The Dangling Conversationalist

BEACH'S OLD GIRL friend kept trying to tell him about her first day at boarding school, what she had learned about herself from it and how it had helped make her the kind of person she was. She did not understand that Beach did not want to hear her talk, about boarding school or anything else. After a little while, she recognized that boarding school stories were doing little to make Beach sit up and pay attention, so she changed subjects.

She started talking about blowing up the Porcellian club, calling such a move the perfect Taoist act. Beach thought if he or she could do it, it might be the perfect Taoist act. Beach thought if he or she could do it, it might be the perfect crime, but he was not so sure it would be the perfect Taoist act. Beach later brought the matter up with a preppie friend, the friend did not think too much of the proposal, but he did ask Beach what a Taoist act was.

Beach was constantly confronted with questions he could not answer, did not want to answer, and secretly thought unworthy of being answered. After all, whose life was going to be changed by someone else's Taoist act? Beach was more concerned with the girl who kept trying to talk to him than with her Taoist act, and he was trying as hard as possible to stop being concerned with her, and succeeding, on the whole.

He was succeeding by preoccupying himself with other things. Beach and his friend Richards sat in the Lowell House dining hall for hours and talked about the situation. Richards did little for Beach other than give him advice, and Beach did little for Richards except slow him down on his thesis. But the two of them, by constantly referring to each other in the third person (a technique that makes self-revelation easier) antagonized hell out of most of the people with whom they sat. Those who tolerated their third person conversations were usually alienated by the way Beach and Richards occasionally tended to switch their conversation into Spanish, and the rest of them were alienated by Richards's tendency to insult anyone he thought was a rich preppie future fascist. Beach found that it all cut down on the number of people to whom he had to say hello on the street.

But Harvard has always claimed to tolerate and cherish her eccentrics. Both Beach and Richards planned to give money to the College Fund; and most of their fellows recognised that second semester seniors are, if not burned out, at least peculiar. The school has developed ways to handle the situation, although UHS psychiatrists will not provide non-scholarship students with extended therapy.

THE SITUATION Beach found hard to handle involved the girl who kept trying to talk to him. For Beach talking to Richards, whom he had known and trusted for years, was not easy, but done the third person it was not painful, either. It was just something he did, knowing that Richards would not talk to others about it and that Richards would not move in on the girl. But when the girl wanted to talk about his emotions there was generally hell to pay.

Beach basically did not believe in talking about his emotions, at least not in any straightforward way. He could make elliptical references to them; he could tell antecdotes permitting multiple interpretations and giving some idea of his feelings; but he was not going to sit down and talk about how he felt. When she suggested that maybe it would be a good idea to lay their cards out on the table, to come up front, Beach said he thought there were somethings better left unsaid.

He told her he had not been brought up that way, that one concealed one's feelings, kept one's emotions a private thing. He said it with a certain stiffness in his voice, a stiffness reflecting not any feeling that he was offering a lame excuse, hiding behind his upbringing, but reflecting instead a certain pride in having been trained properly in the matter.

Beach realized afterwards that maybe his stand did not constitute the coolest move he could have made under the circumstances, but he was not particularly interested in being cool. As a matter of fact, ever since he had been cursed with a New Yorker as a freshman roommate, Beach had not really liked cool people. At this point Beach was much more interested in survival, in finding something else that would not be so wasting.

And Beach was wearing out his body, no doubt about it. If he had been going out drinking every night, the solution would have been simple--dry out. But it was more complicated than that. For Beach had begun talking about the externals of his problem to everyone who would listen, sometimes repeating the same story to three or four different people in a single afternoon. Beach worried, with reason, about becoming a boring old fart before his time. He wasn't sure whether or not he was boring his listeners--he did not think he had begun to repeat his story to the same people. But he was boring himself.

BEACH'S OTHER reactions to the situation included staring at walls and going to desperate parties. Which was the greater waste of time was a toss-up. Staring at walls had no bad after-effects, but it was also a little difficult to justify to other people. Harvard students generally have this ridiculous misconception that they make good conversation, and are all too ready to inflict it on their friends/victims. Beach found most of them as boring as he found himself, and though an inbred civility made it impossible for him to get rid of them as quickly as he would have liked, he found that by staring at walls even as people tried to talk to him, he could discourage even the most aggressive bad conversationalist. The virtues of silence are old-fashioned, but Beach enjoyed them occasionally without worrying about appearing dated. At 22 Beach did not really fear for his contemporaneity.

The desperate parties were another matter, perhaps a danger even to a healthy 22-year-old. Even for a youth Beach did not think climbing out of second-story windows was a very good idea, yet that sort of thing tended to be the culmination of the kind of parties he attended. Nor did Beach like habitual drunkenness, streaking or public displays of affection. Beach might have been a puritan if his personal morals had been as high as those he required of the general public.

But instead Beach was a lapsed Episcopalian, and all that that implied. He had certain ideas about how things ought to be done right, but he was not often concerned enough to see them into practice. And when he took a principled stand, as with the girl who kept trying to talk to him, all hell would break loose. He did not know what to do about it, just as he did not know what to do about most things. About the only thing he was not yet ready to do was walk to the edge of the abyss and walk over. The futility of an end appalled him too much. After all, he did not know what would come afterwards.