“No problem, buddy.”
“How nice. Good heavens. How truly eerie, seeing all this. The trees are just barely hinting at beginning to turn, see? You can see it in some more than in others. Look there, for instance.”
“Pretty, all right.”
“Have you ever been here?”
“I’ve been to Mount Holyoke. I went there once, when Clarice was there.”
“Did you find it pretty?”
“It was March, but it was pretty. The campus was really pretty.”
“I’ve always liked Mount Holyoke, in a general sort of way.”
“What does that mean?”
“God, I really must pee, Lenore.”
“You can pee in LaVache’s room.”
“….”
“Oh, God, no! Rick, those shoes, still.”
“Pardon?”
“Those shoes. See those shoes, on those people? The boat shoes? With the leather shoe and white plastic sole?”
“Well, yes.”
“See those two girls and that guy? God, everybody’s still wearing them out here. Boy do I hate those shoes.”
“They, umm, seem all right to me. They seem harmless enough.”
“I have what I’m sure is this totally irrational hatred for those shoes. I think a big reason is that everyone at school wore them with no socks.”
“….”
“Which meant that they weren’t just wearing sneakers without socks, which would have been plenty repulsive enough, they were wearing nonsneakers without socks. Which is just incredibly…”
“Unhygienic?”
“Make fun if you want, smart guy. You’re the one who’s dumb if you pay Dr. Jay all that money and then don’t even listen to him. It’s not just that it’s unhygienic, it’s downright sick. It stinks. At school, I can remember, I’d be sitting in my carrel, in the library, doing homework or something, minding my own business, and somebody would sit down in the next carrel, with those shoes, and then they’d take them off, and I’d all of a sudden be smelling somebody else’s feet.”
“….”
“Which did not smell good, let me tell you, from constantly being in shoes without socks. I mean I really think foot-smell should be a private thing, don’t you?”
“….”
“What are you grinning at? Are those ridiculous feelings? Does that make no sense at all?”
“Lenore, it makes perfect sense. It’s just that I’d never given the matter that much thought. Never much thought to the… socio-ethics of foot-smell.”
“Now I can tell you’re being sarcastic.”
“You completely misread me.”
“….”
“Is that why you always wear two pairs of socks? Under constant and invariable sneakers?”
“Partly. Partly because it’s comfortable, too.”
“Stone Dorm, pal.”
“Which one of these is Stone?”
“The one we’re right in front of, pal.”
“I see…. Lord am I stiff.”
“You want to just bolt right in and pee?”
“….”
“Rick?”
“I rather think not, now that the moment has arrived.”
“What does that mean? You did nothing but talk pee, in the car.”
“Have you the bags?”
“You know perfectly well they’re in the trunk.”
“The question really meant, do you suppose you could manage getting them inside yourself, making absolutely sure to take my bag in, too, with my underwear and toothbrush and Old Spice and all essentials?”
“I suppose so, but I don’t get it.”
“Meter’s still running, ace.”
“I think with your permission I will simply leave you, here, for a bit. I feel emotions and feelings washing over me that are perhaps best confronted alone.”
“What?”
“I’m going to go wander among the blasted crags of memory, for a while.”
“Pardon me?”
“I’m going to go take a look around.”
“Oh. Well, OK.”
“Till later, then.”
“You want to just come back here and meet me? We can check in at Howard Johnson’s at five and then go to dinner?”
“Fine. Goodbye.”
“It’s room 101, remember.”
“Righto. See you soon.”
“Are you OK?”
“Yes. Goodbye. Thank you ever so much, driver.”
“….”
“Can you please help me with the bags?”
“I guess so, lady. What’s with him?”
“He gets this way, sometimes, when he has to go to the bathroom.”
/f/
6 September
The sudden strength with which the desire to go see whether the initials I’d carved so long ago in the wood of the stall in the men’s room of the Art Building were still there, the sudden and unexpected and overwhelming strength with which these feelings had washed over me, there at the dormitory, with Lenore, was a frightening thing. As I joined the serpentine line of students walking up the ungentle hill to the Art and Science Buildings, all of us falling into the vaguely floppy, seal-like gait of the hurried hill-climber, most of us seals apparently late for class, one of us late for an appointment with a tiny ocean of his own past, stretching away and down beside the carved dock of his childhood, an ocean into which this particular seal was going to pour a strong (hopefully unitary) stream of his own presence, to prove that he still is, and so was — that is, provided of course the bathroom and toilet and stall were still there — as I joined the line of seals in short pants and loose short-sleeved shirts and boat shoes and backpacks, and as I felt the fear that accompanied and was in a way caused by the intensity of the wash of feelings and desires and so on that accompanied even the thought of a silly men’s room in a silly building at a silly college where a sad silly boy had spent four years twenty years ago, as I felt all these things, there occurred to me a fact which I think now as I sit up in bed in our motel room, writing, the television softly on, the sharp-haired object of my adoration and absolute center of my entire existence asleep and snoring softly in the bed beside me, a fact which I think now is undeniably true, the truth being that Amherst College in the 1960’s was for me a devourer of the emotional middle, a maker of psychic canyons, a whacker of the pendulum of Mood with the paddle of Immoderation.
That is, it occurs to me now in force that in college things were never, not ever, at no single point, simply all right. Things were never just OK. I was never just getting by. Never. I can remember I was always horribly afraid. Or, if not horribly afraid, horribly angry. I was always desperately tense. Or, if not tense, then in an odd hot euphoria that made me walk with the water-jointed jaunt of the person who truly does not give a shit one way or the other. I was always either so unreasonably and pointlessly happy that no one place could seem to contain me, or so melancholy, so sick and silly with sadness that there was no place I could stomach the thought of entering. I hated it here. And I have never been as happy as when I was here. And these two things together confront me with the beak and claws of the True.
One of the trees at the top of the hill, which I stopped to look at as I played with my hat and recovered from the climb, the line of students forking past either side of me and disappearing into buildings to the sound of bells, one of the trees was just beginning to bum, a bit, with color, a flush of hesitant red suffusing the outline of the tree against the southerly sun, the tree’s blood draining out of those leaves most distant from the heart first; and I looked at the flush of crinkled red crowning a body of soft green, with the sunlight winking through the branches as they moved and creaked in the breeze, until I was drawn away by the twin urges to remember and to pee.