Chapter 17
Roy Prentiss sat in his room in the dorm staring at the pictures he had drawn of Eve Banner. His breath tightened until he could not breath more deeply than a quivering, shallow gasp. His loins stirred into life and swelled against the confines of his trousers.
He looked down at the lump, rubbing his hand over it. Nothing wrong with that! No sir!
No ma'am Eve rose in his mind as he pushed harder against .his turgid flesh. He imagined her here, on his bed, on her back, her legs spread out. She was naked....
Naked.
So what? The fantasy did nothing for him. He had seen her naked, with her legs spread, so many times. Some other girl he could undress in his mind and enjoy it, but Eve....
He needed more than the imagined sight of her bare flesh. He didn't have to imagine that, not now.
He tightened his fist and banged it on the desk top, tears of frustration coming into his eyes. In a moment, his glasses were wet and steamed. He took them off and cleaned them on his shirttail. He squinted painfully at the drawings; he could barely see them now, his eyes were so weak.
Everything about him was weak except His hand touched the magic of his maleness. His lips parted as his tongue darted over them.
He put his glasses on again. The drawings sharpened and changed from fuzzy gray to defined black. The clarity was unbearable because he knew he had no talent. He could not draw; he never had been able to. He just took the art course so that he could see a naked woman, a real woman with no clothes on, instead of the pictures in magazines that he had been buying since he was eighteen.
His mother had found them once. He could still hear her screaming, taunting, horrified voice. "You're a beast, a nasty little snot! A filthy, dirty monster!"
He looked into the mirror on the back of the closet door. I am a beasi, a nasty little snot, a filthy dirty monster....
Prentiss sprang from the chair, knocking it over, and stood in front of the long mirror. I hate them! I hate girls! They hate me-why shouldn't I hate them?
He was so small and thin; he still looked about sixteen, even if he were a freshman in college. They had made fun of him, always. Ever since he started kindergarten. At first he thought it was his glasses; he had always worn them. When he was a little boy they had to be strapped on so he wouldn't lose them as he toddled about in a clumsy, childish gait. Before they finally discovered that his sight was so poor, his parents had thought he was mentally retarded because he kept bumping into things and had no curiosity. He gazed at things dully, with no interest. He couldn't even Prentiss shuddered with rage as he heard his father's voice, disgusted, disappointed, jeering:
"He's so dumb he can't even piss! Look, he missed it again."
The glasses were only one problem as time went on. It wasn't so bad in the lower grades, when everyone was little, but later on all the rest of them grew so tall-except him.
Then the girls began to hate him with a ferocity they did not bother to hide. "There's no room at the tables. So? Eat your lunch off of Roy's head!"
He would go to the football games in high school to look at the cheerleaders. The game didn't interest him; it only made him feel worse because he wasn't big and strong enough to play. But, miraculously, there was one part of him that was big; damn big. That much he knew from the locker room in gym class. Of course, he was excused from gym because of his eyes and the effects of the rheumatic fever he had had as a child. But he kept score and took care of the equipment, and so he dressed in a sweat suit along with the other boys.
It was not until then that he realized what he had, compared to them. They realized it, too, but they admitted it in a jeering way.
"Hey, cock! Where're you goin' with that boy?"
Prentiss knew for a fact that the captain of the football team had a dong no bigger than a girl's thumb. That was why he liked to go to the games and stare at the cheerleaders. What if they had known of the disparity?
He watched them, their jiggling breasts that were always moving under their heavy sweaters. When they squatted and jumped, which was perpetually, you could see way up their skirts. They wore tights, but you could see the crotch. The girls did mid-air splits. Each time the milky legs opened, he imagined they were wrapping around him. He saw himself planted between them, throwing it in hard. He wasn't sure of the place ... he knew there was supposed to be an opening but he didn't know where it was. From his pictures, he couldn't tell. It was just a patch of hair, shaped like a triangle. Did you just ram it into the hair? Did it all open up when you did it to a girl? If the girl had never done it before, you had to break through something ... but what? Where? Did it mean that after you did it to her, she would have a bald place there in the triangle?
The thought pleased him. Right in the gut! That would fix them, that would pay them back for laughing at him.
The confusion stayed with him until the day he followed one of the cheerleaders home from school. At first, he didn't consciously plan it. He just wanted to watch her bottom bounce, but then it bounced so much that he couldn't stand it any longer. He had to get in there and feel it, that soft flesh that always looked plump, no matter how thin the girl was. He didn't want to hurt her ... he couldn't stick his dong in her because that would be a crime and they'd send him to jail. He just wanted to feel her, put his hand up there and find out where that place was, and touch it, maybe put his finger in it.
Just to see ... he wouldn't hurt her. He just wanted to know, to feel....He had to know.
When she passed a small park he ran up to her, panting. "Hi! How-how are you?" he stammered.
Her mouth twisted in disgust. "Oh, it's you."
"You ... want to sit in the park for awhile?" His voice shook; he felt a pounding in his throat and in the back of his head.
"No, thanks," the girl said in a snippy voice.
He stepped closer. It was a wonderful feeling to see that look of terror come into her eyes. They widened, just like ripples in a pond when you throw stones in. Widening ... ever widening.
"Hey-stop!"
He clamped a hand over her mouth and pulled her into the bushes. For some reason, he was strong, stronger than she, even though he was shorter. His hand shot up her skirt and dug into the crotch of her pants. He felt the hair, lots of it, and then something else.
The skin parted, and then it was like having a finger inside a mouth. It felt the same ... slippery, moist, just like gums.
She struggled away and screamed hysterically, crawling on her hands and knees over the wet, muddy grass.
Someone in a car stopped. An older couple got out, horrified. She ran to them, pointing back at the bushes where he lay, crying. What would his mother say now? What would she call him?
There were angry, hysterical meetings between the police, the juvenile authorities, the school counselor, the school psychiatrist, and both sets of parents. They made him go to therapy three times a week, and took him out of school. A-tutor had to finish out the senior year for him. In exchange for agreeing to this, Roy's parents were assured that there would be nothing on record that would keep him from getting into college.
Yet he still hated women, too, for what they had done to him. There was a book he read; its title was one short word: She. It's author was H. Rider Haggard. Roy couldn't concentrate on the story because of the title. It was like something lurking behind him as he read. The word was awful. It sounded viscious; it sounded tike shriek, screech, scream. It sounded like something that had claws. He imagined an animal called a she. It would have slanting eyes, sleek hair, long pointed teeth; it would move with stealth and grace, silent and undulating toward its prey.
Of course, there was no such animal. Yet, there actually was; the big cats. The circus came to town and he went. As he was watching the lion tamer he stiffened. Afterwards, when everyone was talking about it, he wanted to tell them that he had known it was going to happen, but they would just laugh, as they always laughed at him.
The cats moved in sulky but timid obedience. The whip cracked, the cats cringed and performed, climbing up on little colored drums and sitting docilely on their hind legs. The spectators applauded, and the tamer turned around to take a bow....
A lunge. A hoarse, hideous scream. Panic. Fascinated horror as the sand in the cage grew red.
Roy sat staring at the gore. A man behind him hollered, "Oh, no ... no ... the goddamn fool. They'll turn on you every time.
She....
"Cats don't like to be tamed," people said, reading the papers the next day. "They're too independent. Even a little house cat."
The circus incident occurred the summer before Roy started college. One day, he saw a cat walking in the alley. She....People called all cats she whether they were male or female. It didn't seem to matter: they were always she or her.
As with the girl he had assaulted, he didn't plan to do it. The idea birthed itself in a labor apart from the workings of his conscious mind. He picked up a can of lighter fluid and some matches and went out the door.
"Here, kitty, kitty, kitty."
The cat stared at him with slanting green eyes. How coolly mocking they were! She....How he hated that cat. He went forward slowly, crouching down and holding out his hand.
Suddenly, unable to wait any longer, he grabbed at the fur ruff. The cat squalled and spat, turning into a raging ball of fury as it began to shred the flesh of his arm. Roy cried out in pain and dropped the animal, watching it race away from him.
It was as though he had just awakened from sleep. He shook his head, dazed, and looked at his arm. The blood was coursing down it from four deep cuts. It looked like the tines of a huge red fork.
When he entered college and took the drawing class, he became obsessed with Eve. There she sat, on that little stool, with her slanting eyes and that thick mane of tawny hair. Watching ... always watching something or somebody carefully, even though she never really looked at anything.
She had answered his question for him. She spread her legs so wide sometimes, or bent over with her back towards him, so that he at last understood where the opening was. It was down at the bottom of that divided oval. A couple of times, he could practically see it open.
Now, he stood in front of the mirror in the dormitory room, opening his pants. There! Wouldn't she like that? What girl wouldn't? He arched his back and beat the palm of his hand hard over the stiffened rod. Goddamn her ... her ... she ... her ... she.
But abruptly, he stopped his solitary pleasure. No, not this way. There was a better way. The detached sensation came over him once again.
He walked to his desk and searched for the piece of paper. He hadn't planned to follow her home; he wasn't going to bother her, he just wanted to see where she lived. Somehow, seeing the most intimate parts of her had made him want to know other things about her-insignificant things.
Like where she lived.
He picked up the slip of paper. On it was written: She: 144 West Street, Apt. 7.
He fastened his pants, put the paper in his pocket, and left the dormitory. It was dark as he walked across the quadrangle. He saw the bus coming and ran for it, taking a short-cut through a clump of bushes. They made him think of the cheerleader. As he pushed them open and jumped through them they made a scratchy sound against his jacket that seemed to be the word: She.