Chapter 9
THAT DAY ON THE BEACH turned out to be the only day I would spend with Nell that summer.
The next morning she telephoned me at Aunt Bertha's and told me not to try to see her that day. Her voice sounded strained and she closed the connection quickly.
I spent the day roaming the waterfront, poking among the boats and packing sheds. Aunt Bertha greeted me with a peculiar expression when I got back to her late that afternoon. She handed me a note she said Nell had left with her an hour before. I tore open the envelope. The note was hastily scrawled and brief.
Mark, Fred is leaving tonight on a business trip and I am going with him. I'm not sure how long we'll be gone-it could be most of the summer. It was fun seeing you again. I'm sorry we won't get to spend more time together during your vacation.
Love, Nell
I stared at the words, feeling stunned. Next I looked at Aunt Bertha. She was busy fumbling around with some dishes on the table.
"Did you know Nell was going away on a trip?" I demanded.
She avoided looking directly at me.
"No. It seemed to come up all of a sudden."
I was thinking about that character who had seen Nell and me swimming on the lonely strip of beach far down the island yesterday-the guy Nell had said worked for Fred. That he had recognized either of us at the distance was un-likely. But he had probably known the car and might have found some identification in my clothing. Had he reported to Fred Turner? Had Fred decided that Nell was too friendly with her cousin? Was jealousy the reason for this unexpected trip that would take her away for an indefinite period?
"What do you know about this trip, Aunt Bertha?" I persisted.
She wiped her palms on her apron, still avoiding my eyes.
"Land's sakes, Mark, I don't know what goes on in : Nell's home. It's none of my business. If Fred wants to j take her on a trip with him-that's their business." She looked embarrassed and uneasy. She moistened her lips. "Mark," she finished awkwardly, "maybe you'd-you'd better spend your vacation somewhere else. There isn't much around here for a nice young fellow your age."
I looked at her closely.
"Are you trying to get rid of me, Aunt Bertha?"
Her hands flustered toward her hair. The poor old lady looked distracted and more than half frightened.
"Now-you know it isn't that at all, Mark. You're a fine boy and I love you just like I love my own kids. It's just that I don't want any trouble. I don't want to see you getting involved in something that-well, that might not be pleasant."
She was scared. That was it. Both she and Nell were afraid of Fred Turner. The fat bastard had the whole family cowering under his pudgy thumb. I felt a new wave of hatred-I also felt utterly frustrated and helpless. What could I do? Nell was Fred Turner's wife and likely to remain so.
Aunt Bertha was right-no point in my continuing to hang around. I left that day.
I spent an uninspired summer, part of the time at home and part of the time knocking around aimlessly. I ducked out of Alice's invitation to spend some time at her parent's ranch. Back home everything was in a hopeless state of confusion over Debbie's frenetic wedding preparations. No one paid attention to me-so that for me it was a time of glum peace.
I was glad to see the fall college season begin.
I was hardly back on the campus before I ran into Alice. She ran to me and kissed me.
I was glad to see her, I guessed, but kind of uncomfortable about it, too. We had had some swinging times together last year. But my recent contact with Nell had dimmed my feeling for Alice to a considerable degree. I saw Alice from a new perspective-I saw in her a sweet but young girl. Not dime a dozen, certainly-but a girl who could make it with any of a number of guys. No matter how she felt about me, I felt I was nothing special to her.
Nell had a certain maturity-and she had made me feel special, selected, from the start.
Alice had linked her arm through mine and was dragging me off to a coffee shop near the campus, chatting a mile a minute.
"Why didn't you answer any of my letters, Mark? And you were coming out to the ranch, remember? I'm furious at you. Are you trying to brush me off?" she demanded.
I made up excuses about being all tied up with my family and having to spend some time at one of my father's plants. I thought of breaking cleanly with her on the spot-but I couldn't make up my mind. Not seeing Alice at all could make for an unpredictable school year. I looked at the fine clean lines of her body and figured I would be a damn fool to give up someone like her.
In the coffee shop we put our heads together and made small talk. I told her about Debbie's impending marriage.
"The old man is making a three-ring circus out of it-he wants to impress everybody. There's going to be an enormous reception at the country club. He's hired a big-name band and the most expensive caterer. He's going to blow thirty thousand bucks on the thing before he's through."
Alice laughed at my disgust, holding my hands and looking into my eyes as if unable to pull her gaze away. The look and the warmth of her hands on mine began to stir my blood. Her thigh found mine under the table and began a sliding caress. I began to pay attention to the deep V of her neckline.
She was warming up, too. I felt a trembling in her fingers.
I said, "Why don't we go over to my pad for a while?" She blushed, but her eyes didn't waver. "All right, Mark," she said.
We went outside and got into her red convertible and drove quickly to my place. I had again rented the garage apartment.
Alice locked the door and turned to me. The pupils of her eyes were wide with excitement and her breath came quickly. A lovely blush tinted her cheeks and throat.
She whispered thickly, "Mark-"
Then we were in a clinch. Her kiss was sweeter than I had remembered.
"How much I missed you," she whispered against my lips. She kissed me again deeply, hungrily. "I've been a good girl, Mark-I've been saving myself for you." She drew back to look at me. "How about you? Any other girls?"
"No," I lied.
We kissed again. I unbuttoned her blouse and pushed it off her bare, white shoulders. I unhooked her bra and took that off, too. Undressing her was a familiar chore. Her small naked breasts were familiar, too-but I found myself comparing them to the fullness of Nell's. But Alice's were delicately and beautifully formed.
"Mark, you're driving me out of my mind. Don't make me wait any longer."
Within seconds we were both stripped and on the bed. What I felt was not quite love. The bed became a battlefield and Alice a challenge-could I find with her a sub-sdtute for what I had lost with Nell?
I still did not know by sundown.
Alice and I made the college scene again-the registration, the classes, the pep rallies, bonfires, football games, dances and parties.
That fall I made friends with Sandy Cleary, a way-out type, a halfway intellectual who became a philosopher if you got him drunk enough. Sandy majored in drama but spent so much time getting involved in meetings and demonstrations that I don't know how he ever made any classes. He had a pint-sized, sexy girl friend named Flip Gordon. Both of them were nuts. I dug them because they were honest. I was bugged by people with pretensions and found the off-beat honesty of Sandy and Flip refreshing.
Alice did not share my taste for Sandy and Flip. She had a feminine suspicion and distrust of them, especially of Flip, who was a first-rate swinger.
"You shouldn't hang around with people like that, Mark. You're in enough hot water as it is. They'll just make it worse."
"Why are you always trying to reform me? You're beginning to sound like my old man."
"It's just that I care. I know how close you came to getting kicked out of school last year. You're headed in the same direction again."
"Big deal," I replied. "This whole culture scene bugs me. Look at the phonies you and I know-the kids from families like ours. Sandy and Flip are different. Maybe they are a little out in left field-but they're there because that's where they like to play. Not because somebody told them that's where they belong."
"Mark, you're going to have to latch onto some kint of values."
"Stop bugging me, will you?"
Suddenly we were glaring at each other. Alice slammed out of my pad. It seemed as if we either had to fight or make love. Our relationship swung from one extreme to another.
I didn't care what Alice thought, I went right on seeing Sandy and Flip. Sometimes I was able to talk Alice into double-dating with Flip and Sandy. One night we went to hear the performance of a big-name folk singer at the campus auditorium. Later, we stopped at Sandy's pad. He had an apartment more disreputable than mine. The walls were covered with Flip's outlandish paintings. She was an art major and she was using some kind of experimental impressionistic style that nobody understood. Her paintings looked like something out of an LSD nightmare. They well might have been. Sandy and Flip turned on with anything available, including LSD.
That night we were drinking rum.
"A square," Sandy said of the singer we had heard. "Pure commercial junk."
Alice gave him a testy look.
"I thought he was great."
"Junk," Sandy repeated.
"Sandy, you think if someone isn't so avant garde that nobody will pay to hear him-he puts out junk," Alice said heatedly.
She and Sandy seldom agreed on anything.
Flip broke up the argument by getting her guitar from under the bed and singing some of her own songs. She was really talented.
I sat back, getting sozzled on the rum and coke, taking in the whole silly scene. We sat on the floor because the only furniture Sandy had was a pallet and some rugs and pillows and bookcases made out of apple boxes. They were crammed with volumes on philosophy, leaning heavily toward existentialism. Flip's pint-sized figure was sheathed in skin-tight stretch pants and an equally clinging blouse. Alice wore a pink cardigan over a blouse. Her legs were curled under her. Sandy was listening to Flip and staring at Alice's legs.
Flip got tired of singing. She propped her guitar in a corner and put some classical music on Sandy's portable stereo player. Muted violins filled the pad. Sandy and Alice got into an argument about the accepted practice of homosexuality among the ancient Greeks.
Sandy advocated permissiveness today.
Alice gave him a disgusted look.
"You're absolutely decadent," she said.
"Why, because I am not afraid of change? Nothing stays the same. How are we ever going to find the truth unless we experiment? The thing to do is to experience every sensation, try everything-then you can pick the false from what's true and good."
"That sounds like a rationalization, a license to indulge yourself."
"No. What keeps you to a rigid social conduct," Sandy said, earnestly, "is not a rational approach. It's an emotional approach based on guilt. Guilt makes us all too cowardly to re-evaluate our concepts of right and wrong."
"But our concept of right and wrong has been handed down to us by generations who have learned from experience what is good and bad. And maybe it sounds trite-but these values are eternal."
"You think so? Then why has our morality resulted in hydrogen bombs, overpopulation, mass starvation, water and air pollution, prejudice-"
Their argument wasn't making much sense to me-and I doubted they were very clear in their own minds about what they were saying. By then we were all getting pretty well bombed.
Sandy said, "The whole point is, we need to be jerked out of a rut. We need to reach up to other planes of consciousness, to look down from the heights. Like right now. We're just sitting around here talking, and our senses are dulled and everything is routine and commonplace. Now, suppose all of us took their clothes off. We'd be in revolt against convention. We might find fresh insights and new viewpoints-"
Alice flushed angrily.
"You'd have a new viewpoint all right. All that so-called philosophy of yours is just a disguise for a dirty mind. Mark, take me home."
Our evenings together usually wound up this way. Alice and Sandy fought. Flip boozed and sat listening to music as it evoked inner voices in her.
I took Alice back to her sorority house as she requested. We said little on the way home. She was half-mad at me, too, because I refused to drop Sandy and Flip. I suspected she was a little jealous of them.
I left Alice, I picked up a fresh bottle of rum from my apartment and went back to Sandy's. He and Flip were necking on the bed when I walked in. Neither was at all embarrassed. Flip made no bones about the fact that she was sleeping with Sandy.
I mixed up a fresh round of drinks, put a couple of them near the bed where Flip and Sandy could reach them. I looked through Sandy's record collection. He went in for the longhair stuff. I preferred jazz. I finally located an album I could stand. I put it on, leaned against the wall with my eyes closed and listened to fine jazz. After a while the candle went out and I went to sleep. I woke up once and heard the bedclothes on the far side of the room whispering rhythmically. The sounds steamed me up but presently they ceased. I went back to sleep.
I felt a nudge during the night. Flip was curled up beside me.
"Hi," she whispered. "Hi," I said, surprised.
She moved closer. I reached out and touched bare flesh. She wore not a stitch.
The next thing I knew she was helping me get out of my clothes.
"How about Sandy?" I whispered.
"He's asleep."
"What if he wakes up?"
"He won't mind."
"Are you sure?"
"Of course. Sandy likes for me to-to have other experiences. He says it makes me more interesting."
She stopped talking. Her mouth became busy. The night turned into a wild one.
Sandy did wake up and, as Flip had said, we didn't bother him at all.
He came to sit on the floor beside us. He said this kind of situation was very sexy and gave a guy a whole new perspective of love and friendship. We finally all went to sleep on the bed and in the morning we all got up and sat around, naked as jaybirds, while eating a weird breakfast of yogurt, wheat germ and rum that Sandy served up.