Still, Arthur hung on her every word. “I’ve heard,” he said, stirring his tea, “girls always prefer fellows a little older than they are. I can’t do much about that.”
Betty extended a plate of cake to him. “Have this—I insist. And eat it.—It’s not the end of the world, Arthur. Even if Maggie—even if it lasts for a while. Is this Larry the person Maggie’s going to spend the rest of her life with? You’re both eighteen. It’s hard to plan a whole life at eighteen.”
Was it hard? Arthur was planning his life in biology, maybe specifically microbiology, and he felt he was on the right track. He wasn’t suddenly going to become an architect. He had felt on the right track with Maggie. “Half my life’s just gone,” he said. “Maggie is half my life.”
Betty shook her head. “It just seems that way today!”
“Yes.” It seemed to Arthur as true as anything he had ever seen under a microscope or seen proved by logic. “So I thought I should get out of the house. I can definitely leave tomorrow, if that’s all right. Even tonight, if I sleep at Gus’s.”
“Not necessary, Arthur,” Betty said slowly. “You’re as welcome here as you ever were.” She poured more tea for both of them. She had strong but graceful hands, much like Maggie’s.
“This is so much Maggie’s house—to me. Tomorrow I know I can get a dorm room, because I asked today.”
Betty sighed and took a cigarette. “I understand.—It might even be good for you to try to forget her for a while. See what happens. You can’t just mope for the next many weeks, Arthur; your class work would go to hell and you don’t want that!”
Before 7 that evening, Arthur telephoned Gus, and asked if he could come over, knowing Gus and his family wouldn’t mind if he crashed in while they were having dinner. Then Arthur knocked on Betty’s half-open door and told her that he was going over to Gus’s for a while.
“Good idea, Arthur! See you later, maybe.”
At Gus’s house, it was twenty minutes before they could go up to his room, and during this time in the kitchen where dinner was in progress, Gus’s mother insisted on giving Arthur a plate of something at a corner of the table.
“Maggie’s met someone else. Older guy. Wouldn’t you know,” Arthur said, when Gus had closed his room door.
“Oh, yeah?—I had that feeling tonight, looking at you.”
“You did?” It sounded like a pronouncement that he even looked dead to other people and was still somehow walking around. “Jesus!” Arthur bent his head, put his face into his palms and wept. He held his breath.
“Yeah, yeah,” Gus said. “It happens. Boy, yeah—I heard of it. A lot.”
Arthur laughed and looked at Gus through wet eyes. “Not to you, ol’ pal, I hope. Not you!”
“Na-ah—yeah. Little bit when I was sixteen. But you and Maggie—well, I was hoping it would last. Y’know what Veronica would say?”
“What?” asked Arthur, eager for words, thoughts.
“Meet somebody else. Even if it’s short. Yep, you know she was saying something like that the other day about a girl she knows. The girl got left high ’n dry and was talking about suicide.”
“Well, I ain’t thinkin’ about suicide!” Arthur said with a laugh.
Gus ran down to the kitchen and was back in a flash with two beer cans and two Coke cans. “Tonight you got a choice.”
“I’m moving out of the Brewster house,” Arthur said.
“I can understand that.”
“So now I’m a man without a country.” Arthur hoisted his beer. “Without a home, anyway. I can go into Hamilton Hall dorm tomorrow, by the way. I asked this afternoon.”
The following day at the lunch hour, Arthur moved into 214 of Hamilton Hall, having paid a month’s bill in cash taken from his savings bank. His roommate or study-mate Frank Costello was not in. The room was not large, and its area was square, its walls originally creamy white but now soiled with fingerprints and odd smudges. In opposite corners stood two single beds, and against opposite walls, two writing tables, so that the table-users would have their backs to each other. One scruffy carpet, not very big. On an old-fashioned trunk with metal corners, no doubt Costello’s, stood a hot plate with one burner, and Arthur had just been told that hot plates were not allowed. Costello’s bed was unmade, and the other bed’s two blankets had been carelessly thrown over the bed, and there was no pillow, Arthur noticed. A carton of empty Coke bottles sat by the trunk. The one window on Arthur’s side looked onto the campus and at least had a view of tall and handsome trees. There was a tiny fridge on the floor near Costello’s trunk, and in the wall there, the swivel telephone, now swivelled toward the next room, and its convex container had the words YACK BOX penciled on it. Arthur went over and turned it. A gray telephone, filthy with fingerprints, came into view. What would that show up under a microscope in the way of germs, and was it even safe to hold it anywhere near one’s nose or mouth?
Arthur gave a laugh like a yelp that brought tears to his eyes, sent a shiver over him, and after the crazy laugh, he felt better, but was glad Frank Costello hadn’t walked in and heard him. He set his suitcase, duffel bag and typewriter closer to his bed, and now he noticed a minuscule chest of drawers beside his bed. The top of it served as a night table, Arthur supposed. He returned to the swivel telephone, because he wanted to call his mother before she left for the Home. He pressed the O button and had to identify himself before he was given permission to dial.
Arthur’s father answered, one of the rare days he was home for lunch, but Arthur didn’t give a damn today.
“Mom there?” Arthur asked.
“Just a minute. Lois?”
His mother came on.
“Hi, Mom. Just wanted to tell you I moved into Hamilton Hall at C.U. today.”
“Oh?—Why this decision?”
“Well, to put it quickly—Maggie’s sort of said good-bye to me.” Arthur stood up straight and looked at the ceiling. His mother sounded thoroughly shocked. “Yes, Mom, but don’t say anything to Dad, will you? Please . . . Oh, it’s nothing great but quite okay. Thanks to you and Grandma, I suppose I can afford it . . . Yes.” He gave his mother the number, reading it from the dirty telephone base. He had to assure his mother he wasn’t unhappy and had to promise to telephone her at the weekend and come for a meal. Arthur promised only the telephone call.
Then he unpacked, making use of a tiny closet, and left a note on Costello’s bed, saying he was the new room-sharer and would be back at 5:30. He went off for afternoon classes, followed by a stop at the town’s main supermarket where he bought some fruit, Cokes, beer and milk. While he was putting these things away, some into the little fridge, a slender dark-haired fellow came into the room, and showed no surprise at seeing Arthur.
“Hello. Arthur Alderman,” Arthur said. “You’re Frank?”
“Yup.” Now Frank frowned. He had a couple of books under one arm and a brown paper bag in one hand.
“Just bought a little stuff,” Arthur said. “Wrote you a note.” He nodded toward Frank’s bed. “The dorm people didn’t tell you I was coming in?”
“Nope. Didn’t hear from ’em. Didn’t see ’em today.” Frank let his books fall on his bed. Then he pushed off his desert boots, carried the paper bag to the fridge area, pulled out a six-pack of Coca-Cola and cut its cardboard with a bread knife. “Want one?”
“No, thanks. Just bought some.”
“I’m not here too much. Goin’ out tonight,” said Frank.
Arthur was still on his knees by the fridge. “Where you from?”
“New York.” His dark brown eyes were pink-rimmed.
Arthur doubted that, for some reason, but it was of no importance. Frank went out with his bathrobe and returned in it, carrying his clothes, a few minutes later as Arthur was going out to sample the Hamilton Hall refectory. The dinin
g hall was cafeteria-style and not crowded, though already rather noisy, and the food was what Arthur had been told it was, boring but ample. When he returned to his room, Frank had gone, and Arthur sat down to write a letter to Maggie. He wrote it in longhand.
Today I moved from your house to room 214 in Hamilton Hall of C.U.
He didn’t mean that she should write to him and didn’t ask her to in the course of the letter.
. . . My bedroom-study-mate is a fellow named Frank Costello which sounds like the Mafia, but I have heard this can be an Irish name, too.
Your mother was very nice as usual and asked me to stay on. But you can imagine how I feel. I do still love you; there is not a bit of a change there, and if that’s a mistake, I don’t know why it is. And so I hope you are happy—really.
All my love, ever,
Arthur
About two minutes after he had stamped the airmail envelope and was pulling on a jacket to go out and mail it, Arthur was seized again with nausea and had to get to one of the toilets down the hall.
Back from the letter-dropping, Arthur studied for half an hour. But every few minutes he thought about his letter to Maggie. It hadn’t been exactly right. It was friendly, polite, calm. But it wasn’t at all the truth. The truth was something awful. He felt that he had no reason for living now, though he didn’t feel like killing himself. The jangling music (inferior rock) that came faintly from somebody’s room down the hall did not even annoy him, because it seemed part of the general madness and ugliness of his life just now. He would have three more years in a room such as this, unless a miracle happened, and miracles usually didn’t.
At 1 in the morning, after about an hour’s sleep, Arthur woke up and found his forehead cold with perspiration, though the room was even overheated. Arthur shivered. His chest was sleek with sweat. He put on a bathrobe and went down the hall. Some students were still up. Arthur didn’t know any of them. He had brought his towel, and he leaned over a basin, wiping his face in cold water. Was he hot or cold? When he went back to bed, he couldn’t get to sleep and his heart beat rather quickly. He deliberately breathed slowly, as he had often told Robbie to do, he recalled, when Robbie was furious about something. The dawn was showing before he fell asleep. Then Frank Costello came in, either a bit drunk or very tired, turned on the central light, then his table light, kicked off his shoes and fell into bed after removing his trousers, turned off his table light and left the central light on. Arthur didn’t bother getting up to turn it off.
And so it went even at the beginning of Easter holidays, when classes stopped, and only a few students stayed on at the dorms, because they had nowhere to go. Frank Costello went “home”—his parents were separated, he said—to Wisconsin, not New York. Frank took angel dust, Arthur had discovered, as it was certainly no secret, and Frank didn’t care whether he got passing grades this semester or not. “My folks’re paying, but they keep me on short rein. Look at this dump!” Frank had said. “These shits here can kick me out when they want to. I couldn’t care less.”
Frank Costello’s life was drearier than his own, Arthur realized. Arthur had his microbiology to hang on to, but what joy did Frank get except five or six highs a week? Professor Jurgens of microbio liked Arthur and in January had invited him to dinner at his house, which Arthur knew was unusual. Still, he could not talk with Professor Jurgens about Maggie. And the cold sweats at night continued, not every night, but two or three a week. His trousers became looser at his waist. Arthur went to Norma Keer’s house for dinner one evening, ignoring his family’s house next door, as if it belonged to strangers. Before he left, he told Norma about Maggie’s being interested in someone else now, and Norma had been as sympathetic as Betty Brewster, saying, “Everyone in the world has this happen to them once or twice, Arthur. Now don’t let it get you down for long.” But what, after all, could Norma or anyone else do about it?
Maggie wrote him a short letter, saying that she was glad he was “not taking it too hard,” for which Arthur stoically congratulated himself.
During Easter vacation, Arthur visited the Brewster house four or five times. Warren had a few consecutive days off, quite by lucky accident, Warren said. Arthur tried to keep a cheerful air, feeling that people would smile behind his back if he looked melancholic. Betty told him his room was still empty, and they invited him to stay for a couple of days, if he wished, and there was yard work to be done besides. Arthur did several hours of work in the yard, some of it with Betty, but he never stayed a night. If he ate small meals, his food stayed down better, but Arthur knew something had to be done or he would end up sick in a hospital or at a psychiatrist’s. And what would he tell a psychiatrist? “The bottom’s fallen out. There’s nothing under my feet now.” Something like that.
On the second day of return to regular classes at C.U., Arthur had a cheerful idea. It was an idea to cheer himself up, he realized, and quite simple. He would invite Gus and Veronica and a girl called Shirley something, whom Veronica had introduced Arthur to a week or so before. He would invite them out for drinks and eats, as if it were his birthday. So Arthur, running into Gus on the campus that day, proposed Friday night for the get-together. Gus said Friday would be fine for him and probably Veronica.
“Can Veronica get Shirley? They’re together in some classes, aren’t they?”
“I didn’t think you liked her,” Gus said. “That’s what Veronica told me.”
Arthur could hardly remember Shirley. “I don’t dislike her. I just thought it’d be nice to—Maybe Mom’s Pride? That’s sort of fun.”
As it turned out, Shirley wasn’t free, but a girl called Francey McCullough was. Veronica had produced her. Francey was a soph, about five feet five with short, curly brown hair and a friendly but absent or distant manner. They went in two cars, as Gus wanted to take his, and Arthur as host wanted to drive his own car. Arthur picked up Francey at Gus’s house, the meeting place, and they drove to Mom’s Pride.
The jukebox at Mom’s Pride was throbbing, and the place looked full. Arthur hadn’t reserved a table, if that were even possible, but after a ten-minute wait with beers at the counter, they got a booth for four. Francey looked like a dud compared to Maggie, Arthur thought, even compared to Veronica, whose homey charms Arthur had begun to see. But Arthur felt it was his evening; he was determined to be a good host, which meant being sure everyone had what he or she wanted and that he paid for it.
“I know a girl who likes you a lot,” Francey said to Arthur when they were dancing. “Aline. Remember her? Short brown hair?”
Arthur certainly did. Aline was the one who resembled Maggie, and he thought of Maggie at the same time he heard the name Aline. “Yes, sure. Met her once.” He hoped Veronica or Gus hadn’t told Francey about Maggie having abandoned him. Nothing he could do about it now, if they had.
Old Gus’s dancing was improving, or he was more at ease with Veronica than he had been with Maggie. Arthur smiled at the sight of them, Gus tall and lanky and Veronica dumpier than Francey, bending and twisting in unison a yard apart from each other.
“You do boxing?” Francey asked.
“Do boxing?—No, I—Never in my life. I’m a sports snob!”
“No kidding! You’re so strong; you could do wrestling.”
Arthur laughed, feeling his couple of beers in a pleasant way. There was a slow number, the lights dimmed, as at a disco, and people on the floor groaned and laughed. Francey held him round the waist. Not since Maggie had he held a girl like this, and that had been—around New Year’s, so long ago! Arthur realized he was becoming excited and drew back a little; Francey pressed herself against him, then drew back also, and their eyes met for an instant in the semi-darkness. She was not smiling.
The music ended; the lights came on, and some people clapped their hands.
Arthur checked Gus and Veronica and Francey for further orders, then went
to the counter for two coffees, one beer, another hamburger for Gus, and a double order of french fries.
“Make that two beers!” Arthur said, and paid.
They dipped french fries into ketchup at the edge of the big plate.
“How’s dorm life, Arthur?” Veronica asked him.
“Just elegant,” Arthur said, thinking of Frank Costello’s dirty socks and shorts on the floor.
“Sorry about—” Veronica squirmed, and her brows frowned quickly. “You had to leave the Brewsters’.”
“Didn’t have to,” Arthur yelled over the music, “but I couldn’t camp there forever.” Gus and Francey didn’t seem to pay attention to what he had said, and so much the better. Francey sat next to Arthur in the booth. She was leaning back in the corner, smoking a cigarette slowly, eyeing him, Arthur felt. He asked Veronica to dance.
“Francey likes you,” Veronica said on the dance floor.
“She said that?”
“No, I can see it.” Veronica smiled at him with her curiously sleepy eyes. “Just now—she hasn’t got a boyfriend. You might give it a thought.” Veronica had to shout to make herself heard.
Arthur wasn’t thinking about it, wasn’t planning. By 1 o’clock, he was in a happier mood. “Hey, Gus! Coffee nightcap at the Silver Arrow? Remember that night? That hooker Irene?”
“What’s the Silver Arrow?” Francey asked.
“Truck-stop diner,” Gus said. “Sho, boy. I’m gettin’ tired of this place. You gals gettin’ tired of this place?”
They pushed off for the Silver Arrow, Francey again in Arthur’s car.
“What’s so great about this diner?” Francey asked.
“Absolutely nothing. Well—there’s a woman behind the counter who’s pretty tough. The whole place is tough.”
“A woman you know?”
“No-o.” Arthur laughed. “Well, I met her once or twice. Am I a patron, no.”