Laura moved her head back gingerly as if she expected it to fall off her shoulders at any moment. Beth pushed it back against the high wing of the chair, laughing at her.
“Now, isn’t that better?” she said, mussing Laura’s hair.
“Yes, thanks. Much better.” And Laura had to smile back at her. The real world, with its real bumps and backslides and perplexities, was never farther away.
Three
On Saturday night Laura went out with the two fraternity boys and Emily. They walked to Maxie’s, one of the oldest campus joints, and drank beer and listened to the Dixie Six. Bud put on almost as much of a show as the musicians; Bud was Emmy’s flame—Bud was “it.” He would drop his head in his hands and groan at the bad notes and at the good ones exclaim, “Christ! Listen, Emmy!”
Bud was slender and tall, with thinning brown curls and round green eyes. He had remarkably sensual lips with straight white teeth behind them, and an impish smile. He was a well-known campus musician, one of the best; his reputation with a horn and with women far outweighed his reputation among his professors in music school.
He was a sort of perpetual student; the type that comes back year after year and never quite graduates. He loved music and he loved girls, and he seemed to exist quite satisfactorily on beer and slide oil and kisses. He was a campus character; one of the ones everybody knows, or hears about and wants to know.
Emily was the only girl who had ever come near to hooking him. It wasn’t the physical attraction; Bud liked them all pretty; he wouldn’t have taken her out the first time unless she had fulfilled that qualification. It wasn’t her twinkling charm or her compliance, either; it was all of these plus her willingness and ability to learn something about music—his kind of music. She was learning how to play the piano, spending long hours at it, so she could talk to Bud in his own language. All these attractions weren’t enough to keep him from surveying the field and finding a little competition for her, but as it happened that was the best possible way to intrigue Emmy, who liked to “work for a man.” He was fast becoming her major subject, and Laura and Beth had to sit through several monologues on his merits as man and musician.
Laura examined him curiously. The music didn’t move her, but everybody else was so excited that she pretended to be. She didn’t understand the mass fervor but she was afraid to say so, and she sat and watched the band like the others.
Fortunately it was not very hard to be friendly at beer parties, and the more beer you drank the easier it was. Not that Laura could drink very much. But Jim, Bud’s friend, did famously. With every passing quart he got friendlier. Toward the end of the evening anything in skirts was irresistible, and the handiest skirt was Laura’s. He made an effort to get better acquainted, draping an arm over her and squeezing her into the corner of the booth with the warm weight of his body. He put a hand on her thigh and began to press it, and Laura looked to Emily in sudden alarm. She hated to let a man touch her and she hated even worse to let him do it in public. But Emily was too preoccupied with Bud to notice that her roommate wanted help.
“Jim—” Laura said helplessly, and wondered wildly what to say next. Maybe all sorority girls did this. Maybe this was part of the price of membership.
When Laura hesitated in confusion, Jim thought she was searching for a way to encourage him, and he began, as he thought, to make it easy for her. He murmured, “What, baby?” in her ear, and “Tell me, come on,” with a nauseating intimacy, and began to plant wet kisses on her neck and cheek, his hand closing harder on her thigh, until it started to hurt.
Laura trembled in revolt and he breathed, “Oh, baby!” and pulled her chin around and kissed her lips. The hot blush burned her face and she thanked God for the bath of pink neon that disguised it.
“I was all wrong about you, Laura,” he whispered, and his lips brushed hers and they moved.
Laura wanted to claw at him, to burst from that terrible basement into the cold air and run and run and run until it was all miles behind her.
He kissed her again; a man’s lips were claiming her own, and it was all so new, so alarming, that it took her breath from her.
“Jim—” she said.
He kissed her again, harder.
“Oh, Jim, please!” and she turned her head away sharply against the wall of the booth. It was unbearable. No punishment could be worse than this. She waited, shaking, for him to reprimand her.
Instead he stroked her leg and leaned over her and said softly, “I understand, baby. Believe me. We’ll have time later.”
Laura thought she might be sick. It was no consolation to her to suddenly discover that she might be attractive to a man. She heard Emily’s voice across the table with such grateful relief that she almost reached out to clutch at her.
“Well, look here!” said Emmy. “Look who’s hitting it off!” She smiled a pleased smile. Emmy was a born matchmaker.
Jim straightened up a little and grinned at her. “Why sure,” he said. “Just took us a little while to find each other. Kinda dark down here.” He was delighted to have discovered an unexpected warm spell at the end of a chilly evening.
They laughed, and Emily gave Laura an approving smile that made Laura weak. It was apparently not only right but expected that she should let Jim maul her. Beth! she thought with sudden desperate force. Oh, Beth, if only you were here! The thought came unbidden out of the blue.
The two couples walked home
