Tony is worried sick about him. She loses sleep. Inky rings appear beneath her eyes, her skin turns to paper. She writes her final exams in a frantic trance rather than with her usual cool rationality, calling upon reserves of stashed-away knowledge she didn’t even know she had.
West on the other hand doesn’t even turn up, at least for the Modern History exam. The vortex is taking him down.
Roz passes Tony in the hallway of McClung and notes her dreadful appearance.
“Hey. Tone,” she says. (She has reverted to this pet name since the defection of Zenia, which she knows about, of course. The grapevine here has many tendrils. Tony without Zenia is no longer viewed with trepidation, and can be treated as a diminutive again.) “Hey, Tone, how’s it goin’? Holy cow, you look awful.” She puts her big warm hand on Tony’s pointy bird-shoulder. “It can’t be that bad.—What’s the matter?”
Who else does Tony have to talk to? She can’t talk to West about himself, and Zenia is absent. Once upon a time she would have talked to no one, but ever since Christie’s Coffee Shop she has developed an appreciation for confidences. So they go to Roz’s overstuffed room and sit on Roz’s pillowcovered bed, and Tony disgorges.
She doesn’t tell Roz about the forged term paper or the thousand dollars. In any case they are not the story. The story is about West. Zenia is gone, with West’s soul stuffed into her over-the-shoulder bag, and without it West will die. He will kill himself, and then what will Tony do? How will she live with herself?
This isn’t how she puts it though. She outlines the bare facts, and facts they are. She isn’t being melodramatic. Merely objective.
“Listen, sweetie,” says Roz, when Tony stops talking. “I know you like him, I mean, he seems like a nice enough guy, but is he worth it?”
He is, says Tony. He is, he definitely is, but she is without hope. (He will dwindle and fade, as in ballads. He will pine and wane. Then he will blow off his head.)
“Sounds to me he’s acting like a jerk! Zenia’s a floozie, we all knew that. A couple of years ago she went through half the fraternities—more than half! You never heard that poem about her—‘Trouble with your penia? Try Zenia!’ He should wake up, eh?” says Roz, who has yet to encounter love, having yet to encounter Mitch. She has however just encountered sex and thinks it’s the new wonder drug, and she’s always had trouble keeping secrets. She lowers her voice. “You should take him to bed,” she says, nodding her head sagely. She’s enjoying the role of wise woman, counsellor to the afflicted. It helps not to be afflicted yourself
“Me?” says Tony. The girls in McClung Hall, although they talk endlessly about their boyfriends, are never very specific about what they actually do with them. If they go to bed with them they don’t mention it. Zenia is the only person Tony’s ever known who has been at all open about sex, until right now.
“So who else?” says Roz. “You need to make him feel wanted. Give him an interest in life:”
“Oh, I don’t think I could do that,” says Tony. The thought of going to bed with anyone at all is terrifying. What if they rolled over on her by mistake, and she got squashed? Also the thought of giving another person that much power over her makes her flinch. Let alone her reluctance to be pawed and drooled on. Zenia was frank about sex, but she didn’t make it sound all that attractive.
Still, thinking about it, Tony has to admit that if there’s one person she might be able to tolerate, it would be West. Already she holds his hand, on their walks; it’s nice. But the concrete details defeat her. How would she lure West into such a place as bed, and which bed? Not her own narrow bed in McClung Hall—that’s out of the question, too many eyes are on her, you can’t even eat cookies in your room without everyone finding out—and surely not the same bed he’s been sleeping in with Zenia. It wouldn’t be right! Also, she doesn’t know how such things are done. In theory, yes, she knows what goes where, but in practice? One of the hurdles is conversational: what would she say? And even if she could successfully manoeuvre West into the physical location, what would happen then? She is too small, and West is too big. She would be shredded.
She loves West, though. That much is very clear to her. And isn’t it a matter of saving his life? It is. So heroism and self-sacrifice are called for.
Tony grits her teeth and sets out to seduce West. She is every bit as inept at it as she has feared she’ll be. She tries bringing some candles over to West’s apartment and cooking a candlelight dinner, but her activity in the kitchen seems only to depress West further, because Zenia was such a marvellous and inventive cook; in addition to which Tony burns the tuna casserole. She takes him to movies, leading him to cheap and
Silly horror films that give her a chance to clutch his hand in the dark when the vampires bare their fangs and the rubber head rolls down the staircase. But whatever she does West chooses to regard as simply the ministrations of friendship: Or so it appears to Tony. To her despair, but also—partly—to her relief, he views her as a loyal sidekick, and that is that.
It’s June, it’s warm, the university term is over but Tony has signed up for a summer course, as usual, so she won’t have to move out of her room at McClung Hall. One afternoon she goes over to West’s place to do his accumulated mildewed dishes and to take him out for his walk, and finds him asleep on his bed. His eyelids are curved and pure, like those on carved tombstone saints; one arm is thrown up over his head. Breath goes into him, breath goes out: she is so grateful that he is still, as yet, alive. His hair—uncut for weeks—is ragged on his head. He looks so sad lying there, so deserted, so lacking in threat, that she sits carefully down beside him, bends gingerly over, and gives him a kiss on the forehead.
West doesn’t open his eyes, but his arms come around her. “You’re so warm, he murmurs into her hair. “You’re so kind to me.
Nobody has ever called Tony warm and kind before. No man has ever put his arms around her. While she is still getting used to it, West begins to kiss her. He gives her small kisses, all over her face. His eyes are still closed. “Don’t go away,” he whispers. “Don’t move.”
Tony can’t move anyway, because she is paralyzed with apprehension. She is dismayed by her own lack of bravery, and also by the sheer magnitude of West’s body, now that she’s so close to it. She can actually see the stubs of whiskers coming out of his chin! Usually they’re too high up for that. It’s like seeing the ants on a falling boulder, just before it crushes you. She feels acutely menaced.
But West is very gradual. He slides off her glasses; then he undoes one button at a time, fumbling as if his fingers are asleep, and pulls his raspy blanket over her, and smooths her as if she’s a velvet cushion, and although it does indeed hurt, as the books have said, it’s less like being torn apart by wild beasts than she’d supposed, given all that growling that used to go on with Zenia, and more like falling into a river, because West is what other people call him, a long drink of water, and Tony is so thirsty, she’s parched, she’s been wandering in the desert all of these years, and no-%w at last somebody truly needs her for something, and in the end she discovers what she’s always wanted to know: she is bigger inside than out.
In this way Tony, proud of herself and filled with the joy of giving, drags West from the field of defeat and carts him off behind the lines, and tends his wounds, and mends him. He has been broken, but he knits together after a time. Though not perfectly. Tony is conscious of the scar, which takes the form of a low-level anxiety: West is convinced he’s failed Zenia. He thinks she’s been tossed out into the back alley of the world, to fend (badly) for herself; because he wasn’t capable enough or smart enough or simply enough for her. He thinks she needs his protection, but Tony must keep her sneers about this to herself. There is no rival like an absent one. Zenia is not there to defend herself, and for this reason Tony can’t attack her. Chivalry as well as wisdom ties her hands.