I never had any direction. I liked to read, I always liked to read, so when I got to college and I saw they had a major in American Literature I fell into it, like falling into bed. I’d already read most of it anyway: The Scarlet Letter, Moby Dick and “Bartleby,” Leaves of Grass, some Poe, The Red Badge of Courage, A Farewell to Arms, The Catcher in the Rye.
It’s very strange, really. Some people know what they want to do with their lives, so they pick the major that matches the goal. But other people, like me, are just drifting along, and just drift into one major or another, and finally pick a goal that matches the major. And what can you do if your major is American Lit? Nothing but teach. So I was going to teach.
But I didn’t have a vocation. Do you know what I mean? I wasn’t planning on teaching for any reason that had to do with self-fulfillment, anything like that. I was just drifting, nobody was at the helm, my life was just following the tide of least resistance.
Which brings me back to Betsy. I went back to the dorm after that first date with her, having cast my seed in some neighbor’s back yard — the Bible is silent on that particular aberration, I believe — and Rod was up, writing a story. He didn’t have the overhead light on, we both hated it. The gooseneck lamp on his desk was lit, he was typing away on his Smith-Corona portable, a machine exactly like this one, also beige. In fact, I have this one because he had that one. I had to have elite size type because my manuscripts had to look like his, so when I was doing the first book, up in Albany, I rented a typewriter from a place on State Street, but when we moved down here I went out and bought one. Naturally, having no opinions of my own on the subject of typewriters, I bought one like Rod’s. Ergo, Smith-Corona.
It’s a pretty good machine, I guess. I do fifty thousand words a month on it, and I’ve had it now two and a half years, and I’ve never had to have anything fixed. It rattles some, it sounds loose when I work on it, but it does the job.
I guess I don’t want to go back to Betsy. If I start doing commercials for my typewriter instead, I guess I really don’t want to go back to Betsy.
I don’t care, I’ve started this I might as well finish it. I don’t know what kind of crazy death wish has me in its grip, today’s the 22nd and I still haven’t started the book, but I’m going to get this junk out of my system for good and all.
Tonight. After dinner I definitely go to work.
In the meantime, Rod looked up at my entrance and said, “How’d it go?”
“Okay,” I said.
“You score?”
“Not yet,” I said. “But it’s a sure thing.”
The thing was, I believed it myself. Partly because I was so horny, and partly because I needed a score on my side of the tally sheet. In college Rod was what we call an assman. He was constantly making out with this girl or that girl, three or four times I had to go spend the night in somebody else’s room because he’d snuck a girl into the dorm, and my few lays were hardly enough to keep me afloat in his company. And here it was January, and I hadn’t so far got into anybody at all in my junior year, and I was feeling really troubled about it.
So I called Betsy the next day, a Saturday, and she had a date for that night, but she was free Sunday. I had to work a double date with Howie again, not having a car, and we drove down to Port Jones, on the Mishkon River, and we went to a bar there called Hiram’s Lodge, where they had a real fire going in a real fireplace, and stag heads on the walls, and real logs everywhere, and all in all a good ski lodge effect. We drank two pitchers of beer there, and necked in the booth, and I got my hand at last up under her skirt, gloveless, and felt her panties for a while. She was getting very hot, panting against my mouth, but when I tried to tug the panties out of the way with my fingers she shook her head and whispered no several times in a frantic sort of way and then pushed my hand away, and that was that.
I didn’t want to get out of Howie’s car at her place again tonight, because I knew nothing was going to happen and it was goddam cold, but I felt locked into the gesture. So I got out, and the warm car drove away, red taillights and white exhaust, tires crunching on the snowy street, and there we were in the snow-white darkness and silence, her house as black as the tomb in front of us. They never left a light on for her, and when I got to know her parents I found out why. They’re cheap. Betsy’s parents are the cheapest pair of miserly bastards the world has ever seen. Their toilet paper, for instance. You wouldn’t believe the hard scratchy rotten paper they use for toilet paper. The stuff must be two cents a roll. I hate to crap at her parents’ house, believe me.
Anyway, I went up on the porch with her again, and kissed her awhile, and took my right glove off, and tried to get my hand up under her skirt, but she pushed me away and whispered, “It’s too cold!” Which it was. I was just doing it, you know? Going through the motions.
I don’t think I ever wanted Betsy. I wanted something, and she was the only thing I could understand. The only thing within reach.
So we made arrangements to meet in the cafeteria at twelve-fifteen the next day, Monday, because she ate her lunch on campus, and then I left, and had lover’s nuts again, and spat in the same back yard, and walked on home. Rod was in bed, asleep, so I didn’t have to answer any questions till the next day.
The reason she ate lunch on campus, of course, was because it was cheaper. We paid for lunch a semester at a time, and got monthly cards, and the cards were stamped every day when we went in for lunch. The state paid half the cost, or more than half the cost, and we paid the rest. Thirty-five dollars a semester, which isn’t bad. Otherwise, I’m sure Betsy’s parents would have made her walk home for lunch every day and then walk back to school. They were too cheap, you’ll notice, to let her go to college away from home, and think how much trouble that would have saved me.
She was sort of an oddball, actually, being a local citizen at the college. I know there are lots of colleges where the student body assays high in locals, but up in Monequois there were practically none. I think that was because Monequois didn’t produce many college students at all, either for the local college or to ship out. It’s a poor town, tucked away in a northern corner of New York State, and I think most of its citizens don’t even bother to finish high school.
Anyway, we had lunch, which was a cheap date, even cheaper than paying for half a pitcher of beer, and I had a lot less walking to do afterwards. I tried to subtly suggest she might find it fun to sneak into the dorm sometime, simply as a lark because girls were forbidden there and all, but she didn’t rise to it. She didn’t rise to anything, but I was so inflamed by my idea that we were headed for the rack that I didn’t pay any attention to the real girl sitting across from me at all. So I asked her for another date, for that Friday, and she said yes. We also managed to meet in the cafeteria again for lunch the next day.
I think basically she was lonely. Because she didn’t live in the girls’ dorm she didn’t have any real girl friends on campus, and of course being a college girl separated her from the other locals, so who did she have? I was easy to get along with, I told jokes, I was somebody to talk with at lunchtime in the cafeteria three days a week (Wednesdays and Fridays our schedules conflicted) and I was a date on weekends. So what she was doing was pretty much what I was doing: not paying any attention to the other person at all, but only thinking about his/her usefulness.
Well, she got a lot more mileage out of me than I got out of her. Three days a week in the cafeteria. Two or three dates every weekend. After a while, because I was getting bored and nothing was happening, I cut it to one weekend date by claiming I couldn’t find anybody with a car to double with. We were always dependent on other people, we were always the couple in the back seat. The only good thing to come out of it was the exercise, three miles from her house back to the dorm every time, unless it was either snowing or raining.