We went outside and started walking across the campus together, and she said, “When do you want to begin your lessons, Mr. Scaggs?” and I said, “Call me Skimmer,” and she said, “Very well, you may call me Sylvia, then,” and I said, “Sylvia’s a pretty name. I always wanted to meet someone named Sylvia. You ever get a name in your mind and just go on for a long time wishing you could meet someone with that name?” which was a lot of bull, of course, because I’d never thought about meeting anyone named Sylvia and didn’t even think it was such a hot name at all, as a matter of fact, and I guess she didn’t swallow too much of it, anyhow, because she just looked at me and said, “When do you want to begin your lessons, Skimmer?” and I said, “You’re the teacher.”
“Very well,” she said. “I suggest that we meet three evenings a week and that you come over this evening to make a beginning,” and I said, “Over where?” and she said, “Drayton Hall,” which was a place the dolls lived who weren’t in sororities and stuff, and I said, “What time?” and she said, “Around seven,” and I said I’d be there.
We’d come along to the old gym by that time, and I had to go in, so I said, “I got to go in and practice basketball now, and as it is I’m late, and old Dilky will be blowing his stack,” and she said, “Don’t let me detain you,” and it sounded pretty snotty the way she said it, and I made up my mind right then to have her talking out the other side of her God-damn face before I was through, and I said, “Well, I’ll see you around seven,” and she said, “Very well,” and I found out later that she was always using that crummy expression, very well, and when she walked off I could see that her skirt fit pretty tight and had a nice wobble to it.
I practiced and went back to the frat and ate and got my Goddamn rhetoric book and went over to Drayton Hall, which was a big stack they’d built with money that had been left to Pipskill by some old doll name of Drayton and was called Mother Drayton’s Fun House by the guys at the frat and others. There was a desk in the hall with a doll behind it, and she said, “Whom are you calling for?” and I said, “Sylvia Pruet,” and she said, “If you’ll just have a seat in there, I’ll call her,” and what she meant by in there was a big room with sofas and chairs scattered around, and quite a few of the girls who lived there were doing this and that with guys who had come to see them, and I went in and sat, and pretty soon old Sylvia came down. She looked pretty damn slick, if you want to know it, and I got to thinking that what had looked like a damn dull year at Pipskill, what with having to play on the crummy freshman team and no one paying much attention or anything, might pick up after all and turn into something pretty good, and the truth is, I was damn glad I had trouble with the lousy rhetoric and needed a tutor.
“Well, Skimmer,” she said, “shall we get started?” and I said that was what I’d come for, which might have been all of the truth in the beginning but wasn’t any more by a damn sight, and we got on a sofa in one corner of the room and went at it, the rhetoric, that is, but to tell the truth I had something else on my mind and couldn’t show much progress, and after about an hour I said, “I just can’t seem to put my mind to it with all the noise and the people around and everything,” and she said, “Perhaps you’re right. I think we’d better use the library after this.”
We arranged it between us to meet at the library three nights a week, and we did it for a couple of weeks, and studied, and I picked up a little on the rhetoric, but not much. It came around Thanksgiving then, and school closed up for a week, the classes, that is, and nearly everyone went home, but I didn’t, and neither did Sylvia. We went on meeting at the library just like we’d been, only now it was every night instead of only three, and we had the room we studied in pretty much to ourselves, and to tell the truth, we started doing less studying and more other stuff, and I guess now’s the time to tell it and get through with it.
She was nuts, this Sylvia Pruet was. All slobs who go for literature and stuff like that are nuts, of course, but she was even more nuts than most. She asked me if I liked poetry, and I said I didn’t, except the kind of dirty limericks my brother Eddie used to teach me before he got himself killed, and she said it didn’t do any good to talk to her that way, because she’d made up her mind that all my toughness and everything was just a kind of protective armor to keep me from being hurt and that I’d been hurt terribly sometime or other and had been embittered by it. This was strictly bull, but I could see it made me look romantic or something to her, so I didn’t deny it, and she said she’d like to teach me to love poetry the way she did, because she knew I was the type would really go for it once I got into it, and it looked like an angle to me, so I told her she might be right and I’d try to learn if she thought there was anything in it for me.
After that we only spent about half the time on the rhetoric, and the other half she’d read this poetry to me, and it was enough to make you puke, honest to God. The poems she liked best and read most were all full of Aprils and lost loves and broken hearts and all sorts of crap like that, and they were written by someone I’d never heard of, name of Sara Teasdale, and one night after we’d left the library we sat on a stone bench in the dark out behind the museum, and I was just about to make a pitch and see if she’d do a little business when she said, “Oh, the fall, Skimmer, the beautiful fall. I think fall is just the most perfect time, don’t you?” and then before I could say yes or no she started reciting this poem by Sara Teasdale that was all about how someone named Robin had kissed her in the spring, and someone else named Strephon had kissed her in the fall, but how a third guy named Colin had only looked at her and hadn’t kissed her at all, and personally I thought Robin and Strephon had showed some pretty good sense for guys in a poem but that Colin was altogether a simple bastard, and I said so.
She reached up and patted me on the cheek and said I was just hiding my tender emotions behind a false front and that the point was that the most powerful feelings were often mute and undemonstrated. To show how this was, she went on and finished the poem, which told how Robin’s kiss was lost in jest and Strephon’s in play but that Colin’s, which had only been in his crummy eyes, kept right on haunting her and everything, and it was just more than I could stand, and I said I guessed it was pretty enough but awful dull. That tore it for the time, and she got up and walked off back to Drayton Hall and wouldn’t say another word to me, and I got to thinking that maybe she wouldn’t meet me at the library the next night, either, but I went there and waited when the time came, and she did.
She said hello, and I said hello, and she sat down and asked me if I wasn’t sorry for the way I’d talked last night, and I wasn’t in particular but said I was, anyhow, just to get things going again, and she said, “I don’t feel like rhetoric tonight, Skimmer. Let’s go for a walk,” and this was fine with me because I didn’t feel like rhetoric myself at the time, or any other time, either, for that matter, and so we went outside and walked along to the same bench behind the museum and sat down. We were sitting there not saying anything, but just looking off down the slope in the darkness, and all of a sudden I began to recite this poem, and I’ll admit I’d gone to the library and looked it up and memorized it just that afternoon, because I thought I might need it to get me in good again, and it was just a short one about how I’d once been as fresh as rainwater but was now as bitter as the God-damn sea.