Campus Tramp (18 page)

“I see.”

“I’ve got his phone number right here,” he went on. “I’ll give him a ring in a few days and you can fly down and have everything taken care of. A few days bed rest afterwards and you’ll be as good as new.”

She nodded.

Then she said: “Don, I don’t know how I’ll be able to afford it. Even if he’s inexpensive and all there’s the plane trip and the time in bed and—”

“I’ll take care of it.”

She started to say something but he interrupted her. “I’ve got the money,” he told her. “I’m okay financially right now and I won’t miss the dough.”

She didn’t know exactly what to say. All she could think of was how he knew exactly what to do. One conversation with her, one phone call, and everything was going to be all right again. She couldn’t believe it, and she wanted to be able to say something, something to sum up the way she felt about it all.

She said: “Why?”

He looked at her, puzzled.

“Why are you doing this, Don? Why are you doing all of this for me?”

He smiled. “I’m just philanthropic—that’s all.”

“I mean it.”

He looked away. “I suppose I feel partly responsible,” he said.

“That’s silly—it’s not your baby.”

“That’s not what I mean and you know it.”

“I know. But you shouldn’t feel responsible anyway. What happened was my fault. I was too young and too mixed up to know where I was and by the time I got straightened out it was almost too late.”

“And now?”

“Now I think I’m all right. I’ve been living clean lately, Don. It’s like I’m not the same person I was a few weeks ago.”

“You’re not. You’ve changed a lot, Linda Shepard from Cleveland.”

She smiled.

“I’m not even too sorry about what happened,” she said. “I learned from it. I grew a lot older—sometimes I feel almost … well, ancient.”

“I know what you mean.”

“I wish—”

He waited.

“I wish I had known what I know now when I came here. I suppose that sounds like a line from something, but it’s true in this case.”

He nodded.

It was hard for her but she said: “I wish I had known all this when I … met you. I think things would have turned out a lot differently. I would have known how to … to love you.”

He didn’t say anything.

“I messed things up,” she said.

“It wasn’t all your fault.”

“If I hadn’t tried to smother you—”

“We were too different,” he said. “You clutched at me because you were afraid I was going to run away. I ran away because you clutched at me. And because I was afraid—”

“Afraid?”

“Afraid I wasn’t going to get away. Afraid I was going to care too much about you.”

She was puzzled. “What do you mean? You weren’t in love with me, were you?”

“Of course I was.”

She didn’t know what to say.

He saved her by changing the subject. “Any idea where you want to go to college next year?”

“I’m not sure. Where are you going?”

“I’m going to grad school. I figure I’ll go to New York and get a job of some sort.”

“On a newspaper?”

He shook his head. “I’ve had a bellyful of newspaper work with the
Record.
I think I’ll try to get my foot in the door either in advertising or public relations. They’re supposed to be looking for bright young men.”

“Like you?”

“Not like me—but maybe I can fake them out.”

“How about your girl?”

“
What
girl?”

“Aren’t you going with anybody?”

“No.”

Before she could say anything he added: “I haven’t gone with anybody since you.”

Again she didn’t know what to say.

“I didn’t want any other girl,” he went on. “I thought I did. I thought all I wanted was to get rid of you.”

He lit another cigarette, offering the pack to her. She didn’t want one.

“I messed things up with you,” he said. “We had something pretty good going and we were both too dumb to realize what was happening. All we did was louse each other up.”

She knew suddenly that she was going to cry. There was a lump in her throat and her eyes were starting to cloud over. She thought how silly it was to cry over a love that was dead and buried, and then she began to realize that it was not dead and not buried, that she loved Don more than ever, that she had never stopped loving him, that she probably never would stop loving him. She clenched her teeth to keep from crying but she knew that the tears were going to come.

He spoke with difficulty. “I kept trying to hurt you,” he said. “I’m beginning to realize why. You were the first girl I ever really loved, Linda. The only one. You had me scared silly. The only way to get out from under was to hurt you, and—”

Then she was crying. She got up from her chair and half-stumbled, half-fell across the room and into his arms. His arms went around her and he held her as she cried, her eyes overflowing with tears and her whole body shaking with the sobbing. He held her and stroked her and for a long time neither of them could say a word.

Finally she was able to get up. She sat beside him on the bed and he took her hand in his. They didn’t look at each other.

“It would be very hard,” he said.

That was all he said but she knew what he meant.

“Terribly hard,” he continued. “It’s not easy to pick up the pieces and put them back together again. It’s harder than starting from scratch.”

“I know.”

He turned and looked at her. “I think it’s worth a try,” he said.

“So do I.”

“I can’t let you go now, Linda. I’m only beginning to realize how much I love you. I’m not going to let anything spoil it, not now.”

She couldn’t speak.

“Do you love me, Linda?”

“You know I do.”

“And I love you. I never told you that before, did I? I was afraid to say it. Maybe I didn’t even know it at the time—maybe that was part of it. But now I’ll say it. I love you, Linda.”

He put one hand under her chin and brought her face close to his. His lips touched hers and he kissed her.

“I love you,” he said.

“Oh Don—”

He kissed her again.

“I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen, Linda. But there are a few things that I do know. We’re both going to finish up here. You’re going to pass those exams of yours and I’m going to graduate and get that silly diploma they hand out to you after you’ve finished wasting the prescribed four years here.

“Then we’re going to pile into the car and drive to Pittsburgh. If the car gets that far—I don’t know if it will or not. Then you’re going to have your abortion and we’re going to stay in Pittsburgh until you’re well enough to travel.

“From Pittsburgh we’re heading to New York. I’m going to find a place to live and then get a job. You’re going to find a place to live—”

“The same place you find?”

He shook his head. “Not right away,” he said. “That’s got to wait until we’re both ready for it. There are too many things we’ve got to learn first, Linda. And we’re going to have loads of time—time to find out more about each other. Time to love each other.”

He was right.

“Then we’ll find you a college,” he went on. “You ought to be able to get into NYU without a hell of a lot of trouble. A year there and you’ll be a New York resident and you can go tuition free to CCNY. It’s a free school and it’s a hundred times better than this hole.”

He closed his eyes, then opened them again. “God only knows what’s going to happen after that. Maybe we’ll find out that we hate each other. Maybe we’ll quietly drift apart and never see each other again. Maybe what we’ve got will just disappear.

“There’s another possibility. Maybe we’ll find out that what we’ve got is worth keeping—worth keeping forever. It’s too early to even think about that yet, Linda. But it might happen.”

She nodded, not trusting herself to speak.

“We won’t make the same mistakes again.”

“No,” she said, “we won’t.”

She looked at him, loving him, needing him. But she loved him and needed him in a different way now. She wasn’t afraid of him or afraid of losing him, not now. She felt safe and sure of herself and sure of him. For a moment she felt terrible about all the other boys she had been with since that first time with him, but then she told herself that they didn’t matter, that they never really existed. They were a child’s substitute for the real thing. Now she had the real thing, and at the same time she was no longer a child, no longer the girl who had first come to Clifton.

He reached for her and drew her close to him. His finger touched her cheek and ran down her face to her chin. He kissed her lightly on the lips, then kissed her closed eyes and the tip of her nose.

He took a deep breath and held it. “I want you,” he said. “Christ, I want you more than I’ve ever wanted anything. But we’re going to wait for a while, anyhow.”

“Okay.”

He smiled. “Besides,” he added, “with a woman in your condition—”

He laughed when she started to blush. “You better go now,” he said. “You’ve got to lick that exam tomorrow and I’ve got one of my own to worry about. We’ll have plenty of time later.”

She stood up. “Plenty of time,” she said.

He kissed her once more. Then she left.

The walk back to her dorm was easy. She started studying immediately, sure of herself, sure that the exam would be no problem at all for her. There would be problems coming up, plenty of problems, but now she knew that she could handle anything that came her way.

She was a big girl now.

She wondered idly what it would all be like. NYU, CCNY, New York City, the whole thing.

She wondered what it would be like to be Mrs. Donald Gibbs.

Well, she would find out. She would learn all the answers and find out all that had to be found out.

There was plenty of time now, she thought.

Time for everything.

THE END

A NEW AFTERWORD BY THE AUTHOR
Campus Tramp
Revisited

In June of 1955 I graduated from Bennett High School in Buffalo, New York. The school was named after one Lewis J. Bennett, and you now know as much about the man as I ever did. Having one’s name on something enduring—a school, a bridge, a building—is thought to provide immortality of a sort, but if that’s immortality, well, I’m with the Persian philosopher Omar Khayyam, “take the cash and let the credit go.” What’s the big deal about having your name bandied about by people who haven’t got a clue who you were?

But I digress.

After I graduated from Bennett, I spent the summer as a counselor-in-training at nearby Camp Lakeland. In September I arrived at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. My parents had both graduated from Cornell University, as had my mother’s brothers, and it had been taken for granted that I would follow in their wake. But sometime in my junior year my parents had heard about Antioch, where the son of a friend of a friend had gone, and decided it was just the thing for their son. Antioch’s most striking feature was its co-op plan, whereby students were placed in jobs designed to give them genuine vocational experience for half of each year. My parents liked that, and they also learned that Antioch was a refuge for the quirky and the unconventional, and that sounded about right for young Larry.

The summer before my senior year, we visited the campus on the way home from a Florida vacation. I seem to recall a student showing us around, pointing out buildings like a hunting dog pointing out game birds. Did it make an impression? Not that I recall. My parents thought I should apply there, so I did. They thought I should apply to Cornell as well, so I did that, too. I was a pretty suggestible kid, and inclined to do as I was told.

All of that changed, but never mind.

I was accepted at both schools, and I learned I’d get a nice scholarship to Cornell, having scored high on the New York State scholarship exam. My folks sent me to Antioch anyway and not without financial sacrifice. They really thought it would be good for me, and, looking back, I guess it was.

I spent the whole of my freshman year on campus in Yellow Springs, as did a substantial percentage of entering students. I had known for a couple of years that I was going to become a writer, and I wrote some poems and short stories. I submitted them to magazines with no real hope of success and regarded the inevitable rejection slips as badges of honor and ample compensation for my efforts. I displayed them with some pride on my dorm room wall.

The school year ran through June, and come August I was in New York, living in Greenwich Village and working in the mail room at Pines Publications, a diverse publisher of paperbacks and magazines. I returned to Antioch for the fall semester, spent the winter job period working in Buffalo at the Erie County Comptroller’s Office, went back to Antioch for the spring term, and then arranged that my next job would be my Own Plans. I went home, bought an aging Buick, and drove it to Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where I intended to get a subsistence job and write stories. I’d almost sold a story that I’d written while living in the Village, and figured I could rewrite it and sell it, and write other things and sell them, too.

I got a room in an attic and wrote a batch of stories, but the Cape didn’t work out too well, and I wound up in New York. I went to an employment agency, took a blind test, and landed a job as an editor at a literary agency. Every day I would read a batch of stories submitted, with fees, by what the world had not yet learned to call wannabes. It was my task to write them lengthy letters assuring them that they were supremely talented (they were not), that it was the plot structure of their stories that was at fault (that was the least of it), and that we would welcome further submissions from them, with further fees. (That last, I must say, was the truth.)

It was purely wonderful experience, the best possible training for a writer, and I could see right away that this was not a job I wanted to abandon at the end of a three-month Antioch job period. Besides, I’d sold the story I revised on the Cape, and had every reason to assume I’d sell more, now that I was working for a literary agent. So I dropped out of Antioch and kept the job.