by Tito Perdue
He loitered, enjoying the first real autonomy of his eighteen years. There were some notable faces in that cafeteria as also among the people trundling past. He thought that he could see in them some of the personality types described in the novel he was reading. One man was choleric, another rubicund, and so on.
In the afternoon, he drove back and forth for perhaps half an hour before finding where a certain room was said to be available, a place neither too far from campus nor too near, in an area where the apartment buildings were tall and narrow and needed each other to keep from falling over.
He took up his comb, refreshed himself in the rearview mirror, and then went and knocked politely at the paint-flaked door still adorned with last year’s Christmas wreath. The woman was also tall and narrow and had given up on any sort of female appeal. He followed up the stairs. Her hips were no better than a man’s, and every third or fourth floorboard gave off a painful sound. Let him have an unsought-for place in which to live, the lack of sexual distraction, and he planned to be in graduate school in record-breaking time.
The woman proved reasonable and was even willing to consider the boy’s proposal that he carry out certain small projects in return for an equally small reduction in the monthly rent. He liked to imagine that a superior person ought be able to live without money altogether, a theory that stayed with him right up until he refueled the car, made a deposit against his first electricity bill, and then sauntered in his arrogant way down to the little family-owned delicatessen situated so conveniently near. It was full of all kinds of things, and he hadn’t spent two minutes in that place before he had to reshelve most of the unaffordable items he had added to his cart. In one case, he had actually chosen an imported sausage purely on account of the fog-bound castle shown on the bright green and yellow label. He took out his wallet and looked at its contents. He did have a checking account with his hometown bank, a modest resource once he set off to one side the thousand dollars his father had deposited without the boy’s consent. Superior people do not rely on others, and it pleased him to know that most people of his age were willing to do so. Better be dead (he once said to me) than average. Or even just slightly better than average, better to be dead than that.
In the end, he bought a half-gallon of milk, sugar and cereal, mustard, frankfurters, and a few other things, salt and pepper for instance, and enough coffee to last him, as he foolishly believed, for the whole ensuing nine-month period.
Sixteen
He had imagined the university would be housed in one building only. In fact, it often required him several minutes just to walk from one region of the campus to another. He did admire the library, a noble structure that looked to him like something from Augustan Rome. But more than that, he liked the geology building, a three-story affair constructed out of yard-square blocks of a cream-colored limestone full of fossils.
He had deemed it proper to start his curriculum with philosophy, the proper place for beginnings of every sort. For a teacher, he had expected an elderly sort of person, a man with a beard, his head of hair turned white from too much exposure to the shocking truth. In fact, he found that he had placed his hopes in someone not greatly older than himself. They looked at each other. He had put himself on the second row, the boy, as if to say that while he didn’t necessarily consider himself the most gifted person in the class, yet he did view himself positively in that regard.
The room held perhaps twenty students, some of them, ironically, girls. He showed no reaction when a brown-headed wench of about five-foot-four came and sat next to him, and after fuddling about with her books, bag, pen, and compact, crossed her legs. She was neatly shod and might be wearing hose. Meanwhile, a splotch of fluid (sunlight, actually) was edging ever so slowly across the floor.
He was compassed on all sides by strangers, gregarious types gossiping beneath the general silence. Framed portraits hung along the wall, Greeks mostly, together with two Germans the boy identified without having actually read their work. He had hoped, uselessly, that the professor would not waste the first hour describing what he planned for the course, its purpose, etiology, and so forth.
Chemistry was better; the place was full of acrid (even acrimonious) smells that seemed to come from other worlds. The teacher, too, was a “heavier” type, a grumpy man who hadn’t the least wish, judging from him, of ingratiating himself with a congeries of callow students hoping with the least effort to satisfy their science requirement. This one, wasting no time at all, jumped feet-first into the structure of the atom, and before the hour was over, had already begun breaking protons down into still smaller things. The students grew nervous. Many would not be coming back again. Here was a man who wanted to get to the heart of the matter and quickly, too. This man was and is myself.
The boy then strode hurriedly from the east side of campus to west, and after halting long enough for a cigarette, stepped into a classroom packed to the gills with thin boys in thick glasses. Our hero had cajoled the authorities into letting him take a course in astrophysics though he knew almost nothing of mathematics nor of physics itself. (He was to last three days.)
By late afternoon, he had wandered in and out, had scanned multitudes of girls, had bought his books, had visited the library (Tennessee’s most excelsior location), and had again reviewed some of the really interesting-looking fossils embedded in the exterior wall of the Geology building.
Came night, his favorite season. Pressing at the window, he could see much, including bits and pieces of his own apartment house reflected in the glass. The window pane was only the thinnest thing but tended to fortify the intellectual membrane that sealed him off from the actual world. And yet, he was in a place where others like himself might be found, ten acres with a million books, a concert hall, scholars full of brains, some of them, and laboratories supplied with instruments as would have entranced the Greeks.
He ran to his coffee and books, turned down the lamp, arranged himself on his tattered couch—five dollars at the used furniture store—and opened at random to a page on colonial American history in which he could have wandered for years, or until the coffee ran out. He was lucky in other ways as well; the school maintained a radio station that offered good music hour after hour with almost no human interruption. It was here, he said later, here on his little green plastic radio (two dollars) that he first realized there was something in the world even better than literature. Luckier still, they were playing Wagner that night, an instrumental version of Parsifal that caused him to look up and blink and then set his book off to one side. Something was happening in that music, a question of forlorn hills, dark clouds, and plangent horns from far away.
He studied, or dallied rather, till past midnight. The assignments seemed to him more apposite to secondary school than to the place to which he had imagined he had come, and he’d finished with them in less than an hour. The music meantime had moved on to Debussy and Ravel, both men quickly claiming permanent lodging in his memory cells.
Grateful too, was he, how history had devised a way for preserving fruits and vegetables in tin cans, a development that let him do without a stove or refrigerator or any other sort of equipment apart from a fork and two spoons. In this fashion he could read with one hand while victualing himself from a can of beans and a wedge of cheese. It left him with a lot of unneeded shelf space that later on he filled with books and papers and chemical reagents of various kinds. One more great good fortune had fallen to him, that the neighborhood pharmacy offered a range of high-purity chemicals needed by him when attempting to replicate certain classic experiments touted in his texts.
Seventeen
Things were better than she knew. Strolling room to room in her new studio, the girl could hum and think thoughts while not colliding with anyone. Any fear that life might not prove to her liking, all such fears now drained away completely. How good the sunlight extruding through lace curtains and how resonant the mauve-colored wallpaper providing scenes of colonial times, a condig
n apartment for demur people in search of quietness.
Her books were few but made a good appearance when arranged in order of color and size on the window sill. She possessed a five-pound bookend of purple crystal discovered by her on one of her jaunts in the mountains. Her clothes, some thirty outfits of various design, were put away on hangers at equal distance from each other in the closet that also held her cello and music scores. She owned more cosmetics than could be displayed on the bathroom counter space. “They make art out of tin cans,” she said. “Me, I make art out of me.” She dusted the furniture, finding almost no real dust at all, and then retreated into the next room, where she stripped and threw herself into her exercises, a strenuous regimen requiring never less than an hour and half. She refused to look at herself in the mirror until the routine was finished, and when she did look, she looked with the eye of an art critic. She showered and depilated and then came out into the room and put on a thin layer of a milk-white oil of some nature. It would be another few minutes before her bespoken shampoo took effect, and when it did, her golden hair would seem to have been built from the same materials as the Sun’s.
In October, she preferred to practice between the hours of 5:15 and 7:10, the day waning down at last after a protracted delay. This was the time to take up her cello, burnish it just a little bit, and then set it up in the window whence she could acquire, if not an actual sighting, at least some of the ambiance of the “Smoky Mountains,” so-called, that lay about two hours toward the east. Next, she took up her wand, and putting herself into an almost sexual position with regard to her instrument, began with a bit of Bach followed hard upon by one of Haydn’s well-known works. The Sun pounced upon her hair. She was not of this world. Her future was decided and always had been—to assail the world with two different forms of beauty, straight out of a double-barrel shotgun.
Eighteen
On her first day, she came to school in a grey blouse and rose-madder skirt that was a bit too short. She was not ashamed of her knees, nor was anyone else, either. Her shoes were modest enough, the heels elevating her pelvis by just an inch or so. We know about her face.
She respected the Sun, and when the Professor arrived, he found her stationed on the front row embossed in light. Music isn’t everything, and she was required to know about algebra and history as well, not to mention a soupçon of German and/or Italian, according to her option. The teacher was a presentable sort, and in view of his evident boredom probably did have the intelligence she expected in instructors of hers. Would he, or not, pay regard to her two lovely snow-white knees and equal number of legs that must have taken up a percent or two of the one-hundred-forty-degree view available to him? Or was he well-married and immune to such views?
In the event, they were learning German. It amused her how in this language all nouns bore uppercase initial letters and how, in accord with her own belief, these people had imputed femininity to the Sun. Attracted, too, the woman was, to the sound of the language, which seemed really to say what it meant to mean. At long last, she was actually learning something. She must return someday and share her knowledge with her people and idiot brother. Not that they would want it, of course. Was she the only student in the class who felt the lesson had come but all too quickly to its end? She was, yes.
She rotated over to the adjoining building at just past ten and sat through a session on music theory, a rather more sophisticated approach than she had ever seen before. She feared that this might give her trouble. She couldn’t write fast enough to take down the information. And then, too, she had the impression her fellow students already knew a good deal more than she. Some weren’t bothering to take any notes at all. The hour continued for longer than she wanted, and when finally she drifted out into the hall, she was approached by a tall and rather ragged-looking boy, the first male ever to come so near to her in this part of Tennessee.
“Wow!” he said. “This is going to be one tough course!”
The girl looked at him. He was not the one.
“Yes,” she said.
“Are you one of the new students?”
“No, I’m eighteen now,” she said, turning away. She had to fetch her instrument and then carry it about six hundred yards to her first practice session. The campus wasn’t a huge one, not much larger really than her own home town, and yet it awed her that so few acres could hold so many musicians and famous scholars together with so many others who didn’t at first strike her as quite so admirable as no doubt they were. Good music was coming from the practice studio, mixed with very bad music coming from passing cars.
Came night, she finished off her grapefruit and got into her jeans and an unclean raincoat that reached to the ground, garments more proper to the farm than to the town. She had a pair of rubber boots with traces of the pigpen on them. Dressed in these, no one could have imagined the woman inside them.
Obliged to attend a welcoming party, she strode in safety to the place and then resorted to the ladies’ room, where she could get into her gown and makeup. Two other girls were there already, both of them falling silent the moment she stepped inside. She got into her shoes and gown, a blue affair the color of the sky. It wasn’t till she came to her eyeliner, her mascara, and eye shadow that her real artistry came into effect. Her lashes were naturally thick, and she needed only the least bit of lipstick. For ten minutes she went on with it, regarding herself from different angles in the facing mirrors. Other girls were meanwhile coming and going, only one of them daring to interrupt the project.
“Will you be long?”
Sometimes her appearance was simply that of an extraordinary-looking girl of a certain age, height, measurement, serenity, and weight. These things depended upon sunspot activity, one must suppose, relative humidity, atmospheric clarity, or the spiritual condition of the viewer at the time. And sometimes her appearance was better than that.
She moved into the crowd, no one taking notice of her at first. The orchestra was small but good, the singer doing a romantic piece from the 1950s. She must be careful now; a bowl of pink punch was on offer and it might have alcohol in it. Probably she ought never have come in the first place.
It did have alcohol, but not enough to ruin the taste. She saw herself (and her glass-blue gown) reflected in the ice cubes that filled the punchbowl nearly to the rim. She adored all things, provided only they were beautiful enough, her own special morality. There were coils of crepe paper constituting an artificial ceiling of different colors. She must be careful. The dancers and the wine, the music and the people and her certain knowledge of what she must have looked like standing off by herself in the liquid-like darkness of the place. Her nipples were erect.
She came home by taxicab, no doubt a mistake in consideration of the way the driver went on examining her in the rear-view mirror. His glasses were cloudy, and she could see two colloidal views of herself in the lenses. From the compassing hills, signal towers were pulsing with Chinese lanterns, whilst within the passing cars she once or twice caught sight of avid faces sheltering in the dark. Clearly, the ratio here of young people to old entrained dangers all their own.
She stepped hurriedly to her apartment, but then had to return to pay the driver and gather the cello. Within moments she had entered her place, had fed her lizards, and gotten into comfortable shoes. The night was still active, as could be seen between the curtains. What were they doing out there, people who ought to be studying or practicing their instruments? She hadn’t come here to fritter away her scholarship money, not with so many generous people invested in her future. Instead, she served herself the little iced cupcake she had filched from the party and prepared a cup of tea.
Left alone, she watered her African violet with an eyedropper and then set out upon Kodály’s Summer Evening, one of her five or six preferred exercises. Someday she would play for the Hungarian Emperor. The project took her to just past ten o’clock, at the end of which she arose, exited to the bedroom, and got out of her cerulean gown. L
eaving her underwear, she inspected herself in the mirror, a further piece of narcissism and self-criticism habitual with her since the age of twelve.
By seventeen after eleven she had brushed and showered and pared and salved and put herself beneath the sheets. Usually she could defer (if not actually prohibit) the unclean dreams that more and more often sought advantage of her. But not tonight, not after a taste of alcohol, colored lanterns, dancing couples, Kodály, and that encouraging view of herself in her facing mirrors. She really didn’t want to do it, but by eleven-forty, still not sleepy, she arranged the pillow on top of herself and wrapped her legs about it as if it were a man.
Nineteen
She was to have four instructors of which only one was demanding enough to do her any good. The students themselves mostly just wanted to feel good about themselves, and to that end went about pretending to be destitute. Others were tormented geniuses with long hair. Twice a week she was made to report to her advisor, a bedraggled man who allowed his dog to attend these sessions. He, too, needed a haircut, and his glasses were held together by the thinnest of little golden wires. He never actually put those glasses to use but allowed them forever to rest midway on his pitted nose. And in short, he was the most admired member of the faculty.
“So you play the harp as well,” he testified once the girl had come into his presence. “Is that because they think you’ll look real good sitting up there on stage?”
“Probably.”
“Ha! You admit it. Well! But can you really cope with that big old instrument?”