Wake Up With a Stranger (6 page)

She met him when she was a senior in high school, and she had by that time decided what she wanted to do and what kind of person she wanted to be. She had enrolled in a correspondence course in design, which she studied in addition to her regular school assignments, and she had definitely abandoned any idea of going to college. She would have liked to go, so far as that was concerned, but only if she could do it in a manner that suited her, which was out of the question for financial reasons. So she enrolled in the correspondence course as an alternative, and she worked very hard at it, and at the same time she began deliberately to try to achieve a certain effect physically. She designed and made her clothing for the achievement of this, and she also became artful in the use of cosmetics. It was in this period, just before she met Enos Simon, that she went to the optometrist and bought the harlequin glasses.

She met Enos in the reading room of a branch library about a mile from her home. The task of carrying the correspondence course and doing well at the same time in her school work was proving rather strenuous, and she had acquired the habit of going directly from school to the library in order to accomplish as much as possible before going home. The day she first saw Enos there, she was sitting as usual at a large table at which as many as six people could be seated, and he moved slowly across in front of her, beyond the table along a tier of shelves against a wall. He seemed to be reading titles in a rather desultory way, not stopping to remove and open any of the books, and what struck her at very first sight was an air of somber intensity about him. His skin was swarthy, his hair was dark and tumbled and slightly curly, and although he was clean he was somewhat unkempt, as if he had a fine indifference to the effect of his clothes, which had in its own way its own effect. He carried his head tilted a little forward, his chin tucked down, and this gave him the appearance of looking up at an angle under his heavy brows with a kind of repelling expression, not so much of belligerence as of a fierce desire to be let alone. He drifted along the tier of shelves and out of sight without stopping or looking once in Donna’s direction, but she thought of him that night and looked for him when she returned the next afternoon.

He was there, sitting alone at the very same table she had sat at yesterday, and she was shaken by the strong feeling she had upon seeing him. It was as if his presence were something she had planned, and it amounted, therefore, to a conquest.

He was slouched in his chair with his legs extended under the table, and when she sat down across from him, she accidentally kicked one of his feet. He drew the foot away and looked up at her from his book with that oddly fierce expression she had noticed before.

“Excuse me,” she said.

He grunted and lowered his eyes, but she continued to stare across at him as she opened the chemistry text she intended to study, and after a while he looked up again to meet her gaze.

“I wish you wouldn’t stare at me,” he said.

“Why? Do you feel guilty?”

“Guilty? Why the devil should I feel guilty?”

“Because you have such bad manners.”

“What do you know about my manners? You know nothing about them at all.”

“I know that you stick your legs out in all directions, which is rude, and I know that you haven’t even the courtesy to acknowledge an apology.”

“All right. Now you have told me off, and you can quit staring at me.”

“I am just wondering why you never comb your hair.”

“So now we are being rude to each other! It’s a pleasure to tell you that my hair, and what I do or don’t do to it, is none of your damn business.”

“Perhaps not. But it’s rather fascinating just the same. Rather like Raggedy Andy’s. Like a string mop. I’m also wondering why you let your clothes get to looking as if you slept in them. Is it a kind of pose or something?”

“Suppose it is. You’re something of a poseur yourself, aren’t you? Why do you wear glasses shaped like that, for instance, and why do you fix your face and your hair to make you look like a college girl at least, when you’re obviously only in high school?”

“Do my looks offend you?”

“Not at all. I don’t care what you try to look like.”

They had started talking in whispers, but their voices had risen in the exchange, and suddenly a female librarian appeared from around a tier of shelves and hissed at them sharply. The boy turned his head indolently in her direction and hissed back at her deliberately.

“Old crow,” he said.

The librarian flushed and wagged an admonishing finger and retreated.

“My God,” Donna whispered, “there’s no
end
to your bad manners, is there?”

“I don’t like being hissed at,” he said.

“Well, neither do I, so we had better stop talking.”

“Must we? Now that you’ve started it, I’m not sure that I want to stop.”

“Don’t I have anything to say about it?”

“Oh, I suppose I’d eventually get tired and quit talking if you simply refused to listen or make any reply.”

“Yes, but before that happened, you might get thrown out of here.”

“That’s true. And you might get thrown out also, since you’re involved. Would you feel humiliated if you were?”

“I think I’d manage to survive.”

“I’m sure you would. But it seems silly to invite trouble. There are lots of places we could talk all we wanted to.”

“What places?”

“I don’t know. Lots of them.”

“Are you asking me to leave with you?”

“Not yet. I’ll ask you, though, if you promise to agree. I don’t like being rejected.”

“That’s two things you don’t like. Being hissed at and being rejected.”

“There are others. Many others. Do you agree to go?”

“Yes.”

“Then I ask you to leave with me.”

They closed their books and stood up and went out past the desk of the angry librarian, and outside they stood on the sidewalk that was wet from an earlier rain and wondered where they should go together in the soft mid-May afternoon that was almost evening.

“If we are going some place together,” she said, “we should at least know each other’s name. Mine’s Donna Buchanan.”

“Mine’s Enos Simon. Where would you like to go?”

“I don’t know. Why don’t you just choose one of the lots of places you know about?”

“Do you like beer?”

“I’ve never drunk any.”

“I knew that look of yours was phony.”

“What look?”

“You try to make people think you’re a lot more experienced than you really are.”

“Oh, hell. The truth is, you talk pretty silly sometimes, do you know that? I was eighteen this month, as a matter of fact, and that’s as old as I care to be or look at present. Besides, what has not drinking beer got to do with anything? Do you measure experience by such silliness?”

“Never mind. It’s not important, and I don’t want to argue about it. I suggest that we walk down to Sully’s and have a sandwich and a cup of coffee. Are you hungry?”

“Yes. I think I’d like a sandwich.”

“All right. Have you been to Sully’s?”

“No.”

“It’s not much.”

He took her books, and they walked the six blocks on the wet sidewalk to Sully’s. As Enos had said, it wasn’t much of a place. The booths ran down one wall, and the counter ran down the other, and between the booths and the counter were a few tables. At the rear of the room was a jukebox with colored bubbles rising and descending soundlessly in lighted tubes. They sat and listened to the music until the man had returned with their order and gone again and the box was silent.

“Now that we’re here and free to talk without being hissed at,” Donna said, “what shall we talk about?”

“You can start by telling me why you kicked me in the library and then picked a quarrel with me.”

“I kicked you quite by accident, and I did not pick a quarrel with you. You were rude, and I told you so, that’s all. Please don’t be so vain as to think I kicked you on purpose just to get your attention.”

“Well, didn’t you?”

“Of course not. You were sprawled all over the place.”

“Oh, all right. I’ll be more honest than you and admit that I’ve noticed you in the library before. I was trying to think of a way to meet you when it happened.”

“You certainly didn’t sound as if you wanted to meet me.”

“That’s just my way. The truth is, I’m shy and get all tensed up in such circumstances. Did you say you go to high school?”

“You said it, not I. But it’s true. I’m a senior. I’ll graduate next month.”

“Are you going to college in the fall?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t want to. There’s something else I’d rather do.”

“Get married?”

“God, no! I want to be a designer. A fashion designer. I’m taking a correspondence course in design now, but I don’t think it’s much help. The main thing is, I seem to have a natural talent for it.”

“Did you design the dress you’re wearing?”

“Yes. I designed it and made it.”

“I agree that you have a talent. Can you get very far with something like fashion designing in St. Louis? I should think you’d have to go somewhere like New York.”

“If you had an exclusive shop to work through, you could go a long way right here. That’s what I’m going to try to do when I get good enough. I’m going to try to start a line of originals in a shop right here.”

“You’re very ambitious, aren’t you?”

“I guess so. Aren’t you?”

“No. I can’t even make up my mind what I want to do.”

“What do you mean, you can’t make up your mind? Don’t you do anything now?”

“No. I graduated from high school a year ago, and I haven’t done anything since.”

“Really? Nothing at all?”

“Not a damn thing. I’ve been thinking about it, but I can’t seem to get started. I’m going to the state university this fall, but it’s more because my old man thinks I ought to than because I really want to.”

“Isn’t there anything at all you think you’d like to do?”

“Well, I think I’d like to be a writer, but I’m sure I could never be anything but a poor one, so I guess I won’t even try. Maybe I’ll end up teaching.”

“What would you teach?”

“Oh, literature. Something like that.”

“Do you like to read?”

“I read a lot. Always have. It’s the only thing I do much of.”

She nodded at the book he had carried with hers from the library.

“What are you reading now?”

“The
Grand Testament.”

“The Bible, you mean?”

“Lord, no! Villon’s
Grand Testament.”

“Who’s Villon?”

“Seriously? Don’t you actually know? How can you be so ignorant?”

“Well, you needn’t start being insulting and rude again. If you do, I’ll leave. I guess there are a few things I know that
you
don’t, as far as that goes.”

“That’s true. I have a nasty way of thinking the only things worth knowing are the things I happen to know myself.”

“That’s better. You can be very nice when you want to be. Will you tell me who this Villon is? Is he French? His name sounds French.”

“You’re right except for your tense. Was, not is. He was born in Paris in 1431 and disappeared in 1463. No one knows what happened to him after that, but probably he was hanged.”

“Why on earth do you think he was probably hanged?”

“Because he had almost been hanged two or three times before, and it doesn’t seem likely that he could go on escaping by the skin of his teeth forever. He was a murderer and a thief and a whoremonger and a syphilitic and almost anything bad you could mention, but he also happened to have a master’s degree from the Sorbonne and to be the greatest poet of the Middle Ages, and one of the greatest poets of any age. Don’t you think that’s very amusing?”

“I admit that I don’t see anything amusing about it at all.”

“Don’t you? I do. A common criminal who worshiped beauty and wrote some of the most beautiful poetry in the world in cheap taverns and whorehouses and prisons and all sorts of low places. He was a coward, too. He was afraid of physical pain, and he was especially afraid of dying, because he had lived such a sinful life that the mere thought of dying filled him with terror. A criminal and a coward who wrote all this beautiful poetry that’s still read after more than five hundred years. Beauty and evil co-existing in such extremity in one ugly and diseased little man. Don’t you see why I consider it amusing? It’s so ironical and paradoxical, and it’s so contrary to what all the good little mediocre people try to teach you about evil not begetting beauty, and all that kind of crap. Would you like to hear something he wrote?”

“I guess so.”

“All right. Listen to this.”

He began to recite
Ballad of Dead Ladies,
the Rossetti translation, and each time he repeated the sad refrain with which each stanza ended, his voice assumed an intensity that was very compelling, as if he were himself acutely aware of the brevity of life and was urging in her an equal awareness.

When he had finished, he was silent for a moment, looking at her intently across the table, and she didn’t know what to say. Up to then, she had honestly considered him rather ridiculous, although interesting, but now she saw he had sensibilities she had not imagined, and she no longer considered him at all ridiculous. The truth was, he disturbed her a little, more than she was prepared to admit, and she began to think that it was time to go home.

“You’re right,” she said. “It is beautiful.”

“Do you think so? It’s probably the most famous thing he did. It’s called
Ballad of Dead Ladies.”

She had by this time finished her sandwich and coffee, and she slipped sidewise, on the red leather seat and stood up abruptly, impatient with herself for permitting him to affect her so strongly.

“I think I’d better go now,” she said.

“All right.” He also slipped out of the booth and stood up, lifting their books from the table. “Do you live far from here?”

“Not so far. It’s about a mile, I think.”

“Will you let me go with you? I haven’t got any place to go, except home, and I would much rather walk along with you.”