Free The Hair of Harold Roux by Thomas Williams Page B

day of sharp borders, when the treeswere yellow-green against an unmoving, enameled blue sky, Allard, Mary Tolliver and Harold Roux sat on the grassy bank overlooking the tennis courts, where girls sweatily chased white fluffy new balls, laughing at their own awkwardness. Allard was talking about a play he was writing, called
The End
. And he was writing it, of course, back to front.
    The day was so warm and benevolent Harold had actually removed his coat and tie. The long white points of his shirt collar, unused to such informality, still held themselves together. The sunlight seemed to disappear into his pale skin, and his immaculate wig (or toupee, or hairpiece) rode too perfectly his smooth forehead.
    Mary wore a white tennis blouse and shorts. Tiny golden hairs gleamed along her slim thighs; the slightest dew was on her upper lip. Her hair gleamed light gold, though her eyes were a startling dark brown, dark and soft to look into. In the brown radiations of her left iris was set the smallest shard of green, like a splinter of jade. She had been decorated at birth with this surprising little jewel. Now, she expressed her happiness in each limb, each motion. Even the wrinkles and folds of her clothes seemed to draw smoothly toward excitement and contentment. It was so obvious that of all the places and times of the world, here and now was where she most wanted to be, and was. Allard watched her, thinking how each cell of her body must be operating in harmony with that happiness. She was eighteen; she would be nineteen in the fall.
    While she and Harold listened, Allard explained that in his play the last scene would take place in a restaurant with booths all along the back and sides of the stage. On each table was a lamp containing several bare flash bulbs. Just before the final curtain, all lights would dim into total darkness long enough for the audience’s retinas to open to maximum diameter. Then all the bulbs would go off at once. In the ensuing stunned mass blindness, the actors would run down the aisles sobbing and screaming that they were in agony, blind and dying. The end. For the curtain call (after the audience had regained its sight, and whether or not there was any applause),the curtain would open not upon the happy actors arm in arm, but upon a huge movie screen on which was projected in full color the blinded, ravaged, pus-laden face of a victim of Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Silence. The audience could stay or leave. No actors or attendants would be visible in the theater.
    “Whew!” Harold said in admiration.
    “I wonder what the audience would do.” Mary said.
    “Lynch the author?” Harold suggested.
    “No,” Allard said. “They’d be masochists or they wouldn’t have come to the play in the first place.”
    “But maybe it would be a little cruel,” Harold said.
    “Cruel?” Allard said. As if in answer, he leaned over and bit Mary lightly above the knee, her skin sun-warm and salty to his tongue. Laughing, she took him by the ears and shook his head. Harold smiled painfully.
    “You taste good. You’re edible,” Allard said. “I knew you were edible.” As he turned onto his back she blushed, but let his head down in her lap and lightly held it there. He looked up at her breasts and chin against the clear blue, the tall college elms framing her. As she looked down at him her hair fell around her face, sunlight seeming to be inside it, and her expression was suddenly private, the two of them alone within the arbor of her hair. A straight, grave look, her eyes wide, said that he was the one. He knew that.
    Harold wanted to be with them, they knew, so she let his head go and he sat up, the three of them again facing each other, now including Harold, who had introduced Allard to Mary a week before. He was a companion, good company, almost an official observer of their relationship. He was also something of a confessor, like the priest he might have been. When he looked at Mary it seemed to hurt