Indignation

“Oh, no,” I said. “And she’s where?”

“At a hospital specializing in psychiatric care.”

“But she can’t possibly be pregnant too.”

“She can and she is. A helpless young woman, a deeply unhappy person suffering from long-standing mental and emotional problems, unable adequately to protect herself against the pitfalls of a young woman’s life, has been taken advantage of by someone. By someone with a lot of explaining to do.”

“It’s not me,” I said.

“What was reported to us about your conduct as a patient at the hospital suggests otherwise, Marcus.”

“I don’t care what it ‘suggests.’ I will not be condemned on the basis of no evidence. Sir, I resent once again your portrayal of me. You falsify my motives and you falsify my deeds. I did not have sexual intercourse with Olivia.” Flushing furiously I said, “I have never had sexual intercourse with anyone. Nobody in this world can be pregnant because of me. It’s impossible!”

“Given all we now know,” the dean said, “that’s also hard to believe.”

“Oh, fuck you it is!” Yes, belligerently, angrily, impulsively, and for the second time at Winesburg. But I would not be condemned on no evidence. I was sick of that from everyone.

He stood, not to rear back like Elwyn and take a shot at me but to let himself be seen in all his office’s majesty. Nothing moved except for his eyes, which scanned my face as if in itself it were a moral scandal.

I left, and the wait to be expelled began. I couldn’t believe Olivia was pregnant, just as I couldn’t believe she’d sucked off Cottler or anyone else at Winesburg other than me. But whether or not it was true that she was pregnant — pregnant without telling me; pregnant, as it were, overnight; pregnant perhaps before she even got to Winesburg; pregnant, quite impossibly, like their Virgin Mary — I’d myself been drawn into the vapidity not merely of the Winesburg College mores but of the rectitude tyrannizing my life, the constricting rectitude that, I was all too ready to conclude, was what had driven Olivia crazy. Don’t look to the family for the cause, Ma — look to what the conventional world deems impermissible! Look to me, so pathetically conventional upon his arrival here that he could not trust a girl because she blew him!

My room. My room, my home, my hermitage, my tiny Winesburg haven — when I reached it that Friday after a trek more laborious than I’d been expecting up a mere three and a half flights of stairs, I found the bedsheets and blankets and pillows strewn in every direction and the mattress and the floor overspread with the contents of my dresser drawers, all of which were flung wide open. Undershirts, undershorts, socks, and handkerchiefs were wadded up and scattered across the worn wooden floor along with shirts and trousers that had been pulled with their hangers from my tiny alcove of a closet and hurled everywhere. Then I saw — in the corner under the room’s high little window — the garbage: apple cores, banana skins, Coke bottles, cracker boxes, candy wrappers, jelly jars, partially eaten sandwiches, and torn-off chunks of packaged bread smeared with what at first I took to be shit but was mercifully only peanut butter. A mouse appeared from amid the pile and scuttled under the bed and out of sight. Then a second mouse. Then a third.

Olivia. In a rage with my mother and me, Olivia had come to ransack and besmirch my room and then gone off to commit suicide. It horrified me to think that, crazed with rage as she was, she could have finished off this lunatic fiasco by slicing open her wrists right there on my bed.

There was a stink of rotting food, and another smell, equally strong, but one that I couldn’t identify right off, so stunned was I by what I saw and surmised. Directly at my feet was a single sock turned inside out. I picked up the sock and held it to my nose. The sock, congealed into a crumpled mass, smelled not of feet but of dried sperm. Everything I then picked up and held to my nose smelled the same. Everything had been steeped in sperm. The hundred dollars’ worth of clothing that I’d bought at the College Shop had been spared only because they’d been on my back when I went off to the infirmary with appendicitis.

While I was away in the hospital somebody camping in my room had been masturbating day and night into almost every item I owned. And it wasn’t, of course, Olivia. It was Flusser. It had to be Flusser. I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you. And this one-man bacchanalia was the revenge on me.

Suddenly I began to gag — as much from the shock as from the smells — and I stepped out the door to ask aloud of the empty corridor what harm I had done Bertram Flusser that he should perpetrate the grossest vandalism on my piddling possessions. In vain I tried to understand the enjoyment he had taken in defiling everything that was mine. Caudwell at one end and Flusser at the other; my mother at one end and my father at the other; playful, lovely Olivia at one end and broken-down Olivia at the other. And betwixt them all, I importunately defending myself with my fatuous fuck yous.

Sonny Cottler explained everything when he came for me in his car and I took him upstairs to show him the room. Standing in the doorway with me Sonny said, “He loves you, Marcus. These are tokens of his love.” “The garbage too?” “The garbage especially,” Sonny said. “The John Barrymore of Winesburg has been swept off his feet.” “Is that true? Flusser’s queer?” “Mad as a fucking hatter, queer as a three-dollar bill. You should have seen him in satin knee breeches in School for Scandal. Onstage, Flusser’s hilarious — perfect mimic, brilliant farceur. Offstage, he’s completely cracked. Offstage, Flusser’s a gargoyle. There are such gargoyle people, Marcus, and you have now run into one.” “But this isn’t love — that’s absurd.” “Lots about love is absurd,” Cottler told me. “He’s proving to you how potent he is.” “No,” I said, “if it’s anything, it’s hatred. It’s antagonism. Flusser’s turned my room into a garbage dump because he hates my guts. And what did I do? I broke the goddamn record that he kept me up with all night long! Only that was weeks ago, that was back when I’d just got here. And I bought a new one — I went out the next day and replaced it! But for him to do a thing so huge and destructive and disgusting as this, that I should stick in his craw so much for so long — it makes no sense. You would think he was miles above caring about anybody like me — and instead, this clash, this quarrel, this loathing! What now? What next? How can I possibly live here anymore?” “You can’t for now. We’ll set you up tonight with a cot at the house. And I can loan you some clothes.” “But look at this place, smell this place! He wants me to wallow in this shit! Christ, now I have to talk to the dean, don’t I? I have to report this vendetta, don’t I?” “To the dean? To Caudwell? I wouldn’t advise it. Flusser won’t go quietly, Marcus, if you’re the one who fingers him. Talk to the dean and he’ll tell Caudwell you’re the man in his life. Talk to the dean and he’ll tell Caudwell that you had a lover’s spat. Flusser is our abominable bohemian. Yes, even Winesburg has one. Nobody can curb Bertram Flusser. If they throw Flusser out because of this, he’ll take you down with him — that I guarantee. The last thing to do is to go to the dean. Look, first you’re felled by an appendectomy, then all your worldly goods are bespattered by Flusser — of course you can’t think straight.” “Sonny, I cannot afford to get thrown out of school!” “But you haven’t done anything,” he said, closing the door to my stinking room. “Something was done to you.”

But I and my animosity had done plenty, of course, upon being charged by Caudwell with impregnating Olivia.

I didn’t like Cottler and didn’t trust him, and the moment I stepped into the car to take him up on his offer of a cot and some clothes, I knew I was making yet another mistake. He was glib, he was cocky, he considered himself superior not just to Caudwell but probably to me as well. A child of the classiest Cleveland Jewish suburb, with long dark lashes and a cleft in his chin, with two letters in basketball and, despite his being a Jew, the president for the second straight year of the Interfraternity Council — the son of a father who wasn’t a butcher but the owner of his own insurance firm and of a mother who wasn’t a butcher either but the heiress to a Cleveland department-store fortune — Sonny Cottler was just too smooth for me, too self-certain for me, quick and clever in his way but altogether the perfectly exemplary external young man. The smartest thing for me to do was to get the hell out of Winesburg and get myself back to New Jersey and, though it was already a third of the way into the semester, try, before I got grabbed up by the draft, to rematriculate at Robert Treat. Leave the Flussers and the Cottlers and the Caudwells behind you, leave Olivia behind you, and head home by train tomorrow, home where there is only a befuddled butcher to deal with, and the rest is hardworking, coarse-grained, bribe-ridden, semi- xenophobic Irish-Italian-German-Slavic-Jewish-Negro Newark.

But because I was in a state, I went to the fraternity house instead, and there Sonny introduced me to Marty Ziegler, one of the fraternity members, a soft-spoken boy looking as though he hadn’t yet required a shave, a junior from Dayton who idolized Sonny, who would do anything Sonny asked, a born follower to a born leader, who, up in the privacy of Sonny’s room, agreed on the spot, for only a buck and a half a session, to be my proxy at chapel — to sign my name on the attendance card, to hand it in at the church door on the way out, and to speak to no one