Marge kneeled in the middle of the floor-nude, as were the circle of eager watchers. Les Haberman, a tall muscular senior, stood over her cupping her breasts in his hands and gently massaging the already-swollen tips. Marge had her eyes shut and her mouth clamped tight, and sweat was pouring down her body in rivers. For her initiation to the club she was having to resist Haberman's stimulation for thirty minutes-during which time he could kiss and touch her in any way he wanted-then if she survived the test she would submit to him and two other male members.
The second part of the initiation would be no problem to Marge, but now she was obviously suffering. Highly susceptible to the male touch as she was, she was nearly splitting herself in half by forcing herself not to respond to Haberman's devilish caresses. Her big breasts rose and fell rapidly, as her breath came in short gulps and she pressed her thighs tight together.
Only twelve minutes left. But Haberman was really tightening the screws. He grazed his fingers once more down her thighs, then shifted his position, took Marge by the elbows and drew her back, sprawling her out flat....
CHAPTER ONE
It was a hot September afternoon just before my sophomore year at Metropolitan was about to open, and I was lying in the sack in my dormitory room, fourth floor of Hendricks Hall, overlooking the noise and clamor of Bryant Avenue. The room was dusty and bare, like a shell waiting for its occupant to climb in. My unpacked suitcases were scattered all over, but I ignored them. I was tired and dizzy from the heat and from the long railroad trip downstate from my home in Hudson, New York. And I was having a daydream. The daydream probably started the whole mess that was going to end up so horribly later that fall.
As I lay there, I was imagining that I was walking down Broadway, and I turned a corner suddenly and smacked into this girl coming the other way. She was a tall blonde wearing Bermuda shorts and a white blouse open at the collar, and-I could see big, white, bulging, squeezable breasts. I laughed and she laughed and somehow that lit a spark, and I invited her into a local bar for a drink, and then she said, "how about going to my place," and we did, and it was an apartment near campus.
And she had all the kinds of books I like, and serious records like Bach and such, and there was harpsichord music tinkling and she had a bottle of cheap red wine. We drank, and then suddenly we were next to each other on the couch, and I was taking her blouse off and there was nothing on underneath, and I was looking straight at her big, round, pale breasts that stood up firm without any need of a bra.
And I touched them and she came to life under my touch, all fire and passion, and we stripped off our clothes and sank down on the floor, sweat-slippery bodies thrusting against each other, her breasts grinding against my body, my hands gripping her tight buttocks, and both of us were swept away on an ecstasy of glorious sex.
As daydreams go, it was a damned good one. But it mostly had the effect of reminding me that as a lover, I was a miserable failure. Here I was, Jeff Burnside, nineteen years old, Metropolitan '65, and I had never gone to bed with a woman in my life. I was wasting my whole goddam youth, I thought. As I lay there on the squeaky dorm bed, I made up my mind that this year I was going to do something about that. In my freshman year I had been too busy just managing to survive my courses to worry about socializing. But now I was a sophomore. Time to turn those daydreams into reality.
I unpacked and looked at myself in the mirror. The glass was a little warped, the image untrue, but it was good enough. I looked pretty nondescript. Sort of reddish hair, sort of blue-gray eyes, but nothing too definite in any category.
Then I thought-classes don't start for a couple of days. Your time is your own. Why not go out and get made?
Boy, what a fiasco!
I went downstairs. All around me the campus was quiet-hot, sunwashed, the grass in Holman Quad was browned and toasted by the summer heat, the long shadows of afternoon slanted down off the top of Reynolds Library. I felt good, liberated from the strangling grip of my hinkydink home town. This was the Big City. The City of Opportunity.
I went wandering down Broadway, turning corners in hopes of bumping into my daydream girl with the big breasts. No dice. On 213th Street I made a quick turn, bumped into a little old lady, and knocked her groceries out of her arms. The hell with turning corners. Daydreams never came to life.
I strolled around until it started to get dark, and stopped into a cafeteria for some eats, and then went to a movie. By myself. All around me couples were making out like crazy. I left the movie in the middle and went back to the dorms. The place was starting to look crowded as other residents arrived after their summer vacations.
Alone in my room, I pulled out my old typewriter and started to beat the keys-sublimating my sex drives with creative effort. I was writing a profound essay on the sexual nature of the college male, only in a light vein. I was planning to submit it to Don Hammer, the editor of Knave, the campus humor magazine. I had met Hammer the previous spring, and he had extended a halfhearted (and, I now think, phony) invitation for me to write for him.
So I spent half the night writing the article, and then sacked out. I dreamed that six brunettes with giant knockers were dancing nude around my bed. I visualized them down to the last detail, down to the tilt of their nipples, and the saddest thing was that my knowledge of anatomy came exclusively from men's magazine photos. I woke up in a cold sweat of desire.
Get hold of yourself, Burnside! I told myself sternly. Sex isn't everything.
Oh, no? I answered with a sneer.
I fell asleep finally. The next few days were pretty hectic, what with registration and greeting old friends and all, and the bull sessions in the dorms. I spent what spare time I had polishing and repolishing my essay, which I titled The Sexual Crisis of Modern Civilization. Around the second or third day of the new semester I climbed up into Hammond Hall at an hour when I knew Don Hammer would be in.
Hammer was a senior, active in half a dozen campus affairs. He was a goaty little fellow with protruding teeth and rimless glasses, but he was never seen around campus without a girl on his arm, usually a chesty Chesley type, and formidable rumors of his sexual prowess circulated all over campus. He came from Iowa, or maybe it was Ohio.
The door of the Knave office was open. Hammer was there, sitting behind a paper-littered desk, looking through some girly magazines. I stepped in.
"Brought you an article, Hammer," I said importantly.
He surveyed a page of bare-bosomed wenches. Without looking up he said, "Okay. Leave it on the desk."
"I'd sort of like a reading now," I said.
"Ippolito of the Critic is interested too." Critic is the Metropolitan literary mag, ultra-ultra-arty.
You never could tell what they'd print. I hadn't approached Mark Ippolito yet, partly because I didn't know him and partly because I was sure Knave would snap the article up. But I figured it couldn't hurt to use some leverage on Hammer.
And I was right. "Okay," he said. "I'll take a look at it."
I handed the manuscript over. He read the first page very carefully, then started to skim. His facial expression didn't change. I started to visualize the big play, the double-spread illustration, the review in the campus daily, calling my article "significant ... searching ... witty...."
He got all through, rolled the sheets of paper up, pounded them against his knee. After a long, long pause he said, "I can't print crap like this, Burnside. Knave has a reputation to uphold."
I damn near fell over. That was a shot to the vitals. "What the hell do you mean?"
He kept pounding my script against his khaki-clad knee. "It's too obviously the work of-well, a frustrated virgin. Go out and find a woman if you want to write about sex."
My hands were numb. I took the script back, feeling I ought to defend myself somehow. "I didn't ask for a damn psychoanalysis, Hammer. Just for a reading. Anyhow, your opinions on the state of my virginity are irrelevant, insulting, and downright untrue."
"That's your story. But it shows, Burnside. It shows."
Suddenly I didn't feel like arguing or defending myself any more. I shoved my rejected baby onto my clipboard, glared at him awkwardly, and got out of there. For a second I saw myself through Don Hammer's eyes, and it hurt-I was a long-legged goof of a kid pretending to a sophistication I didn't have. I couldn't fool an expert. Right now I couldn't even fool myself.
In a sort of dreamy daze I started to walk down the hall. Further along, typewriters were banging away in the Daily office, and further down the hall some members of the Maske Gown were rehearsing an insipid song-and-dance routine for their next production. I felt out of phase. I stood all alone in the middle of the howling hubbub, picturing myself as a gaunt tragic figure doomed to everlasting loneliness. Hell, I was a silly kid ... but that was the way I felt right then. Only later, after all the trouble I got into, did I really begin to understand how the world worked.
Right then, in the hallway, I saw sex as the magic open-sesame that would turn me from a gawky adolescent into a man. I was troubled by the fact that I had managed to stay out of bed with females for some nineteen-plus consecutive years, which if not the world's record was still a long enough time to annoy and discourage me somewhat.
It was funny. For years my home town was known for its red-light district. Of course, it's been somewhat cleaned up of late, but only just recently. In the palmy days Hudson must have seemed to an outsider like a real hotbed of sin. But I was on the inside, born of a good family, and so I never dared venture into the wrong end of town because if I got caught it would look bad for my parents. So there I was in a city like that, and I managed to grow up pure.
In the couple of awkward, arms-length talks I had had with my father he hadn't said much more than to be sure to save it for my wedding night. Well, that was what I was seeming to be doing, whether I wanted to or not.
And I felt like I was on a treadmill. Round and round and round, with more unanswered questions popping up every day, and me never any closer to reaching any kind of equilibrium with the world about me than a circus freak. I felt pretty bitter and miserable about the whole thing.
Brooding, I -edged along the hall and practically fell into the Daily office. Metropolitan's dashing young journalists were engaged in their usual frantic occupation of getting out the day's edition. Someone tall and pimply was city editor for the day, and he was standing up behind his desk yelling, "Hey, Sid, dial extension 2525 and ask Alphonse if there's been any campus crime wave yet." Somewhere else I heard two members of the paper's managing board having a hassle over the day's editorial. And somewhere else a sports reporter was clacking out some crud about the approaching football season.
Everyone was busy. Except me. I was floating high, wide, and loose, with Don Hammer's all-too-perceptive rejection griping at me. I wondered why I had bothered to go into the Daily office. Just to watch busy people, I supposed. But I remembered that a new term had started, and that I had better get myself over to the college bookstore and grab up my needed textbooks while I still had some cash on hand from my folks' last check. I started to drift out when I saw a familiar face.
He called to me. "Hey, Burnside!"
He was Chuck Gordon, Class of '64-a lean, whippet-like junior from California or Oregon or someplace else out west. He was highly regarded on Daily as future managing-board material. I had met him last year, when he and I were in the same geology class. He didn't crack a book till the week before finals, and then put in a cram-session with me and came out with an A. I worked like a dog all term and got only B-plus. But things came easy to him. I had to admire him for his slickness.
I said, "Hello, Chuck. How was the summer?"
"Can't complain. You?"
I lifted my shoulders in what I hoped was a sophisticated shrug. "Pretty dull. But I survived." I looked at my watch. It was half past three. Time to get going.
" I'm heading over to the book store," I told him. "You going in that direction?"
"I really ought to stick around the office here. Oh, the hell with it-yeah. I'll go with you. On one condition."
"What's that?"
"That you stop off with me for a beer in the West Side afterward."
"Okay," I said. It was a good idea. I felt I could use a beer to wash away the taste of the afternoon, and I was glad to have some company. Anyone's company. Even a hard-driving louse like Chuck Gordon. And maybe hanging around Gordon would bring me good luck, in my present condition of frustration. He was supposed to be one of the biggest makeout men on campus. They said he had a pet project of making every girl in Chesley College, and that he was surprisingly close to completing the project. And considering that there are around a thousand girls over there, it means he's been doing swell even if he's only two percent of the way there. Me, I would have settled for just one girl, right then.
Gordon and I sauntered down the steps into Henry Hawks Lobby, where some guy was peddling football tickets, and drifted out into Hol-man Quadrangle. It was a warmish September afternoon-not the soul-stifling soggy heat of the summer, but a kind of pleasant springy-fall warmth.
As usual, the Quad, chief outdoor gathering place of the Metropolitan undergrads, was jammed with loafers who sprawled over every sittable bit of concrete in sight. There were some Chesley girls in the Quad, each of them surrounded by a cluster of eager upperclassmen. Here and there I spotted a day-student-one of those miserable fellows who spends two or three hours a day riding the subway between Brooklyn and Metropolitan, or the Bronx and Metropolitan, and who never gets to think of college as anything much more than an extension of high school, but tougher. Almost half of Metropolitan's population consists of these guys-at nightfall, the college fragments and a thousand of the splinters go every which way all over the city.
As we proceeded up the Quad toward 216th Street, Gordon suddenly nudged me. "Hold it. There's a girl I want to say hello to."
She was sitting alone on a stone bench just outside Davis Hall. She looked like a sweet mid-western type-clean, neat, blonde-in the inevitable plaid Bermuda shorts, long black socks, and white woolen sweater. The sweater was pretty tight and two good-sized bumps were protruding. All in all she looked astonishingly like the girl I kept daydreaming about, except that I knew this one didn't have an apartment off-campus, probably didn't like cheap Chianti, and almost certainly didn't put out. She had the wholesome look that spells virgin in capital letters. I was obscurely annoyed that an operator like Chuck Gordon should have an eye out for her, even if I didn't know her myself.
She was bent over a vast textbook. For a moment Gordon paused above her, surveying the way her breasts pushed the front of her sweater out. Then he cleared his throat. She glanced up, surprised.
"Oh-Chuck."
"Want you to meet a dear friend of mine," he said. "Carol West, meet Jeff Burnside."
She gave me about half a glance; her mind was somewhere else. "Pleased to meet you."
Gordon said, "What are you doing out here? Waiting for some lucky inhabitant of yonder dorm?"
"Nothing of the kind," she said, reddening. "I'm just killing time till four o'clock. I want to take a reserve book out of the college library, and regulations are regula-"
"Oh, just wiggle your fanny in front of one of the student librarians," Gordon said scornfully. "You'll discover how fast those regulations can get broken. Anyway, it's almost a quarter of four. They don't stick that hard to the rules."
She looked doubtful. She also looked anxious to get rid of Chuck, a fact which made me privately rejoice a little.
He went on, "Come along, huh? I know one of the librarians. Jack Eigenfeld's on duty now. He'll let you have your book-"
"No. No, really, Chuck. I can wait. Please?"
He must have caught something of a hint in her voice, because he gave up. He sighed and said, "Try to do a Chesley girl a favor, and-oh, well. See you around, kid."
We left hurriedly, turning up the walk and heading for the book store. When we were out of earshot Gordon said, "There's a lesson for you, Burnside. The real true-blue Chesley girl will never break a university rule, whether it's Thou Shalt Not Take Out A Reserve Book Ten Minutes Early or Thou Shalt Not Commit Fornication."
I clamped my lips tight shut. I wanted to tell Chuck that the real reason Carol West hadn't gone with him was that she was waiting for someone. Even I could see that. Otherwise she'd have been inside the library, not sitting around near the dorms.
And I knew what was on his mind. It annoyed me. Sure, I wanted to get made worse than anything in the world. But I wasn't out to make a nice girl, like Carol. Just any old dog would have done.
Chuck said, "Carol's a nice kid, but she's regulations-happy."
"Aren't they all?" Right now it seemed to me that every girl in the world was sternly defending her chastity against all comers, or at least against me.
"Thank the Lord, no! But she is. Sweet, though. It's going to be a challenge to make her."
Just a goddam challenge, I thought. A challenge. I choked back the part of me that puritanically wanted to flatten Gordon's thin-bridged nose, and gave dominance to the part of me that envied him.
"Do you think you can? Make her, I mean?" I said, awed.
We reached the entrance to the book store. "Maybe," he said dreamily. "Maybe not. Some of them are absolutely unmakable-but not all. This one's a soph. She's dating some kid in your class; I don't know who. But she's my first big project this fall."
I looked at him. And I knew one reason why I hadn't had any luck with girls. I had the wrong attitudes. I was a little shocked, deep down inside, by the idea of taking a girl to bed. I told myself that I was going to have to cultivate a cynical attitude like Chuck's. Otherwise I might stay a neurotic male virgin all my life.
Right then and there on the steps of the book store I made up my mind. To hell with puritanism. If Chuck wanted to seduce Carol West, good for him. And no more piety for me, either. All I wanted was a good make.
CHAPTER TWO
We went into the book store. It was crowded, since it was the beginning of a term. I fumbled out my list of required texts, while Gordon busied himself among the new paperbacks. He never bought texts, he told me smugly-he took them out of the college library, and if they weren't available in the library when he wanted them, he just forgot about them.
Eighteen minutes later I had parted with seventeen dollars sixty-two, and was the proud owner of a thick stack of tomes dealing with psychology, zoology, and contemporary civilization. The first two items looked dull, but then all my pre-med textbooks did. My parents were figuring I was going to be one hell of a doctor some day, maybe up there in Hudson where I could tend to the locals for the next eighty years. All the time I was home in the summer they never caught on to the fact that four years in New York would louse me up forever so far as living in Hudson was concerned, and besides that I didn't want to be a doctor anyway, I wanted to write plays for TV or somewhere.
"You got all the books you need?" Gordon asked.
I nodded. I was just about out of cash now, until the next check came through from my folks. It was like dangling by the neck from an umbilical cord, but what else could I do?
"Let's go get those beers," I said.
Gordon led the way and, clutching my textbooks, I followed him through the mob and out onto Broadway. We walked down to 214th Street, crossed over, and entered the dank musty darkness of the West Side Bar, student rendezvous and purveyor of what to me is some of the dreariest-tasting tap beer this side of the Mississippi.
It was early; the place never filled up until seven or eight. Right now there were a couple of decrepit drunks at the bar and a few thirsty students at the tables.
"My treat," Gordon said airily. He dumped a quarter and a nickel on the bar, took the two beers, and led the way to a booth in back near the pinball machine.
I deliberately set the tone for the session. "Here's to Carol West," I toasted. "May the project meet with speedy success."
"I'll drink to that!" Gordon exclaimed. He did, and when he put the glass down, it was almost empty. I took a gulp out of mine. The stuff was acrid and tongue-curling. I think the deans pay the barkeeps to serve a special mixture to under-grads, figuring to cure them forever of beer-drinking that way.
We gabbed for a few minutes about our courses and how tough they were. I wanted to get down to more basic matters, but somehow Chuck was in an abnormally academic mood. He chuntered on and on about some crock of a contemporary drama course he was taking, and how he was going to have to read reams and reams of Ibsen and Strindberg and Clickhov and those guys.
"What gripes me is that there's no way of faking it," he moaned. "Damned prof gives a weekly quiz on characters and quotations. You can't bluff that. I almost feel like dropping the thing."
"Why don't you?"
"I need the points. Besides, this Carol West girl is a drama major at Chesley. I need to be an expert on the subject. See?"
I saw. Gordon's technique, taken purely as technique, was something definitely worth making note of.
He tapped my clipboard, which lay on top of my books. Indicating my ill-fated Knave essay, he said, "What's this thing? You writing term papers so soon?"
I felt my damned peach-fuzzy cheeks reddening. Good thing it was so dingy in there. "That's just a thing I dashed off for Knave-sort of an essay, like."
"Mind if I read it?"
"Yes. Don Hammer thumbed it down." I realized I was trembling. I took a slug of the poison this bar claimed was beer and bravely said, "It's about sex. Hammer rejected it because he thought it showed I lacked experience."
Gordon was quiet for maybe half a minute, eying me with a sort of squint. Then he grinned and said, "Okay. I won't read it, then. Damned if I'll be a partner to your humiliation by having to agree with him."
I could have kissed him for that. Instead I snagged a passing waiter in a dirty white jacket and ordered a couple more beers. This time I made sure to order bottles. They come sealed up, so there's no chance they'll taste as rotten as the tap beer.
The waiter brought two Schlitzes. I gave him a buck and got two dimes back, which struck me as exorbitant. But I didn't say anything. I quaffed beer until I felt calm and loose, and said, "I think I got a problem."
"We all do. What's yours?"
I drummed nervously on the table. With even this minute quantity of beer in me, I felt ready to let my hair down and bare all to Chuck Gordon. He was only a year older than me, but his cynicism made him seem terribly ancient. At that moment he was-well, Freud might have said a sort of father-surrogate.
A defective neon light buzzed droningly. I said, "I'm looking for a girl."
"There's a whole schoolful of them behind that green fence on Broadway," he said, meaning Chesley. "And four million more roaming around loose in New York."
"I'm looking for a special girl."
"Special how?"
"One who'll sleep with me. That's how special."
Now it was his turn to drum on the table. He looked troubled. I wondered if I'd said too much, maybe. The current collegiate ethos requires, I had found out, the stiff-upper-lip technique of aloofness. John Donne to the contrary, each of us tries to be an island.
"Let me get this straight. You want a girl who'll go down. Is that it? Hell, how horny can you get?" Suddenly his eyes widened. "Burnside, don't tell me that you're a-that you haven't-that you're cherry!"
I nodded miserably. "Uh-huh. Precisely."
"Keerist! A hulk like you, six feet tall, nearly twenty years of age, and you haven't exercised your manhood as much as once! Keeris!"
I wished he would keep his voice down. I began to wish I hadn't come in here in the first place. This confession of my own ineptness shattered what little was left of my poise and inner calm, and I reached desperately for the Schlitz bottle, knocking it over and dumping a torrent of brew on the floor.
I grabbed up the bottle before all its contents had run out. Gordon's dry raspy laughter hit my ears. The waiter came over to mop up. Gordon said to him, "Johnny, you got a spare gal for my friend here?"
I kicked Gordon hard under the table. But the waiter showed very white teeth and said, "I got a couple, but ain't none to spare. Let him go find his own!"
He moved off, chuckling. "Why the hell'd you have to say that?" I asked. "This thing is serious. If I knew you'd make fun I'd-"
"Okay," Gordon said. "So tell me a few things. You got a car?"
"Nope."
"And you're not a fraternity man, either."
"Uh-uh."
He scowled meaningfully at me. Chuck Gordon was good at scowling, with those thin lips and the cynical glint in his eye. "No car, no frat affiliation. Hell, Burnside, you can't go to bed with a girl in the middle of the street. Not even in Macy's window. Did you ever think of that? You need a place-you can't bring women into the dorms."
"Maybe they'll change that. The poll they took-"
"Is so much damned wishful thinking. No, Burnside. You'll have to move out of the dorms if you want sex. Get yourself a room in one of the residence hotels around 214th Street. A man who lives off-campus has a certain bohemian glamor about him. And it's a place to use, Burnside."
"Maybe you're right. But my parents-"
"They don't need to know! Hell, a hotel room will set you back ten dollars a week, and you can save money by cooking for yourself instead of eating out. How much you paying in the dorms?"
"Two ninety-five for the year."
"Hmm. Knock out June, July, August, half each of May and September-figure thirty-six weeks to the academic year. That's three sixty hotel rent. Only sixty-five more than you spend now. You can make up the difference by cooking. Take my advice-get out of the dorms now."
I thought it over. To my innocent mind there was something evil about living in an off-campus hotel. But Gordon had a good point. "Maybe I'll do that," I said. "Yeah. I'll move out."
He smiled. Then, after a pause, he said, "Tell you what else. You free tonight?"
"Why-yeah." , "Good. Meet me around nine and well go down Broadway and pick up a couple of chippies."
I gulped. "You mean-prostitutes?"
"I sure as hell do. Floozies. Tarts. Hookers. Call 'em whatever you want to."
"Will you know where to find them?"
"Have faith, my son. Are you game?" I thought it over. And my legs started to shake. It was all so simple, the way he put it. Just walk down Broadway and pick up some whores. And no complications. I could get rid of my bothersome virginity for a mere five bucks.
I took a long gulp of beer and said with a courage I did not feel, "Okay. I'm game." "See you at nine, then-in the Quad." He stood up. "I gotta get back to the Daily office now. They'll be making up the issue soon and I want to be around."
We emerged from the stale beer atmosphere of the West Side Bar into the equally stale air of Broadway. We stood outside the bar for a couple of minutes while Gordon thought out loud about Daily. He was planning the campaign that would bring him the post of Managing Editor when the newspaper held its elections next April. He was coldblooded-calculatingly ambitious. Not at all like me.
"That paper really means a lot to you," I remarked.
He looked at me. Deep. Quietly he said, "That's another thing for you to learn yet. There's got to be something you can hang onto. For me it's the Metropolitan University Daily. The rest of college is so much jazz-but Daily's real to me. See it, Burnside?"
Slowly, I saw. It was the first time I had ever heard Gordon sound sincere. Something had crept out from behind the slick mask. He was so damned sincere I didn't know what to say.
He broke up the silence suddenly. "Quarter to five. I'd better be in the office. See you at nine. And don't chicken out, hear?"
Then he was gone, scooting across Broadway and narrowly avoiding getting run over by a bilious little green Renault that was steaming northward. He vanished into the gate near Adams Hall. I stood by myself for a minute or two, envying him. I thought that Chuck Gordon held all the aces. He knew all the rules of the game. I fumbled around by guesswork-He fitted in, one of the lucky few. I envied his easy grace and his natural line of patter and his ambition, and most of all I envied his cheerful amorality. My small-town upbringing kept getting in the way. Hell, I wanted to be like Chuck Gordon just then!
I stood out there in the fading sunlight of that September day while dust-motes danced around me. For some reason my home town drifted before my eyes. I got a vivid glimpse of Hudson's main street on an August afternoon, with dirty-faced kids lollygagging around waiting for the movies to open, and openshirted farmers sipping cokes in a drugstore. And while I stood there dreaming nostalgically, along walked a riving ghost of that very place. Fred Lambert, Metropolitan '65. My townsman.
Fred sported a bristly brand-new crewcut, a charcoal gray suit, an inch-wide necktie sprouting from his button-down white shirt, and the gloomiest look I'd seen on anyone since the last time I looked in the mirror. Lambert and I had suffered through high school together in Hudson, and we had come to Metropolitan together. But we saw very little of each other except on chance meetings like this one.
"You look as bleak as I feel," I told him. "You just flunk out or something?"
"Too early in the term for that. But I got troubles."
When Fred Lambert talks of troubles, that means only one thing. "Don't tell me you're in love again?"
"Deeply. Miserably. Woefully." He has a way of being flip even when he's suffering, a trick I've only partially learned. He said, "I'm on my way to the library. Walk over with me and I'll tell you all about it."
This is always happening to me. I find myself standing around doing nothing, and people come along and ask me to walk them here or there so they can tell me their troubles.
There was a frozen little silence. Sudden nastiness made me say, as we moved at a brisk clip up Broadway, "I can remember your first love. Tessie. I remember how astonished you were when she tried to seduce you back or McMan-nery's barn."
"Don't stir up the past, Jeff. Anyway, it was back of Hannebrink's silo."
"And you ran away."
"I was young and tender in those days. But let me tell you about this girl."
I guess I was nasty because I was so tense about the chippie-session Gordon had talked me into. "Sure," I said. "She's six feet three and plays hockey on the Chesley varsity. You're depressed because you want her to quit the team before she has her teeth knocked out, and she refuses, placing hockey paramount before your love-"
"Shut up," Fred said coldly. We turned down 214th toward the library. "Let me talk."
"Okay," I said guiltily.
"This girl's a Chesley girl. Intelligent, lively, good-looking. And stacked." "Frosh?"
"No, she's in our year. A clean, unspoiled girl. No hardened old sinner." Fred sighed. "I think she loves me."
"So what's your problem?"
"I understand some junior is after her. A real slick operator. Jeff, I'd hate to have some fast-talking guy get hold of this girl and-"
I sucked my breath sharply inward. Afternoon shadows were descending and I felt doom closing. "Fred, what's your girl's name?"
"Carol. Carol West. She's a drama major."
"Oh," I said numbly. Why did things always happen this way?"
"You know her?" he asked.
"No. No. I guess I was thinking of someone else." I closed my eyes for a second, only a second, and thought of poor naive romantic Fred contending with slick Chuck Gordon for the favors of Carol West, and I felt heavy with pity. Fred was heading for trouble, and I was getting myself entwined in a complex situation that was bound to end in pain for someone. I felt so sorry for Fred that I almost stopped feeling sorry for myself for a minute.
"You know, you're awful damn quiet all of a sudden," Fred said as we turned past the tennis courts. A couple of shorts-clad Filipinos from one of the graduate schools were socking the ball back and forth with enormous speed and gusto.
"Just thinking," I said. "Brooding over the tragedy of human existence."
"You never used to be like that in Hudson," he said.
"See what a Metropolitan education does for a man? I'm turning into a philosopher in my old age." I decided to give it to him straight. "Fred, Chuck Gordon of Daily introduced me to your darling about quarter to four this afternoon. She was sitting over in the Quad waiting to grab a reserve book."
I started to enter the library, but Fred whirled, caught the sleeve of my jacket, and dragged me down next to him on one of the benches near the entrance. The stone bench was cold. I wished I had been merciful and kept my mouth shut.
"Gordon introduced you to her?"
"Yeah. He was trying to make time with her, but she wasn't having any. When we walked away he was denouncing her for her purity."
I didn't know people could go pale that peculiar gray-faced way. Fred did. He bowed his head in a defeated slump and said in a dead voice, "Chuck Gordon's just the guy I was worrying about. They say he's slept with every girl on the seventh floor of Morton Hall."
Morton is one of the Chesley dormitories. I said, "He didn't seem really serious about Carol. Too much of a challenge for him-I think that's what he said. Yeah. Something like that."
Fred looked squarely at me. "That's a rotten stinking lie, Jeff Burnside. But thanks. Thanks for it anyway." He shook his head woefully. "Now I feel devastated. Now I feel utterly shattered. I knew there was some lousy junior interested in her, but why did it have to be him?"
I socked Fred lightly in the arm, anything to get him out of his shyness and killing sense of inferiority. Tactic 106a, Stout-Fellah-and-All-That. "The hell with Chuck Gordon," I said. "He's got a fast line of patter, but a girl like Carol will see right through him in a flash. She's perceptive. She's intelligent. Hell, I might almost work up an interest in her myself, if-"
Poor Fred nearly turned green. "Jeff! You-"
"-if it weren't for the fact that my dear townsman Fred Lambert had staked out prior claim," I finished neatly, avoiding another catastrophe. "Come on. I'm freezing out here. You want to go into the library or not? ' "Okay."
We moved down the long shiny corridor to the College Study, where dozens of my fellow scholars sat cudgeling their brains even though it was five-thirty now and approaching mealtime. This was the early-season academic push; it would fizzle out soon enough.
By now just a hard core remained in the library. The commuters, the day students, had long since embarked on their subway journeys home. The men in the library almost exclusively bore the trademarks of the resident student; the khaki pants and dirty white buckskin shoes, the blue wool sweaters and button-down white shirts. Commuters tend to dress drably in suits and ties and such. They live drably, too. Not at all like a college man ought to live.
Fred got a couple of thick books from the shelves and we slid behind one of the tables. He opened a volume of Aristotle, but I could see that his mind was very far from the Nicomachean Ethics at that very moment. He was stewing about Carol and the chances of Gordon cutting him out. I couldn't blame him for worrying.
I made a stab at reading my contemporary civilization book, since I had thirty pages to cover before tomorrow's 10 A.M. class. But I wasn't in a studying mood either. I kept looking forward to the experience that was ahead of me tonight. I wondered what it would be like. I wondered if I would goof things up.
I hoped not. A strange exultation filled me. If everything went okay, tonight I was going to become a man.
CHAPTER THREE
Unable to concentrate, I glanced around the library, looking for familiar faces. Don Hammer was sitting to my left and a few tables back, boredly leafing through somebody's term paper. He must have been taking one of those stiff senior seminars on the poetry of Yeats, or Non-Shakespearean Elizabethan Drama, where you spend the whole term reading everyone else's term papers and ripping them apart. It was too soon in the year for that; he was probably reading an old one the library had on hand, just to get in shape.
Well, I wasn't much interested in talking to Don Hammer. Not after this afternoon. I didn't even want him to see me and smile his knowing superior smile at me in that patronizing way of his.
I spotted Lily Norman huddled over a big book four tables ahead of me. She was a small mousy Classics major who took most of her courses at Metropolitan because Chesley just didn't have a faculty capable of keeping up with her. She studied things like Advanced Greek Poetry and Roman Drama last year, and I shuddered to think of what she might be studying now. I had dated her, once, in my freshman year. Just once.
Fred saw me looking her way and nudged me. "Isn't that the creep you took to the Cornell game last year?"
I nodded. It had been a cataclysm. She spent the whole afternoon analyzing the philosophical implications of football in terms of Greek Tragedy, particularly Aeschylus. I was off on an anti-intellectualism kick that month, and besides Cornell whomped us fifty-four-nothing that day too. Then on the way downtown, in the back seat of a friend's car, I had made a grab for her miniscule bosom and got myself loudly slapped.
A little further along I spotted a girl named Marge Halloran. My eyes widened a bit. Marge Halloran was long and angular and untidy, with a sloppy-looking pony-tail dangling down her back and a truly astonishing pair of breasts out front, where you wouldn't expect to find them on such a tall and otherwise skinny girl. I let those breasts linger in my field of vision awhile. They thrust upward and out, magnificent twin mounds of flesh that threatened to split the seams of her shabby-looking maroon sweater. I pictured myself curling up between those big breasts for a good night s sleep, and I started to tingle all over. They were quite some breasts. And they were real.
I didn't have any personal verification of that fact, naturally, but I did have the word of a good authority-Chuck Gordon. "That girl's the biggest pushover on campus," he had confided to me on our way to Geology one day in my freshman spring, when we had seen her striding past, breasts foremost. "All you have to do is get some alcohol into her. Any way at all-spray her with it, inject it subcutaneously, even get her to drink some. And boy, will she do tricks then!"
I remembered that I had made some bitter remark then-muffled, half-swallowed before it escaped-on the morals of college men. That had been in my early, puritanical stage. But now, the ghost of an idea flickered into my mind as I saw Marge Halloran. Tonight, if all went well, I would become a Man of Experience. But there was no sense continuing to pay for what I could get free, if I played it smart. I lifted my gaze from her mammaries to her face. She was a big sad-eyed girl who carried around devil knew what load of sorrow inside her. She took the easy ways of releasing it-drink and sex. But right now I couldn't be too concerned with her private woes; I saw her as part of the cure to mine.
She sat by herself, surrounded by a little invisible aura, a halo of immorality so to speak.
I began to make plans.
Looking down at the book I was allegedly reading, I blinked two or three times. Words, words, words. But the words didn't make any sense; they were just black worms marching across the page. I slammed the book shut.
"You all through?" Fred said.
"I need some fresh air. I have some very serious thinking to do."
"Mind if I come with you?"
"As you please," I said lightly.
He led the way out; I paused near the door to demonstrate to a hawk-nosed checker that the books I had were my own and not library property. We stopped by the water-fountain just outside. I took a drink. Warm, rank stuff.
Then I said, "I'm leaving the dorms tomorrow."
"Huh?"
"I'm going to cancel my room soon as the dorm window opens up shop in the morning. I'm going to move off campus."
It was said, now; an inner transition had been made public. Fred was gaping at me with the same sort of awed bewilderment I reserved for such types as Chuck Gordon.
"What the hell for, Jeff?"
"Use your theoretical brain. You can't bring women into the dorms, can you?"
Fred reddened. The town of Hudson had impressed puritanism even deeper on him than on me. The small-town upbringing can be stifling.
He said, "You got a woman? I mean-"
"Not exactly yet. But I will. Don't you worry about that, Fred. I will."
I put what I hoped was a smug and knowing expression on my face. I was going all-out to impress Fred, giving it full voltage, and I knew why-he represented a sort of old self of mine, the bumbling, innocent self I wanted so badly to discard.
He looked at me strangely, with hatred, disgust, and a curious sort of admiration all mixed. I wondered if I had ever looked at Chuck Gordon this way.
"I knew this would happen to you, Jeff. You've become just like all the rest. Only interested in sex.
"Pardon me. Sex and beer."
He ignored that. "Okay, do whatever you want. But how come the sudden switch?"
"Had a long talk with Chuck Gordon earlier today. He suggested it."
Fred flinched. I knew I had delivered a mortal thrust. A long friendship was coming to an end right here and now, I could tell.
"Oh," he said in a flat toneless voice. His lips drooped. "So you and Gordon are pals now. Well-well-"
"Can it, Fred. Don't take things so tragically. It's not your girl I'm after."
"Thanks." Sarcastically. "Who, then?"
I took a deep breath and gambled on what I hoped wasn't a very long shot.
"Marge Halloran," I said.
Fred eyed me stonily. "She was sitting in the library. You and she didn't seem particularly enraptured of each other then. You didn't even say hello to her."
"Ah," I said. "Things have just begun. She doesn't know the fate that's in store for her, yet. But let's go back within. You can watch from the sidelines while I negotiate for our first rendezvous."
Fred's goggly glare unnerved me. He was shaking his head. I got the feeling he was pitying me. "You sound like Chuck Gordon," he said. The way he said it, it was half a grudging compliment, half a deadly insult. "If you're trying to shock me, Jeff, you've succeeded. But what the hell's your point? Don't you have any decency left?"
"Not very much." I hoped my pretense of decadence was convincing him. "Come watch."
Fred looked disgusted. We went back inside. As I passed the desk, Jack Eigenfeld, the junior who stamps out the books from three to six every day, grinned and said, "Forget something?"
"Yeah," I said, and kept going. Watch this, Don Hammer, I thought. My heart was racing.
Marge was still sitting in the corner, nibbling an unpainted fingernail, her long legs stuck out under the table, her tan trenchcoat open and dangling off her shoulders. That superb bazoom loomed invitingly before me. At close range I could plainly see the little protruding bulges of her nipples, looking like buttons underneath the fabric of the sweater. I quite casually slid into the seat across the table from her. She didn't look up.
I strained an eye peering over to see what she was reading. It was James Joyce-Portrait of the Artist as A Young Man. Her face was devoid of expression.
I said, "That's a marvelous book, isn't it?"
She looked up. "I like Ulysses better."
"So do I. But I can't stand Finnegans Wake."
On such flimsy grounds did we erect our relationship. I said, continuing, "Is that a Chesley course you're reading it for?'
"Yes. Psychological Undertones of the Modern Novel."
"I've heard of that," I lied. "I hear it's quite a thing. You know, I'm glad I happened to sit down here. I've been meaning to listen in on that course and hear the Joyce lectures, but I didn't have the Chesley catalog and couldn't find out when it meets."
"Tuesdays, Thursdays. Eleven o'clock in three-o-five Bryce."
I smiled. "Thanks. I guess I'll come on Tuesday."
Suddenly I became conscious of one of the library monitors, a big blandfaced graduate student, hovering reproachfully above us. He said, "If you want to hold a conversation you'll have to leave the study room."
"But I just want to find out-"
"Sorry. You can't keep on talking in here." I looked at Marge Halloran, shrugging as if to say, you can't beat the forces of law and order. "Well," I said, "would you care to come downstairs to the Den for the rest of our conversation? It's almost dinner time."
Immediately I wished I hadn't said that. I had only ninety-seven cents in my pocket, plus the five dollars I was reserving for the evening's entertainment. But Marge got me off the hook by saying, "Sorry, but I have a season's meal-ticket to the Chesley cafeteria."
The monitor hadn't gone away. "No talking in here!" he said again, more sternly. "Look, buddy-"
"Guess he means it," I said to Marge. The time had come for the stroke toward which all this had been building. "Suppose I call you tonight at the Chesley dorms?"
"Right. I'm Jeff Burnside, by the way." She grinned at me; I grinned back and left the library, feeling strange and lightheaded. I thought I had handled the encounter pretty well. I wished Chuck Gordon had been watching.
Well, Fred had. He was waiting for me at the library door, an expression of stuffy morality combined with downright envy plastered over his face.
"Care to stake me to a meal?" I asked. "Pay you back next week. My allotment got used up on textbooks."
"Okay." He smiled, but the smile rapidly tailed off into a scowl. "You made out all right, I guess?"
"I'm calling her later to arrange a date."
"You bastard. You damn lucky bastard."
He waited for me in the Quad while I dumped my books in my room-the room I was abandoning tomorrow-and then we passed out through the arch onto Bryant Avenue. We ate in a little delicatessen a few blocks down. I wasn't very hungry. I kept looking at my watch and counting off the minutes till nine o'clock.
"You aren't talking much," Fred said. "I wish I could figure you out. You know what kind of reputation that Halloran girl has."
I nodded. "Exactly."
"And still-"
"Look, Fred, you go out with a nice girl like Carol. Walk around campus with her, hold her hand, carry her books, kiss her on the cheek when you get up the nerve. I'm looking for something else right now. Okay?"
"Suit yourself," he said.
We parted soon after dinner. I promised to pay him back the buck-fifty I owed him soon as the next check came in from my folks. I returned to my dorm room. It was quarter past seven. For the next hour I did my contemporary civilization reading, understanding ten percent of it, more or less. And then I wandered down to the recreation room and hung around the ping-pong table waiting to get a game. It was five minutes to nine before I reached the table. I played and lost an eleven-point game and went outside into the Quad. It was exactly nine.
Chuck Gordon was standing by the statue, his arms folded. He grinned when he saw me.
"Right on time, Romeo."
"You bet. Let's go," I said.
We left the campus by a 214th Street gate and walked rapidly toward Broadway, and then down Broadway. Below 210th Street the college area ends abruptly.
I felt jittery. "Where are we going?"
"Corner of 203rd and Broadway usually does it," Chuck said.
"You talk like you've done this often."
"Oh, four or five times. Generally when I have cousins from home visiting me. I'm not in the habit of paying for the stuff just for me."
"What's it likely to cost?" I asked. "I only have five bucks on me."
"Five will see you through," Gordon said. He shook his head. "I still can't believe it. A great big monster like you-"
"Well, it happens to be that way," I said grumpily. "At least I'm doing something about it."
"Long overdue, though."
"How old were you when you had your first, then, Gordon? Eight?"
"Twelve and a half."
"Twelve and a ha-that's impossible!" I snorted.
"I was precocious." He smiled dreamily. "The girl was fifteen. She thought I was, too. It happened in a washroom at school. Then somebody told her what grade I was in, and after that she wouldn't even speak to me again. She was a fat pig, anyway."
We reached 208th Street. Five more blocks, I thought. I cleared my throat. "About tonight-what am I supposed to do, really?" I went red all over. "About the arrangements, I mean."
"Leave it all up to me. You've had the health education course, haven't you?"
"Sure." It was mandatory for all freshmen.
"Then you know the mechanics of the thing. I'll pick out a nice sensitive-looking understanding kind of girl. If you have difficulties, she'll help you out."
"And-what's the procedure?"
"You go in, you put your money down, and you open your pants. Don't bother getting all undressed-she'll be in a hurry to get back on the street."
"Will she get undressed all the way?"
"If you want her to. Do you?"
"I-I think so. I want to see."
"Okay, then. She'll get undressed. You don't. You transact your business with her. Don't think you're doing her any favors by taking your time, either. She's not interested in making a grand affair out of a five-buck make. So get it over with, wash up in the basin, and leave. I'll go in ahead of you, just so I can make sure you'll get the right treatment."
I smiled nervously. Gordon was going out of his way to make sure I got the right sort of initiation. But I couldn't put my appreciation into words.
"And-is there any chance of my catching something?" I said worriedly.
"Not if you take precautions," he said. "You mean-but I don't have any-"
He shook his head deploringly. "I figured as much. Here, have one of mine." He held out a little cardboard box with a flip-top, like a cigarette pack. Inside were rolled up rubber goods. I took one gingerly, as if it was a mousetrap, and pocketed it.
We were at 205th Street and Broadway now. The night was dark and moonless, but Broadway was lit up bright enough to read by. The streets were crowded.
"Most of the time. The cops make a crackdown once a month. The rest of the time you can usually find a girl here. Mainly Puerto Rican. You don't mind that, do you, Burnside?"
"No-no, no, of course not." I was trying to keep my teeth from chattering.
Gordon said quietly, "There's one right now. But I doubt that we're interested."
I looked. She was a woman of about forty, standing in a doorway lighting a cigarette. Maybe she was only thirty, but used up ahead of her time. She wore an old gray sweater that failed to conceal the baggy droop of her breasts. I felt sick. We walked on.
At the next corner Chuck nudged me and said, "Okay. There's what we want."
I looked again. This time it was a pretty Spanish-looking girl, seeming hardly more than seventeen or eighteen. She too was wearing a sweater, and it emphasized the sharp projecting points of her breasts. Her dark hair hung down to her shoulders. She looked exciting, exotic, and much too pretty to be a prostitute.
"How do you know she is one?" I asked.
"It's ten to one," Chuck said. "If I'm wrong, I get my face slapped and try again. Wait here."
I waited. Gordon walked casually up to her and offered her a cigarette. She smiled, showing brilliant white teeth, and accepted. Behind his back, Chuck made a sign with his circled forefinger and thumb-success. I heard them talking quietly in Spanish. Chuck was speaking just as fast as she was. I couldn't understand a word of what was being said, but after a few minutes of quick talk Chuck pointed at me, standing sheepishly some distance away. The girl smiled at me. Chuck waved me over.
"Chiquita, Jeff. Jeff, Chiquita. Chiquita doesn't speak any English, except the words, 'five dollars."
Chiquita giggled. "Five dollar," she said.
Chuck nodded. "You see?"
Chiquita said something in Spanish and we started to follow her. Her rear wiggled saucily as she walked. I was bowled over. She seemed to be clean and she was certainly attractive. I had always thought that five-buck tarts were dirty and ugly. But Chuck had a master's touch, it seemed.
We crossed the street and went a short way down 203rd, stopping in front of a dilapidated tenement. Kids of five and six were playing noisily out front, even though it was certainly past their bedtime. They grinned wisely at us as we followed Chiquita in, and called things out in Spanish.
We entered. The lobby was dark and smelled of uncollected garbage. We walked three flights upward, Chiquita still leading the way and twitching her behind at us as though it were bait. On the third floor she produced a key and let us into a two-room apartment.
It was dingy as all hell, with a lot of Salvation Army tenth-hand furniture. A baby about a year old was sleeping in a battered cradle in the outer room. Further in was the bedroom. I had never seen such a shabby place in my life.
But I understood now why Chiquita took this particular way of supporting herself. Obviously unmarried and with a child to feed-maybe some of the kids downstairs belonged to her too-she needed income. And she could probably make a hundred bucks a week this way, which was about twice what she would be getting in any legitimate job.
Gordon said, "You sit down here and wait. And stay calm, Burnside. Calm and loose. I'll be right out. Just take it easy till it's your turn."
CHAPTER FOUR
I sat down in a creaky old armchair with the stuffing leaking out. I felt like a patient in a goddam dentist's office, waiting for his turn. Chuck went into the bedroom and shut the door. Damn discreet of him to shut the door.
I crossed my legs and fidgeted and stared at the baby, who woke up and stared malevolently back at me. The brat didn't start crying, which was one good thing. If he had, I would probably have busted out bawling myself, I was so keyed up.
Maybe five minutes went by, crawling, and then the bedroom door opened. I could hear water running in a sink inside.
Chuck came out. He was smiling, a pleasant tranquil smile. "Okay, Burnside. Your turn."
"Was it-okay?"
"I don't think you'll have any complaints."
I got up, nearly fell flat on my face from sheer funk, and walked around him. I kept telling myself, Pull yourself together, Burnside. This is the night you become a man. At long last.
I walked into the bedroom. Chiquita was lying on the unmade bed, her arms behind her back. She was naked all over. I took a good long slow look. It was the first time I had ever seen a naked woman close up, in the flesh, and I was curious.
She was on the slim side, and built small, fine-boned. I doubt that she was much more than five feet tall. Her breasts were small but perfect, high and round and jutting forward, and the little dark tips stood up stiffly. I was a little surprised-I don't know why I should have been-to see an appendectomy scar on her side.
I must have been standing there an awfully long time, staring at those breasts and bare hips and slim thighs, because finally she grinned at me and said, with a touch of impatience, "Five dollar?"
"Oh-yeah. Sure."
I snapped out of my daze and took the crumpled-up bill from my pocket, putting it on the dresser next to another fiver which must have been Chuck's. Then I advanced on wobbly legs toward the bed. Feeling about as self-conscious as I ever want to feel, I dropped my trousers and lay down.
For an instant nothing happened. A shaft of fear and panic ran through me and, horror-stricken, I thought it was going to be a total fiasco. But I guess it was just nerves. I felt Chiquita's fingers touching me, expertly, professionally, and then everything was all right. She drew me to her. She whispered in heavily accented English, "Don't be afraid." I wondered if Chuck had coached her to say something like that.
It was over almost before I knew what was happening. I felt her stiff-tipped breasts poking into my chest, felt her warm thighs gripping my body. Then our bodies moved rhythmically for a few moments, and I felt a quick delicious shuddering in my vitals, and that was it. I closed my eyes. I wanted to go to sleep pillowed on those warm breasts. I felt cheated because it was over so quickly.
Chiquita grasped my shoulder. "Ees all," she said.
I realized that if I stuck around any longer I'd be preventing her from earning her living. I got up, unsteadily; my legs were shaking. She pointed to an adjoining bathroom. I nodded, went in, and washed up. Coming out, buttoning up my trousers, I saw that Chiquita was already getting dressed. She still looked pretty and petite, but now I saw something new I hadn't noticed before-her face was hard, sullen, commercial. She was nothing but a whore, and a cheap one at that-though not half so cheap as she should have been, in these days of inflation. She was into her bra already.
I walked toward the bedroom door, wondering if I was supposed to say good-by. I decided not to say anything. I turned around and smiled, but Chiquita was too busy getting dressed to smile back. She was in a hurry to get out to her street corner again and solicit the next patron.
Chuck didn't say a word to me until we were out on the street. Then he said, "Well? You didn't have any complications, did you?" No.
"And was it all it's cracked up to be?"
I hesitated a moment. "No," I finally said.
"It never is, the first time. Especially when it happens that way. But it get's better. It's better when it's free, and better when it's a girl you know. And better when you can take your time."
"I suppose," I said. I felt very tired, and tremendously let down. But at least now I was a man. I wondered if it showed on my face-if the people walking past us as we headed northbound back to Metropolitan could read at a glance that I had just been made for the first time.
"It gets so you can't do without it," Chuck was going on. "Me, I start to go crazy a little bit if I don't every other night. My body's all toned up, you see. It's just as important as eating or breathing, to me."
"And you do every other night?"
"Of course."
I blinked at the idea of getting made three or four nights a week, every week. It was a kind of sexual activity that seemed utterly impossible to attain.
"How do you do it?" I asked naively. "I mean-you must spend half your time finding girls--"
"It's an art and a science both, Burnside," he said. "But you'd be surprised how much is sitting around waiting to be had. You'd be amazed at some of the things that go on all around you."
"Such as?"
He shook his head. "Better not ask. When the time comes, I'll tell you. If you're interested, that is. But it's all hush-hush."
"You're mystifying me," I said.
"I mean to. Burnside, I take an almost paternal interest in you. I hope you appreciate that. Do you?"
"Sure, Chuck. But-"
"And I have great delights planned out for you. Only don't rush things, hear me? I've got to talk to certain people, make certain arrangements. Meantime you do the same."
"I wish I knew what the hell you were talking about," I said irritatedly.
"Bide your time, bide your time. Meanwhile just find yourself a nice co-operative Chesley girl who puts out. Like Marge Halloran. You know her?"
"Yes."
"Make a date with Marge. Call her up right now, maybe. Get to know her better."
I realized I had promised to call Marge anyway sometime tonight. It was curious that Gordon should have suggested her. We stopped in a candy store on 210th Street, and I phoned the Chesley dorms number, asked for seventh floor Morton Hall, then asked for Marge.
"Hold the wire, please," a Chesley broad with a phony Oxford accent told me.
I waited and Marge came to the phone. I reminded her who I was, but she hadn't forgotten, and we batted some talk around for a while before I got to the main point. What about Saturday night? It turned out she was busy Saturday night. What about Friday, then. She was free on Friday. I could call for her around eight, she said.
When I was through, I hung up and left the phone booth. Chuck was thumbing through some science-fiction magazines in the rack. I said, "I've got a date with her for Friday night."
"Good going. Now hustle and get yourself a room off-campus so you'll have a place to bring her."
I gawped. "You mean I'm supposed to make her on the first date?"
He smiled paternally. "Any man who doesn't score with Marge Halloran on the first try ought to throw in his towel. You get that girl in bed Friday night, and then try to date her for a week from Saturday. If you do, let me know and I'll arrange something."
"What are you cooking up?"
"Never mind that. Just leave it to me." . We fell silent and walked along until we came to the campus. It was about ten o'clock now, but there were still plenty of goofers in the dorm lobbies. I said goodnight to Chuck, thanked him for his help, and pushed the elevator button. A couple of freshmen were standing next to me-kids about seventeen or eighteen, with soft pink cheeks. They didn't look as if they had been shaving more than once a month yet. I sneered quietly at them. Obviously virgins. Inexperienced. I puffed my chest out, glorying in my new devirginized status, and felt tempted to tell them that I knew the name of a good five-buck girl I could personally recommend, if they were interested. But they didn't look like the type to be interested, and anyway I knew I was acting like a damned fool. I went upstairs to my room, studied without much enthusiasm for an hour, and fell into the deepest, most dreamless sleep I had had in years.
The alarm went off at eight. It was an electric clock, the kind that rings forever if you don't get up to shut it off, and it buzzed for ten minutes before I finally gave up and got out of bed. I felt bushed, but I threw cold water in my face and got dressed and got downstairs not too much later. My first class was at ten, but I had something to take care of before that.
I went over to the dorm office in the lobby of Davis Hall and announced that I was leaving to five off campus. They gave me a battle. There was no reason why they should have been sore, since there's a waiting list a mile long for single rooms of the type I was giving up, but I guess they felt they ought to hassle with me just for the sheer fun of it. After about fifteen minutes of conferring, they decided that it was all right if I moved out, and agreed to give me a refund on the rest of my year's board. If I'd been a freshman, I would have needed a note from home and the permission of the dean, but as a sophomore I could pull out on my own say-so. That gave me a fine adult feeling, let me tell you.
So it was arranged that I would quit the dorms no later than Sunday night, and earlier if it was possible for me to find accommodation before that.
I had a quick breakfast in the cafeteria, killed some time in the Quad with some classmates of mine-I wore a superior glow that was intended to tell them subtly that I was a Great Big Man now-and at ten minutes to ten I ambled over to Michaels Hall for my first class of the day, Contemporary Civilization.
C.C. had been a bore in my frosh year, and I didn't figure it would be any better in its second half. And it was all I could do to keep from falling asleep. The bell rang finally, and I got out, hop-skipping it five blocks up the campus to Stone Hall, at the extreme northern end of the university, for a Zoology session. My mind was not exactly focused on Zoology. I was more or less concentrating partly on the way that Chiquita had looked on top of the bed with nothing on, and partly on the way I conjectured Marge Halloran would look under the same circumstances.
Noontime at last. And two hours free until the Psych class at two-ten.
Chuck had recommended a couple of residence hotels that he said weren't too bad to live in. He himself lived in a fraternity house across the street from the Library on 214th Street, but he said he had been in these hotels often.
The first one he had mentioned was on 213th Street. I walked in and walked out right away. One look at that bug-crawling lobby told me I didn't want to live there.
I went up to 214th Street. The hotel he suggested there was at the end of the block. I walked in. There was a little cubicle of an office just to the left of the front door. A bald-headed man in his fifties or sixties looked up owlishly at me.
"You have any rooms?" I asked. "A few. You from the college?" I nodded.
"Interested in a single or a double?"
"Single," I said.
He took a key from a rack and said, "Come on. I'll show you the best we've got."
We rode upstairs in a slow-moving elevator to the fourth floor. We got out and he led me to a big metal door, which he unlocked. Within were a whole lot of smaller doors. He opened one of these.
"You see, we've got these outer doors for protection, and then there are seven or eight rooms in each section." I understood why. Once, years ago, this had been a fancy apartment house. The management had simply chopped each of the big apartments into a cluster of singles.
He opened the inner door. I saw a room, tolerably clean, containing a single bed, a lamp, a desk, and a small bookcase.
"No sink?" I said.
"You won't find sinks in these rooms. There are two washrooms in each section."
I frowned. At least I had had a sink in my room back in the dorms.
But the room seemed more spacious than the one I had left, cozy and private-looking. Life in the dorms was like living in a goldfish bowl. Always characters running up and down the halls playing touch football in the middle of the night, and you never knew who was going to come busting into your room to say hello or borrow a textbook or maybe to cadge a tube of shaving cream. And, of course, you couldn't bring a girl into your room.
"Let me show you the kitchen," he said. He led me down the hall to a largish room with a refrigerator, a sink, a table, cupboards. The linoleum on the floor was worn and faded. "This is a community kitchen. You'll have your own cupboard space and your own shelf in the refrigerator. Naturally, you won't be allowed to leave messes here-you got to co-operate."
"Naturally," I said. "What's the rent, by the way?"
"Eleven-fifty a week."
I frowned. That threw Chuck's figures some fifty-odd bucks off right at the start. "I was figuring on paying around ten," I said wistfully.
'Sorry. We don't bargain. Take it or leave it."
"Okay. I take."
He grinned, showing worn yellow teeth. "Sometimes when you college boys move in here you ask me if we have any rules about overnight guests in your room."
'Well-do you?"
He nodded solemnly. "It's against the law for two people to spend the night in a hotel room registered for only one. Therefore if you want to do any sleeping around, do it quietly so you don't bring the cops. We have some fussy old ladies living here."
He winked. I knew that he knew what my purpose in moving in here was. I reddened faintly.
"What's your name?" he said.
"Burnside, Jeff Burnside."
"Okay, Burnside. Do you want the room today?"
"How about tomorrow morning?"
"You start paying rent from one o'clock this afternoon," he said. "I don't care when you move m.
We went downstairs and I registered. I gave him eleven-fifty that I had drawn from the dorm office as an advance against the refund I would be getting.
I went back to the dorms, told them I'd be pulling out as soon as I could move, and went for lunch. I met Chuck Gordon in the restaurant.
"I have a room in that place on 214th Street," I told him.
"Good deal. Watch out for the manager, though-he's an old lecher. Likes to make passes at pretty girls who come to visit the tenants."
"He seems harmless enough," I said.
"When are you moving over?"
"I'll pack up this afternoon after Psych," I said.
"Need some help?"
"Wouldn't mind, Chuck." Suddenly I felt tremendously good about things. I was no longer a virgin, I had an apartment all my own where I could bring girls for the purposes of seduction, and in a couple of days I would have a date with a Chesley girl of reputedly easy virtue. I was certainly off to a lightning start in my sophomore year. Everything was going jim-dandy.
I could almost picture the lower classmen whispering behind my back, six months or a year from now. 'That's Jeff Burnside," they would say. "Biggest makeout man on campus. A different girl every night." I was certainly starting off the right way.
CHAPTER FIVE
By that afternoon, thanks to Chuck's help, I was moved completely out of the dorms and into the hotel. By nightfall I had seen all of my new neighbors. They were quite a motley crew. There were six other rooms in my little section, and they contained, in order, a Czechoslovakian graduate student of physics, a seventy-year-old seamstress, a Chinese man in his forties, a tall, angular, middle-aged lady librarian, an elderly female White Russian refugee, and a Greek nurse. Quite a conglomeration. The lady librarian, Miss Rooksby, was the only one interested enough to come snow me which shelves in the kitchen and in the refrigerator I was entitled to. She also filled me up with plenty of gossip about the other boarders-the Czech had a mistress who visited him, the seamstress was deaf and intolerant, the White Russian monopolized the apartment's one phone by holding interminably long and loud conversations in Russian with her aged mother, who lived somewhere else in another residence hotel.
Miss Rooksby seemed pleasant enough, if a little old-fashioned and snooty. She told me I looked like a nice quiet boy, not like "the other kind" at all. I didn't know exactly what she meant by "the other kind," but I could guess.
Thursday was my heavy day for classes, starting off with a lab from nine to twelve, then a lunch break, and then a full afternoon schedule too. So I spent Wednesday night in my new room, studying diligently. And on Thursday I was so pooped I came right back to the room after classes. Before I knew it it was Friday, and time for my date with Marge Halloran.
At about quarter to eight Friday night I locked up my room and sauntered over to the Chesley dormitories. I was wearing my best clean khaki pants, white shirt, blue sweater, dirty white buckskins. Nobody was going to accuse me of being a non-conformist. In the lobby of Morton Hall I phoned upstairs to let Marge know I was waiting, and a few minutes later she came down.
If I looked like a typical Metropolitan man, she looked even more typical in her Bermuda shorts, tan trench coat, and man's white blouse open at the collar. At a quick glance she looked fine, with long stretches of well-turned leg visible from mid-thigh to mid-calf, and those exciting breasts ballooning out her blouse. Her face wasn't much-long, and on the horsy side-but who had to look at her face when the rest of her was so easy on the eyes?
She was a little edgy, and so was I. Neither of us really knew the other, and neither knew what direction the evening was going to take.
She smiled at me. "Hello, Jeff. Well, where to?"
I shrugged and said, "I thought maybe the movies. There's a good double bill over at the Uptown-there's this Fernandel picture, and a Brigitte Bardot-"
"I've seen them."
"Oh," I said. There was also a dance being held at school, but we weren't dressed for it. I scrabbled around for another quick suggestion. "What about that old Russian film at the Thalia?"
"Alexander Nevsky? I've seen that too."
"Oh," I said again. "I guess the movies are out, then. Unless you want to take in a show downtown-"
"Why go to the movies? It's such a nice night just for staying around campus."
"In that case," I said, "why don't we start off by going over to the West Side for a couple of drinks? Then maybe we can take a walk down by the park, and-uh-talk about James Joyce-"
"The West Side would be fine for a starter," she said, her eyes glittering already at the thought of getting a drink.
We walked quickly down Broadway. I felt buoyant and bubbly. I'm a six-footer, and yet Marge was practically my height-that itself was a novelty. Another novelty was that I was quite confident I was going to take her to bed before the evening was out. Compared with the Jeff Burnside who had been in existence a week ago, I was a totally different person.
On the way down we talked rapidly-the hurried talk of two people who want to get to know each other at least in passing before they get down to the main business of the evening. We talked about James Joyce first, but got off that topic quickly enough. I learned that Marge came from somewhere out on Long Island, that her parents had money, that her mother was an incurable alcoholic and her younger sister was a freshman at Bryn Mawr. I told her the much less interesting news that I was from Hudson, New York, that my parents didn't have money, that my father was a vegetable jobber and ray mother deplorably sober, and that my one sibling was an older brother who lived in Ohio and had dozens of children.
By the time we reached the bar, we were holding hands. It just sort of happened naturally. It was a good sign for the ultimate success of the evening.
The West Side was packed full, this being a Friday night. Everyone was there-shabby neighborhood drunks who liked to watch the television, earnest graduate students who met here to discuss epistemology or nuclear physics, and even undergrads like myself with their girls or without. Somehow we found an empty table at the very back, where there was no view of the television set.
The waiter scurried over and said, "What'll it be?"
I looked inquiringly at Marge. She batted her eyelids and said, "Dry martini."
I gulped a little. A martini was at least seventy-five cents, maybe more. If she was in a thirsty mood she could wreck my budget, even though I had received a check from home that morning.
"Beer," I said. "Make it a Schlitz." I smiled apologetically at Marge and said, "I'm not much of a cocktail drinker. Give me beer any time."
"My mother taught me to drink martinis when I was nine," she said simply. "I love them."
The drinks arrived. I shrugged and told myself what the hell; if we had gone to the movies it would have cost more, and in any case I might be getting something out of the evening for a lot less than the five dollars I had paid out a few nights back.
Marge put half her martini away in a single gulp. Evidently her mother hadn't taught her how to sip. "Do you live in the dorms, Jeff?"
"Nope. I have' a little room on 214th Street."
"How interesting." I saw her eyes light up again. "Do you find it more convenient than the dormitories?"
"Much," I said gravely.
"I've often thought of moving off-campus," she said. "The Chesley dorm curfews are so annoying! Imagine, asking grown girls to be in their rooms by one-thirty!'
"Is that what time I'm supposed to bring you in tonight."
"Oh, no," she said demurely. "I've applied for an overnight pass. I told them I was going home to visit my parents."
I nearly choked on my beer. Either she thought I was a fool, or she had as much as invited me to make a heavy pass at her. Well, I was willing to oblige.
We finished our drinks and then I said, "Look, I've got an idea. Instead of throwing more money away here, why don't we buy a bottle of wine and go up to my place? We could listen to some of my records and-"
I stopped short, aghast at the baldness of my proposition. The unlamented Jeff Burnside of a week ago would sooner have sung bawdy ballads in church than openly invite a girl to come to his room, with the obvious intention of fornication. But Marge shared none of my embarrassment. She smiled and said, "That's a swell idea, Jeff. This place is too crowded anyway."
I was walking about six inches off the ground as we left the bar. Our first stop was in a liquor store on the next block, where I invested ninety-seven cents in a flask of adequate chianti. A hardware store nearby, open late on a Friday night, sold me two wine glasses at fifteen cents apiece. Then we made tracks for the hotel.
Apologizing all over the place for the shabbiness of my lodgings, I opened the outer door, and we entered. The Tight was on in the community kitchen and I saw Miss Rooksby stick her head out, scowl disapprovingly at Marge, and pull her head back in. I had a hunch I had just become one of "the other kind" in Miss Rooksby's book.
"I like it," Marge said, looking around at my modest domicile.
"You wait here. I'll get the bottle open." She settled down on the bed and I went down the hall to the kitchen. The day before I had bought a few kitchen utensils, including a combination can-opener and corkscrew. I opened my drawer, took out the corkscrew, closed the drawer. Miss Rooksby was washing her dishes at the sink, and glancing sourly at me. I bet she wanted to tell me in loud tones not to do anything sinful, but she said nothing.
When I returned to the room I found that Marge had pulled a couple of records out of my meager stack of LPs, and had put one on my portable player. I recognized it as a Bach harpsichord music record.
"I adore Bach," Marge murmured. "And Landowska is so-so musical."
"Yes, she is," I agreed solemnly. I privately thought the record was something of a drag, but why look for trouble? I pulled the cork out of the chianti bottle and poured wine into the glasses. After a moment I got up, locked my door, and pulled down the window shade.
Outside I heard booming thunder, and an instant later rain began to fall. "We were just in time," I said. "It's pouring."
Marge leaned back against the wall, dangling her long legs over the side of my bed and smiling with her eyes shut. "It's wonderful to be all dry and safe in here, isn't it? With wine, and music, and everything."
I had to admit it was a hell of a romantic situation. As a matter-of-fact, it was all I had daydreamed about, in essence. We had the wine, we had Bach tinkling away, and there on my bed was the girl with big knockers, waiting for me to come ravish her.
But I bided my time, and as a matter-of-fact Bach was off the player and Chopin was going before I made the first aggressive move. By this time about half the wine was gone, and I could see by the glazed look in Marge's eyes that the wine and the previous martini had had the expected synergistic reaction. She was potted. I wasn't completely sober myself, but I was sober enough to know what I was doing and what I wanted to do.
I sat next to her on the bed and put my arm around her shoulders, and for a few moments both of us pretended to a fine esthetic frenzy over Chopin. Then I wriggled my hand a little lower so it cupped her breast. Unlike the girl of my dreams, Marge was wearing a bra, but still I could feel the warm fullness of her flesh through the material. She let out a little gasp and stretched her legs out tight in front of her. I pulled her close to me and slipped my other hand into the front of her blouse, working it into her bra until the tips of my fingers just touched her nipple. It was hard as a rock.
After that everything proceeded in a smooth and orderly fashion. She pulled me down next to her on the bed, and while her tongue explored the inside of my mouth I carefully opened her blouse, button by button. My hands shook only a little. I had to remind myself that this was real, that it was actually me who had a girl in his room and was taking her clothes off.
There were five buttons altogether, and when I had succeeded in opening the last of them she arched her body to enable me to slip her blouse off. This I accomplished without too much trouble. It was harder to open her bra, since I had never experienced that sort of hook before, but after a redfaced bit of fumbling I got it open. The straps tumbled forward and the cups fell away from her breasts. She shook the bra off.
Her breasts were magnificent. Never in all my daydreams had I ever envisioned anything quite so breathtaking. They were perfectly white, except for the dark reddish-brown of her nipples, and they rose in steep cones from her chest. They were firm and close together, and big enough to quiver slightly. But though they were big, they weren't gross in any way. They were just perfect. I thought to myself that it was a cruel trick of fate to attach such awesomely beautiful boobs to such an ordinary face. Perhaps that explained much of Marge's personality troubles. But I didn't give that much thought at the moment. I had brought her here not to psychoanalyze her but to make her.
And there she was, lying back on my bed with her eyes shut, panting so hard her breasts jiggled. She was wearing only Bermuda shorts and long socks now. Gently I slipped my hand up over her kneecap and headed northward along her cool thigh. She began to moan and whimper. Her fingers tore at the zipper of her shorts, and practically ripped them off.
I stood up, partly to get a better look and partly to get my own clothes off. She was stretched nearly the full length of the bed, and her body was a rich creamy color, her breasts and hips paler than the rest.
"Hurry," she murmured.
I undressed as fast as I could, leaving my clothes where they fell, and she drew me down to her. The piano music was still going. I was thankful for the gadget that shuts the phonograph off at the end of the last record.
Marge was writhing and wriggling on the bed as though she had some oriental disease. I pressed myself against her, burying my head between those twin upjutting breasts, while my hands slid underneath her body and gripped her buttocks. Time seemed to stand still as we explored each other's bodies.
And then Marge seemed to really catch fire. Her mouth drooped open; she struggled for breath. Her long legs wrapped themselves around me.
"Now! Now, Jeff!" she gasped. Her teeth nearly met in my earlobe. In surprise, I reacted by thrusting myself forward. And that was what she wanted. We clung together tightly while Marge gyrated and panted, and our bodies both became slippery with sweat. I closed my eyes suddenly and we both went floating away to nowhere on a sea of love.
Maybe it was an hour before I became aware of the universe again. All I know was that I must have dozed, because at some time later in the evening I woke up and discovered, to my amazement, that I was lying next to a sleeping naked girl on my bed, with my face nestling between her superb breasts. It took me a couple of seconds more before I remembered what I had been doing.
Marge was asleep, with a smile of contentment on her face. That made me feel good. Hell, I knew she had slept with half the undergraduate body of Metropolitan University, but I was egotistical enough to hope that maybe I had satisfied her more than most of the others. After all, in most cases she had made love with them furtively in the back seats of autos, or even under the bushes in Riverside Park. At least I could offer her such relatively civilized things as a room, a bed, wine, music.
She opened her eyes sleepily, wriggled closer to me, and draped her arm over my shoulder.
"There any wine left?" she asked in a sleepy purr.
"A little. Quarter of a bottle, maybe. Or more."
"Mmm. What time is it?"
I reached down for my watch, which lay in the middle of my heap of discarded clothing. "Quarter after eleven," I said.
"Put some more music on."
I got up, took the Chopin record off the turntable, and selected some Mozart. It was still raining outside; a good night to be indoors, I thought. I felt very tired, and satisfied.
Pouring out some wine for both of us, I said, "It's a good thing we didn't go down to the park. We'd have been drenched."
"Uh-huh." Marge sat up as I handed her the wine. She drank it quickly, nodding her head in time to the gay music. "Honest, when I applied for that overnight pass I didn't know you lived off-campus. I just wanted to be able to stay out as late as I could."
"Do you want to sleep over?" I asked. The bed was pretty narrow for two people, but it looked like it would be fun to share it with her.
"You won't get into any trouble?" she asked. "I mean, is this allowed here?"
"Theoretically, no. But nobody will say anything."
"Then I'll stay," she said. She drained her wine glass. "You know what I'd like to do? I'd like to take a shower. Then we can go to bed."
"The shower room is right next to the kitchen," I said. "I'll give you my robe."
She got up, stretching luxuriously and turning all the way around. Her buttocks were gorgeous, slim and curved, with little dimples in them. And her back was lovely. I got the picture clearly-plain face, sensational body, confused home life. She probably thought she had to put out to be popular.
I gave her a towel, some soap, and my bathrobe-it fitted her pretty well-and she went down the hall to shower. While she was gone I tidied the place up a little, hanging up my clothes, draping hers over a chair. I shook my head in quiet amazement as I witnessed myself draping a girl's size forty bra over the back of a chair in my own bedroom. Me, Jeff Burnside!
She returned about fifteen minutes later, damp and sweet-smelling. "You know what happened? I started to go into the John, and some old bat with her head in pin-curlers stuck her head out her door and looked at me and said something about how immoral young people are, and slammed her door." Marge giggled. "You have funny neighbors."
"That was Mis Rooksby," I said. "A spinster librarian. Probably thinks sex should be practiced only in marriage, and then only for the purpose of procreation. Hell with her."
I slipped into my robe, which was still excitingly moist from Marge's body. "I'm going to grab a shower myself. Turn the record over when it ends."
I was back in less than ten minutes, and this time Miss Rooksby stayed in her room-maybe composing a nasty letter to the Society for the Suppression of Vice, or something. When I returned, Marge was curled up under the covers, looking at my Advanced Psychology textbook. She closed it in a hurry when I came in, but I was willing to bet she'd been reading the section on nymphomania.
"All set for bed?" I said.
"All set." She put the book on the chair near the bed.
I turned the lights off and got into bed. She was waiting with open arms.
It was quite a night. I don't think I got more than three hours' sleep, but it was quite a night, I may say. Quite.
CHAPTER SIX
We woke up about nine. The rain had stopped and bright sunlight came streaming in under the window shade's lower border. Marge stirred sleepily. I kissed her.
"Morning," I said.
"Mmmmm."
"Sleep well?"
"No," she said. "But the interruptions were fun."
We got out of bed. It had been cramped, the two of us in a bed not even wide enough for one, and neither of us any midget. But it was a wonderful feeling to wake up in the morning after having spent the whole night in bed with a big, busty, warm, co-operative wench. We dressed, and I playfully ogled Marge as she got into her garments, leaning forward to dangle her big breasts into the cups of her bra before she put it on.
"My mouth feels like somebody's been using it for some obscene purpose," she said. "Lend me your toothbrush, hon."
Up till that moment I had never thought in terms of sharing a toothbrush with another person, of whatever sex. But I couldn't very well refuse. And as she disappeared down the hall with my toothbrush it occurred to me that sharing it with her was one hell of an erotic thing. Or so it seemed right then.
When we were both groomed and ready, we went downstairs into a lovely autumn morning for breakfast. I hadn't yet gotten around to buying any groceries, or we could have had breakfast in the kitchen-but it was just as well this way. If we ate in the kitchen Miss Rooksby would most likely have come out to glower at me for having dared to entertain an overnight guest of a sex other than my own.
We ate at Riker's. I was ravenously hungry, and it was a big bang of a feeling to sit there sipping orange juice with my mistress right at my side. I was glowing. Overnight Marge had transformed me into a great lover.
I said, "When am I going to see you again?"
She shrugged. The sleepless night had left her with bags under her eyes. "I've got a lot of studying this week. And I've got a couple of dates."
The mention of other dates let all the air out of me. I awakened to the bitter realization that I had no great claim on Marge. She was still going to see other men, and, ninety-seven to one, she was going to put out for them if they wanted her to.
"Oh," I said a little numbly. "But can you squeeze me into the schedule somewhere?"
"I'm still free for Saturday," she said.
My ego, which had been sagging, rebounded. "Swell! How about a football game, and dinner, and then afterwards maybe we can go up to my room again-"
"Is that all you're interested in?"
"It's one of the things I'm most interested in. Aren't you?"
"I suppose."
"Then why'd you ask?"
She stared morosely into her coffee. "Because I seem to wind up in bed all the time. Football game and bed, movie and bed, concert and bed-the evening always ends the same way."
I became uncomfortable. "All right, we won't go up to my room, then. Dammit, Marge, I don't want you to think I'm attracted to you just for that," I lied.
She shook her head. "It doesn't matter. We'll see on Saturday."
We parted after breakfast, Marge going in the direction of the library and me back to the hotel. I felt on top of the world. I had my own room, I had a girl who went to bed-everything was just perfect.
A few minutes after I had entered my room, there was a knock on the door. Putting down my textbook, I hopped up and opened the door.
Miss Rooksby stood there. At first I thought she was going to give me a tongue-lashing for having lowered the moral standards of the section, but she kept any such thoughts firmly inside her head. She simply looked at me rather coldly and handed me a slip of paper.
"There was a telephone call for you while you were out. I took the message."
I thanked her. She stalked away, giving me the definite feeling she didn't approve of me any more. The message, written in a neat, prissy hand, said, Call Chuck Gordon, and gave the telephone number of his fraternity house.
I found a dime in my jeans and headed for the pay phone in the corridor. But the White Russian woman had beaten me to it. She was gabbling away volubly in her native tongue, and for long moments all she seemed to be saying was, "Da! Da!" or "Nyet! Nyet!" just as I would have expected a Russian to be saying. I fumed slowly while the minutes ticked by, wondering what it was that Chuck wanted and how long it would be before Mrs. Berezhovskaya got off the damn telephone.
She ran out of nickels finally and hung up. Before anyone else could get to the phone, I did, and dialed Chuck's number. A supercilious fraternity brother answered the phone. "Alpha Gam, who is this, please?"
"I'd like to talk to Chuck Gordon."
"Who's calling?"
"Jeff Burnside. He asked me to call him."
I waited nearly a minute, and then Gordon's high-pitched, rapid-speaking voice said, "Hello there, Jeff. Must have just missed you. Well, how was it?"
"Fine."
"You scored, I hope?"
I looked around for eavesdroppers. "She slept over," I said softly into the mouthpiece. "All right. We were out having breakfast when you called."
"Hurray for you! She's a swell piece, isn't she? Built like a brick you-know-what. Some chest, eh? And the prettiest little butt you ever-"
I moderately resented his talking in such familiar terms about the girl I had just spent the night with, but at the same time I knew I hadn't any right to resent. Marge wasn't exactly virginal. I said, "Everything went swell, Chuck."
"Glad to hear it. What about next Saturday? Did you make a date with her?"
"Yep?"
"Okay, fine. I got a proposition for you, then, for next Saturday."
"I told her we were going to a football game."
"I mean in the evening," he said. "You don't have any arrangements for the evening, do you?"
"Not yet."
"Good. Keep it that way."
"What are you planning?"
"I can't talk about it over the phone," he said. "Suppose I come over to your place and fill you in on it. It's something really big-but hush-hush, and I mean!"
On that note of suspense, we concluded the conversation, and I went back to my studies for fifteen minutes, until I was interrupted by the ringing of the outside bell. I opened the door and let Chuck in.
We went into my room and he sat down on the edge of the bed. Seeing the empty chianti bottle in the wastebasket, he grinned. "I guess you and Marge had yourselves a regular little old party in here last night."
"Jealous?"
"Not at all. In fact, I'm sort of paternally proud of you, my boy."
"Cut the patronizing crap," I told him. "What's this hush-hush proposition you wanted to make?"
He leaned forward, staring off into the distance. His eyes seemed troubled, "First off, I want to get a pledge of absolute secrecy from you. What I'm about to say can get me kicked out of school, if you decide to open your mouth. So can I count on you to keep shut?"
"Sure, Chuck." I was mystified.
"Okay, then. Now listen carefully. There's a sort of a fraternity that I think you might be interested in joining."
"Oh, look, Chuck, if you're going to start peddling Alpha Gam to me-"
"Shut up and listen," he said, with a cutting edge to his voice. "I said this was a sort of a fraternity. It isn't a recognized campus body. Matter of face, it's the most secret organization on campus. Membership is limited to fifteen-five sophs, five juniors, and five seniors. Each September the juniors are entitled to sponsor five new men for membership. I've picked you as my nominee."
"That's damn nice of you, Chuck. But what sort of organization is this?"
"It's a sex club," he said gently.
I couldn't have been more surprised if he had pulled a pack of marijuana from his pocket. I stared at him in no little confusion and said, "Huh?"
"If you're not interested, say the word now and I'll leave."
"Did I say I wasn't interested?"
He shrugged. "Are you?"
"Maybe. Tell me a little more."
"This is the most secret organization here. It's been in existence over twenty years. There are branches at a lot of other important colleges, by the way."
I had heard legends of this underground sex fraternity. But this was the first time I had come close to getting the straight poop on it. I pricked up my ears and listened hard.
Chuck said, "There's a sister group at Chesley. We hold meetings jointly. Fifteen and fifteen, you see. It makes things neat. And Marge happens to be one of the girls being considered for new membership too. Which makes it even neater, since the two of you are seeing each other already." He licked his lips nervously. I could see his hands shaking a little as he lit up a cigarette. "Any time you decide you're not interested, Burnside, just let me know and I'll stop talking. I don't want to tell you any more about this than I have to.
"Go on," I said in a thin voice. "I'm still interested in what you've got to say."
"We meet every week. Attendance isn't compulsory but it's a good idea to look in on the meeting at least for a little while. Membership is limited to undergraduates, and you can't remain a member more than three years, so if you get held over past your senior year you're out. The important thing is this-any male member of the organization is entitled to cohabit sexually with any female member, and with female members at any of the other branches. If a guest from an out-of-town branch is present at the meeting, he's entitled to a woman even if one of the other members has to do without."
I guess my mouth sagged open in awe. "Regular fraternity rules of hospitality, huh?"
"Right. Now, also, any perverse practices may be indulged in, but only with the willing co-operation of the other partner. That is, you can demand to sleep with any of the girls, but you can't work out anything dicey unless they specifically consent. Still think you're interested?"
"This is incredible," I murmured. "How long have you been a member?"
"Since last September. If I told you who my sponsor was, you'd drop your cookies. But you'll meet him next week, if you come to the meeting."
"If I come, do I have to become a member on a permanent basis?" I asked.
"Provided you can pass the initiation tests."
"Which are?"
"For a male applicant, it's necessary to have sex relations with three of the female members within the space of one hundred fifty minutes. The said acts to be witnessed by at least three male and three female members of the organization, not including the applicant's sponsor.
I moistened my lips. "I've got to make it with three girls in two and a half hours? That sounds pretty steep. Especially doing it in public."
Chuck rose. "If you don't think you can make the grade, Burnside, we'll let the matter rest right here. I thought you might be interested in joining such an organization, and you'd bring just the right attitude of innocence that we're looking for. But if-"
"Hold on," I said. "I never told you I couldn't make the grade. I was just wondering. But I made it three times last night with Marge, at least-after that I wasn't even counting. There's no reason why I couldn't pass the initiation."
"Good for you."
"What does a girl have to do to become initiated?" I asked.
Chuck smiled. "She's got to resist seduction for half an hour, in the presence of three male and three female witnesses. The man who's initiating her can undress her, kiss her, touch her in any way he wants-the only thing he can't do is attempt actual rape. If she holds out for the full half hour of stimulation, she's in, and becomes a full-fledged member upon submission to her initiator and two of the male witnesses."
"I see. It sounds like fun."
"It is," Gordon said. He looked straight into my eyes, and what I saw in his-intense brooding darkness-frightened me a little. I wondered if I was out of my head to get involved in this kind of an organization. But I told myself that it was just what I wanted. I had lived the quiet life too long. Now, to have access to fifteen different women, to take part in fabulous orgies-well, it sounded two hundred percent okay.
"One thing," I said. "How can you keep this thing quiet? Suppose somebody flunks the initiation and then goes spilling the beans to the college authorities?"
"We take precautions against that," Chuck said evenly. "Whenever someone flunks the initiation, we take him aside and make it quite clear to him that he'll regret it if he opens his mouth. Then we watch him. If he comes within twenty yards of the Dean's office within a week after the initiation, we head him off and give him warning. You see, we film the initiations. If he squeals, we'll have to argue away the evidence that he was trying to become a member himself. So far nobody's informed on us."
"But what about someone like me?" I asked.
"I've listened to the whole story. Suppose I felt myself duty-bound to inform, now?"
"What would you say? At best you could identify only one member, me, and I'd simply deny the whole thing. You have no proof. Anyway, if I thought you were likely to go blabbing I wouldn't have proposed you for membership in the first place. But I think you've got promise, Burnside. You've got the right spirit. And a couple of years in this club will make a man of you. Give you backbone." He smiled. "You'll find, by the way, that some of the biggest men on campus are in our little group. They'll be your friends, your intimate buddies. I'm not naming any names, but I can tell you that by belonging to this group I have the inside track on the job of Managing Editor of the Daily. And I could be Editor-in-Chief if I wanted to be, only I don't want the job."
I could understand that. The Editor-in-Chief was a sort of public functionary, attending dinners and deans' teas, while the Managing Editor did the real job of running the paper.
Chuck said, "I ought to tell you that there are dues of twenty bucks a month. The money goes for rental of the meeting place, also refreshments, purchase of pornographic books for the club library, and rental of special films."
"Twenty a month? That's a pack of loot."
"Sure it is. But your dang expenses will go down. You won't have to bother about taking girls to expensive shows dinners, stuff like that. At twenty a month it's a bargain." He stood up. "I've told you all that I'm empowered to tell you, Burnside."
"And now you want my answer?"
"No. You've got to think it over. Remember that if we're caught, you can get expelled-but that hasn't happened yet. And I can guarantee you one hell of a good time as a member."
"How do I notify you of my decision?"
"Call me on Tuesday, one way or the other. If it's no, of course, I'll never mention the subject again to you. It's okay if you discuss it with Marge, by the way. She'll be approached by her sponsor some time over this weekend. And shell be told that you're invited to join."
"Okay," I said. "I'll let you know on Tuesday. And-Chuck-"
"Yeah?"
"Thanks for everything. I wish I could tell you how much-"
"Skip it, kid. You're my favorite charity, that's all. I hate to see a man wasting his youth."
I grinned at him and he left. I took a long, deep breath. I was sweating from head to foot inclusive. I thought about my childhood buddy Fred Lambert, now pursuing the chaste and pure Carol West, and wondered what he'd say if I repeated Chuck's conversation to him. Old Fred would flip, absolutely flip.
And the next thing he'd do would be to send a wire to old Ma and Pa Burnside, back in Hudson, N.Y., telling them to come get their son before he was corrupted beyond all repair.
I chuckled a bit over poor Fred. Then I thought about what it was going to be like to have fifteen women at my disposal. I wondered who the other members, both male and female were. I tried to picture what took place at the meetings.
My pulse raced. My throat went dry. I nearly called Chuck up and told him that I accepted. Only the fact that I didn't have the right change for a phone call prevented me. But I knew what decision I was going to make, all right. I couldn't wait.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Tuesday morning, I got a call from Marge.
"Did they give you the pitch about Saturday night?" she asked me.
"You mean, after the game?"
"That's right. The-club."
"Yeah," I said cautiously. "They told me all about it on Saturday."
"And what are you planning to do?"
"I don't know," I said, continuing to fence. "How about you?"
"I sort of wanted to check with you first."
I decided to grab the bull by the horns. "I guess I'm figuring to join," I said. "I mean, it looks like a lively outfit. Unless-"
"Unless what?"
"I don't know. What about you?"
"I figure I'll join too," Marge said. "That is, if you're going to. I wouldn't want to get mixed up with a bunch of total strangers."
I wondered privately whether there were any male upper-classmen in the whole damn university that Marge could consider a stranger. I said, "I'm not allowed to reveal names, but I can tell you that at least one of the brothers is someone you've dated in the past."
"Chuck Gordon?"
"I tell you, I can't name names."
"Don't worry about me, Jeff. I know Chuck's a member of this thing. He as much as told me."
"Okay then, Marge. As long as you know, I'm not really telling you anything. Chuck's the one who's sponsoring me. But I don't know who any of the other brothers are. Honest."
"I guess it's okay," Marge said. "Should I tell my sponsor that we'll be coming there after the football game on Saturday?"
"Yeah. And I'll call up Chuck and do the same," I told her.
When I got off the phone with Marge, I rang up the Alpha Gam house. Chuck wasn't there, but I left a message for him in four simple words: "Jeff Burnside says yes." I figured he'd catch on.
He called back that afternoon. "Got your message, Jeff. Good man. You hear from Marge?"
"Yeah. She's coming with me on Saturday."
"Good. Now, well do it this way-I'm coming to the game too, with one of the female members. Suppose I pick you up and well drive there, and then well come straight to the clubhouse after the game."
"Sounds okay."
"One thing I ought to tell you-act as though you don't know a thing about the organization, when you meet my girl. It isn't considered polite for members to indicate in public that they re in the know. Clear?"
"Clear," I said.
I spent the rest of that week in a state of fidgety impatience. I kept to myself mostly, doing my homework in my room, visiting the library sometimes when I needed a book. The load of classes was pretty stiff, and I was in a hurry for Saturday to come round.
The day of the game dawned bright and clear and crisp, the kind of day they call "good football weather." Well, it was. Personally, I find football an enormous drag to watch, but you don't really have to watch the game when you go to one; you sit in the stands and talk to people you know, and you munch sandwiches and frankfurters and soda pop (or rye, if you've brought a flask) and generally have a good time, and every now and then you look down at the field where Princeton or Dartmouth or Cornell is handing our alma mater its usual weekly shellacking.
I picked up Marge at Chesley before noon, and we walked down to 214th Street, where Chuck was supposed to meet us. He came along just around twelve, in his little Volkswagen. We were introduced to his date, who was a short, bouncy, cheerful little third-year girl named Helene. I ogled her melon-shaped breasts thrusting through her tight sweater with envy; and then I remembered that after I became a member of this club I would be entitled to fondle them and fornicate with Helene practically at will, and I burst out into a little sweat all over. And off we went, bouncing uptown to Lawrence Field.
Metropolitan's football stadium is way to hell and gone uptown, around 260th Street or so. Chuck drove up Broadway, weaving his car daringly in and out between the lumbering oil and beer trucks. Marge and I sat huddled in the back, thigh against thigh. I was thinking about the evening and I guess so was she.
We parked about five blocks from the field and joined the thick mass of humanity streaming toward the entrance gates. My seats weren't anywhere near Chuck's, but he did a bit of finagling inside the gate and the four of us wound up sitting together anyway. Quite an operator, Chuck was. Real slick.
The place was jammed, of course. It was Princeton's turn to batter our varsity this week, and across the way the Orange and Black rooters were already packed tight. I saw a lot of familiar faces around me in our section.
Once we were settled I volunteered to get hot dogs all round. Everybody was willing, and as I jostled my way toward the refreshment stand, I happened to bump into none other than Fred Lambert.
"Long time no see," he said. Always a good man with a cliche, was Fred. "Been busy."
"I'll bet. Especially living in that hotel room of yours. How are you coming with Marge?"
"No complaints," I said. "You here stag?"
"I came with Carol," Fred said proudly, pointing over my shoulder into the stands. I looked, and there was Carol West, her blonde hair fluttering prettily in the breeze, her lily-white body sheathed in a thick wool sweater in patriotic Metropolitan maroon. She was waving a pennant. A sweet kid, I thought.
"I brought Marge Halloran," I said.
"That figures." Fred frowned. "Look, Jeff, have you been seeing Chuck Gordon very much?"
"I came to the game with him today."
"Oh." He wet his lips. "He's been bothering Carol again. Wants to date her."
"It's a free country," I said.
"But you know what Chuck's like. There's no telling what he might do with her."
Indeed, I was thoroughly aware of the debauched nature of Chuck Gordon's character, and I knew damned well that no pretty little blonde-haired virgin would be safe in his paws very long. "But don't you trust Carol?" I said.
"Sure I do. But she's-kind of naive. A glib trickster like Gordon might be able to take advantage of her."
"So marry her fast," I suggested.
Fred made an impatient face. "Don't be silly. But since you and Chuck have become such good friends, I was wondering if you could talk to him and ask him subtly to leave Carol alone. Hell, he's got so many other girls he can run around with-"
I shook my head. "Sorry, but this is between you and Chuck and Carol. I'm not playing go-between."
"Okay, Jeff," Fred said thinly. "Forget it. Sorry I asked." And he wandered off into the crowd. I made my way to the refreshment stand, picked up four hot dogs, and threaded a path back to my seat.
Chuck was passing around a flash. I could see by the glow on her face that Marge had already had some. Remembering the effect that alcohol had on her, I wondered whether she was going to get the urge right here in the middle of Lawrence Field.
"Let's have some of that sauce," I said, handing out the franks. Helene gave me the flask. I took a good pull. "Bourbon," I guessed learnedly.
"Scotch," Chuck corrected. "But you were close. At least you knew it was alcoholic."
"I'm a beer drinker," I mumbled shamefacedly.
I settled down next to Marge, and a little while later the game began. Marge was pretty well lit up. I was sitting with my arm around her waist, and after a few minutes she moved my hand up under her jacket so I could cup her breast. From the softness of her bosom and from the way I could feel the stiff, hard nipple jutting into my palm, I knew that this time she hadn't bothered to wear a bra.
Football has never made much sense to me; I never was hot on games in general, but of all of them I generally preferred to play or watch basketball. All I knew here was that twenty-two over-padded empty-headed bruisers were battling up and down the field, and every now and then one of the Princeton mammoths would barge into the end zone and a loud roar would go up from the sons of Old Nassau across the way. By the end of the quarter the scoreboard read Princeton twenty-one, Metropolitan nothing. It got as bad as forty-nine-nothing in the second quarter, by which time Princeton was using its tenth-stringers, and by accident a Metropolitan man scored. Forty-nine-six. But by then I had lost even a token interest in the game. My right hand was inside Marge's sweater, gently kneading the heavy globe of her breast, and from the way she was snorting I knew she wouldn't mind being had under the stands or even right up here in the bleachers. Chuck had spread a lap robe over himself and Helene, and what he was doing under that robe I didn't know, except that his left hand was out of sight, and I was willing to place a considerable wager that it was not only under the robe but under Helene's skirt as well.
Halftime came. Still forty-nine-six. The Princeton band performed. I detached myself from Marge's bosom and bought some more frankfurters. The scotch was gone, so I got some beer too. In the third period nothing much happened. In the fourth, the score ran up to sixty-two-thirteen. That was where it ended. Chuck said, "I don't know why Metropolitan bothers to have a football team at all."
"The alumni want it," Helene suggested. "What the hell for?" I asked. "They can't be proud of it, can they?"
We moved along through the thick crowd, out the gate, down a side street, and back to Chuck's Volks. We piled in.
Chuck said, "There's a hamburger joint near here where we can have dinner. Then well go down to the clubhouse . We don't want to be the first ones there."
In the back seat, Marge and I nestled up closely. She pulled her long legs up; I put my cold hand between her thighs to warm it, and when she dropped her head on my shoulder I slipped my tongue between her lips. She began to pant and heave. Hastily I broke away from her. She looked up at me reproachfully and I whispered, "Don't get yourself heated up. Remember you've got to pass that initiation tonight."
She nodded gravely. She was afraid of the same thing I was-that she would be unable to resist for the full half hour. Certainly she would be in no shape for the initiation if I steamed her up beforehand.
So we rode a good distance apart in the back seat. In front, Chuck had one hand on the wheel and one in Helene's sweater. But he drove the Volkswagen as though he had special divine protection from accidents.
We had a good, cheap meal at the hamburger place. I sat across the table from Helene and noticed, with some small embarrassment, that she was giving me the eye. Well, I could understand why. In a few hours I might be making love to her, and she wanted to have a look at the merchandise beforehand. I gave her a good scrutinizing too. She was on the roly-poly side, probably carrying a little too much weight on her belly and buttocks, but I was sure she'd be fun in bed. She had sparkling brown eyes and short curly brown hair; with her pretty face and chubby body, she was about as much a contrast to Marge as could easily be imagined.
It was about seven o'clock when we finished eating. We loaded ourselves back into Chuck's vehicle and drove downtown. I began to feel a little nervous. This was if, after all. Only a couple of weeks ago I'd been the purest greenhorn, and now I was on my way to initiation in a secret campus sex club.
I had about half an hour to ask myself, Is this what I really want? And I kept telling myself, Yes, it is. I didn't have to worry about saving myself for my wife any more. I had already been to a whore, and also slept with a girl who was just the same as a whore except that she didn't charge a fee. So I was already pretty damn un-virtuous, and joining this club wouldn't make matters much worse.
Besides, I told myself, if I was going to go to medical school and become a doctor, I had six or eight or maybe even ten years of pretty lean living ahead of me. The rest of college, then four years of med school, internship, residency, a stint in the army. All those years I'd be earning peanuts, and keeping my nose to the grindstone. I probably wouldn't be able to marry till I was near thirty. So I'd be a damn fool to get pious now and miss out on all this fun, with so much hard plugging ahead of me.
Oh, I had half a dozen neat rationalizations all worked out. But I still had to admit that I was scared. At heart I guess I was still a good small-town kid. And I was plunging into real big-city vice, no denying it. I tried to look calm and cool and collected, but I wasn't. And I was worried about that initiation, too. Suppose I flunked it? I'd be having doubts about my masculinity for the rest of my life, if I did.
"Here we are," Chuck said suddenly.
He pulled up outside a two-story brownstone house on a side street near Broadway in the West Nineties. The windows of the house were covered by drawn Venetian blinds.
"Don't the people on the other floor object to what goes on here?" I asked.
"We have the whole place," Chuck said.
"That sounds expensive."
He grinned. "We get a subsidy from rich alumni. Well-to-do ex-members like to send little contributions to the organization that provided them with so many pleasant hours during college. Let's go in."
Stepping up to the door, he rang the bell. I could see by the way he was pressing it that he was giving a special signal. A moment later came the answering buzz from inside, two shorts, a long, and a short. Chuck pushed the door open and we went in, first Chuck and Helene, then Marge and myself. I stole a glance at Marge and saw that her face was pale and nervous-looking. I figured I probably looked the same way.
The first thing I was aware of was the booming sound of a loud hi-fi set, pounding out the rhythms of Ravel's Bolero. Chuck beckoned us forward. There was a big living room just to the left of the foyer, and we turned into it. It was quite a sight.
About fifteen or twenty people were in the living room. Seven or eight girls, about as many fellows. Most of them were completely naked. A few of the girls still had filmy underpants on, and one was wearing simply a garter-belt and long stockings. All the girls were bare above the waist, though. I had never seen so much bosom at once. It was a blinding sight. Some of the girls had heavy swinging breasts, some had small pointy ones, some had medium-sized gorgeous ones. Quite a sight.
I was even more stoned when I recognized some of the male members of the organization, sitting there in their birthday suits. The Editor-in-Chief of the Daily was there, Roy Burchard. So was Don Hammer, wearing only his eyeglasses and peering at me with amusement. And the president of the Student Council, Les Haberman. Three of the biggest men on campus. I also recognized Lome Byris, a junior active in campus dramatics, and two members of my own year, Ellis Dill and Charles Mason. Dill was the president of the Sophomore Class.
I stood there gaping at this assemblage of campus leaders and naked females. I felt out of place, fully-dressed as I was.
Everyone was arranged in a circle, and right in the middle of the group a couple was dancing. Both of them were stripped right down to the buff, and they were pressed as tightly together as two people can get. They were moving in time with the savage pounding of the music. I recognized the fellow as Ned Carter, a senior. The girl was facing the other way, and I couldn't recognize her from the curve of her buttocks or the slope of her back, but the view was pleasant all the same.
Chuck said, "Come upstairs and I'll show you where you can get undressed. Then we'll introduce you around to everyone."
We marched upstairs. There were a lot of bedrooms up there. The place was well furnished, just like any regular fraternity house that had been in business for a number of years.
Chuck pointed to a bedroom and said, "You two can peel in there. Take everything off and wait up here for me."
We went inside and began to undress. Although I had spent the night with Marge only a week ago, I felt foolishly self-conscious about taking off my clothes in front of her. But I sternly told myself not to funk out now. Marge was out of her clothes in a flash, and stood examining her bosom critically in a mirror. I could have told her therewas nothing at all wrong with it, nothing at all.
I deposited my clothes on a chair and, turning to Marge, said, "Ready?"
It was an obvious question, with an obvious answer. She couldn't have been any nuder.
Chuck stuck his head in the door. "Okay, you two. Let's go."
He and Helene stood outside, stripped. I glanced quickly at Helene, taking her in. She was stacked, all right. Her breasts were like swollen grapefruits. She was a little on the chunky side,-with ripples of fat around her hips and thighs.
Chuck said, "Well go downstairs first. You follow, side by side. And remember that the human body was made to be looked at. Don't mess things up now."
Marge said, "My sponsor isn't here yet."
"Shell be here. I'll introduce you with Jeff. But you'll have to wait till she comes to be initiated."
He and Helene started downstairs. I moistened my lips tensely. This was like one of those dreams were a formal dinner is going on below, and you descend the stairs in the nude. Only this time everybody below was naked too. Oh well, I thought. I didn't have any inhibitions about being seen by other members of my own sex, and I figured it was high time I got rid of any other inhibitions too. What the hell-I was reasonably muscular, and anatomically complete. I had no more to be ashamed of than the next guy.
On slightly wobbly legs, I started down the stairs.
CHAPTER EIGHT
I'll say this about being naked in a place where everybody else is naked too-the novelty sure wears off in a hurry. At least, after the first moment of embarrassment, I found myself starting to forget that I wasn't properly dressed for mixed company.
But one other aspect of the shindig was not quite so easy to get used to. The Bolero was still going on, but the couple who had been dancing were dancing no longer. They were on the couch, body twined against body, making love. They seemed oblivious to everything that was going on around them. I was still a mere novice at sex myself, and I guess I wasn't yet in the right frame of mind for this postgraduate sort of amour conducted right out in public. Most of the others were ignoring the lovemakers, but a few of the members were watching with interest and calling out encouraging remarks.
The doorbell rang. Roy Burchard reached over and pressed a buzzer, and a moment later a girl walked in unescorted. Marge smiled, and I knew it was her sponsor. The newcomer had jet-black hair cut in short bangs, and wore a tight maroon sweater that covered what looked like an eye-opening figure.
Chuck said, "Your candidate came here with us, Janet."
"So I see." Her voice was deep, richly musical.
With some surprise I recognized her now as one of the leading ladies of the Chesley theatrical club. "Let me get my things off and we can have the initiation."
She disappeared upstairs. Chuck rose, facing Don Hammer, and said, "Mr. President, I wish to sponsor Jeff Burnside of the Class of 1965 for membership."
"Let the candidate step forward," Hammer said. I hadn't realized he was the president of this organization. I came from my place in the corner of the room and stood facing him, uncomfortably aware that nearly everybody was watching me except the copulating couple on the couch.
"Are you Jeff Burnside of the Class of 1965?" Hammer asked formally.
"Yes."
"Yes, sir."
"Yes, sir," I said obediently. "And you wish to become a member of this organization?"
"Yes, sir."
Hammer nodded. "Membership is limited to fully accredited undergraduates for a three-year period beginning in their sophomore year. If at any time you suffer academic suspension, your membership is likewise suspended. And your membership expires permanently on the day your class is graduated, whether or not you yourself actually are graduated on that day. Is this clear?"
"Yes, sir."
"Are you a virgin, Burnside?"
The sudden personal question puzzled me. But I answered quickly enough. "No, sir."
Hammer frowned. "Any untruths told during the application for membership can be-founds for your expulsion from the group, Burnside."
"He's telling the truth," Chuck said. "I can vouch for that."
Hammer nodded and said, "Each member of this group, once accepted, becomes one with the bodies of all other members, and hence, no member may refuse to cohabit with another member in normal heterosexual intercourse. Do you accept this specification?"
"Yes, sir."
"Sadistic, masochistic, and homosexual practices may be indulged in, but only with the consent of both parties. Is this clear?"
"Yes, sir."
"Revelation of our activities to any person not a member of this organization will lead to severe penalties. May I point out here that we are making a tape recording of this application interview. You will abide by total secrecy?"
"Yes, sir."
"The final requirement for membership is successful completion of the initiation rite. This rite requires you to have carnal knowledge of three full-fledged female members, within the space of one hundred fifty minutes, in the presence of three male and three female witnesses not including your sponsor. The rite may be performed at any time during this evening. I designate as your partners for the rite Helene Wallace, Janet Bryce, and Sarah Rawlins. I designate as witness-male, Lome Byris, Roy Burchard, and myself; as witnesses, female-Zelda Hughes, Paula Garson, and Lois Reznik. Other members, of course, are free to witness as well."
I was allowed to sit down after that, and I was introduced to the various people who were going to take part in my initiation. Helene, I already knew; Janet was Marge's sponsor, and she had come downstairs by this time, a long-legged girl with a beautifully lush body. The third girl was Sarah Rawlins, a senior, rather lean and muscular-looking, but attractive. She was the girl who was wearing the garter-belt and stockings.
Marge then went through the same rigmarole, with, of course, a different statement of the initiation rite. I learned that a total of five initiations were being held today-aside from my own and Marge's, Ellis Dill, Charles Mason, and a sophomore redhead named Claire Reynolds were being initiated. Claire had passed her initiation before our arrival, while Dill and Mason each were one-third of the way toward full membership. If all five of us passed, there would still be five vacancies, which would be filled in succeeding weeks as other candidates were selected.
Since everybody was now present, and all of the new candidates had been introduced, the party proceeded to scatter all over the house. There was plenty of liquor, and the hi-fi set blared continuously. The couple on the couch had finished with each other, now, and were each dancing quite innocently with different partners.
I decided that this was as good a time as any to begin my initiation. I crossed the room to where Janet Bryce was talking to Chuck and said, "You're Janet?"
"That's right."
"I-I want to begin," I said. Again I had the feeling that this was all a dream. Here was this beautiful brunette nude before me, her breasts inches from my skin, and I was asking her to come make love with me the way one would normally ask a girl to dance.
"I'll go round up the judges," Chuck said. He ; went into the other room. Janet smiled at me. She had a lovely face and a perfectly-formed body, with well-made breasts and broad, flaring hips.
"Have you done much of this before?" she asked sympathetically.
"Not really," I confessed. "Just Marge and one other girl, that's all."
"Well, don't worry about tonight. Just try to get each act over with as quickly as possible. That'll leave you more time to recuperate for the next one. Don't worry about pleasing me now-just concentrate on succeeding."
Chuck returned, leading my various judges. I was a little unhappy that Don Hammer had included himself among the group, but I knew he had done it on purpose, after the little run-in we had had: he probably figured that if I could pass the test under his critical eyes, I deserved membership.
The judges gathered round. I began to sweat, and because of my nakedness the sweat made me shiver. I told myself that it was no good, that I could never do anything in front of an audience. But Janet took me by the hand and led me to the couch.
Don Hammer said, "The time is now eight fifty-three. Your initiation period expires at eleven twenty-three, Burnside."
Janet ran the entire show. She drew me down to her on the couch, placing my hand on her high, firm bosom and wrapping her body around me. "Don't look at the judges," she murmured.
"Forget they're there. Just think of me." Our lips met; her tongue darted into my mouth; her hands roamed my body. Automatically, in response, I felt myself swelling with desire. Janet clasped me to her. "Relax," she whispered. She seemed tremendously anxious to help me pass. I had to remind myself that this wasn't charades we were playing. That I was here on this couch with a girl I had never spoken to in my life before tonight.
I heard something whirring behind me. "For crissake, are they filming us?" I asked.
Janet whispered, "Please, don't pay attention to anything but me. Otherwise you might not pass."
She clasped me tightly against her. Our bodies joined; I felt the dizzying quiver that I knew by this time was love's ecstasy; and she released me. I was drenched with sweat. Someone handed me a towel. Chuck put a highball in my hand. Don Hammer scribbled sometliing down in a notebook. Janet smiled at me.
"The next time," she said, "we can take longer and have more fun."
As the others disappeared. Chuck said, "Okay, kid. You're one-third of the way there. How do you feel?"
"Tired."
"Don't let it get you down. Just sit quietly and relax, watch what's going on. And stay away from the liquor, after this drink. It tends to reduce your desire."
"Do you think I'll make it?" I asked eagerly. "Why not? You're doing okay so far. Just pace yourself well, and remember that you've got better than two hours left. Take Helene next, around quarter to ten."
"Why not Sarah?"
"Save her for last," Chuck advised. "She's a senior, and she really knows the ropes. She'll help you if you run into difficulties. We've also got some Spanish Fly if you think you need it, but it isn't a good idea to fool around with that stuff."
He grinned and clapped me on the shoulder. "Cheer up, kid. After tonight it's all a lark. Let's go inside-Les Haberman is initiating Marge."
I followed him into a room lined with books. Marge kneeled in the middle of the floor while Les Haberman, a tall, muscular senior who was President of the Student Council, stood over her, cupping her breasts in his hands and gently massaging the swollen tips. Marge had her eyes shut and her mouth clamped tight, and sweat was pouring down her body in rivers. Three or four of the other members were standing near her, the rest of the witnesses sitting by the side. Ned Carter was holding a watch. Sarah Rawlins was operating a small movie camera, recording everything for posterity.
I went up to Ted Felks, a senior who was one of the witnesses, and whispered, "How much more time does she have?"
"About thirteen minutes."
I looked at Marge. She was obviously suffering. Highly susceptible to the male touch as she was, she was nearly splitting herself in half by forcing herself not to respond to Haberman's devilish caresses. He was stroking her skin lightly now, just grazing it. I saw Marge's big breasts rise and fall rapidly as her breath came in short gulps. But she remained in her kneeling position, thighs pressed tight together, sitting on her heels.
I stood there watching as Haberman's fingers went squirreling down her thighs and across her breasts, and I ticked the minutes off in my head. Now there were only twelve minutes left. Seven hundred twenty seconds left. Come on, Marge, I thought. I was rooting hard for her to make it.
But Haberman was really tightening the screws. Since anything short of actual penetration was allowed, he took Marge by the elbows and drew her back, stretching her out flat and lying so that the witnesses had to come over to make sure that Haberman didn't break the rules, which would mean automatic acceptance for Marge. But he was too smart for that. He played a tantalizing game, keeping himself a strategic distance away and stimulating Marge in every way possible.
Seven minutes were left. Six. Five.
I heard her whimper, low, deep in her throat. I knew she was hot with desire, half out of her mind with sheer frustration. This was a hellish rite. Her hands tightened on Haberman's back and for a second I thought she was going to give in.
Then she said, in a tight, passion-choked voice, "How-how much time is there left?"
"Four minutes and thirty-two seconds," Felks said.
She relaxed again. And I knew she was going to make it. Haberman did his damndest, but she just lay back like a lump of dead meat, and finally Felks said, "The half hour is elapsed and the candidate is successful. The candidate will now submit to her initiator and two of the witnesses, and will then be welcomed to membership."
Haberman never had a chance. Marge grabbed him in a stranglehold like a giant python, and vented her half-hour of frustration on him in a brief, savage, terrifying performance. I turned away, glad she had passed but horrified by the sight of her writhing with Haberman on the carpet.
About fifteen minutes later she came over to me, where I was standing talking to Ellis Dill. Dill had completed the second leg of his initiation and had an hour left to finish the job.
Marge looked pale, and I realized it was because of her ordeal followed by three quick acts. "You made it," I said. "Congratulations."
"Hell, I thought it would kill me," she said. "But I made it. After Felks had me, they gave me the club ring and showed me the recognition sign." She grinned. "I can't show you the sign because you're not a member yet. But look at the ring."
I looked at it. It was set with some dark stone, onyx maybe, and something was carved on it. When I looked closely I saw the carving was incredibly obscene. But you had to look closely.
"I keep it till I graduate," she said. "Then I hand it on. How are you doing?"
"One down and two to go," I said.
About nine-thirty I found Chuck, who had been necking quite innocently with Helene, and I said, "I'm ready for the second one."
He gestured to Helene. "Here. Hang on to her. I'll so round up the witnesses."
My tribunal assembled-according to the rules they had to come when called, no matter what they happened to be doing-and Helene and I made love. I didn't have any difficulties at all. She was soft and cuddly and warm, and our bodies fit neatly together. She was giggling when it happened, out of "pleasure I guess. Altogether we were with each other less than five minutes. Chuck shook my hand when I rose, and said, "Sit down and rest for a while. Get your strength back. The third is always the hardest."
I got myself a cold drink of water, wiped the sweat from me, and sat down. A few of the others, temporarily showing no interest in the orgy, were listening to music on the hi-fi, and I joined them. But when Les Haberman offered me a drink I shook my head; it was a deliberate trap, I knew, since alcohol would weaken my virility.
So I just rested for maybe three quarters of an hour, listening to the music and watching the endless flow of naked bodies back and forth. Some of the girls were partially dressed again, and I understood why-nakedness as such can get pretty dull in large doses. A few of them had donned bras and underpants, or like Sarah Rawlins, garter-belts and stockings. It made for a hell of an erotic effect, compared with simple nud-ity.
I sat back and rested. Right now I felt no desire at all, and I wondered how in deuce I was going to pass the third and vital part of my initiation. It seemed to me that Aphrodite herself couldn't have raised my eyebrows. Word came from the other room that Dill had successfully completed his initiation, and that Mason was finishing up now. Which left me as the only one of the five candidates who had not yet qualified for membership. I hoped I wasn't going to make a mess of things. It was ten minutes to eleven. I had thirty-seven minutes left to finish in.
Chuck came over to me. "You better get with it. Keep a safety margin in case there's trouble."
I found Sarah. And I blessed her for what she had done. She had gone upstairs and gotten herself fully dressed. Now she stood before me, with Chuck to one side and the six witnesses staring eagle-eyed at me, and she began to do a slow strip-tease. It was just the thing I needed to revive my flagging desires.
She was lean, but she had a neat little body and she knew how to use it. She stripped seductively, first the skirt, then the blouse, then her bra, finally her panties. By that time I was ready to assault her. She kept the garter-belt and stockings on and held out her arms to me.
I walked forward and she drew me down onto the carpet, smiling. The friction of her stockings against my skin excited me, and I forgot all about how tired I was and how much depended on my success now. I grabbed her tight and took her, and pleasure shuddered through me.
And then my legs turned to water when I tried to get up. The excitement, the stimulation, the wildness of the orgy-it damn near knocked me out. But Chuck was holding me up, handing me a drink, and I heard Don Hammer say, "We welcome you to full membership, and signify it with this ring."
Someone put the ring on my finger, and Hammer demonstrated the secret recognition-sign of the organization, then I was free. I staggered over to an armchair and threw myself down limply. A few moments later Marge threw herself down on top of me. Her bare body was warm and soft, but it didn't do a thing for me, not a thing. I held her the way I might have held a toy teddy-bear.
"Congratulations," she said.
"Yeah. Thanks."
Now I was a member. I didn't feel exultant, though. I just felt pooped.
CHAPTER NINE
I guess I slept pretty near all day Sunday. When I woke, the sun was streaming through my window, and the clock said it was half past four in the afternoon. So I had had pretty close to twelve hours' sleep, and I guess I must have needed it. My tongue felt like a big wad of cotton and my insides were a little jumpy. I remembered having had all sorts of stuff to drink, and then near the end of the evening trying to make it with a senior named Lois Reznik and failing miserably. Well, it hadn't been my fault. I had already made it three times in one evening, which was good enough in my book. But this Reznik girl, who had been one of my three female witnesses, was drunk and insisted that I make it with her too. She kept putting her breasts in my mouth-must have had a maternal complex or something-but I was absolutely no use to her, and after a while she gave up and went away, telling me she'd come back later when I felt better. Luckily she never did.
And then I staggered upstairs to look for my clothing, but I wandered into the wrong bedroom by mistake, and found Roy Burchard and Lome Byris on the same bed with Zelda Hughes, another stacked senior, and I can't even bring myself to face what the two of them were doing to her, but I can say it was pretty bad. And when they saw me they wanted me to come join them, but I told them no, I didn't think there was any room for me on the bed, and anyway I was pretty tired. And some time after that I got home and into bed.
So now it was half past four on a Sunday afternoon, and I felt weak and wobbly and senile, and when I looked into my warped mirror a stranger's face looked back at me, with bloodshot eyes and green skin.
Sunday was the day I usually wrote home to my parents. An unanswered letter from them, forwarded from the dorms, had arrived yesterday and was sitting on my desk. It was full of the usual chatter about the neighbors, and full of the usual half-baked questions like Are you brushing your teeth regularly? and Do you keep up with your class work? and Have you made some nice new friends?
Well, I just couldn't bring myself to answer that letter today. What the hell was I going to write them? Dear Mom and Dad, I've moved out of the dorms and into a cheap hotel room because you aren't allowed to make girls in the dorms, and I'm dating a nympho from Chesley, and last night I was initiated, into a sex fraternity and slept with three girls and learned half a dozen new things that I never thought existed-"
Hell, no. I couldn't write that sort of letter to my parents. And just now I didn't have the strength to make up a pack of lies. So I shelved the letter-writing project for the time being. I needed a couple of days to get back on an even keel.
I got dressed, had breakfast-the Czech physicist was in the kitchen, and looked at me peculiarly when I started pouring orange juice and frying bacon, but he didn't say anything-and went out for a walk around the block, by way of clearing the cobwebs out of my head. I revolved in my mind the idea that I was a full-fledged member of a coeducational fraternity. And that some of the biggest men on campus belonged. I wondered how Les Haberman or Roy Burchard kept straight faces when they attended faculty functions and heard the Dean asking for stricter adherence to moral standards.
I still had some doubts about joining. But I was told that it wasn't always quite as wild an orgy; the presence of new candidates had made things a little more hectic than usual, but the atmosphere was more relaxed once the full complement of members was filled. And it was a handy thing to belong. Any time I felt the need for a woman, all I had to do was phone up any of the fifteen girls, and she was oath-bound to provide entertainment unless she was currently busy with one of the other brothers. I could take my pick of redheads, blondes, brunettes; short ones, tall ones, skinny ones, fat ones. There were girls with perfect bosoms and there were girls with perfect buttocks, and girls with both. There were sophomores, juniors, and seniors. Clever girls and slowwitted ones. Serious ones and comic ones. And I had the run of the lot. No wonder, I thought, that Don Hammer and Chuck Gordon had such ferocious reputations on campus. With fifteen girls to choose from, and all of them honor-bound to obey orders, you could look like one hell of a casanova around campus. And it took neither looks nor money nor a glib line to get any of those girls. All it took was a phone call saying, "I want you right this minute. Can you make it?"
I got some homework done Sunday evening, tired as I was. Being secluded over in the hotel had its advantages. In the dorms there's always the temptation to wander down the hall and shoot the breeze with Tom, Dick, and Phil for a while, and a lot of evenings get wasted that way. But who was I supposed to go shoot the breeze with here? The Czech? Mr. Szu? Mrs. Berezhovskaya? Miss Rooksby?
I slept soundly again Sunday night, and was in good shape for classes Monday morning. As it happened, one of the first people I saw as I entered Michaels Hall was Don Hammer. Instead of sneering, as he normally would, he smiled in quite a friendly fashion, and with a subtle twist of his fingers gave me the secret high-sign. I returned it and went on into my classroom, fingering my ring and feeling inwardly important. All around me, I thought contemptuously, were men most of whom would never sleep with more than four or five women in their lives, at most, and that with great difficulty and much pursuit. And here I, at the mere age of nineteen, had fifteen women on my string, each to be had for the price of a phone call (plus the monthly dues of twenty smackers.)
But I wasn't in the mood to make use of my privileges just yet. It wasn't until Tuesday night that I felt the first twitch of yearning, and decided to see just how valid my privileges were. I took out the notebook in which I had carefully inscribed the phone numbers of the twelve female members (there were still three vacancies) and ran down the list. Marge? No, not for a while again. Claire Reynolds? She was a sophomore too, and a looker. I phoned her dorm room and discovered she was out on a date with Ted Felks. Evidently the new members were in hot demand at the beginning. I tried again-Paula Garson, a junior who lived off-campus on 207th Street. She had been one of my witnesses. I phoned her up and she answered.
"Jeff Burnside," I said, and paused.
"Oh-hello, Jeff. Feeling lonely?"
"I was-well-wondering if you were busy tonight," I stammered.
"I've got a load of homework," she said. "Tell you what-would it break up your evening if I said for you to come over around eleven and spend the night? My roommate is sleeping out tonight, so we d have the place to ourselves."
Her roommate was Sally Marshall, one of the other junior members. I said, "Fine. I'll be there at eleven." I spent the evening studying virtuously, and about quarter to eleven left for Paula's place. I remembered to pack my toothbrush, too.
It was the most amazing damn thing, the way this club worked. Paula answered the door in a filmy bathrobe. She was a big Scandinavian-looking blonde, with milky skin and big thick thighs and breasts, and I could see the red tips of her nipples through the gauzy fabric of her robe. She was from Minnesota, and I guess she was escaping from a pretty narrow family. We were all escaping from something in an organization like this.
We talked for a little while, and then we went to bed. She had taken a bath just before I arrived, and her skin was cool and moist, and she supported me better than a foam-rubber mattress. She was passionate as all get-out, too. I don't think she was faking it. But she must have had a dozen climaxes while we were going at it. Finally, exhausted, I fell asleep lying atop that magnificent bulk of womanflesh. When I woke, we were side by side, and I had one of her massive breasts cupped in my palm.
She gave me breakfast and I got back to my room in time to shave and grab my notebooks, and I was off to class with a bouncy spring in my walk. No doubt there were guys who looked at Paula Garson every day and ogled her and mentally undressed her and wished they could climb aboard her, the way they might wish to find a million dollars lying in the street. And they didn't know how easy it really was. You just had to know the right people, and then all you needed to do was phone her up and bring your toothbrush.
I was crossing the plaza in front of the Library that afternoon, wondering which girl I would try next, when I bumped into Fred Lambert. Or rather, he bumped into me, because it was obvious he'd been looking for me.
"Jeff, I've got to talk to you."
"What about?"
We sat down on a stone bench. He looked pale and sick. "About Carol," he said. His lip was trembling.
Frowning, I said, "Are you still chasing her? Listen, Fred, leave off the Galahad bit and go out and get yourself made. It'll do you a world of good. Build up your self-confidence. And-"
"Jeff, shut up and listen to me."
"Okay. I'm listening."
"I need help. I know, you don't want to be a go-between, but you've got to do this for me. Or else I'm likely to kill myself. Or join the Army or something."
I looked at him without saying anything for a moment. He seemed dead serious. "Go on."
"I-I love Carol, Jeff. I want to marry her. Not now, but as soon as we graduate."
"Have you told her this?"
He reddened. "No-I can't work up the nerve."
"And you want me to do your proposing for you?"
He shook his head miserably. "No, that's not what's worrying me."
"Chuck Gordon?"
Fred nodded. "He calls her pretty often. And she's got a date with him for Friday night. Jeff, I'm scared. They say Gordon has never failed to seduce a girl he sets out to seduce."
"And you think he's going to steal your fair one's maidenhead?"
"Don't joke, Jeff. He's liable to. Hell get her drunk and rape her while she doesn't know what's happening, while she's too drunk to resist-"
"It isn't rape if she doesn't resist."
"Jeff, please be serious!"
"Okay. What do you want out of me in this caper?"
He licked his lips. "I'm supposed to meet her at half past three in front of Prexy's, and talk things over with her. But I'm afraid I'm going to mess things up. So I want you to meet her instead."
"Me?" I yelped.
"Yes. You're a friend of Chuck's. You can tell her what sort of guy he is. And maybe you can put in a good word for me too. Sort of hint to her that I'll be all broken up if she lets herself get seduced by Gordon."
I was so disgusted I could have spit at him. Of all the mealy-mouthed stunts, getting a third person to put the smear on Gordon and play John Alden for Fred! Fred saw the anger in my eyes and grabbed my arm. "Please, Jeff, say you'll do it. For the sake of our friendship."
"Fred, you're a spineless slime."
"Maybe I am. But will you talk to her for me?"
I looked down at him from the heights of my new experience and said patronizingly, "Okay, Fred. I'll talk to her. I think you're a fool for not doing it yourself, but I'll help you out."
He Was stickily grateful. I separated myself from him and walked over to the place where Carol was supposed to be. I wondered why Chuck was so persistently pursuing Carol when he had a dozen other girls he could make at will. The moment I raised the question in my mind I knew the answer. The sex club was a good things for guys like me who otherwise would be going frustrated, but a guy like Chuck was skilled in the ways of seduction and looked for chances to practice his skill. There was no challenge in getting Paula Garson to give you a roll in the hay. All you had to do was phone her up. But there was real challenge in pursuing someone like Carol West. If I knew Chuck, he would keep after her until he got what he wanted-which would be a hell of a jolt for Fred and his ideas of marrying. What the hell, though-the least I could do was talk to her for him, anyway.
It was one of those fluky hot summery days that New York sometimes gets in the first week of October, and Carol looked like springtime personified as she stood waiting for Fred to come along. She was wearing Bermudas and a white blouse open at the collar, and she had some paperback books under her arm, and her golden hair trailed in the gentle breeze.
I walked up and said, "Hello. I'm Jeff Burnside. I think we've met before."
"You're Fred's friend, aren't you? I'm waiting for Fred right now."
"He just phoned me and said he couldn't make it," I lied glibly. "He has to see his faculty advisor and he probably won't be free till five. But he asked me to come over and meet you. There were some things he wanted me to tell you."
"Oh?"
We started to stroll. As it happened, we were strolling in the direction of my hotel. I said, "Fred's awfully stuck on you, Carol."
"He's a nice boy."
If I had repeated her words to Fred in just that tone, it would have left a mark on his soul for life.
"He's pretty serious about you," I said.
"I know. He can't seem to bring himself to tell me out loud, but I know he feels pretty strongly about me. It's too bad, too."
"You mean you don't feel the same way about him?"
"Well, it's hard to say. He's nice, and all that, but he's kind of young. So am I. It's too early for me to be tying myself up with just one boy."
"Is that why you made a date with Chuck Gordon?"
She shrugged. I could see she was displeased at the amount of personal poking I was doing. "Chuck's-well-interesting."
"You know why Chuck is dating you, don't you?"
"I suppose so. I suppose he wants to sleep with me.
"That's what Fred's afraid of."
"It isn't any of Fred's business what I do!" she shot back sharply. "Not that I intend to sleep with Chuck Gordon-or with anyone else."
Smiling, I said, "Chuck's a dangerous boy to fool around with. I happen to know him very well. He takes seduction as seriously as some guys take poker or baseball or politics."
"I'm not afraid of him," Carol said. We were practically in front of my hotel building. And I could see I was getting nowhere with this conversation. She knew her own mind, or thought she did, and was willing to take her chances on being able to fend Chuck off. I hated to tell Fred this, but he was nowhere with Carol West. She said, "It's been very nice talking to you, Jeff, and-"
And just then fate took a hand. At least the sky opened and the most godawful cloudburst cracked over our heads, and rain started coming down in sheets. In half a second we were both soaked through. Carol gave a little shriek. She wasn't wearing any jacket or anything, and her blouse was drenched, and she tried to protect her books against getting wet by huddling them against her chest and arms.
Lightning-like, I grabbed her by the wrist and said, "Come on. I live right in here."
I pulled her along, helter-skelter, and within seconds we were in the lobby of my hotel. But those few seconds had done the job. We were both drenched. I looked around at the courtyard. It wasn't raining cats and dogs outside, it was raining lions and wolves.
"You can't go back out into that," I said. "How about coming upstairs for a while until it lets up?"
I guess she wanted to prove that if she could resist Chuck Gordon she could also manage to survive entering a college man's hotel room without chaperone. "We might as well," she said.
The elevator was right there. We rode upstairs and I let her in. Her blonde hair was plastered to her forehead and her shirt was so soaking wet I could see right through it. She had a bra on underneath, of course, so there wasn't anything indecent involved, but it was pleasant to look at anyway.
"I guess these books are ruined," she said. "Damn-I just bought them." She shook her head, spraying water around. "And my blouse is going to be ruined too if I don't wring it out."
I gave her a towel. "Here. I'll turn my back. Let me know when you're decent."
I turned around. But as it happened, I had a perfectly good view of her in the mirror. I watched as she took her blouse off-looking carefully at me to make sure my back remained turned, but never thinking I could see her in the mirror-and wrung it out carefully on the windowsill. As she bent forward, the bra fell away from her breasts a little, showing me firm creamy globes. I had to admit she was a beautiful girl, almost too beautiful, in a china-doll sort of way. The sight of her breasts did something to me. My breath started to come hard. I saw flashes of light in front of my eyes. The caveman in me woke up.
I turned around.
She looked up, startled. "You said-"
"You're beautiful, Carol. Absolutely beautiful." I took a step toward her. My hands groped for her breasts. I put my mouth over hers. That was when she socked me.
CHAPTER TEN
It was the closest I had ever come to rape. I was completely out of control, and her wild swing with open palm only maddened me further. In another second I would be ripping her clothes off and forcing her legs apart. She hit me again, harder, and I let go of her.
She was staring at me in complete horror. I took a couple of steps backward. My jaw sagged open.
"Hell-I'm sorry," I mumbled. "I don't know what happened to me-"
She was still glaring at me. Then her legs gave way and she folded up on the bed, huddled in my pillow, sobbing like a wild woman.
I went over to her and put my hand lightly on her shoulder. "Carol, for God's sake, it's all right now. I just sort of went off my rocker for a moment. I-"
"Don't touch me," she croaked.
I felt like I was worth about two counterfeit Confederate cents. I stepped back. "Listen to me, Carol. I couldn't help myself, honest. I caught sight of you in the mirror and it sort of drove me nuts. But it's okay now. I'm sorry I went after you like that. Won't you believe I'm sorry?"
She got up and unrolled her wrung-out blouse, not even bothering to ask me to turn my back. I could see she was flushed and angry and a little afraid of me. She slipped into the blouse and buttoned it up. It was still pretty wet and transparent. She tucked the blouse flaps into her shorts. I looked at her and, angry as she was, I had to admit she was the best-looking girl I had ever seen. And pure. I couldn't blame Fred for getting so hipped on her. I was getting pretty hipped on her myself.
"Do you mind if I leave now?" she said.
I looked out the window. The rain had slacked off some, but it was still coming down pretty hard. "Hell, Carol, you can't go out in that."
"I can't stay here and let you paw me, either," she retorted. "Will you get out of my way or do I have to scream for help?"
"At least let me lend you a jacket."
"I don't want anything of yours."
"Don't be silly, Carol." I took one of my old jackets from the closet and handed it to her.
"You'll only be asking for pneumonia if you go out without a jacket. Here, take it."
She ignored it. I dumped it down on the bed. In my most sincere, anguished-sounding voice I said, "Carol, I know you re sore at me. Hell knows I acted like a chump-promising Fred I'd talk to you, and then making a pass at you that way. But honest, that wasn't what I planned to do. I didn't even dream you'd ever be coming up here. The way it happened, it happened all at once, you looking so wet and pretty-"
"If you're trying to apologize, skip it." But I could see she looked less angry.
"Do me at least one favor," I pleaded. "Don't say a word about this to anyone. Not to Fred and not to Chuck either. Will you?"
"It isn't the sort of thing I'd want to spread all over campus, you know."
"Fred would die. Positively die if he knew that his best friend had-had-well, you know."
"All right," she said coldly. "I won't breathe a word. Now can I go?"
"Take my jacket. You don't even have to give the damn thing back. It's an old one anyway. Just throw it away when you get back to your room. But I don't want you to get any wetter out there."
Frowning, she picked up the jacket and put it on. It fit her about as well as a medium size tent. Despite herself, she grinned at the way it enveloped her. "I'll return it tomorrow. Only I'll remember to wear my chastity belt when I come over."
"I'm really not that sort of fellow at all," I protested. "Hell, put yourself in my spot-you're me and there's a beautiful girl all wet and practically naked in your room-"
"I'd be a little better at resisting temptation. Did I hit you very hard?"
"I'll live."
"Too bad. I was trying to break your jaw." She pulled the jacket close around her and slipped her damp books into the pockets. "Good-by, Mr. Burnside. And thanks for a very pleasant half hour's company."
I looked down at my feet. I felt like an absolute worm. She opened the door and I glanced up, and it seemed like she was smiling a little, but when she saw me looking she remembered she was supposed to be angry with me, and her eyes once again took on the icy glare of the outraged virgin. Then she left, slamming the door.
I was so annoyed at myself I kicked my chair over, hurting my toe. I had sure made a bungle of things. Instead of pleading Fred's cause I had simply made a clumsy pass and gotten myself belted.
She wouldn't stay angry forever, I knew. It wasn't altogether my fault-the circumstances had been pretty damn provocative-and anyway any girl, no matter how pure she keeps herself, is secretly flattered by the thought that the sight of her bare shoulders and the upper couple of inches of her mammaries can make a great big male lose his head completely. Still and all, I hadn't exactly acted like a gentleman. If Fred found out he might easily try to kill me-or himself; and if Chuck found out, he would split a gut laughing. It would strike him as tremendously funny that I could get a girl into my room, get her to take her blouse off, and then get nothing out of the encounter but a couple of good socks across the face.
I righted the chair and glowered at myself in the mirror for a moment, rubbing the red places where she had slapped me. I didn't feel much like a man of the world just then. I felt like a ten-year-old who had tried to grab a kiss and failed.
The next morning on campus I ran into Chuck Gordon. "What's the news from your friend Fred?" he asked.
"Why?" I said cautiously.
"Just curious," he said. "I've made a date with his heart-throb for tomorrow night."
"I know. He told me. He's scared green. Why the hell do you have to go around despoiling virgins, Chuck?"
"It's my hobby. Anyway, if I don't do it someone else will-sooner or later."
"Do you think you'll make her tomorrow night?"
"Quien sabe? Personally, I doubt it," he said. "I get the impression that it's going to take a prolonged campaign to get that girl where I want her. But I can be patient. It isn't as though I'll be going without in the meanwhile."
I wanted to tell him that Carol knew how to use her hands in the defense of her honor, but I figured he might as well find that out for himself. "I still wish you'd leave her alone, Chuck."
"Why? You interested?"
To some extent I was. But I didn't tell him that. "Lambert's all hipped on her. He wants to marry her. But he won't if you get to her first."
"He won't anyway," Chuck said. "She thinks he's a nothing. I'll just be saving him the trouble of mooning over her for the next three years." Changing the subject quickly, he said, "How are other things working out for you? I hear you slept over at Paula Garson's."
"News travels fast, eh?"
"I was there the next night, and she told me." He grinned. "Paula's bringing a girl Saturday night to fill one of the vacant slots. Soph named Bea Mannheim. Paula swears she's cherry."
"Really?"
"The initiation ought to be some fun. See you around, kid." He socked me on the arm and vanished in the general direction of the Daily office.
I spent the next half hour wondering just how and why a virgin girl would be requesting admission, to the club. No doubt she was ugly as sin, I figured. But that wasn't too likely, though. Every candidate had to get approved in advance by two seniors of the opposite sex, and if this Mannheim looked like a dog she'd be thumbed down.
I went over to the library to get some books. Marge was there. I gave her the high-sign, and she returned it as I sat down.
"Coming Saturday?" I whispered.
"You bet. How's it been?"
"Not bad. I've only visited one of the members, though. Too much else to do."
"I've really been busy," Marge said, grinning. "The first night it was Felks and Hammer. Then Byris and Gordon on Monday, Carter on Tuesday, Dill Wednesday, Mason and Haberman last night-"
"A full schedule, huh?"
"It gets a little strenuous. But fun, anyway."
I was tempted to invite her over to my apartment for a little quiet smooching this afternoon, but I decided against it, even though she had plenty of time before her date with Burchard in the evening. I just wasn't in the mood. Hell of a thing that when sex is so easily available it takes a little of the zing out of it.
I holed up in my room and got caught up with my studies. All this sex was starting to wear me down a little, but I figured it was as good a way to get worn out as any there was. Saturday came around, finally. Marge phoned up in the middle afternoon, and I agreed to meet her for dinner-dutch treat, she insisted-and then we would go down to the clubhouse together for the weekly orgy.
The restaurant was crowded, the service was slow, and it wasn't until nearly eight o'clock that we reached the clubhouse. I gave the special ring that I had been taught, someone rang back, and we went inside.
Everyone else was there, in various states of nudity. Chuck came up to me wearing only a top hat and whispered, "You're missing all the fun. They started initiating that new girl twenty minutes ago."
We scooted upstairs and dumped our clothes-we were old hands at this now-and hurried down. The initiation was taking place in the library, and everyone was clustered round watching eagerly. Don Hammer himself was conducting the initiation. He was a lucky guy, too, because that entitled him to the privilege of being the first to make love to the Mannheim girl.
She was sitting in the middle of the floor, stark naked. There was something pathetic about her.
She was a very pale girl of maybe eighteen and a half, on the slim side, with small pointed breasts and narrow hips. Her face was pretty. She had the glassy-eyed look of someone who had fortified his or her courage with a good deal of alcohol, and she seemed dazed by the idea of being naked in front of this whole multitude let alone being fondled in such a lascivious way by a strange and nude male. Undoubtedly she was a virgin.
I sidled up to Paula Garson, who as sponsor was watching intently, and whispered, "I hear she's green. What's the story?"
"She's in one of my classes. She was moaning that there wasn't any excitement in her life, and I figured I'd let her know how to get some. First time ever that a girl who was a virgin applied."
I felt a little disgusted. Hammer was trying out every trick in the book, but she was resisting without too much trouble, since she was so inexperienced anyway that Hammer's caresses didn't have much effect. Burchard was timing it and he said quietly, "Three minutes left."
The three minutes passed quickly. And then came the event that everyone was waiting for. Burchard said, "The candidate will now submit to her initiator and two of the witnesses, and will then be welcomed to membership."
She smiled hesitantly. Hammer knelt over her, then embraced her. She moaned as he went to her, and I knew it must have hurt. It was the most sadistic damn thing I had ever seen. But I guess she was asking for it.
I turned to the girl on my left-Claire Reynolds, the redheaded sophomore who had been initiated the week before. She was wearing a pair of high-heeled shoes and nothing else. She seemed a little uncomfortable about what was going on.
I said to her, "You don't want to watch this any more, do you?"
"Not very much."
"Let's go get some drinks, then."
She preceded me into the kitchen, wiggling her rear at me. I followed. She was a girl about five feet five, well built and marred only by a nose that was slightly too big. She was a natural redhead, and, I was amused to discover on close inspection, she had a light sprinkling of freckles practically everywhere on her body, including her breasts. For some reason there were none on her rear end. I fondled her buttocks playfully while she mixed the drinks, and said, "How come no freckles here?"
"I used to have them there," she said. She giggled. "They wore off from constant handling."
We sipped at our highballs. "How did you get into this outfit?" I asked.
"Sally Marshall sponsored me. But I was sort of introducted to this kind of thing by Chuck Gordon, last spring." She laughed-a sharp, unfunny laugh. "Until last spring I was a very, very pure girl. Then Chuck took me out and filled me full of bourbon, and next thing I knew I was in the back of his car with my clothes off. That was my first time. It hurt, too. But I learned to like it."
She seemed to have some mild regrets about the whole thing. But her regrets disappeared as the drink went down her throat. I found myself powerfully attracted to her. Only I didn't want it to happen down here, in the middle of the noise and clatter. I led her upstairs, into one of the vacant bedrooms, and we settled down on the bed for a while. It was slow warming her up. But after maybe twenty minutes she started to pant and gasp and whispered, "Oh hurry! Please. Quick!"
I went to her, and it was like touching her body with a live wire. She started to jerk and have the craziest convulsions, but she kept her eyes open all through it. And then suddenly it was finished, over as though the switch had been thrown. She went limp and smiled at me.
"You're the eighth one," she said. "No, the ninth."
"You keep count?"
"Yes. Chuck was the first, and then there was one boy during the summer, and then Chuck again. Then at the initiation last week there was Hal Sharp and Roy Burchard and Ned Carter. Then Jack Beale on Monday, Ted Felks Tuesday, Ned Carter again Wednesday, Byris Thursday, and now you. You were third best. Chuck was the best, and Felks second. You and Burchard are about tied. The boy during the summer wasn't any good at all."
I got the idea from the way this girl made love and from the way she made conversation that she was very mixed up indeed. I suggested that we go back downstairs and mingle a little with the others, and she agreed, so we washed up and rejoined the crew below.
I caught a glimpse of the new girl, Bea Mannheim. Her initiation was over, and she was partially dressed-wearing panties, at least. She looked very pale and she was guzzling a drink. It had obviously been an ordeal for her.
Don Hammer called out, "Attention, everybody! Quiet down! We're going to show some movies now."
Chuck and Burchard rigged up the screen, while Felks put the film in the projector. The rest of us crouched down on the floor to watch. The lights were turned off, and a few giggles went up. I found myself sitting next to Paula Gar-son, and she drew my head back so I was comfortably supported against her great breasts. Considerate of her, certainly.
I figured we were going to see some professional pornographic shots from the club's library. Instead what appeared on the screen was a view of Ellis Dill making love to Sally Marshall, while appreciative onlookers gathered round. Dill let out a surprised yelp. I realized unhappily that the films of last week's initiation were being shown.
Whoever had been taking those films was really devilish. The purpose of the showing was to make the initiates look ridiculous, and in that they succeeded. After finishing with Dill they moved on to me, showing me in succession with Janet, Helene, and Sarah. Don Hammer narrated, making blisteringly witty comments. I wanted to crawl under the couch. There's nothing so completely ego-crushing as having to watch films of yourself doing things that should be private, while the audience roars with delight.
Finally the spotlight turned off me-I was permanently blushing by that time-and the initiations of Claire Reynolds and Marge were shown in part, and then that of Charley Mason. Then the lights went up.
"I could have done without that," I said sourly to Chuck.
"Relax. Everyone goes through it the week after they're initiated. It helps to make you a good sport about everything."
"And I'd love to make some cracks about Hammer-"
"You'll get your chance for that, maybe. You went upstairs with the Reynolds, didn't you? How was it?"
"Interesting."
"She's a weird one, isn't she? Freckles on her belly, yet! But she's unusual."
"Yeah," I said. "Listen, you haven't told me about last night-you and Carol-"
Chuck made an offhand gesture. "I took her to the movies. Then I took her to the Den and she wouldn't drink anything stronger than coke."
"I take it you didn't score."
"You take it correctly," Chuck said without sign of dismay. "But I'm not worried. The longer and harder the chase, the more delightful is the payoff. I'll make her yet. You can bank on that."
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I didn't want to carry on that line of conversation much longer, so I excused myself and headed for the john. While I was in there, I paused to reflect that this club was a pretty damn sadistic outfit. The type of initiation, the showing of the movies afterward-that was just downright sadistic.
But I guessed the reason why. This club was run by the seniors, by Don Hammer and Roy Burchard and company. The juniors just went along with everything, while we sophs were given next to no say in what went on. And I suppose by the time you're a senior and have belonged for three years, good old normal sex can get pretty dull. After all, you've had access to more girls than you could normally take on in a single week, or maybe a month. It's just too much of a good thing.
And so the senior members get jaded by just sleeping around. That's kid stuff to them. They're bored with plain ordinary sex.
So they start fooling around with refinements and novelties. They spend a lot of their time reading the club's pornographic books, brought back from Europe by members who go abroad for a summer, and they get their ideas from that. Instead of just making a girl, they beat her up, or take her on two at a time, or do other things even worse. Sadistic things. They figure out new and complicated settings-submerged in a bathtub, maybe, or hanging by your heels. They watch dirty films. They humiliate the new members by showing them films of the initiation. Tonight must have been a regular old picnic for them, what with Bea Mannheim being a virgin.
And after graduation? Well, by that time they've got nicely developed perverse tastes. Maybe they dabble in a bit of homosexuality, or some other perversion. They've been highly educated, sexually speaking. And isn't that why we go to college-to get educated?
I took a long look in the mirror and saw myself as an aging pervert of thirty or so, and I tell you, it sickened me. I pictured myself balding, with sly uptilted eyebrows and the dark circles of debauchery round my eyes, and a cynical jaded smirk on my face. It was one hell of an image. I closed my eyes and jabbed the balls of my thumbs into them, massaging them, and when I opened my eyes again my own familiar not-very-sophisticated-looking face peered back. That was a relief. But I made up my mind right then and there not to let myself get drawn into all the curious byways of sex that would be offered to me. That way lay perversion. I wanted to stay normal.
Normal. As if it were normal to wander around naked in a houseful of other naked people, who made love whenever the mood seized them.
I heard someone knocking on the bathroom door, and a female voice yelled, "For crissake, hurry up and get out of there!"
"Keep your pants on," I automatically, without realizing it was a pointless thing to say. "I'm com-mg.
I opened the door and Lois Reznik went rushing past me like a whirlwind. She made it as far as the sink and then heaved up royally. I closed the door behind her, cutting off the sounds of retching and upchucking.
Jack Beale was standing just outside, shaking his shaggy head. "I told the dope she'd lose her supper, but she wouldn't listen."
"What was she doing?"
"Mixing her drinks. Gin and scotch and rum and lord knows what else. Hell of a. way to get drunk."
I drifted on through the clubhouse, feeling like a disembodied figure. Flesh everywhere, sweating panting heaving flesh. Bare buttocks quivering across the room, full breasts swinging pendulously in the corner, thighs and hips and shoulders everywhere. Sally Marshall lying drunk on the floor with her head in Lome Byris' lap, singing bawdy songs and waving her glass around. Ellis Dill and Zelda Hughes wrapped into a pretzel on the couch. Hal Sharp, serious-minded and intent, serious-mindedly and intently making it with Sarah Rawlins on the kitchen floor. Don Hammer quietly helping himself to some aphrodisiac or other to get himself ready for another round.
Quite a scene, all right. Nero's orgies couldn't have been much worse. And Nero didn't have a cameraman on hand. We did. Ted Felks, who had been very active earlier in the evening, was quietly filming the whole thing. And Ned Carter crouched near the couch with a tape recorder, holding up the microphone to record for posterity Zelda Hughes' grunts of animal pleasure as Dill brought her to a peak of satisfaction.
Helene Wallace crossed in front of me. She had been upstairs earlier with Les Haberman, and now I noticed purplish bruise marks on her plump buttocks. The skin was red, too, as though she'd been spanked. As I watched, Roy Burchard came up to her and fetched her a lusty swat on the rear. She seemed to tingle with delight, and practically threw herself at him.
I found Chuck standing at my elbow again. "She looks like she's had a strenuous night," I said.
He nodded. "Haberman was letting her have it with the hose upstairs."
"Doesn't she mind?"
"Loves it. Masochist." Chuck shook his head. "First time I made Helene was in my freshman year. Know how? I wasn't even trying. We were walking in the park on a date, and I pinched her behind, just for fun. Guess I pinched her a little too hard or something, because it really plugged her in. She dragged me under a bush and damn near raped me."
I shuddered. I had thought such things were for the textbooks only. But then I realized we were rewriting the textbooks right here.
Lois Reznik had finished heaving now. She was sitting in a corner, looking white and sick. Bea Mannheim, the ex-virgin, was lying near her, out cold. Charley Mason was kneeling over her, trying to bring her to, but she was stony drunk.
Marge came weaving up to me. She'd had quite a load too. Her breath smelled of half a dozen different things. She held me by the shoulders to steady herself, and said in a wobbly voice, "I'm angry at you."
"What for?"
"You've been ignoring me."
"I've been busy," I said.
"You had plenty of time for me once. But now I've got to share you with a dozen other girls."
"And I've got to share you too," I pointed out. "Anyway, it isn't like we were married or anything. We just had one date."
"Hell with that. Come upstairs with me now or I'm gonna be sore at you."
I wasn't going to argue with her about it. Anyway, I was just starting to feel ready for another round. So I let Marge drag me up the stairs and into one of the bedrooms on the upper floor. Two people happened to be occupying the first bedroom we went into, but I don't know who they were, because what they were doing so shocked me that I backed right out again, pulling Marge with me. I was still a small-town boy at heart, I guess.
We went into the adjoining room and threw ourselves down, and Marge pulled me over on top of her so my body was pillowed on her softness, and I felt the hard bones of her hips pressing against my hip-bones, and the soft bulks of her breasts spreading out against my chest. Then she wrapped herself around me like a carnivorous amoeba, and I thrust my tongue deep into her mouth, and we became one.
After that we must have gone to sleep in each other's arms. I woke up a lot later, and found myself still snuggled up with Marge.
The only thing I was wearing was my wrist watch. I looked at it. It said ten minutes to six.
I got up. Marge muttered something unintelligible and reached out for me, but quickly subsided back into sleep. I went tiptoeing out of the bedroom to have a look around.
The place looked, of course, as if a cyclone had hit it Cigarette ashes and empty glasses were everyplace, the couches were a mess, some of the chairs were turned over, books were scattered. Don Hammer, Ned Carter, and Ted Felks were the members who actually lived here fulltime, and I knew they had somebody come in once a week to clean the place up. I wondered what sort of ideas their cleaning-woman formed about the sort of things that went on at the weekend parties.
There were plenty of stragglers. Felks sat on the couch, awake and smoking a cigarette, looking down in a glassy-eyed kind of way at the sleeping form of Janet Bryce. He was stroking her breasts, but she was out like a light. He nodded sleepily to me as I appeared. I wondered how in hell anyone could smoke a cigarette at this hour.
"Morning."
"Morning," I said. "Corpses all over the place, huh?"
"Looks that way."
Bea Mannheim was still crumpled in the same corner she had been in five hours before. She was breathing, which relieved me. But she must have had an awful lot of alcohol in her system to be so stoned.
Ned Carter and Paula Garson were asleep on the couch. Lois Reznik lay face-down on the kitchen floor. Ellis Dill was curled up in an armchair.
"How come you're still up?" I asked Felks.
"Just never bothered to fall asleep."
"Did I miss anything after one o'clock?"
"Some dancing, that was all. Maybe you wouldn't have liked it. It was pretty raw stuff."
"Am I supposed to be a puritan?" I asked, a little miffed.
"I get the feeling you don't altogether enter into the spirit of our little group, Burnside. The dancers were Sally and Janet and Lome Byris. They did some fancy stunts." Felks closed his eyes, remembering. "That Byris. If I didn't know better, I'd say he was a fairy, he dances so I started to reply, but I saw that Felks had slipped off into sleep on his final word. Shrugging, I moved on, looking around the place. Going to a front window, I peered out. Gray dawn was rising. The streets looked misty. Nobody was out there.
I didn't feel sleepy at all, not after having caught three or four hours of solid shut-eye. Going back upstairs, I looked in on Marge-she was still in dreamland, curled up now in a fetal position with her thumb in her mouth, for gosh sakes-and went on into the bedroom where I had parked my clothes so many hours before. Don Hammer and Claire Reynolds were occupying the bed in that room, and they were asleep. I moved around quietly, trying to get dressed without waking them up. But as I started to pull my trousers on I got the impression I was being watched, and I glanced around to see Claire looking at me and grinning.
"Good morning," she whispered.
"Morning."
"Leaving?"
"Why not?"
"Come to bed," she said. "I feel like having some fun, and Don's too drunk to wake up."
I shook my head. "Go back to sleep."
She pouted. "Spoil sport!"
"Trouble with you is, you're too greedy." I zipped up my fly. "Haven't you had enough for one night, anyway?"
"I never have enough," she said with a smirk.
I didn't answer her. I had had enough debauchery for one night.
Maybe she had, too, whatever she said. Because by the time I finished dressing, she had gone back to sleep. I tiptoed downstairs, past all the huddled sleepers, and out into the morning. The air was cool and bracing, and Broadway was practically deserted, except for a few working people like the newsstand men busily getting ready for the sale of Sunday newspapers a couple of hours from now.
I was in a sort of philosophical mood as I took the bus back to 214th Street. I was wondering where all this was getting me, this frantic hugging and kissing and sleeping around. Was this what I really wanted? I tried to think back to the Jeff Burnside of the summer, the Jeff Burnside who had ridden that train down from Hudson telling himself that this was the year finally to make it with women. I had succeeded beyond my wildest dreams. Chiquita, Marge, Helen, Janet, Sarah, Paula, Claire, all in less than a month. And, if my virility held out, there were still seven more members I had access to, plus two other girls yet to be enrolled.
So I was really sowing my wild oats. Yet I felt subtly disappointed. I was like the man who had waited all his life to have a taste of hundred-year-old brandy, and who, when he finally got some, drank an entire fifth all at once and got sick.
That was sort of my position. I was getting an overdose of sex. But, I told myself, there could be worse fates.
What about the future, though? I wasn't going to be nineteen forever. Some day I was going to get married, and I would have the memory of all those orgies in the back of my mind. I realized that I would probably insist on marrying a virgin. Why? Because that was the only way I could be sure I'd be getting a girl who hadn't been had by fifteen or twenty other guys. I knew it was an inconsistent attitude for me to have, but nobody ever said you had to be consistent about your sex life.
So you see I was in a land of introverted mood when I reached the hotel. I let myself into my room and sank down on my unbroken bed, and thought about things for a while. Along toward seven, I got up and went into the kitchen and brewed some coffee. I didn't feel like sleeping at all.
Then I wrote that long-overdue letter to my folks. I told them about my classes, as best as I could-I guess I didn't pay much attention to my profs this year, having other things on my mind-and I mentioned that my social life was coming along okay, which was one hell of an understatement in my book. Then I added, casually-like, By the way, I'm seriously considering moving out of the dormitories and into one of the hotels in the neighborhood. The rent is about the same, and I'd be able to save money by cooking for myself. You see, I find dorm life quite stultifying; there is no privacy at all, people keep barging into my room at all hours of the day and night, and there is continual roistering. I feel that by moving out of such a noisy environment I would be able to study more satisfactorily.
After writing that sentence I stared at it for a long while, wondering where I had found the brass to write such a glib fib.
I had already decided to break the news slowly to my parents about living off-campus. Maybe in the next letter I would be considering it more seriously, and then-unless they howled real loud-in the letter after that I would tell them I had actually moved, and give them the address I had been living at all along. At least that way I would have one less he to keep up.
I finished up the letter with a few mushy sentiments, scribbled, Your son, Jeffrey at the bottom, sealed it, and stuck a stamp on it. So much for filial devotion, I thought. I carried the letter out to the mail chute near the elevator and dumped it in.
By this time morning was well under way, and it looked like by way of being a really nice morning. Too nice to spend in my room. I scooped up my Psych text and the Contemporary Civilization readings, and went downstairs and over to Riverside Park. I curled up there on the still-damp grass, and studied.
The sun was warm but mild. By the time I finished my Contemp Civ readings, it was past nine and the park was starting to fill up with young mothers out for Sunday strolls with their baby carriages. Just from force of habit I ogled them. Some of them were real lookers. They were twenty-two or twenty-three and even though they had kids they didn't look like wives yet, but like pretty young girls.
I wondered if I'd ever get married. I tried to picture myself, a successful doctor or writer of video scripts, and my wife going out for a Sunday stroll with the baby while I lounged around upstairs in my duplex apartment, sipping coffee, and reading the papers.
It wasn't a bad picture. The only thing missing was the face of the wife. I tried to picture myself married to Marge. It wouldn't be so bad, finding those knockers in your bed night after night, but eventually I was going to get bored with mere lumps of mammary flesh, and there wasn't much else to Marge than that.
Besides, it was going to be embarrassing to go to alumni reunions and such. "You know my wife Marge, don't you?" I might say to someone. "The former Marge Halloran, Chesley '65."
"Sure I know her," almost anyone might reply. "I made her in the spring of '63-or was it the fall of '62, Marge? I'm starting to forget little details. But we did it in the back of my dad's '59 Chevy, that much I remember-"
That would be a hell of a thing.
My thoughts rambled by a natural progression to Carol West. She would make a nice wife for somebody. Clean and well turned out and intelligent and studious, and without any sordid past to haunt you. I pictured Carol and me out for a stroll on West End Avenue on a Sunday, pushing a big baby carriage. Twins, yet. "Dr. and Mrs. Jeffrey Burnside." I liked the sound of that. "Mrs. Carol Burnside." That had a nice ring to it, too.
Then I remembered that a) I had mortally offended Carol and wouldn't even be able to get her vote for dogcatcher, let alone her signature on a marriage license application, and b) I hardly knew her and had never dated her, and c) that Chuck Gordon was eventually going to seduce her and ruin her life for her.
The three thoughts all at once made me a little sick. My private fantasy session ended abruptly. I was back in the real world.
I looked down at the open textbook. My head started to ache. All of a sudden I felt lousy all over.
CHAPTER TWELVE
During the next couple of weeks, things just drifted on, and I let myself be carried uncomplainingly along with the tide. It was nearing the end of October, and the weather was starting to get chilly. A cold wind ripped up out of the river now, every time I came down my street. Winter was setting in fast, though there still might be as much as a month yet before it got uncomfortably cold.
Every Saturday night there was a big party at the clubhouse. The second week in October another sophomore girl was initiated, name of Beth Sidney, a smoky-eyed little burnette who, they said had had an illegitmate child in her high school days and had given the kid away for adoption. Looking at her, I was willing to believe it. Some of the strangest sorts get into Chesley, which is supposed to be so damn exclusive.
At the same meeting two classmates of mine made the grade, Nat Marks and Mike Chase. I didn't know either of them except by sight. That filled up the male contingent for the year, but left one vacancy on the female side, since Helene Wallace had not yet found any Chesley soph she cared to sponsor for membership.
By my fifth regular meeting I had achieved a complete circuit, having slept with all of the female members. Some were hot stuff, some not. Bea Mannheim struck me as absolutely cold, scared stiff, when I made it with her. She submitted, but I could tell her heart wasn't in it and that she was wishing she hadn't gotten mixed up in this whole thing. Beth Sidney, on the other hand, was so goddam passionate that she left me far behind. I made a mental note to leave her for the others, after this.
It was a little funny sleeping with the senior girls. I mean, because they were so much older. But they didn't seem to mind. If anything, they were as happy to be making it with someone new. Two of them, Zelda Hughes and Lois Reznik, impressed me as being screwballs. They got drunk and usually sick at every meeting, and they seemed about as mixed up as people could get. Zelda was twenty-three, almost.
Sometimes I made dates during the week and had girls stay over at my apartment. Nora Sands did that, and Betty Childers, and Joan Donalds. It caused all kinds of confusion for the other people in my residence section, to see me eating breakfast with different girls all the time. They didn't dare say anything to me about it, naturally, but I could tell they were puzzled. And the Chinaman, Mr. Szu, kept looking at me as if he wanted to come right out and ask me how many concubines I really had, but I never heard him say a word, not even hello. He just watched with his beady little eyes.
I figured sooner or later the staying-the-night bit would get me in trouble, and finally it did, in a way. It happened the morning after Betty Childers slept over. I ought to describe Betty, because I haven't done it yet. She was a junior, medium height, very dark complexion, almost olive-skinned, jet-black hair. There was something pantherish about her, except for her morals, which were strictly of the reptilian order (that isn't an original phrase; I got it out of a Henry Miller book in the club library.) She was tremendously thin-hipped but had big breasts, which gave her a top-heavy look.
Well, she had spent the night with me, and it had been a pretty exhausting night. Morning comes, and there's a knock on the door. I'm sleeping next to the wall, trying to pretend it isn't morning yet.
Betty said, "Should I answer it?"
"Mumph," I grunted, without making myself any clearer.
Betty must have taken that for a yes, because she got out of bed and pranced to the door in her birthday suit. I heard the door open, and then I heard a little strangled scream, and I sat up and opened my eyes.
Betty was standing stark mother-naked at the door, and old Miss Strauss, the maiden seamstress from the backroom, was standing there blinking myopically, and Betty had her bare bazoom shoved practically into Miss Strauss's face. Miss Strauss muttered something like, "Well, I never," and turned and stumped away.
"She said to tell you someone left the refrigerator door open last night and a lot of food got spoiled," Betty reported. "She wanted to know if it was you."
I goggled at Betty. "That's a hell of a way to answer a knock on the door. You could have put a robe on, at least. Hell, it might have been my mother out there!"
"If your mother knocked on your door and a girl opened it up," Betty said, "would it make a damn bit of difference whether or not the girl had clothes on?"
"That isn't the point. Miss Strauss knows I bring girls into the room. But she doesn't expect to have them come to the door in the buff."
"The old coot probably left the refrigerator door open herself," Betty said. "Just so she'd have an excuse to knock on your door first thing in the morning and get a look at who you were sleeping with. Well, I gave her a good look. She got her knock's worth."
We let the discussion drop there. But I knew there would be repercussions, and I was right.
Lunchtime, when I stopped off in the office to pay my week's rent, the baldheaded old lecher who runs the hotel leered up at me and said, "We been getting some bad reports about you, Burnside. Very bad."
"What kind of reports?"
"Girls in the room overnight."
"Listen," I said with a sigh, "if those two old spinisters Rooksby and Strauss are making up stories-"
"I don't think they're making them up, Burnside. Strauss came down here all in a dither and a flap around half past nine and said she knocked on your door to tell you something, and a stark naked hussy answered. You know anything about any stark naked hussies in your room last night, Burnside."
"Now, hold on-"
"And they say you've got girls overnight two or three times a week. Different girls. Kid, you must be some lover."
I went red. "If those old bats would mind their own business-"
"They don't know what minding their own business means." He lowered his voice. "Listen here, now, Burnside. I don't give a copper plated damn if you're getting made up there twenty-five hours a day. But use some sense, huh? Don't let your women go running around the hall naked-"
"They don't."
"Well, Strauss seems to think they do. Tell your girls to stay in the room. Try to get them out pretty early in the morning, too. Be subtle about your sleeping around, that's all I ask. Otherwise-"
"Yes?"
"Well, I'll have to throw you out, you see. I don't want to do it, but if those old witches scream to the cops, and the cops start hanging around here on complaints, the cops are going to find out all sorts of things about this building that I wouldn't want them to know. They're going to find out about that nest of chippies on the third floor, and about you and your girls, and about a lot of other things I don't need to tell you. We could get investigated and maybe fined. I wouldn't want that. So if you keep stirring Strauss and Rooksby up, I'll have to ask you to leave. Got that?"
"I'll try to keep things decent up there," I promised.
"Okay. I don't mean to threaten you, but that's the way it bounces." He winked. "By the way, since you seem to be getting so much, how about lending me a couple of hot phone numbers?"
I looked at the lewd old bastard in disgust. "Aren't they too young for you?"
"Nothing over twelve is too young for me."
"No dice," I said. "I can't help you out. These girls are supplied by Metropolitan University for the use of undergraduates only. No outsiders allowed."
He gasped, and I damn near think he half believed me. It was as good an exit line as any, so I turned and left.
But I knew I had to watch my step from now on. One more complaint and I might be out on my ear.
Luckily, though, there were no more incidents. And Betty was properly contrite when I told her about the trouble she had nearly brought down on me.
And so the weeks passed. One week we had visitors who were in town for the Cornell-Metropolitan football game. They were members of the Cornell chapter of our little group, and were staying for the weekend at the clubhouse-a girl and two fellows. The girl was very much in demand at the party that weekend, but I managed to get hold of her for a half hour or so. She was quite torrid-a sultry redhead (originally brunette, though) with what I would call fluid-drive action. Smooth, man. And of unlimited capacity. She took on all fifteen of us during the course of the party, and was still hungry for more when morning came around. We were so impressed that Chuck and Hal Sharp tried to talk her into transferring to Chesley, but she wasn't keen on the idea, and when the Cornell guys found out they were horrified. "We don't try to steal your silverware," they yelled. "You stop trying to steal Alice!" But it was all in good fun.
Some time along in here, we had midterm examinations. Followed by midterm marks. My highest mark was a B minus, in Psych, and they trailed all the way off to a D Plus in Zoology. In short, I wasn't doing so well. I was profoundly glad that midterm marks aren't made a permanent part of the record or sent home to parents. But I knew I was going to be in hot water, and plenty of it, if things kept going this way. You don't get into medical school with a bunch of Cs and Ds. You don't even get into the fifth-rate medical schools, let alone the good ones like P&S and Harvard and Cornell. And my parents had the notion that I was going to be a doctor.
The way I was going, though, I might have trouble being a street-sweeper. I knew what the problem was. I was studying maybe half an hour or an hour a night, instead of three or four. And weekends were just one long orgy. My stamina wasn't enough to see me through both a hyperactive sex life and a full program of academic classes. So the classes suffered.
It occurred to me about this time that Chuck was doing very little talking about Carol West. That meant only one thing: that he was getting noplace with her. Otherwise he'd have been spreading the word.
I wasn't seeing much of Fred Lambert-he seemed to be avoiding me, matter-of-fact-but I knew he was still dating Carol now and then. I wondered what the story was. Chuck had had a few dates with Carol, but obviously he hadn't scored.
Finally I asked him about it.
"What goes with you and C.W.?"
Chuck shrugged. "I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that it might tend to damage my reputation as a make-out man."
"Nowheresville, huh?"
"Precisely." He shook his head ruefully. "That girl guards her virginity like it's more precious than the Crown Jewels. I've never seen anyone who could deflect a pass with such unerring skill."
"And yet you keep getting dates?"
"We both find it a challenge," Chuck said. "She enjoys having her defenses tested, and I'm anxious to find out how long it takes to melt an Iron Maiden. And it isn't going to be much longer, either."
His sudden note of confidence, after his previous admissions of failure, caught me off-balance. "Huh? You mean you think that soon-"
"Not 'soon,'" he said, with the smug, cocky little grin that sometimes annoyed me so much. "More accurately, practically at once. I tell you solemnly that before another week has gone by I'll have despoiled that fair maiden of her treasure.
"How?"
Chuck winked. "Never you mind that. Would you care to put a little wager? Say, five bucks that I make her by Sunday?"
"That gives you only two days," I pointed out.
"More than enough time. Five bucks?"
"I hate to take your money, Chuck."
"It's a bet, then?"
"Okay," I said. We shook on it, and Chuck went off toward his class.
I was mystified by his sudden confidence. All along I had been quietly grateful that he had been unsuccessful with Carol, but now I had my worries. It wasn't like Chuck to make a bet on anything but a two hundred percent sure thing. I hoped he wasn't up to something funny. I was pretty sure he wouldn't claim to have made her just to win the bet, but still and all, there was no way I could prove he hadn't-
The matter sat around in the back of my mind and, later that day, when I met Fred Lambert for the first time in a few weeks, things got even stranger.
Fred greeted me distantly. In his eyes I was a sinful person, and he wanted to keep far away from my corrupting influence.
"How's Carol?" I asked. "Still seeing her?"
"Yeah," he said gloomily. "So is Chuck Gordon."
"I know. He still has designs on her virginity, too," I said. "But he doesn't seem to be getting anywhere. Your Carol has strong powers or resistance."
Fred shook his head. "Sooner or later Gordon is going to get what he wants. I know it."
"Why don't you propose to her, then?" I suggested. "Now, while your darling is still virgo Intacta?"
"I can always count on you to say something that's in bad taste, huh, Jeff?" He wrinkled up his face. "You know I can't go getting myself engaged while I'm only a damn sophomore, even if Carol would have me."
"She must like you a little, Fred. She still lets you date her, doesn't she?"
"I'm taking her to the football game tomorrow."
That puzzled me more than somewhat. I happened to know that Chuck Gordon was spending tonight with Marge. And he would be at the orgy tomorrow night from around eight until Sunday morning. So the only time he hadfree to carry out the seduction of Carol West-which he had wagered would be done by Sunday-was tomorrow afternoon. And Carol would be in Fred's company tomorrow afternoon. I couldn't figure it for beans. But I began to think that maybe I stood a pretty fair chance of winning that fiver.
Naturally, I didn't say anything about Chuck's bet to Fred. I may be dense-witted but I'm not malicious. And Fred was suffering enough.
So we just made some more idle chatter, and then I wished him a good time at the football game.
"Thanks. See you around," he said.
"See you around," I echoed.
I spent Friday night and most of Saturday in the library, getting caught up on my studies. The campus was practically deserted on Saturday, with everybody either home for the weekend or else up at Lawrence Field watching the game.
I ate dinner-a light meal, because there were-always refreshments aplenty at the parties-and went down to the brownstone house in the Nineties about half past seven. Giving the special ring on the doorbell, I was admitted by Don Hammer.
"You're early," he said.
"Am I the first one?"
"Not that early. But it's a pretty thin turnout so far."
I went inside. Only about ten members had arrived. Most of them were still fully dressed too, having a few drinks and loosening up before they got down to the serious business of the evening. Dave Rees and Nora Sands were the exceptions, both of them naked and doing a lascivious fox-trot, body against body, while the others watched.
I went into the kitchen. Betty Childers was there, wearing a sweater and nothing else, mixing herself a drink. Just to be friendly, I patted her rear, then slipped my hands up her belly under the sweater and grasped her breasts. They felt like warm, soft mounds of clay in my hands. She leaned back and kissed me.
"Any trouble with the ladies in your section?"
"Not yet. What are you drinking?'
"Bourbon. Want one?"
"You bet."
She mixed me a drink, and I had some and then went upstairs to get out of my clothes. The party had gotten a lot nuder by this time, and Dave and Nora were no longer dancing, but enmeshed on the rug, while the onlookers clapped their hands in rhythm as though it was a hoedown. Dave is on the wrestling team and likes to show off his muscles in fancy positions.
People kept arriving, and the ones who were there kept going upstairs to get undressed. I had learned, by this time, that the ideal arrangement was to take on two girls per party, one at the beginning and one at the end of the evening, and to do nothing worse than neck the rest of the time. I had already picked out my two girls for tonight-Janet Bryce and Sally Marshall. They were two of the best lookers in an organization of good-looking girls, and I hadn't had either of them for a long while. I found Janet unoccupied and asked her if she had made any arrangements for the first part of the evening. She hadn't, so we nestled into an armchair together and began a little preliminary petting.
By way of making conversation she said, "Looks like almost everyone's here already."
"Pretty near? Who's missing? Chuck Gordon's not here, and Lois-"
Then I frowned. Chuck not here? Oh, oh! Maybe-though it was unthinkable-he had decided to skip the session tonight and concentrate on making Carol West. Or maybe he would drop in later, with news of his conquest. By, by, five bucks, I thought.
And at that precise moment the doorbell rang. Ned Carter buzzed back.
The door opened and Chuck Gordon came in, waving a cheery greeting to everybody.
With him was Carol West. And she was so drunk she could hardly walk straight.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
It was about as probable as if he'd walked in with the Queen of England on his arm. And just as shocking. I gawped in openmouthed becrogglement.
The entire room grew silent. People stared at each other. I felt curiously ashamed of my nakedness and of the naked girl curled up on my lap.
Janet said, "I know that girl. She's a sophomore named Carol West."
"And not the sort of girl to be coming here, either," I added.
Chuck stepped into the middle of the room, leading Carol by the hand. Carol looked like a shambling zombie. Her eyes were not only glassy, they might have been beads. Her face was set in a rigid, mechanical doll's smile. Her arms hung limply, as though they were strung to her body by wires.
She didn't look merely drunk. She looked completely helpless.
Drugged? Hypnotized? I wouldn't put anything past Chuck Gordon.
Chuck grinned broadly and said, "Ladeez and gentlemen, I have the honor to announce my flame for the evening, Miss Carol West, Chesley '65."
Roy Burchard said irritably, "You ought to know better than to bring strangers in here, Chuck."
"Have no fears. The little lady is sworn to secrecy. Besides, I assure you, she's in no condition to reveal our secret mysteries. None whatever! Furthermore, let me assure you," he went on in that same phony ringmaster's voice, "the little lady is a total novice to the sexual arts, and promises to give us all some rare entertainment this evening." Chuck's gaze came to rest on Helene Wallace. "Helene, would you be good enough to fetch two bourbon-and-waters, one for me and one for the little lady?"
Breasts jiggling, Helene went obediently into the kitchen to mix the drinks. Chuck eased Carol down in a vacant armchair. She sat there like a puppet temporarily placed at rest. Her eyes were open, but she wasn't seeing us. I was getting to feel very uneasy about this whole business.
"Excuse me," I said to Janet. "I want to find out what's going on."
"What do you mean?"
"I want to know how Chuck persuaded that girl to come here. She isn't the type."
Janet moved over, letting me get up, and I walked across the room to the corner where Carol was sitting, Chuck standing next to her chair. I remembered that only a few short weeks ago this girl had been in my room and I had made a simple little pass at her, only kissing her and squeezing her breasts a little, and she had practically had hysterics. Now here I was walking toward her absolutely in the nude, and she didn't even notice. She just sat there smiling. She was about as animated as a stuffed museum specimen.
Chuck was talking to Claire Reynolds. I took hold of his arm and pulled him around.
"Hello, Burnside," he said. "Surprised?"
"You damn well bet I'm surprised." I glanced at Carol. "Have you won your bet yet?"
"Not yet," Chuck said. "I figured I'd win it publicly, tonight. That way you can't claim that I'm lying. I'll win it right before your eyes.
I stared straight into his eyes. Snake's eyes, they were. My Adam's apple bobbed nervously a couple of times. I said, "What the hell did you do to her?"
He folded his arms. "We didn't agree on any limiting conditions. I didn't say she had to be sober when she was seduced."
"But she's too smart to get this drunk. Anyway, she had a date with Fred Lambert for today. Fred told me so himself."
A thin smile played on Chuck's thin lips. "Yes, that's right. Lambert had a date with her for this afternoon. He took her to the football game. But Lambert hadn't made any concrete arrangements for this evening, you see. And since I had gone to the game stag, I met Carol during halftime while Fred was getting refreshments, and I persuaded her to ditch Fred and go out for dinner with me after the game."
My blood pressure started to rise. The dirty louse, I thought. "So you went to the game alone, planning to spirit Carol away afterward?"
"That's right."
"Okay, then. So you spirited her away. But what did you do to her afterward?"
"Took her to dinner," Chuck said lightly. "We went to a fancy place in Washington Heights. The check, you might like to know, came to a neat twelve twenty-five plus tip. Which means I'll be down quite a bit on the night, even after I've charged off the five dollars I'D be collecting from you."
"Too bad," I snorted. "But how did you get her-this way?"
Chuck lifted an eyebrow in a genteel, mocking way. "We had some cocktails before dinner. Carol likes cocktails, you know. Then we had wine with the dinner-she didn't want any, but the waiter and I managed to talk her into it. And then, after dinner, I put some of this into her coffee while she was in the ladies' room."
He produced a small tubular vial, carefully stoppered, that contained a pale reddish powder.
Peering at it as though he were showing me a hydrogen bomb, I said, "What is it?"
"An aphrodisiac from the club collection. Guaranteed to turn a female into putty within fifteen minutes. She drank her coffee, I paid the check, and we drove down here. She kept getting sillier and sillier on the way. By now she probably can't tell her tail from her elbow."
" You drugged her?"
"I guess you could call it that."
"Of all the low, mean, filthy, despicable, underhanded, immoral, unethical-"
"Easy on the adjectives, Burnside. All's fair in love and war, ylcnow. Don't make a fuss or you may find yourself getting censured by the members here. You don't have any right to interfere with their amusement."
"And," I snapped hotly, "you don't have any right to take an innocent girl and drug her and-"
"Quiet," Chuck said in a low, menacing voice. "This isn't the place to get moralistic. If you don't like it, go upstairs and don't watch."
Helene appeared, wearing a scanty apron and nothing else. She looked cute as all hell. She was carrying a tray on which were perched two bour-bons-and-water.
"Sorry the drinks took so long, Chuck. There weren't any ice cubes except in the bottom of the freezer, and so I had to-"
"Thanks, sweetheart." Chuck reached out and affectionately pinched Helene's chubby breasts, first one nipple and then the other. I saw her eyes narrow and heard the sharp intake of breath that signaled the fact that Helene was turning on.
Chuck took the drinks from the tray, made a courtly little bow to Helene, and handed one to Carol. She took it acquiescently enough.
"Drink it, my dear," Chuck commanded. A regular goddam Svengali.
Helene rubbed herself up against me. Chuck had aroused her tremendously with his two little pinches, and she wanted to satisfy herself with anyone handy. "Jeff," she murmured. "Let's go upstairs for a while. I want you."
"Not now, Helene," I said, shaking my head. "I want to see what happens down here."
"But-"
"No."
She looked at me a long moment, not angrily but just disappointedly, and walked away. I glanced to my left and saw her talking urgently to Hal Sharp, and evidently Sharp agreed to give her what she wanted, because they went into an adjoining room. I pitied Helene. She was so high-strung that even a friendly pinch could send her spinning off into love-hunger.
Don Hammer came up and said to Chuck, "You know, this girl isn't eligible to become a member, Gordon. She's got to be sponsored by one of the junior girls-by Helene, as a matter-of-fact."
"I didn't bring her here to join. Just to give us some fun for the night."
"You know that's risky."
"Don't worry, Don. She won't remember a thing that happened to her. " He produced the little vial of reddish powder, and winked.
"Oh, so that's itl' Hammer said. "Okay, then. Fine."
He walked away. My dark expression got darker. Of course, Hammer would be delighted to have anything as foul as this take place.
Chuck bent low over Carol, who looked a lot more animated now that she had had her drink. She was still totally dazed-looking, though. Chuck was talking to her in a low, earnest voice.
Then he looked up, and called out, in his ringmaster's inflection, "Ladeez and gennelmun! I have the honor to announce that Miss Carol West will dance for us-the Dance of the Seven Veils. Following which, Miss West and I will demonstrate the Ceremonial Deflowering of Virgins as practiced on the little-known isle of Congatongal A little music, maestro."
Somebody put a record on the hi-fi-sinuous, twisty bump-and-grind music. Chuck drew Carol to her feet and dragged her out on the middle of the floor. Everybody paid keen attention. I noticed that Helene and Hal Sharp had returned from their quickie. Helene was wearing a smile of satisfaction.
Like a puppet master reaching the climax of his act, Chuck set Carol in motion. She moved jerkily, threatening to topple in a heap several times.
There wasn't a single thing I could do. I stood by the back of the room, watching with the same morbid fascination that I might nave had when watching a public execution. I couldn't cry out, couldn't say that this was all wrong, that this was an unspeakably filthy thing to do. Because I was very much in the minority here. Everybody else was waiting for the fun, waiting to see Carol peel to the buff and then to see Chuck rape her. The look on the faces of the seniors, particularly, was disgusting. Don Hammer and Les Haberman were practically bug-eyed with anticipation. They didn't even look human.
I felt sick. Yet I didn't have the guts to speak up against what was happening, because I knew that if I opened my mouth I might get expelled from the club. And I didn't want that. Whether I liked it or not, I was going to stay a member because I wasn't strong enough to break away from the club.
Carol was wearing a white woolen sweater, a plaid skirt, and warm woolen knee-socks. She went into her crude little dance, eyes fixed on a point a thousand miles in front of her. Guided by suggestions from Chuck, she put her hands on the hem of her sweater, peeled it upward, drew it over her head, tossed it into the corner. A cheer went up. She was wearing a pink bra.
She took a couple more turns around the floor wiggling her hips grotesquely, and started to open her skirt. There was a button on her right hip, and then a zipper. She had some trouble with the button, and nearly fell down. Chuck caught her and deftly flipped the button open. She managed the zipper by herself.
The skirt dropped, sagging over her hips, getting tangled for a second at knee level, then falling to the floor. She stepped out of it, and kicked it into the comer where her sweater had already gone. Another cheer rose, this one even louder.
I was in a cold sweat now, clenching and unclenching my fists, digging my teeth into my lower Hp.
Carol wore only the bra, panties, and the knee-length socks. The panties were so gauzy that when she pirouetted I could see the individual cheeks of her buttocks through them. I practically had to pinch myself to remember that this was the girl who had slapped me for making a pass at her that day.
"Take it off, take it off!" Burchard and Hammer chorused.
On instructions from Chuck, Carol peeled off the socks, one after the other. She tossed one to Burchard, the other to Hammer.
"Take it off!" they yelled. "Take it off!"
I glanced around the room. Everyone was staring fixedly at the drugged girl. I didn't have to guess what was going on in the minds of the fellows, but it was the facial expressions of the girls that amazed me. They weren't sympathetic at all. They were expectant, eager, malicious, anxious for Carol to be humiliated. The ugliest expression of all was on the face of Bea Mannheim, and I knew why. So recently devirginized herself, she was hoping fervently to see another good girl go the way of all flesh and be dishonored right in front of everybody.
Carol's hands were behind her back, now, working the catch of her bra. She was having trouble, but finally she got it open. The cups of the bra slipped from her breasts. She discarded the filmy bit of cloth. Another cheer went up.
Despite myself, I began to get excited. Carol had lovely breasts. They were white, and neither too big nor too small. And they were made with almost mathematical perfection, set close together, with full curving bottoms and a high, steep slope. They seemed to stand out from her chest as if supported by wires. Her nipples were small, and were stiff with sexual excitement. As she moved, her breasts swayed gently from side to side, and tiny ripples passed through the flesh.
Then her hands went to the waistband of her panties, and she started to roll them down past her hips, over her thighs, down her knees, then to her ankles and off. She was as naked as though she had just come from the womb.
There was a general murmur of pleasure, in which I joined, she was so beautiful. If she had any flaw, it was that she was carrying a pound too much flesh. But the only hint of that was the slight rounding of her belly. Her hips were smooth and outcurving, her thighs full without being thick, her buttocks slim, rounded, delicious-looking. She was like a kind of goddess, standing there still moving rhythmically, clad only in her golden hair. My heart ached at the sight of her.
And it ached even harder at the thought that all this beauty was going to be sacrificed now, sacrified to Chuck Gordon's libido and the collective sadism of all these onlookers.
Chuck began to strip.
He said, as he peeled off his clothing, "We will now demonstrate the Virgin-Deflowering Ceremony of the Isle of Congatonga. A virgin was obtained for this demonstration at almost unbelievable cost and effort, as our friend and fellow member Jeff Burnside can testify. Following the demonstration, other members of this organization are welcome to repeat the ritual, though of course the act can be performed only once."
I never felt so helpless in my life. I was quivering with mixed rage and fear. Chuck was naked now, and ready to go. Carol still stood dumbly, her mind a blank, not knowing what was about to happen to her.
But I knew.
It wasn't only that Chuck was going to rape her. Girls had lost their virginity before and still managed to retain their mental health. But this was different. Tomorrow sometime, Carol was going to come out of her fog and find out that she had been had, not just once, but twelve or thirteen times, maybe even more. There might be physical damage and there would certainly be psychological damage. I knew what happened sometimes to victims of mass rapes. Some of them committed suicide. Others entered convents. Others just imprisoned themselves in spinsterhood. But no matter what, Carol would never be the same again. Would never be able to marry, never be able to love, never have the children she no doubt wanted. After having kept herself pure for eighteen or nineteen years, she would regard herself with loathing now. For she would be defiled by more than a dozen men.
While I stood by watching and doing nothing.
A kind of clock started ticking in my head, counting off the seconds. Any moment now Chuck would get through clowning, and he would drag Carol down to the floor and throw himself on top of her, and then, to an approving chorus of yells from his assembly of satyrs and nymphomaniacs with which I had somehow become entangled, he would do away with her maidenhead, as the old phrase goes, and turn her into a ruined woman-also an old phrase, but in this case an accurate one. There are girls who can lose their virginity with no more regrets than if they had lost a pencil or a stick of chewing gum, and there are other girls who are saving themselves for their one special man, whenever he comes along, and when this treasure is taken from them they have nothing else left to stay alive for, and they pass out of life whether literally or just symbolically.
I knew that before the clock in my head had ticked off five minutes more, Chuck Gordon would have destroyed the essence of Carol West. And to my undying shame I have to put down here that if it had been left up to me I would not have done a thing to save her. I would have stood by and watched, and bitten my hp, and maybe ever afterward I would have regretted my fatal moment of inaction.
But it wasn't left up to me. While I stood there sweating and wincing and cursing myself, and while Chuck stood leering over the pale, naked, innocent body of Carol West, the action was taken from my hands.
The doorbell rang.
It wasn't the special signal of a member, nor could it have been, because all twenty-nine current active members were present. But Jack Beale, who was standing near the buzzer, didn't think of that. He was a little drunk, and ninetenths of his mind was occupied in watching Chuck and Carol, and it was simply a matter of reflex that led him to reach out and press the buzzer, opening the outside door to whoever might have been ringing.
Don Hammer saw him and said, "Beale, you idiot, you pressed the buzzer!"
Beale smiled foolishly, realizing he shouldn't have done it. But he had. And the front door was opening. We heard it slam. And then Fred Lambert came rushing in.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Because Fred is mild-mannered and soft-spoken, people usually don't notice how big he is. But actually he stands about six feet one and must weigh one-eighty or one-ninety, and he's a pretty solidly put together sort of guy. When he came bursting into the room, he looked a lot bigger than he really is, because he was so angry.
Everyone was too stupefied to move. Fred stopped short at the entrance to the big room, and looked quickly around, twitching his neck from side to side and taking in the startling sight of more than two dozen people of both sexes in a state of nudity (or, in a few cases, near-nudity.)
That first look must have shaken him, but what he saw on the second look really touched him off. Because now he looked in the middle of the floor, and saw Carol stretched out there, mother-naked, sitting up on one elbow with a silly smile on her face, and her knees invitingly up in the air. And Chuck Gordon was crouching over her.
"Get away from her!" Fred said in a thick, strangled voice. It was a terrible sound.
Chuck was so amazed that he stepped back.
Don Hammer said, "This is a private club, fella. You've got no right to come bursting in here and-"
"Don't talk to me about rights," Fred said. His voice had dropped at least an octave, his breath was coming fast, and his face was dark with anger. "What about him? Stealing my girl out from under my nose, taking her off and getting her drunk, filling her up with drugs-doing hell knows what to her-"
"I haven't done a thing to her!" Chuck said.
"Not yet! But-"
"How did you know where we were?" Chuck asked.
"One of your frat brothers told me. Told me the whole thing, how you had gotten this surefire drug, how you were taking this girl to a party somewhere in the Nineties, how you were going to seduce her-" He paused for breath. "I knew it was Carol. So I've been wandering up and down these streets, and then I found your Volks parked right outside, and I came up on the steps and I heard laughing, and your voice, and-and I rang the bell-and Carol-Carol-"
The sight of his beloved lying sprawled out shamelessly nude was too much for Fred. I detected all the signs of the slow burn-of the soft-spoken ninny who builds up a head of steam, and builds it up, and builds it up, going quietly crazy inside and keeping himself rigidly in check, and then all of a sudden explodes with a fury that just can't be contained.
I knew all the signs. And I saw it happened to Fred. And the next second, the explosion came.
"Blast you to hell, Chuck Gordon," he roared in a voice that could have been heard in New Jersey. Tears of rage and hysteria flooded down his face. There was a beer mug standing on a table just next to Fred, and he grabbed that mug up and flung it with all his might at Chuck's head.
If it had connected, Fred would have had to answer manslaughter charges. And Chuck didn't even have time to duck. But Fred threw the mug with such force that it went sailing over Chuck's head by some three or four feet, smashed through the front window, and landed with a crash on the street outside.
Livid with rage, Fred went charging forward like a maddened buffalo. His arms were outstretched, going for Chuck's throat. Carol may have been drugged, but she had enough sense to pull herself out of the way, or she would have been trampled.
The rest of us had been so stunned by Fred's arrival and by the sharp little interchange between him and Chuck that we had stood still as statues. But now all hell broke loose in that room.
One of the girls began to scream. Ted Felks started to shoulder his way toward Fred, holding an empty soda-bottle as a club.
I found myself standing next to the light switch. In a moment of confusion I turned the light off. The room was plunged into darkness.
And then into milling riot.
Fred was somewhere in the middle of it all, either holding Chuck Gordon or trying to get hold of him. Ted Felks and Ned Carter were attempting to grab Fred, but Fred's strength just then was as the strength of ten. I could see dimly people milling around in confusion. One of the girls-I think it was Bea Mannheim-set up a low, steady, hysterical moaning.
Furniture went crashing to the floor. Things broke. Fred and Chuck emerged from the melee, Chuck pounding at Fred in hopes of breaking his grip, and I heard Chuck yell, "For chrissake let go of me, you idiot! You're choking me-"
I stood where I was. I didn't know what was going to happen, but right then I was on Fred's side, and I knew that so long as the lights remained out Fred would be able to do some damage to Chuck, and right now that was what I wanted to happen. So I stuck to my post by the light switch.
Hal Sharp came up to me in the dark and said, "Where's the switch? Turn on the light!"
I put my hand over the switch. Hal groped for it and said, "That you with your hand on the switch, Burnside?"
"The switch is on the other side of the room," I said. I took him and grabbed him by the shoulders and propelled him into the tangle. I saw him collide with someone bulky, most likely Dave Rees, and the two of them started slugging, each one probably thinking the other one was Fred.
With the light out, nobody knew who anybody else was, and everybody moved too fast to figure anything out. Standing as I was in the corner, not moving, my eyes got accustomed to the dark and I had a pretty good idea of the action. The girls were running all over the place, trying to break things up, and some of them were getting belted too. I wondered if Helene, that masochist, had managed to work herself right into the middle, where she was likely to get pummeled and knocked around in the way that most delighted her.
I saw Carol sitting leaned against the wall like a dummy, right near the main scene of all the fighting. I was afraid she was likely to get hurt, so I left my post at the light switch, ducked around behind the couch, and picked her up. Her naked body was soft and light, and her skin was warm against my own. Her head lolled drunkenly against my chest.
I carted her out of the living room and propped her up at the foot of the stairs, where she was out of harm's way. Then I returned to the living room. By this time the brawl had spilled over into the adjoining library. Fred had all the furies of hell possessing him, and he was simply unstoppable. He was taking advantage of the confusion to do as much damage as he could, both to Chuck and to the place in general. Smashed liquor glasses were lying all over the place and I was sure somebody was going to get cut to pieces on them, naked the way all of them were.
Two people emerged from the thick of it, Fred and someone else, maybe Lome Byris. Byris took a swing at Fred, who ducked, grabbed the slim Byris by the waist, and tossed him against the wall. Byris sagged and flopped down. Then Fred turned around and plunged right back into the middle of the fight.
It was the damndest thing, all the pandemonium of thirty naked people milling around in one big room, most of them trying unsuccessfuly to collar one angry male who was intent on mayhem. Fred was out of his head, absolutely buggy.
I knew there wasn't much chance that it could go on very long. Fred wasn't a superman, and pretty soon someone would catch hold of him and drag him down, and that would be the end of the fight. It was what would happen afterward that was so hard to think about. They couldn't very well just murder Fred, but it was certain they'd have to do something to keep him from spilling all this to the college authorities.
Or maybe they would murder him. I felt a chill run up and down my back. Some of these boys were pretty big wheels, Burchard and Haberman and Hammer particularly. They came from important families with long careers as Metropolitan men, and they were seniors with law school or medicine ahead of them. Expulsion would smash up their lives for good. They couldn't risk it. Maybe to save their skins they would even do away with Fred. It was a hell of a thing to think about. But there had been murders at colleges before. It was just that I had never been so close to a situation where people had motive to kill, before.
It occurred to me too that it couldn't be long before somebody in the neighborhood would call the police. We weren't exactly being quiet about things, and between the grunting of the fighting males, Fred's bellows of hatred, and the various feminine screams-not to mention the periodic crashes of breaking furniture and the occasional heaving of an object through the already shattered front windows-we could probably be heard blocks away, and it would sound like mass murder was being committed in here. And if the police arrived-
Evidently someone else got the same idea about the police just about when I did. Because I clearly saw a short figure detach himself from the struggling mass and run past me, out of the living room, past the uncomprehending form of Carol, and upstairs to the bedrooms where the clothes had been left. I figured this was one of the seniors running upstairs to get dressed and clear out before the law arrived, and it turned out later that I was right-it was Don Hammer, always a quick thinker, scramming while the scramming was good.
Dumbhead that I am, I was starting to figure that maybe I ought to get going too, since I wasn't mixed up in the fight and could get away without any trouble. But even though the thought definitely passed through my mind, I didn't do a thing about it. I kept thinking that my old friend Fred might need me, and besides there was Carol lying there all naked and drugged and nobody thinking about her except me, and what with one thing and the other I couldn't bring myself to do the simple little thing of running up the stairs, putting my clothes on, and leaving.
Then someone warm and soft pressed herself up against me. Even without looking, I could tell by the cuddly feel of her that it was Helene. She was quivering and panting like a madwoman.
"Who are you?"
"Jeff."
"Make love to me, Jeff. Right now, while all this is going on. Make love to me!"
"Helene, don't be silly. You-"
"You refused me before. Don't do it again." She started to tug me down on the floor, gripping me insistently, her hands roving over my body in an attempt to awaken desire in me. I struggled to get loose. I didn't give a damn about her peculiarities, but I wasn't going to get myself entangled in a female's body while a bloody riot was going on all round me.
"Please, Jeff! Please!"
"Not now, Helene. We'll get trampled on."
She was like a crazy woman, desperate for loving. I figured someone must have hit her hard and touched off that pain-sex reflex she has. I was deciding that the smartest thing would be to try to get over to the other side of the room, where she might not be able to find me. If the cops did come busting in, it would look lousy to get caught in the act.
I started across. And then I heard it-everybody in the room heard it, coming clearly and unmistakably through the sound of the melee.
It was only a simple little sound-a car stopping, doors slamming, feet running. But it said the same thing to each of us.
Cops.
I ducked around the couch and peered through the broken glass of the window. The law, all right. The squad car was in the middle of the street, and two grim-looking bruisers were running up the steps of our brownstone.
"Kill it!" I yelled hoarsely. "Cops!"
"Cops!" someone else screamed, and the cry went through the room. The struggle was over in an instant. We heard the bell ringing, heavy pounding on the front door.
"Open up in there! Open up!"
There was a mad dash toward the stairs. I guess they all felt that if they got upstairs and got into their clothes, things wouldn't look so bad for them. The result was a king-size traffic jam on the staircase, and nobody getting anywhere.
And then the cops broke open the front door and came surging in.
The lights were turned on.
"Stay where you are, all of you!" a tough police voice snapped.
We stayed. The cops blinked, looking around. Their faces were purple with astonishment.
"Get a load of this, will you?" one of them said to the other one. "A pajama party without the pajamas!"
We must have made quite a spectacle. For one thing, the house was a shambles. For another, the battle had left some picturesque scars. I looked down at Helene and saw that she had the beginning of a black eye. No wonder she had been so heated up. Chuck was lying in a far corner, looking dazed and battered. Most of the others had various major or minor injuries. Fred was still standing, but he was a terrible mess, with one eye swollen closed and his shirt ripped pretty near half off him, and bruises and scratches all over him.
The cops were standing in the foyer, craning their necks back and forth with amazement. They let their gazes linger slowly on one bare body after another. Self-consciously, a few of the girls folded their arms to cover their breasts, while Bea Mannheim huddled down in a little heap, trying to keep front and rear hidden from the cops' eyes simultaneously, and not succeeding.
"They called us out because there was a fight going on here," the younger of the two cops said. "But nobody told us it was a damn orgy."
"Are you college kids?" the other cop asked.
A few of us nodded mutely.
"Wouldn't you have known it," he said. "Rutting season in the Ivy League."
The other cop said, "Go out to the car and radio for a wagon. There must be twenty or thirty of them."
"Right."
We were frozen like statues. Looking around, I noticed that Don Hammer was missing. As I had guessed, he was the lucky one who had slipped out in the dark. Everyone else was here, some of them on the staircase but most still in the foyer or living room. Carol lay where I had propped her, but she had opened her eyes an was looking from side to side with a puzzled air.
"Is this a fraternity house?" the cop demanded.
"A-a private party," Les Haberman stammered. He was seeing law school go sailing down the drain.
"A private party, huh?"
"That's right," Fred said. "They drugged that girl over there and they were just about to rape her, all of them, when I came in."
"And who the hell are you?"
"I'm not part of this bunch," Fred said loudly.
"I came here to get her-" He pointed to Carol. "That's when the fight started."
The other cop returned. "The wagon's on its way," he reported.
"Okay. All of you-where are your clothes? Get into them, and make it fast." The cop glanced at Fred. "You come with us too."
"But-"
"Well want to talk to you special. The rest of you, get into your clothes! Boy, are the papers going to eat this story up!"
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
We straggled upstairs, too stunned to speak, and started to dress. The cops, bright-eyed at the sight of so much bare flesh of the female variety, followed us upstairs ("Just to make sure nothing funny happens") and watched with eagle eye as the girls donned their undergarments. I bet those cops hadn't had so much free kicks since they joined the force.
All along until this moment I had been privately gloating that the law had come. I had stood back, a detached observer during the fight, and I was pleased that all these foul ones would get their just deserts. And then it occurred to me that I was just as guilty as any of them, and that I was probably going to get expelled along with the rest.
The police wagon had arrived, along with a few more men, and as we finished dressing we were shepherded downstairs and placed in the wagon. Carol was slowly waking up, now, and managed to dress herself. She didn't speak to anyone, didn't even seem to have any idea where she was or what was going on.
Finally all of us were loaded in the wagon, all but Fred, who rode separately in the police car. We were taken down to the lock-up, since it was too late at night for any kind of judicial action.
So that was how I happened to spend a night in jail. We were stuffed in four to a cell, and I drew Chuck Gordon, Les Haberman, and Ted Felks as my cellmates. We huddled up miserably in the dank, dark place. Somewhere in the distance one of the other prisoners, not part of our group at all, was intoning a mournful Negro spiritual. I felt pretty mournful myself now. They had taken the girls, locked them up somewhere else. Carol had been locked up with them, as though she were as guilty as any of them. Fred was not with us. The cops were smarter than to lock him in a cell with any of the group.
Chuck sprawled out on his cot. Evidently Fred had given him a real workout. His face was swollen in half a dozen places, and his nose looked either broken or badly bent. He didn't say anything.
Haberman sat huddled up against the wall. He had his face in his hands, and every once in a while his shoulders shook in a dry sob.
Ted Felks said in a dismal voice, "What do you think they'll do to us, Haberman?"
Haberman-who up until a couple of hours ago had been pre-law-said hollowly, "They could slap us in on any of a bunch of statutes. Disorderly conduct; immoral congregation; mixed nudism; hell, there's even an old fornication law they could invoke."
"They couldn't prove fornication, could they?"
I said, trying to be helpful. "They didn't catch any of us in the act."
"That doesn't matter. If they've got any sense they're giving all the girls physicals, now. They'll discover that most of them have been had five or six times tonight, or worse. Draw your own conclusions."
"At least they won't make trouble for Carol," I said. "They'll discover that she wasn't taking part."
Felks said, "Go on, Haberman. What can they do to us? What kind of sentences do these things rate?"
"I don't know. I was only pre-law, not in law school. But I guess they could put us away for years. Or fine us, or something."
"They wouldn't do that!" Felks said hotly.
"Why not?" Haberman asked.
Nobody had any good answer for that one, so we were quiet again. I began to see that we might be in real hot water. I hadn't been thinking in terms of jail sentences. Suppose they gave us each five years? Hell, five years at hard labor! I would die. Absolutely die.
But even at best, we were sure to get expelled. That was the end of medical school for me, the end of a lot of things for these others. Maybe with my marks I never would have gotten into med school. But Haberman, Felks, Burchard, Carter-they were seniors, probably they had already made application to graduate schools, they were all set to enter their careers. Poof. Finished in a second. Finished for good. Instead of a big-shot lawyer, Haberman would wind up as a bookkeeper, maybe. His whole life was split open in one night, nobody's fault but his own, but still a hell of a thing to happen.
I thought about Don Hammer. He was the lucky one; he had escaped. I wondered if any of his alleged buddies would incriminate him.
Thinking thoughts like these, I fell into an uneasy half-sleep that lasted until morning. They brought us breakfast, but none of us were hungry. Then they left us alone to stare at each other until noontime.
And then they came around to tell us that the Dean of Students had arrived, and wanted to see us.
We were let out of our cells and marched down the hallway to a brightly-lit big room, while curious winos and pimps and panhandlers peered at us out of their cells. We walked like condemned men being led to execution.
Dean Chisholm was waiting for us. The Dean is a mild-mannered, gentle man who always has a cheery smile for anyone he meets in the street who might possibly be a Metropolitan man. But he wasn't wearing any cheery smiles right now. His face was rigid as iron and pale as death, and his eyes glared at us like little bullets set in his face. He waited while we filed into the room and arranged ourselves on a long bench in front of him. He particularly winced when he saw Burchard and Haberman, whom he must have known very well.
Cops were standing at either end of the row of us. The Dean paced up and down in front of us, arranging his words in his mind, obviously trying to check the flow of abuse he wanted to pour out on us. I wished I could melt into the floor.
Finally he said, in a soft voice, "I've just read a sworn statement by a member of the Class of '65, describing the state of affairs as he found them when entering your place last evening. I've also spoken to two members of the police who are prepared to testify that they discovered all of you, plus some fifteen or sixteen women, in a state of partial or complete nudity. And I've been shown a record of the medical examination of the Chesley girls arrested with you. The record shows that some of them had had sexual intercourse many times during the past twenty-four hours."
He paused, fixing us each in turn with eyes that were alternately sad and menacing. "I conclude from what I've been told that you and this group of Chesley girls had met regularly for the purpose of committing immoral acts at that address. Does any of you care to deny this?"
He waited, his lips compressed in a tight little line, his eyes searching us one by one. When his gaze came to rest on me, I bowed my head, unable to meet his stare.
"Very well," he said crisply, when he had looked us all over. "I take your silence to mean an admission of guilt." He folded his arms. "I have arranged with the authorities to have you released without arraignment or punishment. This is not primarily for your benefit, but to prevent undue scandal being linked with the University's name. In the same connection, of course, it will no longer be possible for any of you to continue as students at the University. Your Chesley confederates are being similarly treated."
So that was it, then. His words echoed ringingly in the big room. There would be no flashy trial, no jail sentences, no scandal. The Dean had made a deal with the forces of law. No fuss; but we were to be expelled.
I saw him staring ruefully at us. He had said all he intended to say, but he couldn't help going on, "I must tell you how shocked I am at this. Men I've known and trusted-men with high positions in the student body-men with brilliant careers ahead of them-" He scowled. "I don't need to tell you that I am physically sickened by this. And I hope never to see any of you again on the campus. We will try to blot out the memory of you as though you had never enrolled."
He turned away. With an offhand gesture he told the police he was through with us.
But there was one thing I had to find out from him. As the cops started to shuffle us back to our cells, I left the line.
"Where you going, bud?"
"I have to ask the Dean something."
"Dean don't want to talk to you."
But the Dean had heard, and he had turned around. I grabbed my opportunity and called to him, "Dean Chrisholm, I have to ask you something!"
He nodded to the police, who let go of my arms. As the others went off to their cells, I advanced toward the Dean. He was much shorter than I, but I felt about as tall as a worm.
"Well?" he asked sternly.
I gulped audibly. "Sir, I-I have nothing to say in my own defense-but-but-"
"Yes?"
"I was wondering-about the Chesley girls who were caught with us-will all of them be expelled too?"
"Of course."
"All of them? But there was one of them who isn't really mixed up in this. She was drugged, brought to the session under duress-"
The Dean shrugged. It was apparent that he found even talking to me distasteful. "The Chesley authorities will take whatever action they deem to be just."
"But, sir, this girl doesn't deserve expulsion. Heck, sir, the medics must have examined her! Didn't it seem peculiar that one girl of all those was still a virgin? Surely-"
He shook his head. "If the girl is innocent, Burnside-it is Burnside, isn't it?-she can speak in her own defense. I'm only concerned with the behavior of Metropolitan men. Is there anything else you wish to say to me, Burnside?"
"No, sir."
"Very well, then."
He walked away, and the cop who had remained guided me back to my cell. We stayed in the lock-up for most of the rest of the day, while legal arrangements for our release were being made. Toward evening we were called before a magistrate, who gave us a royal dressing-down, let us know what sort of sentences we deserved, and warned us in no uncertain terms that if we were ever hauled in on any sort of morals charge again, the law would descend on us with double vigor. At present, he thought, we were being punished enough by the disgrace we had brought upon ourselves, and so he was releasing us on probation.
And that was that. The law turned us loose. We were free men. We slunk out on the streets, sullen and afraid to talk to each other.
All this entire time since the arrest, we hadn't seen either Fred or the girls. I wondered if Carol had been exonerated.
We must have made a pretty sight as we rode uptown in the subway, each of hanging his head as though he wore the Mark of Cain above his eyes. We got out at the 216th Street Station and went our separate ways without even saying good-by.
I walked back to the hotel, let myself in, and slammed the door. I was beginning to get used to the idea that I was expelled, that I didn't have to go to my morning classes tomorrow, that the textbooks piled sloppily into my bookcase might just as well be sold back to the book store now. I wasn't Joe College any more. I wasn't part of the Ivy League, now.
I was just Jeff Burnside of Hudson, New York, and now I was supposed to go trailing back home with my tail between my legs and let them see what a fine figure of a man their son had turned out to be.
Everything had happened too fast to absorb. The sudden arrival of Fred, the free-for-all, the cops, the arrest, the trip to court, the expulsion-it was all such a blinding sequence of events that I was only now beginning to get it all sorted out in my mind.
I didn't know what to do now, where to go, how to react. Should I just leave, slip out of New York like a thief in the night? That didn't seem right. I didn't know what to do, so I settled down on my bed fully dressed in the dark, smoked a dozen cigarettes, and then closed my eyes and went to sleep.
The ringing of the phone got me up. I was surprised to see that it was after ten. Nobody else seemed around to answer it, so I climbed off my bed, hurried out into the hall, and caught it on the fifth ring.
"Mr. Burnside?" a cool, efficient woman's voice asked.
"T-that's right."
"This is the Dean's Office calling. Kindly report here at noon to pick up your papers."
"Noon? Okay, I'll-"
Click. I stared at the dead phone awhile, finally replaced it on its hook.
I shaved, showered, breakfasted. By that time it was nearly eleven. I started over to Michaels Hall to see the Dean.
On the way, I paused at the newsstand, and what I saw made me feel sick. If the Dean had hoped to avoid scandal by getting us released, he was going to be disappointed. Because smeared across the front of the Daily News in big black letters were the words, EXPOSE IVY LEAGUE LOVE CLUB.
Hastily I dumped a nickel down, snatched up the paper, opened it to page three. And the whole story was there. Some fast-moving reporter with an inside track on the police had gotten it all. It was even illustrated by six photos, that looked like they had been taken for the senior yearbook. The smiling, well-groomed mugs of Zelda Hughes, Lois Reznik, Nora Sands, Roy Burchard, Les Haberman, and Ted Felks stared up at me.
The article began, "More than two dozen Metropolitan and Chesley students were taken into custody over the weekend after the exposure of a collegiate 'sin house' near the Metropolitan campus." It went on to give the whole lousy story, or as much of it as was printable. It listed the names of everybody taken in-I found my own name right there, Jeffrey Burnside, Hudson, New York, and ironically enough it was the second time I had ever had my name in the paper, the first time having been when the Hudson rag proudly announced that I had been accepted by Metropolitan University. Don Hammer's name was not listed, which implied that he was going to slip through, and Carol West was listed among the girls apprehended. That upset me. Fred was mentioned too, as a jealous lover whose arrival in search of his girl had touched off the exposure. That was accurate enough, though they didn't name the girl.
Maybe bank robbers save their press clippings for their scrapbooks, but I didn't want any part of the newspaper I was holding. I read the article through again, shuddered, and dumped it in the nearest trash barrel.
So now the cat was really out. Everyone on campus would know; the home papers would find out; maybe the wire services would pick the story up and blare it all over the United States.
I walked on leaden feet toward the Dean's office, wishing I was wearing a sack over my head. The campus was comparatively quiet at this hour, most people being in classrooms, but I was sure that a thousand eyes were on me, a thousand tongues whispering what I had done.
I skipped up the steps of Michaels Hall, crossed the lobby, and waited outside the office. It was precisely half past eleven. Chuck Gordon came out, stared dazedly at me, and walked rapidly away. I went in.
The coldly impersonal secretary looked up at me and said, "Your name, please?"
"Burnside, Jeff." My voice was barely a croak.
She searched through a stack of file folders on her desk and handed me one with my name on it. At her order I looked through it and found a note from the Dean officially advising me of my expulsion, a voucher informing me of the amount of tuition refund that would be paid to my parents, a record card with my freshman grades, and various other official odds and ends. I closed the folder and said, "Is there anything else?"
"No."
So I turned and left. Lome Byris was waiting outside the door as I came out, looking like a ghost. I didn't say anything to him.
I went back to the hotel. The hotel manager had a copy of the Daily News spread out on his desk, and while I waited for the elevator to come he smiled at me with greasy joviality and said, "Hey, Burnside, this your name I see in the paper?"
"What of it?"
"Told you, you'd get into trouble, fooling around with all those girls!"
"I'm moving out this afternoon," I told him. "Don't worry about my lowering the moral tone around here."
"Nice young fellow like you, why'd you have to get mixed up in that crap?"
"Go to hell,' I said. The elevator came and I got into it.
The apartment was empty upstairs. Good thing, too; if Miss Rooksby had come out clucking about my sinfulness, I might have committed murder or something. But there was no one around. I tossed my damning file folder down on the bed and wondered about my parents. I decided finally I better call them.
So I did, collect. My father answered the phone and said immediately, "Hey, there was a story on the radio this morning about a bunch of kids getting expelled from Metropolitan-"
" I know. I was one of them."
He started to say something, then realized what I had just told him, and I heard him gasp.
"What?"
"I'm out, Dad. I guess I got mixed up in something too deep for me, or something." I prayed that I would drop dead right here at the telephone, so I wouldn't have to continue this conversation.
But he said, "Let me get this straight. You've been-expelled? For being part of that sex thing?"
"That's right, Dad."
He was silent for a long time. Then he said, "What about the money I paid for this year's tuition?"
"The University is sending it back to you."
"Oh," he said. There was something like a cough. I wanted him to offer sympathy, to forgive me for my mistake, to say something encouraging.
Instead he said, "What are you planning to do now?"
"I-don't know. I guess I'll come home first, and then-"
"Home? You're not coming here, you filth! How could you dare show your face in Hudson again?" He went on in that vein for nearly a minute, playing variations on the theme of never-darken-my-door-again, and then, as though remembering that this was a collect call and so his tirade to a worthless son was costing him money, he slammed down the receiver.
Numbly, I hung up the phone-it was the second time in the past few hours that someone had hung up on me, and I didn't like the sensation at all. I walked back into my room and took stock of things.
I had fifty-one dollars in cash, and about two suitcases full of belongings. The important thing now was to get out of the college area. I decided to move to Greenwich Village or some place, get a job, support myself, and try to figure out what my next big move would be.
Cash was the most important item now. I piled together all of my textbooks, dragged them over to the book store, and struck a deal for $25, or approximately half of what I had paid for them.
Returning to my room, I packed up the rest of my belongings. The next step was to take a subway ride down town and find a place. Within three hours I had found one, not quite in Greenwich Village, but over on East Third Street. A reasonably clean room, eleven dollars a week, with sink, community kitchen and bathroom, and use of a phone.
I settled up my rent uptown, dragged my pitiful belongings into the subway, and rode to my new place of residence. I said good-by to nobody. The chapter in my life called Metropolitan was over, and it hadn't had a happy ending at all.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
I sat around in my new room-which hadn't been painted in about six years-until the afternoon started to end and night began to drop. I just felt too beat to do anything but sit. I kept thinking about how good we had it, all of us with all those women, all those jugs to hold and all those warm bodies to snuggle up with, and now it was all exploded because Chuck Gordon had been dumb enough to bring Carol over.
I was seized by a powerful curiosity. I wanted to know what had happened to the rest of my fellow expellees-where they were going, how they had reacted, whether they planned to do anything. Most of all I wanted to know about Carol.
So about five in the afternoon I went out in the hall and put a dime in the phone and dialed the number of her dormitory, and asked for her. I didn't really expect her to come to the phone. That was why I was so surprised when she did.
Her voice, remote, hollow, said, "Hello?"
"Carol?" I gibbered.
"That's right. Who's this?"
"Jeff. Jeff Burnside."
"Oh," she said. I expected her to slam the receiver down on me the way everybody else seemed to be doing today, but to my surprise she didn't. "Why do you call, Jeff?"
"I-I just wanted to find out how everything was. I mean, I haven't seen you since Saturday, and I was wondering-whether there were any repercussions-that is-" I stopped, not knowing what to say.
'Repercussions?" She laughed bitterly. "I'm packing my things."
"Why?"
"I was invited to withdraw from the college," she said in a weary voice.
"You mean they expelled you?" I gasped. "But that isn't fair! You weren't in control of yourself that night. You-"
"They didn't expel me," she said. "All the other girls were expelled. I was simply invited to withdraw."
"What the hell's the difference?"
"The difference is that I'm eligible to go to some other college, if I want to. The other girls are blackballed at any good school."
"But-why? You weren't involved."
"I was there, Jeff, and I had my clothes off. The fact that I was drugged has nothing to do with it. Presumably a Chesley girl has sense enough not to get herself drugged. So I was scandal-tainted enough to be persona non grata on campus. They asked me politely to leave, the way they ask a girl to leave if she gets pregnant and isn't married."
"And suppose you had refused to withdraw?"
"They would have made it very tough for me here, then," she said.
"Oh. So you were railroaded out. What are you planning to do now?"
"I'm not sure. For the time being I'm going to live with Marge Halloran. We've got a little place in midtown. I don't know if I want to go back to college or not. I spoke to my parents, but they're pretty bitter about the whole thing and just about washed their hands of me-"
"Same here."
"Maybe I'll try to get into the theater," Carol said. "I was always interested in that. What about you?"
"Don't know. I'm living down here on the East Side now. I got hell from home. I don't know where to go next."
And that was about where our conversation ended. She didn't seem to have much enmity toward me about the incident in my hotel room, and she didn't seem to think I was responsible for her downfall at the sex club. I gave her my phone number, finally, and told her to keep in touch, though I knew she wouldn't.
When I hung up, I invested my remaining dimes in phoning other people. And, bit by bit, I began to piece together the fates of the others. Most of them had left New York already, to go home to a no doubt stormy welcome. Haberman and Felks were entering the Army. Helene Wallace was talking about becoming a nun, but no one took her very seriously. I talked briefly to Fred; he said he was sorry to get me into trouble, but I should have known better in the first place-and anyway, he had only been interested in saving Carol from a fate worse than death, etc. He said he didn't feel he could stay at Metropolitan any more, so he was transferring to an all-male college in Oregon. He had no plans for staying in touch with Carol; he knew she had never loved him, and after the incident Saturday night he didn't want to see her again. He explained that the ugly memory would always remain, so it was impossible to think of marrying her.
Nobody I spoke to seemed to know where Chuck Gordon had gone. It was just as well; I couldn't care less about that louse.
So that was the way matters stood. I spent the next two days looking for a job, and finally found one-a forty-seven-fifty-a-week job for a magazine distributing company, sorting and baling magazines. Dull work. Every time I had to give my name in connection with anything, I expected the reply to be, "Burnside? Are you the fellow that got kicked out of college for that sex club thingr" But no one actually said it. I came to realize that nothing gets forgotten faster by the public than last week's scandal. My name meant nothing to the eight million. But I would remember, forever.
The story could just about end here, I guess. A whole bunch of careers shattered, lives twisted from their courses, me a forty-seven-fifty worker instead of a pre-med student, me an outcast from my family and my town and friends, drifting along into the gray, bleak years ahead. New York is full of bums and drifters who started out heading for better things, but got short-circuited.
Like I say, it could have ended there, with nothing but drifting ahead. For a whole week I did my job, came home exhausted, cooked a little meal, read for a while, and went to sleep. I had no friends, I saw no one, I spoke to no one. I had woven a cocoon around myself, and inside the cocoon I was trying to repair the damage that had been done to my life. Without succeeding.
And I knew that here and there over the country there were about thirty other people in the same boat. Girls who had thought it nice fun to get made, and who now would probably become call girls or something, unless they became nuns. College guys who thought they had had it made, and who didn't. And one girl who hadn't deserved what she got. Also Don Hammer, who had escaped. Well, I wasn't angry about Hammer. At least he had had the brains to run while the running was good. But I didn't envy him having to live with his conscience all the rest of his life, thinking about the friends of his that got expelled while he went walking away free.
And then, a week after it happened, more or less, I got this phone call from Carol.
I hadn't figured to hear from her ever again. She had reason enough to hate me, after all that had happened. But the phone rang. It was Tuesday night, and I had eaten and was lying in my room, not even reading, just lying there thinking about what a lousy life this was. In addition to everything else, I was feeling hard up for a woman. I had been living it up high for weeks, and now for a solid seven days I had had nothing. That hurt. I was debating whether or not to go out and find myself a floozie when the phone rang.
I walked out into the hall and picked it up. I heard a whispering female voice say, "Jeff?"
"That's right. Who's this?"
"Carol."
"My god, how come-"
"Shh. Listen to me. Can you get up here and make it fast? I'm scared stiff. Marge is drunk and she's talking about suicide.
So that was why she was whispering. "Suicide? Hell, can't you tie her down?"
"She's stronger than I am, Jeff. And she says she's going to jump out the window. She just found out she's pregnant, and-oh, hurry, Jeff!"
In a situation like that I wasn't going to stand around gabbing. I got the address, a hotel on West Fifty-eighth Street, and got my shoes and got going. The subway would have been much too slow, so I hailed a cab. It cost me a buck and a half, but what the hell-
And even so, I wasted my money. I reached the hotel some twenty minutes from the time Carol had called. Their room was on the ninth floor, and I fidgeted as the old elevator creaked its way up.
I found the room. Nine-o-seven. I knocked.
"Who's there?" Carol's voice.
"Jeff."
She opened the door. In the same instant I saw Marge, stark naked, go wobbling across the room toward the window. I pushed Carol out of the way and made a dash for Marge just as she got the window open.
Too late.
She scrambled over the ledge just as I got there, and I stabbed out wildly, caught the fleshy part of one buttock, gripped it tightly-
And then she fell.
Automatically I looked out the window. I saw Marge plummeting toward the ground, belly first, her limbs flapping in different directions, her bare body clear against the gray concrete below. Then she landed.
I got up, closed the window, staggered to the washbasin, and lost my dinner. When the vomiting was over, I looked up. Carol had thrown herself down on one of the rumpled beds, and was having hysterics. She was wearing only a white housecoat that had come unbelted, and I could see the whiteness of her thighs and the soft roundness of her belly and breasts as she lay curled up. But just then I wasn't even aroused by her nakedness. I felt too sick.
I went over to her. I felt shaky as hell. The room was filthy, and there were liquor bottles everywhere, and it smelled of liquor. I held Carol tight for a moment, trying to keep myself from going hysterical too. Burned into my mind was the image of Marge's naked body floating downward and....
After a moment I picked up the telephone that was on the night table between the beds, and when the desk answered I said, "Hello. I'm in Room nine-o-seven. A drunken girl just jumped out of the window here."
I heard yelling in the lobby-evidently they had just discovered the fact down there too. The phone went dead. Carol was still waiting.
"Get hold of yourself," I said. I made her sit up, and I drew her housecoat tight and belted it. She continued to sob, and I slapped her. That calmed her down.
"Marge-she just-jumped-"
"Yes. Try to be calm, Carol."
"She was drinking all week," Carol said in a monotone. "Said she was disgusted with herself, said she wanted to die-and then she missed a period, you know, and yesterday she went to the doctor to get a test, and today he called back and said yes, she was pregnant-"
People started to pound on the door. I left Carol and let them in.
Within ten minutes, the room was jammed with policemen, hotel people, reporters, curious bystanders. We told the story over and over again. Expelled from college; drunk; despondent; pregnant. Suicide. We must have gone through the routine a hundred times during the next hour and a half. The police counted the liquor bottles, asked a million questions.
Finally they left, after warning us both to remain available for further questioning. It was nearly nine o'clock at night.
Carol was icy calm by then. I was pretty frayed around the nerves, and it was startling to think that there was a good chance that Marge had leaped to her death with my child in her belly. It wasn't very pleasant to think a thought like that.
"So she's gone," Carol said in a tight voice. "She was talking about it, and then the moment you walked in, there she went-"
I put my hand on her wrist. "You mustn't keep going over and over it like this."
"I have to. I have to get it out of my system."
"She was a very confused girl," I said. "An unhappy one. She was heading for destruction."
We were silent a long while. Then Carol said, "By the way, Jeff, I don't want you to think I'm still angry about that business in your hotel room. It was silly of me to get so excited."
"It was stupid of me to make a pass like that."
"We'd better forget all about it."
"Okay," I said.
I looked at her, as she sat there with her soft cheeks puffy from tears, and I remembered how she had looked, a drugged puppet, at that final catastrophic party. And if Chuck Gordon had been within reach just then I would have hurled him from that window.
She said, "Fred told me all about you, Jeff. How mixed up he thought you were. He said you tried to help me, when Chuck brought me to the party."
I shrugged. "At least I carried you out of the way when the fighting started."
"Tell me honestly-what did I do that night?"
"You came in looking like a robot. Chuck made you do a striptease. He was about to-to seduce you when Fred came busting in."
"But that was all that happened? I mean, Chuck didn't actually do anything to me?"
"No. He didn't get the chance."
She nodded gravely. "It doesn't matter, I guess. I got hanged for a lamb, anyway." She shook her head. "Tell me something, Jeff-why did you join that club?"
"For excitement, I guess. Adventure. I hadn't ever slept with a woman before September, you see. And I was kind of curious about what it was all about. So Chuck sort of led me into it-"
"Chuck kept trying to lead me into it too," she said. "And finally he did, only he had to drug me first."
"Let's not talk about the club," I said. "Let's talk about now."
"I'd rather not. The present isn't very pretty and the future looks worse."
"Are you going to stay here?" I asked.
She shrugged. "I can't stay in this room any more, of course. I don't know. Maybe I'll room up with one of the other girls who got expelled. Nothing matters much, does it?"
"Yes,' I said. "One thing matters."
"What's that?"
I was silent for a moment, looking at her, radiantly lovely even after all the torment she had been through. Unjustly expelled, grossly treated by her parents, by Fred, by Chuck. I pitied her. She had just been trying to be a good girl, and the universe had caved in about her. It almost made it look like there wasn't any percentage in trying to be good.
I said, "I love you, Carol."
She looked at me as though I'd just said something in Albanian or Hungarian. "What?"
"I said I love you," I repeated. "I always have-right from the start, from the day I saw you in Holman Quad. But first you were Fred's girl, so I didn't dare get involved, and then I was mixed up in that club thing-and after the mess I made of things in my room that day, I didn't have to say anything to you-" I reddened. "I guess I don't have any business saying this. I'd better leave."
I started for the door, but she caught me and held me, pressing her body up against mine.
"No-don't go. Stay here. Don't leave me alone, Jeff."
I took her in my arms. "Do you believe me when I say I love you?"
"I believe you, Jeff."
"And-and-"
"I love you too, Jeff. I think. We hardly know each other."
We kissed, slowly, then more intensely. When it was finished Carol said, "I hope we get to know each other a lot better, though."
I stayed there that night. She was afraid to be left alone in this room where Marge had lived. But, at my insistence, we slept in separate beds-because I had had enough cheap sex for one lifetime, and I didn't want to spoil anything by jumping the gun. So I kissed her tenderly on the mouth and on each rosy nipple, and turned up the covers, and then I undressed and got into Marge's bed myself.
There's nothing like suffering to teach you self-control. The expulsion, Marges suicide, the disgrace-all of these things will remain in our memories, of course. But they are fading. Carol and I will be married next month, and after our honeymoon I'll go into the army. As a soldier's wife, she'll be able to follow me once I'm through with basic training.
In two years I'll be out, and I'll have Carol. As for what happens then, quien sabe? I want to become a writer. After what I've been through, I should have something to write about. And Carol wants to do something in the theater. And we'll have each other. They say you can't live on love, but I'd like to try.
Right now I don't worry too much about what's going to happen two years from now. I'm confident that we'll be able to rebuild our lives somehow. The only future event that interests me right now is the event that takes place three weeks from today. Well be married then. And three weeks from tonight will be our wedding night, when all of that blonde loveliness is going to be legally mine. I don't know how I'm going to wait twenty-one whole days, but somehow, I'll manage, because I don't want to spoil anything. This isn't any quickie shack-up job, and it isn't any sordid campus affair. We've both been through a lot, and we take both love and sex more seriously now. At least, I take it more seriously. Carol always did. And that's why I'm waiting. I want everything to be perfect. After all, this time it's for keeps.
