He half-smiled ironically. “I imagine you’re right.” He sat hunched over the coffee table, drinking coffee, smoking, gazing at the floor.
She got up and went to him, sat on the couch beside him, touched his shoulder. “Look, Victor, I’m not
that
angry.”
He suffered her touch. “Yeah.”
“What is it? You act as if you’re angry with
me
.”
He lifted his head, sighed, leaned back against the sofa, losing her hand as he moved. She replaced it in her lap. She watched him.
“I don’t know,” he sighed, “everything seems wrong, suddenly.”
Her heart stopped. Her mad scene
had
done damage.
“
I
seem wrong,” he concluded, miserably.
Her eyes spurted to life. “Have you ever seemed wrong—to yourself—before?”
“Once. Just once. But it was a long once. Or no, maybe twice.”
“Want to tell me?”
“No. Yes. Both.” He never looked at her. She rose and went into the kitchen. She made more coffee, some toast, and brought it out on a tray, with butter and cheese, and set it down on the coffee table before him. He was still smoking.
“Preparing for a long siege, huh?” he said, giving her his first full smile of the day.
“I think you’ve earned one,” she smiled back, smeared cheese on toast, and returned to her rocker.
He buttered some toast, poured fresh coffee into his cup, lighted another cigarette. “The thing is, I don’t know how I ended as I did. I don’t think I started that way. It’s as though I was meant to live on a branch line, but someplace or other got switched to the main line, and have been happily blindly shuttling between New York and Washington ever since. And not remembering….”
He spoke with his eyes firmly fixed on a dark spot across the wall, never looking at her.
“I remember being fifteen or sixteen. I remember one day in particular, it was in the summer after my sophomore year of high school….”
Long, thin, too thin, everybody said. Aunt Gladys laughed when he tripped—as he invariably did—on the little step up to her porch, and came flying through the porch door headfirst, arms outstretched.
“A skeleton with wings!” she’d announce, and laugh, and so would everybody else. After a while, he laughed too. It was better than blushing.
His long, thin, too thin body sprawled in the hammock, legs dangling out. Around him were the green hills of Ohio, overlooking a valley. Green for miles. Beautiful day, baby-blue sky of the Middle West, puff-ball clouds, warm sun, shady tree, green grass, garden in bloom. He lay there trying to think of one good thing. He couldn’t. He hated this book, it was ridiculous. The ice in his lemonade was all melted. And then he felt a tingling on his chin, oh, no, oh, no, and put his finger up and it was, shit! it was a whole cluster.
“Don’t pick at them, it only makes them worse,” Mother said.
How could things be any worse? Everything was against him. The book slid from his lap and fell to the grass, knocking over the lemonade, which then trickled into the pages of the book. Shit! But he let it lie. Shitty book, anyway. Shakespeare,
Antony and Cleopatra.
Giant bestriding the world, winning battles with his own sword, not with bombs and airplanes and tanks, but with his own hand and arm, his own sword. He’d go on forced marches, days and days of marching, sleeping on the ground. When there was no water, he could drink horses’ urine. He was the greatest soldier in the world, like Alexander in his time. The way Nelson had been the greatest sailor in the world. These people were real, not fake, like Superman or Batman. No one had made them up. People like this had really lived on the earth once. And women fell madly in love with them, Cleopatra, Emma Hamilton, the great beauties, they loved these heroes, they lived for them.
And here he was, Victor Morrissey, fifteen and a half, skinny and with pimples. He was as handy with a sword as with a battle-ax. They didn’t even have a fencing team in their lousy hick high school. He closed his eyes and pictured himself in a tight fencing outfit, with a body like Victor Mature’s, dancing elegantly across a polished floor thrusting, parrying, crying “Point!” In the small group of courtiers sitting in a circle was Dorita Haas with her black eyes and long black hair, watching him. She was wearing a rose in her hair and when he’d won the match and was bowing to the applause, she tossed the rose to him. He bent and picked it up, bowed to her, then walked off proudly, like a god, impervious. Elegant all the way through: no one could see what he felt. Maybe he wouldn’t feel at all. Maybe he’d be like Clark Gable, who always looked at women as if he knew what color their underwear was, and exactly how they liked to be … touched. He
owned
them, he didn’t have to be frightened of them. His eyes said so.
At school, Victor looked at Dorita only sidelong, when she wasn’t looking his way.
No, there wasn’t a single good thing. There were hamburgers, but so low was he, he couldn’t even muster the energy to go indoors and cook himself a hamburger. He kept repeating to himself Antony’s lines: A Roman by a Roman nobly vanquished. That’s what he ought to do: kill himself. Leave a noble note condemning the tainted things of this world. Do it like Brutus, the noblest Roman of them all. Of course, he didn’t own a sword. Or he could run away and join the merchant marine. The army would never believe he was eighteen, he knew that, but he’d heard the merchant marine wasn’t so fussy, they took anybody.
There just wasn’t any place for him in this jerkwater town. His father loved it here, his mother too, but they had small minds, that was clear. There were the jerky guys who spent their time outside of school—when they bothered to go to school—in roadhouses, drinking 3.2 beer, and conning some older guy to buy them a pint of bourbon every once in a while. And all they talked about was drinking and souped-up cars, and baseball, and broads and tits and asses, and they were stupid and boring. They all hung out with the town pumps and weren’t even ashamed even though there were ten or twelve of them and only three or four girls. They’d meet the girls in the roadhouses and buy them a pitcher of beer, and the girls would get up and dance the polka with each other on the creaky wooden floor, while the guys sat there acting as if they were big-time operators, but watching the girls out of the corners of their eyes.
There was a small group of intellectuals, most of them seniors, a couple of juniors. They’d let him sit around with them a few times last year, and sometimes it was kind of interesting, they talked about books and poetry and it was because of them that he’d read
Man’s Fate
, by Andre Malraux, and
Darkness at Noon
, by Arthur Koestler, and they were pretty good books, but they intimidated him. The guys. Because they seemed as if they knew everything, and although he, Victor, was perfectly aware that they could not possibly know everything, they
acted
as if they did, and somehow or other, that was the same as if they really did. And it wasn’t just a matter of knowing everything, it was knowing where to
put
everything. Because it was clear that somewhere, somewhere far more arcane and rarefied than the public library, there was a master schedule listing the proper places of things. And some people knew it, and most did not, and those who did knew the rest did not, and it made them scornful. Victor would like to know enough to be scornful. Even his mother could trip him up, she read so much. But he’d bet his mother didn’t know that Proust was heads and shoulders above John Steinbeck. Maybe his mother had never even read Proust. He, himself, had to admit that he hadn’t. In fact, he wasn’t even sure what the guy had written except something about a swan. But Proust, anyway, was good, and John Steinbeck was not, although Victor had read
Cannery Row
and loved it, liked it even better than
Man’s Fate.
But he’d never say that with the intellectual guys. He’d learned his lesson, he’d blurted out one time that he liked Tchaikovsky, and there was a dead silence in the room. Then Leonard Masari said that no composer after Brahms was to be taken seriously, and the others agreed, and since Victor wasn’t sure if Tchaikovsky came after or before, but gathered from the climate that it was after, he just shut up. Victor’s fondness for George Orwell had endeared him to one of them, Bill Colt, but he was sort of tough anyway, not like the others, he wanted to become a newspaper reporter and was the editor of the school paper, and the others laughed and said it was all very well for the Rude Colt, as they called him, but Victor would do better to spend his time reading Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Williams, and above all, Wallace Stevens. One of them had given him a book with some poems in it by this guy Stevens, and marked one of them, something about some guy who was king of ice cream or something like that and Victor couldn’t make head nor tail of it. He sort of stopped hanging around those guys.
Colt was all right, even though he had to act so tough all the time, walking around in the corridors with a butt hanging out of the corner of his mouth and the teachers not even making a fuss about it, just saying, Okay, Bill, douse it, but he’d just graduated and was in the army now.
Then there were the good boys. Nobody called them that, but that’s how everybody thought of them. And they were lower than low. Victor had spent considerable time thinking about this. Because not too many people liked the jerky, wild guys, but the jerky guys thought they were hot shit and walked around like they were and so people might curl a lip when they talked about one of them, but the guys had a certain status all their own, especially the two who owned motorcycles. It was as if they’d made their own world and inside it they were kings, and other people sort of accepted that. And the same was true of the intellectual guys. Everybody dumped on them, I mean people really disliked them, but they were so above everything that it never touched them, and that fact meant that other people, no matter how they felt, treated them with a kind of respect. And of course everybody adored the athletes.
But nobody looked with respect on the good boys, not even the good boys themselves.
Most of them got good grades, but weren’t geniuses, like the intellectual guys. And they didn’t smoke, and most of them didn’t go out with girls, and they went to church with their families on Sundays, and did what they were told. There was Bob Evans, who was going to be a missionary to China like his parents before him, and who was pink and white and sweet and kindly, and went out doing surveys to find out how many black people—called colored, then—were living in the county, and what their living conditions were. There were only twenty-three, but Bob got an A on his paper. There was pudgy little Joe Santorro, who giggled tike a frog, and whom everybody liked because they could laugh at him. And other, less memorable, pale good boys who did moderately well in school and nothing at all with girls. These were the boys Victor was most at home with, but they were a bit too pious for him, and besides, he refused, absolutely refused to hang out with them, it was just too
low.
Finally, there were the athletes. Some of these were also good boys, and one was even a jerk, but they comprised a separate group and it was this group that Victor aspired to. But no matter how he tried, he could not be a good athlete. He was okay, he had a batting average respectable enough to be mentioned in public, and he did not shame his team when he was sent in as end, second string, of course. But he was too skinny, too slight to be really good. His mother said his body had not grown up yet, and just wait, he’d be great in time. But it would be too late, he knew. He was best at basketball, but even there he didn’t shine. Hanging around with the athletes, he felt second-rate, and felt, moreover that they treated him that way.
So he was mostly alone. He would have liked a guy he could be close to, tell things to, ask questions of. He wondered if other guys felt the things he felt. They didn’t talk as if they did. So neither did he. He kept his lips shut and laughed at the jokes. He had laughed in eighth grade when he sometimes didn’t know what was funny, but by now even if he did not know what was funny, he knew what was a joke. They were always the same.
And mostly they were about girls. And alone as he was, he thought about girls. You never had to worry about girls looking down on you, like the athletes or the intellectual guys, because girls always looked up to guys. The problem was, he was even intimidated by the
girls!
So there he was, lying in the hammock, unable to think of one good thing.
That morning, he’d gone to the lake to swim with a bunch of guys (mostly good guys). He always felt a little superior with them, since he also could be said to hang out with the athletes and the intellectuals (after all, no one else knew what he felt). But this day, the good guys had pulled one on him. There was a blanket of girls sitting next to them, and little by little, the guys got to talking to them. Only Victor and a small sharp-nosed boy named Heinz were too shy to join in. Eventually the guys were all on the girls’ blanket, all except Victor and Heinz, who then looked at each other and decided to go home. They got up and Victor with bored bravado said he had a date, and Heinz glanced at him and Victor could see Heinz wasn’t sure if it was true or if Victor was putting on an act, and so Victor looked over the girls on the other blanket with a look of scorn, as if they were dogs beneath his consideration, and then walked off, Heinz in his trail. They walked the three miles back to town not speaking, not even looking at each other. Victor would have liked to say something to Heinz, to ask if Heinz maybe felt the things he did, but he couldn’t, after his bravado act, he had to keep the act up. He acted superior, as he had seen others do, and that shut Heinz up.
(Heinz, in later life, became an astrophysicist and quite famous. Despite the devastating fact that his height never went above his sixteen-year-old five-foot-two, he became the most acclaimed graduate of Cardon High.)
And Victor slunk home hating himself, hating the world, hating above all the new cluster of pimples erupting on his chin. And drank lemonade (iceless and now spilled) and read
Antony and Cleopatra
(stupid) and lay in the hammock concluding that the entire universe was a huge joke aimed at him.