"I didn't see you, I'm sorry," she said, then saw him.
"I wasn't watching, I'm sorry." He smiled in reply.
The truth was that, from time to time for a dozen years, they had seen but not looked at each other, or had looked but never seen.
Lance was almost twice Joy's age, and so Fate had waited until that once vast difference had contracted to insignificance—as far as desire at first sight could see.
"I haven't seen you around here before." Lance leaned over the side of his open sports car, a crimson burning chariot. Joy had often seen herself riding in such a car, her hair tied in a sky-silk scarf, and wearing costly sunglasses. "Oh, I live here," she confessed.
"Me, too. Poor us. What's your name?"
"Joy."
Lance never doubted it for a minute. And Joy still stood where he had almost run her over, and he still pushed at the brake. And the birch plume poised trembling in air, then chose, was chosen, and, floating downward, fell to earth. "Joy Strummer."
"Lance Abernathy."
"Oh. Well, your car's nice, even if it almost killed me. I've seen it around before."
"You're okay, right? You weren't hit?"
"Oh, no, yeah, I'm okay."
"Look, maybe you shouldn't walk, maybe I should give you a ride, two locals, right? That'd be okay?"
"Well, I don't know. Oh, sure, I guess so. I was just going home, that's all."
"Hop in, Joy." He leaned to the right, in his costly white sweater; his handsome tan hand flung open a door for her. And Polly Hedgerow, foot at her kickstand, watched, astonished, as Joy (too shy to raise her hand in class or joke with the librarian, Mr. Blossom) not only conversed easily with a grown stranger, but sank easily into the leather seat of a foreign car, as if nothing could be more customary, utterly disregarding her mother's warning: never get into a car with a stranger.
Deserted by Joy (friendship can hold no candle to the flame of love), Polly returned to books. We bloom at different times. Joy's recreational petals were open, Polly's tightly bound in leaves. Polly's ideational blossom had flowered, while Joy's was but a bud. The spring of some is others' summer, and in winter a few (like Beanie) may still fall.
All spring, off in the library, while the slowed sun shadowed her chair, Polly had practiced the same faith as that expressed by an earlier New England young female: that for solo excursions a book is the best frigate. And on that voluminous ocean of print Polly had sailed, if not as far as Emily Dickinson, then at least all the way to London, Paris, and Moscow. And she had decided she preferred the people she met there to her fellow Dingleyans. For her, the garbled gawking of even the most popular suitors would be silly—had she not heard Mr. Darcy and Byron woo? For her, the clumsy clutchings in the lot beside the Falls held no allure. How could they, compared with the passion of Heathcliff and Aramis? Who at Dixwell High could love her like Prince André or Count Vronsky? Certainly not Tac Hayes, who was, okay, pretty handsome, but who loved only a netted hoop ten feet off the ground. Certainly not Luke Packer.
But Nature, marshaling summer for her assault, pursued Polly even across her sea of books. Nature has always had frigates of her own. Up in a dim corner of the library's second floor, where rare (and rarely read) books were moved only when dusted, Polly had hidden (behind shelves where Gladys Goff had gathered the lives of valiant missionaries) a few forbidden texts. There she went after Joy had left her, to begin Lady Chatterley's Lover. The place was dark. Apparently no one else was in the entire library, not even the librarian, Mr. Blossom.
Polly was wrong. As she saw when she flipped the switch and abruptly lit up Sidney Blossom and Kate Ransom on the floor in front of her secret shelf. They were wrong, too, for they had relied upon the (usually quite reliable) Philistinism of Dingleyans to keep them away from dusty learning on so lovely a June afternoon. The two now stared up from the rows of dusty theology, frozen as two rabbits caught in a headlight beam, caught, appropriately enough, in the missionary position.
The Fact, after so much fiction, was to one whose view of Romance had come largely from Victorian novels as unsettling to Polly as Norman Mailer would have been to George Eliot. Mr. Blossom's far too hairy buttocks jerked up, away from an emphatically untanned width on the all too obviously female flesh of Kate Ransom, whose collegiate allure and modishly proletarian outfits Polly had often admired from afar. But now Kate's clothing was inappropriately high or low. Flowered panties like a wrist corsage dangled around Kate's ankle, her tennis skirt was up to her waist, her tennis shirt was up to her neck. Mr. Blossom's pants were down to his feet, and his far too white and skinny legs were squeezed between Kate's raised tan knees.
"Oh, excuse me, gosh, excuse me," blurted Polly. They could come up with no reply before the bulb flicked off—her finger had never left the switch. Darkness handed the lovers back their privacy as swiftly as light had snatched it away. And Polly's sneakers snuck quickly down the steps into the main reading room and out the varnished oak doors and into a fat red sun that slid out of the sky behind Mr. Barnum's store.
Now she had seen It. Sex. So that was It. It was ridiculous. And the thing, Mr. Blossom's, a twitching red knob sticking out of the wet, curly hair around it. For a fraction of a second before he sank down on Kate Ransom, she had definitely seen that too. It was really big. Was Joy destined to let Lance Abernathy push his into her?
Polly ran back onto the green. She had left her bike there, leaning against the ancient copper beech known as Dingley Tree, when she had gone to sit beneath the Dingley statue to try to read Anna Karenina but had then gone to the library to try to read another book instead. Out of the Dingley Day sauntered Luke Packer with Coleman Sniffell, who went irritably to put a coin in a parking meter.
"Hey!" Luke yelled. "El Dopo! Wanna ride the bus over to Argyle with me?"
"No!"
"What's eating you?"
"Why don't you drop dead?" was her answer, as she jumped on the bike and rode off.
"Hey! How much do I owe you for my sandwich? Hey! What's bugging you?"
"Typical," muttered Coleman Sniffell. Luke shrugged.
Out of Dingley Circle, Polly pedaled home to Glover's Lane.
Locked in her room, its haphazard eaves covered with posters of Spain, Al Pacino, Bella Abzug, and Snoopy, its high blue shelves stacked with the clutter of a past she could never bring herself to discard—unraveling bears, plastic camp trophies, a broken tower of popsicle sticks, rocks and shells now dull and dirty that had glittered in the sand once with such promise of treasure, children's books all bearing a card saying POLLY'S LIBERRY. PLEASE RETURN IN A WEEK —locked in there, she pulled to her window a wicker chair (also painted blue, as were the walls, the bed, and the dresser, and as would have been the floor and ceiling as well had her father not said, "Enough's enough, I'm seasick"). Just outside the window was Polly's maple tree, the Xanadu of her hermitage. Climbing through the window onto the roof, onto the big branch, among leaves in her favorite escape, she sat to think it over. Sex.
It was a funny thing, overrunning people's lives, driving them crazy, destroying them—like Anna Karenina or Mrs. Abernathy or The Scarlet Letter or the poor Great Gatsby. Not her, Polly determined. Passion was not going to ruin her mind, not going to make her act like an idiot, not make her slide about on a sweaty floor, tangled up in somebody else's arms and legs. Not make her put goop on her eyes as Joy Strummer now spent hours doing. She would not be Madame Bovary, but Madame Curie, dedicated to science (or something), her faculties intact, her limbs unentangled.
Of course, Madame Curie had had Pierre. It would eventually be nice to fall in love. Life, Polly decided, would give her a Pierre, a friend and colleague who would save the world with her; and she would incidentally have a few children (she'd always wanted brothers and sisters). Then when they brought her word that a bus, or something, had run over and killed her Pierre on his way to the lecture hall, she would remain beautifully calm, gather up his notes (or better, know them by heart), and so g
o to give that lecture on science, or something, in his place. Tears twinkled happily in her eyes as she heard the standing ovation burst forth for so brave and brilliant a young woman, who would now go on alone (her parenthetical children having dropped from the dream) to win the Nobel Prize, or something.
These thoughts made her feel immensely better about It. It would be different with her and Pierre. Much more noble. She brought back the sight on the library floor and looked it over. She had today learned something she wanted abstractly to know. She had seen sex. She had also learned something about Sidney Blossom. It appeared that he was not a pansy, as many people thought—simply because he was a librarian, was known to have ironed his own shirts, hung up his own curtains, and subscribed to a cooking magazine.
According to Ray Ransom, Mr. Blossom sneaked up behind boys when they bent over at the water cooler in the library, and wham bam. It was just another of Ray's dirty lies. Now Polly was tempted to tell Ray about his big sister, Kate, the Vassar girl. Serve him right.
Obviously she couldn't share this latest Dingley Falls scoop with Father Highwick without the embarrassment of describing how she had discovered it, and she would never, after the way Joy had spurned her for a sports car, tell Joy Strummer anything ever again.
It was good to find out, however bluntly, that the librarian was not a pansy, for she liked him and had worried that there was no one in town for him to be in love with that way: except possibly (and this was a new hypothesis of Polly's—also unshared with the rector)
Father Jonathan Fields, who was as beautiful as Dorian Gray (in another of Miss Goff's forbidden books), but whom Mrs. Troyes and the rector already completely monopolized.
Coitus interrupted by a summer bookworm, the shaken couple had flung on their clothes to meet the citizens' committee Blossom imagined was on its way to arrest them for visually assaulting a minor. But there were no knocks or sirens, and no posse showed up as they smoked a cigarette off in the librarian's tiny office, where a portrait of his predecessor, Gladys Goff, frowned down at them as if she had witnessed their sacrilege in her cherished theology section.
Gradually, shock faded and shame followed.
"Crap," began Kate. "She's probably done it herself by now. I know I had by sixteen." The worldly Miss Ransom, now twenty-one, here juvenilized (though only by one year) the loss of her virginity at seventeen to Bobby Strummer in the den of her family's summer house on Lake Pissinowno, where this local Apollo had reigned as lifeguard before going to Vietnam, where he had been for years "Missing in Action."
"You should hear the stories Ray tells me about what goes on up at Alexander Hamilton and Dixwell High. Sidney, you're so naive.
You've hidden yourself off in this hole so long, you don't know what's going on. Even Dingley Falls is out of the dark ages. Even Dingley Falls went through the sixties. They do everything these days. Drugs. Group sex. They do it in grammar school, for crap's sake."
"Well, I can still be sorry she had to see us like that, probably at least embarrassed her."
"Embarrassed her! She's the one that barged in."
"I know, I'm sorry about the whole thing, forgive me, okay?"
"I started it, Sidney. Don't think you raped me or something."
"But not like that, right on the floor in a damn library!"
Sidney Blossom was not a worldly man. In his thirty-two years he had had sexual intercourse twice with his mother's maid, four times with prostitutes in Providence during four years at Brown University, and twenty-six times with Beth Page, a fellow library science student, during a summer tour of Europe—once in England, six times in France and Germany, and the rest in Italy.
On the way to Greece, Beth had thrown him over for a friend of his and had so wounded him by a detailed comparison of his own and his rival's sexual performance, that after his graduation there had been in his life only a rare commercial arrangement with the hostess of Fred's Fries Bar and Grill. And that arrangement had been only at the prodding of Lance Abernathy, to whom the shy librarian had finally turned for information about "where to go." It was really not much of a record.
When Blossom met (remet) Kate Ransom on his return to Dingley Falls seven years after he had left it, he had fallen in love with her sulky beauty, with the thick black eyelashes and brows that windowed the sullen blue eyes. She had her mother's stylish body and her father's remarkable good looks—in her made animate by an apparently inexhaustible annoyance with what she called "the System." Her sister, Emerald, was as cool as her name, but Kate seethed. She was cool to him though. They spent a great deal of time together. They went to movies and out to eat and to reminisce about the sixties while listening to folk-rock records.
They analyzed the seventies and each other. But Kate had told Sidney so often, "Stop trying to make me and let's be friends; that's much harder," that finally—though it was much harder—he had stopped. She explained that she wouldn't sleep with him because she knew he wanted to marry her, and she couldn't afford to get involved with such a man. He was finally pressed to pretend to casual lust, only to be told, "You must think I'm really dumb if you expect me to fall for that." Sometimes he worried that she went out with him only to threaten her parents with the possibility that she would marry him, for he knew he was not, in their view, a suitable suitor for Kate.
So, today, when miraculously she had walked behind the library counter and leaned over his back as he filed the late cards, when she had pressed her unbra'd breasts into his shirt, Sidney had lost his head. So lost it that he did exactly what for years he had dreamed of doing, and feared she would reject him for attempting, and feared he would fail in accomplishing even if he were not rejected. Still, he felt he should not have gotten so out of control. "Let me apologize, okay?
I practically forced you."
Kate laughed. Today she had simply done exactly what for years she had more or less planned on sooner or later doing. "Forget it. It's no big deal."
"It is to me." Sidney frowned. The voice he heard did not sound familiar. He sprang down from his desk and pulled Kate out of her chair. "It is to me!" The voice was thick and came from a different place than Beth Page had ever gotten to know. "Kate," he heard this voice say. She looked up, startled. He kissed her up against the file cabinet, he kissed her to her knees, he kissed her, at last, to the floor—half under his desk, half under Miss Goff 's baleful stare. He kept on kissing her. Down again to his feet went Sidney Blossom's pants. Out again came his thing. And soon into Kate. There it stayed, thick and full as his voice, for twenty uninterrupted minutes.
Compared to years of waiting, twenty minutes really wasn't very long. But compared to Bobby Strummer, two Yalies, one Amasser, and a Harvardian, Kate was impressed.
By now they had cleared the desk and were squeezed between a swivel chair and a dictionary stand. "There!" rumbled Sidney, finally, as he hooked his arms under her knees, raised her almost off the floor, and let go inside her a hundred nights of dreams.
"There!"
"Damn!" panted the object of his dream. "Oh, goddamn!"
Soon out came the thing, hot, red, and nodding in triumph.
Limbs disentangled, the way Polly Hedgerow preferred them to be.
Both shiny lovers lay puffing for breath on the floor. Even Kate's tennis was not quite so strenuous, and as for the unathletic librarian, he fully expected immediate (though happy) death. Kate recovered first and asked for a cigarette. "Sidney," she said in a spiral of smoke, "I came twice."
"Marry me" is what Dingley Falls's librarian wanted to say. But he had learned to wait. So what he said was, "Sid. I hate being called Sidney. Just Sid. Okay?"
"Okay."
At last, he was on his way.
chapter 18
Frankly, Winslow Abernathy had found little consolation in the sonnet Mrs. Canopy had left for him in a terra-cotta bell jar outside his door. In it she had voiced a presentiment that Beanie would soon be home to change "the raven, Rumor, back to Truth's own dove/Through he
aven's magic trick—transforming Love." But Beanie wasn't back. The Seville was not in the garage, Big Mutt was not on the lawn, there was no note on the bedroom dresser, no telephone call, no telegram, no hospital, no police station, no apology, nothing forwarded from his Boston hotel, no repentant wife come into his office, where he had sat until 6:30, waiting. There was no Beanie.
Since his return at three, Abernathy had received five invitations to dinner for that evening. As if I were abruptly widowed, he thought, and judged helpless to care for myself. A solicitor in need of solicitude, of immediate transference to another female, lest I famish, go naked in rags, smother in dirt, die of neglect.
"You'll need to eat, Winslow," Tracy Canopy had added in a postscript to her sonnet. "Let me have you over, something simple."
"Dear Winslow, the house." Evelyn Troyes had stopped by his office to remind him. "Shall I send my Orchid over? And then your laundry?"
"It never helps to be alone," counseled Sloan Highwick, "and we could drive to a new Chinese place I heard about where your legs don't go numb from all that MSG, and honestly I've often thought I'd had a stroke from some of those dishes. But it's only twenty miles or so south of us. Or west."
"Priss thought," Ernest Ransom had phoned, "we could all have dinner at the Club tonight. Sound okay? Their scampi, you know."
"I gather the whole town has heard. Tell me, Ernest, were you having a town meeting at your house last night?"
"No need to take that tone. Just thought you might feel a little at loose ends. Never mind then."
Finally the lawyer, accepted an offer by A.A. Hayes to share a Scotch at the Prim Minster. While he was too shaken to bear the solicitude of his wife's friends or of his old college roommate, he found he could not afford solitude just yet. With the newsman be could focus on news other than his own. Abernathy and Hayes were not intimate; neither had aspired to "friendship" for many years. But their minds had moved each toward the other's, so that at parties the two men usually found themselves off by the bar—by Hayes's request—alone in conversation. Abernathy and Ransom, on the other hand, had never learned to talk easily together, though they had lived during their undergraduate years in New Haven in the same bland room. Abernathy suspected he made Ernest uncomfortable because he knew so much about him. But with Hayes, Abernathy shared a professional interest, shared the luck of being paid (Abernathy much more handsomely) to do what each most enjoyed—working with words to find out truths. Not so much to right wrongs with their proofs, but more purely and simply to penetrate truth's secrets with the pin of language. They also shared the shame of feeling that they had betrayed the highest achievements of their callings—juristic and journalistic—by being, in their opinion, failures. They also shared, though had never discussed, an incapacity to communicate with their wives or their children, none of whom shared their love of pure language.
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