A boy who had to be approached, who wouldn’t speak until spoken to.
And who would then never shut up.
Alice Atkinson McDermott arrived at Davidson College with one ambition. To be different. Just being here was the first step. She’d made her stand, insisting on matriculating at this small, well-regarded liberal arts college-a spawning ground for communists and sexual libertines, in her father’s certain estimation-instead of the small Catholic women’s colleges her older sisters had been forced to attend. As formidable as those Amazons were, they, unlike her, hadn’t had the good fortune to be born the youngest, the prettiest, and the favorite. And so her father, infamous among television-addicted insomniacs in both Carolinas as the King of Unpainted Furniture, finally conceded. On one condition. That Alice promised to attend Mass and take Holy Communion every Sunday. By the middle of Lent, I was attending with her.
But a month of Sundays and three dozen Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary wouldn’t have fooled J. Curtis McDermott. He sized me up on first sight, at that tense Sunday afternoon brunch where I chain-smoked and refused to allow anything but black coffee to pass my lips. The simple fact that he hated me convinced her she was in love with her smart-ass, daydreaming little rebel. If truth be told, she would have preferred it if my armpits hadn’t needed a good shellacking with an anti-perspirant. But my sour apple presence certainly made an impression in the prissy little restaurant that served dessert cakes dusted with confectioner’s sugar sifted over a paper doily.
But the body odor she mistook as an act of defiance was, in reality, the byproduct of sheer, abject terror. The overbearing pitchman on television, the King of Unpainted Furniture, was a soft sell compared to the Grand Inquisitor confronting me across the table. He was a massive, strawberry-blond Irishman with chiseled features, a barrel-chested Spencer Tracy with a seventeen-and-a-half-inch neck. He waved his hands as he spoke, inspiring irrational fears of the Boston Strangler’s meaty hands gripping my neck. He bore down on me like a heat-seeking missile.
“Where are you from?”
“ Gastonia.”
“How do you spell your last name?”
“N-O-C-E-R-A.”
I enunciated as slowly and carefully as a parent teaching a toddler the alphabet. Alice giggled, drawing an apprehensive look from her mother.
“I don’t think I know your family,” he said, suspicious of my origins.
“I have a cousin in High Point. Maybe you know him. Zack Vanzetti?”
Alice kicked me under the table, barely able to contain her glee.
“I don’t think so. What parish does he belong to?”
“ Alice says you’re an English major,” her mother interjected in a futile attempt to steer the conversation to neutral territory.
“I just don’t understand that,” he declared. “You’ve been speaking English since you learned how to talk.”
“Actually, Daddy, Andy grew up speaking Bulgarian,” Alice said, purposefully avoiding the pleading looks from her mother.
“I thought you were a wop?” he blurted, hypertension pumping blood into his cheeks.
“My mother was born in the Balkans,” I lied, suppressing any trace of sarcasm in my voice.
“Jesus,” he said, exasperated, turning to his wife for reassurance that North Carolina hadn’t been infiltrated by communist agents from behind the Iron Curtain. “Are those people Catholic?”
I refused to let him pay for my meal, such as it was, and threw a couple of ones on the table when he wouldn’t take my money. He wanted to have me drawn and quartered. His daughter would have married me on the spot.
That night we made love for the first time.
I was sprawled on the floor of her dorm room, flipping through her records in a futile search for Buddy Holly in the stack of Schubert lieder and Bach choral works. Try as I might, I couldn’t appreciate the subtle beauty of Strauss’s Four Last Songs.
“Let’s listen to this instead,” she said and I flopped on my back, swept up in the overture to The Magic Flute. She curled up beside me. I felt the heat of her body and could almost taste the peppermint on her breath. I stared at the ceiling and she touched my chin, gently turning my face toward her. I knew what I was supposed to do next. I closed my eyes and kissed her.
I knew she could tell I was a virgin. I could tell she wasn’t, which made me all the more nervous. When she undressed and turned to show me her body, I realized I had never fantasized about how she looked naked. I stared at her breasts and her vagina. I knew I liked her, maybe even loved her. I knew I didn’t desire her body. Funny thing about the body, though. It can respond to anything, anytime, even without the desire to possess.
“Shit,” I said, pushing myself away from her. “We can’t do this. I don’t have any rubbers,” I announced, not exactly regretting the reprieve.
“Don’t worry. I’m on the pill.”
I was awkward at first, but found my rhythm soon enough. I knew her moans were real. You can’t fake a faker.
She made it easy for me, always careful not to be too demanding. She seemed genuinely impressed by the inanities that rolled off my silver-tipped tongue. I’d always been the listener, never the talker, and certainly never the center of attention. But there was something in Alice ’s deep green eyes, something about the way she’d nod her head, anxious that I know she absolutely, positively, one hundred percent, agreed with me, that compelled me to share my insights and announce my opinions. All of which, in hindsight, were the pathetically ordinary pronouncements of a self-absorbed undergraduate, the all-too-familiar polemics endured by long-suffering parents footing the bill to gild their (temporarily, they hope) obnoxious offspring with a liberal-arts education.
Alice insisted I go home with her one warm spring weekend. Their house made the Monument to Heat and Air where I’d grown up look like a shack. We arrived late Friday and were driving back to the dormitory by Saturday afternoon. The King had gone ballistic when he stumbled upon the copy of The Militant, the Voice of the Socialist Workers Party I intentionally left sitting on the toilet tank of the guest bathroom. Bellowing at the top of his lungs, he declared me guilty of treason. In my snidest, most condescending voice, I informed him it was perfectly legal to cast my vote against the oppression of free-market capitalism. And I then announced I could not spend one more minute in his house. Alice followed me out the door, triumphant.
Her mother came rushing toward us, pleading for a treaty or at least a temporary cease-fire.
“ Alice, please, come back inside. He’ll be miserable if he thinks you’re mad at him.”
“Well, I am.”
“ Alice, he loves you.”
“And I love Andy,” she announced, closing the door and telling me to start the car.
I knew she was mine forever.
Little Gloria Bunker can’t accept that I can’t stay for the Big Game tomorrow. The booze is flowing; everyone’s loose and insistent on having a good time. She realizes she’s going to have to be a little forward. After all, the night’s not getting younger and my hands have yet to stray under the table. They’re announcing last call, one more round, and the invitation to my room isn’t forthcoming. She’s shouting, thinking I’ll believe she’s just trying to be heard over the din. But I know she’s hoping that her breath tickling my ear is what I need to get me started. Her friends are on the dance floor, flailing away to Donna Summer’s “Last Dance,” very consciously having decided to leave us alone. Little Gloria arches her back and takes the plunge.