People Who Knock on the Door (23 page)

He didn’t mean that she should write to him and didn’t ask her to in the course of the letter.

. . . My bedroom-study-mate is a fellow named Frank Costello which sounds like the Mafia, but I have heard this can be an Irish name, too.

Your mother was very nice as usual and asked me to stay on. But you can imagine how I feel. I do still love you; there is not a bit of a change there, and if that’s a mistake, I don’t know why it is. And so I hope you are happy—really.

All my love, ever,

Arthur

About two minutes after he had stamped the airmail envelope and was pulling on a jacket to go out and mail it, Arthur was seized again with nausea and had to get to one of the toilets down the hall.

Back from the letter-dropping, Arthur studied for half an hour. But every few minutes he thought about his letter to Maggie. It hadn’t been exactly right. It was friendly, polite, calm. But it wasn’t at all the truth. The truth was something awful. He felt that he had no reason for living now, though he didn’t feel like killing himself. The jangling music (inferior rock) that came faintly from somebody’s room down the hall did not even annoy him, because it seemed part of the general madness and ugliness of his life just now. He would have three more years in a room such as this, unless a miracle happened, and miracles usually didn’t.

At 1 in the morning, after about an hour’s sleep, Arthur woke up and found his forehead cold with perspiration, though the room was even overheated. Arthur shivered. His chest was sleek with sweat. He put on a bathrobe and went down the hall. Some students were still up. Arthur didn’t know any of them. He had brought his towel, and he leaned over a basin, wiping his face in cold water. Was he hot or cold? When he went back to bed, he couldn’t get to sleep and his heart beat rather quickly. He deliberately breathed slowly, as he had often told Robbie to do, he recalled, when Robbie was furious about something. The dawn was showing before he fell asleep. Then Frank Costello came in, either a bit drunk or very tired, turned on the central light, then his table light, kicked off his shoes and fell into bed after removing his trousers, turned off his table light and left the central light on. Arthur didn’t bother getting up to turn it off.

And so it went even at the beginning of Easter holidays, when classes stopped, and only a few students stayed on at the dorms, because they had nowhere to go. Frank Costello went “home”—his parents were separated, he said—to Wisconsin, not New York. Frank took angel dust, Arthur had discovered, as it was certainly no secret, and Frank didn’t care whether he got passing grades this semester or not. “My folks’re paying, but they keep me on short rein. Look at this dump!” Frank had said. “These shits here can kick me out when they want to. I couldn’t care less.”

Frank Costello’s life was drearier than his own, Arthur realized. Arthur had his microbiology to hang on to, but what joy did Frank get except five or six highs a week? Professor Jurgens of microbio liked Arthur and in January had invited him to dinner at his house, which Arthur knew was unusual. Still, he could not talk with Professor Jurgens about Maggie. And the cold sweats at night continued, not every night, but two or three a week. His trousers became looser at his waist. Arthur went to Norma Keer’s house for dinner one evening, ignoring his family’s house next door, as if it belonged to strangers. Before he left, he told Norma about Maggie’s being interested in someone else now, and Norma had been as sympathetic as Betty Brewster, saying, “Everyone in the world has this happen to them once or twice, Arthur. Now don’t let it get you down for long.” But what, after all, could Norma or anyone else do about it?

Maggie wrote him a short letter, saying that she was glad he was “not taking it too hard,” for which Arthur stoically congratulated himself.

During Easter vacation, Arthur visited the Brewster house four or five times. Warren had a few consecutive days off, quite by lucky accident, Warren said. Arthur tried to keep a cheerful air, feeling that people would smile behind his back if he looked melancholic. Betty told him his room was still empty, and they invited him to stay for a couple of days, if he wished, and there was yard work to be done besides. Arthur did several hours of work in the yard, some of it with Betty, but he never stayed a night. If he ate small meals, his food stayed down better, but Arthur knew something had to be done or he would end up sick in a hospital or at a psychiatrist’s. And what would he tell a psychiatrist? “The bottom’s fallen out. There’s nothing under my feet now.” Something like that.

On the second day of return to regular classes at C.U., Arthur had a cheerful idea. It was an idea to cheer himself up, he realized, and quite simple. He would invite Gus and Veronica and a girl called Shirley something, whom Veronica had introduced Arthur to a week or so before. He would invite them out for drinks and eats, as if it were his birthday. So Arthur, running into Gus on the campus that day, proposed Friday night for the get-together. Gus said Friday would be fine for him and probably Veronica.

“Can Veronica get Shirley? They’re together in some classes, aren’t they?”

“I didn’t think you liked her,” Gus said. “That’s what Veronica told me.”

Arthur could hardly remember Shirley. “I don’t
dislike
her. I just thought it’d be nice to—Maybe Mom’s Pride? That’s sort of fun.”

As it turned out, Shirley wasn’t free, but a girl called Francey McCullough was. Veronica had produced her. Francey was a soph, about five feet five with short, curly brown hair and a friendly but absent or distant manner. They went in two cars, as Gus wanted to take his, and Arthur as host wanted to drive his own car. Arthur picked up Francey at Gus’s house, the meeting place, and they drove to Mom’s Pride.

The jukebox at Mom’s Pride was throbbing, and the place looked full. Arthur hadn’t reserved a table, if that were even possible, but after a ten-minute wait with beers at the counter, they got a booth for four. Francey looked like a dud compared to Maggie, Arthur thought, even compared to Veronica, whose homey charms Arthur had begun to see. But Arthur felt it was his evening; he was determined to be a good host, which meant being sure everyone had what he or she wanted and that he paid for it.

“I know a girl who likes you a lot,” Francey said to Arthur when they were dancing. “Aline. Remember her? Short brown hair?”

Arthur certainly did. Aline was the one who resembled Maggie, and he thought of Maggie at the same time he heard the name Aline. “Yes, sure. Met her once.” He hoped Veronica or Gus hadn’t told Francey about Maggie having abandoned him. Nothing he could do about it now, if they had.

Old Gus’s dancing was improving, or he was more at ease with Veronica than he had been with Maggie. Arthur smiled at the sight of them, Gus tall and lanky and Veronica dumpier than Francey, bending and twisting in unison a yard apart from each other.

“You do boxing?” Francey asked.

“
Do
boxing?—No, I—Never in my life. I’m a sports snob!”

“No kidding! You’re so strong; you could do wrestling.”

Arthur laughed, feeling his couple of beers in a pleasant way. There was a slow number, the lights dimmed, as at a disco, and people on the floor groaned and laughed. Francey held him round the waist. Not since Maggie had he held a girl like this, and that had been—around New Year’s, so long ago! Arthur realized he was becoming excited and drew back a little; Francey pressed herself against him, then drew back also, and their eyes met for an instant in the semi-darkness. She was not smiling.

The music ended; the lights came on, and some people clapped their hands.

Arthur checked Gus and Veronica and Francey for further orders, then went to the counter for two coffees, one beer, another hamburger for Gus, and a double order of french fries.

“Make that two beers!” Arthur said, and paid.

They dipped french fries into ketchup at the edge of the big plate.

“How’s dorm life, Arthur?” Veronica asked him.

“Just elegant,” Arthur said, thinking of Frank Costello’s dirty socks and shorts on the floor.

“Sorry about—” Veronica squirmed, and her brows frowned quickly. “You had to leave the Brewsters’.”

“Didn’t
have
to,” Arthur yelled over the music, “but I couldn’t camp there forever.” Gus and Francey didn’t seem to pay attention to what he had said, and so much the better. Francey sat next to Arthur in the booth. She was leaning back in the corner, smoking a cigarette slowly, eyeing him, Arthur felt. He asked Veronica to dance.

“Francey likes you,” Veronica said on the dance floor.

“She said that?”

“No, I can see it.” Veronica smiled at him with her curiously sleepy eyes. “Just now—she hasn’t got a boyfriend. You might give it a
thought
.” Veronica had to shout to make herself heard.

Arthur wasn’t thinking about it, wasn’t planning. By 1 o’clock, he was in a happier mood. “Hey, Gus! Coffee nightcap at the Silver Arrow? Remember that night? That hooker Irene?”

“What’s the Silver Arrow?” Francey asked.

“Truck-stop diner,” Gus said. “Sho, boy. I’m gettin’ tired of this place. You gals gettin’ tired of this place?”

They pushed off for the Silver Arrow, Francey again in Arthur’s car.

“What’s so great about this diner?” Francey asked.

“Absolutely nothing. Well—there’s a woman behind the counter who’s pretty tough. The whole place is tough.”

“A woman you know?”

“No-o.” Arthur laughed. “Well, I met her once or twice. Am I a patron, no.”

Again a couple of giant trucks stood outside the diner and half a dozen cars besides. A man in a windbreaker and light-colored trousers, who didn’t look like a trucker, was drunk and making a fuss because a waitress was refusing to serve him a beer.

“You’re gonna get
thrown
out if you don’t
get
out!” yelled one of the waitresses behind the counter.

And there was Irene with her phony blond hair under her silver cap, grinning at the altercation between the drunk and her colleague.

“That’s the one,” Arthur said to Francey, and nodded his head toward Irene, who hadn’t noticed his group.

There was no room for all of them together at the counter, so Arthur sat with Francey on two stools, and Gus with Veronica farther down. All the booths were taken. The jukebox played “Tuxedo Junction.” Arthur yelled an order for four coffees.

“Really is a tough place,” Francey said to Arthur.

“Slice of life, as they say,” Arthur replied with a languid air.

Arthur and Francey got their coffees, served by the middle waitress. Irene still hadn’t noticed Arthur, and in fact her eyes looked unfocused, despite her big smile. Maybe the lights of the place damaged people’s eyesight after a while.

A trucker, trying to clown but plainly enjoying his superior muscle power, ejected the drunk who fell down the couple of steps outside the door.

“Who’s driving
that
guy home?” a woman yelled.

“Let him walk!” Laughter.

Gus came over to Arthur, smiling a little, his hands stuffed in the slash pockets of his jacket. “Hey, Art,” he said in Arthur’s ear. “Veronica thinks your blond friend’s pregnant.”

“No kidding!” said Arthur, amused. “Pretty likely, I s’pose.” If so, his father’s counsel had been in vain.

Gus went back to Veronica, but after a minute, he and Veronica were able to take stools next to Arthur and Francey. Meanwhile Arthur had been looking at Irene. Was her waistline bigger? Possibly. But it wouldn’t have caught Arthur’s eye. Did pregnant women start getting heavier at the waistline or below it?

“Oh, hello, Arthur,” a voice said near him, just as he had turned to Francey.

Irene leaned toward him, and Arthur glanced at her hands which were so near his coffee, red nails and a fake gold ring, and somebody’s check between two fingers.

“You all right? Being a good boy?” she asked.

“Oh, sure.” Arthur saw for an instant that crazy mixture of intense concern and mental fuzziness in her eyes that so disturbed him. “And you? I hope—”

Irene was summoned by a loud male voice at the food window.

“Amazing, no?” Arthur said to Francey. “She goes to church—every Sunday.”

Francey put her head back and laughed, hardly making a sound, and lit a cigarette before Arthur could pull out his lighter. Arthur liked the way she laughed, as if she enjoyed it.

Arthur was to drive Francey home. The couples said good night outside the Silver Arrow.

“Great evening, Art. Thanks a lot,” Gus said. “See you soon. Come by my house
anytime
.”

“Come by my joint anytime,” Arthur said, “but I can’t promise any privacy.”

In the car, Francey said, “I’d like to see your joint. Can we go there?”

Arthur wasn’t surprised. He had been about to propose the same thing. “Sure. My roommate’s not even in tonight—or even tomorrow night. He’s in Wisconsin.” Arthur was suddenly reminded of an overheard remark at Ruthie’s party last year, when Maggie had been out of town for the first abortion: “. . . roommate’s out and won’t be back till four,” a fellow from C.U. had said, trying to persuade a high school girl to go off with him.

“This place isn’t too bad,” Francey said when she entered 214.

The Residence Assistant had not been at his desk downstairs when Arthur had sneaked Francey in. In fact, sneaking girls in was considered no problem, Arthur had learned. The problem was the other way round, if a girl wanted to have a fellow in her room after 11 p.m.

“To tell you the truth, I straightened it up a little. Doesn’t always look this neat.”

But Francey remarked that he had a view out the window instead of looking on a wall and that he had only one roommate, whereas some people had a second who slept on another jammed-in bed. So Arthur felt better suddenly about his living arrangements. When he turned from the fridge, whence he had been taking two beers, Francey opened her arms. Arthur put the beers down. He held her tightly. And now it didn’t matter if he became excited. They kissed. Then Arthur stepped back.

“D-do you—This beer—”