by Ruth Galm
“Yes. My foot is cut a little, that’s all.”
“Everything’s closed now,” he said. Dozens of sprinklers exploded on, the jagged arcs thrusting in the dark.
“I have some bandages at my house,” the man eventually said. “It’s just down across the way there.”
“Oh. I don’t know . . .”
“I’m harmless, I promise. You could infect the cut walking on it like that.”
She’d seen his wedding ring, wide and shiny. He spoke in a slow liquid manner, possibly from drinking, she thought. But a quality in his voice was reassuringly authoritative (he must be a professor, she decided); she felt too tired to argue.
“Alright. Thank you.”
She put back on her heels. They walked along one of the paths, the sprinklers catching their ankles. The house, opposite the quad, was a small Craftsman with every light on. The woodwork inside was mahogany, the ceilings low and the walls crowded with bookshelves, a comforting feel, although she wished the blazing lights would go away. B. noticed various charcoal sketches on the walls of nude women with giant engorged nipples. In one corner a tall heavy African mask. Piles of papers scattered across the tables and chairs.
He led her into the bathroom. There was a shaving kit open on a shelf, a can of woman’s hairspray and an open jar of cold cream, as if two people were still in the midst of getting ready. The man motioned her to sit on the side of the tub and ran the water until it was warm, then bent down next to her and washed her hands, then her feet. She smelled the man’s aftershave and the liquor on his breath; his tanned hands on her skin briefly made her stiffen. The white washcloth turned brown with dirt; B. blushed, embarrassed. When her foot was washed he moved her to the toilet seat and swabbed the cut with antiseptic, then reached for her dress and picked off a few spurs. B. waited for him to finish with gauze and tape for her foot but he stood up and put everything away.
“Shouldn’t it be bandaged?”
“No. It needs to develop a protective layer. Open air.”
“Stay for a drink,” he added.
He left the bathroom before she could respond and she hobbled behind him on the side of her foot. She realized then a radio had been on, beating out a twisting, low and mournful jazz that made the house drowsy. She sat down on a couch next to more papers.
“You don’t live around here,” he said, handing her a glass.
“No. Visiting.” She thought briefly she should not be drinking with a stranger, she should get back on the road and find a motel. But the tiredness and light-headedness (did she have a bit of sunstroke?) made her unable to move.
“And why on earth, dear lady, would you visit Chico? You have an Aunt Alma here or some other bad luck?”
“No, I’ve just been driving.” She did not feel like knitting together the explanation in her mind. She drank her scotch.
“We haven’t been here long,” the man said. “Still finishing the dissertation. We’re out from New York. That’s where my wife is now. That faraway galaxy called New York . . .” He peered dolefully into his drink.
“I’m from the East too.”
He did not seem to hear her. “So you’re really just driving? No obligations, no appointments? Sounds lawless.”
She fidgeted. Some of the papers from the couch fell onto the floor. She bent to pick them up.
“Don’t bother about those. No point.”
“Does your wife like it out here?”
“Oh, she’s busy enough keeping me in line, you know.” He laughed but it was not cheery. He fiddled with a thread on the arm of his chair. “It’s been an adjustment for her, cooking more, keeping up a house instead of an apartment. I mean, she paints and sketches too, of course.” He pointed at the charcoals.
The drawings troubled B. She tried to find them modern, but the nipples were out of proportion, bellicose. “They’re very interesting,” she said.
“How old are you?”
Suddenly a chorus of drunk voices crowded in through the windows. “Well, helloooo, Professor! Helloooo, helloooo! Another one of your ‘conferences’?” Howls of laughter, catcalls.
The man raised his hand in embarrassed greeting. It was impossible with all the lights to make out any faces in the dark.
“Don’t give that grade ’til she earns it!” someone yelled, then more howls of laughter. The man’s face looked like it would turn red if it weren’t so mellowed. A few more mutterings and hoots and the commotion faded out.
“The frats stay here all summer,” he explained. “Amazing they survive to fall.”
“Thirty.”
“Pardon?”
“I’m thirty years old.”
He looked her up and down. “Well. What a nice change. I’m usually in the company of nubile student-girls—severely off-limits, of course—or mommies and widows.” He got up and went into the kitchen. She heard the slamming of cabinets and the suction of a freezer door, ice clinking.
When he came back, he held a refilled drink in one hand and the bottle in the other. He sat back across from her in the slouchy arm chair, tearing more thread out of the upholstery, widening the hole. “I saw pale kings, and princes too,/Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;/They cried—‘La belle Dame sans merci/Hath thee in thrall!’ You made me think of that. Keats. My dissertation.”
“Well, thank you . . . I think . . . It’s lovely.”
“What I find lovely, and fascinating, is exactly what a thirty-year-old woman is doing driving around the valley for no reason.”
“It’s not for no reason.”
“No?”
The lights felt momentarily blinding. She drank more scotch. “Can you turn some of the lights off, please? I have a bit of a headache.”
“Whatever the lady wants.” He walked around the room and hallway until all the lights were off except a small lamp on an end table. She picked at a stain on her dress, hoping he would drop the subject.
“It’s funny,” he went on, “I find I can talk more easily to single women of a certain age. I tend to go out of bounds. Not always appreciated in normal, civilized speak. I’ve found that mature-yet-not-coarsened sensibilities appreciate the out-of-bounds from time to time.”
“I can’t talk to people easily,” she said. The dimmed room relaxed her; it might be the alcohol, she realized. “In college I was passable at it, but not anymore . . .
“What do you and your wife talk about, usually?” she asked.
“Ha! That’s funny.” But he didn’t laugh, only drank more.
“No, really.”
“Oh, c’mon. We’re married. What do married people talk about? You’re obviously not married.”
She peered into her scotch with a vague irritation. “No.”
“In fact, now I’m putting it together,” he said, leaning forward, the mellowed face brightening. “Thirty and unmarried. That’s it: you’re on a quest. A midlife journey. Something mystical even.
“I ran away from the East too,” he went on without waiting for corroboration. “Didn’t want all that baggage and dusty claptrap. Not to mention the tenure tracks were for the picking out here—forgive the pun. The days of peace and slumberous calm are fled . . .”
“I don’t really read poetry,” B. said.
“Most people don’t.” He got up to refill their drinks and then sat down beside her on the couch. He stretched an arm out behind her shoulder. She found she didn’t mind.
“How old is your wife?” It was the scotch, she realized. The scotch was making her open, calm.
“You’re awfully interested in my wife.”
“You asked my age.”
“Look, let’s get to this. What are you, pregnant? A dyke? Wanted by J. Edgar Hoover?”
“I just think it will help.” She was suddenly aggravated. “To get away from the city for a while. It’s really n
one of your business anyway.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. His face filled with what looked like true remorse. “That was wrong of me.” He drank down the rest of his glass. “I like a few drinks, honestly. I get uncivilized sometimes. It’s why my wife is out east at the moment.”
They sat silent.
“Hey, do you know the one about the blonde and the drunk professor? Hilarious. Just wait a few days and I’ll remember the punch line.”
She smiled.
He stood up, slightly swaying. “We need a bit of dancing, I think.” He held out his hand.
She hesitated. But it was all nice, the talking, the drinking, the dimness. She rose and took his hand. They began to shuffle together back and forth clumsily, she on the side of her foot. His smell was richer in the dark. The room swirled around her as they rocked, the books and the objets d’art taunting with their French titles and hanging breasts, the burning cities and Jayne Mansfield’s decapitated head in the newspapers at their feet.
He murmured in her ear. “Take me with you. Sounds like a good time. I’ll be your helmsman.” He kissed her wrist.
She thought in a part of her mind that she should not let a married man kiss her. But she liked him breathing in her ear, she liked a handsome professor trying to figure her out.
They danced cheek to cheek (he was not much taller than she when they stood together), his skin salty, cologned. She felt the swaying had to do with the room, not their own bodies, it rocked her into a kind of trance. The carsickness was buried underneath the layers of scotch. She should drink more often, she thought.
“I played with paper dolls when I was younger,” she whispered into his ear. The image appeared to her as they danced: a dozen ladies’ punch-out outfits with tabs on her bedroom floor, flouncy chartreuses and roses and tangerines. “It was always the point to see her in something different. One dress grew tiring and you tried another, and it was pretty for a while, and then again it was tiring.” She paused. “I didn’t have any thoughts about this when I was a girl.” He brought her forearm to his mouth and sucked on it for a moment, his dry lips and rough tongue spurring on the memory of the dolls. “But now it seems so disturbing to me. That I would think of the doll with no care or concern but what new different dress to wear. What did she do all day? I never thought about it. I never thought about what her days would be like.”
“They were just paper, darling.” Now he nuzzled her neck. “Just dolls.”
“But I should have considered . . .” The scotch had gone all through her body and the kisses tingled on her skin, rippling inside her. Her thoughts splintered. The jazz was swirling in a low moaning wail.
“Is your wife ever nauseous?” she asked abruptly.
“Nauseated,” he corrected, licking her collarbone. “I wouldn’t know, we don’t talk about female things.” He unzipped the back of her dress. Her back spasmed when his fingers brushed it. He took down her bra straps and cupped her breasts. “No more about her,” he whispered.
He moved her to the couch. He emptied the last bit of scotch into their glasses and finished his in a single go. He pressed her back on the couch and began kissing his way down her breasts and onto her stomach. Somewhere again she thought she must stop; he was married. But the sensation of the kissing and the scotch and having confessed about the dolls made her malleable, new. At her navel he stopped as if struck by something. “People don’t really talk, you know. The hippies think we’re so rotten and bourgeois, and they don’t talk any more than we do—communicate, I mean. I mean, what are they really saying to each other with all this ‘turn on and groove’? It’s all another way to obfuscate. Cover over the void. Just a different language of avoidance.”
He seemed to be speaking to an entire room, not B. in particular, but she did not mind. She lay on her back with her eyes closed, her own voice in her head disappearing. She felt he might have sensed this.
“I see the fear in my students’ eyes,” he went on. “Those guys outside the window just now. They oughtta be scared. There’s no way to know they have it right anymore. They may be totally wrong, useless. I have nothing to tell them.” He laid his cheek on her breasts. “They see the others living in the parks, getting high and sticking it to the Man, so what are they supposed to think about themselves? What can I tell them? Subconsciously it grinds them. Subconsciously . . .”
B. was soft and serene in her drunkenness now; no spinning anywhere. She stroked his hair. He inched up next to her until their faces touched. It seemed she had left the city and traveled to the valley precisely to find this man.
He took her hand and pushed it down his pants, guiding it back and forth over his penis. “I wish I had some grass for us,” he said.
She craned her mouth toward his, rubbing the penis dutifully, losing her rhythm occasionally. “Say more,” she murmured.
“About the grass?”
“No, no . . . the other . . .”
“Yeah, baby? You like the talking? Alright then . . . Listen, it’s all a wash. The rules they’ve been setting up this whole time. The rules will never paper over the abyss, never get it out of our heads, and now the holes are showing up. The fraying. But the holes are deep, unfathomable. The expectations are tumbling down. People don’t know which way to go. The crybabies yell about ending the war, and they don’t see that it doesn’t even matter, the whole charade will end in war and famine and misery. Keats said it—nature and youth and suck at the beauty before it rots. The kids get high, wait for the parents to die. Ha!” He laughed at his own rhyme.
It struck B. even in her drunkenness that his disquisition about non-believing might be just another form of believing, another attempt at “papering over.” But the scotch swallowed the validity of this thought. Anyhow, she preferred the sureness of his authoritative voice. She wanted it to keep talking.
“What does your wife think of the war?” she asked.
“This wife obsession is a serious bummer, as our friends would say.” He reached for his empty glass on the coffee table and licked the inside rim. “Never enough,” he sighed. “To answer your question, my wife does not think about the war. She may give you an opinion but she does not spend any qualitative part of her days pondering it.”
“How do you know?”
“Do you think of the war?”
“No.”
“Exactly.”
“But I might if I wanted to . . . I could.” Anger rose up weakly through the alcohol. She wondered momentarily if he’d slipped her something stronger; but this thought departed. She struggled to her elbows and he pushed her back down.
“Look, she’s not here, baby, don’t worry. She has what she wants. She has her Ivy Leaguer, her little slice of bohemia. She reads Kant and sketches her nudes and irons my shirts and cooks up spaghetti. She likes it all just fine. She doesn’t concern herself with every part of the arrangement.” He placed B.’s hand, which in her distraction had stopped massaging, back on his shaft and led it up and down more forcefully. “Now where was I? Hmmmm, yes, our children of the flowers and peace and dropping out. Maybe they’re trying to live Keats, I’ll give them that—”
She sat upright suddenly, pulling her hand out of his crotch. “—it really shouldn’t be such a difficult thing, you know, to walk around the city. To daydream. I realize that.” Blurred thoughts had been gathering as he spoke. “I want to be like the others. I don’t want to be different. I don’t know why the carsickness comes. I hate it. It’s horrible. And I realize the things I’ve wanted to do lately are strange, could be seen as strange . . . but they don’t seem strange to me. I don’t know what else to do.
“And that’s the problem, you see. Nothing feels safe. The banks do, but nothing else. I don’t know why.” He was jerking himself off now as she spoke, grabbing at her breasts. But she was not aware of him. “I need to get to a new place. I thought maybe it was the valley, or a kin
d of house. If I could only get to this new place, it would all make sense.”
She was so lost in thought she didn’t notice him coming until he spurted his semen onto her lap. She sat a bit stunned, hazy. He hung his head, shuddering for several moments. Then he got up wordlessly and came back with a kitchen towel and tossed it to her.
“In the end it’ll all be shot,” he said, picking up where he had left off, as if he’d spilled some milk on her. “All the old rules won’t matter. Transcendence and pleasure and unboundedness, that’ll be the new society.”
“But that can’t be it.”
“. . . making love and rapping . . . ” He hiked up her dress and pulled down her underpants.
“No, that’s not right either. I don’t want that.” She felt an urgent desire to get back to something. They had been on the verge of answering all the questions. Of uncovering a transformative truth. But after wiping off the semen, the room overtook her again, the alien objects and the assault of words and nudity. As his fingers worked between her legs, she had no energy to fight, against the questions, the incongruities. “Yes, maybe you’re right, maybe . . .”
“You’re lovely,” he whispered.
“No, not that. Everyone says that. Talk about the fear again . . . the grinding.”
Later she could not remember when they had switched to wine or moved to the bedroom. She could not recall any more of what they said, except that she’d kept wanting to get back to the earlier thing, the real conversation. She seemed to remember having his penis in her mouth. She seemed to remember his waking up in the middle of the night and whispering in her ear, “Take me with you,” as he held her. But she was not sure this wasn’t a dream.
Her first awareness the next morning was the searing hangover, then the throbbing foot. The wound now pulpy and sore. It took a moment of staring at the door and the white-and-black-checkered rug to piece together where she was. The university man slept with his mouth open. She listened to his breath sputter like a boy’s. After several minutes of lying there, she brought her hand to his cheek. His eyes opened. He blinked at B., clearly attempting to place her, then launched into a hacking cough. Eventually he settled red-faced into the pillow.