Some Came Running (47 page)

If she had been less innocent. More knowing. Other girls ignored parental “wisdom,” and went ahead pursuing the horizon anyway. But not her: She believed.

No wonder she took it out in helping them, these ineffectual weakling male idiots, who did however have one thing, as Dave had said, this burning desire to unzip their soul’s underwear and expose themselves in public.

Poor poor weak pittance. But she did it, because what they did was what she wanted most of all in this world to do. Expose. Her, a schoolteacher, a college English instructor, virgin.

It hammered in her head over and over again, carrying with it a deep blushing sense of shame, of fear that someday someone might find out. There were a lot of paradoxes in the quasi-religious American chastity superstition, and this was one of them. That she should be ashamed of being a virgin. But it followed. And thus it was, that so many librarians, secretaries, technicians and staff assistants (
and
schoolteachers!) gradually came to lead haunted lives, their ears constantly alert for any laugh, any snicker, which might be directed at them.

And thus it also was, that she herself, Gwen French, would do anything—even be thought a nymphomaniac by everyone—rather than admit to anyone what she really was, a thirty-five-year-old virgin college English teacher.

She sank down on the divan. Then she got up and went to put the pot on, for a cup of coffee.

It was really very funny. In a way. Like the man who took the stack of steel bars, tested them carefully for strength, fitted them meticulously, welded them precisely, never realizing once that what he was building was his own cage, his own cell for life.

There were times, in moments of wildness, when she thought to go out somewhere—Chicago, Indianapolis, anywhere she was not known—and pick up some strange man and get him to sleep with her. Maybe then she could unlax, let down that constant fear of people finding out. Maybe then she could even self-expose. Like Dave and Wally and Mac Price. But she never did. For one thing, being a virgin at thirty-five embarrassed her. For another, she told herself she was wise enough to know beforehand no such simple and artless thing would ever be able to uncage her.

It had been an easy cage to build. So easy she had not even known she was building it. The first stage was back in high school, when she learned the easiest way to handle boys was to tell them you were in love with someone else.

That way they never got mad at you but instead acquired a great respect for you and wanted to be your best friend and confidant to whom you brought your woes—always hoping of course that they could catch you right, and angry enough, some evening. But they never pushed you, and merely waited. It made for nice relationships.

From there, for anyone with any brain at all, it was only a simple logical inference to the second stage at college, when all the girls began having affairs and talking about them: the sly smug look, the little smile, the possessiveness around the men. It was easy to convince the girls. All you had to do was look smug occasionally. She didn’t know, now, how many had been really having affairs, and how many had been pretending like herself. But at the time she thought they all were having them. Except herself. And, drawing from the girls, it was easy to know to tell the men you dated the same thing, and easy to discover they believed it even quicker than the boys in high school. The only difference was where in high school you said “in love” now you said “having an affair.” Let them but think you were just getting over a heartbreaking affair, and they became so tender and solicitous it was unbelievable; much more so than if you had been a simple virgin. And suddenly, although you didn’t really know it yet, your cage was half built.

She could still have crawled out when she came back home from school. Maybe. But what could have been easier than to tell the men at home you were still violently in love with a boy from school? They believed it just as readily as college boys. Once you knew that, once you grasped the principle behind male guilt, it was just as easy when you went off to get your master’s, to use the same trick there. Except now, of course, it was a man back home—from Francis Parkman College, Parkman’s Own Liberal Arts College, Fully Accredited, Vitally Christian. The sign at the city limits said it well.

Only by then, Gwen thought, something had changed, and it was no longer a lark, it had become a huge black shameful secret, her virginity, to be hidden now at all costs. In essence, that was why she had become engaged to Casper Milquetoast as Dave called him, after she came home with her master’s. They were engaged five years. She might even have married him, just to quell any suspicions, if it had not been she was afraid he might find out in bed that she was a virgin. And that would have ruined his romantic picture of her. Of course everyone in town knew right away that they were sleeping together, but of course that was all right, since they were going to be married. Only in this case they weren’t sleeping. When he was killed in a Japanese air raid on some grubby little island in the Pacific, it was as if no one had died. That seemed to be his destiny. But the last stage was set, for her. The cage was finished and she was in it. How could she ever marry any man now, even if she wanted, even if she loved him, in Parkman, Illinois—or anywhere else she was known? Have him discover she was still a virgin? And all the stories only lies?

So she became the woman of the world who had had her share of love affairs and wasn’t interested in sex anymore. Wally Dennis believed it. Mac Price believed it. The bright young Yale men of Time & Life and the publishing world of New York believed it. Dave Hirsh believed it, too, until he saw through it tonight, and realized she was a nymphomaniac.

She hadn’t meant to flirt with him like that. It hadn’t started out to be that, and then suddenly it had slipped into it somehow without her knowing it. And the truth was, her vanity liked it. But it wasn’t fair to do that to a man when you never intended for it to go any further.

The coffee was ready now, but she didn’t want any. She didn’t know what she wanted. The theme papers still lay in a jumbled pile beside her chair. Certainly, she did not want them. And certainly it was not a man she wanted.

What law, moral or divine, said a woman
had
to have a man? Oh, the myths and superstitions we civilized people lived by. She stepped to the mirror that hung beside the dining room doorway and studied herself in it. She was
not
drying up. Her neck was
not
getting scrawny. She studied her face for signs of spinsterhood. She was just as attractive now as she had ever been—which, while it may not ever have been much, certainly was not getting any lesser. Evening at home, she thought. Miss French’s evening at home.

Damn it all, why couldn’t she be like Doris Fredric, whose father owned the bank, and who taught freshman English in the high school—who took all the men she wanted, and then claimed to be a virgin. That would be more normal.

A half-crazy, inflamed rebellion bubbled up in Gwen. Like the blood of a man machine-gunned through the chest, she thought; there’s an image for you. I should write. She knew what she would do. She would do what she did every time she got rebellious every six months or so. She would get out her father’s pornography collection and look at it. Resolutely, she went to the doorway at the other end, and up the back stairs to his bedroom.

She didn’t know why she did it. She only knew she wanted to do something horrible, and this was the most horrible thing she could think of.

The pictures themselves fascinated her anyway. They were sickening. They always made her think of Suetonius’ description of the orgies of Tiberius in his self-imposed retirement on Capri. You never realized what a really foul thing the human body was until you— She had studied them enough times—and with such pinpointed concentration—that she practically knew each one by heart. That any woman—or any man—would allow themselves to be so degraded—and then allow pictures to be taken of it!—seemed unbelievable. Another thing was that there wasn’t a single really sensitive face among them. Most of them were grossly animal, stupid, as if drunk or drugged. Now and then, there was a face with a trace more, a hint only, of perception; but always where there was any hint of any deeper sensitivity than just animal, it came out manifested as pure hatred. Such pure, utter consuming hatred she had never seen on any human face, such smug degrading domination—as existed on these few slightly more self-sensitive faces. Never was there any trace of even a physical affection. It was a strange, dark comment on the real underlying pressures and motives and emotions of our sexual habits.

And this hatred was what fascinated her. After all, hatred was her forte, wasn’t it?

At the top of the stairs, she went directly to Bob’s bedroom and to the closet. At the very back on the very top shelf were three not large heavy-pasteboard boxes and one very small long box of 35 mm slides. She had to get a chair to reach them. Then she got Bob’s little slide projector. Usually, she took them to her own bedroom, but tonight with a flamboyant recklessness she took them back downstairs to the kitchen.

Why her father had them in his possession she had no idea, but she suspected that psychologically some way it had something to do with her mother. Where he had come by them she hadn’t the least idea, and what he did with them she did not know. Evidently, he looked at them. She had discovered them years ago, long before her mother died, in the house out by the school in Parkman, while rummaging through the back corners of a storage closet looking for something else. She had looked through them, her breath getting shorter in her chest (she was past twenty-five, and already knew—by hearsay anyway—everything they depicted), and then had put them back exactly as she found them (while she listened to her mother downstairs serving tea to one of her committees) and had said nothing. If Bob knew she found them, he never gave any sign. It was hard to tell with Bob; you never knew what his motives were for anything, and he had a very devious subtle mind, really. After that she kept track of them, and noted that he took them out from time to time. When she herself, in moments of rebellion and sick fascination, took them out to look at them, she found that he often had added new ones to them. It was turning out to be quite a bulky collection. When they had moved out here to Israel, it was as if she consciously divined beforehand just exactly where he would put them, and sure enough when she looked, he had.

In the kitchen, Gwen spread the whole conglomeration out on the big dining table. There were several of those little packs of playing cards with pictures on the faces, a great number of simple photographs on glossy paper, a number of little printed books of stories with a few badly reproduced photographs which said they were made in France but which obviously were not since some of the photographs were the same as those printed on the paper. Anyway, the people in them didn’t look like Frenchmen, they looked American.

All of this stuff she did not bother with, but instead set up the little projector (which she had seen Bob use a thousand times right here in this room, to show his own color snapshots and nature pictures) so it was focused on the wide white brick wall of the fireplace, the only blank wall in the room. Then she took the box of color transparencies and started running them through it.

She was well aware there was a strong element of danger in all of this, a possibility that she might be caught, but she welcomed it. Something wild and outraged and violated in her made her almost wish for it. It would make quite a nice little scene. It was only a little after nine, and Wally Dennis might still show up lugging along that chicken-headed little idiot Dawn, whom he was trying so hard to seduce. Or Bob himself might very easily come home a little early. Well, let them come; damn them; damn them all. Let them catch her. She wished they would. Wouldn’t they be surprised, and then she could tell them how she was a nymphomaniac.

There were a few pornographic scenes among the color transparencies, but mostly they were only posed portraits of nude women.

It was always a startling thing to think of Bob being interested in such things. He was really such a dear, sweet old thing. She could just see him, hiding his pictures away like a small boy and looking at them guiltily in his room. It would be funny if he did catch her, Gwen thought, and giggled nervously like a girl. Would his face be red! Who would ever have thought of him, Robert Ball French the poet, philosopher, recluse, collecting pornography?

Suddenly, a wild idea came to her and she laughed outright as she began immediately to put it into action. She had wanted to do something wild, hadn’t she? All evening, she had dimly heard people going along the sidewalk outside the little fence, hadn’t she? Laughing to herself with a kind of insane ribaldry, she selected one of the most garish, chorus girl-looking nudes, put it into the projector. Then she went around turning all the lights off. When the room was dark, she carried the little projector into the living room to the window edge and opened the window.

The cold air from the open window poured in over her. There were two slightly open spaces between the trees and bushes where you could see in a straight line to the street. Still laughing to herself nervously, Gwen switched the projector on and focused it through one of them, adjusting it till the picture of the nude, which she had put in sideways, appeared to be lying in the gutter beside the sidewalk. Then she switched it off and waited.

There was a streetlight at the corner whose feeble light would help hide the beam of the projector through the air, while at the same time not being strong enough to kill the picture on the ground. The way the trees were situated before the house it would be next to impossible for anyone to see the beam. She waited patiently.

Pretty soon she could hear voices coming down the sidewalk on the other side across the street, a man’s and a woman’s. She couldn’t recognize them. She waited until they were about a hundred feet away. Then laughing silently she switched the projector on.