Campus Tramp

Chapter Seven

She had always wondered what you did when the world ended. And now it had happened, finally. The whole big beautiful wonderful hopeless terrible stinking world had dissolved in one grand and glorious puff of oily smoke. So she found out what you did when the world ended.

You went on living.

Of course, for a reasonable amount of time you cried on shoulders. Ruth was there, fortunately, and Ruth’s shoulder was a handy one to cry on. So she cried on Ruth’s shoulder, and she told Ruth the whole stinking story from beginning to end, and then Ruth told her everything would be all right and she told Ruth everything most emphatically would not be all right, and then she cried some more.

And went on living.

For three days she lived in an impenetrable little shell. She crawled into the shell and pulled the shell in after her. In a purple fog she went to all her classes, read all her assignments, went to sleep at ten and got up at eight. But she didn’t remember what the professors said in class and the assignments that she read passed directly through her brain and made no impression upon her. She had nine hours of sleep every night but she was still tired in the morning. Her sleep seemed to be one continual bad dream and there were times when she woke up in the middle of the night with terror shrieking through her heart and a scream on her lips.

After the fourth day she couldn’t take it any longer. She had to get Don back or she would go out of her mind. It was terrible — she passed friends in the halls without talking to them, ate her meals without tasting her food, behaved in all like an automaton just going through the motions of living.

She waited, desperately, for Don to come to her. In the back of her mind she couldn’t help knowing that he wouldn’t come to her, that the only way she could possibly see him was for her to go to him, to seek him out and try to explain to him how much she needed him, how much she had to have him back.

And, in the back of her mind, she knew that this wouldn’t work either. Nothing would work, and no matter how much she tried Don would be irrevocably lost.

But she had to try.

She started to go to the Record office one afternoon, fairly confident that she would find him there. She was on the second floor of the Union building before she changed her mind. She couldn’t see him there, not with the chance of finding others around, not with the chance of somebody like Pete Chatterjee stepping in and blowing everything to hell.

Instead she walked to his apartment. The front door was open and she walked up the stairway to Don’s apartment. He never locked his door; she went inside to wait for him.

The apartment was a mess again — piles of debris all over the floor, the bed unmade and the room generally filthy. Without thinking she began to clean it up, to put the books where they belonged, to hang the clothing in the closet and stuff the dirty clothes in his laundry bag. She threw out the garbage, piled the scraps of paper neatly on his desk, made the bed and generally created order out of chaos. It gave her something to do, and at the same time it made her feel close to Don again the way she had felt when the two of them lived together and when cleaning the apartment was part of her daily routine.

When she had finished, when the apartment was as clean as it had ever been, she sat down in a chair to wait for him.

He came home an hour or so later. He walked into the apartment, not seeing her at first, not even seeming to notice that the room had been cleaned or anything. Then he looked over at her and a strange expression appeared on his face.

“What the hell—”

She saw at once that he had been drinking. His eyes were a little bit bloodshot and out of focus and his step wasn’t as sure as it normally was. He could walk and talk straight even after hitting the bottle hard for a long period of time, but she knew him well enough by this time to know that he was more than a little drunk.

“I wanted to see you,” she said.

He lit a cigarette, dragged on it and expelled the smoke from his lungs. Then he kicked off his shoes and sat down on the edge of the bed. He didn’t say anything to her.

“I had to see you,” she went on. “I... I need you.”

“Like you need a broken collarbone.”

It wasn’t working at all. What did she have to do — get down on her knees and crawl to him?

“Don—”

She broke off after saying no more than his name. Now that she was here and he was with her she didn’t know what to say. She had an insane desire to run to him and throw herself into his arms, but she felt that if she did he would probably slap her face.

“Linda, you shouldn’t have come here.”

She looked at him but his eyes were turned downward as if he didn’t want to look her in the face.

“There’s nothing left for us,” he said. “I’m sorry for any pain I’ve caused you, but the only thing you can do now is get along without me. If we go on it’ll just be that much worse for both of us.”

She opened her mouth and closed it again without saying anything.

“We just aren’t right for each other,” he said. “I’m too old for you and you’re too young for me. I should have left you alone to begin with but I wanted to let you make your own decisions. Maybe they were the wrong ones, I don’t know. But if we get involved again it’ll be that much worse.”

“Don—”

“Please,” he said, and he sounded very tired all of a sudden. “Please, Linda. I wish you’d go now. If we keep away from each other it’ll be better for both of us.”

She took a deep breath and held it as long as she could while he sat silent upon the edge of the bed. Then she let the air out of her lungs, slowly, and began to speak.

“Just one more time,” she said. “Just make love to me one more time even if it’s the last time. I want you, Don.”

For a moment he didn’t say anything.

“See how shameless I am?” she went on. “But I can’t help it, Don. I need you and even if all it is is one more night or one more hour I want to have you.”

He looked up.

“No,” he said.

“I—”

“Damn it, can’t you get it through your head that I don’t want you? I want this to be over once and for all, Linda. I wish you’d just get the hell away and leave me alone.”

“Please, Don—”

“Get the hell away from me,” he said, his voice low and angry. “If you’re so hard up go back to your dorm and find yourself a candle.”

She went back to her dorm, but not to find a candle. She went back, walking blindly and not looking where she was going. Don didn’t want her, not at all, not even for one last bounce in a bed, and she knew now that the world had definitely ended, that there was nothing left for her, nothing at all.

She undressed before her mirror, taking a long slow look at herself, studying her firm breasts and flat stomach, handling herself all over to assure herself that it was a good body, a desirable body, a body that men would want to make love to. Her hands cupped her breasts and held them like burnt offerings to the image in the mirror, and she studied her reflection and wished that the hands that held her breasts were Don’s hands instead of her own, that Don’s eyes instead of her own eyes were busy studying the curves and contours of her body.

She didn’t want to go to sleep that night. But she didn’t want anything else, either.

She knocked herself cold with four sleeping pills and slept through all her classes the next morning.

Joe Gunsway called her the next day. She went to the phone convinced that the call was from Don even though she knew he would never call her, went to the phone on the run and grabbed the receiver and held it to her ear, saying Hello right away and praying that Don’s voice would come to her over the wire.

But the voice was Joe’s.

“I wanted to get in touch with you,” he said. “I... heard that you and Don broke up.”

“That’s right,” she said, amazed how calm she sounded to herself. “We broke up.”

“I... well, I wondered if I could see you this evening.”

At first she didn’t answer and he repeated what he had said, thinking that she hadn’t understood him. But she had understood him, all right.

And she couldn’t think of anything she wanted to do less than go out with Joe Gunsway.

“No,” she said. That was all — just the one word. She wasn’t in the mood to go into details.

“Linda—”

He stopped. She waited for him to go on.

“Linda, why not?”

A logical question, she thought. It deserved an equally logical answer.

So she said: “I don’t want to see you.”

“But why?”

Because you’re too good for me, she wanted to say. Because I’m Don Gibbs’ cast-off whore and nothing more than that. Because I’m a lousy little tramp and you’re a nice square guy and you can do better than me.

But she didn’t say that. Instead she said: “I just don’t, Joe. Please don’t call me any more.”

And she put the receiver back on the hook. He called again, of course, as she must have known he would. This time she didn’t talk to him at all. As soon as she knew that it was him again on the phone she replaced the receiver and broke the connection again.

He didn’t call any more after that.

For the next week she didn’t do anything.

It is not easy to do nothing at all. As a matter of fact, it takes either a great deal of concentration or a great deal of lack of interest in the world. Linda didn’t have a great deal of concentration — concentration in general was too much for her just then. But she possessed an enormous capacity for lacking interest in the world.

Nothing mattered any more. It was as simple as that.

There were quite a few things she did not do. She did not go to classes. She did not open a book. She did not even read the Record when Don deposited a stack of copies on the table in the caf Friday night.

She ate, but only when she was starving and then only enough to keep her alive. She slept, but only when she was so exhausted that she couldn’t stay awake any more. She woke up, but only when she had slept as long as she possibly could.

She didn’t speak to people if she could possibly avoid it. She didn’t go for walks or look at the scenery. In short, she did as close to nothing as she possibly could while still eating and breathing and sleeping enough to keep alive.

She would sit in her room for hours on end, just staring at the wall like a schizophrenic or looking out the window without seeing anything on the outside. She would lounge on the steps of the Union building along with the other people in the group, but she would sit there for hours on end without exchanging a word with one of them, without listening to what they said, without doing anything in particular.

During that week she hardly even thought about anything.

That was funny, in a cockeyed sort of away. Every once in a while her mind would start on one cycle of thought or another, but before long she would be thinking about Don again and she would get all fouled up. It was easier not to think than to think about Don.

So she quit thinking.

Ruth tried to pull her out of her depression. Ruth wasn’t around the room much — she was spending more and more time up at Sheila Ashley’s room — but still she talked to Linda whenever she saw her and tried valiantly to cheer her up.

Needless to say, it didn’t work.

Nothing worked.

The trouble, she decided, was that she no longer seemed to want anything. She wanted Don, of course, but wanting Don was like wishing for wings. If she had wanted anything in particular she might have been able to shake the mood of depression that nestled around her neck like a black albatross.

As it was, she didn’t want a thing in the world. And that was worse than wanting something she could never have.

Finally — and it took over a week — she found something she could want.

A man.

It wasn’t quite that simple. She was standing nude in her room again before her mirror, looking at her body, touching herself and remembering Don’s touch. It occurred to her that her body was a very good body, a body that men ought to want. And it also occurred to her that even if Don no longer wanted her body, somebody else might want it.

It wasn’t Don’s private property any more, that body of hers. If it no longer belonged to Don, there wasn’t much sense in keeping it out of circulation until the end of time. Why not let somebody else have a crack at it? Don had told her to go back to her room and find herself a candle. But another man would do her a lot more good than a candle, that was certain.

She gave the matter a lot of concentrated thought while she stood nude before her mirror and gazed upon the reflected breasts and belly and thighs. She imagined a man with a blank face, a shapeless nonentity, a man who would touch her and arouse her and take his pleasure with her and ultimately satisfy her, and her mind made itself up after a while.

She got dressed. She put on the white sweater she had worn to the Record office that first time, but now she omitted the bra. She would make things easier for whoever she selected as her human candle.

She slipped a skirt on without bothering with panties underneath it. The skirt was a dark green and it contrasted nicely with her blonde hair and with the white sweater. She didn’t bother with socks but pulled a pair of dirty white tennis shoes onto her feet and tied them quickly.

Then she left the dormitory. She wandered aimlessly around campus for about half an hour, not knowing who or what she was looking for, not knowing where to search for the man who would serve as Lover Number Two. For a moment she considered hunting up Joe Gunsway — he certainly wanted her, and he’d be more than grateful for a chance to maneuver her into a horizontal position. But she decided that she didn’t want Joe. Joe represented a potential emotional involvement, on his part if not on hers, and she didn’t want to find anybody who would fall in love with her. She just wanted somebody to take her to bed.

It was cold out — in a week or so it would probably be snowing, but now the ground was blanketed with covered leaves and the night air was clear and cool and quiet. She wandered around, getting halfway into town at one point before she turned and headed back toward the campus.

She was looking for a man. And, ultimately, she found a man.

His name was Jim Patterson.

He was a junior, she knew, and he was majoring in economics. She knew him enough to say hello to — he was one of the vague members of the Group — the gang of boys and girls that Don hung around with. He was short and wiry, with a goatee that was always neatly trimmed and eyes that seemed to look through a person.

When she saw him he was walking alone on the way back to his dormitory. He had a few books under one arm and there was a pipe in his mouth. He didn’t see her at first, and she had to run up to him before he noticed her.

“Jim!”

He turned and looked at her, his face blank. “Hi,” he said. “Where are you headed?”

“Nowhere special.”

She looked at him — a bold, purposeful look. He wasn’t a moron; he knew what had happened between her and Don, knew what she wanted when she looked at him like that.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “I want to get rid of these books. I’ll be down in a second.”

She waited at the side of the dormitory while he walked up the fire escape. While she waited she wondered what would happen, whether he already knew what she was after or whether she would have to be more obvious about it.

When he came down the fire escape with a blanket under his arm she knew she didn’t have to worry about it any more.

“Let’s go for a walk,” he said. She nodded and let him take her arm. They walked along silently across the campus toward the golf course.

Clifton’s excuse for a golf course had greens that looked like fairways and fairways that looked like rough. This, of course, was perfectly all right, since no one had attempted to play golf on the six-hole weed patch since Grant had been elected president of the United States. The physical education golf classes played on the course at Xenia Country Club. The golf course at Clifton had one use and one use only, but that use was enough.

It was a golf course with hazards, of course. The hazards consisted of the pairs of bodies that blanketed it from tee to green on warm nights. There was a legend that the president of Clifton had once walked the length of the golf course on a pitch-dark spring evening. At one point he stepped on someone. The boy who had been stepped on thanked him profusely and went back to what he had been doing.

There were those who swore the legend had a firm basis in fact.

The course was relatively empty that night, however. It was late and it was cold and the two of them had as much space as they could possibly have wanted. Without saying a word Jim spread the blanket out on the ground and the two of them sank to the ground and sat on the blanket side by side. For several seconds, neither of them made a move or said a word. Then, as if by some prearranged signal, they turned to look at each other. It was very dark — Linda could barely make out the boy’s features.

But it didn’t matter what he looked like.

“You’re very pretty,” he told her. The words were automatic — mere formality to go before the more serious business of the day. Gratefully she snuggled closer to him and his arms went around her.

They kissed. It was a passionate kiss right from the start, with both of their mouths open and both of their tongues urgent and demanding. She pressed close to him so that he could feel her breasts through the sweater, rubbing herself against him while she touched his tongue with her own.

When the kiss ended she stretched out on the blanket and he lay down beside her. She lay on her back so that he could touch her breasts, and with her eyes wide open she watched the few stars that were out that night. His hands, through the thin sweater, were warm and insistent as he manipulated her breasts expertly and she felt her nipples hardening into firm little rubies.

She lifted herself up on her elbows and helped him take off her sweater. His gasp of pleasure at the sight of her two perfect breasts made her feel warm inside, warm and wanted and desirable. The ache that had been present within her since Don had refused to sleep with her now seemed to evaporate as his hands stroked her breasts and excited her as Don’s hands had excited her not so long ago.

Then he removed her skirt, folding it neatly and placing it on the blanket beside them. His hands touched her where no hands had touched her in too many days and she writhed under his hands, wanting him, ready for him.

She unbuttoned his flannel shirt and he took it off. She touched him and held him and his breathing was becoming faster and harsher now and she knew how much he wanted her, how much he had to have her, and her heart swelled with the pleasure she derived from his need just as it pounded with her own physical need.

Then he was naked, ready for her as she was ready for him. She felt ridiculous with her tennis shoes still on her feet and kicked them off impatiently, then drawing her feet up and making herself ready for him. There was no time to waste on loveplay, no time to waste on kisses and caresses, no time for anything but pure sexual pleasure.

“Hurry!” she begged him.

He took her and her body slipped at once into the now-familiar rhythm. Her hips churned as her arms locked around him and pressed him against her. She felt almost alive again, alive for the first time in weeks, and she wanted to make the moment last forever, to make him stay there until the end of the world, loving her savagely and passionately forever.

He reached his climax before she did and she feared for a moment that he would leave her before bringing her the release she craved so desperately. But her fears vanished the next second as he stayed with her, moving with her, straining with her, until she floated higher to the top and finally received the gift of peace that was so essential to her.

Then they lay together very still. It was over now — they had made love and now they could part like the proverbial two ships that pass in the night. Now she had had her pleasure; she wanted only to be alone.

He seemed to understand.

Awkwardly they separated and began dressing. She put on her sweater and skirt, then her tennis shoes, wondering as she did so why she felt absolutely no emotion toward Jim Patterson. She felt that she ought to love him or hate him or something, but instead there was no emotion at all, nothing that lingered after the so necessary orgasm had come and gone.

They stood up and he folded the blanket and put it over his arm, letting her take his other arm as they walked back to the campus. They parted at the edge of the golf course — their dorms were in different directions and there seemed to be no need for them to walk together any further. She went straight to her room without a backward glance at him.

It wasn’t the same as it had been with Don. It was sex, nothing but sex, and it wasn’t the same as what she had enjoyed in the past. It was the quiet and random breeding of animals in the privacy of a barnyard. The only purpose was physical satisfaction, the only emotion was an indefinable feeling of cameraderie.

But, she thought as she undressed for bed, able to sleep at last, it was surely better than nothing.