The Graduate (9 page)

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her and eased her down onto her back on the bed. He kissed her and kicked off his shoes at the same time. Mrs. Robinson put her hands up at the sides of his head and then moved her fingernails up through his hair and finally wrapped both her arms around him and pressed him down against her until he could feel her breasts flattening underneath his chest and the muscles trembling in her arms. She pulled her mouth away from his and pushed it against his neck, then pushed one of her hands down between them to the buckle of his belt.

“Please,” she said.

Benjamin raised his head up several inches to look at her face. Her eyes were closed and her mouth was partly open.

“Please,” she said again.

Benjamin reached for the lamp on the table beside them. “Inadequate,”

he said, turning it off. “That’s good. That’s really pretty—”

“Please!”

He let her unbuckle his belt and push his pants down around his legs, then climbed on top of her and started the affair.

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The date after which Benjamin was no longer eligible for the Frank Halpingham Education Award fell sometime in mid-September. He celebrated the event quietly and by himself. When his parents had gone to bed he carried a bottle of bourbon from the liquor cabinet out to the pool and drank it slowly and smoked cigarettes, grinding the first ones out on the cement beside the pool and then flipping the rest up in the air and watching them fall and sputter out in the bright blue water. It was not till long after midnight that he tossed the empty bottle into the pool, stood from his chair and walked slowly inside and upstairs to bed.

He spent most of his time at home. He got up late in the morning or early in the afternoon and dressed in his bathing suit. He usually ate breakfast by himself. Sometimes, if she wasn’t shopping or reading in her room, his mother came into the kitchen to sit with him while he ate.

After breakfast he went out to the pool. He had found anold rubber raft in one of the cupboards of the garage which had not been used since before high school when the family had taken it on weekend trips to the beach. Benjamin inflated it and although the rubber was cracked where it had been folded and stored, it still held air.

After breakfast Benjamin usually kicked it into the water from the edge of the pool where he had left it the day before, then walked slowly down the steps of the shallow end. Sometimes he carried a can of beer down into the pool with him and sat on the raft while he drank it. Then he tossed the empty can off beside the pool and eased himself down onto the raft to float for the rest of the day. Sometimes he floated on his back with his hands folded across his stomach and sometimes he lay on his stomach with his arms hanging down into the water beside the raft. Unless it rained he floated all afternoon and right up until it was time for dinner, getting off the raft only once every hour or so to inflate it when he felt the water slowly rising up around his chest.

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He ate dinner each evening with his parents. He put on a shirt and rolled up its sleeves around his elbows after his father insisted he wear more than his bathing suit to the table. After dinner, on the nights he didn’t dress and drive to the Taft Hotel, he took a can of beer with him into the den and watched television. During the early part of the evening he usually drank only beer as he watched television and then when it was later and his parents had gone to bed he usually poured himself a glassful of bourbon to drink as he watched the movies that came on after the shorter plays and comedy programs had ended.

Sometimes, if his drink was still not finished, he sat a long time after the last movie was over watching one of the test patterns or the photograph of an American flag that one of the channels always put on the screen after they had played the national anthem and signed off the air. Once or twice he fell asleep in his chair and woke up hours later just as it was beginning to get light outside to find that the can of beer or the drink he had been holding had fallen out of his hand and spilled into his lap or across the rug. But usually the movies kept him awake. After a while he was able to calculate just how much to drink so that the moment the last movie ended he could set down his empty glass, turn off the set and go upstairs and be asleep almost the moment he slid in between the sheets of his bed.

One evening, an hour or so after dinner had been finished, Mr.

Braddock came into the den where Benjamin was watching television.

Benjamin glanced at him, then back at the screen. Mr. Braddock closed the door behind him and walked to the set to turn itoff.

Benjamin scowled at him. Mr. Braddock seated himself behind a desk in the room and looked for a long time without saying anything at an ash tray Benjamin had perched on the arm of his chair.

“Ben?” he said finally, quietly. “What’s happening.”

“What’s happening,” Benjamin said, grinding out a cigarette.

“Yes.”

“Well up until a minute ago I was watching TV.”

Mr. Braddock shook his head. “Ben, I don’t know what to say to you.”

“You don’t.”

“No.”

“Well what’s the problem then.”

“You’re asking
me
what the problem is?”

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Benjamin shrugged and reached into the pocket of his shirt for a new cigarette. “I don’t see that there is one,” he said. “The only problem I see is that you came busting in here and turned off a program.”

“Ben,” his father said, shaking his head. “Can’t you talk to me? Can’t you try and tell me what’s wrong?”

“Look,” Benjamin said. “Nothing’s wrong at all. I mean you—you walk in here, you turn off the TV, you start wringing your hands and crying and asking me what’s the problem. Just what in the hell do you want.”

“Have you just lost all hope?”

“Oh my God,” Benjamin said. He lit his cigarette and dropped the match into the ash tray.

“Well what is it then,” Mr. Braddock said, holding up his hands. “You sleep all day long. You drink and watch television all night.

Sometimes you disappear after dinner and don’t come home till the next day. And you’re trying to tell me there’s no problem? Ben, you’re in a complete tailspin.”

“I’m in a complete tailspin.”

“Ben,” Mr. Braddock said, “we are your parents.”

“I’m aware of that.”

“We want to know what you’re doing. Ben, what do you do when you take off after dinner. Do you sit in bars? Do you go to the movies? Is there a girl you’re meeting somewhere?”

“No.”

“Well then what.”

“I drive around.”

“All that time?”

“That’s right.”

Mr. Braddock shook his head. “That’s rather hard to believe,” he said.

“So don’t believe it.” Benjamin reached down for the can of beer on the rug beside his chair.

“And what are your plans. Do you have any plans at all?”

Benjamin swallowed some beer and returned the can to the rug. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Look,” he said. “I’m The Graduate

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perfectly content. All summer long you nagged at me to have a good time. So now I’m having one. So why not leave well enough alone.”

“This is what you call having a good time?”

“This is what I call having a ball.”

Benjamin finished his cigarette slowly. When he was done he ground it out in the ash tray and sat a few moments longer with his arms resting on the arms of the chair and staring ahead of him at the dark screen. Then he glanced up at his father. “Do I have your permission to turn on the television?”

“No.”

“I don’t.”

“No.”

Mr. Braddock stood and walked to the window of the den. He looked out into the dark back yard. “I want to talk about this,” he said.

“Dad, we’ve got nothing to say to each other.”

“But we’ve got to, Ben.”

“We don’t.”

“Ben I—I want to talk about values. Something.”

“You want to talk about values,” Benjamin said.

“Do you have any left?”

Benjamin frowned. “Do I have any values,” he said. “Values. Values.”

He shook his head. “I can’t think of any at the moment. No.”

“How can you say that, son.”

“Dad, I don’t see any value in anything I’ve ever done and I don’t see any value in anything I could possibly ever do. Now I think we’ve exhausted the topic. How about some TV.”

“You’re twenty-one years old,” his father said.

“Come on, Dad.”

“You have a wonderful mind and you’re a well-educated young man.”

“Dad,” Benjamin said, reaching into his shirt pocket for another cigarette, “let’s not beat around the bush. If you’re trying to tell me you’re throwing me out of the house why not come out with it.”

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I’m not, Ben.”

“Excuse me then. It sounded like you might be leading up to something of that nature.”

“I’m leading up to this, Ben. There are certain things you seem completely unaware of.”

“Such as.”

“Well,” Mr. Braddock said, “such as a few economic facts of life if you want to put it that way.”

“Economics.”

“Yes.”

“I think I’m aware of them.”

“Are you?”

Benjamin nodded. “I seem to remember taking a course or two on that subject,” he said.

“Well you don’t seem to have gotten much out of it.”

“As I recall,” Benjamin said, lighting his cigarette, “I got the highest grade in the class.”

Mr. Braddock remained standing with his back to his son, looking out the window. “Well Ben,” he said, “for all your intellectuality you don’t—”

“I am not an intellectual!” Benjamin said. He dropped his match in the ash tray. “If you want to stand there and insult me I’d appreciate it if you’d stop short of that.”

“For all your education, Ben, you seem rather naive about certain things. One of them is that someday you are going to have earn a living.”

“Am I?”

“Of course.”

“Are you going broke or something? You can’t afford to feed me any more?”

Mr. Braddock turned around to face him.

Benjamin stood. “Now look!” he said, waving his arm through the air. “I have been a goddamn—a goddamn ivy-covered status symbol around here for four years. And I think I’m entitled to—”

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“What did you say?”

“What?”

“A status symbol? Is that what you said?”

Benjamin stared at him a moment, then looked down at the rug. “I didn’t mean that,” he said.

“Is that how you feel, Ben?”

“No.”

“That your mother and I think of you as—”

“No!”

“Because—”

“Be quiet a minute. Now Dad? I appreciate everything you’ve done for me. I’m grateful for the education. But let’s face it. It didn’t work out. It wasn’t worth a damn. Not one single damn thing was it worth.”

Mr. Braddock returned slowly to the desk and seated himself. “I don’t know quite what to say,” he said.

“I didn’t mean that about the ivy-covered—”

“All right,” he said. “But Ben?”

“What.”

“Something has to be done. Maybe the education didn’t work out, as you put it. Maybe it wasn’t worth a damn. But you can’t go on like this.”

“I try not to bother anyone.”

“Well that’s hardly the point. Just the life you’re leading is taking it out of both your mother and me. I’m afraid your mother’s much more upset than she lets you know.”

“I’m sorry about that.”

“And let’s be honest about this, Ben. Your mother and I are certainly as much to blame as you are for whatever is happening.”

“No you aren’t.”

“Well we are. We’ve raised you. We’ve tried to instill certain values into your thinking.”

“Dad, I’m not blaming you.”

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“Well I’m blaming me then.”

“Well you shouldn’t.”

“Ben,” Mr. Braddock said, “something is horribly wrong.”

“Look Dad,” Benjamin said. “This is getting kind of melodramatic. Why don’t we—”

“Just that?”

“What?”

“This is just melodrama to you?”

“Dad, look,” he said. “The graduate come home. He gets disillusioned. He gets bitter. He sits around home and goes to pot.

His parents wring their hands and blame his failings on themselves.

I mean—yes.” He nodded. “It has kind of a hearts and flowers ring to it.”

Mr. Braddock was about to say something more when he was interrupted by a knock on the door. Mrs. Braddock opened it and looked into the room.

“Mr. and Mrs. Robinson are here,” she said. “Will you come out and say hello?”

Benjamin took a step backward toward the other door. “I’ll be in my room,” he said.

“Ben?”

“Mother, I don’t feel too well.”

His father was frowning at him from the desk. “Ben?” he said.

“What.”

“What’s going on.”

“I don’t know,” Benjamin said. “I get these cramps sometimes after dinner. It helps if I lie down.”

Still frowning at him, his father rose from his chair. Benjamin glanced up at them a moment, then down at the floor. “There,” he said. “There.

It’s better.” He nodded.