The Art Student's War (33 page)

And then Henry was talking again but what Henry might say no longer mattered in the slightest. He was speaking of God, he was showering her with apologies, he was telling her he loved her and explaining something about Calvin College and the incalculable size of the sea, and his parents, and a catastrophic fall, which turned out to be his own fall, on a hillside in the jungle, but nothing counted for anything given the crime scene contemplated by Mitchell’s big and innocent face from its perch on the end table: there was a spatter of loud bright blood on her thigh and on her stomach and on her blouse and—yes—blood on the couch, too. Bea pushed Henry off of her, completely off of her (“I didn’t know,” he kept saying, dimly, “I didn’t know”), and she gathered her clothes inadequately around her and, whimpering and gasping, she
scurried into the bathroom, just the way Aunt Grace had dashed toward the changing room when her bathing suit strap snapped at Lady Lake, and Bea shut and locked the door. She was breathing hard, but she was not crying.

The room’s sharper light made everything all that much more coldly horrifying.
What had she done?
At the base of her ribs she found a smear of something altogether alien and then a moment later she knew precisely what it was, this shiny clinging white mud: oh, every cell in her body recognized it in all its concentrated cruelty and selfishness and menace.

Bea removed her blouse, completely removed her blouse, and draped it on the towel rack, and she removed her brassiere too. Her skirt had already fallen to the floor. Henry was speaking from the other side of the door, but she didn’t listen. She lowered the rest of her clothing and let it lie piled at her ankles. Bea still wasn’t crying, though her breath was coming in sobs. She turned on both the hot and cold taps as far as they would go. Into the tumbling upset tumult of the basin she plunged a washcloth, wrung it out, and applied it to her stomach, her ribs, her breasts. She wrung it out and applied it under her arms, over her arms. Wrung it out and, panting harder than ever now, so that her breathing seemed to get in her way as she bent over, she applied it to her trembling private parts. Lastly, with a second washcloth, Bea rinsed her face, dried herself carefully, and one by one put her garments back on. Then she took the first, soiled washcloth and attended to the bloodstain on her blouse.

When she unlocked the door, Henry was all over her. He was hovering beside her, flailing his hands and talking a mile a minute. Bea all but pushed him away.
“Henry,”
she said. “Don’t you see? My God, there’s cleaning up to do!”

“Cleaning up,” Henry said. “Yes, cleaning up,” he echoed. “Of course there’s cleaning up.”

The phrase seemed to carry great philosophical weight with Henry—he nodded respectfully, as though she’d uttered something terribly profound—but failed to inspire any action. He planted himself beside the end table—beside Mitchell’s grinning stupid face—and observed her silently as Bea applied to the couch the same washcloth she’d taken to her blouse. Fortunately the couch’s plaid pattern hid the stain a bit.

“How would this look,” Bea said, her voice higher than normal by a
couple of notches, “if Mitchell came home now? Look at me. Henry, look at this couch.”

“I don’t think he will,” Henry said. “There’s still—there’s still quite a bit of time.”

“Look at me, Henry,” Bea cried in anguish, scrubbing and scrubbing at the plaid couch.

Then Henry made a funny sudden cackling sound. He started sobbing and, after a minute or two—unexpectedly—Bea began to feel genuinely sorry for him. She sat Henry down on the half of the couch not wet with her scrubbing and she squeezed in beside him. She placed his face at the base of her neck and held him. Perhaps because she was such a crybaby herself, she could never resist comforting a person in tears.

“It’s okay, Henry,” she said. “Everything’s all right, Henry.” It should have been so strange, and yet the whole business followed its own compelling weird logic: on this night when she’d lost her virginity, it was not she, but her partner, who wound up in tears.

“What have I done?” Henry cried. “What have I done?”

“You haven’t done anything.
We
did. We did it together.”

“You don’t see how awful I am.”

“You’re not awful, Henry. Or no awfuller than I am.”

“It’s so wonderful of you: it’s as if you can’t see it, Bea. My God,
you’re wonderful.”
Henry raised his head from her neck and, eyes red with tears, peered at her intently. “Under any imaginable scrutiny, you’re wonderful.”

“Shh,” she said. “Hush now.”

“Bea,” he said, “what’s the worst color a person could be? What’s the very worst, disgustingest color a human being could be?”

“Henry, what in God’s name are you
talking
about?”

“You’re a painter. What’s the very worst color a human skin could be? In theory. Hypothetically.” An eager excitement returned to his face. “I mean of all the colors in the whole universe—the whole entire spectrum. The worst-colored skin. Turtle green? Cobalt blue? In all your entire imagination, what’s the very worst color any person could be?”

And now—with all the irrepressibility of his eccentric soul—Henry was essentially Henry once more. He had come up with a burning preposterous hypothetical question requiring an immediate answer: “What’s the worst, worst color?”

“Any color in the whole spectrum?” Bea asked.

“Any
color. What’s the worst, disgustingest color any human being could be?”

Tonight, Bea had lost her virginity, which made Henry cry, who now was ushering her into some
Astounding Tales
planet of Uncle Dennis’s, where a person’s skin could be any hue in the spectrum: yes, events were following a logic all their own … “Bright shiny plum?” Bea replied, and shuddered, for at once she could see just such a person, aloofly elongated and angular: he was seated in a high chair at a low desk, and his skin, his neatly parted hair, the whites of his eyes were all the same intensely infused, glossy shade of purple.

“Precisely!” Henry crowed. “And it’s as if that’s me! It’s me! It’s as if I’m some sort of plum-colored creature—and you? You’re color-blind to that particular shade! Do you see what I’m saying? Bea, you’ve got the best eye of anyone I know, you’re constantly pointing out things I didn’t see, but
you
can’t see the worst, most important fact about me. Whatever the worst shade is, that’s the one you can’t see. Constitutionally, you can’t see it, Bea.”

“Henry,
I’m
the one who came up with the color …”

“Bea, I have something I must tell you,” Henry said.

“Oh Jesus Christ,” Bea replied, not meaning to swear. But honestly she couldn’t take any more. “Henry, haven’t you said enough already?”

When Bea whispered, “Oh you won’t believe it, the very
worst thing
has happened,” Maggie’s face brightened so dramatically, so eagerly, Bea balked at continuing. But she had no choice, really. There was nobody else on earth she could tell …

They’d found shelter in a branch library. It was hardly the place for this sort of conversation but Mrs. Hamm didn’t approve of luncheonettes (a waste of money), and the Hamm home presumably hid listening devices. Outdoors, the rain was coming down hard. It had taken Bea forever to journey over here—riding the streetcar for miles out Grand River, then walking block after block through the miserable downpour, holding aloft her broken-ribbed umbrella. On her arrival, the Turnkey had eyed her dubiously—no sympathy extended, though Bea must have looked half drowned. But ultimately the two girls were permitted to visit the library. Naturally, Herbie was sent along.

Yet at the library something wonderful occurred. Bea had wisely come equipped: before boarding the streetcar she’d raided one of her
mother’s candy bowls. She presented Herbie with a little bag of gumballs and he curled up happily in a chair with a book. He actually seemed to be reading, as he munched his candy. It appeared the two girlfriends might speak in peace.

Quietly they had nudged a couple of armchairs right up to a streaming windowpane. “Tell me,” Maggie said.

The rain provided a muffling, tolerant background music, encouraging Bea’s confession. She began with some scene-setting. What had unfolded inside Mitchell’s house three nights ago obviously couldn’t be disclosed right away.

All the preliminary information took some time, partly because Maggie frequently interrupted and partly because Bea shied from divulging the worst. “Oh my God, do you mean you actually lost it?” Maggie said finally, and, when Bea wavered, Maggie asked point-blank: “Your virginity?”

“Shh,”
Bea replied, though Maggie actually was keeping her voice low. And given the rain’s drumming against the pane, there was little danger of being overheard.

“Well did you or didn’t you?”

“Shh
. Okay, I suppose I did.” To utter even this tentative assent made everything feel fixed and irrevocable as it hadn’t quite before. A burning mist filled Bea’s eyes.

“I can’t believe it,” Maggie said. “You,” she said, shaking her head, and yet her warm touch—she had taken Bea’s hand—held far more approval than disapproval. It was from Maggie, as much as anyone, that Bea had learned to be a “toucher.”

“My downfall was, I had this sudden
feeling,”
Bea said. “Suddenly I had this crazy definite feeling: I just felt completely absolutely certain Henry wasn’t coming back. That he was honestly going to die out there.”

“You and your
feelings,”
Maggie whispered, and the fondness in her voice was almost painfully reassuring. “You and your second sight,” she said, and squeezed Bea’s hand. Oh, Bea needed this affection! If Maggie all too often made her uneasy, with her keen undisguised appetite for tales of misfortune in Bea’s life, still there was no doubting Maggie’s steadfast love. No matter what Bea did. Maggie was Bea’s best friend, and right now she was the only soul on earth Bea could turn to.

“And he said he loved me. That he’d never loved any girl before.”

“Oh, that’s what they all—”

“Actually, he said he loved me so much, it changed the way he saw
his parents, and mathematics, and even the way he saw God was—” But Maggie was already looking impatient and how in the world was Bea to encapsulate everything Henry had said about God on that cataclysmic evening?

“Do you think he’d marry you?”

Bea hesitated. “Well, he’s gone away.” It made her feel quite strange to speak of such things, but she went ahead anyway: “But when he comes back, I think he’d want to.”

“But do you love him, Bea?”

“Maggie, I don’t
know …
”

“I thought you loved Ronny.”

“Maggie, I don’t
know
. I’m feeling so confused! Good grief, what am I going to do
if I’m pregnant?
And Henry across the Pacific!”

“Well, is there any chance Ronny would marry you?”

“Oh but I wouldn’t
want
to now, Maggie, even if he would! It wouldn’t be fair, under the circumstances—you see that, don’t you? Don’t you? I’ve given myself to someone else.”

“But you might have to make sacrifices, Bea.” Maggie-the-married-woman trained on her a look of worldly wisdom.

“But I couldn’t sacrifice somebody completely innocent! You honestly don’t think I’m the kind of girl to trick somebody. Do you?”

Maggie delayed just a little too long. “No,” she said. “Of course not.”

“Well I’m
not.”

“Though it would solve a lot of problems …”

This was Maggie being practical, and showing her practicality by biting thoughtfully on her lower lip—but honestly, if she was so practical, how had she wound up living with Herbie in a penitentiary run by Ma’am Hamm?

“But it wouldn’t be
fair
. You see that, don’t you?”

“What else could you do?”

What else could she do?
It hadn’t been easy to think logically these last few frenzied, wretched days. After miserable struggling, Bea had formulated a few possibilities, all of them scary and overwhelming. She would move away from home, leaving behind a beautiful candid letter explaining how much she loved them all and how grateful she was to them and this was the reason she couldn’t bring her shame down upon them and she would move to New York City and become an artist. Or she’d move to Chicago and support herself drawing fashion ads. Or climb aboard the overnight ferry to Cleveland and throw herself on the
dependable mercy of Uncle Dennis and Aunt Grace, who would surely take her in. Or perhaps it was possible that Uncle Dennis, as a doctor, might be able to arrange something, though she wasn’t sure she could live with that …

“There’s really nothing—there’s nothing I could do.”

“Now tell me what happened. Exactly what happened.”

“Well—”

What followed was a conversation unlike any in Bea’s life before. It was amazingly intimate, though Maggie herself seemed wholly unflappable. She wanted to know how many times they had done “it” and in exactly what circumstances. She had an all-purpose term for their most intimate parts—his “thing,” your “thing”—and it seemed Maggie, while sitting in a public library, saw nothing peculiar or shameful about discussing the “thing” of a man she’d never met.

Admittedly, this branch library offered an especially intimate and comfortable sanctuary on an afternoon like this. The few visitors who had braved the rain looked sleepy and distracted. Even Herbie had drifted off in his armchair, one hand buried possessively in his bag of gumballs. The conversation rolled along …

Then an unexpected complication arose. When Maggie eventually discovered that Henry had withdrawn his thing before, in some technical sense, completing the act, she announced, almost indignantly, that Bea hadn’t, in fact, lost it: Bea was still a virgin.

Still a virgin?
Bea met this conclusion with an indignation far greater than Maggie’s, whose remark seemed not only incorrect (surely it was mistaken!) but quite hurtfully dismissive. Having suffered weeping anguish only moments ago, contemplating her lost innocence, Bea felt strangely swindled on being informed that she’d not lost it at all.