The Hair of Harold Roux Read online

  Finally he unlatched the door and came out, wiping his eyes with toilet paper. He was angry—a pouty anger that seemed hard and real, yet unpracticed. He turned back to throw the toilet paper in the toilet and fastidiously flushed it away, watching as it went.

  “I’ve been thinking of quitting school, or transferring to some other place, and I don’t want to,” he said, his voice turning plaintive.

  Allard thought, Yes and if Harold could manage to lose the toupee en route, in a strong wind, it might be a good idea to transfer. Here, again, he wanted to deal directly with Harold in this matter, but found that he simply couldn’t mention that piece of hair. It was as if by even mentioning it he would brutally tear it from Harold’s head. What would stand revealed then but some skin? No, something unmentionable and horrible might happen, like the whole top of Harold’s skull coming raggedly off with it, revealing the gray-pink of his squirming brain. But Allard knew this wouldn’t happen. He wondered, though, if the thing were glued down. His eyes sneaked guiltily at its edges and away.

  After they cleaned up the beer and spray from Harold’s room, Allard suggested again that they go see Mary, thinking that this might cheer Harold up a little, but Harold refused, somewhat curtly. “No, I don’t think I want to,” he said.

  “I thought it might cheer you up.”

  “Allard, don’t you understand that it doesn’t exactly give me pleasure to see Mary look at you like you were some … idol or something?”

  “I wondered about that.”

  “Well, now you know. T can see why, superficially, she’d prefer you. You’re fairly good-looking and I look more or less like Donald Meek. I know that. And you’re clever and even sort of crudely witty at times. Much as I like you, I don’t trust your feelings about Mary. I’m six years older than Mary and I feel very protective toward her, and now, if I have to go away …” Harold gave him a deeply serious look. “Allard, you won’t hurt her, will you?”

  “Oh for Christ’s sake, Harold, you sound like a character in your novel.”

  “I’m being serious. I’m being deadly serious.”

  “Then I feel obliged to inform you that my relationship with Mary Tolliver is, as you might say, ‘strictly platonic’” Then the worm of truth, or perhaps sadism, stirred in him and he added, “So far.”

  Harold looked at him. “It’s true. You can be unkind. You can be cruel.”

  “Anyway,” Allard said, pleased by this attribution to him of power and danger, “you said once that Mary was too good a girl and too good a Catholic to fall for my cheap, facile, crudely obvious wiles.”

  “I think that’s absolutely true!”

  “But maybe you’d better stay here and keep an eye on her anyway.”

  “Maybe I’d better!” Harold said angrily, then had to smile, painfully, and resented it.

  Aaron Benham comes slowly out from the middle of his head into a bright spring morning. Will there have to be a chapter entitled “The Seduction of Mary Tolliver,” which will deal with her background, how her mother died six years ago when she was twelve, and how close she is to her younger brother and especially to her father, who isn’t well? Will she have to shed bitter tears, tears of betrayal made even more bitter because betrayal has not destroyed her destroyer, which is love? Tune in next week.

  Of course this is an old story, and loss of innocence usually doesn’t kill, after all. But each time it happens it is new to the one it happens to, fresh and terrible both in what remains and in what has been washed away. There is still the desire to possess forever, yet part of the mystery’s awesome-ness and power has been washed away forever, all in the same act, an act which, on one level, can be described in rather crudely mechanical terms. A girl (Winifred Cott) once told Aaron that if a girl wore tin pants, he’d have a can opener—an earthy, kitchen metaphor, definitely revealing the demise of awe. But we won’t do it that way. And with Mary there are those terrifying beliefs she will never be able to exercise, those that come from her childhood, from retreats in which nuns and priests have limned the wages of sin, which always seemed to be sexual, and told of torments, of hellhounds eating the flesh of the unabsolved. She has told Allard something of this, he sitting there incredulous, safe within the bland memories of his own benevolent, even gooey Protestantism.

  He and Mary are sitting in the wide living room, or lounge, of her dormitory. The room is all shades of dusty, worn brown, and all around against the walls are davenports, with single, empty easy chairs here and there. Upon most of the davenports are couples who don’t have an available car, or whose relationships haven’t got that far yet, or who perhaps enjoy necking in public. Do you know there is a written house rule that one’s feet must touch the floor? Allard will not put his arm around Mary, much less kiss her, in such a ridiculous place. All around the room the other couples are exacerbating themselves in excruciating stop-motion. Later will come the silent howls to the moon as all the frustrated studs’ seminal vesicles unsnarl themselves from bowlines, half hitches and sheet bends.

  “I’ve got another one,” Mary said. u ‘Tack factory.’ There actually is one in my town.” She was fond of collecting such phrases. Another she had discovered concerned heels that, upon the sidewalk, “metrically clicked.”

  “Met-trick-click-clicked,” she said. “Isn’t that interesting?”

  “Did you know there are African languages called Click languages?” Allard said. “I bet that means something to a Bushman in the Kalahari, or wherever one would find a Bushman.”

  “I wonder,” Mary said. “It sounds sort of like a warning.”

  “Maybe it means ‘What a nice afternoon for a motorcycle ride.’ “

  Mary shook her head, smiling. The green glint in her brown iris caught the light from the floor lamp (always on, day and night) that stood over them on its ponderous pedestal like a watchful housemother.

  “I told you I promised my father I wouldn’t ride on your motorcycle,” she said. “He was so worried about it I just had to promise.”

  “You shouldn’t have told him about it.”

  “Why not? I mean I really had to. He asked me if I was seeing any boys down here, so I told him about you. He’s worried, you know. He thinks this is a pretty sinful place.”

  “Did you also tell him I’m some kind of a godless atheist?”

  “No.” Her face darkened; he put his hand on her cheek and felt the warmth of blood. “I don’t know why he didn’t ask.” She hated even a lie of omission. This quality did awe him considerably.

  He looked at her steadily as she continued to blush. What a pretty, high-cheekboned face, now full of ambivalent excitement, with all that fresh young blood careening around at the slightest command of emotion. She continued blushing because of his cool appraisal. She was such a complete living thing, but all humans had to be just slightly defective in some physical way or other, except possibly those rare, statistically certified idols of the movies. Was Mary’s neck a centimeter too short for perfection, or her little-girl hips a centimeter too narrow? What cold, inhuman standards this uncrowned prince demanded as the price of adoration.

  He had been stunned by beauty in the past, but Mary didn’t do this to him, and he couldn’t find the principle behind her vulnerability. Right now she was excited rather than bored by his silent examination of her. He had the feeling they could sit next to each other for hours on end, saying nothing at all, and to Mary each second would be all intensity and life. Out of the ordinary qualities of Allard Benson what a paragon of excitement and glamor she must have created. This bothered him a little, as though he had the opportunity to take advantage of someone who was under the influence of drugs, or of magical delusions. He could not imagine what he had done to deserve the look she gave him. This thought registered itself and quickly began to fade in importance. But it did register.

  His coolness impressed her; he was not trembling worshipful Harold Roux, nor was he Hilary David Edward St. George—another of her calf-eyed infatuates, who
se debility in her presence was the inability to stop talking about everything in the world except what he wanted to talk about.

  “Anyway, you can always take Naomi for a ride on your motorcycle,” Mary said, imitating jealousy—pretending to imitate jealousy. When Allard first asked her if she would like a ride, she declined, but her roommate, Naomi Goldman, said she would, so he took Naomi. She and Mary were improbable roommates, brought together by chance and the housing office.

  “And Naomi and I could talk politics,” Allard said.

  “Is that what you talk about?”

  Oh, oh. A bit of edge there, though deprecated by a smile. He wondered if she had seen, or been told of, other times he had taken Naomi for rides on his motorcycle.

  “We’d discuss the finer nuances of Das Kapital, or perhaps sing anthems in praise of Stalin,” he said, thinking that there was some truth in this but very much aware that the conditional tense was a pure lie.

  The first time he took Naomi for a ride (seemingly with Mary’s approbation) they rode around the campus for a while, Naomi talking constantly into his left ear. She wanted him to take part in a symposium on the Marshall Plan—as the politically illiterate opposition to her position—at the next meeting of the Liberal Club. He was deliberately noncommittal about this project because he could feel her long high jumper’s legs squeezing him as if he were a horse she rode, and her hard, melonlike breasts seemed to burn great holes in his back. She was a tall, coppery girl—copper and rose, with black hair, a noble Roman nose and a jet-black bar of eyebrow that came across unbroken above her eyes, which were robin’s-egg blue and at first glance seemed cold and doll-like. Naomi was serious; humor was flippancy, irony facetiousness. The world must be fixed. But she knew as well as any middle-class girl the precise language of touch. When her arms slid down to his waist they clearly indicated that they were feeling the torso of a man, so without a single word on this subject he turned across the railroad tracks and took the bridle path into College Woods to a place he knew, a little alcove in the pines where the sun warmed the long needles and there were no signs at all of human traffic.

  “After the war,” Naomi said as they sat on the soft tawny needles, “there were eight million more people in Europe than before the war. How does your theory of economic ruin account for that?” Naturally she was against the Marshall Plan.

  “That’s very interesting. I didn’t know that,” he said, scouting for possible roots beneath the needles before he pulled her (a signal touch, not an actual pull) down beside him. Her arms hadn’t lied to him on the motorcycle; when she arched her back to let him slide her Levis under her it was a pleasant, mild shock to find that she wore nothing under them. His throat contained a large bubble. Olive tones shimmered beneath her copper and rose; her blue eyes, almost as strange as Mary’s green-flecked assymetrical ones, watched him undress, seemed to approve of the equality of nakedness. He was not used to unshaven armpits and legs, but the tight shimmery gleam of her flesh shone as though she had been anointed. Myrrh? She smelled vaguely of salt and sand. The dry carpet of needles seemed to undulate as her comradely body received him.

  Afterwards her long fingers encircled his buttocks. “Wait a minute. Don’t go away yet,” she said. “Stay inside me. I suppose we should have used something, but I’ve just had my period so it’s not the most fertile time in my estrual cycle.” She stared into his eyes. “You know, it’s strange you didn’t suck on my nipples. Maybe you’re not infantile in that sense.”

  “Did you want me to?” He was heavily aware now of the sky open above them and the breeze that signified that they were, after all, outdoors and could be discovered. He slid out of her and she reluctantly let him sit up.

  “I want you to do whatever you want to do, providing it doesn’t hurt. Hurt too much, I mean, or in the wrong way. I’m kind of a masochist, in a mild way, and I’m not ashamed of it. If it feels good to both partners it’s good, don’t you think?”

  He hastened to agree.

  “What I don’t like are rubbers. It just seems wrong to have a layer of rubber between a man’s penis and my sheath. Anyway, if we do this again I’ll know how it will turn out and I’ll wear my diaphragm.”

  “Do you think about all that during intercourse?” he asked. Although she hadn’t spoken recognizable words during those minutes, she had made little yelping and purring noises.

  “No,” she said seriously, “I can’t remember thinking at all then.”

  She lay there naked, open to him, her doll-blue eyes wide open, too, and with her last words a wave of fondness for her, maybe love, nearly drowned him. Came from somewhere behind him with no warning, and suddenly he was in its element and couldn’t breathe. He got over her on his hands and knees and kissed her. “You’re beautiful,” he said.

  “You’re ready again already?” she said, surprised, her hands competently checking him out.

  That was the first time he took Naomi for a ride on his motorcycle. Later it became fairly regular. She might call him at his dormitory but he didn’t call her at hers because Mary might answer the floor telephone. He could usually get her at Herbert Smythe’s apartment downtown. She had only recently been promoted by Herbert from mimeograph girl to a more or less vocally respectable comrade. The Marshall Plan symposium (which Allard attended but did not participate in) was her first assignment in this new rank, and she carried it off quite well.

  They spoke of Mary occasionally. Naomi was quite fond of her. “She’s such a little bourgeoise,” Naomi said. “But she’s sweet. She has a sweet nature. And she’s your nice little small-town ‘girl friend,’ which I think is stupid but quaint.”

  He searched her ice-blue eyes for some humor, but couldn’t find any. Or jealousy, either.

  He could detect both in Mary, however. She looked at him and said, “Naomi’s really quite an attractive girl, don’t you think?”

  “I like blondes with one brown and one green eye,” he said. “I know it’s a fetish, but I can’t help it.” He leaned over until their noses touched and looked into her left eye where the glittering green and dark brown turned kaleidoscopic. Her breath was as sweet as cool water. “When the sexy secretary from the tack factory trotted, her heels metrically clicked,” he said.

  She laughed and pushed him away. “Everything you say, practically, has ‘sex’ in it somewhere.” She thought it quite sophisticated and daring even to say the word.

  “All I do is take cold showers,” he said.

  She blushed.

  “Let’s go for a walk or something,” he said, looking around the room at all the Laocoon groups of two in their saddle shoes and loafers. “There’re enough sex spores floating around here to give asthma to a Buick.”

  “You are funny, Allard,” she said. She had to go fix herself up before going for a walk. While he waited he watched one couple across the room. They were immobile. Their mouths had grown together. She wore his sport coat over her shoulders so that his hand, hidden by the cloth, could fondle her breast through her pastel blue cashmere sweater and her brassiere. The boy was the one who was sweating, however. His glasses lay neatly on the table next to the davenport, as did her pink ones. His legs were crossed in order to hide his erection, which meant that his back, because he had to keep his foot on the floor, must be in terrible pain. Her scuffed saddle shoes were primly, solidly and legally planted on the rug. Their tongues must be tired. Just then the girl opened one eye, looked at Allard and shut the eye again. That was all. Their locked immobility was, he thought, reptilian.

  When Mary finally returned she was wearing a silk blouse, a cardigan sweater and one of the plaid skirts she made herself, pinned together at the thigh with a gold safety pin. She also wore knee-length knitted stockings and the kind of shoes usually called “stout brogans.” She was always dressed up in some sort of ensemble, and inside and out she wore all the complicated rigging dressed-up girls were supposed to wear. Boom Maloumian nudged him one time and said, leering at Mary, “That’s
eatin’ stuff, Benson,” smacking his wet lips. Mary certainly heard this, but said nothing. Allard wondered about it, but thought, finally, that it sounded not nice and was probably screened out of her mind somewhere between issuance and reception.

  They walked down the sidewalk among the students, many of the men wearing parts of military clothing—especially those whose jackets were decorated with stenciled bombs or other informative devices. No one would go as far as to wear decorations, but any other sort of visible bragging seemed to be considered all right.

  Down Main Street in front of the Student Union, people were gathering on the lawn near where garbled yelps and static came from a sound truck. Allard and Mary drifted over with the others, two hundred or more, most of whom were at this moment between classes. Next to the sidewalk was a big granite boulder. Herbert Smythe and Naomi stood on the boulder and several of their supporters stood rather quietly and nervously around it. The sound truck was parked next to it in the street. Herbert, a slender young man whom Allard instinctively pitied and despised, affected a uniform consisting of a cheap blue pin-stripe suit, GI boots and a white shirt worn with the collars spread over the lapels of the suit coat. To him this was the costume of the poor workingman, the embattled but unbowed organizer of the people. Unfortunately his head, appearing on top of a thin neck above a satisfactory, Lincolnesque Adam’s apple, was all wrong. It was a nice-boy head, a mama’s boy or divinity-school head, too young and somehow evasively not shy but embarrassed, as though it wondered, without daring to look, if his fly was open. His oratorical gestures were classic, learned, out of the last century, and now, in the giant cone of force of the amplifiers, his shrill voice blared and squealed. The oratorical gestures were just out of synch with the voice, and of course the voice was completely out of synch with the audience, who at first wondered what in the world this fellow was so instantly hysterical about. But soon they got his drift. A few phrases such as Triumph of the proletariat! and Capitalist running dogs! sorted themselves out of the blast. Actually Herbert was protesting a movie that was to be shown that night at the local theater. The movie was an old one, Ninotchka, in which Greta Garbo plays a humorless (at first) Soviet agent who is seduced and converted by an American capitalist (Melvyn Douglas). Soon the crowd, sensing a common target and buffoon, and angered by his seriousness, began to howl Herbert down. Herbert responded by howling, with the advantage of electronics, back at them.