The Hair of Harold Roux (11 page)

And then as if in a dream Janie found her own shy arm reaching out toward that face. She came closer, closer, till she felt the warm, rich air of the old woman’s breath on her hand. She reached toward the brown, wrinkled eyelid and lifted it up from the sunken eye.

What they both saw then was so strange that in their wonder they almost forgot to be afraid, for in the eye was no pupil or iris but a clear lighted glasslike globe in which they
could see with the clarity of a bright winter day green spruce trees and a great crystal waterfall, and behind the wildly flashing water a dark mountain. Over its gray rock, black clouds rolled and climbed against a clear blue sky.

When they had seen the waterfall, the mountain and the clouds just long enough so they would never forget them, ever in their lives, Janie let the old skin of the eyelid settle once again over the clear globe. With a long glance at each other, but not a word, they crept back from the old woman, put the candle out, and climbed back to the loft, each to his own bed, where they slept, each one, a sleep full of dreams of the ominous beauty of a mountain, surging clouds and falling water …

“And now it’s late and both of you have to go to school tomorrow,” Aaron said.

“No! No!” Janie Benham said. “Tell about the winter and when Oka gets lost and the little girl!” She trembled, blinking, unable to leave the lonely log cabin in that wilderness.

“When they didn’t have enough to eat!” Billy said. “And the boy remembers the birch-bark boxes!”

“No. Some other time, kiddoes. It’s late. Come on, now, no fuss.”

“No! Dad, please?”

But the forceful noise of their objections was bringing them back to here and now. “I don’t want to go to bed in my old bed,” Janie said.

“It’s a great old bed,” Aaron said. “What’s the matter with your old bed?”

“I want to hear about what happens!”

Agnes had gotten up, making come-now noises, and they began to see the inevitability of this evening’s events, future-less and doubtful and ordinary as they were. Not a story, but the usual, the usual. He kissed them good night and Agnes went upstairs with them. He went to the kitchen and opened a beer, then went to his study to look down at whatever he was working on then. After a while Agnes came up behind
him and put her arms lightly around his waist. It was nice, and they would, barring possible drastic changes of mood, make love. But like an alien to such domestic probabilities he felt just the smallest, the most remote sense of irritability that she should translate his hour with the children into affection toward him. How women loved their domesticated beasts. Control, control. Horses, lions, wolves, meek and gentle. But her presence pressed against him, this strong, real woman, and even though he knew the old story of the two of them he turned toward her, tensely willing to find it out all over again.

George Buck arrives, nervous and upset about something that is obviously new, a new consideration since their telephone conversation. He comes down the front hall yelling “It’s me!” and comes striding or stumbling through the house to Aaron’s study, where Aaron has been staring down at his notebooks.

“Jesus, Aaron! Jesus H. Christ!” George says, and stands, waiting for the question. “What’s the matter?”

“Well …” George looks away, suddenly evasive. “It begins with Irv Lebowitz. You know him? A graduate student. I just found out he got busted last night in Litchwood.”

Litchwood is four miles from the university, another depressed little mill town where rents in the old mill tenements are cheap.

“Begins?” Aaron says. “What was he busted for?”

“Just grass, as far as I know, but we can’t get him loose on account of other things. They’re being really difficult about it. One thing was—this cop was examining his rectum. Did you know they did that? For evidence, I guess. And if you know Irv, of course he couldn’t resist. The situation wouldn’t seem too funny to most people, but Irv … Anyway, he’s supposed to have said, ‘Tell me when you’re through, honey,’ among other things. They didn’t take it too well. Plus asking them all sorts of rather personal psychological-sociological
questions. Bill Zinner says they would have killed him if they thought they could have gotten away with it, they were that mad. Irv sort of got on this track, like the cops were his patients. He’s amazing when he gets going, funny as hell. But you can imagine the local cops. All that
hair
! Irv wasn’t even at the party they were suspicious about, but when he heard all the ruckus he came out in the hall and they took one look at him and that was it. They collected all the whiffle dust out of his pockets and his bellybutton lint and everything else. Man, I mean I think long hair’s a pain in the ass, myself, but all this shit makes you ashamed to go near a barbershop.” His hands busy under his raggedy Bowdoin sweatshirt, he scratches the blond fuzz on his slim but rather slack belly. “I don’t know, Aaron. It’s all a bloody plot or something.”

“You said it ‘began’ with Irv Lebowitz,” Aaron says, a little apprehensive. George obviously has something else he finds hard to go on with.

“Well, it’s a favor I’d like to ask, and it isn’t fair, really, so you can certainly say no and it’s my own goddam fault I got in such a bind anyway, but this is it. Irv was going to read a paper tonight to my senior seminar I have at my house and now Irv won’t be able to make it and I’m about totally unstrung. Listen, none of this occurred to me when I asked you out for supper. You’ve got to believe that, Aaron, but I thought you could just possibly stay for the class and answer questions or something. Just rap about the literary situation, or read something. Anything. They’re bright kids. It’s a great class, really. They all talk and argue and there’s not one real asshole in the bunch. It’s that kind of class—they
like
each other. You know.”

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.

M
y 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 not 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.