Robert B. Parker (5 page)

She was sitting alone in the empty Student Union in a big leather armchair near the console radio that stood at the far end of the lounge. It was 8:30 on a Saturday night. But that made no difference. The Student Union was always empty. Rugs, upholstered furniture, piano, card tables, magazines, space, always empty, just like the lounges in Boys’ Clubs and YMCAs. Later I would see similar lounges in USOs and military day rooms, always empty, and in their emptiness, a symbol of the echoing void between the young and those who administered them.

She had on a black cashmere cardigan sweater and a plaid skirt. She got right up when she saw me.

“I got my white charger outside,” I said. “Want to get up behind and ride off?”

“Yes.”

“Where you want to go?”

“I don’t care. I just had to get away from Nick.”

I held her camel’s-hair coat and she slipped into it and I smelled her perfume, and barely, beneath the musk, the scent of her, which was a little like the scent of crushed bittersweet leaves that my father had taught me to chew when I was very small.

In Herman’s Chrysler again we drove slowly downtown.

“Nick wanted to get engaged,” Jennifer said.

“And you didn’t want to?”

“No.”

“Probably thought you loved him,” I said.

“Well, I …” She stopped and looked over at me. I couldn’t see her face in the dark car, but I felt bad. It was an easy point and she didn’t need to be scored on right now.

“What I felt was affection—what he wants is ownership,” she said.

“Sometimes,” I said, “it almost seems that you’re even smarter than I am.”

She smiled at me.

I could feel the tension shivering along my arms. I felt as if I were trembling internally.

“Want to go to Bill’s Café?” I said. “No one ever goes there. We’ll be alone.”

She nodded. I thought about Nick at the frat party looking for his date, full of himself and his surprise, the ring in his pocket, looking for Jennifer and slowly realizing something and feeling the sickness in his stomach and the humiliation and feeling alone.

Bill’s served draft beer in steins for thirty cents. We each had one. Across from me Jennifer’s face was almost gaudy with possibility, serious and grateful, full of relief,
intensely interested in me, affectionate, gorgeous, and electric with personality, dense with contained animation, beautiful beyond correlative, desirable beyond speech. I was numb with desire, terrified with epiphany, barely able to breathe.

“I’m sorry to break up your Saturday night, Boonie,” she said.

My throat was nearly closed. I took a shallow breath and said, “You didn’t.” My voice was hoarse, I could hear it shaking. “I would rather be with you than do anything else on earth.”

She smiled and looked down and took a tiny swallow of her beer. I struggled for steadiness. Here it was, my life, every happiness, all meaning, here staring at me, now, not yet twenty years old and I had to turn the corner and win it or lose it right now, without help, with almost no experience, with my emotions tearing about inside in jagged and mongrel confusion.

I said, “You got to tell him.”

Jennifer’s head came up and she stared at me. “Nick?” she said.

“Yes. You can’t just walk off and leave him like that.”

“Oh, I’ll talk with him tomorrow,” Jennifer said. She smiled her thrilling smile.

“But he loves you,” I said. I felt as if I were shivering visibly, but my hands on the table seemed still.

Jennifer stared at me again. Her face was too rich, too interesting ever to look blank. But there was in the vibrant complexity of her look the trace of incomprehension. “Well,” she said, “he’ll stop.”

“Call him up,” I said. “You have to tell him. Have
him come down. I’ll stay with you. Do you want to go out with me tomorrow?”

She nodded.

“And Monday?”

She nodded.

“The rest of the week?”

“Yes,” she said. “I’d like to a lot.”

Steadiness surged through me, it suffused me, it warmed and solidified my soul and all things were possible and nothing was fearsome.

“Call Nick, tell him you’re with me, and tell him to come down and talk. When he gets here, tell him it’s over. Tell him you’ve decided to go with me, or whatever is the truth. You owe him the truth.”

“Boonie,” she said. “Why? Why do that? Why hurt him?”

“The other way would hurt him more,” I said. “And it would hurt you.”

“How would it hurt me?”

“It’s not honorable,” I said. She had to be honorable. She had to be everything. She was my future. She had to live up to that, to my standards.

“He’s so big,” Jennifer said, looking at me. “What if he has a fit or something?”

“He’s bigger than I am, but I’m much quicker,” I said. “Call him. It’ll be all right.”

And it was. It was more than all right. It was touching and sad and dignified and full of nobility in a way that only the affairs of children can be. Nick came down and he and Jennifer talked at the table while I leaned on the bar out of earshot and drank my beer. When it was
over Nick came over to the bar with Jennifer. He put out his big hand and we shook. “Take care of her,” he said. I nodded. He turned and walked out of the bar. Jennifer and I looked at each other.

“You’re right,” she said. “It was better this way.” But there was a very small line between her eyebrows as if she were frowning to herself. When I drove her back to her dorm we were quiet and when I dropped her off I was scrupulous not to touch her. No good-night kisses, no hugs. There was no large plan at work. I was simply scared to. I had little reason as yet to think women cherished my affection, and I didn’t want to force it on Jennifer.

“I’ll pick you up at seven tomorrow?” I said.

“Oh, Boonie, I’d love it if you would,” she said. And smiled at me. And went into the dorm. It was cold, three weeks before Christmas; the high, clear stars must have looked this way two thousand years ago.

I drove Herman’s car back to the ATO house and found him and Guze and Billy Murphy in the living room drinking Ballantine’s scotch from the bottle. I joined them. The bottle passing from one to the next, and each of us ritually wiping the bottle mouth. I drank without speaking my secret until I was calm enough to sleep.

Driving Dave Herman’s car up from town I said, “We’ve been out every night this week and we haven’t even made out.”

“I know,” Jennifer said.

“One of these nights I may hook a left up here at Johnson Pond and be all over you,” I said. “So be alert.”

At the fork I bore right.

Jennifer said, “Chicken,” her voice low and full of implication.

I U-turned the old Chrysler and headed out behind Johnson Pond, where freshman year I had scored my only point with the Shark’s kid sister. It was early Friday night. No one else was parked there. The lights swept out across the frozen pond as I turned in and stopped. I shut off the lights but left the engine running. The heater was on high.

I half-turned and looked at her. She was sitting neither next to me nor against the door. The light from the college across the pond made it easy to see in the car. Her oval face was white and her mouth was dark against
it. Only her eyes were invisible, dark shadows in her face. The radio played Jimmy Ricks, who used to be the lead singer with the Ravens. He sang “Love Is the Thing” in his bottomless bass voice. Jennifer turned her head and looked at me with her smile and her eyes shadowed. She wore a navy peajacket with collar up and with her dark hair she seemed almost a disembodied face pale and magical in the car. The moment was crystalline, and careful, and unhurried. I put my arm out to her and she slid toward me on the seat and shifted easily so that her face turned up. I closed my arms around her and kissed her and felt my soul go out of me and suffuse us. We kissed for a long time and when we stopped there were tears stinging my eyes wonderfully. She leaned her head against me, looking up, and now I could see her eyes, and a look that I can only call enchantment was in them.

“I love you,” I whispered.

She nodded her head against my shoulder.

“Do you love me?” I said.

She nodded again.

“Say it,” I said.

“I love you,” she said.

“Not right now, I know we’re too young, but later, when we graduate, will you marry me?”

She moved her head against my shoulder again.

“Will you?”

Her head nodded.

“Say it.”

“I’ll marry you,” she said. Her voice was small.

The wind skittered swirls of light snow across the frozen pond so that it looked dusty. We sat perfectly silent listening to the radio, looking out across the pond. I
had my arms around her. She had her face pressed against my chest. I was complete. Reunified. Whole.

“I will be special,” I said. “I will be somebody. I will take you where other people couldn’t. I know it sounds braggy and like teenage crap, but I am not like everyone else. I will be special for you.”

She didn’t say anything but shifted slightly and leaned a little harder against me. I felt a kind of vertigo, as my self spiraled down into oblivion, fusing with her and becoming us. I was gone. Even now, looking back from so long a distance, the years before Jennifer, when I was merely I, seem unimaginable, as unreal as baby pictures—the blank, roundfaced infant that is only technically me.

“Shall we get married right after graduation?” I said.

“Maybe.”

“We could get married sooner and live in the vets’ apartments.”

“What would we do for money?”

I put my face against the top of her head. “Money will come,” I said. “You can always get money.”

“How?”

“I could work.”

“What about school?”

“We could quit,” I said.

She was quiet and I had a sense that I was going too fast, that she was maybe a little breathless. A week ago she was dating Nick Taylor. Now I was speaking of quitting school and getting married.

“Or we could wait till graduation,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. Her voice was muffled against my chest.

We were together almost all the time. When we parted at night I sometimes stood on the sill of her first-floor window and talked with her until the campus police chased me away … between classes we drank coffee together in the spa … after class we went to the library, or sat in her dorm living room and read aloud to each other, homework, newspapers, popular novels. Evenings there were parties with kegs of beer and three-piece bands, chaperons ill-at-ease, caught between embarrassment and the demands of the college, kissing and the press of bodies, boisterous affection among the men cloaked by insult, and always I moved in the miasma of her splendor, contained in her radiant presence like a saint in a halo. To everyone but me the romance was sudden. One week and we spoke of marriage. I knew it wasn’t sudden and perhaps she did, too, knew it in the inarticulate way she knew things, knew it without knowing it, in the way she had of ignoring what didn’t apply at the moment. I had loved her since I saw her. Loved her, or the imagined her, before I’d met her. Loved her before I was able to
understand what love meant, before I knew of sex, loved her since I could feel and had spent my life waiting to meet her and then waiting to have her love me.

Her mother’s couch was rough tweed and made friction burns on exposed skin as we struggled joyfully on it.

“Would you take off your clothes?”

“Take them off for me.”

She lay still as I unbuttoned her cashmere sweater and slipped it back over her unresisting shoulders and pulled her arms from the sleeves. Her skirt zipped at the side and I unzipped it and edged it down her thighs. She arched her body compliantly and lifted her butt at the right time. She wore a white bra and white nylon underpants. She raised up slightly so I could unhook the bra. “It has little hooks,” she murmured. I undid the hooks and she put her arms up so I could slide the bra off forward. The lights were out in the living room but the streetlight spilled through the front window and everything was clear and bright. She lay back and raised her pelvis again and I slipped the nylon underpants down along her thighs and off. She lay back perfectly still and smiled at me. I’d never seen a live woman naked before. Shark’s sister, Barb, had been up-with-the-dress-in-with-the-member. I stood and looked at her. She didn’t seem embarrassed. She seemed tranquil. I took off my own clothes and lay back down beside her on the couch. She opened her arm for me and I pressed against her in the curve of it. I kissed her; she opened her mouth. I touched her. I ran my hands over her. She touched me. The passion rushed through me; I hugged her to me in thundering darkness. Both of us were damp with sweat. She put
her hands on either side of my face and raised my face from hers.

“We shouldn’t,” she said.

“I know,” I said.

“I might get pregnant.”

Our voices were hoarse.

“It would spoil it for the honeymoon,” I said. “For us it wouldn’t be right.” We pressed still hard against one another.

“I wouldn’t trust a safe,” she said.

Shivering with the effort I lay still beside her. “We’ll wait,” I said. “When we get married I want it all just right.”

The sun was bright and the snow, four feet deep over most of the campus, was beginning to melt. The runoff, channeled through the shoveled paths, turned the bare ground to mud. I held Jennifer’s hand as we squished through the mud toward her dorm.

“I wouldn’t want my children brought up Catholic,” Jennifer said. I felt the flutter of fear in my chest.

Before I spoke again I knew that my religion had ended. It was as simple as that, and I was startled by it. It conflicted with Jennifer and so it was gone. Twenty years of often impassioned belief, of dark confessionals and cool churches, of Latin prayers and Gregorian chants, of complexity, and mystery, and time, washed away in casual conversation in a muddy Maine spring.

“I’m not really Catholic anymore,” I said.

The ocean rolled in among the rocks at Christmas Cove. The sun baked the rocks hot and the spray cooled
them. In small depressions among the rocks were tiny pools; the remnants of high tide lay still and warm. Jennifer dipped a naked big toe in one and stirred it absently. Her toenails were painted red. “Why are you so mad,” she said.