etcetera, etcetera. All the gods, sneering, grimacing, or passive and smoldering, had a striking resemblance to Robert Mitchum.
Miss Mayberry beamed. She positively beamed.
“I brought wall tacks,” she said.
“How creative,” Miss Luptik said.
Then Miss Mayberry tacked up the gods. Miss Luptik worked along. She had been taken completely by surprise. Miss Mayberry won the day without losing an arrow.
As I sat watching, in the greenhouse of my heart a hatred bloomed simply and sweetly—a clean, neat hatred for the pink, ripe, bitchy, muffler-knitting, big-knockered, tight-assed Marilyn Mayberry. Instantly, easily, absolutely without anger, I swore vengeance on her for this fantastic act of total blasphemy. Without ado, the gods appointed Oliver August as their ambassador in this matter of honor. I accepted the job without hesitation.
How come?
To this day I can only speculate. Perhaps because I had only recently learned about being afraid. Miss Luptik allowed me to see something of dignity and beauty in that dirty emotion. The darkness is real. The Wakonda Bads are a bopping gang. There is reason to crap carefully during new moon, and therefore real reason to huddle together.
Having learned about fear, I learned about need. But all this was new and vulnerable insight.
Miss Marilyn Mayberry, on the other hand, was impatient with unseen phantoms. Tranquil since teething, tranquil she would remain. Undoubtedly she too had been disturbed by Miss Luptik’s doll, but she refused to nurse its ugly hunger. Her mother had warned her not to play jacks with the Wind People. There was too much going on, hope chests to fill, the promise of weddings and babies. So, a true child of science, she drew the gods and nearly killed them all.
The girl came close to wiping out all of Hell. That, of course, was really the terrible penalty the Indians suspected —that the evil gods would die, leaving nothing, not a stain, but only tepid paradise.
I screamed for blood. I swore to drill Marilyn Mayberry to some carpet, somewhere, with the bluntest instrument I could think of. That was the way it had to be, the only way to save the universe.
Imagine, I of tender passions, Oliver, who turned my adolescent eyes from those long, thin books that showed Popeye and Olive Oyl making love. I, the lonely dreamer, the nibbler of rose petals. I had grown feathers. I painted my face. Miss Mayberry was my buffalo. I wanted a coat made of her.
The pictures hung, the class went on. I heard Miss Luptik’s voice, but not the words. For the first time in my life, I had a single purpose. Already I was busy with blueprints.
After class, looking eager, I invited Miss Mayberry for a coke. She thought things over. I had a difficult moment. Did her antenna pick up static?
She said yes.
From then, to the end, it was a quaint courtship.
In the early phase my biggest problem was to conceal my red identity.
There is a story about a prince who was lonely. One day, looking at one of his fields from the castle tower, he saw a maiden. He wanted the maiden, so he saddled his white horse and galloped to where she was picking strawberries.
Around and around he rode, but the maiden never looked up. So back he rode and fell into depression. His wise man was called to diagnose the trouble. When he heard the prince’s story, he patted his royal head. He told the prince to sleep and seek guidance in a dream.
The prince slept and dreamed. He dreamed he rode a green horse. When he woke up the message hit him right away. He called his groom and ordered the groom to paint his stallion green.
“Green?” the groom said.
“Uh huh,” answered the prince. “Get the picture: I ride down to the field where this maiden is picking. She sees me on a green horse. Then she says, ‘Heavens, Sire, your horse is green.’ And I say, ‘Yes, beautiful lady. I am the prince.’ In a week, I send her flowers. In two weeks, I send her jewels. In a month, I grant her daddy a fief. In six months, I take my pleasure.”
“Great,” said the groom, and painted the horse green.
Later, the prince saw the maiden. He jumped on his green horse and went flying down to the field. Around and around he rode, but nothing happened. He rode faster, the horse snorting, the prince in a lather. Finally, the maiden looked up from her strawberry patch.
“Heavens, Sire,” she said in a golden voice, “your horse is green.”
“Yes, beautiful lady,” said the prince, “and in six months we’re going to screw.”
My situation was similar. The important thing was to go slow and steady. Dressing for dates, I double-checked my fly. I used my sister’s deodorant. I chewed Dentyne and gargled with Lavoris. I trimmed my pointy nails. Nothing should offend. No jagged ends should telegraph jagged intentions.
I followed a perfect timetable, forcing my mind to think like a German. It was two ballets at City Center, an Italian movie and an off-Broadway revival of The Tempest before I even touched her hand.
When I touched, she pulled away. I did not pursue with reckless fingers. I made a fist, as if in suffering, and rested the fist on the arm of my seat.
No need to give you every detail. Student romance is not the most interesting of subjects. You know how things go, in chords and flashes.
A human totem pole, with all the faces mine and smiling, I took Marilyn Mayberry into various worlds. If she did not like green horses, I would use brown paint. If not brown, lavender.
What did she like the best? Art? We went to the Modern Museum where she showed a taste for Edward Hopper’s picture of an usher in the movies.
“I like films,” she said. “And not only uptown. Right in the neighborhood is just as good.”
I took her to movies.
“I like foreign,” she said. “But I think people who criticize Hollywood are artsy-craftsy snobs.”
Remembering the Mitchum-faced gods, I confessed a love for the Warner Brothers.
Sports?
“Basketball is nice. The rest I can take or leave.”
The basketball season was over, so we left.
Books?
“I read and read,” she said. “And read and read and read. Do you enjoy Thomas Wolfe? I do.”
“I do.”
“Look Homeward Angel.”
“Oh yes.”
Food? She loved Chinese, a touchy subject in those days, but I went along.
“You order from group A.”
“No, really.”
“Go on. I’ll order from group B.”
“Let’s start with wonton.”
“Wonton is lovely. Two wonton soups, please. And chopsticks. We’ll eat with chopsticks.”
“I couldn’t. Olly, I just couldn’t.”
“You can. Sure you can. I just know you can.”
Meal after meal, I grappled with stilts. A winner down the line, Marilyn Mayberry never dropped a grain of pork fried rice or a single snow pea.
How I hated that girl.
Gradually, I got to know her. So comfortable within her healthy skin, Marilyn Mayberry was absolutely without pangs. She had never felt hunger. The few appetites that stirred in her were appetites for future feeding, and she was calm and confident that her table would be set in due time. This was not a girl who would sleep with a frog on the chance of morning metamorphosis. There was enough in the world to keep her happy. Why gamble when it is so much easier, and safer, to simply be cautious?
She liked everything about the twentieth century, from the Double-Crostics in the Times to Jackie Gleason. And she seemed to like them equally.
Oliver Chameleon, camouflaging my secret heart, took on painful coloration. When Marilyn Mayberry bought the New Yorker, we went to little theaters where they served Coffee in cups designed for thin lips. When she wished to rest from the better things, she would tell me about “when I was a little girl” and we would end up watching that mighty milleped called the Rockettes at Radio City.