The Hair of Harold Roux Page 9

  Of course he can’t refuse. He has never been able to refuse this sort of request. He thinks of the handsome supply of bourbon left in the half-gallon bottle of Beam, but drinking always turns bad except right after some kind of triumph, meaning the completion of something, and he hasn’t completed anything for months. He is, after all, supposed to be a teacher, though often in the middle of a class he wonders why he is there. How did all those faces come to be looking at him? In his real dreams he is usually an uncommitted odd-job man, an aspiring artist of some kind, about twenty-six years old, and what he really wants to be is a student gleaning knowledge from some older, established person, a master. He wants to be potential. He wants to want to be known, not to be known. He wants to want to show them, not to have shown them.

  “All right,” he says to George, who, suddenly relieved and happy, thanks him over and over again.

  Back at the old farm, the beloved old house, George and Helga listen sympathetically to his further compulsive discussion of his having forgotten Agnes’ parents’ fortieth-anniversary reception. After a while he detects in George’s smooth young face, and in Helga’s friendly, toothy one, the sort of care one tenders to the ill. With that he leaves off his twisted, self-mocking jokes and they talk of other things.

  Dinner, with red wine and candlelight from candles set in old pewter candlesticks, is mainly a very fine beef stew. Helga is a serious cook—a follower of Joyce Chen and Julia Child on educational television, the TV set hidden upstairs some place—and in her kitchen things are always marinating in twist-top jars of various sizes. Herbs hang drying from the beams, festoons of garlic gleam. When they go to Boston she always visits ethnic grocery stores. Edward disapproves of most of her best efforts, but tonight he doesn’t mind the stew, even the pearly sections of tripe. A while after dinner, when the students begin to arrive, Edward wants to stay. It is hard to explain to him how his mere youth might inhibit discussion. “Not that any of us feel that way,” George says.

  “It’s stupid,” Edward says resignedly, and he and his mother go upstairs. For too much of his life he will have to suffer living in too young a body.

  Aaron knows several of the students who arrange themselves on chairs and wicker stools, and on the floor around the chair that has evidently been saved for him. Linda Einsperger is a tall, blond, caustic-voiced girl whose incredibly long thighs—alabaster columns descending for what seem yards below her skirt—always remind him of the legs of a giraffe. When she moves, she has that same ungainly grace. John Periault is a hockey player who comes from a Canadian border town. He is still on the hockey team, but in his senior year he has undergone a fairly common intellectual change of life and as one symptom has let his hair grow even longer than is fashionable these days. On the rink, from beneath his head-guard, a wide black cape of hair flows over his neck and shoulders. A scar over his left eye bisects his eyebrow, and his nose points somewhat to the right. In class discussions, unlike his savage behavior on the rink, he is reasonable, self-deprecating and rather gentle. Frank Hawkes, whose tawny hair shoots out for nearly a foot from all over his head as though his brain constantly generates twenty thousand volts, is a former Maoist—or perhaps he still is one—who has recently returned to school after two years’ disappearance. His smile is fierce; he knows, it proclaims, what is not known by any of the others. Bradford Wilkins is a Black, watchful and arrogant, who is handicapped by having to make a definite predecision before he speaks: Will this answer compromise me? It is almost like thinking in one language and speaking in another. In moments of indecision he forsakes the general language of the class and speaks jive, man, y’know? I mean, y’know, this dude come along, y’know. I mean what that got t’do thit? I mean what’s all this shit, man? Bradford is dressed in blue jeans and T-shirt, and on his head blooms an Afro of such extraordinary dimensions his neck seems too thin to support it. A silver comb handle sticks out of the side of that dense black cloud like something prosthetic.

  There are ten students in all, the others not quite as exotic, including a slender woman of sixty or so who seems to carry her age into this young group with self-conscious bravery. Obviously an okay member of the class, she is included in the others’ conversation. Aaron hears one girl call her Gladys.

  Except for Bradford Wilkins, those he knows smile briefly at him as he takes the official chair. Wilkins gives him a curt nod. It is always a strangely unfocused moment when he first becomes the center of everyone’s attention this way. He wonders, thinking back to his own merely potential time, about the quality of their expectation and curiosity. And resentment, too; that is always there, waiting, possible—the resentment toward someone who has done something along the lines of what you would like to do someday, only you will do it better, much better. And now this person has the gall to appear before you looking merely human and vulnerable, but seeming to act upon the supposition that he deserves your attention, even your regard.

  George explains that Irv Lebowitz can’t make it tonight because he has been busted in Litchwood, but Aaron Benham has kindly agreed to come at the last minute even though he is on leave this year. With that, George sits down on the rug beside Linda Einsperger. One of her long arms is across her knees, and she seems to be chinning herself on this arm while she stares at Aaron with pale blue eyes. She has slipped out of her sandals, and her bony toes seem as long and articulate as fingers.

  Aaron decided, easily, before he left his house, that he would read them a story. He knows that it is imperfect in many ways, but like many stories one reads these days it has an interesting middle and a certain intensity of tone here and there. He knows enough to keep all this to himself; without telling them more than that it is a story in progress, he reads.

  My name is Allard Benson and I am a writer of fiction, a college professor, and an unwilling collector of paranoiacs. Perhaps I am no more surrounded by paranoiacs than anyone else, but sometimes I wonder. Like those who fear dogs only to excite in all dogs an immediate, aggressive affection, I seem doomed to be the chosen confessor of those who have systematized their delusions. I wonder if they know how much they frighten me.

  Long ago I used to try to explain to them that the world was mainly plotless, chaotic, random. I used to have that warmth and time. In spite of their eyes that are always bright beyond mere alertness, as bright beyond the tender depths of protoplasm as polished gemstones, I once, in my surfeit of time, brought them home for a drink and tried to explain. That was before I knew how short life was, how long it takes to learn the craft I am apprenticed to.

  This morning I have just finished a short novel written by G., a student. At three this afternoon, in my office at school, we will have a conference. I ought immediately to tell him that he has no ear for dialogue, that his few metaphors consistently violate his intent, and finally that his chief motive for writing, so clearly revealed in his novel, is not the creation of art but an attempt to create legitimate targets for vengeance. His villains are carefully prepared and set up for their deserved reward, and his hero is armed and ready. Armed, in this case, with a weapon G. actually carries himself; he once proudly showed me the knife he carries in his boot—a vicious little dagger he calls an “Arkansas toothpick.”

  In the last conference I had with G., a week ago, he chose not to discuss the short story he had written, but to tell me about the universal cheating in courses where multiple-choice tests are given. At other times he has revealed to me the blatant callousness, cynicism, laziness, senility, dope addiction and suspected perversions of my colleagues. In his revelatory stance he is more than a little threatening. He leans his shoulders toward me, smiling the bitter yet triumphant smile of one who knows all, and demands that I enter his world. I, too, should find in the discovery of evil the joy that keeps his eyes so icy bright.

  You can see why I’m not looking forward to the three o’clock conference with G. His intimidating attitude causes me to be dishonest with him, and in that sense he is right; his psychosis is no
t all fantasy. It is the encompassing magnitude of his “delusional system” that disheartens me, that diminishes my soul and makes me evade my responsibilities toward him. He excludes the world until there is only he and I, and in that small, cold cell I am lonely and apprehensive. So I nod, or shake my head in feigned wonder, and wait for the hour to pass.

  And while I wait rather tensely here in my study for the hour when I’ll have to go to my office to meet G., I remember other confrontations with delusion. Perhaps there is an order to them, not in time but in another way. In fiction one plays a strange game with ugliness and fear.

  F., an occasional handyman and jack-of-all-trades in our town came up to me in the general store and told me that he had been seeing several deer, including a large buck that would go at least eight points and two-hundred pounds, in the orchard behind his house. The deer nearly always came into the orchard at dusk, he said, and why didn’t I come out and see if I could “connect”?

  F. was a rugged, dark little man, about thirty-five years old. He always wore the laborer’s uniform of our region, which in all seasons is basically green chino work pants and shirt, and leather boots. At this time, since it was November and getting cold, he had added to this basic outfit a greasy red wool hunting cap with his hunting license pinned to the crown, and a faded red sweatshirt. He had been sitting with the others on the benches in front of the store in the morning sun when I came to get the Sunday papers, and I was surprised when he followed me into the store, touched my arm and offered me a chance at his deer. I hadn’t shot a deer for two years in a row, and the offer excited me perhaps beyond my better judgment, because I knew that F. was a tense and unusual character, a man involved in many complicated, interlocking local feuds. Some of these involved work that he had contracted to do and never finished, some were over damages he had claimed for one reason or another, some were with the selectmen and road agent concerning the plowing or grading of the gravel road that led to his place. He was quite a verbally clever man, and his voice was heard often in town meetings. He was generally considered to be a good workman, too—if you could get him to do the work. He could blast ledge, fix nearly anything mechanical, paint, paper, shingle, glaze, wire, do stonemasonry that was widely admired by other professionals, and so on. At times, however, he wouldn’t do anything for months on end except sit on the benches of the general store, or drive around in his old pickup truck drinking beer and tossing the empty cans with an expert backhand flip out the window of the cab into the truck bed. Or he wouldn’t be seen at all for weeks.

  His hand, still on my arm, was a cracked red instrument of scars and calluses, the ridged brown fingernails packed smoothly with hardened black.

  “You git your gun and come on out ‘bout three-thirty—‘bout an hour ‘fore dark. You know the way.”

  I thanked him for the chance at the deer, and said that I knew approximately where he lived but I’d never been there and wasn’t sure I could find the place after I left the blacktop.

  He feigned surprise, or I thought he did—all of F.’s publicly displayed emotions seemed exaggerated, meant for effect. Then he laughed loudly, his hard little eyes, as always, watching through the mask, and gave me closer directions.

  “You familiar with the back road to Cascom?” he said, and continued with the directions, smiling as if the whole thing were a needless hypocrisy and of course I knew the way exactly. At the time, partly, I suppose, because of my greed for venison, I took this to be only another of F.’s peculiarities. The reason for the gift, I thought, was that I had recently published a book. This event had been mentioned in our local newspaper, and I thought F.’s gesture was a manifestation of the intense interest that even the smallest amount of celebrity seems to evoke.

  That afternoon at three-thirty I found F.’s place, a rundown farm typical of our region. The small unpainted house was fairly level upon its foundations, but the barn sagged, a wooden silo had spun down upon itself like pick-up sticks, and the connecting outbuildings and sheds had all begun to lean heavily upon one another, doors sprung, roofs mostly stripped by wind and ice of their ancient tar paper.

  Nailed to a tree in the ragged front yard was a sign, uneven black letters on a white-painted board:

  THELMA’S BEAUTY SHOP

  The house had been well banked with sawdust, but the sawdust was old, reddened by age, probably put there winters ago and left by someone who didn’t care enough that the house would rot at its footings.

  I didn’t see F.’s truck anywhere, but thought it might be around in back or in one of the leaning sheds. The front door to the house was obviously never used; it seemed as permanently fused into its frame as the gray subsurface of an old wound in a tree. I left my rifle in the car and followed the worn track to the kitchen door, feeling that I was being observed. I knocked, and after a suitable amount of time the door was opened by a young woman in her late twenties. She seemed frightened, but asked me, without the usual belligerence that emotion causes, what I wanted. I said F. had asked me to come out this afternoon to see if the deer would come into the orchard.

  “You mean he asked you to come here?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  She seemed puzzled and cautious. After some worried thought she asked me to come in and sit down. I sat at the table in the large, crowded kitchen. The implements of the beauty shop stood among the domestic paraphernalia like a double exposure, dominated by what I took to be a hair drier—a huge, battered, chromed bell on a stand.

  “You’re Thelma?” I asked, and she nodded, smiling quickly.

  She knew who I was; she told me that her cousin had been a student of mine several years before, and that the cousin had pointed me out to her once. “I don’t get to town much, though,” she added.

  She wanted to be friendly, but it was so obvious her friendliness was undercut by fear. I watched her as she prepared coffee, thinking even then how one might document this unfortunate woman, who seemed in her unhappiness typical, common, yet sharply her own living self. Her hair was a dull, lusterless brown that no surface beautification would ever bring to life, her face was smooth and well boned, yet dark, wasted by the forces of poverty and unhappiness. That look, which is common among oppressed children and women, has deeper causes than poor diet and lack of sunlight. She seemed a woman of another kind of shadow, a prisoner of this prideless house. It took a startled second look to see that she was pretty, that beneath her faded print dress she still carried her light burden of woman’s flesh with grace. When we smiled at each other, we both grew tense and shy, as if appalled by a vague and secret understanding.

  F. came in then, banging the door open. He stood in the doorway, arms akimbo, a look of mock anger on his face. “Well!” he said fiercely, looking from Thelma to me, then back to Thelma. “So you come after all!” He laughed, to indicate that his fierceness was only put on, but we were not all that reassured. “Come on,” he said, and took his Winchester from a wall rack made of cocked deer hooves.

  Until dark, F. and I sat beside a granite boulder where we could overlook the small orchard, but the deer didn’t come that evening. Their one great talent is, of course, survival. When it became so dark we couldn’t see our front sights, F. got up, saying, “Tomorrow. Sure as hell they’ll be coming back one of these nights. Let’s give her a try tomorrow.”

  We walked back to the house in the dark, coming upon its warm windowlights. In the kitchen we sat at the table and had a cup of the coffee Thelma had made earlier.

  F. sat across from me, grinning like a wise cat. “I don’t know what’s going on these days up to the college,” he said, his expression belying his words. “Some of them coeds, they wear their skirts any higher they going to have two new cheeks to powder!”

  Thelma was over at the oil stove, her back to us, and F. pretended she couldn’t hear. His hand rose to the side of his mouth—one of the stage devices he used to superpose his own artifices upon reality. “It must git you all hot and bothered, having to look a
t it all day long.” He laughed and pounded the table. When this timed paroxysm was over, he wiped his eyes. “And you a writer, too,” he added, shaking his head.

  I grew weary at the thought of trying to plead anything before the court of F.’s prejudices. “Sometimes it’s not easy,” I said.

  “‘Course I suppose you git caught with your eyeballs hanging out they’d throw your ass out of there.”

  “No,” I said recklessly. “We can look all we want.”

  He seemed taken aback. “That so?” He expressed exaggerated surprise. Even his thick black hair seemed to stiffen as his eyes stared at me. “Well, you never know!”

  I began to wonder just what I’d said to cause such a reaction, but of course it mattered little what I’d said; F.’s drama coexisted with real life. Finally he did drop this subject and we talked for a while of the deer—a subject as rigidly classical in its turns and counterturns as Oriental theater.

  When I left, I promised to come back the next afternoon.

  Again when I arrived at the small farmhouse F. wasn’t there, but a rusted-out Chevrolet was parked next to the kitchen. Thelma opened the door for me without my having to knock. I saw immediately that she had prettied herself up. She wore red lipstick, and her hair was fluffed out. A customer was just leaving, a pale woman in her forties who, below the convolutions of her freshly baked hair, wore a man’s old mackinaw over a polka-dot dress, her milk-white legs descending into unbuckled galoshes. As Thelma explained carefully that I had come to hunt with F., the woman’s steady eyes judged this information upon its own merits.

  After the door closed, Thelma busied herself putting away the various objects of her profession. In the air, competing with the domestic odors of the kitchen, was the odor that always reminds me of burnt feathers, or burnt glue—the chemical that sets the hair. As I watched her putting away the jars of goo, the racks of curlers and other torture devices that women think powerful enough to do magic, I knew by the delicacy of Thelma’s movements that she knew I was watching her. For me she kept her back straight, calculated the cant of her pelvis as she knelt to a cupboard, the profile of her breasts as she rose on tiptoe to reach another. It was all innocent and pretty, and I felt considerably more than pity for her.