Cynosura

by Tito Perdue

  He parked well off-campus and waited for the recording to finish. He had time, time enough for a cigarette and for critiquing the women pacing along the sidewalk. Given salt and ketchup, he could have devoured all of them. Half of them, anyway. Their sweaters were full of breasts, and by some sort of oversight, their winter coats allowed their legs to show, the devils. What did they want really? He knew what men want, but women? Himself, he didn’t like to come within light distance of another male.

  And yet, the place was full of such people when he arrived at his usual station. He found himself seated next to a student all dressed up to look as if he were poor. My favorite student, poor in fact, was dressed as for the Paris Opera. Excusing himself politely, he moved two rows nearer to stage right, putting himself no more than about twenty-six feet from where his obsession must soon appear. He counted, getting up to seventy-four before the auditorium darkened at last, the curtain fell, and when it lifted again, as soon it did, some of the world’s choicest people were preparing to play. His eye ran to the cello section it had never left.

  Oh, good Lord. Alert, unmoving, melancholy, her head lifted, she had been put into a light-blue gown that came down to the floor. Her golden hair could alone have illuminated the hall entire. She did not belong in that group, or any group, or Earth itself. The poor boy was assailed by a sudden pain in the back of his skull and a wish to rise and walk back and forth, or go outside and speak out loud and have a few cigarettes. This thing, this artifact purportedly of flesh . . . He whimpered, bringing unwanted attention down upon himself. As for the audience, these people hadn’t even the right to look at her.

  He could imagine emplacing the tip of the littlest of his two little fingers in the tiny indenture behind her left ear and fooling with the girlish cilia that resides in that place generally. Hell, he would have been satisfied just to remove one of her shoes before then returning it to her winged foot, and, in short, he was going insane.

  I, too, have observed this girl, I have even interviewed her on two occasions. Obviously, no one could be as gorgeous as the boy imagined. On the other hand, she was simply out of this world. She could never be mine, of course, but I thought about her all the same. Like music and flowers, things like that aren’t generally allowed to go on for very long.

  He reported, the boy, that he endured it until intermission, and then betook himself out to the lobby, and after investing in some white wine, spent the next ten minutes comparing and contrasting the female concertgoers with what they should have been, had only the world been what it should have been, too. In short, he compared them to the girl. On the lobby wall, he had meanwhile found a bejeweled baton in a display frame, the very same given to Wagner all those years ago by the notorious King of Bavaria, a man as insane as the boy himself.

  Taking his wine with him (he hadn’t eaten in fifty hours), he endured the rest of the concert in near silence, disturbing neither the cretin to his left nor the one on his right snoring into his jowls. He counted, getting up to over a thousand, he claimed, before losing count and having to begin again. This time they were performing the violin concerto of Sibelius, a favorite of his, which, however, left his milk-colored divinity with not very much to do. Finally, the program at an end, he hurried to the orchestra pit in hopes the players might dally long enough to give him his chance.

  He was desperate. Even so, putting on an insouciant face, he screwed up the courage to drift on down to the cellos where he focused upon a fat girl having some trouble with her instrument and herself.

  “Very beautiful playing,” he said loudly.

  She looked up at him in surprise. Himself, he was a decent-looking male in a suit, and well-spoken, too. A fat girl should be flattered, and she was. She blushed.

  “Thank you! But it doesn’t have much to do with me, I’m afraid.”

  “Nonsense.”

  He glanced to his true purpose, already three-fourths ready to abandon the place. He had a good vantage on her profile, silent, noble, sad, aspirational, elevated, introverted, proud, unapproachable. She stood before him as a living person whereon his heart, as Yeats had so well understood, was “driven wild.” This was it, not politics nor economy nor even music, this was the point and purpose of life itself. He couldn’t take his eyes off her. They were alone now, or almost, while he was falling deeper into a trance that to a spectator must have looked like unmixed imbecility. She turned then, lifted her eyes to him, and spoke calmly in that slow, dark, Southern voice:

  “I’m aware of the effect I have on you.”

  (What!!)

  “Can’t help it,” he said.

  “I know. But you’re wasting your time.”

  She was departing. He grabbed for her, missing by four or five feet.

  “Can I carry your cello for you?” he asked. “Just to where you’re going, I mean?”

  She laughed, proving once and for all that her mouth and lips, gums and dentition, uvula, and the rest were in the best condition of hers or anyone else’s. It hurt him, her breasts and gown, her upper arms with silver bracelets on them; soon he would be bawling out loud.

  “You’re very flattering,” she admitted. “I do like that in a man. Coffee?”

  He thought that he would faint.

  Thirty-seven

  He fought for the cello and managed to take it over into his own possession. His opportunity arrived at the stairs, where he was allowed to take her upper arm, an extraordinarily good one that more than anything else reveals a woman’s age, and conduct her and the cello to the outside world. It was dark out there, and for a minute he couldn’t discern her figure from the others moving across campus. This thought came to him: okay, here am I, taking her to have a cup of coffee. Hmm. Never thought it could happen so quickly. Or ever!”

  “But is it really her?”

  The café was full of youths, and he needed another minute to conduct her back across the road and into an old-fashioned restaurant where some dozen adults were sitting quietly at the tables. It seemed at first that the girl might be willing to sit in plain open view, but he managed to guide her to a booth at the further end of the room. She was not mad at him, not yet, and hadn’t yet given any sign of the disgust that he continued from minute to minute to expect.

  “Well!” he revealed. “Would you like a cup of coffee?”

  “Alright.”

  “And a slice of cherry pie with cheese and cinnamon on top?”

  “Is that what you want?”

  “If you’ll pay for it.”

  She laughed. He was making progress. Maybe not a lot of progress, but some. The thought came to him that maybe she was wasn’t too wild about ordinary conversation. Meantime he sat there, drenched in the aura of her beauty and the sunrays that formed an ambit that almost, but not quite, reached all the way to him. Came then the coffee.

  “May I stir it for you?” he asked.

  She laughed again, the third time she had done so. (He never told about the second time.) Indeed, she was able to do her own stirring, and having done so, sat looking back at him calmly.

  “You’re looking into my eyes?”

  “I guess I am.”

  “But the light isn’t right. You have to come close and look from a certain angle. You can see little golden flecks in there sometimes. But I can’t just make it happen.”

  “Good Lord.”

  “I saw a painting one time that had a sky the same color as my eyes.”

  Her voice was slow, dark and deep, and came perhaps from Alabama. Some girls are beautiful by drawing on Plato’s category, but this girl was that category that other girls borrow from.

  “I’d like to see that painting.”

  “I can’t remember where I saw it.”

  “Like to see those little golden flakes, too.”

  “They’re hard to see at night. Okay, but I have to tilt my head a little bit.”

  And did so, a movement that brought out other features as well, namely the faint blue vein in her throat that
ran for a short distance before then plunging into the other material that supported her supernal head. Insane.

  “Do you come to all our concerts?” she asked suddenly.

  “Yes. Certainly.”

  “And you drive all that way?”

  “Walk.”

  “You must really like music!”

  “It’s my second-favorite thing.”

  “I see. Does your mother know what kind of person you are?”

  “She taught me to be nice to girls.”

  “I like that woman. But how nice are you really?”

  “I’ve already bought you a cup of coffee!”

  “You’re wasting your time. But would you die for me? I don’t talk to boys who won’t.”

  “I would if you wanted me to. Do you?”

  “Not yet.”

  Thirty-eight

  She had been absent for hours, and by the time she got back, her chameleons were hopping mad. She felt just awful about that. To amend, she watered them with an eyedropper and then added four, maybe five, red ants from her terrarium, the only other livestock her landlady allowed.

  She had permitted an unprincipled boy to touch her arm. Annoyed, she bathed and showered, buffed her cello, and put it away where burglars were minimally likely to find it. She hoped to have no sexual-type dreams that night, but suspected that she might. Next, she put on a long-playing recording of medieval chants and went through a few routine exercises. Having squandered the evening, she must now spend an hour or more on her assigned readings. Outside, people were moving back and forth, college students, and shouting from their automobiles.

  Who did he think he was, that boy? She did fall off to sleep at about eleven and hardly dreamt at all, or not until just after three in the morning, anyway, when she emerged from bed and had some cigarettes.

  Thirty-nine

  He walked halfway home before turning and coming back for the car. Did he have fuel enough for the almost thirty mile trip in front of him? Yes, but only just.

  There was, of course, no chance he’d get any sleep that night. The room was too short, and his heart was making noises. He rose finally, lit the fire, and began rummaging through a price list of almost-unobtainable Kaiser Motor parts offered at exorbitant prices, a pursuit hardly less arduous than understanding Hegel. He didn’t ask for college credit. He was also highly engrossed in a half-year course in printing methods. He appeared to have a vocation for such matters, for machinery and blacksmithing, for lathes and drills and decommissioned typewriters and the like. He had wanted to buy an antique typesetter but had no place to put it. And so thus, aged twenty-three, he left his auto repair job and began to seek a place in which to house his tools and books and weapons and his other possessions needed for personal growth. He owned some one hundred seventy-five or one hundred eighty books by now, not to mention another thirty or forty on semi-permanent loan. They formed walls of truth and wisdom that fenced him off from the outside traffic and the quotidian world.

  He tried twice to call the girl but lost nerve each time. And then on Thursday, he picked up a (free) newsletter, and after running down the list, visited five foreclosed homes in the five worst locations. He wanted something of brick, a good foundation, a view if possible. A bit of a yard and possibly a few pieces of furniture unimportant enough to have been left behind. A wood-burning stove to fend off the winter weather. A bathtub, a roof without holes, was that too much for a remarkable person who was so good at taking care of himself? No, and he would have wanted, did want, a desk, a bed, and some other things.

  The first place was occupied by a middle-age negress going through a divorce.

  “Whose fault,” he asked, “is the divorce?”

  “Hims! I ain’t studyin’ no ’vorce! He kin stay here, if that be what he wans! It don’t make me no never mind!”

  “Children?”

  “Some.”

  The second place was on a hillside that was not so steep that the boy’s car couldn’t reach it. View, too. He sniffed at it skeptically, kicked the walls, and let his face show how dubious he was. He wanted to be shrewd, knowing how necessary it was for a person’s future.

  “Very well,” he said. “I’ll buy it.”

  “Will?”

  “How much does it cost?”

  He was told the price.

  “What! Seems like too much to me.”

  “Yeah, never thought I’d get it. You can have that old refrigerator, too.”

  “What’s in it?”

  “I know what used to be in it. You paying cash, or what?”

  “Who’s that!”

  “Don’t worry. She’ll leave if you tell her to.”

  The boy paid, handing over reluctantly the one thousand seven hundred fifty dollars he would have preferred to invest in cultural materials. It wasn’t of brick or stone, the dwelling, but did have an earthen cellar for emergencies and food storage.

  He had planned to give the afternoon to cleaning the place, but in the event had to give three whole days to it. An entomologist would have delighted in the attic and cellar both. Nor was it absolutely the case that the roof had no holes in it. It was not till he was trying to sort out his own belongings from those of his prior employer that he received a telephone call relayed to him from next door. The voice was dark and slow and much deeper than was typical for an ordinary girl:

  “How can I have any respect for a person who won’t even call me! You people! Good grief.”

  He held out his hand to keep from falling.

  “Hi.”

  “We’re doing something this Saturday. Of course I have no way of knowing whether you’d be interested in something like that. Kodály, I believe.”

  (Already he had, by God, scaled her outer wall and was gazing down on the red tile rooftops of medieval Tours, the first person so far to have done so. His hand was shaky, his knee caps trembling. In fact, he was nervous.)

  “Yes! I am interested, yes. I am.”

  “Entirely up to you.” (That voice!) “I’ll be wearing that gown. But I won’t have any solos this time.”

  “I’ll write one for you.”

  She laughed. He could not view her face, of course, not from thirty miles away. “What are you wearing at just this moment?” he wanted to ask. Instead he actually did ask: “Starts at seven?”

  “Yes. Of course I’ll need to leave my place a little earlier than that.”

  “In order to get there?”

  “Yes. And the cello. I don’t have that little cart anymore.”

  “Heavy.”

  “It can be.”

  “Doesn’t seem so heavy to me.”

  “Well I reckon not! You can’t compare things like that, boys and girls.”

  “No. My mother told me.”

  She laughed again, a new record. In fact he actually was beginning to see her across the miles. Coming closer, he beheld her nose.

  “I could carry the cello.”

  “Oh! I couldn’t ask that. I don’t even actually know you very well, not really.”

  “What are you wearing just now?” (He had again come near to asking this question.) “I could come to your place at, say, about noontime? Give us lots of time.”

  “Yes, that sounds like you.”

  “See? You do know a lot about me after all.”

  “But are there any good things about you? Who can I ask?”

  “My mother?”

  “Good grief, I need to talk to that woman!”

  “Yes,” he asked himself, “but why are you interested in me in the first place, hmm?” Soon he would be in the arms of the divinest woman on Earth—was that plausible? Her waist had small circumference, and he could just about sniff the smell of her sunset-colored hair when said hair was spread out across his unclothed chest, and so on.

  Forty

  He had bought his house, had cleansed and fumigated it, and by Tuesday had transferred a certain quantity of his personal things to his new high place that lay just a few rods
below the summit of a hill that itself lay over against one of the elements of the lower Blue Ridge mountain range. The more he saw of it and the more he viewed it from various angles inside and out, the more he liked it almost as well as the places he hadn’t the money to pay for.

  No, it was a good investment for him, and he had plans for it that will be described more fully later on.

  To begin, he sought out a retired man who lived nearby and offered him a small wage that, together with his federal benefits, might make his life a bit less unpleasant. A man of almost eighty, he had seen his share of life, and after two years of imprisonment, three wives, three worthless daughters, two worthless sons, and a ninth person, he was glad for a bit of work in the outside world. The boy was good at masonry, but the old man was better at carpentry, and despite his age could drive a ten-penny nail in just four quick blows. He could ingest a fifth of rum without bad results. He had lost a thumb at some date, but otherwise was whole. They liked each other.

  “I want to put a fence around the place,” the boy said.

  “They’s some old lumber over to Pinky’s place. He don’t want it.”

  They worked from about nine in the morning till evening fell, and by the end of the month had transformed the property—I must admit it—into a cozy estate with flower beds and a built-in floor-to-ceiling bookcase with enough space left over for months of growth. Seeing this, the boy began to perceive a certain hostility from his neighbors, a gratifying development. He wanted to be a living reproach to everyone who knew him. Finally, at the beginning of the following month, he took out his .32 Beretta and conducted a half-hour’s worth of noisy target practice in his half-acre yard. He was still enrolled in the state university, his parents believed, and when he wrote them, as sometimes he did, he had to route the letters through me. For the postmarks, don’t you see.

  The concert was for Saturday, but by Wednesday he was nervous all over once again. Thursday was unbearable. He purchased a professional haircut and invested $2.50 to have his suit cleaned. He had learned that a certain motor oil was the finest shoe polish in the world. He had a nineteenth-century pocket watch bought at a pittance from one of the pawnshops. His purpose was to live the most brainy, spiritual, sexual, aesthetic, etc., etc., life possible without resorting to the employment stratagems endorsed by mediocre people, a project he was to carry out much better than me. Where did this boy come from?