In fact, I was more observant than even that: I took note of Shirley’s vigilance as Audra went from helping with his heavy winter coat to meeting him at the door of his car, the better to touch his elbow as he clambered out. The biggest problem was that Audra at twenty-eight was, as Karl confided to me, “easy on the eyes.” She was indeed: fresh-faced, cascading oak blond hair, and a tidy figure made poignant by the cheap Eastern European clothes she’d arrived with. She spoke an oddly correct schoolgirl English and radiated the sort of industry that predicted success in her new country. She was also a baseball nut, like Karl, and their amiable skirmishing over statistics drove Shirley to distraction. Audra feverishly studied baseball magazines in her room, as though she were trying to pass the bar exam. I several times sidled up to her, but she blew me off disdainfully, which I lamented as only a blue-balled late adolescent could. We each had our rooms on the north end of the second floor, at the end of a blind corridor, and shared a bathroom. That she sauntered around up there in her underwear, breasts spilling from an abbreviated bra, only emphasized how insignificant I was. Because of Audra, my energy was grossly depleted by jacking off, and had I not brought this vice under control, my grades surely would have fallen enough to keep me out of medical school. And what a way to fail a career in medicine!
At the point that Shirley looked likely to voice her indignation, I thought to reintroduce my manufactured fear of dying a virgin. From then on, it was merely a matter of waiting for Karl’s next business trip to coincide with Audra’s time off.
While Shirley drove Audra like a government mule, cooking, cleaning, polishing floors, washing windows from a ladder, cleaning eaves troughs, and ironing, Audra never lost her composure; only I knew how close to eruption her moods could be as she shoved me out of the way en route to the bathroom or pretended to spit in my face when I smiled at her. Karl only occasionally asked Audra to do something, and usually it was something quite small, like keeping an eye out for lost keys or glasses. If Shirley was present, Audra complied like a dutiful servant. If Shirley was not present, Audra let her joy at being of service to Karl shine in her eyes before purring, “Of course I find dose glasses. A lawyer must be able to see!” A pause before, a pause after. Then Karl, quietly, “Thank you, Audra.”
Early college days were really a delight for me, my first chance at disappearing into a crowd. In so many places I had grown up, especially in the rug-shampoo years, when we were pretty much transients, ignorance was its own reward and standing out in school was a sure way to get beaten up. But I’d heard John Wayne say, “Life is tough. Life is tougher if you’re stupid.” And I took the Duke’s words seriously, trying to be smart, haunting bookmobiles and the mildewed Carnegie libraries of the American West.
My clothing came principally from the Salvation Army store in town, no hardship implied: with a bit of imagination a person could dress well there and with great originality. I bought numerous Hawaiian shirts discarded by servicemen, bowling shirts and shoes, porkpie hats, and so on. This gave me a reputation on the tiny campus of a real sophisticate, a hipster even, my retro mishmash more mysterious than comprehensible. My great find at the Sally was a Chinese robe that had been dropped off by the family of a deceased Presbyterian missionary. It was a glorious blue silk garment with macramé buttons and a thin lining of down. Drawing upon my new reputation and the delightfully sordid memories of my late aunt out there in Idaho, I wore this on my first college date. It was a warm evening in early fall and I stood at the entrance to the girls’ dormitory barefoot in nothing but the luxurious blue robe and a distinctive porkpie hat with a varnished pheasant feather in its band. The girl, Nancy Bellwood of Owosso, Michigan, was slow adjusting to my appearance and my anxiety-driven shower of non sequiturs, but as her friends gathered and approved enthusiastically of my festive getup, Nancy’s zeal soon followed. It wasn’t long before we found ourselves by the small and slow woodland river that bounded our campus; turtles adorned the low limbs of trees overhanging the water, dragonflies sparkled, birdsong poured from the forest. I rested against the trunk of a great beech whose canopy scattered the evening light. Nancy had all but vanished under the robe and, to prolong my enjoyment, I concentrated on the little fuzzy balls on the back of her tennis socks. “Caramba!” she cried through the robe, reminding me that she was a Spanish major. As soon as it was over, I began thinking again of my studies. I loved to study. It used to be that when people asked me what I was interested in I would say, “Electricity!” Now I told them, “Science!” Ooh, la la!
I admired the Hansons’ home. So many houses in these small towns of the old Midwest were handsome. The towns themselves were beautiful and had been more so, said the locals, before the elms that once shaded them died of blight. Compared to the towns of the West they seemed remarkably wooded, sheltered really, and more contained than the sprawling towns I knew with only sagebrush to stop their spread. I saw photographs of this town before Dutch elm disease, and it looked like a huge green corsage set out in rolling farmland. The Hanson family had been in this house since 1841, and the attic held the Civil War uniforms of Hanson forebears, including the riddled one of a Hanson who died at Chickamauga, having served in a storied unit of Swedish immigrants. The spacious basement, now holding a stout coal-fired furnace, was said to have hidden escaped slaves. I particularly enjoyed the oak window seats with cushions fitted out into the bays that looked upon the small, well-tended backyard with its old roses and ancient black walnut tree. Here I sat with my schoolbooks, in my Chinese robe, entertaining unrealistic hopes for my future: my daydreaming, my fantasy life was still highly impractical.
The house was quite dark inside, enclosing, and had fireplaces in all the public rooms. A formal dining room opened onto an old utilitarian kitchen with a built-in gas range. The wood counters were worn to hollows, their edges held intact by steel bands and acorn-headed screws. It was a small space, and when I helped Shirley prepare meals there we rubbed against each other between stove and refrigerator with a steadily increasing frequency. The duration of these encounters was directly related to the complexity of the meals which were aimed at Karl Hanson’s enthusiastic palate; therefore we avoided the simple preparations and natural-food approaches advocated by Gloria Swanson, Hollywood vegetarian, resorting instead to complex glazes and various potted things, an elaborate cassoulet, and so forth. By the time Hanson complained of gout and a defiant waistband, Shirley and I were regularly dry-humping next to the counter that held the big chrome Mixmaster and Pyrex coffee machine.
In my second year, I started studying Spanish, abandoned the Chinese costume, and affected serapes. By now my reputation as a sort of Western hipster had vanished and I was viewed simply as a damn fool, a fool with snow falling on his serape four months a year and with mariachi 78s on an old brown record player.