Meyer Levin - Compulsion

“Steger?” It took the family a moment to think back to poor Paulie Kessler. “But I understood they let that teacher go,” Max said.

“They arrested him again.” Artie could hardly keep the laughter out of his voice.

Judd hurried him from the house. “Like a couple of kids to a fire,” he heard his aunt say as they rushed out.

The street was blocked off, and lights had been brought up, flaring over the small area where the crew chopped away at the trench, now waist deep.

“We should have thought of this too,” Artie whispered. “Stuffing the clothes down there.” Getting out of the car, Artie remarked that this was a good place to pick up some gash – easy to start a conversation. “How about those two?” Then began the game of undressing the girls with their eyes.

Artie pushed up against a pair and in great innocence asked what was going on, requiring a full explanation of the Kessler case. “Hey, don’t you even read the newspapers?”

He gave them the bootlegger act. “We’ve been up to the border for a shipment.” Judd tugged, getting him away. “What’s wrong? They’d have put out,” Artie snapped at him.

“Their teeth were bad,” Judd said.

“Oh Christ, just for a lay, you examine a twat as if you’re going to marry her.” He started on another pair, cute ones, full blown, with knowing looks. By this time Judd felt almost uncontainably excited. The peculiar feeling of tension, of expectancy about seeing Ruth, with which he had awakened that morning, seemed to have been multiplying progressively all day until now it was a general uncontainable lust. The presence of Artie had excited him even more than always; from the moment Artie came into the house, the need had been unbearable. And now it was the pressure of the bodies, Artie’s among them, until all the bodies seemed Artie’s, and something even more, something special in the excitement of the crowd, a crowd lust, the smutty things they were talking about. And perhaps compressed with it all, with Max’s engagement and the marriage talk, there was the danger in being here within arm’s reach of dozens of policemen. A cop was right in front of the girls, and Artie, instead of drawing the girls aside, started a conversation with the officer.

Pressed against the girls and against Artie, and tormented by the tumultuous raging need, Judd could have torn the bastard apart. “Come on,” he urged Artie.

But there was no moving him. “They’re just getting there!” Artie exclaimed. And someone wisecracked that the diggers had found a dead skunk. No, Artie said, it was a five-month baby! With a shocked gasp, the girls walked off. Artie pressed after them, loudly telling tales about the dreadful things women did – women were much dirtier than men, but women couldn’t help it. After all, the way they were made, they had their own sewer pipe.

And in that moment Judd recalled a chart in a drugstore window, first seen in childhood, with square-angled pipes going through a cross-section of a human body, a woman’s. And was there a baby curled in one part, or had he seen that in a medical book? But the picture remained in his mind, ugly, horrible. A nausea came over him; he backed out of the crowd. That nursemaid, Trudy, and even his mother, and even Ruth, the way a baby was made in there – no, it was too disgusting, too filthy in there. Females! He leaned against the car, feeling weak and ill.

Just then Artie spotted me in the group of reporters talking to the captain. He waved and pushed his way to me. “Anything new on the case?”

“They’ve got us running around in circles,” I said. “They’re even listening to a medium!” I told him about that crazy phone call. “She predicted a confession on Friday.”

“That’s only the day after tomorrow,” Artie said. “Want to bet on it?”

I said I wouldn’t be sorry if it happened; I hadn’t had any sleep for a week.

“You’d better watch out. Judd is making time on you, he’s stealing your girl,” Artie said.

We all laughed, and as they pulled away Artie blew the horn.

Judd was annoyed by that last remark; it was a night when everything that Artie did or said rubbed him the wrong way. And yet this only heightened his need. He was sure Artie was teasing him.

They ended up in a cat house, Judd agreeing to go just to get the stuff out of his system. But when the moment came when he always imagined himself doing it to Artie, this time again it didn’t happen. The act itself lasted longer, and for a time he imagined a wedding scene – Ruth in white, a shining bride, coming toward him. He would not picture himself doing it to her. There came back the scene on the beach, and then a kind of blank grief was in him, and, at his climax, a dreadful trembling, a sense of tumbling, like giants crashing in a circus act.

Going home, Artie was half potted. Judd still felt querulous; the post-coital compound of disgust and remorse was on him, and with it some dreadful unidentifiable anticipation.

Artie started to tease him about Ruth, making cracks.

“Shut up,” Judd said.

“Wow,” said Artie. “This is getting serious.”

“Aaw, cut the crap!”

He looked at Artie, and all at once his friend’s face appeared to him the way he had seen it the very first time when his mother brought him over to Artie’s house: he saw it as long-jawed and pasty. A tumult of revulsions and fears raced through Judd; everything, everything in the whole past of creation was wrong. In that moment he knew Artie, knew him objectively, as a being apart from himself. In the thing that they had done, they had not been doing the same thing. Artie had been doing something else, something he had done before, like the one in the lake, and the ones Artie had made dark hints about – the campus fellow who had been found shot, the taxi driver found castrated. Artie was driven by some demonic force, and in himself it was not the same. Had everything, then, been a gargantuan mistake? When he had believed himself to be participating, joining with Artie, had they really been separate, doing their separate things? If that could be so, then what – what had he been doing there? The possibility was a gasping void. Judd closed it out of his mind, and yet found it continuing into another thought: when people imagined they could be immersed together performing the act of love together, it was also like that: each was doing a separate thing.

Judd was silent the rest of the way home. Artie once or twice took gulps from the flask, then brooded. He got off at his house, saying in no obvious connection, “All right for you, you -.”

The tumultuous sense of some impending change, something tremendously imminent, remained in Judd through half the night. He could not analyse it, though he attached it to Ruth. In the morning the feeling was still with him, and with it he felt a compulsion to talk. If he met Ruth, he would perhaps babble out everything.

Instead, he found himself talking about her, about being in love with her. On impulse he was visiting a young married member of his birding class, Mrs. Cyrilla Sloan – and his excuse for ringing her apartment bell on South Shore was the delivery of a book he had promised her.

It had come upon him, that morning, that he must leave no promise unfulfilled; it was as though he were propitiating the nonexistent gods of luck.

Just after his ten-o’clock class, he found her looking morning-fresh, neat; Ruth would be a young wife like that, a secret bird in her nice neat little package of an apartment.

Mrs. Sloan offered him coffee, drew him into conversation. And presently Judd was talking in a rush, more easily than to Aunt Bertha, saying he was considering changing his plans – perhaps he would get married, perhaps he would get a job as a teacher instead of going to law school. Of course, this might displease his father, but -