The months rolled by. The only break in the routines he set up was the operation of setting up new ones, registering for new classes and fitting into different time slots. So each semester varied his life only that much. For instance, he might be getting up at eight thirty instead of nine o’clock. Everything else was the same. He took summer courses in the summer. The seasonal changes passed almost without notice. His professors’ names he forgot after the first two weeks of their classes. The other students he never talked to or looked at, in the halls looking at his feet and sitting at the lectures taking volumes of notes. And when the professor would make a joke and the room would roar with laughter, he would write it down: Joke made here, about how ancient culture seems like ours today. Years went by.
His upstairs landlady thought he was not right and probably for that reason fetched him upstairs whenever she could bring herself to impose on his solitude, to eat dinner, lunch, and breakfast with her four children. She’d never had a renter stay so long, and she felt this was a kind of intimacy, at least compared to the few students she’d had before whose lives were so erratic that they’d be here one day and breaking leases another with no regard for any responsibility.
C dreaded her children. He dreaded eating with them. He dreaded eating. After two and one half years he still dreaded living. And then what he dreaded most of all and knew would happen happened on a dreaded afternoon in winter. Mrs. Sorenson, his upstairs landlady, had slipped silently into the apartment. She often did this and would sit—C did not know for how long—watching him work at his desk (he imagined for hours) until he finally turned around or got up for a drink of water. At first this so distressed him that he made a point of turning around every ten minutes in order to catch her (he could not bring himself to lock the door). His studies suffered. His plan suffered; and he finally turned the desk around so that he sat with his back toward the wall. Even with this she managed, despite her lumbering size, to enter without being noticed. This particular afternoon she did not wait to be caught, but spoke out from her seated position on the Hollywood bed.
“How did you get a name like C?” she asked.
“My father,” C said and did not look up from his books.
“Your father called you C?”
“Yes.” He looked at her now—dreading. “That is, he called me Cecil and my mother didn’t like that because it was too long.”
“Then your mother named you C,” she concluded, with satisfaction, and crossed her heavy legs.
“I suppose so.”
“I’m not old enough to be your mother,” she confessed and re-crossed her legs the other way.
Dread, thought C, staring into the pages of his book, through the desk, through the cement, and into the ground—hoping she would think he was reading.
“I’m only thirty-six.”
“Your children,” said C.
“No; we’re a very liberal family. I have made it a point for my children to be completely used to their bodies and mine. There’s nothing dirty about it.”
“I can understand that,” said C, “for you.”
“You too, C. You study too hard. Come upstairs and let me stick you between my thighs and shake something loose.”
He’d expected it might come in that way, nothing but the terrible facts of the desire. There was no other way for her. It was her attitude. Dread, thought C . . . but he believed then, and always, that relationships between people were like nothing else—that somehow it was partly his own responsibility for his landlady feeling the way she did, and because he was partly responsible for agitating this desire, then it would be wrong not to help her satisfy it. Dread, he thought. Involvement, maybe, but like this, now . . .
“Can’t you think of anything else to do?” he asked himself, “like shopping, or laundry, or working, or . . . no, I don’t suppose you can.” And he got up and they went upstairs and upstairs again and into her room, where he stood nervously next to the door.
“First time, ain’t it?” she said, pulling her sweater over her head, beginning to let her full self out. “Come over here,” she said, stretching her arms out to him. “Don’t be shy.”
“I’m not,” he answered.
“Come over here,” she cooed.
“I can manage,” he said and quickly removed his clothes, giving himself more time with the socks as he noticed she was having some difficulty in undoing her bra and finally peeled it off downward.
“Must have been rusted,” he said.
“Come here,” she said, and he saw that outside the window was rain, slush, snow, ice, and wind, and this made him feel smaller somehow. He walked over to her as gracefully as he could and she laid hold of him and sat him down on the bed with one of her hands around behind his buttocks and the other already stroking and pulling at his shrunken penis.
“That’s better,” she said. “You’ll be all right.” C had his eyes closed and was concentrating on intellectual theories—names and dates. Mrs. Sorenson wrapped her legs around him, pressed him neatly into her with the backs of her calves and heels, rocking him gently with her hands on his shoulders. The front door opened and closed. Feet clambered up the steps and into the room. C’s soul slipped to his feet.
“Mom, where’s Benji?” asked the seventh-grader, soon joined by his younger sister.
“I don’t know. At the neighbors’ . . . maybe Mrs. Myers let him in the house again. Why don’t you go look?” C had stopped and was looking at them, apologetically, fearfully, hatefully. Mrs. Sorenson began rocking him again with the tremendous power of her legs. “And tell Dennis to turn down the radio or turn it off.”
“Did you have a good day, Mommy?” asked the smaller one.
“It’s been all right. Now run along and don’t go wandering off before dinner . . . and take off your boots,” she called after them. They left.
“You have very liberal children, Mrs. Sorenson.”
“Don’t think about them now,” she said and closed her eyes.
AFTER SOME TIME C WAS ALLOWED TO ROLL OVER ONTO A MORE SPACIOUS part of the mattress and Betty trotted off to the dresser drawer. She extracted a large manila envelope and carried it over to the bed. C had sat up and was watching the summing up of the afternoon outside.
“Look at these,” said Betty. “These were taken at Lake of the Dells—at night, of course.” And she lifted out a clump of photographs and spread them out on the bed . . . pictures of her in the nude standing beside pieces of furniture, trees, lying in the grass, eating candied apples, playing a guitar . . . “My husband took them.”
“Where is your husband, Mrs. Sorenson? Is he dead?”
“No. He was in the reserves and in 1949 volunteered for active duty in Korea, and stayed there.”
C looked outside again.
“Here’s one taken at Okoboji on our first vacation. That’s Jack,” she said, pointing into a black-and-white picture. C got off the bed and went over to his neat pile of clothes on the floor, and began putting them on.
“I’ve got a lot more here,” she said.
“I don’t have time to look at them, Mrs. Sorenson. I’ve got to be going.”
“Back to your studying, I suppose.”
C put on his lost shoe and walked downstairs and then walked downstairs again. Margie, the first-grader, opened the basement door for him and stood