Crossroads Page 12

  “It’s kind of implied, don’t you think?”

  “No. I never hear anyone here talk about it. All I hear is contempt for the military.”

  She was little, and female, but her thoughts were original. In Arizona, on his church group’s spring trip, he’d worked for a Navajo man, Keith Durochie, who’d lost a son in Vietnam. Only seventeen, uncomfortable in the presence of a parent’s loss, Clem had tried to sympathize with Durochie by lamenting how unjust it was to die in such a war, and Durochie had gone morose and silent. Clem had said the wrong thing, but he hadn’t known why. Listening to Sharon, he understood that, far from consoling Durochie, he’d dishonored his son’s death. What an ass he’d been.

  “I’m really sorry I didn’t write back to you,” he said.

  Her dark brown eyes were on him. “Walk me home?”

  Already, that first night, he’d had the heart-fluttering sense that he would have to take action; that he’d glimpsed a moral truth which there was no going back and unglimpsing. He might have been spared if he’d had a higher draft number, but lottery ball 19 had followed an incalculable (“random”) trajectory to pairing with his birthday, and his heart went out to the uneducated kid who was serving in his rightful place. He didn’t want to be like his father, who merely professed to have sympathy for the underprivileged. Giving up his student deferment was an insanely steep price to pay for being more consistent than his father, but by the time he and Sharon reached her house, on one of the shabbier side streets of Urbana, his moral intuition was telling him to pay it.

  At the top of the stairs to her front porch, she turned around and kissed him. He was one step below her, the stairs compensating for their rather extreme height difference. The kiss was the beginning of a long reprieve from the judgment he’d passed on himself. When he finally tore himself away from her, with a promise to call her the next day, the thought of Vietnam had been banished by the sweetness of her mouth, the welcoming scent of her skin, the parting of his lips by her bold little tongue, the great surprise of it all.

  Her house was a clapboard wreck with a hippie-run bicycle store on the ground floor, hippie common rooms on the second floor, hippie bedrooms on the third, and Sharon, who detested hippies, in the only habitable room on the fourth. She looked to the world like a harmless small creature, but she had a way of getting what she wanted. The year before, after her sorority had expelled her for violating its rules, the hippies had given her the best room in their house. Among other things, it was the perfect room for uninterrupted sex. Clem would later come to see the wisdom of parietal regulations, which, outmoded norms of behavior aside, served to keep undergraduates from falling into a pit of pleasure and neglecting their studies, but on his second visit he’d gone up to her room in all innocence. After some hours of necking on her bed, in their clothes, Sharon went to the bathroom and returned wearing only a terrycloth robe. It transpired that she’d got impatient with the necking, also sore of chin and nose. She pushed Clem onto his back and undid his belt buckle. He said, “Wait, though.” She said it was okay, she was on the Pill. She’d lost her own virginity when she was seventeen, an exchange student in Lyon, France. The family she’d boarded with had an older son who went to the university but lived at home and was her lover for two and a half months, until they were detected. The ensuing shitstorm had resulted in her being sent home to Eltonville. A monumental embarrassment, she said, but worth it. After exchanging letters for a year, her lover had found someone else and she’d had further adventures on which she didn’t care to elaborate. Clem, supine, his belt unbuckled, was still trying to slow things down, to extend a discussion that seemed mandatory, when she took off the robe and lay down on him. “It’s easy,” she said. “I’ll show you.” In short order, he found himself looking up at the naked entirety of a girl he might have expected to uncover part by part, with much asking of permission, over a span of weeks or months. Seeing her altogether was such a visual overload he had to shut his eyes against it. She moved up and down on his erection until there was a cracking rip in the fabric of the universe. She fell forward and kissed him with her indeed very abraded mouth. He needed to know if she’d liked what had just happened. She said she had, very much. But, he persisted, had she…? “All in good time,” she said. “I’ll show you.”

  For a twenty-year-old farm girl from southern Illinois, Sharon knew a lot about sex. Some of it she’d learned in France, the rest she knew from reading books. To Clem the most shocking thing she knew was that she really, really liked to have her vulva licked. Licking a vulva hadn’t been on his most distant radar; the Latin word for it, although he’d seen it in a dictionary, had only been a word. If pressed, he might have guessed that it was a technique for seasoned lovers, a sort of hard drug to which ordinary intercourse was a gateway. He certainly couldn’t have imagined doing it with a girl who was still confusing the names of his two brothers. Still less could he have imagined loving it. The only thing better than seeing and smelling and tasting her vulva was the moment when he got to put his penis in it; and therein lay the problem.

  He now saw that his supposed self-discipline, the outstanding study habits his parents and his teachers had always praised, had not been discipline at all. He’d excelled at school because he’d enjoyed learning things, not because he had superior willpower. As soon as Sharon introduced him to more intense forms of pleasure, he discovered how hopelessly undeveloped the muscles of his will really were. He found himself skipping organic chem lab for hardly any reason, just to take a long walk with her, not even to have sex, just to be near her. He had his first experience of fellatio on a morning when he should have been in Roman history. He failed to prepare for his cellular biology midterm because putting his penis in Sharon’s vulva had offered more pleasure, in the moment, than studying did. What this said about his self-control was bad enough. Worse yet was how it undermined his best moral argument for keeping his deferment—the idea that he could better serve humanity by working diligently at school, becoming a leader in the field of science, than by serving as a grunt in Vietnam. If he couldn’t keep his grade point average above 3.5, he truly had no right to a deferment.

  Sharon, for her part, was wonderfully untroubled. She couldn’t be drafted, and she only took the kind of courses where a gifted writer got an automatic A. She could outline a paper just by talking it through with Clem, whereas he needed to study hard, by himself, to memorize organic radicals. She was a true reader, accustomed to solitude, and preferred having no friends to having friends less remarkable than she was. Clem didn’t have good friends at U of I yet himself, but one of his science study mates, Gus, had asked him to room with him, clearly hoping to deepen their friendship, and now Gus was barely speaking to him, because Clem had hurt his feelings by spending all his time with Sharon. She was every bit as hungry for pleasure as he was, but it didn’t seem to derail her life the way it did his. She was never in a hurry to be somewhere, and he’d come to crave what she did to his sense of time, her serene indifference to the clock, nearly as much as he craved her body. As long as he could stay curled up inside her neatly ordered life, as if it were his own life, and never leave her room, he felt all right. Only when he left her room was he engulfed by anxiety, and only by returning could he relieve it.

  Though he would have denied it, vehemently, if she’d asked him, another reason he preferred to be in her room was that he felt awkward with her in public. The difficulty, such as it was, lay not in what she was in herself. He was proud of her intelligence, proud of her pretty face and prettier figure, proud of her limpidly unaffected manner. The difficulty lay in what she was in relation to him, namely, fourteen inches shorter. She had never, not once, made reference to their height difference, and he hated himself for even being aware of it. The way the world judged people by their physical appearance, which they had no control over, and which had nothing to do with their mind or their personality, was totally unjust. In theory, he was happy to be so much taller than Sharon, because
it demonstrated his commitment to equality and to the marriage of true minds, irrespective of physical impediment. In practice, too, when they were alone in bed, the almost illicit littleness of her naked body was an added turn-on. But in public, try as he might, he couldn’t help feeling that people were staring at them and drawing conclusions about him.

  At Thanksgiving, when he went home to New Prospect and saw Becky, who was now a fully grown woman, his discomfort had become acute. Becky and her friends, especially Jeannie Cross, were so resplendent that they might have been a different species, and Becky had made an uncharacteristically cutting remark about the height difference of Tanner Evans and Laura Dobrinsky. Although Clem had looked forward to telling his sister that he had a girlfriend, he sensed right away that Becky had no interest in Sharon—didn’t want to meet her, didn’t want to hear about her, wouldn’t approve of her. When he proceeded to gush about the beauty of Sharon’s mind, and to describe the extremity of her allure, the depth of the sensual pit he’d fallen into, his words sounded hollow and abstract. The whole conversation was deeply embarrassing. He came away from it ashamed of his sexuality, ashamed by extension of Sharon herself, and more painfully aware of their dimensional incongruity. Their relationship, which until then had seemed open-ended, now felt temporary, as if Sharon were merely his “first girlfriend,” the sweet but dimensionally unsuitable person with whom he’d lost his virginity. Intentionally or not, Becky had caused him to scrutinize his feelings for Sharon, and he found them lacking. They weren’t rugged enough for him to declare to his sister, “I don’t care about your superficial judgment, she’s the person I love,” and they weren’t powerful enough—didn’t strongly enough suggest an enduring future of togetherness—to serve as an argument against giving up his student deferment. They were more like an escape, a reprieve, from his moral duty.

  He’d returned to school with a strict plan for himself. He would see Sharon only two evenings a week, and not stay over at her house at all, and he would study ten hours every day and try to ace every one of his finals and term papers. If he ran the table with A-pluses, he could still keep his GPA above 3.5—the figure which, though basically arbitrary, was his last plausible defense against the action he would otherwise be called upon to take.

  His plan was sensible but not, it turned out, achievable. When he stopped by Sharon’s house, it was as if they’d been apart for five months, not five days. He had a thousand things to tell her, and as soon as he took down her corduroys it seemed mean and silly to have worried about their height difference. Not until he returned to his room, the following afternoon, did he lament his lack of willpower. He recalibrated his plan, assigning himself eleven hours of daily study, and stuck to this schedule until Friday, when he treated himself to another evening with Sharon. By the time he left her, on Sunday afternoon, he would have had to study fifteen hours a day to make the numbers work. He told himself that he was living in the moment, like an existentialist, and savoring their togetherness while it lasted, but he sensed something darker going on. Something almost spiteful—as if, by surrendering to Sharon’s elastic sense of time, and thereby ensuring that his grades would suffer, which would leave him no moral choice but to drop out of school, he were secretly preparing to punish her. She had no inkling of what the figure 3.5 signified to him, but she would understand it soon enough, and rue that she hadn’t insisted that he study.

  What had made the coming punishment crueler was that Sharon was giving signs of loving him in an old-fashioned, romantic, totalizing way. Despite having presented herself as a free spirit, a Colette-reading sexual adventurer, and despite being too sophisticated to use mushy language, she seemed to have a longer-range vision for the two of them. No sooner had he told her about his conversation with his sister at Thanksgiving, the bequest from their aunt, than she’d become fixated on going to Europe with him. She respected him for refusing the money Becky had offered, but why not at least accept a free vacation? Wouldn’t it be amazing to be together in France? The two of them visiting the same places as his sister and his mother, but doing their own thing? Whenever she returned to the idea, to add or subtract some stop on their mythical itinerary, Clem simply closed his eyes and smiled. In his secret heart, he already knew that he would write to the draft board. The overriding reason to do it was that it was morally correct. He had further important reasons relating to his father and to Sharon, to whom he wanted to prove how seriously he’d taken her ideas, and who he hoped would admire the rightness of his action and compare him favorably with her brother Mike. And yet, ridiculously, in the waning days of the semester, as the reality of his academic failures had sunk in, the most salient attraction of forfeiting his deferment had been to avoid going to France with his girlfriend and his sister.

  The morning sky was growing darker, not lighter, when he reached her house. He had a key he never used—despite a recent bicycle theft, the hippies refused to lock their back door. He let himself into the murk of their kitchen and hurried past the cheese-crusted crockery piled in and around the sink, which existed in a kind of hippie equilibrium, a steady state in which new dirty dishes were added at exactly the same rate that someone bothered to wash the older ones. Most of the hippies were too placidly self-absorbed to even know his name, but he’d received many a knowing smile in passing, and he was glad not to encounter anyone as he made his way upstairs. He sensed that the sum of his identity, in that house, consisted of being the dude who was boning the little chick on the fourth floor, which was uncomfortably close to a fair summation.

  Sharon, in flannel pajamas, was mixing something at the plywood counter of the makeshift kitchenette outside her room. Clem stooped to kiss her curls and put his arms around her from behind. In his disordered mind, he was already halfway a soldier, arriving to do what soldiers did with a woman, but she shrugged him off playfully. “I’m making toast with sugar and cinnamon.”

  “I’m not sure I can face food right now.”

  “When was the last time you ate?”

  “Sometime yesterday. I had a tuna-salad sub.”

  “You definitely need food. But first—” She crouched to open her little refrigerator. “I bought champagne.”

  “Champagne.”

  “To celebrate.” She handed him the cold bottle. “You didn’t believe me, but I knew you could do it.”

  Typing out fifteen pages of C-level work in sixty hours didn’t seem like such a feat to Clem. “Champagne, Urbana,” he said.

  “Exactly.”

  Drinking anything alcoholic, at nine in the morning, in his condition, was ill-advised, but Sharon had definite ideas about how things should be done, and he didn’t want to disappoint her. He peeled the foil off the bottle and popped the cork.

  “To us,” she said when he’d filled two jelly glasses. “To Scipio Africanus!”

  “Don’t even say that name. I spent all night typing Scipoi and having to erase it.”

  “Just to us, then.”

  She stood on tiptoe for a kiss that he bent down to give her. He caught an exciting, catfoody whiff of degraded semen from his several deposits of it in her on Monday. She took her glass and the bottle into her bedroom, and he followed her like a dog. She sat propped against the pillows on her bed while he pawed her feet, massaging her bare soles with his thumbs. The champagne was making her exceedingly lovely. Far from easing his announcement to her, it was inviting him to calculate when he would have to leave her house to intercept the postal worker emptying the mailbox and get his letter back. On the theory that his brain cells needed readily absorbable glucose to regain higher function, he drained his glass.

  She immediately refilled it. “You said you had something to tell me?”

  He fell back onto the bed and looked up at the canted ceiling, his vision spinning. The light coming in through her dormer seemed detached from any specific hour, by its grayness and by his body clock’s confusion, the feeling that today was still yesterday and morning had followed afternoon without an
intervening night.

  “I have something to tell you, too,” she said.

  It occurred to him that he’d never kissed her feet. They were tiny and high-arched, their soles soft and cool, a balm to his fevered cheeks. She laughed and pulled them away.

  “Sorry,” she said. “That tickles.”

  He had no basis for comparison, but it was possible to worry that not all girls—perhaps very few girls—were as sweetly direct as Sharon about what they liked and didn’t like. Possible to worry that few girls could have been more generous, more forgiving of his blunders, more tolerant of his incessant wish for intercourse, more interested in having it herself, less given to tears or pouting, less emotionally demanding, than Sharon had been. Possible, indeed, to worry that the three months now ending had amounted to a little Eden, an earthly paradise that he’d been stupid-lucky to land in and was a fool to be destroying. He thought of the November morning when he’d watched her hobble to the bathroom, like an old woman, and had understood how miserably sore he’d made her in his pursuit of one last, negligible orgasm. He remembered how she’d hobbled back to bed, how he’d castigated himself and begged her forgiveness, and how she’d simply laughed it off, C’est l’amour. He’d been living in an inverse Eden, whose Eve had eaten the apple and shared her delicious knowledge with him. Why, oh why, did he have to destroy it?

  He reckoned that he could leave her room as late as 10:45 and still be back at the mailbox before a postal worker got there. For that matter, he could spend the whole morning with her and write a second letter to say he’d changed his mind and was keeping his deferment.

  “Are you falling asleep?” she said.

  “Not at all.”

  “Let me make you some toast.”

  “No, I’m okay. Champagne is like a glucose bomb.”