“Perfect,” Sy said. “Otto, you’ve done it again!”
Hy nodded agreement. “A perfect blending of face, breasts, legs and buttocks. She’ll have to shave her bush!”
Everyone laughed while it slowly dawned on me what Hy meant. “You’re crazy,” I snorted forgetting that I was pretending to be a Greek statue, arms shielding her femininity. “This kid only shaves her legs and under her arms.”
Otto examined all that I would let him see. “You should thin it once in a while, Miss Hillyer. There’s a few blonde strands encroaching on your belly button.”
“To hell with that. Do you want me to look like a ten year old? Shaved, I’d feel like an unframed picture.”
“Look, sister,” Sy said trying the sincere arm-around-you approach, which I fluttered away from, “we don’t care what you look like in your private life! Only in nudist magazines do they have a beaver. Did you ever look at a nudist magazine? My God, really naked women aren’t sexy! When we pose you, two million Cool Boys are going to stare with their tongues hanging out. We’ll show everything the law allows, right down to the edge of your deft, which from all appearances is considerably below that blonde nest. But hairs! No! Only on your head.”
“It’s deeper than that,” Hy said. “Nobody airbrushes a Fleshman photograph. We don’t permit it. So if a few hairs get in the way we lose our best shots. The law says it and we agree; pubic hair isn’t artistic.”
“You got to see the whole picture,” Otto said realizing that I was still adamant. “Cool girls aren’t really females in the ordinary sense; they’re just wet dreams.”
“I haven’t got a razor,” I said lamely.
“There’s one in the bathroom and plenty of shaving cream,” Otto said.
“I wouldn’t know how to shave myself down there.”
“I’ll help you,” Harry said smiling broadly. Sheila, Val, Stanley and Jack collapsed with laughter.
I glared at Helpful Harry, but, aided by Frozen Daiquiris, he was already too far in the spirit of things.
“Let’s sign the contract first,” Stanley said practicality studdenly constraining his hysteria.
“I have a better idea,” I said grimly. “I’ll sign the contract, I’ll let Harry desecrate my femininity ... but first every damn one of you can take off your clothes. I’m not standing around here being stared at like a freak. It makes me feel inferior, as if all of you were born fully dressed and I’m the only one that has skin and sexual organs.”
Otto with his paunchy belly, and Sy and Hy, skinny wrecks with too long hair and sideburns, all looked at me in dismay. They shook their heads in vigorous protest. Sheila, Val, Jack and Stanley voted their immediate approval and started to doff their clothes. At least InSix sticks together.
“Suffering Jesus!” Otto moaned. “I’ve been had by six nuts. I tell you the younger generation is going to hell, you offer them a sweetheart deal and right off they start to make conditions.”
“I won’t do it,” Hy said emphatically. “How can I concentrate on taking pictures of a naked dame when I’m naked myself?”
Four drinks later, after Otto, Hy and Sy had tried every gam bit from being too fat or too skinny, and even genuine tears that they would be too embarrassed to be flopping around without clothes, we finally convinced Otto, who by now was a little bleary, to undress. Propped in a sling chair, a scotch and ice resting on his white hairy belly, Otto was blubbering that he felt like an ass. Sy and Hy, hairy white skeletons with dangling penises, cursed Otto as they set up their lights and cameras and complained that there must be a better way to make a living.
But Harry, as I sprawled on the bathroom floor, and screamed at the indignity of being plastered with shaving cream in such a vulnerable area, scraped my lovely hairs away, and told me he was going to apply for a job as Cool Girl Scalper, First Class.
Jake listened to our slightly revised version of the story and shook his head. “It’s too much for me, Harry. My lips are sealed. Abi gezunt, pray your mother and bobbe never hear about it.”
The day before we went back to Harrad, Grandma took me to the attic. “I have something to show you,” she said mysteriously. “Promise you will never tell Harry’s father.” From an old trunk she exhumed a yellowed book and opened it to pictures of a young naked woman entitled “Woman, walking and turning while pouring water from a watering can.” “That is Saul’s grandmother,” she said smiling at me craftily. “A man named Muybridge took them. My mother was a pretty woman in her day.”
I nodded, pretty sure of what was coming next.
“Uncle Levi, the junk man found a copy of that magazine in an ash barrel. He showed it to me. Burn it, burn it, you old meshugah, I told him.” Grandma sighed. “Men are all the same. He hung it in his junk shop. Seventy-two and he still has ideas. You are a pretty girl, Beth. Pray that Harry’s mother never hears about it.”
“Does she know about Saul’s grandmother?” I grinned.
Grandma winked. “She should worry! A picture! The body is dust.”
I looked at Harry’s great grandmother pouring water from her watering can. “I’ll be darned ... they didn’t make her shave.” When I told grandma what I meant she thought it was a great joke. “I’m glad we have a secret, grandma,” I told her, and kissed her withered face.
FROM THE JOURNAL OF SHEILA GROVE
October and November, the Fourth Year
Even when I’m the happiest, most joyful and life is bouncing along in C Major ... simple, uncomplicated, I always seem to have a minor key melody playing softly and unobtrusively in the back of my brain. Sometimes I can’t hear this sad requiem playing in my conscious mind, it is still there ready to be triggered alive often by unrelated incidents.
Mostly a lilting song floats on the surface of my mind. It bubbles and effervesces and makes the entire one hundred and four pounds of me a misty gift of love. Tomorrow evening in the Little Theatre, Stanley and I will be married. Now, I truly know that tomorrow night, when I snuggle in Stanley’s arms, there can’t possibly be a deeper emotional and intellectual involvement than we already have, yet there is something in the commitment that will legalize our relationship and will validate the children we will have that is essential to the human psyche. At Harrad we have learned that society cannot legislate love, but we also know that the very existence of society, and hence man, depends on regulating and defining the boundaries of sexual behaviour.
Last night about eleven o’clock, when Stanley and I were finished studying, he tiptoed behind my desk, picked me up and carried me into the bedroom. From the look in his eyes I knew words were unnecessary. I kissed his face and cheeks and head while he took off my blouse and brassiere. When my skirt and panties had dropped to the floor and I stood before him naked, I felt suddenly shy.
“Why do you look at me like that?” I asked him, seeing the tenderness in his expression and tears in his eyes. “I’m not very beautiful. My breasts are too small. I’m too skinny.” I sat on the edge of the bed. Stanley didn’t answer. For a moment he knelt before me and kissed my knees, my belly, my breasts. I hugged his face fiercely against me.
“Shelia,” he whispered. “Every time I’m with you like this I’m awestruck, amazed at the sheer wonder of you. As you sit there now, fragile, feminine, your heart beating, your eyes liquid and half open, as you hugged me against you I know that every time I make love to you is the first time, and though I have actually had intercourse with you a hundred times, and will make love to you in our lives thousands of times, the physical joining with you is only a small fraction of my need.”
“I know,” I said smiling. “Your penis in my vagina is only a small attempt. Maybe you feel the way I do. You want to be simultaneously you and me. I want to vanish inside you and look at the world through your eyes.”
Joined, we lay silent for a long time. I was happy in a pensive kind of way. I knew that deep in my subconscious I was contrasting our marriage tomorrow, a beginning, and the strange death of my fathe
r in September. A grim finality.
In the telepathic accord we have, Stanley’s thoughts bisected mine. “I feel like Ozymandias, today,” he said softly. Sometimes I wish I would stay away from bookstores. If you are too curious, the forgotten past, all the centuries that man has lived, have a new way of reaching out and grabbing you with their bony fingers, and crying; “Here I am. Don’t forget me.” Men or women long dead who once tried to evoke in words the meaning of life. Thousands of people who lived and died, and with them all their effort and striving and everything they held valuable or dear. Some of these books are like a pitiful call across the centuries. People pleading, “Listen, listen. I lived once, too. I knew all your problems and tried to solve them! I held in my hands The Memoirs of the Cardinal de Retz, The Memoirs of Duc de Simon, plays by playwrights of the seventeenth century, unknown today. The Yellow Book, source book of the crime that impelled Browning to write The Ring and the Book . . . and as I flipped the pages, read here and there, and regretfully put them down, I felt sad for man who dreams such magnificent dreams, has so many things to tell other men that might give them the answers they so desperately need. There is no time for the past. The men who thought they might bridge the centuries or even the decades will ultimately receive little hearing or even recognition of the few fundamental truths they spent a lifetime learning and attempted to communicate.”
I kissed Stanley. “Eccelesiastes ... Vanity ... vanity . . .”
“No, vanity is too simple,” Stanley said. “Ghiding men like your father or me for their strong drives doesn’t prove anything. Preaching the folly of ambition doesn’t answer the question why. It leads only to negativism and hopelessness. Just so long as we are driven to find the answers to what our individual and collective meaning in the world, then we have a purpose for living. Since it is probably insoluble it is a good quest. From the perspective of man, at least.”
I hugged Stanley. “I wish somehow I could relate Daddy’s death to my own life ... to our lives. When I first came to Harrad I had a sense of futility as the minor motif to all my thinking. It came down to this. ”What does anything matter in this world? In life? Why bother to study, for example! What does it matter whether I am Phi Beta Kappa, or just a bored rich girl! Either way I’ll die, and that will be that. And then I found you, and the feeling was no longer autistic, it embraced us. Now I go around praying that somehow a moment like this could be ever frozen for us, not for the world to view like Keat’s Greek vase, but just for us ... both of us, immobile forever, but sentient. You see my selfishness now includes you. But it is better, somehow, because I know I need you more than I need my own life.”
“Your father never even achieved that much,” Stanley said, kissing my neck and tracing the contours of my ear with his fingers. “When I think about Sam, I can’t feel he was really brave, and yet I know he was braver than I would have been. At least, typically and necessarily for Sam, he was the final ‘master of his fate.’ ”
Lying with Stanley deep inside me, his arms around me, neither of us seeking anything but a joyous loss of personal identity as I had numerous times, I reviewed the last weeks in August and the days in Houston and Newport before Daddy took his own life.
When Harrad closed in June, Stanley and I went to Houston. As he had the summer before, Stanley worked on the top floor of the headquarters in an office next to daddy’s.
“You could start at the bottom and work up,” Daddy told him. “But that doesn’t mean a thing today. Horatio Alger heroes would get clobbered in the business world today. Take me, for instance, I don’t run an oil business anymore. I play an never-ending chess game that involves national and foreign politics, local wars, labor leaders, foreign affairs, economic cycles, competition and the movement and direction of top executives who have all the fun doing the job that I used to do; the producing of oil and gasoline and selling it. It’s a world which operates without love. The grease that keeps the wheels turning is what it will profit you.”
While Daddy continued his unremitting campaign to prove that even his own daughter was simply an interesting adjunct to the more vital world of business, I infiltrated the Office of Grove Employee Welfare. This department, a necessary evil that Daddy shrugged off as a damned fool development, cost Grove Oil several hundred thousand dollars annually because people today not only wanted a job and endless fringe benefits, but expected their employer to be a great white father and love them in spite of all their foolish little woes and misfortunes.
Much to Beejee’s surprise, Stanley and I slept together in one of the guest rooms, drove Daddy back and forth to work each day, swam in the swimming pool naked, and generally lived as if we were on our own private island. Beejee, dressed, or in a bikini, occasionally watched us from a pool side chair. A drink in her hand, trying not to stare at Stanley’s nudity, and quite obviously disapproving of me, she would propose various dinners and social gatherings, or dances with other young people who she was sure would interest us.
“You two will get bored to death with each other,” she said one day unable to control her thoughts any longer. “I’m not your mother, Sheila, but if I were I would never have permitted you to start this sex business so young. Not even married. God! In a couple of years you’ll be absolutely fed up, weary to extinction with each other. Waiting to divorce or just die. What have you got to look forward to?”
“What are you looking forward to?” Stanley asked her. “You’re only thirty-six.”
“More of the same,” Beejee said, “And I’m thirty-three. At least all my surprise packages weren’t opened at twenty-two.”
“Stanley and I have found the secret of everlasting surprise,” I said, grinning at her.
“What the hell is it?” Beejee demanded, and looked rather sour when I told her.
“Curiosity, wonder. Maintaining a child’s mind in an adult world. Essentially not giving a damn about all the silly little conventional problems of being what people expect you to be, or what you think they expect you to be ... and being just yourself. Come on, Beejee! Take off your bikini and dive in the pool! Yell at the cook and your maid who are watching us through the venetian blinds. Tell ’em to come on in and swim bare-ass with us.”
“You are nuts,” Beejee said. “Even your Daddy would grow faint at the idea of two negroes swimming in his white marble pool.”
So the summer was a lovely love summer, and Stanley and I were oblivious to the world. The thought of death was for people who die ... not us. We were immortal. Then, one afternoon in August, Daddy told Stanley he was going to London. Typically, he left on the afternoon plane without saying goodbye. Beejee was more than a little exasperated. Daddy had promised her that the last week in August, all of us, Beejee, Stanley, Asoka and I would fly up to New England, pick up the company yacht, Shebee (named after me and Beejee), which was moored at a marina near Gloucester, and from there cruise along the coast arriving in Newport for the Cup Races in September.
“This is a marriage?” Beejee asked me angrily. “I’m simply one of your father’s possessions. Occasionally he remembers that he owns me. Then he smiles fondly at me. Insists that I tell him that he is really nice. All the while he is fawning and offering me blandishments, his mind is a thousand miles away. Just why did he have to go to London now?”
Stanley didn’t know, but Daddy told him he would join us in Gloucester on Labor Day weekend.
Beejee exploded. “God damn him, anyway! I have to learn what my husband’s plans are through his flunkeys. No aspersions on you, Stanley. If it hadn’t been you, it would have been Miss Graves, his pursed-lipped efficient Man Friday.”
In retaliation for Daddy’s treatment, Beejee immediately set in motion plans for a houseparty. Guests started arriving on Friday and were still going strong a week later. When all bedrooms were filled new arrivals from all over Texas slept on the lawn and beside the pool. No one escaped initiation: being tossed in the pool, clothes and all. The timid ones were issued dry cotton dresses from Be
ejee’s enormous wardrobe or chinos from Sam’s. The braver ones simply walked around naked until their clothes dried out.
The rumor spread that a continuous blast was in progress at the Grove mansion. Departing friends, unable to face another drink, were replaced by strangers who didn’t even know that Beejee was the mad hostess. Finally, some days later, Tim Shoaty, our butler, discovered Stanley and I hiding out on the flat L roof where we were spying on the proceedings like visitors from space. Tim informed us that thus far two thousand dollars worth of liquor had been consumed, several sofas had been set on fire by female inebriates. The front living room was covered with foam from fire extinguishers that two drunks had aimed at each other in great good humor, one of Daddy’s Etruscan vases etched with a man and woman copulating had been used as a football and missed on a forward pass ... and if Stanley and I were going to continue to camp out on the roof and ignore the whole mess, he was quitting.
Over Beejee’s protest (it was her house and if she wanted to reenact the Fall of the Roman Empire, well, it was her own damned business), Stanley and I closed the bar, kicked out twenty or so pie-eyed Romans, telephoned Asoka, who was attending summer school at Harvard, and escorted Beejee (who after three days, suddenly discovered that she had a god-awful hangover and pounding head) to the airport.
The next day, the Saturday before Labor Day, we were all quietly aboard the Shebee. Beejee swore off liquor trying to convince “Snowy” the Captain and any of the crew who would listen, that drinking was absolutely suicidal. She would take the pledge if they would.
Daddy arrived on Labor Day. Within an hour we were underway. He told us he cabled “Snowy” to load up with supplies. We were well enough stocked to stay at sea until the races started at Newport.
“Your father is acting strangely,” Stanley told me when we were in our cabin the first night out. “I know Sam pretty well, Sheila. Something has snapped out of place. I wonder if he is having problems with Grove Oil!”
The Harrad Experiment Page 22