The Hair of Harold Roux Read online

  Actually Harold’s ordered world appealed to Allard a great deal. How wonderful all that honor and virginity and sacredness would be, in a way. The immense sacred value of Mary’s lovely body until such momentous dark acts were sanctified by a Higher Being; meaning beyond mere fleshly considerations! It was a world he’d once believed in too—back, say, in grammar school, when a girl’s very glance might give him palpitations. Now he had chosen not to dream but to be there in the flesh, and in acting on that choice he had to admit to a vague feeling of sadness and loss; perhaps those childhood intensities could never again be recaptured.

  Aaron hears, above the clamor of birds, Helga moving around in the kitchen. Dishes and silver tinkle and clank softly, water is about to boil and is making its squeezed complaint—the sounds of a domestic morning. He squints one eye at his watch, which tells him it is seven o’clock. Helga must have shut the door between the birthing room and the kitchen so he could sleep a little longer. But he is only a guest here, an alien to the clink and clatter, the soft voices—Helga’s and Edward’s—that form this kleine Morgenmusik. He must get up, so he does. Through the birthing room’s other door is the downstairs bathroom, in which the real ceramic tiles, glassed-in shower, plumbing, cabinets and all had been lovingly assembled by George the craftsman—instead of crafting his dissertation. Each tile must have told him in a small voice, even as it fit so perfectly in place, Loss, waste. If you do us and not the other thing, you will have to leave us. All the while he made this beautiful house, in order to keep his family warm and safe, he was doing just the opposite. It was not a matter of improving the place and getting equity in it in order to sell it. No, this is love.

  George is a teacher. Teaching is what he has been chosen to do. Everyone in the department agrees on this point, and certainly this is the only point in the world upon which they all agree. George’s students expect him never to fake or lie. They expect from him generosity, but in the matter of work and marks they expect firmness, because he cares about what they learn. He is an enthusiast of his subject, which is literature in English. But if his contract is not renewed he will simply have to go elsewhere—to a two-year college, to one of the new small colleges of somewhat doubtful standards and aims, to a secondary school somewhere, or even to another job altogether, because in these hard days teaching jobs of any kind are scarce. The one certainty is that it will have to be somewhere else, away from his beloved home. Neither George nor Helga have any other source of money, so they can’t simply continue to live here, the way some failed scholars and teachers have. The property taxes on their house and acres are nearly confiscatory now, and will of course get worse.

  Aaron examines his ageless, always unfamiliar face in George’s mirror. “Glah,” says the face. “And who are you, anyway?” Aaron asks as the face cleverly imitates the words.

  Men do not sham convulsion

  Nor simulate a throe

  “Ulgh!” says the face. Emily Dickinson is wrong. “Ullsb!” the face says, simulating a throe.

  Nothing is funnier than simulated agony. A man’s head sticking out of a commode, Boom Maloumian laughing at a world that always lives up to his expectations. But maybe Emily Dickinson is right after all, and the deepest causes for our imitating throes, gags, convulsions, spastics, drunks, babbling idiots and stunned drooling mongoloids are the real causes. We only think we are doing imitations.

  Aaron washes whatever invisible stuff is supposed to be washed from that face, from among those morning bristles, borrows a handy comb and combs his hair.

  Morning sunlight turns the kitchen bright and dark, changes Edward’s hair from Helga-colored to gold. Edward bends over his bowl, netting the last grains of Crunchy Granola from the milk. “Good morning, Aaron,” he says.

  “Good morning, Ed.”

  Helga looks just a little puffy about the eyes, as though she’s been awake too long in the night.

  “Bacon and eggs?” she says cheerfully. “This is George’s day to gorge himself on breakfast, but you can order what you like.”

  “That sounds fine. We’ll gorge together,” he says. “I’ll gorge with George.”

  She laughs as she skillfully separates the bacon strips with a spatula and arranges them side by side in a big iron skillet. Sunlight brushes the down on her upper lip and flashes on her flowered housecoat as she moves across the light. To Aaron’s strange eye she seems as green and graceful as a young tree.

  George comes in humming and smiling. “Beautiful day! Beautiful day! Hear all the goddam lovely birds screaming! Everything they say means life, procreation, plenty of tasty bugs to eat!”

  “Tasty!” Edward says, laughing over his bowl.

  “I have a great class this morning,” George says. “I won the freshman lottery with this class. They are all merely beautiful people.”

  Aaron meets Helga’s eyes. It’s as if George has a terminal disease and is unaware of it. How easily they can keep the secret from him.

  At seven forty-five he and George drive toward town, leaving Edward with his lunch box and green book bag to wait for his bus, which comes by around eight. George hums happily as they drive along, and Aaron argues with himself about bringing up the dissertation, that nest of snakes. Should he destroy such obvious contentment? George is, in a sense, killing himself with this self-deception. What good is a friend if he can’t grab his friend before he leaps? But not now, not on this spring morning that is so bright each border of tree, house and hill imprints itself almost painfully, nervously, on the brain. And maybe George is really happy; maybe no small voices speak to him at all. Aaron, to whom small voices constantly scream and babble in tongues, in code and in clear, finds this hard to believe, yet he does know something about lying to oneself and God knows it might be true.

  Of course, George might rationalize his laziness through criticism of the system itself—a system that can sacrifice teachers of George’s sensitivity, knowledge and care, sometimes in favor of idiots. But that is too simple; how can you find out if a scholar is still alive in his discipline if you can’t read his words? “Where are thy fine wondrous works,/And where are they to read?” Lecturing itself is a kind of publication, and if your ideas are worth giving to your students, are they not then good enough to be written for your peers everywhere? This, after all, is a university, not a trade school. Here you are supposed to be on the cutting edge of knowledge, not merely teaching known skills. George can fill up all the hours of his days teaching, caring for his students, getting them out of jail, helping them with the problems of addiction, pregnancy, madness, vicious or cold parents, faulty logic, fanaticism, dull complacency, misinformation, but that is not his only job. The system is also meant to give him time to write, to produce that solid thing: a book. The general class or contact load is six to nine hours a week. There is an old story about a businessman and a professor. Businessman: “How many hours do you teach?” Professor: “Nine.” Businessman: “Well, that is a long day … but it’s easy work.” Another, even more ancient story, about two men talking below the cross upon which Christ is crucified. “He was a great teacher,” says one, and the other says, “Yes, but he didn’t publish.”

  George hums and drums happily upon the wheel with his fingers as they drive along. He doesn’t seem to have a care. Smiling cheerfully, he drops Aaron at his house and drives off to his eight o’clock class of freshmen, those beautiful people.

  Aaron stands in his driveway in the warm sun, not wanting to go into his house. He anticipates the feel of the doorknob, the sound of the heavy door pulling out of its weather stripping as it swings open, the sound of his own feet in the hallway and across the kitchen floor. On the desk in his study will lie his manuscript. In the silent air will hang his various anticipations of Agnes’ behavior when she returns this evening, and his rehearsals of his own cold or warm guilty responses. He shivers, even out here in the sun. There in the garage is his Honda, silver and black, everything upon it functional and clean-lined. It seems such
an easy toy, but it contains thousands of design choices, subtleties of torque and friction, electrical circuits of staggering complexity. Alternating current is changed to direct through the mysteries of selenium, that mineral with a selective mind of its own. Gasoline is vaporized and fed in minutely precise amounts into an engine whose reciprocating and revolving parts can whirl and valve more than eight thousand times per minute, over one hundred and thirty-three times each second. And the complications of suspension, balance and control: he despairs of ever understanding. He cannot contemplate such brilliant competence.

  He goes into the house. After only one night unoccupied it smells a little close, the air too still, as if the house feels and resents its abandonment. The cat comes in with him at his ankles, all forgiveness, which means it is hungry. He spoons some of its gray, fish-smelling glop into its dish and goes on into his study, where his manuscript lies perversely unchanged, exactly as he left it, not a word added.

  Last night he dreamed that with George’s aid and advice he shot George several times in the head and heart. The pale face looms, the weeping bullet holes hardly affecting George’s earnest reasonableness. He unlocks the desk drawer and takes out his black Nambu, unlatches the slide a crack to see if it is loaded, which he knows it is, and puts it back. Those fingerprints on the oily metal are his own. He is an adult; he makes his decisions in private, on his own, with only himself for counsel. He can live, obviously, with paradox, guilt, ambivalence. It may not be the clear golden life of the dedicated or the faithful, but it has its occasional rewards. It is not rewarding him at the moment, however.

  Once he went toward his pleasures with near arrogance, believing not only in his strength but that no matter what debacle of nature or of emotion or even of machinery occurred he would, by agility and luck, survive. He dreamed of being in a high tower as it toppled, and as it came through high trees he coolly stepped off onto a branch and let the tower fall past to its destruction. In another recurring dream he, a corporal, is being taken by speeding staff car with military motorcycle escort down the dark roads of a combat zone. Colonels and generals ride with him, but he is the center of things because he carries a message of high importance. Sirens screaming, they come to an airfield, and out on the field under harsh lights a trim and dangerous silver jet fighter plane is in readiness for him. It is a single-place airplane, and suddenly he realizes that he doesn’t know how to fly it, that the only flying he’s ever done is holding the controls of a Piper Cub for a few minutes in the air. So a little debate goes on in his head, but finally he decides what the hell, he’ll give it a try. The dream ends there, but with some disappointment that it does end there, because he always wants to find out how he did with the jet.

  He has had so many close calls in his life, big and small, from mere inconvenience to the threat of death. Whatever fate or magic gets him into these situations usually gets him out. The odds seem to favor him; something seems to be on his side, and he has at times consciously counted on this. Once, broke and hungry in a miserably cold gray Chicago dawn, after a bad run of luck at poker, he was walking back to his room when, across from the university bookstore, he heard a scratchy, ticking sound from a barberry hedge; impaled on a thorn was a crisp ten-dollar bill. Twenty years ago an odd ridge on an otherwise smooth cement highway caused his sliding motorcycle to jump vertical just before he hit the car that had turned in front of him, so that he hit the soft door panel with his side and crash bar, and wasn’t hurt at all. A septic-tank hole in wet sandy earth collapsed just before he was to be lowered into it to dig. A hunting bullet seared his leg and gave him nothing more than a burn. Congress passed a law, just before he was to go to the battle of Okinawa, saying that he was too young to fight without a full six months of training. While dozing next to Norman Winebaum as they drove to New York, he awoke just in time to see that Norman was going to keep to the right of a car parked facing them on their side of the road. When he and twenty other soldiers were lined up to bail out of a C-47 over suburban Los Angeles, the copilot came running back to find out why the plane was so tail-heavy and told them that the plane was not going to crash—the pilot was losing altitude, circling and wagging his wings as a greeting to his wife below. His reserve enlistment ran out twenty-eight days before the Korean War began. He got the mortgage on this house a week before the rate jumped a whole percentage point. It is almost frightening to go on listing his luck. In Tokyo, one summer evening, two Kanakas had him cornered and were in the process of deciding to throw him out a fourth-floor window of the Nihon Yusen Kaisha building when help arrived in the form of Iwashita and Ohara, members of his squad and also Kanakas, thus as fierce as the first two. The cold sweat of that balmy night can still be felt. He shouldn’t go on; luck is luck, and should never be listed. Do not think of it. His children are intelligent and handsome …

  But what has now happened to the Prince of Luck? Has the long-deserved comeuppance begun? Here on his desk lies his work. In the morning light it seems to him dry, starved, flippant, even somewhat nasty. And there is always, in any moment of stasis in his work, the temptation to think about what is currently fashionable, which is a disaster and the death of energy, the death of sincerity. Unless a man has given away his brains to one of a thousand current Salvation Armies, he is alone, judging himself. He wants to congratulate no one. He doesn’t want to shock anyone, either. He doesn’t want to shock anyone’s Aunt Mabel, or Mrs. Robert H. Ferranos, of 99 Crescent View Terrace, Plumville, Ohio. That is not his purpose. She is human, is she not? Are you not human, Mrs. Ferranos, once an open and delightfully sentient young animal running and jumping over the daisies? He did want her to hear his voice, and he failed.

  Mrs. Robert H. Ferranos

  99 Crescent View Terrace

  Plumville, Ohio

  Dear Mrs. Ferranos,

  I was hurt by your letter, not so much by its judgment of my book, but because I caused you to write to me in anger. How can I tell you that I respect you, and that no matter where I take you, I don’t want to hurt you? I don’t want to shock you in the way I’ve shocked you. I may call upon you to witness terrible things at times, but I am not upon the side of terror. There are those who would want to shock you, of course, but I don’t think I have their rather infantile needs. Maybe you and I have different, but respectable, ideas about what literature should do. You object, I think, not to the violence in my book but to the occasional (but not random) sex without love, the recognition of the gross mechanics of our needs, the stinks and emissions of the human animal. These would not be part of your literature, which would have as its purpose entertainment and moral instruction—both good things …

  Boom Maloumian ruled his room, an exotic despot sitting in state and dominating his roommates, visitors and anyone within hearing by exuberance and the sheer intensities of his needs, demands, his constant blast of anecdote. To be near him at all caused in Allard a change of style. He resented this influence because in his moral center he despised Boom Maloumian, but after hearing the flow of that huge voice for a while he detected in his own voice some of those rhythms and even assumptions. In Boom Maloumian’s presence this force was stunning. Sitting majestically on his sagging bed, two hundred pounds of shining brown hairy flesh, sweat always gleaming on him, he celebrated his adventures: how he tupped a humpbacked hooker in Toledo, diddled a ripe banana-titted jigaboo in Big D. There was always something odd or freakish about his women, and they always paid for their sins. He told at length how he rolled queers one season in Beantown, the things he or his outfit did to jigs shines spades inks spooks shades coons dinges smokes coals zulus tarpots jazzbos fuzzies darkies shinnies boos nigs boogies. He was an encyclopedia of racial, ethnic and sexual derogations. When his troopship docked in Sydney two men were missing, both fairies. “Official report was, they flew away!”

  He looked you in the eyes, beginning one of his tales, daring you, beginning softly like a huge engine idling. Allard had the feeling that if he tried to get away f
rom that fierce, possessive regard he would not quite make it to the door; almost, with the last fearful optimism of a mouse, but not quite. Boom Maloumian threatened always some last horrifying burst of potential you didn’t ever want to see activated, even against someone else. You were afraid even to witness it. He had the rare quality—at least rare to Allard, who was no stranger to violence—that caused your bones to feel thinner, and when you are conscious of your bones as sticks you are intimidated. This is when the logistical section of your brain calculates that he outweighs you by forty pounds of living tissue, that in the cold regions of his intent he is much less ambivalent toward murder.

  Although Boom Maloumian must have had some kind of reconnaissance going, because he was never caught, he seemed to pay no attention whatsoever to any rule or law. He was a constant, almost casual thief, shoplifter, scrounger. His towels and shoes came from the athletic department; one sweatshirt improbably claimed itself to belong to STATE POLICE, TROOP c. You would find your possessions in plain sight in his room. Allard and his roommates would, without comment, take their things back, but others didn’t dare.

  He roasted a whole lamb in a pit Short Round dug behind the dormitory, made Short Round eat one of the hot green tomatoes from the five-gallon crock he kept beside his bed to clean the shish from the kebabs. Short Round ran down the hall screaming “Water! Water!” which only made it worse, while Boom Maloumian whooped and bellowed, swaggering down the hall naked, scratching his moss-grown balls. The housemother stayed carefully downstairs in her enclave, and Harold Roux, as floor proctor, was by this time making frantic efforts to find another place to live. Boom Maloumian and Short Round would line up in front of their door as Harold walked past to the showers. “Now,” Boom said in ponderous baby talk, “Evybody who beweeves in faywies cwap dey itto hands!” And they softly clapped Harold down the hall.