A Self Made Monster (12 page)

Jimmy congratulated himself on his quick thinking. He planned on walking into Kris’s room with her hand in his. He imagined Holly looking up from her textbooks and turning red with envy. He even imagined the two women would get into a cat fight over Jimmy: slapping and clawing and tearing off one another’s clothes while Jimmy, nude except for a cigarette, cheered them on. “Don’t worry,” he would say, “the loser can sleep with me tomorrow night.”

They burst into the room.

Holly sat at her desk.

Edward Head sat beside her.

“What happened to you?” Holly asked Jimmy. She pointed at his muddy pants.

“We’re here for my cigarettes,” Kris announced. She rifled through several desk drawers until she found a pack. She opened it, handed a cigarette to Jimmy.

Jimmy was shocked to see Edward. Distracted, he lit the filter end of the cigarette, then cursed and flung the cigarette across the room into a wastepaper basket.

“You dumb ass!” Kris yelled at Jimmy. She retrieved the cigarette and ground it out in an ashtray.

“Sorry,” Jimmy mumbled.

“Don’t start a fire!” Kris ordered. She gave Jimmy another cigarette.

Edward stepped forward. “Allow me. We wouldn’t want you to hurt yourself.”

Jimmy stood seething as Edward produced a lighter. The cigarette was bent and would not draw correctly. Jimmy sucked hard, but the lit end fell to the floor and burned the rug.

Edward laughed. Jimmy stared down at the burn hole, then up at Edward. Now Holly and Kris laughed too. The laughter was self-perpetuating. Soon Holly was laughing so hard that tears rolled down her cheeks, and Edward was doubled over.

Jimmy’s red face made his blonde mustache look white.

Kris pointed at Jimmy. “Look! The little monkey’s about to cry!”

Jimmy took another cigarette from the pack and lit it. He took two deep drags to assure it remained lit. When Edward straightened to catch his breath, Jimmy grabbed his right hand.

“Have a cigarette.” Jimmy ground out the cigarette in Edward’s palm.

Edward yelled and yanked his hand away. Jimmy punched Edward’s nose and kicked his shin. Edward fell against the wall and Jimmy kept attacking.

Shouts filled the room. When Jimmy turned around to tell the women to shut up, Kris struck his face with a beer bottle.

Alex hurried into the classroom, a stack of midterm exams in his arms. At their desks, the students were hunched over their notes, trying to memorize last bits of information. Anxiety lined their faces.

“You can take an extra ten minutes on the test,” Alex said soothingly. The test was a dilly; he knew that some students could not pass with an extra ten hours.

He handed a stack of tests to the first person in each row. When he came to Jimmy’s row, he noted Jimmy’s black eye. When he came to Edward’s row, he noted Edward’s bandaged hand. When he came to Holly’s row, he noted her suddenly lowered head.

Alex told the students to pace themselves carefully, and to not labor over any section longer than twenty minutes. He wished them good luck then sat at his desk to mull over his outline for a new novel. Alex had started the outline after returning from Chicago. Sandy’s blood had revitalized Alex as rain revitalizes the desert. Ideas had bloomed in his mind, taking on lively narrative shapes and intense emotional colors; for a few hours, the ideas had sprouted at an exhilarating, even dizzying, pace. The abundance was galvanizing, and he worked quickly. In two days, he had finished half an outline.

But on the third day, Alex’s energy flagged and he struggled to finish even a paragraph.

Now Alex stared at the outline, wondering how to proceed. His protagonist was a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist’s husband, an inept hospital administer, is having an affair with a young nursing intern. The psychiatrist, possessed of nearly inhuman calculation, decides to murder him and make the death look like suicide. Six months before taking any action, the woman “confides” to a friend that her husband is acting strangely. He has even threatened to hit her. Meanwhile, the nursing intern tells the man that she is pregnant with his child. She threatens to expose their affair if he does not pay for an abortion and give her $100,000 within ninety days.

The psychiatrist begins slipping anti-psychotic drugs into the husband’s drinks. His behavior changes as she expected: violent mood swings, bellowing delusions of grandeur, memory loss, paranoia. One evening the wife comes home late from work. She finds blood spattered across the kitchen, and the blood leads to the bedroom. On the dresser, she finds a note torn into small pieces. She assembles the note as best she can and makes out the words “scheme” and “revenge.” The note is composed in block printing, so she cannot be sure who wrote it. Worse, she finds a bloody boot print that is larger than her husband’s.

At this point, Alex’s outline stopped.

Alex had tried to push the story forward for three weeks, but it would not budge. Now Alex sat at his desk, reading the outline, occasionally glancing up at his students, and cussing under his breath. After thirty minutes, the tests began trickling in. The first few were half-finished. The students tossed the tests on Alex’s desk and hurried out of the classroom. More tests followed, some unfinished, and others crammed with minute handwriting. The students looked exhausted. One joked that she would be too tired to attend class for a week.

Jimmy Stubbs submitted his test and stomped out. Alex glanced at the test: the first half, composed of multiple choice and short answer, was partially complete. The second half, an essay discussing the link between William Butler Yeats’s poetry and his beliefs regarding Irish nationalism, was a mess. The answer started out with bare coherence, then disintegrated into uninformed rambling. The handwriting grew sloppy and the tone desperate. At the bottom Jimmy scrawled, “I give up. Why don’t you pull the trigger now and put me out of my misery?”

Alex looked at his watch and announced that two minutes remained. Two students were still writing: Edward and Holly. Edward was calm. With a small smile, he slowly reviewed his answers, pencil poised in his bandaged hand. Holly, however, was frantic. Halfway through the test, she began nervously running her left hand through her hair as she wrote, and now her hair pointed haphazardly in all directions, as if she’d written her test in a malfunctioning wind tunnel.

“Time’s up,” Alex announced.

Edward gave Alex his test then stood by the doorway, waiting for Holly.

Holly put down her pen, folded her arms across her chest, and remained in her chair. She looked as immovable as an anchor.

Edward asked Holly if she wanted to get some coffee.

She stared straight ahead.

Edward left.

Finally Holly stood up. Her lips trembled, her chin wrinkled, and she cried.

In his office, Alex spent ten minutes calming Holly to the point that she could speak without weeping and blowing her red nose.

“I apologize, Professor Resartus.” She spoke softly, without theatrics. “I made a butt of myself, and I am sorry to bother you like this.”

“It’s all right.”

“I didn’t do too well on the test. I do not want any special favor, but…” She shrugged. “Maybe I do. I guess I just want to explain.”

Holly said that she had studied hard for the test, but something happened last night that upset her. The trouble started when her roommate and Jimmy Stubbs, both drunk, burst into her room. Soon a fight broke out between Jimmy and Edward. Kris ended the fight by striking Jimmy with a bottle. Holly threw everyone out of the room, but on the way out Edward had mistakenly grabbed several pages of notes.

Holly was telling the truth—except about Edward taking her notes. Her notes were where she had left them, on her desk.

“By then,” Holly exclaimed, “I was too angry to phone Edward for the notes and who knows, maybe it wouldn’t have helped anyway. I was too bagged to study more.”

Alex leaned back in his chair, took out a Dunhill. “I’m sorry about this whole mess, but what do you propose to do about it?”

Holly had hoped that Alex would not count the test, but she could see that she was wrong. He just sat there, smoking and stone-faced.

“If I do better on my other tests maybe it, maybe this one wouldn’t count quite as much.”

“Did you pass this test?”

“I doubt it.”

“I have an idea. I will grade your test with all the others. But I will discount it a bit if you do well on the upcoming term paper and on the final exam. If you do well on the remaining work, that will suggest that you could perhaps have done better on the midterm.”

Holly nodded bravely. Already she was making plans for Edward to ghostwrite her term paper.

“I’ll do my best.” Holly rose from her chair, then asked, “Did you hear about the double murder in
Chicago
this weekend?”

“No.”

“My mother told me about it when I called her the other day. She was shook up.” Holly laughed. “She didn’t want me to go on the field trip in the first place. Said
Chicago
was too dangerous. And then two murders. Can you imagine?”

“Your poor mother,” Alex smiled.

“The police think it was a love triangle. Somebody murdered a woman and her husband in their apartment. They were separated, and the police think it’s the woman’s boyfriend.”

“Sounds like a melodrama.”

“Or a soap opera.”

Edward was washing the dishes when he heard a knock on his door. He paused, listened again. Friends of the women upstairs sometimes mistakenly knocked on Edward’s door. But the knocking persisted.

“Who is it?”

“Holly Dish.”

Edward gulped. It was unthinkable. After last night, he feared that she would never speak to him.

“Just a moment.” He ran his hands through his greasy hair, popped a mint into his mouth, then opened the door.

Holly stood in the doorway. She wore sweatpants, sweatshirt, and a generous smile. A six-pack of beer dangled from one hand. “It’s about time for a break from the books, don’t you think?”

Shrugging happily, Edward led her to the living room. His bowels rumbled with anxiety. Holly Dish in his apartment…with beer!

“What a, a, it’s a surprise to see you.” His voice seemed an octave higher than normal.

If Holly noticed his high pitch, she did not show it. She handed Edward a beer and took one for herself.

Edward motioned for Holly to sit on the couch; he took the folding chair beside the couch. They talked about the exam. Edward was modest. He had done well, he knew, but suspected that Holly had been nuked.

“I got at least a ‘B’ on the test,” Holly said casually.

“That’s terrific!”

“Who knows? Maybe I’ll even luck out and get an ‘A’.”

He thought she was lying, but he was happy to agree with her.

“I want to thank you for helping me study for the test. You really helped me out.”

“You’re welcome.” Edward looked squarely at Holly for a moment, and she did not look away. “And I’m sorry about the stupid fight.”

“Maybe you can help me with the final, too?”

“Sure!”

After thanking Edward again, Holly drained her beer in three gulps and began talking about her plans to get into publishing. Then she asked Edward about his plans after graduation.

Edward disliked talking about himself, but the combination of Holly and his second beer excited him. “I want to make movies, so I’ll try to get into a film school in California. Maybe UCLA.”

“What makes it so good?” She feigned interest with great skill, eyes bright and smile lively.

Edward took the bait and talked ten minutes, pausing only to open his third beer. Holly nodded and smiled at the perfect moments, playing Edward as a virtuoso plays the piano. Soon Edward was talking about his plans to form his own movie company.

“I like your ambition.”

Edward’s grin made his big ears stand away from his head.

She slowly tucked her legs underneath her bottom. “Do you have any wine, Ed?”

“I—yes, I think I do.” He jumped from his chair, sprinted to the kitchen, and rifled through the refrigerator. When he did not see any wine, he panicked. But then he saw the wine lying behind a loaf of bread.

“Hope you don’t mind regular drinking glasses,” he called.

“Not at all.”

Edward carried the bottle and glasses into the living room. Holly was lying on the couch.

With unsteady hands, Edward filled Holly’s glass, then his.

“Here’s to your movie career,” Holly smiled.

“And to your publishing career.”

They clicked glasses. Holly downed her drink quickly and looked at Edward. She nodded at him, indicating that he too should chug the wine.

He did. The room was suddenly warm. He giggled.

“I’ll pour us another,” Holly said. When Edward gave her his glass, she grasped his hand and pulled him on top of her.

“Jesus Christ,” Edward managed.

Holly encircled Edward with her arms and pushed her groin against his.