I never heard a word from Alistair all that semester. Or the next. And as far as I know, none of his friends or lovers at Bryn Mawr did either. And he’d had many—lovers, that is. I’m not sure anybody actually considered him a friend. But he’d had a plethora of paramours. After I’d been safely dating Billy Bradford for a few months, an amazing number of fellow Mawrters approached me to tell their own Alistair stories.
Apparently the man had been a busy bunny all over campus, snowing clueless little freshmen like me in three different dorms. He’d used the excuse of visiting them to get invited in to play cards or whatever, so he could meet their ultra-rich friends. It seemed he’d bedded a good portion of my own dorm mates, including two of the Brontës.
Only once each, they were eager to say. Charlotte called him a “disaster in bed.”
I also discovered I wasn’t the only one of Alistair’s conquests who had been taken up to Princeton. It seemed he’d bribed a series of underage Princetonians with a bottle or two of alcohol to get the use of a room for a couple of hours.
That explained the dirty laundry on the floor the night I surrendered my virginity.
I asked Wogs not to relate the humiliating saga to her mother. Explaining to Aunt Livy that I’d brought a con man into her home was something I couldn’t face—maybe because it also might have involved talking about whatever I did or didn’t see going on between the two of them, and I couldn’t face that either.
I never talked to Billy about Alistair, and Billy didn’t seem to want to know. But we could talk about most things. The relationship was the opposite of whatever I had with Alistair. No waiting for phone calls. No dramas. And Sandburg never got any mysterious gifts while I was out.
Billy and I got together to study a couple of times a week, and on weekends, we’d go dancing, take long walks or talk till dawn, reveling in nineteen-sixties dreams of Disneyfied revolution and drug-hazed optimism.
Slowly Alistair faded to the shadowy part of my brain where humiliation and old pain gets buried. I guess you could say I forgave him. As Fitzgerald said in one of Alistair’s favorite quotes, “forgetting is forgiveness.”
Over the next year, my life drifted into something like normality. Dad started sending me a reasonable allowance and sometimes actually answered my letters. He made peace with Uncle Con and came out with a new book of poems. They were mostly about my mom, so I couldn’t read them without pain, but he got great reviews.
However, the world around me was anything but normal. War was everywhere. Billy got assigned a fairly high draft number, so even after he got the braces off, he wasn’t too afraid of being drafted, but his older brother was already in Vietnam, and a couple of guys in the group that hung around the Brontës had been called up.
After his brother got wounded, Billy became an avid anti-war protester. He took me to his demonstrations at first. But after I got tear-gassed by the Philadelphia police, I refused to go any more.
That’s how I lost him, eventually. At some sit-in he met a psych major from Penn named Heather who didn’t shave her armpits and belonged to SDS. At first they were just friends, but her name kept coming up in conversations more and more, and in the spring of our sophomore year, Billy announced he was going to move in with Heather so she could teach him the “zen of radicalism.”
Two months later, trying to build a bomb, they blew up the warehouse where they were living, as well as the one next door.
Heather survived, but Billy didn’t.
Somehow I finished that semester, and apparently I walked and talked and went to classes, but I have no recollection of it. All I can remember is reading that copy of Slaughterhouse Five Billy gave me, over and over.
About that time, Wogs lost Judy to radicalism, too. A month before they were supposed to graduate, Judy announced that college degrees were a “badge of patriarchy” and refused to take her final exams. She went off with a group of traveling separatist lesbians called the Van Dykes, leaving Wogs bereft.
Wogs and Judy had been planning to travel in Europe after graduation, and Wogs had already bought two plane tickets to London. So she invited me.
Our European Grand Tour was exhilarating for me—packed with museum-filled days and fun nights youth-hosteling in the fabled cities I’d only known from books. We were both distracted by flirtations along the way: in the Munich hostel, Wogs met a curvy blonde from Sydney who nearly talked her into moving to Oz, and in Florence, I met a Marxist law student who made me feel like the most beautiful woman in the world. I was in love with him for five whole days until I realized something about his chin reminded me of Billy, and after that I couldn’t even kiss him.
But mostly Wogs and I spent all our time together as we Europassed through the Continent on our Frommer-prescribed $5 a day.
Or $10. Or whatever. Wogs paid for all the extras. She knew I didn’t have much, since I wasn’t getting a clothing allowance from her dad any more. We got a little extravagant when we hit Paris in late July, and got a room in a real hotel on the Left Bank, only a few blocks from the fabled Deux Magots café.
We were having so much fun poking around in little galleries and bookshops and swapping stories with other travelers, we didn’t even go over to the right bank for a week. When we finally did, it was only to do an obligatory tour the Louvre and pick up our mail at American Express.
We went to American Express first. I had a letter from my father, who hadn’t written since I left, and Wogs had a letter from Judy, who had been incommunicado since their break-up in April. We decided to splurge on some overpriced croissants on the Champs Elysées as antidote to whatever poison our mail contained.
My father’s letter—which had a Nevada postmark—was short and to the point. He’d met someone named Mary-Margaret O’Donnell at his AA meeting. She was the love of his life. They’d decided they were too old to waste another minute apart and had flown to Las Vegas to get married and have a bit of a honeymoon. He’d never felt more content. She was his soul mate. Bla bla bla. I should have been happy for him. But instead I felt my insides go cold and numb. With a little slow burn around the edges. He couldn’t have waited the month and half until I got home to get married?
I sipped my café au lait and stared at impossibly well-dressed Parisians while Wogs finished reading. Her face had gone kind of pale, so I figured her letter was even more upsetting than mine and I should wait before I told her my father’s news. But as soon as she finished, she stuffed the letter in her bag and announced we had to go back to the hotel.
“But your croissant…” I said. “It cost more than a hotel room in Athens.”
“Take it,” she said. “I can’t eat.”
She took off toward the Metro station as I grabbed the croissant and ran after her. It wasn’t until we were in line at the station that she slowed down enough to tell me what the hell was going on.
Her words came out in staccato bursts.
“Judy’s in the hospital. She needs me. She was attacked. She and her friends. Somewhere in Missouri. She might lose a leg.”
I was going to ask how rushing back to St. Germain des Pres would help Judy keep her leg, but at that moment the train arrived. Wogs insisted I take the only free seat while she hovered over me, hopping from one foot to the other as she hung from the strap as if she were running all the way to the Left Bank.
“My dad got married.” I said, hoping to open up the lines of communication. “To somebody named Mary-Margaret O’Donnell. In Las Vegas.”
Wogs looked at me as if I were demented. “Las Vegas? That isn’t anywhere near Missouri.”
A rush of new passengers pressed in around us and she didn’t say another word until we got to the hotel, when she started throwing things into her backpack.
“We’re leaving Paris?” I said finally. “We haven’t even seen the Mona Lisa!”
“I’m leaving. You’re staying here. I’ll have to by a full price ticket. And I can’t put it on Dad’s card. My parents hate Judy. So I’ll have to use my travelers’ checks. Our return tickets aren’t refundable. It would be stupid for you to go with me, anyway. I’m going to get a connecting flight straight through to St. Louis.”
“You’re leaving me alone here?”
I looked around the hotel room, knowing there was no way I could afford it on my own, even for one night.
But she wasn’t listening. She was already on the phone to the concierge, saying something about a taxi in her perfect French. She zipped up her backpack and squeezed me in a hug. Her cheeks were wet with tears.
“You’ll be fine on your own Nick.”
I felt sniffly too. “My French is horrible. I sound like a parrot with a head cold.”
“Go to England then. You’ll meet people. It will be more fun than traveling with your dyke cousin. You’ll see.” She hugged me again. “And please don’t let my parents know where I am. They’ll be furious that I left you here. They don’t know how strong you are.”
Strong. Right. I was the world’s biggest wimp. Alone in Paris. With exactly one hundred dollars in travelers’ checks to last me until my non-refundable ticket from London to New York could transport me home. Six weeks from now. I sank onto the bed, fighting panic. I couldn’t even contact my father. I had no idea where he was in Las Vegas or how to contact him.
At least Wogs had left the cigarettes. We’d bought a couple of cartons of black market Kools in Rome and there were still five packs. I lit up and took a calming drag as I perused the other mail I’d picked up at American Express. There was a letter from Lois in Scarsdale lamenting the boredom of a summer of parental supervision, a couple of bank things my dad had forwarded, and a postcard from London.
The postcard was from Anne and Emily, the two youngest Brontës, who had graduated last spring. They said they’d taken a flat in Maida Vale and invited me and Wogs to visit “any time.” They even gave an address.
I had a place to stay in London.
I threw my things in my pack and checked out of the hotel. I was relieved to find Wogs had paid the whole bill. That left me with enough money to take the train-ferry trip to London and have a little something for food and bus fare while I was there.
An adventure. It might even be fun.
Only it wasn’t. I was seasick on the ferry from Calais to Dover, and threw up after eating Wogs’ much-squashed pricey croissant. On the bus trip into London, I had to sit next to a smelly hippie from California who kept telling me I had “nice tits,” and offered to give me the “best vaginal orgasm I’d ever had.”
Once I was in London, I kind of knew my way around, because we’d spent three days there after we landed. I even still had my “London A-to-Zed” in my backpack. But I was pretty exhausted once I’d lugged the damned pack on three different tube trains all the way to Maida Vale.
But the Brontës weren’t there.
Nobody answered the door after five rings. I don’t know why the possibility they might not be home hadn’t occurred to me, but I had to face the fact they were gone—and might be away for hours—probably out clubbing or at a party somewhere. It was only nine PM, although I felt as if it had been weeks since I sat on the Champs Elysées with Wogs. I sat on their doorstep, smoking one Kool after another, my brain numb from travel fatigue, until an Indian man from the building next door came and told me that this was a respectable neighborhood and “you lot” could go take our drugs elsewhere. I tried to explain I was just smoking cigarettes, but he threatened to call the cops.
So my backpack and I made our way back into central London. I’d have to spend some of my last remaining cash on a room in the not-too expensive bed and breakfast where we’d stayed on our first night. I couldn’t remember the name or the address, but I kind of remembered how to get there from the Piccadilly Circus tube station.
So, at about ten-thirty in the evening of a very long day, I walked out of the tube into the noise and lights of Piccadilly Circus. I found myself staring at a huge billboard advertising the film The Warrior Returns starring Delia Kent and Peter Fonda. I tried to remember where I’d heard the name Delia Kent before.
But I didn’t ponder long. The rain that had been threatening since I arrived started coming down in big fat drops. After failing to find my umbrella in my jumbled backpack, I decided to make a run for the hotel. As I rushed along Regent Street, in what I hoped was the right direction, everything looked slimy and strange in the cold, soggy night. After a couple of blocks, it finally occurred to me to be scared.
Especially when I heard footsteps coming up behind me. The faster I went, the faster they followed, slap-slapping on the wet pavement. I told myself I was just imagining things as I tried to move faster still, but the heavy pack weighed me down. My denim jacket started to soak through, and little rivulets streamed from my hair down under the collar.
I heard a shout. And another. A cold, heavy hand came down on my shoulder.
“It’s you!” a man’s voice said. “Nicky Conway! What are you doing here? You look like a drowned kitten!”
I turned to be engulfed in the familiar, Burberry-clad arms of Alistair Milbourne.