“You want to stay with me?” I said. She nodded.


I worked that summer loading trucks in a Coca-Cola plant out on Kempton Street in New Bedford. Every day from ten in the morning till seven at night I took cases off the roller track and heaved them into a truck. The top of the truck always had broken glass on it and when you loaded tops and shoved the cases across you usually scraped your forearms. I had cuts on both arms all summer. One weekend I borrowed a car and went up to Marblehead and visited Jennifer. Sarah Vaughan was singing at a club in Magnolia and we went down in the warm evening, just she and I. Her friend couldn’t go and it was almost like a date. I had on my summer dress-up — white linen jacket, white oxford-weave shirt, button-down collar, black knit tie, gray slacks, loafers, no socks. Jennifer had on a full skirt and a peasant blouse. She sat easily and poised in the front seat with me and talked as we drove north through Salem and Beverly. Settling darkness, people still out, a lot of them on front steps, the radio on. Vaughn Monroe, “Dance Ballerina Dance,” Larry Clinton, Bea Wain, “Deep purple falls over sleepy garden walls.” “She’s married to André Baruch,” I said. Jennifer was never aware peripherally. Her alertness was always concentrated on one thing. “Bea Wain,” I said. “The girl singing. She’s married to an announcer named André Baruch who sounds sort of like Basil Rathbone and did play-by-play on the Dodgers for a little while.” Jennifer smiled. It was as if I’d explained E=mc2. The road curved, nearly empty, along the seacoast and the summer trees were deep green and placid.

Chapter Nine

Jennifer said she loved Nick. She loved everyone she went steady with.

“That’s not love,” I would say, “that’s convenience. You can’t be in love with two or three people a year.”

And she would smile that aching smile and say I could love my way and she could love her way. “What fun would it be,” she would say, “to go out with someone without being in love?”

“You got it backwards,” I would say, and she would nod and think on it, but I always had a sense that she wouldn’t be different because I said she should be.

I was in Onie’s with Billy Murphy and Guze drinking beer on a December night when she called me.

“Come and get me,” she said. “I need you to come and get me.”

“Where?”

“Student Union.”

“I’ll be up.”

I borrowed Dave Herman’s Chrysler convertible and drove up rubbing the frost off the inside of the windshield until the heater took hold. Electricity buzzed in the pit of my stomach. Come and get me, she had said. I need you to come and get me. I was half drunk and tense with excitement and frightened. Both hands on the wheel, I took in a big lungful of smoke without taking the cigarette from my mouth. Nineteen years old, I felt that something was about to happen, something that would fix me forever like an insect caught in amber, something that would commit me beyond deviation or retraction or even regret. God was about to put his mark on me and I knew it and it scared hell out of me. Now, looking back with the forgiving, solicitous, but lordly wisdom of adulthood, I have no quarrel with what I felt then. I was right.

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.

Chapter Ten