The Art Student's War (34 page)

“But there was blood!”

“That can happen to you in gym. Or on a playground. Norma Nunnally told me it happened to her riding a horse, when she was all of ten. So are you telling me Norma lost her virginity to a horse at the age of ten?”

“Maggie, stop it.”

So that Maggie’s judgment could be scientifically, categorically arrived at, she needed to know various excruciatingly personal specifics—matters like how long and how deeply Henry’s thing had penetrated. But these were precisely the sorts of questions Bea couldn’t answer. Indeed Bea felt—a point she couldn’t quite articulate—that her
very inability supported her contention: if she hadn’t lost her virginity, wouldn’t her memories be clearer?

After a torturous grilling, during which Maggie kept asking the same few pointed questions, slightly rephrased, she finally offered her summary: “You haven’t lost it yet.”

Among other things, this conclusion seemed unfair to poor Henry, who right there on the couch in Mitchell’s living room had cried Bea’s collar wet, pleading all the while for absolution, and who in the extremity of his guilt and grief had conceived of an altered God and a nightmarish cosmos peopled by high-gloss plum-colored human beings.

“But Maggie—Maggie! What if I’m pregnant?”

“You’re not pregnant.”

A powerful, stinging rebuttal presented itself: “But what if I am? Good God, Maggie, are you saying this would be a virgin birth?”

Maggie looked at her not only wisely but sadly, as though the gullibility of the world was painful to contemplate. “You don’t get pregnant that way.”

“That’s not what
I
heard.”

“That’s only what they tell you so you won’t misbehave.”

“But you can. You
can.”
Bea felt herself on solider ground here. She had read this perhaps. Or heard it definitely somewhere.

“Well
you’re
not pregnant and isn’t that the point?”

“I didn’t know you’d become a clairvoyant,” Bea said.

Maggie’s reply was quite cutting—cruel, really. “You’re the one with the
feelings
. You’re the one who knew Henry’s not coming back …”

A pause opened and it was as if the patter of the rain, previously so soothing, now pricked at the two girls, goading them on.

Bea said, “So are you still seeing Wally?”

Normally, Bea would have uttered this “seeing” more delicately—in deference to the notion that Maggie might be seeing but certainly wasn’t
seeing
Wally.

“Walton. I keep telling you that, that that’s what he goes by now.”

“And I keep forgetting.”

“If you want to know, we had coffee this week. Did I tell you he drives a Cadillac?”

“You did.”

“They’re really getting rich, the Wallers—not just the father but Wally and his two brothers.”

“So do you think you’re going to sleep with Wally?”

This, too, was a cruel inquiry, to say nothing of being brutally, nastily blunt, and Bea instantly regretted it. What
was
going on inside her—why was she talking this way? She’d have withdrawn the question, if she could, but the words were out …

“Bea …” was all Maggie offered in sighing answer, and projected her lower lip as if about to cry. There was little danger of that, for Maggie almost never cried. No, this was a long-standing ritual, perhaps originally evolved in response to Bea’s perpetual floods of tears. This particular negotiating ploy of Maggie’s—a hung lower lip, a flurry of blinks—initially might have surfaced something like ten years ago, when the two girls first became best friends.

Herbie’s interruption was almost welcome. “I wanna go home,” he said.

“We can’t go home,” Maggie replied. “See that?” She shrugged at the window. “It’s called rain.”

“I’m hungry.”

“Chew the gumballs Aunt Bea brought you. They’re different fruit flavors. You need to try them all.”

Bea didn’t know quite how she felt about this “Aunt Bea” routine. Though a joke, it acknowledged a stark legal oddity: this sticky-mouthed boy standing beside them truly was Maggie’s brother-in-law.

“Already ate ’em.”

In truth, Bea felt a little guilty about having brought so many gumballs. Lord knows, she didn’t want him sick again, but that was only the start of it. Herbie’s teeth were a shocking disaster. You’d think the Hamm family would be more careful. Or at least Maggie would, who had dealt with George’s anguished tears when the Army yanked all his teeth. (He’d feared that Maggie would break their engagement, and Bea had often wondered—not a speculation to share with Maggie—whether under different circumstances, if only the Army had left him his teeth, George would have been
quite
so insistent on marrying before shipping out.)

“Christ almighty.” Maggie made no effort to watch her language around Herbie. “Kid, jever hear of sugar rationing? Jever hear there’s a war on and your brother’s fighting it?”

“I’m hungry.”

“Oh hell. Bea?”

Bea dug into her purse and found half a roll of cherry Life Savers.
She meant to offer Herbie only one, but Maggie plucked the entire roll from her hand.

“You want to sit with us, I give you one. Or you sit back in your chair, I give you the whole roll.”

Herbie shuffled back to his chair.

“Where were we?” Maggie said.

“Discussing virgin births?”

“And you were calling me a slut …”

Really, Maggie had grown distressingly coarse. What was happening to the two of them? “Don’t,” Bea said. “I didn’t, Maggie, and you mustn’t say I did.”

“Sorry.”

“You know how I appreciate this. I came through a downpour to see you. You were the only friend I could talk to at a time like this. Maggie, I’m so frightened.”

The closing confession rang oddly in this rain-enveloped library, way at the western edge of town, until Bea recognized that the phrase wasn’t altogether her own.
I’m so frightened …
These were the very words Henry had repeated no end of times at Mitchell’s house.

… And, with a naked pungency that took Bea’s breath away, the whole evening opened up. The feel and fear and smell of it came back. There she was: suddenly she was sitting once more in Mitchell’s living room, with Mitchell’s big, cheerful face gazing out from its too-tight frame. All Maggie’s mortifying questions, all her own descriptions of that living room—no, the audacious words hadn’t begun to capture the evening! It was as though, ever since, Bea had been marching around to a hypnotist’s orders … Only
now
did she remember how she’d
felt
, in her blood and in her face and low in her stomach, the overpowered sense of things gone wrong—wronged—at the very self’s center, and how strangely she’d behaved in the bathroom, stripping off her clothes and giving herself a sort of sponge bath while Henry, weeping, stranded on the other side of the locked door, desperately called out to her, and to his Maker.

Then Henry went away. The Army carried him off again. Yes, some facts were facts. Henry was gone. There was no disputing that Henry was gone.

“You’re fretting over nothing,” Maggie said. “Take it from your friend the old married lady.
Nothing …
”

“I’m so sorry,” Bea said. “Oh dear, dear
Lord…
”

“Sorry for what? It’s all nothing, nothing, nothing. Now tell me you feel better.” Maggie had again laid a warm hand upon Bea’s hand.

“I do,” Bea said, which was true. “A little,” she added. Which was truer yet.

Her hidden shame—and the entire crushing, incalculable chain of ramifying disasters waiting to emerge from that shame—was a burden Bea carried around everywhere, more closely than her pocketbook. Nothing was untouched by it. The five-minute eggs her mother served in the morning, the damp rising winy smell from the cellar, the dent in her pillow when she first glimpsed her bed at night—these things spoke directly to her body’s invaded condition. How in the world could she chat with Ronny in the old way, as though she were the same young woman she’d been last week? Never again would she be that girl.
What if I’m pregnant?
she’d asked Maggie, who asked in reply,
Would Ronny marry you?

It was a crazy notion—all the crazier because now, and suddenly, Bea recoiled at Ronny’s touch. She could hardly bear to kiss him. Under the circumstances, kissing him was
wrong
. And yet this very reluctance turned out to have an unexpected, contrary effect on Ronny.

One of the puzzling things about Ronny was how hot and cold his passions ran. In moments of ardor, there was no questioning the healthy urgency of his desires. The very next day, though, he might turn cool and aloof. Bea had learned to ascribe such changes to his “moods,” while also coming around to understanding that, as explanations went, this didn’t take her very far. In any case, Ronny wasn’t accustomed to Bea’s fending off his advances, and her doing so provoked or aroused him. Once again Ronny needed to feel, as he’d constantly needed to feel in the summer, his power to make her swoon—but these days Bea was disinclined to swoon.

Still, Ronny was determined, and he was as skillful as ever, and at times her scrupulous resistance dissolved and she could feel herself almost wholly succumbing. One of Ronny’s hands might be drawing circles on her knee, his other stroking lightly, and yet deeply, the back of her neck, while his tongue was formulating its own patterns upon her upper lip, different but harmonious with his hands’ patterns, and all the while his body was exuding its wonderful smell—she’d never known a body to smell so good—and in a way Bea wanted him more than ever,
while, simultaneously (and this was new), something within her yearned to push him forcibly away and let loose a scream, a scarlet outraged howl from the roots of her throat: Oh
stop
it,
stop
it,
stop
it. Because it was all too much …

Bea had even less control than usual over her tears. She cried when she read in the
Free Press
about a Sicilian girl who had lost all four of her brothers in the War. She cried when she read in the
News
about a blind man’s offering his Seeing Eye dog to the military. She cried when, in a park, a big Negro woman slapped her little daughter for picking up a piece of chewing gum from the sidewalk—even though the girl hadn’t yet put it into her mouth. And she even came close to crying when Edith reprimanded her for throwing away a sheet of paper that should have been salvaged.

At home, they were all circling warily around her. Bea sensed this only dimly, since at the moment most everything was dim, and yet she could tell—and hated herself for being able to tell while being unable to do much about it—that she was perceived as being on what Papa would call “a terrible tear.”

What was she doing? Where would it end?

Given all her recent shocks, it seemed impossible that fate had in store any additional upheavals. But it did. In one astounding day, two further revelations arrived. The boundaries of her world were being redrawn, and again redrawn …

Exactly eight days after her catastrophic visit to Mitchell’s house, and seven days after Henry’s departure, she at last received a letter. She took it into her bedroom, settling in her “nest” before allowing herself to open it.

It seemed Henry had been in Illinois—he alluded to the land of Lincoln. The letter ran for eight dense pages, but she didn’t read them all, and she never would. Nor would she reply. Instantly, she vowed never again to speak to Henry Vanden Akker.

The first two pages were hard to follow. Henry described his recent thoughts about God, and his parents, and Kierkegaard, and he spoke of “the terrifying jungle, literally and metaphorically.” Bea hurried through these passages, figuring she could go back and study them later.

But when she turned to the third page, her every sentiment altered instantly and she had no more intention, ever, of going back and rereading. “But I’m afraid no preamble could ever excuse the confession I now must make,” Henry wrote.

I lured you to Mitchell’s house under false pretenses. I had no intention of meeting him there. It was all arranged beforehand that you and I would not meet him. Do you remember the phone call? That was Mitchell, calling as arranged. It was meant to look as though he’d been delayed. It was all a ruse I’d worked out to place us alone together at last
.

What was I intending would happen at Mitchell’s house? As God is my witness, I truly do not know. But one of the possibilities in my mind was what in fact did happen
.

I
did
try to confess that night. You may recall my saying I had something to tell you. And you replied that I’d said enough. Well, perhaps I
had
said enough. I have no excuse to offer except my love—a love so all-encompassing …

At this point Henry’s letter reached the bottom of the third page, but what possible reason was there to follow him further? Bea would read no more. It was clear at last: horribly, hideously clear. The whole scheme was exposed in its true underhanded ghastliness. Oh, the effort she’d wasted! All this past week, trying so frantically to find something,
something
noble or beautiful about their last night! But it offered nothing noble or beautiful. It was all slinking ugliness, it was all chicanery and betrayal. She’d been deflowered in some little nasty mathematician’s game and so long as she lived she would never again speak to Henry Vanden Akker. Ten, twenty years from now, she might just run into him on the streets of Detroit. It would be raining, and she would lift high a luminous lilac-colored umbrella and saunter right by. Some things couldn’t be forgiven.

Bea’s hands were shaking so hard, she could scarcely have read further had she wanted to, and she didn’t want to—ever. She let the letter drop to the floor.

Oh, she’d tried so hard, really, to give Henry, and their last evening together, the benefit of the doubt! Never, never again … She wouldn’t do him the favor of reading to the end. Bea sat up on the side of her bed, gathered up the letter, and methodically, patiently tore all eight pages into little bits.