“Wasn’t Paul about to tell us why he fought with his wife?” Erlenmeyer leaned forward to look into Juleson’s face. “Do you want to go on?”
The class turned to watch Juleson. For months Erlenmeyer had been prodding him to discuss something he didn’t even want to think about, and their subtle conflict had created a certain small suspense. They were curious as to what Juleson would say, what they might hear him admit to if he ever did open up.
“You did fight?” Erlenmeyer asked.
“Yes, we fought.”
“What over?”
“Anything. Pick something. We could find some way to fight about it.”
“Did you fight often?”
“After the first year.”
“What was the underlying cause?”
“If I’d known that,” Juleson said, a stain of bitterness in his voice, “she’d be alive today.”
“What do you think now?”
“We weren’t much alike. Maybe we were at first, but we were just passing each other, moving in different directions. The longer we were together the worse it got. Like strangers in the same house. Neither of us had anything the other wanted any more, and we both pretended it wasn’t like that, but neither of us fooled the other, or even ourselves. It was bad. Very bad.”
“Then why didn’t you leave her?” Erlenmeyer asked gently.
“I didn’t want to. No, I couldn’t. I don’t know why, but I couldn’t.”
“I think that’s a question you should learn to answer.”
“It’s hard to see how the answer could help much any more. She’s going to stay dead.”
“It could help you. Your life isn’t over.”
But Juleson couldn’t quite believe his life wasn’t over, that his life hadn’t ended with Anna Marie’s, kicked out of him by his own feet as hers had been. He reached for a cigarette, and then automatically offered the pack to Zekekowski. He looked up to find Society Red smiling at him with sly speculation and he experienced a twinge of uneasiness as he recalled the cool mockery with which Oberholster had questioned his keys. For that matter, why hadn’t he removed the useless keys? Another question to answer.
Erlenmeyer was still watching him from the round tan ambush of his glasses. No more, Juleson begged silently. No more. He lit his cigarette, then held the match for Zekekowski, noting again how finely formed Zekekowski’s hands were, actually beautiful, the hands of a ... of an arsonist, as it happened.
Then Bernard, who had sat through hour after hour without ever having made a comment, unless the quality of his silence might itself be taken for a single, sustained shout of resentment, finally spoke up to ask in a strong country voice if they could force a man on parole to live with his wife.
“You don’t want to go home to her?”
“I guess I don’t.”
“Why is that?”
“I heard some stuff. One of my homeboys come in last week, he told me.”
“What did he tell you?”
“Told me she’s been putting out,” Bernard said, staring at the floor. “To my buddies.”
“They don’t sound like the kind of buddies a man needs.”
“Ain’t their fault. If it’s pushed up to them, they’re going to take it, wouldn’t matter if it was the President’s old lady, but you tell me how I’m supposed to go out there and look them in the eye, knowing all the time I was laying up in this jailhouse they was sticking my old lady?”
Erlenmeyer didn’t try to answer this question. Instead he got Bernard to admit that if his wife were in the hospital for a long time, Bernard would probably be unfaithful to her, and while he was quick enough to spring Erlenmeyer’s trap, he was equally quick to maintain that this was different.
“It’s different with a man. Any man figures to get something strange ever’ once in a while. That’s nature.”
“Exactly how is it different?”
“Christalmighty, if you don’t know, how the hell am I s’posed to tell you? It’s different, that’s all. A woman’s s’posed to stay to home, not go flashing round no honkytonks by herself, taking up with the first stud who’ll buy her a beer. Now, what the hell kind of woman is that? You want a woman like that?”
“But your wife wasn’t like that when you were home with her, was she?”
“I guess she wasn’t.”
“So, when you’re home again why wouldn’t it be the same?”
“Not goddam likely. She’s got a taste for cheating by now, much dick as she’s been getting put to her. Prob’ly has to cross her legs to keep her guts from falling out. I don’t want it. I wouldn’t piss on her. Not after she shamed me with my buddies. Not if she was the last woman on earth.”
Erlenmeyer was looking at his watch. “Well, I’m sure the parole authorities will let you live by yourself if this is still what you want to do when the time comes. And that’s it for now. I’ll see you all next week.”
Juleson finished the day at his desk, and at the four o’clock whistle gathered his books and joined the crowd heading for the blocks. He found his cell partner, dressed in new blues now, already waiting for the bar to be thrown.
“How did it seem today?” Juleson asked.
Manning smiled, apparently glad to see him. “Better,” he said, “but—I guess the word I want is ‘alien.’”
“When it no longers seems alien, you’ll know you’ve heard too many bells.”
“Too many bells?”
“Just an expression—another way of saying you’ve done too much time.”
The block bell rang, as if on cue to aid Juleson’s illustration, and the bars were thrown. They entered the cell. “Go ahead and wash up, I’ll wait until you’re through,” Juleson said, still unconsciously acting as a host. While he was waiting he continued reading. He read steadily, except for the time it took to go to the mess hall and eat, until seven, when he lowered his book to his chest and went to sleep.
He had one of his rare dreams of mastery in which he was engaged to a popular young television star—a girl so young their relationship would have seemed grotesque in the waking world. His entree to her had been his musical talent, and when at one point he sat down to a piano he was surprised to discover he could play it, but, even in the dream, he was embarrassed to find himself playing “The Flight of the Bumblebee.” He played it bravura, watching his hands reaching for chords his mind could not foresee. He expected at any moment that his hands would betray him, that the Bumblebee would disintegrate into musical gibberish, but he finished firmly and sat listening to the applause.
Then without transition, he was kissing the girl, apparently for the first time because she drew back to tell him, “Don’t move your head so.” And she mimicked his style of kissing with cruel precision. He kissed her again, pressing his open mouth hard into hers. The moment widened without effort, both of them motionless, and when they parted he was unmoved, but she looked up at him with soft eyes.
—With the lights off, she said.
Someone came up at this point to ask him to play the piano again, and he started to go with them, but the girl pouted.
—I want Paul to kiss me with the lights off. He never has.
He woke up. As the mood of the dream slipped away he recognized it as adolescent in its coloring, and he felt a nostalgic longing for that lost country whose heightened values had poisoned his adult life by exposing its drabness.
He climbed from his bunk to get a drink of water, and noticed Manning lying on his back staring up at the springs. “How do you feel tonight?”
“I’m not sick,” Manning said.
“If you start to get sick, raise a holler, I’ll start banging on the bars again.”
“I’m not going to get sick. I’ll be all right.”
“Good.”
As Juleson was drinking, he noticed Sanitary Slim pass by on the tier, his eyes restlessly invading each cell, and he thought briefly of Lorin. And then of Zeke. For a moment his original hatred of the prison pressed ag
ainst the layers of his studied indifference.
7
LORIN WAS celled alone by order of the psych department, and in his three years of confinement this was the only time the meddling of the psych department had pleased him. Now he no longer needed to practice the tedious maneuvers necessary to quiet and evade a cell partner’s curiosity as to the nature of “all them funny marks” he filled his notebooks with. His photo albums were secure from prying and insensitive eyes. His poems unread, undefiled.
He sat writing, his paper supported on an unfinished piece of plywood. He wrote: This box is in a box, which is in another —infinite to the nausea of great space.
He paused and began to chew the end of his pencil. It was a new pencil and flecks of yellow paint stuck to his lips. That evening in the dining room he had overheard someone make the comment that he looked like Kim Novak. The recollection slipped from the back of his mind, and again he blushed painfully.
He began to write again: Yet I am free—free as any to test the limits of my angry nerves and press the inner pains of my nature against the bruise of time.
The pencil found its way back to his mouth—having recorded one thought it needed to be charged with another. Again someone whispered: Kim Novak. And another added: Ain’t she looking good. Consciously he pictured his brain as a large oyster coating this irritation with the luster of a pearl. But his thoughts were lifeless, pale beside the vigor of his shame. He sighed and removed the pencil from his mouth. The aftertaste of cedar reminded him to wipe his lips. Then he dated his entry.
He heard the noise of the lower tiers showering and the scene came to him like a tableau from Dante. He saw two hundred men trying to shower in facilities that wouldn’t have been adequate for twenty, a writhing tangle of soapy bodies struggling for a place under the shower heads like piglets fighting for access to one of their mother’s tits. Lorin erased the image as too wholesome. He saw a knot of worms pulled from a bait can.
He replaced his notebook on the shelf and paced for a while beside his bed. The paint had worn away to the bare concrete under his feet just as night after night he had worn the edge from his nerves. The paint did not replace itself. Once he stopped and studied himself in the mirror.
Lorin was sentenced for Grand Theft Auto. He had stolen the car because his own had broken down and it was imperative that he have a car not only to live in, but to drive from the park where he spent the nights to the library where he spent the days. When he had tried to explain the importance of his work to the arresting officers they had grown thoughtful and noncommittal. During the entire arrest and court procedures no one had listened to him without evident sympathy, still he had had the impression he was caught in the works of a mindless machine which could find no way within its programming to release him. Now he missed the nights in the park, sleeping with his knees drawn up on the front seat of his car, the early mornings playing chess with vagrant perverts before it was time to drive to the library, and there his orderly numbers formationing on the clean white paper, neat and intricate as ants.
Sentenced to prison for his first offense, he had promptly committed another when he scored too high on the battery of tests they administered to every new arrival. Much too high. His IQ pulsed ominously in the minds of the parole board. They condemned him with a cliché as worn as “criminal genius,” and Lorin, whose sense of humor sometimes supported him, saw reflected in their attitude the burning eyes of Dr. Fu Manchu.
He stopped pacing and began to look through a stack of coverless, grimy, and fragmenting movie magazines he had acquired in trade for a week’s desserts. His eyes brightened with anticipation, and in a moment his breath caught. Diana! She was photographed at a typical Hollywood party and the camera had arrested her in the act of turning towards her date, her face vivid with animation. Lorin took the blade from his razor and cut Diana free of her escort. Now he could imagine her smile was for him.
He took his notebook from the shelf and, looking at the photo, started another poem:
O Lady
To see you
In your lovely
Lovely
Lovely
White and lovely
Is to love thee
Is to love thee
In the radiant chalice
Of the night
“Lovely, lovely, lovely, white and lovely,” Lorin reread softly.
He took his photo album from its hiding place beneath his mattress and began to look for the proper position in which to place the new picture. Lorin was arranging the pictures in groups he thought of as fugal. Diana in a hundred poses invited, provoked, and challenged. She was a starlet who had entered Hollywood as Miss Dairy Products of Wisconsin, and Lorin was in love with her. He had idealized her into a nymph of delicacy and a Héloïse of faithfulness and wisdom. He saw them holding hands as they listened to Purcell, Monteverdi, and Mozart, or discussed symbolic logic and group theory.
He placed the photo and copied the new poem beneath it. Some day he would give Diana this book. He dreamed how that would be. How her eyes would shine with instant comprehension of his every nuance. How she would give him her hand to hold and how he would tell her about his Theory of Identity, his discovery which was going to revolutionize thought and speed man forward so swiftly he would look back on his former self as he now looked back on a Neanderthal. How he had invented seventy-two new mathematical symbols and filled over three hundred pages with equations ...
Sometimes he had her interrupt at this point to say, That’s not necessary, Lorin. And he would explain that he only wanted her to be proud of him.
—But I am. You’ve reworked my heart in your own image. I feel cleaner, purer.
—Did you ever ... he sometimes tried to ask.
—Ever what?
—You know. With boys?
—Well, Hollywood. My career was terribly important to me before I met you ...
—You don’t have to talk about it. Just promise me it’s over.
—Of course, Lorin, unless you ...
—I’ll never soil you by thought, word, or deed. This is the promise Lorin imagines he will make to her. And then they seem to dissolve in a warm and scented silver mist until they no longer have bodies, but are released as pure spirits to the sweet cohabitations of the mind.
“Lovely, lovely, lovely, white and lovely,” he whispered again.
As he put away his photo album and got out the notebooks dealing with his Theory of Identity, he noticed Sanitary Slim sweeping outside his cell.
Sanitary Slim paused in his work, leaned on the handle of his broom, and stared into Lorin’s cell with an eye as bright as a snake’s. The boy was a punk. Old Sanitary knew, he could always tell. Never came down to take a shower, crapped after the lights went out, wouldn’t look a man in the eye.
“Hey, boy,” Slim called. “When you going to let me shine them shoes.”
Lorin made several careful and deliberate marks before he turned to say. “No, thank you.”
A punk! Sanitary Slim could always spot them. He stared hotly at Lorin for a moment, then made a disagreeable noise with his lips, and continued on down the tier, sweeping with great care. A tall dried old man with a nose as sharp and red as a beak, whose lips were locked in a vice of chronic disgust. His shirt collar and sleeves were buttoned tight, winter and summer, and he wore a faded denim cap, pulled straight down over his eyebrows, and in the shadow of the bill his eyes blazed with a hectic and feverish vitality.
He considered turning Lorin in. Sanitary Slim was violently revolted by every form of erotic expression and he considered it his duty to tell the captain of the guards the names of all the punks his instincts uncovered, as well as those who didn’t keep their eyes to themselves in the shower, or hung around the urinals, or walked and whispered together as couples. He was equal death on dirt and disorder and he made no firm distinction between the two forms of contagion. Sparkling toilets and a rigid anus were equally wholesome. Touching, rubbing, stroking, sucking
were all the same as filth—shades of the same horror.
He was a marvelous janitor. Even the most obscure corners were dust-free; floors gleamed, windows sparkled. His specialty was shoes. He made them glitter. What few staff members even suspected, though a number of inmates had guessed, was that Sanitary Slim had been left a single exception through which the steaming drive of his own sex escaped. He got his shining shoes. Each stroke of the brush increased his excitement until he rocked and moaned on his stool crooning to the shoes like a lover. And some shoes, like women, were better than others and Sanitary Slim yearned after Lorin’s with a smoldering passion.
Punk! he snarled again. Ain’t tooken a shower in weeks.
That night Sanitary Slim dreamed he was an enormous white slug rolling in the warmth and pleasure of his own slime. He woke to nausea and a violent headache. It was the middle of the night, but he rose and scrubbed out his sink and toilet for the second time in twenty-four hours. Then he went back to sleep and had the same dream again.
Lorin rarely dreamed and he woke the next morning from a smooth darkness with a question already formed in his mind: Why not let him shine your shoes? Whatever his obsession is, how can he involve you if he only wants to shine your shoes? But he knew he couldn’t allow it. The unconscious resistance he felt in his own mind warned him that the compromise would be a costly one even if the exact price remained obscure to him.
He got up and tried to take a sponge bath in the few ounces of hot water allowed him for shaving. There was enough to wash his armpits. He was sure he was beginning to stink. Yesterday in the lunch line someone had deliberately moved away from him. He shaved in cold water and though his beard was slight the razor pulled.
He spent the day at his desk in the education building. He finished early with the papers he was required to correct and returned them to the teacher. He wanted to talk to his friend Juleson, but Juleson seemed disturbed over a letter he had been expecting and had so far failed to receive. Lorin reminded him of how their mail was frequently delayed for several days in the censor’s office, and Juleson agreed absently, and of course it had already occurred to him. None of them were quite sane on the subject of mail.
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