Chapter 30

And before I knew it I was back in the normal rhythm of school. I was surprised at how quickly it happened, there was no easing into it. The first day in Behavioral Statistics we had a research paper assigned, due in a few weeks, and I took from that they weren’t inclined to go easy on us in the second semester.

So I got back into my rhythm, which involved planning a series of short Brain Sponge sessions in a library carrel at least once a week. They didn’t require that much time for each one, but with the number of courses on my schedule it added up. I had promised myself that I wouldn’t save it all until the end of the semester. That had worked out pretty well for me last term.

I’d found that I was liking the biology part of my double major. I discovered that learning how life worked -- plants and animals and humans -- was pretty interesting. I already had questions that weren’t answered in my current textbook. I was trying to decide whether to just wait till the answers showed up in a later course, or to go ask my biology prof about them during office hours.

That afternoon, back in my room, I booted my PC and found an email from Karen.

Tom, just a quick note because I’ve got a test I have to study for. I finally got the portrait you sent me. Lest you think that I just forgot to thank you for it, it had actually been delivered to someone else! The PO put the package in the wrong mailbox! The guy to whom it was delivered didn’t bother to return it to the PO till this morning, so I didn’t get it until today.

It’s perfect. Tomorrow when I have a spare hour I’ll go out and buy a frame for it so I can put it on my desk where I’ll always see it. Let the other girls be jealous for a change.

Oh, you might find this interesting. One of the CS faculty is doing a short course -- no credit -- on how to use HTML to make web sites. Anybody can attend and there’s a department web server where we can stage our web sites and try them out. I thought it might be fun, so I’m going to sign up, see what the mystery is all about.

--- K

On a Thursday evening after classes, I went for a late-ish supper after writing a long email to Karen. Pot roast on the menu again tonight, which I’d liked the last time I had it, so I gave it an encore. Larry had somewhere to go, so he’d eaten earlier.

I sat down and cut my first bite. Yeah, still pretty good.

“Carter, may I join you?” the voice behind me asked. I looked up and found Al Marquez standing there. I told him to sit and get comfortable.

“Did you enjoy your time in Atlanta?” I asked him, making small talk.

“It was educational,” he said vaguely. I waited for him to elaborate if that was his intention. He took a bite of his sandwich.

“Do you remember,” he asked me, “at the end of last semester when we were talking and those two girls came up to our table?”

“Uh, yeah, I do, in fact. One of them looked like she was ready to drag you into the nearest empty closet.”

“Yes. I said that certain foreign men often appeared exotic and romantic to some American women. Like they want to find out if they’re better than American men in some way. It is a kind of fantasy for them.”

“I remember.”

“It turns out that it is true in Georgia as well. My cousin, Juan, had hinted at it before, without really explaining. He looks a little like me, a Spanish kind of complexion that is very different from most Georgia men. It makes us look more ... European than American. It is like a... --- I have forgotten the word. It means a smell or an image that causes arousal, to make women want sex...”

“Maybe ‘aphrodisiac’?” I suggested.

“Yes, that is it, an aphrodisiac. It is perhaps a little uncomfortable, being an object of attraction to so many girls who know nothing about me. I represent something that they do not have in their lives and they want to sample it.”

“Is that a bad thing?”

“No, it is just ... uncomfortable, because I have to make a choice and whatever it is, it will upset many of them. I do not like to do that, because I try to get along with everyone.”

I thought about that. Women liked me, sometimes they’d flirt with me, but I never had had the sense that every woman present was competing for me. That was what he was describing. I could almost feel his discomfort.

“I think that you’re mostly correct. Someone not from here, from another country that is considered romantic -- Spain, France, Italy, for example -- is an attraction to women. It is like a prize for which they compete against one another, to prove who among them is most appealing, able to capture the interest of the attractive man. It is a contest that they have with one another, so that they can see if they are more alluring than all the other women present. You are just the football they are trying to grab so that they can win the game.”

He thought that over for a few seconds, then laughed out loud. “I had not considered it like that. I think maybe you are right. I am just the football.”

“The other women will begrudge the woman who won,” I elaborated, “but they will say it was because she happened to be dressed better or had a better figure or was able to be more charming, some minor advantage that gave her the edge this time. They will not hold it against you.”

“American life is sometimes very confusing. Still, some part of me is like a nun shaking her finger at me saying, ‘You are a betrothed man, Alfonso, you should not be doing that.’”

“Are you religious, Al?”

“Not really, not anymore. I was raised as a Catholic, but we really don’t go to church except on the big religious holidays. Yet all those ‘Don’t do this, don’t do that’ lectures are still in my head from when I was a child.”

“I’m not religious either. Religion is supposed to teach us how to behave responsibly, how to live among others and treat them fairly. I think it often goes beyond that and gets into details of personal behavior which are not really any of their business.

“You want to treat your fiancé respectfully. My own feeling is that this experimentation that we, young men and women, do while we are this age is part of the growing process, part of learning about ourselves.

“When you are married -- again, my own personal feelings -- you have made a commitment to that person and I believe that you should be faithful to her as she should be to you. The phrase that is important here is ‘when you are married.’ I believe that what you do before that is, in some way, preparation for your later life, when you commit to another.”

He was quiet for a while as he ate his salad.

“That is a ... not unreasonable philosophy, Carter. It makes some sense. I think that I am feeling guilty about all these women approaching me, as if they should be able to detect that I am spoken for already. I see some men, my father’s married friends for example, brag about the women they have slept with recently, just after they have talked about their families. It is ... hypocrisy. It always makes me feel a little ill.”

“No one has ever been able to reconcile that with the ‘family values’ that religion and society tout. You’re right, it is hypocrisy. You will have to make your own decision about how you will behave before you are married. There is an American idiom that says that young men need to ‘sow their wild oats.’

“It means that before they are grown they do all kinds of foolish and dangerous things, and also try to be with as many women as possible. Everyone frowns upon it, but they shrug their shoulders and say that the young men are just doing those things so they can say they’ve done it and won’t look back at that time when they are older and regret the things that they never tried, and perhaps be tempted to stray and try the thing that they didn’t do, to see what it feels like.”

“I have not heard that saying before, ‘sow their wild oats.’ I like it. It condenses a lot of things into a short phrase.”

“I’ve got to get going, Al. I’m glad to see you had a good time. We’ll talk again.”

He said goodbye, and I dropped off my tray and slipped on my coat, heading for the dorm.

The next day I had a ten o’clock lecture, and after breakfast I stopped by the campus post office to check whether I’d won the Publisher’s Clearing House sweepstakes. I hadn’t, as it turned out, but I did find that my grades from last semester had arrived as promised.

I was a little nervous as I opened the envelope, I’m not sure why because I’d felt I’d done okay on the finals. I had to read it twice. I had gotten A’s and one A- across the board. I was a bit stunned because, while I’d thought I’d done reasonably well in the finals, I wasn’t sure that I’d gotten everything right.

I leaned up against the wall of the post office to catch my breath. This Brain Sponge thing had turned out to be the best trick I’d ever come up with. I liked the others, the little tweaks I did to myself or my sex partners to make sex better, those were fun, but this one was proving very useful.

I put the envelope away in my backpack and went off to my class, feeling just a little smug about myself.

By the end of the day, despite the rush of having aced my finals, I was pretty tired. The routine of classes, reading, study, and writing seemed to consume a lot of hours and mental energy. When Fridays rolled around nearly everyone, including me, was ready to relax for awhile.

If you’re Larry, my roommate, you’re fishing around for the hottest party that night, a blowout that would let you forget your troubles for a few hours. He usually tries to drag me along, convinced that it’s just what I need, despite a year and a half of me telling him that it’s not.

I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I doubted that it would involve a frat party with people barfing in the corner or passed out on the floor. I decided to get some dinner while I thought about it.

The energy level was always high on the weekends, especially on Fridays when the whole weekend loomed enticingly ahead of you. You measured that by the amount of noise in the mess hall, which was raucous. Tonight the least suspicious of the offerings was sliced turkey and gravy, so that, along with mashed potatoes and a small salad went onto my tray.

I found a table where someone had left the dirty dishes and went off without bussing them. I pushed them aside and made room for my plates.

It was a little dry, I decided after a few bites, but not bad.

“Carter, may I sit?”

My mouth was full, so I nodded. When I swallowed I belatedly said, “Hello, Al. What did you get?”

“Nothing appealed to me tonight, so a hamburger and french fries. I never ate these growing up, so they feel like some glamorous foreign food.”

“I have never thought of hamburgers as glamorous. But still, I like hamburgers every so often. Did you get your grades yet?”

“I did. I passed. I could have done better, but I think my understanding of English is still a little ... fragile and I miss some important ideas during classes and reading. I hope it will get better.”

“Languages require a lot of practice. The more you use it, the easier it gets. I am losing my skills with Spanish because I don’t use it much anymore. Same with French and Italian.”

“Perhaps I can practice my English with you and you can practice your Spanish with me. We can correct each other.”

“That sounds like an excellent idea. I’d like that. You never told me, what are you majoring in?”

“I am majoring in philosophy and business.”

I looked up. “That is an unusual combination. Why those?”

“It was my father’s idea. The philosophy is to gain a sense of ethics and morality, and to get an overview of the world. The business is to learn some of the details of running a company. He feels it will give me a balance between the harsh reality of the business world and the larger idea of remaining honest and dealing fairly in that world.”

“I can see his point. They seem like two very opposite points of view, though.”

“Perhaps. Right now it is just easier to go along with it. Do you have plans for the weekend?” he asked.

“Not really. I’m not in the mood for the usual round of loud parties where everyone drinks until they can’t walk. I don’t handle alcohol very well.”

“I’ve gone to a few of those, but I do not enjoy them that much.”

He swallowed a bite of his hamburger and cleared his throat. “I’ve been thinking about that conversation we had. About being betrothed but not yet being married. Do you remember?”

“From yesterday? Yes, I recall it.”

“It made me consider it in a new way. I had to rethink my position on a number of things. Mostly, I decided that you were right. You taught me that English idiom, ‘sow your wild oats’, remember?”

“Yes.”

“I agree with you, that marriage is a commitment, a promise to be faithful and to care just for the person to whom you are married. But before that, we must prepare ourselves by experiencing many things.”

I nodded, finished the last of my mashed potatoes and started on the salad.

Al dipped some fries in ketchup and nibbled on them happily. We traded small talk, I think mostly an opportunity for him to practice his English. I’d finished my salad and started in on the piece of chocolate cake that had been teasing me from its corner of the tray.

As I swallowed the first sugary forkful I heard voices behind me.

“Oh, hi, Alfonso! We just finished our dinner. I hope yours is better than what we had.”

They moved to the side of the table so I could see them. I didn’t know them, but they knew Al. One was blond-ish, hair in a pony tail, brilliant smile that looked expensive. The other was shorter, reddish-brown hair in a pixie cut, with a little beauty mark on her cheek.

What was interesting was how Al reacted. This was not the way he’d responded to the girls who’d come up to our table before finals. Then he’d been polite but reserved, a courteous, noncommittal response to a casual social interaction.

His demeanor changed. I’d not really seen his full smile before. I saw it now. His smile seemed to draw them in, welcome them, say how happy he was to see them, because they were the most important people in the room. His body language showed his openness, he was relaxed, delighted to talk with them. This was a very new Al.

“Carter, let me introduce you to two of my classmates, the lovely Stacy, and her friend, the beautiful Miss Anne. We are in an English Literature class together.” They blushed, and at the same time they appeared to glow from his description of them.