Robert Coover - Public Burning

Ola was the daughter of the local police chief, and maybe that was why I started going with her. However far we went, I thought, it would be somehow legal. Under the arm of the law. At the same time, it seemed dangerous, dating a cop’s kid like that, a challenge worthy of the class president and wingading honors man. Sometimes I walked around school feeling a little bit like Douglas Fairbanks slipping into the caliph’s harem. I admit, I knew nothing about girls, I had only brothers, I didn’t even know what their underside looked like or what you were supposed to do when you got there. “Menstruation” was a distant rumor. I expected holes of some kind, but I wasn’t sure how many — at the burlesque shows, all you saw were tits and bottoms, and even then we were too nervous to sit down in the front rows. I didn’t know what a clitoris was until years after I was married. In fact, I’m still not sure I’d know one if I saw one. Ola had no brothers, perhaps we started even, but I supposed at the time she knew everything, she was cute and popular and very self-confident. And a Democrat besides, which suggested a lot to me at the time. Also, she liked all the dangerous things — which in those days were the movies with their “jazz babies” and “red-hot mamas,” beach parties, and dancing — I was clumsy as hell at dancing, but it always made me hot, I could see why the wild people liked it.

We got off to a terrific start, playing the romantic leads in a high-school Latin Club production of Aeneas and Dido . There were omens in this: Dido was abandoned by Aeneas and killed herself. Not that Ola had it in her to kill herself, far from it — but she did marry a guy who locked her into that small town forever, a kind of suicide, and I’ve always thought she did it to spite me. On the other hand, to be accurate, it was really she who abandoned me. But that was years later; the end came slowly. At the time, the play gave me a vocabulary different from my own that I was able to use for a while with great success. And those white togas, they were like flimsy nightshirts, like bedsheets — I had to wear a jockstrap so as not to make a spectacle of myself. Those goddamn Greeks and Romans, they must have been at it all the time. I got a handful myself every time I threw myself on Queen Dido’s bier at the end, best part I ever had. Everything was great — but only so long as the play lasted. Then she fell into the same clichés about me as all the other girls. Maybe they’d been talking to her too much. I fought against this, acted silly or loud or flirtatious or belligerent. I hated myself at these times. I assumed an air of possession wherever we went, looking old and already half-married, hoping she would fall into the same patterns and find herself past the barrier without remembering when she’d crossed it. She looked up to me, more than any other girl, even Pat, she went with me everywhere, said I was a man of the world and she felt so stupid around me, sometimes even almost afraid, but she wouldn’t give in, stop being frivolous, and just be mine. She was even more goddamn stubborn than I was.

We had arguments. About religion, politics, friends, what to do. But we didn’t argue about what was really the problem. We didn’t even mention it. I tried everything. When my brother Harold died, I even suggested I might get TB too, might be dead soon… This was even less successful than the political arguments. Each day the opportunity receded. I had black moods and unhealthy imaginings — I felt she knew what was wrong and was only taunting me. And it wasn’t her virginity I wanted, no, I was frightened in fact by the prospect — what I wanted was her surrender. I wanted her to give herself to me, utterly, abjectly, deliriously. That was all. She had nothing to fear. And perhaps much to gain. Our political arguments were surface manifestations of this deeper struggle. I thought if I could so break her self-assurance as to make a Republican of her, the rest would follow. She did not understand the importance of these arguments. She would get flippant about them, make fun of my seriousness. I would become ill-tempered and bark at her. She’d start to cry. But I wasn’t being doctrinaire — all of us Quakers were for Hoover in 1932, that was natural, but I hardly noticed when Roosevelt smashed him that fall. We were in the middle of final rehearsals for Bird-in-Hand and I gave the greatest performance of my life on opening night, just two days after the elections (admittedly, I got a certain perverse pleasure out of the line about what kind of Conservative I was: “Governing folks as isn’t fit to govern themselves!”). And then a week later I entertained my entire fraternity in Grandma Milhous’s home, the whole football team was in the fraternity and the party was to celebrate the Poets’ victory over Loyola, forty guys were there — Christ, what the hell did we care about politics? Couldn’t Ola see this?

In the spring we even had the romantic leads in a revolutionary play about the sordid life of Scottish coal miners, a thing called The Price of Coal . It was mostly my idea, in fact I thought we might recapture the spirit of Aeneas and Dido, but somehow we got lost in the dialect. Also the lighting was fucked up something awful, it was a disaster. As usual, we put it on in Founders Hall. There was something wrong with that building, my whole romance was tied up in it and there were thousands of places to hide, but somehow nothing ever seemed to happen, we always ended up out in the corridors or on the benches built into the stair landings — already mine was a public life. I was running everything, arranging picnics, staging plays, bringing bands to campus, winning debates and scholarship honors, holding the fraternity together, participating in clubs, running for offices, literally working my ass off, and somehow this only made Ola laugh gaily and go off and date some other guy. I remembered walking around on that tight little stage on the second floor — it was Friday-morning chapel and everybody out front was still half asleep and bored shitless — thinking: Goddamn it, she has no sense of value: Jock the Miner or Aeneas the Father of the Romans, it was all the same to her, let’s face it, she’s too flighty, I could never marry her. But I still wished to break her down, prove to her she needed me. And then, probably, I would marry her. Back in the wings, sweating under the greasepaint smudges, aroused by the musty odors of the costume racks, I’d give her long deep looks. She’d sigh and complain about the electricians. Or glance over my shoulder and wave at a friend.

And then we got into a fight one night at a dance. I walked out on her. I expected her to follow me. She didn’t. She called her folks to pick her up. That should have been the end but I kept trying. I don’t give up easily. Then we suddenly had the best night we ever had together. It was the night I found out about winning the scholarship to Duke. I felt so terrific I wasn’t even trying to make out — and then I almost did. I’d bought an old 1930 Ford and we rode around in it all night. I think she was really in love with me that night. But I was so in love with myself I didn’t notice until it was too late. By then we’d celebrated too long and she was sleepy, wanted to go home. I didn’t want to spoil anything, we were both so happy, there was always tomorrow…but there wasn’t. When I went away to Duke Law School, I wrote her every week, went home on holidays to see her. Clear across country. She was going with other guys. I was desperate and tried to ignore this. But when she wouldn’t even let me come see her, I lost my temper and broke it off. As I slammed the phone down, I thought I heard her giggling. Yet I was relieved. I’d been saved. I realized I’d been pursuing my passion like a career — I’d even considered throwing over law school and going back to Whittier for good! — but now I used my stifled passions as energy in my pursuit of a career in law. Oh, I never doubted I would marry, keep a woman beside me, have children, I was normal — but the law degree, I knew, was like a potent aphrodisiac, obtainable through abstinence. I remembered that history book that Aunt Edith gave me when I was ten years old: lawyers ran the world. And could have, I assumed, whomever they pleased. Even there, in that dismal unlit room in Whippoorwill Manor without toilet or running water, burning crumpled newspapers in the old sheet-metal stove to stay warm, sharing a double bed with old Bill “Boop-Boop” Perdue, listening to Brownie and On-the-Brink Freddie over in the other bed spinning off their horny tales of coquetry and conquest, worrying about the next round of exams, cold, miserable, and poorer even than Jock the Miner, I knew this mating must happen to me. And it did. In The Dark Tower . Not Ola, of course, but I didn’t forget her. Years later, out on Green Island, I wrote a note to myself: “There’s a kind of love for permanence. There’s another kind that’s just champagne bubbles and moonlight. It isn’t meant to last but it can be something to have and look back on all your life….”