Knuck would be the head coach of the Chicago Bears, carried on the shoulders of his men across the field after their championship victory, the hoarse jock shouts sweet in his ears, his Cadillac and high-class broad waiting and the cold kiss of a shower to get the champagne out of his ears, his ass red from the smacking spanks of heroic giants. Fame, money, approval and good booze.
Hilary foresaw a gentle, ordered life as a partner in his stepfather’s law firm, a fine house in dark brown tones, leather, tweed, very good wine, a beautiful wife, sailing his ketch off the Cape on summer days.
Nathan would be privy to affairs of state, he and his noble wife, Angela (Fitzgibbon) Winston, entertaining the great and near-great in their town house off Copley Square. Polite, suave, rich, clever, yet engagingly witty and erudite, Nathan would be known as the man who had gracefully turned down the Republican nomination for governor of Massachusetts in favor of a less visible yet more interesting position with the State Department in Washington, where he and Angela would host, from their town house in Georgetown, national and international luminaries. Surviving by talent, and as if by miracle, all party rises and defeats, perhaps in the middle of a distinguished career an appointment to the Supreme Court might beckon, but for now we will leave these glittering yet broadly cultured people of affluence and power …
“Bullshit,” Naomi said in a friendly, almost dreamy voice. “You’re talking about a fantasy, a doomed decadent anachronistic bunch of shit that never existed in the first place.”
“Oh, something like that exists,” Angela said. “Naomi, I swear it does exist because I’ve been fairly near to it, you know.”
“Reality is the poor, the people …”
“‘Yearning to be free,’” Allard said.
“Yearning to get rich and screw the rest of the masses.”
“Oh Jesus, Allard,” Naomi said. “Drink your beer.”
“‘Revolution destroys the worst and the best in a society’ —I. V. Lenin.”
“So?”
“So how can I trust the dumb-ass masses, not to mention their commissars, when I can’t even trust myself? That trust would be the biggest fantasy of all.”
“Just because you’re a shit …”
The others weren’t listening to this exchange. Harold and Mary were talking to each other, Allard and Naomi having drawn closer together across the blankets behind them, in their shadows. The sky was bright, but the trees and rocks bled darkness all around the embers of the fire. The little falls splashed at the head of the pool. Naomi lay on her stomach, her face framed by her long hands, her long black hair gleaming, the dark gold of her shoulders cut by the narrow straps of her swimming suit. He reached over and freed the straps so they came down her arms. She looked at him steadily.
“Let’s take a dip,” he said.
“What about…” She nodded toward Harold and Mary.
“We’re all friends here. Anyone for a dip?” he added in a louder voice.
“Mary and I are going for a walk,” Harold said. “We’ve got some things to talk about. Do you mind, Allard?”
“Somehow I trust you, Harold,” he said. Mary looked very serious, somber over the magnitude of their conversation. She put on her sneakers and arranged her towel around her shoulders. They strolled off down the path, Harold speaking to her in a low voice.
When they had gone, Naomi put on her bathing cap and she and Allard slipped into the cool water. Across at the ledges she took his hands in hers when he began to take her straps down again. “You must feel pretty important,” she said.
“All I feel is that I want to go inside you.”
“This is ridiculous.”
He took off his trunks and put them on the ledge, feeling the movement of the water displaced by her.
“Doesn’t the cold affect you at all?” Naomi said. “No, I can see it doesn’t.” Her hand had touched him lightly before it fled away, quick as a fish.
“Just the opposite,” he said.
“Jesus Christ,” she said, letting him peel her suit down away from her beautiful freed flesh. He went underwater, down the long columns of her legs, and brought her black suit back up, shapeless now. She glowed through the water, cool and uninterrupted beneath his hands.
“It feels so strange,” she said. “It feels so strange in the water. I feel so naked.” Her hands came and examined him. “Your little scrotum feels like a couple of walnuts.” Her hands drew quickly away, and she turned and swam away from him underwater.
They went the length of the pool, where he cornered her by the little falls, Naomi turning in the white water, the rising bubbles stinging his skin. She wouldn’t let him hold her, but kept turning, moving her long legs across his body as he came at her. He reached for her in the foam, the bubbles like carbonation clinging to her skin that was smooth, grainy, slippery. Her breasts were moved by the water and by her defensive contortions. She was his, wasn’t she? Some anger rose in him and he grabbed her roughly by untender places and entered her. She continued to struggle, meaning it, even hurting him, until it was too unreasonable to him and she turned victim, woman to be taken. For that moment he thought nothing else of her and let his seed explode deep inside her.
When he had finished grinding and pumping, she put her face close to his in order to see him more clearly in the dim light. “Well,” she said. “I hadn’t been raped lately.”
He was quiet and sad.
“We might just get a baby from that bit of irresponsibility,” she said.
He had come out from where he wondered why he had gone. Could she feel his sperm swimming up toward her center? Dark Naomi, the Jewess, daughter of a people leading back through ancient times in caravans, with herds of goats into the Old Testament and beyond. Dark blood, dark flesh, tribal oil and wine, sweat and genocide. And now his Anglo-Saxon sperm, pale and callow, moved into strangeness like tiny Vikings in a dark sea. Come back, he wanted to call to himself, but his mindless silver things could not be recalled. He shivered, the central warmth of her blood making him apprehensive and open to the cold of the water.
“Are you still going to marry Mary?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t know anything.”
He swam back toward their swimming suits, wanting to be covered. She followed, turning and gamboling in the water, enjoying her nudity. While he tried to put on his trunks she poked and tickled him.
“Cut it out!” he whispered.
“Cut it out! Cut it out!” she said, imitating him. “What’s the matter? You sure wanted to play a minute ago.”
“I don’t know what I want to do.”
He gave up trying to put on his trunks and just stood there in the water, his feet on the grainy ledge below. She circled around him, treading water, her knees coming up, her breasts pointing at him.
“Why didn’t you say it was Mary you wanted next to you in that apartment in New York? Don’t you know how unhappy it made her when you didn’t say it was her?”
“No. I didn’t think,” he said.
“Do you ever think?” She grew quiet, standing on her tiptoes. Someone had put wood on the fire across the way and its distant light flickered across her high cheekbone. Hilary’s ukukele tinkled, a lonely sound. The water between their bodies seemed to make them touch.
“Anyway,” he said, “maybe in that daydream it’s you, once you’ve lost all that Stalin crapperino and have your brains back again.”
She didn’t move for a moment. “Do you mean that?” she said.
“Yeah, Naomi. I don’t think, I just say what I mean.”
“You make me feel funny saying a thing like that.” She had moved an inch closer to him and he took her nipples delicately between the tips of his fingers. “Allard, you know you may have made me pregnant.”
“Yes, there’s millions of me swimming inside you. Can you feel them?”
“I don’t mind.”
His cautious brain was again severed from the sources of power. She kissed him and p
ut her chin across his shoulder. This time it was with consent, and in the strange element that made her buoyant and firm, they made small, slow waves, her legs around him. The pond moved with them. The water seemed to give slowly, then push them back into each other with a slow volition of its own. He seemed slow yards long.
Later, when they came dreamily out of the water, their suits properly back on, Nathan got up and came over to Allard as he toweled himself off by the fire. “Harold and Mary came back, Allard. I’m afraid they saw you and Naomi and then they went away again.”
“They saw us?”
“Yeah. I hadn’t noticed what you were doing until I saw them looking. I guess they had a better view, standing up, you know. Anyway, it was pretty obvious.”
Knuck and Vera had gone, taking their blanket. Hilary had drunk too much beer and was asleep next to his ukulele, someone having put an extra blanket over him.
“What do you think we ought to do?” Angela said.
“It’s my fault, but I feel sorry for Mary,” Naomi said, looking accusingly at Allard.
He did not like to think of Mary seeing their urgent rhythms in the water, she perhaps thinking at first that the shoulders she saw were not his, then having to know that they were. He went to his clothes and found a cigarette.
“Should we go find them?” Angela asked. “I suppose the party’s fairly well over.”
“I feel awful. I feel like a bitch,” Naomi said.
“Well, I’d better find them,” Allard said, though he wondered what the proper talents might be. While the girls turned away, he and Nathan changed into their clothes.
They walked unhappily, or at least uncertainly, down the path to Lilliputown. Because he was the agent of Mary’s and Harold’s unhappiness, Allard found it hard to consider the moment truly tragic. And if he were the cause, he might somehow undo the unhappiness. Naomi was keeping away from him, walking upon her handsome legs on the other side of Nathan and Angela, her graceful hips encompassing (a painful sweet thought) part of him. A nearly full moon had risen over the trees. He moved to her side.
“Are you going to marry her?” Naomi said.
“Do you think I should?”
“Have you told her you would?”
“I can’t exactly remember if I did or not.”
“Have you told her you loved her?”
“Yes, I guess so.”
“Well, do you?”
“I guess so.”
“Christ!”
Like giants, aware of their heavy footsteps, they came down among the silent streetlights and the elms of the village.
Somewhere in this happy complex of miniatures, the Colonel’s work of art, Mary was probably crying, Harold holding her hand. How sad, how serious their thoughts would be. Mary would know now that Allard had lied to her for mere lust of the flesh, destroyed her honor just to toy with her, sent her to eternal damnation with no more thought than he might give to flicking away a cigarette. She had loved him more than she loved God. What a stupid fool she’d been! To him she was nothing more than a vessel, a … cunt. That was what he must think of her, what he’d thought of her from the very beginning. And Naomi, who’d pretended to be so friendly and nice. And all the time …
“What will you say to her?” Naomi asked.
“I was going to ask you the same question.”
He and Nathan waited by the laundry room, which was disguised as a livery stable for dog-sized horses, while the girls dressed. Nathan squeezed his shoulder. “Maybe it’s worse finding out something you wouldn’t let yourself think about,” he said.
“Yeah.”
When Angela and Naomi came out, they all stood looking at each other for an indecisive moment. Allard wondered if it was absolutely necessary to have this confrontation. Evidently it was. He knew he had to find Mary and say what he could. If he got her alone he might patch things up somewhat. How, he didn’t know. There would be a certain amount of lying involved. He felt tenderness for Mary, and pity for her. She should not have had to see him and Naomi in the water; that was wrong. He had caused that. And there would be Harold’s parent-like, moral outrage to listen to.
They walked across a miniature stone bridge, single file, and came through the poplars by the walk along the railroad track. The Town Hall showed a light here and there; the Railroad Station was all dark. Without speaking they entered the small foyer, or lobby, of the Town Hall. The door to Harold’s quarters was open, light coming into the dim foyer. Nathan tapped on the doorframe and they all stepped into the room. Mary sat in the davenport, small, smudged around the eyes when she gave Allard a look and looked down again. She still wore her bright yellow bathing suit, her white towel over her shoulders. Her hair, slightly damp, was darkened by the moisture and curled at its ends into pathetic little ringlets.
Harold sat beside her, holding her hand. He gave it back to her and stood up, pale and stern. Anger did his homely face no justice; his nose was sharp and bloodless around the nostrils, and his eyes, in spite of their brightness, were gummy and moist.
“Well!” he said. His pinched, vibrating anger seemed to constitute a danger to his toupee, that perfectly parted cloud of darkness above his white forehead.
“Well,” Nathan said, “we sort of figured the party was over so we wanted to thank you and all that, Harold. We’ll go back and collect Hilary and clean up all the bottles and stuff.”
Harold wouldn’t look at Naomi or Allard, but seemed to direct all his outrage toward Nathan. “The party! What a joke! It’s all over as far as I’m concerned!”
Naomi suddenly went to Mary and sat down next to her. “Mary?” she said. “Mary? We all love you, honey. You know that, don’t you?”
Allard was stunned by that speech. It seemed entirely out of his league.
“Love!” Harold shouted. “Love!”
“Yes, love,” Naomi said. “So why don’t you calm down and shut up, Harold?” She turned back to Mary.
“I want you to get out of here!”
“Aw, come on, Harold,” Nathan said, embarrassed.
“Yes, Harold,” Angela said. “There’s really not enough reason for all this shouting and anger, is there?” She looked down upon him from her smooth, somewhat monumental height. “After all, Naomi and Allard are old friends, you know, and in a moment of passion who knows what can happen? What I mean to say is that such incidents are not terribly unexpected or unforgivable.”
“Unexpected!” Harold was truly startled, breathless for a moment. “Old friends!” He choked. His trachea did not seem up to these heights of emotion.
“Don’t blither, Harold,” Angela said sternly. “Let us discuss this, if we must, in calm voices.”
“You! I can’t understand any of you! Mary found it very unexpected! She was in love with this monster. In spite of her faith she was willing to marry him, and then, at a party, she finds them—her roommate, her so-called friend, and the man she loves—naked, fornicating! Do all of you think this is just something casual? A joke? Do you have any idea how Mary felt? Is this the way you treat other people, the way you’d like to be treated? You’re monsters! All of you are monsters!” Harold hit his hands on his thighs and choked again. “Practically betrothed, and promises, and I can’t understand …”
Mary said, “No, Harold.”
“What?”
“I was never sure about that.”
“The bastard! The complete, utter bastard!” This time Harold’s standards had been so unforgivingly violated he was through with friendship, with all of that. All of that was over.
“Yeah, well, okay, Harold,” Allard said.
“You shut up! Who asked you anything? And why don’t you just get out of here?”
Allard saw with sadness Mary’s narrow, delicate fingers, her pale knuckles each a little jewel of bone beneath the clear skin. Her wrists were so slim yet squarish, with such tidy sturdiness. He looked from Mary to Naomi, at Naomi’s long fingers, the dark gold of her skin, a hazy fuzz of fur on he
r long arms. Black silky hair next to Mary’s finer dark blond silk. Mary’s eyes were bothered, dingy from crying but beautiful inside the lids—and there, she looked up for a second and he caught that green fleck of jade. She wouldn’t look at Naomi, who leaned over her to comfort her. Naomi, who’d had sex with Allard, just as Mary had. He wondered what images Mary had of that sex, or if she even thought of organs and lengths and diameters. Maybe not. A man did because certain of his dimensions actually had to change. Maybe Harold didn’t think of it that way, either. Poor Harold.
Mary looked up again, her mouth trembling at one corner, but turning down, then, toward irony. A little pucker came and went on the exact point of her chin. He didn’t mind this caught feeling of already being married to her because he did love her, as far as he could tell. He cared about how she felt right now, which was pretty awful and embarrassed. Her swift, ironic scowl-pout now told him that. He knew, too, that she hadn’t done any real confessing to Harold, and that caused a wave of love for her, for her real dignity. And for Naomi, who’d said, “We all love you, honey.” Honey! Where did Naomi get that word?
“My feelings were hurt,” Mary said in a weak, breathy voice. “I felt sorry for myself. That’s all. Nobody has to marry me or anything like that.”
Saying that, she was so beautiful his eyes dimmed. He felt that he was the only alien here, a nonhuman observer among real people who could say the truth about themselves, while he watched from a position of strength that was really coldness, selfishness. He wanted Mary and Naomi. It was as if they were so much meat and bone, hair and skin. Their female complexities, their womanness, their givingness, even the dark differences of uterus and womb—the mere youth that he was, all of whose history was open and known to him, had no right to claim these others whenever he chose, for his own gratification. He could make either of them unhappy with a word or a glance. He should not be allowed that power.
“Of course your feelings were hurt,” Naomi said. “He should have kept his hands off you in the first place.”
The Hair of Harold Roux Page 35