A Chimney of Nasturtiums

Fitzway was beginning again. He was beginning where he had begun on Monday, which was only slightly past where he had left off the previous Wednesday. It was Wednesday again. Notes...notes... I take good notes, but God, Harvard in December.

Past Snyde I saw her again. She. Her. Oh, hell...Snyde says her name is Peter. It really is, he says. I'd watched her all fall...my class notes were filled with dreams.

Finally I met her. When we picked up our term paper assignments. The term paper. God. The only nice thing about it, it wasn't due until April.

By April...well, as we picked up the assignment, my shoulder brushed her bosom, hard. The bosom was hard. It was accidental, but she smiled in a small, familiar way.

"Peter..." I said. Suddenly I was breathless, almost speechless, practically without a metaphor from desire. Hot desire. Warm, tanned, crimson desire. That she should come with me. Through the cold December Yard into the pink April of Albiani's for some coffee--April, no extensions--just in case, I borrowed twenty cents from Snyde.

You go to Albiani's for coffee in Cambridge if you do not go to the Hayes-Bickford, or Hazen's, or the Wursthaus, or Jim's Place and that is what the sign over the door says, for those who do not know any better and read the sign--or the University Restaurant which Hemingway does not go to, but which Fitzgerald was known to prefer, or to the Casablanca, or the Cafe Mozart. The coffee varies; but you get to know what it tastes like in each place.

Somehow, some way, I managed to ask her.

She came.

Then and later.

When I was with her, I felt that I, too, could fly. With her, I abandoned myself to the luxury of lechery...to her bare clean lips, her cool tweed sweaters, her short warm tweed skirts, her tights which covered her painfully long thin legs without wrinkling.

I knew that somehow I must get her out of all this.

Even though it was December, the winter around us with all its vital austerity, I asked her to my room again and again. But again and again, Snyde stayed around. Snyde--blond, from Beacon Hill, via Concord Reformatory--I hated him. He stayed around, picking his nose, reading old Crime book reviews and playing those acid esoteric Mozart quartets when I wanted Fantasy in Flyland and Ravel to work upon her soul.

Suddenly one night, as I was walking beside Peter up Garden Street, it hit me. He was chaperoning. Him. My buddy. I ran all the way back to the room. I must know. "Snyde," I pleaded with him, "What is it? You've got to tell me. If you don't, who will?"

He wouldn't.

So we fled to the Patisserie Cafe Morceau. It was warm there too; though the sky was apple green, the pastries were aging but good. I loved to see Peter's strong teeth clamping down over them, demolishing them; I felt demolished too, and would order more. "Garcon," I would say to the diseased French girl who presided behind the marble-topped, crumb-lined counter, "por favor, una fumata fur meine fraulein." "Mynheer," she would always reply, smiling, and bring us another of Peter's favorite pear-filled, chocolate-covered fumates. You do not get such fumates everywhere. We would stay there in the warm pink exciting womb-like garret until the basketball jocks dropped in for pear-filled fumates, bringing with them the stench of the cages...of Harvard. Of Cambridge, that book-lined, brick-paved prison.

We had to get away to the only place where love is free. Abroad. Spain. In April. But it was Cambridge, in December.

There were seventeen problems: money; passports; tetanus-typhoid-yellow fever shots; a Greek landlady bearing an expensive product (Snyde would say, Beware! I hated him); reservations on a plane carrying ginger ale to be served with Dramamine at Gander; German, French, Italian, and Spanish for the Swiss Alps; Greek for the return voyage...How else could we preserve the rapture of passion which comes when you eat pastry at the Patisserie Cafe Morceau beside the girl you love.

Well...

Here I am writing at the desk of my father's insurance office in Hannibal, as the afternoon light fades. "The Education of Henery Lamby."

Over this river there is a moon, but it does not give much light. And I cannot stop thinking... The passport office refused to issue Peter's passport, because she was a transvestite from Brooks House, employed by the Yale Daily News to find out what was shoe at Radcliffe. Harvard rusticated me for getting an E in Fitzway's course. My notes were all on Peter, and Snyde refused to lend me his.

Notes...notes... I used to take good notes. Now I sell farm policies for forty acres and a mule to those who have only jackasses in the family.