Psychology and Other Stories Read online

  Archie didn’t know what to say to this. Earlier, when a pack of Downsfield girls had come into the diner and ordered malteds, Rodney had said, with something like sickened awe, “What I couldn’t do with a pair of gazongas like that.” This kind of statement always rendered Archie speechless. What did one do with a pair of gazongas? Or, for that matter, a nice set of legs or a smashing ass? He understood the sentiment behind such comments: “That girl is physically attractive to me.” It was their peculiar figurative expression, half nonsensical, half obscene, that bemused him, as if Rodney were speaking in some kind of childish masonic code. And when he himself tried to speak this language it always rang false. He simply could not say things like “I wouldn’t kick her out of bed” or “Now there’s a can I could drink from” without feeling like an imposter, or a troll. Although, in fact, he felt that way—guilty, dirty, stupid—whenever he even looked at a pretty girl. No doubt some prehistoric part of him longed to subdue and degrade her, pull her by the hair back to his cave. Probably that was why the salacious words turned to ashes in his mouth: shame.

  But most of the time, talking to Rodney was easy. Archie did not have to try so hard. Not that Rodney was stupid; he could not spell, perhaps, but he had life smarts. And the two of them had a lot in common. Rodney too was the only child of a widowed mother. He too had transferred to Pervcliffe, just last year. He too had hated it at first.

  “One summer,” Archie said, “when I was about thirteen, my mother got it into her head that I needed a tutor. Of course, you can’t really blame her …”

  Rodney leaned back and nodded nonchalantly in the direction of the door. Two Downsfielders had just come in.

  “Nice,” Archie mumbled.

  He recognized the brunette.

  She was the one he sometimes saw in his vision, embracing him from behind on that lonesome desert road.

  “Ask them to join us.”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “Wait here.”

  Archie could not watch. He hung his head over his plate and stuffed cold french fries in his mouth.

  “Hey, you haven’t met my roommate Arch yet, have you? Ladies, this is Arch my roommate. Arch my roommate, this is Sandra. And this is Meagan, my future ex-wife.”

  The girls laughed obligingly, as if they had already heard this joke but were too polite to say so. Archie saw with horror that he had extended his hand in greeting; now it hung in the air above the table, unnoticed, unacknowledged, irrefutable proof of his awkwardness. Did one even shake hands with girls? He grasped the ketchup bottle, as if this had been his goal all along, just as the girl of his dreams held out her hand to him.

  “Hi Arch his roommate, I’m Sandra his future ex-wife’s future ex-roommate.”

  Archie rangily upended the bottle, insouciantly slapped half a pint of ketchup onto his plate, and grinned wisely up at the girl of his dreams. Through a mouthful of half-chewed french fries he said, “Peeaarreeaagghh.” He tried again, this time with greater emphasis: “Peeaarreeagghh.” The girl furrowed her brow and leaned closer. He felt the sweat break out on his back. He looked wildly at Rodney, who looked wildly at him. The other girl eyed him with remote distaste, as if she had picked him up on the sole of her shoe on her way to a wedding. The mass of sodden potato in his mouth seemed, meanwhile, to have expanded, so that smiling rangily or insouciantly or in any other way was out of the question; the best that he could manage, by waggling his eyebrows and bringing his lips together, was a sour, maniacal moue. Recognizing that the only way out of this predicament was to chew, he abandoned all attempts at non-verbal communication and began madly to chew. Then he bit his tongue.

  Why did he do that?

  Why did one bite one’s tongue? Presumably because one was afraid of what one was about to say. What had he been about to say? Something stupid and inadequate, no doubt. But if his secret motive had been to avoid looking stupid, he surely could not have hit upon a worse solution than screaming in agony, spewing bloody mush from his mouth, and galumphing out into the night. Either his unconscious was even stupider than he was, or his problems went deeper than he realized.

  Perhaps it was not the girl he’d been afraid of, but himself. What would he have discovered if he’d allowed himself to spend even a few minutes in conversation with a pretty girl? That he didn’t care? That he wasn’t nervous? That he was afraid to be around girls not because he might make an ass of himself, but because it might not matter if he did? Maybe what he really felt around beautiful girls was not love, but terrifying, vertiginous indifference.

  But that didn’t make any sense either, because, by the doctor’s logic, an indifference to the opposite sex would only point to a repressed attraction to them. But no: to qualify as a reaction-formation, wouldn’t it have to be stronger than mere indifference, something more like active hatred or repugnance? Unless, of course, it was possible to form a reaction-formation to a reaction-formation. Perhaps he so loved women that the sight of a pretty girl crippled him; disgusted by this weakness, he clamped down on it so hard that his lust underwent a subterranean transformation into loathing; but, being even more ashamed of his loathing than he had been of his lust, he clamped down again, until his troll-like, rapacious, destructive urges were refined into commonplace lust and wretched infatuation …

  But if one could form a reaction-formation to a reaction-formation, what prevented one from forming a reaction-formation to a reaction-formation to a reaction-formation? What prevented infinite regress? And more importantly, how did one ever discover one’s true feelings? A loop had no starting point.

  All he knew for certain was that he had not meant to bite his tongue. His unconscious, apparently, did not want him talking to girls.

  *

  Archie returned to the library and to “A Song of Myself,” which Clayton Fishpool had brought to his attention as one of the best poems ever written—“in the English language, at least.” Archie had perceived its brilliance the first time he read it. To think that someone had thought to write such long, unrhymed lines as long ago as 1858! And he liked the idea of grass as the “beautiful uncut hair of graves.” That was poetry, all right.

  But his second reading left him discomfited. There was an awful lot of talk of men, for one thing. Men, to Archie’s way of thinking, were (like automobiles, politics, and wheelbarrows) not quite proper subject matter for poetry. But Whitman gave them as much attention as women, perhaps more. And what could be made of lines like these?

  I am enamoured of growing outdoors,

  Of men that live among cattle or taste of the ocean or woods …

  I can eat and sleep with them week in and week out.

  On his first reading, he had chalked this sort of thing up to the innocence of earlier times: Whitman could not have known what people would one day mean when they said “sleep with” someone. But how did Whitman know what men tasted like? Was this just poetry—that is, saying what you didn’t mean, not saying what you did mean—or was this something else?

  Let’s be blunt, he said to himself. Let’s cut to the chase. Let’s not mince words.

  It was possible that Walt Whitman had been a homosexual. Many famous writers had been. (He could not at the moment think of any, aside from Oscar Wilde.) One could enjoy their works without being homosexual oneself. Though possibly it helped…

  Was Clayton Fishpool a homosexual? Was that why he had befriended Archie, invited him to join the Literary Club? Because he had recognized in him a kindred spirit?

  Just like the man in the wood outside Templeton.

  But that was different. Archie had been, after all, in that wood on the edge of town near the public toilets, a known meeting place for homosexuals. The man could perhaps be forgiven his assumption.

  Well, what if Clayton Fishpool had made a similar mistake?

  From the stacks, Archie pulled every book by Lytton Strachey the library owned and returned with them to his carrel. He did not believe he would find what he was looking for. After a
ll, it wasn’t the sort of detail you could expect to find in a scholarly introduction or the biographical note on the dust jacket. He had already resigned himself to the futility of his task when he came upon, in Lytton Strachey by Himself, an autobiographical essay that quickly came to the point:

  Perhaps if I could have lain with Bunny … And then I smiled to think of my romantic visions before coming—of a recrudescence of that affair, under Duncan’s nose—and of his dimness on my arrival, and of how very very little I wanted to lie with him now!

  There could no be question of what “lie with” meant here—not with “romantic visions” and “that affair” in the same sentence. But he read on, just to be sure.

  As the first flush of victory at having confirmed a wild hypothesis began to fade, it was replaced by an at first pleasurable, then disquieting, shock of recognition. For, in many ways, Strachey was exactly like him, he was exactly like Strachey: indecisive, self-doubting, filled with daydreams and velleities, addicted to introspection and to self-dramatization: “I imagined myself reading about myself in a novel by Tolstoy—reading quickly, and turning over the pages as fast as I could, in my excitement to know what would happen in the end.”

  But as he read on, the shock of recognition faded too, and with it the worry about what it might portend, what it might prove about Clayton Fishpool or about himself.

  And then the vision of that young postman with the fair hair and lovely country complexion who had smiled at me and said ‘Good evening, sir,’ as he passed on his bicycle, flashed upon me. My scheme of meeting him in the long lane past the village recurred to me, and then I began embroidering romantic and only just possible adventures which might follow: the bedroom in the inn at Norwich, and all the rest. But there was the necessity of talking to him first; and I went once more through the calculations of time and place, and saw that my plan really might, if I had the nerve, come off …

  He read quickly, turning over the pages as fast as he could, to find out what would happen next.

  PART II

  EAT THE RICH AND SHIT THE POOR

  “You fiend!” exclaimed the Duchess. “How dare you kiss me!”

  Such, if we may believe tradition, was the ideal first line proposed by a “psychologist” when asked to give an opening for a story that would grip attention and foster interest.

  Here was a man who was trying to apply his knowledge of human nature. He knew that an exclamation gets attention. He knew that most people are interested in the nobility. He knew that everyone is interested in sex. He tried, successfully or not, to cram an appeal to all of these into one short sentence. He was an applied psychologist.

  H.K. Nixon

  MR. CUSTARD DROVE THE SPEED LIMIT. He was in no hurry. In fact, he had never felt less anxious in all his life.

  He always stopped for hitchhikers, because driving bored him and he liked to have someone to talk to. He had in fact just come from Loyola (well, he’d been there a few days ago; he did not know what day it was now, exactly) but he saw no reason not to go back, if that was where circumstances conspired to take him. Francine had set up an appointment for him in Carbon, towards which he had more or less been heading, but he would have missed the meeting by now anyway, and he could always make it up later. He did not set great store by schedules or appointment-making like some people did, but preferred to arrive at places and events naturally, in the fullness of time. He was, in the lingo of Dr. Yard, “open to experience.”

  “Now what takes you ladies to Loyola?”

  The one in the front with him, the skinny one, did not want to answer, but the one in the back had been raised with better manners.

  “We missed our bus,” she said.

  “Going to meet someone,” said the skinny one.

  “Bad luck,” said Mr. Custard, as if this were his professional diagnosis. “For you ladies, that is. Good luck for me!”

  The skinny one made a derisive sound, and Mr. Custard realized that unflappable cheerfulness, which worked so well with middle-aged and older ladies, would have limited effectiveness with these two.

  “Damn nasty old day to be stranded on the side of the road,” he said, scowling at the dark patches of cloud hanging over the highway, which five minutes earlier he had been praising to the cashier at the filling station. He had been trying to get her to cash a cheque, but she’d insisted on calling the owner.

  “What, you mean to tell me you don’t own this place? A capable woman like you?”

  She smacked her lips in distaste, though not at his flattery. “Wouldn’t care to neither. Loses money hand over fist.”

  “Hand under fist,” he quipped, and she pressed a thumb into the cheek opposite the telephone receiver to hide a smile.

  They stood on opposite sides of the counter looking out the unwashed window at the sky. Mr. Custard sighed contentedly, giving the easy impression that he was not in any hurry.

  “Those clouds look ugly,” he said, “but, you know, they keep some of the heat off.”

  “He don’t always answer on the first ring,” she explained, rolling her eyes to indicate that this was a kind of understatement.

  “You know what you need?” He slapped his hand on the counter. “A place like this?”

  “What’s that?”

  “You need a ‘Going Out of Business’ sign.”

  She thumbed her cheek, rolled her eyes, and shook her head.

  “I got a bunch of them in the car. Cheap.”

  “You sell ‘Going Out of Business’ signs?” She pulled the phone away to devote both ears to hearing what she was hearing.

  He had not sold her any signs, but he could have. There came a point in every conversation when he knew he could sell someone something, borrow money off them, or pass a cheque on them. Technically, the signs were samples and he wasn’t supposed to be selling them at all; it was the idea he was selling to the man up in Carbon. But he could have sold her five signs, if he’d cared to. Same with the pump boy outside, who was still standing there gawping at Francine’s old beater, which Mr. Custard had led him to believe once belonged to Bonnie and Clyde. After that, he could have sold him anything, the car or just about anything else. It wasn’t a matter of pulling the wool over a person’s eyes, but lifting the veil from them. Mr. Custard ushered people across the border of their everyday experience into a wider world, a larger-than-life world where heroes and villains still existed and marvelous things still happened—and might happen to them. For Mr. Custard, the joy of selling was in getting them to cross over; once that was accomplished, he often didn’t bother to carry the deal to a conclusion. He hunted for sport, not for food. All the pleasure was in getting them on the hook.

  He did not sell any signs or wait around for her to cash the cheque but left it with her, saying he would pick up the cash on his way back through in a day or two. In the meantime, as a “surety,” he said, he took one packet of gum.

  He popped a piece in his mouth now, without for a moment taking his eyes off the highway. He held the packet out to the skinny girl, who made a buzzing chirp of refusal, so he reached back over the seat until he felt a stick slide out of the wrapper. In lieu of thanks he received another grunt, but slightly longer and with a note of apology in it. He decided that the girl in front, the skinny one, thought she was the leader, but the one in back, the chubby one with eczema who was always cleaning her glasses, followed her lead only when it suited her. From the first second he’d seen them across the road he’d recognized that his job would be to get the skinny one alone—that is, to get rid of the chubby one. Practically speaking this would mean winning the skinny one over to his side while alienating the chubby one, a feat which would itself entail setting the girls against each other.

  He had not even begun to imagine how all this might be accomplished, but this suited him down to the ground. He did not like planning ahead. He believed that he was at his best when forced to act spontaneously, without forethought or, indeed, thought. Besides, knowing what to do
next was almost like already having done it. He had a weak mind’s eye, and consequently no taste for fantasy: visualizing a future event was the surest way for him to lose all interest in it. He had cultivated the habit of thinking only of the obstacle or challenge directly before him, never of its probable consequence or outcome.

  He’d figure something out. It was only a shame that so far the chubby one had shown herself more disposed to be friendly. Well, he had his work cut out for him. Dr. Yard shook his head wonderingly.

  “What all’re your ladies’ names?” he asked, not too cheerfully. “I’m Custard.”

  Again, the skinny one hesitated, and the chubby one waited to take her cue.

  “Melissa,” said the skinny one at last.

  “Connie,” said the other.

  “But folks call her ‘Slim.’”

  “They call her ‘Missy.’”

  “Well, folks call me Custard,” said Mr. Custard diplomatically. “Sometimes Mr. Custard, sometimes Corporal Field Sergeant Custard. Sometimes Dr. Custard.”

  He chewed his gum energetically, snapping his mouth open after every bite, and waited for this information to settle—not all the way, just a little.

  “Sometimes Damn You Custard,” he chuckled, then made his face grim again when this got no response from the girls. “And how old’re all you ladies?” he said, and immediately wished he hadn’t asked.

  “Nineteen,” said the one called Missy, with a slight quaver, as though she were guessing someone’s weight.

  “Twenty,” said the one called Slim, with a note of gloating.

  He admired her pluck but could not encourage it. Addressing the skinny one, he said, “That’s a fine age. Why, that’s not only the age you can legally drink at, but the age you can legally marry at.”

  At this absurd notion, the girl made a noise that bore some resemblance to laughter.

  Mr. Custard was gratified, but he was not born yesterday. He did not believe for a second that they were nineteen and twenty. He was pleased however that they had taken the trouble to lie. If they had come clean he would have had no choice but to not believe them. If they were as young as he thought they probably were—closer to half than to two-thirds his age—it might lead to trouble if he ever managed to get the skinny one alone like he hoped to. If they had told him the truth he would have had to claim that they’d acted older, or that he’d forgotten.