This was also a habit of hers around home, being naked, which was also disconcerting to people when she occasionally opened the door to them before remembering.
On the twenty-one inch screen, Brad was teaching algebra in black and white. He was talking about something called a quadratic equation, and Maggie had a vague notion that this was a way of solving problems that she had been exposed to at some time or other in the past, but now she knew nothing about it of any significance, and it did not matter in the least that she didn’t, for she was only watching and listening because it was Brad she was seeing and hearing.
She wished that he could see her too, exactly as she was, just for the fun of watching his reaction in the box with his blackboard and his silly piece of chalk. This struck her as being a very entertaining speculation — what Brad would do if he could suddenly see her as she was, with nothing on at all. She smiled a little and kept thinking about it, but all this while, although she was not conscious of a single thing he said, her lips kept forming exactly the shape of every word.
After a bit, tiring of speculation, she again became conscious of the words, their meaning as nearly as she could grasp it, and she admired him tremendously for what he knew that she didn’t. Mostly, however, she admired him for looking so handsome and talking so cleverly, with just the merest tone of condescension for his unseen students. As a matter of fact, relative to her feeling in these matters, admiration was by no means the proper word for it. Whatever the word was, the feeling had something itchy in it.
Behind her, on a tousled bed pulled down into the room from a compartment in the wall, Buddy Jensen stirred and grunted and rose on one elbow.
He was a stocky young man with swarthy skin, thick shoulders and a dark sullen face that was given a cast of ferocity by black brows and thick curly hair, also black, that grew rather low on his forehead and always needed combing. His body matching Maggie’s in its present condition, was hard and powerful. It was the body of an athlete, though this was a kind of natural deception since he abhorred exercise of all sorts — physical and mental alike.
He had met Maggie about a year ago in another town, where she had been at loose ends, restless and bored but living fairly comfortably on the wages and fringe benefits of a temporary job as a waitress in a fancy bar, and there had been between them almost immediately a kind of dark combustion. Buddy had also been in comfortable circumstances at the time, thanks to a careless gentleman, slightly drunk and very lucky, who had been in a poker game that Buddy had been kibitzing in the back room of a cigar store. The gentleman had also been indiscreet, which was where his luck ended, and he had wakened later in an alley behind the cigar store, by which way he had left the game, with a splitting head and an empty wallet. The almost two thousand dollars that had been in the wallet were by that time in Buddy’s pocket, although Buddy was the only one who knew it. Not even Maggie ever knew it, although she helped spend the money.
Buddy’s parents were reasonably prosperous folk who had disowned him after paying off his third bad check, and he was himself at loose ends at this time. He had been going to college when the third bad check was written, but he was now unemployed and unoccupied and wondering what to do with himself. He was, in fact, wondering if it was worth while doing anything at all at the time he met Maggie. She had given him a sort of illicit purpose, justification for a bad life, and she had become, in fact, his only reason for wishing to live in a world that was generally threatening and inhospitable. Consequently, when she had decided later in the summer to leave town and enroll in college, without apparent logic from his point of view, he had quite naturally followed her to the town in which they now were, and had himself even enrolled in college again to keep her company. To finance all this, he robbed a filling station.
Now, having just awakened, he rubbed his eyes, scratched his scalp and looked foggily around the room to see where Maggie was and where the man’s voice was coming from.
After a few moments he located the lighted television screen, Brad in black and white and, finally, Maggie on the floor before it. He rubbed and scratched again, rearing a little higher on his elbow.
A faint flush came into his dark cheeks, adding to his look of ferocity. The flush was incited partly by the sight of Brad on television and partly by the sight of Maggie on the floor, each part for different reasons.
“What the hell are you doing down there on the floor?” he demanded.
She did not answer or turn her head. Her lips kept forming the shapes of words.
“You’ll catch your death of cold,” he told her.
Brad in the box, telling a funny anecdote all the while, kept writing numbers and letters on the blackboard with chalk, and there on the board all at once, as simple as could be, was the answer to everything, the whole problem, and Maggie was exorbitantly proud of Brad for getting the answer, even though she couldn’t see how, or why anyone would want to. Her lips formed the shape of the answer slowly, with pleasure, as if it had taste and the taste was good.
“You’d better answer if you know what’s good for you,” Buddy said.
“Shut up,” she answered, her voice carrying no inflection whatever.
His flush deepened and his heavy brows drew together over his nose, but he was quiet just the same, lying propped on his elbow and watching the finish of the algebra lesson. The lesson was already finished, as a matter of fact, and now in the last minute or two Brad was merely being clever about making the assignment. He faded away with his last word, and the theme came up, and credits began to appear on the screen one after another.
Still Maggie did not move. She continued couchant, belly down and chin cupped, apparently intending to remain in that position until the next lesson next Saturday. It was not a position, to say the least, that was calculated to alleviate the mixed emotions of Buddy behind her, scorned and contemptuously silenced. He was obviously brooding over this summary treatment, for when he spoke again it was with ominous truculence.
“What the hell did you mean,” he said, “telling me to shut up?”
“What I meant was plain enough,” she retorted. “Do you have to have the simplest thing explained to you in detail?”
“You’d better be careful how you talk to me, that’s all.”
“Oh, God! I’m utterly terrified.”
“What’s the matter with you? Are you crazy or something?” he demanded, his voice carrying a note of honest puzzlement.
“Maybe I am. I must be crazy to have anything to do with you.”
“That’s not the way you talked last night.”
“Well, don’t let it confuse you. What I said and did last night don’t necessarily mean anything this morning.”
“I ought to give you a good beating, that’s what I ought to do.”
“What you ought to do is get dressed and get out of here. I can’t stand you first thing in the morning,” she told him flatly, still not deigning to look around at him.
“Come here and I’ll show you how to stand me.”
“No, thank you. I prefer to stay here.”
“Why do you want to keep on lying there on the floor?”
“Just because I want to, that’s why.”
“You can’t go on lying there all day,” he pointed out.
“I can if I choose. I may do it.”
“Maybe you think if you lie there long enough your precious Professor Cannon will come back on television.”
“If I lie here long enough, that’s exactly what he’ll do. Next Saturday morning.”
“He’s about the worst creep there is. I don’t understand what you see in him.”
“Of course you don’t. You’re too stupid.”