by John Updike
After exams, in the heart of the Cambridge winter, there is a grateful pause. New courses are selected, and even the full-year courses, heading into their second half, sometimes put on, like a new hat, a fresh professor. The days quietly lengthen; there is a snowstorm or two; the swimming and squash teams lend the sports pages of the Crimson an unaccustomed note of victory. A kind of foreshadow of spring falls bluely on the snow. The elms are seen to be shaped like fountains. The discs of snow pressed by boots into the sidewalk in front of Albiani’s seem large precious coins; the brick buildings, the arched gates, the archaic lecterns, and the barny mansions along Brattle Street dawn upon the freshman as a heritage he temporarily possesses. The thumb-worn spines of his now familiar textbooks seem proof of a certain knowingness, and the strap of the green book-bag slung over his shoulder tugs at his wrist like a living falcon. The letters from home dwindle in importance. The hours open up. There is more time. Experiments are made. Courtships begin. Conversations go on and on; and an almost rapacious desire for mutual discovery possesses acquaintances. It was in this atmosphere, then, that Orson made his confession.
Dawson turned his head away as if the words had menaced him personally. Kern blinked, lit a cigarette, and asked, “What don’t you like about him?”
“Well”—Orson shifted his weight uncomfortably in the black but graceful, shapely but hard Harvard chair—“it’s little things. Whenever he gets a notice from the Portland draft board, he tears it up without opening it and scatters it out the window.”
“And you’re afraid that this incriminates you as an accessory and they’ll put you in jail?”
“No—I don’t know. It seems exaggerated. He exaggerates everything. You should see how he prays.”
“How do you know how he prays?”
“He shows me. Every morning, he gets down on his knees and throws himself across the bed, his face in the blanket, his arms way out.” He showed them.
“God,” Dawson said. “That’s marvellous. It’s medieval. It’s more than medieval. It’s Counter-Reformation.”
“I mean,” Orson said, grimacing in realization of how deeply he had betrayed Hub, “I pray, too, but I don’t make a show of myself.”
A frown clotted Dawson’s expression, and passed.
“He’s a saint,” Kern said.
“He’s not,” Orson said. “He’s a fake. I’m taking Chem I with him, and he’s worse than a child with the math. And those Greek books he keeps on his desk, they look worn because he bought them second-hand.”
“Saints don’t have to be good at math,” Kern said. “What saints have to have is energy. Hub has it.”
“Look how he wrestles,” Dawson said.
“I doubt if he wrestles very well,” Orson said. “He didn’t make the freshman team. I’m sure if we heard him play the piano it’d be awful.”
“You seem to miss the point,” Kern said, eyes closed, “of what Hub’s all about.”
“I know goddamn well what he thinks he’s all about,” Orson said, “but it doesn’t go. All this vegetarianism and love of the starving Indian—he’s really a terribly cold bastard. I think he’s about the coldest person I’ve ever met in my life.”
“I don’t think Orson thinks that; do you?” Kern asked Dawson.
“No,” Dawson said, and his puppyish smile cleared his cloudy face. “That’s not what Orson the Parson thinks.”
Kern squinted. “Is it Orson the Parson, or Orson the Person?”
“I think Hub is the nub,” Dawson said.
“Or the rub,” Kern added, and both burst into grinding laughter. Orson felt he was being sacrificed to the precarious peace the two roommates kept between themselves, and left, superficially insulted but secretly flattered to have been given, at last, a nickname of sorts: Orson the Parson.
Several nights later they went to hear Carl Sandburg read in New Lecture Hall—the four adjacent roommates, plus Fitch. To avoid sitting next to Hub, who aggressively led them into a row of seats up front, Orson delayed, and so sat the farthest away from the girl Hub sat directly behind. Orson noticed her immediately; she had a wide mane of coppery-red hair which hung down loose over the back of her seat. The color of it, and the abundance, reminded him, all at once, of horses, earth, sun, wheat, and South Dakota. From Orson’s angle she was nearly in profile; her face was small, with a tilted shadowy cheekbone and a pale prominent ear. Her ear reminded him of Emily; she was Emily with long red hair and Cambridge sophistication. He yearned to see her face, and felt her about to turn. She turned away. Hub had leaned forward and was saying something into her other ear. Fitch overheard it, and gleefully relayed it to Dawson, who whispered to Kern and Orson, “Hub said to the girl, ‘You have beautiful hair.’ ”
Several times during the reading, Hub leaned forward to add something more into her ear, each time springing spurts of choked laughter from Fitch, Dawson, and Kern. Meanwhile, Sandburg, his white bangs as straight and shiny as a doll’s wig of artificial fibre, incanted above the lectern and quaintly strummed a guitar. Afterward, Hub walked with the girl into the outdoors. From a distance Orson saw her white face break into a laugh. Hub returned to his friends with the complacent nick in the corner of his mouth deepened, in the darkness, to a gash.
It was not the next day, or the next week, but within the month that Hub brought back to the room a heap of coppery hair. Orson found it lying like an animal corpse on a newspaper spread on his bed. “Hub, what the hell is this?”
Hub was on the floor playing with his spinning wheel. “Hair.”
“Human hair?”
“Of course.”
“Whose?”
“A girl’s.”
“What happened?” The question sounded strange; Orson meant to ask, “What girl’s?”
Hub answered as if he had asked that question. “It’s a girl I met at the Sandburg reading; you don’t know her.”
“This is her hair?”
“Yes. I asked her for it. She said she was planning to cut it all off this spring anyway.”
Orson stood stunned above the bed, gripped by an urge to bury his face and hands in the hair. “You’ve been seeing her?” This effeminate stridence in his voice: he despised it and only Hub brought it out.
“A little. My schedule doesn’t allow for much social life, but my adviser has recommended that I relax now and then.”
“You take her to movies?”
“Once in a while. She pays her admission, of course.”
“Of course.”
Hub took him up on his tone. “Please remember I’m here on my savings alone. I have refused all financial assistance from my father.”
“Hub”—the very syllable seemed an expression of pain—“what are you going to do with her hair?”
“Spin it into a rope.”
“A rope?”
“Yes. It’ll be very difficult; her hair is terribly fine.”
“And what will you do with the rope?”
“Make a knot of it.”
“A knot?”
“I think that’s the term. I’ll coil it and secure it so it can’t come undone and give it to her. So she’ll always have her hair the way it was when she was nineteen.”
“Oh, Lord. How did you ever talk this poor girl into it?”
“I didn’t talk her into it. I merely offered, and she thought it was a lovely idea. Really, Orson, I don’t see why this should offend your bourgeois scruples. Women cut their hair all the time.”
“She must think you’re insane. She was humoring you.”
“As you like. It was a perfectly rational suggestion, and my sanity has never been raised as an issue between us.”
“Well, I think you’re insane. Hub, you’re a nut.”
Orson left the room and slammed the door, and didn’t return until eleven, when Hub was asleep in his eye mask. The heap of hair had been transferred to the floor beside the spinning wheel, and already some strands were entangled with the machine. In time a rope was pr
oduced, a braided cord as thick as a woman’s little finger, about a foot long, weightless and waxen. The earthy, horsy fire in the hair’s color had been quenched in the process. Hub carefully coiled it and with black thread and long pins secured and stiffened the spiral into a disc the size of a small saucer. This he presented to the girl one Friday night. The presentation appeared to satisfy him, for, as far as Orson knew, Hub had no further dates with her. Once in a while Orson passed her in the Yard, and without her hair she scarcely seemed female, her small pale face fringed in curt tufts, her ears looking enormous. He wanted to speak to her; some obscure force of pity, or hope of rescue, impelled him to greet this wan androgyne, but the opening word stuck in his throat. She did not look as if she pitied herself, or knew what had been done to her.
Something magical protected Hub; things deflected from him. The doubt Orson had cast upon his sanity bounced back onto himself. As spring slowly broke, he lost the ability to sleep. Figures and facts churned sluggishly in an insomniac mire. His courses became four parallel puzzles. In mathematics, the crucial transposition upon which the solution pivoted consistently eluded him, vanishing into the chinks between the numbers. The quantities in chemistry became impishly unstable; the unbalanced scales clicked down sharply, and the system of interlocked elements that fanned from the lab to the far stars collapsed. In the history survey course, they had reached the Enlightenment, and Orson found himself disturbingly impressed by Voltaire’s indictment of God, though the lecturer handled it calmly, as one more item of intellectual history, neither true nor false. And in German, which Orson had taken to satisfy his language requirement, the words piled on remorselessly, and the existence of languages other than English, the existence of so many, each so vast, with so many arbitrary rules, seemed to prove cosmic dementia. He felt his mind, which was always more steady than quick, grow slower and slower. His chair threatened to adhere to him, and he would leap up in panic. Sleepless, stuffed with information he could neither forget nor manipulate, he became prey to obsessive delusions; he became convinced that his girl in South Dakota had taken up with another boy and was making love to him happily, Orson having shouldered the awkwardness and blame of taking her virginity. In the very loops that Emily’s ballpoint pen described in her bland letters to him he read the pleased rotundity, the inner fatness of a satisfied woman. He even knew the man. It was Spotted Elk, the black-nailed Chippewa, whose impassive nimbleness had so often mocked Orson on the basketball court, whose terrible ease and speed of reaction had seemed so unjust, and whose defense—he recalled now—Emily had often undertaken. His wife had become a whore, a squaw; the scraggly mute reservation children his father had doctored in the charity clinic became, amid the sliding transparencies of Orson’s mind, his own children. In his dreams—or in those limp elisions of imagery which in the absence of sleep passed for dreams—he seemed to be rooming with Spotted Elk, and his roommate, who sometimes wore a mask, invariably had won, by underhanded means, the affection and admiration that were rightfully his. There was a conspiracy. Whenever Orson heard Kern and Dawson laughing on the other side of the wall, he knew it was about him, and about his most secret habits. His privacy was outrageously invaded; in bed, half relaxed, he would suddenly see himself bodily involved with Hub’s lips, Hub’s legs, with Hub’s veined, vaguely womanish hands. At first he resisted these visions, tried to erase them; it was like trying to erase ripples on water. He learned to submit to them, to let the attack—for it was an attack, with bared teeth and sharp acrobatic movements—wash over him, leaving him limp enough to sleep. These dives became the only route to sleep. In the morning he would awake and see Hub sprawled flamboyantly across his bed in prayer, or sitting hunched at his spinning wheel, or, nattily dressed in his Nehru hat, tiptoeing to the door and with ostentatious care closing it softly behind him; and he would hate him—hate his appearance, his form, his manner, his pretensions—with an avidity of detail he had never known in love. The tiny details of his roommate’s physical existence—the wrinkles flickering beside his mouth, the slightly withered look about his hands, the complacently polished creases of his leather shoes—seemed a poisonous food Orson could not stop eating. His eczema worsened alarmingly.
By April, Orson was on the verge of going to the student clinic, which had a department called Mental Health. But at this point Fitch relieved him by having, it seemed, his nervous breakdown for him. For weeks, Fitch had been taking several showers a day. Toward the end he stopped going to classes and was almost constantly naked, except for a towel tucked around his waist. He was trying to complete a humanities paper that was already a month overdue and twenty pages too long. He left the dormitory only to eat and to take more books from the library. One night, around nine, Petersen was called to the phone on the second-floor landing. The Watertown police had picked Fitch up as he was struggling through the underbrush on the banks of the Charles four miles away. He claimed he was walking to the West, where he had been told there was enough space to contain God, and proceeded to talk with wild animation to the police chief about the differences and affinities between Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Hub, ever alert for an opportunity to intrude in the guise of doing good, went to the hall proctor—a spindly and murmurous graduate student of astronomy engaged, under Harlow Shapley, in an endless galaxy count—and volunteered himself as an expert on the case, and even conferred with the infirmary psychologist. Hub’s interpretation was that Fitch had been punished for hubris. The psychologist felt the problem was fundamentally Oedipal. Fitch was sent back to Maine. Hub suggested to Orson that now Petersen would need a roommate next year. “I think you and he would hit it off splendidly. You’re both materialists.”
“I’m not a materialist.”
Hub lifted his dreadful hands in half-blessing. “Have it your way. I’m determined to minimize friction.”
“Damnit, Hub, all the friction between us comes from you.”
“How? What do I do? Tell me, and I’ll change. I’ll give you the shirt off my back.” He began to unbutton, and stopped, seeing that the laugh wasn’t going to come.
Orson felt weak and empty, and in spite of himself he cringed inwardly, with a helpless affection for his unreal, unreachable friend. “I don’t know, Hub,” he admitted. “I don’t know what it is you’re doing to me.”
A paste of silence dried in the air between them.
Orson with an effort unstuck himself. “I think you’re right, we shouldn’t room together next year.”
Hub seemed a bit bewildered, but nodded, saying, “I told them in the beginning that I ought to live alone.” And his hurt eyes, bulging behind their lenses, settled into an invulnerable Byzantine stare.
One afternoon in mid-May, Orson was sitting stumped at his desk, trying to study. He had taken two exams and had two to go. They stood between him and release like two towering walls of muddy paper. His position seemed extremely precarious: he was unable to retreat and able to advance only along a very thin thread, a high wire of sanity on which he balanced above an abyss of statistics and formulae, his brain a firmament of winking cells. A push would kill him. There was then a hurried pounding up the stairs, and Hub pushed into the room carrying cradled in his arm a metal object the color of a gun and the size of a cat. It had a red tongue. Hub slammed the door behind him, snapped the lock, and dumped the object on Orson’s bed. It was the head of a parking meter, sheared from its post. A keen quick ache cut through Orson’s lower abdomen. “For God’s sake,” he cried in his contemptible squeaky voice, “what’s that?”
“It’s a parking meter.”
“I know, I can see that. Where the hell did you get it?”
“I won’t talk to you until you stop being hysterical,” Hub said, and crossed to his desk, where Orson had put his mail. He took the top letter, a special delivery from the Portland draft board, and tore it in half. This time, the pain went through Orson’s chest. He put his head in his arms on the desk and whirled and groped in the black-red darkness there. His bo
dy was frightening him; his nerves listened for a third psychosomatic slash.
A rap sounded on the door; from the force of the knock, it could only be the police. Hub nimbly dashed to the bed and hid the meter under Orson’s pillow. Then he pranced to the door and opened it.
It was Dawson and Kern. “What’s up?” Dawson asked, frowning as if the disturbance had been created to annoy him.
“It sounded like Ziegler was being tortured,” Kern said.
Orson pointed at Hub and explained, “He’s castrated a parking meter!”
“I did not,” Hub said. “A car went out of control on Mass. Avenue and hit a parked car, which knocked a meter down. A crowd gathered. The head of the meter was lying in the gutter, so I picked it up and carried it away. I was afraid someone might be tempted to steal it.”
“Namely, you,” Orson said.
“Nobody tried to stop you?” Kern asked.
“Of course not. They were all gathered around the driver of the car.”
“Was he hurt?”
“I doubt it. I didn’t look.”
“You didn’t look!” Orson cried. “You’re a great Samaritan.”
“I am not prey,” Hub said, “to morbid curiosity.”
“Where were the police?” Kern asked.
“They hadn’t arrived yet.”
Dawson asked, “Well, why didn’t you wait till a cop arrived and give the meter to him?”
“Why should I give it to an agent of the state? It’s no more his than mine.”