Testimony and Demeanor (8 page)

Well, all I can think is that it wouldn’t really be like that in real life—”

“It would,” I said. “It would because—”

“Oliver,” she said, cautioning me.

“It’s you!” I said.

I felt that this revelation would undo her. I had seen her nerves. But behind her nerves she was horribly self-possessed. I realized a little later that she’d been prepared for any declaration I had the power to make.

She said, “I know you’re so sweet that I just can’t be cross. But you really shouldn’t let yourself get carried away.…”

While she was talking I considered what else I could do. I had another poem, but that was out. It went further in some
ways—it was a shipwreck poem, in which only two reach a desert shore. I also knew that now I was much less interested in long-term love—I had come to see several flaws in her in the last minute—but I was all the more interested in a real kiss.

Josie said, “Real feelings are much more complicated—the feelings a woman has for a man have to do with so many more emotions.… There has to be more or there really just isn’t real feeling at all.”

That was certainly the catechism of the fifties. I believed it. I believed she believed it and that she was right to believe it. In fact, the most complicated parts of my imagining were not the physical setting (loose togas, storm-tattered skirt, etc.); they were rather the array of other emotions I devised for her to feel for me: gratitude, pity, amusement, curiosity—even family loyalty. I always imagined at least a half dozen concurrent feelings to shore up the plausibility of her one giddy spark of dangerous affection. So I was irritated when she told
me
: “Real feelings are much more complicated.”

Irritated, but helpless. Because while she’d been talking I’d had to admit to myself that I didn’t have the courage to try to kiss her. I was as tall as she was, but I was thin and I had the terrible feeling that she was stronger than I was.

It had also crossed my mind to tell her either that I was so miserable that I was going to leave school for good or that one of the masters had tried to seduce me and that I was in desperate need of reassurance. I wasn’t sure why I couldn’t try these tacks; I just knew I couldn’t.

I said, “Give me back the poem.”

She handed it to me and I tore it up.

She said, “Oh, Ollie.”

I said, “Don’t call me that.”

She pushed herself up from the desk. Our eyes were on the same level. I suddenly began to move toward her, some small wish in me suddenly swimming hard, leaping and plunging upstream into her look. But there was no real force in the rest of
me; I was just weakly staggering. She put her arms out. I took another dizzy step, my eyes blindly on hers. She caught me by the shoulders and held me at arms’ length.

Then I realized she was looking at me with pleasure—a mild, completely controlled pleasure.

She said, “You really are so sweet. What am I going to do with you? Believe me, if I were a girl your age I really don’t know what—” She squeezed my shoulders, picked up her pocketbook, and left. I don’t believe she knew exactly what she was doing, but she had done it neatly. When she left I didn’t have any feeling left at all, not one bit.

When I told Honorée this story I left out that last part—I think I thought she wouldn’t understand. But I was prepared for her to be stabbed by the poignancy. Instead she was filled with admiration for cousin Josie. Miss Hogentogler chose to regard my adolescent anguish as an anecdotal frame for the portrait of an elegant lady. And yet it was Miss Hogentogler who was by far my best student in our section of composition and rhetoric.

I found that I looked forward to correcting my students’ papers. I divided the themes by sex and saved the girls’ for last. It was the most erotic experience of the week. When I would write a comment in the margin—“You can do better than
this
, Miss Akerblad”—the very act of adding the name would arouse me as though I had surreptitiously touched her. And the thought of her writing out corrections at my command made it seem as though she were shyly acquiescing. I would pore over the paper again and feverishly write out, at elaborate length, alternate ways for her to correct the dangling modifier, comma splice, or missing antecedent.

Among the choices of titles that the department assigned for the first freshman theme was “My Life Story.”

“My name is Honorée Hogentogler,” she wrote. “Honorée means honored in French. However my family name is of German racial origin. My sister’s name is Desirée. That means
desired in French also. The other names in our family are normal. However our dog is named Kartoffel. This means potato in the German language. He is called that because of his supposed predilection for such a vegetable.” And so it went to the end, listing the events and honors of her life in stiff, nervous sentences. Wapsi Valley High girls’ gymnastics team. Choral group. Bell lyre in the marching band. Valedictorian. In short, whole-apple goodness. What interested me more was that when I said to her, “Instead of ‘because of his supposed predilection for such a vegetable,’ why don’t you say ‘because he likes potatoes’?” she replied, “I was being funny.”

I knew she was not telling the truth. This slight taint attracted me.

At this point I discovered why some of my colleagues didn’t like me. It was the way I dressed. The very style that so pleased Miss Hogentogler offended them. My officemate wore cowboy clothes. It was he who told me that several people had mentioned that they thought I was deliberately dressing up to put them down. Although they wore cowboy clothes, some of them came from back East, though not Miss Hogentogler’s East. One of them came from Fitchburg, Massachusetts. But even he had surely encountered a coat and tie at some time.

They wished their students to call them by their first names, and this wish was somehow connected to their cowboy clothes—their theory being that their manner would help bridge the gap between their own rigorous intellects and those of their students, and at the same time align them with their students in a comforting way against the difficult fopperies of, say, Jane Austen. Insofar as they applied this theory to themselves, it was fine with me. But as they extended it to me, I became an illustration of conspicuous consumption—somehow a striped shirt with a white collar was a finger in the eye of democracy. My reaction to my officemate’s advice was to get my three-piece suit out of mothballs. The vest had small notched lapels; the tweed itself was green with squares drawn in bright orange
lines—a borderline case between a country squire going bird shooting and a Newmarket tout. My officemate unfortunately was sick the next day, but this suit had a strong effect on Miss Hogentogler. The day after I wore it she told me she’d dreamed of it. In her dream it, and she and I, went to Europe together.

“What was funny,” she said, “was that we went by train. Of course, maybe the train got put on a boat. Did you ever go by boat?”

I said, “Only once by ship. Otherwise by plane.”

She said, “Well, in my dream it couldn’t have been by plane. I’m terrified of planes. I’ve had dreams of planes crashing. I’m in my room at home—it’s on the top floor and there are all these planes flying around. Then one of them begins to fall right toward the house, right toward my room, and then it comes right through the ceiling right on top of me.”

I said, “This plane isn’t firing a gun from its nose, is it?”

“No,” she said. “It’s just an ordinary plane.”

“Miss Hogentogler, have you ever read any Freud?”

She said, “I don’t
think
so.”

I said, “Have you ever slept with anyone?”

She laughed and looked out the window. Then she looked at my face, her gaze focusing on one of my eyes and then the other. Which eye had the right answer?

“Almost,” she said.

“Almost?”

“It was really very funny,” she said. “It was really just very amusing.”

I told her about Freud. It occurred to me as I spoke that I had initially acquired Freud through oral tradition too. But Miss Hogentogler believed every word I said.

Public speaking was part of rhetoric and composition. One of the assigned topics from English HQ was “My Favorite Magazine.”

Honorée, when her turn came, said, “This assignment is one that finally awakened my interest. I at last have a speech topic that is nearly as interesting as ‘My Summer Job.’ My favorite magazine is of course
Hot Rod
.” She held it up daintily between her thumb and forefinger. She’d painted her short nails bright pink for the occasion. “I love to get up at the crack of dawn and get right to work on
Hot Rod
’s latest idea—how to put a full race cam on your family station wagon.
Hot Rod
is full of brilliant writing which evokes all my favorite smells—be they burning rubber from laying a strip or hot exhaust from the muffler by-pass. Although I have to say the prose is not as good as my favorite book, which is the repair manual for a fifty-two Ford.”

Her irony grew heavier, and the class began to laugh.

My own thoughts were suddenly possessive: Why was she playing to the boys? Miss Quist and Miss O’Rourke weren’t laughing. Did she want these boys to like her, after all? Moreover, she was making them laugh in a way that made me the butt—as though I were responsible for the speech topics, as though this class were capable of anything more. I looked down at Honorée’s speech-grading blank. Section 4 was Eye Contact. I circled Poor, then changed it to Fair. I thought she’d better keep in mind to whom she should address herself. But I rated the speech excellent as a whole. In all the other blanks except Voice I circled Excellent. I looked up and saw Honorée smiling at me tentatively, her face now oddly pale after the flush of victory at her first laugh. I wrote in the margin, “You have a beautiful voice, Miss Hogentogler,” and as though I were alone in my office, I felt the erotic power of marginal comment.

The next speaker gave me his grading blank and went to the lectern. He was a tall conscientious boy with a blond crew cut that looked as though it had been stuck in quill by quill at the peak of the long flat slope of his forehead. He stood in silence for a moment. I said, “Go right ahead.”

He said, “My favorite magazine is
Hot Rod
.”

Laughter. Honorée flushed with triumph again.

I said, “That’s all right. I’m sure Miss Hogentogler has left room for some genuine appreciation of the subject.” Honorée beamed at me across the room.

Honorée said to me that since she knew my thesis topic was Elizabethan drama, she would like to ask me some questions about drama. I said fine. She said, “Do you think I could be an actress?”

I said, “Not on the Elizabethan stage.”

She looked puzzled.

I said, “The girls’ parts were played by boys.”

She said, “Oh, Mr. Hendricks. Don’t be droll.”

I said, “Why this sudden interest?”

“It’s not sudden. I had the female lead in our high school play. I played Eliza Doolittle in
My Fair Lady
.”

I said, “How did you manage the accents?”

She said, “Well, we mostly concentrated on the music, but I can do a sort of English accent. Anyway, I was thinking of taking an acting class, but I was worried about …”

“About?”

“Well … how I look.”

She took a step back so that I could see her full-length over the lunch counter. She stood completely still, inviting inspection. I felt a peculiar emotion—a harsh peppermint thrill.

I said, “Well, that uniform isn’t the most flattering thing.”

Honorée’s face burned. Her lips parted slightly and then stayed completely still. I looked down and was suddenly touched by her small plump feet squeezed into her tennis shoes.

I said, “You have wonderful coloring. And you look healthy—health is a large part of good looks.”

I wished to give her more than this modest compliment, but
I babbled on. “It occurs to me you
could
do more. Your hair is too fine to wear that long. You should get it cut.”

Her gaze was steady.

I said, “I don’t know much about make-up so I can’t say with certainty, but you should give up the lip gloss. I think lip gloss is for cute little Cupid’s bows. Your mouth is too full for … But don’t go to dark lipstick. What’s wrong with pink? A nice tea-rose pink. And then simplify your clothes—the ones you wear to class are far too busy.”

Honorée said softly, “I guess I ought to lose some weight.”

I said with a donnish chuckle, “Not from your lips.” Honorée didn’t laugh. I said, “No, no. Not much. When you simplify everything you may find you won’t have to. Take your hands.” Honorée put her hands flat on the counter, palms down.

I said, “You shouldn’t bite your nails. It makes your hands look fat.”

Honorée’s fingers curl up, but she wills them open again.

I know I’ve gone too far, but we are both silent, watching her hands on the counter.

I finally said, “Actually, your hands are very well shaped, broad handsome hands.”

Honorée said, “I’ll do what you say. I’ll do just what you say.”

On the other side of the statue
Pioneer Woman
, two girls sat down to eat their lunch. They began to discuss the student evaluation forms they had filled in.

“You have Matthews in psych, don’t you? What’d you give him?”

“Are you kidding? I let him have it. Of course, I’m pulling a D, so they won’t count it as much.”

“What’d you give Hendricks?”

I started. I thought perhaps I should stop them.

“Oh, God, I feel so sorry for him.”

I now recognized their voices. Miss Quist, who’d been assigned to be Honorée’s roommate by the computer, and about whom Miss Hogentogler had said to me, “She loves not wisely but too well”; and Miss O’Rourke, a rawboned athlete who, I learned from her life story, had been the women’s half-mile champion of S.E. Iowa. She blushed furiously whenever I called on her in class. It was Miss O’Rourke who felt sorry for me. She added, “I feel sorry for him because he tries so hard, you know?”

Miss Quist replied, “Yeah. He wrote all over one of my dumb papers. I mean all over it. He wrote more than I did. Can’t you just see him sitting around with nothing better to do than write all over my dumb paper? I wonder about him and girls, you know.”