Braided Lives (15 page)

“When I was ten.”

“Were you very close to him?”

“Close? He was my father.” He raps his knuckles on the column of a streetlight. “I can hardly call up his face. What’s gone is gone and you have to see you can’t do anything about it. I’m trying to tell you. Do you think I’m making small talk?” He turns on me fiercely.

“I listen. Are you going to give me a test?”

“Consider it an exposure.”

“Sounds like a disease.”

“If you think I’m sick, consider it that.” He stands boring at me with a strained demand.

I unclench my hands and let them drop. “I don’t!”

“One never knows. You might be amusing yourself.”

“Mike! I’m not that crafty. Amusing myself?”

“My father was a furrier but my mother just couldn’t run the business. She almost went bankrupt and then she had to sell it. She put the money into a trust fund to send me through college.”

“Are you an only child?” I ask.

“I had an older brother. He was twelve. He was killed in the same accident with my father…. Do you have siblings?”

“Two brothers. One’s thirty-one and one’s twenty-eight.”

“So much older. How did that happen?”

“They’re my mother’s kids by a previous marriage. But I grew up with them. I mean they were both home till I was six.”

“She’s a widow?”

“No, divorced.”

“Oh,” he says as if I had confessed my mother is an ax murderer. What a funny mixture of being straight-laced and trying to
épater
the bourgeois. I do not understand his world that looks dark and overshadowed. We walk on to the brink of the hill.

Opposite us my dormitory blazes, where I will be swallowed. “Don’t be annoyed. I didn’t know about your father.”

He halts to look hard at me. “You’re an odd one.” Then he grins.

“Sure, but all told, no odder than you.”

“That makes us even.” He tugs my hand and we run down the slope, plummeting pell-mell with our steps clattering off the retaining wall like a rain of pebbles.

CHAPTER EIGHT

T
HE
T
EMPTATION OF
S
AINT
J
ILL

O
N MY DRESSER Donna stands barefoot holding a huge jagged green nude to the wall, the fruit of her long sessions posing. “Do I have it straight?” she shouts over
Rite of Spring.

“Straight enough.” I sit bobbing to the music while sorting clean laundry. Saturday-morning bustle tickles me and I like our room with Lennie’s garish canvases blazing from the white walls, replacing the Picasso blue and rose period reproductions every tenth girl in the dorm has put up. On my bunk Theo is flopped like a large cocker spaniel. She and Donna share the same coloring, both flaxen-haired and blue-eyed, but Theo has a permanent tan. She is five feet ten, her bones big but shapely. She is something of an athlete and something of a lush. Theo talks little as she hums to the music, wriggling her foot. Donna is more relaxed with Theo than with Julie.

“Your dresser’s covered with powder. Have you been using mine?” Donna hops down lithely, dusting her soles.

“You told me I looked better in it. So I used it last night.”

Donna looks sharply at the socks I’m putting away. “Hey, that’s mine.”

I toss her the balled pair. “Should have known. They didn’t have holes.”

“What do you mean? My socks aren’t new like yours.”

“Well, how would you like to get fucking socks for Christmas? And the rest of mine are darned so lumpy they give me blisters.”

As the record finishes, Theo unwinds to return it to its folder.

“Thanks for bringing that by,” I say. “Stravinsky is ace.”

“Oh … if you want to keep it for a week?” Seeing my expression, she lays the record in my lap as I sit among the laundry. “I’m off to the pool.”

Donna mocks a shudder. “Chlorine. Cold water.”

Theo gives that big smile with her eyes sad. “I wish you’d come to a meet sometime. Hardly anyone does.”

As Theo swings out, Donna turns with her arms full of socks, dumping them at my feet. “I’m proving my point. Look!” She drives her fist in, wriggling her fingers through two holes at me.

“Think I’m impressed? Look, taken at random.” I hold a sock to the light. “Five separate holes. Count them!”

“Feel how lumpy this darn is. Feel!” She presses a sock into my palm. Our gazes meet and we burst out laughing, kneeling face-to-face over our wash. “If we were burning at the stake, we’d argue over who had a hotter fire,” she says.

I get up to start the record over. “Suppose the music built and built and didn’t resolve?”

She stands on one foot like a heron. “Do you think Theo’s queer?”

“No,” I say loudly. If I wonder too, that is one thing I will not share with Donna. “She’s asexual. Something’s broken.”

“Her hymen?”

“Something more serious.”

“I don’t know, kid.” She gives me that crooked grin with her eyes squinted. “It seems to be a pretty serious matter—like preparing for your Ph.D. orals—for you to deal with yours. Did Mike kiss you last night?”

“Nope.” I glare at the pile of books by Pound and Eliot he lent me. “He’s forming my mind. He’s giving me a liberal arts course. At the end of four years he’ll kiss me and make me a proposition.” I manage to sound flippant but then I spoil it, chewing anxiously on my thumbnail.

“Why don’t you and Mike come with us tonight? We’re going with Van and Julie to see
No Exit
at the Drama Society.”

“Mike hates Sartre. I tried to talk him into going.”

“Since Julie started seeing that grind Van, I spend more time with her than exactly thrills me…. Sometimes I think you’ve set out to gather in every misfit in this dormitory.”

“What’s a misfit, Donna? What are we trying to fit into?”

Donna softens, giving me a cuff on the shoulder. “I’ll tell you what —you can borrow my black jumper tonight. You’ll look great in that.”

“Really, Donna?” In her clothes I feel magical.

“But don’t get food stains on it or spill coffee on yourself.”

“I won’t eat or drink! I won’t hardly sit down. I promise.”

One of the lounges—bold and arid as an advertisement and patrolled by housemother and attendants who apply rules such as kissing with both feet on the floor—has been designated for coed studying. There Mike and I are entrenched the following Wednesday night, while I try to start a paper on the Cleveland administration, first or second. I am taking American history post—Civil War, but Donaldson is not teaching it and all the bubbles have gone out. Our lecturer Professor Grimes recites the text. Even the jokes are in the book. Yet the flunkies down front laugh loudly and take notes. On what? His ties?
(Bow.)
His part?
(On the right.)
Grimes drops snide references to what we may have mis-learned. “Contrary to what you may have gathered, Lenin was not one of the Founding Fathers, heh, heh.” He lectures on the violence of labor. My murdered grandfather mutters in my ear, violence is when
we
dare to fight back.

Mike looms across the table writing in his loose-leaf of tooled brown leather. The neat columns grow in his curious ornate hand with its curlicues and pothooks, leaned a little back as if a wind blew against its progress. That loose-leaf contains something besides class notes. With a wicked and satisfied smile he alludes to it. “It’s evil stuff. I can’t let anyone see it.”

A little before ten he slams it shut. “Let’s take a stretch. We’ll leave the junk here. Nobody’ll steal it.”

The snow has softened into a slow casual rain. He raises his big black umbrella, our hands touching on the bone handle. I ask, “What’s the use writing a journal if you won’t show it to anybody?”

“To get it all straight in my mind. So I can escape from those depths and begin again.” He grins. “I call it, ‘Love Letter to a Scar.’”

How can you call a diary anything, except Diary? Then one little question among the several hundred I am dying to ask him squirms out. “How did you get that scar? The little one beside your mouth.”

“In a fight….” He swaggers a little.

I don’t believe it. One thing I like about Mike is that he isn’t strutting and muscle-bound like Matt. He’s skinny and completely unatlhetic. His only sport is weight lifting, he told me: he likes to lift a full glass and then an empty one. He may or may not drink as much as he suggests, but he never took to street fighting, I know it. That he was beaten up I can believe and I want to put my arms around him and tell him it’s over, it’s all right, and now he’s where brains and not muscles count. “I think it’s very distinguished.”

“A dueling scar. My pal Davis and I fought once at Cranbrook when we were after the same girl. A dumb sexy blonde who sang opera.”

“What was she like? Did you go out with her?”

He shrugs. “Davis made her. But he’s a fairy anyhow. He was always sucking up to Cribbets.” His voice loud, drubbing me.

At the foot of the hill near the heating plant steam pours from a manhole billowing over the wet pavement. “Hell’s down there. Sinners like us are turning on spits,” he declaims.

“Sinners like you. I claim nothing.”

His voice is polite and mild. “Are you a virgin, then? I think it’s very nice. A woman’s virginity is the finest gift she can give.”

“Appropriate for birthdays and Christmas, as well as weddings?” I start walking rapidly. He is laughing at me and I hate it. Gauche, grass green he thinks me. “What’s the damned time?”

He holds out his wrist. “Ten twenty.”

“Come on. We’ll just make it.”

As he runs beside me uphill, “My books. Bring them out.”

“I can’t if I’m late. Hurry.”

“If we don’t make it… My journal. Don’t read.”

“You want… me to know you.”

He stops short and turns. “If you read it, I’ll know. If you read it, you’ll be in my past. You’ll become an entry.”

“Like that?”

“Just like that.”

“Don’t threaten me, Mike.”

He lets his umbrella fall to grab me by the shoulders. “Promise me you won’t. Don’t you understand what’s happening?”

“No. I’m tired of mystery. I understand nothing.”

“What’s
happening”
He kisses me.

A hand on the nape of his neck, I kiss him back. His lips are cold and fresh, his hair wet. Drawing back we stare. His eyes hold me as if I floated on them. He fumbles at the buttons on my jacket and imitating I open his coat. The large buttons slide easily through the worn rotted holes. The wind cuts me and I shudder. He tries to draw the old coat around us like a tent but the wind flaps through. Together we fill the coat, our mouths joining again open.

As he lets me go and we begin to run, he repeats, “Promise!”

As I come in, Donna turns rubbing her eyes. “Late, Stu?”

“Six minutes.” Tossing my wet jacket over a chair I put the loose-leaf on the dresser, lie down and begin to stare at it. “See that loose-leaf?”

“It’s not hard to see. Mike’s isn’t it? Nice leather.” When I only nod, she asks, “Want me to kiss it?”

“You can flush it down the toilet.”

“Are you mad at him?” She sits beside me, her face immediately tense with indignation. “What did he do?”

“Not mad. Hand me the cigarettes from my purse, won’t you?” When I am with Mike I forget to smoke. I wonder sometimes how I remember to breathe, for I feel crammed into my eyes and ears and fingers, crowding hard at those windows looking to fall out at him. “In that lousy binder is a journal. He told me if I read it, I’d become an entry. No more Mike.”

“Cute. Read it, of course, but don’t tell him.”

“He says he’d know if I read it.”

“He’s trying to scare you.” She reaches for it.

“Don’t.”

Reddening, she swaggers away. “It’s all yours.” With a quick shuddery yawn she begins brushing her fine hair.

“He doesn’t trust me. He doesn’t realize how bloody broad-minded I am. Any experience carries prestige, even with a rhinoceros or .his grandmother. He thinks I’m too gauche for the truth.”

“You’re making a crisis out of nothing. If you’re interested—and you’re practically quivering—read it. I bet it’s boring. Now I’m going to bed.” Her bare leg disappears into the upper bunk. “Worry about that stinking journal in the morning. I bet he isn’t lying awake.”

Hands clasped behind my neck, I lie taut, my nerves whining. Damn leather binder, rival, trusted over me.

I get up, cross to the dresser. The binder weighs heavily in my hands as I flip the pages so that I can see only the outside bottom corner of each. Pages of German glossed underneath, lecture notes, till finally I reach a closely written section. Mike in my hands. Phrases flash into view: “tormented by unfathomable lust…” “She, sitting in the chair, her pendulous …” breasts? Who? “… could not see in the dank fog more than the outline of the dark prow bearing down….” “… His aquiline profile sneering. I fought to control my rage.” I hear Mike’s voice saying these scraps, his deep reading-aloud voice projecting. “Nevertheless, C’s persistent efforts to intrigue me by hints of Wildean decadence …” “blood spurting from his opened veins like geysers …” “… hips swayed as if the power of the waves were in her …” I taste excitement like acid in my mouth. My palms leave damp patches. Disgusting. Mother in my attic room, rifling my papers. I snap the binder shut and toss it on the dresser.