Robert Parker - Love and Glory

“Yes,” Jennifer said. “Wasn’t it awful.”

“Boonie wrote half the ones in the freshman class. How many’d you write, Boonie?”

“Twenty-two,” I said, “but who counts.”

“Do you want to be a writer?” Jennifer said. She looked really interested. The way she had when I danced with her, as if what I said really mattered.

“Yes,” I said.

“It’s not something you can just interview for, is it. Does the uncertainty scare you?”

“I don’t know, I guess so. But you have to assume you can make it, I guess, or you wouldn’t try.”

“What do you want to do besides write?” Jennifer said.

“Drink beer,” I said. And lie beside you in a spring meadow forever.

She laughed, “And you’re down here practicing.” She was interested. “Would you want to work at a newspaper, or in advertising?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think I could stand the office and briefcase bit. I don’t want nine to five for the rest of my life in some goddamned white clapboard suburb.” Unless with you. I’d do anything to be with you. “I thought I might write the great American novel.”

Jennifer puffed on her Pall Mall. There was reserved appraisal in her eyes. Nick held her hand across the table. “I hope you do,” she said.

“I’m a business major,” Taylor said. “I’d like to get into sales, work my way up to sales management maybe.”

Her attention shifted from me to him and I could feel slackness, a kind of ebbing, as Taylor traced small patterns on the back of her hand. Mixed with the smoke and the malt smell of spilled beer, her perfume persisted, and as I became aware of it, the smell of it overpowered everything else. I felt disseminated, as if I eddied, commingling with her sound and the smell of her in the loud and smoky room.

Nick looked at his watch. “Better get you back, love,” he said to Jennifer. “You have to be in in an hour and we need some time for parking, right?”

She smiled. “Good to see you, my dear,” she said to me. “Maybe I’ll see you in Bing’s class someday.”

“Tell him to sing ‘When the Blue of the Night Meets the Gold of the Day’ for me. I might come for that.”

Jennifer laughed. She and Nick got up to go out. As they edged down the narrow, crowded aisle between the booths, Nick patted her companionably on the fanny. She looked back at me and winked and then leaned her head against Nick’s shoulder. Get up to the campus for a little make-out time. The press of her wide mouth, the taste of her lipstick, the smell of cigarette smoke faintly mingled with beer on her breath. Her perfume. The tousle of her hair. The smell of fresh autumn air about her... with Nick; but there had been the wink and the moment of shared knowledge. Knowledge of what I didn’t yet know.

I was alone in the booth, smoking my cigarette. Her glass with the lipstick circle on the rim stood three-quarters full across from me. I took in a lungful of smoke and picked up her glass and drank the rest of her beer. Then I let the smoke out slowly and watched it drift and eddy and disappear into the larger haze of the barroom.

We were in the spa drinking coffee and smoking and I was explaining a poem.

“Think about it,” I said. “Why worms?”

“Which line is that,” Billy Murphy said.

“Down here,” I said, “line twenty-seven.”

“My echoing song then worms shall try that long preserved virginity,” Nick Taylor said, running the words and lines together without pause or comprehension.

“A worm’s gonna screw her?” Guze said.

“Screw who?” Billy said.

“I don’t know, this is some sick poem, Boonie. A worm screwing a virgin?”

“It’s about you. You’d screw a worm, Guze, if someone would hold it.”

“Yeah, but I ain’t no virgin.”

“So you say.”

“Shut up,” I said. “You want to pass this fucking test or not?”

“Yeah. How much time we got?”

“Hour and a half.”

I saw Jennifer across the spa. She was barely visible talking with three girls in another booth. The ripe thrust of her lower lip and part of her chin were all that showed among the other heads in the booth. I shifted a little and caught her eye. She smiled. I winked at her. There were six of us crowded into my booth and the smoke was thick. It is hard to think of that time now without seeing it through the glower of cigarette smoke that hung in hot, crowded places.

“C’mon, Boonie, explain the goddamn poem, will you?”

“He’s saying if you wait too long to come across, you’ll die and then the worms will eat you in the grave.”

“Jeez, what a nice poem,” Billy Murphy said.

I shrugged. “And he says worms, rather than, say, ants, which also eat corpses, because a worm is like a schwantz, you know. It’s an appropriate image.”

Nick Taylor said, “Wait a minute. Wait just a fucking minute. I know what that is. That’s a goddamned phallic symbol.”

I nodded.

“Sym-bo-lism,” Guze said, dragging the word out. “Symbo-fucking-lism.”

“Terrific, Guze. Put that down on your exam.”

“Are you shitting? In the exam I’m going to cheat off of Boonie.”

“You better.”

Jennifer was looking at us. Nick Taylor, I suppose. She could hear most of the talk because she was close. But everyone knew she wasn’t bothered by swearing.

“Before that,” Billy Murphy said, “what’s this shit about a chariot?”

Jennifer took her cigarette from her mouth and flicked the ashes onto the floor outside her booth with a shake of her hand. There was a wonderful carelessness about her. A kind of arrogant disinterest in some of the most elementary proprieties, the way I always imagined a princess might act, first in line to the throne, adored by the king and queen, worshipped by the people, she could shake the ash from her cigarette without looking where it would land. She could do whatever she wanted. Her wanting it made it right. And yet she was very polite, she always called professors sir. She dressed exactly the way she should; she was always a complete expression of the received look at Colby in 1950. Exactly sloppy enough, exactly enough makeup, exactly right roll in the cuffs of her jeans. It would have confused me in someone else, this seeming discontinuity, both careless and careful, but I applied no mortal categories to her. I saw her in great detail, and clearly, but I saw her as if through a projected overlay, which imposed upon the real contours of her attraction, the ornate illuminations of my dream. It was as if a real person had walked in the path of a movie projector. My imagination played upon her face until the reality was neither she nor the projection, but the fusion of both. In those days, just turned eighteen, her carelessness seemed to me, breathless in adoration, the identifying gesture of breeding and style. She was never careless with me.

“Boonie, what’s this fucking chariot? If I flunk this test, they’ll draft my ass.”

“In a lot of classical myths and stuff the sun was seen to ride across the sky in a chariot,” I said. “And so Marvell uses it to suggest time.”

“What’s time got to do with the sun?”

“The sun is the basis of time. Why the Christ do you think there’s twenty-four hours in a day?”

“Oh, yeah. Why the hell doesn’t he just say it?”

I shrugged. “The idea of a chariot bearing down on the two lovers is also threatening, you know, like a war chariot.”

Billy Murphy said, “Guze, don’t try to figure it out, just remember it.”

“Whyn’t they have us read stuff we can understand?”

“If you understood it, what would the fucking English teachers do every day in class?” I said.

“I’m going to work the meat counter at my old man’s market when I graduate,” Billy Murphy said. “I wonder what good Crosbie thinks this will do me.”

“Liberalize your views of life,” I said. “Make you a better human.”

“Like Crosbie?”

“Yeah. That’d be good in the market, huh?” I put on a fruity accent. “Perhaps a slice of boiled ham, madam?”

The laughter rolled around the table. In the booth behind us I saw Jennifer smile. Her mouth was wide and bright when she smiled, making a broad crimson slash across her face. Her front teeth were white and slightly uneven, one of the canines barely out of line. The effect of the laughter on her face was to emphasize her cheekbones.

Nick Taylor said, “Come on, come on, we only got an hour left. How about this next poem? How do you pronounce the guy’s name?”

“Donne,” I said, “rhymes with gun.”

“Jesus, why doesn’t he spell it right?”

“Never went to Colby,” I said. “Doesn’t know shit.”

Guze was a tough kid, a fullback on the football team, with biceps that made his shirt sleeves tight, and the intensity of a wolverine when he got in a fight. We were the only two college kids in the Arena Café, and that made me nervous. If you were drinking with Guze, the odds on winning any fights you got into went up. The bad part was that the odds on getting into a fight went up too. I was uneasy. This was a town bar, full of lumberjacks and mill workers. I was uneasy, too, because we were waiting for two girls.

“They fuck like bunnies,” Guze said, “both of them.”

I felt the excitement bore into my solar plexus. It mingled with anxiety. The prospect of being with a girl who fucked like a bunny was a little scary, especially since I’d never actually done it at all, exactly. I felt awkward and sweaty. I dragged on my cigarette.

“Where we going to take them,” I said.

“We’ll take them in the car. You get in the back with the sister, me and the Shark up front.”