The Hair of Harold Roux (50 page)

Back in the room, Nathan was about all packed but Knuck hadn’t yet returned from wherever he’d gone last night. A little nest of dirty clothes lay in its circle on his bed.

Then Allard and Nathan were both startled by the appearance in the room of Paul Hickett. There he was, in the flesh. Allard could not at first believe that the excited, wizened face of Short Round was right there within reach of his hands.

“You got to hear what happened!” Short Round said breathlessly.

“You’ve got some kind of crust coming in here,” Nathan said.

“Wait a minute! Wait a minute! You got to hear what happened, for Chrissakes! Cut it out! Listen, I got to tell you what happened!”

They both looked at him coldly while he explained that last night they took Betty Bebop back to Boston in Harorba’s car and Boom wouldn’t give her all the money she thought she was supposed to get and she hit him with her pocketbook and he hit her back,
wham
! Man, the car was going thirty anyway and Boom pushed her right out into the street. Down in Roxbury someplace. She went ass over teakettle into a bunch of garbage cans and they kept right on going, man! Boom said what’s one beat up dinge whore, more or less. Even if she croaks it won’t even be in the papers.

“Honest to Jesus, that’s what happened! Can you beat that? I was scared shitless, man! But Boom! Cool as a cucumber! Even Harorba was scared shitless! Can you beat that? So she didn’t get a goddam plugged nickel, not a Christly nickel!”

Short Round went on, even when Knuck Gillis lurched into the room and stood looking down at him, vaguely knotting his hairless eyebrows at Short Round’s dance of joy and
hysteria. Short Round finally left, screeching with desperate laughter. He was afraid, badly frightened by it all, and he would not be able to stop talking about it.

“Do you believe it?” Nathan said.

“I’m afraid I do.”

Knuck merely sighed and lay face down on his bed.

“We ought to call the cops,” Nathan said.

“Yeah, but I bet we don’t.”

They didn’t, because nothing could continue after that day. The year was over, the exams were over and the marks were in.

Allard left that afternoon for his home in Leah, where he stayed a few days before heading west.

Aaron, sitting at his desk in front of the yellow circle of light, the only light in the dark empty house, tries to remember the name of the girl he went out with that summer in Pasadena. She went to Occidental College, she could always borrow her father’s Packard, she always wanted him to drive, she lived in Monrovia … Other things about her are as clear as if they had happened yesterday. The powdery texture of her thigh as it moved over his, a favorite phrase of hers: “What a kick!” Her hair that was so black and glossy it was almost Oriental, her uptilted narrow nose. And also a general warmth of feeling about her presence. But her name is gone, gone out of his memory altogether. It is another of those failures, smallnesses. He hasn’t in his life been an avid or compulsive collector of women; there weren’t all that many and he should remember. He wonders where they all went, what happened to them. He doesn’t like to think how old they must be now, how their lives ran on through other people and other places, small satisfactions and the probable tragedies that loom for everyone.

His own children are at that threshold now. Bill will get his driving license in the fall, and will take his chances in that
unending lottery, those blinding oncoming lights. Janie is developing breasts even though she isn’t yet fully grown. In her there is the vulnerability of kindness. She loves without a certain clarity he would wish her to have; she loves that murderous cat for its moments of purring, avaricious softness. She will be too generous, unwary, forgiving. The amateurs will be after her with their needful smiles, their callow wit. Some selfish young blade will casually break her heart.

He is alone in his house, but then he is used to being alone, to having at his work nothing really tangible for company—no good paint or canvas, no solid clay or stone, no musical instrument to carve real sensual impingements out of the air. He is alone with uncontrollable, freakish, perversely willful images. Better to be like Boom Maloumian (dead in an automobile accident in 1950) and act out one’s myths (but not that last one, not yet) than to be condemned to this constant fantasy state, ever alone when the activity is most frantic.

There is always booze, with its paradox of revelation and impotence, but he chooses not to go there; life is getting so much shorter in these latter days, so much shorter it even seems an indulgence to worry about any of George Buck’s public nightmares. But he does, he does.

What future there is is the work he will do, the chaos of the past he will somehow make into form, all the fragments now swirling just out of reach, the excitement inside him somewhere like an itch he can’t scratch, a pain he can’t locate. Pain is one of the necessary functions, however.

The circle of yellow light on his desk seems to contract and grow brighter. The only light in the whole dark house is directed here.

Fragments. He’s got to get everything together, first, then discard what must be discarded. And he must tell the truth—that all of us were once immature and stupid, oscillating between the banal and the sublime (or in some range between those polarities), and that the banal is also true. Allard Benson, once flip, facetious, to whose golden youth other
bodies were sometimes felicitous tools, must learn and be touched. We perceive depth slowly. When a man tries himself he constructs a scaffold and a throne.

There is a letter, a document he hasn’t read for a long time. He never deliberately looks for it, but every once in a while he comes across it and reads it again. It is surprising that he still has it around here somewhere—in a drawer or folder or stuck in a book. Where is it now? Most things from those times have worn out, been discarded or lost in his travels.

In the semi-dark outside of the circle of light his hand goes to a drawer below a cupboard, to an old manila folder, straight to the letter. His act of keeping it all these years is vaguely shameful, as though he has kept it as a souvenir, something as untoward as the polished wristbone of a corpse. The letter was written to him out of a sadness that was too close to self-hatred. It was a sadness he caused, though everyone grows sad and who knows whether this or any unhappiness would have been less if he had never been born. But he has kept these sheets of scalloped-edged, buff-colored stationery, this document, because even from the beginning it has always suggested to him use, a colder use. The handwriting is round, generous but not unformed, the hand of a girl who did her lessons and was bright. It is neat, spaced, incapable of lying, written in liquid blue ink with a fountain pen. That alone proves this document to be of historical interest, yet he must remember her as the young girl she was, so much of her unused, untouched, unworn. Eighteen, and adult life just beginning for her.

Mary
, he thinks, but is then startled; her name, of course, was not Mary, and again he is troubled by the uses he must make of past reality. Once this beautiful, complex being did exist upon a real Earth, but the Earth has changed and any recalling of it will be shaped, changed again.

Dear Aaron,

You don’t sound like you in your letters, you sound like an old philosopher or something, so I don’t know who’s writing to me. Am I reading the truth or some sort of fictional treatment of a letter? Do you enjoy writing them or is it painful to get around to saying what you mean? I know I never criticized you like this, but I know it doesn’t really make any difference anymore.

I get this terrible feeling that you’re the only boy I’ll ever love. I sometimes think—maybe all the time when I’m not trying to think of something else—that when I let you make love to me I was marrying you and I was a stupid little fool because you weren’t going to marry me so I threw it all away. I mean the whole possibility, ever, of marrying a boy I could really love. Because there will always be you back there smiling about it all and composing those sophisticated letters with all the long sentences and subtle little twists in the middle of them that mean you’d like to make love to me but you don’t love me enough to marry me. I know.

In July my period came about six days late and that was a scare. But it’s all right now—you didn’t leave any tracks behind you.

Don’t worry about going to the University of Chicago in the fall. I’m not going back to school anyway. I couldn’t walk around there and see all those places again. Dad isn’t any better so I’m going to stay here and take care of him. Richard will be gone, you know. Dad looks so bad we’re really worried about him. He’s even more yellow-colored now. The whites of his eyes and his fingernails are yellow. He has trouble getting around and spends most of the time in bed. It’s sad because even if he’s grateful he can’t show it because he resents being like he is so much. He’s only fifty and there was Mother’s death and now he’s so sick I guess it all just doesn’t seem fair.

Natalie wrote me a long letter trying to explain everything and cheer me up at the same time. She is very
angry at you. Sometimes I feel like a baby or a feebleminded child everybody is trying to reassure. But I guess I do feel different from the rest of you. You were always trying to convince me that all the things we did weren’t sins and all that. But I know they were, even if it’s just how empty I feel now. I never used to feel empty. I don’t feel complete anymore. Why should I believe Natalie doesn’t feel that way too?

She’s thinking of transferring to Hunter College beginning in the spring semester next year. Anyway, we sign our letters “love.”

Sometimes I resent the way nothing really matters to you, so you can just jump on your motorcycle and you’re away, free as a bird. But I don’t think it’s your fault. That’s the way you are and always will be. Maybe it was that about you made me love you. But no, it wasn’t. You’re really a very kind person, Aaron, I know. You can be a little sarcastic sometimes but you don’t go out of your way to hurt people. It’s just that you’re not really mature yet and you don’t want to be tied down. You’ve got a wonderful career ahead of you, Aaron, I know it, I’m sure of it. I guess I can’t blame you even if like a little idiot I wanted to be with you always. Well, don’t let my self-pity spoil your summer.

Sincerely,
Maura

But now it is the present, timeless time, tense; only we pass, and that is some of the meaning, he supposes, of every story, even of that other, unchanging one, in which Billy Hemlock gained strength and knowledge from the powders, especially from the powder of the graceful hand, which he finally recognized as the outermost frond of the hemlock tree. And so he did enter, as a descendant of the Old People, the passage into the mountain denied to Eugenia, and after many adventures found Janie and Oka in that strangely warm interior valley. The old lady was the Lady of the Deer, one of
the ancient gods herself, her feet delicate deer hooves. Then, refreshed by grateful gods in the form of wheat, sweet grasses, the very bodies of the animals who were conscious only as long generations, generous in the timeless knowing that they would always survive, Billy and Janie came home with Oka, bearing sustenance, to wake Eugenia and Tim Hemlock from their long sleep of despair. How the children loved that loving reunion.

But that was the children’s story, and they are not here, in fact are no longer children. When they return tomorrow they will bring to him lives that are their own, that are growing away from him. All lives move beyond his ken. George Buck will have to leave after next year, George and Edward and Helga vanished from their beautiful house. You can’t write another man’s story for him. You can’t raise Mark Rasmussen out of the despair of his years. But this is only reality with all its collisions and coincidences.

It is deep in the fathomless but temporary night. Aaron has gone to bed, alone into the fresh sliding of the sheets of his and his wife’s bed. Soon he is washed under, where the currents, themselves not in control, control him. He dreams that a strange woman watches him. He is twenty-six years old, ageless, having had all of his experiences yet inhabiting the quick, observing body that is never conscious of its perfection. He is sitting on a couch, in an old brownstone garden apartment, in a gray city of the 1950’s. The air is the air of the city, not dirty but busy, moving, only a trifle gritty. The towers of the city are gray stone and crystal glass, having meaning and dignity, as have the trees in its parks, its arcades, avenues, squares. All have the somber dignity of the city. Windows are clean, all of its interiors are clean, polished, glittering with care. He half reclines on the couch in the high-ceilinged apartment, the strange woman standing across the room next to the French doors, watching him. She is not
strange, she is in part every girl he has loved; she is Agnes, a mystery. She is twenty-four—old, experienced, wryly humorous, her light hair floating around her thoughtful face in undisciplined yet deliberate small fronds. She does not smile as she looks at him. The brave, eternal angle of her hip as she stands, in a light dress, melts his heart and he holds out his arms to her.

I WAS BORN IN Iowa City when my father was a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. My mother remembers being pregnant with me and wheeling my brother around in a stroller. She walked all over the city, giving my father time and quiet so he could write. They lived in a motel for a while. It couldn’t have been easy to get any work done. A few months or so after I was born my father was offered a job at the University of New Hampshire and we moved to Durham. New Hampshire was my home until I returned to Iowa in 1995 to attend the Iowa Writers’ Workshop myself. My father never knew that his daughter would eventually head back to Iowa, following in his footsteps.