by W. S. Penn
One day, I commented, “You’re not laughing anymore.”
Mrs. Tompson looked at me, her face as blank as Grandfather’s could be, and replied, “You know what your problem is?”
“No,” I said. “But you’re going to tell me, aren’t you?”
She rose and went to the cupboard—we were sitting at the kitchen table—took out brandy snifters, filled them, and handed me one. “You’re afraid.”
“Of what am I afraid?”
“At first,” she said, “I thought you were afraid of women. I mean the Vegomatic, your mother’s toasters, that girlfriend you had in high school. But when you talk about your sister, or that girl Yvette, your voice changes. So I doubt it’s that.”
“I’m relieved,” I said, sipping the brandy.
“Then I thought you were afraid of emotion, real emotion, the kind that makes people cry, you know? You didn’t seem to feel close to anyone, man or woman, except for those people who could know what it was you were feeling, like your sister and Grandfather. You’re critical of everyone; and yet you make fun of yourself as often as you make fun of anyone else. More often, even.”
She thought for a moment, gazing down at her hands resting open on the table. In that moment, seeing the hazel color of her eyes and the way her features seemed to comply with the way her eyes looked, I saw that Mrs. Tompson was beautiful—had been and would always be beautiful, that to Proctor Tompson she was sexy because her body was so comfortable with who—or was it how?—she was. Because she was closer to my mother’s age than my own, the possibility of someone being like her was overwhelming.
“I hope you don’t mind,” she said. “But I had the Proctor do some checking. Through your confidential files. How come you never said you had another sister?”
I shrugged.
“Are you afraid of pain?” she said.
“No,” I said, seeing Proctor Tompson pull in the driveway and shut off the car. “Just afraid of being boring.”
I was grateful for the Tompsons during that Fall. I had never felt my solitude more, although I was determined that wasn’t going to bother me. I had Grandfather, even though as past and future closed in on the present like the walls of a claustrophobic nightmare, he was becoming more a memory and less a presence. I had Elanna. Her letters arrived from Crete in packets, being mailed whenever she had the chance. Whether all of mine got there or not, addressed care of the American Express office, I didn’t know. It didn’t really matter. I wrote to her every other night and the act of imagining her sitting in the pink dust of Iraklion and reading the words I wrote was sufficient. There was basketball, which gave me some company; yet I felt silly playing basketball with an all-white team. It just didn’t seem right, and more than once I wondered how William the Black was faring at Stanford. It didn’t seem unusual that it was at the Tompsons’ that I felt least alone.
As for women, well, my college was flanked by two women’s colleges. The problem wasn’t quantity or availability. The problem was the women.
One college was a giggling sorority for girls who studied cocktail French and learned to string crepe paper across the rafters of dining halls, making them over into dance halls. Those girls caused names to creep out of my past the way the smog drifted out from Los Angeles to hover overhead and make you choke.
The other women’s college was arty. The girls carried canvas bags stencilled with Poetic License or the portraits of Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf. Meticulously disheveled, they fired clay pots that leaned like the Tower of Pisa or that collapsed in on themselves which, because the pots could not be accused of having any function or use, the girls called “art.” They went braless, their small fortunate breasts barely wrinkling their sleeveless, neckless sweatshirts. Afternoons, they could be found sitting beneath the shade of palm trees, bruising the prose of their own feelings as they wrenched it into iambic pentameter in the blank books they carried like passports. They, too, were there to change their names, but they would hyphenate theirs—Annie Smith becoming Annie Grover-Smith when she married Jay Grover, who would change his name to Jay Smith-Grover. Cute.
On weekend nights, I walked beneath the oak trees along the sandy riverbed, listening to the language of crickets punctuated by the chirps of courting. From behind one tree came, “C’est bon. N’est-ce pas?” From behind another, a disputation on the metaphysics of love, burdened by flashcard quotations from Heidegger and Sartre. It was there, most often, that I would find my roommate, Woody, searching for any woman left in the lurch by her date, willing to take up the baldric of her loneliness.
Woody was a case. A round-faced boy with hair so blond that it seemed transparent in the moonlight. His qualifications for admission to the college seemed to be that his father was a judge in the state supreme court and a vulgar banality that made neurosis look like genius. He had quickly learned to be a transvestite, using the French his mother had used at the dinner table to get a free feel off the girls from one college and then easily changing his empirical clothes, using existential theories of pop art to obtain permission to run his hands over the chests of girls from the other college.
“I hate him,” I said to Delia Tompson. “He makes me want to puke.”
“It does seem ironic,” she said, “that you came here to get away from women and you ended up in a boys school in which the only obsession is the knowledge of women.”
I was not good at the languages of love, like French. I didn’t want to be. My directness glared like a cold sore beneath the bright lights of the crepe-papered dances. Yet, unable to behave like a gamekeeper whose only complete sentence is “I want to fuck thee” (which the artier girls found charming), my reserve threw me into a peristaltic clumsiness on the lawns of Poetic License. I told myself that I was too old to patter once again down the path of the first steps of so-called love, trying to obtain the grail that those women knew I wanted. They were happy to be pursued, but unless I was willing to lie to them about marriage and family, they would not be caught. I was unwilling to lie—for that, I had only Elanna and the memory of Pamela to blame.
Some of the artier women were willing to put up with my advances as long as I was against the Vietnam War. And I was. But when they found out I was in R.O.T.C., I may as well have had cholera. The contradiction was too much for them, despite the story I’d invented to explain how I came to enroll in Rotsy. I made up other stories and still they shunned me without even hearing me out. It was, in a way, my first experience with formulaic rejections, and while it depressed me, it didn’t make me bitter. I didn’t have to approach these women, put the stories out there for rejection. Their rejections only served to make me more determined. While it seemed the world only wanted Mellorses or Maurices, I began to believe that one day I would meet a woman who would not need the false inventions and explanations in order to perceive the truth in the apparent contradiction. If I didn’t, tough. I gave up inventing reasons for being in Rotsy, deciding only to tell the truth (I couldn’t help but embellish it a little—out of exuberance, not need).
For the time being, if I wasn’t at the Tompsons’ house, I was content to follow the electric golf carts the elderly drove over to the Clearmont Inn and watch them play Bingo, or read, or try to figure out the inner workings of economics from the elementary texts that Proctor Tompson lent me, or take apart and clean my M-1. A month hadn’t passed before I could break down and reassemble my rifle quickly and easily in the dark. That rifle was the first mechanical object that I understood and I eagerly believed that if I took care of it, it would take care of me.
39.
Elanna wrote, approving my decision to give up all but the embellished truth. “It’s a good decision,” she said. “Even if it means being a little lonely sometimes.” Her letter arrived three days after I wrote to her about Sara Baites, telling her how funny it seemed that the moment I had found comfort in being alone, I’d made a new friend.
One cool afternoon in October, Sara had introduced herself to me after E
nglish class. We had just received compositions back from the professor. Mine had been on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, comparing it to “My Kinsman, Major Molineaux” and suggesting that the novel was not a novel at all but a tale which had gotten out of control, the “Customs House” preface working with the rest of the book in the same way the first paragraph of “My Kinsman” worked with the rest of that tale.
After class, I was sitting at my desk searching and researching the comments on the paper for some indication of a grade, and then rereading the professor’s final comments, trying to find a reasonable explanation for the fact that my paper was, as the comments indicated, “ungradable.”
“Where you get your ideas is a mystery to any intelligent reader,” Professor Quinin had written, “and I dare say that while your writing is adequately college level, your thinking (or non-thinking) causes you to say things that are silly, unacceptable, and wrong.”
“What did you get?” Woody asked, stopping by my desk. He had gotten a B + on his three-page essay on “Images of Darkness in Hawthorne,” most of which he had plagiarized from an obscure monograph in the library, changing the vocabulary and shortening the sentences to statements with the rhythm of a tin drum.
“You learn as much putting someone else’s ideas into your own words as you do putting your own ideas into someone else’s words,” Woody had said. “Besides, who’s gonna catch me?” He had grinned, his forehead wrinkling beneath his pale mop of hair, shredding the pages of the book he had plagiarized into three separate trash containers.
When I showed him my paper he laughed. “I told you so,” he said, gloating. “I told you not to write ten pages. All Quinin wanted was five.” To Woody, delightful as he was, the problem was the length of my essay. He left to go celebrate.
“I hate him,” a girl said. When I looked up, I felt for the first time in my life every joint in my body declare its independence from muscle and nerve in the onslaught of a smile that was neither flirtatious nor shy, on a makeup-less face that gave me joy to look at.
“No grade, huh?” she said. I shook my head. “Don’t worry about it. Probably means it’s an intelligent paper.”
Marshaling my legs with the concentration it took Grandfather to drive from Chosposi to the City of Angels all those years ago, I stood up.
“Sara Baites,” she said, introducing herself. “El Creepo is your roommate, isn’t he?”
I nodded.
“May I see it?” she asked, holding her hand out for my paper. I handed it to her.
She flipped through it as we walked across the campus. “Looks interesting,” she said, giving it back. “Don’t worry about Mr. Quinin. He’s only got a master’s degree—still working on his doctorate—on Colonial American literature, of all the boring things. He’s afraid of any new ideas, or old ones for that matter, because he’s afraid he might have to change one of his ten thousand footnotes.”
“He’s an asshole,” I said, finding my voice for the first time.
She laughed. “Not really. He can be really nice, if you get to know him. He’s just boring, sometimes. That’s what graduate school has done to him. But then that’s what graduate school is all about, isn’t it? Becoming obsessed with old ideas. Redressing them in laundered swaddling clothes, and then talking about them endlessly at cocktail parties the same way new parents talk endlessly about their baby. Believe me,” she winked, “I know better than anyone how boring Quinin is.”
I paused on the curb of the street that led to the Tompsons’ house.
“I still gotta love him. Where’re you headed?”
I was unable to think. Feeling like a pimple on the face of humanity walking beside her, I turned up the street towards the faculty housing, habit my only defense against panic.
“Proctor and Delia Tompson’s.”
“Mind if I tag along?”
My arms hung like elephants’ trunks from my shoulders. I wondered if any male, heterosexual or otherwise, would have minded Sara’s tagging along.
“Do people like you ever tag along?” I blurted.
“Am I being rude to ask?”
“No! No, sure, you can come along if you want. I mean, I’m just going to drop by and say hello. Chat for a while. It probably won’t be very interesting. I don’t know. I like talking with the Tompsons. They’re sort of like the parents I wish I’d had, but for you … sure, come if you want.”
“They’re like the parents everyone wishes he’d had, don’t you think? Because they’re so damned happy. Disgustingly happy. Tell me,” she said as we strolled beneath the shade of the mulberry trees lining the street, “do you always apologize ahead of time for being boring?”
“Yes,” I said, regaining my wits. “It clears the air. Sets up the audience. Like a mediocre comedian who comes on stage and apologizes for his writers, no matter how bad he is the audience is going to want to laugh.” We turned up the Tompsons’ driveway. “Listen,” I said. “I should warn you. I’m in R.O.T.C.”
Sara frowned. “That’s a strange thing to tell someone you’ve just met. Why?”
“Why tell you? Or why am I in R.O.T.C?”
“Either.”
“I don’t know. I thought I wanted to be a part of something.”
“So you picked Rotsy?”
“Something simple.” I rang the doorbell.
“Is anything simple, these days?” Sara said.
“Duz detergent,” I replied. “A free glass in every twenty-pound box.”
Sara Baites became a part of my visits to the Tompsons. It turned out that she had known them for years, having grown up in Clearmont, where her father—Professor Quinin—had taught high school English for a decade before returning to college for his doctorate. Artless herself, Sara had enrolled in the artier of the two women’s colleges. Her tuition was free.
“A little like you joining Rotsy,” she said, grinning.
Sara had adopted her deceased mother’s maiden name to avoid being stereotyped as a “P. K.”
“He’s a preacher too?” I asked.
“A Pontificator’s Kid.” Sara knew that using her mother’s name, she would have to hear other students complain about her father.
“I do love him, after all. I can’t say that I respect him, but I love him anyway. It’s hard to respect a man who stops reading literature to read criticism and eventually reads only criticism of criticism. Daddy hasn’t read a novel in years,” she’d say, “though he can talk about any of them. He knows what to think. He’s forgotten that he’s forgotten how to think.”
40.
Through Sara I met David Zarpin, ne Zarpinskic, a Polish Jew who had been accepted to the college either because his father had a great deal of money (he’d invented a process for photocopying that was more profitable to industry than the hula hoop or superball) or by mistake. It was, after all, obvious that David was much too bright for a college for the children of the well-connected.
He rarely, if ever, studied. He could pass any multiple-guess examination; adept at patterns, he most always received the highest marks. Essays he tossed off with the ease of a man doffing his hat. To him, everything was a game and all that mattered was winning, which he could do and did do as easily as he could beat you at chess after spotting you his queen.
“Anything you want,” David liked to say, “you can have. All you have to do is concentrate properly and it will come to you.”
He sounded enough like Grandfather to be believable. Besides, he gave me proof, teaching me how to close my eyes and read the page of text needed to answer an examination question—something I’d forgotten how to do. He also taught me how to read a text I had never even looked at, let alone read, before a test. Illness was simply beyond consideration, if you focused the white blood cells properly (“Or in your case, pink blood cells,” he’d laugh). I learned how to slow my heart rate even while on amphetamines, and for a while my headaches seemed to become fewer and less severe.
It was a carefree time.<
br />
When I tried to reach Grandfather through the Absence of Angels, I received the buzzing of a television’s test pattern as though he had gone off the air for good. Father’s long-distance complaints of loneliness and love I put out of my mind by dreaming up schemes to sue the telephone company for interfering with my right to life, liberty, and a dogged pursuit of happiness—schemes I would entertain Sara and David with until the time came that father could find another woman who had few, if any, conflicts with toasters and could make an honest woman of her. In the process, father would slowly change from a man who had defended a Chicano’s right to buy a house on our block into someone who believed in bumper stickers and assumed all Negroes were on welfare. Like litmus paper revealing its true colors. He would actually tell me on the phone that when it came to voting, it was better to vote for the horse than the man, meaning, I guessed, that the incumbent was tractable and capable of being saddled.
“Next he’ll tell me that when guns are outlawed only outlaws will have guns,” I said to Sara, who was trying to console me. “That’s the point, isn’t it? Outlaw handguns and anyone who has one can be arrested before he can use it on someone?”
“Or she,” Sara said. “Cruel and senseless violence is not a male prerogative. So what are you going to say? He is your father, after all. What can you do?”
“Hang up,” I said.
Every fourth letter from mother I opened, sharing its contents with Sara and David as we crisscrossed southern California in David’s G.T.O.—a fast, sky-blue car with a Hurst shifter and a six-pack that hummed with the vibration of our nerves as we raced around the back highways, our eyes glued to the road by speed.
“Hey,” Sara would say, sitting between the bucket seats, “don’t let it get you down. You don’t have to understand. You don’t even have to forgive her. She does love you. She’s obsessed with loving you. That’s why she keeps writing.”
“She’s got a funny way of showing it.”