The Hair of Harold Roux (21 page)

They spoke of Mary occasionally. Naomi was quite fond of her. “She’s such a little bourgeoise,” Naomi said. “But she’s sweet. She has a sweet nature. And she’s your nice little small-town ‘girl friend,’ which I think is stupid but quaint.”

He searched her ice-blue eyes for some humor, but couldn’t find any. Or jealousy, either.

He could detect both in Mary, however. She looked at him and said, “Naomi’s really quite an attractive girl, don’t you think?”

“I like blondes with one brown and one green eye,” he said. “I know it’s a fetish, but I can’t help it.” He leaned over until their noses touched and looked into her left eye where the glittering green and dark brown turned kaleidoscopic. Her breath was as sweet as cool water. “When the sexy secretary from the tack factory trotted, her heels metrically clicked,” he said.

She laughed and pushed him away. “Everything you say, practically, has ‘sex’ in it somewhere.” She thought it quite sophisticated and daring even to say the word.

“All I do is take cold showers,” he said.

She blushed.

“Let’s go for a walk or something,” he said, looking around the room at all the Laocoon groups of two in their saddle shoes and loafers. “There’re enough sex spores floating around here to give asthma to a Buick.”

“You
are
funny, Allard,” she said. She had to go fix herself up before going for a walk. While he waited he watched one couple across the room. They were immobile. Their mouths had grown together. She wore his sport coat over her shoulders so that his hand, hidden by the cloth, could fondle her breast through her pastel blue cashmere sweater and her brassiere. The boy was the one who was sweating, however. His glasses lay neatly on the table next to the davenport, as did her pink ones. His legs were crossed in order to hide his erection, which meant that his back, because he had to keep his foot on the floor, must be in terrible pain. Her scuffed saddle shoes were primly, solidly and legally planted on the rug. Their tongues must be tired. Just then the girl opened one eye, looked at Allard and shut the eye again. That was all. Their locked immobility was, he thought, reptilian.

When Mary finally returned she was wearing a silk blouse, a cardigan sweater and one of the plaid skirts she made herself, pinned together at the thigh with a gold safety pin. She also wore knee-length knitted stockings and the kind of shoes usually called “stout brogans.” She was always dressed up in some sort of ensemble, and inside and out she wore all the complicated rigging dressed-up girls were supposed to wear. Boom Maloumian nudged him one time and said, leering at Mary, “That’s eatin’ stuff, Benson,” smacking his wet lips. Mary certainly heard this, but said nothing. Allard wondered about it, but thought, finally, that it sounded not nice and was probably screened out of her mind somewhere between issuance and reception.

They walked down the sidewalk among the students, many of the men wearing parts of military clothing—especially those whose jackets were decorated with stenciled
bombs or other informative devices. No one would go as far as to wear decorations, but any other sort of visible bragging seemed to be considered all right.

Down Main Street in front of the Student Union, people were gathering on the lawn near where garbled yelps and static came from a sound truck. Allard and Mary drifted over with the others, two hundred or more, most of whom were at this moment between classes. Next to the sidewalk was a big granite boulder. Herbert Smythe and Naomi stood on the boulder and several of their supporters stood rather quietly and nervously around it. The sound truck was parked next to it in the street. Herbert, a slender young man whom Allard instinctively pitied and despised, affected a uniform consisting of a cheap blue pin-stripe suit, GI boots and a white shirt worn with the collars spread over the lapels of the suit coat. To him this was the costume of the poor workingman, the embattled but unbowed organizer of the people. Unfortunately his head, appearing on top of a thin neck above a satisfactory, Lincolnesque Adam’s apple, was all wrong. It was a nice-boy head, a mama’s boy or divinity-school head, too young and somehow evasively not shy but embarrassed, as though it wondered, without daring to look, if his fly was open. His oratorical gestures were classic, learned, out of the last century, and now, in the giant cone of force of the amplifiers, his shrill voice blared and squealed. The oratorical gestures were just out of synch with the voice, and of course the voice was completely out of synch with the audience, who at first wondered what in the world this fellow was so instantly hysterical about. But soon they got his drift. A few phrases such as
Triumph of the proletariat
! and
Capitalist running dogs
! sorted themselves out of the blast. Actually Herbert was protesting a movie that was to be shown that night at the local theater. The movie was an old one,
Ninotchka
, in which Greta Garbo plays a humorless (at first) Soviet agent who is seduced and converted by an American capitalist (Melvyn Douglas). Soon the crowd, sensing a common target and buffoon, and angered by his seriousness, began to howl Herbert down.
Herbert responded by howling, with the advantage of electronics, back at them.

“
Fascisti! Fascisti! Fascisti! Fascisti
!” Herbert madly screamed, and just then none other than Short Round ran up to the boulder shaking a quart bottle of beer and squirted foam all over Herbert and Naomi. Boom Maloumian roared in the crowd, the crowd roared, and the man in the sound truck turned Herbert off with a gigantic click. Herbert’s mouth continued to open and shut for an evidently hilarious few moments, and the sound came on again, this time carrying another voice which explained that the views of the previous speaker were not those of Acme Sound Services, Incorporated. Cheering and laughing, the crowd began to disperse.

Allard and Mary continued down toward the Coffee Shop. “
Fascisti
, for Christ’s sake,” Allard said. He had seen
Ninotcbka
, and though he’d enjoyed it he knew that its basic assumptions were simple-minded and that it sucked up to its audience’s self-satisfaction. Some truth was perhaps revealed in it, and for Herbert and Naomi to get so exercised over this bit of froth merely reinforced its message. When Short Round squirted beer all over Naomi, however, Allard’s first instinct was to attack. He was very fond of her as a creature whose crannies, pleasures and quirks he knew in intimate detail. And Short Round, that utter creep, had the gall to squirt beer all over Allard’s nice animal.

He and Mary were having their coffee in one of the cramped wooden booths of the Coffee Shop when Herbert and his troops came in, back from the barricades, their eyes illuminated by Righteousness Embattled. They sat at a corner table, eight or nine of them, including Naomi. One of the group, a small, deprived-looking boy wearing steel-rimmed GI spectacles, sang in a low, emotion-wavered voice:

“
Die Heitnat ist weit
,

Docb voir sind bereit
.

Wir kämpfen und siegen fur dich
:

Freibeitr
!”

Sitting glumly with Herbert’s friends was Use Haendler, a rather nice, sad, blonde German girl whose parents, it was said, had died as political prisoners in a concentration camp. Allard couldn’t understand why she hung around with Herbert. She did, however, have the firmly superior, kindly look of those who are dedicated to some transcendent ideal or other, and that benevolent, understanding firmness could at times be highly irritating. He caught her eye, raised his left fist and said, “
Hoch die rote Fahne
!”

She frowned. Naomi had seen this, too, and she spoke quickly to Use, who then got up and came over.

“Won’t you sit down?” Allard said, rising. Against part of his will he made a joke of his politeness.

“Hello,” Use said to Mary, and sat down. With no change in her stern, forgiving face she said to Allard, “Why are you so aggressive toward us?” She had almost no accent at all.

“I thought Herbert’s performance out there was ridiculous and stupid,” he said. “The fellow is an ass.”

She frowned, perplexed. “But what has that to do with it?”

“Those people aren’t
‘fascisti
,’ they’re just boneheads, and for that matter hardly any of them are even Italian.”

Ilse struggled not to be offended, and won. “It’s too bad. I hope one day you can try to understand.” She got up, saying abstractedly that she had a class she ought to attend. They said goodbye, rather distantly.

As Ilse walked away on her healthy German legs, Allard felt just the slightest pang of loss. It was partly the impermeability of her opinions, like a soft, erotic irritation.

Perhaps it was then, not later in College Woods, that Mary accused him of believing that every pretty girl in the world really belonged to him. She often surprised him by reading his mind—a startling little side effect of the intensity of her regard.

“Are they really communists?” Mary asked. “Naomi thinks I’m so naive about politics we don’t talk about it any more.”

“I don’t know,” Allard said. “I suppose you are if you think you are, but I don’t know how official it all is.” Naomi’s politics seemed to him an undisciplined mixture of the Freudian doxology of her middle-class parents and those parts of radical thought that justified what she wanted to do. As for Herbert Smythe, he seemed hardly real at all. When Allard asked Naomi if she’d ever made love (his euphemism) with Herbert, she made a disloyal grimace and said that even if he wasn’t exactly her sex image, she put her hand on him once and he just froze, so they both pretended it had never happened. Herbert, she said, was dedicated.

“But how do you know so much about all this political stuff?” Mary said. “Like that German—
hoch die
, whatever it was.”

“Well, I’ve heard those songs before,” he said.

He’d come by his mishmash of left-of-center beliefs through inheritance, which in some not quite logical way seemed to make them more legitimate. Perhaps they had been legitimized in Japan. He’d been doing the work of an officer, and his commanding officer suggested that he apply for a commission. He was nineteen, and there was an arrangement where he could go to a quick officer training school and come back to his job. He passed the exams, the physical, the OCS board and all the rest, only to be told a month later that his eyes weren’t good enough. Because this made him worry about his eyes he got them tested by another army optometrist, at St. Luke’s Hospital in Tokyo, and aside from a permissably mild myopia they were all right. Then it occurred to him that the army of his country, the whole huge apparatus whose uniform he had been actually proud to wear, had conspired to make that little lie. Because of certain left-wing connections in his family he would never be trusted enough to assume any real authority. It was a quick and very interesting education for that American. Amazing how many myths were lost all at once in that Tokyo summer; the void they left in his assumptions proved that he had believed a good deal. He’d been thinking of staying in Japan another year, but
when his hitch was over he came home. Home? Back to the States, his only country, from which he’d innocently, apolitically sprung.

He never mentioned his new knowledge to any of his family. They had all settled into their businesses and professions, those few who had been radicals having been tumbled and buffeted by the Moscow trials, Trotsky’s assassination, the invasion of Finland, the Moscow-Berlin alliance, until they had retreated back toward positions of respectable Democratic leftishness. They tended their own business, raised their children and sent them to college. He was the oldest of all his cousins, the only one old enough to get in on the tail end of the war against fascism. Later a cousin would die in the First Marines near the Changjin Reservoir in a war generally approved of by most of the family.

It is noon in Aaron’s lonesome house. The house belongs to Agnes—its heart does. Just look anywhere and you’ll see antiques, which make him nervous because he doesn’t want to break or stain them or burn long brown cigarette grooves in them. He likes to look at that lean, delicate Shaker chair, but he won’t sit in it. In his study he has a ragged Morris chair he found at the town dump, and his desk is a solid-core birch door on sawhorses; if he ruins this side he can just sand it down or turn it over. Everything he owns is cracked, burned, dented, faded, flawed in some way, small or large, but everything works. The ejector-holding spring, for instance, on his 30-06 came from something as unmilitary as a ball-point pen, but it works as well as the original flat spring, which tended to break. The rubber footrests on his Honda are cracked, now held on with elastic bands made from an old inner tube. The left bow of his glasses is mended with masking tape.

He is having a beer for lunch. As far as the writing is concerned, this is like cutting his throat. After lunch he will have another beer for desert.
Finito
. No words will appear, only chaotic thoughts, memories, nostalgic scenes. How
Mary cried. The taste of her tears, like the warm unsaline seas of the Eocene. She would have liked that phrase. He would like to drink her tears again.

That evening, when Allard and Mary went to see
Ninotcbka
, they had to pass a picket line of Herbert Smythe’s friends, including Naomi, who pretended not to see them. In the semi-dark before the screen, they held hands. Mary squeezed his hand, signals in a little code it was not necessary to decipher. He had crude thoughts. He had tender thoughts. The tender thoughts combined with the crude thoughts to give him what Boom Maloumian would call a blue-steeler. Throughout the film he was urgently aware of the delicate organism beside him who held his hand, nerves touching at fingertips. He could feel her happiness. She had a talent for shimmering happiness he had never known before in anyone. Yet it was not demanding or cloying; it seemed always that he owned her, not the other way around. Near the end of the movie he was desperately trying to think his erection down. He had various ways to do this, gathered over the years. His motorcycle needed a new front tire; but that didn’t work because the new tire was suddenly installed and he was taking Mary out to his hidden place in College Woods. Arithmetic didn’t work; it had no power over the current flowing through her touch. She moans as her first man gently but enormously enters her. Garbo laughed. Melvyn Douglas smiled. Allard Benson grimaced at the extruded frozen fire the whole middle part of his body seemed to feed. Fetch the baggy tweeds and we’ll smuggle it into London, said the Duke to his valet—courtesy Boom Maloumian. All life, even the shadow people on the screen, inflamed him, bade him erotic welcome. He could think of nothing that was not sweet help and welcome. Since puberty this desperate situation had lain in wait for his dignity. High school had been hell. How in God’s name to make this willful monstrosity desist? The bell will ring, he’ll have to stand up, and he’ll look like a triangle.
But so what? God knew what; for some unarguable reason he could not let himself be observed in public in the rut. Ah, but alone with Mary! He decided, at the last moment, that he would visit her family this weekend. Either that resolve, or the usual end-game desperation, enabled the mindless, mind-proof member to partly disengorge, and they left the theater looking more or less like the other people.