“Let’s kick away,” I whispered. “We’ll drive in a roundabout way to the house party.”
There was a house party we were invited to, in a house built over a big lake, a modern house of open-face brick and cedar rafters owned by the father of one of the class-mates. The mother was an alcoholic, and it was rather sad, when we got there, to see her coddling the school drunk beside the fireplace and sympathizing with how sick he felt, while she reached for her own bottomless glass on the hearth and stroked the young drunk’s head in her lap. I looked away before things got too intimate and they began throwing up on each other.
Some college bucks were in the house, two old grads from Dream of Pines and a couple of others from L.S.U. and Tulane, all of them sold on themselves, looking at the ceiling or the baseboards and wearing those little titty-pins with chains on their sweaters as fraternity men are wont to do. Their penny loafers and their cultivated slouches; hair raked aside violently into a part; little fingers curled around the little fingers of their girls, college men enjoying their own smirks of careless possession. Their dates were girls who had not gone unnoticed by me during the last few years. They were girls who had been pretty so long they looked tired of it. Ah, the perfect medium-sized bosoms, the thin necks, the burning hair (they were wearing it short, then), the graceful legs, which demanded your hands around them and the long caress, from knee to ankle, like milking a cow. They weren’t for this boy — not yet. Rock-and-roll was pounding out of a speaker by the hearth — Ray Charles on “What’d I Say” and “Sticks and Stones”—a speaker as big as a giant Negro’s mouth. Couples slogged on the rug, with arms going up in the dim hearthlight. Over to the right, in a lighted dining room, the drabs and roaches were sitting in foursomes at tables playing bridge; this was the gang not too much on looks but high on spark, talent, or personality. This house party wasn’t for every senior at Dream of Pines. I understood it was for people who had become conspicuous in any conceivable way: homecoming queen to second-place winner in the state hundred-yard dash. I suppose there were forty of us there. Earl and Bob, my buddies, didn’t make it. Tonnie Ray Reese, of course, did. She looked around bug-eyed at all the celebrities under this single roof.
We’d just driven over thirty miles on gravel roads and had knocked off a pint of vodka with Seven-Up and smoked as many cigarettes as we could get in our mouths. (I myself was carrying three different brands in my coat at the time.) Also, we’d gone to work against each other’s mouths for about an hour, and I had a rosy-tasting tobacco and alcohol spit rolling around in my throat. Tonnie Ray went off to change into suitable party wear. I made my way casually toward the head, and passed Ollie Sink’s niece in the hall. She noticed me, stopped, and gave me a smile of withering sweetness. This girl, whose nickname was Lala, had tiny bones and a sort of emaciated prettiness that grabbed you only if you thought on it a while. The big brown eyes were there, all right, along with the small lips, which always seemed to have a glint of juice on them. She stepped like a baby stork, and wore girlish-ritzy clothes. Her family was rich, and yet she was shy and always seemed to be apologizing to you with those big eyes. I imagined that her hard little brassiere was stuffed with hundred-dollar bills. She was dressed in a pants and sweater outfit of creamy pink. I was high enough at the moment to think I loved her and had always loved her, only her. But I couldn’t think of anything to say. So I just ran back and blocked her and looked at her sincerely.
“Oh, Harriman,” she said timidly, looking down with closed eyes. “Tonnie Ray looks so nice tonight!”
Those days I was wearing an affected serious-musician’s hairdo, with long lanks and a part almost in the middle. I thought this would really sink Lala, and was slaughtered by what she said. Yeah, Tonnie Ray. Lala passed by and didn’t feel my hand as I reached to her back in agony and swept my fingers down the soft fuzz of her sweater. I thought of Tonnie Ray and went to take a leak.
I was thinking wistfully of Lala Sink and having that minor orgasm of urination, when I felt somebody’s breath on my bare backside.
I turned and saw one of the college honchos standing behind me. He held a blown-out match in one hand and was sucking a cigarette.
“Hey! Watch where your breath goes,” I complained.
“Sorry, buddy. This is a crowded head.”
I recognized him as the Tulane romeo I’d seen playing little fingers with this magnificent natural-blond gal from Dream of Pines. They were standing against the sliding glass door, on which the hearth fire and mantle were reflecting, and they did indeed look like an ideal couple in a ski-lodge plate from National Geographic. He had a dark, slightly skeptical handsome face and the girl was like pale butter molded lovely, and the way she was lounging toward him, his slouching power in his fern-green windbreaker, the chain of his fraternity pin lobbing back and forth brilliantly, you imagined he was the one who had molded her. I hated him with a hate that came deep, out of my dreams. And I had been drinking, of course. But I pulled it off rather well, I think.
“You’re a lucky dog, brother.”
“Why … what … wh …?” he wanted to know.
“Come on. You know what I mean. Your girlfriend. Blond. Personality. She’s simply tremendous. You couldn’t do any better if you tried.”
“Thanks. Thank you very much.”
“Listen. I know. And Earl and Bob. We’ve all gotten it from Sherry, and I mean, she can put it to you. She can really throw the junk at you. Man! She’ll grind you out of the backseat of a car. (I whistled and wagged my head dazedly.) Uuuummph!”
He collapsed as much as a man can and still stand up. His face broke and fell into a saggy frown, as he watched me zip up — an action I made a lot of to-do about, realizing that it gave a sort of authenticity to everything I’d told him. At this point I was a dramatic genius, having acted in the senior play, etc. I left the head; the Tulane romeo was by the commode shredding like a cigar butt you might see in a toilet.
Tonnie Ray was in one of the bedrooms chattering away with another roach. She was still in her evening gown. The fact was that she was prettier in that gown than she’d ever been before, and maybe knew she’d never be that pretty again and was hesitant to get out of it. I called to her and said let’s go out to the pool. She said wait a minute, and I said come on, now. Tee hee, I was such a brute, she giggled to the other roach, also still vainly wearing her evening gown. This other girl had on one of those huge, stiff bell-like contraptions and looked like a pumpkin seed stuck up in a bowl of sugar. I made off with the intention of deserting Tonnie Ray and her sickening friend. Tonnie Ray swept out in the hall, however, and clamped on my arm with her swimming suit in hand. She managed to do a lot of winks and poses to the society we passed in the kitchen. The old man parent of the house was trying, with the help of two boys in dinner jackets, to cram a horrid, bloody pig corpse into the rotisserie of his electric range. Everybody had to eat a slab burned to char outside and completely raw inside that morning at the house party breakfast.
The pool was in the back yard. It was late May and still cool, but there were a few body-conscious football players thrashing in the water yelling for their dates to jump in. I dragged Tonnie Ray into the bathhouse, a building made of two separated rooms with V-shape roofs and curtains inside hanging from a rod which went across the middle of the V. The view from inside gave you a triangle of glass above curtains at two ends, three tables in a concrete room like a teepee, and a brownish single light bulb hanging on a frayed old-timey wire of pleated yellow and black. We were alone.