I had a girl friend whose father ran an untidy, neglected drugstore; we often stopped by of an afternoon and made sodas for ourselves. I found myself one day looking up poisons in the pharmacopoeia, and I tried to reassure myself by recalling that, no matter how many times I’d read Crime and Punishment, I’d always hoped that Raskolnikov wouldn’t. Still, why had I avoided the school library and gone to the city one downtown?
“Then, one day when Tyng stood up to dismiss me after having been particularly vicious to me in the conference hour, he said: ‘Easter vacation coming up. Such a strain on poets. Perhaps you might curb your élan a little, during the Lenten season. Try not to drink quite so deep of the Pierian spring. Otherwise—’ Then he shook his head, licked the flap of an envelope he’d been fiddling with, and set it on the desk, as if for me to see. REPORTS , it said. RETURN TO REGISTRAR.
“I walked out of there holding my breath, but not because I was worried about the mark. I’d done the work, and for all its spotty precocity it wasn’t the kind he could openly give an F or D; what he’d do would be to purge me with mediocrity as he’d done last term, cupping my overheated blood with a C.
“No, what made me shiver, even as I passed girls in light jerseys on the tennis courts, was that licked envelope, falling to my lot as the knowledge that the old woman would be alone fell to Raskolnikov’s. Dozens of times I’d heard someone say, as we left Tyng’s course in Room 242: ‘Couldn’t you kill him?’ Now I realized that what I’d been saying to myself was ‘I could kill him.’ I don’t know what I’d have gone on to do if Ben Bijur hadn’t been waiting for me at the dorm—as he usually was, in spite of his best resolutions, almost every other day. He was waiting, though, in one of those chintzy cubicles they made boys wait in. In a way it was like being saved from jumping out the bedroom window by happening to be in the center of the room, thinking about it, when the plaster falls.
“I suppose I was in love with Ben Bijur because he was the first man who’d ever touched me. In later years I’ve seen words swarm about an idea just the way my spongy dreams clustered about Ben Bijur’s head the minute he put a hand on me and I let it stay. At home, in Ontario, I’d been a day student at a convent in a small town; the few local boys I’d known had been as fair and corn-fed as myself. This boy was enticingly swart and world-weary; he had splendid teeth and a fine baritone, but at twenty-two he was already losing his hair—a fact that he and I both looked upon, at the time, as an effect of character—and he was fond of saying quietly that he had been born old.
“The sad truth was that he had; his was one of those temperaments that never, even in senility, take the form of youth. At twenty-two, he was already a disappointed man, sulking at authority instead of flying at its eyes, carrying his hypersensitivity around with him the way a would-be suicide carries a knife—hoping to hurt himself. Even his frustrations seemed secondhand, as if he’d got them only through reading of Prufrock and Leopold Bloom. But at the time I was much impressed by the experiences at which Ben hinted—though he was, no doubt, as virginal as I—and when he repeated his fantasies of affairs with older women, I smoothed his poor, shedding scalp in awe. He was a word collector too, and used to tell me mournfully that he was afraid he was already putting life into footnotes without ever having enjoyed the text. Whereas, he used to say, there was something about me, young as I was, which marked me for the success that would pass him by. Sometimes he drew little word pictures of how, when ten years had passed, I would open the door of my penthouse and find him fainting on the doorstep, his feet wrapped up in burlap bags.
“Ben called me four or five times a week and dropped by during the day, but he
“Then, one day when Tyng stood up to dismiss me after having been particularly vicious to me in the conference hour, he said: ‘Easter vacation coming up. Such a strain on poets. Perhaps you might curb your élan a little, during the Lenten season. Try not to drink quite so deep of the Pierian spring. Otherwise—’ Then he shook his head, licked the flap of an envelope he’d been fiddling with, and set it on the desk, as if for me to see. REPORTS , it said. RETURN TO REGISTRAR.
“I walked out of there holding my breath, but not because I was worried about the mark. I’d done the work, and for all its spotty precocity it wasn’t the kind he could openly give an F or D; what he’d do would be to purge me with mediocrity as he’d done last term, cupping my overheated blood with a C.
“No, what made me shiver, even as I passed girls in light jerseys on the tennis courts, was that licked envelope, falling to my lot as the knowledge that the old woman would be alone fell to Raskolnikov’s. Dozens of times I’d heard someone say, as we left Tyng’s course in Room 242: ‘Couldn’t you kill him?’ Now I realized that what I’d been saying to myself was ‘I could kill him.’ I don’t know what I’d have gone on to do if Ben Bijur hadn’t been waiting for me at the dorm—as he usually was, in spite of his best resolutions, almost every other day. He was waiting, though, in one of those chintzy cubicles they made boys wait in. In a way it was like being saved from jumping out the bedroom window by happening to be in the center of the room, thinking about it, when the plaster falls.
“I suppose I was in love with Ben Bijur because he was the first man who’d ever touched me. In later years I’ve seen words swarm about an idea just the way my spongy dreams clustered about Ben Bijur’s head the minute he put a hand on me and I let it stay. At home, in Ontario, I’d been a day student at a convent in a small town; the few local boys I’d known had been as fair and corn-fed as myself. This boy was enticingly swart and world-weary; he had splendid teeth and a fine baritone, but at twenty-two he was already losing his hair—a fact that he and I both looked upon, at the time, as an effect of character—and he was fond of saying quietly that he had been born old.
“The sad truth was that he had; his was one of those temperaments that never, even in senility, take the form of youth. At twenty-two, he was already a disappointed man, sulking at authority instead of flying at its eyes, carrying his hypersensitivity around with him the way a would-be suicide carries a knife—hoping to hurt himself. Even his frustrations seemed secondhand, as if he’d got them only through reading of Prufrock and Leopold Bloom. But at the time I was much impressed by the experiences at which Ben hinted—though he was, no doubt, as virginal as I—and when he repeated his fantasies of affairs with older women, I smoothed his poor, shedding scalp in awe. He was a word collector too, and used to tell me mournfully that he was afraid he was already putting life into footnotes without ever having enjoyed the text. Whereas, he used to say, there was something about me, young as I was, which marked me for the success that would pass him by. Sometimes he drew little word pictures of how, when ten years had passed, I would open the door of my penthouse and find him fainting on the doorstep, his feet wrapped up in burlap bags.
“Ben called me four or five times a week and dropped by during the day, but he
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