The Art Student's War

by Brad Leithauser

And now—with all the irrepressibility of his eccentric soul—Henry was essentially Henry once more. He had come up with a burning preposterous hypothetical question requiring an immediate answer: “What’s the worst, worst color?”

  “Any color in the whole spectrum?” Bea asked.

  “Any color. What’s the worst, disgustingest color any human being could be?”

  Tonight, Bea had lost her virginity, which made Henry cry, who now was ushering her into some Astounding Tales planet of Uncle Dennis’s, where a person’s skin could be any hue in the spectrum: yes, events were following a logic all their own … “Bright shiny plum?” Bea replied, and shuddered, for at once she could see just such a person, aloofly elongated and angular: he was seated in a high chair at a low desk, and his skin, his neatly parted hair, the whites of his eyes were all the same intensely infused, glossy shade of purple.

  “Precisely!” Henry crowed. “And it’s as if that’s me! It’s me! It’s as if I’m some sort of plum-colored creature—and you? You’re color-blind to that particular shade! Do you see what I’m saying? Bea, you’ve got the best eye of anyone I know, you’re constantly pointing out things I didn’t see, but you can’t see the worst, most important fact about me. Whatever the worst shade is, that’s the one you can’t see. Constitutionally, you can’t see it, Bea.”

  “Henry, I’m the one who came up with the color …”

  “Bea, I have something I must tell you,” Henry said.

  “Oh Jesus Christ,” Bea replied, not meaning to swear. But honestly she couldn’t take any more. “Henry, haven’t you said enough already?”

  When Bea whispered, “Oh you won’t believe it, the very worst thing has happened,” Maggie’s face brightened so dramatically, so eagerly, Bea balked at continuing. But she had no choice, really. There was nobody else on earth she could tell …

  They’d found shelter in a branch library. It was hardly the place for this sort of conversation but Mrs. Hamm didn’t approve of luncheonettes (a waste of money), and the Hamm home presumably hid listening devices. Outdoors, the rain was coming down hard. It had taken Bea forever to journey over here—riding the streetcar for miles out Grand River, then walking block after block through the miserable downpour, holding aloft her broken-ribbed umbrella. On her arrival, the Turnkey had eyed her dubiously—no sympathy extended, though Bea must have looked half drowned. But ultimately the two girls were permitted to visit the library. Naturally, Herbie was sent along.

  Yet at the library something wonderful occurred. Bea had wisely come equipped: before boarding the streetcar she’d raided one of her mother’s candy bowls. She presented Herbie with a little bag of gum-balls and he curled up happily in a chair with a book. He actually seemed to be reading, as he munched his candy. It appeared the two girlfriends might speak in peace.

  Quietly they had nudged a couple of armchairs right up to a streaming windowpane. “Tell me,” Maggie said.

  The rain provided a muffling, tolerant background music, encouraging Bea’s confession. She began with some scene-setting. What had unfolded inside Mitchell’s house three nights ago obviously couldn’t be disclosed right away.

  All the preliminary information took some time, partly because Maggie frequently interrupted and partly because Bea shied from divulging the worst. “Oh my God, do you mean you actually lost it?” Maggie said finally, and, when Bea wavered, Maggie asked point-blank: “Your virginity?”

  “Shh,” Bea replied, though Maggie actually was keeping her voice low. And given the rain’s drumming against the pane, there was little danger of being overheard.

  “Well did you or didn’t you?”

  “Shh. Okay, I suppose I did.” To utter even this tentative assent made everything feel fixed and irrevocable as it hadn’t quite before. A burning mist filled Bea’s eyes.

  “I can’t believe it,” Maggie said. “You,” she said, shaking her head, and yet her warm touch—she had taken Bea’s hand—held far more approval than disapproval. It was from Maggie, as much as anyone, that Bea had learned to be a “toucher.”

  “My downfall was, I had this sudden feeling,” Bea said. “Suddenly I had this crazy definite feeling: I just felt completely absolutely certain Henry wasn’t coming back. That he was honestly going to die out there.”

  “You and your feelings,” Maggie whispered, and the fondness in her voice was almost painfully reassuring. “You and your second sight,” she said, and squeezed Bea’s hand. Oh, Bea needed this affection! If Maggie all too often made her uneasy, with her keen undisguised appetite for tales of misfortune in Bea’s life, still there was no doubting Maggie’s steadfast love. No matter what Bea did. Maggie was Bea’s best friend, and right now she was the only soul on earth Bea could turn to.

  “And he said he loved me. That he’d never loved any girl before.”

  “Oh, that’s what they all—”

  “Actually, he said he loved me so much, it changed the way he saw his parents, and mathematics, and even the way he saw God was—” But Maggie was already looking impatient and how in the world was Bea to encapsulate everything Henry had said about God on that cataclysmic evening?

  “Do you think he’d marry you?”

  Bea hesitated. “Well, he’s gone away.” It made her feel quite strange to speak of such things, but she went ahead anyway: “But when he comes back, I think he’d want to.”

  “But do you love him, Bea?”

  “Maggie, I don’t know …”

  “I thought you loved Ronny.”

  “Maggie, I don’t know. I’m feeling so confused! Good grief, what am I going to do if I’m pregnant? And Henry across the Pacific!”

  “Well, is there any chance Ronny would marry you?”

  “Oh but I wouldn’t want to now, Maggie, even if he would! It wouldn’t be fair, under the circumstances—you see that, don’t you? Don’t you? I’ve given myself to someone else.”

  “But you might have to make sacrifices, Bea.” Maggie-the-married-woman trained on her a look of worldly wisdom.

  “But I couldn’t sacrifice somebody completely innocent! You honestly don’t think I’m the kind of girl to trick somebody. Do you?”

  Maggie delayed just a little too long. “No,” she said. “Of course not.”

  “Well I’m not.”

  “Though it would solve a lot of problems …”

  This was Maggie being practical, and showing her practicality by biting thoughtfully on her lower lip—but honestly, if she was so practical, how had she wound up living with Herbie in a penitentiary run by Ma’am Hamm?

  “But it wouldn’t be fair. You see that, don’t you?”

  “What else could you do?”

  What else could she do? It hadn’t been easy to think logically these last few frenzied, wretched days. After miserable struggling, Bea had formulated a few possibilities, all of them scary and overwhelming. She would move away from home, leaving behind a beautiful candid letter explaining how much she loved them all and how grateful she was to them and this was the reason she couldn’t bring her shame down upon them and she would move to New York City and become an artist. Or she’d move to Chicago and support herself drawing fashion ads. Or climb aboard the overnight ferry to Cleveland and throw herself on the dependable mercy of Uncle Dennis and Aunt Grace, who would surely take her in. Or perhaps it was possible that Uncle Dennis, as a doctor, might be able to arrange something, though she wasn’t sure she could live with that …

  “There’s really nothing—there’s nothing I could do.”

  “Now tell me what happened. Exactly what happened.”

  “Well—”

  What followed was a conversation unlike any in Bea’s life before. It was amazingly intimate, though Maggie herself seemed wholly unflappable. She wanted to know how many times they had done “it” and in exactly what circumstances. She had an all-purpose term for their most intimate parts—his “thing,” your “thing”—and it seemed Maggie, while sitting in a public library, saw nothing peculi
ar or shameful about discussing the “thing” of a man she’d never met.

  Admittedly, this branch library offered an especially intimate and comfortable sanctuary on an afternoon like this. The few visitors who had braved the rain looked sleepy and distracted. Even Herbie had drifted off in his armchair, one hand buried possessively in his bag of gumballs. The conversation rolled along …

  Then an unexpected complication arose. When Maggie eventually discovered that Henry had withdrawn his thing before, in some technical sense, completing the act, she announced, almost indignantly, that Bea hadn’t, in fact, lost it: Bea was still a virgin.

  Still a virgin? Bea met this conclusion with an indignation far greater than Maggie’s, whose remark seemed not only incorrect (surely it was mistaken!) but quite hurtfully dismissive. Having suffered weeping anguish only moments ago, contemplating her lost innocence, Bea felt strangely swindled on being informed that she’d not lost it at all.

  “But there was blood!”

  “That can happen to you in gym. Or on a playground. Norma Nunnally told me it happened to her riding a horse, when she was all of ten. So are you telling me Norma lost her virginity to a horse at the age of ten?”

  “Maggie, stop it.”

  So that Maggie’s judgment could be scientifically, categorically arrived at, she needed to know various excruciatingly personal specifics—matters like how long and how deeply Henry’s thing had penetrated. But these were precisely the sorts of questions Bea couldn’t answer. Indeed Bea felt—a point she couldn’t quite articulate—that her very inability supported her contention: if she hadn’t lost her virginity, wouldn’t her memories be clearer?

  After a torturous grilling, during which Maggie kept asking the same few pointed questions, slightly rephrased, she finally offered her summary: “You haven’t lost it yet.”

  Among other things, this conclusion seemed unfair to poor Henry, who right there on the couch in Mitchell’s living room had cried Bea’s collar wet, pleading all the while for absolution, and who in the extremity of his guilt and grief had conceived of an altered God and a nightmarish cosmos peopled by high-gloss plum-colored human beings.

  “But Maggie—Maggie! What if I’m pregnant?”

  “You’re not pregnant.”

  A powerful, stinging rebuttal presented itself: “But what if I am? Good God, Maggie, are you saying this would be a virgin birth?”

  Maggie looked at her not only wisely but sadly, as though the gullibility of the world was painful to contemplate. “You don’t get pregnant that way.”

  “That’s not what I heard.”

  “That’s only what they tell you so you won’t misbehave.”

  “But you can. You can.” Bea felt herself on solider ground here. She had read this perhaps. Or heard it definitely somewhere.

  “Well you’re not pregnant and isn’t that the point?”

  “I didn’t know you’d become a clairvoyant,” Bea said.

  Maggie’s reply was quite cutting—cruel, really. “You’re the one with the feelings. You’re the one who knew Henry’s not coming back …”

  A pause opened and it was as if the patter of the rain, previously so soothing, now pricked at the two girls, goading them on.

  Bea said, “So are you still seeing Wally?”

  Normally, Bea would have uttered this “seeing” more delicately—in deference to the notion that Maggie might be seeing but certainly wasn’t seeing Wally.

  “Walton. I keep telling you that, that that’s what he goes by now.”

  “And I keep forgetting.”

  “If you want to know, we had coffee this week. Did I tell you he drives a Cadillac?”

  “You did.”

  “They’re really getting rich, the Wallers—not just the father but Wally and his two brothers.”

  “So do you think you’re going to sleep with Wally?”

  This, too, was a cruel inquiry, to say nothing of being brutally, nastily blunt, and Bea instantly regretted it. What was going on inside her—why was she talking this way? She’d have withdrawn the question, if she could, but the words were out …

  “Bea …” was all Maggie offered in sighing answer, and projected her lower lip as if about to cry. There was little danger of that, for Maggie almost never cried. No, this was a long-standing ritual, perhaps originally evolved in response to Bea’s perpetual floods of tears. This particular negotiating ploy of Maggie’s—a hung lower lip, a flurry of blinks—initially might have surfaced something like ten years ago, when the two girls first became best friends.

  Herbie’s interruption was almost welcome. “I wanna go home,” he said.

  “We can’t go home,” Maggie replied. “See that?” She shrugged at the window. “It’s called rain.”

  “I’m hungry.”

  “Chew the gumballs Aunt Bea brought you. They’re different fruit flavors. You need to try them all.”

  Bea didn’t know quite how she felt about this “Aunt Bea” routine. Though a joke, it acknowledged a stark legal oddity: this sticky-mouthed boy standing beside them truly was Maggie’s brother-in-law.

  “Already ate ’em.”

  In truth, Bea felt a little guilty about having brought so many gum-balls. Lord knows, she didn’t want him sick again, but that was only the start of it. Herbie’s teeth were a shocking disaster. You’d think the Hamm family would be more careful. Or at least Maggie would, who had dealt with George’s anguished tears when the Army yanked all his teeth. (He’d feared that Maggie would break their engagement, and Bea had often wondered—not a speculation to share with Maggie—whether under different circumstances, if only the Army had left him his teeth, George would have been quite so insistent on marrying before shipping out.)

  “Christ almighty.” Maggie made no effort to watch her language around Herbie. “Kid, jever hear of sugar rationing? Jever hear there’s a war on and your brother’s fighting it?”

  “I’m hungry.”

  “Oh hell. Bea?”

  Bea dug into her purse and found half a roll of cherry Life Savers. She meant to offer Herbie only one, but Maggie plucked the entire roll from her hand.

  “You want to sit with us, I give you one. Or you sit back in your chair, I give you the whole roll.”

  Herbie shuffled back to his chair.

  “Where were we?” Maggie said.

  “Discussing virgin births?”

  “And you were calling me a slut …”

  Really, Maggie had grown distressingly coarse. What was happening to the two of them? “Don’t,” Bea said. “I didn’t, Maggie, and you mustn’t say I did.”

  “Sorry.”

  “You know how I appreciate this. I came through a downpour to see you. You were the only friend I could talk to at a time like this. Maggie, I’m so frightened.”

  The closing confession rang oddly in this rain-enveloped library, way at the western edge of town, until Bea recognized that the phrase wasn’t altogether her own. I’m so frightened … These were the very words Henry had repeated no end of times at Mitchell’s house.

  … And, with a naked pungency that took Bea’s breath away, the whole evening opened up. The feel and fear and smell of it came back. There she was: suddenly she was sitting once more in Mitchell’s living room, with Mitchell’s big, cheerful face gazing out from its too-tight frame. All Maggie’s mortifying questions, all her own descriptions of that living room—no, the audacious words hadn’t begun to capture the evening! It was as though, ever since, Bea had been marching around to a hypnotist’s orders … Only now did she remember how she’d felt, in her blood and in her face and low in her stomach, the overpowered sense of things gone wrong—wronged—at the very self’s center, and how strangely she’d behaved in the bathroom, stripping off her clothes and giving herself a sort of sponge bath while Henry, weeping, stranded on the other side of the locked door, desperately called out to her, and to his Maker.

  Then Henry went away. The Army carried him off again. Yes, some facts were
facts. Henry was gone. There was no disputing that Henry was gone.

  “You’re fretting over nothing,” Maggie said. “Take it from your friend the old married lady. Nothing …”

  “I’m so sorry,” Bea said. “Oh dear, dear Lord…”

  “Sorry for what? It’s all nothing, nothing, nothing. Now tell me you feel better.” Maggie had again laid a warm hand upon Bea’s hand.

  “I do,” Bea said, which was true. “A little,” she added. Which was truer yet.

  Her hidden shame—and the entire crushing, incalculable chain of ramifying disasters waiting to emerge from that shame—was a burden Bea carried around everywhere, more closely than her pocketbook. Nothing was untouched by it. The five-minute eggs her mother served in the morning, the damp rising winy smell from the cellar, the dent in her pillow when she first glimpsed her bed at night—these things spoke directly to her body’s invaded condition. How in the world could she chat with Ronny in the old way, as though she were the same young woman she’d been last week? Never again would she be that girl. What if I’m pregnant? she’d asked Maggie, who asked in reply, Would Ronny marry you?

  It was a crazy notion—all the crazier because now, and suddenly, Bea recoiled at Ronny’s touch. She could hardly bear to kiss him. Under the circumstances, kissing him was wrong. And yet this very reluctance turned out to have an unexpected, contrary effect on Ronny.

  One of the puzzling things about Ronny was how hot and cold his passions ran. In moments of ardor, there was no questioning the healthy urgency of his desires. The very next day, though, he might turn cool and aloof. Bea had learned to ascribe such changes to his “moods,” while also coming around to understanding that, as explanations went, this didn’t take her very far. In any case, Ronny wasn’t accustomed to Bea’s fending off his advances, and her doing so provoked or aroused him. Once again Ronny needed to feel, as he’d constantly needed to feel in the summer, his power to make her swoon—but these days Bea was disinclined to swoon.

  Still, Ronny was determined, and he was as skillful as ever, and at times her scrupulous resistance dissolved and she could feel herself almost wholly succumbing. One of Ronny’s hands might be drawing circles on her knee, his other stroking lightly, and yet deeply, the back of her neck, while his tongue was formulating its own patterns upon her upper lip, different but harmonious with his hands’ patterns, and all the while his body was exuding its wonderful smell—she’d never known a body to smell so good—and in a way Bea wanted him more than ever, while, simultaneously (and this was new), something within her yearned to push him forcibly away and let loose a scream, a scarlet outraged howl from the roots of her throat: Oh stop it, stop it, stop it. Because it was all too much …