Again, the strengths have shifted. Zimmerman’s hand leaves Penny’s arm and, finger braced against the thumb to flick, comes toward Peter’s eye. It is a nightmare second; Peter blinks, his mind blank. He feels the breath being crushed from him. The hand glides past his face and softly snaps a face in the framed picture by Peter’s shoulder on the wall. “This is me,” Zimmerman says.
It is a photograph of the O.H.S. track team in 1919. They are all wearing old-fashioned black undershirts and the manager wears white ducks and a straw hat. Even the trees in the background-which are the trees of the Poorhouse Lane, only smaller than they are now-look old-fashioned, like pressed flowers. A brownness hangs unsteadily beneath the surface of the photograph. Zimmerman’s finger, which with its glazed nail and crinkled knuckle is solid and luminous in the now, holds firm under the tiny face of then. Peter and Penny have to look. Though as a trackman he was slimmer and had a full head of black hair, Zimmerman is curiously recognizable. The heavy nose set at an uneasy angle to the gently twisted mouth whose plane is not strictly parallel to the line of the eyebrows gave his young face that air of muddled weight, of unfathomable expectation and reluctant cruelty, which renders him in his prime of age so irresistible a disciplinarian even to those who think they have found it within themselves to be defiant and mock. “It is you,” Peter says weakly.
“We never lost a meet.” The finger, dense with existence, everpresent, drops away. Without another word to the young couple Zimmerman moves off down the hall, huge-backed. Students jostle to clear him a path.
The hall is emptying, the varsity game beginning. The pressure of Zimmerman’s fingers have left yellow ovals in Penny’s naked arm. She rubs the arm briskly and grimaces in disgust. “I feel I should take a bath,” she says. Peter realizes he does love her really. They had been equally helpless in Zimmerman’s grip. He takes her down the hall, as if to return to the auditorium; but at the hall’s end he bucks the double doors and leads her up the dark stairs. This is forbidden. Often at night functions a padlock is placed on these doors but this time the janitors forgot. Peter glances behind them nervously; all who might cry “Halt” have hastened to see the game commence.
On the halfway landing they are out of sight. The bulb burning over the girls’ entrance below the steel-mullioned window here casts upward in distorted rhomboids enough light to see by. There must be light enough for her to see. Her naked arms seem silver, her crimson lips black. His own shirt seems black. He unbuttons one sleeve. “Now this is a very sad secret,” he says. “But because I love you you should know it.”
“Wait.”
“What?” He listens to learn if she has heard someone coming. “Do you know what you’re saying? What do you love about me?”
Into the hush the roar of the crowd penetrates like an en circling ocean. Here on this landing he feels dry and cool. He shivers, afraid, now, of what he has begun to do. “I love you,” he tells her, “because in the dream I told you about when you turned into a tree I wanted to cry and pray.”
“Maybe you just love me in dreams.”
“When is that?” He touches her face. Silver. Her mouth and eyes are black and still and terrible like the holes of a mask.
She says gently, “You think I’m stupid.”
“I’ve thought so. But you don’t seem so now.”
“I’m not beautiful.”
“You are now.”
“Don’t kiss me. The lipstick will smear.”
“I’ll kiss your hand.” He does, and then slips her hand inside his open sleeve. “Does my arm feel funny?”
“It feels warm.”
“No. Rough in spots. Concentrate.”
“Yes…a little. What is it?”
“It’s this.” Peter pulls back the sleeve and shows her the underside of his arm; the spots look lavender in the cold diffused light. There are less of them than he had expected.
Penny asks, “What is it? Hives?”
“It’s a thing called psoriasis I’ve had all my life. It’s horrible, I hate it.”
“Peter!” Her hands lift up his head from the gesture of sobbing. His eyes are dry and yet the gesture did release something real. “It’s on my arms and legs and it’s worst on my chest. Do you want to see it there?”
“I don’t care.”
“You hate me now, don’t you? You’re disgusted. I’m worse than Zimmerman grabbing you.”
“Peter, don’t just say things to hear me contradict them. Show me your chest.”
“Must I?”
“Yes. Come on. I’m curious.”
He lifts his shirt and T-shirt underneath and stands in the half-light half-skinned. He feels like a slave ready for flogging, or like that statue of the Dying Captive which Michelangelo did not fully release from the stone. Penny bends to look. Her fingers brush his chilled skin. “Isn’t that strange?” she says. “They go in little groups.”
“In the summer it pretty well goes away,” he tells her, pulling down his shirts. “When I grow up I’m going to spend the winters in Florida and then I won’t have it.”
“Is this what your secret was?”
“Yes. I’m sorry.”
“I expected something much worse.”
“What could be worse? In a full light it’s really ugly, and I can’t do a thing about it except apologize.”
She laughs, a glimpse of silver in his ears. “Aren’t you silly? I knew you had a skin thing. It shows on your face.”
“My God, does it? Badly?”
“No. It’s not noticeable at all.”
He knows she is lying, yet does not attempt to make her tell the truth. Instead he asks, “Then you don’t mind it?”
“Of course not. You can’t help it. It’s part of you.”
“Is that really how you feel?”
“If you knew what love was, you wouldn’t even ask.”
“Aren’t you good?” In accepting her forgiveness he sinks to his knees, there in the corner of the halfway landing, and presses his face against her cloth belly. His knees ache in a minute; in relieving them of pressure his face slides lower. And his hands of themselves slide up silver and confirm what his face has found through the cloth of her skirt, a fact monstrous and lovely: where her legs meet there is nothing. Nothing but silk and a faint dampness and a curve. This then is the secret the world holds at its center, this innocence, this absence, this intimate curve subtly springy in its sheath of silk. Through the wool of her skirt he kisses his own finger tips. “No, please,” Penny says, her hand seeking to pull him up by his hair. He hides from her in her, fitting his face tighter against that concave calm; yet even here, his face held in the final privacy, the blunt probing thought of his father’s” death visits him. Thus he betrays her. When Penny, pinned off balance, repeats “Please,” the honest fear in her voice gives him an excuse to relent. Rising, he looks away from her through the window beside them and observes, wonder following wonder, “It’s snowing.”
In the lavatory Caldwell is puzzled by the word book gouged in square capitals in the wall above the urinal. Close examination reveals that this word has been laid over another; the F had been extended and closed to make a B, the U and C closed into O’s, the K left as was. Willing to learn, even by the last flash of light before annihilation, he absorbs the fact, totally new to him, that every FUCK could be made into a book. But who would do such a thing? The psychology of the boy (it must have been a boy) who altered the original word, who desecrated the desecration, is a mystery to him. The mystery depresses him; leaving the lavatory, he tries to enter that mind, to picture that hand, and as he walks down the hall the heaviest weight yet seems laid upon his heart by that unimaginable boy’s hand. Could his son have done it?