After a little bit I managed to stop. I wiped the tears off my face and wanted to ask Harold to look at my back and see how badly it was scraped. But I didn't because I was afraid he might take it as a LIBERTY. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of Frannie, oh-ho, that's not so funny.
"Fran," Harold sez, "I find this very hard to say."
"Then maybe you better not say it," I said.
"I have to," he answers, and I began to see he wasn't going to take no for an answer unless it was hollered at him. "Frannie," he says, "I love you."
I guess I knew all along it was just as bald as that. It would be easier if he only wanted to sleep with me. Love's more dangerous than just balling, and I was in a spot. How, to say no to Harold? I guess there's only one way, no matter who you have to say it to.
"I don't love you, Harold," is what I said.
His face cracked all to pieces. "It's him, isn't it?" he said, and his face got an ugly grimace on it. "It's Stu Redman, isn't it?"
"I don't know," I said. Now I have a temper, which I have not always been able to control - a gift from my mother's side, I think. But I have struggled womanfully with it as applies to Harold. I could feel it straining its leash, however.
"I know." His voice had gotten shrill and self-pitying. "I know, all right. The day we met him, I knew it then. I didn't want him to come with us, because I knew. And he said..."
"What did he say?"
"That he didn't want you! That you could be mine!"
"Just like giving you a new pair of shoes, right, Harold?"
He didn't answer, maybe realizing he had gone too far. With a little effort I remembered back to that day in Fabyan. Harold's instant reaction to Stu was the reaction of a dog when a new dog, a strange dog, comes into the first dog's yard. Into his domain. I could almost see the hackles bristling on the back of Harold's neck. I understood that what Stu said, he said it to take us out of the class of dogs and put us back in the class of people. And isn't that what it's really all about? This hellacious struggle we're in now, I mean? If it isn't, why are we even bothering to try and be decent?
"No one owns me, Harold," I said.
He muttered something.
"What?"
"I said, you may have to change that idea."
A sharp retort came to mind, but I didn't let it out. Harold's eyes had gone far away, and his face was very still and open. He said: "I've seen that guy before. You better believe it, Frannie. He's the guy that's the quarterback on the football team but who just sits there in class throwing spitballs and flipping people the bird because he knows the teacher's got to pass him with at least a C so he can keep on playing. He's the guy who goes steady with the prettiest cheerleader and she thinks he's Jesus Christ with a bullet. The guy who farts when the English teacher asks you to read your composition because it's the best one in the class.
"Yeah, I know f**kers like him. Good luck, Fran."
Then he just walked off. It wasn't the GRAND, TRAMPLING EXIT that he'd meant to make, I feel quite sure. It was more like he'd had some secret dream, and I'd just shot it full of holes - the dream being that things had changed, the reality being that nothing really had. I felt terrible for him, God's truth, because when he walked off he wasn't playing at jaded cynicism but feeling REAL cynicism, not jaded but as sharp & hurtful as a knife-blade. He was whipped. Oh, but what Harold will never see is that his head has got to change a little first, he's got to see that the world is going to stay the same as long as he does. He stores up rebuffs the way pirates were supposed to store up treasure...
Well. Now everyone is back, supper eaten, smokes smoked, Veronal handed out (mine is in my pocket instead of dissolving in my stomach), people settling down Harold and I have gone through a painful confrontation which has left me with the feeling that nothing has really been resolved, except that he is watching Stu and me to see what happens next. It makes me feel sick and pointlessly angry to write that. What right does he have to watch us? What right does he have to complicate this miserable situation we are in?
Things to Remember: I'm sorry, diary. It must be my state of mind. I can't remember a single thing.
When Frannie came upon him, Stu was sitting on a rock and smoking a cigar. He had scraped a small round circle of bare earth with his boot heel and was using it for an ashtray. He was facing west, where the sun was just going down. The clouds had rifted enough to allow the red sun to poke its head through. Although they had met the four women and taken them into their party only yesterday, it already seemed distant. They had gotten one of the station wagons out of the ditch easily enough and now, with the motorcycles, they made quite a caravan as they moved slowly west on the turnpike.
The smell of his cigar made her think of her father and her father's pipe. What came with the memory was sorrow that had almost mellowed into nostalgia. I'm getting over losing you, Daddy, she thought. I don't think you'd mind.
Stu looked around. "Frannie," he said with real pleasure. "How are you?"
She shrugged. "Up and around."