by John Osborn
“No,” Hart said, “I don’t want to talk about my dorm problems. I don’t want to talk to anyone.”
Toombs walked to the door.
“Remember that I’m always here. I want you to ask me things. I want you to feel you can rely on me.”
Hart nodded and turned away. He stayed that way, not looking at the door and not moving until, five minutes later, he heard Toombs walking away down the hall.
Then Hart went to Ford’s room. He’d tried to catch Ford Saturday afternoon, after the study group meeting. Ford had been out, maybe trying to avoid him. He hadn’t meant to scream at Ford.
The room was empty. Hart sat down on the bed to wait. He thought about Toombs, and somehow the thought made him feel he’d sit there and wait for Ford until morning if it took that long. On the desk he saw Ford’s journal. He bent over, not really figuring on reading it, but not avoiding it either. He’d hear anyone walking down the hall because the door was half open.
…. had dream last night. Boy in black pants, white shirt, stole my tennis racket. I went down to my car (VW bus) and in it was a Negro boy, very young, and two policemen. All four of us went after the thief. The car (bus) had been in the city, but was now in the country-we saw the thief running ahead. I jumped out of the car and ran after the thief, and so did the police and the Negro boy. The thief got away. Then the Negro boy took a gun and started firing at the police and me. I ducked, and the policeman started firing back. Then one of the policemen turned so his back was to the boy. He threw his gun over his shoulder in a high lob. It landed in the boy’s hand. Now he had two guns…. I started inching away.
There were noises in the hall. Hart stopped reading. He felt very tired and went back to his room to sleep.
15
SUSAN STOOD at the window in her bedroom, looking out over the roofs of Cambridge. Hart’s hands were around her. There was no light on in the room, so they could spy out without being seen.
The softness of the wind. It crept through her hair around Hart’s face. Hart felt as if he was in the time just before sleep, when you think very hard to know where you are.
“What are we going to do in the summer?” he whispered. He wanted to say, I love you.
“I don’t know,” Susan said, “we’ll just wait and find out.”
She put her hands on his, pulling his arms around her.
“If we don’t think about it now, it won’t just happen. I’ll go to Minnesota, you’ll stay here,” he said. He wanted to say, I love you. Everything is all right. Yes, dearest, we’ll always be together.
She turned around, put her arms around his waist, looked into his face. He felt like a statue and he looked out the window, over her head, conscious that she was watching him.
“People get married when there are wars,” she said, “because they’re scared and want some calm. I don’t know, maybe they do it because they want to feel they have too much at stake for God to hurt them.”
She left him and went into the living room. He lay down on the bed, staring up at the ceiling. He felt hurt and he wanted to feel hurt. There was some dignity in that. He wanted to do something. Maybe to grab her and tell her that she was going to marry him and that was that and she could just learn to live with it. Sweep her off her feet. Or maybe put his head down and walk quietly past her out the door without saying anything, not turning when she asked where he was going. Two sides of the same coin. He just didn’t know what the hell to do because he couldn’t guess anything about what she would do.
“I don’t know what to do about you,” he called into the next room. “I never know what you want.”
She came in and sat on the bed, looking down at him.
Her brown hair came close together in the front, hiding her face, making her look soft and cuddly, like a teddy bear. She was so tiny, he thought. He looked into her face and he felt that she was small and delicate. The only light came from the window and it dissolved her face into her hair, making it hard to see the outlines.
“Listen, Susan, I really want to talk to you. You know, really say things to you. I don’t want to fake it.” Why, he thought, why should I be with her, if I can’t talk to her? Why is it her and not someone else?
She tucked her legs under her and leaned across the bed so her back rested against the wall.
“This room’s no good. I want a rug. You can’t have the bed right down on the floor when there isn’t any rug. I get splinters sometimes.” She drew the blanket, piled on the end of the bed, up around her.
“There isn’t anything in this room,” she said quietly. “Just the bed and the window, nothing else. The only decoration is the green light bulb. I used to think that was the only way to appreciate a room for what it is, to have nothing in it so you could see the walls and floor and everything. Now I want to put some things in it, but I don’t know what kind of furniture to get. I don’t know what I want.”
Hart looked over at the window, at the floor, at the walls. There wasn’t anything else in the room, except the bed, put right down on the floor.
“You always talk to me in riddles,” he said. “Listen, don’t you know what I want? Don’t you know what I mean? I want to get away from all the shit we give each other. I want to really talk. I want to tell you how I really feel about you. I don’t want to plot about it. I don’t want to do things, thinking about what you’re going to do.
“I want to cut out all that middle stuff. I want us to be like one nerve. I want to tell you the truth and then have you tell me what you really think about it. I want it to be quick, like a game. I want us to react.”
“All right,” she said. “React.” She pulled the blanket tight around her. She looked down at him and he looked away at the wall.
“Shit,” he said. “I was ruined by my childhood.”
He laughed, first to himself, then out loud, just a little, and smiled. “The only kind of girls I’ll ever get to know are ones who go on dates. I’ll have to go to a dating bar. I just don’t know how to talk. I don’t have any objective. I’m not trying to make it with you. I can’t try to impress you. I don’t have any dreams, or hopes, or plans. I just don’t have any plans.”
He stretched his arms out and pulled her down next to him. She let herself fall and put her head on his chest.
“Am I worthless?” he said.
“What would you like to happen?” Susan said.
“I suppose we could get married, or we could stop seeing each other, or just go on the way we are now.”
“Your problem is that you don’t like not knowing what you want. Why do you have to want anything? Don’t do anything. If anything happens to make it seem like the insides of us want each other, then it’ll work out. Let’s not let outside things push us together or apart. I don’t want you now, but I’m interested in finding out how it will come out.”
WINTER
16
HART AND FORD, their feet up on the windowsill, drinks in their hands, watched the snowflakes dart in and out of the light like fish in an aquarium. This wasn’t the first storm. It snowed every few days, covering all the cars and for a few hours leaving everything neat. The snow would stop, get a ragged, used look to it. Slushy, uneven, brown. The streets would turn to sewers and wait for a rain to wash it all out.
“The trouble with going to sleep here is that there are no surprises. You know what I mean? There are surprises in the summer,” Ford said.
“No,” Hart said, “I don’t know.”
“Last summer,” Ford said,” I was lying in bed, six in the morning, sleeping soundly. I always sleep that way at home. I relapse and let the warmth ooze around me. I was sleeping and suddenly I felt this soft thing shaking around in the bed.”
“A rat, a snake. Maybe a turtle?”
“No.” Ford chuckled to himself “One of my sister’s friends. I think she was fourteen. She’d been reading all kinds of stuff. So she snuck over and lay down in bed with me. Nude. Scared the hell out of me. Statutory rape. Twenty years
. I kicked her out.”
Hart looked away from the window. He swirled the ice in his glass.
“It’s not funny,” he said. “It’s not funny for a fourteen-year-old to jump into bed with you. It’s sad.”
“I’m not making myself into a folk hero. It’s a story. It happened. For Christ’s sake,” Ford drawled.
“It shouldn’t happen,” Hart said. “Someone should have sent her to a shrink. It’s pathetic. It’s sick. Shit, Ford.”
Ford thought for a while.
“Midwesterners are archaic,” he said finally. “Like animals. You’re always on the hall phone, calling your girlfriends. Don’t you see how screwed up that is? Call your girlfriends? Everything in the world is happening, while you’re sitting around reading cases or calling your girlfriends.”
“I don’t know,” Hart whispered. “I really don’t know what the fuck is going on. I don’t understand anything.”
“You’re too late,” Ford said. “Understanding things was what college was for. What did you do in college? We spent hours on it. Dissecting sex, virginity, love, fucking in general. I had a roommate like you. One night he found out his girl in Kansas had been sleeping with, hell, maybe three or four people. I spent hours with him, walking him around the Square.”
“I believe it,” Hart sighed, the words hanging in the air.
“You know, right now,” Ford said, “or tomorrow, when you’re thinking about contracts, forty thousand teenagers are jumping into bed with each other. Forty thousand teenagers are getting pregnant, killing themselves. Fucked up, crazy-ass kids. Everything is happening.”
Hart put his drink on the sill, put his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands.
“God I’m sick of it,” Hart moaned. “Jesus Christ.”
“I’m sick of it too,” Ford said, leaning over so his mouth was right by Hart’s ear. “I’m sick of all the theories. I give a shit if some chick in Kansas loses her virginity. There’s only one sensible thing to do in this mess. Find a good woman and hang on. Hang on like hell. I mean, throw yourself into the goddamned struggle like a maniac. Grab onto her boobs and don’t let go.”
17
KEVIN AIMED the repeater out the window, sighting down the street. It was six in the morning and the street was empty. Every five or ten minutes, a car or a dog would come by.
His room was filled with his notes and law books, laid randomly on the sofa, coffee table and chairs. He’d spent the night trying to catch up.
A Volkswagen turned the corner, puttering up the street, right under the window, moving slowly because of the ice. He leaned out, aiming at the middle of the engine cover, between the air ducts, focusing on the castle symbol. He squinted and pulled the trigger.
The gun went ping as the hammer fell on the empty chamber. It was bad to pull the trigger when there wasn’t anything in the gun, but he didn’t like it anyway. It was a present from Asheley’s father.
He felt almost tired enough to go to bed.
18
THEY WERE on the top of a hill. Out the windshield, Hart could see a long thin expanse of snow and down below it he knew there must be ice. The lake curved around to the left, behind far trees. A large brick building towered beside them. Susan let the motor idle.
“The museum isn’t open. We got here too late,” she said.
“Listen, let’s at least talk about things,” he said. “We’ve got to get organized.”
“Christ,” she said, low and under her breath.
“I’m sorry. Really, I’m sorry.”
“Why? You feel it,” she answered. “Why not say what you feel?”
“We could get married and then live together.”
“Jesus, I told you, I don’t mind sin. I just want to live alone.”
“It would work,” he said.
She shut off the engine and the heater stopped with it.
“I don’t have anything else to say. I don’t want to live in the married student dorms, have neat friends down the hall and walk babies with them. They put people away in that place. And I don’t want to live with you. Organize yourself some other way.”
He got out and slammed the door; stood watching the lake.
They ran down the hill, making wide tracks in the snow, finally reached the lake and started to walk around it, keeping to the ice at the sides. He wished he’d worn boots, or at least something with rubber soles.
“Hart,” she said at last, “there are things I’m trying to do.”
“What?”
“Live alone,” she said.
When he kicked down, he thought he could feel the ice respond, quiver to the touch.
“How deep is the lake?” he asked.
“Deep.”
“All right, I said I was sorry. Everything is coming unstuck. I just can’t play anymore.”
“I wasn’t ever playing,” she said. They veered away from the shore. He worried because he didn’t know the lake and couldn’t see the color of the ice.
“I don’t understand it,” she said. “How I get mixed up with law students. It’s some curse that follows me around. Something my father must arrange. You haven’t seen him lately?”
“Just in class …”
“You’re all crazy … all the law students. You can’t let things alone. Hart, something is happening to your mind.”
He walked straight out from the shore. You should stay apart on the ice so that, if it gives way, you can get to each other. You crawl out on your belly. He’d learned that in Boy Scouts. He put his arm around her, loosely, as if they were old friends.
“You’ve got to understand that I’m real,” she said, “that I’m going to live past twenty. You’ve got to put your head in mine.”
They were almost to the center, one hundred yards from shore.
“I can’t,” he moaned, “I can’t. I don’t know why things are good, and I don’t know why they are bad.”
The ice cracked.
It sounded like it came from a long way off, a wave far out, reaching in to them. He could feel it move beneath them, lift his feet up and then down, slowly, like a slow motion picture of a trampoline. He fell over, turning in the air, landing with his arms stretched out, spread-eagled on the Ice.
“Christ,” she said. “Christ, this will kill us.”
She was still standing, her arms outstretched like a tightrope walker, balancing herself.
The water seeped over his hands. His breathing pounded in and out as if it was moving the ice. He welcomed the numbness the water brought. He didn’t want to move. He could feel the ice rising and lowering gently beneath him, as if he were lying on an air mattress, a perfect balance. He exhaled ever so lightly and the ice shifted.
“Don’t move,” she said softly. She started down, like a ballerina coming down for applause. He watched her, as if dreaming. He felt the ice vibrate as she came down.
His hands began to burn, even though they were wrapped in snow. They passed through numbness, out on the other side into heat. So hot he felt they could burn through the ice.
Then she was down, her feet and hands forming four points. The ice breathed. It relaxed, coming up, as she shifted her weight out. She lay, arms outstretched, on her back. He thought what they must look like from the top: like children playing in the snow, making angels.
She started inching, pushed herself with her heels to see if she could and then stopped.
“Go ahead,” he said, “get off, and I’ll come afterward. Get the fuck out of here.”
Am I saying that, he thought.
She pushed, sliding away toward the shore, inching like a worm. The water rose slowly, over his legs, into his pants. Then she was on the shore standing, a speck, waving her arms.
The water covered his hands. His breathing pounded against the cold, moving the ice, but his mind was still. He couldn’t even think of moving. His mind had disconnected from his body.
For some insane reason, he thought about cases in contracts, and his mind began
to distinguish the cases, make subtle differentiations he’d never been able to do in class.
“Now, slide off, now, now, now….” Her voice came from a long way off, echoed across the lake and then came back from the other side.
He tried pushing with the toes of his shoes. The leather squeaked on the ice. It wouldn’t push him. He dug in harder and the ice vibrated again. The water came up higher and he heard cracking, popping like firecrackers.
He came back to the lake: woke as if someone had jabbed him with a hot coal.
“Get up. Come off before it caves….”
He slid his hands and feet together, slowly, while the ice sank lower: got up like a dog, keeping on four points, and started moving. The ice popped around him, sank but held. Somehow he was fifty yards from shore and then it sank more, and he stood up and ran, sliding his feet over it, not coming down with a bounce.
It popped behind him, as if he were setting off charges with each step. He felt it cave five yards from the shore, and as it gave way-not going down, but floating out to the sides-he gave a push off, sailed out toward the shore as far as he could.
He froze. As soon as the water covered him, the heat in his body left. It paralyzed him from the first second. He tried to touch bottom and he couldn’t. He pushed forward in a huge frog kick, slow and clumsy because of the shoes, glided in, and she was around him, up to her waist in the water, pulling him by the shirt.
“You crazy bastard. You crazy …” she screamed, her mouth so cold that the words came out choked and high.
“Goddamn, goddamn….” They collapsed on the shore, lying on top of each other in a soggy pile, like wet branches.
She stopped the car in the middle of the street, next to the law school dorms. He put his hand down on the door handle and hesitated.
“It isn’t good,” she said. “Something’s happened to your mind. I thought it might be me, but it isn’t. It’s you, your mind. I don’t think we should see each other for a while. That’s the usual thing to do, take time to think about things. You were fresh before, you weren’t like other people in Cambridge.”