The Losers

“Well,” Flood said, busily at work with the shaker, “what do you think of our ‘Bel?”

“She’s a lady,” Raphael said simply.

Flood laughed. “You’re naive, Raphael. ‘Bel has breeding; she’s got class; she’s got exquisite manners and taste; but she’s not a lady—as I’m sure you’ll soon discover.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Raphael asked, a little irritated by Flood’s flippancy.

“You’ll find out.” Flood began to rattle the shaker.

“Isn’t it a little early for that?” Raphael asked, sitting carefully in one of the large chairs in front of the fireplace in the living room.

“Never too early.” Flood’s tone was blithe. “It’ll anesthetize all your aches and pains. You’re gimping around like an arthritic camel.” He came into the living room, handed Raphael a glass, and then sprawled on the leather couch.

“Nice house,” Raphael noted, looking around, “but isn’t it sort of—well—masculine?”

“That’s ‘Bel for you.” Flood laughed. “It’s all part of her web. ‘Bel’s not like other women—that’s why I like her so much. She’s very predatory, and she usually gets exactly what she wants.”

“You’re a snide bastard, Flood.”

“Bight on.” Flood laughed easily. “It’s part of my charm.”

A half hour later Isabel came back down in a flowered print dress that was sleeveless and cut quite low in front. Raphael found that he had difficulty keeping his eyes where they belonged. The woman was full-figured, and her arms plumply rounded. There was about her a kind of ripeness, an opulence that the firm-figured but angular girls of his own age lacked. Her every move seemed somehow suggestive, and Raphael was troubled by his reactions to her.

They passed the afternoon quietly. They had lunch and a few more drinks afterward. Isabel and Raphael talked at some length about nothing in particular while Flood sat back watching, his hard, bright eyes moving from one to the other and an indecipherable expression on his face.

In Raphael’s private place he told himself that he really had no business being there. ‘Bel and Flood were aliens to him—bright, beautiful, and totally meaningless. With a kind of startled perception he saw that sophisticated people are sophisticated for that very reason. Meaningless people have to be sophisticated, because they have nothing else.

When it grew dark, they changed clothes and went over to a supper club in Oswego. Raphael rode with Isabel in her sedan, and Flood followed in his Triumph.

At dinner they laughed a great deal, and Raphael could see others in the restaurant glancing at them with eyebrows raised speculatively. Isabel was wearing a low-cut black cocktail dress that set off the satiny white sheen of her skin, and her hair, dark as night, was caught in a loose roll at the back of her neck. As Raphael continued to order more drinks he saw that there was about her an air of enormous sophistication that made him feel very proud just to be seen with her.

As the evening wore on and they lingered over cocktails, Raphael became increasingly convinced that everyone else in the room was covertly watching them, and he periodically forced his laughter and assumed an expression of supercilious boredom.

They had a couple more drinks, and then Raphael knocked over a water glass while he was attempting to light Isabel’s cigarette. He was filled with mortification and apologized profusely, noticing as he did that his words were beginning to slur. Isabel laughed and laid her white hand on his sleeve.

Then Flood was gone. Raphael could not remember when he had left. He forced his eyes to focus on Isabel, seeing the opulent rising mounds of creamy white flesh pressing out from the top of her dress and the enigmatic smile on her full lips.

“I’d better catch the check,” he slurred, fumbling for his wallet.

“It’s already been taken care of,” she assured him, still smiling and once again laying her hand lingeringly on his arm. “Shall we go?” She rose to her feet before he could clamber out of his seat to hold her chair.

He offered his arm, and laughing, she took it. They went outside. Once out in the cool night air, Raphael breathed deeply several times. “That’s better,” he said. “Stuffy in there.” He looked around. “Where the hell is Damon?”

“Junior?” She was unlocking her car. “He wanted to take a look around town. He’ll be along later.”

They climbed into the car and drove in silence back toward Isabel’s house. The night seemed very dark outside the car, and Raphael leaned his head back on the seat.

He awoke with a start when they pulled up in the drive.

They got out of the car and went into the house. He stumbled once on the steps, but caught himself in time.

Isabel turned on a dim light in one corner of the living room, then she stood looking at him, the strange smile still on her face. Quite deliberately she reached back and loosened her hair. It tumbled down her back, and she shook her head to free it. She looked at him, still smiling, and her eyes seemed to glow.

She extended her hand to him. “Shall we go up now?” she said.

v

The autumn proceeded. The leaves turned, the nights grew chill, and Raphael settled into the routine of his studies. The library became his sanctuary, a place to hide from the continuing distraction of Rood’s endless conversation.

It was not that he disliked Damon Flood, but rather that he found the lure of that sardonic flow of elaborate and rather stilted speech too great. It was too easy to lay aside his book and to allow himself to be swept along by the unending talk and the sheer force of Flood’s personality. And when he was not talking, Flood was singing. It was not the music itself that was so distracting, though Flood had an excellent singing voice. Rather it was the often obscene and always outrageous lyrics he composed, seemingly on the spur of the moment. Flood had a natural gift for parody, and his twisting of the content of the most familiar songs inevitably pulled Raphael’s attention from his book and usually prostrated him with helpless laughter. It was, in short, almost impossible to study while his roommate was around.

And so, more often than not, Raphael crossed the dark lawn in the evenings to the soaring cathedral that was the library; and there, in a pool of light from the study lamp, he bent to his books in the vast main hall beneath the high vault of the ceiling.

And sometimes he saw in another pool of light the intent face of the girl whose voice had so stirred him during his first few weeks on campus. They spoke once in a while, usually of material for the class they both attended, but it was all quite casual at first. The vibrant sound of her voice still struck him, but not as much as it had before he had met Isabel Drake.

If his weeks were consumed with study, his weekends were devoted to what he chose to feel was debauchery. Isabel Drake proved to be a woman of infinite variety and insatiable appetite. She seemed to delight in instructing and guiding him in what, a few months earlier, he would have considered perversion. He did not delude himself into believing that it was love. She was charmed by his innocence and took joy in his youthful vigor and stamina. It was so far from being love that sometimes on Sunday nights as he drove back to Portland, physically wrung out and even sore from his exertions, he felt that he had somehow been violated.

For the first few weekends Flood had accompanied him, delivering him, as it were, into Isabel’s hands. Then, almost as if he had assured himself that Raphael would continue the visits without him, he stopped going down to the lake. Without Flood’s presence, his knowing, sardonic eyes always watching, Isabel’s demeanor changed. She became more dominant, more demanding. Raphael sometimes had nightmares about her during the week, vivid, disconnected dreams of being suffocated by the warm, perfumed pillows of her breasts or crushed between the powerful white columns of her thighs. He began to dread the weekends, but the lure of her was too strong, and helplessly he delivered himself each Friday evening to her perfumed lair by the shores of the lake, where she waited—sometimes, he almost felt, lurked—in heavy-lidded anticipation.

“Have you read the Karpinsky book yet?” It was the girl, Marilyn Hamilton, and she spoke to him as they came out of the library one evening after it closed.

“I’m nearly finished with it,” he replied.

“I don’t know,” she said, falling into step beside him, “but it seemed to me that he evades the issue.”

“He does seem a little too pat,” Raphael agreed.

“Glib. Like someone who talks very fast so you don’t have time to spot the holes in his argument.”

They had stopped near the center of the broad lawn in front of Eliot Hall.

“Pardee seems to think a lot of him,” Raphael said.

“Oh yes,” the girl said, laughing slightly. The vibrance of her voice pierced him. “Mr. Pardee studied under Karpinsky at Columbia.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“My sister found out. She took the course a couple years ago. Mr. Pardee won’t mention it in class, of course, but it’s a good thing to know.” She suddenly mimicked their instructor’s gruff voice and deliberately antigrammatical usage. “Since he ain’t about to accept no disrespect.”

Raphael laughed, charmed by her.

She hesitated and then spoke without looking at him. “I saw you play in that game last month,” she told him quietly.

“Oh,” he said, “that. It wasn’t much of a game, really.”

“Not the way you played, it wasn’t. You destroyed them.”

“You think I overemphasized?” he asked, grinning.

“I’m trying to pay you a compliment, dammit.” Then she grinned back.

“Thank you.”

“I’m making a fool of myself, right?” “No, not really.”

“Anyway, I thought it was really spectacular—and I don’t like football very much.”

“It’s only a game.” He shrugged. “It’s more fun to play than it is to watch.”

“Doesn’t it hurt when you get tackled like that?”

“The idea is not to get tackled.”

“You’re a stubborn man, Raphael Taylor,” she accused. “It’s almost impossible to talk to you.” “Me?”

“And will you stop looking at me all the time. Every time I look up, there you are, watching me. You make me feel as if I don’t have any clothes on.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’ll start making faces at you if you don’t stop it,” she warned. “Then how would you feel?”

“The question is how are you going to feel when people start to think your gears aren’t meshing?”

“You’re impossible,” she said, but her voice was not really

angry. “I have to go home and study some more.” She turned abruptly and strode away with a curiously leggy gait that seemed at once awkward and almost childishly feminine.

“Marilyn,” he called after her.

She stopped and turned. “What?”

“I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“No, you won’t. I’m going to hide under the table.” She stuck her tongue out at him, turned, and continued across the lawn. Raphael laughed.

Their growing friendship did not, of course, go unobserved. By the time it had progressed to the stage of going for coffee together at the Student Union Building, Flood became aware of it. “Raphael’s being unfaithful to you, ‘Bel,” he announced on one of his now-infrequent visits to the lake.

“Get serious,” Raphael told him, irritated and a little embarrassed.

“Don’t be a snitch, Junior,” Isabel said quite calmly. “Nobody likes a snitch.”

“I just thought you ought to know, ‘Bel.” Flood grinned maliciously. “Since I introduced you two, I feel a certain responsibility.” His eyes, however, were serious, even calculating.

“Our relationship isn’t that kind.” She still seemed unperturbed. “I don’t have any objections if Raphael has other diversions—any more than he’s upset by my little flings.”

Raphael looked at her quickly, startled and with a sudden sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach.

“Oh, my poor Angel,” she said, catching the look and laughing, “did you honestly think I was ‘saving myself for you? I have other friends, too, you know.”

Raphael was sick, and at the same time ashamed to realize that he was actually jealous.

In bed that night she brought it up again. She raised up on one elbow, her heavy breast touching his arm. “How is she?” she asked, “The other girl, I mean?”

“It’s not that kind of thing,” he answered sulkily. “We just

talk—have coffee together once in a while, that’s all.”

“Don’t be coy,” she said with a wicked little laugh, deliberately rubbing her still-erect nipple on his shoulder. “A young man who looks like you do could have the panties off half the girls in Portland inside a week.”

“I don’t go around taking people’s panties off.”

“You take mine off,” she disagreed archly.

“That’s different.” He moved his shoulder away.

“Why is it different?”

“She’s not that kind of a girl.”

“Every girl is that kind of a girl.” She laughed, leaning forward so that the ripe breast touched him again. “We’re all alike. Is she as good as I am?”

“Oh, for God’s sake, ‘Bel. Why don’t we just skip all this? Nothing’s going on. Flood’s got a dirty mind, that’s all.”

“Of course he has. Am I embarrassing you, sweet? We shouldn’t be embarrassed by anything—not here.”

“What about those other men?” he accused, trying to force her away from the subject.

“What about them?”

“I thought—well—” He broke off helplessly, not knowing how to pursue the subject.

“Are you really upset because I sleep with other men once in a while? Are you really jealous, Angel?”

“Well—no,” he lied, “not really.”

“We never made any promises, did we? Did you think we were ‘going steady’ or something?” The persistent nipple continued its stroking of his shoulder.

“I just didn’t think you were—well—promiscuous is all.”

“Of course I’m promiscuous.” She laughed, kissing him. “I had you in bed within twelve hours of the moment I met you. Is that the sort of thing you’d expect from a nice girl? I’m not exactly a bitch in heat, but a little variety never hurt anyone, did it?”

He couldn’t think of anything to say.

“Don’t sulk, Angel,” she said almost maternally as she pulled

him to her again. “You’ve got my full attention at the moment. That’s about the best I can promise you.”

His flesh responded to her almost against his will. He’d have liked to have been stubborn, but she was too skilled, too expert.

“You should try her, Raphael,” Isabel said almost conversationally a couple of minutes later. “A little variety might be good for you, too. And who knows? Maybe she’s better at it than I am.” She laughed, and then the laugh traded off into a series of little gasps and moans as she began to move feverishly under him.

vi

The idea had not been there before. In Raphael’s rather unsophisticated views on such matters, girls were divided into two distinct categories—those you took to bed and those you took to school dances. It was not that he was actually naive, it was just that such classification made his relations with girls simpler, and Raphael’s views on such things were simplistic. He had been raised in a small, remote city that had a strongly puritanical outlook; his Canadian mother had been quite firm about being “nice,” a firmness in part deriving from her lurking fear that some brainless sixteen-year-old tramp might unexpectedly present her with a squalling grandchild. Raphael’s football coach at high school, moreover, had taught Sunday school at the Congregational church, and his locker-room talks almost as frequently dealt with chastity as they did with the maiming of middle linebackers. Raphael’s entire young life had been filled with one long sermon that concentrated almost exclusively on one of the “thou shalt nots,” the only amendment having been the reluctant addition of”—with nice girls.” Raphael knew, of course, that other young men did not make a distinction between “nice” girls and the other kind, but it seemed somehow unsporting to him to seduce “nice” girls when the other sort was available—something on the order of poaching a protected species—and sportsmanship had been drilled into him for so long that its sanctions had the force of religious dictum. Isabel’s sly insinuations, however, had planted the idea, and in the weeks that followed he found himself frequently looking at Marilyn Hamilton in a way he would not have considered before.

His relationship with the girl passed through all the normal stages—coffee dates in the Student Union, a movie or two, the first kiss, and the first tentative gropings in the front seat of a car parked in a secluded spot. They walked together in the rain; they held hands and they talked together endlessly and very seriously about things that were not particularly significant. They studied together in the dim library, and they touched each other often. They also drove frequently to a special spot they had found outside town where they parked, and in the steamy interior of Raphael’s car with the radio playing softly and the misted windows curtaining them from the outside, they partially undressed each other and clung and groped and moaned in a frenzy of desire and frustration as they approached but never quite consummated the act that was becoming more and more inevitable.

Flood, of course, watched, one eyebrow cocked quizzically, gauging the progress of the affair by Raphael’s increasing irritability and the lateness of his return to their room. “No score yet, I see,” he’d observe dryly upon Raphael’s return on such nights.

“Why don’t you mind your own damned business?” Raphael would snap, and Flood would chuckle, roll over in his bed, and go back to sleep.

In those weeks Isabel became a virtual necessity to Raphael. With her he found a release for the tensions that had built up to an almost unbearable pitch during the course of the week. She gloated over the passion he brought to her, and sent him back to Portland on Sunday nights sufficiently exhausted to keep him short of the point of no return with the girl. The knowledge that Isabel was there served as a kind of safety valve for him, making it possible for him to draw back at that last crucial instant each time.

And so autumn ground drearily on with dripping skies and the

now-bare trees glistening wet and black in the rain. Isabel grew increasingly waspish, and finally announced that she was leaving for a few weeks. “I’ve got to get some sun,” she said. “This rain’s driving me up the wall.”

“Where are you going?” Raphael asked her.

“Phoenix maybe. Vegas—I don’t know. I haven’t decided yet. I’ve got to get away from the rain for a while.”

There was nothing he could say. He knew he had no real hold on her, and he even welcomed the idea in a way. His visits had become almost a duty, and he had begun to resent her unspoken demands upon him.

After he had seen her off at the airport outside Portland, he walked back to his car almost with the sense of having been liberated.

On his first weekend date with Marilyn he felt vaguely guilty—almost like an unfaithful husband. The weekends had always belonged to Isabel. He had not been entirely honest with Marilyn about those weekends. It was not that he had lied, exactly; rather, he had let her believe that Isabel was elderly, an old friend of his family, and that his weekly visits were in the nature of an obligation.

After the movie they drove to their special spot in the country and began the customary grappling. Perhaps because the weekends had always been denied to her and this evening was somehow stolen and therefore illicit, Marilyn responded to his caresses with unusual passion, shuddering and writhing under his hands. Finally she pulled free of him for an instant, looked at him, and spoke quite simply. “Let’s,” she said, her voice thick and vibrant.

And so they did.

It was awkward, since they were both quite tall, and the steering wheel was horribly in the way, but they managed.

And afterward she cried. He comforted her as best he could and later drove her home, feeling more than a little ashamed of himself. There had been some fairly convincing evidence that, until that night, Marilyn had been one of the girls one would normally take to a school dance.

The next time they used the backseat. It was more satisfactory, and this time she did not cry. Raphael, however, was still a bit ashamed and wished they had not done it. Something rather special seemed to have been lost, and he regretted it.

After several weeks Isabel returned, her fair skin slightly tanned and her temper improved.

Flood accompanied Raphael to the lake on the first weekend, his eyes bright and a knowing smile on his face.

Raphael was moody and stalked around the house, stopping now and then to stare out at the rain, and drinking more than was usual for him. It was time, he decided, to break off the affair with Isabel. She was too wise for him, too experienced, and in a way he blamed her for having planted that evil seed that had grown to its full flower that night in the front seat of his car. If it had not been for her insinuating suggestions, his relationship with Marilyn might still be relatively innocent. Beyond that, she repelled him now. Her overripe figure seemed to have taken on a faint tinge of rottenness, and the smooth sophistication that had attracted him at first seemed instead to be depravity now—even degeneracy. He continued to drink, hoping to incapacitate himself and thus avoid that inevitable and now-disgusting conclusion of the evening.

“Our Angel has fallen, I’m afraid,” Flood said after dinner when they were all sitting in front of the crackling fireplace.

“Why don’t you mind your own business, Damon?” Raphael said, his words slurring.

“Has he been naughty?” Isabel asked, amused.

“Repeatedly. He’s been coming in with claw marks on his back from shoulder to hip.”

“Why don’t you keep your goddamn mouth shut?” Raphael snapped.

“Be nice, dear,” Isabel chided him, “and don’t try to get muscular. My furniture’s too expensive for that sort of foolishness.”

“I just want him to keep his mouth shut, that’s all.” Raphael’s words sounded mushy even to him.

“All right then. You tell me. Was it that girl?”

He glared sulkily into the fireplace.

“This won’t be much of a conversation if you won’t talk to me. Did she really scratch you, Angel? Let me see.” She came across the room to him and tugged at his shirt.

“Lay off, ‘Bel,” he warned, pushing her hands away. “I’m not in the mood for any of that.”

“Oh”—she laughed—“it’s true then. I’ve never liked scratching. It’s unladylike.”

“How the hell would you know?”

Her eyes narrowed slightly, and her voice took on an edge. “All the usual things, I suppose? Parked car, clumsy little gropings in the dark, the steering wheel?”

Raphael’s face flamed. She saw the flush and laughed, a deep, throaty sound that made him flush even more. “You did!” she exulted. “In a car seat! My poor Angel, I thought I’d taught you better. Are motels so expensive now? Or couldn’t you wait? Was she a virgin?”

“Why don’t we just drop this?”

“I think the boy’s in love, Junior,” she said to Flood.

“Here’s to love.” Flood toasted, raising his glass. “And to steering wheels, of course.”

“Oh, that’s cute, Hood,” Raphael said sarcastically. It sounded silly even to him, but he didn’t care.

“Don’t be nasty, dear.” Isabel’s tone was motherly. “It doesn’t become you.”

It was that note in her voice more than anything—that tolerant, amused, superior tone that finally infuriated him. “Don’t patronize me, ‘Bel,” he told her, getting up clumsily. “I won’t take that—not from you.”