Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [33]
Dr. Blankenship had a niece in the graduating class. That was what brought him to Scipio. His niece was Hortense Mellon. I have no idea what became of Hortense. She could play the harp. I remember that, and her upper teeth were false. The real teeth were knocked out by a mugger as she left a friend’s coming-out party at the Waldorf-Astoria, which has since burned down. There is nothing but a vacant lot there now, which was bought by the Japanese.
I heard that her father, like so many other Tarkington parents, lost an awful lot of money in the biggest swindle in the history of Wall Street, stock in a company called Microsecond Arbitrage.
I HAD SPOTTED Kimberley as a snoop, all right, but not as a walking recording studio. All through the academic year now ending, our paths had crossed with puzzling frequency. Again and again I would be talking to somebody, almost anywhere on the campus, and realize that Kimberley was lurking close by. I assumed that she was slightly cracked, and was eavesdropping on everyone, avid for gossip. She wasn’t even taking a course of mine for credit, although she did audit both Physics for Non-scientists and Music Appreciation for Nonmusicians. So what could I possibly be to her or she to me? We had never had a conversation about anything.
One time, I remember, I was shooting pool in the new recreation center, the Pahlavi Pavilion, and she was so close that I was having trouble working my cuestick, and I said to her, “Do you like my perfume?”
“What?” she said.
“I find you so close to me so often,” I said, “I thought maybe you liked my perfume. I’m very flattered, if that’s the case, because that’s nothing but my natural body odor. I don’t use perfume.”
I can quote myself exactly, since those words were on one of the tapes the Trustees would play back for me.
She shrugged as though she didn’t know what I was talking about. She didn’t leave the Pavilion in great embarrassment. On the contrary! She gave me a little more room for my cuestick but was still practically on top of me.
I was playing 8-ball head to head with the novelist Paul Slazinger, that year’s Writer in Residence. He was dead broke and out of print, which is the only reason anybody ever became Writer in Residence at Tarkington. He was so old that he had actually been in World War II. He had won a Silver Star like me when I was only 3 years old!
He asked me who Kimberley was, and I said, and she got this on tape, too, “Pay no attention. She’s just another member of the Ruling Class.”
So the Board of Trustees would want to know what it was, exactly, that I had against the Ruling Class.
I didn’t say so back then, but I am perfectly happy to say now that the trouble with the Ruling Class was that too many of its members were nitwits like Kimberley.
ONE THEORY I had about her snooping was that she was titillated by my reputation as the campus John F. Kennedy as far as sex outside of marriage was concerned.
If President Kennedy up in Heaven ever made a list of all the women he had made love to, I am sure it would be 2 or 3 times as long as the one I am making down here in jail. Then again, he had the glamour of his office, and the full cooperation of the Secret Service and the White House Staff. None of the names on my list would mean anything to the general public, whereas many on his would belong to movie stars. He made love to Marilyn Monroe. I sure never did. She evidently expected to marry him and become First Lady, which was a joke to everybody but her.
She eventually committed suicide. She finally found life too embarrassing.
I STILL HARDLY knew Kimberley when she appeared in the bel tower on Graduation Day. But she was chatty, as though we were old, old pals. She was still recording me, although what she already had on tape was enough