Her head started spinning. She had to get up and race down the hall to the bathroom again, where she was violently sick to her stomach for several minutes.
It was almost dawn before she finally passed out and slept for sixteen hours.
Leon Camelot was followed by Frank Willet, who in turn was followed by Jackson Rice, who paved the way for Nick Bingle, who gave way to Roy Swinnerton.
Thus the days went by.
And the nights.
It made perfect sense to her. She was the tramp of Clifton College, the little girl who could be counted on for a tumble on the turf or a roll in the hay when ever a guy needed something female to take his mind off the pressing business of books and tests and classes. She had more dates than she wanted, but dates weren’t the only source of sexual satisfaction. There would be a date in the early part of the evening, a date that was nothing more than the prelude to a scramble in the back seat of a car. She found in the course of it all that if you weren’t particularly choosy it wasn’t at all difficult to make love in a car, even a non-Rambler without descending seats to simplify matters. Or, if something more than automotive sex was on the evening’s program, there was always the motel down the road where any couple was automatically man and wife and where the proprietor didn’t care what went on as long as he got his money in advance.
After the date, her companion of the evening would drop her ceremoniously at her door and wish her goodnight. Then she would troop down to the Landmine for coffee, waiting for someone to come and pick her up. And there was always somebody willing, somebody who would take her to still another place and make still more love to her.
Why not?
What else was she good for?
Nothing, she would answer herself.
Still, she couldn’t help feeling sick inside from time to time, sick and empty and wasted. She had stopped writing her weekly letter home, but mail from the family still arrived, pathetic and hopeless letters that revealed how blissfully unaware her mother and father were of the sort of life she was leading.
Well, the hell with them. What they didn’t know might hurt her, but it surely wouldn’t hurt them. Every once in a while she forced herself to write a letter to them, a silly and vacuous letter full to the brim with news of events that had never happened, a letter loaded with the stuff and nonsense that she knew they wanted to hear from her. Just so it made them happy, she told herself. Someone in the family might as well be happy.
She gave up classes entirely. Midterms were over and the close of the first semester was coming with its load of exams. She let it come and go, not even going to two of her finals. The others she attended and failed gloriously.
It didn’t matter.
Nothing mattered.
Nothing mattered at all.
She went home Christmas vacation. She went home and lied and pranced around and acted like a veteran trouper, and no one in the family could possibly have suspected a thing. It was rough, that two-week vacation without a man, and on the night before she was due to go back to school she called up Chuck Connor and got him to take her to a drive-in. She looked forward to sleeping with Chuck, looked forward to completing at last something that should have been completed long ago.
But fate somehow decreed that she confine her sex life to the Clifton campus. Her period came in the middle of the movie, so as far as Chuck ever knew she was still a virgin.
Back to school.
Back to the old routine.
Back to the sack.
It was the first week in February when she discovered it was possible and rather pleasant to make love in a dormitory room in the middle of the afternoon. It happened in Lee Colestock’s room in Buchanan hall and it was a very enjoyable experience for all concerned. All, in this instance, happened to be Linda and Lee.
Ruth tried to talk to her. It was, Linda thought, a little late for the brunette to start playing the dutiful roommate, but Ruth seemed sincerely concerned for her.
“Look,” she said, “you’re not in so deep that you can’t stop. You can get to work and pass your courses and keep away from men and—”
“I couldn’t possibly pass my courses.”
“You could if you spent enough time on them. If you quit sleeping around and—”
“I couldn’t possibly quit sleeping around.”
“Of course you could. If you really wanted to—”
“But I don’t want to.”
And that settled that.
Don wouldn’t see her. She tried to see him two or three times, just so that the two of them could knock off a quick one for auld lang syne, but he wouldn’t get near her. He seemed disgusted with her, but it was more than that. It was as if he didn’t want to see her because being with her made him feel ashamed of himself.
Well, she could live without Don. There were plenty of other fish in the pond. And she was developing into a far-better-than-average fisherwoman. It was amazing how adept a girl could get at the grand game of sex when she had a lesson or two every day of the week.
There were a good many ways to make love, she was discovering. There were an almost infinite number of variations on a basically sound theme, and variety was making life quite a spicy affair.
It was a good life, all in all.
Except during the bad moments.
The bad moments were a perennial occurrence. Every once in awhile, every couple of days, the whole twisted pattern of her life would stand up on its hind legs and stare her full in the face until she couldn’t stand it any more. Those were the bad moments, and after they had happened a few times she recognized these periodic fits of depression for what they were and learned to cope with them.
It was a good thing she did. The first really bad moment put her so far down that she actually went so far as to draw a razor blade over her left wrist three times, experimentally, not quite ready to slash her wrists and bleed to death but more than ready to consider the prospect.
Then she learned what to do when things got so bad that she felt like killing herself. It was a simple way out, when you stopped to think about it. You didn’t kill yourself and you didn’t crawl in a hole and pull the hole in after you and you didn’t just sit around and mope or look for a shoulder to spill tears on.
You picked up a bottle and drank.
It wasn’t at all difficult for her to get hold of a bottle. According to the law she couldn’t drink anything stronger than 3.2 beer until she was twenty-one years of age, but there were a lot of things that the law said which didn’t quite jibe with her own personal behavior patterns. Why in the world should her drinking coincide with the norms prescribed by law?
No reason, really.
So she drank.
Boys bought the liquor for her. She didn’t exactly hit the bottle like a full-fledged refugee from Alcoholics Unanimous, and all she needed was a fifth of liquor a week in order to be sure of staying reasonably sane on the surface.
That was all.
She drank gin because it tasted like medicine. Every time one of the bad moments came she would go off to her room and drink just enough gin so that she didn’t feel rotten anymore. She never got high, never got happy-drunk, and very rarely got so stoned that she passed out. Just enough gin to give her a little edge on the world was all she wanted. She poured the gin from the bottle into a paper cup and drank it neat, wrinkling her nose each time because she loathed the taste of the gin.
A psychiatrist might have said that she picked gin to drink because she liked it less than any other form of liquor. But there was no psychiatrist handy to clue her in on the reason for her choice of beverage. She drank gin because she felt like drinking the gin.