At home he stalls the Honda again. When he comes out of the garage the cat, across ten yards of grass, stares at him. It has a live, thinking, bright-eyed chipmunk in its teeth. The cat always takes its prey to an open place where it can play out its torture with little chance of the victim’s escape. The cat is wary because at times Aaron, perceiving a common look, a fellow look in the victim’s eyes, goes charging and roaring after the cat, who then grabs the victim and finds another more distant arena. These pleasures must be taken slowly.
This chipmunk has already lost the skin and fur of its tail, the bare red bone naked to the air, each small vertebra plain to the eye. Seeing that it isn’t one of Aaron’s days to charge, the cat lets the chipmunk go. It turns, knowing it can’t get away, and assays a fearsome front by chattering and trying to fluff its skinless tail into a threat. The cat growls and turns away. The chipmunk gets six feet toward an apple tree before a hook enters its abdomen and jerks it back to the delicate teeth that are so careful not to extinguish life, which is what is all the fun. With birds the cat kills more quickly—say after ten minutes of this. Perhaps birds are more delicate, or the cat can’t tell if they are as yet too sick to fly. For its fellow mammals it reserves the longest, most thoughtful deaths.
Janie loves this cat, or this cat wouldn’t be. It is an affectionate, cuddly, nose-touching cat, as endearing as the devil can make himself. That Janie must love this killer, even though she knows its cruelty, hurts Aaron. He can take such truths about life—God knows he has to. But a child? Don’t be so bloody sentimental, he tells himself; it’s as if you can’t remember childhood as it really was. Or anything as it really is. He has found a stone half as big as his fist, and he throws it with all his strength as if to kill the cat he cannot kill. The stone of course misses the cat, who jumps, takes its live plaything and departs.
Mary and Allard were at Lilliputown. They had come in the afternoon to swim in the rocky pool above the little village. One at a time they had changed into their swimming suits in the nearest cabin—a miniature bungalow on the outside, a room with double bed and bathroom on the inside. Harold decided he had too much paper work to do, so he couldn’t swim with them, but he opened the bungalow and gave them towels before he went back to the Town Hall.
Mary and Allard sat on the ledges in the sun, warming up after their first plunge into the cold pool.
“I wonder if Harold can’t swim because of his wig,” Allard said.
“It’s too bad,” Mary said. “I wonder if he’d be what he’s like now if he didn’t wear it.”
“I wonder what he looks like without it.”
“I don’t think girls care so much about that sort of thing.”
“Well, it’s hard not to feel proud that you’ve got your own real hair,” Allard said, pulling on his.
They hadn’t touched each other. Allard shivered, feeling himself to be a tensely vibrating system of muscle and bone, every part connected just right, nothing slack or extra. Mary, in her yellow one-piece bathing suit, looked the same to him, except that she had a tan from sunbathing on an upper porch of her dormitory. She was dusky blonde, gold on brown. His own whiteness seemed to him bony, rangy, ready for some violent act or other. He followed when she dove in again, and caught her slim ankle under water, then followed her legs with his hands, to her hips, her waist, her breasts, her arms, and kissed her on the lips as they stood together. “Allard!” she said. For him the cold no longer existed. He held her against the length of him, his hands on the small of her back. She was gleaming, fresh, her hair darkened by the water. She loved to have him kiss her; she wanted to melt into him, it seemed, even letting his leg move forward between her thighs.
“Let’s take our suits off,” he said.
She laughed. “Don’t be silly, Allard.”
“I’m not silly. I want to see all of you.”
“No, we can’t do that. It’s dangerous enough as it is.”
“What’s dangerous?” Her thighs slipped along his leg.
“You’re dangerous.”
“I’m not dangerous to you, Mary.”
“Yes, you are.”
“I swear I’m not dangerous.”
“Yes, you are.”
They argued this point as they held each other, her hands moving over his back, the most definite immobile contact between his leg and her small mound down there, his hands on her lower back exploring delicate muscles and hollows here and there, some of them out of bounds if it weren’t for the covering innocent water and of course her bathing suit which was like armor to him. She must feel his gross bulge against her but she chose not to be skittish about it now. She must have thought about that part of him, and he wondered what she made of this so obvious thing she caused: His body changes shape when he touches me. I do that to him, make him grow enormous. Did she think that? Or maybe she thought it was some uncouth thing he did to himself.
He put his hands on her shoulders and slipped the straps of her suit down her arms. She looked at once entirely different, lusher, more fleshly, older even. He kissed her between her breasts before he let her raise her arms to replace the straps upon their white lines.
“Oh!” she said, and swam away from him. She climbed with a woman’s pelvic grace up onto the ledge and wrung some water out of her hair, staring at him, staring with a dark, worried, wondering intensity at him as he swam toward her. He climbed up beside her and she glanced once at, and quickly away from, the long ridge that was like a piece of wood beneath the cloth of his trunks.
“Are you afraid of me?” he asked.
“I’m afraid, yes.”
“You don’t have to be afraid of me.”
“I’m not really afraid of you, Allard.”
He thought it marvelous that he could actually talk to this beautiful creature, that in spite of the difference between them that was changing him into what was essentially a beast they could still talk to one another.
Two nights later they lay on his poncho in College Woods looking up at the few stars they could see through the sighing branches of the pines. He had sensed in Mary what was, for her, a rather reckless mood. If Mary could ever be reckless, she had seemed that way when he picked her up on the Indian Pony at her dormitory. There had been no hesitation, no hint of the broken promise to her father.
“It’s a crazy night,” she said now in the starlight. “Or maybe I’m going crazy.”
“Why?” He opened a can of beer and handed it to her. She felt for and found it in the dim light.
“This, for one thing.”
“You were surprised when you liked it.”
“I didn’t like the first taste. Too sour or something. But now I really think I like it.”
“My promise makes you feel safe with me now?”
“Yes. Yes, Allard.”
She was troubled by having had to exact the promise from him that he would not “take advantage of her.” Before they had gone swimming alone at the rocky pool, he was certain, she never would have felt such a promise necessary. But now their true love was more than merely haunted by this other thing. Supposedly, though she wouldn’t want, ever, to have to be in any way legal about the question, his promise had now removed the danger. Yes, but even though she was incredibly innocent about the actual process, she knew what he wanted, and whatever he wanted her love wanted to grant to him. She didn’t know that throughout the whole steamy history of mankind this promise had always been not so much a pure lie as a contract made by parties who hadn’t the real authority to make it.
Soon they put down their cans of beer and moved into each other’s arms, breathing, soft, gauzy about the edges, warm, sighing. The pines sighed too in the warm wind. The earth beneath them was firm below its forgiving coverlet of aromatic needles. No one would come to startle them because they were deep in the quiet woods. The stars, seen through the pines, were distant and discrete, as coolly eternal as if their orbits took them far beyond God.
Aaron Benham, abandoned by his
family, sits at his desk wondering how much Mary Tolliver did know, wondering how much he knows, wondering about everything. Here is a moment, deep in the distant past, the distant half-past, or non-past, or ever-present past which, it has been said, is (still) the single most traumatic event in a girl’s college life. Mary is six months past her eighteenth birthday, just finishing her freshman year in college. All vital signs normal. Her period is due in about a week, give or take a day. She is lying on a boy’s poncho that has been spread over the long soft needles of white pines, on a balmy, starlit night in June, having a beer, which she has just recently decided she likes. It has been a dry spring and the mosquitoes and black flies are few, a prosaic consideration that could be quite important. She cannot but believe that she is deeply in love with this boy (man, really, for he is twenty-one, a veteran of the recent war). She is a very pretty girl and no boy has ever been able to talk straight to her before, to talk without blushes, awkward pauses, strange glandular twitches and obstructions of vision. But this boy seems unaffected by those adolescent spasms altogether. His palms are dry, his gaze intense but unembarrassed, his sense of humor unwounded by her beauty.
So he fucks her.
No! Jesus God, how did that tonality burst in?
All tonalities are possible to lustful, cruel, fickle, various, faithless humankind. Remember, too, that something mechanical is about to happen, and there is the question of proper documentation. The crude mechanics themselves are basely stimulating, mostly to men, as though any woman will do as long as she has the usual functioning parts. He must ask himself what, exactly, are the proper uses of the word in rendering such activity, providing it should be rendered at all.
He held her gently, carefully, in his arms. He was aware of dimensions, borders, the exact anatomical tensions and vectors of the two trembling bodies, one his. And of belts and buttons, zippers, elastic, silken forbidden places. These were not to be undone and opened to him by skill alone. His ally was love; she loved him. They kissed, tongues touching, and she pushed him away with a little moan.
“Is it wrong for me to kiss you?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. His arm lay lightly across her waist.
“Even if I put my hand on your breast?” he said, putting his hand lightly on her breast. He could feel the seams of her little harnesses. She put his hand back on her waist. Her blouse, of a glowing, slippery material, was coming out of the waistband of her skirt. His fingers touched silken skin.
When he kissed her again his body leaned over hers, the tentative beginning of its move toward where it would go. He was careful not to let her feel the presence of his erection; that subject, that thing, must be kept hidden.
Time passed, an ooze of time they hardly noticed while she took what was to her too much pleasure and while he moved in an excruciating slowness toward what he would have. She had allowed his hands the neutral though bare skin of her sides, the tight young skin of her ribs. His knee had traveled cautiously, pretending honesty—an honest stretch— across her thigh, and soon he lay mostly on top of her.
“Allard, I think we’d better go,” she said, truly out of breath.
Time passed, and she would raise her lips to his to be kissed. He wondered through a haze of pleasure how she could be unaware that her skirt had worked up her thighs. She must know that she held her legs together against a gentle insistence, his firm yet somehow innocent insistence of pressure that it would be more comfortable for them both if he could just lie between them.
“Why don’t you let me put my hands on your breasts?” he asked.
“No, no, Allard. This is too …”
“How can that hurt you?” he asked rationally, gently. “I wouldn’t hurt you, Mary.”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“I wouldn’t hurt you, Mary.”
“I love you, Allard.”
“I love you, Mary.”
“You won’t do anything? You won’t take advantage of me?” She spoke in a small voice. “Oh, we’d better go. This is too much. I almost feel sick.”
“I could never hurt you,” he said.
“Promise?” she asked in a little girl’s voice. “Promise you won’t do anything more?”
“I promise, Mary.”
In time she let him unbutton her blouse, undo her brassiere and touch her naked breasts. When he kissed her hard little nipples she shuddered and squirmed beneath him and her legs opened.
“Stop now,” she said. “Now you must stop, Allard.”
“All right,” he said. He covered her breasts with her blouse, covered them against the night air and the stars. Then, pretending a kink in his leg, stretched and at the same time opened his pants and with quick fingers freed his erection. The air burned it. He kept its touch from her. They kissed, and she moaned.
“Oh, my goodness/’ she said. “Oh, oh. I almost feel sick.”
He kissed her nipple, gently sucking its rubbery little button, and she squirmed again. He pulled the crotch band of her panties aside, opened her easily in the gentle watery oil and went in. A hardly felt ring of resistance, then he was all inside her and she knew what he was doing.
“Oh, God! Oh, God!” she said. “What are you doing?” She struggled to get away. “My God! You’re doing it to me!” He held her down, and when her voice grew too loud, as if to keep it from offending the deep woods, he put his mouth over hers. She struggled against him and her love for him, how he was defining her, but after a while that melting, that love, was all that she was. She let him move upon her, moving with him, though real tears came from her eyes and wet her cheeks and hair. As he felt himself changing toward orgasm she moaned. She was all sweetness, all women yet this one woman here in the private night, receiving him. She was more complete than all the rest of the earth and its objects, complete with him, as though they were one beast breathing and moaning in the forest, having one bloodstream, connected forever at their deepest places. Then all his flesh began its changes. For one moment he thought of danger, but he was beyond all that and he loved her. He saw white light as his body gave her what it had to give to her. As the light burst and waned he slowly lost his strength, as if the beast’s heart slowed and grew thick.
After a while he slipped from her, kissed her with affection and lay on his back, open to the cool air, cool and empty.
At first she lay as if stunned, then freed herself from his arm and got up on her knees. She returned from the golden heat of their oneness slowly, cooling, full of wonder and fright. She cried bitterly. She loved him and he had broken his promise. Now she had left herself behind, left behind her the friendliness, the purity, the openness; she had turned into something else, an alien creature, defiled, guilty of it all. She loved him, but now that love was sordid, infected by the flesh, illicit in the eyes of God.
She cried, “I trusted you!” She seemed to be trying to organize herself so she could run away. When she bent down, feeling for a part of her clothes, he pulled her down next to him. “Ugh!” she said, fighting him. “I know you now! You’re a liar! You said you loved me but you never meant to keep your promise!”
Then she lay passively beside him, weeping silently. After a while she let him kiss her gently, and rub her back. Her lips were soft as down from crying. “I do love you, Mary,” he said. “I just couldn’t help it. Do you understand?”
“Yes.” Then, thinking: “No! What you did!” She let him kiss her and responded, for a moment softening toward him, then remembered: “It can’t have happened! I trusted you!”
Though he loved her and pitied her unhappiness at the moment, he felt that she was, perhaps, a little too hysterical, or that these instantaneous changes of feeling were just a little too irrational. Ah, but how she had responded, finally. Her body had responded to his with such beauty the memory of it caused him to begin to rise again. Careful now, he thought. You have in your arms something of so much value you can’t appraise it. She could be hurt, damaged or lost. Be careful. It was time f
or rational discussion now, using the words that would reshape the usual world. He would like to take her again, right now. But first would come a form of rational equality. Talk.
“When was your last period?” he asked her.
“What? My last what?”
“You know what I mean, Mary. The last time you menstruated.”
She took the question thoughtfully. He understood the great revolution of delicacy, of taboo, that she must now begin to experience. But they would talk, and she would find a way to tell him the unmentionable.
He found their beers and offered one to her. For a moment she lay still, thinking her long thoughts, then sat up and took it. He touched her breast and she recoiled.
“Well?” he said. “Can you remember? It makes a difference about whether or not you’ll get pregnant.”
She shuddered and turned away from him, her light blouse a vague gleam in the starlight.
“Because we didn’t use anything, you know.”
“No, I don’t know. I don’t know anything,” she said bitterly. “I’m due to have my period in about a week, I think. I don’t keep track of it that carefully.”
“It’s probably all right then,” he said.
“I wouldn’t know. I don’t know anything except what you did to me.”
“What we did together,” he said.
“I can’t believe it,” she said, but he detected a small amount of wonder that was not despair. Perhaps there was room for some wonder about growing up and having such experiences.
It was getting late and she had to sign in at eleven. He got her back to her dormitory with ten minutes to spare, but she wouldn’t speak or let him kiss her good night. She turned away, thoughtful, almost grim as she walked up the steps in the lights of the portico.
The Hair of Harold Roux Page 30