“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You mean she didn’t blow you? You are unique.”
Angrily, I said, “I still don’t know what you’re referring to.”
“To Olivia Hutton.”
Fury swiftly mounted in me, the very fury that I’d felt toward Elwyn when he called Olivia a cunt. “Now why do you say that about Olivia Hutton?”
“Because blowjobs are at a premium in north-central Ohio. News of Olivia has traveled fast. Don’t look so puzzled.”
“I don’t believe this.”
“You should. Miss Hutton is a bit of a nutcase.”
“Now why do you say that? I took her out.”
“So did I.”
That stunned me. I jumped up from the bench and, in a dizzying state of confusion about what there was (or wasn’t) in me that made relations with others so wretchedly disappointing, fled Sonny Cottler and sped off to my government class, and the last words of his I heard were “Withdraw ‘nutcase.’ Okay? Let’s say she’s the kind of oddball who’s exceptionally good at sex, and it’s a function of being disturbed — all right? Marcus? Marc?”
The vomiting resumed that night, accompanied by stabbing stomach pain and diarrhea, and when finally I realized I was ill because of something other than my interview with Dean Caudwell, I made my way through the dawn light to the Student Health Office, where before I could even be interviewed by the on-duty nurse, I had to make a run for the toilet. I was then given a cot to lie down on, at seven I was examined by the college doctor, by eight I was in an ambulance bound for the community hospital twenty-five miles away, and by noon my appendix had been removed.
My first visitor was Olivia. She came the next day, having learned of my operation in history class the previous afternoon. She rapped on the half-open door to my room, arriving only seconds after I had got off the telephone with my parents, who had been contacted by Dean Caudwell after it was determined at the hospital that I needed emergency surgery. “Thank God you had the sense to go to the doctor,” my father said, “and they caught it in time. Thank God nothing terrible happened.” “Dad, it was my appendix. They took out my appendix. That’s all that happened.” “But suppose they hadn’t diagnosed it.” “But they did. Everything went perfectly. I’ll be out of the hospital in four or five days.” “You had an emergency appendectomy. You understand what an emergency is?” “But the emergency’s over. There’s no need for any more worrying.” “There’s plenty of need for worrying when it comes to you.”
Here my father had to pause because of his hacking cough. It sounded worse than ever. When he was able to resume speaking, he asked, “Why are they letting you out so soon?” “Four or five days is normal. There’s no need for me to be hospitalized longer.” “I’m going to take the train out there after they discharge you. I’m shutting the store and I’m coming out there.” “Don’t, Dad. Don’t talk that way. I appreciate the offer, but I’ll be fine in the dorm.” “Who will look after you in the dorm? You should recuperate in your house, where you belong. I don’t understand why the college doesn’t insist on this. How can you recuperate away from your home with nobody looking after you?” “But I’m up and walking already. I’m fine already.” “How far is the hospital from the college?” I was tempted to say “Seventeen thousand miles,” but he was coughing too painfully for me to be satirizing him. “Less than half an hour by ambulance,” I said. “It’s an excellent hospital.” “There’s no hospital there in Winesburg itself? Am I understanding you correctly?” “Dad, put Mother on. This isn’t helping me any. And it isn’t helping you. You sound awful.” “I sound awful? You’re the one in a hospital hundreds of miles away from home.” “Please let me talk to Mother.” When my mother came on, I told her to do something to contain him or next I’d transfer to the University of the North Pole, where there were no phones, hospitals, or doctors, just polar bears who stalk the ice floes where the undergraduates, naked in subzero temperatures—“Marcus, that’s enough. I’m coming to see you.” “But you don’t have to come — neither of you has to come. It was an easy operation, it’s over, and I’m fine.” Whispering, she said, “I know that. But your father will not let up. I’m leaving here on the Saturday night train. Otherwise nobody in this house will sleep ever again.”
Olivia. I hung up from speaking to my mother and there she was. In her arms she had a bouquet of flowers. She carried them over to where I lay propped up in the bed.
“It’s no fun being in a hospital alone,” she said. “I brought these to keep you company.”
“It was worth the appendicitis,” I replied.
“I doubt it,” she said. “Were you very ill?”
“For less than a day. The best part came in Dean Caudwell’s office. He called me in to grill me about changing my dorm room and I puked on his trophies. Then you turn up. It’s been a great case of appendicitis all around.”
“Let me get a vase for these.”
“What are they?”
“You don’t know?” she said, holding the bouquet to my nose.
“I know concrete. I know asphalt. I don’t know flowers.”
“They’re called roses, dear.”
When she came back into the room, she’d taken the roses out of their paper wrapping and arranged them in a glass vase half filled with water.
“Where will you be able to see them best?” she asked me, looking around the room, which, though small, was still larger and certainly brighter than the one I occupied in Neil Hall. At Neil Hall there was only a small dormer window up in the eaves, while here two good-sized windows looked out onto a well-tended lawn where somebody was trailing a rake along the ground, gathering the fallen leaves into a heap to burn. It was Friday, October 26, 1951. The Korean War was one year, four months, and one day old.
“I see them best,” I said, “in your two hands. I see them best with you standing there. Just stay like that and let me look at you and your roses. That’s what I came for.” Yet by saying “hands,” I caused myself to remember what Sonny Cottler had said about her, and again the fury rose in me, directed at both Cottler and Olivia. But so too did my penis rise.
“What are they giving you to eat?” she asked.
“Jell-O and ginger ale. Tomorrow they begin with the snails.”
“You seem very chipper.”
She was so beautiful! How could she blow Sonny Cottler? But then how could she blow me? If he took her out only once, then she would have blown him on the first date too. Too, the torment of that “too”!
“Look,” I said, and pulled back the sheets.
Demurely, she lowered her lashes. “What happens, my master, should someone walk in?”
I couldn’t believe that’s what she had said, but then I couldn’t believe what I had just done. Was it she who emboldened me, or I who emboldened her, or we two who emboldened each other?
“Is the wound draining?” she asked. “Is that tube dangling down there a drain?”
“I don’t know. I can’t tell. I suppose so.”
“What about stitches?”
“This is a hospital. Where better to be when they come undone?”
There was a gently erotic sway to her gait as she slowly approached the bed pointing a finger at my erection. “You are odd, you know. Very odd,” she told me, once she’d at last arrived at my side. “Odder than I think you realize.”