Wake Up With a Stranger

1.

One of Donna’s earliest recollections in the area of inceptive light, where remembrance survived in scattered oddments, was the sound of a sewing machine. In the beginning there was one kind of sound, and a little later there was a slightly different kind of sound, and this change occurred when her mother’s old treadle-driven machine was traded in for one with an electric motor. She was sorry to see the old machine go, for the treadle had fascinated her, and she had become quite proficient at working it with her hands while sitting on the floor and looking across under the golden oak cabinet at her mother’s knees. Her mother was glad to be thus relieved of the labor of pumping, and it was pleasant on the floor with her head full of the incisive sound, and the bright fabrics sometimes tumbling over the edge of the machine and behind her to form a kind of silk or cotton or warm wool tent. The old machine was a Bartlett and the new one was a Singer. She remembered the name of the old one quite clearly because it was spelled out in iron letters between iron legs in a shallow arc that served as a brace. The name was also spelled out on the treadle, which consisted of a kind of intricate filigree around the name inside a rectangular iron frame.

A significant oddment was Mrs. Kullen. Mrs. Kullen’s husband was a meat cutter who had acquired his own market, and one of the benefits deriving from her marriage to this prosperous merchant was solvency sufficient for the hiring of a seamstress to modify her fat butt. There were other women who came to the cramped and narrow house for fittings, and some of them were even remembered for a while after they ceased to come, but it was Mrs. Kullen who became and remained the gross symbol of oppression, the prototype in Donna’s mind of those who become dominant through a distortion of values.

Her mother was then beautiful, and employed a fine talent, and those who came to her should have come for favor and not for service, but this was not so. It was perfectly apparent that her mother was considered by these dull and demanding women to be little more than a menial, and it was her mother’s fault, because she was weak and submissive and did not know how to utilize her own superiority. And it was in Donna the beginning of the ambivalence on the one hand, toward her mother, and concentrated contempt on the other, toward all of those for whom Mrs. Kullen stood. And Mrs. Kullen stood for them in her corset. She stood in the room in a slant of sun among a myriad of particles of suspended dust, and the angle of the narrow band of light fell across her fat white downy thighs between her corset and her stockings. This was Donna’s first sight of her, or at least the sight which assumed precedence over all others in time and intensity, and it was the way, the only way, she was ever able to see her afterward in her mind.

For quite a while she seemed to share the house only with her mother and the machine and occasionally the women who came for fittings, and then all of a sudden, emerging from darkness as if he had been gone since her birth and had just returned, there was Wayne Buchanan, her father. It was not true that he had been gone, of course. He was there all the time from the beginning, but for some reason that she could not determine he was excluded from her earlier recollections. Neither could she determine why it was that he took his place so abruptly at the time that he did, but he must have been brought into focus by something unpleasant, something now forgotten that he said or did, for he took shape in an animus that was never overcome. Surely she had formerly felt some affection for him, or had accepted him at least with a kind of tolerance, but the feeling was extinct, if it had existed at all, before it had left a trace in her mind.

Wayne Buchanan was a tall man with heavy shoulders, handsome in a rather florid fashion. Later, when Donna was studying history in school, she thought that he actually resembled the Buchanan who had been fifteenth President of the United States, and this was ironic, besides being a coincidence of names and appearance, because the other Buchanan had been weak and a failure too. He had been, however, a failure on a high level, which was one thing, while Wayne Buchanan was a failure on a low level, which was quite another. He had somehow decided that selling was the thing he did best, and he was always leaving one job for another which promised to be better. But the promise was never kept, and he accomplished so many minor failures in such rapid succession that they seemed to combine in retrospect into one big indivisible failure together, which was really what they amounted to. Not that he looked or acted like the failure he was. His appearance remained impressive, and he supported his natural weakness with a rigidity of attitude that obscured the weakness as it supported it, and it was this rigidity that prevented him from disintegrating entirely.

He was known as a religious man. He said grace at the table and took his wife and daughter every Sunday to church, and because he had no confidence in his own moral stamina, he was particularly critical of the morals of others, and wished to impose upon them dogmas of belief and behavior that they did not wish to adopt for themselves. Donna did not object to grace or church, the truth being that she rather enjoyed these things for the comfortable feeling that they gave her for a short time afterward, nor did she object strenuously to continual admonitions to be a good girl, for she had no active intention of being anything else. What she objected to and despised was her father’s propensity for making formulistic goodness a substitute for genuine devotion and for the capacity to do anything whatever that amounted to a damn. She understood with a kind of childish insight that a person who does not feel himself successful has much to gain from believing himself good, and she might have tolerated this in a more casual relationship. But she could not tolerate it in a relationship which was supposed to invoke respect, if not love, and she never did.

Besides being basically a fraud, Wayne Buchanan was something of a sadist. In a petty way, of course, as was appropriate for a weak man. He enjoyed denying Donna the things she could have had, and he enjoyed prohibiting her things she could have done. Many things were denied her, it was true, because Buchanan never had very much money and simply could not afford to supply them, and this was a valid reason for denial that Donna would have accepted if it had ever been offered, but it wasn’t. Buchanan was constitutionally incapable of making such a simple admission, for it would have seemed to him a confession of impotence. His denials were always accompanied by some pompous hocus-pocus intended to make Donna believe that they were for her own benefit, as if not having whatever she wanted was necessarily good for her character, while having it would necessarily be bad. His phoniness in this respect was clearly evident, even to a child, and as she grew older — Donna the girl becoming Donna the woman — she learned to avoid the revolting routine by asking him at first for nothing she wanted and, a little later, by honestly not wanting anything he had to give.

Although she did not have as much as many children have when they are growing up, she always had, because of her mother’s talent and trade, all the pretty dresses that she could wear, and this was very important to a pretty girl. Her mother bought fabric at a remnant shop for a fraction of its regular cost, but it was good material that was only marked down because it was the last of a bolt or dye lot or of a pattern that was being discontinued. On Donna the finished dresses her mother made had a look of quality that more expensive dresses did not have on other girls. In the beginning, that is, the material was bought and the dresses made by the mother for the daughter, but after a while the buying and the making were done by the daughter for herself, who had, besides her mother’s skill with the machine, a better eye for color and its ultimate effect in design, and, most of all, a sure feeling for the design itself — whether it was right or wrong and why. Long before she took her correspondence course, she was making sketches in a cheap tablet and cutting patterns from newspapers.

Being pretty, and wearing with a flair her pretty dresses, she was attractive to boys, but she wasn’t particularly popular. There is a legitimate distinction here, of course — and if she was glad of the one, she was undisturbed by the other, for the truth was that boys interested her mildly but not excessively, and she had not yet reached the point where she found them useful.

Her first intimate experience was with a quite small boy, when she herself was quite small, and it didn’t amount to much. He was called Dinky, and he lived for a while with his father and mother and six brothers and sisters in a house three doors away. She played with him sometimes in her back yard or his, and one day they went down into the cellar under his house and explored each other’s areas of difference with curiosity. It seemed a natural enough thing to do, and not too disappointing on the whole. She probably would have been willing to repeat the performance if circumstances had fallen out right for it, but unfortunately Dinky’s family was dispossessed within the week for nonpayment of rent, and he moved away with his father and mother and six brothers and sisters, and she never saw him again. She thought about him for a while, but she didn’t miss him. Once she tried to remember his last name and couldn’t, and this caused her to wonder if she had actually ever known it, but she couldn’t remember that either.

After Dinky, who hardly counted, she grew older, and she knew other boys who also hardly counted, and then when she was fifteen and had not yet decided what kind of person she wanted to be — or rather had not become aware of the kind of person she had to be — there was a boy named David who counted very much and was always remembered and regretted, not for what he was or had or did, but simply because he became an issue over which her father made a fool of himself and of her in the most disgusting way.

She went with this boy to what was called a formal dance — formal meant only that the girls wore long gowns and the boys wore the best they had, whatever that was. The dance was held in the gymnasium of the high school, and Donna wasn’t especially eager to go, but when this boy named David asked her, she decided that she would. He was a handsome boy with light curly hair — but he was not so conceited as many boys who thought they were exceptional merely because they were good-looking — and he was in love with her at the time, though she was not in love with him. His being in love with her made her feel important and fairly responsive.

It was quite a distance from her home to the high school, but they walked there, having no other way of getting there, and after the dance was over at eleven-thirty, they walked home. It was a warm May night with the softest stirring of air, and it was pleasant and exciting walking along the streets together, and she was glad when he took her hand and held it as they walked.

They reached her house about midnight, and sat down together on the edge of the high porch with their feet on the steps below them, and it was different at that time in the ugly neighborhood from what it had ever been or would ever be again, an illusion in the light of stars and moon of grace and quietude. He told her awkwardly that he loved her and asked her if she loved him in return, and she said that she did for his sake and the illusion’s, although she knew with a strange and aching sadness that it was not true, that she was really in love with half an hour of a May night and with herself in that fragment of time. In response to her lie, he put his arms around her and kissed her, and she found it agreeable. When he did it again, she responded by putting her arms around him also, and felt one small breast cupped gently in a hand, and heard behind them in that instant the explosive opening of the screen door.

It was her father who came out, who had certainly crept downstairs to spy on them, and he was in such a fury that she thought for a minute he had gone crazy. He jerked David to his feet before the boy had time to defend himself. Slapping him three times in the face with all his strength, her father gave him such a violent shove that the boy lost his balance on the steps and fell sprawling on the walk below. All this, Wayne Buchanan did to the boy Donna had almost loved in a graceful fragment of time.

On the sidewalk, David got to his feet and began to sob, not so much in fear or pain as in anger of his own.

“You son-of-a-bitch,” he said. “You mean son-of-a-bitch.”

Wayne Buchanan started down the steps, and the boy turned and ran, and Buchanan also turned and came back up onto the porch.

“Go upstairs to your room,” he said.

She looked at him levelly, and she was not really angry nor in the least afraid. If he had been a stranger, she might have felt fear or anger or possibly both, but he was not a stranger, he was her father, and she was only sickened and shamed and ineffably lost.

“You heard what he called you,” she said. “He called you a mean son-of-a-bitch, and that’s what you are. You’re a mean, dirty son-of-a-bitch of a hypocrite, and I wish you were dead. I hope David comes back with a gun and shoots you dead.”

He raised a heavy hand and struck her in the face. Her light body was slammed back by the blow against the siding of the house, and she slipped down slowly into a sitting position with the long, full skirt of her new gown billowing around her like a bright cloud. A thin, bitter fluid came up from her stomach into her mouth, and she thought for a terrible moment that she was going to vomit, which would have been, somehow, the most shameful thing of all, and then she stood up and faced him again.

“Don’t ever hit me again,” she said. “Don’t hit me or touch me so long as you live.”

Turning away from him, she opened the screen door and went into the house quietly, and in the end, in a monstrous perversion of normal effect, it was he who was afraid.

2.

It was not the first time he had been afraid. As a boy, he was afraid of his father, who was a minister of the gospel, and later on, when he was himself studying for the ministry at a small denominational college, he was afraid in a different kind of way of a young man named Cletus Corey, who was his roommate.

Cletus Corey was known as a rather dangerous liberal among the three or four hundred students in the college. It was his theory that a minister of the gospel, in order to be really effective, should have a rich, empirical knowledge of the world and its works, even at the expense of minor virtues, and he was fond of pointing out that even Saint Francis of Assisi had been quite a rounder in his younger years. This theory of deliberate deviation for the sake of worldly effectiveness was disturbing enough in itself, but it was made doubly so by illustrative use of the saint, who had been a Catholic (Roman), of course, and was therefore not an acceptable example for young Christians living in the age of enlightenment. But Cletus was certainly catholic (meaning liberal) and he looked to all sorts and extremes of examples in the application of his theory to himself. He was able to admire both William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow. He subscribed to the American Mercury, read H. L. Mencken with roars of delight, and passed Elmer Gantry around to his more liberal cronies. It was generally predicted that he would either be an enormous success or become an enormous cropper, but as it turned out, neither of these predictions was fulfilled. In time, at the request of the college authorities, he abandoned his theological studies, and shortly afterward, at the request of an impatient parent, he got a job and made quite a bit of money selling secondhand automobiles.

He left college at the same time that Wayne Buchanan left, and for the same reason. The truth is, the reason for their leaving was quite a scandal at the time, and it was all the unfortunate result of Cletus Corey’s applied theory. The ingredients of the scandal were juicy and really deserved the attention of more accomplished practicioners than Buchanan and Corey. They included a roadhouse, a stripper, drunkenness, and fornication. The roadhouse was a notorious highway spot known as the Blue Barn, because it looked like a barn and was painted blue, and it was strictly off-limits to students of the college, but Corey had been there before without subsequent retribution, temporal or divine, and he kept suggesting to Buchanan that it would be broadening and beneficial if he were to go also.

“It’s a kind of moral obligation to have some experience in these things,” he said. “In my opinion, it’s a pretty poor sort of minister who can’t trust himself to find out what life’s like just because he’s afraid it will corrupt him.”

This argument appealed to Buchanan. He saw himself standing strong and clean and unassailable, a source of salvation among the fleshpots.

“After all,” Buchanan said, “what if the prophets had ignored Sodom and Gomorrah and Babylon and such places as that? It’s perfectly apparent that the prophets knew all about them, and that’s why they were able to combat their evil and even save some of the sinners who would otherwise have been lost in them.”

“Now you’re getting it,” Corey said.

“What’s this Blue Barn like?” Buchanan said.

“Well, it’s just a big room with a bar and a lot of chairs and tables and a place to dance. There’s a small band Saturday nights, and they have a floor show at eleven and another around one. They must pay off to the cops or something, because there’s quite a lot of drinking and sometimes it gets pretty rough.”

“What kind of floor show do they have?”

“There’s this fellow introduces the acts, an M.C. he’s called, and he sings some songs that are really pretty dirty and disgusting, and there are a couple of girls who dance.”

“What kind of dance?”

“They just sort of move around to the music and make motions of various kinds and take off their clothes.”

“No fooling? How do they get away with that sort of thing?”

“Oh, well, there’s no law against it, so far as that goes.”

“No temporal law, maybe.”

“Sure, sure. I’m not saying it’s right, you understand. One of these girls is called Trixie, and she’s about as pretty as any girl you could see anywhere. It makes you feel real bad to see her dancing around practically naked in front of all those men and all. If the right fellow came along who could make her see how she shouldn’t do things like that, he could probably save her.”

“Well, that would certainly be commendable,” Buchanan said. “We mustn’t forget the parable of the black sheep.”

“Nor Mary Magdalen either.”

“That’s true. That’s certainly true.”

This line of thought was also appealing to Buchanan. He considered himself a right fellow in any possible contingency, and now, considering the practically naked Trixie, he actually wondered if he might not be receiving some kind of call. He could see himself saving her from the shame of ogles, and in his imagination receiving her gratitude and love — platonic, of course, unless he went so far as marrying her for her own good, in which eventuality there were additional purifying possibilities as well as a satisfying element of sacrifice.

“I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” he said. “I’ll go out there with you next Saturday night just to see what it’s like.”

“That’s the stuff. I got a friend downtown who’ll let me use his car if he isn’t going to be using it himself. I’ll find out and let you know.”

“All right. It’s agreed, then, that we’ll go just to see what it’s like.”

As it developed, the friend’s car was available, and Buchanan and Corey drove out to the Blue Bam the next Saturday night on what was really, Buchanan kept telling himself, a kind of mission. Unfortunately, the management of the Blue Barn was not aware of their status as missionaries, which should have exempted them from certain obligations, and it was made clear to them at once that they would buy drinks or get out.

“It’s all right,” Corey said. “They’re not very strong drinks, anyhow, and you can sort of nurse yours along.”

What he didn’t say, however, is that the strength of a drink is relative to the resistance of the drinker, and Buchanan, having had no practice, had practically no resistance. He tried to nurse the first drink according to instruction, but it was the policy of the management to serve fresh ones at fairly short intervals, with or without a specific order, and after a while it began to seem imperative for the sake of appearances to empty some of the glasses on the table in order to get them out of sight. This he set about doing with the assistance of Corey, but they never seemed quite to catch up, and when eleven o’clock came, time for the first show, he was considerably more vulnerable to the corruptions of his mission than it is safe for a missionary to be. The M.C. was truly a disgusting fellow with no claim on Christian charity, and the first dancer, billed as Nanette the Naughty, was only a mild threat to asceticism. But when Trixie came gliding into light to the roll of a drum in an ice-blue satin gown, it was for Buchanan, though he had it to learn, a triumph of flesh in an hour of ruin. She was a slim and sinuous temptress with short curly hair that was almost white, and she gave the impression of being little more than a physically precocious child. Actually, though this was something else that Buchanan did not know, she was fully ten years older than she looked and had never been a child at all. She filled him at sight with a flaming and holy desire, at once with a need to save her from her sordid life. By the time she had finished removing the ice-blue gown, he was committed to a farce and assured of his shame.

“What a rotten crime!” he said, panting a little with an emotion that had nothing to do with his expressed indignation.

“Crime?” Corey said, failing for the moment to readjust to a missionary status. “What’s a crime?”

“Her dancing like that. A young, pretty girl like her in front of all these men.”

“Oh, that. Well, yes, it is, of course. It’s a downright crime.”

“I must talk with her, Corey. I simply must.”

“I don’t know that I’d do it, if I were you, Buchanan. These girls are pretty expensive when you get to fooling around with them.”

“What in heaven’s name do you mean? Are you suggesting that I want to... to buy favors from this girl?”

“No, no. Not at all, Buchanan. I only mean that the management expects you to buy them drinks and all if they sit with you at a table.”

“I don’t intend for her to sit with me at a table. I must talk with her privately.”

Corey, who was not exceptionally charitable and had read, besides, Somerset Maugham’s story of Sadie Thompson, looked at Buchanan with a growing and perhaps excusable cynicism. Buchanan, who had not read the story or even seen Jeanne Eagles in the movie, was nevertheless sensitive to the look and its implications.

“Is it your opinion that I am basely motivated in this matter?” he said.

“To tell the truth,” said Corey, getting directly to the point, “it’s my opinion that you’re drunk.”

Which was true. Buchanan was quite drunk from trying to catch up, but he was also more than that. He was exhilarated and inviolable and filled with holy fire. Rising unsteadily, he looked down for a moment at Corey with imperious contempt, and then, without a word, he turned and made his precarious way among the tables toward the door through which Trixie had gone with a twitch of her rear in the completion of her act. Beyond the door was a short and narrow and dirty hall with an exit at the far end and four other doors spaced along it, two on each side, and in the hall, lounging indolently, was a man with incredible muscles inside a soiled white shirt.

“Where the hell you think you’re going, sonny?” he said amiably.

Buchanan replied with dignity that he wanted to speak with Miss Trixie.

“I don’t know, sonny,” he said. “I’ll see what she says.”

He went back to one of the doors and knocked on it and talked through it and then returned to Buchanan.

“She says it’s okay to come in, sonny,” he said. “Have fun.”

Buchanan, scorning to draw inference from implication, went to the door and also knocked.

“It’s not locked, lover,” a rather brassy voice said.

Trixie had risen from a worn red couch to welcome him, and the only change she had made in her costume since leaving the spotlight was to remove the last two ounces of wispy material from here and there. She had, of course, no way of knowing that Buchanan was a fool, and, proceeding on an assumption to which she was certainly entitled by circumstances, she was simply prepared to supplement her income as she had supplemented it many times before in the only way she knew that did not involve prolonged drudgery. Moreover, having other things to do before her one o’clock show, she did not intend to waste time. In brief, Buchanan was quite probably one of the weakest protagonists of light against darkness since the time of Zoroaster. Afterward, sobered and revolted and terrified by an instantaneous conviction of mortal sin, he wondered why he had not noticed earlier that her feet were dirty.

“Bitch,” he said. “Dirty bitch.”

She was speechless for a minute with astonishment and fury in succession, and then her voice returned with a hiss.

“What the hell’s the matter with you? What kind of talk is that, I’d like to know. You come back here, you bastard, you get what you want, and then you call me names. Give me my money and get the hell out of here and don’t ever come back.”

“Bitch!” he said. “Bitch, bitch, bitch!”

She leaped at him and raked fingernails down his face, and he slashed back at her in a kind of blind hatred. She fell back on the couch and cursed and began to scream. Turning to escape, he ran into the arms of the muscled man of the hall, who began without delay to beat him without mercy. Agent of his corruption, witness to his humiliation, the Blue Barn Jezebel watched and laughed and cursed and jeered. Eventually, he was hauled to the door at the end of the hall and thrown out onto the ground. He lay for a minute or two without moving, tasting his blood in his mouth, and then he dragged himself to his feet and limped painfully around to the gravel parking area. Five minutes later Corey came out of the Blue Barn in a hurry and joined him.

“For God’s sake, what did you do in there?”

Buchanan sobbed and shook his head and said nothing.

“Look,” Corey said, “you’ve got to tell me what happened. Why did they want to know who we are and where we came from?”

Then Buchanan was really terrified.

“You didn’t tell them!” he gasped. “Oh, God, you didn’t tell them!”

“What would you have done with a big gorilla looking down your throat and threatening to tear you to pieces if you didn’t?”

“Oh, God!” Buchanan sobbed. “Oh, merciful Christ!”

Later, in his room at the college, trying desperately to be rational about it, he decided that the management of the Blue Barn was certainly in no position to invite the attention of the authorities or the wrath of the college officials. As a matter of fact, the existence of the Blue Barn was precarious and could hardly have survived a charge of corrupting embryo ministers, but he failed to take into proper account the vindictiveness of Trixie. On Monday a crudely spelled and printed note was received by the dean, and within the hour following, Buchanan was summoned and charged. Although he lied heroically, it was to no avail, for Corey in a separate session had told a conflicting story. Buchanan was flayed with Christian wrath and salted with Christian scorn, and he was sent smarting to his room to await the coming of his father.

He went to his room, all right, but he did not wait. He would rather have faced the devil himself than the man who had sired him. He left the college and caught a bus to St. Louis, and he never saw his father again until after the man was dead, at which time he went home to attend the funeral and collect five hundred dollars that had been left him in a final spirit of paternal charity. He worked at various jobs and was not very successful at any of them, and while he still had most of the five hundred dollars left, he married a very pretty young woman named Ellen Fischer. He married her and unconsciously hated her because she excited him sexually, thereby degrading him, and when they had a child about two years later, he unconsciously hated her also, because she would in her turn excite and degrade someone else.

3.

Inasmuch as she was an attractive girl, she excited a good many boys, but it would be impossible to identify them. However, it would be possible to identify definitely the several who, on the other hand, excited her, and the first of these was a boy named Enos Simon.

She met him when she was a senior in high school, and she had by that time decided what she wanted to do and what kind of person she wanted to be. She had enrolled in a correspondence course in design, which she studied in addition to her regular school assignments, and she had definitely abandoned any idea of going to college. She would have liked to go, so far as that was concerned, but only if she could do it in a manner that suited her, which was out of the question for financial reasons. So she enrolled in the correspondence course as an alternative, and she worked very hard at it, and at the same time she began deliberately to try to achieve a certain effect physically. She designed and made her clothing for the achievement of this, and she also became artful in the use of cosmetics. It was in this period, just before she met Enos Simon, that she went to the optometrist and bought the harlequin glasses.

She met Enos in the reading room of a branch library about a mile from her home. The task of carrying the correspondence course and doing well at the same time in her school work was proving rather strenuous, and she had acquired the habit of going directly from school to the library in order to accomplish as much as possible before going home. The day she first saw Enos there, she was sitting as usual at a large table at which as many as six people could be seated, and he moved slowly across in front of her, beyond the table along a tier of shelves against a wall. He seemed to be reading titles in a rather desultory way, not stopping to remove and open any of the books, and what struck her at very first sight was an air of somber intensity about him. His skin was swarthy, his hair was dark and tumbled and slightly curly, and although he was clean he was somewhat unkempt, as if he had a fine indifference to the effect of his clothes, which had in its own way its own effect. He carried his head tilted a little forward, his chin tucked down, and this gave him the appearance of looking up at an angle under his heavy brows with a kind of repelling expression, not so much of belligerence as of a fierce desire to be let alone. He drifted along the tier of shelves and out of sight without stopping or looking once in Donna’s direction, but she thought of him that night and looked for him when she returned the next afternoon.

He was there, sitting alone at the very same table she had sat at yesterday, and she was shaken by the strong feeling she had upon seeing him. It was as if his presence were something she had planned, and it amounted, therefore, to a conquest.

He was slouched in his chair with his legs extended under the table, and when she sat down across from him, she accidentally kicked one of his feet. He drew the foot away and looked up at her from his book with that oddly fierce expression she had noticed before.

“Excuse me,” she said.

He grunted and lowered his eyes, but she continued to stare across at him as she opened the chemistry text she intended to study, and after a while he looked up again to meet her gaze.

“I wish you wouldn’t stare at me,” he said.

“Why? Do you feel guilty?”

“Guilty? Why the devil should I feel guilty?”

“Because you have such bad manners.”

“What do you know about my manners? You know nothing about them at all.”

“I know that you stick your legs out in all directions, which is rude, and I know that you haven’t even the courtesy to acknowledge an apology.”

“All right. Now you have told me off, and you can quit staring at me.”

“I am just wondering why you never comb your hair.”

“So now we are being rude to each other! It’s a pleasure to tell you that my hair, and what I do or don’t do to it, is none of your damn business.”

“Perhaps not. But it’s rather fascinating just the same. Rather like Raggedy Andy’s. Like a string mop. I’m also wondering why you let your clothes get to looking as if you slept in them. Is it a kind of pose or something?”

“Suppose it is. You’re something of a poseur yourself, aren’t you? Why do you wear glasses shaped like that, for instance, and why do you fix your face and your hair to make you look like a college girl at least, when you’re obviously only in high school?”

“Do my looks offend you?”

“Not at all. I don’t care what you try to look like.”

They had started talking in whispers, but their voices had risen in the exchange, and suddenly a female librarian appeared from around a tier of shelves and hissed at them sharply. The boy turned his head indolently in her direction and hissed back at her deliberately.

“Old crow,” he said.

The librarian flushed and wagged an admonishing finger and retreated.

“My God,” Donna whispered, “there’s no end to your bad manners, is there?”

“I don’t like being hissed at,” he said.

“Well, neither do I, so we had better stop talking.”

“Must we? Now that you’ve started it, I’m not sure that I want to stop.”

“Don’t I have anything to say about it?”

“Oh, I suppose I’d eventually get tired and quit talking if you simply refused to listen or make any reply.”

“Yes, but before that happened, you might get thrown out of here.”

“That’s true. And you might get thrown out also, since you’re involved. Would you feel humiliated if you were?”

“I think I’d manage to survive.”

“I’m sure you would. But it seems silly to invite trouble. There are lots of places we could talk all we wanted to.”

“What places?”

“I don’t know. Lots of them.”

“Are you asking me to leave with you?”

“Not yet. I’ll ask you, though, if you promise to agree. I don’t like being rejected.”

“That’s two things you don’t like. Being hissed at and being rejected.”

“There are others. Many others. Do you agree to go?”

“Yes.”

“Then I ask you to leave with me.”

They closed their books and stood up and went out past the desk of the angry librarian, and outside they stood on the sidewalk that was wet from an earlier rain and wondered where they should go together in the soft mid-May afternoon that was almost evening.

“If we are going some place together,” she said, “we should at least know each other’s name. Mine’s Donna Buchanan.”

“Mine’s Enos Simon. Where would you like to go?”

“I don’t know. Why don’t you just choose one of the lots of places you know about?”

“Do you like beer?”

“I’ve never drunk any.”

“I knew that look of yours was phony.”

“What look?”

“You try to make people think you’re a lot more experienced than you really are.”

“Oh, hell. The truth is, you talk pretty silly sometimes, do you know that? I was eighteen this month, as a matter of fact, and that’s as old as I care to be or look at present. Besides, what has not drinking beer got to do with anything? Do you measure experience by such silliness?”

“Never mind. It’s not important, and I don’t want to argue about it. I suggest that we walk down to Sully’s and have a sandwich and a cup of coffee. Are you hungry?”

“Yes. I think I’d like a sandwich.”

“All right. Have you been to Sully’s?”

“No.”

“It’s not much.”

He took her books, and they walked the six blocks on the wet sidewalk to Sully’s. As Enos had said, it wasn’t much of a place. The booths ran down one wall, and the counter ran down the other, and between the booths and the counter were a few tables. At the rear of the room was a jukebox with colored bubbles rising and descending soundlessly in lighted tubes. They sat and listened to the music until the man had returned with their order and gone again and the box was silent.

“Now that we’re here and free to talk without being hissed at,” Donna said, “what shall we talk about?”

“You can start by telling me why you kicked me in the library and then picked a quarrel with me.”

“I kicked you quite by accident, and I did not pick a quarrel with you. You were rude, and I told you so, that’s all. Please don’t be so vain as to think I kicked you on purpose just to get your attention.”

“Well, didn’t you?”

“Of course not. You were sprawled all over the place.”

“Oh, all right. I’ll be more honest than you and admit that I’ve noticed you in the library before. I was trying to think of a way to meet you when it happened.”

“You certainly didn’t sound as if you wanted to meet me.”

“That’s just my way. The truth is, I’m shy and get all tensed up in such circumstances. Did you say you go to high school?”

“You said it, not I. But it’s true. I’m a senior. I’ll graduate next month.”

“Are you going to college in the fall?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t want to. There’s something else I’d rather do.”

“Get married?”

“God, no! I want to be a designer. A fashion designer. I’m taking a correspondence course in design now, but I don’t think it’s much help. The main thing is, I seem to have a natural talent for it.”

“Did you design the dress you’re wearing?”

“Yes. I designed it and made it.”

“I agree that you have a talent. Can you get very far with something like fashion designing in St. Louis? I should think you’d have to go somewhere like New York.”

“If you had an exclusive shop to work through, you could go a long way right here. That’s what I’m going to try to do when I get good enough. I’m going to try to start a line of originals in a shop right here.”

“You’re very ambitious, aren’t you?”

“I guess so. Aren’t you?”

“No. I can’t even make up my mind what I want to do.”

“What do you mean, you can’t make up your mind? Don’t you do anything now?”

“No. I graduated from high school a year ago, and I haven’t done anything since.”

“Really? Nothing at all?”

“Not a damn thing. I’ve been thinking about it, but I can’t seem to get started. I’m going to the state university this fall, but it’s more because my old man thinks I ought to than because I really want to.”

“Isn’t there anything at all you think you’d like to do?”

“Well, I think I’d like to be a writer, but I’m sure I could never be anything but a poor one, so I guess I won’t even try. Maybe I’ll end up teaching.”

“What would you teach?”

“Oh, literature. Something like that.”

“Do you like to read?”

“I read a lot. Always have. It’s the only thing I do much of.”

She nodded at the book he had carried with hers from the library.

“What are you reading now?”

“The Grand Testament.”

“The Bible, you mean?”

“Lord, no! Villon’s Grand Testament.”

“Who’s Villon?”

“Seriously? Don’t you actually know? How can you be so ignorant?”

“Well, you needn’t start being insulting and rude again. If you do, I’ll leave. I guess there are a few things I know that you don’t, as far as that goes.”

“That’s true. I have a nasty way of thinking the only things worth knowing are the things I happen to know myself.”

“That’s better. You can be very nice when you want to be. Will you tell me who this Villon is? Is he French? His name sounds French.”

“You’re right except for your tense. Was, not is. He was born in Paris in 1431 and disappeared in 1463. No one knows what happened to him after that, but probably he was hanged.”

“Why on earth do you think he was probably hanged?”

“Because he had almost been hanged two or three times before, and it doesn’t seem likely that he could go on escaping by the skin of his teeth forever. He was a murderer and a thief and a whoremonger and a syphilitic and almost anything bad you could mention, but he also happened to have a master’s degree from the Sorbonne and to be the greatest poet of the Middle Ages, and one of the greatest poets of any age. Don’t you think that’s very amusing?”

“I admit that I don’t see anything amusing about it at all.”

“Don’t you? I do. A common criminal who worshiped beauty and wrote some of the most beautiful poetry in the world in cheap taverns and whorehouses and prisons and all sorts of low places. He was a coward, too. He was afraid of physical pain, and he was especially afraid of dying, because he had lived such a sinful life that the mere thought of dying filled him with terror. A criminal and a coward who wrote all this beautiful poetry that’s still read after more than five hundred years. Beauty and evil co-existing in such extremity in one ugly and diseased little man. Don’t you see why I consider it amusing? It’s so ironical and paradoxical, and it’s so contrary to what all the good little mediocre people try to teach you about evil not begetting beauty, and all that kind of crap. Would you like to hear something he wrote?”

“I guess so.”

“All right. Listen to this.”

He began to recite Ballad of Dead Ladies, the Rossetti translation, and each time he repeated the sad refrain with which each stanza ended, his voice assumed an intensity that was very compelling, as if he were himself acutely aware of the brevity of life and was urging in her an equal awareness.

When he had finished, he was silent for a moment, looking at her intently across the table, and she didn’t know what to say. Up to then, she had honestly considered him rather ridiculous, although interesting, but now she saw he had sensibilities she had not imagined, and she no longer considered him at all ridiculous. The truth was, he disturbed her a little, more than she was prepared to admit, and she began to think that it was time to go home.

“You’re right,” she said. “It is beautiful.”

“Do you think so? It’s probably the most famous thing he did. It’s called Ballad of Dead Ladies.”

She had by this time finished her sandwich and coffee, and she slipped sidewise, on the red leather seat and stood up abruptly, impatient with herself for permitting him to affect her so strongly.

“I think I’d better go now,” she said.

“All right.” He also slipped out of the booth and stood up, lifting their books from the table. “Do you live far from here?”

“Not so far. It’s about a mile, I think.”

“Will you let me go with you? I haven’t got any place to go, except home, and I would much rather walk along with you.”

She was ashamed of the house and neighborhood in which she lived, but she was also proud and defiant, so she said he could. After that, they met several times a week in the branch library and went out together from there, and a little later they began seeing each other in the evenings. But they didn’t go many places or do many things because there didn’t seem to be anything Enos really cared about, quite apart from the fact that he was in bad at home for his indolence and was given little money to spend. The first significant thing about him that Donna learned was that it was impossible ever to anticipate his mood. Sometimes he was gay and really clever, other times he was sullen and difficult to get along with, and still at other times, in what seemed to be a kind of intermediate mood between the two extremes, he was quietly considerate, almost tender, and seemed to be making a kind of plea that was never quite clarified.

On the whole, he was much too disturbing in proportion to his appeal, and she thought more than once she would tell him she didn’t care to see him again, but she never did. Their relationship continued past her graduation and into the summer nearing the time when he would have to go away to the university. Several times, at some propitious moment, it wavered briefly on the verge of demand and eager submission, but nothing was gained or lost. Then he came the evening before he was to leave. He had managed to get the use of his father’s car, and they drove out of the city along the river and parked in a narrow road. There at last, at the last moment before the long summer, they crossed the boundary at which they had always stopped before. In the experience for her there was some sadness and a little pain and, most of all, an oddly exciting sense of charity, as if she had, at some sacrifice, been kind to a child who needed her.

He went away the next day to the university, and a little later he wrote to her, and she replied. He wrote again, telling her that he was already looking forward to Christmas, when he would come home and see her, and she replied again and told him that she was also looking forward to it. Then in November she got a letter saying that his parents had moved away from St. Louis to a small town across state and that he wouldn’t be able to see her at Christmas after all. At first, for a while, after the intimacy by the river and his going away, she had felt desolate and alone in a drained and distorted world, and she had thought then that she truly loved him and would die without him. But in time the color returned surely to the world around her, her perspective returned, and she was able to admit to herself what she had known all along, that he was an oversensitive and unstable boy who would never on earth do one thing of consequence. When the last letter came, she did not answer it.