And touching her hip, of course, was out of the question.
As out of the question as the flesh and hair beneath that chartered, licensed, two- or three-inch strip of damp silk or cotton underwear, the tolerated, nihil obstat elastic piping that edged her drawers and which he worried with his finger like a lock of hair.
So maybe she was political too. A born legislator, some negotiator of the physical being. Because she was right, it was almost ten-thirty, almost time for him to leave, gratefully disappear with the other males — she was right about that too; his presence in that house of females had altered him; he was “male” now, his sexuality some new state of chemical excitation, simmering, charged, changed, like the cooked properties of solids melting to vapors — and she’d somehow managed to arrange all this in the last quarter hour of that first night.
(But why was he grateful? He was grateful for the same reasons he’d been relieved, the shit-scared avoider, to learn that the clear-skinned beauties of the Sadie Hawkins Day dance had been the wrong clear- skinned beauties. He was grateful because he’d been this, well, Mikey. It’s not true, Druff thought, that we ultimately turn into our own parents; we’re our own children long before they’re ever born. He was wrapped in a cocoon of stupidity, innocence, inexperience. Not virtue, but its simulacrum, what virtue did while it bided its time, until it sloughed fear and all fear’s hiding places in the cosmetic folds of guilt. He was grateful because he was a virgin and he didn’t have to fuck her and get it all wrong was why!)
Now at least they had a place to go.
Though they still didn’t know that many couples, didn’t double-date, were there — at least, as her legacy, Druff was — on sufferance, like a guest of a member of a country club, say. Now they didn’t have to meet outside movie houses. These days he could pick her up at the sorority. (Gradually they stopped sitting in on each other’s classes, stopped going to coffeehouses; gradually they even stopped going to movies.) And if, collectively, they were novelties to the girls of Chi Phi Kappa, the girls of Chi Phi Kappa were even greater novelties to Druff. Rose Helen was a novelty to Druff. Indeed, Druff was a novelty to Druff. (It was strange — that simmering maleness, his ballsy, newfound exhibitionist’s swagger, his vain regard, his simmering chemical privilege and liberties — but these days he always went about feeling as if he had on brand-new clothes.)
Even though he knew no more people now than he did before, even though, except for Rose Helen, he had no friends there, only, here and there, a few people he could nod to — the waiter from Druff’s boardinghouse, three or four of the pledges — Druff had become a sort of fixture around the place. The fact was they rarely left the sorority house. On weekdays he came there to study with Rose Helen and, if one was unoccupied, they would go into a tiny study room. (Since the night of the serenade when she had gone to the door and closed it herself and then negotiated with him the unspoken rules of their relationship, the study was never closed when they were in it.) At ten-thirty, however, he was the first male out of the house. Even on weekends, when the curfew was extended until midnight, he was always the first to leave.
It was as if he understood their sufferance (he did), their combined weight on the thin social ice that supported them. And if he was political, he thought, it was a strange way to practice his politics, lying low, muting, as it were, his own horn, making himself scarce on the very dot of the curfew hour like a frightened Cinderella. Not like him, not like his position, or his presence during what he had almost come to think of as their office hours, the sorority’s, his own — he was there more often than any of the fraternity men who dated these girls, longer than the waiters who set their tables, served their dinners, washed their dishes — a position and presence which had become obsessive.
He could not keep his hands off her, their almost surgical, circumscripted petting as complicated as the careful, delicately drawn lines of a contended geography, treatied borders; obsessed (not just Druff, Rose Helen too) with the endless diversity, variations, interpretations and all the fine distinctions available to them within compliance. So that he became, they became, respective Casanovas, very Venuses, geniuses of foreplay.
He was never there during scheduled house meetings, secret rites, restricted practices. He was fastidious, meticulous with their curfews, and lived, like many fabulous criminals, by the letter of the law, as if he sought to keep his nose clean by always paying his taxes, going about like one shoving change into parking meters, or each day dropping by the library to show the librarian the due date on a still-not-overdue book. He kept, that is, his accounts with all of them, Rose Helen, the girls of Chi Phi Kappa, the frat boys who visited them, the housemother, Mrs. Post.
Yet it was no game he was playing, neither with Rose Helen nor with her sisters. He was not seeking to test the limits of their patience. He knew the limits of their patience. He didn’t observe their curfews out of any of the old olly-olly-oxen-free impulses of his childhood, but because he was quite terrified of them really, afraid of having his privileges stripped from him.
Because those privileges were large, new, rare, immense. It wasn’t just what happened between the two of them in the study (and much, despite the unimpeded view they afforded anyone who happened to be passing that open door of their strange love gymnastics, the compulsory Olympic figures they cut, did happen), but the incredible feeling he had at those times. It was exactly what he’d said when he’d first gone in there with her, that they were at last alone, his sense of their privacy somehow fed by the curfew he was forced to observe, by his knowledge that the door was open, that their exciting, dangerous gyrations were, well, almost — living on the edge, pushing the envelope, you can just imagine how he felt — adulterous, anyway risky, anyway more intimate than even what her cards looked like on the table — Druff permitted all.
The feeling, if anything, amplified on weekends when they never even got close to one of those studies. (It was understood that on weekends these rooms were reserved for upperclassmen and their dates.) Then they went out into the big music- drawing- living room- cum-library, whatever the architectural equivalent was for that commodious, luxurious center — the house’s real passion pit, he supposed. And there, in that crowded space — there might be upwards of a hundred people in it, girls returned with their dates from campus beer gardens, from dances, from parties, flicks, pep rallies, concerts, basketball games, celebrations — a strange thing happened. He melded in with them, felt that he had somehow become invisible, though the others were plainly visible to him, what they did — he heard sweaters sliding up over cotton blouses, glimpsed underpants, cleavage, flesh, erections — he brandished his own, less self-conscious, finally, than he might have been in a communal shower, a public bath — all about him could hear girls groaning, boys coming. (“Our comings and groanings,” he joked to Rose Helen.) Not a voyeur. In the scene. Of it. Could feel, hear, see, taste the mass dishevelment, some sense of the undone and awry, of smeared lipstick and smudged face powder, of colognes gone off and all the fired chemistry of naked pheromones. A passion pit indeed, a steamy, cumulative sense of the stuff growing, of love cells dividing, multiplying, building in the room like weather, rain cloud, say, electric storm, thunderclap, passionate waves sweeping over them, a kind of heavy sexual traffic, his hip at their haunches on the long, crowded window seats, so that what he felt was not just his own passion but his passion added to the passion of everyone else, his passion compounding, earning interest on the passion of both sexes. (As his own, he felt, increased theirs, all their activity and somber, solemn concentration conjoined, benefited, a public privacy, like the serenade Rose Helen thought was hazing but Druff understood as encouragement, warrant.) A great joy in this, like the joy in a marvelous parade. (Maybe he was political. Sure he was political! Oh boy, was he political! Necking with Rose Helen at Rose Helen’s sorority no orgy but a democratic manifestation, great island chains, archipelagoes of feeling, some republic of sexuality. Druff thinking, no wonder I was so horny when Mikey was screwing Su’ad that time, it was the proximity again, only my fatherly good Americanism. Thinking, no wonder he was, because if we’re our own children before they’re ever born, maybe they’re as childish as their fathers before the fathers have had a chance to grow up. And feeling this anachronistic unity with his son.)