The Hair of Harold Roux Read online

  “Yes, Mark Rasmussen,” he says, thinking that he would never use a telephone to convey anything but cool information. He tries to hold on to this calm thought.

  “Professor Benham, he’s disappeared! He’s left school again and we don’t know where he’s gone! He hasn’t been to any classes for three weeks and his roommates—the people he lives with—won’t tell us anything! They say they don’t know where he is!”

  First he thinks of Mark’s homely, intelligent face, upon which the ironies of despair constantly flicker as he suppresses one inexpressible joke after another—a gnomelike, grayish young face above its tangled beard. It is a face that allows laughter only. Mark would never blat out his feelings this way.

  “Have you talked to the dean?” Aaron’s fraudulently calm voice enters the telephone’s electronic diaphragms and filters. Her voice continues, too intimately near his unprotected brain. He can feel her breath that really isn’t there, as if she might at any moment insert her hot ravaged tongue in his ear. He shudders for Mark. Who wouldn’t want to flee this swampy intensity?

  “Yes! He told us about Mark not going to any classes and that’s how we found out that you were Mark’s adviser and how you might have some idea …”

  She stops, demanding by her silence that he take over her sentence, her problems. But after a moment she takes hold again, her voice weeping and demanding, and he thinks good God he can see this woman he’s never seen who’s lost her whelp, her offspring she never understood under all that creepy weirdo hippie hair anyway. But Mark is her child, isn’t he? He came from her womb.

  “We don’t even know any of his friends! We don’t even know what they look like he wouldn’t bring them home after what happened last fall … what awful drugs he’s taking or what! Mir, mir, mir,” she utters, weeping those syllables.

  He can see her, the granulated skin of her soft cheeks, her eyes ugly from crying. She is probably not much older than he is, but Mark seems much more his contemporary than this damp maternal force. He resents the tears of pity that have got in the way of his vision.

  “I’m on leave this year,” he says, “so Mark has another adviser …”

  “Yes. Professor Parker. We know! But he only signed Mark’s schedule, that’s all he knows about Mark at all! That’s all he knows about Mark!”

  “I’ll see what I can find out for you.”

  “Oh, thank you! Thank you! We thought you might know some of his friends. He must have friends. Students. We just don’t even know who his friends are, Professor Benham!”

  “Well,” he says, still amazed by his falsely steady voice, “I knew who some of them were last spring. Let me have your telephone number so I can let you know if I find out anything.”

  She gives him a number in the town of Somerville, a depressed little mill town fifteen miles or so from the university. But Louise Rasmussen wants to talk further, to try to explain now that her original question has been answered. She sounds as though explanation is more her forte, and Aaron remembers that Mark once told him she used to be a grammar school teacher. Yes, she e-nun-ci-ates. Guilt and self-justification: “What did we do wrong? We’ve given Mark everything, Professor Benham! Everything!”

  He wants to tell her that she probably didn’t do anything wrong, but of course that’s no answer because it isn’t much of a reason for all that hair and those raggedy clothes and that funny smell of burning rope. He wonders if the Rasmussens wouldn’t have preferred some other variety of freak—a mongoloid, perhaps.

  “What did we do wrong? What did we do wrong?” How many times has he heard that self-defeating cry? He is irritated now, because God! these women with their middle-aged quirky crazy desperation hung out like the raw flesh of a wound!

  “I’ll see what I can do, Mrs. Rasmussen,” says the benevolent, paternal voice of the professor.

  “We’ll be eternally grateful! We love Mark so much! Thank you! Thank you!”

  And again he is betrayed into tears by her worry and grief. She finally hangs up and he howls to his empty house with the ear-popping intensity of a tortured baboon.

  When he is through howling, Aaron stands at the kitchen stove listening to the tiny whines the coffeepot emits while it is heating. A cigarette hangs dry in his lips. Yes, he’ll probably be able to locate Mark, and he’ll do it because he said he would, and because Mark was once one of his most talented students. Presumably Mark is still talented, but Aaron has learned not to become overexcited by any sort of potential. It is as if a specific solvent for talent has been introduced into the national diet. Perhaps it is a new symptom of ecological poisoning.

  With a heavy, soggish feeling, he realizes that soon he’ll have to go back to teaching. For every student with Mark’s iron in him, there are so many others. Unused talent can break your heart, but the others deaden the soul. So many times in the last ten years he has so patiently explained that self-indulgence is not art, that in spite of all temporal evidence to the contrary what is gained is earned. How many thousand more poems must he read beginning thus:

  Kaleidoscope of the City

  comes

  neonpulsing

  the I Ching

  opens

  leaves

  silhouettes

  upon

  the

  burning

  we

  ecstaticly

  Revitalyse!

  Or thus:

  Violets vibrating

  My pad

  Warm asleep

  Hare

  Hare

  Hare Krishna

  Hare

  Hare

  Hare Krishna

  Strung

  Out

  Beautiful

  Hare

  Hare

  Hare Krishna

  How many thousand more times must he with sweet reason convey the information that he is neither pleased nor dismayed by any statement of belief or of feeling or by any object supposedly disgusting or supposedly beautiful unless it is made so by the poet. And heaviest of all is the knowledge that he will always search until he finds something, some small, possibly accidental voltage engendered here or there between a word and a word or a phrase and a phrase, and, in mentioning this, store up somewhere in his psyche another dangerously explosive charge, until …

  But not Aaron Benham, that kindly sufferer of fools.

  And then there is still poor Mark, whom he has known now for at least seven years and who has been through most of the major storms and awakenings of his times, beginning with sit-ins in the South, with SNCC, jail, a beating that left him with a broken hand, and on up the twisted years of the late sixties and into the seventies. Chicago, Washington; after the Cambodia-Kent State-Jackson State spring he disappeared for more than a year and came back sad, cynical, allowing that maybe he’d try to write again. Aaron hasn’t seen him for a month or more, but then Mark knows he is on leave and trying to work, and beyond Mark’s usual brashness is a perhaps inordinate respect for those who are working.

  Aaron is back at his desk, his bitter coffee in hand. Suddenly he puts the coffee cup down, walks to the corner of his study and picks up a rifle, black cold metal embraced by the organic walnut of its stock, the long bolt silvered by the locking slides of the fifty and more years of its existence. It was manufactured in January 1918 for a quaint war now passed out of all but a few living memories. The rifle in his arms becomes part of him, part of his humanity. Why else has it evolved to fit shoulder and arms and eye with such perfection, even comfort? His heritage over the generations, slowly evolved from matchlock and harquebus into this smooth instrument of his culture.

  His, indeed. He can not imagine how he has come to be a professor. Aaron Benham, professor of sweet reason? Hysterical laughter in the background. Don’t list your beliefs because they are all, essentially, lies. You are not the sweet rational person whose face they know. One click over that line and murder steams in your heart. You have always been armed. You have always swung your shoulders li
ke a typical arrogant American, and enjoyed the ice of confrontation. Christ! If he could only have some friends, some enemies he is not constrained to understand. He is sick of reason, sick of convincing. The professor is sick to death of explaining.

  He puts his rifle back in its niche; it seems to have given strength to his arm and at the same time to have robbed his brain. He wants to think only of the rifle’s purity of function, which cleans his mind of all the paradoxical complications of having to be a member of his race.

  THE HAIR OF HAROLD ROUX

  his notebook says to him. But that is only a title. The rest of his creation fades back across a long plain into mist and darkness. He has always thought of a novel, before it has taken on its first, tentative structure, as a scene on this dark plain, the characters standing around a small fire which warmly etches the edges of their faces. Distant mountains are turning moon-cold and blue as the last light fades as if forever. It is that small fire he must constantly re-create or these last warm lives will cease to live, will never have lived even to fear the immensities of coldness and indifference around them. Absolute Zero is waiting, always. In Paradoxology that is perhaps the name of God.

  He has a poem he wants to write, called “To an Ice Tick.” Unfinished lines haunt him.

  … the synapse

  Must contain in small the conception

  Of the conception of warmth

  Here in its always small increments

  A dry and an ice age hence.

  Compared to Zero the tiny exoskeletal mite, protected from our inevitable stupidity by the mile-thick icecap of Greenland, is our warm ancestor, our only hope for a recreation of humor, grace and love. When one cannot look back and find even one incident in the sad history of the race in which vanity was not more important, even, than survival, one tends to search desperately for a friend. Perhaps he will presume to instruct the ice tick in the possibilities of selective evolution toward a consciousness of its own mortality—that dark knowledge from which all gaiety and humor arises.

  But then again he might not. He thinks of stabbing his pencil straight down into his notebook to see how many pages the graphite point will pierce, when the telephone rings.

  No. He will not answer it. He will not answer it, he silently declares as his various traitorous appendages move him away from his desk toward the front hall where the mad thing squats and screams.

  “Aaron?” Another worried voice not far from tears, but this time it is Helga Buck, his friend, the wife of his friend. “Aaron, I know you’re working …” Her voice is deep, breathy as the voice of a singer of the fifties whose name he can’t recall.

  “What’s the matter, Helga?”

  “It’s George,” she says.

  She seems to have lost her breath, and he compulsively offers his. “What’s the matter with him?”

  “He’s out in the garden. He’s got the blues something awful, Aaron. I was just wondering if maybe you couldn’t just drop by or something. I mean I know you’re working and I think it’s a dumb thing to ask. I mean maybe beg. Christ, I don’t know …”

  “Sure, Helga.”

  “I mean at breakfast I just mentioned something or other—maybe it was the Corps of Engineers—and he went into the bathroom and I think he vomited.”

  “Okay, I’ll try to cheer him up,” Aaron says. “You know me. I’m just a bundle of joy.”

  He gets her to laugh a little, anyway. “Aaron, don’t tell him I called you, huh?”

  “Okay, Helga, sure. Of course not.”

  “And thanks, Aaron. Thank you.” She is grateful, almost cheerful as she hangs up, which makes him feel noble, or something. He isn’t able to think of a word for his feelings because for one thing he is exasperated by George Buck. George won’t finish his Ph.D. dissertation. He’s been given a deadline by the dean and the department; he has to have it passed by his adviser at Brown by the end of August or next year will be his last. If he doesn’t get the thing finished he will have to take his wife and his bright seven-year old son Edward and go somewhere else to teach, and jobs at decent places are almost impossible to find. Aaron finds this procrastination hard to understand. A little, yes; maybe even a lot. He is no stranger to sloth himself—but not at the certain, documented expense of his job and his home. In the Bucks’ case their home, their beloved old house, has become important far beyond material considerations. George and Helga have taken a sill-rotted, almost hopelessly warped and sunken eighteenth-century farmhouse and by their own sweat and patience made it square and sound. From the sodden, foundering hulk that it had been they have erased time and made it light and crisp upon its green lawns again, as true as its loving builders crafted and squared it in A.D.1749. Aaron knows that the house is deeply—scarily, in fact—part of George’s continuing life. George uses it the way some people use drugs or alcohol; sometimes in the middle of a conversation Aaron can see George’s eyes as he looks for calmness and satisfaction, measuring his ancient hand-hewn beams, counting whatever blessings are left in the midst of so much cold knowledge.

  But during the four years they’ve labored to restore the old house George has put off his dissertation—a time bomb he must have known would destroy all their work.

  But does George really know this, or not? The rationalizations of the highly intelligent can grow subtle beyond human understanding.

  “God damn it!” Aaron yells as he goes back to his desk to write a note to his wife. In his unhinged state he finds himself writing something flippant.

  Dear Agnes,

  SOS from Helga, so out to comfort George. Yippee! I don’t have to write! Also, I am definitely insane, but not to worry: Heaven protects a fool.

  Mossy buckets

  of concupiscence,

  A.

  From the hall closet he takes a nylon windbreaker and his white crash helmet, goes to the garage and straddles his black and silver Honda. As he pulls the crash helmet down over his ears its warm, foamy cushioning reminds him of the interior of a Greyhound bus—too plushy and humid. State law says he has to wear the thing, so he must thank the state for protecting him from himself.

  The machine changes him in ways he finds interesting and somewhat frightening—frightening in retrospect, at least. It is similar to the effect his rifle has on him, in that they both tend to purify and somehow heighten him as an animal. He cannot ride this gleaming power slowly or hesitantly.

  Now he chokes the machine, opens the fuel-cutoff valve, finds the green dash light signifying neutral and kicks down the starter. It has its own authoritative cold life, and he lets the engine warm itself—low, businesslike revolving beats smoothing toward power. It is not a big machine but it is meant for racing, and the short throws of gearshift, clutch and throttle are for quickness and precision. It will take him into the wind, where he will lean through the curves.

  He rides out through his graveled driveway, feeling a hardly perceptible, yet precisely perceptible, sliding out of the rear wheel. Every motion of this machine means, under pain of instant violence to his body. On the asphalt he finds a steadier traction and increases his speed. Soon he is going sixty miles an hour, his tender bones inches from the road, and he asks himself what he is doing here. Isn’t this stupid? some part of his brain insists upon quietly asking. If his chain breaks, or if any one of a number of little possibilities occur, he will instantly become a basket case. The answer is that when this ride is over, he will be safe; nothing exists to force him to ride so dangerously again. And after the next ride, he will be perfectly safe.

  Five miles later, with a few bugs splashed against his glasses, a few more in his teeth (a peculiar, acidy taste, something like fresh tomato), with memories, as if he’s been drunk, of trees leaning, fields tilting, cars about to do threateningly irresponsible things, he turns into the Bucks’ driveway and stops next to their barn. He finds neutral and with a sigh of transition turns off his engine. When he pulls off the thick helmet, his head feels light, giddy. He walks on tingling d
elicate feet to the kitchen door, where Helga meets him. She has been described to him as homely, something he will never be able to understand; she is a small, intense girl, a little skinny, with unfortunate hair the color of tarnished copper, but her smallness is not cute, her intensity is not demanding or aggressive, and when Aaron talks to her he sometimes finds himself abstracted by daydreams of Helga’s vivid little body naked beside his. Learned hesitancies or not, this vision sometimes intrudes, but there is no guilt attached; if he took the time to feel guilty about all the things he thinks of doing, rather than what he actually does, he wouldn’t function very well in this world. But here he goes again, her slim thighs flickering in the muted, strobic light of his fantasies. To him she is always, for some reason, green—a delicate mint green that reminds him of those perfectly formed people in Flash Gordon, from the planet Mongo.

  “He’s out in the garden,” Helga says in her deep voice, a voice that always reveals the breath that is so vital to life. He notices that the fingers holding her constant cigarette are stained browner than usual, and that her large eyes are a little smudgy, the gray irises bleached.

  “You do look a little sad, Helga,” he says.

  She tries to smile, but it turns into a little self-deprecating quirk of the lips. “Well, you know I’m worried,” she says.

  He puts his hand around her arm above the elbow, feeling the bone surrounded by its delicate warmth of flesh. “Where’s the patient?” he asks.

  “In the garden. Come on.”

  Together they walk around the corner of the old gray barn and stop to observe George, who sits among the pepper plants playing listless mumbledypeg with a garden trowel. He wears dungarees and an old gray sweatshirt so full of holes it looks as though it has been sprayed with acid. In faded blue letters, BOWDOIN can still be made out across his slumped back.