better off in bed with Wendy Judd.
People dream of money and love. It was Wendy's ambition to be hired as an extra in a big-budget Technicolor movie. She had no illusions of stardom. Fragmentation, the settling of a myth into the realism of its component parts, had come to the West quite early, and Wendy was a native Californian. She would have been satisfied to get the back of her head in a movie, her revolutionary fist raised in a Bastille crowd scene. She spent a lot of time with Simmons St. Jean, who taught film theory and criticism at Leighton Gage. Simmons was only thirty or so but he tried to come on like the post-accident Montgomery Clift, a hollow echoing man. He worked on his pallor the way the rest of us teased our suntans. At the same time he tried to let his male students know that for an old man he was doing all right with the girlies. Since I majored in film and since Simmons considered me the man to beat for stud honors, we had a certain wary interest in each other. Our discussions were full of small-arms fire. Wendy Judd and I had coffee with him one day.
'I'm just fascinated by you kids,' Simmons said. 'I was with one of my students the other night, the other evening I should say, girl named Pamela something, and I was virtually in awe of her unselfconsciousness and total lack of provincialism. Her quiet command of her own feelings. You kids are so wonderfully free and open. You have none of the hangups I had in college. It's a beautiful thing to see.'
'How come you look so tired and beat-up all the time?' Wendy said. 'Not that it's not attractive.'
'I'd just as soon not talk about myself. I've exhausted all hope of defining who or what I am. Perhaps some time, Wendy, if Dave permits, I'll tell you the story of my life. But for the time being I'd much rather listen to you two talk about yourselves. One of the many pleasures of teaching at a place like this is the uninhibited exchange between students and faculty. There's really nothing like it anywhere in the country. Dave, what kind of thesis are you planning this year?'
'I'm shooting it in the desert, Simmons. It'll be almost pure imagery. A small shade of meaning for those who crave it.'
'I thrive on imagery. It seems to have a laxative effect.'
'David showed me the thing he made last year,' Wendy said. 'Wasn't it wild, Simmons-all those reflections and shadows?'
'He didn't like it,' I said.
'I wouldn't say that, Dave. It had its moments.'
'He said it was meekly derivative. He mentioned, I believe, the early Kurosawa.'
'The prenatal Kurosawa would have been more like it,' Simmons said. 'I'd dearly love to pursue this further but I've got a class in ten minutes. My freshmen tend to get anxious if I don't show up on time. Father figure and all that.'
'I'm going that way,' Wendy said.
'I thought you and I might drive over to the lake,' I said. 'Why don't you come along, Simmons? We never see you at the lake. We look for you, Wendy and I, but we never see you.'
'I've got a class to get to. Which way are you heading, Wendy?'
'We're going to the lake,' I said. 'If you don't have a bathing suit, Simmons, you can borrow one of mine.'
'I'm sure you have enough swimwear for a brigade of lifeguards, Dave, but I'm afraid I'll have to take a rain check on that.'
'It's not raining.'
'You can use some sun,' Wendy said.
'You have to get out there and cop those rays, Simmons. You're spending too much time in the dark.'
'I console myself with the thought that nothing very interesting happens in well-lighted places.'
'Pow,' Wendy said.
Having secured the more essential of victories, I did not dispute the loser's right to get in the last word. Everybody knows how much solace the older generation takes in saving face.
Although there were no athletic teams at Leighton Gage, we were probably more serious about sports than the average student body. But we played games of a different kind-non-team, swift, dangerous. One of the important things money buys is speed. Speed and a glimpse of death. We drove sports cars and motorcycles in informal competition, rode beach buggies over the desert, raced motorboats on the artificial lake near the campus. Several students owned planes and if you were friendly with one of them you could go up to L.A for party weekends and on the return flight test your desire for an early poetic death. The force behind these activities was essentially spiritual. There were many injuries, several fatalities, and we reacted to these with professional dispassion. That's something money can't buy. But either you learn it or you go back to baseball.
Page Talbot's father bought her a fiberglass runabout for her birthday and had it sent out to the anti-lake about a mile north of the campus. She painted it lilac and yellow and planned to install a bedroom canopy until somebody talked her out of it. The first time she asked me to go sailing, as she called it, the outboard fell off and while we waited for someone to tow us in we sat there drinking beer, drifting in small circles, relatively content, pretending we were on an Arab dhow lazing through the papyrus slogs of the Sudanese Nile.
'I made it with Ken Wild last night,' she said.
'I didn't know you knew each other.'
'We didn't.'
'Well I don't want to hear about it.'
'He's nice really.'
'Did I tell you I'm thinking of getting married? I met this girl back home last summer and we've been corresponding. She's in London now touring the epitaphs. I've been thinking of popping the old question.'
'Frankly I don't know why anybody our age would want to get married,' Page said. 'Frankly it sounds to me like the end of the road.'
'Don't you have an urge to play house?'
'If it's a triplex on Montego Bay.'
'Tell me about Wild,' I said. 'Is he good in bed? Is he better than I am? I don't have to know any details. Just say yes or no. It's important.'
The Young Man Carbuncular vanished from the campus three months before graduation. Nobody knew where he went. I thought his disappearance might arouse some guilt in those who had ignored and ridiculed him. Instead it became a joke. People said he had gone to Tibet to find a holy man who might cure his boils; or was wandering in the desert, delirious, singing hit songs of the late forties; or had barricaded himself in the men's room of the library with a submachine gun, several hundred rounds of ammo and a can of spray-on deodorant. I went to Leonard's room one night hoping to find some indication of his whereabouts, a passage underlined in a book, a road map, a letter from his parents. All I found was a piece of paper on which was written:
Something tells me that I shall dream tonight of newspapers wrapped in fish
Leonard Zajac had been four years with us, a man for all his waddling pity, and the mystery of his flight, perhaps in overwhelming dread, was met with nothing more than mild relief. He returned the day after commencement. Some of us were still on campus, loading up cars, completing plans for vacations in the Andes, on the Balearic Islands, aboard schooners bound for the East Indies. In three months we would all have to start earning a living and there was a pitch of hysteria to the dialogue of that last day. Merry and I, who would be starting east in an hour or so, were talking with some friends on the quadrangle when Leonard touched me on the shoulder to whisper hello and goodbye. He said he had come to pick up his books. He had been living with the Havasupai Indians in Arizona, he said, and he planned to return immediately and to remain forever. When he asked me what my own plans were, I could only shrug. His inflammations were gone. He appeared to have lost about forty pounds. I did not introduce him to the others because, for the moment, I had forgotten his name.
Everything begins in California. It is like the hip lexicon of the ghetto; as soon as Madison Avenue breaks the code, Harlem devises a new one. So with California and New York. When surfing and nudity moved east, California got all decked out in flowing madras and went indoors to discover the commune. I liked it out there and might have stayed. But my father was back east, living alone in the music-box house, insistent on remaining. We all have something we are trying to forget. If we're smart we take off for parts unknown. But my father could not leave the house and I didn't have enough sense to remain at the shallow end of the continent. So I began to swim.
