Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [43]
The lights were on, but nobody was home. The family’s 4 unicycles were in the front hall and the car was gone. They never got cored. They were smart. They drove one of the last Volkswagen Bugs still running.
I knew where they kept the liquor. I poured myself a couple of stiff shots of bourbon, in lieu of their absent body warmth. I don’t think I had had a drink for a month before that.
I got this hot rush in my belly. Out into the night I went again. I was automatically looking for an older woman who would make everything all right by becoming the beast with two backs with me.
A coed would not do, not that a coed would have had anything to do with somebody as old and relatively poor as me. I couldn’t even have promised her a better grade than she deserved. There were no grades at Tarkington.
But I wouldn’t have wanted a coed in any case. The only sort of woman who excites me is an older one in uncomfortable circumstances, full of doubts not only about herself but about the value of life itself. Although I never met her personally, the late Marilyn Monroe comes to mind, maybe 3 years before she committed suicide.
Cough, cough, cough.
IF THERE IS a Divine Providence, there is also a wicked one, provided you agree that making love to off-balance women you aren’t married to is wickedness. My own feeling is that if adultery is wickedness then so is food. Both make me feel so much better afterward.
JUST AS A hungry person knows that somewhere not far away somebody is preparing good things to eat, I knew that night that not far away was an older woman in despair. There had to be!
Zuzu Johnson was out of the question. Her husband was home, and she was hosting a dinner party for a couple of grateful parents who were giving the college a language laboratory. When it was finished, students would be able to sit in soundproof booths and listen to recordings of any one of more than 100 languages and dialects made by native speakers.
THE LIGHTS WERE on in the sculpture studio of Norman Rockwell Hall, the art building, the only structure on campus named after a historical figure rather than the donating family. It was another gift from the Moellenkamps, who may have felt that too much was named after them already.
There was a whirring and rumbling coming from inside the sculpture studio. Somebody was playing with the crane in there, making it run back and forth on its tracks overhead. Whoever it was had to be playing, since nobody ever made a piece of sculpture so big that it could be moved only by the mighty crane.
After the prison break, there was some talk on the part of the convicts of hanging somebody from it, and running him back and forth while he strangled. They had no particular candidate in mind. But then the Niagara Power and Light Company, which was owned by the Unification Church Korean Evangelical Association, shut off all our electricity.
OUTSIDE ROCKWELL HALL that night, I might have been back on a patrol in Vietnam. That is how keen my senses were. That was how quick my mind was to create a whole picture from the slightest clues.
I knew that the sculpture studio was locked up tight after 6:30 P.M., since I had tried the door many times, thinking that I might sometime bring a lover there. I had considered getting a key somehow at the start of the semester and learned from Buildings and Grounds that only they and that year’s Artist in Residence, the sculptress Pamela Ford Hall, were allowed to have keys. This was because of vandalism by either students or Townies in the studio the year before.
They knocked off the noses and fingers of replicas of Greek statues, and defecated in a bucket of wet clay. That sort of thing.
SO THAT HAD to be Pamela Ford Hall in there making the crane go back and forth.