Adios, Scheherazade

The reason she ate lunch on campus, of course, was because it was cheaper. We paid for lunch a semester at a time, and got monthly cards, and the cards were stamped every day when we went in for lunch. The state paid half the cost, or more than half the cost, and we paid the rest. Thirty-five dollars a semester, which isn’t bad. Otherwise, I’m sure Betsy’s parents would have made her walk home for lunch every day and then walk back to school. They were too cheap, you’ll notice, to let her go to college away from home, and think how much trouble that would have saved me.

She was sort of an oddball, actually, being a local citizen at the college. I know there are lots of colleges where the student body assays high in locals, but up in Monequois there were practically none. I think that was because Monequois didn’t produce many college students at all, either for the local college or to ship out. It’s a poor town, tucked away in a northern corner of New York State, and I think most of its citizens don’t even bother to finish high school.

Anyway, we had lunch, which was a cheap date, even cheaper than paying for half a pitcher of beer, and I had a lot less walking to do afterwards. I tried to subtly suggest she might find it fun to sneak into the dorm sometime, simply as a lark because girls were forbidden there and all, but she didn’t rise to it. She didn’t rise to anything, but I was so inflamed by my idea that we were headed for the rack that I didn’t pay any attention to the real girl sitting across from me at all. So I asked her for another date, for that Friday, and she said yes. We also managed to meet in the cafeteria again for lunch the next day.

I think basically she was lonely. Because she didn’t live in the girls’ dorm she didn’t have any real girl friends on campus, and of course being a college girl separated her from the other locals, so who did she have? I was easy to get along with, I told jokes, I was somebody to talk with at lunchtime in the cafeteria three days a week (Wednesdays and Fridays our schedules conflicted) and I was a date on weekends. So what she was doing was pretty much what I was doing: not paying any attention to the other person at all, but only thinking about his/her usefulness.

Well, she got a lot more mileage out of me than I got out of her. Three days a week in the cafeteria. Two or three dates every weekend. After a while, because I was getting bored and nothing was happening, I cut it to one weekend date by claiming I couldn’t find anybody with a car to double with. We were always dependent on other people, we were always the couple in the back seat. The only good thing to come out of it was the exercise, three miles from her house back to the dorm every time, unless it was either snowing or raining.

The night I made her come in the back seat of Chuck Marifolio’s car on the way back from the North Bar I thought, Wow, at last I’ve got it made. We’d been necking more and more insanely, it was March by now, and this night at last I got her panties hooked out of the way and my finger inside and she didn’t repulse the attack at all. In fact, her arms tightened so hard around my neck I could barely breathe. It was a very uncomfortable position, my elbow bent wrong, and in that position I poked my finger around till I found the man in the boat and I tickled his ears until all of a sudden she jerked, one little involuntary jerk, and said, “Uh-aaahh,” in my ear. And when we separated a little while later her eyes shone like tiny white Christmas tree lights.

Oh boy, I thought. Now you owe me one, I thought. I make you come, you make me come. Hot damn.

So we got out of the car and up onto her porch, and nothing was different. I kept trying to figure out some way to phrase it, to mention this debt she now owed me, but everything I thought of sounded too crude, so it wound up with me stopping at that back yard again on the way home.

I stopped there almost every time, I’d been doing it for months now, and as spring came along I began to wonder what sort of flowers would blossom there. But as April and May lumbered by nothing grew in my fertilized ground — isn’t come a fertilizer? — but weeds, which should have told me something, but didn’t.

I know how this should end. We’re into the age of the absurd now, and all characters have to become clowns, with the makeup and the colored lights and all. The way this should end, some night I’m out in that back yard jerking off and all at once a thousand lights go on, the neighbors have alerted the police who’ve been lying in wait for me, and I go prancing and leaping away across the back yards with my cock hanging out like a dog’s tongue and my background filling up with policemen on horses.

Well, that isn’t what happened. What happened was, one night in late May, a Friday night, I called Betsy and broke a date because I was disgusted, saying I couldn’t find anybody with a car to double with, and she said, “You can drive, can’t you, Ed?”