Idiots First by Bernard Malamud Page B

together and Mary Lou agreed. “But first you come up to my joint for a drink. I want to show you how I fixed it up.”
    He said he would like to.
    On their ride back she was talkative. She told Cronin
about her life as a child. Her father had been a small wheat farmer in Idaho. She had one married sister and two married brothers. She said the oldest brother was a big bastard.
    â€œHe’s pretty rich by now,” she said, “and he talks a lot about God’s grace but in his heart he is a bastard. When I was thirteen one day he grabbed me in the barn and laid me though I didn’t want to.”
    â€œOh, Christ,” said Cronin. “You committed incest?”
    â€œIt all happened when I was a kid.”
    â€œWhy don’t you keep these things to yourself?” Cronin said. “What makes you think I want to hear them?”
    â€œI guess I felt I trusted you.”
    â€œWell, don’t trust me,” he shouted.
    He drove to her house and let her off at the curb. Then he drove away.
    The next morning Mary Lou did not appear in Cronin’s class, and a few days later her drop-slip came through.
    3.
    A week had gone by when Cronin one day saw her walking with George Getz, and his heart was flooded with jealous misery. He thought he was rid of his desire for the girl; but seeing her walking at the painter’s side, talking animatedly, George interested, Mary Lou good to look at in a white summer dress and doing very well, thanks, without Cronin, awoke in him a sense of loss and jealousy. He thought he might be in love with her. Cronin watched them go up the stairs of the art building, and though he had no good reason to, pictured them in each other’s arms, naked on George’s studio couch. The effect was frightening.

    My God, thought Cronin, here I am thinking of her with the same miserable feelings I had about Marge. I can’t go through that again.
    He fought to put her out of his mind—the insistent suspicion of an affair between her and the painter—but his memory of her body at the lake, and imagining the experience she had had with men, what she would do with George, for instance, and might have done with Cronin if they had become lovers, made things worse. Thinking of her experiences was like trying to stop the pain of a particular wound by stabbing yourself elsewhere. His only relief was to get drunk but when that wore off the anguish was worse.
    One morning he was so desperately jealous—the most useless of emotions, and especially useless in a situation where the girl really meant little to him, almost nothing, and the past, despite all his theorizing and good intentions, much too much—that he waited for them for hours, in the foyer of the school of architecture across the street from the art building. Cronin did not at first know why he was waiting but that he had to, perhaps to satisfy himself they were or weren’t having an affair. He saw neither of them then, but on the next afternoon he followed the painter at a distance to Mary Lou’s apartment. Cronin saw him go in shortly before five p.m., and was still unhappily waiting under a tree across the street, several houses down, when George came out at half-past ten. Cronin was wakeful all night.
    Terrified that this should mean so much to him, he tried to work out some means of relief. Should he telephone the girl and ask her back into his class so that they could once
more be on good terms? Or if that meant trouble with the registrar’s office, couldn’t he just call and apologize for acting as he had, then offer to resume their friendship? Or could he scare George away by telling him about her past?
    The painter was a family man, a careful sort, and Cronin felt sure he would end it with Mary Lou if he thought anyone suspected he was involved with her; he wanted to go on feeding his three girls. But telling him about her seemed such a stinking thing to do that Cronin