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  A Novel

  Dan Wakefield

  For The Dove,

  who saw me through it

  “I had a professor who said ‘Freedom is money.’”

  “I prefer what Janis said freedom is.”

  “What’s that?”

  “‘Nothin’ left to lose.’”

  “I dig it.”

  He was there because he had promised.

  Besides, he had no particular reason or urge to be anywhere else.

  The promise was not that he would go to college at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana but that he would get a college degree, in any thing, in any place. That’s all his father had asked when he gave him the money to do it. There wasn’t even a time limit on it though maybe that was assumed, that he’d do it in the four years it took most everyone else. He had meant to, but being booted out of one place and dropping out of another had set him back, and then he had to take time off to make some bread when he’d gone through what the old man had given him. That made the promise even heavier: he had taken the money and he’d damn well get the degree, no matter how long it took.

  Ages it already seemed like.

  He was scratching a mosquito bite and waiting for the instructor to show for this section of a gut course called in the catalog Survey of American Colonial History and known among students as George Washington One. He was idly looking over the class to see if he could spot some serious, plain-looking chick he could hit on later for class notes, when he suddenly saw her come into the room.

  Not the serious, plain-looking chick.

  This was something else.

  She was wearing a short white dress, a thin gold chain at the waist, the rest of her dark, intense, feline; black hair fell with long luster down her back, dark eyes were topped by large brows and cupped beneath with deep half-moons, the eyes large and quick, giving the catlike suggestion to her face. Gene moved up out of the scrunch he had settled into in his chair, hoping she’d sit beside or near him but instead she went to the desk at the front of the room and with a graceful movement perched on the edge of it, her long legs, richly tanned, dangling.

  There were nervous giggles. No one knew if this was the teacher or some kind of kooky chick trying for attention. She pulled out a cigarette and four jocks jumped to light it. More giggles. Gene didn’t move. The class bell rang and he didn’t mind it, even though at this advanced stage in what was finally a seven-year and four-college trip to the big B.A. that special sound usually worked on his nerves like a dental drill.

  “I’m Louise Fern,” she said, “and this is History one oh three. Usually it’s a gut course. This time it won’t be.”

  There were no more giggles.

  At the end of the hour she was crowded by students, wanting attention, asking unnecessary questions.

  Gene waited. He wasn’t afraid of waiting. He wasn’t a jock but women liked him, liked his lean concave posture, head bent for listening, even then somehow seeming taller than his medium height.

  He knew all the moves, but he wasn’t thinking of games now. This was a new experience. Just when he hoped he had had them all. But this was decidedly different. It was like he had tunnel vision and Louise Fern was standing at the end of the tunnel. Filling it up.

  He waited till just the two of them were left in the room.

  “I’m going to buy you a drink,” he said evenly.

  She looked at him sharp, then shrugged.

  “Well, if I have no choice,” she said.

  “You don’t,” he said smiling.

  Neither do I, he thought.

  He took her for the drink, then he took her back to her apartment, then he took her to bed. The next morning he said he intended to stay.

  “We’ll see,” she said.

  He stayed the rest of the academic year, hardly leaving except to shop for groceries, buy booze, score grass, and go to her lectures.

  In bed, biting and tickling and pinching, they kidded about her being an Older Woman and him an Innocent Young Student. She was twenty-seven, he twenty-three. Sometimes they played teacher-student games. Like she would be the stern, spinsterish teacher and he would be the hood she had flunked in her course who had come to force his cruel lust upon her.

  They got into each other’s heads as well as bodies.

  He saw how history was for her, how she got high on it. When she talked about The Closing of the Frontier, or The Rise of the Railroads, her voice took on a whole other quality, a husky intensity. He read everything she told him to, stuff that especially turned her on and then they’d discuss it. He could see it, in her, but he couldn’t feel it in himself like that. He had never been able to get off on a subject, there were some he dug more than others, that was all.

  She asked if there hadn’t been anything else, aside from academic subjects, that really turned him on, like playing some kind of music or sports.

  “Running,” he said.

  He told her how it gave him a clean feeling, both in his head and his body. He imagined when he ran that the wind was really going through his head, clearing it out, blowing away the accumulated cobwebs of old tangled memories, blowing away the bilge of bad dreams, trash of turmoil, dumpings of dead arguments, dumb deeds. Clean. He went out for track in high school but was cut because he lacked the competitive spirit, a failing the coach said probably meant he was a fairy. He didn’t care about winning, he didn’t want ribbons, just the feeling that came from the running.

  Lou said she could dig, it sounded like what good dope did sometimes.

  They liked doing grass and hash but they didn’t drop acid. Lou didn’t want to mess with her head since she liked it the way it was; Gene didn’t go for the idea of something “expanding” his mind, he wanted to turn the sucker down.

  He said it showed they agreed on the basics.

  He had to move out a few days when her parents came to visit. They were hard-shell Baptists from Arkansas and they assumed their baby daughter, special as the youngest of four, would remain a virgin until she was married. They didn’t even know she smoked cigarettes much less dope. Before their visits she eliminated the deep orange nicotine stains from her fingers by scrubbing them over and over with lemon juice.

  Gene got to meet them on the ruse he was one of her students dropping over to get an assignment he’d missed. She asked him to stay and have macaroons and lemonade with them. Not looking at Lou he said to her parents, “Your daughter has taught me more than any teacher I ever had.”

  “No, no,” said Lou, choking on her lemonade.

  “Louise has always been modest,” her father said proudly.

  “She never tells us,” her mother said wistfully, “of her accomplishments.”

  Sitting stiff in his chair Gene feared he might fart or say “Fuck!” so excused himself after the one macaroon.

  When they’d gone and Gene could come back Lou got some specially good hash and they fucked and talked all night. She asked if his parents would visit or he visit them and he said how his mother had died his first year of high school and Dad, retired and tired, lived with Gene’s much older married sister and her family in Chicago and frankly Gene couldn’t face him again till he had the degree.

  “Your albatross,” Lou said.

  “A real bummer.”

  Mostly they were high, sometimes just on each other. What the counselors always told Gene he lacked was not intelligence but motivation. Now he had it. Her. She shared his bent for daring, difference, doing things your own way, any way but dull.

  The song they played all the time, kind of like their personal
anthem, was “The Harper Valley P.T.A.” It had come out right when they met, September of ’68, and it matched their mood. The sultry singsong of Jeannie C. Riley telling how all the respectable folk of this little town were hypocrites living wild behind the proper front they put up. It was their kind of song, A Fuck You kind of song, and they liked to think of it as saying “Fuck You” in particular to Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, and what they regarded as its monster-sized, tiny-minded university.

  Everything wasn’t all fun and games, though. One night lying in bed after love he asked her how come she never got married, she must have got asked a lot. She said in a flat, toneless voice she’d got asked a lot and said no a lot. Then she raised up on an elbow and fixing her eyes on him so he couldn’t look away, so he couldn’t forget, she laid on him her feelings about “The Horse-Carriage-Love-Marriage Syndrome.”

  “People mistakenly think those things go together but they don’t have to go together at all. Not even horses and carriages much less loves and marriages. There are plenty of horses that aren’t tied to carriages and that’s the kind I’d be if I were a horse. Untied. Not pulling a big load of people behind me like a woman drags a family all her life. If I were a horse they wouldn’t even get a bridle on me. They call that ‘breaking’ a horse. Well no one will ever break me.”

  Gene gently put his hand on her arm.

  “No one here’s tryin, babe.”

  “You promise?”

  He did.

  It was the first time he’d ever had to promise a woman not to marry her in order to stay with her.

  Something new.

  There always was with Lou.

  Like the time in the spring when she came home with a small jar of supermarket red caviar and a bottle of New York State champagne to celebrate her getting a two-year appointment in the History Department at Northeastern University in Boston beginning next fall.

  “Far out,” he said. “I can learn to do baked beans.”

  “Oh,” said Lou, not heavy just curious-sounding, “you coming, too?”

  The thought of not living with her made him feel dizzy, like looking down from some incredible height onto nothing at all below.

  He realized she was his life, in a way that he’d never really had one before.

  But he couldn’t tell her that.

  “Boston’s got lots of colleges,” he said. “I might as well finish up there as anywhere else.”

  “I can’t promise anything,” Lou said. “About us, I mean.”

  “Who can promise anything?”

  “Just so it’s understood. We’re both free.”

  He patted her hand.

  “Hey, roomie, I know how ya feel.”

  She smiled.

  “OK, roomie,” she said.

  Gene popped the champagne and put on Jeannie C. Riley singing “The Harper Valley P.T.A.”

  I

  Rents were sky-high in Boston but they found a one-bedroom apartment whose drawbacks in comfort were balanced by economy. It was on Carver Street, which ran for just a block down from the Trailways station out to Boylston across from the Boston Common. It looked almost like an alley, and winos were fond of using its entryways for shelter during their deadened sleep. Gene and Lou learned to step through without disturbing them.

  Other people might have been freaked by the blaring announcements of bus departures and the neon throb of a parking lot sign pulsing in their living room window, but Gene had lived for a year with Lou in her apartment that was over a chiropractic clinic on the highway heading into Urbana across from an all-night diner whose wagon wheel symbol glowed in the dark and attracted all kinds of last-minute, tire-skidding customers. They figured that must have been practice for the place by the bus station.

  The important thing was this was their place, for in Urbana Gene had just lived at Lou’s. He wanted to make it nice, their nest, so he stripped off the dank, dark wallpaper, painted white, decorated with plants and posters. Philodendron, Swedish ivy, asparagus fern. See Madrid, Ski Sugarbush, Stop the War.

  Now they could get it on.

  Their lives.

  Gene had never really thought that way before, he had just sort of let things happen. Now he was anxious to please, wanting to make sure Boston would be a good trip for them. Since Lou didn’t go for pledges or promises, much less marital contracts, Gene just figured he would see that everything was so cool she would have no reason to split, it would just be the natural thing to keep on together.

  Before he could look for a college in Boston to cop the last twelve credits he needed he had to get some bread together. When Lou started teaching at Northeastern Gene got a job tending bar at The Crossroads over on Newbury Street off Mass Ave, working the eleven-to-seven shift. That left a hunk of the mornings free and he promised himself he was not just going to lie around doing some kind of dope and listening to records, he was going to make some use of his time. What he was going to do was, for one thing, get into cooking.

  He liked to cook because you had to concentrate and your mind couldn’t drift into thinking of other shit Cooking kind of affected his head like a mild sort of dope. He was damn good with any type of eggs and tough on stew but he wanted to get into serious recipes, work up a regular repertoire. He went out and bought himself a paperback James Beard cookbook and a stockpile of gourmet devices from whisk to garlic press.

  They had to eat late, of course, but Gene made what preparation he could in the morning so when he blew in after work he was ready to roll. Lou really seemed to dig it, she liked good food but cooking to her was a hassle, a distraction that fucked up her head from work she was doing, like lecture preparation, thesis research, the kind of things that didn’t mix with trying to remember how many cups of this and dashes of that. So she sat reading and thinking and having a martini or so in the living room while Gene did his thing in the kitchen. It suited them both. That’s what he wanted.

  But the night he made his most ambitious meal, a surprise he’d been preparing to spring from the time he first saw it in James Beard, she wasn’t there.

  Roast beef and Yorkshire pudding!

  He had the day off and had got this incredible dinner on. Always before, she was home when he got in from work a little past seven, so he planned the meal for then, timing everything so the roast would be rare the way she liked it, the pudding a risen prize.

  Now it was eight. The pudding had fallen. The beef was well past well.

  Where?

  There, now.

  She came in laughing, high.

  With this guy.

  Barnes, his name was.

  From what Gene could gather out of the excited garble of her talk she had picked him up or let him pick her up (although she didn’t say it that way) at Waldenbooks on Boylston Street. His pitch was he was a writer and wanted to buy his book for her, he liked to think people like her would read it. (She fell for that?) Then to celebrate the fact she was going to read it he offered to buy her a drink at Gatsby’s bar across from the Statler and after the second drink she said for Godsake you’ll never make a profit like this, buying your book for people and then buying them drinks, she said he had to come back and have a few drinks with her and her roommate.

  Gene could tell she hadn’t bothered to mention she roomed with a guy.

  This Barnes was one big disappointed dude. Tall and slightly stooped, head pulled in as if afraid of a swat, long sallow face that was winsome before he laid eyes on the roomie and now was decidedly woeful.

  Lou very merrily told poor Barnes to make himself at home and handed the book he wrote to Gene while she went to make her martinis that usually tended to put everyone at ease, consisting as they did of a tall glass full of gin, an ice cube, and two portions of vermouth applied with an old Murine dropper.

  “Wow!” she called from the kitchen. “What smells good?”

  “It might have been dinner,” Gene said.

  She didn’t seem to hear.

  Gene held Barnes’s book in his
hand. A paperback. The cover had a picture of a sexy blonde, hair strewn around her and skirt uplifted. Over the body in dripping red letters were the words Death of a Deb.

  “Good title, man,” Gene said.

  What could you say?

  “They changed it,” said Barnes.

  “To what?” asked Lou, coming in with drinks.

  “To that,” he said, pointing at the book. “My title was Coming Out to Die.”

  “Can they do that?” Lou asked.

  He coughed, nodding accusingly at the book.

  “They did,” he said.

  “Listen, everybody,” Gene said, “I hate to interrupt the fun and all, but is anyone going to be interested in having any dinner before the evening is out?”

  “Thanks, but I’ll just finish my drink,” said Barnes.

  “No, no, I’m sure there’s plenty,” Lou said. “Isn’t there, Gene? If there isn’t, we’ll just divide what we have. Share and share alike, right?”

  Gene took a big slug of his martini.

  “Right on, sister. Anything you say.”

  “Listen,” said Barnes. “I oughta go,”

  “No! You haven’t got your profits back,” Lou said. “What is it they call them?”

  “Royalties.”

  “See? You’re way behind. Still in the red. The dinner’ll put you ahead.”

  Rather than listen to more of this bull Gene plunked an extra plate on the table and brought out the shriveled roast and the fallen pudding.

  “Wow,” said Lou, “a real roast! What’s that other thing?”

  “It used to be Yorkshire pudding,” said Gene.

  “You cook a lot?” Barnes asked.

  If this was one of those guys who thought men who liked to cook were fags, he was going to get a cold Yorkshire pudding in his mug.

  “Whenever I can,” Gene said. “I happen to dig it.”

  “Wish I could do it,” said Barnes. “Tired of Van Camp and his goddam pork and beans.”

  Lou complained the roast wasn’t rare.

  “It was about an hour ago,” Gene said, “while you were farting around at Gatsby’s.”