So you can just imagine how he felt, you can just imagine.
His precious invisibility different in kind from the invisibility he so carefully cultivated at the curfew hour, or the invisibility they sought out on those lines outside the picture show, or in the coffeehouses, or could have used in that diner in town, the invisibility not only exciting but comforting — a shared invisibility. And for the first time since he met her unconscious of resentment, all resentment — his, theirs — dissolved or maybe only absorbed in the mutual, protective clouds of sperm that were a sort of collective atmosphere in the fancy room.
He was in his element. He loved Friday and Saturday nights, he loved e pluribus unum, and would willingly have traded four weeknights alone with Rose Helen in a study room for just one additional half hour of extended curfew on the cushioned window seats, long leather sofas, upholstered wing chairs, or stretched out with her in the sexual traffic on the fine Oriental rug in the big ground-floor room.
Which is just where Mrs. Post, the housemother, found them on the one night out of the eighty or so since Druff had been coming to the Chi Phi Kappa house, on the single occasion when he was not the first one out the door. A fixture indeed. And not only a fixture, but someone whose habits were so well known by now it was said that you could set your watch by him. He had simply lost track of the time. Or no, that wasn’t quite true. As a matter of fact it was time he was thinking of at the time, how this was only a Friday, how they still had all Saturday together. (Because he loved her now, had discovered in just the last month, the past few weeks, that there was something there beyond the simple fact of her availability, the damaged-goods advantage he thought he had over her because of her two-year seniority and scarcely legible limp, which, if it was not completely put on, she had at least to take the trouble to memorize; a limp which wasn’t, he’d begun to realize, entirely natural, as a dance step is never entirely natural, but had always at least to be a little studied, like a runner’s stride or swimmer’s kick turn. Because he loved her, because no one could hold his tongue in someone else’s mouth for eighty out of the last hundred nights without developing a certain fondness for the head as a whole, the neck and everything it rested on. Teeth were just not that interesting — palates, gums, inlays, lips. Because he loved her, because he had come to appreciate her savage resentment, enjoy her outcast representations of herself, his own accreditation in the drama — he’d never played an outcaste before, had gotten by on his innate Mikeyness and good-boy behaviors; now they were in it together, Rose Helen, himself, could almost put Greek letters of their own beside their names — appreciate Rose Helen’s marvelous mimicry of the sisters and frat boys, even of the waiter from Druff’s boardinghouse. Because he loved her now, her fastidious dignity and rough, playful ways with her own rules. She had qualities. Also, she let him put his tongue in her head.) Thinking, this is only Friday, there’s still Saturday. Then thinking, Sundays we go our own ways, then it’s Monday and we’ll have all those ten-thirty nights in the study. Isn’t it peculiar, he thought, we do so much more to each other in the study than we ever try to do out here (where the rules were house rules, liberal enough, astonishing really, but ultimately table stakes), but to tell the truth (and he knew what was probably going on right now on the cots in those studies) he preferred it out here, though — they hadn’t talked about it, it was just, knowing her qualities, something he felt — he didn’t think Rose Helen did. Thinking all this (because you can’t do two things at once, you really can’t, not if you were to give each the attention it deserved), and meanwhile letting up on the very things he so loved about these Friday nights — the collective concentration, that mutual chemistry of fired nerves and cumulative, conjoined hip-to- haunch loving, at the same time that, though he didn’t realize this, he failed to hold up his end of the bargain — one hand on R.H.’s breast and the other starting to lift her dress while, absently, he nibbled her ear (not even aware of her squirming until later) in direct violation, though he was woolgathering, lollygagging, oblivious of all her Geneva conventions, not even excited, in his content mode, thinking, it’s only Friday, there’s still Saturday.
Mrs. Post was standing over them.
“What,” Druff said, startled, “what?”
She laid one finger across the face of her wristwatch.
“Is it curfew? I’m sorry, I mustn’t have been paying attention. Is it curfew already?”
Though here and there there were people about, the room had begun to thin out. The bays and window seats were cleared, the piano bench. No one cuddled in the wing chairs, the sofas were all but vacant.
Rose Helen sat up and, to Druff’s chagrin, immediately began to lay into her housemother.
“How dare you?” she demanded. “He’s not the only one left.” Pointedly, she named names, not only indicating a few of her sorority sisters still lingering with their dates, but ticketing indiscretions, citing violations of dress codes, some general dishevelment of human decency.
“I’m sorry,” Druff mumbled, “I guess I must have lost track of the time.”
Rose Helen interrupted him. “You’ve nothing to apologize for, why are you apologizing?” And turned furiously to Mrs. Post. “Have you looked in the study rooms? Is everyone out of the study rooms?” She tugged at his sleeve. “Let’s just go see for ourselves.”
“I’m sorry,” Druff said, “I wasn’t paying close enough attention, I guess. I just didn’t hear that bell you ring in here ten minutes before curfew.”
“Stop saying you’re sorry. No one else says that. Do you hear anyone else saying they’re sorry? It’s not your job to be sorry, it’s not your job to listen for the bell. It isn’t your job to have people set their watches by you.” She was furious with them both, Rose Helen. And though it was Rose Helen who did the shouting, it was Druff and Mrs. Post who got all the attention. The girls, their dates, looked from one to the other of them following their flabbergast silence. Druff felt an odd connivance with and sympathy for the housemother. It occurred to him that her heavy, almost powerful hair, its immaculate sheen, so at odds with her wan, brittle features, must have been a wig. “Well, come on,” Rose Helen said, “let’s just see what’s going on in those study rooms!”