I think that was when I decided I loved her. Not because I finally got into her, though that was a lot of fun at the time too, but because she’d remembered about getting pregnant, which I thought meant she was being considerate of me. I know, I know, but that’s what I thought. Also, I took her word for it. I took her word for it that night, and on every occasion after that for thirteen months, and then one night in June of 1964 I took her word for it once too often, and along about March 21st, 1965, along came Fred. Elfreda.
I don’t mean we played Vatican roulette all the time. Times she said it wasn’t safe I wore a rubber, but I always hated to wear one and she didn’t like it much either, so whenever she thought it was safe I’d go at her naked. Boom, Elfreda.
Anyway, after that night in the truck I couldn’t get enough of Betsy, and for a while she couldn’t get enough of me either. We were at each other every chance we got, and as the spring got warmer and warmer the chances got more and more frequent. I finally did sneak her into my room in the dorm, in the middle of the day, and on two memorable occasions she snuck me into her bedroom in the middle of the night. Also I didn’t go home to Albany for summer vacation, I got a cheap furnished room in town and a job at the makeup factory that was Monequois’s only attempt at local industry, and I spent all summer rutting atop my Betsy.
I also, because I was around her house all the time, got to know her family. Her father wears railroad engineer overalls, and is small and wiry and sour-looking, and is one of those people with so much grime encased in his skin if he stands still you feel like planting rows of beans up and down him. Her mother is fat, and wears flowered dresses that I believe she buys already faded. Pre-shrunk and pre-faded. She’s fat in the mind, too, being one of the dullest women on earth, who talks in a very slow monotone about things she saw on the television. What she talked about before television is anybody’s guess, but these days one hundred per cent of her conversation is what she saw yesterday or last Sunday or Tuesday afternoon on the television. Not on television, on the television. That’s how she speaks of it, the television. Like the Bronx.
I suppose, come to think of it, before television she used to talk about what she’d heard on the radio. But what would she have done if she’d been born a hundred years ago?
Anyway, besides those two there’s Birge and Johnny. Birge is eight years older than Betsy, and Johnny is five years older than Betsy, and they’re both big and ugly and rangy and mean-looking, and they hunt a lot, and they wear the kind of clothes worn by people who hunt a lot. They have both of them always intimidated me, Birge mostly but Johnny too. They stopped in here once last Christmastime, the middle of December. They drove the truck out from the city after delivering a load of Christmas trees, and they sat around and drank beer and we tried to find something we could talk about. We managed to talk about pro football for a while, but naturally Birge used to play semi-pro ball in Canada and all he wanted to talk about was ripping people’s nostrils, and against that my talk about watching the Giants screw up the game with the Packers on television last Sunday was pretty damn tame. As a matter of fact, I always have the feeling with Birge and Johnny that sooner or later they are going to get exasperated and then they’ll come over and stomp me to death with their boots because I’m soft. They make me nervous, and I’m glad they only came by that one time.
But I was talking about fucking Betsy. After that first night, we both of us got this terrible letch for each other, we’d stand around with our hands shaking waiting for a chance to get at each other again, we screwed and screwed and screwed, we tried every position I’d ever heard of, and Betsy was so hot she actually began to grab hold of me. In places like standing on line in the cafeteria. She’s in front of me, we’re holding our trays, and subtly she backs up, slips a hand behind her, gives me a squeeze. I jump, and look embarrassed, and she giggles at me with sidelong looks, and we rush through lunch and go over to the dorm and I sneak her in and lock the door so Rod won’t break in on us, and we hump all over the room.
Rod. Of course, I was reporting all this to Rod. Betsy doesn’t know it, naturally, but I told Rod everything. I told him how she liked it, what she did when she came, how many times I made her come, how she tasted the first time I went down on her, I told him everything. I was making up for all those times I had nothing to tell, of course, so I was overdoing it a little. In fact, I even lied a few times, exaggerated this and that. Like, I told him she was blowing me months before she was.
Then all of a sudden I was marrying her, and I wished I’d kept my big mouth shut.
But I am, as we writers say, leaping ahead of my story. First I have to leave Betsy forever, then we get married.
I graduated from college in June of 1964. My mother and Hannah came up. Hester was supposed to, but she disappeared that day. She disappeared frequently, so my mother didn’t worry about it, she just took it for granted Hester didn’t want to go see her big half-brother graduated. For which I don’t blame her, particularly since that was also the year Hannah and Hester had their own graduation, from high school. It was two weeks after mine, and I suppose Hester figured one graduation a June was sufficient evil unto the year thereof, or whatever.
Anyway, I introduced Mom and Hannah to Betsy, and Hannah and Betsy hit it off right away. They started talking about making your own clothes, and if that wasn’t enough to alert me to start running I don’t know what would have done it. Hester’s the only one in my family with the sense to disappear when the disappearing’s good.
I’d like to call Hester, but I don’t know exactly where she is. Somewhere in San Francisco, last I heard. If she has a phone, she’s probably pawned it.
Anyway, Hannah and Betsy got along like a house awater. Mom and Betsy were sort of cool to each other, I’m not sure why. It might have been a simple generational gap, or Mom might have had that mother thing about competition with the son’s girl friend, or maybe she just looked at Betsy and said to herself, At that girl’s age I was a swinger, and this one’s a bore. Whatever the reason, it was nervous-making to be around them, so for the two days that Mom and Hannah were up it tended to be Betsy and Hannah going off shopping together and Mom and me walking around town and the campus and all and looking at the sights.
Anyway, I graduated. I got the diploma, I shucked out of the black robe, I told Betsy I’d write every day I was in Albany and I would come up in August to see her, and I went away with Mom and Hannah and planned never to see Betsy again as long as I lived.
Because it was over. My lust had gradually worn itself out inside her, and once the lust was gone there wasn’t anything else to take its place. We had talked about marriage once or twice, or that is to say Betsy had brought the subject up, and every time I had talked about the unsettled state of both the world and my career, not knowing if I’d get to graduate school or not, and so on. And Betsy still had two years to go at Monequois, which I knew she would be only too glad to give up for a husband, but I refused to see things that way. I was trying to avoid the commitment without losing the steady lay, which was, I suppose, a sort of practice for fiction-writing. And my ultimate argument was that by August I’d know a lot more about what the future had in store for me, so I’d come back up to Monequois and we’d talk things over and decide our rosy tomorrows together.
Sure.
My mother and Hannah and I went back to Albany, to the house at 50 Slingerlands Street, and there was Hester, smoking cigarettes. She gave me a hello smile that was worth forty of Hannah’s dutiful trips, and she also right away arranged a double date for us, her with some football player she was screwing and me with a friend of hers called Charlotte, with whom I learned why the french kiss has become so popular. That was the first date. On the second date, Charlotte went down on me in the back seat of the football player’s Chevrolet while the football player and Hester were doing various obscure things up front, and Betsy receded in my mind like Smithville as seen from the observation car of the Twentieth Century Limited.