The Hair of Harold Roux Page 4

  “Of course!” George says. “Of course!”

  He leaves George standing there by the barn, the general expression of his spine and shoulders lively again—for the moment. As he goes up through the gears, air hissing past his helmet, he takes one backward glance. George waves, so he risks a moment of control to wave back, then bores on through the narrow permissible tunnel of wind and motion a motorcycle must so precisely follow. He leaves George and Helga behind—George and Helga Buck, sadly and inevitably bound to their real lives. Now he is free but he must watch everything ahead, see and understand every single thing. Dogs, mailboxes, stones, children, potholes; the deepest intentions of all drivers, moving or parked; old ladies, their brittle senilities of motion; raccoons, chipmunks, sand, cats, fallen branches, leaves, acorns. The way must have traction and be free, or else his life will instantly and drastically change, and his huddled people, motionless there on the cold plain before the small fire, will never grow into their own dangers and intensities.

  He is flying, a projectile governed by the brutal judgments of velocity, but also directed by the thin precision of control. His right wrist twists the throttle farther, as far as it will turn. It is madness, but this danger is of his making; he alone creates it. Wind shrieks by him, the whole earth tilts through a long bend, black trees flash past, every one a death, but it is his own wrist, no matter its fragility, that holds the throttle turned. Fear speaks to his nerves, whispers, subsides, shrills to him. He is at the mercy of each spoke of his wheels, each blurred rivet of his chain, the few pounds of entrapped air in his narrow tires, but he is also the controlling force whose skill may successfully complete this journey. It is merely a simpler journey, with a simpler conclusion, than the longer one he hurtles toward.

  The five miles pass and he does make it back safely to his driveway, to the smooth cement floor of his garage. The relief, though post-foolhardy, is deserved, except that he is the only one who has put himself in such needless danger. No one asked him to live this way, just as no one asked him to live or die with those waiting souls on the cold, metaphoric plain. But he is here, he has made it, and in small he feels the completeness, the symmetry of having made something out of chaos. It is the shadow of his expectations about his book, and now he must get back to his work.

  As he enters his house he feels the wrongness, the prophetic stillness of the air. Agnes and the children should be home, but the car, he remembers, is not here either. On the kitchen counter in a square of harsh sunlight is a note from his wife:

  We have gone to Wellesley. I write the name down because you probably wouldn’t remember that, either.

  That is what has been at the back of his mind, wanting out. Now it is all there with horrible clarity; they were supposed to go to Agnes’ parents’ overnight because it is her parents’ fortieth wedding anniversary. The reception is this afternoon; the kids weren’t in school, they were with Agnes getting clothes for the occasion. They must have returned and left just about the time he buzzed blithely off on his Honda.

  The depth of his depression amazes him. He hears himself groan; his hands tremble. Black wings hover over his life. Why hadn’t she called the Bucks? Because the telephone was undoubtedly out along with the electricity, or, more likely, she was justifiably infuriated.

  She has written her short message over the one he left her:

  Dear Agnes,

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

  Mossy buckets

  of concupiscence,

  A.

  The words are unforgivably asinine, and in this context not only flippant but cruel. How can he have forgotten? then her reality; she loves and serves to a fault, and she would never, never commit this particular crime. Thus her icy intolerance. And her parents will really be hurt that he hasn’t come. But he is not going to buzz in, four or five hours late, on his motorcycle. He hasn’t the energy left today to ride a hundred miles. No, it is bravery rather than energy he lacks, and his resentment of his just reward enervates him still further, knocks out his strength. What he has done is unforgivable. He groans again, frightening himself badly with that unpremeditated sound. He cannot stand this. “God damn it!” he yells at the house empty of his noisy family. The accusing answer doesn’t come.

  He walks up and down the kitchen. Sunlight vibrates on the sills.

  So he forgot! Everybody forgets things once in a while! Yes, but what things, Aaron?

  He’ll make himself a drink. After he opens the refrigerator door he is so rattled that he drops the ice-cube tray on the cat, who gives a breathless grunt and runs away. Cats are always prepared for betrayal; all she wants is some Calo and the bastard drops a brick on her.

  Of course his note to Agnes might have been even stupider, even more degradingly flip. He might have written words that would now torture him even more, and he indulges his quivering mind for a moment in a fit of self-hatred; ah, how (is this, and in what way, coldly interesting?) the inventive brain lacerates the soul:

  Dear Agonous,

  Motorsickle in crotch, go I in mercy to a sick psyche.

  Carnally yours,

  A.

  Dear Agonist,

  Sick psychward on motorpsychle Samaritanwise fly I.

  Airily,

  Aileron

  No, he still doesn’t have it right. He could have degraded himself even more. God, what a genius for cruelty Agnes has when he, in his usual fashion, hurts her. And he’s got to call her and receive more of it. But it’s only his preoccupation, his necessary concentration, isn’t it, that makes him seem cruelly indifferent? Then why the bottomless, anxious shame he suffers now?

  The bourbon is tasteless. The liquid is brown and real, but his body signals nothing, not a shiver. Desperately needing something to hold on to, something with even the smallest hope of a future, he goes to his study and looks down at his notebook.

  THE HAIR OF HAROLD ROUX

  his notebook says. It speaks to him tonelessly, from an impossible distance. The words form a cryptic message from a stranger whose dark, complicated intellect is far beyond his simple understanding. And yet the handwriting is ominously familiar. That pretentious hand is his, and it tells him that his imagination is bankrupt, that this project is far beyond his powers. The passion, the energy subside; senility enters on stunning little cat feet.

  THE HAIR OF HAROLD ROUX

  As he reads the words again he finds almost against his will that he is peering, straining to see as if through a thin wall of ice the far plain, cold as the moon, the small fire that is the one warm spark upon its immense uncreated emptiness, and there his people wait. Mary, Harold and the rest are waiting and will wait forever if he cannot separate himself from all the needful vampires of this life—Agnes, his children, his friends, those beloved drinkers of his blood (oh, paradox!)—whose remorseless realities place him here, in this world, now, at his desk.

  He is at his desk but he is thinking of Mark Rasmussen, the strange authority of that young intelligence. One time Mark came by his office at school while Aaron was talking to a nervous girl, one of his advisees, about a course she was probably going to get a D in. It seemed she just couldn’t get along with that particular professor; no matter what she wrote for him he didn’t like it and made sarcastic remarks in the margins. She was a large-boned, husky girl, with a wide, heavy face full of desperate earnestness and all the raw or half-healed wounds young flesh is heir to. Her great hams, stippled with irregular indentations where the muscles were not in stress, filled the chair.

  Mark, although he didn’t know the girl, entered freely into the discussion. “You can’t beat it,” he said. “Drop the course.”

  “But I need the course,” she said. “It satisfies the humanities requirement!”

  Her eyes had begun to glisten and Mark put his thin arm around her muscular shoulders. “Come on,” he said. “It’s all bullshit, but
so you get a D or something. It still takes care of the requirement.”

  “But I’ve never gotten a D in my life!”

  “Oh hell, what’s a D?” Mark said lightly. “Professor Benham here gave me a D once, didn’t you, Aaron?”

  “It was a gift,” Aaron said, and Mark smiled like a grinning dog, his lips pulling back from naked teeth and gums. The girl, whose name was Jackie, didn’t know how to react to Mark’s affection. He continued to squeeze her gently and to pat her hands, and Aaron could see the great mixed desperation in her rigid trunk and burning face. While Mark’s feeling for her was no doubt genuine, Aaron couldn’t help think that his gesture contained more than a small amount of rape. She blushed, she tried to smile, she was pleased and terrified.

  But when she left she seemed calmer, as though those moments of high emotion had somehow let her transcend her apprehension about the prospective D.

  “Do you know her?” Aaron asked when Jackie had gone.

  “No. What’s her name?”

  “Jacqueline Tobia Blum, but she signs her name ‘Jackie.’“

  “I’ll look her up,” Mark said. “You find her attractive?”

  “The poor chick’s so hung up. That’s interesting. Kind of pitiful. Yes.”

  “You mean you just want to mess around with her hangups?”

  “Ah, Aaron! You disapprove!” Mark laughed his sibilant laugh, “See see shoo shoo!” his long, gnomish face turned nearly to the ceiling. Mark was a strange case; he looked like those boys whose almost freakish homeliness make them awkward and shy, and he came from a small New Hampshire mill town, which might have compounded any feelings of inferiority. But Mark was as un-shy as anyone could be; he looked at the world with constantly judging eyes.

  “Well,” Aaron said. “Aside from my disapproval—pardon the aesthetics of another age or something—do you find poor Jackie physically attractive?”

  “All girls are physically attractive if they’re in reasonable health,” Mark said.

  “That sounds lovely, if slightly patronizing,” Aaron said. “It’s just that one of her healthy young legs probably weighs more than my whole wife. I can’t help it. I mean I’d feel like I was doing something a little too monumental.”

  Mark laughed tolerantly. What he had come for was to ask Aaron if he would like to go as crew for a day on a fishing boat run by a friend—a party boat. Mark thought it would be interesting, and that Aaron ought to get out of his ivory tower for a day and see how the other half lived. “You know,” he said, “the real guys.”

  “You think I need that?” Aaron said.

  “Sure, man. There’s another world out there, you know, where nearly everybody gets a D nearly all the time, but they don’t know it. Anyway, the fish are pretty. How about it?”

  So early that Saturday, a warm blue morning in May, Mark picked up Aaron at home and they drove toward the ocean. Mark’s car, a Volkswagen so old it had a little oblong porthole for a back window, went along with at least nothing too urgent about its wheezings and raspings.

  “You’ll find it entertaining,” Mark said, grinning his con grin. “Billy—that’s the captain—sent out this SOS for a crew on Monday. By the way, you can swim, I hope.”

  “I can swim. The only thing is I won V swim in the Atlantic Ocean in these latitudes in May. Is that clear?”

  Mark laughed and laughed. He’d gotten what he wanted—the faint odor of apprehension. He went on to explain that the group Billy was taking out today came from Revere, Massachusetts, and that they had been blackballed by the other fishing boat operators. They called themselves the Joe’s Spa Troops because they spent all their evenings in a bar called Joe’s Spa. Each trooper put a dollar a week into a kitty, and after twenty weeks or so they would rent a boat for a day and have their big blast. Billy needed the money to pay for a baby his wife had just had, or he wouldn’t have taken on the Joe’s Spa Troops either.

  “Wait’ll you see them, Aaron. I know you think you’re in the middle of what it’s all about and all that, but you’re not. You’re surrounded by high IQ^s all the time. Christ, you think somebody’s dumb if he doesn’t know the difference between ‘disinterested’ and ‘uninterested,’ or ‘imply’ and ‘infer.’“

  “Listen, Mark. I was in the army for three years.”

  “That was a long time ago, Dad.”

  “You think I’m going to find out something I don’t know?”

  “Maybe,” Mark said.

  They came into the little town of East Cove, its gasoline alley paved from foundation to foundation with asphalt, the enameled service stations and their gaudy signs rising out of the black. A few years ago the town had observable limits that Aaron could recognize. Houses and streets ended where fields and trees began. But now the buildings, the summer-only hot dog stands, the new streets, the trailer parks, the split-level garrisons and aluminum-sided salt-boxes—all had spread out to meet the same progress coming from the nearby towns and the city to the south. The prime color of this metastases was that putty-pink, somewhat the tone of pancake make-up, that was the color of a certain kind of asbestos siding.

  The broad salt-marshes to the north were in danger, as was all the temperate life of the cove, because of a proposed atomic power plant that would raise the water temperature an estimated ten degrees.

  “It’s funny how pretty it gets once you’re out on the ocean,” Mark said.

  They came to some delapidated-looking wharves, finally, with shacks, houses and house trailers set behind them above the high-tide mark. In the cove were lobster boats, skiffs, dories with rusty outboard motors, and several larger fishing boats. Lobster buoys bobbed here and there among them. Along the shore were old boxes, piles of lobster traps, beer cans, signs, flotsam: the whole place was junky, cluttered—a familiar American scene, revealing that no one had a way of looking at anything whole. One of the fishing boat operators had built his house here, and amid rocks, kelp-strewn sand, odd fifty-five-gallon drums and piles of clamshells being picked over by gulls, was his little quarter-acre featuring the square pink box of a house and a bit of lawn with a white plastic goose leading her white plastic goslings across it. Thus we re-create our beloved and magic nature in plastic. As usual, cars were everywhere, operable and inoperable. Beyond the point was the real blue ocean.

  They parked and walked down to one of the wharves where a white boat, about thirty feet long, rose and fell gently, rubbing its burlap fenders against the pilings. Mark explained that Billy had bought the hull from the Navy and remade the boat himself. It didn’t look like a sport-fishing boat at all, but more like a thin tugboat.

  As they came nearer, Aaron read its name from the side of the wheelhouse.

  FRODO B.

  EAST COVE

  “Dear old Frodo,” Mark said. Aaron had read the Tolkien books a few years before, mainly out of self-defense (he didn’t care much for fantasy), but he’d found himself dreaming along with Frodo Baggins toward “Mordor where the shadows lie” with nearly as much fascination as his students. The experience had startled him, and given him some somber thoughts about literature, about its power and purpose. Tolkien’s prose was so banal, yet a broader, deeper metaphor had rung its dark tones there in the somewhat silly volumes, and he came away from them haunted by life. To see Frodo’s name now, so carefully painted on the white boat, seemed almost a violation, the theft of something from its proper element.

  “Ores and goblins,” Mark said. “Balrogs, gollums and nazguls. Wait till you see the Joe’s Spa Troops.”

  “Why should I want to see them?”

  “To use one of your favorite expressions, Professor, ‘the fascination of the abomination.’“

  “The abomination is all around me and I’m sick of it. I’m up to my ass in the abomination. I get the abomination delivered every morning before breakfast. I don’t have to go looking for the abomination.”

  “Ah, but you do, Aaron. Frodo had to go to Mount Doom, and you have to go to the abomination.”
Mark thought this was extremely funny, and he was still hissing and percussing with his strange laughter when a tall blond boy came out of the wheelhouse of the Frodo S. Mark explained, as soon as he could speak, that this was Captain Billy. Captain Billy, somehow immensely calm, smiled and said hello. He wore faded dungarees, sneakers and a yachting cap—all of these items cured down to the basic weave. His shoulder-length blond hair actually seemed to glimmer, and Aaron was reminded of the illustrations in a book he’d had as a child: Hans Brinker: Or, the Silver Skates. Was that it, or was it the Dutch boy on the paint can, with his blond bangs and cap? But there was a feeling of purity about Captain Billy, of simplicity and strength, a fantasy in which handsomeness equaled goodness, as in Tolkien.

  “His real name, of course, is Aragorn,” Mark said. “And, as you know, I am Gandalf the Gray.”

  Captain Billy gazed seriously down at Mark. “I always thought of you as more of a Hobbit,” he said. His pale blue eyes caught the light and seemed for a moment hollow, like cerulean-tinted spheres of glass.

  Mark laughed, while Captain Billy continued to gaze at him seriously.

  They went on board the Frodo B., where Captain Billy explained their probable duties. The Joe’s Spa Troops would, no doubt, quickly entangle all their handlines, and when they gave up trying to untangle them they would sneakily throw them overboard and come to get new ones. Each handline, with its hook, leader, sinker and wooden stretcher, was worth over a dollar, so this was to be discouraged as much as possible. And in general they were to keep an eye on things. If one of the Joe’s Spa Troops was about to fall overboard, for instance, they were to make him sit down. Fights should be discouraged, as should various kinds of monkey business that might occur. They should play it by ear.