The Cat's Pajamas & Witch's Milk: Two Novels Read online

  “You remember that reefer I told you one of my students gave me?” he said to Sherry at dinner. “Here it is.”

  “Oh, let me see it. I’ve never seen one. Not much to look at, are they?”

  “I suppose most of them are homemade.” He watched her examine it as he had, with a gingerly curiosity. “They’re quite harmless, apparently. You just get high and that’s all. No aftereffects. And better for you than liquor. Care to try it?”

  “Well, I don’t know,” she answered with a nervous giggle. “Are you game?”

  “Why not?”

  The giggle proved prophetic of the experience in store for them. For the result was mainly a laughing jag that went on all evening, and half the night. They sat smoking together on the couch, passing the cigarette back and forth between them and sucking in as much air as possible with each drag, which debauchees were said to do in order to derive maximum benefit from the smoke. Holding the last of the cigarette by a toothpick thrust into it, they managed to consume every scrap. By that time Sherry had begun to bite him on the nose and ears, laughing all the while. The toothpick seemed to amuse Tattersall. He held it up to open derision for some time before discarding it in an ashtray.

  He carried Sherry upstairs to the bedroom, where he turned on a light and proceeded to scrutinize every naked inch of her with a relish that consisted in the most intense and concentrated appreciation of geometric forms. He traced the arcs, curves, parabolas, the concavities and convexities of which her figure seemed the supreme embodiment. He had an especially exaggerated eye for the triangulations which she suddenly struck him as possessing in the most inexhaustible profusion. There was a triangle of imaginary lines drawn between her hips and feet when they were together, reversed when the legs were spread and the lines were drawn between her parted feet and her navel. The fleece beneath was triangular. There was a triangle of which that was a point, and the other two formed by the breasts, also, themselves, vaguely triune. “Turn over,” Tattersall ordered, and, rolling her onto her stomach, continued his pursuit of the trinities on the dorsal plane. Long after Sherry’s amusement had, in sexual satiety, subsided to a series of contented grunts, Tattersall remained in full sway. Everything excited his mirth. She found him laughing at a door hinge, and when she asked from the bed what was so funny, he worked the door a few times by way of demonstration, pointing derisively at it. He turned back into the room.

  “Do you know what broke Schopenhauer up?” he said.

  “Gee, you mean he ever laughed at anything? Beside women’s hips?”

  “A tangent. It’s a fact. He thought a tangent was funny. I’m serious. To understand why, you have to know what his hypotenuse—Jesus, hypothesis of humor was. That laughter—now listen carefully—laughter is our sudden perception of the incongruity between an abstract concept and the actual reality. A tangent is an example. Turn over on your stomach again.”

  He picked up a book and held it against her rump.

  “This forms what is known as an ordinary tangent. Right? A straight line in this relation to a curve. Now what made Schopenhauer smile every time he saw one was, he said, the incongruity between our abstract knowledge that a straight line and a curved one can never, never form an angle, and the fact that such an angle lies visibly before us on paper.”

  “What a price to pay for genius.”

  “You’re beautiful. Marry me.”

  “Oh, not again. It’s such a nasty night out.”

  “All right, later in the week then. I thought we might try Connecticut this time. We can get the blood test and license by the weekend. We can decide on the honeymoon later.”

  “If you insist, but I don’t know why so soon again. It isn’t as though this marriage isn’t working out. I think it’s working out beautifully. Better than most of the rest, don’t you think?”

  Tattersall said he agreed, but it wasn’t a question of that. It wasn’t a matter of how old or how successful the marriage was. He had undergone experiences of so radically transforming a nature that he could not be considered the same person as he had been. Nor, he thought, could she. They were two different people, in need of fresh partners. In short, a new union.

  “I’ll make you happier, too,” he said. “I feel I can do anything for you. Swim the highest mountain, climb the deepest ocean. Make us rich overnight by inventing some new kind of computer, or getting control of an industrial corporation by winning a proxy fight. Anything but teach!” he suddenly and unexpectedly blurted out in conclusion.

  That was the thing that worried Sherry—the suspicion that he was spoiling for a new identity, not just a change in the old one, or a temporary variation of it. It cast a shadow on her forthcoming marriage.

  They were married in Greenwich and honeymooned in the Motel On the Mountain, off the New York State Thruway. He padded barefoot toward his virgin. “What a lovely breast,” he said, fondling one. “So soft and sweet, yet so firm. Oh, and you’ve another right next to it. Excellent.”

  Word soon spread that they were newlyweds. A party at another table in the dining room sent over a bottle of wine when they were having dinner.

  “This is the part I feel guilty about,” Sherry whispered, after they had raised their glasses in a salute of acknowledgment to the donors. “I don’t feel right about it.”

  “Nonsense. It gives people pleasure. Look at the host beam. And there’s nothing you can do about it. It’s one of those things. So enjoy yourself. The end of all good hunting is closer than you think. I aim to. I’ll soon enough have to go back to the campus and all those damned problems again.”

  “How are you going to vote on the dormitory rules?”

  “The way I feel now?” Tattersall pressed her hand with a suggestive grin. “Probably to repeal them altogether.”

  “You want to lose your job, don’t you?” Sherry said, returning his smile by darting him an anxious glance.

  “Oh, come on. This lobster is terrific.”

  “All the same I’m worried.”

  She was a simple woman, and it was just like her to know him better than he knew himself.

  Five

  Tattersall watched the demonstration from a distance. Several hundred students were marching in a steady circle around the Administration Building chanting “No curfew on weekends!”, the slogan also emblazoned on several of the placards they shouldered or held aloft. Some posters were embellished with drawings depicting boys and girls disposed in unobjectionable arrangements, such as playing cards under bright floor lamps, or sitting on the floor in protectively large numbers, listening to records and drinking nothing stronger than beer. There was nothing to suggest that the quarters for which liberalized regulations were demanded were dormitory rooms, or that boys were asking permission to entertain girls without chaperones behind closed doors, if they so wished.

  The demonstration was being staged to coincide with Reunion Week, and now visiting alumni of various ages stood in groups around the fountain near which Tattersall had paused. There were a number of seniors among the onlookers; more than among the participants, since they were about to graduate and leave, and had little or no interest in the subject now. They had more curiosity about the alumni which they were on the brink of becoming. The old grads soon had their fill and returned, by contrast, to more nostalgic concerns, swapping reminiscences, exchanging gossip, and in at least one case, striking up a song or two. The music mingled with the sound of the chanting, which though persistent was restrained and systematic, in keeping with the admonition to “orderly milling.” “Orderly Milling,” Tattersall thought to himself. “It sounds like a hospital employee. Hello, Orderly Milling? Send up another tank of oxygen to Room 312.”

  “Hello, Hank.” Wurlitzer, after a spell of harmonizing, had strolled to his side.

  For Wurlitzer was a graduate of Chichester too, making the final, nagging configuration to a mind prey to triangles. He attended college functions with a special fervor since meeting Lucy at another spring reunion h
ere—her seventh and his fourteenth, as Tattersall rather churlishly noted in a new-math calculation which he chose to believe made Wurlitzer twice Lucy’s and his age. It gave him, that is, twice their adult life. Thus Wurlitzer and Lucy had met as alumni, he and Lucy as classmates, but this did not deprive Wurlitzer of the fancy that he had “beaten Tattersall out”—such at least was the conviction corroding Tattersall now. Lucy had upon their graduation suggested they not correspond, as letters might delusively foster and protract a relationship best regarded as a schoolday fling over and done with. She had taken the words out of Tattersall’s mouth, but he had quixotically not told her so—which left him, in retrospect, a suitor refused. Feminine vanity would inevitably make it so; masculine ego, as typified by Wurlitzer, lay the flattering unction to its heart as well. The assumption that he lived in left field was too much for Tattersall. The sense that he and Wurlitzer were rivals fed at him like a canker worm.

  “How do you feel about it?” With a nod Wurlitzer indicated the demonstration to which his question applied.

  Tattersall understood it to be Wurlitzer’s view that young people “went too far,” “demanded too much,” and were “getting out of hand.” Which was just enough to congeal a latent sympathy with their cause into formal support on Tattersall’s part. It was all he needed.

  “I think they’re right,” he said.

  “You do?”

  “Yes. We’re here to give them an education. Not regulate their private lives.”

  “Then why aren’t you in there marching with them?”

  Wurlitzer had spoken it facetiously, even with a discernible laugh. But Tattersall answered, “Why not indeed?” and strode over and joined the line.

  He was rather surprised to find himself there, since he was also a member of the discipline committee. The demonstrators marched three and four abreast, and he tramped rhythmically along to the right of a youth in a black turtleneck sweater, on whose left was a girl in a plaid skirt and maroon cardigan. That they ignored Tattersall pleased him, since it meant they saw nothing unusual in his participation by reason of age or appearance. In his tweed coat and black knit tie he could easily pass for one of Wurlitzer’s crazy mixed-up kids. Braced by these deductions, he threw his shoulders back and lustily joined in chanting, “No curfew Saturday! Curfew shall not ring on Saturday!”

  For all the rhythmic shouting and stomping, quite blood-rousing in its way, the line steadily circling the Administration Building was indeed an orderly one. It recalled prisoners being exercised in a yard. The half-dozen or so cops one passed at their successive posts, standing with feet planted apart and nursing their sticks behind their backs, heightened this resemblance to an orbiting contingent of inmates in stir. Was that how the term had originated? They quite resembled a vast porridge being stirred by an invisible authoritative ladle. On one circuit he saw President Mattock and Dean Shaffer posing with the student ringleaders for some newspaper photographs. They smiled in a simulated tableau of amicably Hearing the Young People Out, and as if in balanced rejection of any implication that youth was Going to the Dogs. One of the ringleaders was not too fortunate a spokesman for the cause, having, in a way, compromised it.

  Bats Hartack was a junior majoring in architecture, who had violated every rule concerning girls and dormitories except one—the eleven o’clock Lights Out rule. His lights were always out well before that time. On that score there could be no complaints. Since the present expanding agitation had started, some few months before, he had been found with a girl in his bed. Opinion was divided as to whether this prejudiced the cause or performed the service of bringing it into clear and dramatic focus. Some such debate was presumed to be going forward now between the principals, judging by the way reporters took note, now on what one side said, now the other. All this was orderly too. Then suddenly the scene was given a different and quite galvanizing emphasis. Tattersall was recognized. Another minute and he would have been safely past the front of the building. But one of the ringleaders spotted him and instantly made capital of it. “There’s Mr. Tattersall!” he shouted, pointing, and Tattersall was led captive through the roaring mob.

  His statement was straightforward and terse. It began with what he had pithily told Wurlitzer, that they were there to educate the students, not regulate their private lives. “Parietal rules, as we call these campus regulations, can only be partial and therefore hypocritical in any case,” he said, as pencils flew and cameras clicked. “The rules themselves mean nothing. Whether you have a two A.M. curfew or a ten o’clock one, there are still twenty-four hours in a day. And nobody checks the rooms anyway, except in the most desultory and sporadic fashion. The possibility of what you may find in them makes such espionage more disagreeable than the offenses they uncover.”

  “Then how was Hartack caught?” a reporter asked.

  “By someone not looking for that at all. He’d heard there was something stronger than beer in the room, and happened to find something stronger than whiskey.”

  “What are your views on that? As a member of the discipline committee, would you expel a student for drinking bourbon on campus?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why, if not for the other?”

  “Because in that case he’s breaking a state law, and worse, a gentlemen’s agreement. There’s a delicate truce between us and the local authorities, by which they connive at beer and wine in return for our cracking down on whiskey. It’s not perfect, any more than anything in this world is, but it’s one way of solving this whole tricky and complex problem of college drinking. And it works. It’s an honor thing, if you will, and so if I found Hartack drinking whiskey, yes, I’d kick him out. His sex life is his own business. That does not involve what you could accurately call a gentlemen’s agreement.” The laughter was such that Tattersall could enjoy having to hold his hand up for quiet. “We don’t interfere with the sex life of students living off campus. They sleep together in one another’s apartments all over town and everyone knows it. That’s what I mean about its all being hypocritical. The parietal rules are not honest.”

  The President’s face, which looked like a pot of tomatoes the best of times, now positively blazed, as though it had caught fire, while the Dean simply looked at the ground with his crapkicking smile, as though it was he who had been caught with the girl, and was a devil.

  “Do you have a statement to make about all this?” one of the reporters asked the President.

  “Just that there will be an emergency meeting of the discipline committee in my office in exactly one hour,” the President said, and turned on his heel and strode away.

  As a member of it, Tattersall scurried conscientiously about in preparation for the meeting. He sought Hartack out immediately after the demonstration and ordered him to appear without fail at the emergency session. He had a plan which he hoped would put an end to this whole sordid muddle, and marching in unexpectedly with Bats Hartack by his side served his strategy by catching the President unawares. The President was engaged in preliminary consultation with the two other members of the committee: the Dean, and Edmonds of the History Department, a man who sucked on curved pipes and weighed both sides before making a judgment.

  “What is the meaning of bringing Hartack in on this, Tattersall?” the President demanded, looking up.

  “I thought that’s what you meant. That he be summoned. Else what’s the meeting for?”

  “To consider you! As you very well know. Your insubordination—which I make no bones about calling it. This is real malfeasance. What right have you to march in a demonstration aimed at a committee of which you are a member? Up to now anyway,” the President added darkly. If one might not more accurately say brightly, for his face glowed dangerously again. He ground his teeth wretchedly a moment, and then said, “Do you march against yourself, man!”

  “I don’t look at it that way. I took the demonstration to be just what the term implies. A public declaration of opinion. No more, no less. There are some
students who oppose liberalizing the parietal rules, and they were given their right to heckle. Conversely some faculty members favor it, and by the same token share in the right to speak up and say what they think. Or so I assume, unless free speech is a one-way street.”

  The President looked to Edmonds for his view on this thinking, and in so doing riveted all eyes upon him. Edmonds nodded thoughtfully, puffing on his pipe, and at last said through a cloud of smoke which obscured him personally, as Jehovah was said to obscure himself in making pronouncements, “I think Tattersall has a point. It’s a piece of casuistry, granted, but valid in its way. He’s compromised us as a committee in one sense. But in another he’s certified us before the world as honestly accommodating dissent, thereby laying claim for us to a confidence which the student body is now in all conscience obliged to give.”

  “What do you think, Dean?”

  “I’m in agreement.”

  “With whom—Edmonds and Tattersall, or me?”

  This was hard on the Dean, who tried to take both sides of every question, not merely, like Edmonds, weigh them with a view to selecting one. The fence-straddling was in turn hard on the President. It was an open secret that the Dean’s definite maybes were chief among the factors undermining the President’s health; that another mouthful of mush would kill him, by bringing on another duodenal crisis.

  “I agree with you absolutely that Tattersall’s action was imprudent from one point of view,” the Dean said, “but that by sheer luck it may turn out in our favor.” While the President sat magisterially trying to hear everyone out before deciding whether to release unto them Barabbas or another, the Dean, his chins making him look more than ever like a pelican, took the opportunity to glance at Hartack as someone to whom plain disapproval could be safely directed. “Once we know what in the world Hartack is doing here.”

  That worthy (as such types were called in the fiction Tattersall knew full well the Dean still read) had all this while been standing, as, indeed, had Tattersall. After waving them to chairs, the President acidly asked Tattersall to enlighten them on the point the Dean had raised. That made the Dean’s thrust seem to have been directed at Tattersall, causing the Dean guiltily to drop his eyes again.