Indignation

But how could I wash and get into my pajamas and go to sleep and say nothing to anyone about something so extraordinary having happened to me? Yet that’s what I set out to do, and almost succeeded in doing, until, after lying in my bunk for about a quarter of an hour while Elwyn remained studying at his desk, I bolted upright to announce, “She blew me.”

“Uh-huh,” Elwyn said without turning his head from the page he was studying.

“I got sucked off.”

“Yep,” said Elwyn in due time, teasing out the syllable to signal that his attention was going to remain on his work regardless of what I might take it in my head to start going on about.

“I didn’t even ask for it,” I said. “I wouldn’t have dreamed of asking for it. I don’t even know her. And she blew me. Did you ever hear of that happening?”

“Nope,” replied Elwyn.

“It’s because her parents are divorced.”

Now he turned to look at me. He had a round face and a large head and his features were so basic that they might have been modeled on those carved by a child for a Halloween pumpkin. Altogether he was constructed on completely utilitarian lines and did not look as though he had, like me, to keep a sharp watch over his emotions — if, that is, he had any of an unruly nature that required monitoring. “She tell you that?” he asked.

“She didn’t say anything. I’m only guessing. She just did it. I pulled her hand onto my pants, and on her own, without my doing anything more, she unzipped my fly and took it out and did it.”

“Well, I’m very happy for you, Marcus, but if you don’t mind, I’ve got work to do.”

“I want to thank you for the car. It wouldn’t have happened without the car.”

“Run all right?”

“Perfect.”

“Should. Just greased ’er.”

“She must have done it before,” I said to Elwyn. “Don’t you think?”

“Could be,” Elwyn replied.

“I don’t know what to make of it.”

“That’s clear.”

“I don’t know if I should see her again.”

“Up to you,” he said with finality, and so, in silence, I lay atop my bunk bed barely able to sleep for trying to figure out on my own what to think of Olivia Hutton. How could such bliss as had befallen me also be such a burden? I who should have been the most satisfied man in all of Winesburg was instead the most bewildered.

Strange as Olivia’s conduct was when I thought about it on my own, it was more impenetrable still when she and I showed up at history class and, as usual, sat beside each other and I immediately resumed remembering what she had done — and what I had done in response. In the car, I had been so taken by surprise that I had sat straight up in the seat and looked down at the back of her head moving in my lap as if I were watching someone doing it to somebody other than me. Not that I had seen such a thing done before, other than in the stray “dirty picture”—always raggedy-edged and ratty-looking from being passed back and forth between so many hundreds of horny boys’ hands — that would invariably be among the prized possessions of the renegade kid at the bottom of one’s high school class. I was as transfixed by Olivia’s complicity as by the diligence and concentration she brought to the task. How did she know what to do or how to do it? And what would happen if I came, which seemed a strong likelihood from the very first moment? Shouldn’t I warn her — if there was time enough to warn her? Shouldn’t I shoot politely into my handkerchief? Or fling open the car door and spray the cemetery street instead of one or the other of us? Yes, do that, I thought, come into the street. But, of course, I couldn’t. The sheer unimaginableness of coming into her mouth — of coming into anything other than the air or a tissue or a dirty sock — was an allurement too stupendous for a novice to forswear. Yet Olivia said nothing.

All I could figure was that for a daughter of divorced parents, whatever she did or whatever was done to her was okay with her. It would be some time before it would dawn on me, as it has finally (millennia later, for all I know), that whatever I did might be okay with me, too.

Days passed and I didn’t ask her out again. Nor after class, when we were all drifting into the hallway, did I try to talk to her again. Then, one chilly fall morning, I ran into her at the student bookstore. I can’t say that I hadn’t been hoping to run into her somewhere, despite the fact that when we met in class I didn’t even acknowledge her presence. Every time I turned a corner on that campus, I was hoping not only to see her but to hear myself saying to her, “We have to go on another date. I have to see you. You have to become mine and no one else’s!”

She was wearing a camel’s hair winter coat and high woolen socks and over her auburn hair a snug white wool hat with a fleecy, red woven ball at the top. Directly in from the out-of-doors, with red cheeks and a slightly runny nose, she looked like the last girl in the world to give anyone a blowjob.

“Hello, Marc,” she said.

“Oh, yes, hi,” I said.

“I did that because I liked you so much.”

“Pardon?”

She pulled off her hat and shook out her hair — thick and long and not cut short with a little crimp of curls over the forehead, as was the hairdo worn by most every other coed on the campus.

“I said I did that because I liked you,” she told me. “I know you can’t figure it out. I know that’s why I haven’t heard from you and why you ignore me in class. So I’m figuring it out for you.” Her lips parted in a smile, and I thought, With those lips, she, without my urging, completely voluntarily … And yet I was the one who felt shy! “Any other mysteries?” she asked.

“Oh, no, that’s okay.”

“It’s not,” she said, and now she was frowning, and every time her expression changed her beauty changed with it. She wasn’t one beautiful girl, she was twenty-five different beautiful girls. “You’re a hundred miles away from me. No, it’s not okay with you,” she said. “I liked your seriousness. I liked your maturity at dinner — or what I took to be maturity. I made a joke about it, but I liked your intensity. I’ve never met anyone so intense before. I liked your looks, Marcus. I still do.”

“Did you ever do that with someone else?”

“I did,” she said, without hesitation. “Has no one ever done it with you?”

“No one’s come close.”

“So you think I’m a slut,” she said, frowning again.

“Absolutely not,” I rushed to assure her.

“You’re lying. That’s why you won’t speak to me. Because I’m a slut.”

“I was surprised,” I said, “that’s all.”

“Did it ever occur to you that I was surprised too?”

“But you’ve done it before. You just told me you did.”

“This was the second time.”

“Were you surprised the first time?”

“I was at Mount Holyoke. It was at a party at Amherst. I was drunk. The whole thing was awful. I didn’t know anything. I was drinking all the time. That’s why I transferred. They suspended me. I spent three months at a clinic drying out. I don’t drink anymore. I don’t drink anything alcoholic and I won’t ever again. This time when I did it I wasn’t drunk. I wasn’t drunk and I wasn’t crazy. I wanted to do it to you not because I’m a slut but because I wanted to do it to you. I wanted to give you that. Can’t you understand that I wanted to give you that?”

“It seems as though I can’t.”

“I — wanted — to — give — you — what — you — wanted. Are those words impossible to understand? They’re almost all of one syllable. God,” she said crossly, “what’s wrong with you?”

The next time we were together in history class, she chose to sit in a chair at the back of the room so I couldn’t see her. Now that I knew that she had had to leave Mount Holyoke because of drinking and that she’d had then to enter a clinic for three months to stop drinking, I had even stronger reasons to keep away from her. I didn’t drink, my parents drank barely at all, and what business did I have with somebody who, not even twenty years old, already had a history of having been hospitalized for drinking? Yet despite my being convinced that I must have nothing further to do with her, I sent her a note through the campus mail: