The Year's Best Science Fiction 11

THE GIRL WHO DREW THE GODS HARVEY JACOBS

My name is Oliver August.

I am friendly, a Moose. I try to believe in disarmament. I cook for a hobby. Every seven years my cells change. But each new cell sings of health and well-being. No matter how often I am replaced, I remain formidable.

Compare me with the rest.

In my city, in my time, half the people I meet live in their own suburbs, far from the energy of heart and the steam of bowel. The other half, with pinched lips, breathe their own smoke.

Am I apart, the only one with balance? If so, why so?

Look into my eyes: rain puddles rich with life. My story should be told.

When Oliver August, formerly passive, girded his valuable loins they charged like a unicorn, there was cause.

The cause was war.

War is a time for attack. But I did not rattle my sabre at the common enemy. I had a private skirmish.

The war I speak of was a small war. Not World War II, which moved millions, and which I missed by a whisker of time—the Korean War, a bubble of violence off to the left of the world’s population centers.

I was out of college less than a year when the Koreans stopped sharing rice. My full time job was soul searching. I was taking the internal grand tour. I resented interruption.

Suddenly the leisure of self-discovery drained away. Because of someone else’s history, the focus of my life was blurred.

My parents talked sense to me. They suggested that I go back to school. They regarded this move as wise and patriotic. The whole idea has firm roots in tradition.

It is considered a richer experience to give blood if a boy has his master’s degree.

After hesitation I agreed. My reasons were personal. I had just finished four hundred dollars worth of dental work. My mouth was a wet Fort Knox. In dreams I saw Communists mining my head for gold.

So, not eager to break goalposts, I entered a Convenient University. I readied for conflict in the department of philosophy.

The Department of Philosophy was a great, protecting bird. Under her thick wings small groups huddled together.

English literature was my major. Myself and others like me were assigned a place near the bird’s big chest. We took comfort in the regular blood thumps. The hot juices of scholarship kept each feather warm.

At first it was not so bad. After half a year of job hunting and the look of deep fear in my parents’ eyes, campus life was pleasant. College was as good a place as any to wait for my war.

I was deeply involved in a thesis on Chaucer’s symbolic animals for exactly one month. The news from Asia got worse. I worried with Douglas MacArthur. Chanticleer, the old cock, laid eggs of anxiety.

The thing is, I was overly concerned with my own symbols. Every night, my book by my bed, I dreamed about inlays, crowns, and unnatural bridges. With the equipment I used for chewing, a family in Peking could live like Mandarins.

Oliver August grew restless, logy, irregular, ill at ease. My courses lost magnetism. Most of the day I spent sitting in the library smoking room, which is a huge rancid lung. When you open the door to that chamber of gas, blue ooze filters out. I am sure that smoke from students long dead is still imprisoned there.

I sat, hour after hour, pooling my gray breath with the rest. I tried to read classics, but the words were wooden. For the first time in my life I grew jumpy. My belly housed an imp who churned and cursed fate. My palms gave salty sweat. There was weakness in my knees and tightness around my frontal lobes.

To pull myself together, I shopped for new involvements. Desperately, I looked for some subject to lure my response. The eighteenth century, the nineteenth century, Shakespeare’s minor plays, James Joyce, John Donne, the seventeenth century, art in the modern world, the middle ages—name it, I was there. I listened. I heard. I heard. I heard soldiers marching. I heard the lap of the Yalu River. I heard Oriental dentists sharpening their burrs.

Finally, thank god, something caught my attention. The course that won me the minute I read its abridged description was know the navaho II.

Why?

I have since learned that many eminent persons, to keep their sanity, involve with a universe far from their daily experience. They become experts on the Civil War, on Henry Adams, on the Latvian Uprising of 1236. It is not too different from collecting stamps or coins. I needed something to keep my brain intact. I needed Navahos, and I needed them badly.

There was a problem. I should explain here that the University was divided genitally into a Brother and Sister school. Usually students were not permitted to cross this simple sexual barrier. But exceptions were made in cases of hardship.

know the navaho II was given Tuesdays and Thursdays at ten. I read about it on Wednesday. By Thursday at nine, I was waiting at the proper room, signed dispensations in hand.

At nine-thirty the instructor came. Her name was Miss Sydney Luptik. According to her biography in the catalogue, Miss Luptik had lived for years among assorted Indians. She was the author of two books, Arrows in the Sun and The Laughing Waters, and she served as an advisor to the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Miss Luptik walked along the narrow corridor, a thin, dynamic soul who accomplished motion in a barrage of baby steps. It was easy to see her talking right up to a Geronimo or the Great White Father himself.

We met head-on outside her classroom. I told her how much I wanted to audit her. She refused me. She refused me the way she would have refused the Union Pacific permission to build its track over her grazing land. She refused me for the logical reason that I had not had proper preparation.

“Without know the navaho i,” Miss Luptik said, “how could you expect to jump into know the navaho ii? My course builds. You wouldn’t understand subtleties. It would not be fair to you, Mr. August. Come back in September.”

I swore I would bone up. I promised to devote myself. She could not be moved.

“Look,” I said, “by September I’ll probably be in the U. S. Army, and remembering back to the way I played stickball and ring-a-levio, I’ll most likely be dead on an alien shore. Give me my chance.”

Miss Luptik considered my unusual circumstances.

“Welcome to the tribe,” she said.

The course itself was beautiful. It was everything I hoped for. Even the classroom was exactly right.

We met in the basement of a building whose first female students were rebels against the tarantella. The walls were tooth-yellow, stained with brown. The blackboard was cracked down the center. The wooden chairs, which had had flat seats, were actually worn down into small valleys through the attrition of thousands of ripe, impatient rumps.

Each chair had one fat arm for book resting. The arms were covered with initials, dates and names. The place was full of nostalgia. Only a bank of fluorescent lights intruded, and a sprinkler system.

As might be expected, Miss Luptik had triumphed over her environment. She made it her own. Everywhere there were pictures of Indians at work and at play. A table near the window held a jar of seeds, samples of wampum, a necklace of clay, arrowheads, a drum, a pipe, a feathered hat, and a tiny model of a village complete with inch-high figurines.

Our group was small. Beside myself, there were six girls. Miss Luptik had given them names. I became Blue Bear, according to the custom.

Miss Luptik taught her section in semidramatic form. We acted out brief dramas of Indian life. In our impromptu playlets, a kind of group therapy with moccasins, Miss Luptik’s names added scope and dimension.

I, for example, might be asked to describe a day hunting buffalo. As Oliver August, I would have been paralyzed. As Blue Bear, out of Shaking Cow by Great Grizzly, I felt right at home.

Pale Moon, a chubby girl to my left, might tell of her betrothal. Green Tree, a Bostonian, would hash out her weaving problems. Waterfall, Bending Willow, Sipping Deer and Wild Bud might sing a fertility song while beating their feet.

So the days went. On Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday I read the papers, listened to the radio, watched television, and did push-ups while waiting my call. Tuesdays and Thursdays I put on gaily colored clothes and concentrated on the antelope situation.

As the only eligible brave in know the navaho II, I became aware of the maidens who shared my hogan. The girls divided into note takers and knitters. I watched them note and knit with paternal tranquillity. In our dramas it was I who brought them fresh meat and supplied protection against everything but the flow of history. Even Miss Luptik spoke to me with special respect. I knew my responsibility and its rewards.

Which brings me to Marilyn Mayberry.

Of the knitters, Sipping Deer (Marilyn Mayberry) was the most chronic. She made mufflers—long roadlike mufflers with fringes at their beginnings and ends. She knitted like a sparrow pecks, in frantic flurries. While she knitted her foot tapped. Miss Mayberry was blessed with huge energy.

I noticed her the way I noticed the rest. No more. No less. She was pretty enough, a medium-sized girl, nicely built, short black hair, pleasant lips, nothing special except for fine breasts. She dressed well, much like the others, in thick sweaters and plaid skirts, long black stockings and Capezio sandals.

To comprehend the passion which developed between us it is necessary to understand Miss Luptik, a superb storyteller, a marvelous creator of mood, a lovely builder of climaxes, a born inciter to riot. Had Miss Luptik come along in the 1870’s there would be only red faces on the North American continent. General Custer would never have got past Jersey.

Miss Luptik introduced us to the ebb and flow of Navaho life in easy stages. As the term moved on, according to her master plan, she lifted us along the way like canoes in the Panama Canal.

From digging for roots and grubs, we came to the spring feast. From swatting flies, we progressed to the shrieking hunt. From hello in the woods, we copulated under cactus.

Together, in a group as tightly made as Sipping Deer’s mufflers, we achieved new levels of insight. Never suspecting, we traveled from fact to poetry.

With her wise face, her bouncy body and tinkly voice, Miss Luptik carried us. I, her enraptured papoose, went willingly. Strapped to her bony back, Blue Bear was happy.

The fluorescent sun and sprinkler-system rain bordered a terrific cosmos. Tender Tuesdays. Tremendous Thursdays.

Yet all this was only overture, a process of tenderizing. As it is with all instructors, Miss Luptik had her specialty. When she finished teasing us with trifles, when she reached the purple gut of her course, then know the navaho II ceased to be an experience and became a trauma.

Her specialty? Direct from life’s cellar, Myth and Magic, the elemental sisters.

Miss Luptik began her lectures on what she called “the creatures of the wind” on a fine May morning. A puddle of yellow lit her desk. Our room glowed like the inside of a brown egg.

A black cutout standing in the glare, Miss Luptik cleared her throat and found her start. From her purse she produced a wooden doll with a feather on its head.

The doll was a squarish fellow, something like a B-picture robot, but decorated in the Indian manner with slashes of white and red. Miss Luptik held him at arm’s length in total silence. Then, from the floor of her soul, she screamed, “Make rain.”

Until that moment, our instructor had talked of migrations across the Bering Strait during the Ice Ages. She had talked of Mongoloid traits, of longheads and roundheads, of layers of piled life, of seed gatherers and grinders, of modified basket-making peoples, of the anasazi—the ancient ones.

I listened, satisfied, studying the markings carved on the arm of my chair.

That day, Miss Luptik shed her skin. She added the dimension of horror. She connected up with eclipses, council fires, coyote howls, time itself. She burned like tobacco in long, thin pipes.

“Make rain.”

It did not rain immediately. There was a drought that month. But my skull flooded. I nearly drowned in joy.

There was no question but that Miss Luptik was about to give beyond the demands of tuition.

“The higher tribes,” Miss Luptik said, still holding her powerful didy doll, “believed deeply and devoutly in the Great Spirit, Father All Father, the Universe Man.”

Her voice, as she spoke, took on a singsong, like Carl Sandburg’s when he falls into his democratic trance. But it was not the shoes of industrial workers that sparked the instructor. It was bare feet on hot land.

“Say after me,” she semi-sang.

“Great Spirit, Father All Father, Universe Man.”

We made a good chorus. And we liked the tune. Trained in the monotheistic manner, we felt a kinship, knitters, note takers and Oliver A.

“Ambiguity,” Miss Luptik said. “Paradox. Along with their faith in a single moving power, the dynamo of creation, our Indian brothers took an animistic view of daily life. Wakonda—life energy—filled everything. Everything. People and rocks. Flowers and sky. Day and night. Wakonda.”

Nice, nice. Good, good. That was our reaction. For Wakonda, the life energy, had also visited the Bronx. Here was another idea that was familiar, therefore friendly.

“Say after me.”

“Wakonda.”

“Again once more.”

“Wakonda.”

“Wakonda was generally something to feel warm about. Why not? The smallest bug, the wee-est pebble had its chip of spirit. But the concept had its nasty side. Wakonda Good, Wakonda Evil. Mr. and Mrs. Navaho had their bogey men, too.”

A knitter laughed. Miss Luptik frowned.

“Wakonda Good. Love. Babies. Corn. Wakonda Evil. Dwarfs. Ogres. Underwater people. Thunder people. Maize blight. Sickness. Sterility. Death.”

A note taker coughed. And coughed again. Miss Luptik was patient. She wet her upper lip with her tongue. The doll had not moved from her hand. Like the carving on a bowsprit, it gave dignity to her prow.

When the coughing spasm subsided, Miss Luptik raised her second arm and held it suspended at an angle of roughly ninety degrees to its companion.

“What a treasury of lore sprang from this simple belief. Epic poems, Greek tragedies have nothing on the creations of the first Americans. Oh Red Man, how inspired you were in the naked days before we brought you smallpox, measles, syphilis and gold.”

Miss Luptik upped her voice an octave. There was something in her manner that made me twitch. I could feel her accelerating. A vessel in her neck swelled with pressure. My left eyelid jumped in response.

“Children of the land, what have we done to you? Today, the holy Shaman watches Ed Sullivan before conducting his rites. Our cancer culture presses in like fingers on a throat. Rice Krispies and insecticide stifle the Star Maker and the Animal Wife.”

“Who?” said a note taker. “Animal who?”

“Shoosh,” a neighbor whispered.

“Think back!” Miss Luptik said, in her “Make rain!” tone. She conducted with her free hand.

“Think back,” we said. “Think back.”

“Think back many moons.”

“Think back many moons,” we said, an obedient philharmonic.

“Think back to the time of rich earth, clear streams, pure sky, steaming beasts, sharp teeth. Think back to the time of strong medicine.”

“Strong medicine. Strong medicine. Strong medicine.”

“Medicine made from the human heart and the human head. Not cheese mold. No hypodermic remedy injected into the tushy. Medicine catapulted into the bloodstream by lightning in the navel, by the shaft of fear.”

Miss Mayberry dropped a plastic needle. It bounced, rolled and ended up at my feet. I let it lie.

“Medicine of flesh and for flesh. Medicine to make vegetables grow. Medicine to fill squaw belly with kicking sons. Medicine to rip the enemy. Medicine to chase blood-drinking ghosts. Medicine for fire, for water, for sunrise. Medicine for resurrection. Think back to the time of magic. Back, back, back. Let your brains be the land in a world of Wakonda.”

Miss Luptik dropped both arms to her sides and stood rigid, like a palace guard. She began to chant. Then she moved in a kind of religious box step. With a quick wrist motion she told us what she wanted, and we gave it to her. We stood in our places, duplicated her sounds and moved our feet. It was like singing a national anthem for a faraway flag.

Again she stopped suddenly and covered her face with her hands. Then she kissed the little doll, and held it to the girl sitting nearest to her desk. The girl kissed the doll, and passed it along. We all kissed the doll and it was returned, smudged with lipstick, to Miss Luptik’s right hand.

By the last and final kiss, we were had. With glazed eyes and open ears we entered the time of magic. Like a dentist tests his Novacaine, Miss Luptik tested our involvement by dropping the doll. Nobody moved. The doll, a plump fellow, took a short journey and came to rest two inches from Miss Mayberry’s knitting needle, an arrow pointed at its nose.

How can I tell you what happened next? I can only describe the skeleton. You must add the nerves and tubes.

Miss Luptik introduced us to the workaday gods and devils of the Navaho. She knew them so well, she could show us, in words, how they looked, what they wore, what or who they ate, how they played, how they were calmed, what they controlled, who they rewarded, who they destroyed.

For some reason, possibly of curriculum, possibly of need, possibly because Miss Luptik was then into a malevolent chapter of her Ph.D. thesis, she ran through the Wakonda Goods in three minutes flat, then swung over to the other camp. Here, in the kingdom of open sores, many legs, fuzzy bodies and pincers, Miss Luptik seemed curiously at home. Each creature Miss Luptik dragged up from the swamp was a separate Hitler, a swirl of claws and gore. In the sunny, dry classroom, Miss Luptik brewed bitter herbs. We sank in her soup, ankles, knees, thighs, middles, chests, necks, chins, mouths, noses, eyes, hair. We simmered together in an old clay pot.

Miss Luptik ran around the room begging for plants to grow, calling to the heart of each seed, begging the thunder people to rumble the world’s ovaries, fighting off demons, raising the dead, harvesting beans, butchering birds, cursing age, sucking at youth, licking strength from the fiery sun, then tonguing the cold moon for relief.

I stared down at the fallen doll. It grew, a tidal wave of sour protoplasm, slashed in color, its fat feather a weapon. I, Oliver August, who lights three on a match, was frightened half to death by the skinny instructor in the tight girdle. Miss Luptik was some new kind of ventriloquist. She spoke through the doll. And she, in turn, was someone else’s puppet.

Wakonda Bad rolled into a snake, crept like warm ooze into my head through the ear. And a strange and secondary magic occurred for me. The slap of red hands on stretched hide, the tomtom throbbing of Miss Luptik’s voice, changed to another music. Yellow hands beat drums of human meat. Chow Mein mixed with feathers. Wakonda Bad developed an urge for gold fillings. He wanted mine, and my belly button for a nose ring.

All fear has one mother. My mouth dried. My armpits were drenched. My neck tingled. I couldn’t breathe.

Slap! Miss Luptik clapped her hands. I fell five miles, breaking to pieces. Talk about timing. One minute before the bell, Miss Luptik returned us to the world.

In epilogue, a changed Miss Luptik, the familiar Miss Luptik, said in a chatty summary, “The dear Navahos knew their gods the way we know our own moles. They talked to them, prayed to them, made offerings to them. But they never never never depicted them. They never drew the gods. It was an inconceivable act, the worst imaginable sin. Think on that. Isn’t it the perfect testimony to pure horror? Isn’t it the essence of belief? They felt, with wisdom handed down through millenniums, that if the gods were drawn, the image would leap up and devour the artist. Crunch. Fini.”

The bell rang. Miss Luptik asked me to hand her the doll. She took it, dropped it into her bag, and left the room with gorgeous poise.

Later, Oliver August lay thinking of dark forces.

Our apartment was on the second floor. The neon sign from the candy store downstairs flashed on and off, a green guardian through the troubled nights of my childhood. That night I noticed the sign again after long years. I was glad to have it. I lay in bed thinking how shrewd were those Indian gods to avoid too much exposure, to put their faith in a kind of spiritual radio. How much worse is the imagined avenger, the shadow who knows.

Pictures or no, the peculiar truth is if the Rain God came walking on the Grand Concourse, I would recognize him instantly.

Some miles downtown and east, where the Island of Manhattan begins to narrow, Marilyn Mayberry was also awake.

“Good morning,” said cheerful Marilyn Mayberry on the following Thursday.

She came late, dressed for a party in a soft pink dress, a pink hat with a wide brim, white alligator shoes and bag, and long white gloves. Under a chubby arm, she carried a leather portfolio.

“Good morning, Sipping Deer,” Miss Luptik said.

Minutes before, I blushed when the teacher arrived at class. After Tuesday’s experience there was an intimacy between us. The night of her epic lecture, I had her three times in a series of greedy, protective dreams. Since then, this was our first daylight encounter.

When Miss Mayberry entered I was sadly accepting the fact that Miss Luptik would never again duplicate the Tuesday emotion. Her old self, she was telling us about ceremonies of initiation. She was strong but not possessed. Facing the truth was difficult. It was as if a doctor said to me, “Oliver, your stomach is ruined. You will never eat shrimps again.”

“I drew the gods,” Miss Mayberry said.

“Beg pardon, dear.”

“I drew your big old nasty gods. I drew them as an extra term project.”

“Ah?”

“I think they would look nice hanging around the room.”

Miss Mayberry pulled the zipper that held her portfolio together. She lifted out a pile of drawing boards. In living color, before our eyes, Miss Mayberry displayed her gallery of gods. Each drawing bore a legend:

etcetera, etcetera. All the gods, sneering, grimacing, or passive and smoldering, had a striking resemblance to Robert Mitchum.

Miss Mayberry beamed. She positively beamed.

“I brought wall tacks,” she said.

“How creative,” Miss Luptik said.

Then Miss Mayberry tacked up the gods. Miss Luptik worked along. She had been taken completely by surprise. Miss Mayberry won the day without losing an arrow.

As I sat watching, in the greenhouse of my heart a hatred bloomed simply and sweetly—a clean, neat hatred for the pink, ripe, bitchy, muffler-knitting, big-knockered, tight-assed Marilyn Mayberry. Instantly, easily, absolutely without anger, I swore vengeance on her for this fantastic act of total blasphemy. Without ado, the gods appointed Oliver August as their ambassador in this matter of honor. I accepted the job without hesitation.

How come?

To this day I can only speculate. Perhaps because I had only recently learned about being afraid. Miss Luptik allowed me to see something of dignity and beauty in that dirty emotion. The darkness is real. The Wakonda Bads are a bopping gang. There is reason to crap carefully during new moon, and therefore real reason to huddle together.

Having learned about fear, I learned about need. But all this was new and vulnerable insight.

Miss Marilyn Mayberry, on the other hand, was impatient with unseen phantoms. Tranquil since teething, tranquil she would remain. Undoubtedly she too had been disturbed by Miss Luptik’s doll, but she refused to nurse its ugly hunger. Her mother had warned her not to play jacks with the Wind People. There was too much going on, hope chests to fill, the promise of weddings and babies. So, a true child of science, she drew the gods and nearly killed them all.

The girl came close to wiping out all of Hell. That, of course, was really the terrible penalty the Indians suspected —that the evil gods would die, leaving nothing, not a stain, but only tepid paradise.

I screamed for blood. I swore to drill Marilyn Mayberry to some carpet, somewhere, with the bluntest instrument I could think of. That was the way it had to be, the only way to save the universe.

Imagine, I of tender passions, Oliver, who turned my adolescent eyes from those long, thin books that showed Popeye and Olive Oyl making love. I, the lonely dreamer, the nibbler of rose petals. I had grown feathers. I painted my face. Miss Mayberry was my buffalo. I wanted a coat made of her.

The pictures hung, the class went on. I heard Miss Luptik’s voice, but not the words. For the first time in my life, I had a single purpose. Already I was busy with blueprints.

After class, looking eager, I invited Miss Mayberry for a coke. She thought things over. I had a difficult moment. Did her antenna pick up static?

She said yes.

From then, to the end, it was a quaint courtship.

In the early phase my biggest problem was to conceal my red identity.

There is a story about a prince who was lonely. One day, looking at one of his fields from the castle tower, he saw a maiden. He wanted the maiden, so he saddled his white horse and galloped to where she was picking strawberries.

Around and around he rode, but the maiden never looked up. So back he rode and fell into depression. His wise man was called to diagnose the trouble. When he heard the prince’s story, he patted his royal head. He told the prince to sleep and seek guidance in a dream.

The prince slept and dreamed. He dreamed he rode a green horse. When he woke up the message hit him right away. He called his groom and ordered the groom to paint his stallion green.

“Green?” the groom said.

“Uh huh,” answered the prince. “Get the picture: I ride down to the field where this maiden is picking. She sees me on a green horse. Then she says, ‘Heavens, Sire, your horse is green.’ And I say, ‘Yes, beautiful lady. I am the prince.’ In a week, I send her flowers. In two weeks, I send her jewels. In a month, I grant her daddy a fief. In six months, I take my pleasure.”

“Great,” said the groom, and painted the horse green.

Later, the prince saw the maiden. He jumped on his green horse and went flying down to the field. Around and around he rode, but nothing happened. He rode faster, the horse snorting, the prince in a lather. Finally, the maiden looked up from her strawberry patch.

“Heavens, Sire,” she said in a golden voice, “your horse is green.”

“Yes, beautiful lady,” said the prince, “and in six months we’re going to screw.”

My situation was similar. The important thing was to go slow and steady. Dressing for dates, I double-checked my fly. I used my sister’s deodorant. I chewed Dentyne and gargled with Lavoris. I trimmed my pointy nails. Nothing should offend. No jagged ends should telegraph jagged intentions.

I followed a perfect timetable, forcing my mind to think like a German. It was two ballets at City Center, an Italian movie and an off-Broadway revival of The Tempest before I even touched her hand.

When I touched, she pulled away. I did not pursue with reckless fingers. I made a fist, as if in suffering, and rested the fist on the arm of my seat.

No need to give you every detail. Student romance is not the most interesting of subjects. You know how things go, in chords and flashes.

A human totem pole, with all the faces mine and smiling, I took Marilyn Mayberry into various worlds. If she did not like green horses, I would use brown paint. If not brown, lavender.

What did she like the best? Art? We went to the Modern Museum where she showed a taste for Edward Hopper’s picture of an usher in the movies.

“I like films,” she said. “And not only uptown. Right in the neighborhood is just as good.”

I took her to movies.

“I like foreign,” she said. “But I think people who criticize Hollywood are artsy-craftsy snobs.”

Remembering the Mitchum-faced gods, I confessed a love for the Warner Brothers.

Sports?

“Basketball is nice. The rest I can take or leave.”

The basketball season was over, so we left.

Books?

“I read and read,” she said. “And read and read and read. Do you enjoy Thomas Wolfe? I do.”

“I do.”

“Look Homeward Angel.”

“Oh yes.”

Food? She loved Chinese, a touchy subject in those days, but I went along.

“You order from group A.”

“No, really.”

“Go on. I’ll order from group B.”

“Let’s start with wonton.”

“Wonton is lovely. Two wonton soups, please. And chopsticks. We’ll eat with chopsticks.”

“I couldn’t. Olly, I just couldn’t.”

“You can. Sure you can. I just know you can.”

Meal after meal, I grappled with stilts. A winner down the line, Marilyn Mayberry never dropped a grain of pork fried rice or a single snow pea.

How I hated that girl.

Gradually, I got to know her. So comfortable within her healthy skin, Marilyn Mayberry was absolutely without pangs. She had never felt hunger. The few appetites that stirred in her were appetites for future feeding, and she was calm and confident that her table would be set in due time. This was not a girl who would sleep with a frog on the chance of morning metamorphosis. There was enough in the world to keep her happy. Why gamble when it is so much easier, and safer, to simply be cautious?

She liked everything about the twentieth century, from the Double-Crostics in the Times to Jackie Gleason. And she seemed to like them equally.

Oliver Chameleon, camouflaging my secret heart, took on painful coloration. When Marilyn Mayberry bought the New Yorker, we went to little theaters where they served Coffee in cups designed for thin lips. When she wished to rest from the better things, she would tell me about “when I was a little girl” and we would end up watching that mighty milleped called the Rockettes at Radio City.

Music was important too. So, many of our evenings ended with Marilyn tapping her glass with a swizzle while five obsolete Negroes and a sprinkle of middle-aged Caucasians belched Dixieland. When the Saints Go Marching In. I sang along, all right, but with my own words, celebrating my own dream of entrance.

We came closer. Close enough to discuss the great controversy between square-cut and pear-shaped diamonds, the need for adequate insurance, the matter of discipline in the raising of children and how weddings were made for parents and grandparents. We talked about D. H. Lawrence, for whom we felt sorry, and Barry Goldwater, for whom we did not.

And we came closer. We held hands on campus. We kissed in her hall. By the end of May, outside her door, while she fumbled for keys, I pressed her breast and she bit my cheek.

On the bus going home, I rejoiced.

Around that time, I can’t exactly remember dates, the gods began visiting me each night They looked so harried, I worried.

“White boy,” said the fellow in charge of Household Misery, “hurry yourself. We’re fading fast. Necessity is the mother of redemption.”

“I’m doing my best,” I said. “I’m keeping tight lines of supply. Positions must be consolidated.”

“You know how Douglas MacArthur feels about lethargy,” the god said.

“I know,” I said. “I know.”

Marilyn Mayberry retreated suddenly. Was it her intuition? For a week she wouldn’t let me near her. She skipped our Tuesday class, and on Thursday she sat near the door. She broke our Wednesday date. I saw her walking on Riverside Drive eating ice cream with a total stranger. Thwarted love is bad. Thwarted vengeance is awful.

Each night, the gods tch-tched.

I doubled my efforts. Desperately, using everything I knew or suspected, I sought to fill Marilyn Mayberry’s life with aphrodisiacs.

Based on a magazine article I read in my sister’s Ladies Home Journal, I encouraged Marilyn to eat spicy foods.

“My upper lip is sweating, Olly.”

“Have more sauce.”

“No. I’ll dehydrate.”

“Curry is supposed to punish. That’s the gourmet’s way.”

“No, Olly. No sauce.”

To stimulate her mentally, I spent twenty dollars on a copy of the Kama-Sutra and followed with A Doctor Looks at Sex.

“The first book was terrible. They spend so much time thinking about new positions it’s no wonder their gross national product is way down. They need construction manuals, not marriage manuals.”

“Whoever said the Kama-Sutra was a marriage manual?”

“Well, people sleep together. The second book was sensible. I lent it to my mother.”

I took her to the Persian Room to watch Hildegarde.

I championed the wearing of loose-fitting garments.

I planned picnics in Central Park, where we watched the seals.

I took her to the American Museum of Natural History to feel the great presence of dinosaurs.

We went to the Hayden Planetarium to watch stars being born and nebulae whirl.

“Some day man will probe the mystery of outer space.”

“Olly, do you believe that? Why?”

“The sun will enlarge and burn the earth to a crisp. We’ll have to venture into new worlds if the human race is to survive.”

“When?”

“What difference does that make?”

“When?”

Only one thing kept me going. Every Tuesday and Thursday I saw her pictures hanging on the wall behind Miss Luptik and my diabolical battery recharged. I saw the pale and beaten Miss Luptik sink into predictability, and I raged freshly.

Then, of course, there were the dreams. The poor gods, clinging to existence, were gasping for a hero. One even suggested that my cousin Marvin, who I saw on major holidays, might do a better job.

The thing that brought Marilyn Mayberry into contact again was the bell at Riverside Church.

From a Juilliard student who lived on my block, I learned that every Saturday at noon there is a concert in the church tower. High above the city, in a small glass room, a bellringer comes to play the carillon.

For ten cents, visitors are welcome to take the elevator up, walk two additional flights, stand on a landing enclosed by stone arches, and listen.

The main bell hangs in the tower’s center. It was designed to rouse spirits as far away as Teaneck, which is across the Hudson River.

When I heard about it, I conceived a scheme so basically rotten that I hesitate to give descriptions. My plan was to vibrate Marilyn Mayberry into submission. Thinking like the Old Testament, I believed that if she were exposed to total vibration over a sustained period of say five minutes from her arches to her scalp, her defenses would crash like the walls of Jericho.

It came to pass.

We went, innocently, to the church. We paid our dimes. We breached the tower.

At twelve, the bell began.

It boomed gobs of sound so rich and full that we did not hear them. They hit us. Up there, with the city on one side, the river on the other, we drowned in bongs. It was fearsome.

I had neglected to consider my own reaction to the massed decibels of Bach. Quasimodo would have lost his pants. Marilyn Mayberry started to cry, and despite myself, I joined her.

We held on to each other, shaking, while a tone-deaf pigeon watched. The bell went on and on. When a man and a woman vibrate so thoroughly, something changes between them.

When we came down, I knew from Marilyn’s expression that my conquest was no longer a matter of will-she, but when-will-she. It was time to think of time and place.

This can be a real problem for city youth. I have heard of a fellow who rented a safe-deposit box at Manufacturers-Hanover Trust for $6.60 per year so that he can take his girls to the little room where they let you count your money down near the vault.

A friend of my family was leaving for the mountains. It became my responsibility to water their plants. I asked Marilyn to come with me. She did, and she didn’t. In the shade of the window garden, she told me the story of a “fellow” she knew who had violated a woman’s confidence in a similar situation. I looked down at the African violets and lost the urge to cohabitation.

The gods chided me that night. I hardly recognized them. They were fatter, more confident, ready for deliverance. I warned them about premature optimism, but they laughed anyhow.

A poet I know was called back to Brooklyn due to some crisis. He had his own room in the Village. He asked me to look in on his sick cat. Would Marilyn come with me? She would, and she wouldn’t. Together we fed kidneys to the cat. Such grateful mewing could melt glaciers, but not Miss Mayberry. She allowed me a hand underneath her rayon blouse, but in back.

Still, the gods continued to celebrate. I warned them. They winked.

Marilyn had to baby-sit for her aunt. The baby, a formless bag of feces, slept in a lump. We sat on a soft couch, which was made up for the night since Marilyn was to stay over.

We lay side by side for two hours without movement like members of the Young Communist League on bivouac. I went home in a crouch.

Even then the gods cheered the minute I closed my eyes.

Like the prince with the horse, it took some time for me to get the message. Through the Western Union of sleep, it came to Oliver August that Marilyn Mayberry, not I, would pick the time and place. A girl who drew gods would certainly want to design the stage set for her own greatest moment.

I waited. Days passed.

A week following I got a letter from the draft board. They wanted to examine my body. I was no longer worried about the legions of Mao. I was worried about the legions of Mr. Rain, Mr. Sun, Mr. Corn, Mr. Buffalo, Mr. Forest, Mr. Fire, Mr. Death, Mr. Birth, Mr. Pain and Miss Moon.

The letter was a catalyst. I showed it to Marilyn Mayberry. She invited me out to dinner on the night before my physical.

We went to a French restaurant called the Fleur de Lys. Marilyn kept her eyes on me while eating snails, filet of sole, and an eclair. I ordered an artichoke. Peeling the leaves, revealing the heart, swallowing it in garlic butter, daubing with my napkin, I was the soul of seriousness.

After dinner, still on her allowance, we rode in a hansom cab through Central Park, then sat by the bird sanctuary lake on 59th Street watching a matted swan and talking about destiny until the police chased us.

During our hour on the park bench, Marilyn told me many things, but the one that especially impressed me was the revelation that she had planned her wedding at the age of ten.

She described it, down to the point where a line of waiters carry flaming Baked Alaska into the dining room while she squeezes her husband’s leg under the table.

Her apartment had been mentally furnished a year before first menstruation. She wanted white French Provincial. She was on her way. Her mother had bought her a hope chest the size of a cave, and since she was “weensy,” uncles, aunts, cousins, friends and acquaintances had been stocking it. With her head on my shoulder, Marilyn informed me that she was indeed a girl of property.

In a soft voice, she asked me about careers. I was ready for her questions.

“A man needs direction,” I said. “I have my goal. If I am fortunate enough to leave the Army in reasonably good condition, I’m going into corporation law. You may not think that a dramatic occupation, Marilyn. But that’s what I want. And it’s not only the money, which is substantial. The organization of business has always intrigued me. And, on the higher levels, a businessman can share his career with his woman.”

I looked up. The gods were sitting in a row on top of the Plaza Hotel just behind us. I saw them eating an antelope hock and generally carrying on. The vision nearly spoiled my speech.

Late, very late, Marilyn Mayberry and I went home.

She lived with her mother and brother in a solid apartment house on Lexington Avenue. Until that night, our farewells were said outside her door. I had never crossed her threshold. The brother, a teenager, slept in an alcove and was trained to bite the ankle of any stranger.

When we reached her apartment, I took her in my arms. She pushed me away. My temperature dropped sharply. I was confused, but not for long.

Marilyn beckoned. She led me to another door down the ¹ corridor. And from her evening bag she produced a key with a new set of teeth.

“My sister Betty and her husband Irv live here,” she said. “They have darling twins, Jerome and Charlotte. I want you to see the babies.”

“It’s three-thirty,” I said.

“Betty and Irv don’t mind. The kids’ room is off the foyer. Come on. Nothing wakes them. Nothing.”

I went.

We unlocked the door, clicking as quietly as possible. Marilyn took off her shoes. Me too. Like burglars, we entered the dark apartment.

Feeling her way, Marilyn took me to a room. Inside, a nightlight burned between two cribs. Two nice-looking children scrunched under blankets, one pink, one blue.

“Sweet? Yes?”

“Yes.”

“Milk and cake?”

“If nobody minds.”

We tiptoed again through darkness and found our way to the kitchen.

“Hush. Be a mouse.”

Marilyn turned on the fluorescent. It flickered, missed, ignited, blazed. There we were. But where?

That kitchen was like nothing I had ever seen. I enjoy the stamp of domesticity. But such a stamp.

The scene in brief: dirty dishes filled a table. Bottles of half-eaten baby food sat on the sink. Boxes of cereal, a bowl of fruit, wet towels, drippy Brillo pads, pans, a pile of chicken bones, and other testimonials to life lived covered every surface.

And the wash. The wash.

There was wash everyplace. Steel ribs on the ceiling were full of wash. A straw basket, of the modified Navaho type, was full of wash. A machine with its door open had a clump of wash hanging out, and a portable rack near the stove hung wash like a willow.

Food, dishes, bones, soap pads, the fantastic dangling wash came together in the brittle light. We stood in a tree house, engulfed in the foliage of an active marriage.

Marilyn grinned.

“Betty is such a slob,” she said.

At three-thirty-six, Eastern Daylight Time, we stood on blue linoleum. Dew from a turkish towel, or was it a diaper, fell on my forehead. Did Marilyn mistake it for a tear?

The drop ran down my nose, in business for itself, seeking the way to the universal ocean of human misery. And I saw a drop on Marilyn’s cheek take the same journey.

“Are you crying?” I said.

The fluorescents blazed onto the blue linoleum. Like bathers testing the water, we stood together and shivered. I heard the gods howl from behind a Sanforized house dress. Mostly I heard my heart. I looked at my wristwatch. The second hand flew.

“Why are you crying?” I said.

Marilyn shrugged. She played with my tie. I kissed her on the neck.

“Are you crying because this is Army Physical Eve?” I said. “Is that it?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Well stop, please,” I said. “You’re confusing me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I think we’d better say goodnight,” I said.

One of the gods coughed up phlegm.

“Here we are,” Marilyn said.

“Goodnight,” I said.

“No,” Marilyn said.

She opened two buttons of my shirt and slipped her hand in. Her hand was cool, a delicious temperature.

“I know how much you want to make love to me,” she said.

“Someday, dear,” I said. “Tomorrow we’ll find a place. I’ll rent a car. We’ll drive to a motel on a mountain.”

“I’ve known,” she said. “Don’t you think I’ve known?”

“I knew you knew,” I said.

“Take off your stupid jacket,” Marilyn said.

“It’s late as hell,” I said.

She took off my stupid jacket.

“I want to feel your chest against mine,” she said.

“Look, dear,” I said. “Your sister is inside. Your brother-in-law . . .”

Marilyn took off my shirt. First she worked on my cufflinks and dropped them into the little pocket, then she did the rest.

“No T shirt?” she said. “Unzip me.”

Marilyn turned around. I unzipped her. She pulled her dress over her head. Then she reached behind herself and unhooked her bra. I slipped the bra off her soft shoulders.

Her breasts tumbled out like children at recess. We pressed together. Marilyn kissed my ear. It occurred to me that Oliver August, the vengeful seducer, had never opened a single button.

“Make me naked,” Marilyn said.

I made her naked. In the Garden of Lux, in the oilcloth pool, she looked remarkably fine.

“Be naked with me.”

I was naked with her.

“Hold me.”

I held her. The cool sweetness of her hand was total. I think I moaned. My moan set the gods cheering. Marilyn heard music.

Oliver August and Marilyn Mayberry fitted beautifully together. Together, we marveled at the coincidence.

Standing, grasping, moving slowly, in time’s own kitchen, under an umbrella of laundry, we made love.

“Go away,” I yelled to the gods.

“Oh,” Marilyn said, hugging tighter.

“Not you,” I said. “Oh sweet, not you.”

We made too much noise.

Her sister, a light sleeper, was attuned to all city dangers. For years, with the acuteness of those suspicious of fire escapes (every exit is an entrance), she rested with an open ear. Our tender battle in the place where she cooked for her own was enough to wake her twice. Like Betty, Irving came awake clearheaded and primed for attack.

Have you ever covered private parts with a sopping bib?

Bravely, Marilyn stood with me. For some time, two couples stared at one another. Then Betty hollered and Marilyn turned toward the stove. Irving went inside to get me his bathrobe.

I grew quickly engaged.

Shortly thereafter, I was allowed a glimpse into the mouth of my fiance’s hope chest. I saw treasure which would have shamed Captain Kidd. Material things meant little to me then. I was young and foolish.

Our engagement did not last long. We were, it seemed, very different. Before choosing our bedroom set, or even our silver pattern, we began to drift. After all, we were total strangers. Once, in Tanglewood, we fell asleep after Stravinsky and never woke to each other. Unprepared for such relaxation, we said goodbye.

Oh yes. The draft board rejected me for nerves and a bent knee.

In September, Marilyn was wed to an accountant. She invited me to the wedding. I went. Even Betty did a cha-cha with me, and the Baked Alaska was indeed hot and sweet

The gods left my dreams. I assume they returned to Arizona. Our parting was friendly, but I am convinced that their immortality was diluted by the whole experience.

Wakonda Manhattan is its own strong medicine.

Time advances. After heavenly vengeance, reality is a warm shower.

Miss Luptik is now Dr. Luptik. She spends summers with such corn grinders as remain. We correspond.

As for Oliver August, I found my own tribe.

Today I have a store. I give green stamps with pleasure. I sleep beside a mountain of heat.

“Come back inside,” she always says.

Three kids ask me questions and the smell of me gives them security.

You know my hobby? I take pictures. I snap my Polaroid and flash my flash and fill albums by the pound. I take so many pictures the druggist asks if I am some kind of Jap.

It is not that I am a tourist-on my own street. My pictures are pieces of a jigsaw. When it is finished I believe I will have something to look at.

The druggist, a philosopher, says picture taking is for idiots. He says time should not be saved except in the heart.

“All we need,” he said this morning, “is a picture of God. The rest is a waste of clicking.”

“God wouldn’t pose for a picture,” I said. “He doesn’t need publicity.”

“Sure He would pose,” said the druggist. “He would love it. He could look on himself and feel impressed. Take Him a picture, Oliver. Be a sport. It would do us all good. Probably nobody asked Him. Maybe He has a shyness.”

“All right,” I said. “I’ll take Him a picture.”

“Take two,” said the druggist, “in case He moves.”

Tonight in the tub I noticed a gray curly hair float like a gondola of nostalgia. It drifted to the drain. I watched it swirl and go bubbling down.

Then I heard myself say out loud to the tiles, “Dear Marilyn. Dear Book of Knowledge. Marilyn knew!”