But she worried less and less as time went by. She would live with him and love him, and in time he would come to need her as much as she needed him. She loved Don Gibbs and she was determined to wind up married to him.
But there was plenty of time for that.
For the time being she would wait. She would have him at the Record office, at the Landmine, and in bed. She would spend every minute with him.
And, eventually, she would marry him. She was sure of it.
Chapter Six
There were times when Linda hardly realized that she was going to college.
This was primarily due to the fact that she was hardly going to college. While she hadn’t stopped going to classes, the ones she attended were few and far between. She went whenever there was a test, after having stayed awake all night before the test cramming her mind full of the stuff she was supposed to have learned already. It was tough at first, cramming like mad all night and then staying awake the next day for the test. But she found a way to do it — coffee at first, to jolt her mind into an awake much coffee.
Then there was dexedrine. You just took one little pill and you were awake for hours — not high, but very definitely awake with no trouble at all, your mind keen and your body in fine shape. Of course she didn’t want to make a habit of dexedrine, but taking it once a week or so couldn’t hurt, and it certainly did make it easier to keep her eyes open and her mind on what she was doing.
The combination of cramming and dexedrine kept her up to par in her courses for the next two months. But she knew inside that she wasn’t getting all she should be getting out of her courses. She was missing the lectures, and what reading she was doing was confined to the more essential material. Reading somebody else’s lecture notes and skipping over the underlined material in somebody else’s textbook wasn’t any way to get an education. It might get her through exams but that was about all it would do for her.
Well, what did it matter? She didn’t much care about an education, and what Don was teaching her was a good deal more along the line of what she was anxious to learn. She knew that she was developing into a first-class bed partner, among other things, and the sort of conversation she had with Don and his friends was more broadening than the nonsense they filled you with in the classroom.
Almost all of the really interesting boys and girls at Clifton were friends of Don, or at least it seemed that way to her. The off-beat sort of kids who did things and read things and thought about things and talked about things were the kids Don hung around with, and now these were the people Linda was hanging around with. The other students at Clifton, the ones that didn’t count as far as she was concerned, called Don and his friends the Bohemian set. Perhaps the term fit in a vague and inconclusive sort of away, but Linda had never heard it used by any of the people included in the circle.
They dressed to please themselves, and some of the girls in the crowd were as likely as not to wear the same pair of blue jeans and the same shapeless sweater for a week running. The boys went longer between haircuts, most of them, and some of them had beards like Don had. The traditional Ivy League uniform of three-button suit and button-down collar was missing. Nobody wore blue blazers like Joe did and shined shoes were the exception rather than the rule.
But with these people, Linda knew, dress was informal to the point of sloppiness simply because it didn’t matter. They were too busy leading their own lives to concern themselves with the superficial things.
Some of them worked on the newspaper. Others painted or played the guitar or wrote poetry. Some of them didn’t do anything in particular — they just belonged to the group, spending their time sitting over coffee at the Landmine or lounging aimlessly for hours at a clip on the steps of the Union Building. They played chess and held perpetual conversations and got drunk as often as they possibly could.
They were, she decided, nice people. They accepted her quite readily, probably more because she was Don’s girl than anything else, but their acceptance of her mattered to her only as far as it mattered to Don. She could have made a lot more friends among the group if she had cared about it at all, but she didn’t, not down deep. All she cared about was Don — he became more important to her every day.
The two of them became more close every day. Constantly she looked for signs to prove to her how much she meant to him, as if to reassure herself that their relationship would go on forever.
Inside, deep inside, she knew that there was something wrong.
They were sitting across the dinner table in the cafeteria. He held a coffee cup in one hand and a cigarette in the other. She had finished her coffee and she was sitting silently, looking at him.
“Don?”
He looked up.
“What do you want to do tonight?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I think I’ll do some reading for that contemporary fiction class.”
“There’s a good movie playing.”
“Which one?”
“Hungry Wedding.”
“Sounds lousy.”
“Rosmini directed it. It’s supposed to be good.”
He shrugged and took a drag of his cigarette.
“See it if you want. I’d better do the reading.”
“Can’t it wait?”
“Probably,” he said. “But I might as well get it out of the way now as some other time.”
“Then I won’t go.”
“Huh?”
“Well, I don’t want to see the movie alone.”
“Don’t be silly,” he said. “There’ll probably be some of the group going, or you can go with a bunch of kids from your hall.”
“I hardly know a soul in my hall.”
“Hell, you can find somebody to go with. There’s always a crowd on a Sunday night. Even if you went alone it wouldn’t be so terrible, you know. In a town like Clifton you know half the theater by the time you get there anyway.”
“No,” she said. “I won’t go.”
He put down the empty cup of coffee and reached for her hand. “Linda,” he said, “why don’t you want to go to the movie?”
“I want to be with you,” she said honestly. “If you don’t feel like going it’s all right. But I don’t want to see the movie so much that I’d rather go with somebody else than sit around the apartment with you.”
“That’s ridiculous,” he said. “We don’t have to spend every goddamned minute together.”
“I know. I just don’t want to see the picture unless you come along.”
“Look — I’d go, but I really don’t want to see this one and if I don’t get that reading out of the way—”
“It’s all right,” she said quickly. “I don’t want you to come to the picture. I don’t even want to see it any more, Don. I just—”
“Linda—”
She stopped and looked at him. There was an unfamiliar edge to his voice.
“Go to the movie,” he told her.
“But—”
“Go to the movie,” he repeated. “We’re together all the time these days. Go to the picture and it’ll give us a chance to get away from each other for a few hours.”
“But I don’t want to be away from you.”
He didn’t say But I want to be away from you. He didn’t say anything, but he might just as well have told her that he didn’t want to see her. She felt as though she had been slapped and she almost burst out crying — even though, actually, he hadn’t done anything at all.
She went to the movie that night. She went all by herself while he went back to the apartment to read. The picture, an excellent Italian import, went completely by her. She kept her eyes on the screen from start to finish but she might just as well have had them shut. She didn’t listen to a word or take note of a thing that happened on the screen. Her mind was too busy with thoughts of its own, thoughts she didn’t want to think but thoughts she couldn’t help thinking.