Betrayed by F. Scott Fitzgerald (2 page)

Confusion, like Koko, the albino horse-riding bear that appears in the circus wearing red scarves and leaping through flames, was mounting. DeLathaway had fallen off the porch and was wriggling in the pyracantha. When everyone rushed up to help him, I saw the secretary Susette lift her blue ball out of the shrubbery surreptitiously and flip it halfway home. I decided, regardless of Banquo, to get her too. DeLath was laughing now from where he lay in the bushes, and intoned: “A bed of roses, a bed of thorns, a bed of roses …” while a relatively nincompoopal crowd looked on from the porch.

Royal stood by his green ball, crooning now into the microphone of his mallet: “It was only a Tristram in old Shanty town …” He kept singing it over and over to make sure everyone would hear it, which they already had. I figured he must really be in the throes of Old Bardstown to be attempting the first joke of his entire life. People looked at him strangely until he dropped the mallet and stood leaning on it sheepishly. And meanwhile, hearing Royal sing, Banks had begun bellowing from his seat in the Buick, “Desdemona! Where the hmmm hmmm hhmm hmmm hmmm hmmm hmmm!” to the tune of “Oklahoma,” but this too stopped after a dozen birds scattered from their nests in the headlights and Wesson ran over to see if Banks was okay. You can tell when jokes aren’t funny if you begin considering crying for your enemies.

I felt a little sorry for Royal. All he really wanted out of life was a comfortable room lined with unopened leatherbound copies of the rare books of the Western World, in which he and a few friends, a ruly, polite group, could sip tea and play intense marathon games of Authors.

Amid this display of sound and senselessness, and despite two onlookers, Professors Keen and Roachfield standing nearly on top of me discussing the merits of the first versus the third person, I whacked my orange ball out of turn. I did. Thus on my next turn, with the whole world watching, I tapped old orange cleanly through the double hoops and became Poison.

“He’s Poison!” Miss Bedd said.

Royal executed the frown he’d made famous in forty yearbooks.

Upon hearing the word, “Poison” the entire sodden community emerged to take a look. DeLathaway, now on the porch, scratched but smiling, rubbed his hands together as if to say, “Ah yes, on with the games.” Banquo sat up in the Buick, as I feared he would, and did several neck-jarring takes. Wesson looked worried. He skipped over to me, not being too obvious, because he wanted to be seen mostly talking to teachers, not “candidates,” which we both were.

“Caution, Lawrence.”

“Larry, Wesson; and why?”

“It’s a faculty party, remember. We’re
guests
.” He wiggled his tie.

“I’m Poison, Wesson, one side please, or you may find yourself comatose at this particular faculty party.” He skulked away.

After I sent orange ball into the field, at large, and the turns rotated, Banks motioned to me.

“You fool!” he said, gripping the steering wheel of the Buick in an isometric demonstration that bulged his temples.

“Easy there, fella.”

“Easy! Why did you do that! Now you’re going to have to aim for one of the hoops and disqualify yourself. Right?”

“Right, uh huh, right, right. Right, Mr. Banks.” While self-destruction was to become much more my style on future days, this hurling myself through a hoop business would not go. I returned to the wickets. I decided to venomize Royal first; and in obviously the best shooting of the evening I reached out and nailed him with a tricky forty-foot putt.

“Death to Sir Green,” I said. “Touché, Messr. Royal.”

“Why you’ve poisoned me!”

“Yes and I’ve taken your class.” His jaw descended as an invitation to a left hook and I imagined my arm swinging across, clearing the air. But I simply added: “Zounds!”

He stomped off, into the backyard. Wesson walked at his side, picking up his mallet, muttering rapidly, being generally attendant, the squire that he was.

“Now, Miss Blue, for your dosage, arm or cheek?” Susette used her turn to flee, but unfortunately right into a small ditch that circled DeLathaway’s new weeping willow. Banks was really paying attention now, on the edge of his seat, rapt say. So I simply said, “Drink this then to me, dear, and sweets, don’t-you-know, to the you-know-who.” And I sent the potent orange right into the ditch as well, where it kissed blue for the last time.

“Ahhhh!” Banks screamed in anguish. Susette was pouting, luckily, and so his attentions were shifted to her, his wife being in the backyard. I escaped to the porch where DeLathaway kissed both cheeks and knighted me with my own mallet.

“This boy,” he said to Virgil Benson, who had been driven back out of the backyard as well, “is going to be as great a poet as he is a croquet player.”

“No doubt.” Virgil said quietly.

“Why do you realize he has already written a perfect sestina?” It was true. For some reason I had written one in one of my crossword moods, but it wasn’t perfect.

“Whiskey! We need more whiskey.”

“No, thanks DeLath,” I said. “I have to meet Riddel at the Black Heron and give him my last paper.” Riddel taught a philosophy course I was taking as allied studies, and had given me ten extra days on my paper which lay freshly typed on the seat of my green pickup even as I spoke. “And I have to be at work by twelve midnight.” I checked my watch: three o’clock. That meant it was eleven, my watch having been four hours fast for a year. Virgil Benson left, in order to get home in time for the late show, no doubt.

“Naw. N-O. You are the champion and deserve to be celebrated. Come on to the back.” On the way through the kitchen, a man smiled and handed me a drink. He was Leeland Rose, DeLathaway’s “help,” and I’ve yet to figure out if his smile indicated that he knew we’d both be dangerous convicts soon, playing baseball on another side of the bars; there are so many different smiles in this world.

“Haven’t you always thought it curious the way we say, ‘Fix a drink,’ as though it were broken,” Delathaway was saying, always the student of poetic idiom, raking the language for oddities. He looked at the ceiling and lit one of his famous cigars.

As he exhaled acres of smoke upward and stood studying it, I reeled into the backyard, surprising my vertebrae by missing three stairs. “Leeway, here,” I whispered, getting up, “Degree candidate in need of leeway.”

Wesson was now nodding wild affirmation into Professor Roachfield’s face as the latter offered his new theories on drama. I heard my earnest friend ask the professor, “You mean, if the playwright shows us the gun in Act One, he now has the responsibility
not
to fire it in Act Three? My God! that’s amazing!”

I passed them and joined Professor Keen, an intense comparative-lit teacher, who was sitting aside the main circle of wives. The wives were talking about the history department wives. As I sat down by Keen, I didn’t know what to expect, from him or myself. He was esoteric and intense, and I was still buzzing. Keen had the quality I’d noticed lately in Wesson of going around as though every day was the one before the Graduate Record Exam, asking everyone large questions and then looking at his watch. He had stopped me one day in the hall and asked, “In total, would you say Melville or Faulkner is the greatest American writer?”

I’d made him a permanent enemy by answering, “Faulkner by land, Melville by sea.” Tonight, he appeared a bit more mellow, having just published an article in
Overview
on how Spanish gothic novels caused American southern gothic novels, though I did sense an aura of antagonism because I had blitzed Royal’s chances on the hoops of praise; but, Keen asked instead, “Who’s your favorite writer, Boosinger?”

“Burroughs.”

“Really?” Keen looked up from the blade of grass he was splitting into tenths. “Why he’s quite difficult isn’t he? Obscure, arbitrary, wild?”

“Yes sir, quite difficult, but it pays off.”

“Hmmm. Well, do you think his latest work compares with the early stuff, say
Naked Lunch?
”

“Keep William S., Keen. I’m talking about the prolific Edgar Rice, and yes, I think
Tarzan and the Antmen
and
Tarzan Goes to Mars
compare quite favorably with say,
Tarzan
and
Tarzan and the Apes
.”

Keen was pretty obviously recoiling at what he recognized as my potential to do him bodily you know what, so I asked him, “Do you think French bad taste compares to American bad taste?” I left him there, frightened in the dark, rubbing his chin.

Darkness had fallen and the backporch beacon and my unsteady head made the whole scene seem a black and white film shot with a hand-held camera, the tripod gone to hell, and the cameraman away at the races. The circle of women had drawn closer and white light fringed their hair; white smoke rose from their Vantages, and their dark husbands knelt on the lawn between their chairs. I knew most of the wives and they were interesting taken one at a time, but “Faculty Wives” as a group and a concept are like a great heavyweight fighter: elusive, heavy, and repeatedly able to knock you down, if not out. All I could hear from the group was a few proper nouns and they were all names of women and cities in Europe: Daphne, Cleo, Doris, Dover, Marseilles, Naples. It was time, as it had been for three hours, for me to get out. A cool hand fell on my arm. It was Mrs. Banks. “I hear you won the croquet. Congratulations.”

“Thanks, Mrs. Banks.” I said, burning at how incredibly silly it sounded, especially to this woman whom I had enjoyed watching in her husband’s otherwise disappointing class. She thought, as she should I suppose, that Banks was a genius because he actually taught Shakespeare and had a few ideas of his own. Banks was one of the department’s youngest appointees, and that, along with the fact that he played handball with key department figures, made her complexion even rosier as she basked in the warming envy of greying wives. She must have known though, regardless of their relatively darling position, that she was married to a dolt. She had sat in on our class from time to time, sitting over one and up two seats from me, rubbing her cheerful little breasts against the edge of the desk, as I ran my hands along the edge of my own.

I asked her why she hadn’t played croquet and things began to grow rapidly, like those weeds that took over the world in
Day of the Triffids
, out of control. She came back and sat by me away from the central pow-wow, and I was telling her about my deep desires to drive race-cars and hunt with hounds and really ride the rodeo. She was fascinated, and full of Dubonnet, and leaned quite towards me, when Royal decided to test my bellicosity by pouring his drink on my head saying, “There! I’ll dilute thy vile poison, I’ll nullify thy sting.” He was really gone.

“The hell, Mister,” I said as I introduced his Roman nose to fist city. Then the imitable Wesson was on my back and I was yelling let go or I’d let flee a fart. Finally, after a very strenuous neck-wringing moment, I hurled him onto Keen, deciding not to rehabilitate either of them, and spat out: “Zane Grey, Edgar Rice, Gifford Pinchot, Edward Stratemeyer!” I didn’t remember who Pinchot was, but I think he was one of Teddy Roosevelt’s friends, so he’d be all right, and Stratemeyer wrote
Rover Boys Beat the Nazis
and a million et ceteras.

Then I was lost for several jungle seconds in DeLathaway’s landscape foliage, and Mrs. Banks—whom I was calling Adele by now—appeared and escorted me to a very stimulating form of safety behind the garage. For a minute I regretted being so drunk, and Adele was hurrying many things.

The next image that registered was a closeup of Banks himself, leering into the backseat of the Buick, where I found the vinous Adele pretending I was her desk. From where I sat I seemed to be cooperating. Banks was bellowing and hitting the top of the car with my croquet mallet which was doing quite the job on one of my five senses. DeLathaway’s goat was scared and had run to the end of the rope nearly throttling itself, crying a high goat bleat in time with Bank’s insane drumming. This is the end of the world, I thought, bangs
and
whimpers, and leaving Adele, nipples atwitter, I exited the automobile, cut the goat’s tether, and as it ran wild circles eating at the rest of the rope, I boarded my green pickup. Banquo was close behind, playing a rampant imagined game of polo with my head. I peeled out. Poor Banks, I thought, smelling his wife on my hands, his sons will be kings.

The Black Heron will remain for many years a sociologist’s Disneyland. For years it had been a small bar, The Lilac Playroom, a rendezvous for passed-over whores, spent’ jockeys, and deathbound vagrants. Then, in my sophomore year, when the Old Black Heron located a block up the street was torn down to make a parking lot of Ashley-Wasatch Industries (a budding branch of the newly formed Indian mafia), the Black Heron bought out The Lilac Playroom, and all the bright, rosy, saddle-shoed sophomores started dropping in. The old crowd stayed. So on any given night there they were, intellectuals all, creating in their curious merger an atmosphere redolent of Panama and Tivoli Reds, sequins and salvation armed Brooks Brothers, that was the exact chemistry necessary to spawn all the Alice Coopers this world needs. There was also, as I have hinted, a third group: hungry-looking men and women in short-sleeve white shirts carrying notebooks. Sociologists. That is, “degree candidates in the turbid, glacial world of sociology,” without whose patronage the still purple Black Heron would have certainly floundered, as they were the heaviest drinkers.