WORLD OF FOLLY
by K.P.B. Stevens
© 2011 Karl Peter Bush Stevens
Smashwords Edition
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by K.P.B. Stevens
eISBN: 978-0-9850021-2-1
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons. living or dead, or actual events is entirely coincidental.
Read the next Ascalon, Ohio book as it’s being written by visiting www.ascalonohio.com
for Amy
with special thanks for editorial assistance to
Nina Clements and to my mother, Gertrude Bush
Preface: The Accordion and the Tin Star
Paul Whin watched High Noon six times in the week before he left for college. It was a movie that ennobled loneliness. Gary Cooper's body in the twin slashes of his dark vest seemed crumpled as he walked, collapsed by the abandonment of the townspeople he had relied on. Grace Kelley, quibbling and doubting, secretly supported him. Paul watched her face, distorted slightly by the shape of her bonnet. He longed for her. Not for her, exactly, but for someone to notice him, and think about him, and spend agonized hours just sitting, squeezing her hands together, waiting for his fate to be decided. And he longed for Gary Cooper's sense of duty, which gave him permission to grimace and look offended and sad.
Paul kept the movie playing on his computer as he packed. "These items," he thought, putting a rolled up pair of pants into the suitcase, "will follow me to college, and therefore they must define who I am." Didymus College was only five miles from his home, but he was limiting himself to one suitcase and one box and didn’t plan to return for any more of his things. He was packing seven pairs of pants, seven shirts, socks and underwear, two pairs of shoes, his computer and his iPhone. He put a small stack of books in the box. Frannie and Zooey. E.E. Cummings poetry. After he had finished with these, he looked around the house for more exotic objects.
He took his mother’s Tibetan temple bells without her protesting. He went to the basement and dug in fusty boxes, unearthing an old Chinese army bag of his father’s. His father held the bag in his wide, strong hands, and gently mashed the stiff fabric. He looked as if he might cry. But he handed the bag back to Paul and nodded. “You can have it,” he said. “I barely remember it. Weird, right? It must have been important, when I was your age. I must have seen it in a store somewhere and really wanted it.”
Paul found an old accordion in the attic. It was in a black case with strips of leather for hinges. The leather was stiff and a few hard flakes fell off of it when Paul opened the case. The accordion had red enameled wood and keys that someone’s finger grease had made slightly opalescent. Paul lifted the accordion from its case and put his arms through the stiff, leather shoulder straps. He turned his head and put his nose against one of the straps and thought, “This is how the world smelled, when Gary Cooper was walking around in it.” He undid the clasp that held the accordion together and a slow, vibrating discordance fell from it as the bellows swung open.
There was a footfall in the hall below and he felt the looming presence of his mother filling the doorway at the bottom of the attic steps. “Paul?” she called up to him. “What was that noise?”
“Nothing, Mom. I’m just looking around.” He waited until he heard her moving away, and then he slowly closed the accordion and put it tenderly in its case. He carried it downstairs to his bedroom, where he set it on his bed next to his suitcase and regarded it with satisfaction. He turned to his computer and started High Noon playing again, with the volume off. When he turned around, his mother was standing in the doorway.
“You can’t take that,” she told him, nodding at the accordion. She was a short woman, with frizzy brown hair and a pendant on a gold chain around her neck that had his name on it in polished gold letters. She was wearing a black shirt with a pattern of plastic gem stones appliquéd to it. Her brown eyes expressed everything for her, and their default mode was one of lurking violence. This made them exciting when they filled with tenderness or love. Now they were angry, and the other features of her face aligned themselves to that anger.
“Why not?” Paul asked. “Whose is it?”
“It was my grandfather’s. He brought it from Germany. I don’t want you to take it.”
“Well I want to take it. I like the way it smells.”
“You can’t.”
“Why?”
“You’ll ruin it. You’ll spill beer on it.”
“I don’t drink beer.”
“You will.”
“No one ever invites me to parties.”
“In college, parties will find you.”
“How do you know?”
“I went.”
“For a year.”
“I went.”
There was a heavy but careful step in the hallway, and Paul’s father appeared in the shadows behind his mother. “Sari,” he said softly, cosseting her.
“He wants to take Grandpa’s accordion.”
“We never use it.”
“It’s an heirloom.”
“We don’t have heirlooms.”
Paul felt his shoulders grow lean and tight. He lifted his face and tried to imitate the expression of stricken surprise that Gary Cooper wore when the townspeople refused to join his posse. “What’s the use of it rotting in the attic?” he asked.
“It’s not rotting in the attic.”
“Sari,” his father said.
“No, Tom, I’m sorry, but he can’t have it.”
“Sari, you’re making him cry.” But it was Paul’s father who was crying. “Sari, he’s going away to school. Our little boy is leaving.”
Paul’s mother stood very still. The anger in her eyes became muddied by confusion. “Fuck,” she said, softly. Then, louder, “Fuck.” She hesitated, then turned and trudged away.
Paul’s father was left in the shadows. “Go ahead,” he said, softly. “Go ahead, Paul, take it.”
But Paul didn’t feel victorious. He felt like Gary Cooper, after he had shot the Miller gang, and was finally leaving town with Grace Kelley. The townspeople crowded around to congratulate him on his victory. But he took off his tin star and threw it in the dirt.
Professor Bauerschmidt was tall and bald and had cheeks that were so gaunt that Paul could see strands of muscle press against his cheekbones. The tight, acid odor of cigarettes emanated from his oxford cloth shirt, and as he talked he stuck a piece of chalk in his mouth and rolled it around, leaving little white marks against his lips. His class was called Monsters in American Literature, but he seemed to feel sad about that. “It’s an alliterative title,” he said, “and alliteration is the besetting sin of class naming. It’s meant to appeal to a certain preening cleverness in undergraduates.” It took him awhile to get to the subject of the class itself. He spent the first twenty minutes trying to lead a discussion about a sign that the town had placed on Route 36. The sign said “fifteen thousand people enjoyed having you.” He chortled over this, waggling the piece of chalk in his mouth, making Paul wonder if there was some sexual meaning to the sign, or if Professor Bauerschmidt was trying to imply that the townspeople had swindled their visitors in some way.
Paul was from the town. He was wearing shorts and a t-shirt and he hunched his body inwards because the air-conditioner made the room too cold. There was a girl sitting across the big square classroom table from him. She was wearing a sundress with spaghetti straps, and she had tiny moles along the ridge of her shoulders. She turned her head to Professor Bauerschmidt and a strand of dark brown hair fell across her sunburned cheek. Her face had an intent expression and her lips were pursed into a near smile. Paul shifted his gaze back to Professor Bauerschmidt and listened as he talked, trying to hear what the girl heard and discover what drew her face into that look of curious, pleased attention. After a moment he turned back to her and watched her shyly from his small, huddled position at the table.
After class he went back to his dorm room. He walked across the green, full campus, wondering who he could compare Professor Bauerschmidt to. Everyone fell into some role from an old movie. The people he liked were often in black and white in his imagination, and he would watch them and assign them a celebrity. Carey Grant or Audrey Hepburn or Jimmy Stewart. Neutral people, people he didn’t really know, could inhabit movies from the nineteen sixties and seventies. He decided that Bauerschmidt was like the silly minister in The Parent Trap, who smirked and settled in to watch the madcap antics with complacent joy. Paul passed through knots of walking students and glanced shyly at their faces, trying to place them, shifting his gaze away quickly if they tried to meet his eyes.
His roommate, Aaron Hamilton, was standing in the middle of the dorm room in his boxer shorts. During orientation week he had shown Paul every pair of boxer shorts that he owned, naming the labels and asking him to admire the plaid. Paul hadn’t know that boxer shorts were important. To him, underwear was always white and always pressed against the hip joints. Aaron picked up a pair of jeans from his bed and gave Paul a sharp, disgruntled look, as if Paul had interrupted him in the middle of some private ritual.
There was a set of Tibetan temple bells hanging from the ceiling at the foot of Paul’s bed. He went to them and struck each bell in turn with a little wooden mallet. The tones were mellow and rich, and he smiled as he heard them. When he turned around, Aaron had his pants on and had opened the room door. Aaron was tall and gangly and had a trick of climbing the hallway walls while he talked to girls. He would stretch out his long arms and rest splayed hands against the cinderblocks on either wall and slowly winch his way up.
Within moments of his opening the door, guys from the hall began to drift in. Brom Brueghel plopped down on Paul’s bed without asking. He leaned against Paul’s pillow and rubbed the cotton of Paul’s sheets between his thumb and forefinger. Paul’s bed had begun to smell like Aaron’s friends. Every night he slept in a thin grit of Doritos crumbs. He sighed and went to his desk. He put some books and his computer into his green Chinese army bag and left the room, pausing first at the foot of his bed to strike the temple bells, from highest to lowest, letting the last somber meditative note linger as he walked out.
He had found a nice, clean desk in the library where he could sit for hours and pretend to study. It was a little before noon, but he had no one to eat with, so he bought a sandwich from the cart in the library atrium. His desk looked down at the atrium through glass windows, and he sat with a book open, watching the other students come and go. He saw the girl from Professor Bauerschmidt’s class come up the stairs. She walked with her shoulders rounded slightly forward and with her chin up, her bright, clean gaze darting around. She disappeared into the stacks and he sat back, chewing on the inside of his mouth. Then he opened his computer and went through profile pictures on Facebook until he found her.
Her name was Eudora Moxey. That Friday he followed her to a frat party at a large stone house with a stone wall around its patio. He hesitated, watching her as she sat on that wall, looking about her with those open, interested eyes. Then he went up to her and said her name. Then, because he didn’t know what else to say, he said it again.
“Yes,” she said. “That is my name.”
“It’s a great name,” he said. “In the entire universe, it’s probably one of ten great names.”
“What’s another?”
He had anticipated this question and had spent several hours surfing the library’s card catalog, preparing his answer. “Belladonna Poppendick,” he said. “She wrote a book about aborigines.”
Eudora lowered her head and gave him a curious, comical gaze from under her dark eyebrows. “You’re in my English class, aren’t you?”
“Right,” Paul said. “Bauerschmidt chews chalk.”
“What?”
“He’s always chewing on a piece of chalk. You’ve noticed that, right?”
"I like Bauerschmidt. I like what he said about the weird being a gateway into folly."
Paul blinked. “Yeah, that was great. Just great."
"I mean, it's fascinating, the idea that there's this other world, this world of folly right beyond our own."
A thin, dark-haired girl who was sitting on the wall beside Eudora rolled her eyes and said, “The world of folly again.”
Paul glanced at her and then back at Eudora, who had pert lips that looked a little too wrinkled, like the crimping on a pie crust. "And that's where the monsters live," he suggested.
"No. Weren't you paying attention? The monsters live here. They just help us enter the world of folly by being so weird. We look at them and think, 'well, if that can exist then anything can exist,' and we're there, in the world of folly.”
Someone bumped against Paul and he spilled the wine that he was carrying in his Chinese army bag. He was carrying it in a clear plastic lemonade pitcher with a flip top lid. The lid flew off and the wine splashed out, falling in a single mass onto the patio stones between them. Some of it splashed up across Eudora's sun dress. Paul hid his embarrassment by pretending that he was Cary Grant. "I'm dreadfully sorry," he said, and fumbled in his pocket for a white handkerchief.
The thin, dark-haired girl was amused. "Is that a lemonade pitcher?"
"Yes."
"And is that a handkerchief?"
"Yes."
"There's something very old world about you."
“I thought that if I put the wine in the pitcher, I would fool campus security,” he said, busy with trying to mop the wine off of Eudora's hem. Her sun dress was purple with red paisleys.
"Here, give me that," Eudora said and took the handkerchief. Their fingers touched and Cary Grant deserted Paul. He watched her press the white cotton handkerchief against her dress and tried not to look at her knees.
The thin, dark-haired girl noted his embarrassment and scooted over. “Here,” she said, "sit on the wall between us."
Paul sat. There was a glass door that led off the patio into the living room of the frat house, and Paul could see Aaron Hamilton in there, dancing. He stretched his long arms out over the heads of several girls at once and waved his hands in a rhythmic pattern, as if spinning a web. "Do you see that guy in there?" he asked the thin, dark-haired girl. "That's my roommate."
"Spiderman?" she said. "We were just talking about him. Why is he always climbing the walls?"
"I don't know," Paul said. "He wears plaid boxers."
"Are those comfortable?" Eudora asked, handing the wine-stained handkerchief back to him.
Paul blushed. "I don't know.”
"They're pretty comfortable," the thin, dark-haired girl said.
"When have you worn boxers?" Eudora asked her.
"I've lived a full and happy life."
”Tell me more about the world of folly," Paul said to Eudora.
The thin, dark-haired girl squinted her eyes and gazed disdainfully at Aaron. "You're looking at it," she said.
They got drunk together. The thin, dark-haired girl scooted in and out of the frat house, bringing them plastic cups of beer. When the party ended they walked back to north campus, where their dorms sat in a Gothic cluster. It was a warm night and the sky was very clear. Paul thought about Jimmy Stewart singing “Buffalo Girls” in It’s A Wonderful Life. He wanted to sing it, too, although he thought that they would know why and that it would embarrass them. But he felt exactly that excitement of first love, a kind of drunken submergence in the two girls. He tried to think of it in terms of what he’d been learning in college. It was like they were suddenly fashioning their own ecosystem, or creating a tribe out of the remnants of a past society. But these ideas didn’t seem sufficient, and he thought of himself wearing Jimmy Stewart’s striped football jersey and walking with his shoulders thrown back, a little out of balance and dismissive of gravity, his face totally transformed - not the usual, worried George Bailey, but someone else, a new person because of Donna Reed. Eudora clung to his arm and fell against him a little as they walked. He commented on the stars and waxed poetic. "Like pinpricks on the mausoleum of the sky," he said, and called them the tombs of lost radio signals, the bandwidth of spoiled hope. Eudora found this hilarious and Paul laughed at himself, maybe for the first time in his life.
They came to the thin, dark-haired girl’s dorm and she left them with a smile and a backward wave, and it surprised Paul, although he realized that the girls must have communicated, somehow, and that this was how Eudora wanted it to be. He turned with Eudora and walked along a narrow sidewalk that led up a small incline between spruce trees. There were lights overhead but their illumination fell on the boughs and stuck there, and Paul and Eudora walked in shadow. Her mood changed. She loosed her arm and walked at a little distance from him. Then she seemed to change her mind and come back. The path came to the door of her dorm and she held the outer door open so that Paul could squeeze in behind her. The dorm hallways were lit by panels of florescent lights. Every door had its white board and the smell of must and bodies and spilled beer seeping from behind it. Eudora’s door was at the end of the hall and had two names on it, so he knew that she had a roommate, but there was an empty feeling to the door and he also knew that the room behind it was silent and dark. Eudora fumbled out her key and went in slowly, pausing right on the threshold as if she needed a minute to decide something. She turned with her hand on the doorframe and looked at Paul. She flattened out the crimps in her lips. "I'm sorry," she said. "This is a mistake. You'll have to go now." She closed the door.
Paul stood there, blinking. He turned and took a step away from the door. Then he stopped and turned back. “I have nothing to lose,” he thought, “and, anyway, her name is Eudora Moxey.” He knocked. She opened the door a crack. "Look," he said, "I wasn't going to kiss you, or try anything. I've only ever kissed one person and that...well, that didn't work out too well. I don't know, I'd just like to have a friend, I guess. I don’t have that many friends.”
She looked at him and then she held the door wide. "Come in."
She had a rabbit in the room. It was small and fluffy and it had brown ears. It sat in a cage full of wood shavings on the floor. There were two beds, each neatly made, and the floor was clean. The room smelled clean and cold. She told him that her roommate had acquired a boyfriend on the second day of school and hadn't slept in the room since. Eudora lit a stick of incense and turned on a floor lamp so that she could cut the overhead florescent light. Paul could tell that none of this was meant to be romantic, it was just her domesticity, and he waited, sitting indian style on the floor and watching her, as she went through her small rituals of settling in. She made tea in a hot pot. Then she sat down opposite him and brought her knees in to touch his knees. He could smell the spilled wine from the hem of her dress. "I want to tell you something, if we're going to be friends," she said.
"Okay," he said. She hesitated, and he was intimidated by the sense of import and said, "Listen, if it's something that we can be friends without you telling me, then you really don't have to."
“No,” she said slowly. “I want to tell you, so that you'll understand why its friends and not something else."
"Okay."
She took a sip of tea and then held her mug in front of her face, hiding her lips. She looked at the dark, blank windows. “I was molested by my uncle,” she said, “starting when I was thirteen."
Paul felt the warmth of her knees against his own. Her words made him feel immediately guilty, as if he had violated her in some way. "I'm sorry," he said. "That...that must have been horrible."
"It was.” She sipped and then put the mug down. She looked straight at him and let her voice become flat and expressionless. “I think he wanted to rape me, but I told my parents before it went too far. The whole family disowned him. Only I could see how sad it made them.” She paused, then went on, reciting something she’d said to herself many times before. “They were great, they really were. They'd take me places and try to cheer me up. But I could see that they were working at it, that they had to try hard to be cheerful themselves. It all got so dishonest, and I didn't really want to be around them, but also I was grateful to them, and to my grandma. It really broke her heart."
Paul was thinking about how she'd taken his arm and fallen against him on the walk home, and he thought about the way that Donna Reed’s bathrobe slipped off and she had to hide behind a bush as Jimmy Stewart walked around her and said, “This is a very interesting situation.” Paul stared into Eudora’s eyes because she seemed to need him to, and he thought about how the men came to tell George Bailey that his father had a stroke, and how his face fell and he was no longer the man who had walked along happily singing ‘Buffalo Girls.’
“If someone you love does something and you can't forgive them for it, that’s heartbreaking, right?” she said. “You know that you've lost them, and you have to look back over everything you ever knew about them and wonder if there wasn't a seed of it somewhere. Wonder if you really knew them at all."
Paul frowned and looked away. The rabbit shuffled nervously through the wood shavings in its cage. “I don't really know what to say."
She set her mug down and reached out to touch his arm. “That’s what I like about you," she said. "You don't try to be wise when you're not. You're a funny boy, Paul Whin."
They slept in the same bed that night. It was the first of many nights that they slept together in that bed, rarely touching but aware of the other’s warm presence. Paul was a virgin and he had all of the physiological nightmares of any eighteen year old boy, the nocturnal emissions, the weird disjointed dreams about sex acts that he’d never seen and that he thought probably didn’t really exist. But when he slept in Eudora's bed his body never betrayed him. It was as if his body knew that it was ensconced in a holy place, an unlooked for and unmerited intimacy, and it responded with all the careful fervency of a devout believer.
Chapter Two: The Most Structurally Sound Love Shape
On Saturdays, Renata Pasquills drove the five miles from Ascalon to Didymus College, where she had brunch with her younger brother, Alexei. “I can’t get over it,” she said to him. “I know I should, but I can’t. I feel like I don’t know anything, anymore. Ignorant. That’s how I feel.”
Alexei had dark, hard eyes and a very full mouth. As they ate, Renata watched the girls in the dining hall notice him and look away. He wore suits and patterned vest. He occasionally carried a cane. When Renata sat with him, her fringed scarfs tumbled over the sides of the wooden dining hall chair and her long peasant skirts brushed against the floor’s scuffed wood. Their style of dress confused their grandmother, who had spent years trying to be an American. “Why do you want to dress like people from the past, from the old country?” she would ask them, and Alexei would say, “I want to be a Holy Fool.” He had a small silver locket that he wore on a long chain looped around his forearm. It dangled from the opening of his sleeve, and he would flick his wrist to pull it into his palm and then let it drop again, like a yoyo. He had told their grandmother that it contained a relic of St. Symeon of Emesa. “I never heard anything so foolish,” their grandmother had said. “St. Symeon, indeed.”
When she was with her students, Renata was as thoroughly convinced by the silk scarves around her neck and her long pleated peasants’ skirts as they were. Miss Renata was like a gypsy. She made them laugh in their music classes. They closed their eyes and balanced pillows on their heads and sang as they walked around in a circle. Her answer to their grandmother would have been different from her brother’s. She wanted the scarves and skirts to be an exteriorization of her soul. She wanted her interior to be exotic, not this bleating, broken thing, not this cliche of heartbreak.
At the end of each school day she went home and cooked onions, frying them in butter and settling a steak in among them, just like Mitchell had taught her. She sat at the small, cheap table in her apartment and drank a glass of wine and picked over her salad and stared at the seared meat.
“I miss Mitchell,” she said to Alexei at brunch. “And Stacy, believe it or not. I even miss the arguments. The tension.”
“I think that the triangle is the most structurally sound love shape,” Alexei said, gazing across the dining hall. “It can’t fall down in an earthquake.”
The dining hall had a long sloping ceiling and high glass windows. To Renata, it looked like a protestant church that had been built in the mid-seventies. “I miss Mitchell,” she repeated.
Alexei sighed. He let the locket drop from his sleeve and then jerked his wrist up to bring it into his palm. “How can you? I hate Mitchell.”
“I know, and that’s very sweet of you, but I can’t. And then I hate myself because I can’t. Why can’t I, Alexei? He was cruel to me. I know that he was cruel to me, so why can’t I hate him?”
She waited for Alexei to answer but he just shrugged and let the locket drop from his wrist. He swung it back and forth above a puddle of syrup on his plate. She gazed across the dining hall at a group of students who were sitting near the east windows. A boy was sitting with several girls at a round table. The boy had wild, uneven hair and an intense look on his small face. His body listed a little in his chair. His posture was aligned to a brunette who was wearing a loose sun dress. Renata had owned a dress like that in college. Mitchell had shifted his body so that he was always facing her. Or had he? Hadn’t he sometimes turned his shoulders so that he was aligned with Stacy, who ate so many meals with them, and talked and laughed, and sometimes had food stuck between her wide teeth. Renata remembered saying to Mitchell, “It’s weird that she’s so beautiful. I mean, it’s an unusual beauty. She’s got that small nose and those teeth.” Now she wondered if she had made him love her. Had he even noticed Stacy’s beauty, before she pointed it out to him? Had he been capable of noticing the allure of Stacy gums, stretched thin and pink at the top of those teeth?
The boy felt her staring at him and turned around. He smiled shyly and raised a cautious hand to wave at her. Renata waved back. “Do you know him?” Alexei asked.
“He seems very familiar to me,” Renata said.
Alexei smiled thinly. “You’ve been seeing him your whole life. That’s Paul Whin. A local boy.”
“It is? I recognize him, now. Still, there’s something about him that would seem familiar anyway.”
Alexei made his pendant rotate through lazy circles in the air. “He’s like us. Peculiar.”
“But not a Holy Fool?”
He blinked. “No, not a Holy Fool. But an emigre. Except that he’s a true American. His parents are American.”
“Our parents are American.”
“Yes, but they think they’re Russian.”
Alexei and Renata’s grandmother was the real Russian. Her parents had fled Russia in 1918. They had just been children then, but they had lived with other Russians, in an enclave in a tiny Ohio town. The men had worked as brick layers. The women had cooked and tended their wood stoves. Renata found this image of the past convincingly romantic. She understood why her parents subscribed to it, why every family story was about the Russian side, and not about her father’s people, who had been farmers in Utica and never anything else. Her parents had inherited all of the old Russian heirlooms - the burnished samovar that sat on a table in the upstairs hallway, the candlesticks that were brought out of the sideboard for special occasions, the pieces of lacework that had been framed and hung on the bathroom walls. Being among all those old things had warped Alexei, and maybe Renata, as well. Her grandmother wanted nothing to do with them. She had run away from the Russian enclave as quickly as she could. She liked baseball games and Connie Francis records. Now she barely moved from her bed. Her eyes were sunken in her face and her skin was stretched thinly over her nose. Her fingers were so thick and wrinkled that they made her hands look webbed. She rarely moved them independently anymore, but moved the whole hand, cupping it around a glass or pawing at the sheets to straighten them.
“I went to see grandma and grandpa last Thursday,” Renata told Alexei. “Do you know what grandpa said? I was talking to him about the fact that he almost never goes out anymore. He just stays by her all day long, watching TV. He’s afraid that she’ll try to get up or something if he goes out, and she’ll hurt herself. And I said to him, ‘Grandpa, I don’t know of anyone who would show dedication like this.’ I mean, he’s given his entire life over to her. He used to go to breakfast every morning with his friends in the Free Masons. Do you remember that? So I was complimenting him about it. And do you know what he said? He looked at me and he said, ‘well, I made a promise.’ Do you get it Alexei? He made her a promise to be with her, richer and poorer, in sickness and in health, and he’s going to keep it no matter what.”
Alexei had turned his head slightly and was watching her out of the corner of his eye. His face was very still. When she finished he let the pendant drop from his hand and dangle there. He moved it around and around in a little circle. “And you admire that?”
“Stop moving that pendant around. You look like Professor Calculus when he’s dowsing. All I’m saying is that there’s something beautiful in Grandpa’s simplicity.”
Alexei sniffed. “I prefer complexity.”
“Right, but I’m not saying aesthetically. I just mean morally. Grandpa is morally beautiful.” She sighed. “I wish I was as simple as that.”
“What you really mean is that you wish Mitchell had been simple. But if he had, you wouldn’t have liked him. Neither of us like simple people. They’re so boring.”
“Aren’t Holy Fools simple?”
He shook his head. “Of course not. They’re the most complicated kind of fools there are. They understand that the world is an imperfect reflection.”
“An imperfect reflection of what?”
“God, of course. I’ve told you about this before. We live at the bottom of a deep lake. And above us we can see the sunlight striking the top of the water. And it even penetrates the water, in those flat bands you see on nature shows about the coral reefs or sharks or something. Well, but, the sunlight we see in those flat bands and the sunlight we see glimmering in pools at the top of the water, that’s not the way that sunlight really looks, is it? Not the way it would look if we were out of the water. The water distorts it.” He ate a sausage link.
“And?”
“And? And so everything we see is distorted from the true reality. God is the sunlight but we can never see God as God truly is. We just see a distortion made by the water.” He watched her with a pedantic expression on his face. “The water,” he explained, softly, “is the world. This reality. It distorts the divine reality.”
“But Alexei, what does that have to do with being a Holy Fool?”
“Holy Fools see it. They understand that everything is distorted. And they point it out. They make sure that we never confuse the distortions of this reality with divine reality.”
“And that makes them complicated?”
“Of course it does. There’s so much distortion to see. And everyone hates them for pointing it out.”
Renata ate a spoonful of yogurt. “Well, I prefer Grandpa. Holy Fools aren’t kind.”
“You think that people should be left with their illusions.”
“I think that making a promise and keeping it for sixty-three years isn’t an illusion. I think it’s the most real thing there is.”
“But there’s a greater kindness!” Alexei held his fork rigidly in his fist and pounded the fist on the table.
“What greater kindness? You look like Kruschev.”
“Helping people to see God!”
“And if it hurts them and makes them miserable?”
“They still see God!”
Renata looked away from him and gazed towards the east windows, where the boy was still sitting with his body aligned to the girl in the sun dress. “By that logic,” she said, “Mitchell and Stacy were doing me a favor.”
Alexei turned his body in his chair and picked up his cane. He played with the handle as he worked to regain his composure. “What do you mean, favor?”
“Well, they punctured my illusions, right?”
“They’re not Holy Fools,” Alexei said.
“Why not?”
“Because they did it for their own selfish reasons. Not to help you see God.”
The memory came, sharp and specific. The exact way the stars had looked, cold in the sky outside a frosted window. She had been standing in the living room of their student apartment. She remembered the permanent swell of happiness that she had felt in her stomach, so that she sometimes put her hands on it, as if she was pregnant. Mitchell had been sitting on the soft beige couch, talking on the phone to Stacy, his voice light and happy in a way that teased at a corner of Renata’s mind. She remembered the uninteresting words. “Okay, we’ll meet you there. Maybe they’ll have tomato quiche.” And then she remembered the way the other words had slipped out in his high, light tone. “I love you.” Said to Stacy. Said accidentally, but in a way that told her that he was used to saying it to Stacy, that it was habit for him and he’d forgotten that she was there.
She’d turned and stared at him. He’d had his cellphone in his hand and was pressing the button to end the call. His head was lowered. His shoulders had shifted, tensing a little. He glanced up to see if she had heard. “I don’t know why I said that,” he told her.
“You told her you love her.”
“I know. I don’t know why.” He tried to smile. “I must have been thinking about you.” He slipped the cell phone into his jeans pocket. “She said she’ll meet us at Sunprint for dinner.”
Stacy was waiting for them when they arrived, sitting at the table by the window. She was wearing a flower-print skirt over black tights. Her legs were crossed and she was doing a crossword puzzle, bent far forward at the waist so that the line of her back and her head were almost parallel with the table top. She was chewing on a long red pencil.
They sat down and she didn’t look up. Renata sat very straight in her chair. Mitchell tried to put his arm around her, but she shied away. It was their silence that caught Stacy’s attention. She looked up from the crossword puzzle and met Renata’s gaze, and her long Scandinavian face stretched longer with surprise when she saw Renata’s hostility. She glanced at Mitchell.
He leaned back casually in his chair. “Give us a question,” he said.
“What?” Stacy asked.
“From the crossword. Give us a question.”
The waitress came over. Renata ordered rose hip tea. She glanced at the dark window and saw them there, Mitchell between herself and the window, Stacy across from him. She leaned forward a little so that she could see herself in the glass. Her reflection seemed to emerge out of Mitchell’s, as if he was birthing it. Her head seemed to collide with Stacy’s.
“I have to throw up,” she said. The diners at the other tables stared at her as she rushed past. A man got up, solicitously, as if, somehow, he could help her. The bathroom was tiny and yellow and smelled of the jar of dried flowers that sat on a table beside the door. She knelt over the toilet and dry heaved. She was afraid that Stacy would follow her in. She listened for the rattle of the door handle.
When she emerged she didn’t go back to the table but straight down the stairs and into the night. It was mid-March, and still bitterly cold. She had left her coat in the restaurant. State Street was thronged with people, mostly students, passing her in groups, on their way to dinner. They stared at her as she walked by in her yellow sweater, her arms tight around her chest, her hands tucked under her armpits. Her breath fluttered against her face in gusts. You saw things on State Street. Drunk couples fondling each other. Homeless teenagers throwing things at each other and chasing each other around. Sometimes people screamed late at night, falling to their knees on the sidewalk, drunk and anguished and free of inhibitions. She wanted to hear those screams. More, she wanted to hear Stacy and Mitchell following after her, calling to her. “Renata, where are you going?”
She arrived back at the apartment and went into the bedroom and crawled into the bed. She was shaking with cold and the heavy blue comforter smelled like Mitchell and couldn’t warm her. It lay, flat and flaccid against her, and it shifted rhythmically with her shaking, as it might if they were making love. And then she wondered. Had Stacy and Mitchell ever lain in this bed together? How long had he been saying those words to her? Every time he’d said them, he had made Renata’s life a little more illusory, without her knowing it.
She heard the key in the lock and soft movements beside the door. She knew, just from the sound, that it was both of them. Sound had always been her ally and her friend. Organized into music, it was the meaning of her life. But now she heard the careful, guilty sounds of their footsteps, and she wanted to pierce her eardrums. Wasn’t she, of all people, supposed to be loved?
They came into the room. She had the comforter up over her head, and she imagined them as solicitous shadows. Only half real. Mitchell would be standing at the foot of the bed. Stacy would be in the doorway behind him. They wouldn’t touch each other because they wanted to be generous towards her. That was how they would say it to themselves. It was terrible that things had changed, but at least they could be loving, at least they could be generous. But she didn’t want their generosity. She said it out loud, and the words were small and stony and real. Those words were the only real thing in the dark room. “I don’t want your generosity,” she said. “I don’t want your comfort.”
Chapter Three: Revolution in the Head
“You can’t just like The Beatles. You have to choose which one you prefer, Lennon or McCartney.” Tucker Zefferelli was standing at the window in his grandparent’s bedroom, looking out at the maple tree that grew beside it. A mass of leaves hid the neighboring roof. He was naked, and had been moving restlessly around the room, picking up objects on his grandmother’s dresser, turning a cut-glass perfume bottle in his hands and gently pressing the rubber bulb that would spray a mist of perfume into the air if he squeezed it hard enough. Bee was naked as well, laying in bed, sketching with charcoal. Streaks of dark charcoal had been smeared onto the sheets.
“Why?” she asked him, narrowing her eyes and frowning at her sketch.
“Because they were so different from each other,” Tucker said. “Revolution in the Head says Lennon cared about truth and McCartney cared about beauty.” Tucker had left his dog-eared copy of the book on the bedside table. He crossed to it and picked it up so that he could read from it, holding it with delicate care. “‘That the shape and surface of life and art interest him more than their depths and contradictions is apparent in his delight in the sound, rather than the meaning of words.’ That’s about McCartney. Now listen to this: ‘Seeing music as a vehicle of thought and feeling, Lennon stressed expression at the expense of formal elegance.’”
“So you have to choose? Lennon or McCartney? Substance or structure?”
“Yes.”
“Which one do you choose?” Bee paused in her work and pushed her hair out of her eyes, accidentally smearing charcoal across her forehead.
“That’s the problem,” Tucker said. “I don’t know. Sometimes I think a song is Lennon’s because I like it so much, and I think of myself as more of a Lennon person, and then I find out it’s McCartney’s.”
“So you can’t really choose. You like them both.”
“No, that’s not it,” Tucker closed the book. He began wandering around the room again. There was a round mirror above the dresser, and he stopped in front of it and stared at his reflection. He said, “I think of them as a single person.”
“So? Why is that a problem?” Bee asked. He watched her in the mirror as she gazed at her sketch, her eyes narrowed, which meant that she was studying the contrast on the page. She had taught Tucker how to narrow his eyes until the visible world was reduced to shades of light and dark. It was something that artists did, playing with their vision, limiting or widening it to force the things they saw into a unified composition.
“Because I can’t be like them. A single person can’t be both.”
The corner of her mouth twitched. She opened her eyes wide and looked up at his reflection. “A single person can’t have truth and beauty?”
“Right.”
“So which do you have?”
“Truth.”
“Then I’ll take beauty.”
“It suits you,” he said.
She laughed. “You sound like McCartney.”
He turned away from the mirror and went back to the window. The wall of the house next door was twenty feet away from him, mostly hidden by the maple tree’s thick leaves. There was an open window facing him, but no one looked out of it to see him naked. “I can’t compliment you?” he asked.
He heard her move on the bed and he glanced back. She had set down her sketch book and picked up his copy of Revolution in the Head. She was posing with it, on her knees, a long finger held daintily over the page. Her breasts were taut. “Of course you can,” she said.
They were students at Calgary College, the Christian school located on the west end of town. Tucker went there to please his mother, who was Evangelical and poor, and couldn’t have sent him to any other college even if her beliefs had allowed her to. Bee went there because Calgary took students who had come out of high school with a D average. During mandatory chapel, she sat and sketched the preachers as they lifted their arms in their pompous preacher way and tilted their heads so that the spotlight could fall through their crew cuts. She would write “Jesus wept” under each sketch. Her long fingers were always smudged with charcoal. There was always a patch of it on her face.
Tucker’s grandparents spent half of the year in Florida, leaving in September and returning at the beginning of April. He and Bee had been together since the previous autumn, and now that his grandparents were gone again they were returning to the scene of their first love-making. It had been a long summer. Bee had gone home to Perrysville. Tucker had seen her on the weekends. His friends Max and William had been home from art school, and they had all washed dishes together at a steak house. As they labored in the humid, rancid dish room, Max and William had made jokes about professors Tucker didn’t know, and talked about art movements that Tucker had never heard of. They had held one party, at William’s parents’ house, and they had all been naked in the hot tub, and then gotten out and put on cotton bathrobes. Tucker had been drunk, and had lain on the couch with his eyes closed. A fingertip had brushed against his cheek and he’d seized a hand and kissed it, and everyone had laughed because he had thought it was Bee’s hand but instead it had been William’s, who was also drunk, and playful.
Calgary College’s fall semester began in late August, and Tucker and Bee had lived in the dorms for three chaste weeks before his grandparents finally left for Florida. When they’d returned to the house, it was just like the first time. They’d touched each other shyly and then lost their inhibitions on the bed, the sheets crackling under them because there was a plastic pad beneath them, to protect the mattress if either of his grandparents accidentally urinated in their sleep. It had made Bee laugh every time they rolled over. “The sheets are cussin’ like an old man,” she’d said.
“The Beatles were two contradictory things at once,” Tucker said to her, quoting from Revolution in the Head. “They were ‘comfortably safe and exhilaratingly strange.’ I want to be comfortably safe and exhilaratingly strange.”
Bee flopped back against the pillows. “You’re kind of comfortably strange and exhilaratingly safe.”
He frowned. “You think I’m safe?”
“Yes.”
“I’m not. I’m dangerous.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. It’s more exciting.”
“Come back to bed.”
“Don’t you think that it takes two people to make one complete person?”
“Like you and me?”
“Like Lennon and McCartney.”
“Oh, them.”
Tucker turned and sat down on the windowsill, leaning his naked back against the glass. “I think that we should drop acid,” he said.
She gazed at him from under her eyelashes. “Why?”
“Well, John Lennon did. Lots and lots of acid.”
“I don’t know, Tucker.”
“He had his coffee spiked with it and then he and George went walking all around London, having their minds blown.”
“George, not Paul?”
“George. George had his coffee spiked, too.”
Bee crossed her arms behind her head and tapped at the headboard with her long fingers. “George is my favorite Beatle,” she said.
“George is the one who got into Eastern philosophy first. He was the thoughtful one.”
“Exactly. You’re like George.”
Tucker’s shoulders tensed. He frowned. “But no one really remembers George. When they think about the Beatles, they think about Paul and John.”
“Who cares?”
He got up and went to the bed and picked up her sketchbook. He looked at the picture she had been sketching. It was of himself, standing at the dresser, playing with the little perfume bottle. He set the sketchbook down. “We should drop acid,” he said.
“You’re serious, aren’t you?”
“Well, what do you think?”
“I don’t do drugs.”
“Have you ever done them?”
“Yes. Drugs are boring.”
He flopped down next to her and looked at her, resting the weight of his body on his elbows. “We could be perceiving the world in a whole new way.”
“There are enough ways to perceive the world already.”
“Come on.”
“Tucker, I don’t want to, okay?”
He frowned. They heard a neighbor starting up a lawn mower outside. “Let’s go out to Didymus,” he said.
“Why?”
“I don’t know. It would be fun. It’s beautiful out there. And I know some kids from high school who are going there.”
“I have calculus in two hours.”
“Skip it. It’s a great day for a drive.”
She studied him through narrowed eyes. She lifted one hand and extended a thumb and forefinger, making a frame for his face. Then she shrugged and got out of bed. “Okay.”
Tucker brought Revolution in the Head along in his jacket pocket. They drove out of Ascalon and into the dense, forested hills. The sunlight flowed over the treetops. Tucker wondered why sunlight always seemed too bright in autumn. Maybe it was because the rays picked up the decay from fallen leaves, decay that the breeze had kicked up and left hanging in the air. Maybe all of those tiny, floating leaf particles refracted the light. He turned to say this to Bee but she had her eyes narrowed, studying the tree line, and he didn’t want to risk her playing the expert on light and vision.
They turned up a road that led into the woods. There was a large stone sign that read ‘Didymus College,’ flanked by late flowers. They drove past stone buildings and a chapel. “We used to come here when we were in high school,” Tucker said. “Max and William and me. We’d go into the chapel sometimes, late at night. It’s always open. Once we discovered some college kids having sex in the basement.”
“That’s awful.”
Tucker was surprised. “Why is it awful?”
“Well, people worship in that chapel. It means something to them.”
Tucker pulled into a parking space in front of a bar. “Since when did you care about worship?”
“I don’t like hypocrites, but I kind of like worship. Real worship, you know. People humbling themselves before God.”
Tucker frowned. “I suppose it’s impossible to go to a Christian college and not think about God,” he said. He didn’t look at her. He opened the car door and got out. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s find my friend.”
They walked across the shaded campus. Students were hurrying along the path in little knotted groups, talking together, some smoking. They glanced at Tucker and Bee as they went by, identifying them as strangers. Tucker glanced down at his clothes, his body. He looked at Bee. Both of them had rejected the careful dress and rigid cleanliness of their classmates at Calgary. They wore torn jeans, faded t-shirts. Bee had a tattoo on her left ankle. They looked, he thought, like Didymus students.
He got out his cell phone and sent a text message to Alexei Pasquills. “Wr on campus WRU@.” He flipped the phone closed. “Now we wait,” he said to Bee. They sat down on a bench opposite the chapel. Tucker turned his phone over and over in his hands, pressing at its plastic sides with his thumb and forefinger. There was a little graveyard behind the chapel, with a cast iron gate. Tucker hummed a few lines of ‘Eleanor Rigby.’ “We used to hang out in that graveyard, sometimes,” he said, “though it was dangerous because campus security came by it a lot. Max has a great grandpa who’s buried there. One time we got caught and Max told the security officer that he was just paying his respects.”
Bee was flipping through Revolution in the Head. “They wrote that all together. Eleanor Rigby, I mean. At a dinner party. Or at least that’s one of the stories.”
“I know,” Tucker said. He looked away from the graveyard. “That’s what I always thought life would be like. You’d sit around with your friends over dinner and come up with a story, or write a song.”
“Like that scene in Once.”
“What scene?”
“The one where they go to that party and everyone has to sing a song or recite a poem or something in order to be there. Let’s have a party like that.”
“Who would come?”
“Maybe next summer, when Max and William are back from art school.”
His phone beeped and he flipped it open. A message from Alexei. “Back in my room in 1/2 hr.”
Tucker typed back. “Where’s your room?”
“104 Standish Hall.”
“SYS.” Tucker flipped the phone shut again. “Let’s go,” he said to Bee. “We have to find Standish Hall.”
She handed Revolution in the Head back to him, then stretched, and it reminded him of her posing on his grandparents’ bed. He thought, “I’m the only one who knows that. Who knows what she looks like when she’s naked and she’s posing.” She held her hand out to him and he pulled her up.
He glanced around, wondering how to find Standish Hall, and his eye fell on Alexei Pasquills, who was walking out of the door of the chapel. “Wait a minute,” Tucker said. “That’s him. That’s my friend.” He raised his voice and called. “Alexei! Over here!” Alexei saw him and hesitated, pulling down the hem of his patterned vest. He walked towards them with his head held high.
“That’s your friend?” Bee asked. “Why does he dress like that?”
“He thinks he’s a Russian count. It’s harmless. In high school he was always reading Tolstoy.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t like him.”
Alexei came up to them. “Hello,” he said. He was glaring at Tucker with his hard, sharp eyes.
“What were you doing in the chapel?” Tucker asked.
“I was praying.”
Tucker blinked. “Oh,” he said. He turned his copy of Revolution in the Head in his hands, taking comfort from the worn creases on its cover. “This is Bee,” he said.
Alexei gave her a small, dignified bow. “Bee for Beatrice.”
“Yup,” Bee told him.
Tucker lowered his voice. “Hey, man, we were wondering if you could help us score some acid.” He heard Bee suck in her breath. She took a step away from him.
Alexei glanced at her, then looked at him sternly. “I cannot. I don’t go in for that kind of false mysticism.”
“You always did before.”
“That was then. I saw through a glass, darkly.”
“Is that Alice in Wonderland?”
“No. It’s St. Paul. I thought you went to a Christian school.”
“But isn’t there something in Alice in Wonderland like that?”
“Through the looking glass. I can’t help you find drugs.”
Tucker grimaced, then tried to turn the grimace into an awkward grin. “Well, sorry for asking. I didn’t mean to offend you.” Bee was kicking at a tuft of grass beside the bench. “What happened to you, man?” Tucker said in an undertone. “I saw you just this summer, remember, out at Crissa’s house. You were tripping balls.”
“When I was a child I thought like a child,” Alexei said. He almost whispered it, which made it an oddly intimate utterance, like he was confessing something instead of quoting. “Now I am a man, I’ve given up childish ways.”
Tucker laughed and shook his head. “Come on, Bee,” he said.
They left Alexei standing by the bench and walked back to Tucker’s car. Bee was silent as she got in and pulled her seat belt across her lap. She was silent as they drove down the long drive through the woods, away from the college and onto the main road. “Look, I’m sorry, okay,” Tucker said as he drove through the curves that hugged the base of the hills.
“Drop me off on campus,” she said. “I need to go to calculus.”
“I said I was sorry.”
She didn’t say anything, just stared out the window as the light slanted in. When he pulled to a stop in front of her classroom building she picked up her bag and gave him a hard, sarcastic look. Her thin mouth was pulled tight. “I changed my mind. I do like your friend,” she said.