Testimony and Demeanor (14 page)

I said, “Miss Quist—”

“I know you don’t like me,” she said.

“Miss Quist—”

“But you don’t understand.” She turned around and walked up to me. She said furiously, “But I care this much.”

I stepped back, afraid. But she wasn’t looking at me. She turned the reflector of my gooseneck lamp up toward her and put her fingers on the burning bulb. I heard the dampness crisp off her fingers. She cried out, “Ow! Ow!” and put her other hand in her mouth.

I finally grabbed her by the shoulders and sat her back down in the chair. She held her burned hand by the wrist. I ran down the hall and brought back a cup of cold water. I took her wrist and put her fingers in the water.

I knelt there for some time; Miss Quist didn’t move. I felt my assessment of her, my calculation, come unfastened and slide about, like loose cargo in the hold of a ship.

She finally said, “Here—I can hold that,” and took the cup. I sat down again.

I took her theme from her folder. I read it over. It wasn’t very good, but I’d given better grades to worse. I looked up her speech-grading blank. Her speech, from a technical point of
view, had not been as bad as I had marked it. Voice, eye contact, unity of central theme—they could all be three point five. I looked at Miss Quist. I was helpless to know what was now sweetening her wheedling, hypocritical apology, her lying, her malice, her bad taste, “My dad always told me …”

She took her hand out of the water. There were three puffed-up blisters on her middle fingers.

I thought perhaps she wasn’t Iago. She was Edmund. I thought of Edmund’s soliloquy in
King Lear
—the wonderful fire of contempt for tepid legitimacy: “Now, gods, stand up for bastards!”

Was there any element—water, earth, air, or fire—that I could resist in women?

I said, “Miss Quist, in one sense you are in the right and I am in the wrong. This course we are pursuing is not a course in morals but in rhetoric—”

She quickly said, “That means you’ll do it? Oh, that’s so neat! I really will be better, you’ll see. I always do better when I’m doing work for someone who really cares.”

She made her exit, turning back just before she closed the door to compress her mouth, squint her eyes, and shimmy her face at me—a signal to express wriggling pleasure.

I wondered what I’d tell Honorée.

I finally ran into Honorée at the theater department’s costume party.

Elizabeth Mary asked me to take her; she said we should really make an appearance. Elizabeth Mary went as a nun. Her face looked quite wonderful framed in a wimple. Her skin looked even more delicate and gold than usual: the texture appeared to be as smooth as a mushroom cap. Her eyes were only a slightly darker shade than her skin—really no darker than dark hazel.

She made me go as a monk in a baggy brown robe and
sandals. I felt very foolish, but at least the robe made it easy to cover up what passed as my dancing.

Honorée came as part of a Gay Nineties chorus line. They all wore net stockings and a sort of abbreviated velveteen costume with a ruffled skirt that was cut high across the thigh in front but had a flounce or bustle in the back. They came on as part of the entertainment and actually did a kick-and-prance number in the middle of the dance floor. Honorée was the shortest of the five and looked a little chunky by contrast. As soon as she left them, however, she looked adorable. She went to the edge of the dance floor and stood peering around the room. Her fine straight hair was fluffed up from her bouncing around and her pale face was glowing. She had a rather old-fashioned fullness of thigh, bust, and upper arm that went well with her costume. I was surprised and touched to see that much strong ripeness so intimately connected to her sweet girlish face. Her body seemed a part of her costume; her real self was in her look, a look of someone expecting to be surprised—her eyes wide, her lips ready to smile.

When she saw me, however, she blushed and closed her eyes.

She said, “Oh, God, I’m so embarrassed.”

“I’ve been trying to get hold of you.”

“Oh, Mr. Hendricks, I almost died in that class. It wasn’t true, you know. I may have talked to her about things, but she made them seem as though I was, you know,
planning
things. Of course, it may have seemed that way to her, so she may not have been actually lying. And I may have said some things to her that weren’t the way I felt just so that she wouldn’t think I was completely dumb.”

Honorée pulled the top of her bodice up with both hands and held them there, pressing them into her breastbone.

She said, “I know you understand it all, but I’m still embarrassed.”

“Miss Quist told me she was going to apologize to you. Has she come to see you?”

“No. But I’m so hard to get hold of these days.”

Elizabeth Mary came up. I introduced them.

Honorée told Elizabeth Mary that she was in her course and loved it. Elizabeth Mary thanked her.

Honorée said in a suddenly different tone, “It’s an interesting sensation standing here with two of my teachers, wearing practically nothing but a bathing suit. But then, if we all went around like this all the time, it wouldn’t feel odd at all.”

Since neither Elizabeth Mary nor I could think of anything to say to that, Honorée was flustered. After a pause she said, “I often imagine the two of you in your office together. It must be so wonderful. Even when you’re not talking, I imagine there must be a sort of humming between your minds. It must—”

“That would be most distracting, all that humming,” Elizabeth Mary said. “I’m afraid you have quite a romantic view. We hardly talk at all when we happen to be there together. It’s just work, work, work.”

Elizabeth Mary then surprised me. She took Honorée’s hand in hers and said, “We just work very hard so we can try to appear brilliant to you.” She stroked Honorée’s forearm, saying in a soothing voice, “Work, work, work.”

Honorée thought about this. She said in a reflective way, “Oh. I guess you just can’t imagine something until you already know what it’s like.”

Elizabeth Mary said, “No, no. There are some things one can only get right by imagining. But, Oliver, I must get home. I have more work to do. Miss Hogentogler, your dance was very good and you are a very charming creature in your costume, but we must say good night.”

When Elizabeth Mary got into the car, she laughed. “Oh, Oliver, you are such a cruel creature. You should either do something with that smitten girl or stop smiting her. Really, she is wriggling like a fish on your line.” She laughed again.

I said, “She’d take it very seriously.”

“Oh, I think not. I think it could be over in no time at all with no hard feelings.”

I said, “That really isn’t possible with someone like Honorée. And for that matter, it may not be the sort of thing I’m capable of.”

Elizabeth Mary said, “Don’t tell me you believe in total love or nothing. Or perhaps that you believe someone of proper feeling only falls in love once. Ah! No wonder, then, you are so wedded to your Shakespeare. That’s why you are so ‘true to the age.’ Really, Oliver, you are all of a piece.”

I felt a little bullied. But it may have been because I was still too impressed by her training and knowledge. She hadn’t yet told me what a hard early life she’d had, though I should have imagined that it would have been difficult for a girl of such mixed races to be at ease. I was under the impression that she was an example of George Bernard Shaw’s theory of eugenics—the best mixture of several racial geniuses. And I’d also only recently learned that she’d begun her education in science and had actually started medical school when she switched fields. She was of course very well prepared linguistically for comparative literature—she spoke Portuguese from birth, English from early childhood. She was brought up a Roman Catholic at a time when Latin was still in use. Her mother’s brother then sent her to school in Switzerland, where all her classes were in French. She also learned German. She worked for a year or two as a secretary in Switzerland, then quite bravely set out for America to go to college. This dossier of bright achievement was foremost in my mind, but I should have imagined there were shadows.

Of course, I was also under the spell of her sharp beauty, but in such a way that it made me cross. I thought her attractive, even desirable, but not sexual—at least not without refracting her attraction and desirability through some prism of
grotesque fantasy. Perhaps it was the temptation of this fantasy that made me cross.

Or perhaps it was because she was capable of maintaining her own privacy while invading mine. She could send a flicker of attention into my state of mind that gave me an eerie feeling of being possessed.

At this moment, her teasing me about Honorée had yet another annoyance: that she could hover benignly over a pastoral interlude, the outline of which was clear to her as it was not to Honorée, and as it would not be to me unless she offered me her view of it.

She said, “Now I’ve made you angry, Oliver. I only meant to chaff you up a bit.”

I said, “You know, I sometimes worry that a theorist like you may know the structure of everything and the essence of nothing.”

She laughed. “Oh, well replied! You’ve run me right through. Well adapted, dear Oliver.”

All her talk then became a light caressing of my mood—a wonderfully pleasant sensation—but after I dropped her off at her apartment I felt restless.

Elizabeth Mary was certainly a friend, practically my only immediate friend, but still not a comfortable friend.

The next day Elizabeth Mary and I went out for coffee. While we were sitting at a table we saw, through the plate-glass window, Honorée and a young man wearing bib overalls and an Amish hat. They didn’t see us. Elizabeth Mary said, “That boy with Miss Hogentogler is in my graduate seminar. He wanted to submit a short film in place of one of his papers. He was quite cross when I said no.”

I supposed he was the director of Honorée’s movie. I asked, “Is he smart?”

“Not in any useful way for the seminar. He has a cleverness that was quite impressive at first, but now I see how it works, I’m dissatisfied. Its main device is an
esprit de contradiction
. He’ll say things like ‘Romeo and Juliet didn’t really like each other very much.’ It’s all to astonish. But I did like one of his short films. It was quite witty in a visual way; also quite pretty. He will present some more at the Spring Arts Festival.”

I had heard of the Spring Arts Festival. In fact, it was in connection with it that I first heard the word “counterculture.” I at first thought it was a synonym of “anti-intellectual.” Elizabeth Mary started off being sharp with the first local counterculture yearnings for Eastern enlightenment. She told the students who came to talk to her about Indian thought that it was too tedious to discuss it with them, and they were much better off studying the writers in her course. But she was more alert than I was to the phenomenon as a whole. To her credit it must be said that she clearly perceived the elements that were vigorous and contagious. She got me to pay attention, and the two of us attended a number of events that I might not have thought any more important or coherent than the usual student spring assertions.

The “guerrilla theater” was crude but curiously successful. The sketch—it wasn’t really a play—was called “Equal Time.” The theater department hadn’t approved it, so it was put on in a circus tent in a field just outside town. It was a parody of a 4-H Club exposition. There was a master of ceremonies who gave prizes for the best pies—the supposed cooks got into a quarrel and threw the pies in each other’s faces. Predictable slapstick. The ringmaster announced prizes for the best marijuana plants. At this point someone in the audience got up to protest. It was prearranged. The ringmaster blew his whistle and said, “All right! All right! Equal time! Equal time for decency and normality!”

A group of girls brought on classroom chairs with writing
arms attached. A woman wearing a gray wig with a bun came on with a tripod holding a series of large posters. She carried a pointer. The first poster announced “Sexual Hygiene 101.”

The lecturer’s voice was pained and nasal.

“Now, girls, it’s better you learn these things here than in the gutter.”

The ringmaster wandered among the girls, who pretended not to see him. He mugged ferociously.

The lecturer turned the first display card: “Death Before Dishonor—The Case for Virginity.”

The lecturer said, “Now, girls, how can he respect you if you haven’t saved yourself for him?”

A girl raised her hand and wailed, “But suppose it’s too late? I have a friend and she—”

The ringmaster rolled his eyes and the audience laughed.

Another girl said, “Maybe she could lie about it.”

The lecturer said, “Lying isn’t right, girls, but there are ways to avoid undue references to premarital experiences. And there are ways to properly refer to them if references are necessary.”

The girl said, “Oh, I’ve got some great references.”

The ringmaster went down on his hands and knees and pointed at her like a bird dog.

“It’s still mass taste,” I said to Elizabeth Mary.

“But it’s a burlesque of the forces in their lives,” Elizabeth Mary said.

“It’s not burlesque, it’s burleycue.”

The next day Elizabeth Mary didn’t feel well, so I set off by myself for the student union, where the films were being shown.

The small theater was full and I was about to go away when Honorée stopped me.

“Do you want to see the films, Mr. Hendricks? Come with me.”

She took me to the projection booth with a pretty air of
authority. Someone inside recognized her and let us in. “O.K.,” she said to me. “Climb aboard.”

These backstage airs charmed me. Of course, they were for my benefit, but even so, I felt a sympathy for her vanity and excitement.

I asked her if this was the movie she was in.

She said, “Oh, no; that’s not finished yet. These are just some of Phil’s exercises. There may be one at the end that has me in it.” She asked the projectionist, “What do we have of Phil’s?”