The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [163]
I guess I will get out, Al. We're friends then, though.
Certainly. They shake rather self-consciously and leave each other. I've searched myself and I understand it's a remnant of bourgeois aspirations. What a meatball, Hearn thinks. He is amused, a little contemptuous. As he passes a store front, he stares at himself for a moment, regarding his dark hair and hooked blunted nose. I look more like a Jew-boy than a midwestern scion. Now if I'd had blond hair, Al really would have searched himself.
But there are other elements. You want perfection. Perhaps, or was it something else, something less definable?
His senior year he branches out, plays house football with a surprising and furious satisfaction. One play he never quite forgets. A ball carrier on the opposing team breaks through a hole in the line, is checked momentarily, and is standing there stock upright, helpless, when Hearn tackles him. He has charged with all his strength and the player is taken off the field with a wrenched knee while Hearn patters after him.
You all right, Ronnie?
Yeah, fine.
Good tackle, Hearn.
I'm sorry. Only he knows he isn't. There has been an instant of complete startling gratification when he knew the ball carrier was helpless, waiting to be hit. There is not even any cynical pleasure in making the All-House football team.
And other fields too. He attains a grudged notoriety by seducing a DeWolfe Street deb. He even ties up with some of the men he has met through his freshman roommate, now in Speakers, receives after four years a belated invitation to one of the Brattle Hall dances.
The stags line up against the wall, chat cursorily with one another, and cut in to dance with either a girl they know or the girl of a man they know. Hearn smokes a cigarette or two, quite bored, and then cuts in on a little blonde girl dancing with a tall blond clubman.
The gesture toward conversation:
And your name is Betty Carreton, eh, where do you go to school?
Oh, to Miss Lucy's.
I see. And then the barbarity he cannot forswear. And does Miss Lucy tell you girls how to keep it until marriage?
What did you say?
More and more often this inexplicable humor. Somewhere in the cavernous and undoubtedly rotten tissues of the collective brain of Al, of Jansen, of the magazine men, the college literary critics, in the aesthetes' salons, in the modern living rooms on the quiet back streets of Cambridge, there would be the unadmitted hunger to be bored and superior at a Brattle Hall dance, either that or go to Spain.
He thinks it out one night. He can be genuinely indifferent to the Brattle Hall thing because it is the Class AA minor league affair which all his training on the green lawns, at the dancing school, or riding at night in convertibles on the highways back of Cholive-oil, has satisfied. It is for the others, the salon men, to be tortured and attracted by the extra quotient of wealth, the elaboration of social fences.
And about Spain he knows he is never serious. That war is in its last spring, and there is nothing in himself he wants to satisfy by going there, no over-all understanding or compassion which he cares to satisfy. The graduation and class week is upon him, and he is cool and friendly to his parents, bored with them too.
What are you gonna do, Bob, don't you want any help? Bill Hearn asks.
No, I'm going to head for New York, Ellison's father promised me a job there.
This is quite a place, Bob, Bill Hearn says.
Yes, a funny four years. And inside himself he is straining. Go away, leave me alone. All of you. Only he has learned not to say that out loud any longer.
For his thesis he has been given a magna: A Study of the Cosmic Urge in Herman Melville.
He functions easily through the next two years, sees himself consciously, amusedly as The Young Man in New York. He is first a reader and then a junior editor at Ellison and Co.: Harvard, New York Extension, as he terms it, and a room and kitchenette in the East Sixties. Oh, I'm just a literary con man, he will say.
I can't tell you how I've slaved over the thing, the lady historical novelist says to him. I was so worried about the motivations of Julia, such an elusive bitch, but I think I achieved the effect I hungered for in her, the one who worries me, however, is Randall Clandeborn.