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.

Chapter Eleven

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.

I squatted beside her in a bathing suit and T-shirt. My nose was peeling. “We love each other,” I said. “We are supposed to stay together.”

Jennifer’s bathing suit was blue and strapless with white piping. “Oh, come on, Boonie,” she said. “You were having a nice time over there, and I couldn’t stand Billy’s date so I went over with Bobbi and John and those people. It’s not like I ran off with someone.”

I still squatted, shaking my head a little. “Then tell me and I’ll go with you, but don’t leave me. We’re supposed to be together.”

Jennifer’s face showed that hint of fine puzzlement that I’d seen before. “But Billy’s your friend. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings.”

I sat down on the rough rock beside her and put my arms around her and pulled her against me and we went over and lay on our sides, facing. “Doesn’t matter, friends, hurt, not hurt, mother, father, anything. Only you and I matter. You have to understand that. Only you and I. Nothing else. Nothing.” And I kissed her and she kissed me back in the baking sun at the edge of the Atlantic.


The letter was on Colby stationery, Office of the Dean. It said: “Dear Mr. Adams, I regret to inform you that your academic record is unsatisfactory. Your personal conduct has been disruptive, and thus can hardly mitigate in your favor. I am therefore compelled to inform you that we cannot accept you as a student here at Colby for the fall semester. If you have questions about this decision, or need help in pursuing a course of study and conduct whereby you might be reconsidered in the spring semester, please call my secretary, or come to my office and make an appointment to see me. I regret this decision, as you must, but your scholarship and citizenship, or more accurately lack of both, leave me no other choice. Sincerely, Casper A. Brady, Dean.”... They drafted me in August.