Campus Tramp (12 page)

Leon Camelot picked her up at 7:30. Leon Camelot turned out to be a tall beanpole type with glasses and a rather bulbous nose. He told her that he was majoring in physics and that he planned to go to graduate school at M.I.T. At the time she could imagine nothing duller than majoring in physics and going to graduate school at M.I.T., but she didn’t tell him this.

On the way down to the show she sat next to him in the front seat of his brand-new Rambler sedan and listened to him talk about the miracles of the modern physical world. He seemed to know everything there was to know about relativity and quantum theory, and while this didn’t make for the liveliest conversation in the western world, it was something of a change to sit next to an expert on such vital facets of everyday living.

The movie, contrary to Leon Camelot’s report, wasn’t much to sit through—the standard Hollywood drivel complete with the phony happy ending. Instead of watching the actors mince around on the screen she relaxed in her chair and wondered why in the name of Einstein Leon Camelot had called her for a date. Time, she decided, would tell. And whatever it was, it was something to do.

The movie ended.

Everything does, if you give it time. Even a movie like that one. Anyway, it ended, and after it was over Leon Camelot took her by the hand and led her out of the movie theater.

“Wanta coke or something?”

She shook her head.

“Wanta go for a ride?”

“Okay,” she said. She didn’t have anything better to do, just books that she didn’t want to read and studying that she didn’t intend to bother with. Why not go for a ride with Leon Camelot?

They went for a ride. The Rambler was a fine machine and Leon Camelot knew how to drive very well. Linda wondered dimly whether his ability behind the wheel was in some way due to his prowess in the world of physics. It was something to think about anyway.

Leon Camelot, it turned out, not only knew how to drive but also knew how to park. Subtle he wasn’t, but all of a sudden the car was parked on a shady lane unsullied by streetlights. It suddenly became quite clear to her why Leon Camelot had called her for a date. She wanted to say something bright and clever, but all she could think of was how in the world were they going to do it in the car.

So she said: “’How in the world are we going to do it in the car?”

“It’s a Rambler,” he explained.

“So?”

“The seats go down.”

“That’s nice,” she said. “The seats go down and so do I.”

He blinked, and his bulbous nose seemed more bulbous than ever. She turned on her seat and looked up at him, waiting for him to begin. Not once did it occur to her to refuse to make love with him. It was as though she had found her role in life—the question of her own desires didn’t enter into the picture.

But Leon didn’t seem to know what to do.

“Leon—”

He stared at her and blinked again.

“Didn’t you ever—”

“A few times,” he said. “But never with a girl. I mean … never with a girl from school or—”

He broke off, looking somewhat bewildered, and she waited for him to say whatever he was trying to say.

“With prostitutes,” he said. “Down at Newport there’s a place some of the guys go to some of the time. But I never did it with a girl that I knew.”

He looked so sincere that she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. For a moment it occurred to her that she was being called upon to double in brass for a Newport whore but she didn’t let the thought worry her.

“Leon,” she said softly, “don’t you know what to do?”

“I know what to do. I just don’t know how to get started.”

He was approaching the problem like a problem in theoretical physics, and that wasn’t the right way to go about it. “You could begin by kissing me,” she suggested.

He followed her suggestion. At first the kiss wasn’t much more than the pressing of one pair of lips against another, but after a little practice she was surprised to discover that Leon Camelot was learning quickly. Despite herself she felt her heart quickening, found herself getting excited as his arms tightened around her.

“Let’s put the seats down,” she said.

They put the seats down. The seats in Leon Camelot’s Rambler evidently hadn’t been down in quite awhile—which was more than could be said for Linda—and the time it took to get the car ready for battle almost killed her mood. But he kissed her again and she got back into the spirit of the occasion.

“Unbutton my blouse.”

He performed like a highly skilled robot, but once her blouse and bra were off and he was fondling her breasts clumsily but effectively she was able to forget where she was and who she was with. He kissed her breasts, not skillfully as Don had done but with a certain amount of passion, and she didn’t have to manufacture excitement. She was quite thoroughly aroused.

She took off her skirt and panties without any prompting and he had the sense to follow suit. There was something strange about lying around stark naked in a parked car but before long she found herself used to the idea.

Now that the two of them were naked Leon Camelot’s hands took on a new assurance as he caressed her and kissed her and drove her half-wild with hunger. Either he learned quickly or he did a lot of reading, she thought.

Then she didn’t bother thinking any more.

There were better things to do.

And, once they really got down to business, her brain was spinning around much too quickly for any thoughts to germinate in her head. They made love quickly, feverishly, hectically, and at one point she was afraid that the rhythm of their bodies would start the car rolling along the lane.

Then, eventually, it was over. The customary feeling of relief was present as the usual aftermath, but for the first time she felt acutely ashamed of herself, conscious that what they had done was wrong, even inexcusable. As she dressed she found it impossible to look at Leon Camelot, and on the drive back to the dormitory she stayed on her own side of the car, careful to avoid touching his arm, careful to keep from any additional physical contact with the boy.

At her dorm he asked her if he could see her again and she told him maybe sometime, that he could call her some evening next week if he felt like it. She said the words automatically, knowing all the while that he would not call and that if he did she would not see him. The experience had been nothing more than just that to him, she felt, nothing more than an experience not far removed from previous excursions to the Newport cathouses. It wasn’t likely that he’d be particularly anxious for a repeat performance.

As for herself, she already knew what the affair was for her. Just part of a pattern, a pattern that was going to be repeated again and again, over and over, on and on and on and on. She walked up the steps and down the hall to her room, undressing for bed, anxious to sleep. First, though, she had to take a shower. She felt truly unclean for the first time in her life.

The shower didn’t help. She scrubbed herself over and over with no discernible effect. Finally she gave up and went back to her room and crawled into bed.

Her head started spinning. She had to get up and race down the hall to the bathroom again, where she was violently sick to her stomach for several minutes.

It was almost dawn before she finally passed out and slept for sixteen hours.

Leon Camelot was followed by Frank Willet, who in turn was followed by Jackson Rice, who paved the way for Nick Bingle, who gave way to Roy Swinnerton.

Thus the days went by.

And the nights.

It made perfect sense to her. She was the tramp of Clifton College, the little girl who could be counted on for a tumble on the turf or a roll in the hay when ever a guy needed something female to take his mind off the pressing business of books and tests and classes. She had more dates than she wanted, but dates weren’t the only source of sexual satisfaction. There would be a date in the early part of the evening, a date that was nothing more than the prelude to a scramble in the back seat of a car. She found in the course of it all that if you weren’t particularly choosy it wasn’t at all difficult to make love in a car, even a non-Rambler without descending seats to simplify matters. Or, if something more than automotive sex was on the evening’s program, there was always the motel down the road where any couple was automatically man and wife and where the proprietor didn’t care what went on as long as he got his money in advance.

After the date, her companion of the evening would drop her ceremoniously at her door and wish her goodnight. Then she would troop down to the Landmine for coffee, waiting for someone to come and pick her up. And there was always somebody willing, somebody who would take her to still another place and make still more love to her.

Why not?

What else was she good for?

Nothing
, she would answer herself.

Still, she couldn’t help feeling sick inside from time to time, sick and empty and wasted. She had stopped writing her weekly letter home, but mail from the family still arrived, pathetic and hopeless letters that revealed how blissfully unaware her mother and father were of the sort of life she was leading.

Well, the hell with them. What they didn’t know might hurt
her
, but it surely wouldn’t hurt them. Every once in a while she forced herself to write a letter to them, a silly and vacuous letter full to the brim with news of events that had never happened, a letter loaded with the stuff and nonsense that she knew they wanted to hear from her. Just so it made them happy, she told herself. Someone in the family might as well be happy.

She gave up classes entirely. Midterms were over and the close of the first semester was coming with its load of exams. She let it come and go, not even going to two of her finals. The others she attended and failed gloriously.

It didn’t matter.

Nothing mattered.

Nothing mattered at all.

She went home Christmas vacation. She went home and lied and pranced around and acted like a veteran trouper, and no one in the family could possibly have suspected a thing. It was rough, that two-week vacation without a man, and on the night before she was due to go back to school she called up Chuck Connor and got him to take her to a drive-in. She looked forward to sleeping with Chuck, looked forward to completing at last something that should have been completed long ago.

But fate somehow decreed that she confine her sex life to the Clifton campus. Her period came in the middle of the movie, so as far as Chuck ever knew she was still a virgin.

Back to school.

Back to the old routine.

Back to the sack.

It was the first week in February when she discovered it was possible and rather pleasant to make love in a dormitory room in the middle of the afternoon. It happened in Lee Colestock’s room in Buchanan hall and it was a very enjoyable experience for all concerned. All, in this instance, happened to be Linda and Lee.

Ruth tried to talk to her. It was, Linda thought, a little late for the brunette to start playing the dutiful roommate, but Ruth seemed sincerely concerned for her.

“Look,” she said, “you’re not in so deep that you can’t stop. You can get to work and pass your courses and keep away from men and—”

“I couldn’t possibly pass my courses.”

“You could if you spent enough time on them. If you quit sleeping around and—”

“I couldn’t possibly quit sleeping around.”

“Of course you could. If you really wanted to—”

“But I
don’t
want to.”

And that settled that.

Don wouldn’t see her. She tried to see him two or three times, just so that the two of them could knock off a quick one for auld lang syne, but he wouldn’t get near her. He seemed disgusted with her, but it was more than that. It was as if he didn’t want to see her because being with her made him feel ashamed of himself.

Well, she could live without Don. There were plenty of other fish in the pond. And she was developing into a far-better-than-average fisherwoman. It was amazing how adept a girl could get at the grand game of sex when she had a lesson or two every day of the week.

There were a good many ways to make love, she was discovering. There were an almost infinite number of variations on a basically sound theme, and variety was making life quite a spicy affair.

It was a good life, all in all.

Except during the bad moments.

The bad moments were a perennial occurrence. Every once in awhile, every couple of days, the whole twisted pattern of her life would stand up on its hind legs and stare her full in the face until she couldn’t stand it any more. Those were the bad moments, and after they had happened a few times she recognized these periodic fits of depression for what they were and learned to cope with them.

It was a good thing she did. The first really bad moment put her so far down that she actually went so far as to draw a razor blade over her left wrist three times, experimentally, not quite ready to slash her wrists and bleed to death but more than ready to consider the prospect.

Then she learned what to do when things got so bad that she felt like killing herself. It was a simple way out, when you stopped to think about it. You didn’t kill yourself and you didn’t crawl in a hole and pull the hole in after you and you didn’t just sit around and mope or look for a shoulder to spill tears on.

You picked up a bottle and drank.

It wasn’t at all difficult for her to get hold of a bottle. According to the law she couldn’t drink anything stronger than 3.2 beer until she was twenty-one years of age, but there were a lot of things that the law said which didn’t quite jibe with her own personal behavior patterns. Why in the world should her drinking coincide with the norms prescribed by law?

No reason, really.

So she drank.

Boys bought the liquor for her. She didn’t exactly hit the bottle like a full-fledged refugee from Alcoholics Unanimous, and all she needed was a fifth of liquor a week in order to be sure of staying reasonably sane on the surface.

That was all.

She drank gin because it tasted like medicine. Every time one of the bad moments came she would go off to her room and drink just enough gin so that she didn’t feel rotten anymore. She never got high, never got happy-drunk, and very rarely got so stoned that she passed out. Just enough gin to give her a little edge on the world was all she wanted. She poured the gin from the bottle into a paper cup and drank it neat, wrinkling her nose each time because she loathed the taste of the gin.