Compulsion

by Meyer Levin

  He thought of asking them to drop him at Artie’s. That was how Artie would have done it – try to scare him by pulling up in a police car. But for himself, Judd reflected, he could enjoy the thought as much as the deed. Artie was excitable; if Artie saw a police car pull up without warning, he might even shoot, or do something equally wild, and give himself away. And anyway, there was just time to keep his date with Ruth.

  The two cops dropped him at the house. The maid rushed forward as though she had been waiting at the door. Judd laughed at her. “I’ll bet you were scared I’d never come back.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “It was just some routine junk about my bird-watching classes.”

  He went upstairs. There was an elation in him now over the way he had handled the interrogation. His victory was like a confirmation of his entire code of behaviour. He was right, right, right!

  I SEE JUDD then, starting for his date with Ruth, picking up his field glasses to prove he really meant it about going bird-watching. And besides – a weapon? Does he definitely intend…? Let her fate hang on chance. If he spots a warbler. That will be a sign. Do it.

  When the bell rings, Ruth goes to the door, while her mother looks out of the window and notices the red Stutz. “My, my! My daughter is getting popular these days,” she comments. “Who is this one?”

  “He was out with us last night. Artie’s friend, Judd Steiner.”

  “And you’ve got a date already? Fast work,” says her mother. “The Steiners. Is that the millionaire Steiners? Poor Sid, what kind of competition are you giving him?”

  “Oh, don’t jump to conclusions, Mother,” Ruth protests. “We just like to talk. He’s very brilliant. He just passed his exam for Harvard Law School, besides being Phi Beta Kappa at seventeen.”

  She picks up her scarf and her handbag. “Aren’t you going to ask him up to introduce him?” her mother demands.

  “Another time.” And Ruth runs downstairs to where Judd waits in the hallway.

  Coming down, she makes a kind of illumination – her reddish hair, her yellow pleated skirt, her bare forearms, the streak of her scarf, giving a passing gladness to the hall. Ruth feels friendly – curious, she would say – toward Judd. Despite his reputation among the co-eds. Some say Judd gives them the creeps.

  Ruth hasn’t found him at all repellent. He is somehow a stray person, and her upbringing has been in a house of warmth toward strays. Her mother and father are the kind who, some years back, attended Emma Goldman meetings and collected Yiddish poets visiting from New York, or stray anarchists, or intense-looking men with long hair who were vaguely “studying”.

  So what others find odd or even disturbing in Judd rather attracts Ruth. And physically, though Judd is quite short, he is not smaller than she; they danced quite well together. He is something of a change from her gangling reporter.

  There is in her, that day, the unworried adventurous confidence of a girl who has a devoted steady and yet is uncommitted, who may tease herself that perhaps there is yet something unknown, something supreme, in romance to be encountered.

  With his curious perfection of manners that contains a touch of condescending irony for the custom itself, Judd opens the door of his car for her. Then he walks around to his own side.

  As she settles into the fancy car, her skirt rimming her knees, Ruth smiles to Judd. “I almost expected to see you with Artie,” she says. “You’re practically inseparable, aren’t you?”

  “Oh, I have a life of my own, too,” he parries. As he drives away with her, he wonders at the unusual feeling of glee that wells up in him. Is this a feeling of happiness? More likely an enjoyment of the power in himself, of his secret imaginings. Can there really be something special about this girl, about having her sitting next to him, and feeling her interest in him? Wryly, Judd permits himself to appreciate the image of the pretty girl and himself, gay youth breezing through the town in his Bearcat!

  She too must be feeling the image, for she leans back with a delighted sigh, saying how perfect the day is for a ride. Then Judd has a suggestion: “Instead of going to a restaurant for lunch, why not pick up some hot dogs on the road?”

  And Ruth says, “Oh, that sounds scrumptious.”

  He heads through the park and along the lake. A hackneyed refrain comes into his mind. “A pretty girl is like a melody.” He drops one hand from the wheel and catches her knowing smile. Ruth lets her hand lie in his, against her thigh, so warmly firm through the short pleated skirt.

  She remarks that she has been wondering about his friendship with Artie, because they really are so different. Artie acts like a college sheikh, while he is so quiet and even shy. Of course, as everyone says, Artie is very brilliant, and she supposes there aren’t many people around who-”

  “-can meet my lofty requirements?” Judd says. “There is no sense in false modesty.”

  That’s true, she agrees. The average man at the university is interested only in football and his frat. “You’re not a frat man, are you?”

  “No,” he says.

  “Sid practically dropped out,” Ruth remarks.

  “Is Sid your lover?” Judd asks.

  “Oh” – she gives him a candid glance – “it’s not that I believe strictly in the conventions. But I don’t believe in rushing things either. I mean, if I were really certain I was in love and we wanted each other, and for some reason we couldn’t get married, then I should give myself.” There is something almost prim in the way she makes this announcement. It excites him.

  “And you’re not sure you’re in love?”

  “Oh,” she says thoughtfully, “I sometimes feel as if it’s already settled that I’m going to marry Sid. And then sometimes I feel as if some wonderful unknown thing still has to happen.”

  “Does he intend to marry you.”

  She laughs softly. “Even after he gets out of school – a reporter doesn’t earn enough to get married on. And Sid wants to write. And… I don’t know.”

  “I see.” They are silent for a moment. “You don’t mind my being so inquisitive?”

  “Don’t you have to find out if the coast is clear?” Again her soft laugh.

  “Is it?” He reflects how cleverly this female has put him into the rôle of a possible serious suitor. Judd finds himself saying, “Perhaps Sid will win the reward on the murder case – he’s working so hard on it. And then you can get married.” Why has he mentioned the case? He is getting as bad as Artie.

  But it seems a normal subject to her. “Oh, is there a big reward?”

  “The papers said several thousand dollars, I think.”

  “I don’t think anybody needs a reward to try to catch them,” she remarks. And after a musing silence: “I’m not really ready to get married. There are still things I want to do.”

  “Like what?”

  “Oh, go abroad.”

  She recalls that he is to go in a few weeks, and she says she envies him, and Judd offers the expected persiflage about her coming along, and she says she would if she only had the money, and he finds himself saying, “Well, I’ve got an idea how to get the money for you! I’ll confess to the murder! I’ll get the reward – and that will pay for your trip!”

  “There’s only one thing wrong with that” – she takes up the game – “you wouldn’t be able to come along!” And then: “Would you really do that for me?”

  “Why not?” he says. “And it would be an experience to see if I could make them believe me.”

  “I’m afraid I couldn’t accept such a sacrifice,” she says, but then her voice drops. “It’s cruel for us to be joking about such a thing.”

  “Why?” he demands. “Why is it cruel to joke about death? After all, what is one creature more or less in the world?”

  Her mouth opens. But then, as though catching on to his line, she says, “I think you say things just to shock people, to be different.”

  A tiny spasm of irritation runs through him at her words. Unaccountably, Judd th
inks of his mother, of the first time he brought down a bird, a robin, with a B-B gun they had given him, as a little kid. How Mother Dear softly explained to him that he really didn’t want to kill the bird for no purpose. People made guns that could kill, it was true, Mother Dear had said, but they used their guns always for a reason. To protect themselves from wild beasts, or to hunt for food. Or to study animals, like the mounted birds in the museum. As she talked, Judd had felt angry, cheated. And the same shadowy feeling of resentment has come over him now at Ruth’s sententious words.

  With a secret pleasure, he heads for the stand where he stopped with Artie. “They’ve got wonderful hot dogs here,” he says.

  Ruth leans back. “Oh, I’m so hungry I could eat an elephant.”

  “With mustard and piccalilli?”

  “Everything!”

  She sits waiting as he goes to the stand. She looks so right, the pretty girl in the car. Judd tells himself she isn’t precisely beautiful; it is rather a supremely blooming quality that gives her such appeal. It is the sex urge that is causing him to endow his reactions with aesthetic value. Why can’t this be just a date; why can’t he simply take a nice girl out on the dunes?

  He turns down the side road toward Miller’s Beach, stopping the car at the edge of the sand. Ruth gets out; she stands for a moment, breathing full, her blouse rising with her breath. Judd takes the binoculars from the side pocket.

  “Is this where you come to watch the birds?”

  He tells her it was here that he discovered the Kirtland Warbler.

  “Discovered?”

  The species hadn’t been seen for decades, he informs her, and was assumed to be extinct. “I don’t go by other people’s assumptions,” he says. It is this kind of remark that makes people dislike him, Ruth realizes. But can’t they see that he has to do it, from some need, some weakness?

  Judd tells her how he searched all last spring. And then, one day, he recognized the warbler’s call.

  “But you had never heard it before?”

  “When I heard it, I knew it.”

  “That must be such a wonderful feeling,” Ruth says, “to be the discoverer, to be the first.”

  “I’d like to be the first with you,” he remarks, with the expected double meaning. Boys feel they have to say things like that, Ruth knows, and momentarily it even gives her a sunny sensation that Judd has made a silly remark, like an ordinary boy. She feels a surge of sureness – something good is happening – and she gives him her hand so he may pull her up a steep dune. Everyone likes being “different”, but with Judd it is such a terrible passion. Like the way he has to brag about the different courses he takes at school, how he is the only student in that course in Umbrian dialect. And here, his pleasure seems to have been not so much in what he discovered but in having been alone to prove others were mistaken.

  He drops her hand and hurries ahead. There is a dip between dunes, an area of stunted bushes, forming clusters in the sand. She comes alongside him and stands still, as he is standing.

  “Oh, it’s so wonderful here,” Ruth says. “The sand is untouched.” It looks as if no one in the whole world had ever been here before.

  He moves a few steps, and she moves, but then Judd makes a halting gesture with his hand, and Ruth freezes, her arm arrested gracefully. Judd listens. There are a few calls. Not the warbler. “Hear anything?” he asks.

  “I was afraid to breathe,” she says softly.

  “You can breathe,” he says.

  “Doesn’t it frighten them to hear people talk?”

  “You can talk. Just naturally, so the voices fit in.”

  “I think I never listened to nature before,” Ruth says. “I mean, just to the air. It’s as though the sky itself had a sound, not quite a sound, but-”

  “I know,” Judd says. And he is startled, at a feeling as of anguish rising up in himself.

  He leads her farther, over several dunes, until they are well away from where any beachgoers might wander. Then he slips down on the sand, nesting down behind some shrubs. She settles herself beside him, her legs neatly folded. “Is this where you found your bird!” she asks.

  Judd draws out his wallet to show her the picture of the warbler perched on his hand, feeding. This is the same picture that his father has enlarged to keep on his desk at the office. Judd tells himself that he has not forgotten his purpose in coming, and the self-wager he made over the call of the bird.

  Then they listen for calls. She sits alert, listening. “A mating call,” he remarks. He focuses the field glasses, and directs her to a low distant branch, the birds flickering around it, alighting, circling, alighting. A curl of her hair moves against his cheek.

  “This is what you really love, isn’t it!” Ruth says.

  Judd doesn’t reply. He feels a choking rush of conflicting emotions; he feels invaded by her, and he turns against this a scorn for her, for her female sentimentality. And yet the same sense of anguish has returned, as though her voice has touched upon some unbearably sensitive mechanism within him.

  “I can always do this,” he says.

  He puts the glasses to her eyes. After a moment Ruth remarks, “It makes you wonder if we ourselves might be watched, like this, by superior beings.”

  This breaks the spell, he tells himself. And he tells her she might just as well ask if the birds are speculating about being watched by human gods.

  “Why not?” she says. “Last night you were arguing that birds have intelligence and can think.”

  “Then perhaps we exist only in the minds of the birds,” he says.

  Ruth smiles. “Philosophy 3,” she says. “Berkeley.”

  “Well, why not?” he persists, irritated. “What proof is there of anything else? If God exists, it is because we created him in our minds. And if man can conceive of God, then God is less than man – he is merely a conception in man’s consciousness. Isn’t that right?”

  “I know it’s logical,” she says softly, “but it seems so conceited. According to that idea, everyone is his own God.”

  “Why not?” he demands again. She is once more merely the female, refusing to recognize logic! Can’t she see that a person, a consciousness, can be sure only of itself alone? A flood of ideas rushes through his mind – the “God is dead” of Nictzsche – but it is no use explaining to her. Judd sees the archaic bearded gods, the Jehovah – all those gods that little men had invented to fill up their areas of fear. Even his father doesn’t have the nerve to swing out alone into the universe, to admit God is dead. No. He still sends cheques to the Sinai Temple.

  Ruth seems somehow to have followed part of his thought. “I thought you were an atheist,” she says. “Are your folks atheists, too?”

  It angers him that she has touched on his folks. What should that have to do with his beliefs? “My father still adheres to vestiges of Jewish superstition,” he declares. “He still belongs to a temple.”

  “Do you have brothers and sisters, Judd?” she asks.

  He feels even more resentful; she has diverted him from the main discussion. “I have two older brothers,” he mutters. “But they’re just Babbitts.”

  Looking up at the sky, Ruth tells him, “My folks are agnostics. I think I am too.” Then, with almost an apologetic note: “Oh, Judd, sometimes the world seems so beautiful, like here, don’t you feel that things have to be good?”

  “Good?”

  Her warm throaty laugh acknowledges that sophisticated people don’t speak of such sentimental concepts. Oh, she remembers from last night. His philosophy. There is no such thing as good or evil. Things just are.

  “What about the beauty in evil?” he challenges. “What about Baudelaire?”

  Ruth says, “Of course, there is a deeper kind of experience, as in Dostoevski, an evil that has good in it too.”

  “No! There is only experience itself!” Judd insists. And he feels he is almost ready now for his intention. He feels that somehow she has revealed herself, she is really from
the other side, from the enemies of his own kind. He guides the conversation now to the Medici, to Aretino, to the rare book he wants to translate, listing all the forms of perversion.

  “Are you trying to excite me?” Ruth asks.

  “Why not? I’ve got you alone here.”

  “Yes.” She is a trifle breathy. Then she tries to return to the lighter tone, impersonal. “You men! For all we intellectualize about it, the double standard is still in force. Men want women to be pure, don’t they?” And then, with a sudden burst, “Oh, darn, Judd, sometimes I think the whole question is silly, and what am I waiting for, and I just wish something would happen to me so I would get rid of the whole question.”

  “It’s well known,” he says, “that every woman really wants to be raped.”

  “Oh, don’t talk like a callow youth with a line,” Ruth answers.

  “Well, you invited it,” he snaps, beginning to feel the necessary anger toward her.

  “It’s not really like that,” she says. “I think what every woman dreams of is more like a dream I used to have as a little girl, that the great lover is going to climb through the window, and then something wonderful will happen.”

  She continues, appealingly, and it is anguish for me to imagine her saying this to Judd, for this is a fantasy Ruth once confided, so intimately, to me. “When I was a little girl, we used to live in a downstairs flat where there were bars on the windows, and I used to imagine that was why the bars were there, but that somehow my Lochinvar would come in, even through the bars. It used to give me kind of nightmares, but I knew I wanted to have those nightmares.”

  He moves so that the whole length of their bodies touch, as they lie side by side in the sand. She turns her face to him, like on a bed, Judd thinks. “Please don’t – you know – get excited,” Ruth says.

  “I believe in doing everything I want to do.”

  She looks directly into his eyes. “No. How can you, Judd? I mean, there are things people think of, impulses, not only sex-”

  “If we imagine things, then those things exist in us. It’s only cowardly not to do what we want.”