how provocatively it protruded when she spoke certain words, words beginning with “m” or “w” or “wh” or “s” or “sh,” as in the commonplace affirmation “Sure,” which Olivia pronounced as though it rhymed with “purr” and I as though it rhymed with “cure.”
After we’d been speaking for some ten or fifteen minutes, she surprisingly reached across the table to touch the back of my hand. “You’re so intense,” she said. “Relax.”
“I don’t know how to,” I said, and though I meant it as a lighthearted, self-effacing joke, it happened to be true. I was always working on myself. I was always pursuing a goal. Delivering orders and flicking chickens and cleaning butcher blocks and getting A’s so as never to disappoint my parents. Shortening up on the bat to just meet the ball and get it to drop between the infielders and the outfielders of the opposing team. Transferring from Robert Treat to get away from my father’s unreasonable strictures. Not joining a fraternity in order to concentrate exclusively on my studies. Taking ROTC dead seriously in an attempt not to wind up dead in Korea. And now the goal was Olivia Hutton. I’d taken her to a restaurant whose cost came to nearly half of a weekend’s earnings because I wanted her to think I was, like her, a worldly sophisticate, and simultaneously I wanted dinner to end almost before it had begun so that I could get her into the car’s front seat and park somewhere and touch her. To date, the limit of my carnality was touching. I’d touched two girls in high school. Each had been a girlfriend for close to a year. Only one had been willing to touch me back. I had to touch Olivia because touching her was the only path to follow if I was to lose my virginity before I graduated from college and went into the army. There — yet another goal: despite the trammels of convention still rigidly holding sway on the campus of a middling little midwestern college in the years immediately after World War Two, I was determined to have intercourse before I died.
After dinner, I drove out beyond the campus to the edge of town to park on the road alongside the town cemetery. It was already a little after eight, and I had less than an hour to get her back to the dormitory and inside the doors before they were locked for the night. I didn’t know where else to park, even though I was fearful of the police car that patrolled the alley back of the inn pulling up behind Elwyn’s car with its brights on and one of the cops coming around on foot to shine a flashlight into the front seat and to ask her, “Everything all right, Miss?” That’s what the cops said when they did it, and in Winesburg they did it all the time.
So I had the cops to worry about, and the late hour—8:10—when I cut off the engine of the LaSalle and turned to kiss her. Without a fuss she kissed me back. I instructed myself, “Avoid rejection — stop here!” but the advice was fatuous, and my erection concurred. I delicately slipped my hand under her coat and unbuttoned her blouse and moved my fingers onto her bra. In response to my beginning to fondle her through the cloth cup of her bra, she opened her mouth wider and continued kissing me, now with the added enticement of the stimulus of her tongue. I was alone in a car on an unlit road with my hand moving around inside someone’s blouse and her tongue moving around inside my mouth, the very tongue that lived alone down in the darkness of her mouth and that now seemed the most promiscuous of organs. Till that moment I was wholly innocent of anyone’s tongue in my mouth other than my own. That alone nearly made me come. That alone was surely enough. But the rapidity with which she had allowed me to proceed — and that darting, swabbing, gliding, teeth-licking tongue, the tongue, which is like the body stripped of its skin — prompted me to attempt to delicately move her hand onto the crotch of my pants. And again I met with no resistance.
What happened next I had to puzzle over for weeks afterward. And even dead, as I am and have been for I don’t know how long, I try to reconstruct the mores that reigned over that campus and to recapitulate the troubled efforts to elude those mores that fostered the series of mishaps ending in my death at the age of nineteen. Even now (if “now” can be said to mean anything any longer), beyond corporeal existence, alive as I am here (if “here” or “I” means anything) as memory alone (if “memory,” strictly speaking, is the all-embracing medium in which I am being sustained as “myself”), I continue to puzzle over Olivia’s actions. Is that what eternity is for, to muck over a lifetime’s minutiae? Who could have imagined that one would have forever to remember each moment of life down to its tiniest component? Or can it be that this is merely the afterlife that is mine, and as each life is unique, so too is each afterlife, each an imperishable fingerprint of an afterlife unlike anyone else’s? I have no means of telling. As in life, I know only what is, and in death what is turns out to be what was. You are not just shackled to your life while living it, you continue to be stuck with it after you’re gone. Or, again, maybe I do, I alone. Who could have told me? And would death have been any less terrifying if I’d understood that it wasn’t an endless nothing but consisted instead of memory cogitating for eons on itself? Though perhaps this perpetual remembering is merely the anteroom to oblivion. As a nonbeliever, I assumed that the afterlife was without a clock, a body, a brain, a soul, a god — without anything of any shape, form, or substance, decomposition absolute. I did not know that it was not only
If you ask how this can be — memory upon memory, nothing but memory — of course I can’t answer, and not because neither a “you” nor an “I” exists, any more than do a “here” and a “now,” but because all that exists is the recollected past, not recovered, mind you, not relived in the immediacy of the realm of sensation, but merely replayed. And how much more of my past can I take? Retelling my own story to myself round the clock in a clock- less world, lurking disembodied in this memory grotto, I
I could not believe then — ridiculously enough, I cannot still — that what happened next happened because Olivia wanted it to happen. That was not the way it went between a conventionally brought-up boy and a nice well-bred girl when I was alive and it was 1951 and, for the third time in just over half a century, America was at war again. I certainly could never believe that what happened might have anything to do with her finding me attractive, let alone desirable. What girl found a boy “desirable” at Winesburg College? I for one had never heard of such feelings existing among the girls of Winesburg or Newark or anywhere else. As far as I knew, girls didn’t get fired up with desire like that; they got fired up by limits, by prohibitions, by outright taboos, all of which helped to serve what was, after all, the overriding ambition of most of the coeds who were my contemporaries at Winesburg: to reestablish with a reliable young wage earner the very sort of family life from which they had temporarily been separated by attending college, and to do so as rapidly as possible.
Nor could I believe that what Olivia did she did because she enjoyed doing it. The thought was too astonishing even for an open-minded, intelligent boy like me. No, what happened could only be a consequence of something being wrong with her, though not necessarily a moral or intellectual failing — in class she struck me as mentally superior to any girl I’d ever known, and nothing at dinner had led me to believe that her character was anything but solid through and through. No, what she did would have to have been caused by an abnormality. “It’s because her parents are divorced,” I told myself. There was no other explanation for an enigma so profound.
When I got to the room later, Elwyn was still studying. I gave him back the keys to the LaSalle, and he accepted them while continuing to underline the text in one of his engineering books. He was wearing his pajama bottoms and a T-shirt, and four empty Coke bottles stood upright beside him on the desk. He’d go through another four at least before packing it in around midnight. I wasn’t surprised by his not asking me about my date — he himself never went on dates and never attended his fraternity’s social events. He had been a high school wrestler in Cincinnati but had given up sports in college to pursue his engineering degree. His father owned a tugboat company on the Ohio River, and his plan was to succeed his father someday as head of the firm. In pursuit of that goal he was even more single-minded than I was.
