He looked at me without expression. “You can have some of mine,” he said, handing me the box.
“Thank you. I wish they’d put in a vending machine, you’d think they’d have the sense to.” Then I recognized him: it was the young man from the beer interview. I stood there holding the box. How had he known I’d forgotten my soap? I hadn’t said it out loud.
He was scrutinizing me more closely. “Oh,” he said, “now I know who you are. I didn’t place you at first. Without that official shell you look sort of – exposed.” He bent over his machine again.
Exposed. Was that good or bad? I checked quickly to make sure no seams were split or zippers undone; then I began to cram the clothes hastily into the machines, putting darks in one and lights in the other. I didn’t want him to be finished before I was so that he would be able to watch me, but he was done in time to observe several of Ainsley’s lacy frivolities being flung through the door.
“Those yours?” he asked with interest.
“No,” I said, flushing.
“Didn’t think so. They didn’t look like you.”
Had that been a compliment or an insult? Judging by his uninflected voice it had been merely a comment; and as a comment it was accurate enough, I thought wryly.
I shut the two thick glass doors and put the quarters in the slots, paused till the familiar sloshing sound informed me that all was well, then went over to the line of chairs provided by the management and sat down in one of them. I’d have to wait it out, I realized; there was nothing else to do in that area on Sundays. I could have gone to a movie, but I didn’t have enough money with me. I’d even forgotten to bring a paperback to read. What could I have been thinking of when I left the apartment? I don’t usually forget things.
He sat down next to me. “The only thing about laundromats,” he said, “is that you’re always finding other people’s pubic hairs in the washers. Not that I mind particularly. I’m not picky about germs or anything. It’s just rather gross. Have some chocolate?”
I glanced around to see if anyone had heard, but we were alone in the laundromat. “No thanks,” I said.
“I don’t like it much either but I’m trying to quit smoking.” He peeled the chocolate bar and slowly devoured it. We both stared at the long line of gleaming white machines, and especially at those three glass windows, like portholes or aquaria, where our clothes were going round and around, different shapes and colours appearing, mingling, disappearing, appearing again out of a fog of suds. He finished his chocolate bar, licked his fingers, smoothed and folded the silver wrapper neatly and put it in one of his pockets, and took out a cigarette.
“I sort of like watching them,” he said; “I watch laundromat washers the way other people watch television, it’s soothing because you always know what to expect and you don’t have to think about it. Except I can vary my programmes a little; if I get tired of watching the same stuff I can always put in a pair of green socks or something colourful like that.” He was talking in a monotone, sitting hunched forward, his elbows on his knees, his head drawn down into the neck of his dark sweater like a turtle’s into its shell. “I come here quite a lot; sometimes I just have to get out of that apartment. It’s all right as long as I have something to iron; I like flattening things out, getting rid of the wrinkles, it gives me something to do with my hands, but when I run out of things to iron, well, I have to come here. To get some more.”
He wasn’t even looking at me. He might have been talking to himself. I leaned forward too, so I could see his face. In the blue-tinged fluorescent lighting of the laundromat, a light that seems to allow no tones and no shadows, his skin was even more unearthly. “I have to get out, it’s that apartment. In the summer it’s like a hot, dark oven, and when it’s that hot you don’t even want to turn on the iron. There isn’t enough space anyway but the heat makes it shrink, the others get too close. I can feel them even in my own room with the door closed; I can tell what they’re doing. Fish barricades himself into that chair and hardly moves, even when he’s writing, and then he tears it all up and says it’s no good and sits there for days staring at the pieces of paper on the floor; once he got down on his hands and knees and tried to put them together again with scotch-tape, and failed of course, and threw a real scene and accused both of us of trying to use his ideas to publish first and stealing some of the pieces. And Trevor, when he isn’t away at summer school or heating the apartment up cooking twelve-course dinners, I’d just as soon eat canned salmon, practises his fifteenth-century Italian calligraphy, scrollwork and flourishes, and goes on and on about the quattrocento. He has an amazing memory for detail. I guess it’s interesting but somehow it isn’t the answer, at least not for me, and I don’t think it really is for him either. The thing is, they repeat themselves and repeat themselves but they never get anywhere, they never seem to finish anything. Of course I’m no better, I’m just the same, I’m stuck on that wretched term paper. Once I went to the zoo and there was a cage with a frenzied armadillo in it going around in figure-eights, just around and around in the same path. I can still remember the funny metallic sound its feet made on the bottom of the cage. They say all caged animals get that way when they’re caged, it’s a form of psychosis, and even if you set the animals free after they go like that they’ll just run around in the same pattern. You read and read the material and after you’ve read the twentieth article you can’t make any sense out of it anymore, and then you start thinking about the number of books that are published in any given year, in any given month, in any given week, and that’s just too much. Words,” he said, looking in my direction finally but with his eyes strangely unfocussed, as though he was really looking at a point several inches beneath my skin, “are beginning to lose their meanings.”
The machines were switching into one of their rinsing cycles, whirling the clothes around faster and faster; then there was more running water, and more churning and sloshing. He lit another cigarette.
“I gather you’re all students, then,” I said.
“Of course,” he said mournfully, “couldn’t you tell? We’re all graduate students. In English. All of us. I thought everyone in the whole city was; we’re so totally inbred that we never see anyone else. It was quite strange when you walked in the other day and turned out not to be.”
“I always thought that would be sort of exciting.” I didn’t really, I was trying to be responsive, but I was conscious as soon as I’d closed my mouth of the schoolgirl gushiness of the remark.
“Exciting.” He snickered briefly. “I used to think that. It looks exciting when you’re an eager brilliant undergraduate. They all say, Go on to graduate studies, and they give you a bit of money; and so you do, and you think, Now I’m going to find out the real truth. But you don’t find out, exactly, and things get pickier and pickier and more and more stale, and it all collapses in a welter of commas and shredded footnotes, and after a while it’s like anything else: you’ve got stuck in it and you can’t get out, and you wonder how you got there in the first place. If this were the States I could excuse myself by saying I’m avoiding the draft, but, as it is, there’s no good reason. And besides that, everything’s being done, it’s been done already, fished out, and you yourself wallowing around in the dregs at the bottom of the barrel, one of those ninth-year graduate students, poor bastards, scrabbling through manuscripts for new material or slaving away on the definitive edition of Ruskin’s dinner invitations and theatre stubs or trying to squeeze the last pimple of significance out of some fraudulent literary nonentity they dug up somewhere. Poor old Fischer is writing his thesis now, he wanted to do it on Womb Symbols in D. H. Lawrence but they all told him that had been done. So now he’s got some impossible theory that gets more and more incoherent as he goes along.” He stopped.
“Oh, what is it?” I said, to joggle him out of silence.
“I don’t really know. He won’t even talk about it any more except when he’s loaded, and then no one can understand him. That’s why he keeps tearing it up – he reads it over and he can’t understand any of it himself.”
“And what are you doing yours on?” I couldn’t quite imagine.
“I haven’t got to that point yet. I don’t know when I ever will or what will happen then. I try not to think about it. Right now I’m supposed to be writing an overdue term paper from the year before last. I write a sentence a day. On good days, that is.” The machines clicked into their spin-dry cycle. He stared at them, morosely.
“Well, what’s your term paper on then?” I was intrigued; as much, I decided, by the changing contours of his face as by what he was saying. At any rate I didn’t want him to stop talking.
“You don’t really want to know,” he said. “Pre-Raphaelite pornography. I’m trying to do something with Beardsley, too.”
“Oh.” We both considered in silence the possible hopelessness of this task. “Maybe,” I suggested somewhat hesitantly, “you’re in the wrong business. Maybe you might be happier doing something else.”
He snickered again, then coughed. “I should stop smoking,” he said. “What else
