“Mumumu.”
“All right,” I said.
I felt all right. All right.
Finn
FINN, LATELY FEIN, RAN INTO SLOTSKY and mentioned the change.
“By the way?”
“I agree. It goes without saying. Changing one’s name isn’t by the way. Neither are the harsh realities. The business world. You know what I mean, Slotsky? I was a little cavalier in my announcement. Nevertheless …”
“Call me Slot.”
A smile wormed in Finn’s lips. “That’s very amusing, Snotsky.”
To show Finn his smile, a smile wormed in Slotsky’s lips. Reinforced by his speedy, ugly face, it was particularly revolting. But Finn, thumb hooked to alligator belt, stood six two, two hundred fifteen pounds. Imperturbable. Besides, against the big sharkskin curve of his can, he had a letter admitting him to graduate school in business administration. He also had a date that evening with Millicent Coyle at the Kappa house; darkish girl, but in manner and sisterhood fished out of the right gene pool. Black Slotsky, now, was chancy matter in the street; dog flop. Brilliant student, but pale, skinny, cross-eyed, irascible, contentious, a walking criticism of life, and a left-wing communist. In every way he seemed to beg for death. One felt his begging; also his contempt for one’s reluctance to kill him on the spot. He sneered, “I thought your old name was fine.”
Finn repeated, “That’s very amusing, Snotsky.”
“I’m still doing business under the same name.”
Finn answered gently, sailing toward the Kappa house and business administration. “Granted, Slotsky. Your name is Slotsky. Mine is Finn. All right?” And he made concessions in a shrug. Two shrugs.
“Didn’t it used to be Flynn?”
Finn waved bye-bye.
“Flynn, Finley … didn’t you used to be Flanagan the rabbi?”
Finn was three, four, five steps into the evening, the life. Just up ahead there, Finn beckoned. To him, Finn.
“So long, Ferguson.”
He tossed harbingers of love on his bed — trousers, shirt, tie, socks — but couldn’t decide on a jacket to wear that evening. He wandered naked in his indecision, lit a cigar, then considered less the jacket than his indecision. Immediately, he discovered Slotsky in it, shimmering like fumes. Two years ago they had been roommates. People used to say, “You room with Slotsky?” Because Slotsky was famous. He wrote a column in the school paper, noticing films, plays, any little change in the campus ambience — Muzak in the administration building, yellow plastic chairs in the library, new pom-poms adopted by the basketball cheering squad. He was famous for screaming revulsion and his column’s title, “Foaming at the Mouth,” was a description of himself in the throes of a criticism. Otherwise he restricted his humor to sneering irony, never directed at himself, never humorous. Finn explained him to the world by saying, “He wants love. Anyhow, he has brain cancer.” It would have been easy to be more cruel, but Slotsky helped him with chemistry and French — Finn’s reason for rooming with him in the first place. Finn never said anything more about Slotsky. Anything more might have suggested there was more than an apartment between them. There was. It started one night before end terms. Finn heard himself pleading: “I read the books, Slotsky. I took notes in class. But I can’t write it. I tried all week, but I’ve got nothing to say about the New Deal. Do I think it was good? Bad? I think I hate poly sci, that’s all. It isn’t fair not to be able to drop a course in the last week. Sometimes you can’t tell until the last week that you want to drop it. What am I going to do? I need the B.A. I don’t want to fail. My average won’t support a failure in poly sci. I’ll be thrown out of here. That’ll be the end of everything for Bruce J. Fein. Everything.”
“What a pity.”
“I’m sorry I told you about it.”
“You make me a little sick, Fein.”
“I make myself sick. I can’t stand the sound of my voice. I’m disgusting.”
He went to the bathroom, stuck three fingers into his mouth, vomited, then slept all night in his clothes. Came morning, he opened eyes full of prayer. For what, he didn’t ask himself. He dragged to the kitchen, sat down at the table. It was the first time since they had been living together Slotsky hadn’t gotten up ahead of him to make breakfast. Finn looked toward the next room where Slotsky slept, then looked at his hand. It lay on a pile of paper. Eighteen pages, in fact: stapled, nicely typed with double spaces, wide margins, signed Bruce J. Fein under the title “The New Deaclass="underline" Good and Bad.” How could he not have felt contempt? In the next room Slotsky snored with miserable exhaustion, like a man scratching at the sides of his grave. He felt contempt bloom into hatred, bloat, blur into pity, and then, on his way to poly sci, he gradually felt something different, something new, in regard to Slotsky. He stopped for coffee. While reading through the paper, he coiled inward to catch it. He caught it in a word: he and Slotsky had “relationship.” As for the paper, not bad. Not bad at all. Worth a B, maybe B+. He scratched out one phrase and scrawled his own above it. However brilliant, it was true, after all, Slotsky had never taken a course in poly sci. The correction made Finn feel as if the paper were a little bit his own. Two days later it was returned with an A++. Beneath the grade the professor had written: “Please, Fein, become a political science major, as a favor to the world.” Beside his correction, Finn saw: “I will accept this because of the rest of the paper, but it is badly expressed and adds nothing to your argument.” In a daze of gratitude so thrilling it reminded him of fear, Finn rushed back to the apartment, pulled a jacket out of his closet, and hung it in Slotsky’s. Thus, among dull, shapeless gabardines, glowed a smoky tweed, a sensuous texture, a weight of life. Simply to have said, “Thank you, Slotsky, for saving my life,” seemed impossible. Not that it wasn’t sufficient return, but he couldn’t say those words to Slotsky. Some element in their relationship would become too obvious, even grotesquely sentimental. Nevertheless, relationship, reciprocity: Finn was big, rich, good-looking, and he had girls; Slotsky, in relation and return, was his roommate — he wasn’t living alone with himself and the walls; Finn had the paper; Slotsky, the jacket; Finn, Slotsky; Slotsky, Finn.
On his one date that year Slotsky wore the jacket. He also wore it at a president’s tea for honor students, and at an address before a learned society, he appeared in the jacket. Big on him, but, if one knew nothing else about Slotsky, one knew he owned a fine jacket. Finer than anything else he owned. One knew that because he wore it with creaseless, flapping trousers that piled at the cuffs over patent-leather, busboy shoes. He didn’t seem to think the owner of such a jacket might want to wear it with trousers a bit snappier. But Finn knew Slotsky wore no jacket at all. Only an idea of a jacket — Finn’s jacket — beautiful in the eyes of mankind, spilling a superflux of beauty over anything Slotsky wore with it, even those trousers and shoes. Over Slotsky himself, wallowing in it. Finn was gratified. The paper, the jacket, the vision of Slotsky standing and walking in it — reciprocity, relationship. Until this moment.
Naked before the open door of his closet, where a harem of fifteen jackets languished — mute, lovely receptacles of his arms and torso — Finn was struck by the powerful idea: His. Then the powerful corollary: he hadn’t given any jacket to Slotsky forever. When they split up he should have taken that jacket back, but he had thought Slotsky was already too disturbed by the loss of his roommate. He had been very foolish: no jacket in his closet had the drape, cut at the wrist, lapel, and haunch, or texture, tone, and quality of material that that particular jacket had. The one he loaned to Slotsky. Half an hour later, sitting on the bed in Slotsky’s one room, in an odor of socks, underwear, and Slotsky, Finn had the feeling his seat would stick to the army blanket when he stood up. Slotsky said for the third time, “You want one of my jackets? Help yourself, roomie. I’ve got a dozen classy numbers.”