The Hair of Harold Roux Page 32

  “It’s in the wall. It’s a Murphy bed.”

  “Like in Charlie Chaplin?”

  “Yes,” Harold said, annoyed.

  “Harold, I’m sorry. I’m in a strange mood. End of semester and all that sort of rot, eh?”

  “I wish you’d be serious for once. I’m worried about Mary and I want to talk seriously with you. Did you know she missed two finals?”

  “Yes, but it’s all right. With a 4.0 average you can do nothing wrong in college. You know that.”

  “I’m not worried about her flunking out, I’m desperately worried about her”

  “Well, what am I supposed to do?”

  He listened as Harold spoke about his and Mary’s basic incompatibility because of upbringing, religion, and especially because of (said with a certain hesitant delicacy) Allard’s being essentially not right for her because, er, well, he didn’t, couldn’t, appreciate a lady of Mary’s delicacy and refinement—spiritual refinement—and in fact when one came right down to it Allard was too much of a different kind of person entirely for Mary. He listened, but in flashes his mind was off”, thinking of Mary, of Naomi, of women and what in God’s name they found so powerfully fascinating in men. Compared to their loveliness a man seemed to have very little to offer. Perhaps a strange fusion happened in a woman’s mind (tenderness as he thought of a woman’s mind thinking of a man) concerning the wideness of shoulders, the narrow buttocks of a man that were more tensely vigorous than the misty, acquiescent tenderness of a woman. That, and possibly the increment of a child only a man could set swimming toward her womb. Maybe. But no, we use powers we don’t understand, can’t understand. He did know that Mary now wanted to exist in his shadow, to have him dominant and near, and he had known this would happen. She trembled, she hummed within her nerves, she had become too intensely a mirror for each of his thoughts and attitudes. She waited for him, always waiting, he knew. She considered him a real man, the man, and most of the time he didn’t quite recognize that quality in himself. He was twenty-one, a veteran of many things in the past, and the future seemed full of reality, but the present was less definable. Actually he was only a student, that gelding state in the eyes of the real world. What he would do later would be real and substantial. Now was limbo, a sort of limbo, but he felt that it wasn’t any sort of limbo to Mary. Yes, and a darker side was that he thought himself an uncrowned prince who would come into his inheritance someday; would Mary Tolliver be the consort of the future prince?

  “Oh, you’re probably right, Harold,” he said. “But love conquers all, doesn’t it?”

  “Do you love Mary?” Harold asked slowly, as though Allard were about to take an oath.

  “I swear on the shop manual of my Indian Pony I love Mary.”

  “Will you be serious?” Harold was really angry now, willing to endanger their friendship. Allard was fond of Harold; he did recognize the differences between people like Harold and Mary and people like himself.

  “I’m sorry, Harold.”

  Harold took a deep breath and a little color came into his face, emerging in his skin as a delicate shade of olive. “Because,” he said. “Because I’m really afraid that without really knowing it, without being responsible, you two might fall into something that neither of you will foresee …”

  Allard waited, wanting to laugh but at the same time embarrassed for Harold, who was trembling with nervousness now.

  “Because you’re both very young and won’t know what you’re doing until it’s too late …”

  “Yes?”

  “I mean that in a moment of passion you might go all the way. That’s what I mean. I happen to know how much Mary is infatuated with you, Allard!”

  “I’ll try not to hurt her, Harold.”

  “Don’t joke, Allard. You won’t know how powerful the sins of the flesh can be until it’s too late.”

  Ah, Harold, Harold, he thought. What a sweet gentle naive prince you are. Once Harold had told him about a girl friend he’d had in the army, a WAAC private first-class named Mary Ann Waltzel, and had even shown him a letter he’d received from her after she had been transferred to Fort Benning, Georgia.

  Dear Harold,

  Well, here I am at Fort Benning and I don’t know whether I am going to like this set up or not. My commanding officer I am told is a big bull dyke. She is from Alabama and looks like General Patton without the six shooters. I will sure be glad when I get out of this woman’s Army.

  How are you? I will never forget how nice you were to me, Harold. I think you are the nicest person that ever came into my whole stupid life.

  Love ever,

  Mary Ann

  In spite of the chummy, companionable, even somewhat hard-bitten tone of Mary Ann’s letter, Harold had been embarrassed and offended when Allard asked if he had slept with her. Of course not! They went to movies and played honeymoon bridge and talked. But didn’t you even try? Allard asked. No, and don’t pretend you’re so experienced either, Allard Benson. I know better!

  Well, Allard wasn’t going to argue about it now because it was useless and it would endanger Harold’s receptivity toward the party, which would have to be presented as a chaste, dignified affair all around.

  Harold said, “Don’t hurt her, Allard.”

  “Look, I do love Mary. What if I said I was going to marry her?”

  “I’d be appalled. You aren’t about to become a Catholic and it would be a very unhappy situation for her. A tragic situation.”

  “You’re right about the Catholic part. To tell you the truth I went to Mass with her family half expecting to be impressed, but I wasn’t. It all seemed sort of mechanical. And the priest gave a talk about motherhood that was really creepy. I mean that priest was really strange.”

  “What that particular priest was like has nothing to do with it. It’s deeper and has to do with the truth.”

  “The truth!”

  “Yes, the truth. You may be young and proud and self-confident and think you don’t need God, but you’re wrong. I fear for your immortal soul.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “You are not a complete man. Without God you are not complete. You cannot make your own sacraments.”

  “Well, I still don’t think I’m a total shit, Harold.”

  “No, and that’s the tragedy. You’re really a very sweet person underneath.”

  Allard thought he wouldn’t go quite so far as that, himself, but on that milder note he brought up the subject of the party, emphasizing its sedateness, its farewell-for-the-summer cheeriness and so on. “And we won’t mess up the area, either. We’ll police up the trash and leave the place as clean as ever. Just a small gathering of old friends havin’ a brew or two and a hot dog, singin’ some good old songs ‘neath the spoony Juny moon …” Now stop that, damn it. Why couldn’t he keep that tone down?

  Harold considered the idea. “Well, I don’t know. The Imminghams won’t be here all next week. They’ll be in Boston. But I don’t know, it might be all right. It might be a nice idea, really. If we just have a few nice people. Yes, I can’t see why anybody would object. All right, I’ll ask the Imminghams if it’s okay.” Having come to this decision Harold drew a deep breath and let it out.

  “Great, Harold. It’s been sort of an odd year. And you did manage to escape the clutches of Boom Maloumian, The Mean Armenian. I suppose that alone is worth celebrating.”

  “Getting out of that dormitory was the best thing that ever happened to me, Allard. Fm serious. I feel I have some dignity now.” He looked around at his high-class digs. “And the Imminghams. I can’t tell you how much they’ve meant to me.” Harold was getting emotional, his eyes growing misty over the Imminghams. “They’re so kind, so thoughtful, so honorable, Allard!”

  He knew Harold had a final in the morning so he left early. As he rode back through the campus to the town square he noticed that the lights were on in Herbert Smythe’s apartment over the pharmacy. Though Herbert might indeed be an ass, he was prob
ably owed an apology. Also, Naomi might be there and he wanted to try to talk to her, to get all the bad feelings over and done with. She was Mary’s roommate after all, and ought to be invited to the party. Yes, she should come to the party, bringing Herbert if she wanted to, or maybe she could be Harold’s date. Poor frozen Harold; maybe she’d be good for him. But let’s be honest, Allard, let’s be honest now. All other considerations aside, Naomi is your burnished, beautiful animal, the dark one, the one with the unshaven armpits smelling of myrrh, and you haven’t been with her a long time now. No, it was more complicated than that. It truly was more complicated than that.

  Still wondering what he was doing, he parked the Indian Pony at the curb and climbed the dentist-smelling stairs toward Herbert’s apartment, thinking that he ought to be ashamed to show his face there after the scandalous way he had behaved last time. But he wasn’t. None of the people he might find there seemed totally real to him—the men, that is. Naomi and Use Haendler seemed real people infected by their crazy, unreasonable Stalinism, but the men all seemed to have been dissolved by their beliefs into shadows and cutouts. Several of Herbert’s male troops were physically bigger than Allard, but it was impossible to think of them as threats to him no matter how bloody the situation.

  When he knocked on the door the room behind it immediately grew silent. Suspicion was so palpable he could almost smell it over the medicinal fumes of the hallway. The door was opened, finally, by the deprived boy in the steel-rimmed GI glasses, whose shin Allard had damaged on his last visit. The deprived boy stepped back, his small face defensive, suspicious, and Allard confronted all of them, the same deep disapproval on all their faces. Most of Herbert’s group was there—Herbert himself, Naomi, Use, a small girl in a dirndl dress whose name Allard had forgotten but who was the new mimeograph girl, and several men or boys. Their faces were like cold walls, all denning him, walls people were stood against to be shot. He was the enemy, he supposed, the real enemy: not a mere misled fascist dupe who might be converted, but a nasty ironist, a creature of no faith.

  “I came to apologize for previous violent behavior,” he said. The very words his brain chose for him were unforgivable; “previous,” “violent”—this was style, not substance. He wanted to tell them that he truly wished them no ill, that though he was strangely immune to faith, in its presence he felt, always, a vague nostalgia. As if they would be interested in his subjective psychological innards.

  None of them spoke or changed expression. Their pens, papers and inky fingers were still. “I apologize,” he said, “not only for my violence but for my patronizing attitude, which is probably twice as unforgivable.”

  “So get out of here, you son of a bitch,” said one of the male troops.

  Allard looked at him with an inner coolness, a clear, frosty coolness that was almost pleasant. It was a pleasantness he had to resist, however, since he had come here to apologize and not to revert to the beast, however refreshing that might be. “Naomi,” he said, “may I talk to you for a little while? We can sit on the bench across the street and I promise no more Tarzan stuff. Just a few civilized words.”

  “Don’t go with him!” Herbert said.

  And why, Allard asked himself, had he chosen the word “civilized,” which was taboo to them? Naomi was thinking; there was a slight vertical indentation in her round forehead —a place that would in the distant future be a wrinkle.

  “Don’t go anywhere with the son of a bitch,” said the same male troop who had spoken before. This time Allard heard a proprietary tone, and looked at the boy again. A glance showed him to be damp-palmed, palpitating, in love.

  “Just a few words for old times’ sake, Naomi. How about it?”

  “Say what you want right here,” she said angrily.

  “And then shove off,” said the male troop.

  “Oh, all right!” Naomi said. “I’ll talk to him!”

  She walked coldly past him and he followed her down the stairs. She wore her usual Levis and a man’s full shirt. Her hips moved beneath the shirttails in a complicated parabolic motion. Across the street they sat down on the cement bench, the lights of the store windows and neon signs across the way and an occasional car’s lights outlining her face in profile, her straight Roman nose below the black band of eyebrows, her black hair absorbing all light in its shadow.

  “So?” she said.

  “So I want to make up. What’s wrong with that? I’m sorry about the way I acted, which was sort of brutal.”

  “How true.”

  “So all I can do is apologize and humbly request a renewal of our friendship.”

  She turned to him, her pale eyes gleaming. “You’re screwing Mary now, aren’t you.”

  “Did she tell you that?”

  “No, but I’m not exactly totally blind. You are, aren’t you.”

  “Well. Yes.”

  “She cries a lot when she’s alone and she doesn’t sleep very well. Jesus, Allard, you don’t know what you’re getting into.”

  “Maybe not.”

  “She’s awfully naive and all that, but she’s a sweet thing and you could really fuck her up, you know?”

  “I don’t want to do that. I want her to think about these things the way I do. And anyway, I think I’ll marry her.”

  He saw random flashes of light because she hit him on the mouth. When the immediate numbness went away he tasted blood from the insides of his lips, which were already getting rubbery.

  “I must admit I didn’t see that one coming,” he said.

  Naomi still sat beside him, now looking at his mouth with concern. “Did I hurt you? Jesus, I’m sorry! But Allard, you are such a shit.”

  “It’s refreshing to talk to you, Naomi.”

  She smiled. She smiled! For a moment he was disoriented in time. When was this? And it was not like her to find such a remark funny at all.

  “Well, it’s true,” she said.

  “No one has ever offended me by calling me a shit, so either I believe, deep down, that I’m not a shit, or I believe deep down that I am a shit. In any case the epithet never really comes as a surprise.”

  “Words, words, words, words,” she said.

  “So is the ultimate victory of the proletariat over the capitalist running dogs, et cetera.”

  “Strange,” she said, leaning back and stretching her torso and her long legs, “I don’t feel like fighting with you tonight.”

  His heart gave a vacuum-like pause and a thump. He leaned over and kissed her on the cheek; his lips made it feel as if he had a golf ball in his teeth.

  She took his hand. “Allard, Allard, Allard,” she said. “You stand for everything I find regressive and meaningless in this country.”

  “But you’re willing to be friends with this enemy symbol?”

  “All right.”

  He leaned back, safe and relaxed, at ease in the warm night with his woman beside him where she belonged.

  “I’ve got to go back,” she said. “I promised to finish a pamphlet tonight.”

  He liked the addition of the promise, but he remembered the proprietary tone of the male troop and felt jealousy. “Back to that damp character who told me to shove off?”

  “Sexual jealousy is a typical bourgeois reflex,” she said.

  “But I fondly thought there was a little bourgeois reflex there when you gave me the shot in the mouth.”

  She took her hand away. “Nothing of the sort. You deserved it.”

  “This may sound irrational indeed,” he said, “but my problem is that I don’t want that creep to put his damp little hands on you.”

  “That’s none of your business.” She said the words so softly, however, that warmth returned to the cold places along his spine where jealousy had crept.

  She got up. They walked back across the street where the Indian Pony leaned on its stand. Someone, perhaps the damp troop, was looking at them from Herbert’s window.

  “Good night, Allard.”

  “Good night,
Naomi.”

  They shook hands firmly and she went up the stairs. He watched her bones move the outer surfaces of his dark woman until she reached the top of the stairs and went out of sight.

  Nathan was alone in the room when he got back, Knuck being in Litchwood visiting a girl he always referred to as Vera Upstairs. He told Nathan about the possibility of a party at Lilliputown on Friday night. Nathan seemed to like the idea but he was obviously preoccupied with something else.

  He sat at his desk in his Brooks Brothers shirt and slacks, his neat loafers tapping the terrazzo floor, his angular, beard-shadowed jaws tense, staring off through the wall.

  “What’s the matter?” Allard asked.

  “I’ve made up my mind to do a fairly drastic thing.”

  “What? You and Angela getting hitched?”

  “That I intend to do in any case, when the time comes. But I’ve got another problem.”

  “You got dosed up in Litchwood.”

  “No.” Nathan smiled, where ordinarily he would have uttered his oogah laugh. “No, I’ve made up my mind to …” He was silent, thinking. He gave Allard a shy, worried look that was uncharacteristic of Nathan the man of the practical world.

  “To what?”

  “You might disapprove, but it’s because you don’t have the problem. Anyway, you know I’m a Unitarian, right? So what do you think of the name Weinstein? I mean what’s the first thing you think of when you hear ‘Weinstein’?”

  “The first syllable rhymes with the last syllable.”

  “Come on, Allard! I’m serious. I’m deadly serious. If you laugh it’ll make me feel bad.”

  “Okay. It doesn’t sound Unitarian. Unless you’re using ‘unitarian’ as a generic term meaning a belief in one Supreme Deity and in the mortality of Christ, in which case ‘unitarian’ could also apply to Judaism.”

  “That’s right, Allard. But remember, I’m serious.”

  “I’m sorry, Nate. I’ve been running off at the mouth all night and I guess I can’t stop.”