There was a dance that night in the gymnasium, a freshman mixer designed to get all the entering students into the swing of things. A group of freshmen had decorated the gym in a vain attempt to make it look like something other than a gym, but they had failed rather pathetically. A huge weird blue tarpaulin was suspended from the ceiling in an effort to lower the ceiling somewhat, but the basketball backboards and baskets were visible at either end of the room and black and red lines were painted on the hardwood floor.
And, inevitable, the place smelled like a gym. Linda wrinkled her nose when she entered the place, marveling at the way all gymnasiums the world over looked and smelled the same. When you stepped into a gym, any gym from the one at Clifton to the one at Corry Senior High School, the same smell hit you between the eyes. That good old locker room smell, but it didn’t really smell so bad when you came right down to it. Sort of a man-smell, the way Chuck smelled except with the after-shave lotion left out.
There were chairs lined up on both sides of the gym and she picked one out and sat down in it. She was alone; Ruth hadn’t come to the dance and there were no other girls in the hall who interested her enough so that she bothered to seek out their company.
At the far end of the gym a small combo tried to play modern jazz and didn’t quite make it. About a dozen couples were dancing in the middle of the dance floor and a few dozen more pairs of boys and girls were sitting on the sidelines talking. Boys and girls in groups were making conversation too, and Linda felt slightly left out and alone in the midst of all that activity.
She looked around the room, automatically watching the men. Right here in this room might be the man who would be her first lover, the man who would change her from girl to woman. The man might be here, but still she sat alone by herself, no one talking to her, no one asking her to dance.
Across the room a tall, dark-haired boy was sitting by himself. He was wearing a pair of dark grey flannel slacks and a blue blazer with brass buttons. His tie was a thin red-and-green foulard and his shoes were white bucks in approved college fashion. He was good-looking in a quiet sort of a way but she might not have noticed him at all if she hadn’t looked up and caught his eyes. He was looking at her, and when she returned the glance he looked away, as if he was guilty of peeping at her.
She continued to look at him. After a moment or so he looked at her again, and this time he did not avert his gaze. Instead he stood up and began to walk toward her. She flashed him a smile, a quick, hesitant smile that gleamed on her face for a moment and then vanished.
When he was just a few feet away from her he said: “My name’s Joe Gunsway. Mind if I sit down?”
The chairs on either side of her were empty. She rather wanted him to join her and said that she didn’t mind at all. He took a seat next to her and they looked at each other, knowing that it was time to get a conversation started but neither of them quite sure where to begin.
“I’m Linda Shepard,” she said finally. And then, although it didn’t really fit in, she added: “I’m from Cleveland.”
“Freshman?”
She nodded.
“I’m a sophomore,” he said. “From Champaign.”
“Where’s that?”
“Illinois.”
“What are you majoring in?”
“Biology,” he said. “Pre-med. How about you?”
“English.”
They made conversation — the useless but necessary conversation of new acquaintances on a college campus, the patter that served to get two people talking to each other when they actually didn’t have much of anything to talk about. The stock questions and answers: What courses are you taking? What professors do you have? Who are you rooming with? What dorm are you living in? And, finally, they ran out of the perfunctory questions and answers. The band was playing Laura and the tenor saxophonist was working out a slow, languorous melody line that pulsed and throbbed with rhythm and melody, with the drummer using brushes and the pianist laying down soft but solid chords behind the tenor solo.
He asked her to dance.
She stood up and he took her in his arms, holding her comfortably close but not too close. He danced easily but not particularly well, gliding naturally into the familiar foxtrot steps without ever showing any particular bursts of imagination.
She relaxed into the rhythm of the dance, thinking that this was the main reason that dancing had been invented, so that two people who didn’t know each other at all could be at ease in the performance of a social convention, close to each other and restful with each other, moving in time to the music and not bothering with words or gestures.
He was a good four inches taller than she was and she was glad of that. Her mouth was level with his shoulder, and if she turned her head slightly she could kiss his neck. She didn’t, of course, but the idea came into her head and she smiled softly to herself.
The dance ended and they walked back to their chairs. They talked more, and this time the conversation was less automatic and more relaxed and a good deal more meaningful. She told him what it was like to live in Shaker Heights and go to Corry Senior High School. He told her what it was like to come from Champaign and go to Clifton for a year. He told her about his family — his father was a doctor and he planned to go into practice with him after two more years at Clifton and four years at the University of Chicago medical school.
He had two brothers and a sister, all of them younger than he was. He liked to bowl and he played a fair-to-middling game of golf. He played checkers but didn’t like it and liked chess but didn’t play it well.
They sat out a lindy because he couldn’t jitterbug well and danced the next dance, another slow one. He held her closer this time and she leaned a little against him, letting her perfume drift up to his nostrils. His hand squeezed hers gently in rhythm to the music and every few steps she would let her head rest up against the shoulder of his blazer.
After an hour or so they decided that neither of them really felt like dancing any more, and it would be much nicer to go down to the tavern for a beer. They walked out of the gym and down the path to the spot where he had parked his car. He held the door open and she hopped in. Then he walked around the car and got in on his side. He turned the key in the ignition and started the motor and drove the car in the direction of the tavern.
The car was a red Ford convertible, a present from his father. It was a warm night and he drove with the top down. He didn’t drive fast but there was a strong breeze and the wind felt good in her hair. She breathed deeply and the air was fresh and clean, different from the sooty big-city air she had breathed in Cleveland.
She sat close to him but their bodies didn’t touch and he drove with both hands on the wheel. He made conversation and she inserted the appropriate “oh’s” and “uh-huh’s” from time to time without really listening to what he was saying. She was thinking.
She was thinking about Joe Gunsway, about the tall dark boy sitting next to her. She liked him — that she had decided right at the start before their first dance together. She liked him, and she was busy wondering how much he liked her and how often they would see each other and what they would do together. And, automatically, she wondered whether he would be the man, wondered if he would make love to her. She looked at his hands on the wheel and wondered how they would feel on her body, touching her breasts, her thighs. She looked at him almost clinically, like a doctor looking at a patient or a mortician looking at a corpse on a table, and she wondered what he would be like.
The tavern was a college hangout studiously patronized by Clifton students and studiously avoided by Clifton citizenry. It was set up to resemble an old colonial tavern, with wood paneling and ancient-looking tables and chairs. Colonial utensils hung suspended from the ceiling — pots, pans, foot warmers, candle-molds and other weird cast-iron artifacts that Linda couldn’t identify. About seven or eight young men stood drinking beer or hard liquor at the bar. Couples occupied the tables, drinking, laughing, talking and singing.