Флетчер Флора - Wake Up With a Stranger

“Oh, hell. The truth is, you talk pretty silly sometimes, do you know that? I was eighteen this month, as a matter of fact, and that’s as old as I care to be or look at present. Besides, what has not drinking beer got to do with anything? Do you measure experience by such silliness?”

“Never mind. It’s not important, and I don’t want to argue about it. I suggest that we walk down to Sully’s and have a sandwich and a cup of coffee. Are you hungry?”

“Yes. I think I’d like a sandwich.”

“All right. Have you been to Sully’s?”

“No.”

“It’s not much.”

He took her books, and they walked the six blocks on the wet sidewalk to Sully’s. As Enos had said, it wasn’t much of a place. The booths ran down one wall, and the counter ran down the other, and between the booths and the counter were a few tables. At the rear of the room was a jukebox with colored bubbles rising and descending soundlessly in lighted tubes. They sat and listened to the music until the man had returned with their order and gone again and the box was silent.

“Now that we’re here and free to talk without being hissed at,” Donna said, “what shall we talk about?”

“You can start by telling me why you kicked me in the library and then picked a quarrel with me.”

“I kicked you quite by accident, and I did not pick a quarrel with you. You were rude, and I told you so, that’s all. Please don’t be so vain as to think I kicked you on purpose just to get your attention.”

“Well, didn’t you?”

“Of course not. You were sprawled all over the place.”

“Oh, all right. I’ll be more honest than you and admit that I’ve noticed you in the library before. I was trying to think of a way to meet you when it happened.”

“You certainly didn’t sound as if you wanted to meet me.”

“That’s just my way. The truth is, I’m shy and get all tensed up in such circumstances. Did you say you go to high school?”

“You said it, not I. But it’s true. I’m a senior. I’ll graduate next month.”

“Are you going to college in the fall?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t want to. There’s something else I’d rather do.”

“Get married?”

“God, no! I want to be a designer. A fashion designer. I’m taking a correspondence course in design now, but I don’t think it’s much help. The main thing is, I seem to have a natural talent for it.”

“Did you design the dress you’re wearing?”

“Yes. I designed it and made it.”

“I agree that you have a talent. Can you get very far with something like fashion designing in St. Louis? I should think you’d have to go somewhere like New York.”

“If you had an exclusive shop to work through, you could go a long way right here. That’s what I’m going to try to do when I get good enough. I’m going to try to start a line of originals in a shop right here.”

“You’re very ambitious, aren’t you?”

“I guess so. Aren’t you?”

“No. I can’t even make up my mind what I want to do.”

“What do you mean, you can’t make up your mind? Don’t you do anything now?”

“No. I graduated from high school a year ago, and I haven’t done anything since.”

“Really? Nothing at all?”

“Not a damn thing. I’ve been thinking about it, but I can’t seem to get started. I’m going to the state university this fall, but it’s more because my old man thinks I ought to than because I really want to.”

“Isn’t there anything at all you think you’d like to do?”

“Well, I think I’d like to be a writer, but I’m sure I could never be anything but a poor one, so I guess I won’t even try. Maybe I’ll end up teaching.”

“What would you teach?”

“Oh, literature. Something like that.”

“Do you like to read?”

“I read a lot. Always have. It’s the only thing I do much of.”

She nodded at the book he had carried with hers from the library.

“What are you reading now?”

“The Grand Testament.”

“The Bible, you mean?”

“Lord, no! Villon’s Grand Testament.”

“Who’s Villon?”

“Seriously? Don’t you actually know? How can you be so ignorant?”

“Well, you needn’t start being insulting and rude again. If you do, I’ll leave. I guess there are a few things I know that you don’t, as far as that goes.”

“That’s true. I have a nasty way of thinking the only things worth knowing are the things I happen to know myself.”

“That’s better. You can be very nice when you want to be. Will you tell me who this Villon is? Is he French? His name sounds French.”

“You’re right except for your tense. Was, not is. He was born in Paris in 1431 and disappeared in 1463. No one knows what happened to him after that, but probably he was hanged.”

“Why on earth do you think he was probably hanged?”

“Because he had almost been hanged two or three times before, and it doesn’t seem likely that he could go on escaping by the skin of his teeth forever. He was a murderer and a thief and a whoremonger and a syphilitic and almost anything bad you could mention, but he also happened to have a master’s degree from the Sorbonne and to be the greatest poet of the Middle Ages, and one of the greatest poets of any age. Don’t you think that’s very amusing?”

“I admit that I don’t see anything amusing about it at all.”

“Don’t you? I do. A common criminal who worshiped beauty and wrote some of the most beautiful poetry in the world in cheap taverns and whorehouses and prisons and all sorts of low places. He was a coward, too. He was afraid of physical pain, and he was especially afraid of dying, because he had lived such a sinful life that the mere thought of dying filled him with terror. A criminal and a coward who wrote all this beautiful poetry that’s still read after more than five hundred years. Beauty and evil co-existing in such extremity in one ugly and diseased little man. Don’t you see why I consider it amusing? It’s so ironical and paradoxical, and it’s so contrary to what all the good little mediocre people try to teach you about evil not begetting beauty, and all that kind of crap. Would you like to hear something he wrote?”

“I guess so.”

“All right. Listen to this.”

He began to recite Ballad of Dead Ladies, the Rossetti translation, and each time he repeated the sad refrain with which each stanza ended, his voice assumed an intensity that was very compelling, as if he were himself acutely aware of the brevity of life and was urging in her an equal awareness.

When he had finished, he was silent for a moment, looking at her intently across the table, and she didn’t know what to say. Up to then, she had honestly considered him rather ridiculous, although interesting, but now she saw he had sensibilities she had not imagined, and she no longer considered him at all ridiculous. The truth was, he disturbed her a little, more than she was prepared to admit, and she began to think that it was time to go home.

“You’re right,” she said. “It is beautiful.”

“Do you think so? It’s probably the most famous thing he did. It’s called Ballad of Dead Ladies.”

She had by this time finished her sandwich and coffee, and she slipped sidewise, on the red leather seat and stood up abruptly, impatient with herself for permitting him to affect her so strongly.

“I think I’d better go now,” she said.

“All right.” He also slipped out of the booth and stood up, lifting their books from the table. “Do you live far from here?”

“Not so far. It’s about a mile, I think.”