The Broom of the System (29 page)

I walk around the quad, kicking at exposed tree roots, listening to snatches of conversation in languages with which I am unfamiliar. I stay well clear of North Dormitory, to be sure. I make a giant detour around it. Out of the comer of my eye I can see its win dowshades fluttering. I can see its tree-fingers pointing. North Dormitory. Scene of perhaps the single most disastrous, unthinkable moment of my life, thus far.

Actually probably second to my wedding night.

Whom do I see, here, in the quad? Can the present of a past fail to be ugly? But it isn’t so. As I really should have remembered, ugliness is absent from the College. I have visions of it, bound and muffled, its walleyes rolling helplessly, stuffed into the darkest closets and boiler rooms in the deepest basements of the thickest buildings. I think I can hear its soft cries for help. The crazy relative everyone ignores, and denies, and feeds. Ugliness is absent from the quad.

Whom do I see, here? I see students and adults. I see parents, obvious parents, the ones with name tags. I watch the students, and they watch back. Ability To Handle Oneself, elaborate defense structures, exit their eyes and begin to assemble on the ground before them. But the eyes and faces are as always left bare. In the girls’ faces I see softness, beauty, the shiny and relaxed eyes of wealth, and the vital capacity for creating problems where none exist. For some reason I see these girls also older, pale television ghosts flickering beside the originals: middle-aged women, with bright-red fin gemails and deeply tanned, hard, seamed faces, sprayed hair shaped by the professional fingers of men with French names; and eyes, eyes that will stare without pity or doubt over salted tequila rims at the glare of the summer sun off the country club pool. The structures spread out, grow, wave at me with the epileptic flutter of the film-in-reverse. The boys are different, appropriately, from the girls. From each other. I see blond heads and lean jaws and bow-legged swaggers and biceps with veins in them. I see so many calm, impassive, or cheerful faces, faces at peace, for now and always, with the context of their own appearance and being, that sort of long-term peace and smooth acquaintance with invariable destiny that renders the faces bloodlessly pastable onto cut-outs of corporate directors in oak-lined boardrooms, professors with plaid ties and leather patches at the elbows of their sport jackets, doctors on bright putting greens with heavy gold shock-resistant watches at their wrists and tiny beepers at their belts, black-jacketed soldiers efficiently bayoneting the infirm. I see Best faces, faces I remember well. Faces whose owners are going to be the Very Best.

I see the faces of those who belong and those who do not belong. The belonging faces appear in rows, like belts of coins. The coins bob up and down, because belongers swagger. The belonging faces are tiringly complex, the expression of each created and propped up, through processes obscure, by the faces on either side of it. These structures intertwine and mesh, have not yet begun to tear at one another. And the nonbelongers. Of course the faces of those who do not belong are the adjustable dark-eyed faces of Vance Vigorous. Many of these faces are tilted downward, for fear of tripping on a root, for fear of being seen tripping on a root. These are the ones who do not sleep, sleep badly, sleep alone, and think of other things when they hear the sounds through the walls of their rooms. I intuit that the Frisbee players, whom I continue to watch, are nonbelongers. The Frisbee traces faint lines between them, strands that are swept and snapped like spidersilk by the wind off the Memorial Hill and athletic fields to the south. The nonbelongers’ faces are the unfirm faces that are really firm, the self-defined faces, the faces defined by not belonging in a place defined by belonging. These alone are the faces that stare out, protected and imprisoned, from behind the barbed borders of their own structures, the faces that know that, but for the grace of a God distinguished for the arbitrariness of his grace, it is they who would be bound and muffled in the College closets. The faces that are unreachable from this far away, and that look through you and digest you in a moment, against everyone’s will.

Who knows how long I watch. My pantcuffs fill with leaf bits and clippings of hollow-stemmed grass. Parents go by with their name tags. Older men, for whom bellies are burdens wrapped and hefted in checked sportcoats. Older women I have already seen and known in the faces of their daughters. Seals on hills, bright discs in the air. Lovers on stomachs, legs up, ankles lazily crossed against the fluttering approach of the odd falling leaf. The sun moves out over the mountains. I am able to feel it. The ellipse of my quad-orbit absorbs the indentation of North Dormitory.

Oh, why the hate? Why, when a horrible, worse-than-worst thing happens to you, when in all honesty
you
do something horrible, why is it the situation in the context of which the thing happens, the physical place where it happens, the other people whom it involves, that you hate, the thought of which and whom sends organs leaping inside you and corridors in your brain clanging shut against the assault? Why is it not yourself whom you hate, the mirror away from which you reel in horror? Can Jay explain this? What an entirely inappropriate question. How very far I’ve come.

On
2,
soon to be
3,
March 1968, North Dormitory, of which I was a resident, sponsored a mixer for the junior class, of which I was a member, and for the residents of our sister dormitory at Mount Holyoke College, an all-women’s institution ten miles away, the institution Lenore’s sister and grandmother—mother, too, I think—had all passed through. In attendance at this mixer was a Mount Holyoke sophomore named Janet Dibdin, a small, quiet, curved girl, straight red hair and blue eyes with tiny, fluffy white diamonds in the irises. Really. A girl about whom I was privately wild. A girl I met at another mixer, another of the year’s endless string, this one at Mount Holyoke; and at this mixer I had met her, and had survived the agony of dancing with her. And so. And so this was a girl in whose presence I was stupid, damp, tongue-tied, and comparatively huge. One of the three females in my life to whom I have been overwhelmingly sexually attracted, the others being Lenore Beadsman and the daughter of my next-door neighbor in Scarsdale, Rex Metalman’s daughter, an objectively erotic young thing who undulated her way into my heart in the summer of her thirteenth year while ostensibly playing with the sprinkler in the lawn.

In any event, there were we, grouped in blue suits and gray suits and slicked-back hair and shiny nervous noses, and there were they, a sweet shifting miasma of wool, shaped hair, cashmere, eyes, cotton, calves and pearls, in the midst of which she stood, by the hors d‘oeuvre bar, in a skirt and monogrammed sweater, talking quietly with friends, conspicuously danceless all night, and it was close to twelve, and there were we, in suits, gathering our saliva for the final assault. And there we were, moving through geologic time, impossibly slowly, imperceptibly, across the cedar floor, the fire in the fireplace doubtless and not inappropriately reflected and dancing in the centers of our eyes. We moved, and I was suddenly beside her, talking to her, good heavens hello, pretending it be by accident lest all dissolve, one or two of her friends standing with towering hairdos off to the side, wary lest they be caught in the ropes of sexual tension that snapped and crackled in the air between Janet and me, the friends watching us, me, for the tiniest error, the Beatles on the record player playing “Eight Days a Week,” and my hands prepared some sort of hors d’oeuvre, what do I mean some sort, a fastened cylinder of bologna on a Ritz cracker, and she declined it, and stared at me kindly, telling me with her eyes that she was willing to play the elaborate and exhausting game, that it was all right, and I put the hors d‘oeuvre into my mouth, and the cracker seemed to explode into deserts of dust, and there was meat, and I recall she was talking about the upcoming election, and the unavoidable and untalkaboutably horrible invitation to dance began its salmon’s migration from my intestine up toward my brain, and my hand was in the pocket of my slacks, soaking through the wool, and in a disastrous flash I thought of something witty to say, to delay the invitation, and my heart leapt, and my throat constricted, and I turned convulsively from myself to say the thing to Janet Dibdin, as she stared with undeserved trust into my eyes, and I tried to say the thing, and as I opened my mouth there somehow flew out of my mouth an enormous glob of the chewed hors d’oeuvre, the Ritz cracker and bologna, chewed, with saliva in it, with shocking force, and it flew out and landed on the fleshy part of Janet Dibdin’s nose, and stayed there. And the friends were blasted into silence, and the rest of the hors d‘oeuvre in my mouth turned to ice, adhered forever to my palate, and the Beatles sang, “Guess you know it’s true,” and Janet stopped all life processes, virtually killed with horror, which she out of a compassion not of this earth tried to hide by smiling, and she began to look in her purse for a Kleenex, with the obscenely flesh-and-bone-colored glob of chewed food on the end of her nose, and I watched it all through the large end of a telescope, and then the world ceased mercifully to be, and I became infinitely small and infinitely dense, a tiny black star twinkling negatively amid a crumple of empty suit and shoes. This was my taste of hell at twenty. The month following that night is an irretrievable blank in my memory, an expletive deleted. That portion of my brain is cooked smooth.

An unprecedentedly enormous veer around North Dormitory, effected with hands over ears, flings me out past Memorial Hill and into the bleeding forests south of the campus, and I wander, crunching needles and the weak leaves already down, as I used to wander alone for hours as a student, elbowing through the throngs of other students wandering alone, as I elbow students and parents aside now and head for the really isolated, natural part of the New England forest, beyond the road, past dry fields of baking, screaming crickets, out through the wind, elbowing, to find the really secluded places already full, lines of belongers cracking like whips around the sap-sprung trees, sending nonbelongers spinning into the brush. I am outside. And I wait my turn for admission, and smoke two clove cigarettes under the angry eye of a blue-haired mother in a yellow Bonwit pantsuit unfortunately right downwind from me, hissing into the ear of a son with a note concerning laundry pinned to the sleeve of his brand new
AMHERST
jacket. I buy a hot dog from a vendor and watch the sun glitter faraway against the windows of the buildings on the southern face of the broad ridge, the southern wall of the citadel. One of my R. V. ‘s“ was still here, and I had, in the back of my mind, one other place where I might still be, and these things somehow made me unreasonably happy—as happy as seeing the immoderate curve of Lenore’s hip under her scratchy Howard Johnson’s blanket, here, next to me. I love you, Lenore. There is no hatred in my love for you. Only a sadness I feel all the more strongly for my inability to explain or describe it. My ears rumble still.

There was simply no getting around the fact that Stonecipher LaVache Beadsman looked satanic. His skin was a dark, glossy red, his hair an oily black and swept back without care over a deep widow’s peak, his eyebrows Brezhnevian in thickness and starting up high off to the side to slant down evilly over his eyes, his head small and smooth and oval and not too securely attached to his neck and tending to flop, like the head of a shoe tree. An OBERLIN sweatshirt and corduroy shorts and a hurricane of hair on his foot, beside his black hightops. A clipboard with a pen hanging by a string was attached to his leg as he sat in an easy chair, watching television, his profile to Lenore, at the door. On television was “The Bob Newhart Show.” In the big social room with LaVache were three boys who all seemed to look precisely alike, although Lenore wasn’t completely sure about this, because the heavy window curtains were drawn against the afternoon sun and the room was dim. The room smelled of, in descending order, pot, Mennen Speed Stick, hot alcohol, feet. The three identical guys all sat sockless beside tumbled empty pairs of those shoes.

“Lenore, this is Cat, this is Heat, this is the Breather,” LaVache said from his chair in front of the television. “My sister Lenore, guys.”

“Hi,” said Cat.

“Hello,” said Heat.

“Hi,” said the Breather.

Heat and the Breather were on a spring-sprung sofa, sharing what was obviously a joint. Cat was on the floor, sitting, a bottle of vodka before him, and he clutched it with his bare toes, staring anxiously at the television screen.

“Hi Bob,” Suzanne Pleshette said to Bob Newhart on the screen.

“Merde du temps,”
Cat said. He took a swig from the bottle.

LaVache looked up from his clipboard at Lenore. “We’re playing Hi Bob. You want to play Hi Bob with us?” He spoke sort of slowly.

Lenore made a place to sit on the luggage. “What’s Hi Bob?”

The Breather grinned at her from the sofa, where he now held the bottle of vodka. “Hi Bob is where, when somebody on ‘The Bob Newhart Show’ says ’Hi Bob,‘ you have to take a drink.”

“And but if Bill Dailey says, ‘Hi Bob,” said Cat, tending to the joint with a wet finger, “that is to say, if the character Howard Borden on the show says ’Hi Bob,‘ it’s death, you have to chug the whole bottle.”

“Hi Bob,” said Bill Dailey, on the screen.

“Death!” yelled Cat.

The Breather drained the bottle of vodka without hesitation. “Lucky it was almost empty,” he said.

“Guess I’ll probably pass,” said Lenore. “You’re out of vodka, anyway.”

“The duration of a game of Hi Bob is according to the rules determined by the show, not the vodka,” the Breather said, getting another bottle of vodka from a rack behind the sofa and breaking the seal. The liquor-rack was a glitter of glass and labels in the sun through a gap in the curtains. “The serious Hi Bob player makes it his business never to run out of vodka.”