Campus Tramp

Chapter Three

The days were a whirl and the nights were a jumble and the first week was gone almost before it had started. Up in the morning and a quick shower and you put on your clothes in a hurry and rush over to the caf for breakfast. The scrambled eggs are too soft and the toast is burnt and nothing is quite the way mother made it at home. The coffee is bitter and either too hot or too cold, and you have to practically pour it down your throat because you have to get to that eight o’clock English class.

Classes. English, with a tall, balding, stoop-shouldered professor named Bruce Irvine smiling sadly at you and telling you what books you were supposed to read. Pride and Prejudice and Madame Bovary and Crime and Punishment and Great Expectations and Daisy Miller. Five novels plus twenty poems and you had to read them all in the one semester and understand them, and each day in class Professor Irvine would talk about the books and poems as if they were old friends, his eyes sad and his voice soft and watery.

Spanish, with Professor Esteban Moreno, who looked very Castilian with high cheekbones and a thin black mustache, and who left Spain when Franco took power in 1937. He chattered at you in rapid-fire Spanish and you had to listen with both ears and your mind because otherwise you were completely lost in no time. And he spoke better English than you did, to top it off.

Western Civ, with Hugo Mills, a stubby little man who never smiled and who was very, very clever and very, very cynical as he lectured at you on the early years of the Roman Empire. You listened to him and he was extremely interesting and extremely amusing and seemed to know everything there was to know, but you couldn’t help thinking that the bitterness in his face and in his words came from knowing so much and never having done anything about anything.

Biology, with Martin Jukovsky, a quiet, mild-mannered little man who spoke so softly that you could hardly hear a word he said. But it didn’t really matter and after a while you didn’t bother to listen any longer, because you had already learned everything he was saying in high school and the class was a waste of time.

And sociology with Lester Birch. Gemeinschaft and geselleschaft, in-groups and out-groups, roles and patterns, variables and constants, normative norms and existential norms and you never had the slightest idea what in the world the tall, lean, fast-talking man with the piercing eyes was babbling about.

And afternoons reading in the room or at the school library, reading and half the time not even knowing what you were reading, remembering how you used to be able to lose yourself in a paperback novel and wishing you could do that instead of wallowing in all this incomprehensible and totally uninteresting knowledge.

And evenings — evenings that you spent studying sometimes, or maybe sitting around in the room talking to Ruth.

Or going out on dates with Joe.

Linda saw Joe Gunsway three more times the first week. One night they went to a movie in town and had a bite to eat at a local lunch counter. Another night they went for a long walk down one of the back roads, walking and holding hands and looking up at the stars in the sky. They walked slowly, a long way out and a long way back, and several times on their walk they stopped and he kissed her.

That Saturday night his hall had a party and he took her to it. She met other boys and girls and drank several glasses of a punch called Purple Jesus, an innocent-looking concoction of grape juice and grapefruit juice and vodka that was much more potent than it appeared to be. She got a little bit high and enjoyed herself immensely, taking everything in and noticing with approval how heavy her feet were and how happily light her head was.

After the party Joe drove out into the country, taking the same road they had walked along the night before. He stopped the car on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere and for perhaps five minutes they sat side by side, their bodies touching. Neither of them said anything.

Then he turned to her and kissed her. She felt very passionate from the punch and from the gentle blackness of the night, and when he kissed her she put her arms around him and returned the kiss with an animal hunger she had never displayed to him before. She realized with a start that the way she felt that night she would let him make love to her if he tried, and she hoped that he wouldn’t try because she wasn’t ready, not entirely, and she didn’t want to spoil the closeness that existed between them.

There was no cause for her to worry. He kissed her again and he kissed her all over her face and throat, but after the first few times the passion went out of his kisses and was replaced by tenderness. She knew then that it would be very easy for them to control themselves. The loveplay they were going through was not the intensive frenzy that had driven her and Chuck half out of their minds, but a calm, easy-going sort of petting that never threatened to burst into flames.

When he touched her breast for the first time she felt not excited but restful, very restful. That was as far as he attempted to go that night, never fumbling with her clothing and never trying to do more than touch and feel the swell of her breasts through her dress. They sat together for a long time in the car, but for periods of time they stopped kissing and touching and sat very still together, close in each other’s arms and looking out at the night. The top of the convertible was down and the air was clean and the stars bright, and she decided that it was very good to be sitting in Joe’s arms and enjoying the night around her. Once when they were sitting like that his lips brushed her yellow hair and a warm, happy feeling ran through her body.

After he had taken her home and kissed her a final time he drove off into the night and she watched him from the doorway until the car turned off on a side street and disappeared from view. Then she turned away and walked very slowly up the two flights of stairs to her hall. The room was empty; Ruth hadn’t yet returned from wherever she had gone that evening. She turned on the light and sat down at her desk, her head cupped in the palms of her hands and her eyes staring down at the desk-top.

She sat that way for a few moments, letting her mind wander and not thinking of anything in particular. Then the first issue of The Clifton Record caught her eye and she opened it once again to Don Gibbs’ editorial. It was a standard piece on the surface, about sixty double-column lines welcoming the freshman class to Clifton College. But a second reading revealed another message between the lines. The editorial was a subtle slam at higher education in general and Clifton College in particular.

It was, all in all, an especially mean editorial — but there was nothing you could put your finger on, nothing that would permit anyone to censure the person who had written it. It revealed that the author was a very interesting person, a very clever person.

But she had already guessed that. No, it hadn’t been a guess. The minute she saw Don Gibbs at the tavern she knew that he would be worth knowing. Since then she had seen him a half-dozen times or so on campus but had still never met him.

She stood up suddenly and began to get ready for bed, undressing and washing her face and brushing her teeth. She brushed her long blonde hair until it glistened. Then she turned out the light and slipped under the covers of the lower bunk.

She decided, sleepily, that she didn’t want to think any more about Don Gibbs. She already had a man, and she saw that her relationship with Joe could develop into real love. He was so gentle with her, so considerate of her.

She guessed that Don Gibbs would be neither gentle nor considerate. He might not ever so much as notice her to begin with, and if he did he would probably be cruel and sarcastic and demanding. She pictured him in her mind — the crew cut, the beard, the slight wrinkles in his forehead and at the corners of his mouth. Then the picture faded and was replaced by one of Joe.

Joe was obviously the better man for her.

But she couldn’t stop thinking of Don Gibbs.

She bumped into Don Gibbs Thursday afternoon.

That, quite literally, was what happened. She was hurrying from her sociology class to the library with a pile of unreadable books under her arm and her head down. The position of her head enabled her to see quite clearly the hem of her black skirt, the white socks, the saddle shoes, and the ground she walked on.

Unfortunately, it did not enable her to see where she was going.

Halfway down the path to the library she collided with Donald Gibbs. At first, of course, she didn’t know who it was that she collided with. She didn’t know, for that matter, that she had collided with anybody at all. For all she knew she had walked into a tree. The shock of the whole thing sent her sprawling, with unreadable books flying off in all directions. When she looked up timidly and saw his face gazing down at her, she turned a deep shade of red and began sputtering unintelligibly.

“My fault,” he said. “I should have watched where you were going.”

She started to say something but before any words came out he was taking her by one arm and lifting her to her feet. Then he stooped over to pick up her books and handed them to her in a neat stack.

“Oh, yes,” she said, stupidly. “My books.”

“Probably. They’re not mine, and we were the only two cars in the crash.”

“I’m sorry. I should have—”

“Forget it.”

“I didn’t hurt you, did I?”

“Hardly. You all right?”

She nodded uncertainly and hesitated, wanting to turn and hurry off to the library but not knowing quite how to go about it. Before she could do much of anything he smiled at her briefly and asked: “Who are you?”

“Linda.”

“That’s a start. Can you give me any more clues?”

She looked at him, puzzled.

“It may surprise you,” he explained, “but there are quite a few Linda’s. I thought perhaps you might have some means of identification which would be a little more specific.”

“Oh.”

“Like a last name, for example.”

“Shepard,” she said, desperately. “Linda Shepard. From Cleveland.”

“That’s a little better. What else?”

“Like what?”

“What year are you?”

“Freshman.”

He nodded. “Major?”

“English.”

“Hall?”

“Evans.”

He nodded again and struck a pose with one hand on his hip and the other stroking his beard. “Linda Shepard from Cleveland,” he said. “What in the world do you do?”

“Do?”

“Do,” he repeated. “Some people play tennis. Others paint murals on lavatory walls. Still others climb mountains. I just wondered what—”

“Oh,” she said. “I... well, I... I don’t do much of anything.”

He shook his head as if he was thoroughly ashamed of her but she could tell he was making fun of her. “That’s bad,” he said. “That’s very bad. Like an oyster.”

“An oyster?”

“They just sit on the bottom of the ocean. They never do a damned thing.”

She waited.

“I’m Don Gibbs,” he said. “Record editor.”

“I know.”

“Oh?” He seemed surprised. “You said you majored in English?”

She nodded.

“Why don’t you drop up to the Record office tonight? I’ll find something for you to do and you won’t have to wander around bumping into people and feeling like an oyster.”

“I—”

“The paper comes out tomorrow,” he went on. “There are always too many things to do on Thursday night. I can use some help. Can you spell?”

She nodded, mystified.

“Then you can read copy and proof. Drop up any time after eight.”

“I... I have a date tonight.”

“Congratulations,” he said. “Everybody should have them. Like parents.”

“Parents?”

“Parents. Everybody should have dates and parents and things like that. But what does that have to do with it? The date isn’t going to last until morning, is it?”

“No, of course not.”

“Well, drop up after the date is over. It’s simple enough, really. All you have to do is go on your date until your date isn’t any more and then come up to the office. Okay?”

“Sure,” she said. “I guess so.”

He nodded, smiled another smile as brief as the first, and started walking off briskly. She stood watching him for a few seconds until she realized what she was doing. Then she turned and hurried to the library.

Joe was dull that night.

She realized this, and as she realized it she also realized that she wasn’t being entirely fair to Joe. It wasn’t his fault — the movie he took her to was a first-rate foreign film, the beer at the tavern was cold, the pizza properly spicy. And Joe’s conversation was as pleasant and warm as ever.

It wasn’t Joe’s fault, but Joe was dull. He hadn’t been dull before, and this bothered her. Because she knew why he seemed dull now. It didn’t take a genius to figure out why he seemed dull. He seemed dull because, by comparison to Don Gibbs, Joe Gunsway just didn’t sparkle.

She fought against this realization. When Joe parked the car in front of her dorm and kissed her, she forced herself to respond as passionately as possible, pulling him tight against her and probing his mouth with her tongue, sending his pulse racing even if her own remained quite steady.

It was a few minutes after midnight when Joe walked her from the car to the door, gave her a final kiss, and left her. It was another minute or so after midnight when she walked from her dormitory to the Student Union. First she waited until Joe’s car was out of sight, because she didn’t want him to know where she was going. She didn’t think he would mind — she certainly didn’t have a date with Don, but was only going to do some work on the newspaper. But she didn’t want him asking any questions.

It was dark out, and the streetlights were spaced very far apart along the road to the Student Union. She walked quickly, hoping she looked as good as Joe had assured her she did. She was wearing her black skirt, the one she had been wearing that afternoon, with a white cashmere sweater. The sweater was very tight and not particularly warm, but the last time a girl wore a sweater to keep warm was in 1823. It did what it was supposed to do admirably. Her breasts looked as though they might peep out through the thin white material at any moment, and the lines of the bra were clearly visible when she stood in a good light. And, because the sweater was white, it made her breasts look even larger than they would otherwise.

Tricks, she thought. And they probably wouldn’t do much good anyway, because Don was probably interested in her as a piece of slave labor rather than as a piece of something else. But it didn’t hurt to try, anyway.

She mounted the steps of the Union building and crossed over the flat concrete stoop to the door. Once inside she realized how incredibly empty the building was. She’d been there three times a day or more since she arrived at Clifton, since the cafeteria was located in the Union, but she had never before been in it when it was empty. The building was fairly new, built just two or three years ago, and the modernistic architecture of the structure was called Twentieth-Century Ugly by the majority of the student body, as well as by a good part of the faculty in the privacy of their homes. The linoleum-covered floor seemed unusually wide when Linda’s feet were the only ones walking on it, and her footsteps sounded annoyingly loud.

She walked up a flight of stairs to the second floor. Halfway around the building was the Record office; it had been one of the places on the campus tour forced upon all entering freshmen, and she found it now with no difficulty. She would have had little trouble locating it in any case, since it was the only office in the building with the lights on.

At first glance the huge room appeared to be empty. A large desk surrounded by strangely-shaped wooden tables stood at the far side of the office. A long black table lined the wall near her. There was paper in one form or another all over the place — crumpled sheets of white copy paper, folded but unfiled issues of last week’s Record, paper bags and empty coffee cups and scraps of paper that didn’t seem to possess any discernible identity of their own. She wandered into the middle of all this confusion and looked around helplessly.

Then she saw the editor’s office, a separate room running off from the main room. The light was on and the door open, and she walked hesitantly to the doorway. Don Gibbs was sitting behind a large desk, staring at a sheet of paper on the desk in front of him. He held a cigarette between the second and third fingers of his right hand and a pencil in his left hand. Another cigarette burned unnoticed in an ashtray that was already filled to overflowing with cigarette butts and burned-out matches.

The room was even messier than the outer office. There was a small brown pool of spilled coffee on the floor surrounded by more thrown-away paper. A sport jacket lay neatly folded in the middle of the floor, and near the door was a naked dress-dummy, formless and ragged, with a brassiere around the bust and a lamp coming out of the top.

Don didn’t look up at first. He looked tired, incredibly tired. Everything about him looked tired, from the weary lines in his face to the rumpled, wrinkled, once-white shirt that was open at the neck and partially unbuttoned.

He dragged deeply on the cigarette and coughed. Then he turned his full attention to the scrap of paper and made some marks on it with the pencil. He studied the results for a moment, then nodded with bored satisfaction and placed the paper in the upper half of an In-Out box. Without pausing he began to scrutinize another sheet of copy paper in the same manner, marking it up with the thick lead pencil.

Linda looked at him. He was, she decided, a very complex person. She remembered the self-satisfied young man who threw down shots of whiskey with beer chasers at the tavern, the smooth and witty young man who handed her her books after she ran into him and talked her off her feet. This was a new side to Don Gibbs, this tired young man who worked without a break and seemed on the point of collapse.

She coughed nervously, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. She coughed a second time and he looked up.

“I’m here,” she said. “What do you want me to do?”