The Hair of Harold Roux (41 page)

“I came to apologize for previous violent behavior,” he said. The very words his brain chose for him were unforgivable; “previous,” “violent”—this was style, not substance. He wanted to tell them that he truly wished them no ill, that though he was strangely immune to faith, in its presence he felt, always, a vague nostalgia. As if they would be interested in his subjective psychological innards.

None of them spoke or changed expression. Their pens, papers and inky fingers were still. “I apologize,” he said, “not only for my violence but for my patronizing attitude, which is probably twice as unforgivable.”

“So get out of here, you son of a bitch,” said one of the male troops.

Allard looked at him with an inner coolness, a clear, frosty coolness that was almost pleasant. It was a pleasantness he had to resist, however, since he had come here to apologize and not to revert to the beast, however refreshing that might be. “Naomi,” he said, “may I talk to you for a little while? We
can sit on the bench across the street and I promise no more Tarzan stuff. Just a few civilized words.”

“Don’t go with him!” Herbert said.

And why, Allard asked himself, had he chosen the word “civilized,” which was taboo to them? Naomi was thinking; there was a slight vertical indentation in her round forehead —a place that would in the distant future be a wrinkle.

“Don’t go anywhere with the son of a bitch,” said the same male troop who had spoken before. This time Allard heard a proprietary tone, and looked at the boy again. A glance showed him to be damp-palmed, palpitating, in love.

“Just a few words for old times’ sake, Naomi. How about it?”

“Say what you want right here,” she said angrily.

“And then shove off,” said the male troop.

“Oh, all right!” Naomi said. “I’ll talk to him!”

She walked coldly past him and he followed her down the stairs. She wore her usual Levis and a man’s full shirt. Her hips moved beneath the shirttails in a complicated parabolic motion. Across the street they sat down on the cement bench, the lights of the store windows and neon signs across the way and an occasional car’s lights outlining her face in profile, her straight Roman nose below the black band of eyebrows, her black hair absorbing all light in its shadow.

“So?” she said.

“So I want to make up. What’s wrong with that? I’m sorry about the way I acted, which was sort of brutal.”

“How true.”

“So all I can do is apologize and humbly request a renewal of our friendship.”

She turned to him, her pale eyes gleaming. “You’re screwing Mary now, aren’t you.”

“Did she tell you that?”

“No, but I’m not exactly totally blind. You are, aren’t you.”

“Well. Yes.”

“She cries a lot when she’s alone and she doesn’t sleep very well. Jesus, Allard, you don’t know what you’re getting into.”

“Maybe not.”

“She’s awfully naive and all that, but she’s a sweet thing and you could really fuck her up, you know?”

“I don’t want to do that. I want her to think about these things the way I do. And anyway, I think I’ll marry her.”

He saw random flashes of light because she hit him on the mouth. When the immediate numbness went away he tasted blood from the insides of his lips, which were already getting rubbery.

“I must admit I didn’t see that one coming,” he said.

Naomi still sat beside him, now looking at his mouth with concern. “Did I hurt you? Jesus, I’m sorry! But Allard, you are such a shit.”

“It’s refreshing to talk to you, Naomi.”

She smiled. She smiled! For a moment he was disoriented in time. When was this? And it was not like her to find such a remark funny at all.

“Well, it’s true,” she said.

“No one has ever offended me by calling me a shit, so either I believe, deep down, that I’m not a shit, or I believe deep down that I am a shit. In any case the epithet never really comes as a surprise.”

“Words, words, words, words,” she said.

“So is the ultimate victory of the proletariat over the capitalist running dogs, et cetera.”

“Strange,” she said, leaning back and stretching her torso and her long legs, “I don’t feel like fighting with you tonight.”

His heart gave a vacuum-like pause and a thump. He leaned over and kissed her on the cheek; his lips made it feel as if he had a golf ball in his teeth.

She took his hand. “Allard, Allard, Allard,” she said. “You stand for everything I find regressive and meaningless in this country.”

“But you’re willing to be friends with this enemy symbol?”

“All right.”

He leaned back, safe and relaxed, at ease in the warm night with his woman beside him where she belonged.

“I’ve got to go back,” she said. “I promised to finish a pamphlet tonight.”

He liked the addition of the promise, but he remembered the proprietary tone of the male troop and felt jealousy. “Back to that damp character who told me to shove off?”

“Sexual jealousy is a typical bourgeois reflex,” she said.

“But I fondly thought there was a little bourgeois reflex there when you gave me the shot in the mouth.”

She took her hand away. “Nothing of the sort. You deserved it.”

“This may sound irrational indeed,” he said, “but my problem is that I don’t want that creep to put his damp little hands on you.”

“That’s none of your business.” She said the words so softly, however, that warmth returned to the cold places along his spine where jealousy had crept.

She got up. They walked back across the street where the Indian Pony leaned on its stand. Someone, perhaps the damp troop, was looking at them from Herbert’s window.

“Good night, Allard.”

“Good night, Naomi.”

They shook hands firmly and she went up the stairs. He watched her bones move the outer surfaces of his dark woman until she reached the top of the stairs and went out of sight.

Nathan was alone in the room when he got back, Knuck being in Litchwood visiting a girl he always referred to as Vera Upstairs. He told Nathan about the possibility of a party at Lilliputown on Friday night. Nathan seemed to like the idea but he was obviously preoccupied with something else.

He sat at his desk in his Brooks Brothers shirt and slacks, his neat loafers tapping the terrazzo floor, his angular, beard-shadowed jaws tense, staring off through the wall.

“What’s the matter?” Allard asked.

“I’ve made up my mind to do a fairly drastic thing.”

“What? You and Angela getting hitched?”

“That I intend to do in any case, when the time comes. But I’ve got another problem.”

“You got dosed up in Litchwood.”

“No.” Nathan smiled, where ordinarily he would have uttered his oogah laugh. “No, I’ve made up my mind to …” He was silent, thinking. He gave Allard a shy, worried look that was uncharacteristic of Nathan the man of the practical world.

“To what?”

“You might disapprove, but it’s because you don’t have the problem. Anyway, you know I’m a Unitarian, right? So what do you think of the name Weinstein? I mean what’s the first thing you think of when you hear ‘Weinstein’?”

“The first syllable rhymes with the last syllable.”

“Come on, Allard! I’m serious. I’m deadly serious. If you laugh it’ll make me feel bad.”

“Okay. It doesn’t sound Unitarian. Unless you’re using ‘unitarian’ as a generic term meaning a belief in one Supreme Deity and in the mortality of Christ, in which case ‘unitarian’ could also apply to Judaism.”

“That’s right, Allard. But remember, I’m serious.”

“I’m sorry, Nate. I’ve been running off at the mouth all night and I guess I can’t stop.”

“I’m changing it. I’ve made up my mind. It’s a business liability, for one thing. I’m changing it to Winston.”

“Nathan Winston. Well, that does have a ring to it.”

“It’s easy for you to be superior with a name like Allard Benson. But there’s an awful lot of anti-Semitism around that you might never notice. Believe me, when most people hear the name Weinstein the first thing they think of is a hooknose,
a skullcap and they wouldn’t want their daughter to marry one.”

Allard noticed that Nathan had filled a sheet of paper with his new signature. He said, “‘A rose by any other name, Nate. But you’re sure you want to go through all the paper work and everything?”

“I’ve already looked into it. It’s complicated but it’s done every day. Nathan Winston,” he said. “Nathan H. Winston.” His eyes, big and sensitive in his small, bony face, were wondering and thoughtful. They reminded Allard of the eyes of a deer.

After a while Nathan did look over at him and actually focus on him. “Jesus, who gave you the thick lip?”

“Naomi.”

“She’s still pissed off, huh?”

“No, I think we made up, sort of. I got this when I told her I was thinking of marrying Mary.”

“You deserved it, then. Jesus, you don’t
tell
a girl you’re jabbing you’re going to marry her roommate!”

“Nate, you want to know the horrible truth? I want both of them. I want …”

But Nathan was laughing, his reverberant noises distorting his Adam’s apple. “Oh, dear!” he said finally. “My Jesus, Allard! And you sure can pick ‘em, too! An Irish Catholic and a Jewish Communist! I mean with a harem like that what else could you want?”

“I’m aware of the basic humor of the situation and fully forgive your boorish laughter, but the fact remains that I want both of them.”

“I’m glad I’ve only got one,” Nathan said. “She may be nearly as big as two, but she’s only got one
head
!” And he broke into laughter again.

“You sit there laughing, Mr. Winston, while my poor heart burns with impossible love.”

The name sobered Nathan. Suddenly he was thinking
about it again, how the magic of the name would change his life.

Aaron Benham, left alone by his ungrateful family, wanders through his house looking at things, looking out windows, thinking about the party at Lilliputown. It was so long ago and so different, really, from what he must make of it. He is thinking about the tawdry side of the human psyche, of the puerile, the banal. No, that time of youth when the body ruled in all its perfection, demanding worship, not really suffering from mistakes or consequences. He thinks that youth does not really live in its own time because there is always more time, more youth ahead. Work that is not being done is not lost forever because there is forever. Especially back then, when the problems that now beset the world were not visible wherever one turned one’s eyes. The doom that breathes upon the world. The cruel and the nasty who have power. He stood at this very window in May of 1970 staring at that apple tree, grieving at its inevitable doom, fearing for the students he found so sweetly reasonable in their strike. Three times the town had been surrounded by the National Guard. Aaron knows guns; those who control guns want to use them. Perhaps his despair came in part because of the knowledge that those in power really wanted to kill the university. Of course he should have been aware all the time that he himself was an alien, only barely tolerated by any state, but he wasn’t ready and was deeply shocked. Write anything you want, but do not get in the way of patriotism as defined by the gun. All right, he thinks, let’s stop this thinking; these desperate issues cause an emotional death you cannot afford.

The telephone rings, startling him. “Hello?” he says to its black distance.

“It’s Linda. Linda Einsperger. Mr. Benham, we just heard they’re firing Mr. Buck!”

He sees her pale, intelligent face, her long body that
always suggests to him the dignity and grace of a giraffe. Two years ago there would have been anger in her voice, real anger, but now he hears the melting hesitations, hollow places where tears are possible.

“Not really,” he says. “It’s the business about a deadline for his dissertation. If he can get it finished …”

“He’s the best teacher I’ve ever had. Even Frank thinks he’s a great teacher! Don’t they think he
knows
enough? I mean he knows as much as any professor!”

“It’s not that. They all want to keep him here, really.”

“I don’t understand! It’s because of Mr. Buck I became an English major! I mean what’s writing a dissertation got to do with what he really is? He made it all come alive here! We
all
think so!”

“I know he’s a good teacher.”

“But is there anything we can do about it, Mr. Benham? Anything?”

“You could write letters, you could see all the senior members of the department, the chairman, the dean, the vice-president for academic affairs, maybe even the president if he’s around. I just don’t think it would do any good in the end. George has to finish his dissertation. It’s part of the contract he made when he came here, Linda. According to the way things are he’s got to be a scholar too. Eventually he’d have to teach in the graduate program and just as a starter he’d have to have the degree.”

“The way things are,” she says. “Frank’s so down he’s thinking of just dropping out again, and all he needs are three finals. It just makes it not worthwhile. After all that bullshit about rewarding good teaching we went through last year and the year before, here it is right back again.”

“George is my friend,” Aaron says. Is he George’s friend? “But I have to see their point.” Why that guilty
their
rather than
our
? “Maybe George will finish his dissertation.”

“You don’t think he will, though.”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t know anything, either. This whole thing makes
me want to cry.” There are tears in her voice, little echoes not quite voiced.

“Me too,” Aaron says.

“It just makes the whole four years seem ugly in the end. Mr. Buck helped some of us in other ways, too. When Frank was crazy in 1970, and when Bradford was back on his heroin. And other people. But he was all business in class. I mean you did the work and you knew he cared about whether you did the work.”

“I know all that.”

“I mean I’m not upset just because Mr. Buck helped me in my personal life. I mean his classes, what I learned.”

“Yes.”

Linda hears the impotence in Aaron’s voice. It is hopeless; she and Frank, Bradford and the rest, will get no real help from him.