The Hair of Harold Roux (30 page)

“It’s a sin. It is.”

He wondered if she ever spoke to other women about such things. “What’s a sin?” he asked.

“The carnal things you do to me.”

“Really?” He had to laugh, partly out of nervousness.

“Yes.”

“But I haven’t done anything except touch you here and there, and kiss you rather chastely on the lips.”

“That’s carnal.”

“We’re both made of flesh, Mary, so whatever we do has got to be pretty carnal, wouldn’t you say?”

“All my life I’ve been told not to. Not to
feel
this way. ‘Purity of body’—that’s what we were always told. It was always the Sixth and Ninth Commandments. ‘Avoid the occasions of sin,’ they always told us. We had retreats where that was about all that was said.”

“What’s an ‘occasion of sin’?”

“Like, ‘putting yourself in the position of being alone with a person of the opposite sex.’ I can hear the words.”

“And yet here you are in that position.”

“You may think it’s silly, Allard, but it’s very real to me.”

“What’s it like down there? In hell, I mean.”

“You can joke about it but I can’t. It’s fire. You burn. Forever.”

“And so you go and confess out of fear?”

“I know I’ll want you to touch me again. I’m not sincere in my contrition.”

“So you confess just to assuage this voodoo shit?”

“Allard.” She was frightened and sad. “I don’t understand you.”

The Catholic room seemed to darken around him. He knew no logic could free her from a lifetime of madness. He would have to enter her consciousness through her nerves.

“You sit over there, Allard,” she said, pointing to one end of the davenport. “And I’ll sit here.”

They sat, but soon he reached over and pulled her toward him. She seemed weightless. Then he turned her so that he held her across his lap. So deliberately that it seemed almost natural even to him, his hand moved to her breast and she began to breathe quickly. She seemed to be trying to remove his hand, but her hand was weak. She was substantial to him yet light. He leaned down and kissed her on the mouth, her lips fluttering in little spasms against his.

“No, no. Take your hand away, Allard.” She spoke into his lips and he breathed the small gusts of her breath.

“All right,” he said, moving his hand slowly down. She was an instrument he must play, a perfect and even dangerous instrument because if he made an error she would have to take herself away from him. Yet he must play upon her senses with the exactly permissible intensity. He must be aware of all vital signs, even of the technicalities of inches, radii of muscles, bones, tendons, glands, hollows, straps, hems, plackets, the elasticities of flesh and fabric, of pulse and breath. And he was used by his own intensities; golden moilings, like felt clouds of gas, moved deliciously near pain through his body and his vision. He was aware exactly of the calm he must personify to her, and of course of the impropriety of passion in this crowded room haunted by death, Jesus, hellfire and angels. How far he must go—and what a strange word,
far
. As if moving toward the act of love were a going-away. But you had to move toward it and when you were spent of all of its beautiful violence you did move beyond and away, for a time at least, into the sadness that sooner or later, in the proper place and time, he would cause Mary to endure.

Later it was a painful, sweet good night at the door of the small room he would sleep in. They whispered to each other. As long as they were standing she let herself be open to all his dangerous knobs and projections, as she really wanted to be. She whispered how she loved him; he whispered how he wished she would come to bed with him, which brought no
answer. It was a theoretical question; the answer was of course,
yes
—when their union was blessed with official documents and ceremonies. His testicles were full of molten lead. Mary was precious to him. Why, he thought in his pain, did he want so much to arouse her delicacy, to reveal the lustful animal in it? He wanted to hear Mary growl like a beast.

Someone stirred in a room down the narrow hallway and he let her go. She walked quickly, with soft guilty steps, and silently shut the door to her room.

Alone in the rather insubstantial, twangy bed he arrived again at the conclusion that he had no moral hesitations about seducing Mary except that he might hurt her, and since, at that moment, he considered his intentions honorable, he had none at all. Even he could see the subjective flaw in this system. The dull ache in his genitals was a remorseless crush. With Mary’s heat, her scent, her willing body filling his head and hovering against him, his hand lovingly imitated her center. In a few moments came the relief of diffusion, the contented sadness; then, sometime or other without his awareness, as it had to be, he must have gone to sleep.

He woke up damp, chilly, immediately nervous. Yellow daylight, a tarnished, city daylight, entered his small window. He wanted a cigarette. He hadn’t smoked the evening before because he had seen no evidence of smoking in the house—no ashtrays at all, though he had examined various small decorative objects looking for meaningful depressions in them. He waited, as though trapped in the small room, listening for his chance at the bathroom, then abruptly surprised Mr. Tolliver in the hallway, the man’s skinny shins below a plaid bathrobe, his offended face above. Allard pulled his shirt together and said good morning. “Urn. Yes,” Mr. Tolliver said.

In the bathroom, now illuminated by the tired morning light, a tight, bluish old man’s stink faded in the morning air. The short bathtub on claw-ball feet crowded a small wash basin, which in turn crowded the toilet with its narrow seat of varnished wood. Medicines stood behind the glass of the
cabinet. He thought of Mrs. Tolliver in that tub, one-sided after her mastectomy, a woman bleakly sitting in tepid water. He took two nerve-melting drags on a cigarette and threw it into the toilet, where it gasped its last. Soon they would all go to church, the real God place, in which he would become, because of his appearance there with the family, semiofficially Mary’s suitor, her fiancé, her intended. He emptied the bladder of her intended, washed the face of her intended, washed the crusty seed of her intended off her intended’s belly and chest.

Downstairs he was still chilly. He couldn’t speak unless spoken to. Mary smiled at him so warmly it seemed she had forgiven herself for their kisses and caresses the night before and now loved him even more because of a sweet memory. He grimaced back at her. Robert was quiet, neutral, businesslike, while Mr. Tolliver exuded illness and disapproval.

Time passed and soon they filed out past the Infant of Prague, who was too old to be an infant in his dusty finery, with his older figure and face. Mary wore a navy blue dress edged at the cuffs with white lace, and a navy blue hat edged with the same lace, the small hat changing the shape of her face so that she looked older, like a wife. Robert, who had only recently gotten his driving licence, backed the Tollivers’ 1940 Chevrolet out of the narrow garage. Mary and her father got in back and Allard sat in front next to Robert, his feet manipulating ghostly dual controls as the car bucked and stalled before Robert got it down the driveway, up the street, then up the hill Allard and Mary had walked the afternoon before. Soon they arrived at the burnt-brick church, parked and walked slowly, as though stiff, toward the wide doors. Other Catholics converged here in their Sunday clothes, the young boys strangled by collars and ties, smaller children fresh and solemn. Allard felt fresh, too, against the constraints of this solemnity; he could, if he wanted, jump over everybodys’ heads, a vivid jack-jumper among these ceremony-bound people who were all strangers, tranced by their religion. All the men seemed solemn yet bored, not aware of
their boredom. Sunday duty: he saw it in their rugged faces. Only their fingernails and deepest pores retained the grime of their work. They were not large men. They were pale, small in the shoulders, large only in their wrists and hands. The coming ceremonies seemed the property of the women.

Entering the wide dim church with these people he observed with half-knowledge their familiarity with its crannies and receptacles. Fountains, or fonts, of water, odd closets, alcoves, candles guttering behind colored glass somewhere down there toward the holier places, the high, stained-glass-illuminated reaches of the ceilings no one but he examined with a measuring eye. Though Mary had shown him how to genuflect before entering the row of benches, he could only duck down a little. To him sacrilege was not disbelief but the show of honoring unbelieved rituals. Down at the front of the holy barn was the wide altar with its sconces, symbol-woven altar cloth, shrines in miniature and strangely kitchen-like utensils. Soon a priest and a small boy entered, with much sign-making, and against his conscience Allard imitated the hunched general movement of kneeling that surged throughout the church.

In Nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen
.

From the priest’s chanting mouth the words were self-justifying, said with no emotion, needing no human inflections.

Introibo ad altare Dei
.

Then a mumbled response, varied among the worshipers but general throughout the church:
Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam
. The mumblings were like a tired groan.

Judica me, Deus, et discerne causam meam de gente non sancta: ab homine iniquo et doloso erue me
…

As the voices made answer, Allard’s mind turned half away from the words, not understanding most of them but feeling that nobody among these believers was really listening to their meanings, that the words that once must have meant something very specific no longer had to mean. The
priest in his antique uniform, and the small boy who helped him. might have been wax models in a museum smelling of dust, the dusty armpits and crotches of ancient uniforms worn five hundred years ago now resurrected and mounted upon pale dummies whose skeletons were sticks of wood. They moved mechanically and chanted inaudible words. But words had to mean, and these words did not mean. You did not mindlessly repeat what had been previously said because that was rote, a kind of cheating, the death of reality which was life. You never said again what you had said before because that was the sore wounding of truth. He had no idea where he had acquired these strictures, but he knew that he believed them utterly and they seemed to apply here. In this place he could not feel the vibrations of faith, nor its always saddening nostalgic appeal.

Next to him knelt Mary Tolliver, a changed person here at the stifling godhead of her faith. A grown woman, clever and warm yet believing all of it, wearing that fancy hat for some lost crazy senseless reason, her senses and organs unnaturally stilled by this syrup of grave incantative madness, not functioning swiftly for him. This was the place for thinking about dust and dying. Here you were told to yearn for death, a lie masquerading as balm for despair. And it was interminable. That all these dark-clothed, crouching people allowed themselves to be thus punished was degrading. He could smell the sour odors of fear and sanctimony, the effluvium of the church.

Ah, but in spite of all this what if there was a God? Was there any permissible evidence revealed here in the church’s hollowness, its vast dim spaces?

Confiteor Deo omnipotenti, beatae Mariae semper Virgini, beato Michaeli Archangelo, beato Joanni Baptistae, sanctis Apostolis Petro et Paulo, omnibus Sanctis, et tibi, Pater: quia peccavi nimis cogita-tione, verbo, et opere
…

Amidst the chanting many of the people struck themselves
upon the chest three times. Mary, Mary, do not hurt your tender virgin breast.

… mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Ideo precor beatam Mariam semper Virginem
…

It went on and on. He was aware of his body, his person there observing, taking punishment. The priest and his server took their turns, their steps. It reminded him of one of those European tower clocks where, upon the hour, animated figures appear and move across upon a track. Observer, victim of these stimuli, he knew the only ceremonies he could ever enter into would be those of his own making. If only he could create a Mass for presentation upon this stage, for this stunned receptive audience. The church slowly rolled like an ocean liner—slow, slow, and then the return, none of the other passengers aware. Later the priest spoke in English, extolling the supreme worth, the magnificent glory, of motherhood, as all the mothers listened. Allard furtively looked around. Mr. Tolliver seemed bruised about the eyes by these sentiments, clenched with emotion. His yellowed eye sockets were squeezed shut behind his tinted glasses.

And somehow, after a convincing sample of eternity, it was over and they could stand, turn and follow the slowly moving people out into daylight. He had survived another of the stations of his self-imposed duty and felt light in the head. The sounds and rhythms of Latin had entered, without his consent, some deep organ of mimesis:
Prohibitum meam nolens volens introibo corpus Mariae non semper virgini. Mea maximus lascivus libidinosus, maxima magnus et paratus intrare puella, maxima non culpa si solum beato tuns meato
…

The sun was a heavy yellow on this windless day, the first always startling hot humid day of spring that changes the world completely. Immediately he began to sweat, to itch to get away. He had told Mary a small (duly noted) lie—that he had to visit his parents in Leah before going back to school. That had been the reason for the fancy Saturday night dinner, because he was to leave right after church. And he would; within a few minutes he would be escaping upon his Indian
Pony, pushing through the heavy air and making his own fresh wind as he rushed away.

Back at the Tollivers’ he went to the guest room and took off his suit. It was too hot to wear it under his fatigues, so he folded it to fit in his saddlebags and wore only the baggy green fatigues, which seemed wrong with the white shirt underneath and his thin dress shoes. When he said goodbye to Mr. Tolliver it was as if they had already said goodbye. Everything necessary had been indicated between them.