His book is a shambles, but every book is a shambles, or a potential shambles; that is the risk. His trouble is that it is bothering him in a strangely new way. Is he already dead? The thought of death makes him reach for a cigarette, death’s ally. Of course, like any death-preoccupied creature, he’s left his cigarettes and an ashtray handily on the chair beside his sepulcher.
The match lights up the room, a moment of warm color and sanity against the black. With that glimpse of homey perspectives he feels some comfort. So he takes a long, lethal drag of smoke into his lungs. Immediately all the capillaries in his legs tingle. What shall he think of? The other day he received a letter from one of his readers.
99 Crescent View Terrace
Plumville, Ohio
Mr. Benham!
Little did I know when I borrowed your book from our Library what obscene filth it was! I have notified the librarian and the Chief of Police!
But why, why, Mr. Benham, must you bring forth this worthless dirt, in our World, where everything—hippies, lawlessness, riots, communist agitators, students, are all around us! Think, Mr. Benham, think! It is people like you who will be the first to go when we clean it all up!
Mrs. Robert H. Ferranos
What does Mrs. Ferranos mean by “first to go”? Does the dear creature want him liquidated, eliminated, deactivated, shot? Perhaps Mrs. Ferranos’ husband Robert, after finishing off his legal quota of hippies, students, and other nasty types, will come to Aaron’s door with authorization in hand.
He’s never answered such letters, which are usually unsigned anyway, but why not?
Dear Mrs. Ferranos,
I have forwarded Xerox copies of your threat on my life to the Postmaster General, the FBI, and your local Police Department. Initial legal advice informs me that you have broken U.S. Postal Statutes 148-b (1914), 291-f (1960), and 395-g (1970), all of which constitute felonies. I trust my books won’t be found in your prison library.
Yours for Law and Order,
How long can games keep him sane? It is three-thirty in the morning; the black window leans in on him like death. Death makes him think of Boom Maloumian—one species of death, at least. Boom Maloumian is dead, that once brutal force. Aaron remembers, suddenly, one of Boom Maloumian’s jokes, one of thousands: It seems this old maid and old bachelor get married. On their honeymoon, in a hotel, she gets stuck on the toilet, stark-naked, and can’t get loose. Finally, in desperation, she calls her husband. What will we do? What will we do? Call the plumber! But before the plumber comes the husband puts his bowler hat, for modesty’s sake, on her lap. When the plumber arrives he takes one look and says, “I can save the woman, but the man’s a goner!”
The principle of risibility involved here, students, is the shock of the change in visual conception from a mere bowler hat on a lap to a whole man somehow fed down the mysterious convolutions of a commode, coupled with the intellectual shock of the change of manners from prudery to the plumber’s immediate hedonistic toleration of whatever weird, probably sexual play got the two toilet-bound people in their fix. That, however, is only a very superficial reading of this remarkable story. It encompasses psychological overtones, symbolic insights, comments upon the whole paradoxical maze of the human condition. If I list, even in haphazard fashion, a few of these possibilities, I’m sure you will find among them, or preferably beyond them, a subject for your theme. You may be as fanciful as you like, but you must still be honest.
1. Bowler hats and the Velveteen Age
2. Toilets and sex
a. “The throne of love is firmly mounted in the sewer.”—Swinburne
b. Freud on same
c. Dr. Spock on same
d. Your parents on same
3. Toilets and humor
a. Child folk humor, such as “Milk, milk, lemonade,/Around the corner fudge is made.”
4. Death and humor
a. The ultimate put-down
b. Hysteria
5. The Plumber as ultimate authority
a. Charon, Gabriel, Yorick, etc.
b. Plumbers make over $5.00 per hour
c. Value of function in our society
1. Input, or fresh-water function
2. Outtake, or sewerage function
d. Why aren’t you going to plumber school?
6. Form and style
a. Reflection of a universal linguistic pattern
b. Patterns of expectation (invoke transformational grammar at your own risk)
c. Genius
1. The pleasure of being encompassed
2. The pleasure of being fooled
7. Can prudery be sincere?
a. Write a letter to Mrs. Robert H. Ferranos, 99 Crescent View Terrace, Plumville, Ohio, in which you gently but thoroughly convince her that Aaron Benham has never written a dirty book.
Enough. But who was the anonymous genius who structured that joke, that perfect fiction? How it ends so completely, having told everything! Economy and perfection. But it is not envy of that perfection that makes him feel weak now. He shudders again, thinks he might and then decides not to go get himself some whiskey from the kitchen. No, he will just ride out this anxiety. While flying on commercial airplanes he has a constant, quite similar anxiety all the time. For a minute or two a magazine or a movie might take his thoughts away from his insane speed and altitude, but the shock of return is worse than the constant awareness, so he has decided that on airplanes the best thing to do is to sit there and fly. But how can you just sit here and fly this planet with its disappearing thin skin of atmosphere? There is no destination where you will be able to relax. When the cabin depressurizes, no yellow oxygen mask will pop out in front of your face. There will be no emergency procedures. You have to forget for longer periods or you won’t get your work done. Not that it matters in the long run whether you get your work done or not. When the sun turns super-nova your work reverts to hydrogen atoms, anyway. But in the short run, if you have been cursed by art, you have to do your work or you die before you stop breathing. And in the short run you can’t fend off the darkness for a lovely hour with your friend’s wife. The reasons are simple, but there are quite a few of them, each vectoring in on its own course toward unhappiness, of which there is too much already.
It would be nice if he could go to sleep. He wishes he had a pill of some kind, but pills are one of the few vices he’s never taken up. Instead he will try to go back through the years, several wars back. Sometimes he thinks of the Earth as the repository of all the pain it has ever been host to, as if somewhere all pain must be registered, on a great dial, or column, shimmering and exploding to new heights, like those explosions reaching out from the corona of the sun. Each agony must be somewhere recorded—each chipmunk ever tortured to death by a cat, the bellowings of ancient reptiles sinking in tar, each burned or dismembered child. But if he might find his way back even a few years, then the volume is by an infinitesimal fraction smaller, a little more manageable perhaps.
So he thinks of Harold Roux and Mary Tolliver, young and alive on that green campus.
Harold, because of the delicate thing on the top of his head, had to have a single room in his dormitory. And because single rooms were available only to proctors, he had to be a proctor. Perhaps it was this semiofficial, rather doubtful position that first brought him into the gleeful or baleful notice of Boom Maloumian, The Mean Armenian, who lived a few doors down the hall in a three-man room. One of Maloumian’s roommates was a strange poet named Gordon Robert Westinghouse, and the other was Short Round, a small, battered-looking person whose real name was Paul Hickett and who was Maloumian’s minion, or even slave. Short Round was the one usually delegated to assault Harold’s peace. At times Maloumian was implacable, but at other times he could be deceptively friendly, as though he had slight remissions of his sadism. It must have been worse, even, than the army for Harold. There, he had expected to be among savages, but here, amid these ivy-covered walls!
Once, in the middle of
the night, Short Round poured Energine lighter fluid under Harold’s door, screamed “Fire! Fire!” and pounded on the door, then lit the fluid so that Harold awoke nearly surrounded by billowing orange flames. The dormitory was of fairly fireproof cement block and terrazzo construction, and the flames were easily beaten out with a blanket, but even so Harold was terribly upset.
Once, when Allard was visiting Harold, water began to come in under the door. Allard opened the door and caught Short Round in the act of pouring it from a wastebasket. Short Round, unused to any confrontation by Harold, shocked by Allard’s sudden presence, was paralyzed; his gray face and even the scraggly tufts of his sparse blond hair seemed to grow paler. His green army fatigue jacket, in fact, seemed to be losing air, like a leaking balloon. Allard turned the wastebasket over Short Round’s head, jammed it down, turned him around in the direction of his room and more or less threw him down the hall. Afterwards Allard remembered that his anger was chiefly because he, Allard Benson, had been subjected to this irritation, not that his friend Harold Roux was. He even said a few words to this effect as he dealt with Short Round, who then landed in front of Boom Maloumian himself, two hundred pounds of naked Boom Maloumian, brown burnished muscle and fat and glossy areas of black pelt, his laughter booming down the halls, down the stairs, surely filling all the floors and rooms of Parker Hall, flooding obscenely through the housemother’s tidy apartment and washing out over half the campus. “Short Round! Short Round!” he said when he could. “Oh, Short Round! Didn’t you get it!” Then what seemed like ropes, chains and hawsers of immense laughter began again when Short Round managed to get the metal wastebasket off his head. The towel over Boom Maloumian’s shoulder seemed much too small to have dried all that fur and flesh.
But when Allard and Short Round next met, such was Paul Hickett’s half-cringing adjustment to the world that one would think it had never happened. A flick of the wary, calculating eye, and Short Round was prepared again to be tolerated and patronized. They had just left Knuck Gillis, one of Allard’s roommates, who in the war had seen all the officers of his company and ninety percent of its enlisted men killed in the volcanic ash of Iwo Jima. “You know,” Short Round said to Allard, “that guy’s seen more combat than you and me put together!” Allard, who hadn’t been in combat, knew that Short Round hadn’t either, and Short Round knew he knew. Allard was struck silent by this statement. What an interesting contract Short Round was offering him! What a gross, yet almost tempting lie to bind them together in this pact of dishonesty! They could tell each other all kinds of battle tales. He wondered if Short Round made many, or even all, of his alliances this way. And of course Allard thought about himself, too. Perhaps his own social lies and assumptions were merely a little more credible. Afterwards he thought about this quite often.
A few days after the wastebasket incident Allard stopped by Harold’s room an hour or so before Commons opened for supper, and Harold, with grave pleasure, brought out his Bristol Cream sherry and two immaculate wineglasses. He arranged these on a paisley cloth on his special little round table and poured, his grave joy reminding Allard of the formality of the Japanese tea ceremony. This was more Harold’s idea of the dignity of college life.
Harold’s room was neat, his books evenly aligned on the shelves above the small, built-in desk. Harold himself was frail, white and orderly, yet his constant seriousness gave him a kind of strength. Unlike Harold, Allard had always, it seemed to him, entered any new situation, such as the army or college or whatever it might be, with an instinctive eye for farce, even though he didn’t always want to. Maybe college ought to be everything Harold expected it to be. Harold craved the life of the mind—or at least he wanted the life of the mind to dignify all human relationships here. So Allard tried, knowing Harold’s feelings, to be serious. But it was hard. For one thing, Harold did not want to talk, ever, about Boom Maloumian or any of Maloumian’s crude friends, even when those gargantuan noises and appetites intruded, through doors and walls, upon his seriousness. This did not conform to Allard’s idea of reality.
So Allard drank Harold’s expensive wine and they spoke, now, about Edward Arlington Robinson.
“‘He may go forward like a stoic Roman/Where pangs and terrors in his pathway lie—/Or, seizing the swift logic of a woman,/Curse God and die,’” Harold quoted admiringly.
A bellow of gigantic laughter could be heard down the corridor, but Harold seemed not to notice. Neither had he ever complained about Maloumian to Allard and his two roommates, Knuck Gillis and Nathan Weinstein, even though Allard, Knuck and Nathan were considered to be Harold’s friends.
More laughter, brutally energetic now, as though something was being amusingly destroyed. Allard knew that Maloumian and several of his jock friends from Kappa Sigma—O’Brien, Harorba, Whalen and that bunch, were having a case or two of beer prior to going to Litchwood tonight.
“Pangs and terrors is right,” Allard said, nodding toward the sounds.
Harold frowned slightly and shook his head as if to forbid any mention of that subject.
“Anyway,” Allard said, “aren’t there other alternatives to being a stoic Roman or a woman? How about he just beats a strategic retreat? In fact he could run like hell.”
“Allard, I don’t want to talk about those savages at all. Please.”
“Well, what pangs and terrors did you have in mind, then?” He heard in his own voice the facetiousness he really didn’t want to use with Harold.
“I meant life and death. Deeper realities.” Harold poured Allard more wine. “I meant important things. Choices. What to make of your life. Things like love, and morality, philosophy, art.”
“Okay.”
“I’m writing a novel,” Harold said shyly.
The voices and laughter from the hall had increased, then moved like a rattling train along the hall to the stairs and down, muted, finally, by distance.
“That’s ambitious,” Allard said, knowing Harold would like that word. He had been making notes for a novel himself, but Harold’s sounded much more possible, more concrete than his own vague jottings and cravings, because Harold always did what he said he would.
“I just wondered if you’d read the first chapter sometime, Allard, when you get the chance.”
“Sure. How about right now?”
“Now? Oh, I don’t know.” Harold was startled by the immediacy. “Right now?” Startled and shy. “Well, I guess, if you want to.” He was for the moment flustered and shaky, but then he composed himself and handed Allard a sheaf of typed pages so evenly stacked they might have just come out of the original box.
Glitter and Gold Harold’s novel was titled, and it opened high in the towers of Manhattan in a richly decorated modern penthouse suite. Across the crowded living room, where all the clever, scintillating talk and noise of a cocktail party seem nervous and inane, a boy and a girl suddenly see each other. Both, their look seems to say, are rather bored by the glitter and the triviality of their glamorous surroundings. He crosses to her and offers her a cigarette and an ironic comment, to which she replies with modest but delightful wit. Her hair is the color of honey, her complexion creamy, her eyes deep brown except for a fascinating green glint in the iris of one, her arms and hands aristocratically tapered; he thinks he might fall in love with this girl, just as she thinks somehow that she might fall in love with this man. He is well built, of middle height, with thick dark hair and a strong jaw—a face of dark secrets, rugged, yet with the flash of humor about the eyes. He is dressed in dark slacks and a casual Harris tweed jacket of ancient lineage. His name is Francis Ravendon, hers Allyson Turnbridge. She wears a plaid skirt—her mother’s family (Ferguson) hunting plaid, closed at the thigh with a solid gold safety pin—and a white silken blouse that reveals the warm roundness yet proud uptilt of her nubile breasts. He lights her cigarette with a gold lighter decorated with a strange device. Curious, she lightly holds his wrist as he explains that the device is the Ravendon crest—nonsense, of
course, in these enlightened days, but his Uncle Alfred gave the lighter to him, and, after all, it is useful. After some more light conversation—yet strangely intimate, as though they have known each other since childhood—he suggests, since they can hardly hear each other over the babble, that they get out of here. It’s a beautiful afternoon and he has his open car. Why not drive out of the city to Long Island and perhaps have dinner in an excellent little French restaurant he knows? She hesitates; she really doesn’t know him at all, and he seems so masculine, so sure of himself. In spite of his charm there is something dark and dangerous in this handsome man. But he is so kind, gentle, humorous and reassuring, she finally relents. Without bidding their hosts goodbye (host and hostess seem so involved in conversation and, well, so rather drunk), Allyson and Francis descend in the elevator to the street, where they find Francis’ Lincoln Continental phaeton gleaming in the slanting light amid the hectic hustle and bustle of Manhattan. Soon the phaeton’s smooth power has taken them away, across the long bridges, past the teeming tenements of the poor, and at dusk they are on a country road lined with beautiful tall trees, the muted lights of great estates shining down across wide landscaped greenswards.
The Hair of Harold Roux Page 12