The Life of Hope (12 page)

“I guess there’s nothing wrong with him,” said Sheila, “if you happen to like comic books.”

“Or,” I proceeded bravely, “James. Henry James.”

“Sorry,” said Lee.

“What the hell do you mean, ‘sorry?’ ”

“Why don’t you read someone who has some inkling of what’s going on?”

“And what the hell is going on?” I almost shouted. “I don’t
know what the hell is going on.”

“That’s because,” Sheila said calmly, “you don’t read the right people.”

“How about Graham Greene? John Fowles? They might have some slight conception, some vague glimmer in the back of their minds …”

Lee interrupted. “Let’s please keep this serious.”

“Hey!” I shouted. “I’ll tell you who I like. I like old farts. I like Hermie Melville and Tony Trollope.”

There was giggling and even a couple of guffaws.

“Get this!” I screamed. “I like Nathaniel fucking Hawthorne!”

Lee and Sheila laughed with derisive delight. Sara stared at me sorrowfully.

“I got an idea,” said Professor Benson. “Let’s go swimming.”

“Good idea,” said Lee. She climbed to her feet and pulled off her shorts. Her underwear was red and very tiny. Lee reached behind her and yanked at the string that fastened her halter-top. It fell away to reveal small, elegantly fashioned breasts. She began to walk toward the water, taking off her underwear en route, a deftly executed maneuver that involved some nimble footwork. Finally, at the water’s edge, she removed her thick spectacles. The glasses were the one item Lee seemed reluctant to shed.

Sheila pulled off her shorts and removed her top. A mosquito immediately landed on the right breast, probably crazed by the sight of the white, fleshy mountain. Sheila squashed it, her tit bouncing back and forth. She brushed at her breast vigorously and gave me an impish look. “Hawthorne,” she snickered, and ran off for the water.

Sara pulled off her shorts slowly. They were too tight, and her white underwear was dragged downward with them. For some reason Sara tugged her panties back up, took off her shorts, and then pulled down her underwear. “Coming in?” she asked me.

“Sure.” I began to pull off my clothes.

Sara waited for me, idly scratching her backside.

“Coming, Harv?”

Harvey’s eyes were glazed like an opium eater’s. He seemed incapable of speech. Sara and I left him sitting there.

“What a great fucking seminar!” said Professor Harvey Benson.

Harv and I were sharing drinks out on the flagstone patio. From where we sat on our chaise lounges we could see the pond. It was feeding time for the little fish, and therefore for some big birds as well, the heron down at the far end, two kingfishers closer to us, and the scene was one of subtle, muted massacre. I concentrated on the kamikaze kingfishers. They soared at an altitude of twenty or thirty feet and then suddenly plummeted as if shot, diving into the water. I knew, from watching “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom,” that in the world of nature the odds are four to one in favor of the prey, against the predator. As I watched the spearing and skewering that was going on in the little pond, it occurred to me that I wouldn’t take those odds.

“Yup,” nodded Harvey. “Just a great fucking seminar.”

The seminar had resumed after the girls and I had our little swim. Sara, Sheila and Lee hadn’t put their clothes back on. Instead they’d assumed various naked sunbathing positions around Harvey, directing him to start afresh the discussion of the modern novel and its purpose in a world that was about to get nuked into nothingness. Harvey Benson had done so, although it required for him a superhuman act of will. The girls flipped over like meat on a barbecue spit. After almost three hours of discussion the three young women rose and put on their clothes, announcing their intention of hiking through the woods. I pointed out the pathway, warned them against poison ivy, and they set off for the hills. Harvey watched them leave, smiling like a man who’d lived a long, good life and was now prepared to throw off the mortal coil. “What a great fucking seminar,” marvelled Dr. Benson.

He and I had made drinks, and now we were drinking them in the great outdoors.

“So, Harvard,” I said.

“So, Paulie.”

The mysteries of Hope seemed too many, too jumbled in my own mind with sadness and drink. “How long,” I asked, “does a fish live?”

Harvey was oblivious to the quiet carnage taking place at pond level. He shrugged and sucked on a cigar. “Maybe three, four years,” he told me. “I don’t know. Maybe longer.”

“So then, I take it that you personally don’t believe in Ol’ Mossback?”

“Believe in him?” said Harv, his voice rising. “Man, I fucking seen him!”

“Oh yeah?”

“I was fishing over there at Lookout Lake,” he remembered, “and I saw some bird come flying across, real low over the water, and all of a sudden … kerpow! … Ol’ Mossback comes up, grabs said birdie by the throat, and then they were both gone. Christ, that motherfucking fish has got to be like six feet long!”

“No shit?”

“I wouldn’t shit you about something like that,” said Benson with great sincerity.

“I bought a book about him,” I told Harvey. “
Fishing for
 …”

Harvey completed the title, “
Ol’ Mossback
, sure,” and even knew the name of the author, “by Gregory Opdycke. It’s a classic.”

“It is?”

“Sort of.” Harvey reconsidered and changed his opinion slightly. “It’s a well-known book.”

“Hmm!” I decided I’d have to finish reading the thing. “So, anyway, I been spending some time down at The Willing Mind.”

“I figured you would,” nodded Harvey. I had the impression he was still viewing the girls’ nude bodies somewhere in his bald and twisted head.

“There’s a guy there who’s in the book,” I mentioned quietly.

Harvey said, “No way. The book was written eighty, ninety years ago.”

“I know. But it’s the same guy. Jonathon Whitecrow, the guy who talks to Ol’ Mossback.”

Harvey pulled himself forward in the chaise lounge and began
to look around, searching for something or someone.

“What are you doing?” I asked him.

“Looking for Rod Serling,” Harvey answered.

“Come on,” I snapped, a little annoyed.

“Did it ever occur to you,” asked Harvey, “that some guys have fathers and even grandfathers, and that sometimes they have the same fucking name?”

“Oh.” I had to admit, it hadn’t.

“I know Jonathon Whitecrow,” said Harvey. “He’s that old, gay Indian, right?”

“Right,” I nodded. “The guy who has ‘Visions.’ ”

“Yeah, yeah! He had a Vision about me once. Told me I was going to meet a very extremely beautiful young chickie-poo.”

Well, I thought, it was good to know Whitecrow didn’t bat a thousand.

“He had a Vision about me, too,” I said. “He saw Ellie crying.”

Harvey took a puff on his stogie emphatically. “Don’t you worry about that!”

“Huh?”

“Don’t worry about it, that’s all.” Benson finished his drink and waved the empty glass at me. “Want another?”

“What did you mean, don’t worry about that?”

“Just don’t worry! Why worry? Relax and work on your novel!”

“Harvard,” I said sternly, “what did you mean?”

“Okay. All I know is, I saw Ellie on the street last night, just by accident, and you don’t have to worry about her crying, that’s all I’m saying. You were worried about it, I’m here to tell you not to be. Drink?”

“Why shouldn’t I worry about it?”

“Why? Because she was happy. Okay? Don’t worry.”

“Why happy, how do you mean happy?”

“Gay, carefree! Waltzing down the street with friends!”

“How many friends?”

“How should I remember? Friends!”

“How many, Harvard?”

“One.”

“Male or female?”

“Do you want another drink or what?”

“Aaah!” A horde of invisible hobgoblins began to beat on me. One pummeled my stomach, another kicked me a series of stern ones to the groin, and three or four took turns boxing me about the ears. The most awful of them, the Bruce Lee of the hobgoblin set, poked his fingers through my ribcage kung-fu style and ripped out my heart.

Harvey went to fix me another drink.

By the time Harvey returned I’d somehow driven the manky little gits away. My system was on standby, waiting for a deluge of alcohol. I sipped at my beverage (Harvey had thoughtfully made my favorite, a concoction we called “The Top Shelf in a Pail”) and once more attempted to make conversation. “In town,” I said, “they call this the old Quinton place.”

“That’s because”—Harv sang some thriller-type music, bum-ba-bum-ba—“it is. A man named Quinton used to live here.”

I thought of the naked monster in the night. “Harv …” I began.

The three girls came back, all wearing queer and disgusted faces. Sad Sara looked sadder still.

“Do you know what’s up there?” demanded Lee. “Up there on that path?”

“It’s gross,” said Sheila, as if she were giving us hints.

“A deer,” said Lee, “with its goddam throat ripped out!” Lee buckled her hands on her hips, making this clearly my fault.

“What would do something like that?” asked Sara.

“Dogs,” answered Harvey. “Probably just a couple of dogs. And I’ll tell you what else. After they killed that deer, those dogs trotted on home and hunkered down in the family room to play with the kiddies, and they have names like Fido and Rover and Prince.” Harvey puffed on the cigar. “That’s the way it is, baby.”

Lee sat down on Harvey’s lap. “What’s for sups?”

“Tonight,” said Harvey,
“linguine à la Bensoni.”

I caught Sara looking at me. Sheila and Lee might have been living in expectation of a nuclear holocaust; Sara was clearly waiting for fallout.

After dinner, Harvey produced the dope. Harvey was always in possession of dope, although that night the holdings didn’t
amount to all that much, three or four joints, a nugget of hash and a little white pill.

“What’s the pill?” the girls and I demanded in unison.

Harvey examined it, raising his granny glasses on to his forehead and squinting like a jeweler. “I think it’s acid,” he decided, bouncing it on an open palm as if he could learn something from its weight. “I think.”

I lost interest. I had a head full of naked monsters, giant fish and Elspeth screwing others with gleeful abandon. Sara, Sheila and Lee remained in the running. Sheila, whose curls had become an even bigger bubble, dropped out graciously. “Me, I think I’ll get tanked on booze tonight.”

“Good idea, good idea,” seconded Harvey.

Lee likewise declined, although not so graciously. “Acid sucks,” she said. “It’s as bad as Nathaniel fucking Hawthorne.”

That left Sara. Sara was the most sober of us, having spent the evening slowly sucking on a bottle of beer. Harvey handed her the pill. “Go ahead, take it,” he told her gently. “You’ll hardly notice it. Today’s stuff is nothing like it was in the old days.” Harvey turned nostalgic. “Hey, did I ever tell you girls that I was at Woodstock?”

“Where?” asked Sheila.

Sara popped the pill willingly.

It dawned on me that everyone was planning to spend the night. I did some arduous mental arithmetic, adding up the number of people present and dividing by the number of bedrooms available.

Harvey put a record on the turntable, some piece of new wave shit to show the girls that he was hip. Professor Benson began to bounce up and down, explaining that this was how one danced to such music. Sheila joined him, jumping with such vigor that her halter-top exploded away from her breasts. Sheila giggled and didn’t bother to reattach it. Lee found a book on the shelves, some novel translated from Swedish, written by a man whose name was surmounted by a row of double periods and full of slashes through the “o”s. The cover notes seemed to say that the author was so depressed that he committed suicide several months before the novel was even begun. Lee sat down in the easy chair and began to read. I located a bottle of booze and wandered outside.

Sad Sara followed me, carrying a lit joint. We walked down to the side of the pond and didn’t say a word.

When we went back to the house, Harvey and the two girls were no longer in the living room. I could detect a furious giggling coming from the second bedroom upstairs, and it was Harvey’s, his asinine laugh excited into tiny little yelps. I went over to the stack of records and located the one I’d played the night before. Only then did I read the title of the piece, out of the corner of my eye, so that I could name it for Sara in an offhand way. I set it on the turntable. Perhaps I’d done this to impress the girl with my alleged sensitivity, but as soon as the “Vocalise” filled the air my knees weakened and I had to sit down in the big chair. The composer, Rachmaninoff, seemed to have insight into my tiny life and problems, every note and chord corresponding to some ragged piece of my spirit’s tale. Here’s Elspeth in bed with someone else, sang the lovely melody, here’s a sky full of moon and stars, here’s the last pull from a bottle of whiskey, here’s sad Sara sitting down on your lap. I kissed Sara and rudely yanked off her top. Sara arched her back as she kissed, feeding her breasts toward me.

The chair we shared faced the picture window, and in the middle of the kiss (Sara’s tongue was like a friendly neighbor on moving day, popping in and saying, “Hi! How’re ya doin’? Need any help? My name’s Phil!”) I opened my eyes.

The monster was there.

Again the thing was dancing, huge and naked. When first seen the monster’s back was toward me, one hand reaching awkwardly toward the moon, and as he revolved I saw that the other hand was at his groin, two enormous fingers tugging at his penis, jerking off in the style of a seven-year-old. The monster’s dick was as tiny as it had been the night before, but it had achieved the horizontal. One of the monster’s crooked eyes was aimed at Sara and I, the other was closed in transports of rapture.