3

MY JUNIOR year should have been a breeze. I had everything going for me. I’d become a well-known campus character with a small but dependable circle of lunatic pals and drinking buddies. I’d completed all those damnable university requirements—aced two terms of Rat Psych for my science, plodded through four terms of German for my language, got my two years of ROTC out of the way. I’d chosen English over Philosophy for my major, and that had been the right decision; English courses were easy for me. I liked most of my professors, and they liked me. I was still on the Dean’s List. Even my feelings for Morgantown had grown to be curiously affectionate and proprietorial. I was proud of the insanely steep streets, the months of pearly grey rain. I liked the slate-colored buildings, the somber hills that surrounded the town, the little bridge over Deckers Creek I crossed every day on my way to campus. I liked the Monongahela River—a good stand-in for the Ohio. I liked my cheap rattrap apartment. Whenever I stepped outside my door, I liked the view—a slice of bleak sky criss-crossed with black power lines, an image from Edward Hopper. I kept trying to convince myself that I liked living alone. I hadn’t been prepared for how much I was going to miss Natalie.

I’d talked to her a few times over the summer, but Natalie wasn’t good on the phone. I’d ended every conversation by telling her that any day now I’d be down for a visit, but I hadn’t been able to pry myself loose from my friends—from the agreeably useless rut of the high fat summer of Raysburg—and by the time I got back to Morgantown, Natalie had already left. Alone again and plunged back into the familiar grind of student life, I finally had to admit that I’d treated her, exactly as my mother would have put it, “shabbily.” Then, as the year wore on, I realized that I might have treated myself shabbily too. Nothing could have changed the fact that she was going to Swarthmore and I was going to WVU, but why, I kept asking myself, hadn’t I come back a few days early? It wouldn’t have killed me. Boyfriends and girlfriends were separated all the time and somehow still managed to stay together. They looked forward to vacations, wrote letters to each other, talked on the phone, planned their future. Maybe Natalie could have given me what I’d always wanted from a girl: a reason to get out of bed in the morning.

The worst time of day for me was that period of nothingness stretching out interminably between my last class and my solitary dinner. That was the time when Natalie would have been arriving at my Allen Street apartment. We would have made out and had a beer with Joe and Eddie and cooked something. Now I came home to nobody, jumped straight into bed, jerked off, fell asleep, and woke, disoriented, to the night.

I called Natalie’s dad for her address at Swarthmore and wrote to her. I didn’t say much of anything except, “I miss you.” I got a letter back from her so quickly she must have mailed it the same day she’d received mine. She wrote exactly the way she talked, listing everything she’d be doing without saying how she felt about it. Because of her College Board score, they’d put her into a small advanced math class, and it was, I gathered, taking up most of her time. She ended with: “I miss you too. I’ll never forget you and all the fun we had together.” I read her letter over and over again. The subtext beneath her last line seemed to be: “It’s over if you want it to be.”

• • •

SEPTEMBER, 1962. Morgantown, West Virginia. My junior year at WVU.

I have a free hour before my class in The Romantic Movement. I sit in the Mountainlair and watch the girls. I drink coffee. I open my notebook, and I write: “It rained a lot that autumn, and I walked in the rain. The mist flattened the buildings of the campus into distant layers as though they were the cardboard cutouts of a movie set. It was the season of shiny raincoats, of penny loafers and knee socks, of plaid skirts with demure coed kick-pleats, of smoky colors—green, dun, ochre, orange, and scarlet—and the girls were dimly beautiful like the falling leaves. I heard their bright voices, indistinct in the distance, and I watched them from my remoteness, so drawn back that I could do nothing with my desire for them. The mist, the girls, the autumn, and my own preoccupation with my growing isolation blended to form an ambience I can recreate now by closing my eyes and thinking myself back to that corner table in the Mountainlair where I sat between classes, smoking, drinking coffee, writing about the rain.”

I am writing as though I had left Morgantown years ago, writing as though I were an old man looking back, understanding everything. I’m twenty, but I feel old. My body aches from too little sleep; my eyes are gritty. I desperately wish I could understand everything, see it through the eyes of an old man.

I write, “It rained a lot that autumn,” but it is that autumn; it is raining right now. The Mountainlair is filled with a sodden sheeplike smell: moist wool. The rain gets into everything; people create puddles where they sit, water dripping from coats and umbrellas. The windows are steamed, voices muted, meetings uneasy. I write: “The girls were dimly beautiful like the falling leaves,” but they’re dimly beautiful right now.

I’ve drunk my first cup of coffee. I stand and carry the empty cup across the room. I hear a girl’s voice: “I don’t know what I’m going to do! I’m so used to having a boyfriend . . . with his own car and apartment.”

Oh, what a little pain in the ass that one must be, I think, and I turn to look. My body sees her. My chest goes as hollow as my coffee cup, hangs emptied, then fills again in a rush, slamming the base of my throat. The girl is talking to Marge Levine. Marge gives me a wave as they pass.

Like a somnambulist, I refill my coffee cup and walk back to my table. They’re sitting not too far from me; I open my notebook and pretend to write. Marge settles back in her chair, composed, smiling faintly. The girl leans toward her, gesturing; I can’t hear the girl’s voice, but I can feel the bright energy of it. The way she’s sitting, the way she’s looking at Marge, the way she’s punctuating her words with her hands—every inch of her is saying, “Listen to me!”

The girl has draped her raincoat over the back of a chair; beads of water catch glints of light as they run down the shiny red plastic and onto the floor. What has been revealed by the shedding of the raincoat is an outfit so tasteful, so carefully constructed, that she could have stepped out of an issue of Seventeen devoted to “going away to college”—forest-green sweater, Stewart tartan skirt, penny loafers the color of brandy. Almost any other girl would be wearing knee socks, but she’s wearing nylons. A small girl. (If I were ever to kiss her, I would have to bend my knees or she would have to stand on tiptoe.) The kind of old-fashioned hourglass figure that would always say, even from across a vast rainy distance, woman. Hair not merely a dark brunette, not an almost black, but a true black, worn in a deliciously archaic pageboy with perfectly straight bangs cut halfway down her forehead. Huge shining dark eyes, full ripe lips emphasized with plumcolored lipstick. A face easily one of the most beautiful I’ve ever seen in my life. And that day I missed my class on the Romantics.

• • •

THE KEY to my mystery girl was Marge Levine. I could have waited for the next meeting of the SPU, but I didn’t. I knew that if I wandered around campus long enough, I’d run into her, and I did the next day—coming out of the library. We stopped, chatted for a while—until enough time had passed to allow me to ask my burning question: “Who was that girl I saw you with in the Lair?”

She laughed. “You really set me up for this one . . . That was no girl, that was my cousin.”

“Your cousin?” I said as though I’d never heard the word.

“Yeah, my cousin. We’re sharing an apartment this year. Her name’s Carol Rabinowitz. Why? You think she’s cute?”

I didn’t say anything, but my expression must have said it all.

“What happened to Natalie?” she asked me.

“She’s at Swarthmore.”

“Oh. That’s too bad. Well, if you want me to introduce you, I will, but believe me, buddy, you’re barking up the wrong tree.”

I’d been imagining my mystery girl as a freshman. She’d certainly been dressed like one, and why else would I never have seen her before that fall? But no, Marge told me, Carol had an honors BA in English from Marshall. Not only was she in her first year of grad school at WVU, she was even a graduate assistant with her own section of freshman English.

The university officially regarded girls as children and itself as a stand-in for their parents. A dress code as strict and arbitrary as anything in any high school prohibited them from wearing pants to class. Girls were forbidden to set foot in a boy’s apartment (a rule, as I recall, much honored in the breach). Their night life was cut off by a curfew; after that magic hour, they were locked away inside the Women’s Dorm or in other supervised on-campus housing where boys were never permitted beyond the lobby. But a handful of girls were allowed to live off campus. As a senior on the Dean’s List, Marge was one of them. As an MA candidate, Marge’s cousin Carol was another. “Yeah,” Marge said, “we’ve got a great place. It’s on Beechurst. Come over some time.”

“Am I allowed to visit you?”

She shrugged. “No, of course not . . . It’s around the back and up the stairs. Don’t make a spectacle of yourself.”

Later in the day, I took her up on her invitation. She met me at the door, called back over her shoulder, “There’s a man here,” and I heard a single startled yelp.

Looking past Marge, I saw a brief image of Carol. She was wearing a blouse, slip, stockings, and shoes, but no skirt. Then she was gone with a stutter of angry footsteps, her bedroom door slamming behind her. She’d left an ironing board with a skirt on it. Marge obviously found the situation funny. “Do you want a beer?”

“Thanks, yeah . . . Hey, it’s really nice,” I said about the apartment (wondering if Carol was going to reappear). Rather than scavenged junk like I had in my place, they had real furniture: an easy chair, a couch that was actually comfortable, muslin curtains on the windows, a red and white checked cloth on the kitchen table, a row of neatly labeled spice jars lined up behind the stove, candles in Chianti bottles placed strategically around as though to create the ambience of a homey Italian restaurant. Of course they had a hi-fi and a record rack. A Picasso print hung on one wall, a Modigliani on another. I found out later that most of the effort that had gone into fixing up the place had been Marge’s; all Carol did was live there.

At the first meeting of the SPU Marge had suggested that all of us—all six of us—join a new organization called Students for a Democratic Society. She’d handed out mimeographed copies of a paper that SDS had drafted the past summer, and I almost hadn’t read it. I was dubious about political manifestos, but the Port Huron Statement hit me exactly right. In those days, people like Marge and me were nothing more than a tiny lunatic fringe on college campuses; if anyone had told me that in only a few years thousands of students would have read the Port Huron Statement and liked it as much as I did—that SDS, the obscure organization we’d just joined, would be considered so dangerous it would be infiltrated by the FBI—I would have laughed out loud.

To have some excuse for dropping by, I’d brought my copy with me. As with everything I read then, I’d underlined the best passages, written my own marginal notes. “I love this,” I said to Marge, reading from the blurry purple mimeographed pages, “‘We ourselves are imbued with urgency, yet the message of our society is that there is no viable alternative to the present.’ That’s wonderful. That could be a line in a poem . . . no viable alternative to the present.” Even as I was talking, I couldn’t stop myself from glancing over, every few seconds, at Carol’s closed door.

“Well, is there one?” Marge asked me.

“I sure as hell don’t see one.”

I had to broaden my definition of political, Marge told me. Real politics brings people out of their personal alienation and isolation and into community. We had to shed our apathy, change the university so that it reflected our values and aspirations, use the university as a fulcrum to change society. I told her it all sounded good to me, but at a place like WVU, it’d be like tilting at windmills.

In the middle of this, Carol floated into the room in a long shimmery bathrobe. Now I could see what she’d been doing all the time she’d been in her bedroom: her hair and makeup. Marge and I stopped talking and looked at her. With a dazzling smile, Carol walked straight to me and offered her hand. I rose to my feet and took it. “Hello,” she said, “I’m Carol Rabinowitz. I’m afraid you’re not seeing me at my best.”

“Oh, I’ll bet John’s seen a girl with a robe on before,” Marge said.

I think I said, “Howdy” (the authentic ethnic folksinger), but I was so overwhelmed that it might have been anything. I couldn’t even manage to tell her my name, so Marge did it for me.

Carol asked us what we were talking about. Marge told her. “Oh,” she said, “is John one of your comrades?”

“Yes,” Marge said, “that’s exactly what he is.” I saw a look pass between the two of them. I couldn’t read it.

“Carol thinks politics is boring,” Marge said.

“No,” Carol said, “not boring. It’s just something that’s never interested me very much. My father’s been telling me my whole life, ‘Carol, you should take an interest,’ and I suppose I should, but you only have so much time.” She shrugged, gave me another delightful smile. Then she went back to the ironing board to finish her skirt.

With Carol in the room, the conversation gravitated toward things that she was interested in. Dante, Petrarch, and the Troubadour poets, she said. Their effect on the English lyric had been simply enormous. About those guys, I knew not very much. She said that she’d recently become interested in Yeats. I’d read a lot of Yeats; I loved him for “mad abstract dark” and said so. Carol gave me a cool assessing look that I translated as: oh, this guy’s not quite the fool I thought he was.

She carried her ironed skirt into her bedroom and returned wearing it. The skirt was burgundy and so were her three-inch heels. She had precisely the kind of figure that the tight straight skirts of those days were designed to show off—a very girlish rearview—and she really did have the smallest waistline I’d ever seen on someone who wasn’t a corseted actress in a movie. “Is my slip showing?” she asked Marge.

“Not a scintilla,” Marge said.

A few minutes later Carol’s date arrived—Andrew Forbes, the English Department’s visiting professor from Merrie Olde Englande. I saw him as an enormous cliché: a lean, knobby scaffolding of bones, easily six feet tall, draped in a tweed jacket, who spoke with an impossibly plummy accent and had the kind of mature, weathered face that, if one is being kind, one calls “craggy.” Carol turned her full, brilliant-eyed attention on him in a way that made me sick with envy. As though speaking by rote, she told me how nice it was to have met me, and then they were gone.

Sighing, Marge unplugged Carol’s hot iron and set it on the sink counter to cool, folded the ironing board and put it away in the hall closet. “He’s the reason she’s developed an interest in Yeats,” she said.

“My God,” I said, “she’s really incredible.”

“John,” Marge said, “don’t you have something better to do with your time?”

• • •

I’D FALLEN in love at first sight yet once again, and yet once again it had happened exactly the way Lyle and I had envisioned it back in high school—as an unpredictable event that simply occurred, certainly nothing to do with choice—so I was relieved that Cupid hadn’t presented me with the latest in a series of girls who were too young for me. Maybe I was growing up, I thought. Carol was two years older than I was. Carol was a real woman.

Pretending that I was coming over to see Marge, I dropped in unannounced as often as I thought I could get away with it. Marge was out a lot of the time; Carol, who was what was called in the campus slang of those days “a big booker,” usually stayed home. I showed up prepared to impress her with my intellect. I didn’t have an extra year of my life to read Dante, Petrarch, and the Troubadour poets, but I could certainly read bits and pieces of them, and I could certainly read, or skim, quite a lot of what had been written about them. When we talked about poetry, I was pleased to see her response to me shift from condescending to collegial. But I discovered soon enough that what Carol really wanted to talk about wasn’t poetry, but herself.

She obviously needed someone who would hang on her every word with rapt attention, and if there was ever a guy who could do that, I was the one. Then I discovered that if I told her a personal story about myself, she would respond with an even more personal story about herself. Soon we were swapping increasingly intimate details of our lives. I heard about her childhood, her parents, her two older brothers, her high-school days, her undergraduate career at Marshall. The only thing she seemed reluctant to talk about was Stephen, her former boyfriend, the one “with his own car and apartment.” She did mention his name, but that was about it, so of course I was curious.

I told her that when I’d first seen her, I’d thought she was a freshman. I’d meant it as a compliment, but it made her surprisingly angry. “People always think I’m younger than I am. It must be because I’m so small. It drives me crazy.” When she taught her section of freshmen, she always wore a suit and heels so they’d take her seriously. She was an armchair Freudian and often professed an inability to understand her own unconscious motivations, and here, I thought, was a perfect example. It never seemed to have occurred to her that if she really wanted to look older, she should retire her tartan skirts and grade-school pageboy.

She’d known Marge her whole life—since they’d “been in diapers together”—and she thought of her more as a sister than as a cousin, but if she could talk the way she did about “a sister,” I would have hated to hear what she might have said about someone she genuinely disliked. “Boy, does she have a reputation on this campus. She thinks she’s daring and modern, but I just think she’s sick.” Carol thought Marge had appalling taste. “I can’t believe some of her outfits. She looks like a tramp.”

“I think Marge has a wonderful sense of style,” I said.

“Oh, you would! Your fetishes are so obvious. If she didn’t wear high heels all the time, you wouldn’t look at her twice.” That was unfair, I thought, and not entirely true—but true enough to make me uncomfortable.

I couldn’t imagine how anyone with a waistline as small as Carol’s could think of herself as overweight, but she did. She was always either on a diet or planning her next one, either stuffing herself on chocolate or living on cottage cheese. “Only three pounds,” she kept saying all the time I knew her. “That’s all I ask.” There were also, I gathered, many other things wrong with her that needed fixing—bad habits and “complexes.” She worried that she would never be “mature” enough or “adjusted” enough.

Carol saw Marge’s radicalism as “sophomoric” and professed a complete disinterest in politics, but, if pressed, would admit to being “conservative.” I’m fairly certain she didn’t mean that she agreed with Barry Goldwater. More to the point, she called herself “an old-fashioned girl”: her goal in life was marriage and babies. But not just yet, she said. Sometime later, after she had “matured,” and, of course, had found the right man. She had a very clear idea of what she wanted. He would have to be “manly” and have morals just as strict and old-fashioned as hers. “I wouldn’t marry a man who’d marry a girl who’d slept around,” she said. He would have to be much older than she was—confident, self-assured, well established in his career—and she would be his helpmate. “Nothing would make me happier than ironing my husband’s shirts.”

All the time when I’d been with Natalie, I’d been imagining a phantom future girlfriend, and I’d told myself that the next one was going to have to be really feminine. There was no doubt about Carol being feminine. I never saw her in pants, and, for all I know, she might not have owned a pair. She set her hair every day, and, after a while, stopped being embarrassed when I caught her in rollers. With her tartan skirts—she seemed to have an infinite supply of them—she always wore nylons, never socks, because “children wear socks.” She wore demurely clear nail polish because “colored polish looks cheap on girls my age.” She always wore gloves, even when the weather wasn’t particularly cold. She curled her eyelashes. She was always redoing her lipstick. She never left the apartment without putting dots of perfume behind her ears and on the veins of her wrists.

But, however immaculate Carol might have been about her person, she created a howling chaos all around her: face powder, hair rollers, bobby pins, open containers of makeup, combs and brushes blasted out from her like debris from an explosion. I was never invited into Carol’s bedroom, but I could see through the open door that she flung her clothes everywhere. When Carol was working on a paper, she took over the entire apartment: books, note cards, various drafts left on the couch, on the floor, on the bookshelves, on the kitchen counters. Before she went anywhere, Carol always had to go through a frantic hunt for something; her gloves, purses, loafers, scarves, and lipsticks turned up in obscure corners, on bookshelves and windowsills, under chairs and under the couch. There was a drying rack in the bathroom, and she draped every rung of it and then kept on going, draped the towel racks, the top of the shower, every usable surface, with nylons, cashmere sweaters, bras and girdles, waist cinchers, garter belts, and panties—which I couldn’t help seeing whenever I had to go in there. Sometimes one of her intimate objects—some naughty bit of black lace and boning—would stop me dead, and I’d get stuck, standing there staring at it, thinking, oh, my God, what would it be like to wear something like that?

Carol was playing a game with her British professor Andrew similar to the one I was playing with her. When they went out together, they talked about Yeats. If he had any romantic interest in her, he had yet to show it. “What do I have to do, lie down at his feet?” she said.

He had the nasty habit of pointing out beautiful girls on campus. They were usually sorority girls and had a look that Carol thought was appalling but one that obviously turned Andrew’s crank. “What kind of look?” I said.

“They wear their skirts too tight and their heels too high. And they do something with their eyes . . . They look like negative raccoons, this little white mask . . .”

“Oh,” I said. “I know what you’re talking about. Wide eyes, lots of white eye shadow, lots of mascara, and pale lipstick. You could do that. You have gorgeous lips anyway. You don’t need to focus so much attention on your lips. Why don’t you try it? It’s a more up-to-date look anyway.”

“How would you know?”

“It’s in all the magazines.”

“What magazines?”

I’d obviously slipped. I was embarrassed, but I tried to sound utterly nonchalant. “Oh, you know, the fashion mags . . . like Seventeen . . . Vogue.”

“Oh, do you read Seventeen and Vogue?”

“Yeah, I ah . . . look through them sometimes.”

“That’s charming. I’ve never met a boy who reads girls’ magazines.”

Carol began advising me how to dress. “You should wear something besides jeans for a change. You always look like such a thug, and it doesn’t suit you. I’d love to see you in a madras shirt and a nice pair of pants . . . and loafers instead of those utterly absurd cowboy boots.” But that was too much; not even for love at first sight was I about to change my public persona.

She called me “the brightest boy she’d ever met”—and “a Holden Caulfield,” a “Huck Finn,” and “a Jacksonian democrat.” I didn’t know whether to be annoyed or flattered by any of those comparisons. “Every girl needs a friend like you,” she said one night when we were alone in her apartment. That statement had an ominous ring to me, and I said nothing. We were drinking wine, and Carol was more than a little tipsy; it made her giggly and confessional. “Like me how?” I asked her.

“I never thought it was possible to have a friend who was a boy. You know, a real friend.” I felt a spiraling sensation of things going hopelessly wrong. “Most boys, after you get to know them, are just trying to make you all the time.” She gave me her most exquisite smile. “With you, it’s like having another brother.”

• • •

INSTRUCTIONS FOR anyone who might wish to approximate the exquisite tension of the state I was in that fall. You don’t choose your lady; she happens to you as suddenly and irrevocably as an arrow from the hills. Then you must see her often, become her friend and confidant. When you’re away from her, you must carry her image in your mind like an icon. You must imagine making love to her in obsessive detail, undressing her layer by layer down to the bare skin you’ve never seen. You must make small talk with her while she prepares for dates with another man; you should advise her what to wear and help her with small attentions—fastening her pearls or zipping her dresses. You must, it goes without saying, never have made love with a woman, and you must never tell this particular woman what you are thinking or touch her—not even a brushing of the fingertips. If you follow these simple rules, I guarantee that you will come to understand Dante, Petrarch, and the Troubadour poets better than if you were to take a dozen university courses.

It’s early in November, just a week before Thanksgiving.

Even though Carol’s been telling me that I’m her best friend at WVU, she’s never been in my apartment before, and I can see her discomfort by the way she holds herself—her weight high in her body, letting nothing relax, her lower back tense. She’s wearing a forest-green suit with a matching beret. The jacket’s tailored tightly to the lines of her body, a dramatic indentation at the waist; she hasn’t unbuttoned it, hasn’t taken off her gloves either. There’s a silk scarf the color of turned earth at her throat. I love her attention to detail. Circling my apartment, she pauses to look at the pictures on my walls, the notes on my bulletin board. “What’s this?” she says.

“Rilke.”

“Yes? Rilke. What’s it say?”

“It’s poetry. You can’t translate poetry.”

“Oh, John, don’t give me that. I’m certainly aware of what can and can’t be translated in poetry.”

I know by now that she thinks of herself as infinitely more mature than I am—and certainly far better educated. If she’s begun to call me her brother, I’m sure it’s a kid brother she means. “OK, do you want a literal translation?”

The German of the poem is so simple I never bother to turn it into English in my mind. I work through it slowly for her: “‘Whoever doesn’t have a house by now isn’t going to be building one . . . ever. Whoever is alone now is going to be alone for a long time . . . will wake, read, write long letters, and restlessly wander the streets here and there . . . while the leaves are falling.’ Well, driven is better than falling.”

“Oh, what a cheery German poem.”

“It’s lovely in the original.”

“I’m sure it is. I try to be open-minded, but I can’t really appreciate German poetry . . . My God, it’s cold in here. How do you stand it?”

I kneel at the gas heater and light the burners; the flame is sodium yellow and copper blue. Her glossy black hair catches glints of light and throws them back; her eyes seem all pupil, her painted lips full and pouting. She brushes my alternate pair of jeans to the floor and sits down carefully on the only chair, still holding herself tightly reined as though she might break at the waist. She takes off her gloves. They’re so tight she has to tug at each finger. I walk across the room as though I have some place to go and let my hand lightly brush her shoulder. It is an extremely daring gesture for me. I feel her sudden withdrawal.

A thin point of anger between my eyes. I open the bottle of red wine and pour us each a glass. “Noli me tangere, for Caesar’s I am . . .”

For that line of antique poetry, she rewards me with a smile. The glitter of the glass in her hand, the ruby clarity of the wine, obediently point up her lips. “I’m not that untouchable. It’s just that . . . I suppose it makes me nervous being alone here with you.”

This is a tiny victory: her first admission that a sexual tension between us is even possible. “Haven’t you ever been alone with a man in his apartment before?”

“Yes, of course I have, but . . .” an exasperated toss of the head. “Give me a cigarette.” She’s an occasional smoker, buys herself a pack every few days, keeps it on her vanity table: ladies don’t smoke in public. When she’s with me, she bums mine. “It’s just that he was . . . well, sort of my fiancé.”

I light the cigarette for her. “Sort of ?”

“We never announced it or anything. It was just understood. Until it wasn’t.” Oblique gaze, tightening of the lips. “I was tame enough with him.”

“Stephen?”

“That’s right.”

“Did you make love with him?”

“You don’t ask girls things like that,” but she decides to laugh. “No, of course I didn’t. You know me well enough to know that.”

I withdraw, sit on the floor opposite her. I’m beginning to feel an obscure knotting of cross-purposes. “Did you make love to her?” she asks me.

“Who?”

She points. “Your little high-school girl.” She has, after all, noticed my altar to young girls.

“No.”

“That’s Natalie, isn’t it?”

“Yes, that’s Natalie.”

“She looks so young.”

The wine tastes metallic, unpleasant in my mouth. We look at each other across the space of the room. The gas heater hisses. I can’t tell what she’s thinking. The only way I can possibly approach her is with a conceit so elliptical that she can deflect it immediately if she chooses: “I feel like Actaeon.”

“I thought I was supposed to be the deer. And are you sure you’re not one of the hounds?” I remind myself that she teaches this stuff; if I try to keep the game going too long, she’ll beat me at it—but maybe one more move. I search for the next possible twist of metaphor, but before I can find it, she says, “You’ve never made love with anyone, have you?”

I have to consider it before I tell her the truth: “No.”

“We both belong to Artemis then. I didn’t think it was possible for a boy to be twenty years old and still a virgin.”

“Well, you’re looking at one.”

“Don’t be angry.”

“I’m not angry.”

“I don’t believe you. You sound angry . . . John, I didn’t mean anything . . .”

I was only mildly angry before, but now I’m furious. She must sense it: “Come on, let’s get out of here, please. Walk me home. I’m really uncomfortable.”

But she doesn’t move. Neither do I.

“Tell me about Stephen,” I say. I’ve already told her plenty about the girls in my life.

“Oh, hell.”

“I just want to understand what happened.”

She stamps the words out separately, “Well. So. Do. I.”

“You don’t?”

“Oh, I’m beginning to. It takes so damn long to get any insight into yourself . . . and by the time you do, it’s always too late.”

I wait. “He was a strong person,” she says eventually. “He knew exactly what he wanted, where he was going.”

“What was he in?”

“Electrical engineering.”

“What on earth did you talk about?”

“He wasn’t exactly your dumb engineer type . . . I used to think that he just didn’t appreciate how good I could be for him, how much help and support I could be, but . . . Oh hell, give me another cigarette.”

I stand and carry it across to her. “See what you’re doing to me? Now I’m chain smoking.” But she doesn’t inhale: angry puffs of blue smoke blown out as soon as they’re drawn in. “He was right. He saw how weak I was. I wouldn’t have . . . Oh damn it, John, I was such a bitch.”

“What’s that mean?”

She laughs, an unpleasant sound. “Surely you’ve heard the word before. Oh, I was horrid. You have no idea now horrid I can be.” She’s drunk her wine, holds up the glass. I refill it.

I cross to the far side of the room and lean against the wall. I want her to feel that there’s enough space between us. As though admitting to herself that she’s going to stay a while, she unbuttons her jacket, reveals that her tartan skirt is part of a jumper fitted tightly at the waist. “I went over to his place one time,” she says in a low, intent voice. “I didn’t call or anything, just went over. Midterms were coming up, and he had a fantastic amount of work to cover. He didn’t seem very glad to see me, and I was disappointed . . . just like a child. He went back to his books, and I tried to read, but . . . I kept asking him things, interrupting him. I was really in a bitchy mood. I knew I should let him alone, but I just couldn’t. He was getting more and more annoyed. Finally he just stood up, walked over, and slapped me.”

I’m profoundly shocked. “For real?”

“Sure. He wasn’t kidding. He really hit me.”

“What did you do?”

“Nothing. You know that Emily Dickinson line: ‘zero at the bone’? That’s how I felt. Just this whoosh, a kind of emptying. A little voice in my head said: ‘Carol, that’s exactly what you deserved.’ He went back to his chair, picked up his book, and started reading, and I just sat there and waited. I was absolutely quiet. I didn’t make a sound. And after about an hour, he looked up and said, ‘I’m not going to apologize.’ I told him that I was sorry, that it was my fault.”

“He hit you, and you apologized?”

Now she’s obviously as annoyed and uncomfortable with me as I was with her a few minutes earlier. “When you put it like that, it sounds so . . . neurotic. But you don’t understand.”

“I guess I don’t.”

“I didn’t have any right to . . . expect anything. I got what I deserved.”

It does indeed sound neurotic to me; I can’t make any sense out of it. “What happened then?”

“Nothing.”

“Something must have happened. Did you go home or what?”

“No, I made dinner. He finished his work, and we had a lovely evening.”

“What’s that mean? A lovely evening?”

“What do you mean?”

“What did you do? Go to a show? Walk along the riverbank? Play chess?”

“We petted,” she snaps back at me. Her choice of words feels archaic, a throwback to grade school.

She rises slowly to her feet, stretches as though to unknot herself, takes a deep slow breath. The heater’s finally cut the worst of the dank chill off the room. Deliberately she slips out of her jacket and offers it to me. Time is arrested; in a dreamy, viscous trance, I stand, walk to her, and take the jacket. Her face is flushed. I bend to her with a lightly brushing kiss. She catches me behind the neck, rises onto her toes, and draws me into her open mouth, thrusts her tongue against mine. A welding torch lit: first the hiss of gas, then the sudden resonant statement of flame, burning immediately white hot, with the sound of a huge banner cracked, once, violently, in a high wind. She pulls back smiling. “Well now, that’s not very brotherly.”

“You’re the one who decided I was your brother, not me.”

She pulls me down to kiss her again. She may be a virgin, but she must have trained with Stephen to an absolute mastery of dryfucking; her hips move with the calculated expertise of the virtuoso. “Baby, we’ve got to stop this,” she says.

Her wool skirt has ridden up; I slide my hand over the top of one sleek stocking, but she pushes me away. “Now, John,” she says, “I’m not one of your little schoolgirls.” I tense and draw back, but she’s after me immediately, her teeth on my earlobe. Her voice is thick. “This isn’t good for me. We’ve really got to stop this.”

We’ve somehow taken two steps forward so that I’ve got her pressed against the wall. I can feel under the waistline of her jumper a ring of hard, geometrically precise boning. I can see, in vividly glowing colors, a vision of myself stripping the clothes from her, freeing her arching little body from its layers of confinement.

The first distant seismographic warnings of orgasm are beginning in me. Dazzling, emptying, I will be left stunned—I know that—to drop away from her, singed like a moth. I’m driving her into the wall: nothing else but this, to finish this—to vanish into the target of her huge, black eyes. Dimly, from a vast distance, I hear her voice. “Damn it. No! Stop it.”

We’re fighting, two violent bodies with their brains off somewhere else, tabled for the moment. She twists away from me. We’re panting like dogs. “John, stop it right now!”

She’s pulled free. I hate her. The controller forces itself down. She has been talking, is talking now, the words slap-dashing out of her: “I just can’t take it. Oh, John! All last spring. This is what I did all last spring. With Stephen. And it was just terrible. I couldn’t stand it again. I just couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t get any work done. I couldn’t get to sleep at night. All I could think about was him.” I’m sickened, nauseated.

I walk into the bathroom and shut the door. I bend double, press my sweaty forehead into the cold, unyielding porcelain of the sink. There’s a pain like a thick stave shoved up me. Time doesn’t mean a thing; it could be five minutes or half an hour. I straighten up, light a cigarette.

She’s standing exactly where I left her, still breathing hard, her shoulders shaking just perceptibly. Her color is vivid, cheeks as bright as if she’s just come in out of a high winter wind. Her perfect pageboy is not so perfect anymore. She looks at me searchingly; her dark eyes reflect back light like obsidian. One part of me could cheerfully beat her to death where she stands; another part tells me that I have never in my life seen a girl as beautiful.

“Some brother you turned out to be,” she says, her voice deliberate.

I sit down on the floor in a corner of the room, my back against the wall. “I love you, Carol.”

“Oh Christ, John, you do not. You just want to make love to me.”

“That’s not true.”

“Oh damn. I never should have come here.”

We stare at each other. “You have lipstick all over you,” she says.

“Yeah, I suppose I do . . . Goddamn it, I love you. I’ve loved you since I met you.”

She has two voices. The cultivated one is precise, ladylike, and slightly British. This is her real one: “Just shut up, OK? I don’t want to hear that crap.”

“What the hell were you doing kissing me like that?” I yell at her.

She stiffens. She says in an icy whisper, “You’re too young for me.”

She opens her purse, takes out a brush and a tube of lipstick. She strides into my tiny bathroom, banging the heels of her loafers down hard on the floor. She doesn’t bother to shut the door. I watch her restore her hair, redo her lips. She’s quick and efficient.

She puts her lipstick and brush back in her purse, picks up her jacket from where it has fallen and holds it out to me. I help her slip into it. She buttons it up, draws on her gloves. She shakes her head—a gesture of infinite superiority—and smiles. “Come on, walk me home.”

I simply stand up, look at her.

“All right, I’ll go home by myself.”

I grab my jacket. We’re out of the apartment and walking quickly toward campus. “Carol, I don’t understand you.”

“You think I understand me?”

“I love you. I want you to know that.”

She stops dead, turns to look into my eyes. “John, never never never say that to me again.”

Not another word until we get to her door. She gives me a sisterly peck on the cheek. “Call me tomorrow, OK?”

When I called her the next day, she talked as though nothing unusual had happened the night before.