The next three weeks were by all odds the strangest weeks Steve had experienced in his twenty years of life. His motives, impulses, and feelings were tumbling all over each other. He did the most unusual things! Nothing he said really fit into the context of what was going on around him. And nothing he said came out crisp and clear. As he walked along every evening on his chosen path, the ground receded from beneath his feet.
It is amazing how many things a fellow can find out about a girl in the space of three weeks without ever asking anyone. For example, he can stumble over the fact that on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays she eats lunch at 11:30, whereas on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays she does not eat until 12:15, meaning that she must have an 11:20 class on those days. He can even discover that on Mondays and Fridays, she passes him on the staircase between the second and the third storeys of Old Main, provided he is “detained” after math class for a moment or two; that during chapel she nearly always sits on the right-hand side of the nave near the front except on Wednesdays when she arrives late and quietly slips into the balcony to avoid disturbing anyone; that every evening between 7:00 and 7:30 she walks from the women’s dorm to the music hall, often detouring briefly into the woods near the door; that she then proceeds up to the fifth floor where the practice pipe organs are located and for an hour sends a torrent of music out through one of the windows up there; and that she begins almost every day by getting up at the crack of dawn and striking out across the fields behind the dorm on a hike that can take her as far as Mill Creek and back before breakfast. The singular thing about these data is that they all came to him, apparently out of nowhere, with no particular effort on his part.
In this way each day was furnished with its own high points. When one of them occasionally failed to happen (for example, not passing her on the staircase when he should have), his heart sank. Was she sick? Had she dropped that class? Was she detained by that handsome fellow she sat next to in class? Well, as long as she was happy…. Sometimes a lump formed in his throat at the thought. Once he actually said, “Oh phooey!” loud enough to attract a puzzled look from the people around him.
Phooey it indeed! That’s what he told himself times without number when he thought about how hopeless it was to think that a fellow like him could ever attract the attention of a woman like her. He tried to console himself with the thought that women were just trouble. He had seen what a woman could do to a man. He’d been warned that the first sign of love is the last sign of wisdom. You had to really be on your guard. He remembered all the nagging his father had to take from his mother. There wasn’t a woman in the world who would shut up when you were tired of her and spruce up when you wanted her. They just tied a man down for the rest of his life. Who wanted that?
But none of this applied to his Cecilia! How defenseless this left his heart! She was for him the crown of creation, the fusion of all that is good and alluring in womanhood with that extra something from Above which his Spectre Maiden had possessed. He couldn’t think about her without being swamped by that warm ache in the midsection and that feeling of helplessness all over his body so familiar to anyone in love.
This, of course, led him back to the one huge incongruous fact that glared at him: he was worried about warding off a creature as lovely as Cecilia!?! What was there about his mousy face to warrant even a glance from her? If she knew he was worried about her dominating him, she’d just laugh and think he was crazy. Poor Cecilia! She had no idea she was causing him so much anxiety. Her only guilt was her innocence; her only blight was her grace.
But for the moment a few very simple joys sufficed to make his days bright, brighter than they’d ever been before. Just to sit facing her from halfway across the cafeteria was all it took to warm his heart. Just knowing she was there, that’s all. With the studied regularity of an old man set in his ways, he sought out the hardwood bench near the music hall every evening at 7:00, there to “study” in the sharp crispness of the autumnal air, just to be there when she walked past. Of course, he took great pains “for her sake” to avoid drawing any attention to himself. But surely it did no harm to imagine that she was really sitting there next to him on the bench. They might even be holding hands! It must be wondrous to feel her beside you, to have her hand voluntarily enclosed in yours…….
“Get over it, man,” a little voice inside him chided. “It’s never going to happen. Who do you think you are?”
Day by day he was winding himself up tighter and tighter, growing ever more addicted to his bitter-sweet narcotic. He knew very well that this was all going to go nowhere, but he was powerless to stop it. Why would you ever want to put a stop to the one thing that is injecting into your life something altogether new to you, and totally wondrous—a compelling reason to get up in the morning?