Indignation (11 page)

Well, those were the very clothes on which I had vomited in Caudwell’s office. Those were the clothes that I wore when I sat in chapel trying how not to learn to lead a good life in accordance with
biblical teachings and singing to myself instead the Chinese national anthem. Those were the clothes I’d been wearing when my roommate Elwyn had thrown the punch that had nearly broken my jaw. Those were the clothes I was wearing when Olivia went down on me in Elwyn’s LaSalle. Yes,
there’s
the picture of the boy and girl that should adorn the cover of the Winesburg catalogue: me in those clothes being blown by Olivia and having no idea what to make of it.

Y
ou don’t look yourself, Marcus. You all right? May I sit down?”

It was Sonny Cottler standing over me, wearing the same clothes that I was wearing, except that his wasn’t an ordinary maroon pullover sweater but a maroon and gray Winesburg letter sweater that he’d earned playing varsity basketball. That too. The ease with which he wore his clothes seemed an extension somehow of the deep voice that was so rich with authority and confidence. A quiet kind of carefree vigor, an invulnerability that he exuded, repelled me and attracted me at once, perhaps because it struck me, unreasonably or not, as being rooted in condescension. His seemingly being defi
cient in nothing left me oddly with the impression of someone who was actually deficient in everything. But then these impressions could have been no more than the offshoot of a sophomore’s envy and awe.

“Of course,” I answered. “Sure. Sit.”

“You look like you’ve been through the ringer,” he said.

He, of course, looked like he’d just finished shooting a scene on the MGM lot opposite Ava Gardner. “The dean called me in. We had a disagreement. We had an altercation.” Keep your mouth shut! I told myself. Why tell him? But I had to tell someone, didn’t I? I had to talk to someone at this place, and Cottler wasn’t necessarily a bad guy because my father had arranged for him to come to visit me in my room. Anyway, I felt so misunderstood all around that I might have looked up at the sky and howled like a dog if he hadn’t happened by.

As calmly as I could, I told him about the dispute over chapel attendance between the dean and me.

“But,” Cottler asked, “who goes to chapel? You pay somebody to go for you and you never have to go anywhere near chapel.”

“Is that what
you
do?”

He laughed softly. “What else
would
I do? I went one time. I went in my freshman year. It was when they had a rabbi. They have a Catholic priest once each semester, and they have a rabbi over from Cleveland once a year. Otherwise it’s Dr. Donehower and other great Ohio thinkers. The rabbi’s passionate devotion to the concept of kindness was enough to cure me of chapel for good.”

“How much do you have to pay?”

“For a proxy? Two bucks a pop. It’s nothing.”

“Forty times two is eighty dollars. That’s not nothing.”

“Look,” he said, “figure you spend fifteen minutes getting down off the Hill and over to the church. And if you’re you, serious you, you don’t laugh off being there. You don’t laugh off anything. Instead you spend an hour at chapel seething with rage. Then you spend another fifteen minutes seething with rage while getting back up the Hill to wherever you’re going next. That’s ninety minutes. Ninety times forty equals sixty hours of rage. That’s not nothing either.”

“How do you find the person to pay? Explain to me how it works.”

“The person you hire takes the card the usher hands him at the door when he goes in, then he hands it back signed with your name when he goes out. That’s it. You think a handwriting specialist pores over each card back in the little office where they keep the records? They tick off your name in some ledger, and that’s it. In the old days they used to assign you a seat and have a proctor who got to know everyone’s face walk up and down the aisles to see who was missing. Back then you were screwed. But after the war they changed it, so now all you have to do is pay someone to take your place.”

“But who?”

“Anyone. Anyone who’s done his forty chapels. It’s work. You work waiting tables at the taproom of the inn, someone else works proxying at the Methodist church. I’ll find you somebody if you want me to. I can even try to find somebody for less than two bucks.”

“And if this person shoots off his mouth? Then you’re out of here on your ass.”

“I’ve never heard yet of anybody shooting off his mouth. It’s a business, Marcus. You make a simple business arrangement.”

“But surely Caudwell knows this is going on.”

“Caudwell’s the biggest Christer around. He can’t imagine why students don’t
love
listening to Dr. Donehower instead of having the hour free every Wednesday to jack off in their rooms. Oh, that was a big mistake you made, bringing up chapel with Caudwell. Hawes D. Caudwell is the idol of this place. Winesburg’s greatest halfback in football, greatest slugger in baseball, greatest center in basketball, greatest exponent on the planet of ‘the Winesburg tradition.’ Meet this guy head-on about upholding the Winesburg tradition and he’ll make you into mush. Remember the drop kick, the old vintage drop kick? Caudwell holds the Winesburg record for drop-kicking points in a single season. And you know what he called each of those drop kicks? ‘A drop kick for Christ.’ You go around such creeps, Marcus. A little detachment goes a long way at Winesburg. Keep your mouth shut, your ass covered, smile—and then do whatever you like. Don’t take it all personally, don’t take everything so seriously, and you might find this is not the worst place in the world to spend the best years of your life. You already located the Blowjob Queen of 1951. That’s a start.”

“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?”

T
he 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.”

O
livia. 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.”

“I’m always odd after I have my appendix out.”

“Do you always get as huge as this after you’ve had your appendix out?”

“Never fails.” Huge. She’d said huge.
Was
it?

“Of course we shouldn’t,” she whispered mischievously while wrapping my dick in her hand. “We could both get thrown out of school for this.”

“Then stop!” I whispered back, realizing that, of course, she was right—that’s exactly what would
happen: caught and thrown out of school, she to slouch back home in shame to Hunting Valley, I to be drafted and killed.

But then she hadn’t to stop, she hadn’t even really to begin, because I had already ejaculated high in the air, and down over the bedsheets the semen showered, while Olivia recited sweetly, “I shot an arrow into the air / It fell to earth I knew not where” and just as my nurse walked through the door to take my temperature.

She was a round, gray-haired, middle-aged spinster named Miss Clement, the epitome of the thoughtful, soft-spoken, old-fashioned nurse—she even wore a starched white bonnet, unlike most of the younger nurses on the hospital staff. When I’d had to use the bedpan for the first time after the surgery, she’d quietly reassured me, saying, “I’m here to help you while you need help, and this is the help you now need, and there’s nothing to be embarrassed about,” and all the while she was gently positioning me over the bedpan and then cleaning me with moist toilet tissue and finally removing the pan containing my slime and settling me back under the sheets.