That summer, after Curry had graduated and I had come home to Philadelphia for two months, my mother, with the indiscreet eagerness that sometimes overwhelms even tactful parents, asked if there was “anything romantic” between Curry and me.
“Not a chance,” I said.
“There are chances for all kinds of things,” she said coyly.
“Not for that.” At that point I didn’t feel sure of much in my life, but for once I felt I had said something that was absolutely true.
Fine Points
One great thing about Margaret was that she wore exactly the same size clothing that I did, an excellent quality in a roommate; she had, however, completely different taste, with an inclination toward plunging necklines, crimson tights, and minidresses in big, bold Scandinavian prints. My own wardrobe ran to jeans and black turtlenecks, odd little somber-colored tunics that I felt made me look like a wood nymph, and short pleated skirts that seemed to me to convey a sexy jeune fille air worthy of Claudine at school. “You literary types are always trying to look understated,” Margaret would say whenever she saw me dressed for seminar, for an Advocate meeting, or for a date. She was a chemistry major from Wellesley, Massachusetts, an avid lacrosse player with a terrific figure and a pair of unabashed blue eyes that revealed a forceful, stubborn nature—Margaret could keep an argument going for days. She adored fresh air and loathed reticence and ambiguity, and she had little patience with a roommate who, languid from lack of exercise, spent weeks reworking a four-word line of poetry.
“It’s a question of fine points,” I would retort loftily, though I had only a vague idea of what that might mean.
Margaret and I got along well for young women with such different souls. We spent a lot of time together in our cramped dormitory suite, squabbling comfortably over clothes and discussing romance—the one subject on which we were, to some extent, in agreement. The suite was on the fourth floor of Currier House; it consisted of two tiny rooms, a bathroom we’d decorated for a giggle with pinups of the bustiest Playboy Playmates we could find, and a kitchenette filled with moldy oranges stolen from the cafeteria. Our windows faced east, toward the corner of Garden and Linnaean Streets—a lovely view, really, with the Observatory woods, the flat-bottomed, whale-shaped clouds that came sailing down from Maine, and the tall, somber Cambridge houses back of the trees.
In the winter of 1973, our junior year at Harvard, on afternoons when Margaret was back from the lab and I was supposed to be at my desk reading Donne and Herbert for seminar or writing poetry for Professor Hawks’s verification class, we would hang out in Margaret’s room and drink oolong tea, which Margaret brewed so black it became a kind of solvent. Lounging on Margaret’s bed, below a periodic table she’d tacked up on the wall, we’d complain at length about our boyfriends. These young men, a couple of blameless seniors from Adams and Dunster Houses, were certainly ardent and attentive, but they bored us because they seemed appropriate. We yearned, in concert, to replace them with unsuitable men—an array of Gothic-novel types who didn’t seem at all hackneyed to Margaret and me. (Margaret, the scientist, had in fact a positively Brontëesque conception of the ideal man.) We envisioned liaisons with millionaires the age of our fathers, with alcoholic journalists, with moody filmmakers addicted to uppers; Margaret’s particular thing was depraved European nobility. A few years earlier it might have been possible for me to find the necessary thrill simply in going out with white boys, the forbidden fruit of my mother’s generation; but in the arty circles I frequented at Harvard, such pairings were just about required, if one was to cut any dash at all.
What our fantasies boiled down to was that Margaret and I, in the age-old female student tradition, ended up angling for members of the faculty.
“It’s just a question of days before Dr. Bellemere tumbles,” said Margaret one afternoon. (She flirted shamelessly with her adviser, but for some reason could not bring herself to call him by his first name—Don.) “And then, what naughty delights!”
As a matter of fact, I was the one who first was offered the chance to taste those delights. In February a genuine instructor—Geoffrey Knacker, who had taught my seminar on metaphysical poetry the previous semester, and who shared an apartment in Central Square with Millicent Tunney, another junior faculty member—asked me to meet him for a cup of coffee. Margaret sat cross-legged on my bed while I got dressed for the date—we were to meet at six at the Café Pamplona—and grew snappish when I refused the loan of a pair of red tights. She told me that if I hid my light under a bushel, I wouldn’t even get him to kiss me. I didn’t listen to her. I was busy making myself look as beautiful and mysterious as I could, and when I had slicked my hair back into a bun, rimmed my eyes with dark pencil, and put on a severe gray dress with a pair of black high heels I had bought in a thrift shop, even Margaret had to applaud the result.
“If Hopalong calls, tell him I’m riding in the Tour de France,” I said. Hopalong Cassidy was the name we had privately given my boyfriend, who had what I thought was an unnecessarily jaunty gait.
“You’re a cold, hard thing,” said Margaret in an approving tone.
I owned a rather rubbed-looking sealskin jacket that had belonged to my mother; when I had wrapped it around me, waved goodbye to the girl who stood studying behind the bells desk of the dormitory, and stepped outside into the February twilight, I had an agreeable feeling of satisfaction about the way I looked, and an agitated romantic feeling about the meeting to come. “Perhaps I’m in love,”
