Hunger and Thirst (60 page)

He had a sudden urge to run to her.

It seemed as if the two of them were alone in the dream. He had only to leap up and run to her, to touch her warm body, to feel the unutterably sweet taste of her lips, the caress of her arms. To fly in her arms around and around, their hearts beating faster and faster, limbs locking and unlocking, their breaths mingling.

Then to rest while she weaved a spell of scented flesh around him.

While she imprisoned him with her love. Enchanted him with the sinews and muscles of her being.

He held his breath, chained down by a thousand invisible links of tortured desire. She seemed to float before him. She was circling him, music and throbbing rhythm impelling her on. She was dancing in a cloud that grew thicker with each moment. Her form floated in gentle arcs around him. Head back, hair floating in breeze, breasts in superb mold through her black costume. Around and around, never stopping once from her hypnotizing motion. Closer and closer to him, her eyes on him. Her body approaching, ebbing, in magnetic silence. Her form, her softening form settling on him. Blending of their mouths and …

Sudden darkness. He blinked and shuddered. Nothing. He was bound in dreamless black sleep.

The lights went on and he slipped off his glasses. Lynn sat silently at his side, looking straight ahead, his face motionless. Erick’s face dripped with sweat. Lynn’s didn’t. Erick wiped his face and let a shaking breath pass through his throat.

People talked around them. He sat there, a throbbing nerve mass, cleaning his glasses over and over, finally putting them into his pocket.

When the recital ended they went out into the hall. Sally was there talking to a woman. She saw Erick and a quick smile lit her face.

“Well!” she said loudly, falsely, he thought, “you
camel”

They shook hands.

“I enjoyed it very much, Sally,” he said.

Lynn said, “It was interesting.” She smiled through him. Then she looked over Erick’s shoulder.

“Hi!” she shrieked and tore past them toward an older man who stood near the wall.

Abruptly Erick turned and started down the stairs, not even bothering to notice if Lynn were with him.

“She certainly was anxious to see you, wasn’t she?” Lynn said.

“Oh shut up, will you?” Erick said. In his mind the chant went—Over and done with, goodbye forever. Over and done with goodbye forever …

* * * *

Suddenly the weeks passed. As if time were an accelerating motion. Starting out slowly and lethargically at his entrance into the University, gaining velocity and going faster and faster as the years passed until now it was moving so fast in the last few weeks that nothing could be seen clearly. Everything was like landmarks seen from a speeding train.

The day he came from his last examination it was as though some great weight had fallen from his shoulders. The reaction of despair had not yet begun. All he felt was complete relief at being through with endless studies. Now he could go home and spend all his time at writing. Across the street Sally was walking but he didn’t see her. She watched him as he walked along slowly, wrapped around with dreams. And her mouth tightened and she walked a little faster, eyes straight ahead.

One day Erick ran into Leo and she told him that Sally was sorry about being so rude at the recital. He said it didn’t matter. Why don’t you give her a buzz, Leo said. If I get a chance, he said.

The final days before graduation Lynn and he spent at the college pool sleeping in the sun and talking. They both got sunburned. They had thick steaks at night. They got drunk on gin and lay on the campus grass half the night evolving a muddled philosophy of the future.

Sometimes Erick awoke at night and thought of her. But it didn’t matter any more. He was through with her. It was as though she were part of the college life. With that ending Sally alone would be only a thin reminder of previous joys. He would leave her. There would be no more than a few memories.

Yet, deep inside, there was something; an inchoate feeling that disturbed him, that could not be faced. He had to ignore it. Otherwise it threatened to well up and submerge him with its unknown waves.

He thought about graduating. He thought about being young and about being free.

* * * *

It started out like a mass execution.

Somber bell tolls rocked in steady beats through the hot air. The rhythmical waves of solemn sound filled the ears of the black-robed hosts as they gushed methodically from the school corridors. They could hear the rustle of many-tongued hordes who lined the hot sidewalks, armed with cameras and stares.

He walked and ran, stopped and started. Sweat stood out like crystals on his forehead and upper lip. It ran down inside his wilting shirt collar and meandered across his back and chest.

The bell kept hitting the reverberating clang into his moving head. The bell tolls overlapped and soon, under the blaze of sun, the clanging seemed to merge into one annoying dissonance.

He looked around, dizzy. There was no time to see. No time to mark the essence of full moments. It was going too fast. After today, tonight, there would be nothing left. This ground was passing away, this ground which had known all their steps together and apart. He shuddered and tried to forget about it.

Four years had passed, gone. Gone, leaving their indelible marks, but nevertheless, gone. Memories were worthless. The thought assailed him. In a mind that desired more, memories could not fill the immensity of the will to remember. Once he had gone he would have put himself off forever from this spot.

From her.

He kept pushing aside the thought hurriedly, almost desperately. He couldn’t think of her. The desire kept coming to call her up, to go and see her that night, propose, marry her.

Yet he didn’t care for her. He kept telling himself that. You don’t love the girl. What are you so damn worried about? It wasn’t the thought of leaving her that made it all sad, he reasoned. It was the thought of leaving everything, the sense of utter completion, of irrevocable resolution. Of a million happy moments never to be recaptured again.

To walk in the hot sun was more than displeasure. The physical annoyance of the heat-absorbing black robe and cap were bad. But they were nothing to compare to the mental agonies. The slipping away of pleasures, never recognized as pleasures until their times had passed. The poor inadequate consolation of photographs, notebooks, letters, memories, in the face of complete hopelessness.

There were almost two thousand of them. They walked in double columns. Like a flow of blackness they issued from the administration building, their heels clicking noisily onto the sidewalk. Around the huge square campus they marched. Bugs and cameras clicked their recognition of the scene. Parents and friends looked for a familiar face in the sea of black capped heads. And smiled to see it. Waved self-consciously or raised ubiquitous cameras to place the moment on silver paper for all time, that moment caught fast as well as could be.

Erick wondered how his mother would look standing there. He could almost visualize her. Her stooped body dressed in her best dress, a white hat on her greying head. The sun glinting of her glasses. The pink cheeked face glowing with happiness and pride. The little self-conscious wiggle of her fingers as he passed by and the flush of delight to see him for a moment. He was almost sorry she wasn’t there. Then he knew he wouldn’t want her there. He wanted to be alone. There was too much in those last hours to leave room for sharing feelings with anyone. She would have spoiled it.

Everyone must be feeling the moments falling away, he thought. No, maybe not, he decided, maybe the future was all that counted to them. Maybe they were like Lynn with letters in their pockets from magazines and advertising agencies offering them jobs at good salaries starting within the next two weeks. Maybe the world was their toy.

Not his.

The minutes like intangible racers gained and kept gaining. Now in sight of the wire, they were blurs of light. And worlds had perforce to end because there never was any going back since time began.

His lips trembled as he thought of returning to a world he had forgotten how to use. There was no future for him except the dim hope of writing successfully. There was nothing to look forward to returning to a world he didn’t trust or care for. The sense of freedom he had felt after the last examination was gone now. He wanted to take it all on again, start from scratch, become a freshman again. Wipe the slate clean and fill it up again. It had been the happiest time of his life. Now there was only a couch in a livingroom, a brother-in-law who represented to him all the elements in the world he despised, a sick, doting mother.

He had the wild impulse to go to the dean and tell him he had cheated flagrantly on all his final examinations and ask to be put back a term. To ask for a job, any job, just so he could stay at college. He was like a frightened boy afraid to leave his mother. The thought of Sally crossed his mind. For a moment it stood out in sharp clarity. Was the fear of leaving the fear of leaving Sally?

He didn’t know. All he knew was that, despite the heat, he felt his body covered with a chill he knew that he suddenly realized for the first time that he would never see her again.

“Sally,” he murmured.

The girl in front of him looked over her shoulder. He looked down, feeling himself blush. Then the line stopped moving and he came down heavily on the girl’s heel. She turned in spasmodic irritability.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

He felt the heat like a blast from an oven. Dark waves settled around him and he blinked. Someone pushed his back and he stumbled forward suddenly remembering the night in Germany when the man behind him had pushed him forward and he had wanted to kill them all. He didn’t want to kill anyone now. He felt like dying himself.

He stepped on the girl’s heel again. “Come
on
!” she snapped angrily.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

Drops of sweat ran down his wrists. On and on he plodded thinking this was the end of the rest, that this was his punishment, his hell. To walk forever under the hot sun in black with the end of happiness etched in his mind.

Passing clouds and visions. Heat. Stumbling through streets lined with people.

They were in the field house. He found himself listening to some bald man telling the graduates how the world was waiting for them.

He looked around distractedly, remembering how they used to arrange the field house for concerts, looking at the place where Sally and he had always sat. He turned back front, conscious of being watched. He stared at the program littered floor and wanted to cry. He felt like squirming. He felt like leaping up and screaming—Christ, let me out of here! And running down the long weaving aisles like a maniac, into the sunlight. He could hardly sit still, he kept twisting and shifting. He felt sick. Oh, stop it, ordered his mind, what are you bitching about, you don’t love her. And he realized that it was her that was upsetting him.

He twisted his head and saw that everyone had their caps held in their laps. He took his off and felt his hair sticky and plastered to his head.

“God this is awful,” he muttered.

“You said it,” agreed the young man next to him. Erick glanced at him and wondered when he’d stood up with the rest of them. He couldn’t remember doing it.

He remembered the deans droning over the public address system that according to the authority vested in them … they all said they were happy to graduate them. Erick felt dizzy, as if he were going to faint. He recalled the time in basic training when he had gotten sunstroke while standing in review on a great open field in Georgia. He had been holding his rifle before him at parade rest and it had an unsheathed bayonet on the end. He had gotten dizzy and almost fallen forward and impaled his throat on the sharp blade. They had caught him and dragged him to a shady spot. He remembered the cool smell of the grass in that shady spot and the feeling of the cool water they gave him to drink.

The ceremony was over.

He found himself wandering among the broken masses of happy graduates and friends and parents. It was over. He concentrated on that, tried to understand it.

He stumbled along without seeing, his feet moving automatically for the room. Later, he realized he didn’t have his diploma and had to go back to the administration building and stand in a long line to get it. He left his robe at the school store and went down into the cool basement into the Drama office. Lynn sat there alone in a sweat soaked shirt smoking a cigarette. He looked up.

“That’s that,” he said mildly.

* * * *

They walked through the streets toward the train station.

Erick wanted to stop and sit down on the earth, hang onto it. Everything seemed precious to him. There had been nothing so wrenching in his entire life as that moment. To leave such a beautiful portion of existence behind. He couldn’t take it with him. It was not to be lifted, piece by piece, not to be stored in a trunk and sent Railway Express back home.

No, it was ingrained in every spot, in the very ground he walked on, walked
away
from. And for him it was on the campus where he had walked, in the bars where he had danced to jukebox music with Sally in his arms. Mostly, every spot seemed precious now because of Sally. The house she lived in, the streets they had walked together. The movies they had sat in together. The cafes and restaurants they had eaten in. In all the places they had enjoyed together.

And he could not take those things with him. Like gold, it was too heavy to be carted away in the hand. It had to be left in its place, there to remain, a shining memory. And he could never have it again.

“Glad to get out of this hole,” Lynn said.

Erick felt like stopping, putting down his bags, sitting on them and saying—all right, go on. Leave me alone. I’m here to stay.

He kept walking. And every time they passed a public phone booth he felt a twinge. And thought of how easy it had been all afternoon and evening to call Sally and say—Hello, how are you?