Authors: Frederick Exley
Whenever I think of the man I was in those days, cutting across the neat-cropped grass of the campus, burdened down by the weight of the books in which I sought the consolation of other men
’
s grief, and burdened further by the large weight of my own bitterness, the whole vision seems a nightmare. There were girls all about me, so near and yet so out of reach, a pastel nightmare of honey-blond, pink-lipped, golden-legged, lemon-sweatered girls. And always in this horror, this gaggle of femininity, there comes the vision of another girl, now only a little less featureless than all the rest. I saw her first on one stunning spring day when the smog had momentarily lifted, and all the world seemed hard bright blue and green. She came across the campus straight at me, and though I had her in the range of my vision for perhaps a hundred feet, I was only able, for the fury of my heart, to give her five or six frantic glances. She had the kind of comeliness—soft, shoulder-length chestnut hair; a sharp beauty mark right at her sensual mouth; and a figure that was like a swift, unexpected blow to the diaphragm—that to linger on makes the beholder feel obscene. I wanted to look. I couldn
’
t look. I had to look. I could give her only the most gaspingly quick glances. Then she was by me. Waiting as long as I dared, I turned and she was gone.
From that day forward I moved about the campus in a kind of vertigo, with my right eye watching the sidewalk come up to meet my anxious feet, and my left eye clacking in a wild orbit, all over and around its socket, trying to take in the entire campus in frantic split seconds, terrified that I might miss her. On the same day that I found out who she was I saw her again. I was standing in front of Founders
’
Hall talking with T., a gleaming-toothed, hand-pumping fraternity man with whom I had, my first semester out there, shared a room. We had since gone our separate ways; but whenever we met we always passed the time, being bound together by the contempt with which we viewed each other
’
s world and by the sorrow we felt at really rather liking each other, a condition T. found more difficult to forgive in himself than I did.
“
That?
”
he asked in profound astonishment to my query about the girl.
“
That?
”
he repeated dumbly, as if this time—for I was much given to teasing T.—I had really gone too far
.
“
That,
”
he proclaimed with menacing impatience,
“
just happens to be Frank Gifford
‘
s girl!
”
Never will I forget the contempt he showered on me for asking what to him, and I suppose to the rest of fraternity row, was not only a rhetorical but a dazzlingly asinine question. Nor will I forget that he never did give me the girl
’
s name; the information that she was Gifford
’
s girl was, he assumed, quite enough to prevent the likes of me from pursuing the matter further. My first impulse was to laugh and twit his chin with my finger. But the truth was I was getting a little weary of T. His monumental sense of the rightness of things was beginning to grate on me; shrugging, I decided to end it forever. It required the best piece of acting I
’
ve ever been called upon to do; but I carried it off, I think, perfectly.
Letting my mouth droop open and fixing on my face a look of serene vacuousness, I said,
“
Who
’
s Frank Gifford?
”
My first thought was that T. was going to strike me. His hands tensed into fists, his face went the color of fire, and he thrust his head defiantly toward me. He didn
’
t strike, though. Either his sense of the propriety of things overcame him, or he guessed, quite accurately, that I would have knocked him on his ass. All he said, between furiously clenched teeth, was:
“
Oh, really, Exley, this has gone too far.
”
Turning hysterically away from me, he thundered off. It had indeed gone too far, and I laughed all the way to the saloon I frequented on Jefferson Boulevard, sadly glad to have seen the last of T.
Frank Gifford was an All-America at USC, and I know of no way of describing this phenomenon short of equating it with being the Pope in the Vatican. Our local
L
’
Osservatore Romano
, The Daily Trojan, was a moderately well-written college newspaper except on the subject of football, when the tone of the writing rose to an hysterical screech. It reported daily on Gifford
’
s health, one time even imposing upon us the news that he was suffering an upset stomach, leading an irreverent acquaintance of mine to wonder aloud whether the athletic department had heard about
“
milk of magnesia, for Christ
’
s sake.
”
We were, it seems to me in retrospect, treated daily to such breathless items as the variations in his weight, his method of conditioning, the knowledge that he neither smoked nor drank, the humbleness of his beginnings, and once we were even told the number of fan letters he received daily from pimply high school girls in the Los Angeles area. The USC publicity man, perhaps influenced by the proximity of Hollywood press agents, seemed overly fond of releasing a head-and-shoulder print showing him the apparently proud possessor of long, black, perfectly ambrosial locks that came down to caress an alabaster, colossally beauteous face, one that would have aroused envy in Tony Curtis. Gifford was, in effect, overwhelmingly present in the consciousness of the campus, even though my crowd—the literati—never once to my knowledge mentioned him. We never mentioned him because his being permitted to exist at the very university where we were apprenticing ourselves for Nobel Prizes would have detracted from our environment and been an admission that we might be better off at an academe more sympathetic with our hopes. Still, the act of not mentioning him made him somehow more present than if, like the pathetic nincompoops on fraternity row, we spent all our idle hours singing his praises. Our silence made him, in our family, a kind of retarded child about whom we had tacitly and selfishly agreed not to speak. It seems the only thing of Gifford
’
s we were spared—and it is at this point we leave his equation with the Bishop of Rome—was his opinion of the spiritual state of the USC campus. But I am being unkind now; something occurred between Gifford and me which led me to conclude that he was not an immodest man.
Unlike most athletes out there, who could be seen swaggering about the campus with
Property of USC
(did they never see the ironic, touching servility of this?) stamped indelibly every place but on their foreheads, Gifford made himself extremely scarce, so scarce that I only saw him once for but a few brief moments, so scarce that prior to this encounter I had begun to wonder if he wasn
’
t some myth created by the administration to appease the highly vocal and moronic alumni who were incessantly clamoring for USC
’
s Return to Greatness in, as the sportswriters say,
“
the football wars.
”
Sitting at the counter of one of the campus hamburger joints, I was having a cup of chicken noodle soup and a cheeseburger when it occurred to me that he was one of a party of three men seated a few stools away from me. I knew without looking because the other two men were directing all their remarks to him:
“
Hey, Frank, how about that?
”
“
Hey, Frank, cha ever hear the one about…
”
It was the kind of given-name familiarity one likes to have with the biggest man on the block. My eyes on my soup, I listened to this sycophancy, smiling rather bitterly, for what seemed an eternity; when I finally did look up, it was he—ambrosial locks and all. He was dressed in blue denims and a terry-cloth sweater, and though I saw no evidence of USC stamped anyplace, still I had an overwhelming desire to insult him in some way. How this would be accomplished with any subtlety I had no idea; I certainly didn
’
t want to fight with him. I did, however, want to shout,
“
Listen, you son of a bitch, life isn
’
t all a goddam football game! You won
’
t always get the girl! Life is rejection and pain and loss
”
—all those things I so cherishingly cuddled in my self-pitying bosom. I didn
’
t, of course, say any such thing; almost immediately he was up and standing right next to me, waiting to pay the cashier. Unable to let the moment go by, I snapped my head up to face him. When he looked at me, I smiled—a hard, mocking, so-you
’
re-the-big-shit? smile. What I expected him to do, I can
’
t imagine—say,
“
What
’
s your trouble, buddy?
”
or what—but what he did do was the least of my expectations. He only looked quizzically at me for a moment, as though he were having difficulty placing me; then he smiled a most ingratiating smile, gave me a most amiable hello, and walked out the door, followed by his buddies who were saying in unison,
“
Hey, Frank, what
’
ll we do now?
”
My first feeling was one of utter rage. I wanted to jump up and throw my water glass through the plate-glass window. Then almost immediately a kind of sullenness set in, then shame. Unless I had read that smile and that salutation incorrectly, there was a note of genuine apology and modesty in them. Even in the close world of the university Gifford must have come to realize that he was having a fantastic success, and that success somewhat embarrassed him. Perhaps he took me for some student acquaintance he had had long before that success, and took my hateful smile as a reproach for his having failed to speak to me on other occasions, his smile being the apology for that neglect. Perhaps he was only saying he was sorry I was a miserable son of a bitch, but that he was hardly going to fight me for it. These speculations, as I found out drinking beer late into that evening, could have gone on forever. I drank eight, nine, ten, drifting between speculations on the nature of that smile and bitter, sexually colored memories of the girl with the breath-taking legs back East, when it suddenly occurred to me that she and not the girl with the chestnut hair was the cause of all my anger, and that I was for perhaps a very long time going to have to live with that anger. Gifford gave me that. With that smile, whatever he meant by it, a smile that he doubtless wouldn
’
t remember, he impressed upon me, in the rigidity of my embarrassment, that it is unmanly to burden others with one
’
s grief. Even though it is man
’
s particularly unhappy aptitude to see to it that his fate is shared.
Leaving the subway and walking toward the Polo Grounds, I was
‘
remembering that smile and thinking again how nice it would be if Gifford had a fine day for Owen, when I began to notice that the redheaded family, who were moving with the crowd some paces ahead of me, were laughing and giggling self-consciously, a laughter that evidently was in some way connected with me. Every few paces, having momentarily regained their composure, they would drop their heads together in a covert way, whisper as they walked, then turn again in unison, stare back at me, and begin giggling all anew. It was a laughter that soon had me self-consciously fingering my necktie and looking furtively down at my fly, as though I expected to discover that the overcoat which covered it had somehow miraculously disappeared. We were almost at the entrance to the field when, to my surprise, the father stopped suddenly, turned, walked back to me, and said that he was holding an extra ticket to the game. It was, he said, the result of his maid
’
s having been taken ill, and that he—no, not precisely he, but the children—would deem it an honor if I—
”
knowing Owen and all
”
—sat with them. Not in the least interested in doing so, I was so relieved to discover that their laughter had been inspired by something apart from myself—the self-consciousness they felt at inviting me—that I instantaneously and gratefully accepted, thanked him profusely, and was almost immediately sorry. It occurred to me that the children might query me on my relationship with Owen —perhaps even Gifford—and what the hell could I say? My
“
relationship
”
with both of these men was so fleeting, so insubstantial, that I would unquestionably have had to invent and thereby not only undergo the strain of having to talk off the top of my head but, by talking, risk exposure as a fraud.
My fears, however, proved groundless. These people, it soon became evident, had no interest in me whatever, they were so bound up in their pride of each other. My discomfort was caused not by any interest they took in me but by their total indifference to me. Directing me by the arm, father seated me not with the children who, he had claimed, desired my presence but on the aisle—obviously, I thought, the maid
’
s seat (accessible to the hot dogs)—and sat himself next to me, separating me from his wife and children who had so harmoniously moved to their respective seats that I was sure that the family held season tickets. Everyone in place, all heads cranked round to me and displayed a perfect miracle of gleaming incisors.