Villages Read online

  iv. Village Sex—II

  It had been his father who had successfully urged him to get a practical, scientific education. Floyd Mackenzie’s experience of the Depression had been that engineers were the last people to be fired; he had seen it happen. “The kid needs to latch on to something practical,” he announced. “He’s in danger of dreaming his brains away.” The boy’s brains—demonstrated by stellar high-school marks and his ability, during his years of rural isolation, to entertain himself with books and pencil and paper—could be, he reasoned, best engaged by machinery, if not by the giant knitting machines, as long and heavy as freight cars, whose ill-rewarded servant he himself had been, then by some other kind of construction (bridges, dams, dynamos) whose indispensable utility was more obvious to the world than that of strict, honest accountancy. In a materialist age, matter must be trusted. As events proved, the machines of the future were to be lightweight—rockets leaving earth’s gravity and computers quicker than human minds, adjuncts of human subjectivity freeing us into an oxygenless space.

  An institution in far-off Massachusetts, a so-called Institute of Technology, offered Owen a scholarship. His being a student from a small rural school system, in a Middle Atlantic state, helped his chances with the bestowers of admissions and student aid. He never saw MIT before he got there. The buildings were set back from an artificially broadened river, the Charles, across from a venerable city, Boston, that held at the summit of a cut-down hill a sallow gold dome from under which the Commonwealth was governed. In the early ’fifties, pre-war shabbiness still ruled Cambridge and Boston, yet they were cities of youth, of students eager to make a future. Sailboats and rowing sculls rippled the river, a glittering sporting site bluer than the Schuylkill, which had been black with coal silt. This Commonwealth seemed toylike and polychrome, compared with the industrial scale of Pennsylvania—its sooty cities built on grids, its row houses climbing the hills like stairs. Boston in its oldest parts was laid out not on a grid but on a pattern, it was said, of ancient cowpaths, widened by Puritan footsteps and then paved in cobblestones.

  Back Bay, a filled-in marsh, did form a grid, with a grassy central mall ornamented by elms and bronze statues. A long and windswept bridge misnamed Harvard Bridge connected Back Bay with MIT, its hovering pale dome eerily evoking, from across the river, the flying saucers from which, in those days, extraterrestrial creatures were supposedly spying, with impotent solicitude, upon a benighted planet about to blow itself up with atomic bombs. MIT seemed heroic in the grand and mazy scale of its vast central building: a series of buildings interconnected by passageways, each segment known not by a name but by a number. The main entrance, numbered 77 Massachusetts Avenue, led into Building 7, where six great pillars and a high circumcameral inscription to INDUSTRY, THE ARTS, AGRICULTURE, AND COMMERCE upheld the limestone dome. Fabled Building 20, the “plywood palace” on Vassar Street, had sheltered secret radar researches by which, it was said, the Second World War had been won. Underground infusions of government and corporate wealth continued to enlist scientific intelligence in the Cold War. In the analysis center and the digital computer laboratory—rooms entirely taken up with arrayed cabinets full of wires and vacuum tubes, fed by punched cards—all the radar stations around the United States were linked, undergraduate rumors claimed, and electric circuits calculated missile trajectories that a hundred savants with pencils could not compute in a hundred years.

  MIT was a male world, its administrators and instructors all but exclusively male, and a number of them military men. Though the great post-war tide of veterans was receding, uniforms were still common on campus. Of six thousand students, no more than one hundred twenty were women, and half of these were graduate students. Phyllis Goodhue stood out, then, as one of a decided minority, outnumbered fifty to one in the endless corridors—floors of tan terrazzo and doors of frosted glass strictly numbered in black, even the women’s lavatory: 3-101-WOMEN. She was yet more noticeable among the springtime sunbathers in the Great Court, a large sheltered lawn, between Buildings 3 and 4, that overlooked the new segment of Memorial Drive, its double row of sycamores, and, in their gaps, the sparkling, playful Charles and the rosy low profile of Back Bay. Most of the female undergraduates were not lovely—driven grinds with neglected figures and complexions, heads down in the hallways as they bucked the tide, trying to blend in with the boys—and Owen had to look twice at Phyllis to verify that she was. Was lovely.

  True or false? Was twice necessary? No: from the start, through that river-chilled, sleepless, and miserable first year in which his head was being stuffed with, among other rafts of basic data, introductory circuit theory (Kirchhoff’s law and Thévenin’s and Norton’s theorems, step function and impulse response, resonance phenomena and conjugate impedances), whenever Owen passed Phyllis in one of the thronged corridors, his own electromagnetic field changed, by an amount as subtle but as crucial as the difference between d and dt. There was a numbness only she inflicted. Her presence transformed the odd-shaped cement-paved spaces scattered among the buildings west of the Kendall Square subway stop, where bleary students loitered over gossip and cigarettes; like Ginger Bitting, this apparition had satellites, a few other girls but, inevitably in this environment, mostly boys. Owen’s eyes placed her at the center of this set, though in truth she never appeared to dominate. In a boisterous cluster she stood at the edge and appeared diffidently amused; she never laughed the loudest. She had a light but clear, carrying voice—he could overhear her long before seeing her—and careful gestures, restrained by a reluctance to impose herself that moved him and emboldened him. At his watchful distance, her pallor was a beacon, a broadcast resonance.

  She held her head, with its slightly outthrust chin, erect on a long neck. Her straight hair, the mixed blond of half-damp sand, was gathered into a pony tail in back with a rubber band. In the front, bangs came down to her pale eyebrows, which blended with her skin; her brows and eyelashes were almost invisible. She wore no makeup, not even lipstick, and smoked poutingly, her cheeks deeply hollowed on the inhale and her exhale delivered with a certain dismissive vehemence, upward from the side of her mouth. In her offhand, underclad (the same dove-gray cloth coat and dirty tennis sneakers all winter) glamour she came to represent Cambridge for him—aloof, stoic, abstracted, pure. And he discovered that indeed she was a professor’s daughter; her father was Eustace Goodhue, biographer of the clergyman-poet George Herbert and editor of variorum editions of the Metaphysicals and lecturer in English at that other place, the university up the river, where the humanities, descended from Puritan theological studies, still ruled, leaving science to the world’s worker-bees.

  Her distinguished daughterly status was part of the effect she made—made deliberately, he felt. She was like him, he sensed: shy, but with the caution of someone guarding a proud ego. Taller than average, she slouched as if to minimize her bosom, the fullness of which her dowdy winter wraps did not quite conceal. It was even less concealed when, on hot fall days, and again in the sunny breaks of April and May, she took off the long gray coat that made her look like a slender doorman or military attaché and lay stretched on a blanket in the middle of the Great Court with her skirt hiked to the middle of her thighs and her sweater and blouse down to (he could not be sure at his distance) a bathing-suit top or a bra.

  She looked like no girl from Pennsylvania, not even the fancy ones from the Main Line. Elsie Seidel, his high-school girlfriend, the daughter of a country feed-and-hardware merchant, was always smartly turned out, with polished penny loafers and ribbed knee socks and sweeping skirts and broad belts in the New Look style, and tortoiseshell barrettes gleaming in the bouncy waves of her light-brown hair. And plenty of lipstick, maroon lipstick that looked black in photographs and rubbed off on his mouth so that, afterwards, it stung to wipe it away with spit on a handkerchief. He didn’t want his mother to see; his mother didn’t want him to go with Elsie at all, though the girl was respectable, more respectable locally than
were the Mackenzies, newcomers to this end of the county and to the school district. The district encompassed several valleys and included families whose first language was still Pennsylvania Dutch. Elsie herself spoke with a “Dutchy” care, slower than girls in Willow talked—her voice seemed older than she was.

  There was a country simplicity to her, a well-fed glossiness. The first time they kissed, in the intermission of a dance that Owen had attended because his mother urged him to be less scornful of the region’s high school even though it wasn’t Willow High, Elsie didn’t make the anxious pushing mouth that Alice Stottlemeyer had during spin-the-bottle but somehow let her lips melt into his, at this warm moist spot where their bodies joined. She was a short girl, in her sweated-up taffeta dance dress, and he, six feet tall at seventeen, the recent beneficiary of the Mackenzie ranginess. She had to tug down at him to keep his face tight to hers; she wanted to kiss more, there behind a broken Coke machine, where the overhead fluorescent light was flickering. Her eager small body molded itself to his; he remembered hearing how Carol Wisniewski had let herself be fucked by Marty Naftzinger standing up in the narrow space between the Rec Hall and the hosiery mill, and saw that it could be done.

  Not that he and Elsie ever—in a word they never used between them—fucked. He was too smart for that, too anxious to avoid wasting his one life. He knew that fucking led to marriage and he was not ready for that. In the heat and urgency of that first kiss he recognized that she had had her eye on him, as the phrase went—he had been an exotic, aloof arrival at the school, and somehow the idea of him had wormed its way excitingly into Elsie’s head. So between them there was always this tilt, this unbalance: she had desired him before he knew what was up. Nevertheless, he responded; he loved her, as far as he could shake the embarrassment of her not being a Willow girl. She was only, in her swinging skirts and white bobby socks, an imitation, a feed merchant’s daughter.

  He would afterwards associate Elsie with the inside of a car—its stale velour, its little dim dashboard lights, its rubber floormats and chill metallic surfaces. Chill to begin with: after an evening of driving around, the heater made a cozy nook in the dark. On dates, they took his parents’ stuffy pre-war Chevy, the second-hand car the Mackenzies had bought as part of their move to the country house. His father was generally back from Norristown by six, and Owen was granted the car for the gasoline-powered roaming that is, in common American wisdom, a teen-ager’s right.

  Before Elsie, he would sometimes drive back to Willow, looking for the action among his old friends and rarely finding it. He saw Willow now, having left at twelve, with an exile’s eyes, as a small provincial place where life—the social life of his own classmates, the bunch at the playground half grown-up—went on without him, out of sight: a deserted village. His grandfather’s chicken house was losing some of its asbestos shingles, he could see as he cruised by in the alley that bent around their old house. Not that he was certain to have been happy had his family stayed. Adolescence reshuffles the cards. As a child he had been more spectator than actor, valued primarily as a loyal follower, an admirer—of Buddy Rourke, of the girls he scarcely dared imagine naked.

  Now, with Elsie in the car, he had real nakedness to deal with. At first, just kissing, on and on, eyes closed to admit behind sealed lids a flood of other sensations, an expansion of consciousness into a salty, perfumed space quite unlike the hushed and headlong vault of masturbation. In the dark seclusion between cool tight sheets, his parents’ muttering having died away, he would seem for some seconds to stand on his head, having discovered with his left hand a faithful mechanism impossibly sweet, an astonishing release, a clench that took him back to infancy, its tight knit of newness before memories overlaid the bliss of being. Into this private darkness had come another, another seeker, and what was being found, clumsily yet unstoppably, was a core self explored by another consciousness. Elsie was both witness and witnessed. Her eyes were the wet, honey-tinged brown of horehound drops. By the particles of light that entered through the windshield he saw the dark dents of her dimples when she smiled, and the side of one eyeball gleam as she studied him across a gap that closed in a few seconds. Huddled beside him on the front seat, a bench seat in that era, with her back gouged by the knob of the window crank and her calves and ankles roasted by the heater, she seemed cupped to receive him, a nest of growing permissions. With each date she gave him an inch or two more of herself that he could claim as his henceforth; there was no taking back these small warm territories. Beyond kissing there was so much to touch, so many hooks and tricks among the catches and aromatic coverings, there in the shelter of the car, which sometimes became her car, for, though a year younger than he, she also had a driver’s license, and when his poor old family Chevy was under overnight repair or commandeered for some adult evening errand, she would bring a car of her family’s, her mother’s green Dodge or even her father’s new deep-blue Chrysler with its V-8 engine, to pick him up, at the farmhouse where his mother had not without a struggle accepted that Elsie had become his “girl,” whatever that meant as the world embarked on a new half-century.

  Some of those evenings when Elsie did the driving, pulling up in an impressive machine, she would be invited in, into the little house’s front parlor, where the bulky Rausch furniture from the Willow house had suddenly gone shabby and was covered with hairs from the two collies his mother had acquired as part of her vision of rural life. Smartly dressed in this setting of declining gentility, at whose edges Owen’s two grandparents made a shuffling, murmuring retreat, Elsie spoke to Owen’s mother with a lively courtesy. Her honey-brown eyes flashed; her scarlet lips smiled. Uneasily standing by, in a flannel shirt whose sleeves were too short, in scuffed laced shoes that looked oafish compared with Elsie’s polished penny loafers (much on view as she smartly crossed and recrossed her legs), Owen felt like a baton being passed. He felt he was present, as one pleasantry followed another, at a duel. His mother too had once been the smartly turned-out daughter of a successful rural entrepreneur; she knew a certain code, she knew “how to behave.” She also knew how people did behave, and couldn’t do much about it.

  When the young people, these social observances discharged, achieved freedom in a car of Elsie’s, it seemed perverse, after the movie or the miniature golf was behind them and they had found a parking spot, to have her seated on his left instead of on his right. Come at this way, she felt like a strange girl, with whom he must begin from scratch. Their chins and mouths made angles opposite from the usual, and his hands coped with reversed routes.

  “Should we switch?” she asked, when he remarked on this strangeness. Her voice came out breathier, lower in her throat, than the polite, Dutch-flavored voice she used with his mother and the teachers at school. Her lipstick had already begun to smear and flake. Her face was waxily lit by a streetlamp half a block away; they sometimes parked in a hidden place he knew from his childhood walks, at the back of the Dairy Queen lot on Cedar Top. He lived ten miles away, and she four miles more to the south, but Willow was the town whose map he knew and where he felt safest. Other times, they would park up by Shale Hill, near what had been the Victory Gardens, on a dirt road made by recent developers. Always, as the scope of her permissions widened, he searched for even safer spots, where the police would never come up and shine flashlights in their faces, as once had happened, behind the long low sheds of the old farmers’ market. As she sat high behind the wheel of her father’s expensive car, her mussed hair caught fire in stray loops and strands from the distant streetlamp.

  “Let’s,” he agreed. “If you don’t mind my sitting behind your father’s wheel.”

  “I don’t mind, Owen. I don’t like it poking me in the ribs all the time. I don’t see how you can stand it.”

  “Elsie, when I’m with you, I don’t notice such things. Here I go. I’ll get out and you slide over.”

  Thrusting himself into the public space outside the automobile, where adult morality pressed down fro
m the stars, he opened and shut the Chrysler’s passenger door (it made that sucky rich rattle-free sound) and scuttled around the broad chrome bumper and white-walled rear tires hunched over, for he already had an erection. Even behind his fly it felt scarily as if it might snag on something, until he settled behind her father’s steering wheel, which wore a suede cover. The tang of new-car smell was warmed into freshness by the heat of their bodies. As he slid across the front seat, wide enough for three, into the space where she huddled, the far streetlamp illumined her blurred face and a small pearl earring and the fuzzy wool of her short-sleeved angora sweater. She let him slide the sweater up and sneak a finger into her bra and stroke the silky skin there, the gentle fatty rise of it. Though Elsie was plump her breasts were small, as if still developing. When he had advanced to taking off her bra and pushing the sweater way up, her chest seemed hardly different from his own; a breast of hers in his hand felt as delicate as a tear bulging in his eye. One night, parked this time up by the Victory Garden wasteland, where the streetlamp was closer than on Cedar Top, he watched raindrops on the windshield make shadows on her chest, thin trails that hesitated and fell as his fingertips traced and tried to stop them, there, and there. She had dear little nipples like rabbit noses. She let him kiss them, suck them until she said in her breathy, un-Dutchy voice, “Ow, Owen. Enough, baby,” and touched his head the way the barber did when he wanted it to move. Sitting up, he made circles with his finger and his saliva around her nipples, softly round and round, loving the sight of them so much he felt dizzy, as the parallel shadows of the raindrops faintly streaked her chest and the backs of his hands.