The Hair of Harold Roux (45 page)

Allard was stunned by that speech. It seemed entirely out of his league.

“Love!” Harold shouted. “
Love
!”

“Yes, love,” Naomi said. “So why don’t you calm down and shut up, Harold?” She turned back to Mary.

“
I want you to get out of here
!”

“Aw, come on, Harold,” Nathan said, embarrassed.

“Yes, Harold,” Angela said. “There’s really not enough reason for all this shouting and anger, is there?” She looked down upon him from her smooth, somewhat monumental height. “After all, Naomi and Allard are old friends, you know, and in a moment of passion who knows what can happen? What I mean to say is that such incidents are not terribly unexpected or unforgivable.”

“
Unexpected
!” Harold was truly startled, breathless for a moment.
“Old friends
!” He choked. His trachea did not seem up to these heights of emotion.

“Don’t blither, Harold,” Angela said sternly. “Let us discuss this, if we must, in calm voices.”

“You! I can’t understand any of you! Mary found it
very
unexpected! She was in
love
with this monster. In spite of her faith she was willing to marry him, and then, at a party, she finds them—her roommate, her so-called friend, and the man she loves—naked, fornicating! Do all of you think this is just something casual? A joke? Do you have any idea how Mary felt? Is this the way you treat other people, the way you’d like to be treated? You’re monsters! All of you are
monsters
!” Harold hit his hands on his thighs and choked again. “Practically
betrothed
, and promises, and I can’t understand …”

Mary said, “No, Harold.”

“What?”

“I was never sure about that.”

“The bastard! The complete, utter bastard!” This time Harold’s standards had been so unforgivingly violated he was through with friendship, with all of that. All of that was over.

“Yeah, well, okay, Harold,” Allard said.

“You shut
up
! Who asked you anything? And why don’t you just get out of here?”

Allard saw with sadness Mary’s narrow, delicate fingers, her pale knuckles each a little jewel of bone beneath the clear skin. Her wrists were so slim yet squarish, with such tidy sturdiness. He looked from Mary to Naomi, at Naomi’s long fingers, the dark gold of her skin, a hazy fuzz of fur on her long arms. Black silky hair next to Mary’s finer dark blond silk. Mary’s eyes were bothered, dingy from crying but beautiful inside the lids—and there, she looked up for a second and he caught that green fleck of jade. She wouldn’t look at Naomi, who leaned over her to comfort her. Naomi, who’d had sex with Allard, just as Mary had. He wondered what images Mary had of that sex, or if she even thought of organs and lengths and diameters. Maybe not. A man did because certain of his dimensions actually had to change. Maybe Harold didn’t think of it that way, either. Poor Harold.

Mary looked up again, her mouth trembling at one corner, but turning down, then, toward irony. A little pucker came and went on the exact point of her chin. He didn’t mind this caught feeling of already being married to her because he did love her, as far as he could tell. He cared about how she felt right now, which was pretty awful and embarrassed. Her swift, ironic scowl-pout now told him that. He knew, too, that she hadn’t done any real confessing to Harold, and that caused a wave of love for her, for her real dignity. And for Naomi, who’d said, “We all love you, honey.” Honey! Where did Naomi get that word?

“My feelings were hurt,” Mary said in a weak, breathy
voice. “I felt sorry for myself. That’s all. Nobody has to marry me or anything like that.”

Saying that, she was so beautiful his eyes dimmed. He felt that he was the only alien here, a nonhuman observer among real people who could say the truth about themselves, while he watched from a position of strength that was really coldness, selfishness. He wanted Mary and Naomi. It was as if they were so much meat and bone, hair and skin. Their female complexities, their womanness, their givingness, even the dark differences of uterus and womb—the mere youth that he was, all of whose history was open and known to him, had no right to claim these others whenever he chose, for his own gratification. He could make either of them unhappy with a word or a glance. He should not be allowed that power.

“Of course your feelings were hurt,” Naomi said. “He should have kept his hands off you in the first place.”

“But what about you, Naomi?” Mary asked, meaning
Aren’t you hurt, too
?

“Mary, dear, I have a different attitude about sex than you do.”

“Sex?” Harold said, staring at Mary. “Sex?” His face went through the strange focusing effect caused by a new conception.

“Yes, Harold,” Mary said. They could hardly hear her voice. “I’m sorry but I’m not going to lie about anything any more.”

What happened then his eyes observed, Allard’s eyes that were accustomed to detecting quick motions, centers of possible violence, burning fuses, etc, so that his catlike self could triumph either by attack or escape. Now they merely watched as Harold’s thin arm drew back into the classical, or seven-year-old boy’s bent-elbowed, aimed, telegraphed haymaker, the thin white fist diminishing as it clenched. He observed the hatred on Harold’s usually gentle face, also the fragile fist as it came toward his mouth. But how could it be Harold Roux who was doing this? It was Allard Benson’s unmoving, nonducking
head that was being grossly punched by Harold, gentle Harold of the delicately balanced cranium. The white fist was surprisingly hard and painful, painful several times, in fact, as was the other thin fist.

He spoke to Harold, asking him to stop. He could not think of hitting him back, to stop him that way. The pain increased, Harold evidently being one of those thin people who possess surprising strength, as though their wheyish flesh were part metal. Everyone in the room thought this horror should stop, but before any concerted effort could be arranged Harold had hit him many times in the face, neck, forehead, chest, until he put out his hands to protect himself, to push Harold away. He couldn’t see very well through the blows that stung him as if he were being whipped with a stick. He was being thrashed, demeaned, humiliated not so much by this punishment but by whatever he must have done, whatever inconceivably shameful thing he must have done to cause Harold to turn so violent. He tried to grab Harold’s fists, to still them, though he could hardly see, and suddenly there was quiet in the room; even Harold’s sobbing breaths stopped for the moment, and Allard realized that he had something soft, something crinkly but soft and furry, in his hand.

They were all looking at Harold, who stood frozen, staring at Allard’s hand and what it held. They looked too, then, at what Allard had in his hand. Then back at Harold, who was not Harold but a slight, forty-year-old man with a head pale as the belly of a fish, blotched by an even paler patchwork, a strange design of unearthed, unentombed skin. That person was not Harold, and Allard saw in shock how much that pad of hair, this pad of hair he now held in his hand, had been Harold’s youth. It did matter, so much more than the before-and-after photographs in magazines could ever show. He held part of Harold in his hand, wondering if he should give the part back.

Harold fell back into the davenport and sat with his hands over his face, hiding the room from himself. They soon realized that he was crying. Heavy wet tears appeared below
his hands and gathered on his chin. Shudders and hiccups made him tremble, his arms and sharp shoulder points trembling beneath the weave of his light sweater, Allard considered whether or not he might put the hair back on that naked head, turning the thing around straight and placing it gently back on. He could not have been more surprised and horrified if he held one of Harold’s fists in his hand, the bloody stump in the air for everyone to see. It did not seem an act he could say he was sorry for.

Mary put her arms around Harold and hugged him, moving his frail shoulders around toward her. He tried to pull away from her, his hands still pressed tightly against his eyes, but she wouldn’t let him. She pulled his naked head next to hers, the fringes of real hair at his ears and around the back of his ears mussed, upset, wilder than they had ever expected to see any part of Harold. Allard still held the wig, its severed human hair glossy in his hand, a forbidden feeling against his fingers. He felt like a dissectionist. This human part was weighty, corpselike, and belonged back on the rest of its body. But of course it was too late. Harold’s bruised hands seemed much younger, pale and reddish as a child’s, than his blotched naked pate. He wondered if it were glue, or psoriasis, on that head.

Angela and Nathan drew chairs up before Harold’s knees and sat down, which seemed planned, ceremonially odd. Naomi came around and sat on the arm of the davenport on Harold’s other side, her long arm reaching down so she could squeeze the back of Harold’s neck. Allard couldn’t understand all this touching, all this squeezing and patting and touching, as if Harold were a little puppy. He couldn’t understand how that could comfort a man. But he did know, and again he felt himself an alien here. Each of the others had made an instant and proper diagnosis of Harold’s state. Angela and Nathan were patting Harold’s knees, their voices saying it was all right, it was all right, Harold.

“Don’t cry, Harold,” Mary said. “Don’t be so upset.”

Allard observed, since he was useless here, his observing.
Evidently, in some terribly accidental, coincidental way, he had destroyed Harold’s ability to look at his friends. The destroyed person seemed battered, savaged beyond salvation. To remove anyone’s dignity in this fashion was not what Allard wanted to do, or thought himself capable of doing, and this was Harold, who had more than once nominated Allard to be his best friend, his only confidant. Allard did not think of himself as being brutal, or as a betrayer, and yet here he was and something awful had happened. He put the crumpled wig down on Harold’s coffee table; then, still having to watch his victim, took out his handkerchief and blew a small amount of blood out of his nose. His lips were swelling too, but the only bad place was where Naomi had hit him the other evening. Of course his little bruises were nothing compared to Harold’s paralysis, which suggested to him the grief of bereavement, all the worst terrors of grief that could ever happen to a person. Men and women had gone into that denying, crouching position from the beginnings of the race, covering their eyes from the viciousness of their fellows.

Harold’s friends, those other people, still touched him, still moved their hands over him. Allard felt shame, or anger at his shame, or maybe anger at Harold’s shame. “Harold!” he said sharply. “Hey, Harold!” He could not agree with all this demeaning patting and cuddling. In similar circumstances, if they could be imagined, he would find it intolerable to be petted like a baby. “Harold!” he said again.

“Shush, Allard!” Naomi said.

Shush! Another word he hadn’t known Naomi could ever use. Did these women have all those childhood words ready at any moment? He felt a lack of control; those were not the words he had chosen for his maturity, or for Harold’s, or for anybody’s. He wanted to leave but he couldn’t leave Harold in this condition, in these hands. So he stood, agonized in some more complicated way than even this complicated situation seemed to demand.

Harold had contracted into this shivering thing dressed in human clothes but not really there. His face and head
seemed out of shape, as if squeezed lopsided by his own fingers.

“We’ve got to get him to talk to us,” Mary said.

“Come on, Harold,” Naomi said. She massaged the back of Harold’s neck, leaning over him now with both hands massaging his neck and shoulders. He held his head rigid, although it must have been an effort. Pink areas that changed slowly, like clouds, had appeared on the skin of his head. He was surrounded and couldn’t get away.

Mary, who was no longer the consoled but the one to console, spoke to Harold. “I know how you must feel,” she said. Part irony there, but she spoke softly, with a confessional dryness Harold surely listened to. “Allard didn’t mean to pull off your hair, I’m sure of that. He doesn’t know what he’s doing sometimes.” She gave a short laugh that was worldly and sad, then continued in a soft, barely ironic voice. “I know how bad you feel. I do. I didn’t tell you I was a fallen woman, Harold, did I. I’m sorry you felt the way you did about me and then you had to find out, but I’m through lying about anything. We all knew you wore that false hair anyway, you know, and if it made you feel better not to look bald none of us held it against you. I know I didn’t. I don’t think anyone did. Maybe Allard, I don’t know. But he didn’t want you to wear it because he thought it would be better for you not to wear it. I know he didn’t mean to pull it off, though. That was an accident. Do you want to put it back on now? Do you want to put it back on?”

Harold wouldn’t answer, even by moving his head one way or another. It seemed so strange that Mary, in her yellow bathing suit, was ministering to Harold, hugging him now to show her affection toward this somehow partially decapitated person. The frivolous yellow bathing suit and Mary’s young smoothness, the perfection of her skin. She was only eighteen, and though Allard had once thought eighteen an advanced age for women he was twenty-one now and she seemed young. Harold was twenty-four, even if he did look middle-aged with all that bare pate showing. Twenty-four did seem
adult, and it seemed to him that age, that proper gauge of developement that had always meant so much in childhood, was going undependable and wrong. All of these people had resources hidden from him, or weaknesses hidden from him. They had tenderness and consolation hidden from his knowledge. They were all larger continents than he had suspected, dangerous and enveloping. He could not reach for Mary and Naomi; his reach was not great enough. Angela and Nathan and Harold all had depths he hadn’t considered, maybe didn’t have himself. Even Knuck and Hilary, and Vera Upstairs, that poor creature, maybe she was also too deep for him.