the right one. Exactly the right one.
The squeeze came, on his thigh. Let out the clutch, slow, easy, crawling. Let the boy walk ahead a bit, lead your bird.
Artie climbed over to the back seat. They had four blocks to work in, he said; the kid’s house was near his own. “Street’s clear,” he observed happily.
Now they were almost even with the boy. Judd waited for a truck to pass, then coasted along the curb. “Let me handle this. He knows me,” Artie whispered, leaning across to the front door. “Don’t honk.” And as they drew abreast: “Hey, Paulie.”
The kid turned. Judd slid the car still nearer to the curb. Conditions were right.
Judd’s father’s voice cut in, “Thinking about your exam?” The memory images braked, halting sharply. Judd looked up. “I guess I’ll do Harvard the honor of glancing at my notes,” he said, rising.
Upstairs, he even took out the typed notes. And as he went over them, entire pages of text were revived complete in his visual memory. His hand fell on the Bausch and Lomb, brought upstairs last night; Artie had neglected to put it back in its case. Even in Artie, sloppiness irritated Judd. As he arose to set the glasses away, he thought of the boy they had watched through these sights. Was the image still on the lens? Like the story about the last image on the retina of a murdered man . . .
Judd tried to bone again, and then the sexual excitement came. Always, always when he sat trying to study. He was oversexed, he was sure. Images intruded: a slave, a slave rewarded by his master.
With a little gasp, almost a groan, Judd gave himself over to the fantasy. His master was extended on a stone couch, drinking from a silver cup. His splendid muscular torso was bare, the skin golden, glistening, not oily but luminous.
The slave was no common slave, but had been purchased because of his learning. He was crouched, reading to his master, and the master laughed at the tale, a witty account of an ass, making love to a woman.
As Judd read, he looked up to his master, and saw the half smile, the beginning of excitation. The master’s arm lay free, and a short whip dangled from Artie’s hand. Artie caught his slavish eyes, and laughingly commanded him, “All right, you bastard, you sucker,” and flicked the whip. The slave put aside his parchment and . . .
Then a tumult. An attacker plunged into the room, more, three, five, a dozen assassins. Judd leaped up, defending his master, with his bare hands wresting the sword from one of the villains, charging them, forcing them backward, plunging the sword.
Excited beyond endurance, Judd arose, circled the room, trying to keep away from the bed. It would be an hour before Artie came. Then, making sure the door was closed, he lay down.
He let himself slide completely into it, without fixing on any one image, letting the images come one upon the other: a street in Florence, and figures in capes and tight trousers, a young man, blond—Artie—rushing into a shadowed alleyway, a grinning backward, inviting glance, and then it was yesterday and the little girls scattering in twos and threes on the street, and why had Artie always been against making it a girl? Maybe that would finally have rid him of the need, but now he still had something left over that he must do. The girl . . . and there came the image of the Hun and the girl, the war poster in the hallway when he was at Twain—the young Frenchwoman with the dress half torn crouching against a wall, her arm up in defense, and the Hun with the slavering mouth coming toward her, then grabbing her by the hair and doing it to her. Then the almost naked body of the woman, the limbs all awry, broken, in a field of grass . . .
With an effort, Judd pulled himself up from the bed. The typewriter. It was standing against the wall, beneath the glass cases of his mounted birds. Picking up the portable, Judd held it undecidedly, set it on his desk, removed the lid. For this second terrible mistake, Artie would be through with him. Artie would erase all their times together, as though they had never met.
It had been one of the last occasions when Mother Dear had been well enough to go out. Indeed, she had probably overstrained herself, Judd imagined, in arranging the visit for his sake. He had known it was a little plot, of the kind Mother Dear and Aunt Bertha loved to arrange, in their little schemes to manage other people’s lives.
For a long time he had been aware of their whispery worryings about him. Poor Judd, he ought to have more friends. He’s alone with his books too much. And even when he goes out birding, he’ll drive off with the chauffeur on a Saturday afternoon and leave the car to go way out someplace all by himself.
Poor Judd, they meant, the kids all hate him. The kids all think he’s conceited. But poor Judd, they said, all the boys in his class are three years older than he is, and at that age three years makes a great difference. And he’s really not interested in baseball and such things. If we could only find someone . . .
And then they had cooked up the meeting with Artie. Of course Judd knew about Artie, the paragon who had skipped through Twain a year ahead of him, and was even a few months younger. He would have got to know Artie at Twain, most likely, if Artie hadn’t transferred to University High in his last year, to go right into the university at fourteen.
But when people talked about Artie Straus, the brilliant prodigy, Judd always remarked that entering a university at fourteen was not necessarily a criterion of intelligence. Any parrot with a large enough medulla oblongata could absorb the kind of knowledge that was required in a classroom. Judd could easily have done it at fourteen instead of fifteen, if he had not been out of school with his terrible skin rashes and boils, for weeks at a time. And besides, Artie Straus, as everyone knew, had had special tutoring from his governess.
Yet Judd admitted to himself a certain curiosity about Artie Straus. He therefore accepted the pretense that it was just a casual afternoon bridge party at the Strauses’, to which he was escorting his mother and aunt. And if there had been hushed telephone calls between the ladies, to arrange this meeting for the two brilliant boys who really ought to be great friends, he pretended not to have noticed. Judd disregarded too the thought that although his own family was worth several million dollars, his mother and aunt would consider it advantageous for him to become the close associate of one of the Strauses, with their ten million and their palatial new mansion with the private tennis court. Only the best, as his father always said.
There was another uneasiness about meeting Artie. While Artie was brilliant like himself, Artie was more. He was an athlete, a fellow who had fun with the crowd. Tall, a lively figure on the tennis court—instead of a bookworm.
Still, Judd was aware that on his side he was supposed to exert a steadying influence on Artie, because the moment he had got into the university, young Straus had started running wild, with collegians who were several years older than himself. And recently Artie had had a bad smashup in a car.
It was a warm, sweet day in May, and as they left the house Mother Dear paused to sniff the air—she could catch the scent of the lake, she said. Judd offered her his arm, and she gave him her smile, the Madonna smile. The smile he had identified far back in childhood when his Irish nurse had taken him into a church with stained-glass windows. “Is this Heaven?” he had whispered, and of the glowing Lady in the window: “Is she God’s wife?” Then the nursemaid had told him who the Madonna was. The Mother of God. And though as soon as he began to grow up he knew himself an atheist, the Madonna image persisted as someone in whom he believed, and as his mother; even the most empirical of scientists, he told himself, retain certain curious irrational beliefs.
That day of the bridge party, as Judd helped his mother down the cement steps to the walk, his aunt gushed about the fine-appearing pair they made. Mother Dear was
