by Tito Perdue
“She’s an idiot.”
“Sorry to hear it. Some of our chemistry and physics girls are pretty smart.”
“I’ve seen ’em.”
“I could introduce you.”
“I guess not. I just don’t have the time. I’m taking seven classes now, as you probably know.”
“They don’t allow that much.”
“Which is not even to mention Chinese.”
“Chinese?”
“Yeah, and it’s not free, either. Charges ten dollars an hour.”
“Who does?”
“That lady. Works at the cafeteria.”
“Good Lord. You’re getting credit for this, I hope.”
“No, sir. I’m not even supposed to be doing it.”
“And you’re taking boxing lessons on top of everything else?”
“No, sir; I got a gun now.”
“And a car I believe?”
“Yes, sir. It’s a real old one, though.”
“Old as me?”
“No, sir.” Suddenly he jumped up, went to the cabinet, and began fuddling with my books. The ash on his cigarette was unduly long by now and was threatening to topple onto a certain eighteenth-century engraving that had cost me dear.
Twenty-three
Slowly, slowly, slowly, our two people were closing in on each other. The times were bad for cattlemen, however, and although the old man had done passably well, the future boded all sorts of bad for people of his kind. Five months earlier, he might have sold his animals on the futures market and now regretted that he hadn’t.
This bad news arrived just as the semester was ending. Her parents, always willing to transfer their problems to their first-born, awaited her with increasing cheer as she drew nearer. She did have some money, almost seven hundred dollars saved out of her scholarship award, another three hundred fifty dollars from modeling hosiery, and finally another two hundred seventy dollars from creating a line of painted ceramic dinnerware on offer at tourist outlets. She did not have the one hundred thousand offered by a certain pornographic movie producer from Los Angeles, a thin man with a moustache who had come all that way.
She left campus at 7:18 in the morning and arrived back home before noon. The dogs were lethargic, and a space had opened up in the fence where some of the hens had gone off on unauthorized ventures. By contrast, her mother was in the kitchen. The girl went to her, and after handing off her gift of a serving dish with a painted scene on it, tried to reason with her.
“What on Earth are you frettin’ about? You still have the timber, don’t you? And those bonds?”
“Oh, you can say what you want to, but your father went and sold ’em all. I don’t know, I just don’t anymore.”
“All of them?”
“Down to the last little bit. He said he would, and he did. I knew he would.”
“And the timber?”
“I reckon. But you can’t get nothing for ’em, not these days of course.”
“What are you saying? Timber prices are good. I checked.”
“Oh, I don’t know. What, you trying to look like Cleopatra? Better not let your father see you like that.”
She passed five days on the farm. They didn’t care greatly for the sound of her cello, wherefore she practiced in the barn. On Thursday, and specifically in order to see her, her imbecile brother was released from the institution for an indeterminate time. He would sit in the hay, his face covered in a baffled expression as she worked three hours at a time on Vivaldi, Boccherini, and others of the type. She was getting better, no question about it, but was still far from any major orchestra as yet.
She arranged the sale of twenty acres of long-leaf pine on the land bounded by Peabody River in the west, but required the company to leave the hardwoods alone. She specifically protected the walnuts planted twenty-two years earlier, a resource increasingly in demand by Japanese furniture manufacturers. They would not starve, her people, as long as these remained on site. Having gotten seventeen thousand dollars for the pine, she then organized the sale of sixty acres of their neighbor’s loblolly for a seven percent commission. She butchered the bull and got a new one with more vim. Finally, the Saturday following, and with the partial help of her befuddled brother, she hefted up the family’s two hundred forty-pound hog by means of block and tackle, opened its throat, and drained it dry. She never claimed to have made the sausages herself, instead calling for the help of a little old lady who owed her a favor. (What favor was that? Just keep reading.)
She had also mastered the Boccherini by this time, having ruined her D string in the effort. She could not replace that sort of equipment in the tiny town nor get the cosmetics she required. Nor dared she even to use cosmetics among her family, an unconscionable restriction founded on moral principle. And while she remained celibate, also was she without pity, and craved to lodge herself forever in the memory of every male unlucky enough to see her. Was she to be responsible for the failed marriages that might result? Meantime she continued to have no friends of course, nor did she want any. She would never allow her love, once it had found its target, to run off in other directions.
Friday, she took the night bus back to her apartment, ardent to revisit her books and art prints, her bright patterned quilt, the painted dinnerware she had fashioned for herself on the school’s shared kiln. I mention as well the dozen little half-pint canisters, also painted by herself, holding tiny quantities of raisins, figs, and pistachio nuts organized alphabetically by their spelling. But after a half-mile, her cello began to weigh on her, and she was almost tempted to accept the ride offered her by an ignorant-looking red-headed boy prowling the streets at 5:44 a.m. in a pickup truck of the same color.
Her things were as she had left them, which to say extraordinarily well-organized. Had any thief or red-headed intruder broken into her rooms and dared tamper with her possessions, she would have noticed it immediately. Her chameleons were safe. They cherished the security of their converted aquarium as much as she her apartment, though she had to spend a minute distinguishing them from the wallpaper.
She had a wooden filing cabinet, and on top of that a radio that gave off a sizzling sound.
She must now read and absorb four chapters from her text on music theory, the most demanding part of her curriculum. Next, she gathered up her instrument and played (on a faulty D string) the cello parts from five of the Arensky quartets. Her performance was decent, but with the joy of her homecoming having cooled by now, she fell into a mood. People were interacting all over the world, but she was here. She retrieved her mirror, a three-by-five size article that showed only bits and pieces of her face at any time. It did prove she still existed, however.
Twenty-four
It happened that by the third week of their acquaintance, her counselor gave up trying to seduce her. And then on Friday day, he took up his flute and began to play along with her. He said:
“I might just have a slot for you with the Palestrina Group.”
She harkened to him.
“He’s retiring, their cellist is. Not that he was so wonderful in the first place.”
She harkened still.
“It’s not a paying position, of course. And you’ll have to wear fancy clothes.”
“I can do that.”
“But it will give you some exposure. Performance exposure, I’m talking. Both kinds, actually.”
They returned to the duet and began playing again.
In the afternoon, she arrived for history class and filled three pages with the same minuscule script she used for letter writing. Letters? She had writ no letters in months. Her attention was fixed rather on making a good grade in music theory. Just then she felt a sadness taking hold, a climatic change in her perspective on life and things. Perfection was difficult, so very so, while everything else was so much easier than that. She could almost understand why people acted as they did. Just now she was watching a group of students slouching across campus, louche people always laughing and smiling and pa
ssing comments back and forth. By and large, she preferred old to young. City people she avoided.
She spent an hour and a half at a downtown curiosity shop trying to vend her pottery, succeeding only with a middle-aged red-faced woman who went for a cup and saucer bearing an image of angels on them. Never yet had she sold any of her better stuff, never a single piece showing Héloise or Isolde or the gods of India. She had, however, earned enough for a D string.
She visited the downtown music shop, loitering there among the cellos and other fine instruments. The salesman, a lewd person of perhaps forty years, caused her to make her way quickly to the adjoining chamber where an enormous harp was stationed among the other stringed things. She dared not go too near, however, lest she be tempted to test it.
The cellos sat off by themselves, the adults, so to speak, at the dinner table. She visited the one she wanted, knowing she’d never have the funds for it. The wood was mellow, and the thing had been built after the German fashion.
“May I help?” asked the attendant. “You look like you might be a cellist yourself!”
Most people focused on her bust; this individual was fascinated by the rods and cones in her unusual eyes.
“No,” she said, “actually I’m looking for something for my husband. He’ll be along in a moment.”
She acquired two, not just one cello string, and arrived home before dark. No one had entered her dwelling, but if someone had, she would have known it right away. No mail, nor did she especially want any. She prepared a meal fit for a prisoner on bread and water and then turned on the old-fashioned radio left by the former tenant. She dithered with it, picking up voices from Utah and Texas and finally a disturbing sound coming to her, she believed, from somewhere in Mexico.
She understood none of it. Meantime her fingers were busy replacing the D string, whereafter she spent almost two hours on Korngold’s much-underrated (in my opinion) cello concerto. She undressed, and after judging herself in the mirror, took up and applied a few ounces of depilatory for the purpose of constricting her maiden hair to a triangle with perfect boundaries. She had seen women who shaved themselves entirely, and wanted nothing to do with such people.
It was now that she began to dread her approaching dreams and what they portended. Love, she knew, could be dreadful. Or mayhap, grant someone her meed of paradise.
Twenty-five
Thursday, she shrouded her cello in a blanket and put it away carefully in the back seat of her mentor’s high-cost car. The man was behaving decently, though she was growing weary of his affectations. He wanted to be about twenty years old and was full of the gestures and verbalizations that she found exasperating enough in students who really were that age.
“Hey!” he said, once they were some twenty miles from campus. “Hey, you’ll knock ’em dead, right? Like, play that Shosty bit, you think?”
She smiled. Or tried to. The day was ringed with hills, smoke spilling from the summits, not a time to be contaminated with conversation. Her attention was for a stretch of hardwoods in the distance, a regiment of skeletons leaning up against one another for support. She identified all sorts of blackbirds loitering among the branches. Meantime the Sun, her own special star, was shuddering visibly in the cold winter sky.
By noon, they had arrived at a private dwelling in the prosperous district of Catonia. Here the homes were of stone, the way she liked them, and here, too, the dogs were allowed to wander, the way she liked them, too. She stood by as her instructor took the cello and, after giving it a final burnish with his handkerchief, threw the instrument insouciantly over his shoulder. He wanted to appear a reckless person, and his hair was gathered in a pigtail. She knew the type.
They were welcomed into a front parlor decorated with four or five pieces of highly modern art and a medieval hearth stacked with realistic logs. The host was a middle-aged person wearing glasses that made his left eye look implausibly large.
“Wonderful!” he said. “Well! And so here we are. People? This is G------- L.........,” he said, exposing her actual name to the perhaps two dozen persons.
They gathered around, some smiling and one of the men actually kissing her hand. She was introduced to the retiring cellist, a mischievous-looking quantity, quite elderly, who stepped back, looked her up and down, and testified that she was perfect for the group.
“Brilliant!” he said. “A true virtuoso, and not a minute too soon.”
They offered wine and hors d’oeuvres, tasty-looking wafers smeared with pastes and other material. Probably she took too many of the things. Though committed to a (very) strict diet, she couldn’t resist them. The host was smiling at her. To be hungry, lovely, and gifted, nothing could be better in upper-class eyes.
She had arrived in a business suit incorporating a skirt an inch too short. As pitiless as ever, she wore eye shadow and a blue beret, which isn’t even to mention a cameo brooch and two wee earrings seemingly of emerald that sparkled under the chandelier. She deployed a far-away perfume reminiscent of heather. Her face, of course, was serene, and her nose had that intellectual look that had come down to her from Europe. Your ordinary male, young or old, wanted to lay his head in her lap. And if she wasn’t nervous, it was because she didn’t know how.
Twenty-six
April that year, I was granted a nine-month stay at Cracow University to provide a course in advanced (semi-advanced) thermodynamics. Others might have done a better job of it, but I was the sole candidate willing to come right away and work alongside a translator who was to be given part of the money. Truth was, I was impatient for it. Except for my favorite student, I was sick to death of “higher education” in America and sick, too, of a great many other things as well.
It proved a good decision. My new students, most of them, were a serious lot interested in knowledge, a startling experience for me. The city was old and quaint, and the coffee was good. I met a woman.
My obligation at an end, we spent two weeks, me and she, in the Hungarian Carpathians and a further ten days riding horses and gathering mushrooms in the outskirts of Pfoidem. I returned (alone) to Knoxville the summer following, not at all surprised to find that in my absence my students had grown even more infantilized than when I had left them. In this country, I have seen full professors wrangling for rock concert tickets.
Another month had to go by before my favorite (↑) student at last saw fit to make his appearance ’neath the bust of Pallas above my chamber door. He had been reading too much, and his face was sicklied over. His clothes were as decent as always, though his accustomed blue tie appeared to have been entwined twice too often about his neck. His shoes were bad. He carried two—no, three—books in his right hand, and in his left a bouquet of weeds which he lay with care upon my tidy desk. The weeds were flowers.
“Thought I’d stop by,” he said.
“Yes.”
“I was going in this direction anyway.”
“And why not? How have you been keeping?”
“I dropped that English course, but Old Man Jensen let me into his Latin class.”
“Jensen? That imbecile? He can’t even think at the same time. So how many courses are you actually taking these days?”
“Officially?”
“Certainly.”
“Just six. But I get to sit in on some other ones. I get to use the telescope, too, over at ---------- hall.”
I wanted to cry. He was earnest and bright, and as out-of-place in modern America as if he had woken into Cambrian times.
“Good,” I said. “Real good. But how will that help you with your future career?”
“Career?”
See what I mean?
Twenty-seven
After three semesters, the child had accrued a farraginous mass of disparate credits pointing to nothing in particular. Perhaps he wanted to be an anthropologist, a chemist, a philosopher. Or a slum-dweller living amongst the people he preferred, the thriftiest man in America earning three hundred twenty dollars a month
while expending just two hundred three of that sum in each such period. An alliterating womanizer in a world without women worth womanizing, a retired boxer who had learned to trim his own hair, a linguist in possession of about two percent of half a dozen languages.
His room was four feet in width, twenty in length, and while it provided no heating or cooking facilities it did contain a five-gallon jug of fresh water and some two score of tin cans holding pre-cooked eatables of various kind. Life was easy. Everything was easy in a university town with bathroom facilities and no intellectual competition worth mentioning.
He had constructed a desk of two-by-six planks laid across two stacks of library books. He frequented the University gymnasium that offered all the bathing and exercise paraphernalia he required. He boasted to me that he practiced irregular verbs—French and Greek—while swimming underwater in the school’s Olympic pool. I do not mention the professors he had estranged, nor all the pretty girls he had at first imagined to be appealing. (Having actually gone out with two, or two and a half of these, he had pretty well given up on the gender, and to allay his appetite and knowing what actually girls are made of, had come to think of them as second-hand Christmas presents full of candy and shit.)
He had even begun to listen to the counsel of one of his fellow union members, a raw-bone, lantern-jawed, rubicund, gimlet-eyed, so on and so forth individual who not only owned a pickup truck but used tobacco products as well. It seemed that my favorite student had developed more respect for this individual than for any of his professors who were not me.
“You need a woman,” the fellow attested. “I can tell.”
“Maybe.”
“You don’t get some decent pussy once or twice a week, you’ll go out of your fucking head.”
“You may be right.”
“Damned right I’m right! Want some? Pussy?”
The virgin boy stopped what he was doing and listened.
“My wife—okay, she’s my ex-wife now—she’ll give you all the pussy you can use for fifty bucks a pop. Hell, she even likes people like you. Want me to take you over there sometime?”