At least – a point for the defence – Judd didn’t push it. He suddenly was against fraternities. He even made a Hebe question out of it. A principle.
The fact was, the Delts had taken him for a ride. For a couple of days he had the idea he was going to show up Alpha Beta by getting into a real gentile fraternity. Some Delt had made the mistake of inviting Judd over because of his being a genius prodigy and a millionaire too. But then they dropped him cold, and Judd suddenly made a principle out of it. He was against the idea of Jewish frats and non-Jewish frats. Being a Jew was simply an accident of birth. So now he was anti-fraternity. He would never join a Hebe frat either, on principle. Moreover, frat men were all a bunch of rubber stamps, Judd declared. They would come out a bunch of Babbitts. He would drop over to the house and spout this stuff, and some of the fellows would laugh, but a lot of them didn’t like it. They started telling Artie to keep his friend away from the place. On account of Judd he’d almost become unpopular.
Artie walked a little faster. He thought of an idea that suddenly made him feel bubbly, even gay. He would go in through the basement and up the back stairs. He would give Dog Eyes the scare of his life.
Judd was sitting erect, unable to study. He detested being at the mercy of a physical need. It seemed never to leave him. Others didn’t have it so bad. Artie didn’t have it so bad. Those two years at Ann Arbour, near Artie, had nearly driven him crazy.
None of the coeds would put it out. The cat houses weren’t enough. He had to have it all the time – oversexed, he guessed.
And that was the time when the image of Artie began to get in the way. Even when he was with a girl. Inside himself he would be saying to a drunken, laughing Artie, “You goddam whore! You goddam whore!” Whoever she was, he would make her into Artie, and he would be tearing in a rage at his own bondage, at having to have it, at the flesh being stronger than the intellect.
The times he had waited, in agony like tonight, always waiting for that capricious bastard – “See you at nine” – and you’d wait, getting more and more excited, imagining what you would do to him as soon as he came in.
Then, like some damn girl, Artie would behave as if the two of you had never done it at all, as if an idea like that never entered his thoughts.
The house was safe now. If only Artie would show up, they could be alone to themselves in the house, in this room. For two hours, even longer, without the worry of someone walking in.
Artie was already late. You could never be sure with Artie. But under Judd’s fretful impatience there was an almost gratified feeling. Artie, superior, should acknowledge no convention of punctuality.
Judd touched the typewriter. He felt a dreadful reluctance to part with it, to destroy it. It was the one thing he had kept from all they had done together; it was like a token of their pact. Perhaps instead of getting rid of it, they could hide it somewhere?
Judd had an impulse, tender and tragic, to write a farewell note on the machine, a lone confession, taking all the blame. He could mail the note and then disappear. They would recognize the typing. If one could vanish, truly vanish, dissolving into nothingness as though never even born! Would Artie feel regret, appreciate what he had done?
For, caught or not, Judd had a heavy presentiment that it was over now between Artie and himself. And parting with this machine would be like closing the circle.
The night they had got the typewriter was the night they had made their pact. Only last fall. Both of them were back living in Chicago. A bunch of Artie’s frat brothers from his old Ann Arbour chapter had come down for the football game. And Artie had got into their pool on the Big Ten. Then after getting back to Ann Arbour they had ruled him out. He claimed he was the winner. Was he burned! He’d show those bastards! And suddenly the inspiration struck him. “Hey, Jock, we’ll drive up there and clean out the whole frigging house!”
They could do it the following Saturday. Leave at midnight, three hours of travel, twenty minutes for the job, home by daylight. If anybody wondered where they had been, they’d had a big Saturday night and wound up on 22nd Street, and boys will be boys!
In Artie’s room, they had plotted it. A lazy November late afternoon, with Judd stretched out on Artie’s bed – one of those afternoons when he felt his energy ebbed, when he didn’t want to go anywhere, do anything. And Artie, relaxed in his Morris chair, his face in a desk-light glow, the petulant lips full-blown in his anger at the frat – in that moment Artie was Dorian Gray.
And as though recognizing a new closeness, in his anger at the lousy bunch up there in Ann Arbour, Artie suddenly offered, “Hey, you want to see something?” Artie went to his closet. There, under a jumble of junk, which he swept aside, was a treasure trunk that Artie had from when he was a kid. Opening it, he dug beneath a cowboy suit and broken toy guns. Underneath was his loot.
Not merely from the Five and Ten. That dime-store game of Artie’s wasn’t much of a secret. You walked through a crowded store with Artie, and he lifted items off the counters. Or at a party Artie would whisper, “Watch this!” and lift a wallet from the pocket of some half-crocked idiot.
But here in the closet as they knelt down close together, Artie let Judd finger the wallets, emptied now, and some women’s purses, too. Dozens. The trunk bottom was covered with loot.
To no one else, Judd felt, had Artie ever revealed this secret.
That was when Artie made the plan for cleaning out the frat house in Ann Arbour.
That day, Judd felt their intimacy sealed as never before. What his Dorian was revealing to him might be interpreted by the superficial as a mild kleptomania. But these trophies were, instead, tokens of a laughing superiority to the little rules of little men. An adroit theft was like a daring insult. It would be their retort to the whole frigging frat, for everything!
And to do it was to do something real. This Saturday would be the real thing, Artie said. With real guns. Judd could take Max’s. Artie knew where it was kept, in Max’s desk. And Artie let Judd handle his own, an automatic.
Saturday would be a cinch, because the big game was in Ann Arbour. Win or lose, the brothers would be stewed and dead to the world. Even if they heard anybody moving around the house, they’d think some guys had gone to a cat house and were pulling in late, or merely that someone was going to the can. And when they woke up in the morning -! Artie only wished he were still living in the house, so he could watch the hullabaloo and the guys accusing each other!
Whispering, kneeling in the closet, they made the plans.
On Saturday, Artie came over. While Artie stood in the hall, lighting a cigarette, Judd walked into Max’s room and put Max’s pistol into his pocket, feeling a little silly, and yet somewhat scared. Because he was sure Artie would go the limit if anybody tried to interfere. And Artie was right; if you were extending your sphere of experience into this kind of deed, then you did the deed in its own terms, all the way.
There came a quick vision of himself and Artie, pistols out, backing down a hallway as they held off a crowd of men, of himself holding them at bay while Artie ran to the car…
“Let’s go!” Artie snapped, and when they got into the Stutz, Artie fished in his pocket, pulled out two black silk handkerchiefs, and gave one to Judd.
On the way, they didn’t talk much of the adventure. Instead, Judd brought up the subject of New Year. Judd was anxious about New Year’s Eve. Willie Weiss had dropped a remark that he and Artie would be double-dating, Artie dragging Myra. Judd couldn’t believe it. That Artie would leave him out of New Year. Perhaps Willie Weiss had been needling him. So now Judd proposed his own idea, for Artie and himself, just the two of them. Instead of loading themselves down with girls, they could go out on the town, crash one party after another. Artie said sure, that’s what they would do. The two of them. No sense getting tied up with broads. New Year was the best time to pick up new gash.