“I’ve been asked why I spend so much time with you,” Naomi said. “It’s been discussed.”
He knew why she did. It was the simplest thing in the world—they loved each other. When they looked at each other strange things happened in their middles. It was simple. Only he was going to marry Mary. But that didn’t sound exactly right because then he couldn’t make love to Naomi when he wanted to and she wanted to. Perhaps he was insane. Polygamy was the obvious answer but that was somewhat illegal, which was bothersome. It was all bothersome and took time away from his work, so-called. Maybe the only thing he was truly good at was making women want him around. The term for that occupation was gigolo.
“Is love political?” he said.
“Love, phooey,” she said. “If you want love get on your motorcycle and go see Mary. She’s sick with it.”
“Well, there’re different kinds of love, aren’t there?”
Naomi waited while the student waitress cleared off the dirty dishes. Then she said, “Love is a euphemism, in our case, for sexual gratification.”
“I’ll bet it isn’t.”
“You make me sick!” She seemed quite angry, and her real anger made him apprehensive, as though something real might be in danger.
In spite of his apprehension he couldn’t stop. “Is anger political?” he asked.
“Phooey!”
“Is phooey political?”
“Herbert’s right! You’re worthless! You’re a waste of time!” She got up, tall, neat and furious. People were looking at them. Her eyes glittered. He appreciated her lean waist, the firm dark muscles of her neck. She had a little red pimple on her temple, with another, embryonic one below it. Lustrous black hair grew out of her head. She was alive, this functioning organism. What force and presence she had! She. That word wasn’t powerful enough for Naomi. From her skin came invisible moisture, scent, living gross precious effluvia. This complex, feeling animal was part of the atmosphere he breathed. She left. Of course he was worthless. Insane, insane.
He ran out and caught up with her down the street just as she was about to go up the stairs to Herbert Smythe’s apartment. He grabbed her from behind and held her in a bear hug so hard she couldn’t struggle loose. People stopped to watch.
“Are you alive?” he said into her black hair.
She wouldn’t answer so he turned her around and picked her up in an undignified fashion, his arm through her crotch, and carried her upstairs. “I’m real,” he said in the dentist’s-oflice-smelling upstairs hallway. He kicked Herbert’s door open and carried her inside. Herbert and several of his troops, including the deprived boy in GI spectacles, and Use Haendler, looked up from pamphlets, a purple-ink-spattered mimeograph machine, chairs, tables, coffee cups, earnestness palpable as putty. Overflowing wastebaskets. Naomi was hitting him on the head with her fists, which was mildly confusing, but he had something he wanted to say. He held her tightly in the same undignified but secure, right-feeling way, his right arm between her legs, his hand firmly spread across her spine.
“I have brought Naomi,” he began. The deprived boy in GI spectacles attacked him, but he paid no obvious (he thought) attention, merely turning so that Naomi’s back protected him from the deprived boy’s sharp little knuckles.
“I have brought Naomi in order to recover Naomi’s brain. I will not leave until you return Naomi’s brain! Do you hear? I will pull off your heads, one by one, as I have done to rabbits, until Naomi’s brain is returned!”
“You son of a bitch! Put me down!”
“Ladies and gentlemen! Distinguished guests! Kameraden!” He wanted to tell them that, no, really, he was a man of peace, that he wanted to be reasonable, but then he had to kick the deprived boy in the shin just to keep him quiet so he could speak, and they were all overly impressed by this act of mere self-protection. The deprived boy fell down, moaning and holding his shin. Allard knew, finally, that their disapproval, reinforced as it was by every belief they held, precluded any communication at all. Herbert Smythe stared at him, disgusted and horrified.
“Herbert, it has been discussed in FBI circles why I spend so much time with Naomi. There are those who think it bad for my character, that it might jeopardize or soften my ideological discipline. Well, fuck them, Herbert, I say! I’m going to take Naomi away. Naomi is mine; I am Naomi’s. You can have her brain. Keep it. She can grow another one. Goodbye!” He turned as if to leave.
“No! No! Don’t take her!” Herbert shouted.
“Put me down, you bastard! You shit!”
Suddenly it was all real. He had no right to treat them this way. He was brutal, he was a brutal shit, so he put Naomi on her feet—gently, he thought—and left. He skipped and slid down over the stairs as if he were skiing. The incident, left behind but with him, was so profoundly boring and shameful he decided not to think about it. He started the Indian Pony and rode recklessly around the little square, his footrest scraping and sparking on the pavement, then back to the dormitory, where he slewed around to a stop like a Harley-Davidson show-off.
He went into the dormitory, pushing open the institutional door that never closed tightly, its brass hardware evidently a compromise between strength and precision so that its thousands of violent openings and closings would neither break it nor close it firmly. No one cared about the door or the dormitory, or much about anything here. It was temporary to all of them. Knuck Gillis was thinking of going back into the Marines. Nathan wanted to get his degree and get the hell out into the real world. Most of Allard’s classes seemed to be for someone else in the classroom, as though he were a slightly bored visitor who could attend or not attend as he wished. He read so he could pass examinations, and maybe he got something out of the reading.
He ran down the long corridor, cubicles of rooms on each side, up the grimy stairs where a banister rail had been pulled loose from the wall and gray cement dust sifted from the bolt holes. He had two hours before he would leave for Concord. With a pang of pity and revulsion he saw Mary at home getting everything nice for him, dusting, polishing the silver. The little wife-to-be at her domestic arts, her soul humming with innocent happiness. B. Maloumian: What’s the difference between a woman coming out of church and a woman getting out of the bathtub? A woman coming out of church has a soul full of hope. Also, if a mechanical pump sucks and sucks and never fails, what does the Swiss Navy do?
No one was in the room. On Knuck’s bed was one of his atavistic nests of soiled clothes. Nathan’s desk was neat, his bed made, his sharp suits and jackets hung neatly in his third of the open closet, his polished shoes lined up neatly beneath, toes out. Allard went to his own footlocker, a sturdy, joined wooden box made for him by a Japanese cabinetmaker, and opened its combination padlock. At the bottom of the box was a bottle of Suntory whiskey with only a few drinks out of it. “Medicine for the fiance,” he said, and took a drink of it. It reminded him of Japan. That smooth bite of the demon brought back temples and torii, the land’s misty promises, most of which it kept. Also a girl named Yoshiko Nakamura to whom he’d lied because he was only a soldier overseas and therefore did not exist in terms of permanence. Ancient history. But did he exist even here in terms of permanence? By now he could have had Mary near or over the cliff of damnation if he’d really wanted to. Perhaps he was kind and didn’t want to hurt her. But how do you not hurt women?
He put the bottle of Suntory back, next to the dark leather holster of his Nambu pistol, then covered them both up with the GI suntans he’d been issued shortly before his discharge. He locked the footlocker, locked away all that, and got undressed to take a shower.
Short Round appeared. Maybe the door had been left open a crack. Here was Paul Hickett in his army clothes—field jacket and OD wool pants bloused over well-dubbined combat boots. The day was balmy; warm waves of air came through the open windows, but Short Round lived dryly within his heroic clothes, the texture of his skin a moistureless wrinkled gray.
“Man!” Short Round said. “Did
you hear what Boom and me got going?”
Allard was gathering up towel, soap and other necessities, including one of Nathan’s razor blades. “No. What Boom and you got going?” Allard said. One shouldn’t treat even Short Round this way, especially because Short Round would never notice it.
“Don’t tell anybody if I tell you, okay?”
First, there was a car, a Buick. Short Round spoke conspiratorily, his excited voice lowered a little. This brand-new Buick had less than three hundred miles on it. It seemed this old man bought it and a week later had a heart attack and died in it, in his garage. He lived alone and they didn’t discover him for a month. By that time he was so rotten they had to spoon him out of the car, and the car stank so much inside nobody could get near it, so there it was, brand-new, and they only wanted $150 for it. Short Round had put up $50, Boom had put up $50, and they needed one more shareholder. Boom’s plan was to strip the whole inside of the car and fumigate everything, even if it took weeks, then put everything back—probably have to buy a new front seat—and they’d be in business.
“Have you seen the car?”
“No, it’s down in Connecticut.”
“Has Boom seen it?”
“Sure!”
Short Round could kiss his $50 goodbye, Allard decided, but at the same time decided not to tell him.
Short Round followed him to the showers. “Man, we can sell that Buick for two thousand bucks! What a deal! We’ll make around six hundred apiece!”
“Why doesn’t Boom buy the car all by himself?” Allard took his shower, Short Round hopping around the periphery of spray but not answering. This question evidently didn’t interest him. Water gushed around Allard’s ears for a while so he couldn’t hear anything else. When he shut it off Short Round was still talking. “Six hundred bucks! And then we got this deal where we can buy war-surplus jeeps for one fifty apiece. Made by Ford, GM, hardly used. Some still in the cosmoline …”
He continued to speak of these great opportunities as Allard dried himself before the mirror over one of the wash basins. There he was, himself outside of himself, muscular and flesh-colored, an image that wasn’t himself. And look at that face. Undistinguished but fashionably Anglo-Saxon, the face was flexible; people were always startled by the strange, violent expressions, or masks, it could instantly warp itself into. And yet it didn’t smile easily. Behind his mirror image was one of Paul Hickett, who wanted to give the visual impression of a veteran-hero, or maybe now a hero of deals, profits, the man who was In. Paul had once tried to lure him into a strange sort of mutual lie about combat, and he wondered how naive Paul was about new Buicks and surplus jeeps. Maybe this was the same kind of thing, but he thought not. No, this was belief.
Allard shaved his light beard, something he could never do without remembering what Nathan had said—that Nathan himself had a tough beard and tender skin, while Allard had a tender beard and tough skin. A tag of insistent memory he would never lose. Short Round didn’t seem to have beard or skin. His skin looked like parchment, young but ancient, like the skin on a pickled human embryo. Still talking of his deals, Short Round followed him back to his room.
Just a few years ago, Allard thought, four or five fairly short years ago, he himself was a child playing at what he had to know were games. Short Round’s schemes were so plainly games. Boom’s weren’t, but he needed Short Round’s belief in fantasy in order to con him out of real money. The price of the Buick and the price of each jeep were deliberately the same. This was the joke; the con man always laughed because his game was so simple, belief so easily had.
He got his clothes together. For Mary’s father he would wear a white shirt, a tie, and the light flannel suit he’d bought in Boston after his discharge. Such a neat, clean young man he’d seem. A cherub’s face, a reptile all the rest. No, damn it, he had honorable intentions. Then why did this charade seem dishonest, and because dishonest, boring, deadly boring? He did not enjoy fooling people. From the con he got no joy at all.
Or maybe not at this particular moment. For instance, he would let Short Round go on believing because it would only hurt him to tell him that he was probably being taken, that the dead-man’s-car story was so old it could probably be found in the Aramaic, referring to a sedan chair or a chariot.
But the old stories were the best, or they wouldn’t have lasted so long. Stories were to be believed. Even when you didn’t believe them you believed them because you knew how you wanted them to come out.
“Hey Paul, you got any beer?” he said.
Short Round was perfectly willing not only to be interrupted but to drop his games immediately. “Yeah, but it’ll squirt all over the place. It’s a squirty case, I don’t know why. Nobody dropped it. Usually you can open Pabst warm okay, but this you got to watch or you’ll get a bath.”
“Go get me a couple,” Allard said, handing him fifty cents. Pleased by the order, Short Round went to get the beer.
Allard would wear his suit, he decided, under army fatigues, so he could peel off the fatigues at Mary’s house and enter formally. The motorcycle would unnerve Mr. Tolliver enough.
Short Round came back with three cans of beer—one for himself—and put them down gingerly on Allard’s desk. “You got a church key?” he said. Allard had a church key. He took one of the cans and opened it at the window so the spray would go mostly outside, then capped the hole with his mouth and drank the pressured warm bitterness. When the pressure eased, he said, “I’ve got to ride the Red Wonderplane to Concord.”
“To see Mary,” Short Round said diffidently.
“Yeah. How did you know?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Somebody mentioned it.”
“Hmm.” His eye was dangerous to Short Round, who looked away. But Short Round liked that danger. The world was full of exceedingly different pleasures.
He rode the old motorcycle toward Concord, the slow, long-stroking engine pulling him over the hills and through the valleys. Even though this trip brought him toward a confrontation he really didn’t want to have, the riding was a pleasure. It still seemed miraculous to him that an engine and not his legs moved him across the land, down the curving highway at forty-five miles an hour. The rural state presented to him in passing so many pleasant vistas of green fields and the deeper green of pines and spruce, white houses and grayed barns, elms like benevolent high fountains of wood and leaves above stone walls, old maples with trunks like knotted muscles, arms of the earth. He passed through little towns consisting of a general store, a garage with gas pump, a town hall and church no bigger than houses. Into valleys, over small rivers, part of a lake blue and sparsely cabined, a bass fisherman casting from the highway beside his pickup truck. Onward steadily, easily, the engine’s oily heat between his legs, the warm wind a receiving push his body parted firmly and smoothly, mile after mile.
The miles were more precious because of the destination that moved toward him as he moved across the state. Unless he turned around, or went on by, soon that destination would surround him with its particularities and demands.
He rode down the long hill from East Concord, the State House dome a small gold bubble across the river, then over the metal-grate bridge with its gruesome potential toward his flesh. Once into the small, rather dingy city, he turned north in heavier traffic, watching the intent of all drivers lest they be blind or mad. It was ominously, almost unfairly, easy to find the row of sooty duplex houses across the road from and above the mill they served. He drove up the short, steep driveway of Number 16b and parked his motorcycle, the rangy machine leaning raffishly on its kickstand beside the small garage made long ago for a Model T or a Model A. The dark houses crowded around him. It seemed a descent into other people’s lives to intrude into the density of this place. Everything was dusty, brown. Even the grass, where it was allowed to survive within narrow borders, seemed to grow behind an iron gray filter. Stunted shrubs brushed the cement foundations of the houses. Down across the street next to the river
the long, dark mill, once powered by water, smoked and steamed tiredly here and there along its length. Looking at the river now he couldn’t imagine how it had ever been lively enough to power anything. A tepid brown, it puddled slowly about within its scum-enameled banks, barely able to carry off the mill’s brownish foam. Brown. All the houses were painted brown, the wood deep within thick paint, a capitulation to the inevitable tones of the dim factory air. Yet this color, on the modest filigree of porch columns and banisters, seemed also to want to indicate dignity and permanence. A sad meticu-lousness in the choice of dark gray trim here and there, as on the frames of windows and the narrow doors, proved that someone was conscious of design. White lace curtains could be seen through clean glass, light keeping out light, inside a perpetual autumn. How different, as if this were a descent into the past, it all was from Allard’s home in Leah, where crisp white houses were surrounded by grass so green it seemed to glow, even in the dusk, from within each blade.
Mary had been watching for him and came, vivid as a butterfly, from the old house. She wanted to kiss him, but before this intent became too obvious he was taking off the army fatigues he’d worn over his suit. She took them, cradling the soiled GI cloth in her bright arms. She wore a yellow dress so neatly held to her quick body at waist and bodice, so airily swirling at her legs, that she was made preciously delicate by it, as though she were brand-new and he’d never seen her before.
The Hair of Harold Roux Page 21