“And if there’s one thing I know about,” Mr. Challait concluded, stroking the front of his vest significantly, “it’s dieting.”
“Say what you like,” the maid said, “but the boy’s lost thirty pounds since he’s been home.”
But whenever Erin and I tried to examine Robbie on our own, without anyone else lending a hand, what we noticed most was something else the maid had said: a touch of the artist in him. The man had sensibility. This despite continual pimples and cold sores, despite a flabby hipslung posture that would have been ridiculous if it hadn’t been so obviously, terribly impossible for him to correct. But if we asked him about how he felt, the answers we got were intriguing rhymes, sung in an operatic falsetto. His table manners were delicate and he drank without slurping. And if we asked him what he wanted to do — what you truly wanted, Robbie — he always reached for a camera. Taking pictures was the one pastime that brought him anywhere near enthusiasm. With a camera in his hands, Robbie could even stand up straight. Mr. Challait therefore had collected dozens of the solid black machines for his son. Literally, dozens. We found cameras in the salad bowl, cameras lens-down in the tub of shaving cream, cameras stuffed inside the large athletic socks that Robbie masturbated into. His darkroom then came as a surprise, an ordinary panelled closet downcellar. But after the first moment’s astonishment, standing together in the darkroom doorway, Erin and I noticed the dust that lay over everything. Even the developing pans had turned gray with dust. Robbie instead had his rolls of film sent out to the town newspaper, where one of the people in layout was an old family friend. The contact sheets that came back bore ruined shot after ruined shot, nondescript lumps out of focus or empty squares of white. Yet every once in a while there would turn up a miracle. Every once in a while we’d discover a razor-sharp and expertly composed shot of Erin and myself. Robbie would always catch us in some corny domestic pose. Erin and I might stand filling the flower vase with water, each holding the other’s free hand. Even the one contact sheet still left, now, has a shot like that.
Thus it wasn’t a vacancy, beneath the sore moonscape that Robbie presented to the world. There’d been something of substance betrayed when the connections went wrong. Yet precisely because Robbie was a complicated man, soon enough the thought of understanding him began to look grimmer. Too many wires needed untangling, too many levels of language needed unearthing. And Erin and I, our energy waning, his complications mounting — Erin and I felt the few reliable specs of our personalities going soft.
Grimmer: we became careless. We made some bad mistakes.
The first came when once we spoke about Robbie in the third person, while he was there listening. By itself, talking in this way caused no great disruption. Sometimes it seemed to irritate him, but mostly he’d let it pass. We must have been into our second month there by then. Erin and I sat with knees touching on the living-room sofa, and the sun through the front windows was a sleepy-making August sun. Robbie muttered and snapped photos, and the mood was romantic. Erin hitched her breasts in a way she knew I’d notice. She told me that on hot days like this one her older brother used to make her get in a “Kissing Box” for the neighborhood kids.
“Just a big corrugated-cardboard box,” she said, smiling with her lips exaggerated. “But the open end was towards the wall, so that nobody else could see when a boy went in there to get a kiss. Really. Simple but effective, Mr. Bond. My brother charged a nickel.”
“Er-rinn.” I was playing hard to get. “Is this the kind of talk for in front of Robbie?”
“No. No, I’m saying my brother was just like Robbie. He liked to have the kissing and the sexy stuff around, but he would never get in a box like that himself.”
I had to laugh. But just before Robbie started shouting, the cool planes of Erin’s face broke up and I watched her realize she’d said too much.
“Loving is juvving! Loving is juvving!” Robbie let the camera drop, knocked it into a corner with one awkward foot. “It is. But I’ve never juvv, j-judged anyone. Never never never never, always let everyone judge…me!”
Without the camera’s counterbalance, he’d gone hipslung again, his wrists beind his pelvis. His head looked distant. The lower lip hung trembling.
“I’ve never been married, either,” he said.
Then he was turning to the fireplace in the wall behind him, maybe so we wouldn’t see him cry, or maybe so he could add some queer extra dramatic gesture to his latest outburst in operatic falsetto:
“Oh kiss me,
kiss
me, I’m a bee—
Then you’ll lose your
beak
in my
tree
!”
But on “tree” he squatted suddenly, a violent move, a more athletic move than I would have thought possible for him. And he started whaling away at the fireplace with one of the andirons. The brass made a lousy whining clang against the brick.
I was already on my feet. Mr. Challait himself had said the first rule was never to let Robbie get worked up. We had Librium, Thorazine, even a straitjacket. But somewhere along the way during the last couple moments, though with Robbie on one side and the sun on the other I hadn’t noticed, Erin had taken my hand. Now she held me in place.
“Let him,” she shouted over the banging, “let him, please.”
She sounded almost in tears herself. I tried to turn and look at her but instead Erin stood up beside me, softly crushing the bent fingers of the hand she held between her breasts and my own. She touched her mouth to my ear.
“He needs to let it out,” she whispered. “It’s what he could never do before.”
“Uh—” She flexed the fingers that held my fingers; I felt it between my legs.
“What do we care about the rules? Let him, let him, really. We wouldn’t be here if he didn’t want to break the rules.”
The single clear thought in my head was that, when Erin had said “he” in the last sentence, she’d meant Mr. Challait.
“Let’s go,” she said. “Robbie won’t hurt anything. Let’s leave him alone and go upstairs.”
So this was our first serious mistake, allowing Robbie to think that smashing things was acceptable behavior. I should say too, though, that he did look harmless. For instance this time with the andirons, Robbie looked almost businesslike. Methodically his shoulders humped and went slack, humped and went slack, while with each blow the brass changed shape. So we let him be, our first mistake, and then tiptoed upstairs straight into our second. We ducked into our bedroom. We turned the noisy iron lock and went at each other. Knowing exactly what we were doing, Erin and I took it right out of control. Even the pause to slip on the rubber became charged with the determination of foreplay. Call it an outbreak, a mutual fit. In any case these gasping explorations back and forth across our locked room occurred more and more often as the second month dragged on into the third, as the hope of knowing Robbie better first started to turn frightening and then was dropped. We were trying to take our minds off the problem; we were trying to drown in each other’s mouths. Rough and dedicated encounters. We have since managed to forgive ourselves. Because where could we two ever have learned what our daily lovemaking would do to the loose-necked enigma in the rooms beneath? Even at school Erin and I had stayed away from the psychological stuff, the sensitivity sessions and rap sessions and skull sessions. These were always run by the Masters anyway. It was like strip-mining the ego. Erin and I instead had chosen the Independent Study Projects. It was forever said about each of us that we were “the precocious type.” We do like to read, and Erin keeps her journal. So what did we know about how our mystery prisoner would take the bumps and bangs above stairs that oddly echoed his below?