Chapter 34

I think the movement of the bed woke me. I opened one eye and Giulia was headed off to the bathroom, naked, her cute butt doing a little dance as she walked. I closed my eyes again.

The bed shifted again and I opened my nearer eye. She had her legs pulled up under her, leaning on one arm, looking me over. “How is it that you are so energetic so soon after collapse?” I asked. She shrugged. “I suppose people react differently to sex. I feel really good now,” she said.

“You have drained me, left me empty, disposable. Is this true of all Italian women, or is it just you?”

“Italians invented love. Everything else is a pale imitation.”

“You may be right, given the way I feel.”

She moved in closer. “So, Carter, I think this worked out well. I learned some new English phrases, you learned some Italian, and now I feel relaxed, at peace, with a very nice -- oh, what is the word? One of my classmates in English class told me. Oh. -- a very nice buzz. I hope you feel the same.” I nodded.

“But maybe this is the time to say that this is the end of the lesson. I have things to do in the morning, early. And I did say this was a one-time offer, didn’t I? So perhaps we should say buon notte now. And I will add grazie for helping me out with my two problems.”

I was being dismissed. Well, not entirely unexpected. She had been quite clear about the terms, and I couldn’t very well renegotiate now.

“It will take me a few minutes to regain enough energy to move, but I will. And I was very happy to assist.” She lay down beside me, half turned toward me, one hand resting on my arm. I delayed as long as I decently could, then stretched and worked my way off the bed.

I was moving slowly, conserving my depleted stores of energy, but I found my clothes and got them on. I did the last knot in my shoelaces and leaned over and gave her a kiss on the shoulder. She patted my arm and closed her eyes with a hint of a smile.

In the hall, I found where I’d left my coat and gloves and zipped up as I shut the door behind me. It took me a few moments to get my bearings and figure out where I was, but it wasn’t that far away from campus and in fifteen minutes I was back at the dorm.

No surprise, Larry had not yet returned, not while there was still beer in the keg and a woman he had not yet hit on. Say what you will about him, he was consistent.

Just as well, I was tired enough that I wasn’t in the mood to hear him go on about how awesome the party was, and didn’t I feel better for having gone? Well, I wouldn’t tell him, but I did feel better for having gone. Not just for getting expertly laid, but also for having learned something new about language. I smiled at that just before I fell asleep, still dressed.

I didn’t even hear him come in, I was that tired, but when I woke in the morning he was face down in his bed, snoring. I found some clean clothes, took a shower, and then headed off to breakfast.

The details of my academic life start to get a little tedious, even to me, so I’ll skip a lot of that. Classes, exams, research papers, it got to be routine after a while. I had to be careful not to take it for granted. They were throwing a lot of stuff our way, and we had to assimilate it, understand it, if we were to pass the tests and thus stay in school.

And I was finding that I liked it here. I liked the challenge of learning new ideas to thing about, of seeing my understanding of things widen. It was fun, in a perverse kind of way.

Periodically I would get an email from Karen, filling me in on her school life. They were usually short, hurried notes, because she never had much time. The sense I took away from them was that, as intense as it was, how much she felt like a fish out of water, she found it challenging and exciting, and was managing to keep up. She was, she told me, both exhausted and exhilarated.

In one email she told me she’d been thrilled to get picked by the female CS professor she’d mentioned before to do some unpaid research work. It got her closer to the things she wanted to do, working with artificial intelligence, even though she was basically an unpaid intern, doing the tedious work no one else wanted to do. But she did it gratefully, watched and listened and read, and picked up a lot. I’d bet she’d be at the top of the list when another part-time paid position opened up. I was happy for her.

There is one school-related thing that had been poking at me since shortly after I arrived. I’ve alluded to it before, that strange feeling I’d gotten in my European History class with Professor D. Even in high school I got what I had called an ‘alarm bell’ that went off in my head when a teacher was thinking about me and about to call on me.

I’d felt it periodically in history class, especially after I showed some understanding of the historical context and an ability to extrapolate about the effects of events. Mostly this was my siphoning off his own knowledge of the things he was trying to teach us and feeding it back to him, but of course he interpreted it as insight and intelligence. So I found him periodically thinking about me in class while he lectured, and my feeling that tingle that indicated that the alarm bell might be about to sound.

I had initially thought that it might be some sexual interest, perhaps he had a thing for younger men. But eventually I changed my mind, deciding that it was some other kind of interest, but I hadn’t yet determined what the interest was. His mind was very compartmentalized.

That changed one Tuesday morning. I took my usual seat toward the front of the lecture hall, and he arrived shortly after, toting his battered briefcase. Once into his lecture, he was telling us about some of the plotting that occurred regularly over the centuries between the French and the English, and how it had evolved into semi-established offices on both sides working to ferret out secrets or sow misinformation. It was a kind of precursor to today’s intelligence agencies.

And there it was. I had been idly poking around his epicenter trying to understand how these practices had evolved and become institutionalized, when I saw my name in that context! And as soon as it occurred, I saw why it had come up, because the discussion of Anglo-French spying had brought up his knowledge of US intelligence, and I saw instantly that he had been involved on the periphery since he was a young Ph.D. wet behind the ears.

He didn’t think of the specific agency, because it was so normal for him, just people he worked with on occasion, rather than the institution itself. While not an active member, he sometimes wrote analyses of an evolving political situation for them and, more importantly, served as their lookout for new talent! He was considering that, with the insight I had displayed, I might be a good candidate down the road and perhaps he should effect an introduction to one of their friendly representatives.

I dropped down in my seat as if I had been punched. For years I had been making an effort to keep my talents out of any public awareness specifically because I didn’t want to inadvertently wind up on the radar of one of the clandestine three-letter-acronym agencies. And here was Professor D ruminating about introducing me to them directly! I needed to put a stop to this post haste.

It was still at the speculation stage in his head, so I had some time. I thought about it over the next couple of weeks, deciding that the best approach might be simply for him to decide that I was, after all, unsuitable. A possible person of interest who later proves to be not quite up to snuff.

After some thought, I decided that one of the requisites for any successful candidate would be a rigid belief in patriotism, a kind of “my country, right or wrong” ethos, and a firm conviction that capitalism, backed by a strong military, would ensure our country’s dominance. If he began to feel that I lacked some or all of those qualities, my luster would begin to tarnish in his eyes.

I had some skills in implanting ideas -- well, let’s call them suggestions or feelings -- suggestions in people’s minds. Nothing specific, since it didn’t work that way. The feelings I was able to linkcast were rather vague. In a sexual context, they were visual metaphors that provoked a certain kind of reaction, such as Avalanche, which gave the recipient an orgasm accompanied by a sense of falling, helpless, inundated by the noise, until they finally came to rest in a snowbank.

But this was of a different nature. I was going to try to convince him that I lacked some qualities that he desired me to have. This was something new I had never tried before. I needed to send a visual metaphor that suggested that I failed to meet some vague standard, which only he knew. I struggled with this as I tried to work through the possible downsides of each metaphor I came up with.

In the end, I decided to keep it ambiguous, to give a sense that, while intelligent and insightful, I was vacillating about my beliefs, that I felt that capitalism was failing people and the national leaders did not always have the people’s interests at heart. And in fact, I did tend toward those beliefs, as did many others, but it would take many conversations with him before he would come to see my inadequacies and we did not interact outside of class.

I could only try. So I built a metaphor that connected those vague doubts and aimless suspicions with my name and face, and during a following class, when I again had his focus, I linkcast it to him. I did it only once, because I wanted to see how it had been received. I couldn’t see an obvious change, so I did it again at the next class, and a third time later.

And one day in class, when I was rummaging in his epicenter for the matrix to help me place the historical facts he had recently imparted, I felt his gaze turn on me and in his mind I saw ... disappointment, a chance that had proven to be a false hope. And something that felt like a sigh, like ‘Oh, well, maybe there’ll be someone else.’

And so I allowed my chance to be a latter-day James Bond slip by. And thanked my lucky stars that I had been able to do so. It set me to thinking about how to watch for signs in people who might not have my best interests at heart. In high school it had been bullies, the jocks who tormented the nerds. I hadn’t been able to turn their ire away from me, and I wasn’t yet sure why, but it was something to keep poking at, because it was likely to arise again in the future.

The weeks progressed, and the end of the term was now in sight. I saw it in the faces of others who began to have a panicked look when they realized how much they needed to assimilate for all their courses in the time remaining. I had been uncertain about my ability to keep up since my arrival, so I had been working extra hard at it and felt that I was mostly caught up.

Others, like Larry, had developed a hunted look as they tried to compress the preceding months of study into the remaining time in the semester. I even caught him studying once on a Saturday. I was going to say something, but I didn’t want to discourage the newly found habit.

But there was a balance here, too. You could be like some of the library nerds who, when not in class or sleeping, spent their time in the library studying until they were thrown out at midnight. They were back, waiting for the doors to open in the morning. That’s no kind of a life either, spending your days and nights with a nose in a book, pursuing a straight-A goal.

So, fairly regularly, I’d go out on the weekend and do something, a movie, a concert, I even went to a comedy club once. Just something to get me out of the dorm and remind me that there was life outside of school, things to think about that didn’t have to do with classes. Larry’s method for coping was frat parties. They didn’t do that much for me, so I tried other things.

The stress had been building up again, and I felt that I needed to blow off some steam, to clear my head. A glance at the student paper didn’t offer any suggestions for movies that appealed to me, and no concerts of anyone I recognized and liked. I’d done the comedy club recently and wasn’t in the mood.

I flipped the page and saw a half-page article on the regional meeting of CoMBA, the College Music Buyers Association. I don’t know why I decided to read it, maybe the picture of some band playing on a stage somewhere. Anyway, it seems that there’s a business behind the bands and singers who come to do shows at colleges everywhere. There’s a budget allocated to Student Activities Boards at every college, and they use that to hire entertainment for the students. The members of the SAB’s are student volunteers, guided by a faculty advisor.

I’d never given it much thought, but apparently finding the right performer for your school is hard. Mostly people only know the bands they know, the ones that are already famous and out of your price range. To find musicians who both fit your budget and might appeal to your audience was difficult. You couldn’t just ask them to come and audition. It wouldn’t be worth the band’s time.

So organizations like CoMBA served as a clearing house for performers who wanted to play at colleges and SAB’s who were looking for someone new and exciting. CoMBA would host meetings at various colleges in the region once or twice a year, SAB’s would come and listen to showcases, talk to the performers, maybe hire a few, and everyone goes home happy. At least that’s what the article assured me.

But the zinger was that part of the deal with --------- agreeing to host the regional meeting and use the space, was that we, its students, would be allowed to attend and listen to the various performers. And I saw a couple of bands listed that held some interest for me, so I said, “Okay, that’s what I’ll do tomorrow.”

So I spent Saturday finishing up an English paper, studying for a chem quiz, and reading some history. Not unlike Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. As much as school had me on edge, I knew I couldn’t slack off.

Partway through the afternoon, Larry came in -- he’d been in the library, yes, the library, doing research for a paper that was due soon -- and threw his books on the bed, then kicked his desk.

“That bad?” I asked.

“I know I’m supposed to be keeping up with my assignments, but sometimes you reach a point where it’s too much. You’re about ready to tear your hair out. I need to blow off some steam, or I’m not going to make it through the rest of the semester. Wanna come out and hunt for a party with me tonight?”

“Tempting as that sounds, no. I’m going to go to that CoMBA thing and hear a couple of bands, try to put school out of my head.”

“You know there’s no alcohol at school-sponsored events, right? Come with me and I’ll get you fixed up.”

“I think just the music is enough for me. But you have a good time. What am I saying? Of course you’ll have a good time. You always do.”

He shrugged, as if to say, ‘Well, you can’t complain that I didn’t offer.’

It turned out to be a beautiful spring night. We went to eat dinner together and afterwards went back to the dorm to change.

“Last chance, Carter. Bacchus’s revels await. Join me.”

“I’m good, Larry. Enjoy yourself.”

“If I don’t show up back here tonight, don’t worry, I’m just stretching out the party as long as I can. See ya.”

He trotted down the hall to find his party. I was sure he’d have a wonderful time, he always did.

I waited till about nine, then put on a light jacket and went to the student union where the event was to be held. The larger bands would be in the big hall, and there were some smaller rooms where the newer bands and solo artists could strut their stuff. SAB members wandered in and out, some making notes on cards.

I found the bands I wanted to hear and I liked them. The sets were short, because there were a lot of groups hoping to showcase. One would finish, the next would start to set up, while the audience straggled off to hear other acts.

At 10:30 one of the bands I was looking forward to was on in the main hall, so I drifted down there. All the SAB attendees had little badges with their name and school affiliation, and to tell the truth it looked like the party had started last night for some of them and hadn’t yet ended. They were looking a little worse for wear.

Their problem, I suppose. I focused on the band on stage, which had a groove going on and I could see the audience moving along with the beat. They were good. I’d bet they came out of this event with a bunch of bookings.

“Oh, my God! Carter, is that you?”

I had to look around to see who was talking, because it was crowded. I saw her and did a double take. “Melissa Cooley? I don’t believe it!”

She ran at me like she was going to tackle me and jumped up, throwing her arms around my neck and hugging me tight enough to hurt a little.

“I’m amazed! You’re here? What are the odds? How are you? Are you on one of the Student Activity Boards?”

“No, I go to school here. I just came to hear some music. Melissa, get off my neck and let me look at you.”

She let go and dropped down to the ground. I put my arms on her shoulders and held her at arm’s length. The same glorious smile that I remembered, and with a couple more years on her she had developed into a stunning young woman. I could have predicted that when she was sixteen, which is when I last saw her, but the reality of it was something else.

So perhaps time for a brief sidebar, while I bring you up to speed. I’d known Melissa since we were kids on the same softball team. She was funny and sassy and smart and adventurous and we got along, in a friends kind of way appropriate for when you’re ten. At some point, she transitioned from softball-playing tomboy to a young woman who looked like one of those teen models gracing the covers of those beauty magazines like Elle you see peering at you from the newsstands.

When that transition happened, she fell in with a new group of friends, all girls, who reinforced each other’s belief that they were the most attractive and desirable girls in our school, and looked down on everyone else as not being worthy of them. Particularly the boys the same age as they were. It always puzzled me why she fell in with that crowd, because she never struck me as holding those prejudices.

When I had my accident and was recuperating for so long, she was one of the first to come up to me and welcome me back to school, ask me how I was doing. The old Melissa I always knew. Her friends were careful to let her -- and me -- know that they did not approve of our fraternization. They had apparently decided among themselves to approve each others friends, and I had not met the requirements. She ignored them, which earned her some reproving looks.

I won’t detail how it came about, other than to say that at some point she had decided she wanted to experiment further with sex and I was her chosen lab partner. If I was willing, she insisted. Foolish question. I would have swum through a congregation of alligators to make that happen.

I swear that I did nothing to convince her that she wanted my bod. It was her decision entirely. The opportunity presented itself when her parents went out of town for some social function and she was supposed to spend the night at one of her girlfriend’s houses. She had a friend cover for her and we had her house to ourselves.

She was the first woman I’d ever gotten past first base with, and I considered myself extremely lucky that she had chosen me for her first. But here’s the thing. She was nervous about pregnancy, not yet on birth control and she didn’t completely trust condoms, so she had decided no dick in pussy. We did almost everything else, enthusiastically, but no straight fucking.

That was something we were supposed to get around to when she finally got on birth control, but before that happened her mother got sick, and her father moved the family suddenly to California where there were medical facilities that specialized in treating the disease that afflicted her mother. It was sudden, and it felt like a body blow when she told me. She was gone shortly afterwards and, though she had promised to, she never wrote.

“Carter, I just can’t believe it! I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thought about you.” The band had moved on to a high energy set closer and the crowd was getting raucous. Melissa was having to shout to be heard.

Finally she shook her head, leaned up to put her lips close to my ear and said, “I can’t shout any louder. Let’s find someplace quieter.” She took my hand and led me out to a hallway, where the closing door cut the noise level by half.

“Do you remember, Carter? That Friday dance in high school? We had to leave the floor for the same reason, we couldn’t hear each other. Then we had that talk in the physics lab.”

“Yes, I remember. How could I forget?”

“Carter, I thought about you and Cleveland so often. I was going to write and then life got in the way. My mom died soon after we got there. It hit me hard, and it just knocked the legs out from under my dad, he was walking around like a zombie. The hospital was supposed to help her, but it turned out to be too late.”

“Oh, Melissa, I’m so sorry. I wish you had called or written. I don’t know what I could have done, but you shouldn’t have had to go through something like that alone.”

“I couldn’t really. I was having a hard time dealing with it, couldn’t talk about it. Finally I decided I had to just force myself to be ‘normal’ or something, because my dad wasn’t coping well. So I wound up doing most of the cooking and cleaning, and oddly that kind of routine helped me through it. My dad eventually came back from where he was hiding. He still misses her, but he’s gone out on dates a couple of times since then, so there’s hope for him.”

We talked a bit more, then I suggested we go to the cafeteria and sit rather than standing here in the cinder-block hallway, as romantic as it was.

“Okay, I gotta go get my coat. Did you know they had a coat checkroom here? Some classy place you go to school, Carter.”

We retrieved her coat and went to find coffee and pie at the chuck wagon. I found that she was attending one of the California state universities, and had been talked into joining the Student Activity Board by one of her roommates. This was a trip paid for by the school to suss out possible acts for the next school year. There was a regional conference closer to her school but some kind of scheduling conflict had dictated that they fly across the country to attend this one. Her school had put her up in a local hotel close to ----------.

“So I don’t remember you being a scholastic whiz, Carter. You were a pretty good student, but maybe not Ivy-league good. Did you bribe your way in here? Did you find incriminating pictures of the Dean?”

“I found my rhythm eventually and figured out how to navigate the school system. I also found that I had a talent for math and languages, so everything worked out. There are smarter people than me, and I’m actually not sure why I got in here, but I did and I’m keeping my head above water. And you?”

“Well, my grades suffered for awhile after my mother died but I got back into the groove finally. I chose my school because it’s actually pretty good academically and since I’m a California resident I get a hefty break on tuition. My dad’s doing okay salary-wise, so he’s able to handle it. I got a bit of financial aid, too.”

We traded info on interests and possible majors, talked about the friends in high school we knew in common, and what they were up to. I didn’t mention Karen, because I didn’t think they knew each other back then.

She leaned back in her chair and smiled at me. “Oh, Carter, I can’t tell you how happy I am to see you. This is weird, but you’re one of the things I visualize when I think about the happy parts of my life in Ohio. I close my eyes and you’re kinda drifting around in there. I should have written you after I got past my mother’s death, but by then I was feeling really guilty about not having written in the first place. The more I thought about it, the harder it got.”

“Please, Melissa, it’s fine. I know why you couldn’t, and I’m happy that you came out of it okay. Really. It’s so nice to see you. You look wonderful. Well, you always did, but more so now.”

“You’ve changed somehow, Carter, I don’t know quite what it is. You’re confident -- you always were, now that I think about it -- and you have a presence about you, like you can look inside me.”

If she only knew. She blushed a little, which was unexpected. “I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but one of the things that made me saddest when we had to leave so suddenly was that we never got to follow up with our ... what? Experimentation? Anyway, that time we spent at my house, I think I alluded to how eye-opening it was. It kind of knocked me for a loop. It was way beyond anything I had expected, and I was really hoping to find out what it would feel like when we finally had real sex.”

“I was kind of a neophyte then,” I said, “fumbling my way through it. I was afraid I was going to be a disappointment to you.”

“Are you kidding? I know I told you then how powerful it was, how it made me feel like my whole body was vibrating. even if we didn’t go all the way, it was still amazing. I’ve thought a lot about this. It reset my expectations for what sex could be. We girls used to talk about it all the time, what it was going to be like when we finally did it, like any of us had a clue.

“And, by the way, some of my crew finally did admit to us that they’d done it with their boyfriends, after denying that they were ever going to let them get past first base. And when we asked them how it was, I could see it in the way they responded that it had been a disappointment. ‘Oh, it was ... really nice’, they’d say. ‘It felt ... okay.’ Yeah, sure. I could see it in their faces, it was a letdown.

“I was the only one who knew what it really could be like. And I didn’t tell them, by the way, because I knew they wouldn’t believe me, they’d think I was making it up. Plus, they leak like a sieve. Word would be all over town ten minutes after they’d left.”

“Oh, how I miss high school. Not,” I said.

“Exactly. Anyway, my point is, you showed me what it could be like, if a guy knows what he’s doing. Or even if he can only follow instructions. That, Carter, was what I had been hoping to get out of our little experiment, and it worked like gangbusters. So thanks.”

“Well, we Boy Scouts are always looking to perform good deeds in the neighborhood.”

“I hope they gave you a merit badge for that. You deserved it.”

She took another sip of her coffee, probably cold now. “I don’t know if you want to hear this, but in a way it finishes the story. So after we left Ohio and I had started at my new school, I finally met a guy who was cute and intelligent, and we started hanging out. Eventually, one thing led to another, and he was my first, as far as real sex went.

“It was kind of a disappointment, like my friends had had, but it was mostly his inexperience, him not quite sure what to do, so he’d just try things he’d seen in porn movies. I thought a lot about that afterwards, and I also thought about how we’d talked when we were together and you told me that I had to be an active participant, directing what I’d like more or less of.

“It took a bit of convincing before I could get him to stop doing that porn thing, get him to slow down, to make him realize that it’s not really the dick hammering me that gets me off. It went against everything he’d thought he’d learned up till then. He finally agreed to do what I asked him to do and I showed him how to do some of the things you’d done to me.

“And once he learned how to do those things, we got along pretty well. He could get me off most of the time and it felt good.”

She was wanting me to say something positive here, but the truth was that I was really jealous of that guy, whoever he was, disappointed that it was not me. Then I thought, well, if she hadn’t left and we had wound up together, then I probably never would have met Karen.

“I’m glad it worked out for you, Melissa. Are you two still together?”

“Him? Oh, no. That probably didn’t last more than six months. He was cute and had some smarts, I’ll give him that, but he was a little shallow and maybe a bit possessive, too. It got to a point where I wasn’t enjoying being with him and told him so. He left, telling me I’d never find anyone as good as him. Did I mention that he was a bit full of himself?”

I smiled at that.

“So nothing steady after that, though I’ve been seeing a guy at school now who I like. You?”

“Me? I kinda played the field for a couple of years after you left. I met someone later and we were an almost-couple through senior year.”

“What does that mean, almost-couple?”

I explained about Karen’s parents’ frowning on us seeing each other exclusively and forcing her to date others.

“I can almost see that,” Melissa said. “It’s a time when we’re changing so much and we need to experience other points of view. Hard to do that if you’re seeing only one person. You seeing anyone now, at school?”