Chapter 10: A Fresh Start

That outdoor meeting on the South Campus was the end of our affair, but Nora was still on the paper with me for the next three years. I didn’t know much about her personal life during that time, but she knew everything about mine.

Not long after she dumped me, I felt I had nothing to lose by going out and trying to pick up whatever girl seemed worth my time. My indifferent attitude was inadvertently the perfect strategy to have. I only had to approach two girls and I landed both of them.

I met the first one, Michelle Hanley, in the same Finley snack bar that had been an important venue for my doings with Nora. Michelle was a fellow sophomore, and she was just standing there with a coffee, looking confused as to where to sit down. My early thoughts about her were: what color panties is she wearing? Do they show through her white stockings? Is she wearing any panties at all?

As I sat there, I invited her to sit opposite me and, well, she did. I was surprised at how easy it was.

That evening I took her to dinner at a Chinese place on 24th Street. I found out that she was an ambitious sort, and she also worked as a typesetter and paste-up artist at a company a bit further east on 24th. Her work ethic made me ashamed of my own laziness and, eventually, she got me a part-time job there.

Her income allowed her to have an apartment in Long Island City (that’s when there was still affordable housing in New York) and a used Dodge Coronet. Within a few days, she had invited me to spend the night with her out there in Queens.

She was tall and dark-haired and, like Nora, she also had steel-rimmed glasses. Her legs were strong and beautiful because she played tennis in the summer and ice skated in the winter. Compared to Nora’s roiling emotions, she seemed quite calm. I asked her to join the paper with me.

Nora had disappeared from the paper for a couple of weeks, and when she came back, it was obvious that we were no longer a couple. No one mentioned anything about it, but I knew everybody noticed what had happened. I imagined Lilith secretly smirking about it.

Then suddenly I brought Michelle in for a staff meeting. I hadn’t announced her arrival ahead of time, and she was quite restrained compared to Nora’s first-day antics in September. Yet I’m sure everybody was astonished for a second time. What’s gotten into this guy? I was especially careful to watch Lilith’s reactions, and she seemed dismayed.

Nora was also one who noticed. She took me into the hallway and said, “You certainly work fast.”

“I learned it all from you.”

“No, you did it on your own.” She smiled at me. “I’m actually impressed at how you’ve handled this.” I was both touched and a bit embarrassed by her comment.

But I couldn’t leave well enough alone. On impulse, I picked up a second girl, Andrea Cartselos, a couple of weeks later. She was sitting on a wall on Convent Avenue, right by the statue of General Alexander Webb, and she was reading a hard-cover copy of The Naked Ape. As I sat next to her, I thought maybe she would say, who the hell are you? Or maybe, get lost, creep.

But no, she talked to me about the book. She even read some suggestive passages from it to me. I realized that she was testing me, trying to get me rattled. But I passed her test, and she invited me to the West End café with her.

She was dark-haired, and she had nice tits and a luscious round ass. I was immediately in lust with her. After the West End, we went into Riverside Park and made out on a bench. I even got her blouse and halter-top open, and I copped some extensive feels of her beautiful breasts.

Andrea – or Andie as she usually wanted to be called – lived with her mom in Astoria, but she had her own car, a 1967 Oldsmobile Delmont. She called it the Ted Kennedy-mobile because it was the same model the unlucky Senator had driven off the bridge at Chappaquiddick. She had parked it back at City College and we took the bus up there to retrieve it. She drove me home, but we had pizza first on Arthur Avenue. I seemed to have a knack for finding chicks with their own cars, although I didn’t have one of my own.

On our second date, Andie parked with me in her Oldsmobile at night in a commercial area in southern Queens. She gave herself an orgasm with a dildo while I watched, and then she gave me a handjob. Over the next week or so, our affair quickly escalated from there. It happened before I could really comprehend the implications of it, which were that I was cheating on Michelle.

I didn’t invite her to join the paper, but I did bring her around for a visit. Sharp-eyed Nora noticed.

Later he asked me, “Who exactly was that chick?”

“Just somebody I picked up on Convent Avenue.”

“On Convent Avenue? How did you manage that?”

“She was sitting on a wall reading The Naked Ape. We even talked about a passage in the book. It was that one about how headmasters cane their students and like to see the reddening of their buttocks because...”

“Never mind that, let’s get to the point: are you banging her?”

“Oh yeah, I am.”

“And Michelle doesn’t know about it?”

“No, she doesn’t.”

At that time, we were sitting on one of those hallway window ledges on the north side.