First Love and Other Sorrows: Stories (11 page)

They passed through the middle of the Common, by Lincoln’s statue, where a lamp cast a ghostly white glare on leaves and benches and the surface of the walk. Caroline’s charming face swam into the light, shadows fell across it, and Elgin closed his eyes.

Caroline pressed his hand. They hurried.

All during the movie, they sat holding both of each other’s hands, and their shoulders touching. Entwined and tangled like that, they giggled together whenever the movie became particularly violent. They couldn’t stop giggling after a while, as the death toll in the movie mounted. When the movie ended, they left and Elgin bought Caroline a chocolate ice-cream cone at St. Clair’s and they walked down to the Charles River.

The Charles looked placid, and glimmered as it quietly flowed under its bridges; the lights of Eliot House were reflected in its surface. Caroline put her head on Elgin’s shoulder. They breathed in unison, the two of them, standing on the bank of the river, and then Elgin said, “It’s clumsy to ask, but Caroline, do you really…or…would I…” He missed her lips, kissing her cheek instead, and he was holding her so tightly that she couldn’t move and correct his mistake. But a minute later he corrected his error himself. They both had difficulty breathing. “I love, I love you, I love you,” he whispered.

It sounded beautiful in the moonlight, the river ran quietly beneath the bridge, and Caroline was glad she had let him kiss her.

After that they took to kissing each other a good deal. They met every afternoon at Widener. When one of them broke off work, the other would break off, too, and they would both go downstairs. Along either side of the steps rose large stone arms, which looked as if they should be surmounted by statues, but they were bare, and in spring, in the afternoons, on both of them there would usually be people sitting, sometimes alone, sometimes in pairs. Here Elgin and Caroline would sit and look out over the Yard toward the Chapel.

At four-thirty, they would go to Massachusetts Avenue and have a cup of coffee in one of the luncheonettes. Usually they separated then, Caroline to go to Cabot Hall, Elgin to Adams House, for supper, but some evenings, when they had the money, they had dinner together at a Chinese restaurant near the Square, where the food was very cheap. (Elgin didn’t like taking her to Adams House on the nights when girls were allowed in the dining hall, because it reminded him that he was young and ineffectual and under the control of an institution.) In the evenings, they studied, either in the library or in one of the common rooms at Cabot, and at nine o’clock when the library closed, they would walk down to the riverbank. Elgin had an old raincoat that he wore, and they used that to spread on the grass, to sit on. They sat side by side and shared long, rather tender kisses. At first on these expeditions they talked about poetry, but after a while conversation began to seem disagreeable, and they sat in silence.

Then they began to leave off studying at Widener earlier in the afternoon, at three-thirty, or even three. Caroline liked going with Elgin to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and they would look at the pictures and, when their feet were tired, go and sit in the Fens, the park just behind the Museum, which has a rose garden at one end of it. Caroline wanted Elgin to lose his Middle Western pronunciation, and the excuse they used for these jaunts was that this was time spent in teaching Elgin how to speak. He would bring a book, Bacon’s “Essays,” or Montaigne’s, or Jeremy Taylor’s “Sermons,” or Johnson’s “Rasselas”—good, sturdy books, with sentences so rich that sometimes Elgin’s voice grew fuzzy with the pleasure he felt reading them.

“Always, all-ways, not oll-wez,” Caroline would say.

“Wait, Caroline, just wait a bit, listen to this,” and he would read another rolling, rhetorical period. “Isn’t that gorgeous?”

“Not gorgeous,” Caroline would say. “That’s not the right word somehow.”

“Oh, it is in this case,” Elgin would say. “It’s absolutely exact.”

And Caroline, struggling not to be moved, would say, “I suppose. I suppose, just barely.”

Then Elgin started reading Colette and Boccaccio. Now, when silence fell, something seemed to be lying beside them on the grass, breathing softly. Glances, trees, the movements of people in the park suddenly split off from the commonsensical, taken-for-granted world and became strange. Caroline frowned more and more often, turned into something very like a nag. She made Elgin buy new ties and have his shoes reheeled. Often, in the afternoons, she would take him to St. Clair’s and make him drink freshly squeezed orange juice. When it was raining, she still insisted they go for walks because it was good for Elgin. She took to proof-reading all his papers and typing them over for him because he was a poor and careless typist. One day, Elgin read to her the story in Boccaccio of the young girl who used to tell her mother that she wanted to sleep in the garden in order to hear the nightingale sing, but the girl met her lover in the garden—
he
was the nightingale. Elgin read this story to Caroline in an intense and quavering voice. For a week afterward, Caroline walked back and forth to classes hearing in her head the phrase “listening to the nightingale.” Finally, the phrase came to stand for so much, it aroused such deep tumult in her and made her feel so lonely and deprived, that one night Elgin came back to his room, woke Dimitri from a sound sleep, and asked him to stay away from the room the next afternoon.

It turned out that Elgin and Caroline were both virgins.

Their first dip in sensual waters left them nonplussed. They didn’t know what to make of it. They tried to persuade themselves that something had really happened, but the minute it was over, they couldn’t believe they had ever done such a thing. They rushed into further experiences; they broke off in the middle of embraces and looked at each other, stunned and delighted. “Is this really happening?” they both asked at different times, and each time the other said, “No,” and they would laugh. They knew that nothing they did was real, was actual. They had received a blow on the head and were prey to erotic imaginings, that was all. But at the same time they half realized it was true, they
were
doing these things, and then the fact that they, Caroline and Elgin, shared such intimacy dazed and fascinated them; and when they were together, they tried to conceal it, but this indescribable attraction they felt for each other kept making itself known and draining all the strength from their bodies. They tried to make jokes about themselves and this odd little passion they felt. “We’re unskilled labor,” Elgin said. “You know, I’m just giving in because you’re irresistible,” Caroline said. She always pretended that she was completely dispassionate about sex. It just happened that she was susceptible to Elgin’s entreaties. But he was too shy to entreat unless she encouraged him, and Caroline often felt like the worst kind of hypocrite. The truth of the matter is, they were caught up in a fever of their senses. Caroline would have her lunch in Cabot Hall, locked in an impenetrable haze of daydreaming, not even hearing the girls chattering around her. She would walk to Widener, and if boys she knew stopped her to talk, she would stare at them stonily, afraid the boy might guess her feelings for Elgin and think they applied to him. She would run up the stairs of Widener, past the Sargent murals, petrified that Elgin might not be waiting for her. Every day this fear grew worse; but every day he was there, sitting at one of the long wooden tables in the reading room, beneath the great coffered ceiling, and the look on his face when he caught sight of her would make Caroline smile giddily, because she had never known before what a miraculous power she had over men.

They managed a wry stiffness when they were in public. They spoke to each other in tones of the crudest good-fellowship. Elgin called her “Girl.” “Girl, you finished with that book?” Caroline called Elgin “Cheese.” “No, Cheese. Don’t rush me.” They didn’t hold hands or touch. They thought they fooled everyone, but everyone who knew them guessed, and they both told their roommates. In fact, they wanted to talk about what was happening to them to everyone; this news was always on the tip of their tongues; and so they got into the habit of suddenly breaking off conversations with their friends when the impulse to confess grew too strong to be contained a moment longer, and all their friends thought they were becoming very queer and difficult indeed.

Each afternoon that they met in Widener started on this high level of confusion and rapidly ran downhill. The minute hand of the clock over the door of the reading room jerked every sixty seconds, marking off a whole minute in one movement, and at two-thirty they were no longer capable of speech. Elgin would be pale or flushed. He would draw breath irregularly through a mouth he couldn’t quite close, or through distended nostrils, and this phenomenon would fascinate Caroline, except that she couldn’t look at him for too long without feeling the most awful pain in her head. Finally, Elgin would gasp, “Well?”

“I’m finished,” Caroline would say in the weakest voice imaginable.

They would walk in silence to Adams House, and Elgin would sign Caroline in at the policeman’s room. In silence they would mount the stairs, and Elgin would unlock the door of his room, and then they would fall into each other’s arms, sometimes giggling with relief, sometimes sombre, sometimes almost crying with the joy of this privacy and this embrace.

Then, later, both of them dressed and their faces scrubbed, Caroline, like an addict, would descend on Elgin’s bureau and haul out his torn and buttonless shirts. She didn’t know how to sew, but she thought she did, and she sat on Elgin’s couch, smiling to herself, softly humming, and sewed buttons on wrong. Elgin tried to study, but his moods whirled and spun him around so that one minute he’d be reading quietly and the next minute he’d be striding up and down the room on the worn carpet, wringing his hands or else waving them aloft and denouncing the College and the American Educational System, full of rage, but not knowing with what or why, and forced to let it out any way he could, while Caroline, faintly bored, ignored him mostly and sewed.

Every once in a while, Caroline would cry. Then she would be unable to dress properly, and she’d drag around the room with her hair badly combed, her shoes off, looking slatternly, and say, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Actually, nothing’s wrong with me.” But every few minutes tears would course down her cheeks. Nor did she know why she cried; she was as innocent of understanding herself as she was of understanding Elgin.

Sometimes they quarrelled. Once, it was because Caroline wouldn’t use Elgin’s towel.

“If you loved me, you’d use it.”

“I’d adore to use
your
towel,” Caroline said, “but
this
towel is dirty.”

Elgin thought her preposterous; she called Elgin a boor and slammed out of the room. She reached the bottom of the stairs and started back up and heard Elgin coming down. Neither of them said a word; they didn’t apologize or mention this episode again. They went for a walk along the riverbank and talked about Metaphysical Poetry.

On Saturdays, Elgin took Caroline to the Harvard courts to play tennis. Caroline had fine ankles and legs, and while they walked to the courts, Elgin kept stealing glances at them, which made Caroline nervous. She was a good tennis player, as good as Elgin, but he could throw her off her game by charging the net and yelling at her, “I’ve got you now!” This would rattle her so she’d completely miss the ball, and then she would laugh with exasperation.

When he served, he made a point of calling the score in a loud, cheerful, teasing voice: “Thirty-love!” He’d say the “love” in such a way that Caroline would blush, and then she would try to drive the ball directly at him, and most of the time it went out of bounds.

One afternoon, they were in each other’s arms in Elgin’s room. Elgin was whispering, “I love you, Caroline. I love you so much,” and someone knocked on the door. The sound seemed to blind Elgin, who squeezed his eyes closed, as tightly as he could. The knock was repeated a second time, and a third, echoing in the small room. Then the footsteps retreated.

Elgin got up and fetched cigarettes and towels for them both. They leaned back on the couch, at opposite ends, wrapped in towels, and smoked. They didn’t mention the fact that they were afraid it had been the campus policeman and they would be expelled. They discussed whether or not they were depraved.

“We are,” Caroline said. “Otherwise, we wouldn’t be so ashamed.”

“We don’t have to be ashamed,” Elgin said. “We only pretend we are anyway, to be polite.”

“You’re a rebel,” Caroline said gloomily. “You can say that. But I’m a conformist. I’m basically a nice girl. I
am
ashamed.”

The pressure of details, the maze of buttons, hooks, and zippers that they had to make their way through to that condition which pleased them best, kept forcing them to be self-conscious. They couldn’t believe that what they were doing was real, and yet it was real, as they well knew the minute they separated, when the memory of their last encounter would descend on both of them, occupying their minds, and unfitting them for any occupation except dreaming of the next encounter. At night, lying in his bunk, Elgin would try to sleep, but he’d think of Caroline, and slowly, like a leaf curling in a salt solution, he would twist under his covers until his knees were even with his chest, and this was a tortured, involuntary movement of longing he could no more control than he could control his thoughts. He would try to do his reading for his courses: “In the early years of this century, I moved to London, feeling that Ireland and my love for Ireland were too distracting for my poetry.” And then right on the printed page would appear “
CAROLINE
,” in capital letters, and Elgin would rub his face foolishly with both hands, twisting his mouth and his cheeks and his nose.

He didn’t believe that Caroline loved him as much as he loved her, or at least that she desired him as much as he did her, and this made him sullen. He picked on her. He told her she wasn’t as smart as she thought she was; people treated her as if she were intelligent only because she was pretty. He would accuse her of pettiness, and she would agree with him, confess that she had an awful character, and while he was consoling her, their embraces would begin.