“Why, against the girls in the studies, silly. And my witnesses against them were those boys I rousted.”
“Was Rachel there when you said these things? Were her feelings hurt? Did she cry?” he wanted to know.
Now she was more interesting than Druff.
She was political, certainly. It was those two years of seniority she had on him, had on most of them, plus all those other years of pure physical outrage, the one or two before they actually knew that anything was wrong, then the fifteen or so when she had to wear the successively larger braces to make the correction in her spine, to bring it to the point where it was barely noticeable, except possibly to Rose Helen, and which left scarcely a trace, unless it was to those who picked up on the tiny shelf she had made for it above her left hip where she could rest her palm. Because all that kicked into the seniority, too. Plus things he could have only a guesswork knowledge of. (Prosthetic bathing suits perhaps, prosthetic evening gowns.)
There were more meetings. Nothing, of course, was done to the girls Rose Helen had brought her charges against. She was political, perhaps she didn’t intend anything to come of them more than the apologies—which she got—and pleas to stay with the sorority, which she got.
In the end, however, she determined to resign from the sorority.
She told him she didn’t even want to live in a dorm, the fine new women’s residence hall the university had put up, that she’d prefer a room in a boardinghouse.
“A boardinghouse,” Druff said. “What’s so great about a boardinghouse? You live in a boardinghouse, you have a landlady. I’ve told you what mine is like, Rose Helen. They’re all like that.”
“It just seems,” she said, “I don’t know, romantic. You know what I really think? I think they won’t be around much longer. Those big old wood houses. They’re a piece of Americana. All those old landladies and landlords will die out one day. Their kids won’t take them over. One by one they’ll burn down, or the university will start buying them up and turn them into queer little departments—meteorology, Asian studies. Or they’ll just raze them altogether and put up big new buildings. You’re lucky. You already live in one. You know what it’s like. I want to live somewhere they put your whole supper down on the table in big serving dishes and you have to ask someone to pass the mashed potatoes, pass the string beans, the water pitcher, the rolls and bread. It’s like missing out on vaudeville. Al Jolson, Fanny Brice, Eddie Cantor. All those people I know only from listening to on the radio who lived in boardinghouses and used to be on the ‘circuit.’ No,” she said, “when I resign from Chi Phi Kappa I’m definitely going into one.”
Because she was definitely more interesting than Druff. Falling for her now at second-per-second rates. As stones fall.
But who tried still to talk her out of the boardinghouse. Uncertain whether he’d be welcome once she moved. Knowing there’d be no more study rooms, no passion pit worthy of the name (not, as it were, after you’d seen Paree), forced again to think of those long lines at the movies, big public rooms in the Student Union, even of the classrooms and lecture halls where they’d spent the early weeks of their courtship.
They didn’t quarrel exactly—she was too high-strung, he was a little afraid of her—but he took the position that it was mostly their own fault.
“I was woolgathering,” he told her, “lollygagging. You know what the first thing was I thought to tell her when she caught us stretched out there on that carpet and I saw her standing over us? The very first thing? ‘Both my feet are on the floor, Mrs. Post.’ That’s how out of it I was. ‘Both my feet are on the floor.’ No wonder she wanted to throw me out.” (And would have added, if she’d been less high-strung, that it was probably Rose Helen’s squirming when he nibbled her ear that called Mrs. Post’s attention to them in the first place.)
“She had no right,” Rose Helen said. “She was out of line.”
She refused to hear anything more about it, declared the subject closed and even stopped talking about her plans to resign from her sorority. (She told him she was still looking, however, though she thought it unlikely she’d find anything suitable until after midterms and the students who were failing saw the handwriting on the wall and pulled out.) Meanwhile she denied him access to the sorority house, insisting it would be too humiliating for them (who, for his part, was hard to humiliate, who was perfectly content to accept serenades at face value, content to have watches set by him, to be the first out the door, content to eat shit, Mrs. Post’s, Rose Helen’s) to be seen there together.
He asked the waiter from his boardinghouse to keep his eyes open, to tell him if anything was going on.
“You want me to spy on her?”
“No, of course not. Look,” he said, and took the waiter into his confidence, told him the story till now. “I’m not asking you to spy, I’m not asking you to do anything you’re not already doing. Just keep an eye out. If they’re still talking about what happened, if there’s any more discussion about her giving up the sorority—if she’s seeing someone else. Edward, I think I’m getting the runaround.” (Because he was in love now, because she was more interesting than he was, because he thought they thought his lapse, his failure to leave on time, was a violation, like the nibbled ear Rose Helen forbade him, of the conditions of his probation. Because he was in love now—the girls were touching, she’d said; she didn’t blame Mrs. Post; he recalled her talent for mimicry—and couldn’t trust her.) And revealed all the intimate details and actual physical logistics of the complicated, astonishing foreplay they practiced in the study. He made mention of her hip.
Druff didn’t regard any of this as a reward or payment for information, or even as bragging, but as simple, heartfelt confidence, one heartfelt guy in a boardinghouse to another. All that detail, are you kidding, if anything, it was as if he were the waiter’s spy and not the other way around.
“Well?” Druff said when Edward returned one evening.
“She didn’t take the soup, she refused dessert. I think she’s on a diet.”
“So,” Druff said the next night, “what do you think?”
“I was the one who said about the boardinghouses. This was before you were in the picture.”
Rose Helen called on him at the house. She was standing outside. It was Edward who came to his room to tell him she was there. (If we ever get married I’m going to have to ask him to be my best man, Druff thought, then felt misgivings go through him like a bullet. For all he’d made him his confidant, Druff didn’t like the waiter very much, regretted his soiled, spilled beans.)
His landlady climbed the stairs and was waiting for him on the landing. She turned and went down beside him. With Edward, there were three of them on the steps now. Druff had a ludicrous sense of convoy, of imposed escort, a vague impression he was being handed over into another jurisdiction.
“That’s your girlfriend out there, the one you used to go see, the one who calls at all hours?”
“She called at all hours only once,” Druff said. “She’s a nice person, Mrs. Reese.”
“I have keys to all the rooms,” his landlady said darkly. “I know who is and who isn’t a nice person.”
Then they were standing at the screen door. It was already spring. The weather had been mild for two weeks now. The rooming houses up and down Druff’s street all had gardens—glowing, spontaneous flowers, grass the bleached, light green of Coca-Cola glass, parrot feathers. But here there were no crocuses, no daffodils, no hyacinths, no tulips, no forsythia. There were no trees or ornaments at all. Mrs. Reese’s scant, grudging yard was all surface, a kind of scrubbed earth. It seemed tracked, neutral as a path. It wasn’t even scuffed. There were no chairs, no porch swing on the crabbed front porch, no place to sit, not even steps, a proper stoop.
Rose Helen was waiting for him on the ramp which, in lieu of steps, led up to the porch. Druff had heard explanations about the ramp. Mrs. Reese had had it built after the war for paraplegics and quadriplegics, all
the veterans in wheelchairs she hoped to attract to her rooming house. Word in the house was that she was the first, at least the first landlady, to understand the implications of the G.I. Bill. The war hadn’t ended yet, only in Germany, when she’d made her plans, when she realized that if returning veterans were to be paid a handsome allowance to go to school, then it was only reasonable to suppose that disabled veterans would be paid an even more handsome allowance—the greater the handicap the greater the allowance. It wasn’t the extra rent she’d be able to charge for their rooms that had held the appeal for her, it was the handicap itself, the tamed, chair-bound presence of the soldiers, the wild oats they’d probably be too depressed to sow even if they still could. They said she closed the house after the ’45 graduation to have the ramp put in. They said she’d already hired an architect to design modifications to the house itself, interior ramps, special bathrooms, special tubs, workmen to install them. It was the atom bomb. She hadn’t counted on the atom bomb, they said. The war was over before anyone expected. There just wouldn’t be enough casualties to justify the costs. This was what Druff heard. He didn’t believe a word of it, but it was what he was thinking of when he saw Rose Helen on the ramp, leaning invisible inches into the incline, her height and weight evenly distributed.
Druff looked at each of his escorts and opened the door. It hadn’t even closed behind him before Rose Helen began to speak.
“What’s different about me? Can you say, can you tell? No, don’t look at my hair, it isn’t my hair. Why do boys always look at your hair when a girl asks that question?” She was addressing the two witnesses at his back behind the screen door. “Come on,” she said, “I’ll give you a hint. It’s something you wear but it isn’t clothes.” He examined her scrupulously. “Oh, Robert,” she said, “you’re so dense!”
“It’s your pin. You’re not wearing your sorority pin,” the waiter said.
“Who’s that, Edward? Good for you, Edward. You’re absolutely right.” She suddenly sounded to him like the schoolteacher she would one day be. “Well, I’ve done it,” she said.
“They make you turn those things back in if you resign?”
“Please,” Druff said, “we’re having a private conversation.”
“Sorry,” the waiter said, injured, “sometimes it’s hard to know what’s private and what isn’t.” Druff remembered he’d once tried to describe to Edward the taste of her breasts, the smell of her damp pants on his fingers, the odd feel of a particular softness here, the compensatory muscularity somewhere else from the exercises she continued to perform for her hip, her spine, stretching and bending herself, he supposed, like one doing farm work, forking hay, maybe.
“So,” she said, “I’ve voluntarily deconsecrated myself. I’ve left the Chi Phi’s. I’m an Independent now, too.”
Now they were sunk, he thought. She didn’t sound sunk, but now they were sunk. He wouldn’t taste those breasts again until they were married. (At least it wasn’t the furniture, he told himself. I’m not that bad, at least. At least most of my disappointment has to do with the fear of not being alone with her.)
She started to come the rest of the way up the ramp but Druff went to meet her. He began to walk with her toward the Student Union. “Here,” she said, when they had gone about half a block, “you wear this.” She took her sorority pin from her purse and pinned it to his shirt.
“So,” Druff said, “they don’t make you give them back.”
“Nope, that one’s bought and paid for. It’s free and clear. I burned the mortgage on that pin when I quit the Chi Phi’s.”
“Usually,” Druff said, “when pins are exchanged it means you’re going steady.”
“It means you’re engaged to be married,” she said. “It means you have children together. It means forsaking all others. It means till death us do part.”
“I don’t have any pin,” he said.
“Hey,” she said, “you’re this quote Independent unquote. You’ve probably your own weird customs. You’ll teach them to me.”
He gave her the waiter, he gave her Edward (as he had given parts of Rose Helen to the waiter). They still didn’t know any other couples, they still didn’t double-date, but they had a sidekick now, a squire, a retainer, a factotum, this best-man-in-waiting, this in-the-wings witness, their sworn fifth wheel and interested second party, someone to backstage for them and legitimate their love, make it interesting enough, dramatic enough, their own personal second-banana man, Edward R. Markey, with his name like a clerk of the court or some high-up in the Motor Vehicles Bureau, the man who signs the driver’s licenses, or the State Treasurer, say. (Druff enjoyed believing that the waiter was a little in love with her himself, or even with Druff in some safe, charming, companionable way which didn’t threaten anyone, even the faithful retainer. He thought of him, early on, as he would have thought of a devoted theatrical manager, some mysteriously womanless, childless, unfamilied—unsibling’d and, for all he knew, motherless, fatherless, perhaps even cousinless—bachelorly man whose only interest was that they—the two principals—not ever suffer.)
She’d taken a room off campus, in town, in enemy territory, behind the lines, near the railroad station, not far from that diner where they’d gone the time Rose Helen had sobbed to him, confessing her suspicion that she’d made Chi Phi Kappa because of what she called her “sanitary deformity,” something between a pledge and a housemother, who did for them, a kind of dobbin, a sort of Edward herself, the patron saint of their vocabulary lists, of their mending and hairdos, Cinderella without the fairy godmother, a fairy godmother herself, theirs, or at least their fairy good sport.
She’d taken a room off campus.
Strictly speaking, it was an illegal address; unauthorized, non-university housing, not the apartment that undergraduate girls weren’t permitted to lease, and not even the boardinghouse—no meals were served—about which she entertained so many fancy, romantic notions, but a furnished room in what wasn’t even a rooming house for an exclusively female clientele. The house where Rose Helen stayed had as many men living in it as women—railroad employees, conductors and engine drivers, switchmen and gandy dancers. The women in the house were mostly students at a local college for beauticians; some were wives from the nearby air base whose enlisted-men husbands, still receiving their training, were permitted to leave the base only on weekends. Two or three Druff recognized from the Student Union Building, cashiers, food handlers.
“What do you think?” Rose Helen asked him.
“How did you get this place? You’re not allowed to live here. They could withhold your credits.”
“I never gave the university a change of address.”
“Suppose they have to get in touch with you?”
“Why would they have to get in touch with me? I lived at Chi Phi Kappa almost two years, they never had to get in touch with me.”
“What about mail?”
“Edward’s there for lunch, he can bring it to me.”
“It’s beautiful,” Druff said. “It’s really nice.”
It really was. His standard was the rooms at Mrs. Reese’s, his own, Edward’s, the three or four others he’d visited since coming to the university. His standard was the small study rooms with their typing tables and desk lamps, their wooden chairs and narrow cots.
There was a double bed with a pale, flowered spread across it, a small sofa, a ladder-back rocker, a stripped dresser with a pitcher and washstand on it. There was a closet. There was a painting, a pleasant landscape, not a reproduction but an actual oil. There were lamps, plants, hooked rugs, lace curtains on Rose Helen’s two big southern-exposed windows.
He heard someone coming up the stairs.
“Am I supposed to be in here?”
“It’s Edward,” Edward called, “with the rest of your things.”
“That was a close one,” Druff said to Rose Helen.
“Why a close one?”
“Well,” he said again, “am I supp
osed to be in here?”
“The landlady never said anything about visitors,” Rose Helen told him. “All she ever said was that the railroad workers come in at all hours, that they sleep when they can. All she said was that I have to be considerate of my neighbors, to play my radio low even during the day.”
Her room was beautiful, it really was. Still, he felt he was a thousand miles from a grand piano, big stately furniture, Oriental rugs, civilization. He felt like an outlaw.
The stairs and hallways, the rooms and shared baths, even Rose Helen’s landlady’s—Mrs. Green’s—apartment (where the television was which they were invited to watch with her: it was an early color set, an experimental model Mrs. Green’s boyfriend, an electrical engineer, possibly a married man, had given to her; only a handful of color transmissions a year were sent out at that time, and Druff remembered seeing the first lecture ever televised in color, the first-ever color telecast of a polo match, the announcers reporting all this solemnly, the commissioner reminded—now, not then—of those other almanac occasions to which he’d given credence, the Groundhog Days and leap years, Sadie Hawkinses and the various solstices, of all bloodless, neutered history) always smelled of pork chops, frying meat. (Mrs. Green permitted tenants to store food in her kitchen. There was a hot plate in Rose Helen’s room but she used it only to boil the tan beef and pale, mustard- colored chicken bouillon cubes and black coffee she drank, and to heat up the food, the almost untouched leftovers Edward stole from the Chi Phi Kappa house and gave Druff to bring to her, or brought her himself, and on which she lived.)
It was like being married. It was and it wasn’t. They studied there. They necked there, did all their heavy petting there. Because despite the sofa (to say nothing of the double bed), they still played for the same relatively low table stakes that they had played for in the study rooms and in the big, crowded, luxurious central passion pit at the sorority house on those Friday and Saturday nights deconsecration ante. He even observed the same curfew. Maybe it was only Edward (or Rose Helen or even himself) who was landlady or housemother now. Maybe it wasn’t any of them, maybe they didn’t need a housemother, maybe they didn’t need a landlady. Maybe it was merely the Zeitgeist which protected (if that was the word) them, or maybe they were really these collective, dedicated virgins (though technically he wasn’t a virgin, he’d been to the whores; so had the waiter), or maybe it didn’t finally matter where they conducted their white, unconsummated courtship. And maybe, despite what they’d told each other, it was a game, or a sort of a game, but something loftier, higher, more important. Maybe though they weren’t there yet, they were still honestly striving to become the respective Casanova and Venus of foreplay, sexual-stimulation savants. Maybe foreplay was their event. Because these were the days of magnificent foreplay, the student prince, his education-major consort. He could remember times when he’d gone around packing blue balls like kidney stones. Other times Rose Helen, who often sensed his pain before it reached actual critical mass, would bring him off.
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