And here he was, Victor Morrissey, fifteen and a half, skinny and with pimples. He was as handy with a sword as with a battle-ax. They didn’t even have a fencing team in their lousy hick high school. He closed his eyes and pictured himself in a tight fencing outfit, with a body like Victor Mature’s, dancing elegantly across a polished floor thrusting, parrying, crying “Point!” In the small group of courtiers sitting in a circle was Dorita Haas with her black eyes and long black hair, watching him. She was wearing a rose in her hair and when he’d won the match and was bowing to the applause, she tossed the rose to him. He bent and picked it up, bowed to her, then walked off proudly, like a god, impervious. Elegant all the way through: no one could see what he felt. Maybe he wouldn’t feel at all. Maybe he’d be like Clark Gable, who always looked at women as if he knew what color their underwear was, and exactly how they liked to be … touched. He owned them, he didn’t have to be frightened of them. His eyes said so.
At school, Victor looked at Dorita only sidelong, when she wasn’t looking his way.
No, there wasn’t a single good thing. There were hamburgers, but so low was he, he couldn’t even muster the energy to go indoors and cook himself a hamburger. He kept repeating to himself Antony’s lines: A Roman by a Roman nobly vanquished. That’s what he ought to do: kill himself. Leave a noble note condemning the tainted things of this world. Do it like Brutus, the noblest Roman of them all. Of course, he didn’t own a sword. Or he could run away and join the merchant marine. The army would never believe he was eighteen, he knew that, but he’d heard the merchant marine wasn’t so fussy, they took anybody.
There just wasn’t any place for him in this jerkwater town. His father loved it here, his mother too, but they had small minds, that was clear. There were the jerky guys who spent their time outside of school—when they bothered to go to school—in roadhouses, drinking 3.2 beer, and conning some older guy to buy them a pint of bourbon every once in a while. And all they talked about was drinking and souped-up cars, and baseball, and broads and tits and asses, and they were stupid and boring. They all hung out with the town pumps and weren’t even ashamed even though there were ten or twelve of them and only three or four girls. They’d meet the girls in the roadhouses and buy them a pitcher of beer, and the girls would get up and dance the polka with each other on the creaky wooden floor, while the guys sat there acting as if they were big-time operators, but watching the girls out of the corners of their eyes.
There was a small group of intellectuals, most of them seniors, a couple of juniors. They’d let him sit around with them a few times last year, and sometimes it was kind of interesting, they talked about books and poetry and it was because of them that he’d read Man’s Fate, by Andre Malraux, and Darkness at Noon, by Arthur Koestler, and they were pretty good books, but they intimidated him. The guys. Because they seemed as if they knew everything, and although he, Victor, was perfectly aware that they could not possibly know everything, they acted as if they did, and somehow or other, that was the same as if they really did. And it wasn’t just a matter of knowing everything, it was knowing where to put everything. Because it was clear that somewhere, somewhere far more arcane and rarefied than the public library, there was a master schedule listing the proper places of things. And some people knew it, and most did not, and those who did knew the rest did not, and it made them scornful. Victor would like to know enough to be scornful. Even his mother could trip him up, she read so much. But he’d bet his mother didn’t know that Proust was heads and shoulders above John Steinbeck. Maybe his mother had never even read Proust. He, himself, had to admit that he hadn’t. In fact, he wasn’t even sure what the guy had written except something about a swan. But Proust, anyway, was good, and John Steinbeck was not, although Victor had read Cannery Row and loved it, liked it even better than Man’s Fate. But he’d never say that with the intellectual guys. He’d learned his lesson, he’d blurted out one time that he liked Tchaikovsky, and there was a dead silence in the room. Then Leonard Masari said that no composer after Brahms was to be taken seriously, and the others agreed, and since Victor wasn’t sure if Tchaikovsky came after or before, but gathered from the climate that it was after, he just shut up. Victor’s fondness for George Orwell had endeared him to one of them, Bill Colt, but he was sort of tough anyway, not like the others, he wanted to become a newspaper reporter and was the editor of the school paper, and the others laughed and said it was all very well for the Rude Colt, as they called him, but Victor would do better to spend his time reading Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Williams, and above all, Wallace Stevens. One of them had given him a book with some poems in it by this guy Stevens, and marked one of them, something about some guy who was king of ice cream or something like that and Victor couldn’t make head nor tail of it. He sort of stopped hanging around those guys.
Colt was all right, even though he had to act so tough all the time, walking around in the corridors with a butt hanging out of the corner of his mouth and the teachers not even making a fuss about it, just saying, Okay, Bill, douse it, but he’d just graduated and was in the army now.
Then there were the good boys. Nobody called them that, but that’s how everybody thought of them. And they were lower than low. Victor had spent considerable time thinking about this. Because not too many people liked the jerky, wild guys, but the jerky guys thought they were hot shit and walked around like they were and so people might curl a lip when they talked about one of them, but the guys had a certain status all their own, especially the two who owned motorcycles. It was as if they’d made their own world and inside it they were kings, and other people sort of accepted that. And the same was true of the intellectual guys. Everybody dumped on them, I mean people really disliked them, but they were so above everything that it never touched them, and that fact meant that other people, no matter how they felt, treated them with a kind of respect. And of course everybody adored the athletes.
But nobody looked with respect on the good boys, not even the good boys themselves.
Most of them got good grades, but weren’t geniuses, like the intellectual guys. And they didn’t smoke, and most of them didn’t go out with girls, and they went to church with their families on Sundays, and did what they were told. There was Bob Evans, who was going to be a missionary to China like his parents before him, and who was pink and white and sweet and kindly, and went out doing surveys to find out how many black people—called colored, then—were living in the county, and what their living conditions were. There were only twenty-three, but Bob got an A on his paper. There was pudgy little Joe Santorro, who giggled tike a frog, and whom everybody liked because they could laugh at him. And other, less memorable, pale good boys who did moderately well in school and nothing at all with girls. These were the boys Victor was most at home with, but they were a bit too pious for him, and besides, he refused, absolutely refused to hang out with them, it was just too low.
Finally, there were the athletes. Some of these were also good boys, and one was even a jerk, but they comprised a separate group and it was this group that Victor aspired to. But no matter how he tried, he could not be a good athlete. He was okay, he had a batting average respectable enough to be mentioned in public, and he did not shame his team when he was sent in as end, second string, of course. But he was too skinny, too slight to be really good. His mother said his body had not grown up yet, and just wait, he’d be great in time. But it would be too late, he knew. He was best at basketball, but even there he didn’t shine. Hanging around with the athletes, he felt second-rate, and felt, moreover that they treated him that way.
So he was mostly alone. He would have liked a guy he could be close to, tell things to, ask questions of. He wondered if other guys felt the things he felt. They didn’t talk as if they did. So neither did he. He kept his lips shut and laughed at the jokes. He had laughed in eighth grade when he sometimes didn’t know what was funny, but by now even if he did not know what was funny, he knew what was a joke. They were always t
he same.
And mostly they were about girls. And alone as he was, he thought about girls. You never had to worry about girls looking down on you, like the athletes or the intellectual guys, because girls always looked up to guys. The problem was, he was even intimidated by the girls!
So there he was, lying in the hammock, unable to think of one good thing.
That morning, he’d gone to the lake to swim with a bunch of guys (mostly good guys). He always felt a little superior with them, since he also could be said to hang out with the athletes and the intellectuals (after all, no one else knew what he felt). But this day, the good guys had pulled one on him. There was a blanket of girls sitting next to them, and little by little, the guys got to talking to them. Only Victor and a small sharp-nosed boy named Heinz were too shy to join in. Eventually the guys were all on the girls’ blanket, all except Victor and Heinz, who then looked at each other and decided to go home. They got up and Victor with bored bravado said he had a date, and Heinz glanced at him and Victor could see Heinz wasn’t sure if it was true or if Victor was putting on an act, and so Victor looked over the girls on the other blanket with a look of scorn, as if they were dogs beneath his consideration, and then walked off, Heinz in his trail. They walked the three miles back to town not speaking, not even looking at each other. Victor would have liked to say something to Heinz, to ask if Heinz maybe felt the things he did, but he couldn’t, after his bravado act, he had to keep the act up. He acted superior, as he had seen others do, and that shut Heinz up.
(Heinz, in later life, became an astrophysicist and quite famous. Despite the devastating fact that his height never went above his sixteen-year-old five-foot-two, he became the most acclaimed graduate of Cardon High.)
And Victor slunk home hating himself, hating the world, hating above all the new cluster of pimples erupting on his chin. And drank lemonade (iceless and now spilled) and read Antony and Cleopatra (stupid) and lay in the hammock concluding that the entire universe was a huge joke aimed at him.
So he was lying there watching the book get ruined by seeping lemonade, watching ants scurry up and occupy the pages, and his mother came out into the yard. It was Sunday, her day off. She must have seen, known, just from the way he was lying there, maybe from the way he’d acted when he first came home, that something was wrong. She sauntered out into the yard, it was a huge yard, not fenced, just acres of grass overlooking the valley, sauntered out checking on her flowers, then sauntered over to me, easy, nothing special, and tapped my behind and I slid over and she sat down next to me on the hammock and I wanted to scream at her because I knew she’d try to make me feel better and I knew she couldn’t make me feel better and I couldn’t stand her trying. Because she cared and that made it seem all her fault.
And she sat there and talked about how beautiful it was there and how she loved it there and how most people didn’t get to live in places as beautiful as that and how we ought to be grateful. And I wanted to puke, she sounded so dreamy-creamy, god, but she didn’t know anything, anything at all about what life was really like. And then she asked me what I wanted for my birthday, my god, did she think I was nine years old to be bribed out of a sulk by the promise of a birthday present, this wasn’t a sulk it was despair, something she knew nothing about, always singing around the house and worrying about the stupid flowers and the stupid library. So I said that was months away and how was I to know. So she said I should think about it because she wanted to start saving for it, so I said A car, I want a car. Sarcastically. Even if they could have afforded it, there weren’t many cars available then, in the midst of the war.
And she turned to me and said: “You think that will help?”
I turned away from her fast because I was going to bawl. I couldn’t stand it that she knew, that she could see. It was humiliating.
Then she started talking, she had a meandering way of talking, she went round and round and you never knew where she was going, but she always ended up where she wanted to, and she was stroking my back and reminiscing, and saying, “God, I remember being sixteen, it was the worst time in my life. My mother felt so sorry for me, she gave me a sweet sixteen party even though she couldn’t really afford it. And I invited all the kids in my class, there were twenty, and you know what? Only seven came. We were really ‘out,’ because we were so poor. And Mom had gotten all that food in and worked for three days to prepare it. I was heartbroken for myself, humiliated in front of her, but my heart ached most because she’d spent so much money she didn’t have, and I knew it.
“I think it’s a bad time for most kids,” she said. “Oh, there are always the roaring boys like your father, nothing ever seems to daunt them!” she laughed. “But I wish I knew what pill they took to get that way!” She moved her hand to my face and caressed it a little, and looked in my eyes, and her face was very tender, full of love and I wanted just to reach up and hold her but I couldn’t because that would be a kid thing to do, but god, I loved her, and she said, “You know, honey, the only good thing I can say about being sixteen is that you live through it.” And she laughed and then Shandy came bounding out through the screen door and she jumped up and ran with him awhile, zigzagging around the shrubs and trees, and Shandy was barking, and I watched her, her hair bounced, and she had a beautiful round ass and beautiful breasts then, she hadn’t gotten plump yet, and she was laughing with the dog and as I watched her I felt the most tremendous desire I’d ever felt in my life. I sank down on the hammock, listening to Shandy barking, her giggling, then the bang of the screen door. My groin was hot and aching. Shandy came running over to me, he licked my hand and I lay there feeling hot and swollen and oh, god, I can’t tell you, sick, deformed, diseased, filthy—there aren’t any words.
4
“IT’S COLD IN HERE,” Dolores said, and Victor got up and turned on the fire. She uncurled and rose and carried the coffee tray back into the kitchen, while Victor opened a bottle of beer, and took it and two glasses back to the sitting room. They did not speak. Dolores put the soiled dishes in the sink and stopped it up and ran hot water over them, put the cream pitcher in the fridge, and returned to the sitting room. She curled back up in the rocker, pulling a lap robe over her knees. Victor sat on the couch again. They were both still in their robes.
“I’m not talking about anything Oedipal: I was way past that age. Or maybe I am, I don’t know. At the time I was convinced I was the only person who ever felt such a filthy disgusting thing. Ever after that, until she got old, whenever I saw my dad kiss her, I turned my face away.
“What it was, I think, was that I’d never before associated my mother with the voluptuous fevered images of my fantasy life. I used to work part time as a checkout clerk in a supermarket, and every evening as I walked home, they’d float in front of my eyes, women, girls, but not really: really, it was body parts I saw, boobs and cunt and asses and legs, I’d walk the two miles home with my head full of them and couldn’t get them out. And I knew it was wrong—not church-wrong, but humanly wrong—to see people that way, as an accretion of parts, or not even as an accretion, just as parts. But just walking along the road, I’d get a hard-on.
“And suddenly, I saw my mother in the same way. Well, it was intolerable. And it was strange, because much as I loved her that day, that was the day I began to pull away from her. I felt too guilty. I tried to stop seeing her, I tried to see Mother, a notion of motherhood, I guess. In which she was pure and unsexual and saintly and occupied with compassionate trivialities. You know? I defused her. I could look up and down at her at the same time, but I never had to look across.
“Well, I can see that only looking back. But that was an important afternoon for me, everything began there, somehow. Because I lay in that hammock for a long time, feeling disgusting and filthy and powerless and isolated and scorned, and I made up my mind I would change things. I lay there working out strategy: I was going to be different. I decided to do what the little groups did, the jerks and the intellectuals and the
athletes: to see myself as king of the hill, to force others, by my conviction, to see me that way. I spent the rest of the summer preparing. I got together a couple of guys, and worked out at the basketball court every day I began to read the Kenyon Review and the writers it praised. I went back to school that fall determined to outsnob the snobs and to make the basketball team, and I did both. I learned to walk with my head in the air (like the intellectuals) and to talk down to people. It was fantastically effective. People may not have liked me, but they looked up. When I graduated, they voted me the class ‘Renaissance Man,’ the all-round accomplished one. Girls began to sidle alongside me, to flirt with me: I didn’t have to do anything but deign to answer. I couldn’t have predicted how easy it would be!
“And of course in the next two years, my body did fill out, as my mother had predicted, and the pimples vanished and hair took their place. Maybe, in some deep place in me, I was unhappy with what I was becoming, but my life was so much better than it had been that my new style seemed only a good thing. I developed then a determination to win, to win at any cost, and never to fall back into the shame and doubt of my early adolescence.
“And I went on like that, in the army, in college, and in grad school. Oh, the arrogant superiority no doubt was honed down a little with each step: I couldn’t have gotten away in the army with what I got away with in high school. But it became my attitude. I was a winner, an egotist, confident and poised. I looked down on people who were not. And I had my choice of girls, always.
The Bleeding Heart Page 24