Thomas McGuane - Driving on the Rim

I was soon on my way to Calabash College in northern Ohio, a tiny Congregationalist college that, once thriving, had nearly vanished during an imaginary Red scare when local farmers drove out the faculty with pitchforks. I was warmly greeted by my new host, Karl Hanson. He said, “Welcome” and then, after a pause, “welcome, welcome, welcome.” I smiled all the way into the upper corners of the room. “And how is my honored friend Olsson?”

“Dr. Olsson is just fine. He sends his best.”

“I wish we saw more of him. Y’know the bugger won’t play golf. We could have had some winter trips to Camelback. Always out in the woods. Out in the prairie now, I suppose, chasing some dog. But what a guy, and a hell of a doc. He’d had enough. Dyed-in-the-wool bachelor gonna live his life, come hell or high water. He and my wife were sweethearts. She says he’s still carrying a torch. You believe that? Me either. Female bull, is all. When Olsson tells me he’s going to Montana, you could of knocked me over with a feather and, jeez, I’ve missed him ever since. We had the same Chinese tailor, came through once a year, shantung sport coats a tenth of what they ream you for here. I did try to get into the grouse-hunting thing, but first time he cut loose with his repeater I hit the ground. Not my game, not my game at all. Here, let me hang that up for you. I’ll show you your room and then you can meet my ball and chain. Just kidding. Shirley’s the queen of this castle! You could tell I was kidding, couldn’t you? About Shirley?”

Calabash College had recovered in the intervening decades, somewhat, and served students who wished to attend college but could not find admission elsewhere. As a result, the student body was a heterogeneous group of idiots, local mediocrities, and brilliant misfits. Our backgrounds were so diverse that we acquired functional identities as the very first information about us emerged. As someone from the West, I found myself branded the campus cowboy. Wiley would have had a good laugh over that. An undernourished Portuguese boy from New Bedford was “a whaler.” Girls who kissed with their tongues were whores. The kid with Hollywood mufflers on his jalopy was “Brick Track Jack” for the Indianapolis 500. The dorm room where we got free haircuts was Barber College, and so on. It was a loose atmosphere entirely, even from the standpoint of the administration. In my brief stint writing a sports column for the mimeographed campus weekly, I suggested that the chronically losing basketball team might look to ways to play better. The team beat me to a pulp, and even the president, a former tool-and-die executive, judged I had spoken out of turn. All of this was quite manageable, and in fact I did manage, with the expenses of my education borne mostly by Dr. Olsson and reduced by my living in a house owned and occupied by Karl Hanson and his wife. I’m sure Dr. Olsson had no way of knowing that in their subtle way the well-to-do and well-educated Hansons were every bit as strange as my own parents. They were only twice as old as me — that is, somewhere in their thirties, with Shirley sporting a sort of Jazz Age look that had lingered in these Midwestern pockets. The Hansons’ house was somewhat disorderly, as their live-in black lady had gone back to Georgia. Each year a representative of Ton Yik Tailors of Hong Kong made the rounds of the Rust Belt, measuring local nabobs for custom-made suits, the equivalent of Hart, Shaffner and Marx at a third the cost; and each year Karl had a new one made, worsteds, wool, mohair, shantung sport jackets, and so on, all exploding from his closet on the second floor. Shirley’s specialty was fox furs with the heads and black glass eyes that surmounted her fitted Chanel knockoffs and accented her excellent figure. I quickly noticed that excellent figure, and as soon as I could, I told her the men in my family were not long lived and that my greatest fear was dying a virgin. I just let this one soak while I went to class. I could tell by her expression that she couldn’t decide quite what to do with me but that for the moment she would dismiss me as a hopeless goober.

I felt the futility of coming of age in the time of two iconic buffoons, Ronald Reagan and John Wayne. And when I got to college I was still a very backward boy. I’ll never forget the expressions on the Hansons’ faces the first time they saw me licking my plate. But I’m a quick study, and it wasn’t long before I was quite a conventional youth, managing at once to do my schoolwork well, get drunk, and manually inspect the occasional coed. I was well along in self-invention, representing myself to be the son of ranchers Gladys and Wiley. I’m ashamed to say that I was not proud of my own parents. I was at a ghastly stage in life, having raised faultfinding to a science. Some of this came from my Bible-crazed mother, who treated every phenomenon as a possible false sign or lying wonder.

At the beginning of my years at Calabash College, Karl Hanson and his wife, Shirley, were very kind to me. The Hansons had a strong social conscience, and this led them to hire a housekeeper, Audra Vasiliauskyte, a displaced person from somewhere in Eastern Europe, Lithuania, I think. Audra had come to America with her sister, and the two of them were gorgeous schemers. Audra’s sister, Anya, had stolen a Great Lakes freighter captain away from his wife. Audra really stirred things up around the Hanson household, and in the end I was the beneficiary of her troublemaking. When Hanson would come in from work on cold winter evenings, Audra would help him off with his coat and even kneel before him to unbuckle his galoshes, a show enhanced by the omission of several blouse buttons. An excellent cook, she introduced Lithuanian dishes until once I heard Shirley cry out, “One more platter of kugelis and I’m outta here.” Audra was extremely but coolly polite to Shirley. I was more age-appropriate to her enthusiasms, but she treated me with acidic contempt and took the fact of my social awkwardness as proof of homosexuality. She’d spit out, “You fairy!” when we passed in the upstairs corridor. Her mistake was assuming that I was not only gauche but also unobservant. Hence I was able to examine the cautious but steady gravitation of poor Karl into Audra’s web.

In fact, I was more observant than even that: I took note of Shirley’s vigilance as Audra went from helping with his heavy winter coat to meeting him at the door of his car, the better to touch his elbow as he clambered out. The biggest problem was that Audra at twenty-eight was, as Karl confided to me, “easy on the eyes.” She was indeed: fresh-faced, cascading oak blond hair, and a tidy figure made poignant by the cheap Eastern European clothes she’d arrived with. She spoke an oddly correct schoolgirl English and radiated the sort of industry that predicted success in her new country. She was also a baseball nut, like Karl, and their amiable skirmishing over statistics drove Shirley to distraction. Audra feverishly studied baseball magazines in her room, as though she were trying to pass the bar exam. I several times sidled up to her, but she blew me off disdainfully, which I lamented as only a blue-balled late adolescent could. We each had our rooms on the north end of the second floor, at the end of a blind corridor, and shared a bathroom. That she sauntered around up there in her underwear, breasts spilling from an abbreviated bra, only emphasized how insignificant I was. Because of Audra, my energy was grossly depleted by jacking off, and had I not brought this vice under control, my grades surely would have fallen enough to keep me out of medical school. And what a way to fail a career in medicine!

At the point that Shirley looked likely to voice her indignation, I thought to reintroduce my manufactured fear of dying a virgin. From then on, it was merely a matter of waiting for Karl’s next business trip to coincide with Audra’s time off.