by Sally Mandel
“He says.”
“Yeah.” Quinn hesitated.
“And the other?” Van asked, eyeing the remaining page on Quinn’s lap.
“Sure you want to hear it?” Quinn teased.
“You woke me up, for God’s sake. Besides, I’ll admit to a certain prurient curiosity.”
“Listen,” Quinn said, and began to read:
In bygone days, the swain must prove his mettle
To win and wed the kingdom’s fairest lass;
Sadistic kings’ or fate’s requirements set ’til
the dragon fell, expiring, ’pon its ass.
The contest lives again, O campus princess,
The prize: fair Irish gem, O gleaming jewel.
From awesome trial this fierce knight never winces,
Such dares for William merely fire the fuel.
His athlete’s grace, youth, modesty, high IQ,
To love’s sweet challenge like the sun will rise;
With hands persuading, soft words (maybe haiku)
He’ll coax his maid’s bright laughter, giggles, sighs.
And, soul inspired, lean body tightly sprung,
He’ll sate love’s prime demand—and make it fun.
Van stared at Quinn in silence for a moment. “Who?” she asked finally.
“Will Ingraham.”
Van’s eyes widened. “Uh oh.”
“Yeah.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Serves you right.”
“It’s even iambic pentameter, the bastard.” Quinn looked at Van’s smiling face. “Don’t smirk at me, you … postnasal drip.”
Van reached for a Kleenex and tried to blow her nose with ladylike discretion. After several unproductive sniffs into the tissue, Quinn said impatiently, “Damn it, just blow, will you? I won’t listen.” Quinn stared vacantly at the elegant Bachrach portrait of the Huntingtons that stood on Van’s desk.
“All right, then,” Van said. “Why don’t you just tell him he’s too late?”
“It’s a winner.”
“But he wasn’t invited.”
Quinn fell silent, then got up and switched off the light. “Thanks for listening. You’d better get some rest.”
Van smiled into the darkness. “Sleep tight.”
Quinn heard the delight in her friend’s voice. “Oh, shut up,” she said, and closed the door behind her.
Quinn was delayed in the garage on Saturday and had to hurry in order to pick up her mail before kitchen duty. Racing across the campus, she suddenly spotted Will ahead of her. He was walking with a girl—a pretty sophomore Quinn recognized from the cafeteria line. They were taking their time despite the frosty air. Quinn stopped short, intending to make a quick detour, but instead found herself staring curiously as Will bowed his head to better hear his companion. Then he laughed, threw his arm around her shoulders, and gave her a squeeze. What could that dark-eyed little underclassman have possibly said to elicit such appreciation from the cool Will Ingraham? She wrenched her eyes away from the couple and trailed behind them, determinedly forcing her feet to a slower pace. Finally they disappeared into Lenox Hall. She broke into a trot until the cold air whipped the image of Will and the girl out of her mind.
On Sunday, Van and Quinn sat in the dining room lingering over their desserts. It was Quinn’s day off from her cafeteria job, and usually she enjoyed relaxing through her lunch. But today she felt impatient. Van’s mealtime ritual had begun to grate on her. Each slice of turkey got carved into morsels of identical size to be transported to Van’s mouth, one piece at a time, with the same compact gesture. She chewed each bite carefully, jaws meeting in a slow, relentless rhythm. After every two swallows she took a sip of milk. By the time she had finished her meat and started to subdivide the beets, Quinn had already cleaned her plate. She tried not to watch as the second of two forkfuls of beets disappeared down Van’s throat. When Van reached for her glass, Quinn felt a shriek bulging under her larynx. She forced herself to stare out the window until the lump dissolved, but her foot was rapping out a tarantella under the table.
After she had gulped down the last spoonful of chocolate ice cream, Quinn wailed, “Oh, no. I forgot to taste that. I was looking forward to it all the way through the turkey and I don’t remember any of it.” She craned her neck around the sunny dining room, hoping to spy an untouched abandoned dessert.
Van disrupted her ritual to ask, “Something on your mind, dear?”
Quinn shot her a venomous look.
“My thought is that you really want to do this thing,” Van declared.
“What thing?” Quinn asked. The tapping foot was now audible over the dining room clatter.
“The Noble Sir William thing.”
“Oh, come off it.”
“You don’t have any obligation to go through with—”
“It’s a matter of ethics,” Quinn interrupted.
Van broke out laughing.
“God damn it.” Quinn wadded up her napkin and tossed it onto her tray.
“Has anybody ever pointed out that you’ve got a problem with control?”
“Yes, Vanessa, ad nauseam. Why don’t you just quit Fine Arts and be a shrink?”
“You’d make a great case study. Really, this whole contest thing is fascinating. You’ve set up all these controls as precedents for losing control. I mean orgasm, of course—”
“On second thought,” Quinn interrupted irritably, “better stick with Fine Arts.”
They sat in silence for a moment. Quinn’s freckles had grown perceptibly darker. “You’re mad at me,” Van said.
“It’s just that you are constantly psychoanalyzing everybody.”
“Not everybody. Just you.” Van tried out an apologetic smile. “I’m sorry. I’ll stop. Well, I can’t stop, but I’ll keep it behind closed mouth.”
“Much appreciated.”
“Do you think it’s a sin? Sex, for you, I mean.”
Quinn shook her head slowly. “I’ll tell you one thing,” she said, “eternal damnation’s gotta be more interesting than virginity.”
Van laughed, and they finished their coffee amid speculation regarding Jerry Landring’s alleged conquests, two of whom were sitting together at a table near the window.
Monday morning, Quinn lingered at the garage until finally Gus asked her if she was feeling all right. When she arrived at Lit class, she slid into a seat at the back of the room nearest the door and tried to concentrate on Dr. Buxby’s remarks concerning Jane Austen. Her attention strayed around the room, and came to rest on the back of Will Ingraham’s head. His hair was light brown with pale, sunny streaks. Amazing, really, for the beginning of December. It waved slightly, particularly at the neck, where it curled over the back of his collar. She wondered if it was coarse or soft. It looked soft, even though it seemed very thick.
“Miss Quinn Mallory?”
Her eyes flew to Dr. Buxby’s face. Everyone seemed to be waiting for her to say something. “I’m … sorry, I guess … I didn’t hear the question,” she stammered.
Dr. Buxby frowned at her and snapped, “Mr. Ackley.”
During Ackley’s response Will turned to look at Quinn. She felt his gaze and stared straight ahead. When the bell rang, she bolted from her seat, down the corridor, and out the heavy wooden door onto the quadrangle.
Although in fact she managed to avoid him, her imagination found him everywhere. Lying on her back beneath a crippled truck on Tuesday, she concocted reasons for him to appear at Gus’s tiny glassed-in office. Maybe Will needed a job. Maybe he wanted to borrow a special tool to fix something in his room, like … She stopped hammering on the muffler line and invented. Like his emergency generator. Surely he had a generator stowed away in his closet just in case the lights went out while he was studying for a crucial exam.
Gus’s feet appeared, two sturdy shadows in the slice of light beyond the truck’s underside. “Your friend’s here,” he said.
Quinn heard pounding in her ears.
“She’s got your books.”
Quinn scrambled out and blinked at Van in the sudden brightness.
“It’s a good thing I happened to stop by your room,” Van said. “You left everything on the bed. Aren’t you going to Religion?”
“Yeah.” Quinn reached for a clean rag. “I guess I just forgot them. Thanks.” She took the books from Van.
Van stared at Quinn’s smudged jeans. “Aren’t you going to change?”
“She forgot her overalls, too,” Gus said. He turned to Quinn. “You losing your grip, or what?”
She didn’t answer.
“Got a lot on her mind,” Van said quietly. Quinn grabbed her friend by the elbow and pulled her toward the door.
Quinn sat through the Religion lecture without hearing the completion of a single sentence. When the bell rang, she nodded a dazed good-bye to Van and walked out of the classroom like a somnambulist.
Will sat under a tree beside the massive stone steps that led to the library entrance. He leaned back against the tree trunk with one knee bent to support his book, a slim volume that absorbed his attention completely. Watching him, Quinn wondered if she had forgotten the mechanics of breathing. As she approached she tried to tell herself that she could still turn and walk the other way. But she knew she couldn’t; there was this giant invisible hand pressing hard against the small of her back, propelling her toward him.
Will glanced up, and for a moment she thought he didn’t recognize her. Then the vague, dreamy look lifted from his face and he gave her one of his strange half-smiles.
“All right. You win,” Quinn said. Until this moment she’d had no idea what she would say to him. Her words seemed to float up into the branches of the tree and hover there. She felt as if she could follow them, she was so light and giddy.
“Thank you.”
She waited for him to say more, but he just looked at her. Finally she stammered, “I’ll be around this weekend. Next weekend.” She stopped for a moment, trying to pull herself together. “Saturday night, this coming Saturday night.”
“I know the one you mean.”
She inspected his face to see if he was teasing her, but he seemed earnest enough. “Is that okay?”
He nodded.
“Seven?”
“Fine. Shall I pick you up?”
“No!” Quinn burst out. “No, I’ll come to you … to your room.”
“All right,” he said.
She looked at his leg stretched along the frozen ground. “Aren’t you cold?” she asked him.
“Yes.”
Again, she waited for more, but he just continued to watch her patiently. She knew that her face had gone deep pink. “Well … see you then. Thanks …” She turned and started walking toward the library. Thanks for what? she thought. Thanks for turning my brain into rice pudding? She resisted a powerful impulse to run, but halfway up the steps she tripped anyway, barely catching herself. She could feel Will’s eyes on her still, and cursed fiercely.
Once inside the ornate marble entrance she began to gasp like a drowning person surfacing for a final lungful of air. Then she started laughing and finally had to go to the ladies’ room to splash cold water on her face before she could stop.
Chapter 7
Over the next few days she distracted herself with responsibilities, real and manufactured. For a baffled but delighted Gus she did a record number of brake jobs, repaired five snow tires, and performed a miracle on a particularly wayward exhaust system. She worked extra hours at the cafeteria. She researched a term paper for Poli Sci that wasn’t due for four weeks. She exhausted herself, hoping to fall asleep every night without a thought in her head.
But as she lay waiting for unconsciousness, Will Ingraham’s voice whispered in her ear, his face stared from the darkness—tender, enigmatic, apologetic face. She imagined his body, muscular and lean. Seduction scenes from countless movies played across the window shade. Will was Kirk Douglas in Spartacus watching her bathe naked in a lake like the lovely, sensuous Jean Simmons. Quinn was Deborah Kerr lying in the sand. The surf pounded as Burt Lancaster took her in his arms for a passionate kiss. She was Phaedra to Anthony Perkins’s Hippolytus, twisting together in the firelight in an ecstasy of forbidden lust.
She flopped on her side and pulled the pillow over her head. There was time to back out. Even now. She didn’t have to go through with it. But what to do about that sensation between her legs? Every time she thought about Saturday, she began to tingle. Her breasts felt as if they were stretching against the fabric of her T-shirt, turning her nipples to hard little knobs. Sister Maria Theresa always said you could tell a sinful movie if you had to cross your legs to watch it. Well, thinking about Will Ingraham made her cross her legs. Oh, Saturday. Maybe she would die before it ever got here. Please.
Please what? Quinn asked herself. Please yes, she’d die, or please no, she’d live to bed down with this potential Marvin the Magnificent? Fifty-fifty, she decided. Even Stephen between nothankyou and yesokay-Iwantto.
She lifted the pillow off her face. Liar, she thought with a sigh. The ratio was a whole lot more like twenty-eighty.
Van walked into Quinn’s room at six o’clock on Saturday evening and said, “What’s this, a garage sale?” She picked her way through the piles of discarded shirts, sweaters, and dresses that were heaped on the floor.
“I look awful,” Quinn wailed. “I tried Vamp. I tried Sweet Young Thing, Nubile, and Urban Sophisticate … oh, the hell with it.” She yanked a jersey off over her head and flung it onto the bed in disgust.
“What’s the difference? You’re only going to take it all off anyway,” Van said.
“Jesus Christ,” Quinn breathed, holding her hand to her heart. She closed her eyes, reached into her closet, and said, “Okay, whatever it is, I’m wearing it.” She extracted a flowered blouse and slipped it on, tucking it into a pair of bleached-out jeans. Then she donned her ski jacket, brushed her hair, and stood staring at Van with wide eyes. Van reached into her pocket for a faded party noisemaker which she held to her mouth and blew. With a feeble wheezing sound it uncurled into a paper snake.
Quinn giggled.
“Well, I felt there ought to be some kind of formal send-off,” Van said. “The walls of Jericho and everything …”
Quinn gave Van a quick kiss on the cheek and marched past her and out the door.
Chapter 8
This was the first year of up-to-midnight visiting hours in the men’s dormitory. In fact, it was rumored that next fall one of the women’s residences would become co-ed for seniors. It was a far cry from St. Theresa’s, and Quinn still felt awkward walking along the corridors of Will’s building.
She stood in front of his room contemplating the pattern scratched in the peeling gray paint of the door. A fence, perhaps. No, more like a reclining skyscraper, or a jet plane taking off. Soft flute music piped away inside, but the sound was not comforting enough to neutralize her sudden longing to flee. The exit sign beckoned from the stairway at the other end of the hall. Her right sneaker tapped against the linoleum floor—dot-dot-dot, dash-dash-dash, dot-dot-dot—in unconscious imitation of the SOS code she had absorbed from Late Show World War II movies.
The music whispered again, soothing siren song. He was probably stretched out on the bed, deep into somebody’s poetry, she thought. His eyes got a funny cloudy look when he read that stuff. Out by the tree, in front of the library, they’d appeared bright blue, when all along she had thought they were gray. Tommy’s were gray. Maybe she’d got them confused. All at once the need to know seemed urgent. She knocked on the door.
“Come in.”
Quinn poked her head into the room. He sat in a chair by the window, his shaggy hair golden in the light of his re
ading lamp.
“Hi,” he said with that weird half-smile. Blue eyes. Lazy, summery blue eyes.
Yesokaylwantto, she thought. One hundred percent. She stepped inside and waited for him to tell her what to do.
He got up, reached her in two long strides, and drew her farther toward the center of the room. “Want something to eat? We could go to Lou’s.”
She shook her head. “I’m not hungry,” she said, much louder than she had intended.
“Sit,” he said, gesturing at the worn recliner. He pulled out his desk chair and sat reversed, one leg stretched out on either side. He wore a dark turtleneck jersey, jeans, and moccasins. He crossed his arms on the chair back, rested his chin there, and regarded her curiously.
“Is this music all right, or do you prefer jazz?”
“It’s pretty. What is it?”
“Bach. Rampal playing Bach.”
“I don’t know anything about classical music,” Quinn said.
“Then you’re missing something.”
“I can sing you any song from the top ten, 1959 to ’63,” she said, looking straight at him for the first time.
“What happened to ’64?”
“I lost track after the assassination.”
“Why?”
“I guess it just didn’t seem important enough to bother with.”
They watched one another in silence, but after a few seconds Quinn grew uneasy and began to toy with the pen that lay on Will’s notebook beside the chair. She moved the point around and around inside one of the rings. Will observed the motion and began to smile. She flushed and dropped the pen as if it had stabbed her fingers.
“You don’t have to go through with this, you know,” Will said gently.
“Yes. I do have to.”
“Whose rules?”