“Rachel doesn’t smoke. She comes down in her bathrobe? Mrs. Post doesn’t say anything to her?”
“Her fingernails are a mess, she bites them to the quick.”
“Rachel doesn’t bite her nails. Poor kid, she’s so worried about her grades.”
“She’s pregnant.”
“She isn’t,” Rose Helen said.
“She is,” the waiter said, “she’s pregnant all right. She’s had the tests.”
All Druff could think was Where? How? She was an underclassman herself. On weekend nights she hadn’t any more access to those study rooms than they had, he, Rose Helen. She was pregnant? She’d done it? She wasn’t a virgin? And if she wasn’t a virgin, he wondered, then who was the guy? Not the mouse, the little Gamma Beta Sigma shrimp she dated, it couldn’t be him. And if it was him, then how many times did the runt get to poke her before he knocked her up? And who, finally, were Miss and Mr. Foreplay on this campus anyway, and what was the point of having a girlfriend with her own private room in her own unauthorized, non-university housing with a landlady who apparently not only lived and let live but was this high-rolling high liver herself, if all he ever got to show for it was, pardon my French, the goddamn blue balls he went around with all bent over so he was never any higher than the little runt Gamma Beta Sigma son of a bitch himself?
“Oh,” the waiter said, “by the way, I won’t be seeing you guys Saturday. It’s Alumni Weekend and they’re putting on a special banquet. Mrs. Post wants the waiters to come in two hours early to serve drinks and pass around hors d’oeuvres. Then we have to be there for the banquet part, and by the time we clean up it’ll probably be midnight or later before we get out of there. So you’ll have to fend for yourselves about dinner.”
But he’d stopped listening, and Rose Helen was probably fixing to call curfew on him anyway.
Which, because of what the waiter had told them, had suddenly become a question between them. Because, though it was true, it no longer mattered to him that she was the more interesting. He had begun to discount her seniority, the damaged-goods factors, her recovered cripple’s way of walking, her defiance and resentment and pride, even the outlaw housing where, in the dark, in their nest there on the double bed, beneath all the queer hodgepodge of their coats and towels and laundry, all the odd, invisible motley of what, for warmth and style and texture, might just as well have been a housepainter’s drop cloth, she was even more inventive than he was. He had even begun to discount the fact that he loved her. Because he was jealous now. (This was the old days. This was the old days and somehow he already knew it was the old days, had this prescient sense of a soured nostalgia, realized they lived in a magic conspiracy of flimflam fears, knew the times were shoving them through the cracks, shucking them, jiving them, feeding them the prose of innocence, the hype of upbringing. For who gave blowjobs then, who took it up the ass? Poor Druff, Druff thought. Because evidently somebody did, and why did he have the feeling that it might have been him? Because maybe they weren’t the Dutch and Duchess of foreplay at all, maybe they were only the floor show. He would, recalling his old, presumed invisibility and warm, comfortable e-pluribus-unum ways, the fancied atmosphere of mutual absorption and the cumulative, conjoined hip-to-haunch of those Friday and Saturday nights in the Chi Phi Kappa passion pit, wince.) Because he was not only jealous now, he was furious.
Furious (and not just on poor, pregnant Rachel’s behalf either), and not just at the mouse, the little runt shrimp Gamma Beta Sigma son of a bitch, but at all single men and women everywhere, particularly at every unmarried undergraduate or graduate student, coed or otherwise, who was getting it, regularly or otherwise, anywhere in the jiving, shucking, civilized world.
And not only furious either. Regretful as well. For all his bent-over trials by erection, his excruciating stalled blood and stopped-up sperm.
They quarreled. Or Druff did, Rose Helen just said no. He quarreled. Or cajoled and wheedled, rather; fawned and flattered, soft-soaped, pleaded and begged.
He argued.
“There are less attractive guys than me. The Gamma Beta.”
“No. I’m sorry. No.”
There were less attractive men, he argued, plenty of them, but it wasn’t the flukes he cared about. “Really,” he told her, “good for him, good for the Gamma Beta son of a bitch! Good for runts-of-the-litter everywhere!” Because who he really resented, if she wanted to know, were the non-runts, the idea of simply ordinary fellows taking their pleasure was the really galling thing. If she wanted to know.
She didn’t want to know.
And now they really quarreled, really went at it.
We never do this, he told her, we never do that, naming acts for her, citing specifically denied sexual frictions, indicting the five-or-so months they had known each other now, almost, as lawyers do, fixing dollar amounts to his pain and suffering (so much for each blue ball, so much for going around all bent over), and assessing his mental anguish (so much for frustration, so much for the personal humiliation he felt when he’d learned that even a little runt Gamma Beta Sigma mouse had knocked someone up).
“Don’t I let you touch me down there?” Rose Helen said. She might have been close to tears. It sounded that way, but he couldn’t tell. They were on Rose Helen’s made bed. It was too dark to see. “Don’t I?” she repeated. “Let you touch me down there?”
“Sure, through layers of underwear.”
“Haven’t you kissed my nipples?”
“Oh come on, Rose Helen, you practically make me brush my teeth first,” he said irritably. “And when did you ever let me even touch them with your brassiere off?”
“Don’t you get to hold my behind?”
“With gloves on, mittens, through goddamn snowsuits.”
“Don’t you go under my dress?”
“I have to get past all the dry cleaning first, all the clothes and shower curtains on the damn bed. I have to prick my fingers on the pins in your Ship n’ Shore blouses. It’s a regular obstacle course!”
“All right,” she said, “haven’t I kissed you down there?”
“Through my trousers!” Druff yelled.
“Don’t raise your voice to me!” she raised her voice to him. “And if this bed’s such an obstacle course, why don’t I just get out of it and remove one of the obstacles?”
She got out of bed, smoothed her clothing down. She turned the light on.
“Fine,” Druff shouted in the now bright room, “and why don’t I just remove the rest of them!” He ripped the bedspread off the bed, scattering it across the floor along with all his and Rose Helen’s intervening protections, the various towels, washcloths, throw rugs and clothing.
“Pick all that up!” Rose Helen said.
“I won’t do it,” Druff said.
That was when Edward came up with their dinner.
“Hey,” the waiter said, “what’s going on here? It looks like a cyclone hit the place. What happened?”
“A cyclone hit the place,” Druff said. “All that crap ended up on the floor.”
“Here,” Edward said, “let me help you get some of this stuff up,” and started to bend down.
“Leave it alone,” Rose Helen shouted. “Don’t touch a thing!”
Which was when Mrs. Green, startling them all, came into the room.
“What’s this shouting?” she demanded. “Didn’t I tell you about the railroad workers,” she said, “the irregular hours they sleep? How are they supposed to get the rest they need if you people are so inconsiderate?”