“It may surprise you,” he explained, “but there are quite a few Linda’s. I thought perhaps you might have some means of identification which would be a little more specific.”
“Oh.”
“Like a last name, for example.”
“Shepard,” she said, desperately. “Linda Shepard. From Cleveland.”
“That’s a little better. What else?”
“Like what?”
“What year are you?”
“Freshman.”
He nodded. “Major?”
“English.”
“Hall?”
“Evans.”
He nodded again and struck a pose with one hand on his hip and the other stroking his beard. “Linda Shepard from Cleveland,” he said. “What in the world do you do?”
“Do?”
“Do,” he repeated. “Some people play tennis. Others paint murals on lavatory walls. Still others climb mountains. I just wondered what—”
“Oh,” she said. “I... well, I... I don’t do much of anything.”
He shook his head as if he was thoroughly ashamed of her but she could tell he was making fun of her. “That’s bad,” he said. “That’s very bad. Like an oyster.”
“An oyster?”
“They just sit on the bottom of the ocean. They never do a damned thing.”
She waited.
“I’m Don Gibbs,” he said. “Record editor.”
“I know.”
“Oh?” He seemed surprised. “You said you majored in English?”
She nodded.
“Why don’t you drop up to the Record office tonight? I’ll find something for you to do and you won’t have to wander around bumping into people and feeling like an oyster.”
“I—”
“The paper comes out tomorrow,” he went on. “There are always too many things to do on Thursday night. I can use some help. Can you spell?”
She nodded, mystified.
“Then you can read copy and proof. Drop up any time after eight.”
“I... I have a date tonight.”
“Congratulations,” he said. “Everybody should have them. Like parents.”
“Parents?”
“Parents. Everybody should have dates and parents and things like that. But what does that have to do with it? The date isn’t going to last until morning, is it?”
“No, of course not.”
“Well, drop up after the date is over. It’s simple enough, really. All you have to do is go on your date until your date isn’t any more and then come up to the office. Okay?”
“Sure,” she said. “I guess so.”
He nodded, smiled another smile as brief as the first, and started walking off briskly. She stood watching him for a few seconds until she realized what she was doing. Then she turned and hurried to the library.
Joe was dull that night.
She realized this, and as she realized it she also realized that she wasn’t being entirely fair to Joe. It wasn’t his fault — the movie he took her to was a first-rate foreign film, the beer at the tavern was cold, the pizza properly spicy. And Joe’s conversation was as pleasant and warm as ever.
It wasn’t Joe’s fault, but Joe was dull. He hadn’t been dull before, and this bothered her. Because she knew why he seemed dull now. It didn’t take a genius to figure out why he seemed dull. He seemed dull because, by comparison to Don Gibbs, Joe Gunsway just didn’t sparkle.
She fought against this realization. When Joe parked the car in front of her dorm and kissed her, she forced herself to respond as passionately as possible, pulling him tight against her and probing his mouth with her tongue, sending his pulse racing even if her own remained quite steady.
It was a few minutes after midnight when Joe walked her from the car to the door, gave her a final kiss, and left her. It was another minute or so after midnight when she walked from her dormitory to the Student Union. First she waited until Joe’s car was out of sight, because she didn’t want him to know where she was going. She didn’t think he would mind — she certainly didn’t have a date with Don, but was only going to do some work on the newspaper. But she didn’t want him asking any questions.
It was dark out, and the streetlights were spaced very far apart along the road to the Student Union. She walked quickly, hoping she looked as good as Joe had assured her she did. She was wearing her black skirt, the one she had been wearing that afternoon, with a white cashmere sweater. The sweater was very tight and not particularly warm, but the last time a girl wore a sweater to keep warm was in 1823. It did what it was supposed to do admirably. Her breasts looked as though they might peep out through the thin white material at any moment, and the lines of the bra were clearly visible when she stood in a good light. And, because the sweater was white, it made her breasts look even larger than they would otherwise.
Tricks, she thought. And they probably wouldn’t do much good anyway, because Don was probably interested in her as a piece of slave labor rather than as a piece of something else. But it didn’t hurt to try, anyway.
She mounted the steps of the Union building and crossed over the flat concrete stoop to the door. Once inside she realized how incredibly empty the building was. She’d been there three times a day or more since she arrived at Clifton, since the cafeteria was located in the Union, but she had never before been in it when it was empty. The building was fairly new, built just two or three years ago, and the modernistic architecture of the structure was called Twentieth-Century Ugly by the majority of the student body, as well as by a good part of the faculty in the privacy of their homes. The linoleum-covered floor seemed unusually wide when Linda’s feet were the only ones walking on it, and her footsteps sounded annoyingly loud.
She walked up a flight of stairs to the second floor. Halfway around the building was the Record office; it had been one of the places on the campus tour forced upon all entering freshmen, and she found it now with no difficulty. She would have had little trouble locating it in any case, since it was the only office in the building with the lights on.
At first glance the huge room appeared to be empty. A large desk surrounded by strangely-shaped wooden tables stood at the far side of the office. A long black table lined the wall near her. There was paper in one form or another all over the place — crumpled sheets of white copy paper, folded but unfiled issues of last week’s Record, paper bags and empty coffee cups and scraps of paper that didn’t seem to possess any discernible identity of their own. She wandered into the middle of all this confusion and looked around helplessly.
Then she saw the editor’s office, a separate room running off from the main room. The light was on and the door open, and she walked hesitantly to the doorway. Don Gibbs was sitting behind a large desk, staring at a sheet of paper on the desk in front of him. He held a cigarette between the second and third fingers of his right hand and a pencil in his left hand. Another cigarette burned unnoticed in an ashtray that was already filled to overflowing with cigarette butts and burned-out matches.
The room was even messier than the outer office. There was a small brown pool of spilled coffee on the floor surrounded by more thrown-away paper. A sport jacket lay neatly folded in the middle of the floor, and near the door was a naked dress-dummy, formless and ragged, with a brassiere around the bust and a lamp coming out of the top.
Don didn’t look up at first. He looked tired, incredibly tired. Everything about him looked tired, from the weary lines in his face to the rumpled, wrinkled, once-white shirt that was open at the neck and partially unbuttoned.
He dragged deeply on the cigarette and coughed. Then he turned his full attention to the scrap of paper and made some marks on it with the pencil. He studied the results for a moment, then nodded with bored satisfaction and placed the paper in the upper half of an In-Out box. Without pausing he began to scrutinize another sheet of copy paper in the same manner, marking it up with the thick lead pencil.