The Hair of Harold Roux (17 page)

Harold sat there in his desk chair, turned toward Allard, silent and a little apprehensive because he wanted his friend to admire the sophistication of his story’s setting, the intelligent conversation, the mood, the tone. His sports jacket was just a little too thin in the nap to go with the striped regimental tie that was knotted too tightly and led down to his silver belt buckle, the kind that was solid and you fed the leather through it to the right place where it was held by some kind of inner roll-lock, and you bought it with an initial stamped on the outside of it,
R
for Russell, or Reade or Richardson or Ravendon or Roux, and your gabardine slacks were pleated at the waist and too much of a light blue and your socks were machine-knit cotton argyles and the soles of your too shiny, too pointed black shoes were too thin. Harold, Harold, of all the people in the world you should be the last to labor to deceive.

And you, Allard Benson, having another glass of Harold’s Bristol Cream and feeling it in the back of your head, if you took on the job of changing Harold Roux into what he wanted to be, would you do it out of care? Would you really give a shit? Would you do it because you understand the sweetness and gentleness of this fellow creature who, compared to you, is practically a saint?

About then it was probably time to go to Commons for supper, where they would meet Mary and her roommate, Naomi Goldman, who was a communist, and whom Allard called Yetta Samovar.

But that is another story, and now Aaron Benham is lying in a strange bed in the cool vast gray light of predawn. A cock crows from a neighboring farm, a clear, mindlessly too early, machistic, bullying yodel.

Aaron can just make out his cigarettes and matches on the chair beside his bed. As he lights a cigarette the inevitable sermon against this form of suicide runs its boring, desperate course through his head. He holds the match up to the match-book the better to read about La Salle Extension University of Chicago, which will change you into an accountant, artist, high school graduate, night club manager, diesel mechanic, and more—if you are smart enough not to mail the matches along with the cover.

One drag on the cigarette tells his capillaries what death’s soothing syrup feels like, and he puts it out. But deep in his body he feels a sea change. Certain glands have closed, and his heart is running well, almost without effort. His muscles and joints are full now of sweet fatigue, and he believes that he can sleep. He must sleep, but he never desires that nothingness and never really wants it to happen. That suicide in small—he has never understood it, never remembered how it came to him when it came. He has watched others fall asleep and it was almost as if they willfully died before his eyes. And yet he loves to dream; he loves that emotion so encompassing it destroys all the concerns of the other world
and makes something so great out of nothing. But to die in order to hope for a dream?

No dream; there is that small single room in Parker Hall again, and Harold Roux, having by his writing revealed something of himself to Allard Benson, sat smoking a Parliament cigarette and carefully tapping the ash into a shining glass tray. His legs neatly crossed at the knee, his pale face calm, he vibrated on a frequency the eye could not quite discern.

Allard glanced quickly, guiltily, at the line across Harold’s forehead where the dark neat cloud of hair had settled upon the flesh. “Well,” he said. “It’s really a fantasy, isn’t it? I mean, you’d like to be Francis Ravendon, and have Allyson look at you like that.”

Harold nodded, smiling. “Yes, I guess so.”

“But, Harold …” How was he to say to Harold what was so obvious? “It’s not really the truth.”

“The truth?” Harold said. “Isn’t it the truth if you believe it? Fiction isn’t the truth, is it?” Though terribly disappointed by Allard’s reactions so far, Harold would consent to discuss theory, which hadn’t such a personal claim on him. Allard didn’t want to destroy him, and he didn’t want to mention Mary, either—to say, for instance, that Allyson Turnbridge was obviously, from more evidence than the shard of jade in her brown iris, Mary Tolliver. Though he had, almost as a matter of predestined right, taken over Mary as soon as Harold introduced her to him, he still wondered why Harold wasn’t angry with him. Here was a real, live, warm girl, after all, not a fantasy.

“Wouldn’t you rather …” he began tentatively, but then felt himself change; irritation, exasperation, and possibly a feeling of his essential benevolence toward Harold made him reckless and a little brutal. For one thing, he believed that if it weren’t for him and his two roommates, who were known to be Harold’s friends, Boom Maloumian and Short Round would by now have beaten Harold naked through the halls, painted his balls and bare skull blue and crucified him. So
maybe he did have a right to speak straight. “Wouldn’t you rather have Mary than dream all this moonlight and roses? Damn it, Harold. I mean, wouldn’t you rather even
write
about what it’s really like?”

“I don’t particularly like what it’s really like,” Harold said. “Why should I write about that? I know what Mary is like. Perfection, that’s what she’s like.”

“Oh Christ, I don’t know. You’re a strange case, Harold.”

“You mean because I … All right, I’m not ashamed of it. I love Mary. I think she’s the most beautiful, sensitive, kind, wonderful girl in the world. I do love her.”

“Okay, I agree that she’s damn near all those things, Harold, but wouldn’t you want to take what you love? Wouldn’t you want to have all of her, not just the ideal? Wouldn’t you rather … I mean, well, fuck her, Harold?”

“I wouldn’t use that or any other dirty word in connection with Mary.”

“If you were in connection with Mary, what
would
you be doing to her then?”

“I don’t think that’s funny!” Harold’s voice was rather shrill; usually he tolerated Allard’s lapses into vulgarity with a shake of his head, but now his disapproval was nearly outrage. “Mary is a virgin and will remain a virgin until marriage. She’s a good Catholic, too, or hadn’t you noticed that? No, I’m not worried at all about Mary in that way. I think she’s fascinated at the moment by you. You’re very sophisticated and all that, but she’s not going to let anything bad happen. She’s too moral and too honest with herself. I know her very well because we see each other and talk for hours when you’re not around—when you’re giving Naomi Goldman rides on your motorcycle or something.”

“What do you mean by ‘or something’?” Allard said, wanting to laugh, although outright laughter would do more violence than he wanted to do to Harold’s seriousness.

“You take her out to the reservoir or to College Woods
and neck with her. I’ve seen you come in with pine needles all over you.”

“She also likes to be bitten high up on the insides of her thighs,” Allard said.

“Cut it out! I don’t believe that or anything else you say!” Harold was near tears; he was also horrified to be talking to his best friend this way, Allard could tell. Harold thought he had put himself in grave danger of losing Allard’s friendship by this show of real anger. Allard stood up. My God, he thought, I’ve not removed my friendship from people who’ve smashed me in the mouth. What a delicate world Harold inhabits. He slapped Harold lightly on the shoulder of his padded jacket. Because of some fear that he might dislodge the toupee, the slap was gentle indeed.

“Come on, Harold, old chap. I do believe Commons is open, and shall we dine?”

Partly pacified, at least, and certainly relieved, Harold smiled as he tidied up his room. Of course he still held to his arguments. A certain grimness of jaw indicated that. They walked down the stairs and across the green campus to Commons.

Actually Harold’s ordered world appealed to Allard a great deal. How wonderful all that honor and virginity and sacredness would be, in a way. The immense sacred value of Mary’s lovely body until such momentous dark acts were sanctified by a Higher Being; meaning beyond mere fleshly considerations! It was a world he’d once believed in too—back, say, in grammar school, when a girl’s very glance might give him palpitations. Now he had chosen not to dream but to be there in the flesh, and in acting on that choice he had to admit to a vague feeling of sadness and loss; perhaps those childhood intensities could never again be recaptured.

A
aron hears, above the clamor of birds, Helga moving around in the kitchen. Dishes and silver tinkle and clank softly, water is about to boil and is making its squeezed complaint—the sounds of a domestic morning. He squints one eye at his watch, which tells him it is seven o’clock. Helga must have shut the door between the birthing room and the kitchen so he could sleep a little longer. But he is only a guest here, an alien to the clink and clatter, the soft voices—Helga’s and Edward’s—that form this
kleine Morgenmusik
. He must get up, so he does. Through the birthing room’s other door is the downstairs bathroom, in which the real ceramic tiles, glassed-in shower, plumbing, cabinets and all had been lovingly assembled by George the craftsman—instead of crafting his dissertation. Each tile must have told him in a small voice, even as it fit so perfectly in place,
Loss, waste. If you do us and not the other thing, you will have to leave us
. All the while he made this beautiful house, in order to keep his family warm and safe, he was doing just the opposite. It was not a matter of improving the place and getting equity in it in order to sell it. No, this is love.

George is a teacher. Teaching is what he has been chosen to do. Everyone in the department agrees on this point, and certainly this is the only point in the world upon which they all agree. George’s students expect him never to fake or lie. They expect from him generosity, but in the matter of work and marks they expect firmness, because he cares about what
they learn. He is an enthusiast of his subject, which is literature in English. But if his contract is not renewed he will simply have to go elsewhere—to a two-year college, to one of the new small colleges of somewhat doubtful standards and aims, to a secondary school somewhere, or even to another job altogether, because in these hard days teaching jobs of any kind are scarce. The one certainty is that it will have to be somewhere else, away from his beloved home. Neither George nor Helga have any other source of money, so they can’t simply continue to live here, the way some failed scholars and teachers have. The property taxes on their house and acres are nearly confiscatory now, and will of course get worse.

Aaron examines his ageless, always unfamiliar face in George’s mirror. “
Glah
,” says the face. “And who are you, anyway?” Aaron asks as the face cleverly imitates the words.

Men do not sham convulsion

Nor simulate a throe

“
Ulgh
!” says the face. Emily Dickinson is wrong. “
Ullsb
!” the face says, simulating a throe.

Nothing is funnier than simulated agony. A man’s head sticking out of a commode, Boom Maloumian laughing at a world that always lives up to his expectations. But maybe Emily Dickinson is right after all, and the deepest causes for our imitating throes, gags, convulsions, spastics, drunks, babbling idiots and stunned drooling mongoloids are the real causes. We only think we are doing imitations.

Aaron washes whatever invisible stuff is supposed to be washed from that face, from among those morning bristles, borrows a handy comb and combs his hair.

Morning sunlight turns the kitchen bright and dark, changes Edward’s hair from Helga-colored to gold. Edward bends over his bowl, netting the last grains of Crunchy Granola from the milk. “Good morning, Aaron,” he says.

“Good morning, Ed.”

Helga looks just a little puffy about the eyes, as though she’s been awake too long in the night.

“Bacon and eggs?” she says cheerfully. “This is George’s day to gorge himself on breakfast, but you can order what you like.”

“That sounds fine. We’ll gorge together,” he says. “I’ll gorge with George.”

She laughs as she skillfully separates the bacon strips with a spatula and arranges them side by side in a big iron skillet. Sunlight brushes the down on her upper lip and flashes on her flowered housecoat as she moves across the light. To Aaron’s strange eye she seems as green and graceful as a young tree.

George comes in humming and smiling. “Beautiful day! Beautiful day! Hear all the goddam lovely birds screaming! Everything they say means life, procreation, plenty of tasty bugs to eat!”

“Tasty!” Edward says, laughing over his bowl.

“I have a great class this morning,” George says. “I won the freshman lottery with this class. They are all merely beautiful people.”

Aaron meets Helga’s eyes. It’s as if George has a terminal disease and is unaware of it. How easily they can keep the secret from him.

At seven forty-five he and George drive toward town, leaving Edward with his lunch box and green book bag to wait for his bus, which comes by around eight. George hums happily as they drive along, and Aaron argues with himself about bringing up the dissertation, that nest of snakes. Should he destroy such obvious contentment? George is, in a sense, killing himself with this self-deception. What good is a friend if he can’t grab his friend before he leaps? But not now, not on this spring morning that is so bright each border of tree, house and hill imprints itself almost painfully, nervously, on the brain. And maybe George
is
really happy; maybe no small voices speak to him at all. Aaron, to whom small voices constantly scream and babble in tongues, in code and in clear,
finds this hard to believe, yet he does know something about lying to oneself and God knows it might be true.

Of course, George might rationalize his laziness through criticism of the system itself—a system that can sacrifice teachers of George’s sensitivity, knowledge and care, sometimes in favor of idiots. But that is too simple; how can you find out if a scholar is still alive in his discipline if you can’t read his words? “Where are thy fine wondrous works,/And where are they to read?” Lecturing itself is a kind of publication, and if your ideas are worth giving to your students, are they not then good enough to be written for your peers everywhere? This, after all, is a university, not a trade school. Here you are supposed to be on the cutting edge of knowledge, not merely teaching known skills. George can fill up all the hours of his days teaching, caring for his students, getting them out of jail, helping them with the problems of addiction, pregnancy, madness, vicious or cold parents, faulty logic, fanaticism, dull complacency, misinformation, but that is not his only job. The system is also meant to give him time to write, to produce that solid thing: a book. The general class or contact load is six to nine hours a week. There is an old story about a businessman and a professor. Businessman: “How many hours do you teach?” Professor: “Nine.” Businessman: “Well, that
is
a long day … but it’s easy work.” Another, even more ancient story, about two men talking below the cross upon which Christ is crucified. “He was a great teacher,” says one, and the other says, “Yes, but he didn’t publish.”