The Hair of Harold Roux (14 page)

Helga serves coffee, Cokes, cheese, crackers and cookies, and after a half-hour in which Aaron, the formerly silent girl and Gladys talk about the writer’s intentions, who he writes for (himself, Aaron says, but that’s too simple maybe), with Helga sitting nearby listening, the class is over and people begin to leave. George brings Frank and Bradford over to Aaron and asks them if they know Mark Rasmussen’s whereabouts, and what he’s doing these days.

Frank looks up into his head, showing the whites of his eyes—an imitation of unconsciousness. Bradford shakes his head. Standing there together in their wild rigid hair they look like two varieties of the same exotic flower.

“So I take it the news is not good,” George says.

“The news is bad news,” Bradford says.

“Mark’s on a long, bad trip, I’m afraid,” Frank says.

“Listen, man,” Bradford says. “That boy’d shoot cat piss if he thought it was a kick. I mean he’s shooting stuff nobody can
pronounce
”

“Do you know where he is?”

“Last seen in Cambridge,” Frank says, going on to explain that when last seen Mark was sitting on a mattress with a variety of freaks, all holding hands. Frank isn’t sure what kind of high, exactly, they were on, but they were seriously,
seriously
, discussing the possibility of getting plastic tubing so they could attach each one’s bloodstream to the next, through maybe the femoral artery. Then they would all have exactly
the same high, a kind of super-togetherness, the ultimate circle-jerk.

“That is
dumb
,” Bradford says.

Frank says he thinks he can find out where Mark is, and Aaron gives him some money for telephone calls.

“I can get a message to him—if he’s receiving,” Frank says. “Fle’s pretty down, you know. On all of us. On the people. He doesn’t hope for anything much.”

Aaron looks at Frank, startled by this tone which is so unlike Frank’s usual militant certainty. Aaron wonders if he will ever get over being surprised and touched whenever another person escapes, if even for a moment, the raw simplicities of his ideology.

When the students have left, Aaron, George and Helga sit in the living room that is now large and quiet in its emptiness.

“God, that sounds awful about Mark,” George says. “I keep wondering if there’s any hope at all for him. And after all the
causes
and everything like that he’s been through. He was always so idealistic. I just don’t know much about drugs, except what I read, and I know half of that is probably bullshit. But Mark’s too old for all that now. You know he’s twenty-six? I mean all I know is about pot and maybe bennies and Dexedrine and that old stuff. But Mark went through LSD and all
that
crap years ago. I mean this must be something else …” He stares bleakly at Aaron, his pale blue eyes filmy. “If we could just find him, Aaron, we could get him back here and …”

And what, Aaron thinks. Make him stop killing himself? Make him able to get along with his history and ours? Change him somehow with our love and care so that he’ll do the equivalent of getting his dissertation done? George is now silent and morose, and finally he yawns, his eyes shiny as if with tears.

After a while Helga says, “That was a weird story, Aaron.”

“Maybe it said too much, Aaron/’ George says. “I mean it might reveal too much. No secrets left, or something.”

“I thought just the opposite,” Helga says.

“Me too,” Aaron says, being quite serious about it. They both look at him and see this. “In some ways it’s a shitty story.”

“What do you mean?” George asks somewhat defensively.

“I mean it’s so easy to be insincere.”

“But we know everything the narrator thinks,” George says. “Everything.”

“Everything he chooses to tell,” Helga says.

George, evidently deciding that he doesn’t want to go along with this, says, “They really liked it. I think it was a good class, Aaron, and I’m awfully grateful you bailed me out like that.” He yawns again, then unsuccessfully tries to suppress a whole series of yawns. Aaron suggests he’d better be going home but it is soon decided that he should spend the night, and Helga gets the guest room, which is the old “birthing” room off the kitchen, ready for him.

When George goes upstairs Helga stays behind, giving his departure a quick look, quick as the wing of a bird. “Aaron, what can we do?” she says. “If I even mention the dissertation he sulks.”

“I don’t know,” Aaron says. At first he is angry at George for making her have to go down with this sinking ship; never has he put a woman in such a position. He couldn’t think of doing such a thing. What the hell is wrong with George? Yes, but he himself has put women in other positions maybe as unhappy. For instance, is Agnes happy? It seems irrelevant, somehow, though it shouldn’t. He would like to take Helga to bed. If Agnes is unhappy sometimes it is usually because of something he’s done, or forgotten to do—never because he is passive or lazy. Somehow this seems a better basis for a marriage. This is ridiculously egotistical; suddenly he feels completely inadequate. How can he comfort Helga? A person
whose own life is stupidly messed up, whose work is in bits and pieces. He feels that during the evening he has falsely posed as a person who is objective, mild and sincere. He has compromised himself by playing that role.

Helga puts her hands to her face, her shoulders hunched over. Then she stands straighter—almost a jaunty stance—and wipes her eyes with the palms of her hands, like a child. “Fm sorry,” she says.

“Why?” For some reason he thinks of a sweet, hard yellow apple.

“I shouldn’t break down. George is in bad enough shape. Would you like a nightcap, Aaron? I’ll have one with you.”

He says he would, and follows her to the kitchen. His legs seem to have too much strength, as though they might spring him painfully against the low ceilings.

“He loves this place so much,” she says. “Not just the house, but everything. He can’t think of going anywhere else. And it would be so good for Eddie to stay in school here. He knows that, too.”

“I’ve tried about everything,” he says. “For a while I thought that official letter would wake him up …”

“Oh, dear!” she says. She puts the two glasses on the shelf and her hands on her face again. His arms go around her and she leans against him, her face against his chest.

The shock of pity does not lessen the shock of desire. He holds her against him very carefully, his hands frozen into the act of comfort. Pity, love, lust—they all reinforce each other until he knows he must stop touching her right now. His hand, tender, sliding, falsely innocent, caresses her slender neck just once, just once a little bit too shapedly, too unpattingly. Her lovely muscles have defined themselves too clearly beneath his hand.

“Have a drink,” he says, and they turn away from each other to reach for their glasses.

He follows her into the living room, the little sheathed levers and fulcrums of her bones moving against his nerves.

They sit across from each other in the lamplight and have their drink. He says he will talk to George again in the morning. As he speaks his eyes mist a little, though firmly forbidden to do so, from love and sympathy for George and Helga.

“I’ll force something out of him, Helga.” He wants to help them both, but there is no way to make a man do work that has to be done inside the head. But why are they so concerned about this George, this other fellow, anyway? Who needs a third party here? You ass! he thinks. You
idiot
! But he didn’t cause George to procrastinate away his opportunities, damn it! What he knows, and this is always delicately and precisely known, and will never, ever be made more specific by Helga, is that his fantasies do not have to remain fantasies. Beyond her love for George and Edward and her present life is the inclination, one she hardly lets herself consider possible, to blow up in one recklessly sensual, guilty, even partly revengeful affair with the older, more aggressive man who is looking at her now. The signals are so sweet, so dimly frightening, so minute that, not acted upon, they have the perfect right never to have existed at all.

When they finish their drinks they say good night, sadly and with tenderness. Helga remembers that he hasn’t a towel, and gets one for him before she goes upstairs.

Aaron lies in the strange bed, in the fresh crisp sheets that smell just slightly and foreignly different from fresh sheets at home. The pillow is more bulky, the old bed sags in the middle. This and the quilt’s small sewn squares beneath his fingers remind him of his childhood, the hard body of the child alone, always alone in bed surrounded as if by an elaborate canopy with possibilities, scenes, futures.

Through the open door to the kitchen he feels the long room’s strange spacial vibrations. In a far corner the black wood stove stands on wide iron feet, an ancestor of the modern white enameled stove against the south wall. When the refrigerator comes on, its real hum pushes the other voices back, but they are still there. The sink breathes water, the
wooden cupboards are silent, but inside them the hanging copper-bottomed pans wait to clatter and gong when disturbed. Upstairs a board creaks as Helga slips into the ancient fourposter beside her sleeping husband, his boyish face slack around the long breaths of sleep. If only she were slipping, smooth and tender and cool, into this bed. No, he should be with Agnes, the good firm body of his wife, his calves her stirrups. Or with Mary, or Naomi, and so on. Or with Thelma, for that matter, though her name wasn’t Thelma. A girl—was it Mary?—once told him, long ago, that he considered every girl in the world to be, secretly, his property; that deep down inside him he really believed this, and that all other men were not quite adequate substitutes for him. That would have to have been long ago on a warm May night in College Woods, in the real past that has moved away from him, some years faster than others but all dimming now, moving away like a planet in space, its warmth surrounded by absolute zero as it grows smaller and dimmer on its long path toward infinity. He can pull it back, slowly, little by little, fragment by fragment, but it is all changed then. Changed but still true. True, but he doesn’t know what that truth will be.

He has a brief glimpse, a telescope’s field, a clear view of the receding planet. My God, it’s Earth, so where is he? There are the waiting figures on the cold plain, lighted warmly by the small fire. They are there, but he must build whole nations and cities around them, and buildings, trees, weather, breath, sweat, the sweet funkiness of mortality, and apprehension, fear—the seen object growing toward the eye as though alive. And love, the lovely vacuum, the lovely oil. The task is impossible, and he groans with fatigue.

G
eorge carried the black kitchen stool out into the garden, saying he knew the damn legs would sink down into the dirt. He stood at the garden’s edge studying the rows of pale green lettuce and peas and beans. “There’s a good place. Good as any, I guess,” he said. He was right about the legs; when he sat on the stool, the legs sank down several inches into the moist black loam. “It’s okay, though, I guess,” he said. “There’s a hoe I left out. Would you toss it over on the grass, Aaron?” Now his pale young face was calm. “Okay,” he said. “I think the best place would be just behind the ear. What do you think?”

“All right,” Aaron said. He lifted his 8mm. Nambu and shot into the thick blond hair just behind the ear. George’s head moved and some blood came to the surface where the hair was scorched.

“That didn’t do it,” George said. “Jesus, it sure stung, though. Try the temple, okay?”

Aaron put the Nambu to George’s pale temple and fired; the pistol jumped and a blue hole with some soot around it appeared in the tender flesh.

“Wow!” George said. One of his eyes rolled out of synch. “Ouch! Ouch! Aaron? Find a better place, huh?”

He put the Nambu to George’s forehead. George shut the one eye he still controlled, and again the pistol pushed back against Aaron’s hand. The blue hole yielded a thick drop of blackish blood.

“Jesus, Aaron, I wish you’d get it over with. It hurts like hell!”

“Maybe I ought to shoot you in the heart, George.”

“Yeah! Yeah! Any place. Come on!”

He shot George in the heart. The process was irreversible, of course, by now, even though Aaron had grave doubts about what they were doing. George seemed to go out of himself, to become almost somnolent, yet he still lived. Aaron fired again and again, hurrying now.

Aaron awakes, tangled in legal possibilities as well as the not yet flown justifications for what he has done. George was the one who wanted it done, but maybe Aaron was too agreeable. Now the idea comes that the whole thing was not done, that it was only a dream, and there is loss as if it were loss of any past action. It was
not
done. He is in bed in George’s house, it is still black night, and he is shuddering and twisting away from the dream.

He stares at the blackness. He cannot in his life remember being so unhappy. He must be in hell; it must be all over and here he is in hell. Angst. It is angst that slides icily over his belly and up his ribs, taking his breath. The nausea of the soul. Everything is wrong, though if only he could look calmly at everything, everything is not wrong. He should be able to discount his mistakes, count his blessings. He could so easily be worse off than he is in this world. He could be poor George, who can’t make himself do the work he knows he has to do. He could be poor Mark. He could be without a job. He could work at a job for which he is barely inadequate. There could be illness or some other tragedy in his family. But his family is, in fact, amazingly all right. Agnes will forgive his lapse of memory—all that will pass.

His book is a shambles, but every book is a shambles, or a potential shambles; that is the risk. His trouble is that it is bothering him in a strangely new way. Is he already dead? The thought of death makes him reach for a cigarette, death’s
ally. Of course, like any death-preoccupied creature, he’s left his cigarettes and an ashtray handily on the chair beside his sepulcher.

The match lights up the room, a moment of warm color and sanity against the black. With that glimpse of homey perspectives he feels some comfort. So he takes a long, lethal drag of smoke into his lungs. Immediately all the capillaries in his legs tingle. What shall he think of? The other day he received a letter from one of his readers.