The Hair of Harold Roux (22 page)

They stopped at the College Pharm and had a sundae, chocolate fudge with crushed nuts. Crushed nuts? asked the soda jerk of the trembling man. No, shell shock, was the reply—courtesy B. Maloumian.

They sat in a narrow booth, facing each other, Mary’s neat lips at her sweet spoon. She was so pretty, so perfectly immaculate, that she had the power all at once to turn him into the perfect date for her. America, innocent honest sweet America, the girl next-door, the wonder of growing up. And with most of his real, or dark, desires wafted away before this American idol, or ideal, or idyll, he fell in love with her, or it, as though he were the kind of person (boy) whose fondest dream was to possess this sweet clean intelligent American girl, meet her family, take instruction in her religion, marry her in church—she in taffeta, lace and veil, an untouched virgin until her sacred wedding night. How God and all the authorities, heavenly and civil, would smile upon the pretty young couple! How all would approve!

He told her he’d changed his mind and would like to go home with her for the weekend.

Her happiness deepened, sobered into deeper places. “If you come to mass on Sunday, I’ll have to show you how to genuflect.”

Holding hands, they walked back to her dorm. In a shadowed place beside an arborvitae he unbuttoned her jacket and put his arms around her, his hands on the silken warmth of her blouse. She trembled as they kissed. Her mouth was sweet, not sugary but the deeper sweet of her health, giving him a feeling of his own rough unworthiness.

“I think I love you, Allard,” she said, breathless mystery
and bravery in these words. “I know I love you. I couldn’t feel anything stronger than this.”

“I think I love you, too,” he said.

“You,” she said. “You won’t …”

“Won’t what?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I can hardly breathe. I’m all confused.” She turned her face away. “It’s nearly eleven, I’ve got to sign in.” Her ear was hot to his lips and she trembled so much a buzzer seemed to be going off inside her somewhere. She turned back and kissed him awkwardly, as though in reckless desperation, then stepped away from him. He held her hand and pulled her back.

“We’ve got a full thirty seconds,” he said.

When he kissed her again she seemed to be committing a sweet but mortal sin. “I love you,” he said.

“I love you. I’ve never felt anything like this. I love you.”

How beautiful to say that, to say something with no reservations, with nothing at all left unsaid.

Gravely blushing, with her face averted as though she were ashamed of what must be too apparent upon it, she ran up the steps to the dorm entrance and inside.

He walked, dazedly, back to Parker Hall, dreaming upon the sweet simplicities of love. The trees leaned, sweet green, benevolently above him. Orange windows were gentle depths, each with its meaningful life inside. A lamp seen glowing on a student’s desk must surely illuminate a calm, important volume explaining the beauty of existence. Mary seemed now all perfect and whole, gleaming silver and gold. He could worship her heel, idolize the pit of her knee. No part of her could displease him, nothing. He was unworthy of her body yet protectively superior to her mind, to her strength. She was his to tenderly break, yet honorably, honorably.

But of course he would then bring her into his own world—as soon as he achieved it. For instance, he was not about to become a Roman Catholic. He had nothing against its pomp and ceremony, but he would always view it as interesting theater. Their children could have their choice. With
the thought of their children a fearful shiver of pleasure quaked his loins; they were good protoplasm, he and Mary. To enter and become part of her body in another! It awed him, that sweet mortal union. Its particulars, its biological miraculousness awed him. My God, there was a deep complex inside her body made to welcome part of his body. Little live parts of him would then swim up into her, there to meet and combine with her in that blood darkness. Life, continuation. No miracle conceived by man could compare to the one made actual by protoplasm itself.

Dreaming upon these sweet and dangerous possibilities, he returned to Parker Hall. He wanted to talk to Nathan, who would, in his fashion, take him seriously. It seemed necessary to Nathan to consider him naive in those worldly affairs having to do with money, or the Great American Game of Con, and perhaps also, on a less important level, fashions in clothes. Allard’s genius, as Nathan seemed to need to have it, was in art and in love. All Nathan’s friends had to have their spheres and be great in them. Allard believed that as audience for this confession of love and future, Nathan would be properly and seriously correct. Harold Roux would have suspected his motivations and quizzed him sharply—too sharply—on the practicality of it all, but Nathan would never doubt the romantic importance of this crisis.

Allard knew all this but without any diminution of enthrallment. Our self-importance raises the importance of our friends, our loves, our world. To be truly involved while observing our skill at the scene itself is not really dishonest. Does he cry at the beauty of his sorrow or joy (both of which are real)? Does he love the beauty of his vision of love?

Back at the room he found Nathan studying. Knuck was snoring, his gray-white head as insensible to its own signals as a buoy rocking upon the sea.

“Ho!” Nathan said. “The lover returns.” He looked at Allard, the large dark eyes in his bony little head holding, after the first glance, seeing what Allard wanted them to see.

“What’s the serious bit?” Nathan asked.

“I think, my friend, I am under the influence of love.”

“Mary?”

“Mary. I’m having a crisis about marrying her, Nate.”

“Whew! Ooee! That
is
serious.” Nathan’s face turned properly grave at the wonder of this life-important decision. “That’s a big step, Allard. A big step.”

“In fact, I’m going home with her this weekend and meet her father and little brother.”

“And go to Mass on Sunday?” Nathan asked shrewdly.

“I suppose so.”

“That’s sort of like getting engaged, you know.” Nathan, who was a Unitarian himself, made it a point to know about the protocols of various Christian sects. “I mean, are you going to turn R.C.?”

“Impossible.”

“Mary is going to turn whatever you are? What are you, anyway, come to think of it.”

Allard couldn’t think what he was, and realized nervously that this question would certainly be asked. A non-Protestant? A paradoxologist? “I don’t know what the hell I am, Nate.”

“You better think of something before ol’ Dad lays his cold eye on you, boy. You’re the crummy crud who’s going to violate his sweet virgin daughter.”

“How true.”

“You haven’t touched her yet, though, have you.”

“No.”

“Maybe you
are
in love, Allard.” Then Nathan’s avuncular side began to function. “You’re only twenty-one, right?”

“Yeah, but I’ve been around. Maybe I’d like to settle down.” He felt that he had important work to do, and maybe all this dating and screwing around was what kept him from it.

“Are you sure you’re ready, Allard? I mean it costs money, and then come the babies. You want to tie yourself down to a nine-to-five?”

“I’ve got the GI Bill for about four more years.”

“Slim pickin’s. What does Mary think about birth control?”

“We haven’t discussed it. But I know what I think about it. Mary doesn’t know much about the whole subject of sex, as a matter of fact.”

“Sometimes they know more than you suspect.”

“The way Mary was educated it was a sin even to have any curiosity about the subject. I asked her what she was going to confession and confessing to all the time and she blushed.”

“Goddam. With Mary I kind of believe it,” Nathan said. “But how about Naomi? She could give Mary a course in the rough mechanics, from what you’ve told me.” Allard had told Nathan about Naomi, though with some reservations and a serious pledge of secrecy. He considered it a rather juvenile need, but he’d had to tell somebody. He wondered if he’d told Nathan because he and Naomi were both Jewish, and then had complicated feelings indeed about his motivations. Nathan hadn’t seemed to have any proprietary feelings about Naomi, but then, of course, he was Unitarian.

“Naomi concurs about Mary’s fairly total innocence.”

“Amazing. Amazing,” Nathan said. “But Mary knows you take Naomi out to the woods and jab her, doesn’t she?”

“I doubt it. I really think she doesn’t know what we do out there. I don’t think she can get her mind around it.”

“Now, that is what’s called
purity
,” Nathan said, with an oogah muted so as not to awaken Knuck. Then, in deep seriousness: “But Allard, I have to say that Mary Tolliver is the sweetest, loveliest girl I’ve ever laid these old eyes on.” Nathan was twenty-two. “Yes, you’ve got some kind of a queen, there, Allard. There’s nobility there. I mean it. And a sense of humor, intelligence. Yes, Mary is one in a million. You’re one lucky fellow.”

They were both quiet, musing upon their mutually accepted high seriousness. How dramatic it was; they could almost hear sacred music.

Allard lay back on his bed. What a decision he could
make. It would be so sweet, life with Mary. They would move into one of the small, one-room apartments built for married veterans with no children. How right, how companionable it would be to study together in the evenings. Her wonder at their legal, sanctified status, her wonder at the powerful dark postures of love, her ecstasy at having the one she loved passionately at work upon her shy yet eager body and mind. He would perhaps do more studying for his classes than the minimal amount he did now, but mainly he would have the calm, the time, to write his play and his novel, to create, and thus to deserve the life he would bring lovely Mary toward. She would of course leave her Catholicism gradually behind, and he would become famous. Not famous, really. What he wanted was more a solid, respected reputation as a man of art. In that life they would be surrounded by people of wit and accomplishment. They would have a future uncloying, always new and good. And Mary would be there to relieve his pressures—to, in fact, worship at the altar of their union. Well, not quite like that. Of course it would all be mutual. What gave pleasure to one would give pleasure to the other. In the haze of these idyllic thoughts, her own, more immediate, dimensions and textures came to mind and he began to gather toward thickness. A strange golden light gleamed into, or out of, his eyes and he was falling, absolutely sure of what he was going to do.

Though Boom Maloumian got the last word that evening, it was to Allard merely a passing grossness, a minor interruption. Short Round was the first to come into the room. Laughing, giggling, wary, dingy around the eyes, he was followed by a contentedly roaring Boom Maloumian.

“What? What?” Knuck said, convulsively waking into speech.

“Boom, you got to tell them!” Short Round said. “The one about the mud!”

“Well, now,” Boom Maloumian said. “It seem you got to heah ‘bout Rastus. Rastus, he a stud. I mean, he a
stud
! Rastus got a whang on him drive them nigguh gals plumb crazy.

Speshly this little ol’ gal Mandy. She think she sumpthin’, too, snatch fulla honey, she a powerful lovin’ gal. Anyways, she finely git Rastus away fum them other gals an’ man, they bofe in a hurry! Onliest place handy is down by de levee in de nice soft Mis’sippi mud. Purty soon they goin’ at it hammuh an’ tongs. Atter a while Rastus, he ask, ‘Is it in, Mandy?’ Mandy, she say, ‘No, Rastus, it in de mud.’ ‘Put it back in, Mandy.’ Little latuh on Rastus ask, ‘Is it in, Mandy?’ ‘No, Rastus, it in de mud.’ ‘Put it back in, Mandy.’ Little while latuh Rastus ask, ‘Is it in, Mandy?’ ‘Yes, Rastus, it in.’ ‘Mandy, put it back in de mud.’”

Short Round’s screeches of laughter followed Boom Maloumian’s deep rumble down the hall.

“Put it back in de mud!” Knuck Gillis said. “That’s rich. My God! Put it back in the
mud
?”

T
he telephone rings, surprising him. Who wants him now? He feels guilty, violated, defensive. If he could only let the thing ring. He could let it go on and on until it lost its breath and quit. But it insists; its shrill, self-confident yowl demands him, and so he goes to it and picks up the black bar, the crooked Bakelite dumbbell, and puts it to the side of his head. “Hello,” he says in his always receptive, neutral telephone voice.

“Hello, Aaron? Hey, man?” It is Mark Rasmussen, his voice high and accelerated, coming from a long way off as if through a conduit.

“Mark!”

“
See see shoo shoo
!” Mark laughs. “Aaron, now! Wee green pinkadoolic voices tell me you’ve been inquiring after me, man. Very paternal, responsible. Brother’s keeper, like. I mean, pardon me, just mean to say it’s all fine, okay, so don’t worry about anything. Okay?”

“George and I want to help you, if you want us to. Where are you, Mark?”

“You’re both sweeties. Indeed you are. Appreciate it oh so much but never mind, huh? I mean, forget it? It’s such a bummer, the whole bit. Bummer bummer bummer, as we used to say. But I’m all right. Strictly in control. Right on top of things, so just wanted to ease your mind, give you a friendly ring on the telephone. Mean it. No, wait a minute. Didn’t mean to sound so bad. Why do I always give the wrong impression like that? I mean Aaron you’re perfectly well away—aware—of what a stupendous bummer it all is and I don’t mean to confuse the issue. It’s merely the consensus of opinion, so don’t worry about a thing. Not a thing. Right? Anyway, I’ve got a busy schedule, so I’ll be saying ta ta and cheerio now, okay?”

“Mark! Don’t hang up!”

“Hang up! Hang up!” Mark says, sliding into his sissing laugh again. “Oh, I mean!
See see see see
!”

“Where are you?”

“Aaron, I hate to tell you, but I’m on
earth
! Same place you are, and I’m looking out of this teeny-tiny crack. Did I happen to mention what a bummer? Sad. But don’t worry, now, Aaron. Everything under absolute control. Don’t mean to sound so shall we say bitter about it. Giving wrong impression again, I can tell. Really very calm. Calm acceptance. If I had an udder I’d give five gallons of rich cream. No shit.”