The lights were on, but nobody was home. The familys 4 unicycles were in the front hall and the car was gone. They never got cored. They were smart. They drove one of the last Volkswagen Bugs still running.
I knew where they kept the liquor. I poured myself a couple of stiff shots of bourbon, in lieu of their absent body warmth. I dont think I had had a drink for a month before that.
I got this hot rush in my belly. Out into the night I went again. I was automatically looking for an older woman who would make everything all right by becoming the beast with two backs with me.
A coed would not do, not that a coed would have had anything to do with somebody as old and relatively poor as me. I couldnt even have promised her a better grade than she deserved. There were no grades at Tarkington.
But I wouldnt have wanted a coed in any case. The only sort of woman who excites me is an older one in uncomfortable circumstances, full of doubts not only about herself but about the value of life itself. Although I never met her personally, the late Marilyn Monroe comes to mind, maybe 3 years before she committed suicide.
Cough, cough, cough.
If there is a Divine Providence, there is also a wicked one, provided you agree that making love to off-balance women you arent married to is wickedness. My own feeling is that if adultery is wickedness then so is food. Both make me feel so much better afterward.
Just as a hungry person knows that somewhere not far away somebody is preparing good things to eat, I knew that night that not far away was an older woman in despair. There had to be!
Zuzu Johnson was out of the question. Her husband was home, and she was hosting a dinner party for a couple of grateful parents who were giving the college a language laboratory. When it was finished, students would be able to sit in soundproof booths and listen to recordings of any one of more than 100 languages and dialects made by native speakers.
The lights were on in the sculpture studio of Norman Rockwell Hall, the art building, the only structure on campus named after a historical figure rather than the donating family. It was another gift from the Moellenkamps, who may have felt that too much was named after them already.
There was a whirring and rumbling coming from in-side the sculpture studio. Somebody was playing with the crane in there, making it run back and forth on its tracks overhead. Whoever it was had to be playing, since nobody ever made a piece of sculpture so big that it could be moved only by the mighty crane.
After the prison break, there was some talk on the part of the convicts of hanging somebody from it, and running him back and forth while he strangled. They had no particular candidate in mind. But then the
Niagara Power and Light Company, which was owned by the Unification Church Korean Evangelical Association, shut off all our electricity.
Outside Rockwell Hall that night, I might have been back on a patrol in Vietnam. That is how keen my senses were. That was how quick my mind was to create a whole picture from the slightest clues.
I knew that the sculpture studio was locked up tight after 6:30 P.M., since I had tried the door many times, thinking that I might sometime bring a lover there. I had considered getting a key somehow at the start of the semester and learned from Buildings and Grounds that only they and that years Artist in Residence, the sculptress Pamela Ford Hall, were allowed to have keys. This was because of vandalism by either students or Townies in the studio the year before.
They knocked off the noses and fingers of replicas of Greek statues, and defecated in a bucket of wet clay. That sort of thing.
So that had to be Pamela Ford Hall in there making the crane go back and forth. And the cranes restless travels had to represent unhappiness, not any masterpiece she was creating. What use did she have for a crane, or even a wheelbarrow, since she worked exclusively in nearly weightless polyurethane. And she was a recent divorc?e without children. And, because she knew my reputation, Im sure, she had been avoiding me.
I climbed up on the studios loading dock. I thumped my fist on its enormous sliding door. The door was motor driven. She had only to press a button to let me
in.
The crane stopped going back and forth. There was a hopeful sign!
She asked through the door what I wanted.
I wanted to make sure you were OK in there,¨ I said.
Who are you to care whether Im OK or not in here?¨ she said.
Gene Hartke,¨ I said.
She opened the door just a crack and stared out at me, but didnt say anything. Then she opened the door wider, and I could see she was holding an uncorked bottle of what would turn out to be blackberry brandy.
Hello, Soldier,¨ she said.
Hi,¨ I said very carefully.
And then she said, What took you so long?¨
15
p
amela sure got me drunk that night, and we made love. And then I spilled my guts about the Vietnam War in front of a bunch of students at the Pahlavi Pavilion. And Kimberley Wilder recorded me.
I had never tasted blackberry brandy before. I never want to taste it again. It did bad things to me. It made me a crybaby about the war. That is something I swore I would never be.
If I could order any drink I wanted now, it would be a Sweet Rob Roy on the Rocks, a Manhattan made with Scotch. That was another drink a woman introduced me to, and it made me laugh instead of cry, and fall in love with the woman who said to try one.
That was in Manila, after the excrement hit the airconditioning in Saigon. She was Harriet Gummer, the war correspondent from Iowa. She had a son by me without telling me.
His name? Rob Roy.
After we made love, Pamela asked me the same question Harriet had asked me in Manila 15 years earlier. It was something they both had to know. They both asked me if I had killed anybody in the war.
I said to Pamela what I had said to Harriet: If I were a fighter plane instead of a human being, there would be little pictures of people painted all over me.¨
I should have gone straight home after saying that. But I went over to the Pavilion instead. I needed a bigger audience for that great line of mine.
So I barged into a group of students sitting in front of the great fireplace in the main lounge. After the prison break, that fireplace would be used for cooking horse meat and dogs. I got between the students and the fire, so there was no way they could ignore me, and I said to them, If I were a fighter plane instead of a human being, there would be little pictures of people painted all over me.¨
I went on from there.
I was so full of self-pity! That was what I found unbearable when Jason Wilder played back my words to me. I was so drunk that I acted like a victim!
The scenes of unspeakable cruelty and stupidity and waste I described that night were no more horrible than ultrarealistic shows about Vietnam, which had become staples of TV entertainment. When I told the students about the severed human head I saw nestled in the guts of a water buffalo, to them, Im sure, the head might as well have been made of wax, and the guts those of some big animal which may or may not have belonged to a real water buffalo.
What difference could it make whether the head was or was not wax, or whether the guts were or were not those of a water buffalo?
No difference.
Professor Hartke,¨ Jason Wilder said to me gently, reasonably, when the tape had reached its end, why on Earth would you want to tell such tales to young people who need to love their country?¨
I wanted to keep my job so much, and the house which came with it, that my reply was asinine. I was telling them history,¨ I said, and I had had a little too much to drink. I dont usually drink that much.¨
Im sure,¨ he said. I am told that you are a man with many problems, but that alcohol has not appeared among them with any consistency. So let us say that your performance in the Pavilion was a well-intended history lesson of which you accidentally lost control.¨