Short Fiction Complete

by Fred Saberhagen

  “Oh, one of those religious schools?”

  “Yes.” There was a pause. “I remember seeing you, too, now that I think about it. Rita looks a lot like you.”

  He laughed. “Don’t say that about the poor girl. She’s all excited about graduation these days. So are you, I suppose.”

  “Yes, we all are, I guess.” But Ann was evidently not nearly as excited as Rita was.

  “And about going to college. Where are you going your freshman year, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “How could I mind your asking anything?” Ann smiled beautifully. She was really quite a good-looking girl. “I might go to Mid-Cal my first year. Or maybe Ha-Levy Junior. I’m not sure.”

  George also liked this girl’s voice, now that he had a chance to listen to it attentively. Girls’ voices were important, in his estimation. So were their tempers and spirits. If there was a suggestion of repression in Ann’s clothes and manner, well, that was an attractive spice for him. He hadn’t yet seen her standing up, but he guessed that she would be no taller than he was. That, too, was nice.

  “You’re older than Rita, aren’t you?” Ann was asking. “Well, naturally you are. Where did you go to college, or are you still going?”

  “I didn’t go.” Not wanting her to think him lazy or stupid, he quickly added: “Oh, I may go yet. But the year I finished high school there was one problem after another in our family, people were getting sick and losing jobs and all. We were almost back on BI. I didn’t have much time or money, and I was a little too dumb to qualify for any good scholarships. Then I got into this karate business. Once you get your black belt, it’s really a profession.”

  Ann looked at him warmly. “I can’t imagine that you’re lacking in intelligence. Anyway, you’ve proved that you have courage, that’s more important.” She shook her head as if marveling. “When you stood up there in the aisle, I didn’t know what you were going to do. But I knew that you knew.”

  Unable to find the words to answer that, George changed the subject. “I suppose you’re all excited about the Prom? Rita is. She’s got her escort all picked out and everything. I don’t know if the poor clod knows about it yet.”

  Once more Ann seemed to withdraw for a moment, as she had when he caressed her leg. “I’m not going to the Prom,” she said, then busied herself suppressing a quarrel that had been developing among the children.

  George supposed that she had been having a quarrel with her best boy friend, and was uncertain about who her escort was going to be. He never doubted that a girl like this would have a choice of invitations to accept. “I’ll bet you change your mind about that,” he said, thinking back to the closing of his own high school days. “The Prom’s half the fun of graduating, or more than half.”

  She didn’t answer. But surely a girl like this had been invited, so he could push and tease and probe a little more without seriously hurting any feelings. “Why,” he said, “I’d be tempted to ask you myself, if I was in your class.”

  “I’ve been asked.” Ann’s face was slightly averted so he could not make out her expression, but her voice was unhappily chilly. “I’m just not going.”

  Ouch. He had managed to hit a real sore spot after all’. “Anyway,” he said, “your Prom isn’t next week. You have lots of time to think about it. Meanwhile, when am I going to see you again?”

  IT TURNED out that he saw her next day, at the police station where they had both been summoned for questioning about the fight on the bus. George came near being charged with aggravated battery, but when the testimony of all the available witnesses had been heard, he was not charged.

  Later George bought Ann a snack at a nearby restaurant, and then suggested they find some place a little less noisy and copulate.

  “No, please, I’d rather not.” Again her reply was blunt and seemed to amount to an open invitation to repression. But at the same time her answer seemed so natural and direct, so unembarrassed, that he simply could not take it at face value. He told himself that she had probably been upset all over again by having to testify. She was so matter-of-fact about what she said that she probably didn’t realize how it sounded.

  He asked her several times to go out with him on a regular date, but she consistently refused. Still, he contrived to see more of her. His sister Rita told him where Ann could usually be found on Monday nights, playing volleyball, and he went to the gym and managed to get in on some of the games.

  “Annie, this is fun, but how about you and me going out someplace by ourselves? You like other sports? Bowling, swimming? Or maybe a show.”

  “George, I . . . you’re nice, and I really like you, but I think it wouldn’t be wise.”

  “Why not?” But now people were yelling at them to get back to the net if they wanted to play. They never had the time or the place for a serious discussion. Ann seemed to be making sure of that.

  During this same period of a month or so George made it a point to enjoy sex with five or six different girls. With each, at the most abandoned moments, he found himself closing his eyes and imagining that it was Ann Lohmann’s flesh that moved against his own. The popularizers of psychology on television and in the newsprints were always warning that such behavior could be a danger signal. To focus lust on one individual might be a step toward its repression whenever that individual was not available. Brilliant, thought George. It was just staggering how smart those college educated psychologists could be. Anyway, he wasn’t worried. A lot of the younger, more radical psychologists held that sexual repression, or all-out sublimation even, did no permanent harm when practiced occasionally. That seemed .sensible to George, though he hadn’t much personal experience to judge by. He was young and full of health and usually wanted to do nothing with his sex but satisfy it every day or so and enjoy thinking about it in between times.

  But now this thing with Ann—this thing with Ann was something else.

  Early on the evening of the Prom—living in the same house as Rita, he could not possibly have gotten the date wrong—he obeyed an irrational-seeming impulse and phoned Ann’s home. Ann’s mother, tight-lipped and looking somehow hurried and harried, answered. When he asked for Ann, she reminded him in a nervous voice that this was Prom night. Still he noticed that she did not say in so many words that Ann had already left for the Prom, or that she was too busy getting ready for it to come to the phone.

  After he had blanked off, George sat thinking. Then he went to Rita’s room, where his sister was still being fitted into her Prom gown, meters and meters of fuzzy pink transparency. While their mother was out of the room looking for implements or materials of some kind, he took the opportunity to question his sister.

  “I really don’t know whether she’s going tonight or not, George. How does this look in the back?”

  “Fine.”

  “She’s an honest girl and a good friend of mine and I love her dearly. If she said someone has asked her, then someone has. Also, if she said she’s not going, then that’s the way it will be. I love her dearly, as I said, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if she doesn’t go. Oh, George, what do you mean it looks fine? I can tell in the mirror that it’s terrible.”

  He wasn’t looking into the mirror, or at the dress.

  Ineluctably motherly even on her Prom night, Rita came over to him, frowning with concern. “Oh, George, is it really getting serious between you two?”

  “It is for me, although I’ve never even screwed her once. Is she always—like that? You know?”

  Rita was worried now, completely distracted from her dress. “I might as well tell you bluntly, Ann has a bad rep with the boys in the class. I mean I’m not the most prudish and old-fashioned girl, but she is really way out.” Rita glanced at the bedroom door to determine whether their mother was still out of earshot. “You know she’s been excused from Erotic Orientation classes all along, on religious grounds. Don’t get me wrong, she’s been my loyal friend ever since sophomore year.”

  “No, I
didn’t know that about no EO. But it’s not really surprising.”

  “You say you’ve never screwed her. If you ask me, no one has.” Rita nodded significantly. “I mean it. She’s my friend, but you’re my brother. I’ve seen a lot of the boys displaying a certain interest in her, if you know what I mean. And more than one man teacher, too. Well, if she hardly ever lets them see anything between her shoulders and her knees, I suppose the men are bound to get the message and come sniffing around. I guess you know what you’re doing.”

  Rita was still looking at him worriedly when their mother returned and George withdrew. A deep excitement was now taking control of him. It had begun on that first day on the bus and had been developing ever since. He went back to his own room and spent half an hour alternately lying on the bed, pacing, and practicing his side snap kick before the mirror. Meanwhile he fought an inner struggle, understanding that the whole course of his future might be altered here and now. Again and again he told himself to put dark ideas out of his mind and phone some other girl with whom he could joyfully and simply spend the night in bed. Then he gave up and started to punch out Ann’s phone number again. Then he gave that up too and headed for her house.

  THE house was all in darkness and he almost stumbled over a small figure sitting on a step in front of the door before he realized that anyone was there. Taking a second look, George saw that it was a boy about ten years old, who held in his hands a carved wooden figure about half as tall as he was.

  “You live here?” George asked, his hand hesitating over the callplate on the door.

  “Yeah,” said the boy. “Nobody’s home but my sister,” he added gloomily.

  George’s heart gave a little premonitory throb. “It’s her I want to see.” He touched the plate and immediately a light came on above his head, giving the TV eye in the door a chance for a good look.

  In the new light George could see that the carved wooden figure in the boy’s hands was— or had been—a female nude, executed with some skill. The kid was slowly mutilating it now, moodily gouging and hacking it with a small knife. The step was littered with little chips and shavings.

  “Hey, what’re you doing that for?”

  “I carved it, I can do what I want.”

  “Well. What’s your name?”

  “Fred.”

  “I’m George. You can carve pretty good, Fred, if you did that. Why don’t you save it?” Though it seemed too late for that. Now one of the house’s windows came alight; someone was on their way to answer the door.

  “Oh, you’re karate-George from the bus.” The boy looked up with interest for a moment, but then lowered his brown head again and dug in with the knife. “Why should I save it? Nobody wants to look at it.”

  Ann opened the door, rubbing her dark hair with a towel. She was wearing a translucent pinkish sarong, not radically concealing, with apparently nothing under it. “Hello, George. Freddy! I thought you were at the Scout meeting. What are you doing, destroying that?”

  “Nobody cares about it.”

  “I care. I told you I like to see anything you do—”

  “You don’t know nothin’ about it. And nobody else cares.” Freddy flung down the chunk of wood and was gone running into the night, across the little front yard and then swallowed up by the shadows along a narrow statwalk beside a slow river of taillights.

  Ann called after her brother in annoyance, but evidently without any real expectation that he would turn around and come back. She made a gesture of resignation and then turned. “Come in, George.” It was almost as if she had been expecting him.

  “Thanks. Is your brother going to be all right?”

  “Oh, I suppose so. I think he’ll stay in the neighborhood. Anyway I don’t know what I can do.”

  George daringly omitted giving her any slightest pinch or caress of greeting, even on the hand or arm, as he stepped into the house. True to form, Ann did not blush or giggle at the omission, as most of the girls he knew would probably have done, nor did she take offense at it, as the really nice conservative ones might. A bad girl then, as Rita had warned him, and all the signs so plainly showed. But still . . . somehow he couldn’t believe she was.

  “Let’s go out beside the pool,” she said. “It’s nice outside tonight.”

  “All right.” He followed her through the house. “I called earlier, and your mother sort of implied you were going out, but I just had a hunch and came over anyway.”

  “I’m glad you did.” As they were leaving the indoors for a palm-fringed patio Ann stopped and turned to him. Her gladness, if such it was, was quiet and almost melancholy. “My parents have gone to the Prom, they agreed to be chaperones. They were very upset when they found they couldn’t talk me into going, even going at the last minute with them instead of a boy taking me. My mother is Church of Eros, you know, quite devout, and she’s been going there for guidance day after day and trying to get me to go. But her church and mine just don’t agree. My father went to his playclub and talked to the philosopher. Finally my parents both decided they ought to do what’s expected of them even if I won’t. So they’re chaperoning. I guess that’s partly why Freddy is upset. He thought Dad might go with him tonight to some Scout meeting.” It was about the longest speech that George had ever heard from her. She seemed farther from melancholy when she had gotten it out.

  “I’m glad your parents decided that way,” said George. “Now I have you all to myself.”

  “I’m glad you do. I had to talk a little bit to someone.” Ann stopped rubbing her hair and let the towel hang down in front of her. She seemed innocently unconscious of concealing effect. Now for the first time she smiled. “Would you like a swim, George? I just climbed out.”

  “Sounds like fun.” He followed her around the bend of the L-shaped patio to the pool, which was irregular in shape and fairly small, and bordered along most of its perimeter by plastic grass and probably artificial flowers. His mind pictured Ann climbing from the pool, slipping on her sarong, going to answer the door. Suddenly he was sure she had been swimming in the nude, and his inward excitement—if excitement was really the right word for this chilling thing—went up another reading on the dial. Of course there was no sensible reason why a girl alone should not slip off her bikni and swim nude if she wanted to. Only the most satyrish reactionaries would insist that a solitary person wear clothes to emphasize his or her sex. But still the mental picture of Ann floating alone, smooth as a snake, divorced from sex, all chaste and bare as a lily-pad, was overwhelming.

  “Still, the air is getting a little cool now,” said George, stalling. Standing beside her on the edge of the pool, he felt very unsure of himself. Would she laugh at him for an old-fashioned clod if he mentioned his lack of a swimming codpiece? On the other hand, if he just stripped bare and dove in, would she, after all, be shocked? In spite of the evidence of her own words and actions he couldn’t really believe that she was the bad kind of girl. But hadn’t he come here tonight hoping she was, trying to prove it, wanting to get from her what only bad girls gave? Confused as a sixteen-year old, he chickened out.

  “You’re right,” she said calmly. “I wasn’t in the pool for very long.”

  They sat down side by side on the pool’s curved grassy edge, and George pulled off his sandals and dipped his feet into the water. In his knitted translucent shorts and jacket he was really quite warm enough, but he saw Ann shiver just slightly in her sarong with the damp towel around her bare shoulders. In a minute he would suggest that they go back inside where it was warmer. Meanwhile he wanted to watch her as she stirred the water gently with one toe, scattering a thousand California stars.

  ONLY ONCE, as an adolescent in the grip of a way-out mood, had George visited & brothel. There a pretty girl had draped herself while he watched, and had talked about stars and purity and poetry and other high, mysterious things until she had him sexless as a mushroom. Then he and the girl had lain chastely side by side on her narrow bed and talked. Between othe
r topics of conversation he tried to explain the mental processes of karate to her, how the mind could concentrate the body’s force sufficiently to drive the hand uninjured through a wooden slab. At the time he had not really started any serious study of karate, and so he had been facile with explanations.

  Probably his dissertation hadn’t made too much sense, but the girl was a skilled listener. He supposed most whores were that, and sexually desirable, too. He had heard Japanese speculating about what the old-time geisha must have been like, and he wondered if they were something similar. In the brothel George had never forgotten how desirable the girl with him was;-while at the same time his mind had daringly pushed lust farther and father away. A door had opened for him to a bittersweet world of controlled power. Change the metaphor: free-style sparring, and Eros’s feet of fleshy clay were swept out from under him, and down he came with a great ignominious gonad-jarring crash, to be made to bend his neck before a single rebellious human slave.

  Still, when it was all over, when his half hour was up and he was being expertly shown the door, he found himself somewhat disappointed. Was this all that sublimation ever amounted to? It hardly seemed worth the fuss that people made about it.

  Now, sitting with Ann on the grassy rim of the pool, he watched a movement of her hips show through the sarong as she shifted her weight slightly, and felt a sudden physical surge of desire for her. He remembered suddenly that he had seen and responded to just such a movement of the prostitute’s body as she began to wrap herself before him.

  “So. I guess you’re still working with that Sunday school religious class, hey?”

  “Oh, yes. When I have time.”

  “Have you belonged to that Christian group long? I mean, guess the rest of your family aren’t members.”

  “It’s a Christian school, but . . .” Ann spoke slowly and carefully now. “I’m not actually baptized into the Church yet myself. I just help out there. I’ve been hanging around the school and church there since I was about thirteen. You’re right, my parents are much against it and of course they try to argue me out of ever being baptized. I guess my adolescence has been difficult for them, with me always hanging around Sunday school instead of going to young peoples orgies in their church. The philosopher at Daddy’s playclub says I’m looking for a crutch to help me get through life. And really it is such a tremendous step, being baptized, I mean. In a sense I’m still free now to do anything I want, but after baptism I won’t be.”