Braided Lives (14 page)

“Scratches heal faster when they’re exposed.” But not all wounds. I’ll shut up about Matt. I realize that this is the first time any person has ever told me that they love me. I feel too numb to enjoy it. “I’m too wound up to study. Let’s go get a cup of hot chocolate across the street.”

“Fine, but not across the street. At Drake’s they make it with milk and two whole marshmallows.” At her mirror she retouches her makeup with ritualistic gravity. I like her better without the coral lipstick and blue eye shadow, but she believes that unless she uses all eleven bottles on her dresser, she looks “washed out.”

“Six months ago, I’d never have believed anyone could make me walk half a mile for hot chocolate with milk and real marshmallows.” But I approve her joy in details. To be consciously sensual is part rebellion and part discipline that she is teaching me.

In the Union cafeteria patronized by faculty and the loosely connected factions of campus intellectuals, I sit with my books spread before me. I have given up trying to study and begun instead a letter to Howie:

I am writing this from the student Union while waiting to meet Mike Loesser, a friend of Lennie, who is a poet also.

I feel as if I have been dying into total stupidity sitting here waiting and waiting, without being able to think of one sentence to set beside that opening. Mike has obviously forgotten our … appointment.

Someone stands beside me. I look up—not as tall as he had loomed in my mind but with posture more rigid as if on guard. “Oh, hello.” Lightly, brightly, ouch.

“Well, here I am.”

“Yes. Well, yes.” We have nothing to say. I knew it.

He flips his old coat over a chair. “I’ll get coffee. Cream or sugar?”

“Sugar, thanks.”

When he returns he takes out the sheaf of my poems, thumbs them looking stern.

“May I see your poems?”

“Damn.” He snaps his fingers. “Forgot.”

Like hell. At least I can look at him. Dark hair starting far back as if to give his face more room but thick on the crown. Tall forehead over the bulge of bone. Long full mouth. Don’t let me blush. His neck is thin and so are his bony wrists that lead to the long-fingered hands. None of his clothes fit: they droop and hang and wrinkle on him with a forlorn carelessness. His navy sweater is good wool but raveled at the elbows and cuffs. His bones are big but his flesh is spare. His lashes brush his cheeks as he reads, smiling now. What amuses you: me? Woman-mouse I crouch behind a barricade of table nibbling with my eyes, but if you make a sudden gesture or speak sharply I will turn into an empty chair.

He fans the pages out like a hand of cards. “Nice images, weird! But like nothing has happened since the imagist manifesto. They lack form.”

Will he tell me to write sonnets, like Mr. Stein did? I am not comfortable in sonnets. They fit me like girly clothes, that pinch and make me walk as if I were holding a bar of soap between my knees. “How should I be writing?” I am not ironic. Probably I have to take lessons in a whole new language.

He passes that off with a wave of his hand. “But this one, wild. Reminds me of the stuff I was doing when I came here. Violent, screaming, grotesque stuff. It’s real weird that a girl wrote it.”

“That’s the one my instructor told me was for the confession magazines—though it’s a compilation of various people’s experiences, you understand. Including Lennie.”

“All that
I
business.” He plants his elbows on the table. “I want to make gadgets so hard and brutal and self-enclosed that after the wreck of this syphilization, some little green men with antennae instead of ears can come along and dig them out of the rubble—and dig them. You understand? You see?”

Gently I shake my head no. “Explain. What would you be communicating that wasn’t one I to another I?”

He drains his cup and shoves it aside. “Whole lot of rot talking
literature.
Let our critics do the carping for us.” He pauses, listening to the sound of that allusion, lost on me. Then, “How old are you?”

“Practically eighteen. And you?” I hear he’s a junior.

“I’m twenty.” He frowns, sitting back. “You see, I’m younger than I look.”

Well, maybe. The prominent bones are set for the face of the man but the too spare flesh, the tumbled hair, the mobile hypersensitive mouth and eyes contradict him. “You’re from Detroit too, aren’t you?” Should I have admitted I’ve been asking Lennie about him?

He nods, tilts back in his chair as if figuring something out. “Near Eight Mile. But I grew up in the inner city, off Second. Till I was nine. That’s a Negro neighborhood and it’s tough.”

I smile. Everybody from Detroit claims a tough neighborhood. “My friend Howie lives near there.”

“Your friend? Is he here?”

“He got a scholarship to Columbia. In New York City.”

“I know where Columbia is,” he says acidly. “And I went to Cran-brook Institute. I had a scholarship there.”

That’s some kind of fancy private school out Woodward someplace. “Did you like it?”

“Bunch of future commuters and barbarian pricks and nancies who like to use pastels. But I had Cribbets for a year.”

“What’s cribbets?” Maybe it’s a deficiency disease?

His mouth curves scornfully. “Arthur Cribbets has only had poems in the
Chicago Review
and the
Beloit Poetry Journal
and—dozens of places. That’s all.”

I hunch in my chair. The names that come out of him. He must despise me.

“He’s writing the definitive book on Rimbaud. You know what he told me? ‘The requisites for the literary life are to know how to discuss the other fellow’s work without letting him know what you think and to stand on your hind legs and drink martinis.’ “

“I don’t think I’d like him.”

“Of course not. He’s queer.” One eyebrow dips independently. I wish I could do that. I resolve to practice.

“Why do you say I wouldn’t, just because he’s homosexual?”

“You’re a woman.”

Woman: not girl. Thank you. “So what?”

“So you wouldn’t abide him.”

“All right, so I wouldn’t be interested in him as a man, say, but I might like him as a friend or a teacher.” I wish Arthur Cribbets, the jerk, was at this table so I might begin liking him ostentatiously right now.

“As a woman, you couldn’t.”

“As a human being, I could too. You think I’m a bigoted idiot?” Suddenly aware he is looking at my sweater, I draw back and fold my arms.

“You look like you’re ready to bite.” That grin.

Our glances knot. We stare for several gluey moments. Then I look away and down to the empty cups. “I’ve got to go. I’ll miss supper,” I say.

On the sidewalk out front, “Well, look …” He stands hunched against the wind. The light changes unleashing a pack of cars and bicycles.

“Thanks for looking at the poems.”

“Sure.” He tilts forward, half frowns. If he would say something about seeing me again. But why? He turns and is off, his head ducked, his coat flapping loose. I begin to walk fast and then trot, wishing I was already in my dormitory room, transported instantly to Donna so I can spill out to her verbatim, gestures illustrated and pauses marked, the afternoon. Then it will be real for me, secured, understood.

Finals swallow us and the new term begins. The second Monday I wake with a jolt. Donna is hanging her coat. “Sleeping! Don’t you have a class, Stu?”

“Didn’t feel like it.” I sacrificed Spanish to her. I try to catch her expression, but she is combing her sleek hair. She is smiling as she turns, swirling her skirt, so I may ask, “How did it go last night?”

“Beautiful. Worth any risk.” She curls up beside me, seductively happy. “No rush, no clock watching. Making love is different when you really sleep together. No wonder people get married! Sharing the apartment with his roommates doesn’t give us terrific privacy, but it’s still fine.” She smiles teasingly. “You’ll understand…. Hear anything from Mike?”

“Your mind is not working oversubtly.” I have news but I hoard it. I want all her attention.

“Lennie is so warm. When he feels good, happiness just flows from him.” She stretches, coiling on the rich red corduroy of the quilt in a patch of sun. “He’s begun painting me. Posing is tedious, but he makes me feel beautiful.” Raising her arm against the sun she squints at me. “How were things on the home front? Did anyone ask where I was?”

“Not a peep.” I stretch, feeling for my loafers. “I went down well before closing and signed out an iron. While the attendant was getting it, I took your slip from the sign-out box and popped it into the in-box. I even rumpled up your bunk.”

“I felt sad when I thought of you alone. But…” She gets up, brushing imaginary wrinkles from her skirt. “Lennie says Mike keeps asking questions.”

“Like what?” We sit down at our side-by-side desks.

“Like who Howie is and was he your boyfriend.” She runs her knuckles across her nose.

“Donna, Mike asked me out. To a concert Friday. All Bach.”

She laughs, tapping my shoulder. “I know! Lennie says Mike has been trying to think up an excuse to see you—as if he couldn’t just ask you.”

“I can’t imagine him acting that way.” I kick my chair back and go to lean my forehead on the cold window. The glare of the sun, the melting snow staining the flagstones of the courtyard dark, seem suddenly more than I can bear. “He won’t like me.”

“Of course he will. He’d be an idiot. Besides, Lennie said just yesterday that you’re stacked—”

“Tell Lennie … Oh, leave me alone.” I grab my book and pull myself into it. Donna watches a moment, then shakes her head.

The flood of couples pours between the pillars of Hill Auditorium, eddies on the sidewalk, then trickles in all directions. He says, “How much time before the Greyzies lock you up?” Bass voice incisive when he chooses but inclining to a mumble.

“About an hour. Greyzies?”

“You know. Them. The greybeards, the deans and administrators and judges. The ones who own places and lock you out or lock you in. Want coffee or should we just walk?”

“Whatever you like.” Shyness makes me malleable.

“Then, let’s
walk.
”

Even under the coat I can feel the redness of my dress in its maiden voyage. “You know more about music than I do.”

“I was an infant prodigy on the violin till I petered out about age nine.” We stroll past the fountain covered with its winter shed. He grips my arm. Through the layers of wool, the meat burns. Clearing his throat: “There’s something here I want to show you.”

“Good. What is it?” I must lean a little forward to see his head against the streetlight. He stares ahead with a sullen glare, his mouth grim. Have I bored him?

“Nothing. Just a house. If the moon stays out.”

I stare at the blue-white disc of the moon trailing wrack. “Don’t look yet. Wait!” He orders. Then he turns me to our right. “It’s just that wall.”

We face a narrow court whose left and back walls are stucco broken only by a narrow balcony and the heavy grillwork that covers the ground-floor windows. At the back a yellow lantern casts dim patterns. Moonlight whitewashes the nearer wall and slants across it the attenuated shadow of bare tree branches.

“Doesn’t it look damned French?”

“I must have passed here dozens of times, but I never noticed.”

“In the day it’s nothing. An arty stucco box. But you do like it?”

“Yes, of course.”

He jams his hand in his pockets. “It’s futile.”

“What is?”

“Trying to recapture an experience. You can’t step in the same river twice, and it’s no good.”

“But I’m glad you showed me.” Slowly we walk away.

“Really?”

“Yes!”

He grips my arm again. “What do you think of yourself as being—Jew or Gentile?”

“I’m a Jew. That’s just what I am. Not by religion. But I also feel Welsh, some. I’m a mongrel.”

“That’s absurd. You can’t be two contradictory things. I wondered when Lennie said your dam was—”

“My what?”

“Your dam. You object to the phrase?” His shoulders snap back, his voice deepens.

“Well, I call her Mother myself. Don’t you think it sounds a little phony?”

“Merde.
Just squeamishness. Why use one word for other animals and a special term for man? It’s the same act, the same covering. We’re all born from a female’s hairy cunt.” His voice raised in speechmaking.

“Do you think that’s sad or something? Would you rather be born from your father’s hairy skull?”

“My father’s skull is rot and bone. He’s dead.”

“I didn’t know.” I’m clumsy. I have hurt him. Slowly we climb past a dark classroom building, forestry.

He says gruffly, “This is his coat. I’m tall as he was now, but it’s still too big. I’ve got to develop into it.”

The coat is old. He will have to blow himself up like a balloon if he wants to fill it before it falls apart. “When did he die, Mike?”