Now at least they had a place to go.
Though they still didn’t know that many couples, didn’t double-date, were there—at least, as her legacy, Druff was—on sufferance, like a guest of a member of a country club, say. Now they didn’t have to meet outside movie houses. These days he could pick her up at the sorority. (Gradually they stopped sitting in on each other’s classes, stopped going to coffeehouses; gradually they even stopped going to movies.) And if, collectively, they were novelties to the girls of Chi Phi Kappa, the girls of Chi Phi Kappa were even greater novelties to Druff. Rose Helen was a novelty to Druff. Indeed, Druff was a novelty to Druff. (It was strange—that simmering maleness, his ballsy, newfound exhibitionist’s swagger, his vain regard, his simmering chemical privilege and liberties—but these days he always went about feeling as if he had on brand-new clothes.)
Even though he knew no more people now than he did before, even though, except for Rose Helen, he had no friends there, only, here and there, a few people he could nod to—the waiter from Druff’s boardinghouse, three or four of the pledges—Druff had become a sort of fixture around the place. The fact was they rarely left the sorority house. On weekdays he came there to study with Rose Helen and, if one was unoccupied, they would go into a tiny study room. (Since the night of the serenade when she had gone to the door and closed it herself and then negotiated with him the unspoken rules of their relationship, the study was never closed when they were in it.) At ten-thirty, however, he was the first male out of the house. Even on weekends, when the curfew was extended until midnight, he was always the first to leave.
It was as if he understood their sufferance (he did), their combined weight on the thin social ice that supported them. And if he was political, he thought, it was a strange way to practice his politics, lying low, muting, as it were, his own horn, making himself scarce on the very dot of the curfew hour like a frightened Cinderella. Not like him, not like his position, or his presence during what he had almost come to think of as their office hours, the sorority’s, his own—he was there more often than any of the fraternity men who dated these girls, longer than the waiters who set their tables, served their dinners, washed their dishes—a position and presence which had become obsessive.
He could not keep his hands off her, their almost surgical, circumscripted petting as complicated as the careful, delicately drawn lines of a contended geography, treatied borders; obsessed (not just Druff, Rose Helen too) with the endless diversity, variations, interpretations and all the fine distinctions available to them within compliance. So that he became, they became, respective Casanovas, very Venuses, geniuses of foreplay.
He was never there during scheduled house meetings, secret rites, restricted practices. He was fastidious, meticulous with their curfews, and lived, like many fabulous criminals, by the letter of the law, as if he sought to keep his nose clean by always paying his taxes, going about like one shoving change into parking meters, or each day dropping by the library to show the librarian the due date on a still-not-overdue book. He kept, that is, his accounts with all of them, Rose Helen, the girls of Chi Phi Kappa, the frat boys who visited them, the housemother, Mrs. Post.
Yet it was no game he was playing, neither with Rose Helen nor with her sisters. He was not seeking to test the limits of their patience. He knew the limits of their patience. He didn’t observe their curfews out of any of the old olly-olly-oxen-free impulses of his childhood, but because he was quite terrified of them really, afraid of having his privileges stripped from him.
Because those privileges were large, new, rare, immense. It wasn’t just what happened between the two of them in the study (and much, despite the unimpeded view they afforded anyone who happened to be passing that open door of their strange love gymnastics, the compulsory Olympic figures they cut, did happen), but the incredible feeling he had at those times. It was exactly what he’d said when he’d first gone in there with her, that they were at last alone, his sense of their privacy somehow fed by the curfew he was forced to observe, by his knowledge that the door was open, that their exciting, dangerous gyrations were, well, almost—living on the edge, pushing the envelope, you can just imagine how he felt—adulterous, anyway risky, anyway more intimate than even what her cards looked like on the table—Druff permitted all.
The feeling, if anything, amplified on weekends when they never even got close to one of those studies. (It was understood that on weekends these rooms were reserved for upperclassmen and their dates.) Then they went out into the big music- drawing- living room- cum-library, whatever the architectural equivalent was for that commodious, luxurious center—the house’s real passion pit, he supposed. And there, in that crowded space—there might be upwards of a hundred people in it, girls returned with their dates from campus beer gardens, from dances, from parties, flicks, pep rallies, concerts, basketball games, celebrations—a strange thing happened. He melded in with them, felt that he had somehow become invisible, though the others were plainly visible to him, what they did—he heard sweaters sliding up over cotton blouses, glimpsed underpants, cleavage, flesh, erections—he brandished his own, less self-conscious, finally, than he might have been in a communal shower, a public bath—all about him could hear girls groaning, boys coming. (“Our comings and groanings,” he joked to Rose Helen.) Not a voyeur. In the scene. Of it. Could feel, hear, see, taste the mass dishevelment, some sense of the undone and awry, of smeared lipstick and smudged face powder, of colognes gone off and all the fired chemistry of naked pheromones. A passion pit indeed, a steamy, cumulative sense of the stuff growing, of love cells dividing, multiplying, building in the room like weather, rain cloud, say, electric storm, thunderclap, passionate waves sweeping over them, a kind of heavy sexual traffic, his hip at their haunches on the long, crowded window seats, so that what he felt was not just his own passion but his passion added to the passion of everyone else, his passion compounding, earning interest on the passion of both sexes. (As his own, he felt, increased theirs, all their activity and somber, solemn concentration conjoined, benefited, a public privacy, like the serenade Rose Helen thought was hazing but Druff understood as encouragement, warrant.) A great joy in this, like the joy in a marvelous parade. (Maybe he was political. Sure he was political! Oh boy, was he political! Necking with Rose Helen at Rose Helen’s sorority no orgy but a democratic manifestation, great island chains, archipelagoes of feeling, some republic of sexuality. Druff thinking, no wonder I was so horny when Mikey was screwing Su’ad that time, it was the proximity again, only my fatherly good Americanism. Thinking, no wonder he was, because if we’re our own children before they’re ever born, maybe they’re as childish as their fathers before the fathers have had a chance to grow up. And feeling this anachronistic unity with his son.)
So you can just imagine how he felt, you can just imagine.
His precious invisibility different in kind from the invisibility he so carefully cultivated at the curfew hour, or the invisibility they sought out on those lines outside the picture show, or in the coffeehouses, or could have used in that diner in town, the invisibility not only exciting but comforting—a shared invisibility. And for the first time since he met her unconscious of resentment, all resentment—his, theirs—dissolved or maybe only absorbed in the mutual, protective clouds of sperm that were a sort of collective atmosphere in the fancy room.
He was in his element. He loved Friday and Saturday nights, he loved e pluribus unum, and would willingly have traded four weeknights alone with Rose Helen in a study room for just one additional half hour of extended curfew on the cushioned window seats, long leather sofas, upholstered wing chairs, or stretched out with her in the sexual traffic on the fine Oriental rug in the big ground-floor room.
Which is just where Mrs. Post, the housemother, found them on the one night out of the eighty or so since Druff had been coming to the Chi Phi Kappa house, on the single occasion when he was not the first one out the door. A fixture indeed. And not only a fixture, but
someone whose habits were so well known by now it was said that you could set your watch by him. He had simply lost track of the time. Or no, that wasn’t quite true. As a matter of fact it was time he was thinking of at the time, how this was only a Friday, how they still had all Saturday together. (Because he loved her now, had discovered in just the last month, the past few weeks, that there was something there beyond the simple fact of her availability, the damaged-goods advantage he thought he had over her because of her two-year seniority and scarcely legible limp, which, if it was not completely put on, she had at least to take the trouble to memorize; a limp which wasn’t, he’d begun to realize, entirely natural, as a dance step is never entirely natural, but had always at least to be a little studied, like a runner’s stride or swimmer’s kick turn. Because he loved her, because no one could hold his tongue in someone else’s mouth for eighty out of the last hundred nights without developing a certain fondness for the head as a whole, the neck and everything it rested on. Teeth were just not that interesting—palates, gums, inlays, lips. Because he loved her, because he had come to appreciate her savage resentment, enjoy her outcast representations of herself, his own accreditation in the drama—he’d never played an outcaste before, had gotten by on his innate Mikeyness and good-boy behaviors; now they were in it together, Rose Helen, himself, could almost put Greek letters of their own beside their names—appreciate Rose Helen’s marvelous mimicry of the sisters and frat boys, even of the waiter from Druff’s boardinghouse. Because he loved her now, her fastidious dignity and rough, playful ways with her own rules. She had qualities. Also, she let him put his tongue in her head.) Thinking, this is only Friday, there’s still Saturday. Then thinking, Sundays we go our own ways, then it’s Monday and we’ll have all those ten-thirty nights in the study. Isn’t it peculiar, he thought, we do so much more to each other in the study than we ever try to do out here (where the rules were house rules, liberal enough, astonishing really, but ultimately table stakes), but to tell the truth (and he knew what was probably going on right now on the cots in those studies) he preferred it out here, though—they hadn’t talked about it, it was just, knowing her qualities, something he felt—he didn’t think Rose Helen did. Thinking all this (because you can’t do two things at once, you really can’t, not if you were to give each the attention it deserved), and meanwhile letting up on the very things he so loved about these Friday nights—the collective concentration, that mutual chemistry of fired nerves and cumulative, conjoined hip-to- haunch loving, at the same time that, though he didn’t realize this, he failed to hold up his end of the bargain—one hand on R.H.’s breast and the other starting to lift her dress while, absently, he nibbled her ear (not even aware of her squirming until later) in direct violation, though he was woolgathering, lollygagging, oblivious of all her Geneva conventions, not even excited, in his content mode, thinking, it’s only Friday, there’s still Saturday.
Mrs. Post was standing over them.
“What,” Druff said, startled, “what?”
She laid one finger across the face of her wristwatch.
“Is it curfew? I’m sorry, I mustn’t have been paying attention. Is it curfew already?”
Though here and there there were people about, the room had begun to thin out. The bays and window seats were cleared, the piano bench. No one cuddled in the wing chairs, the sofas were all but vacant.
Rose Helen sat up and, to Druff’s chagrin, immediately began to lay into her housemother.
“How dare you?” she demanded. “He’s not the only one left.” Pointedly, she named names, not only indicating a few of her sorority sisters still lingering with their dates, but ticketing indiscretions, citing violations of dress codes, some general dishevelment of human decency.
“I’m sorry,” Druff mumbled, “I guess I must have lost track of the time.”
Rose Helen interrupted him. “You’ve nothing to apologize for, why are you apologizing?” And turned furiously to Mrs. Post. “Have you looked in the study rooms? Is everyone out of the study rooms?” She tugged at his sleeve. “Let’s just go see for ourselves.”
“I’m sorry,” Druff said, “I wasn’t paying close enough attention, I guess. I just didn’t hear that bell you ring in here ten minutes before curfew.”
“Stop saying you’re sorry. No one else says that. Do you hear anyone else saying they’re sorry? It’s not your job to be sorry, it’s not your job to listen for the bell. It isn’t your job to have people set their watches by you.” She was furious with them both, Rose Helen. And though it was Rose Helen who did the shouting, it was Druff and Mrs. Post who got all the attention. The girls, their dates, looked from one to the other of them following their flabbergast silence. Druff felt an odd connivance with and sympathy for the housemother. It occurred to him that her heavy, almost powerful hair, its immaculate sheen, so at odds with her wan, brittle features, must have been a wig. “Well, come on,” Rose Helen said, “let’s just see what’s going on in those study rooms!”
“Most of those people are pinned,” Mrs. Post defended. “Many are already engaged.”
“So,” said Rose Helen, “they’re in there. They haven’t left! They’re in there, all right.”
“Please,” Druff said.
“No,” snapped Rose Helen, but not at Druff, at Mrs. Post, at her sorority sisters, at the fraternity boys, “I won’t please. Rules are rules. I’m going to empty out those study halls for you!” And then began exaggeratedly to limp about the now silent, curiously passionless passion pit, circling the big room and gathering, it seemed, a sort of momentum, and went out into the hall, going past the big staircase and continuing on toward the studies at the back of the sorority house.
He heard her roughly opening doors, heard her shout “Curfew, curfew” like a hysterical town crier.
“I’m going,” Druff called. “I’m leaving now, Rose Helen.”
“Curfew in there! Curfew!”
“I’ll phone you tomorrow,” he called. “Would you tell her I’ll call her tomorrow?” he appealed to Mrs. Post.
But she called him. It was almost three in the morning. It was the waiter from Druff’s boardinghouse who came to fetch him to the phone.
“It’s your girlfriend,” he said.
“So late?”
The waiter shrugged. “They ask for ketchup when it’s right out there on the table in front of them.”
“I hope nothing’s wrong,” he told the waiter.
“Sometimes, if it’s chicken cacciatore, or meat in a heavy gravy, they ask us to cut it up for them in the kitchen so they don’t dirty their hands or get grease on their clothes.”
“Rose Helen? Are you all right, Rose Helen?” He expected her to be crying. She wasn’t, though he could tell she seemed excited, even pleased. She didn’t scold him, didn’t even mention that he’d left without saying good night.
“I threatened to resign,” she said. He didn’t understand. “From the sorority, I threatened to resign from the sorority.”
“But why?” Druff said.
“Mrs. Post was there when I told them. Though you know, Robert,” she said, “I don’t blame Mrs. Post. She doesn’t make policy, she takes her signals from the girls.” Druff was uncomfortable. If any of this was on his behalf… “I’ve only just left them,” Rose Helen went on. “It could have been, I don’t know, a beauty parlor in there. You should have seen them. All those girls in their curlers and face goo…” He thought of her own soft, beautiful skin, oddly backlit, pearly from suffering, maybe from grudge. “Except for the few of us who were still in our clothes, it could have been a giant slumber party, all those girls in their shorty pajamas, some still clutching their teddies, the goofy, outsize turtles, froggies and stuffed kitty cats they take to bed with them. It was really rather touching.”
“You woke them? You got them out of bed?” (He thought of the ketchup right out there on the table in front of them, of the cut-up chicken cacciatore and of the meat in heavy gravy.)
&nbs
p; “I called a special meeting,” Rose Helen said. “I had charges, I had witnesses. You can call a special meeting when you have charges and witnesses.”
“Charges against who? Mrs. Post doesn’t make policy. She takes her signals from the girls, you said.”
“ ‘If I resign,’ I told them, ‘your room and board goes up. You’ve already lost Jan and Eileen this semester. Rachel’s on academic probation and may flunk out.’ ”
Druff thought of the furniture, of the grand piano, the Oriental rugs. He couldn’t imagine that whatever few dollars Rose Helen’s leaving might cost them could make a difference. He thought them rich enough to take up the slack by themselves. He didn’t want her to resign. He’d grown quite too accustomed to the furniture. Besides, even after he heard her speech, the good arguments she’d presented to get them to keep her from resigning (the money it could cost them if she quit; the straight-A average she maintained and which—“A rising tide raises all boats“—helped keep the Chi Phi G.P.A. just about where it needed to be in order to remain competitive and continue to attract prospective pledges—“Because supposing,” she argued, “Rachel doesn’t flunk out, supposing she just manages to keep her head above water and drags along with a D-plus or even a C-minus average, then losing all those A’s would really mean something”—throwing even her deformity into the argument, that limp that made her look so bad and them so good), he was still uncertain about her reasons. If this had anything to do with Druff… And what about Mrs. Post, who didn’t make policy, who took her signals from the girls? And what about the girls with their stuffed animals and face goo, and who were really rather touching?
“Charges?” Druff said. “Witnesses? Has this anything to do with me? Am I at fault here?”
The MacGuffin Page 9