The Macguffin

Druff had been married to Rose Helen 36 years. What was he, 22 when he married her? Just a kid. And Rose Helen, 60 now—60, Jesus!—had been 24. Jesus! too, as far as that was concerned. Because hadn't a deep part of her attraction been, as, God help him, it was something of an aversion now, those two extra years she had on him, as if she lived in a distant, telling time zone, coming to him, it could be, from alien geography, bringing alien geography, the covered flesh she'd not permitted him to see until their wedding night and teased him with—only it was nothing nearly so playful as teasing—denying him its light even then, granting him access to her only beneath the sheet and thin cover in the darkened room. The mysterious functions of her moving parts as much mysterious. Allowed to bring away with his eyes, like some impinged victor of guarded rewards, only what he could make out in that hobbled, weighted light. Only what he felt on his lips, the moistened tips of her powdered, perfumed nipples in licked conjunction with his moving, frantic tongue, a thick, yielded chemistry of a clayey, bridal milk. The source of her sweet and sour odors protected as the upper reaches of some under Nile. And what Druff was able to take away with him on his fingers, lifted like fingerprints from that dark and solemn scene.

Things were different then. At least for Druff. Well, give him credit, for others, too. This was the early Fifties. A time of girdled sexuality. If you knocked someone up, you married her as much to make an honest man of yourself as an honest woman of the girl. Guilt was champ. He hadn't thought the belt would ever change hands, though now he knew it had all been so much magic, the superstitious flimflam of conspired fears; he'd been squeezed through the cracks by his times, assigned, like others of his generation, high-flown attributes to what was mere rumor, the prose of innocence, the hype of "upbringing."

And now recalled how he'd met her, how it had been on just such an almanac occasion as those he'd lived by for years. On a pseudo holiday, Sadie Hawkins Day, named from a comic strip, a day of suspended decorums, when the girls "chased" the boys, were permitted to ask them on dates, make first moves. Only even that didn't happen, or happened timidly, some mistletoe indulgence that would never stand up in court, all of them playing a Mardi Gras in the head.

In some gymnasium now forgotten. But, though this may only have been his politicals speaking, instincts of the retrograde enhanced, he seemed to remember bunting. (Perhaps it was a function where Republicans asked Democrats to dance.) Well, it was gone. But in a gym (continued on page 160) The Macguffin(continued from page 118) at the state university. And Rose Helen, already 22, already at her roots' roots the melanin fading, a chromosome snapping in her aging hair. The only Sadie Hawkins part to it—for them, he meant; it really had been Sadie Hawkins Day—was that both of them had agreed to be there. A friend of his from her graduating class in high school had given him her name, had given her his, who'd never mentioned either to the other before, was not fixing them up but only supplying on some mutual demand (though he couldn't, in truth, conceive of Rose Helen's ever having asked for it) this unwritten letter of introduction, the names like a sort of reference—"To whom it may concern," say.

His friend had told him Rose Helen was a cripple.

"She's crippled?"

"What are you, Druff, planning to enter her in a foot race? She has this minor deformity. Some hip thing you can't even notice. It's no big deal, don't be so narrow. She's very insecure. I think she has an inferiority complex. My mother plays cards with her mother. She's very self-conscious; that's why she started college late. I'd call her, Druff. It's the crippled-up girls with the inferiority complexes who are hot to trot."

"How come you never took her out?"

"Hey, don't you listen? Our mothers are friends. Though, personally, my mom would love it. She keeps giving me this shit about her beautiful skin. Druff, I don't know how we ever got born. To hear my mother tell it, you'd think clear skin was a secondary sex characteristic."

And, really, you didn't notice it and, after he met her, the notion of her invisible physical deformity was vaguely exciting. It was a mild scoliosis, the slight curvature of her spine lifting her left hip and thrusting it faintly forward, providing a small shelf where she characteristically rested the palm of her hand and lending her the somewhat hard look of a dance-hall girl in Westerns.

But on the Sadie Hawkins Day in question, they almost missed each other. He looked for a girl with a deformity. He looked for a girl with clear skin. And, although he found no cripples, two or three clear-skinned girls agreed to dance with him when he went up to them. He said his name, they told him theirs. Then he bowed out.

And found her, of course, where he should have looked first, along that wall of wallflowers, which isn't always a wall, or even a partially occupied row of chairs, but often as not just an area, some dead space in the room that, occupied or not, is something set off, a kind of sanctuary, as necessary to the practice of civilized life as flatware or toilets. Asking as soon as he saw her, "Are you Rose Helen Magnesson?"

"Yes, I am. Are you Robert Druff?"

"Yes. Happy Sadie Hawkins Day. Would you care to dance?"

Dancing wasn't his specialty, even a simple box step, though now he thought that if it had only been a few years later, when people first began to dance to rhythm-and-blues, it might have been a different story. He could have handled the fast stuff, accommodated to the large motor movements of funk. It was going in close that clumsied him, moved him, that is, toward unearned intimacy, pulled him, he meant, toward love. Dancing with Rose Helen that evening, moving his hand to rest casually on her left hip when she suddenly started, bolted, pushed it away, as if he'd grabbed her haunch. (Druff assuming he'd found her invisible deformity, believing in some compensating synergistic justice, the up side of eye-for-eye that, wounding her in one place fixed her someplace else, cleared her skin, say, which was beautiful, radiant in fact, incandescent, burning with the pearly collagens and organic steams, all the natural cosmetics of, at once, a shining virginity and a devastating pregnancy.)

Druff blurting, "Did I hurt you?"

"No," she said, "I'm not a good dance partner. I think I'd like to sit down now."

"Oh, sure," he said, "but I'm the lousy dancer. I'm sorry I hurt you."

"You didn't hurt me," Rose Helen said, "I'm not hurt. My dancing's OK, I'm not a good partner."

•

They were having coffee in the Union. Rose Helen guessed that their friend had told Druff all about her. "All there is to tell," she said. "I'm not a good partner, because, well, I don't like it when a boy touches me there."

"I wasn't trying anything. I mean, all he said was it was some hip thing, that it isn't even noticeable. It really isn't."

"A full skirt covers a multitude of sins."

He thought it a wonderful sentence. He believed she was clever. The synergistics again, the very thing that had driven her underground and caused her shyness had given her wit.

"Look, I'm sorry if I loused up your Sadie Hawkins, OK?" Then she laughed.

"What?"

"Well, look at me. Sadie Hawkins! I mean, did you pick the right girl, or what? I guess I'm just not the type."

"Why do you say that?"

"Well, I'm too nervous to dance, aren't I?" She looked at him. "I'm two years older than you." Sure, he thought, his deformity. Their friend was a good reporter. He'd spilled the beans about both their deformities.

They discussed their majors. Rose Helen said she enjoyed being around kids and thought she would become a teacher, possibly declare a minor in English, since, counting this semester, she would already have six hours of credit in that subject. Druff confessed he was still undecided, that he hadn't realized how important it was to have a plan since you'd probably be stuck for life with whatever you chose, adding that it wasn't quite fair to expect someone only 19 or 20—not, he amended in deference to that two-year difference in their ages, that being 19 or 20 was anything of a handicap (that was the word he used, handicap)—to lock in on what he wanted to be doing 15 or so years later. It was a serious business, and sad, really, when you thought about it, that you had to start your life off on the right foot, or otherwise, you could wake up when you were 35 and find out that you weren't where you thought you belonged. Because how many times were you alive? Once, right? He thought that to waste your life was the worst thing you could do with it. It was like self-murder, suicide.

"This is very depressing," Rose Helen said.

"Well, it is," Druff said. "That's why I don't think that just because someone has six hours of credit in a subject that's a good enough reason to say, 'Yes, I have six hours of credit in this subject, I might as well make it my minor.' You have to be interested for its own sake."

"Yes, but did it ever occur to you that the reason a party already has six hours in a particular subject just might be that the person is already interested in it?"

Then she said she thought he was being pretty sarcastic for someone who didn't seem to know what he was going to do with his life and talked about self-murder a few years down the line. And (continued on page 230) The Macguffin(continued from page 160) now Druff remembered exactly what an attractive, tragic, brooding figure she had made him led at the time, recalling, who hadn't forgotten so much alter all, though they were seated inside the Student Union—La Mer was playing on the jukebox—how he had had this vagrant image of himself, how he must have looked in her eyes, this wind-blown, tempest-tossed guy, collar turned up against the elements, cigarette smoke rolling like fog up the side—it wasn't That many years since the war had ended—of his doomed Resistance fighter's sharp features.

"I'm interested—" he said, "to the extent that I'm interested in anything—in politics." To fulfill his social-science requirement, he was taking a course in civics. Monday there might be a snap quiz on the bicameral legislature.

"Really In politics?"

"I'm like you, the future city commissioner of streets confided offhandedly, "I want to help make sure that future generations of children will have, well, a future."

•

They met for coffee, they went to the movies, they went to concerts. They'd become enthusiastic about certain of their professors and from time to time would sit in on each other's classes. They were the only couple they knew who did this on a date. Though they really didn't know all that many couples. Rose Helen was a sorority girl. (Yes, it surprised Druff, too.) There was this rule that sorority girls couldn't date independents. Well, it was an unwritten rule, actually, enforceable only while the girls were still pledging". Though even after they were initiated, it was strongly discouraged. "They wouldn't want to be hypocrites," Rose Helen told him. "That's what they say, that they wouldn't want to be hypocrites, the hypocrites. That it would set a bad example for the pledges, that what would we think if we were still pledging and found out one of our sisters was dating" someone who wasn't a Greek?"

"That's why they didn't know too many couples. That's why they met for coffee in various cafés on campus, that's why they met in front of certain movie theaters, and managed to be in line when the tickets to particular concerts—Odetta, Pete Seeger, Theodore Bikel—went on sale. That's why they sat in on each other's classes.

Because the pressure was on her not to date an independent, because she couldn't bring him to her sorority house (and because the landlady in Druff's boardinghouse was as strict about men socializing" with women in their rooms as the sisters were about fraternizing with independents), couldn't and wouldn't, she said, even if she could. Because she didn't want any brooding, tempest-tossed, La Mer–whistling, tragic and sarcastic friend of hers subjected to the silly remarks of a bunch of spoiled, malicious, superficial girls. Though Druff felt he could have held his own with the best of them and wouldn't have minded. He told Rose Helen as much.

"No," she said. "Why sloop to their level?"

"Well, why did you?" he asked in turn.

Which was just exactly the wrong question. Druff's little poster girl dissolved in tears, and not because she couldn't answer his oblique reference to her hypocrisy but because she could. Because she knew herself that well.

"I'm two years behind my year." she sobbed. "I should be graduating in June. Instead, I'm only this sophomore. Don't you know anything? Because why did they rush me if it wasn't to show off how liberal they were? Not only a cripple but a relatively presentable cripple, and not only a relatively presentable cripple with this almost sanitary deformity but someone older than they, and aren't they sisters, and don't sisters have big sisters? So what does that make me if not an intermediary somewhere between an older sister and their housemother? Someone who not only can do for them—make last-minute adjustments on their hairdos, go over their lists of French and Spanish vocabulary with them, help with their mending, give them a hip to cry on—but who looks good on their record, too. Don't you know anything? I wasn't here three days before they spotted me and rushed me. They didn't even give me a hard time. I wasn't even hazed."

She was telling him—though, of course, the terms for all this hadn't been invented yet—that she was their first affirmative action, token project.

He persisted. "'You didn't answer my question. Why? Well, why did you?"

"Don't you know anything? You don't know anything, do you? I told you, they made it easy for me. All I ever had to do was pose with them in the front row when the group picture was taken. I wasn't even hazed."

If she was their first affirmative action. Druff was their second.

Rose Helen said she'd told them about him and that they couldn't wail to meet him. He was invited to come to dinner Tuesday night.

"Well, yes," he said. "I'm an 'independent.' " This was in the living room, (He supposed it was a living room, though it might have been a drawing room or a music room or even a library, even, for all he knew, the board room of some fabulous, oak-paneled corporate headquarters. He'd never seen anything like it. It could have been a manor house in the family for generations.)

"Rosie tells us that you intend to be a politician," said one of his hostesses.

"Well," he said, "I'm not running for anything, if that's what you mean. My eye isn't 'out' for any particular 'office.' " That's how he spoke to them all evening, in the living room—if that's what it was—and, later, at the head table at dinner, shooting for aphorisms by stressing individual words or setting them off in what he hoped would be understood as quotation marks, sometimes punching up everything, addressing them in a kind of oral Braille. When they were informed that they would be taking their coffee and dessert by the piano that evening. Druff rose, wiped at the corner of his lips with his napkin and thanked the president of the sorority for having him over for dinner. "Really," he said, "though I'm this, quote, bred in the bone, unquote, quote, independent, unquote, I have to admit that the dinner was excellent, and the evening was fascinating, and I underscore fascinating. You're very kind, all of you. As a would-be, quote, public man, unquote, I have to confess to a certain, quote, interest, unquote, in the dynamics of your organization. I find it's all rather like some loyal politician's allegiance to, well, 'party' Quote, part, unquote, underscored."

In that living room again, Rose Helen and he were directed to seats on one of the leather sofas and offered coffee and cake by a waiter. (Druff recognized him. They lived in the same boardinghouse.) There was some general conversation. Then the waiter went around the room taking up their cups and saucers, their cake plates, their forks and spoons and paper napkins. One of the sorority sisters walked over to the piano and sat down on the piano bench. She was joined by the rest of the girls, who ranked themselves about her in what even Druff recognized as a formation, a kind of musical battle stations.

"Oh, no," Rose Helen groaned.

"What?"

"Oh, no."

Some of the waiters had come in from the dining room and were leaning against a wall in the entrance hall.

The president of the sorority was speaking directly to Druff and Rose Helen on the sofa. "Robert." she said, "the women of Chi Phi Kappa are proud of all their sisters. Rose Helen, however, whose maturity and unselfish generosity have been an inspiration to all of us, holds a special place in our hearts, and we do not wonder that she should have found one in yours. Now, Rose, in your honor, and in honor of your interesting new friend, the ladies of Chi Phi Kappa house are pleased to honor you this evening with a serenade, one of the most cherished of our traditions.

"Your sisters smile on you tonight, Rose, and wish you all the happiness you could wish for yourself. We delight in your delight. We support you, we love you, we bless you."

They sang the Chi Phi Kappa song. They sang the school fight song. They sang love songs. They sang Rosie, You Are My Posy. They sang La Mer.

Of course they were embarrassed, of course they were. All that drilled attention, it was like having the attention of a firing squad, a little like taking, at close range and at full force, a blast from a fire hose. Of course he felt patronized, of course he did. Nevertheless, he fell he had made a good impression.

•

He had, Rose Helen told him, he'd confirmed all their misgivings, was everything they thought an independent would be.

"Didn't you feel it?" she said. "Didn't you feel any of it? Didn't you? Don't you know what that was?" They were in one of the small study rooms—two small typing tables, a couple of desk lamps, two chairs, a narrow cot—at the back of the sorority house. The door to the study room was open. Rose Helen was standing with her hand on the little shelf above her damaged left hip, the akimbo'd arm and forward thrust of her body giving her her familiar, faintly bold air, and a suggestion about her mouth (though if this was there at all, it was something Druff had penciled in himself) of the pout of some saloon cupid.

"Rosie, you are my posy," Druff said, reaching for her hand and lifting it from her hip to pull her gently toward the cot.

She held her ground. "If I scream, they'll come running."

"Why would you scream?"

"Listen, it's almost ten-thirty. Males have to be out of here by ten-thirty."

"Why would you scream?"

"We came in here to study. We're supposed to be studying."

"Isn't this the passion pit? Isn't that what they call it?"

He stood up and kissed her.

"The door's open."

"I'll close it."

"It's supposed to be open. You're not allowed to close it."

"The door across the hall is closed. That one over there is."

"Girls are studying in those."

"Sure," he said.

"They are," she said. Then she went over to the door and closed it herself. Druff stood waiting to embrace her. "They are," she said, "but even if they're not, even if they're in there with boys, even if they're slow dancing with their hands all over each other's behinds, even if they're French kissing. Even if they're, quote, doing it, unquote, I wouldn't let you touch me. I wouldn't even let you hold my hand."

"Why? My God, Rose Helen, why? They're your sisters. They serenaded us. Isn't that like piping us aboard? Didn't they just, like, marry us at sea?"

"Don't you know what that was? Don't you? They as good as made you their mascot. They brought the waiters up from downstairs as witnesses."

"Come on," Druff said, "I don't care about them."

She was crying again, and Druff suddenly understood that that was why she'd closed the door, because she knew they were going to have this conversation. And why she'd extended their invitation in the first place, because it was exactly the conversation she'd wanted to have with him from the beginning. Understood she was permitting him something far more intimate than just the groping he had anticipated, showing him a glimpse of her turf, an unrestricted view of her cards on the table.

He tried to comfort her. "Oh, Rose Helen. Rose Helen, oh."

"Don't you."

"Don't I what?"

"That was it. That's what they were saving. That's what they were waiting for all along."

"What are you talking about, Rose? What were they waiting for, what were they saving?"

"That was my hazing."

"No," he said, "you've got it wrong, Rose. They're your sisters, they're on our side. Really. All the happiness we could wish for ourselves, remember.' " (Druff taking her in his arms—maybe he was political, maybe he was—and working his own agenda, wondering, marveling, Don't they know? Don't they know it's all a line? Don't they see how it is with us? Don't they know what we want to do to them, what we want them to do to us? Are they fools, or what?)

And astonished to be stroking her breasts beneath her sweater, to slip his hand up beneath her skirt, to negotiate the rind of stiff corset and feel the damp silk of her panties.

•

They were seated on the edge of the cot now. He tried to draw her down, to get her to lie beside him, but she resisted. She struggled to a sitting position and started to rise. "All right," he said, "all right," and she sat back down again. (Of course, political. Political, certainly. Bargaining actual territory, dividing physical spoils, making these Yalta arrangements, so that it was somehow agreed without one word passing between them that he could do this but not that, that but not this. Although he was not, for example, permitted to blow in her ear, he was allowed to lick her nipples. Although she would never hold his erection in her hand, she might touch in here and there through his trousers.)

Druff, astonished, astounded, amazed now by her bizarre terms, terms, he realized, roughly equivalent to the restrictions imposed by the Hays Office in regard lo the sexual conduct in films. (One fool had to be on the floor al all times. They could kiss with their mouths open, but only one of their tongues could be moving, and if it was his, he could touch her breasts but was not permitted to go under her dress.) It was to become the source of what weren't so much arguments as vaguely legalistic, quickly abandoned disagreements, like appealed line calls in tennis, say, or a batter's brief, abrupt flash of temperament about an umpire's questionable called strike.

And touching her hip, of course, was out of the question.

As out of the question as the flesh and hair beneath that chartered, licensed, two-or-three-inch strip of damp silk or cotton underwear, the tolerated, nihil obstat elastic piping that edged her drawers and that he worried with his finger like a lock of hair.

So maybe she was political, too. A born legislator, some negotiator of the physical being. Because she was right, it was almost 10:50, almost time for him to leave, gratefully disappear with the other males—she was right about that, too; his presence in that house of females had altered him; he was "male" now, his sexuality some new state of chemical excitation, simmering, charged, changed, like the cooked properties of solids melting to vapors—and she'd somehow managed to arrange all this in the last quarter hour of that first night.

(But why was he grateful? He was grateful for the same reasons he'd been relieved, the shit-scared avoider, to learn that the clear-skinned beauties of the Sadie Hawkins Day Dance had been the wrong clear-skinned beauties. He was wrapped in a cocoon of stupidity, innocence, inexperience. Not virtue, but its simulacrum, what virtue did while it bided its time, until it sloughed fear and all fear's hiding places in the cosmetic folds of guilt. He was grateful because he was a virgin and he didn't have to fuck her and get it all wrong was why!)

•

Now at least they had a place to go.

Though they still didn't know that many couples, didn't double-date, were there—at least, as her legacy. Druff was—on sufferance, like guests of an associate member of a country club, say. And if, collectively, they were novelties to the girls of Chi Phi Kappa, the girls of Chi Phi Kappa were even greater novelties to Druff. Rose Helen was a novelty to Druff. Indeed, Druff was a novelty to Druff. (It was strange—that simmering maleness, his balls, new-found exhibitionist's swagger, his vain regard, his simmering chemical privilege and liberties—but these days, he went about feeling as if he had on brand-new clothes.)

On weekdays, he went there to study with Rose Helen, and if they were unoccupied, they would go into one of the tiny study rooms. (Since the night of the serenade, when she had gone to the door and closed it herself and then negotiated with him the unspoken rules of their relationship, the study was never closed when they were in it.) At 10:30, however, he was the first male out of the house. Even on weekends, when the curfew was extended until midnight, he was always the first to leave.

It was as if he understood their sufferance (he did), their combined weight on the thin social ice that supported them. And if he was political, he thought, it was a strange way to practice his politics, lying low, muting, as it were, his own horn, making himself scarce on the very dot of the curfew hour like Cinderella.

He could not keep his hands off her, their almost surgical, circumscripted petting as complicated as the careful, delicately drawn lines of a contended geography, treatied borders; obsessed (not just Druff, Rose Helen, too) with the endless diversity, variations, interpretations and fine distinctions available to them within compliance. So that he became, they became, respective Casanovas, very Venuses, geniuses of foreplay.

He was fastidious, meticulous with their curfews, and lived like some fabulous criminal, by the letter of the law, as if he sought to keep his nose clean by paying his taxes, or each day dropping by the library to show the librarian the due date on his still-not-overdue book.

Yet it was no game he was playing, neither with Rose Helen nor with her sisters. He was not seeking to test the limits of their patience. He knew the limits of their patience. He didn't observe their curfews out of any of the old olly-olly-oxen-free impulses of his childhood, but because he was quite terrified of them, really, afraid of having his privileges stripped from him.

Because those privileges were large, new, rare, immense. It wasn't just what happened between the two of them in the study (and much, despite the unimpeded view they afforded anyone who happened to be passing that open door of their strange love gymnastics, the compulsory Olympic figures they cut, did happen) but the incredible feeling he somehow fed by the curfew he was forced to observe, by his knowledge that the door was open, that their exciting, dangerous gyrations were almost adulterous, anyway, risky.

On weekends, they never even got close to one of those studies. (It was understood that on weekends, these rooms were reserved for upperclassmen and their dates.) Then they went out into the big music—— drawing—— living room—— cum-library, whatever the architectural equivalent was for that commodious, luxurious center—the house's real passion pit, he supposed. And there, in that crowded space—there might be upwards of 100 people in it, girls returned with their dales from campus beer gardens, from dances, from parties, flicks, pep rallies, concerts, basketball games, celebrations—a strange thing happened. He melded in with them, felt that he had somehow become invisible, though the others were plainly visible to him, what they did—he heard sweaters sliding up over cotton blouses, glimpsed underpants, cleavage, flesh, erections—— he brandished his own, less self-conscious, finally, than he might have been in a communal shower, a public bath. All about him, he could hear girls groaning, boys coming. ("Our comings and groanings," he joked to Rose Helen.) Not a voyeur. In the scene. Of it. Could feel, hear, see, taste the mass dishevelment, some sense of the undone and awry, of smeared lipstick and smudged face powder, of colognes gone off and all the fired chemistry of naked pheromones. A passion pit, indeed, a steamy, cumulative sense of the stuff growing, of love cells dividing, multiplying, building in the room like weather, rain cloud, say, electric storm, thunderclap, passionate waves sweeping over them, a kind of heavy sexual traffic, his hip at their haunches on the long, crowded window seats, so that what he felt was not just his own passion but his passion added to the passion of everyone else, his passion compounding, earning interest on the passion of both sexes. A great joy in this, like the joy in a marvelous parade.

He was in his element. He loved Friday and Saturday nights, he loved e pluribus unum and would willingly have traded four weeknights alone with Rose Helen in a study room for just one additional half hour of extended curfew on the cushioned window seats, long leather sofas, upholstered wing chairs, or stretched out with her in the sexual traffic on the fine Oriental rug in the big ground-floor room.

•

Which is just where Mrs. Post, the housemother, found them on the one night out of the 80 or so since Draff had been going to the Chi Phi Kappa house, on the single occasion when he was not the first one out the door. A fixture, indeed. And not only a fixture but someone whose habits were so well known by now it was said that you could set your watch by him. He had simply lost track of the time. Or no, that wasn't quite true. As a matter of fact, it was time he was thinking of at the time, how this was only a Friday, how they still had all Saturday together. (Because he loved her now, had discovered in just the past month, the past few weeks, that there was something there beyond the simple fact of her availability, the damaged-goods advantage he thought he had over her because of her two-year seniority and scarcely legible limp, which, if it was not completely put on, she had at least to take the trouble to memorize, a little studied, like a dance step or a swimmers kick turn. Because he loved her, because no one could hold his tongue in someone else's mouth for 80 out of the past 100 nights without developing a certain fondness for the head as a whole, the neck and everything it rested on. Because he loved her, because he had come to appreciate her savage resentment, enjoy her outcast representations of herself, his own accreditation in the drama, appreciate Rose Helen's marvelous mimicry of the sisters and frat boys, even of the waiter from Druff's boardinghouse. She had qualities. Also, she let him put his tongue in her head.) Thinking, This is only Friday, there's still Saturday.

"What?" Druff said, startled. "What?"

Mrs. Post laid one linger across the face of her wrist watch.

"Is it curlew? I'm sorry, I wasn't paying attention. Is it curfew already?"

Although here and there, there were people about, the room had begun to thin out. The bays and window seats were cleared, the piano bench. No one cuddled in the wing chairs, the sofas were all but vacant.

Rose Helen sat up and, to Druff's chagrin, immediately began to lay into her housemother.

"How dare you?" she demanded. "He's not the only one left." Pointedly, she named names, not only indicating a few of her sorority sisters still lingering with their dates but ticketing indiscretions, citing violations of dress codes, dishevelment of human decency.

"I'm sorry," Druff mumbled, "I guess I must have lost track of the time."

Rose Helen interrupted him. "You've nothing to apologize for, why are you apologizing? It's not your job to be sorry, it's not your job to listen for the bell. It isn't your job to have people set their watches by you." She was furious with them both. Rose Helen. And although it was Rose Helen who did the shouting, it was Druff and Mrs. Post who got all the attention. The girls, their dates, looked from one to the other of them following their flabbergast silence. Druff felt an odd connivance with and sympathy for the housemother. It occurred to him that her heavy, almost powerful hair, its immaculate sheen, so at odds with her wan, brittle features, must have been a wig. "Well, come on," Rose Helen said, "let's just see what's going on in those study rooms!"

"Most of those people are pinned," Mrs. Post defended. "Many are engaged."

"So," said Rose Helen. "They're in there. They haven't left! They're in there, all right."

"Please." Druff said.

"No," snapped Rose Helen, but not at Druff, at Mrs. Post, at her sorority sisters, at the fraternity boys, "I won't please. Rules are rules. I'm going to empty out those study halls for you!" And then began exaggeratedly to limp about the now silent, curiously passionless passion pit, circling the big room and gathering, it seemed, a sort of momentum, and went out into the hall, going past the big staircase and continuing on toward the studies at the back of the sorority house.

He heard her roughly opening doors, heard her shout "Curfew, curfew" like a hysterical town crier.

"I'm going," Druff called. "I'm leaving now. Rose Helen."

"Curfew in there! Curfew!"

"I'll phone you tomorrow," he called. "Would you tell her I'll call her tomorrow?" he appealed to Mrs. Post.

But she called him. It was almost three in the morning. It was the waiter from Druff's boardinghouse who came to fetch him to the phone.

"It's your girlfriend," he said.

"So late?"

The waiter shrugged. "They ask for catsup when it's right out there on the table in front of them."

"I hope nothing's wrong." he told the waiter.

"Sometimes, if it's chicken cacciatore, or meat in a heavy gravy, they ask us to cut it up for them in the kitchen so they don't dirty their hands or get grease on their clothes."

"Rose Helen? Are you all right. Rose Helen?" He expected her to be crying. She wasn't, though he could tell she seemed excited, even pleased. She didn't scold him, didn't mention that he'd left without saying good night.

"I threatened to resign," she said. He didn't understand. "From the sorority. I threatened to resign from the sorority."

"But why?" Druff said.

"Mrs. Post was there when I told them. Though you know," she said, "I don't blame Mrs. Post. She doesn't make policy, she takes her signals from the girls." Druff was uncomfortable. If any of this was on his behalf....

"I've only just left them," Rose Helen went on. "It could have been, I don't know, a beauty parlor in there. You should have seen them. All those girls in their curlers and face goo...." He thought of her own soft, beautiful skin, oddly back-lighted, pearly from suffering, maybe from grudge. "Except for the few of us who were still in our clothes, it could have been a giant slumber party, all those girls in their shorty pajamas, some still clutching their Teddies, the goofy, outsize turtles, froggies and stuffed kitty-cats they take to bed with them. It was really rather touching."

"You woke them? Got them out of bed?"

"I called a special meeting," Rose Helen said. "I had charges, I had witnesses. You can call a special meeting when you have charges and witnesses."

"Charges against who? Mrs. Post doesn't make policy. She takes her signals from the girls, you said."

"'If I resign,' I told them, 'your room and board goes up. You've lost Jan and Eileen this semester. Rachel's on academic probation and may flunk out.' "

Druff thought of the furniture, of the grand piano, the Oriental rugs. He couldn't imagine that whatever few dollars Rose Helen's leaving might cost them could make a difference. He thought them rich enough to take up the slack by themselves. He didn't want her to resign. He'd grown too accustomed to the furniture.

"Charges?" Druff said. "Witnesses? Has this anything to do with me? Am I at fault here?"

"Why, against the girls in the studies, silly. And my witnesses against them were those boys I rousted."

Now she was more interesting than Druff.

She was political, certainly. It was those two years of seniority she had on him, had on most of them, plus all those other years of pure physical outrage, years she'd worn successively larger braces to correct her spine, plus things he could only have a guesswork knowledge of—prosthetic bathing suits, perhaps, prosthetic evening gowns.

There were more meetings. Nothing, of course, was done to the girls Rose Helen had brought her charges against. She was political; perhaps she didn't intend any more to come of them than the apologies—which she got—and pleas to stay with the sorority, which she got.

•

In the end, however, she determined to resign from the sorority.

She told him she didn't even want to live in a dorm, the women's residence hall the university had put up, that she'd prefer a room in a boardinghouse.

"A boardinghouse," Druff said. "What's so great about a boardinghouse? You live in a boardinghouse, you have a landlady. I've told you what mine is like, Rose Helen. They're all like that."

"It just seems," she said, "I don't know, romantic. You know what I really think? I think they won't be around much longer. Those big old wood houses. They're a piece of Americana. All those old landladies and landlords will die out one day. Their kids won't take them over. One by one, they'll burn down, or the university will buy them and turn them into queer little departments—meteorology, Asian studies. Or just raze them altogether and put up big new buildings. You're lucky. You already live in one. You know what it's like. I want to live somewhere where they put your supper down on the table in big serving dishes and you have to ask someone to pass the mashed potatoes, pass the string beans, the water pitcher, the rolls and bread. It's like missing out on vaudeville. Al Jolson, Fanny Brice, Burns and Allen. All those people I know only from listening to on the radio who lived in boardinghouses and used to be on the 'circuit.' No," she said, "when I resign from Chi Phi Kappa, I'm definitely going into one."

Because she was definitely more interesting than Druff, falling for her now at second-per-second rates, as stones fall. But who tried still to talk her out of the boardinghouse. Uncertain whether he'd be welcome once she moved. Knowing there'd be no more study rooms, no passion pit worthy of the name (not, as it were, after you'd seen Paree), forced again to think of those long lines at the movies, big public rooms in the Student Union, even of the classrooms and lecture halls where they'd spent the early weeks of their courtship.

Meanwhile, she denied him access to the sorority house, insisting it would be too humiliating for them (who, for his part, was hard to humiliate, who was perfectly content to accept serenades at face value, to have watches set by him, to be the first out the door, content to eat shit, to be seen there together).

He asked the waiter from his boardinghouse to keep his eyes open, to tell him if anything was going on.

"You want me to spy on her?"

"No, of course not. Look, Edward," he said, and took the waiter into his confidence, told him the story till now. "I'm not asking you to spy, I'm not asking you to do anything you're not already doing. Just keep an eye out." He revealed intimate details of the complicated, astonishing foreplay they practiced. He made mention of her hip.

Druff didn't regard any of this as payment for information, or even as bragging, but as simple, heartfelt confidence, one heartfelt guy in a boardinghouse to another. All that detail—are you kidding?—if anything, it was as if he were the waiter's spy and not the other way around.

Rose Helen called on him at the house. She was standing outside. It was Edward who came to his room to tell him she was there. (If we ever get married, I'm going to have to ask him to be my best man, Druff thought.)

Rose Helen was waiting for him on the ramp that, in lieu of steps, led up to the porch. Druff looked at his escort and opened the door. It hadn't closed behind him before Rose Helen spoke.

"What's different about me? Can you say, can you tell? No, don't look at my hair, it isn't my hair. Why do boys always look at your hair when a girl asks that question? Come on, I'll give you a hint. it's something you wear, but it isn't clothes." He examined her scrupulously. "Oh, Robert," she said, "you're so dense!"

"It's your pin. You're not wearing your sorority pin," Edward said.

"Who's that? Edward? Good for you, Edward. You're absolutely right." She suddenly sounded to Druff like the schoolteacher she would one day be. "Well, I've done it," she said.

"They make you turn those things back in if you resign?" Edward asked.

"Please," Druff said, "we're having a private conversation."

"Sorry," the waiter said, injured, "sometimes it's hard to know what's private and what isn't." Druff remembered he'd once tried to describe to Edward the taste of her breasts, the smell of her damp pants on his fingers, the odd feel of a particular softness here, the compensatory muscularity somewhere else from the exercises she performed for her hip, her spine, stretching and bending herself, he supposed, like one doing farm work, forking hay, maybe.

"So," she said. "I've voluntarily deconsecrated myself. I've left the Chi Phis. I'm an independent now, too."

Now they were sunk, he thought. She didn't sound sunk, but now they were sunk. He wouldn't taste those breasts again until they were married.

She started to come the rest of the way up the ramp, but Druff went to meet her. He began to walk with her toward the Student Union. "Here," she said, when they had gone about a block, "you wear this." She took her sorority pin from her purse and pinned it to his shirt.

"So," Druff said, "they don't make you give them back."

"Nope, that one's bought and paid for. It's free and clear. I burned the mortgage on that when I quit the Chi Phis."

"Usually." Druff said, "when pins are exchanged, it says you're going steady."

"It means you're engaged to be married," she said. "It means you have children together. It means forsaking all others. It means till death us do part."

"I don't have any pin." he said.

"Hey," she said, "you're this quote, independent, unquote. You've probably got your own weird customs." He gave her the waiter, he gave her Edward, as he'd given parts of Rose Helen to the waiter. They still didn't know any other couples, they still didn't double-date, but they had a side-kick now. a retainer, this best-man-in-waiting, this in-the-wings witness, their sworn fifth wheel and interested second party, someone to legitimate their love, make it interesting enough, dramatic enough.

•

She'd taken a room off campus, in town, in enemy territory, behind the lines, near the railroad station, not far from that diner where they'd gone the time Rose Helen had sobbed to him. confessing her suspicion that she'd made Chi Phi Kappa because of what she called her "sanitary deformity."

Strictly speaking, it was an illegal address; unauthorized, nonuniversity housing, not the apartment that undergraduate girls weren't permitted to lease, and not even the boarding-house—no meals were served—about which she entertained so many fancy, romantic notions, but a furnished room in what wasn't even a rooming house for an exclusively female clientele. The house where Rose Helen stayed had as many men living in it as women—railroad employees, conductors and engine drivers, switchmen and gandy dancers. The women in the house were mostly students at a local college for beauticians; some were wives from the nearby air base whose enlisted-men husbands, still receiving their training, could leave the base only on weekends. Two or three Druff recognized from the Student Union—cashiers, food handlers.

"What do you think?" Rose Helen asked him.

"How did you get this place? You're not allowed lo live here. They could withhold your credits."

"I never gave the university a change of address."

"Suppose they have to get in touch with you?"

"Why would they have to get in touch with me? I lived at the Chi Phi Kappa house almost two years; they never had to get in touch with me."

"What about mail?"

"Edward's there for lunch, he can bring it to me."

"It's beautiful." Druff said. "Really nice."

It really was. His standard was the rooms at Mrs. Reese's, his own, Edward's, the three or four others he'd visited since coming to the university. His standard was the small study rooms with their typing tables and desk lamps, their wooden chairs and narrow cots.

There was a double bed with a pale, flowered spread across it, a small sofa, a ladder-back rocker, a stripped dresser with a pitcher and washbowl on it. There was a closet. There was a painting, a pleasant landscape not a reproduction but an actual oil. There were lamps, plants, hooked rugs, lace curtains on Rose Helen's two big, southern-exposed windows.

He heard someone on the stairs.

"Am I supposed to be in here?"

"It's Edward." Edward called, "with the rest of your things."

"The landlady never said anything about visitors," Rose Helen told him. "All she ever said was that the railroad workers come in at all hours, that they sleep when they can. All she said was that I have to be considerate of my neighbors, to play my radio low even during the day."

The room was beautiful, it really was. Still, he felt a thousand miles from a grand piano, big stately furniture, Oriental rugs, civilization.

•

It was like being married. It was and it wasn't. They studied there, necked there, did all their heavy petting there. Because despite the sofa (to say nothing of the double bed), they still played for the same relatively low table stakes that they had played for in the study rooms and in the big, crowded, luxurious central passion pit at the sorority house on those Friday and Saturday nights decon-secration ante. He even observed the same curfew. Maybe, despite what they'd told each other, it was a game, or a sort of game, but something loftier, higher, more important. Maybe they weren't yet but were still striving to become the respective Casanova and Venus of fore-play, sexual-stimulation savants. Maybe foreplay was their event, their white, un-consummated courtship. Because these were the days of magnificent foreplay, the student prince, his education-major consort. He could remember packing blue balls like kidney stones. Other times, Rose Helen, who often sensed his pain before it reached actual critical mass, would bring him off.

She brought him off, he brought her off. But always in the dark—because there was a daytime curfew, too; Rose Helen wouldn't let him touch her while it was still daylight, and sometimes he had to sit like an Orthodox waiting for the last light to quit the two big windows with their southern exposure—and always between the mutual, prophylactic cloth of each other's clothing—beneath coats, towels, laundry, things grabbed out of the closet, on the always-made double bed.

•

They grew closer. Not just he and Rose Helen but he and Rose Helen and Edward, as well. Who broke stolen bread with them, increasingly shared in their diminished, doggy-bag suppers, and whom, and not as founder of the feast, they regarded as their invited guest, despite the fact that he was the one who always served them whatever happened to be reheating itself inside whichever pot or pan he had placed there for them on the hot plate. Not just eating warmed-over supper together but some shared sense, too, of roughing it, dividing foraged food.

"So," Rose Helen would occasionally remark after Edward had cleared away their dishes, "how's your life?" This was the signal for him to start his strange commentary, as if it were not enough that he had just brought them their supper and prepared and even served it but must now sing for it, too. (And now it was exactly as if they were outdoors, in dark woods, say, beneath the stars like tramps in hobo camps alongside railroad tracks, Edward's voice lulling, his gossip like some post-prandial accompaniment to their digestion.)

"I don't know how any of them expects to make it in the real world," he might begin. "Do yon know what Anita Carlin had the nerve to ask me to do for her tonight? Her soup was too hot. Instead of waiting for it to cool, she told me to take it back to the kitchen and bring it to her again when it was safe enough for her to eat without scalding herself. Just who does she think she is, Goldilocks? When I asked how I was supposed to know when it was the right temperature, you know what she said.' 'Edward, do I have to do your thinking for you? Just pour off a little in a cup and sip it.' Now, how will someone with an attitude like that ever raise children? Or Jean Allmann? Last night, she complained that the milk was sour. It came from the same pitcher everyone else's came from at her table. No one else thought it was sour, but she made me go back and open up a bottle just for her use. Where's the catsup, where's the salt? ' he grumbled. ' "Is there cream on the table?' When it's right there in front of them. "Edward, my napkin's disappeared. Would you be a darling and get me another one?' 'Edward, there are too many bones in my fish. See if you can find a piece that doesn't have so many bones in it.' I mean it, the average Chi Phi expects there's always going to be someone around to wait on her hand and foot, cut up her meat for her, blow on her soup, recommend her dessert. 'Which is better tonight, Edward, the German black forest or the chocolate mousse?' Then light up her cigarette as if we were waiters in some fancy four-star restaurant instead of just students trying to get an education like anyone else. How will they? I mean, really, how will they? Make it in life, in the world?

"Oh," he said, "and Rachel?"

"She never studies," Rose Helen said.

"The one who may flunk out." Druff said.

"Well, that's the thing," the waiter said. "But you know, the last few weeks, she's been eating like a horse. She asks for second helpings. Seconds on soup, the main course, seconds on salad."

"Rachel doesn't even like salad," Rose Helen said.

"She never particularly liked soup. She never Particularly liked anything. Now she eats—pardon my French—like' she's got two behinds."

"Is she fat?"

"She's pregnant."

"She isn't," Rose Helen said.

"She is," the waiter said, "she's pregnant, all right. She's had the tests."

All Druff could think was. Where? How? She was an underclassman herself. On weekend nights, she hadn't any more access to those study rooms than they had—he, Rose Helen. She was pregnant.' Shed done it? She wasn't a virgin? And if she weren't a virgin, he wondered, then who was the guy? Not the mouse, the little Gamma Beta Sigma shrimp she dated, it couldn't be him. And if it were him, then how main times did the runt get to poke her before he knocked her up? And who, finally, were Miss and Mr. Foreplay on this campus, anyway, and what was the point of having a girlfriend with her own private room in her own unauthorized, nonuniversity housing with a landlady who apparently not only lived and let live but was this high-rolling high liver herself, if all he ever got to show for it was—pardon my French—the goddamn blue balls he went around with all bent over so he was never any higher than the little runt Gamma Beta Sigma son of a bitch himself?

•

The curfew, because of what the waiter had told them, had suddenly become a question between them. Because, though it was true, it no longer mattered to him that she was the more interesting. He had begun to discount her seniority, the damaged-goods factor, her recovered cripple's way of walking, her defiance and resentment and pride, even the outlaw housing, where, in the dark, in their nest there on the double bed, beneath all the queer hodgepodge of their coats and towels and laundry, all the odd, invisible motley of what, for warmth and style and texture, might just as well have been a house painter's dropcloth, she was even more inventive than he was. He had even begun to discount the fact that he loved her. Because he was jealous now. Because not only was he jealous now, he was furious.

Furious (and not just on poor, pregnant Rachel's behalf, either), and not just at the mouse, the little runt shrimp Gamma Beta Sigma son of a bitch, but at all single men and women everywhere, particularly at every unmarried undergraduate or graduate student, coed or otherwise, who was getting it, regularly or otherwise, anywhere in the jiving, shucking, civilized world.

And not only furious, either. Regretful as well. For all his bent-over trials by erection, his excruciating stalled blood and slopped-up sperm.

They quarreled. Or Druff did, Rose Helen just said no. He quarreled. Or cajoled and wheedled, rather; fawned and flattered, soft-soaped and begged.

He argued.

"There are less attractive guys than me. The Gamma Beta."

She didn't want to know.

And now they really quarreled, really went at it.

We never do this, be told her, we never do that, naming acts for her, citing specifically denied sexual frictions, indicting the five-or-so months they had known each other now, almost, as lawyers do, fixing dollar amounts to his pain and suffering (so much for each blue ball, so much for going around all bent over) and assessing his mental anguish (so much for frustration, so much for the personal humiliation he felt when he'd learned that even a little runty Gamma Beta Sigma mouse had knocked someone up).

"Don't I let you touch me down there?" Rose Helen said. She might have been close to tears. It sounded that way, but he couldn't tell. They were on Rose Helen's made bed. It was too dark to see. "Don't I?" she repeated. "Let you touch me down there?"

"Sure, through layers of underwear."

"Haven't you kissed my nipples?"

"Oh, come on, Rose Helen, you practically make me brush my teeth first," he said irritably. "And when did you let me even touch them with your brassiere off?"

"Don't you get to hold my behind?"

"With gloves on, mittens, through goddamn snowsuits."

"Don't you go under my dress?"

"I have to get past all the dry cleaning first, all the clothes and shower curtains on the damn bed. I have to prick my fingers on the pins in your Ship 'n Shore blouses. It's a regular obstacle course!"

"All right," she said, "haven't I kissed you down there?"

"Through my trousers!" Druff yelled.

"Don't raise your voice to me!" she said, raising her voice to him. "And if this bed's such an obstacle course, why don't I just get out of it and remove one of the obstacles'?"

She got out of bed, smoothed down her clothing, turned on the light.

"Fine," Druff shouted in the now bright room, "and why don't I just remove the rest of them!" He ripped the bedspread off the bed, scattering it across the floor along with all his and Rose Helen's intervening protections, the various towels, washcloths, throw rugs and clothing.

"Pick all that up!" Rose Helen said.

"I won't do it," Druff said.

That was when Edward came up with their dinner.

"Hey," the waiter said, "what's going on here? It looks like a cyclone hit the place. What happened?"

"A cyclone hit the place," Druff said.

"Here," Edward said, "let me help you get some of this stuff up," and started to bend down.

"Leave it alone!" Rose Helen shouted. "Don't touch a thing!"

Which was when Mrs. Green, startling them all, came into the room.

"What's this shouting?" she demanded. "Didn't I tell you about the railroad workers," she said, "the irregular hours they keep? How are they supposed to get the rest they need if you people are so inconsiderate?"

She looked from one to the other, taking in the mess on the floor, taking in Rose Helen's Butler's Principles of Basic Education, Foerster's American Poetry and Prose, Druff's Civics, taking in the big cellophane-wrapped dinner plate with Rose Helen's supper on it.

"You kids aren't students, are you? That one, he isn't a waiter sneaking food in from some sorority he just stole it from where he sets table and serves the sisters their lunches and dinners, is he? Because I run a respectable house with railroad workers, beauticians, cashiers, Air Force wives and food handlers. This isn't any authorized university housing I do here to baby-sit a bunch of all-grown-up kids on the excuse that they're here for an education, while the truth is that the male grown-up kid is mostly just interested in finding some agreeable female grown-up kid who's willing to take his pecker and hold it inside her for a while."

"I don't steal it," Edward said.

"What's that?" Mrs. Green said.

"The food," he said. "I don't steal it."

"Well, all right," Mrs. Green said, "so you don't steal it. That's still no call to go shouting at each other at all hours of the day and night and make the kind of mess I see here on the fl——"

"They give it to me themselves. I'm no thief. I don't steal it. They make up the plates themselves. For her, for Rose Helen. 'Here,' they tell me, 'you're friends with them, you know where she's living, why don't you go on and take these scraps to her? We won't miss them, we'd only have to throw them out. Why should they go to waste? This way, we'll know that at least she's eating well. She was one of us, after all. We took her in once and made her feel welcome. What difference does it make that just because she thinks she had a falling out with us that she should go hungry? She's had a hard enough life as it is.' So I didn't steal it. The Chi Phi Kappas give it to me for her themselves."

"The hypocrites," Rose Helen shouted, "the hypocrites!" She started to cry.

Druff wouldn't leave. Rose Helen said no, he had to. She said that once he'd picked everything up he'd tossed on the floor, he could stay but that she expected him to observe the usual curfew.

That night she tried to kill herself. Mrs. Green and one of the railroad workers saved her life. They called the authorities and, afterward, Mrs. Green had the decency to call Druff at Mrs. Reese's to tell him what had happened.

She was still being held for observation when he proposed. Both of them understood that his proposal of marriage and her acceptance had nothing at all to do with forgiveness, or mercy, or either of their sorrows.

he cajoled, wheedled, fawned and flattered, argued, pleaded and begged. but rose helen always said no

" 'To hear my mother tell it, you'd think clear skin was a secondary sex characteristic.' "

"Druff remembered what an attractive, tragic, brooding figure she had made him feel at the time."