And Francine wasn’t worth the trouble, for Pete’s sake. No matter how nice her body was, there was too thick a layer of stupidity and selfishness hovering over it. And no matter what terrific secrets she had hidden between her legs, they just couldn’t be worth all the games and crap you had to go through to get to her.
I just wasn’t interested.
You may have trouble believing it. I don’t blame you for a minute. This is I, Chip Harrison, talking, after all, and to tell you the truth, I didn’t believe it all myself. But it was true.
I went outside and walked around until I found a place to have a cup of coffee. I just walked right in and sat down at the counter without giving the place the usual carefully casual are-there-any-girls-here glance. I didn’t even care. I sat at the counter, and the waitress who always served me came over and gave me the usual big phony smile and leaned forward to give me the usual cheap thrill, and I talked to her the same way I always did but without even pausing to think for a moment that I would like to bang her. I drank my coffee and ordered another cup. I told myself I might be a virgin for the rest of my life, and if that was the way it was going to be, I would just have to learn to live with it, because no matter how great Doing It felt (and I don’t suppose it would really feel a whole hell of a lot different from some of the things I had done with Aileen, as far as that goes), it still couldn’t be worth making a horse’s ass of yourself or building your whole life around. It just wasn’t worth it.
I was having a third cup of coffee, which I don’t usually do, but this wasn’t my usual kind of evening, either. A voice said, “Say, is anybody sitting here?”
I turned around. It was a girl about my age, with long brown hair and, very wide brown eyes. She was wearing a pair of those granny glasses and if anything they made her eyes look bigger.
“No one at all,” I said.
“What I meant was, do you feel like company or are you involved with your own private thoughts?”
“Company’s fine.”
“Are you sure? I don’t want to come on heavy or anything.”
“I’m sure. I ran out of thoughts, anyway.”
She parked herself on the stool next to mine. The waitress came over and showed off her breasts. The girl ordered coffee, and I said I didn’t want anything, thanks just the same. The waitress gave me one of those tentative dirty looks, as though she didn’t know whether to take that the wrong way or not. She brought the girl’s coffee and went away.
“I think I’ve seen you around,” the girl said.
“I’ve been around.”
“Are you living in town?”
“For the time being. Just passing through, actually.”
“I’ve been living here for years, but I’m on my way out now. I’m going to college tomorrow morning.”
“Oh.”
She stirred her coffee. “My first year. I guess I must be a little nervous about it because I couldn’t sleep. I had to get out of the house. I didn’t think I was nervous but I must be.”
“Maybe you’re just excited. That can happen.”
“I guess so. Do you go to school now or did you finish?”
“I sort of dropped out.”
“That’s groovy. I guess I’ll probably drop out. Most of the kids I know who went already, the more interesting ones, all dropped out after a year or two. But I wanted to see what it was like first.”
“That’s probably a good idea.”
“That’s what I figured.” She drummed the countertop with her fingers. Her fingernails were chewed ragged and the backs of her hands were brown from the sun. “I’m a Capricorn. Open to new ideas. I believe in that, I think, but I don’t know much about it. Astrology, I mean. What are you?”
“Oh. Virgo.”
“My name’s Hallie.”
“Mine’s Chip.”
“That’s very together. I like that.” She sipped her coffee and made a face.
“It’s pretty bad coffee,” I said.
“The worst. But everybody’s closed at this hour. Do you work or what?”
“Over at the car wash. They wash and I dry.”
“That sounds fair enough.”
“I don’t love it, but it’s a job.”
“I think that’s where I may have seen you. And you know, walking around.”
I looked at her again. “I’ve seen you, too. I think. With a sort of stocky guy? With shoulders?”
“My brother.”
“Oh.”
“He’s in the Service. The Infantry.”
“Oh.”
“He enlisted to get it over with and now he’s sorry. He hates it.”
“I can imagine.”
“He thought it would get better after basic training, but he says it’s the same shuck all around, and now he thinks they’re going to send him overseas.”
“Rough.”
“You know it.”
I looked at her again. She was damned attractive, although it was the kind of goodlookingness that you didn’t notice right off. It didn’t wave and shout at you, but after you saw it a few times you began to appreciate it. She looked very clean and cool and casual, and she talked with her whole face. I mean, she didn’t keep throwing smiles and winks at you and do things with her eyebrows, nothing like that. But the expression on her face always went along with what she was saying. A lot of the time a person’s mouth will go off in one direction while their mind is somewhere else.
We didn’t talk about anything very important. I told her about some of the apple knockers I had met, and she talked about spending summers on her uncle’s farm when she was a kid. I hadn’t really talked to a girl this way in I don’t know how long. I used to talk to Aileen in Chicago, but that was all screwed up by the fact that I was all hung up on her sexually. With Hallie, sex didn’t have anything to do with it. Not that she wouldn’t have appealed to me, but that I had gone through some real changes and I wasn’t the same horny kid I had been a couple of hours ago.
She had a second cup of the terrible coffee, and I kept her company and had a fourth. When she finished hers I said I thought I would probably go for a walk, and she said maybe some fresh air would do her good, help her get to sleep. We each paid for our own coffee and went outside together.
We walked two or three blocks without talking. But it was an easy silence, not one of those uncomfortable ones where you try to think of something to say and keep running different sentences through your mind. It was completely relaxed. I didn’t even get lost in my own thoughts. I just walked along, hardly thinking of anything.
Then she said, “Chip?” I looked at her and for a second her eyes seemed so deep that I could see for miles into them. Then she lowered them and shifted her weight from one foot to the other.
She said, “I live at home with my folks.”
“I know.”
“We could go to your place.”
“If you’re tired of walking, sure.”
“I mean if you wanted to ball or anything. Not to come on strong, but like I have to go to college tomorrow so there’s no time to let things just happen. I think they would happen because I sort of dig you and everything, and even our signs are compatible, Virgo and Capricorn, or at least I think they are, but I don’t really know much about it. Astrology.”