First Love and Other Sorrows: Stories (12 page)

Elgin would be hurt whenever Caroline was the first to point out that it was time to go and have dinner. Caroline would eye the clock, but Elgin would pretend he was so entranced with Caroline he didn’t know what time it was. The minutes would tick by, and Caroline would grow gayer and gayer, trying to ignore the time, while Elgin, beetling, thin, and sardonic, refused to say the words that would release her.

Elgin became frightened. He was so frightened he couldn’t eat. He was afraid of losing Caroline, of failing his courses because he couldn’t study unless she was sitting beside him where he could reach out and touch her every few minutes. The thought of what it would be like if any of the quarrels they had should turn serious worried him until he was sick. Finally, looking gray and haggard, he suggested to her one afternoon that the two of them should run off and get married.

“Elgin, don’t. Don’t let’s talk about that. You know we can’t.”

Elgin shrugged and looked disheartened. “I don’t like self-pity,” he said. “But I admit I have some. Oh, yes. I pity myself a lot, Imagine, here I am, in love with a common, ordinary, conventional girl like you.”

Caroline supported her head with her hands. “Oh, Elgin,” she said, “you’re being cruel. You know we’re awfully young. And just because we got carried away—there’s no need, really, to…It’s our animal appetites mostly, you know….”

Elgin wanted to say something bitter but her last remark stopped him.
“Your
animal appetites, too?”

“Yes.”

He was so happy he forgot his feelings had been hurt.

Sometimes, she and Elgin went out with Felicia and Dimitri. Caroline could not now bear girls she thought were virgins; they made her uneasy, and she would not go on a double date with Dimitri and Felicia until Elgin swore they were lovers, too. Elgin spent more than one afternoon telling her that almost all the girls at Radcliffe and all other colleges had slept with somebody. “The percentage is very high,” he said.

They went boating twice at Marblehead. Dimitri had a car, which Elgin borrowed—an old, weak-lunged Ford—and they would wheeze up to Marblehead and rent a dinghy and be blown around the bay, with the sunlight bright on Caroline’s hair and the salt air making them hungry and the wind whipping up small whitecaps to make the day exciting.

Caroline wrote in her diary, “His back is so beautiful. It has such a lovely shape. It’s so defenseless. I like to put my ear against his back and listen to his heart—I think it’s his heart I hear. It’s funny he is not more handsome in his clothes, but that only makes him seem more beautiful to me, I think. I feel I would like to give birth to him. Sometimes, I want to crawl into his pocket and be carried like a pencil. I never let him see how strongly I feel. I am a dreadful person, dreadful….”

Elgin wrote her a letter.

“Dear Caroline, Isn’t it funny to have me writing a letter to you when I see you every day? But just imagine how it would seem later if we looked back and saw that we had never written each other how we felt.

“You, Caroline Hedges, are the greatest love of my life, just as you are the first.

“I don’t suppose, you being a girl, that you know what it’s like to love a girl like you, but if you knew how dependent men are on women, you might understand. Not that men can’t survive alone, but they don’t seem to really amount to anything until they have a woman they love.

“Reading over what I have just written, I see that everything I’ve said applies only to the selfish side of love. I guess that’s a dead giveaway about me. But as for you, kid, just knowing you is rather awe-inspiring.”

Sometimes, there would be birds singing in the ivy outside the window of Elgin’s room. Sometimes, Elgin would sing to Caroline; he had a sweet, insecurely pitched voice, and his singing would give them both pleasure. Sometimes, seeing Elgin walk across the room unclothed would make all the breath leave Caroline’s body, and she would not even be conscious of her gasp or that he heard her. One afternoon, Elgin went into the bathroom to get Caroline a glass of water. She was lying in the lower bunk, lapped in shadows, and she saw him come back into the room and she said weakly, “I love you, Elgin.” It was the first time she had said it, that proud, stubborn girl. Elgin heard her; he stopped in his tracks and he put his head back. “God,” he said. “This is the happiest moment I ever had.”

Now there was no bar to their intimacy, and they talked. Elgin was relentless about asking questions: “What do you think about money? What is your father like? Are you fond of him?”

At first, Caroline was cautious. “Well, I think there’s a minimum amount of money people should have…. My father is sort of nice. He’s shallow, I guess. He doesn’t seem to have very strong emotions. He works for an insurance company. I used to like him a lot; I still do…. I think I feel sorry for him.”

“What do you mean by that?” Elgin asked. He handed her a cigarette and lit it for her. “Tell me everything about yourself. Be honest. I’ve never known anyone as well as I know you.”

Caroline cupped her hands over her mouth. “I think he loves me, and now I love you, and I think that’s sad. That he’s older…Should we be talking like this, Elgin?”

“Why not? Who else can we talk to?”

Then it all began to come out, her feelings toward her father, toward her mother, toward money. Caroline wanted a nice house and a large family; she looked down a little on people who weren’t well off. When she felt exhausted from telling Elgin these things, she asked him questions.

“My mother’s very possessive,” he said. “If we got married, I think we’d have in-law problems. I want to be a famous scholar. I don’t disapprove of campus politics. I know I should, but I don’t. Isn’t that shameful?”

“This isn’t dignified, talking like this,” Caroline said. “I don’t want to do it any more.”

She was frightened. Having admitted she loved Elgin, she felt naked, and these conversations only made her feel worse. She kept hoping she and Elgin would reach some stability together, but it never came. She still was frightened when she ran up the stairs of Widener that he wouldn’t be waiting for her. She wondered why she couldn’t get used to this situation, why the pleasures she was drawn into didn’t lose their elements of pain—indeed, why the elements of pain grew steadily worse, until she dreaded seeing Elgin and had to force herself to get out of bed in the morning and go through her day. She couldn’t help thinking that what she was with comparative strangers was much pleasanter than what she was with Elgin. With him she was capricious, untruthful, often sharp-tongued, giddy with emotions that came and went, and while one emotion might be ennobling, having six or seven in the space of an hour was undignified and not decent at all. She had always believed that a woman ought to walk very straight, write a firm hand, keep house and entertain well—in short, be like those friends of her mother’s whom she most admired. The fact that she was young didn’t seem any excuse at all for her not being like those women, and now she said to herself, “I’m wild. That’s all there is to that.”

She decided she was inordinately sexual. Elgin caught her in Widener reading a book describing the great courtesans of the nineteenth century, La Belle Otero and Lola Montez. She believed that Elgin would inevitably forsake her because she had lost all her dignity and mystery, and she boasted to him that he would never forget her, even if he married some pasty-faced virgin. Elgin couldn’t calm her; in fact, he was more than half persuaded that she
was
unusually passionate when she said she was, and he became uneasy with her. Caroline began to wear a little too much lipstick and to walk not in her habitual erect fashion but slouching and swaying her hips. She drank and smoked more, and when she got high, she would look at Elgin through lowered eyelids and kiss him in a knowing—a childishly knowing—way. And all of this humbled Elgin, who felt Caroline was a great enigma and that she was drawing away from him. One night, they were sitting on the riverbank and Caroline put her hands on Elgin’s head and drew him to her, and Elgin pulled away desperately. “I don’t want you to kiss me like that!”

“What’s wrong?” Caroline asked haughtily. “Am I too much woman for you?”

Elgin’s eyes grew moist. “I don’t know what you do to me,” he said miserably. “I’m ready to cry. I didn’t think we were having
that
kind of an affair.”

In the darkness, he saw Caroline’s eyelids descend. Then a shudder passed over her face. He decided to stake everything rather than have Caroline frighten him into helplessness.

He grabbed her arm. “Listen, you’ve got to get hold of yourself. You’re acting like an ass.”

Caroline was motionless.

“You’re ruining everything,” Elgin said.

“You have too many illusions about me,” Caroline said coldly. She pulled away from his grasp and lay down on his old, battered raincoat and put her hands under her head. “There are a lot of things you don’t know about me. I didn’t want to tell you I loved you because I wanted to hold you. There, what do you think of that?”

Elgin hit himself on the chest. “You think that’s bad? Well, I always intended to seduce you, right from the beginning. God!” He lay down, too, on the damp grass, two feet away from her, and he put his hands under his head.

Lying like that, they quarrelled in this peculiar way, libeling themselves, lowering the object of love in the other’s eyes.

“I think it’s loathsome that we sleep together,” Caroline said. “I feel like a you-know-what.”

“I hate seeing you every day,” Elgin said. “Not because of you but because I’m always afraid you’ll see through me. Also, I miss having free time to study—that’s how cold-blooded I am.”

There was a full moon that night, and its light was no chillier than what these two young people said about themselves. But after a while Elgin rolled over and took Caroline in his arms. “Please don’t hate me.”

“I don’t hate you. I love you.”

“I love you, too. God, it’s hell!”

They decided to be more sensible. The next day they didn’t meet in Widener. Elgin stayed in his room, and at three o’clock the phone rang.

“It’s me—Caroline.”

“Oh God, you called. I was praying you would. Where are you?”

“In the drugstore on the corner.” There was silence. “Elgin,” she said at last, “did you have any orange juice today?”

He ran, down the stairs, along the sidewalk, to the drugstore, to have his orange juice.

One day, Elgin told Caroline he was going to stay home and play poker with some of the boys in his entry. Caroline said that was a good idea. She had to write her mother; for some reason, her letters home had got her mother all upset, and she wanted to take some time and calm the old biddy down. “Poor thing,” said Caroline. “She’s had such an empty life, and I’m so important to her.” Then she smiled a thin, nervous smile. “Of course, when I think how stupid she is, I wonder what I’ll find to say to her.”

Elgin played poker. He lost four dollars and sixty cents. At eleven-thirty, he excused himself from the game and went out on the street. He walked hurriedly, jogging part of the distance, until he stood on the sidewalk across from Cabot Hall, looking up at the light in Caroline’s room. Finally, a shadow passed over the window, and Elgin felt what he could only describe as anguish.

He looked in the gutter until he found a pebble, and then he hurled it at Caroline’s window. It struck. The shadow appeared again, standing quite still. At that moment, a policeman rounded the corner. Elgin thrust his hands in his pockets and walked up the street. The policeman stopped him.

“Hey, buddy, did you just throw something at that building?”

“No, Officer.” Elgin was sweating and looked so pitiable the officer said, “I guess it was a trick of the light.”

When Caroline asked him if he had come by Cabot the night before, he denied it.

The next day, he and Caroline went up to his room. As Elgin closed the door, Caroline threw herself onto the couch. She looked pale and unhappy, and she was making a face, preparing herself for what was coming. But Elgin walked over and stood next to the couch and said, “Caroline, we’ve got to be chaste. God!” he cried. “It’s not easy to say this, and if your feelings get hurt, I don’t know what I’ll do!”

“They’re not hurt.”

“I want you to be happy,” he said, looking down at her. “I think we ought to get married.”

“We’re under age, Elgin—you know that. Our parents won’t let us.”

“We’ll tell them you’re pregnant. We’ll do something.”

Caroline jumped up. “But I don’t want to marry you! You won’t make me happy. I’m scared of you. You don’t have any respect for me. I don’t know how to be a good wife.”

“Listen, Caroline, we haven’t done the right thing. You want to have children?”

A pink, piteous flush covered Caroline’s face. “Oh,” she said.

“We ought to get married,” he said doggedly. “It won’t be easy, but otherwise we’ll never be happy. You see, what we didn’t figure out is the teleology of the thing. We don’t have a goal. We have to have a goal, do you see?”

“Elgin, we can’t be foolish. If we really love each other, we have to be very practical or else we’ll just cause each other very needless pain.”

They looked at each other, pure at last, haloed by an urge to sacrifice.

“I may not be right for you,” Caroline whispered. “We’ll wait. We’ll wait until fall. We’ll have the summer to think things over.”

Elgin frowned, not liking to have his sacrifice ignored. “I’m willing to marry you,” he said.

“No, it’s not right,” said Caroline. “We’re too young. We couldn’t have children now. We’re too ignorant. We’d be terrible parents.” How it pained her to say this!

“If you feel that way,” Elgin said, “I think we ought to plan to break up. Nothing sudden,” he added, to ease the sudden twinge that was twisting his stomach. “When school’s over.”

Caroline hesitated, but it seemed to her dreamlike and wonderful to be free of this febrile emotion. And atonement would be so wonderful…. At the same time, she was hurt. “All right,” she said with dignity. “If you want.”

Elgin turned away from her. “Caroline, tell me one thing,” he said with his back to her. “Emotionally, would you like to marry me?”