But, say, if Fleece wanted to visit Silas — an unlikely wish — he would come up his stairs, walk to the right three feet, in full view of me if I happened to be in, to get the stairs to Silas’s room. I could see Silas descend, similarly, and go to his right to catch the stairs to Fleece’s room, which had a back door giving onto more black iron stairs that put you in the back yard. This is the route, these iron steps, we all used coming to and going away from our quarters.
The stairs coming through my room, I was fixed worse than anybody. I awoke on my bed and had to observe Silas escort his drunk hags up to his room. They were always little women, and I saw in the moonlight that they weren’t even as good as the roaches I’d been with. I think they must’ve been nurses and beauticians. We were near the nursing school and the beauty college. It was well known that the girls from these institutions would tear off their pants for anybody who gave off a hint of making ten thousand dollars a year. Silas’s bed walked all over his room. I thought of the tiny little mermaid he’d taken up there. Almost always, you would hear the girl weeping; hear her bare feet sliding. The ceiling was thin and the stairway was completely open. Silas would speak out, broad and jolly. What he liked best, I gathered, was for little girls to break into tears when he undressed. He would call them to sit on his lap, they would do this — I guess — and he would lecture them about how he would never force himself on them — I heard one of these talks — because he didn’t want to soil their plans to marry a smaller fellow with high principles. She must understand that she was only a naked pygmy on his lap, and that the kisses he was giving her were only for good luck.
Then they would come down fully dressed, Silas handling her with one wrist.
Silas read certain magazines and sent away for certain uncensored underwear and a bottle of red oil. He called me up to his room and explained this. The room was so bright you felt heat. He had two sunlamps on; the curtains were tied back so anybody on Titpea could see him. He wore this bikini which amounted to two strips of leather attached to a bandage covering his genitals; the idea was a sling made into a jockstrap. He talked, at ease, sitting on his bed, as if he had on nothing unusual.
“This is me. I can’t change it. It hurts me to put on a shirt It hurts my arms. It hurts me to wear pants, it binds me. And oh God, shoes. Nothing fits me. When I put on socks, it’s like, my feet, somebody’s twisting a tourniquet on them.”
“Fleece got in trouble wearing his underwear in his garage,” I said. I asked him if I ought to call Fleece up to talk it over with him. Yes, yes, Silas wanted to hear what Fleece had to say. I yelled down. Fleece wasn’t there. I’d told him he could use my car, and he was out with it now.
“I have to wear tennis shoes,” Silas was explaining, “and they’re bad enough, but if I wore leather shoes, they would strangle me. They’d kill me.”
14 / Catherine
It was nice to be in the double bed all to myself, nobody else in the room. I read several books in this bed that I would never have read in the dorm: Billy Budd, Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, The Sun Also Rises, and The Great Gatsby, all of them pleasures which inflated me and upon which, on the exams, I could write for hours. I was taking a minor in English and was making A, no sweat, in the courses where these books were assigned.
One morning Fleece was coming up and Silas was going down. I was too sleepy to get what they said to each other. But I know the word-knives flew and the low blows of the tongue were traded.
When I was fully awake, Fleece was pulling out the drawers of my chest. He was looking for the gun he’d given to me. He said, One night when Silas was asleep, he would go up and shoot him through the head. I told him that would be cowardly. He said, No, it would be beautiful. He would come down and turn the gun over to me. I would make a citizen’s arrest on him. I didn’t know then that Bet had agreed to go out with Silas that night, on the terms that he would quit calling her.
Next day it was bright gray in the room. The windows were small octagonal portholes, and you had to turn on the bare overhead light to see anything. I hadn’t smoked for three days. When I woke up, I was ready to meet the classes I’d missed and attack them with the facts I’d memorized. One look at my twelve pages of histology and I knew it cold. I felt so healthy I could learn anything. I could swallow the world.
But then they showed me love, the love from afar that hurts the worst. Silas and I went to “Oklahoma!” and sat beside Fleece and Bet, who were holding hands. We all knew that Whitfield Peter’s niece was in the musical. I bought a coat for the occasion, a wild red madras plaid. I looked around for Peter in the audience. He didn’t seem to be there. I carried the little automatic in my coat pocket.
The student orchestra took the overture surprisingly well. I could’ve done better on the first trumpet part, but you can’t go through life adding up regrets like that. My old friend Livace was conducting, and Zak, the drama teacher, had coached the cast. Livace was waving the baton with big romance, his black tuxedoed back to us, and you saw he was conducting nobody but himself, saw he had forgotten the orchestra and was dwelling on his own histrionics. I thought of shooting him in the back to get him in line. Because he was what was wrong with the musical. He was not one to follow the singers on stage. They followed him, they sang to him. The singers kept their eyes glued to his baton.
Whitfield Peter’s niece was a minor dancer and chorus member. She was mama’s little darling. That’s how she looked. She was lithe and restlessly shy. Her hair was brown, pinched back, but strands fell over her ears in the heat of the dance. Just pretty enough to disturb you after a third look, and by then you wanted to take her to your chest and have her breathe on it. She was the one you came home to. She was your helpmate. I fell for her before I was certain who she was. You could tell she loved being in the musical. I felt sorry for her. The musical was such a wreck. It lunged on, a robot dream above the heads of the orchestra; people appeared and fled like costumed metronomes. Good old Livace.
Fleece passed a program down. He had underlined her name in the cast. Catherine Marie Wrag. She would be anxious to have her last name changed. Fleece had encircled Catherine. Yes. I’d read it often enough in the letters. His estranged wife. My stomach went cold. But her last name was not Lepoyster. I still loved her purely. My imagination was going crazy, but I hung on to my love for her. She held herself like she was accomplished in innocent talents that the musical was not making plain.
“Wouldn’t you love to tie that nice brown-headed piece across a barrel and work the old will?” Silas whispered in my ear during a scene that had her out front.
“No. Leave her alone,” I said.
When “Oklahoma!” was over we kept seated and let the crowd get out. A photographer was popping away at the cast. He told Catherine to move a little closer. I was even jealous of him. Watch your hands yanking her, you, you jaded bag.
Catherine ran off into the wings, and then down the aisle came her uncle. Peter had been waiting for her. He was a young pink fifty now. His hair seemed to have been waved and veneered by professional aid. And his profile — a matured fruity cupiedoll. I almost lost my supper when I saw him.