Psychology and Other Stories (5 page)

“Ah—
pétition principe.
You are still treating them as distinct entities. Content
cannot
be extracted; meaning
cannot
be abstracted. A paraphrase is not the same as a poem. A synopsis is a lie.”

Archie nodded and grumbled his agreement. It was the only response he'd managed to muster since their arrival.

“But then,” someone else was saying, “as Lucretius so aptly put it, you will not feel death because you will not be. By the same token, you will not feel fame either.”

“Lucretius is overrated as a philosopher—underrated as a poet.”

“Ah!—but it is the desire of posthumous fame that inspires one to create great works of art in the here and now.”

“The here and now is overrated. No one lives there anymore.”

“Ah!—but!—the esteem of future generations, as Seneca so felicitously phrased it, is no more valuable than that of the present one!”

“Give it to us in Latin, Bowling.”

“One little known fact about Seneca is that he often spoke a lot of balls.”

“Often speaking a lot of balls is underrated.”

Archie laughed with the others, but this only made him feel more excluded, like a ghost excluded from the gaiety of those he haunts, which he can never hope to contribute to.

He saw now that Fishpool was speaking: “… On the other hand, you can't rule it out entirely.”

Archie felt harpooned with awe and envy. To be the sort of person who always knew what to say, and at just the right moment! When he looked at Fishpool as an example of what he himself was not, Archie almost hated him.

“I need solitude for my writing,” someone was saying. “As Kafka said, not ‘like a hermit,' but like a dead man.”

“Firbank was a hermit, wasn't he?”

“That's
one
word for what he was, yes.”

Archie glanced at Fishpool, but he seemed not to have heard. But a minute later he stood, and the other members of the Club fell silent.

It was time for the story.

“One summer, when I was thirteen, my parents got into their heads the notion that I was in need of a tutor. Nor was this notion completely unfounded, I must confess. I was not exactly, at that time, setting the world afire. The fact was that my interests had begun to migrate outside the academic realm. I was thirteen. Perhaps you know what I mean.

“Money, as always among the Fishpools, was scarce. My parents could not afford a ‘proper' tutor, but had to cast their flimsy net among the teaching trainees at the local college. I gathered that only one candidate had, for the rate they could offer, presented herself to their scrutiny. I overheard my parents discussing this candidate's qualifications one night. Wasn't she too young? my mother worried. My father agreed, but the advanced state of my nescience left them no choice; in spite of their reservations, the girl was hired.

“As if deliberately to combat my parents' fears, ‘Eileen,' as I will call her, acted not like the seventeen-year-old girl that she was but a
sexagenarian schoolmarm. She dressed like a matron and ruled like a martinet. Not a day went by without her finding some excuse to slap my hand with her ruler. The most common indictment was inattention. If the object of my alleged inattention was my schoolwork, I plead guilty; but emphatically not guilty, if the object was my tutor. Despite her formidable demeanor, there was no question but that she was the most exquisitely lovely creature I had ever laid eyes on. It was the most delicious torture to sit beside her day after day, pretending to grapple with algebraic functions or dangling participles while in fact grappling with the overwhelming urge to take into my arms and grapple with Eileen.

“Nor was she blind to my misery—I made sure of that. I called her cruel, vicious, uncaring, cold; she feigned to believe that I referred only to her pedagogy. I asked if she treated all men this way; she slapped my hands for my impertinence. I began to find these slaps strangely pleasurable. It was as if the ruler were an extension of her flesh. I became more impertinent, inciting her to more frequent thrashings, and trembled in anticipation when she reached for the instrument; at night in bed I caressed the smarting welts that blossomed on the backs of my hands. She understood what I was up to, but saw no way to relent without acknowledging the passion that underlay my impudence. She was committed to her course of action, as I was to mine. More than once I provoked her to the brink of tears. I was shameless; I was in love.

“Then my parents went away on holiday. My scholastic performance had not improved; as punishment, they left me at home, alone with my tutor, to study.

“By the second day we were both utterly frazzled. I refused even to pretend to work, and she, for her part, abandoned all attempt to control me. Even the ruler disappeared. Instead of liberating me, this rather intimidated me. Had I gone too far? I teased her; she made no
reply. I jabbed my pencil at my books; she took no notice. We sat in agonized silence, heads hanging, frozen with fear—each frightened of what the other would do.

“When, after an eternity, I looked up, I perceived that she had been weeping. Quite thoughtlessly, I put my hand on hers. A spasm, as of malaria, shook her thin frame, and tears began to roll down her cheeks. She looked at me then, and I saw that her eyes, though moist, were not sad.

“‘Oh Clayton,' she said, ‘we mustn't …'”

Archie, who had been listening raptly, captivated as much by Fishpool's eloquence and self-possession as by the tale itself, noticed that some of the boys in the circle were fidgeting. Now one of them stood and, moving with exaggerated delicacy, like an usher in an opera house, went to the door and locked it. Another withdrew something from beneath his chair.

Archie felt a stirring of panic: something was about to happen, and he wouldn't know what to do.

“I told her that it was not wrong, that nothing that two people both wanted so badly could be wrong. She smiled at me then—and it was as though she had doffed all her schoolmarm's sternness. She shook her head as if shaking off a dream. She had regained possession of herself, but no longer had to smother anything, or lock anything of herself away. She grasped my hand firmly and led me to the bed, saying, ‘But you must not forget that in this, as in all things, I remain your
tutor
.'”

Another boy withdrew something from under his chair, and another. Archie saw that they were readying their towels. He felt a flood of relief that spilled over into gratitude; though Fishpool had not told him what the towel was for, he
had
told him to bring one. Archie rummaged in his book bag for his.

“I applied myself to her instructions with a fervor that I had never shown in scholastic pursuits. And, as our passions mounted and
intermingled like the smoke of two cigarettes climbing towards the ceiling, a strange inversion occurred. I, for one ineffable moment, became the tutor, and she the pupil. I taught her the calculus of pleasure, showed her how to bridge the split infinitive of joy. I clutched her like a pencil, spun her like a protractor, measured her every dimension with my ruler—repeatedly, patiently, pedagogically. She gasped; she understood; she saw the light.

“Like the Jabberwock,” Fishpool concluded, “she burbled as she came.”

There was no applause, no plaudits, not even any smiles. It was as if they had all been waiting impatiently for him to finish. Fishpool left the pages of his address on the podium and returned to his seat without a word. Without a word, the towels were unfurled and laid on the floor at the center of the circle, like the long petals of a flower. Then, without a word, the boys of the Literary Club unbuttoned their trousers.

Archie followed suit. He draped his pants over the back of his chair; he sat on the edge of his towel, facing the others; he spread his legs and grabbed his cock—which he was alarmed, then relieved, to find fully erect.

Afterwards, the boys put on their pants, rolled up their towels, and proceeded to mingle and chat as if nothing extraordinary had occurred. “I thought C.S.'s story this week rather good, didn't you?” “Have you read the new Isherwood?” “When's the bloody
Lyre
deadline anyway?”

He was reminded of parties of his mother's, when someone had puked in a vase, or broken the punch bowl, or begun weeping in the bathroom, or pawed at the wrong person, and so had to be politely shown the door. This fall into disgrace always marked the climax of the party, but the guests lingered awhile through the dénouement,
chatting extra loudly, grinning extra brightly, mixing their drinks extra strong, as if to deny that anything disgraceful had happened at all.

Archie, who wished for nothing more than to disappear, found himself consistently not alone. A steady file of boys came round to introduce themselves, shake his hand, welcome him to the Club. They asked him questions: “What's your stance on rhyme, Archer?” “Archer, how do you feel about this Beat thing?” “Have you read the new Isherwood?” Gone now was the frosty atmosphere of the symposium; but, friendly as they were, he could not clear from his mind the image of what they had all just done.

“Say, Archer, what's your favorite poem? I know, I know—but if you
had
to pick one.”

He struggled to think of the title, or indeed existence, of a single poem. He remembered
Don Juan
, but wasn't sure that something so lengthy qualified as a poem. Could he get away with something like Shakespeare's Sonnet 163?

“Well, if I had to pick
one
, I guess it would have to be ‘The Windhover,'” he said, recalling the quantity of praise that Master Royd had heaped on a poem by that name in Advanced English last year.

“Manley Hopkins, eh?” The boy lifted his brows, as if impressed by Archie's audacity. “How about that. Old manly Manley Hopkins.”

Ms. Hastings looked up from her knitting and smiled warmly. As one of the few women on staff at Parcliffe, and the only one under forty, it was perhaps strange that the librarian had so utterly failed to inflame the ardor of the student body. Though amicable and by no means deformed, she was nevertheless not only thoroughly unsexy but downright unsexual. It was simply not conceivable that she could be the owner of organs of procreation. (Though Archie had to admit
that he could not muster much faith in the existence of, for instance, his cousin Patricia's vagina, either.)

Today, he keenly resented Ms. Hastings's sexlessness. It seemed an ambiguity expressly designed to confuse and dismay him, like a bit of doggerel introduced into an otherwise intelligible play.

“Title, author, or subject?”

He was prepared for this. “Subject, please. I'm looking for information—whatever I can find—I don't know if you'll have anything—on
honorary degrees
.'

But she was unwilling to deviate from the script: “Under what letter, please?”

“H, please.”

“H what?”

“What?”

“H what? H-A, H-E, H-O, what?”

“Oh. H-O, please.”

“H-O what?”

“H-O, um, well, N, I guess. H-O-N.”

“In that case our choices are two. We've got Homo to Hone or Hone to Hot.”

His heart sank. His eyeballs started to tremble.

“What are we looking for again?”

“Honorary degrees.” His mouth was too fast for his brain.

“That's easy, then. We'll be wanting Hone to Hot.”

“Well yes and hominids too, if possible. It's a sort of anthropological angle that I'm taking to … honorary degrees.”

“Then we'll be wanting Hoc to Homo. ‘Hominid' is with an I, isn't it?”

“Well, yes. However,” he went on, his speech slowing to a panic- stricken crawl, “it just occurred to me that it's not
hominids
it's likely to be under but, come to think of it, more likely, ah, homonyms.”

Ms. Hastings put her hands on where her hips would be if she'd had hips. “With an O?”

“With an O, yes.”

“H-O-M-O,
homo.
As in homo-nyms.”

“Yes.”

“Then it's not Hoc to Homo that you're wanting at all, but Homo to Hone.”

“I guess you're right.”

After an epic search in which something more esoteric than mere alphabetization must have been involved, she lugged the two drawers over to the counter and dumped them with a grunt. Then she waited.