First Love and Other Sorrows: Stories

by Brodkey, Harold

  It turned out that Elgin and Caroline were both virgins.

  Their first dip in sensual waters left them nonplussed. They didn’t know what to make of it. They tried to persuade themselves that something had really happened, but the minute it was over, they couldn’t believe they had ever done such a thing. They rushed into further experiences; they broke off in the middle of embraces and looked at each other, stunned and delighted. “Is this really happening?” they both asked at different times, and each time the other said, “No,” and they would laugh. They knew that nothing they did was real, was actual. They had received a blow on the head and were prey to erotic imaginings, that was all. But at the same time they half realized it was true, they were doing these things, and then the fact that they, Caroline and Elgin, shared such intimacy dazed and fascinated them; and when they were together, they tried to conceal it, but this indescribable attraction they felt for each other kept making itself known and draining all the strength from their bodies. They tried to make jokes about themselves and this odd little passion they felt. “We’re unskilled labor,” Elgin said. “You know, I’m just giving in because you’re irresistible,” Caroline said. She always pretended that she was completely dispassionate about sex. It just happened that she was susceptible to Elgin’s entreaties. But he was too shy to entreat unless she encouraged him, and Caroline often felt like the worst kind of hypocrite. The truth of the matter is, they were caught up in a fever of their senses. Caroline would have her lunch in Cabot Hall, locked in an impenetrable haze of daydreaming, not even hearing the girls chattering around her. She would walk to Widener, and if boys she knew stopped her to talk, she would stare at them stonily, afraid the boy might guess her feelings for Elgin and think they applied to him. She would run up the stairs of Widener, past the Sargent murals, petrified that Elgin might not be waiting for her. Every day this fear grew worse; but every day he was there, sitting at one of the long wooden tables in the reading room, beneath the great coffered ceiling, and the look on his face when he caught sight of her would make Caroline smile giddily, because she had never known before what a miraculous power she had over men.

  They managed a wry stiffness when they were in public. They spoke to each other in tones of the crudest good-fellowship. Elgin called her “Girl.” “Girl, you finished with that book?” Caroline called Elgin “Cheese.” “No, Cheese. Don’t rush me.” They didn’t hold hands or touch. They thought they fooled everyone, but everyone who knew them guessed, and they both told their roommates. In fact, they wanted to talk about what was happening to them to everyone; this news was always on the tip of their tongues; and so they got into the habit of suddenly breaking off conversations with their friends when the impulse to confess grew too strong to be contained a moment longer, and all their friends thought they were becoming very queer and difficult indeed.

  Each afternoon that they met in Widener started on this high level of confusion and rapidly ran downhill. The minute hand of the clock over the door of the reading room jerked every sixty seconds, marking off a whole minute in one movement, and at two-thirty they were no longer capable of speech. Elgin would be pale or flushed. He would draw breath irregularly through a mouth he couldn’t quite close, or through distended nostrils, and this phenomenon would fascinate Caroline, except that she couldn’t look at him for too long without feeling the most awful pain in her head. Finally, Elgin would gasp, “Well?”

  “I’m finished,” Caroline would say in the weakest voice imaginable.

  They would walk in silence to Adams House, and Elgin would sign Caroline in at the policeman’s room. In silence they would mount the stairs, and Elgin would unlock the door of his room, and then they would fall into each other’s arms, sometimes giggling with relief, sometimes sombre, sometimes almost crying with the joy of this privacy and this embrace.

  Then, later, both of them dressed and their faces scrubbed, Caroline, like an addict, would descend on Elgin’s bureau and haul out his torn and buttonless shirts. She didn’t know how to sew, but she thought she did, and she sat on Elgin’s couch, smiling to herself, softly humming, and sewed buttons on wrong. Elgin tried to study, but his moods whirled and spun him around so that one minute he’d be reading quietly and the next minute he’d be striding up and down the room on the worn carpet, wringing his hands or else waving them aloft and denouncing the College and the American Educational System, full of rage, but not knowing with what or why, and forced to let it out any way he could, while Caroline, faintly bored, ignored him mostly and sewed.

  Every once in a while, Caroline would cry. Then she would be unable to dress properly, and she’d drag around the room with her hair badly combed, her shoes off, looking slatternly, and say, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Actually, nothing’s wrong with me.” But every few minutes tears would course down her cheeks. Nor did she know why she cried; she was as innocent of understanding herself as she was of understanding Elgin.

  Sometimes they quarrelled. Once, it was because Caroline wouldn’t use Elgin’s towel.

  “If you loved me, you’d use it.”

  “I’d adore to use your towel,” Caroline said, “but this towel is dirty.”

  Elgin thought her preposterous; she called Elgin a boor and slammed out of the room. She reached the bottom of the stairs and started back up and heard Elgin coming down. Neither of them said a word; they didn’t apologize or mention this episode again. They went for a walk along the riverbank and talked about Metaphysical Poetry.

  On Saturdays, Elgin took Caroline to the Harvard courts to play tennis. Caroline had fine ankles and legs, and while they walked to the courts, Elgin kept stealing glances at them, which made Caroline nervous. She was a good tennis player, as good as Elgin, but he could throw her off her game by charging the net and yelling at her, “I’ve got you now!” This would rattle her so she’d completely miss the ball, and then she would laugh with exasperation.

  When he served, he made a point of calling the score in a loud, cheerful, teasing voice: “Thirty-love!” He’d say the “love” in such a way that Caroline would blush, and then she would try to drive the ball directly at him, and most of the time it went out of bounds.

  One afternoon, they were in each other’s arms in Elgin’s room. Elgin was whispering, “I love you, Caroline. I love you so much,” and someone knocked on the door. The sound seemed to blind Elgin, who squeezed his eyes closed, as tightly as he could. The knock was repeated a second time, and a third, echoing in the small room. Then the footsteps retreated.

  Elgin got up and fetched cigarettes and towels for them both. They leaned back on the couch, at opposite ends, wrapped in towels, and smoked. They didn’t mention the fact that they were afraid it had been the campus policeman and they would be expelled. They discussed whether or not they were depraved.

  “We are,” Caroline said. “Otherwise, we wouldn’t be so ashamed.”

  “We don’t have to be ashamed,” Elgin said. “We only pretend we are anyway, to be polite.”

  “You’re a rebel,” Caroline said gloomily. “You can say that. But I’m a conformist. I’m basically a nice girl. I am ashamed.”

  The pressure of details, the maze of buttons, hooks, and zippers that they had to make their way through to that condition which pleased them best, kept forcing them to be self-conscious. They couldn’t believe that what they were doing was real, and yet it was real, as they well knew the minute they separated, when the memory of their last encounter would descend on both of them, occupying their minds, and unfitting them for any occupation except dreaming of the next encounter. At night, lying in his bunk, Elgin would try to sleep, but he’d think of Caroline, and slowly, like a leaf curling in a salt solution, he would twist under his covers until his knees were even with his chest, and this was a tortured, involuntary movement of longing he could no more control than he could control his thoughts. He would try to do his reading for his courses: “In the early years of this century, I moved to London, feeling that
Ireland and my love for Ireland were too distracting for my poetry.” And then right on the printed page would appear “CAROLINE,” in capital letters, and Elgin would rub his face foolishly with both hands, twisting his mouth and his cheeks and his nose.

  He didn’t believe that Caroline loved him as much as he loved her, or at least that she desired him as much as he did her, and this made him sullen. He picked on her. He told her she wasn’t as smart as she thought she was; people treated her as if she were intelligent only because she was pretty. He would accuse her of pettiness, and she would agree with him, confess that she had an awful character, and while he was consoling her, their embraces would begin.

  Elgin would be hurt whenever Caroline was the first to point out that it was time to go and have dinner. Caroline would eye the clock, but Elgin would pretend he was so entranced with Caroline he didn’t know what time it was. The minutes would tick by, and Caroline would grow gayer and gayer, trying to ignore the time, while Elgin, beetling, thin, and sardonic, refused to say the words that would release her.

  Elgin became frightened. He was so frightened he couldn’t eat. He was afraid of losing Caroline, of failing his courses because he couldn’t study unless she was sitting beside him where he could reach out and touch her every few minutes. The thought of what it would be like if any of the quarrels they had should turn serious worried him until he was sick. Finally, looking gray and haggard, he suggested to her one afternoon that the two of them should run off and get married.

  “Elgin, don’t. Don’t let’s talk about that. You know we can’t.”

  Elgin shrugged and looked disheartened. “I don’t like self-pity,” he said. “But I admit I have some. Oh, yes. I pity myself a lot, Imagine, here I am, in love with a common, ordinary, conventional girl like you.”

  Caroline supported her head with her hands. “Oh, Elgin,” she said, “you’re being cruel. You know we’re awfully young. And just because we got carried away—there’s no need, really, to…It’s our animal appetites mostly, you know….”

  Elgin wanted to say something bitter but her last remark stopped him. “Your animal appetites, too?”

  “Yes.”

  He was so happy he forgot his feelings had been hurt.

  Sometimes, she and Elgin went out with Felicia and Dimitri. Caroline could not now bear girls she thought were virgins; they made her uneasy, and she would not go on a double date with Dimitri and Felicia until Elgin swore they were lovers, too. Elgin spent more than one afternoon telling her that almost all the girls at Radcliffe and all other colleges had slept with somebody. “The percentage is very high,” he said.

  They went boating twice at Marblehead. Dimitri had a car, which Elgin borrowed—an old, weak-lunged Ford—and they would wheeze up to Marblehead and rent a dinghy and be blown around the bay, with the sunlight bright on Caroline’s hair and the salt air making them hungry and the wind whipping up small whitecaps to make the day exciting.

  Caroline wrote in her diary, “His back is so beautiful. It has such a lovely shape. It’s so defenseless. I like to put my ear against his back and listen to his heart—I think it’s his heart I hear. It’s funny he is not more handsome in his clothes, but that only makes him seem more beautiful to me, I think. I feel I would like to give birth to him. Sometimes, I want to crawl into his pocket and be carried like a pencil. I never let him see how strongly I feel. I am a dreadful person, dreadful….”

  Elgin wrote her a letter.

  “Dear Caroline, Isn’t it funny to have me writing a letter to you when I see you every day? But just imagine how it would seem later if we looked back and saw that we had never written each other how we felt.

  “You, Caroline Hedges, are the greatest love of my life, just as you are the first.

  “I don’t suppose, you being a girl, that you know what it’s like to love a girl like you, but if you knew how dependent men are on women, you might understand. Not that men can’t survive alone, but they don’t seem to really amount to anything until they have a woman they love.

  “Reading over what I have just written, I see that everything I’ve said applies only to the selfish side of love. I guess that’s a dead giveaway about me. But as for you, kid, just knowing you is rather awe-inspiring.”

  Sometimes, there would be birds singing in the ivy outside the window of Elgin’s room. Sometimes, Elgin would sing to Caroline; he had a sweet, insecurely pitched voice, and his singing would give them both pleasure. Sometimes, seeing Elgin walk across the room unclothed would make all the breath leave Caroline’s body, and she would not even be conscious of her gasp or that he heard her. One afternoon, Elgin went into the bathroom to get Caroline a glass of water. She was lying in the lower bunk, lapped in shadows, and she saw him come back into the room and she said weakly, “I love you, Elgin.” It was the first time she had said it, that proud, stubborn girl. Elgin heard her; he stopped in his tracks and he put his head back. “God,” he said. “This is the happiest moment I ever had.”

  Now there was no bar to their intimacy, and they talked. Elgin was relentless about asking questions: “What do you think about money? What is your father like? Are you fond of him?”

  At first, Caroline was cautious. “Well, I think there’s a minimum amount of money people should have…. My father is sort of nice. He’s shallow, I guess. He doesn’t seem to have very strong emotions. He works for an insurance company. I used to like him a lot; I still do…. I think I feel sorry for him.”

  “What do you mean by that?” Elgin asked. He handed her a cigarette and lit it for her. “Tell me everything about yourself. Be honest. I’ve never known anyone as well as I know you.”

  Caroline cupped her hands over her mouth. “I think he loves me, and now I love you, and I think that’s sad. That he’s older…Should we be talking like this, Elgin?”

  “Why not? Who else can we talk to?”

  Then it all began to come out, her feelings toward her father, toward her mother, toward money. Caroline wanted a nice house and a large family; she looked down a little on people who weren’t well off. When she felt exhausted from telling Elgin these things, she asked him questions.

  “My mother’s very possessive,” he said. “If we got married, I think we’d have in-law problems. I want to be a famous scholar. I don’t disapprove of campus politics. I know I should, but I don’t. Isn’t that shameful?”

  “This isn’t dignified, talking like this,” Caroline said. “I don’t want to do it any more.”

  She was frightened. Having admitted she loved Elgin, she felt naked, and these conversations only made her feel worse. She kept hoping she and Elgin would reach some stability together, but it never came. She still was frightened when she ran up the stairs of Widener that he wouldn’t be waiting for her. She wondered why she couldn’t get used to this situation, why the pleasures she was drawn into didn’t lose their elements of pain—indeed, why the elements of pain grew steadily worse, until she dreaded seeing Elgin and had to force herself to get out of bed in the morning and go through her day. She couldn’t help thinking that what she was with comparative strangers was much pleasanter than what she was with Elgin. With him she was capricious, untruthful, often sharp-tongued, giddy with emotions that came and went, and while one emotion might be ennobling, having six or seven in the space of an hour was undignified and not decent at all. She had always believed that a woman ought to walk very straight, write a firm hand, keep house and entertain well—in short, be like those friends of her mother’s whom she most admired. The fact that she was young didn’t seem any excuse at all for her not being like those women, and now she said to herself, “I’m wild. That’s all there is to that.”

  She decided she was inordinately sexual. Elgin caught her in Widener reading a book describing the great courtesans of the nineteenth century, La Belle Otero and Lola Montez. She believed that Elgin would inevitably forsake her because she had lost all her dignity and mystery, and she boasted to him that he would never forget h
er, even if he married some pasty-faced virgin. Elgin couldn’t calm her; in fact, he was more than half persuaded that she was unusually passionate when she said she was, and he became uneasy with her. Caroline began to wear a little too much lipstick and to walk not in her habitual erect fashion but slouching and swaying her hips. She drank and smoked more, and when she got high, she would look at Elgin through lowered eyelids and kiss him in a knowing—a childishly knowing—way. And all of this humbled Elgin, who felt Caroline was a great enigma and that she was drawing away from him. One night, they were sitting on the riverbank and Caroline put her hands on Elgin’s head and drew him to her, and Elgin pulled away desperately. “I don’t want you to kiss me like that!”

  “What’s wrong?” Caroline asked haughtily. “Am I too much woman for you?”

  Elgin’s eyes grew moist. “I don’t know what you do to me,” he said miserably. “I’m ready to cry. I didn’t think we were having that kind of an affair.”

  In the darkness, he saw Caroline’s eyelids descend. Then a shudder passed over her face. He decided to stake everything rather than have Caroline frighten him into helplessness.

  He grabbed her arm. “Listen, you’ve got to get hold of yourself. You’re acting like an ass.”