “It’s just that I was sort of . . . disappointed in the way you handled a few of the characters.”

  “Like who?” George asked seriously.

  “Well, for example, Abbot Mattachine.”

  “But the Abbot was a good Joe. I thought the way I had him save the Knight from the tax collectors was pretty nifty.”

  “There was that business with him and the choirboys, though . . .”

  George shrugged. “Lots of abbots had business with choirboys. Even a fantasy novel has to touch base with reality once in a while.”

  Cathy Reinigen cleared her throat. “It’s not that I’m a moralist-reconstructionalist,” she said, borrowing a phrase from a long-ago freshman seminar. “And I certainly wouldn’t want to infringe on your notions of realism by insisting that characters should always be properly punished; real people get away with crimes every day. It’s just that to me, the very best stories are those where the author gets a strong moral message through no matter what actually happens to the characters in the end. Do you understand?”

  George nodded. “The big problem with messages like that,” he told her, “is that you can make them clear as a bell, in letters ten feet high, impossible to miss, and readers still don’t get the point. Shakespeare was a kick-ass storyteller, but look what’s happened to Romeo and Juliet. Almost everyone forgets that the play was a tragedy. Tragedy, that means Fate doesn’t like you, but nine times out of ten it’s you who makes the final screwup. These days we call a lovesick man a ‘Romeo’; you’d have to be pretty sick, though, to really want to be Romeo. He was a punk kid; in the story he kills two people in a passion and he’s directly responsible for the death of a third. In the last scene he kills himself over the loss of a woman who isn’t even dead, and then she wakes up and follows his example. The double suicide is the unforgivable part; it’s not touching, it’s dumb. They gave up hope, and that means it’s not even a love story, it’s an immaturity story.”

  “Mature people despair,” Aurora suggested.

  “Never completely,” George insisted. “Mature people make mistakes, they have breakdowns, they lose, but they never stop looking for the chink in the wall of Fate. The only time they suicide is to save another life; otherwise it’s just quitting. That’s a children’s escape.”

  “But Romeo and Juliet loved each other so deeply—” Cathy began.

  “If that were true,” said George, “they both would have come out of the tomb alive. Even Juliet’s real death wouldn’t have broken Romeo permanently. Hell, do you think Abbot Mattachine would have cashed it in over the death of one choirboy, when there were so many others in the world?”

  “Well now that,” Cathy Reinigen said, beginning to look annoyed, “that is an entirely different case.”

  “Oh, but it isn’t,” George insisted. “That’s the other thing you’ve got wrong . . .”

  They argued back and forth about it for some minutes more without resolving anything until Aurora tactfully changed the subject. No matter, it had been enough; Mr. Sunshine must surely have overheard them, for what happened later in the evening seemed a most amazing coincidence, the ever-moving wall of Fate bending itself to get George and Aurora alone again, unchaperoned.

  IV.

  A thick fog—another reminiscence of Lothlórien, but cold and damp, as genuine November fogs tend to be—rose up to cover The Hill shortly after nightfall. Some time after that thee figures emerged from a door beneath the Balch Arch. Following dessert Aurora had suggested, much to George’s surprise, that they all go down to the Fevre Dream in Collegetown for a beer. Even more to his surprise, Cathy Reinigen agreed wholeheartedly with the idea, offering to pay for the pitcher.

  They crossed Fall Creek Bridge and meandered through the Arts Quad where the statues of Ezra Cornell and Andrew White kept their vigil, patiently awaiting midnight when perchance a passing virgin would free them to take a brief stretch. George and the two women were several hours too early to make the test, but George saluted Ezra all the same.

  Then they were passing between Olin and Uris Libraries, both dimmed for the holiday. There in the shadows beneath the great Clock Tower stood two figures, holding hands. The fog parted fortuitously just then, and a chance ray of moonlight revealec that the figures were, in fact, two men.

  “That is disgusting," Cathy Reinigen pronounced, when they were safely out of earshot. Aurora remembered her mother’s first, and only, visit to Cornell; George, usually a bear for argument, let the moment pass. Though it didn’t, really.

  As the trio drew nearer to Collegetown, an astonishing number of same-sex couples began materializing out of the fog, most of them extremely taken with each other. Aurora noted this with interest; George stared openly (for he always stared at everything); but Cathy Reinigen took it as a personal affront, as if the law of averages had conspired to set up a visual gauntlet for the express purpose of making her uncomfortable. Which was close enough.

  “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all,” Cathy said, as they reached the Fevre Dream and spied two women necking in the front seat of a parked van. It was the sixth lesbian couple they had come across in less than ten minutes. George admired them greatly, for they were content in and of themselves, but his contemplation of them was interrupted by a blurred form that came bursting out of the bar. It was the Bo
hemian Love-Minister Aphrodite, and she had Panhandle slung over her shoulder like a war bride.

  “Evening, George,” she greeted them, “everybody. Hey, hurry on in, drinks are seventy-five cents until nine o’clock.”

  That said, she spun on her heel and rushed off down the block, still carrying the unconscious Panhandle.

  “Well thank God for normal people,” said Cathy, morally vindicated. Still bracing herself against possible improprieties, she thrust open the front door of the Fevre Dream and stepped inside.

  Smiling discreetly at each other, George and Aurora followed.

  V.

  Though the members of Ithaca’s gay community never understood why, the hand of Fate pointed in their direction that night. The town rednecks stayed home and bloated themselves on turkey and football. Among the Community, connections were made; the weak found courage, the lonely found companionship, and one and all found good fortune.

  Over on East Hill, a seventeen-year-old football prodigy admitted to his parents during dinner that his unseen steady girlfriend was actually the team’s wide receiver, a fleet-footed beanpole named Jonathan. Now it so happened that the football prodigy’s father was a devotee of Lyndon LaRouche, and thus his first thought—actually more of a reflex—was to beat the living hell out of his son. But even as he rose out of his chair, a spoon clenched in one chubby fist, he lost his balance and pitched face first into a bowl of lumpy mashed potatoes. Inexplicably struck blind, the old man was carted off raving in an ambulance, and spent three sightless days as a guest in Tompkins County Hospital. Finally, at sunrise of the third day, he awoke from a deep slumber crying, “All right, all right!” Instantly his sight was restored. He went home, embraced his son, and thereafter did good works.

  Down by the shores of Cayuga Lake, three men who had been infected by the AIDS virus were walking in Stewart Park when they heard a hidden lyre playing a distinctly Greek variation of a Calvinist hymn. At the sound the disease fled their bodies, entering into a nearby pack of squirrels who went mad and cast themselves into Cayuga’s waters. Likewise four thugs in pursuit of a lone lesbian had their bashing days brought to a premature end when a sewer gas explosion blew the roof off a (thankfully unoccupied) Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant, showering the thugs with fire, brimstone, and extra-crispy wings.

  This sort of thing went on throughout the night, and the only real disappointment came when a mysterious one-block power outage forced the early closing of Jenny’s New Wave, the gay bar downtown. But the problem was easily solved; their spirits undimmed, the patrons relocated to The Hill—to the Fevre Dream. And the upshot of that was that Cathy Reinigen spent a good deal of time hiding out in a locked stall in the women’s room, while George and Aurora, untroubled, took advantage of the bargain price on mixed drinks and got quietly trashed.

  “Tell me why,” Aurora asked over her third Tequila Sunset (she had tried one at the Halloween party and fallen in love with them), “you don’t like Christians.”

  “What makes you think I don’t like Christians?”

  “Little things. They way you looked at the drawings on Cathy’s wall.”

  “I loved those drawings,” George said truthfully. “Wish I had a book of them.”

  “The way you act around Brian sometimes.”

  “Well now, with Brian Garroway you’re talking about a two-way street. He’s got a way of acting around me."

  “I know.”

  “With me,” George added. “what you’re basically dealing with is the Baskin-Robbins theory of Christianity.”

  “The what?”

  A low chuckle rumbled from an adjoining table, where a mountain of a man sat with five beer mugs arrayed in front of him like toy soldiers.

  “The Baskin-Robbins theory,” the mountain said, speaking in a rich bass. “Thirty-one Flavors. Disliking mint chip doesn’t mean you boycott the entire store.”

  “Exactly,” said George.

  “Nonsense,” replied the mountain. “You are a storyteller, George, and all storytellers are liars and prejudiced. In your case the prejudice happens to be for outcasts, which puts you in a natural opposition to any organized religion. You also have delusions of godhood and don’t like anyone ridiculing your theories, most of which are romantic trash.”

  “This,” George explained to Aurora, “is Rasputin.”

  “The Queen of Hearts,” Rasputin added with a nod. “Tell me, has he fed you the one about Romeo and Juliet yet?”

  Aurora smiled, charmed, as most people were, by Rasputin’s unabashed rudeness. “Yes,” she said, “he’s mentioned them.”

  “No doubt you were discussing homosexuality. He has a writer’s fixation about that. George, you see those two dykes over there?” He jerked his thumb at a pair of women in checked flannel shirts who sat at the bar arguing with Stainless Marley.

  “I see them.”

  “Do you think they would make it out of your Shakespearean tomb alive?”

  “Sure. Why not?”

  “You see?” Rasputin looked triumphantly to Aurora. “He doesn’t even know the ladies in question, and already he’s granting them nobility and strength of character. What if I told you, George, that they were the two biggest neurotics in New York State, ready to fold their cards at the first sign of crisis?”

  “Fuck that,” said George. “I like the way they smile at each other.”

  “Naturally. Be truthful—you fantasized about lesbians in your adolescence. That’s the real story.”

  “You’ve got me pegged, Raspy.”

  “Hmmph . . . liar.”

  “Christians can be outcasts,” Aurora spoke up.

  Rasputin cocked an ear. “Beg pardon, my dear?”

  “I said Christians can be outcasts, just as much as anybody else.” She fished beneath the collar of her blouse and brought out a tiny golden cross on a chain. “Do you have any idea how some people react when they see this? Unless you’re obviously wearing it just for fashion they get nervous; mention God as more than a concept and the conversation ends like someone pulled a plug.”

  This brought another low chuckle. “That’s the spirit! Well spoken—take it from Rasputin, my dear, you keep talking like that and you’ll have him eating out of your hand in no time.”

  With a final nod, Rasputin dismissed them and left the conversation as abruptly as he had entered it. Focusing his attention back on the rest of the room, he raised a beefy hand; at this signal five lithe choirboys in silk shirts appeared from various corners of the bar and replaced his beer mugs with slopping-full champagne glasses. It was strange.

  “You have a point, you know,” George told Aurora, looking at the little cross. “But I promise I won’t pull the plug if you start talking more than concept. It’s just that I have a hard time believing God only wrote one Book. Hell, I’ve got three novels under my belt and I’m not even especially hot shit.”

  “Oh, I’d say you’re at least warm shit,” Aurora said seriously (and seriously not intending any insult, no matter how it sounded). “As for God, I don’t claim to know if the Bible is all She wrote or not. In fact, there are a lot of things I don’t claim to know.”

  “Then you’re not mint chip,” George pronounced, “and I can deal.” He

  raised his glass in a toast, then paused. “Did you say ‘She?’”

  Aurora twitched her nose mischievously and sipped her Tequila Sunset. “Maybe,” she said. “Will you put me in one of your stories?”

  “What kind of story?”

  “A fantasy, like The Knight. You remember the woman in the enchanted forest?”

  “The one who turned into a grizzly bear when the moon rose?”

  “Yes,” Aurora said, “but never mind the grizzly bear part. That’s the kind of character I'd want, sort of off the beaten track.”

  “Sort of outcast?”

  “Maybe.” She toyed with her cross.

  “You should keep wearing that,” George told her. He let one of his own hands stray to Calli
ope’s whistle.

  “Who knows?” said Aurora. “I might get a bigger one.”

  “Good. Can I ask you a personal question?”

  She twitched her nose again. “If you promise to put me in a story.”

  “It’s a deal.”

  “OK, shoot.”

  “How did you fall in love with Brian Garroway?” George asked. “He’s mint chip to the core, or at least he seems to be. I don’t see the attraction.”

  Aurora first laughed, then fell silent, searching for words. It promised to be a long and difficult explanation, but she was spared by Rasputin, who chose that precise moment to vent a remarkable gout of wind. Big men as a rule cut big farts, but if flatulence were visible he would have literally been enveloped in a vapor cloud. Embarrassed, he tried to cover up his faux pas as best he could.

  “Hmmph!” he grunted, pretending it had just been a noisy throat-clearing. “Hmmph!"

  Holding her nose and grinning, Aurora glanced at him and then past him, her eyes fixing by chance on yet another pair of women at the bar. She gasped, and not from Rasputin’s scent.

  “My God,” she whispered.

  “My God what?”

  “There.” George looked where Aurora pointed, recognizing Bijou, a female guitarist who had once played with Benny Profane, and with her a dark-haired woman he did not know.

  “That’s Bijou.” he said “Rock musician. I know her, if you want to be introduced.”

  “No, no, not her. The other girl.”

  “Bijou’s steady, probably. What about her?”

  “That’s Cathy’s roommate.”

  “Cathy Reinigen's roommate?”