Chapter 10

The weather turned cool as winter approached, and that was the last time we had a party outside that year. There's something about doing it in the open air that's special. You feel more natural or something. That just left doing it inside, in bedrooms, recreation rooms, living rooms, and so on. These parties happened all over a house, and I sometimes wondered if our hosts used industrial-strength cleaners to mop up all of the stains the next day.

School settled into the long slog past the first of the year. We were busy socially, pairing up with various other Greek houses for dances, mixers, parties, and so on. And this being a large city with an active group of alumni, we were also heavily involved in social affairs that entered us into the real world. These can be very important, and while attendance wasn't quite mandatory, a girl missed them only with a very good excuse.

My roommate dropped her boyfriend, and played the field for a bit. She met a guy from one of the jock houses, a legacy who helped keep their GPA up. It wasn't quite love at first sight, but soon they were inseparable. Wesley and I continued to date, and I realized I was beginning to make plans around him. We were both getting out of school at the same time, though I'd be involved with a year of post-graduate classes. Still, we took the big step by spending one Sunday afternoon looking at want-ads for apartments.

"You're sure?" Krys asked me one Wednesday afternoon.

"I think so."

"Girl, you'd better do more than just "think" so."

"I realize that."

"What else do you two do besides go to parties?"

"We've been making the social scene here in town."

She nodded. "Okay, that's good. You need to do that if you want to get anywhere." Louisiana still had a lot of French influence, even in social mores, and that meant connections. Personal relationships were more important than titles. English Common Law got hung up on titles, and how you did the job your title proclaimed. Louisiana pioneered the "other duties as assigned" bit. Oh, sure, there was the boss of all on top, a leftover from the French infatuation with authority figures such as Napoleon, King Louis XIV, and most important of all, that suck-up jackass Charles deGaulle. Charles of France! Didn't anyone catch the significance? Shades of Charles X of the Bourbon Dynasty? And about as competent.

We had our own home grown version. Huey Long was the best known, but Mayor Nagy of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina was probably more corrupt and better connected. Part of their appeal is their shear chutzpah. Anyone who can carry a third of the police on the books as real people when they were just fakes certainly has it in spades. Aside from Huey Long, the best connected person had been the Mafia Don in New Orleans, though I can't remember his name. He knew everyone, and he knew where every body was buried, having put a lot of those in the ground himself. The Feds eventually busted him. He found someone he couldn't bribe, and it went hard on him.

The whole apparatus in Louisiana is built around that concept. Other states have other methods that work. Utah, for example, has the Mormon Church watching over everything. That holds some of the governmental excesses down to a minimum. Certainly something had to.

I wasn't exactly aiming for a career in public service, not with the horrible examples in front of me. But I was going to be a semi-public figure, and I needed to do some considering of the image I was going to project. I couldn't come across as a small-busted harridan with a straight figure, not with these curves, so I'd have to make some other changes. The first, unfortunately, was with my social life.

The trouble was, I loved sex. I loved the way I felt while anticipating it, while doing it, and after we were through. I loved the way it felt when men, and some women, touched me. I loved the excitement of a party, and the way things looked, tasted, smelled, and felt. And yet I knew there was going to be a point when I'd have to walk away from it all.

As the year turned I realized that I had better get my house in order. People ran background checks, and while people in the swinging community covered for each other, it didn't hurt to make doubly-sure. I pondered that, and after running the idea past Krys, I let drop a hint of a suggestion in some gossip, knowing it would get back to me.

It was a blustery day for northern Louisiana, I was coming back from campus with Mary Alice and one other girl, when Roxanne, the biggest gossip in the house, came sidling up to me.

"Amber, you'll never guess what I heard."

"Let me take a stab at it. I've been drafted by the New Orleans Saints to play wide receiver."

Everyone burst out laughing. Roxanne's boyfriend had been drafted by the Chicago Bears, and everyone knew it.

"No, silly, I heard that you belong to some sort of sex club."

"I do? Why didn't someone tell me? Where are the meetings? I could use some of that in my life from time to time."

"How can I join?" Mary Alice asked. "I saw something like that on TV. There's some place in California like that. They have regular meetings, and then everyone does it."

"I could use some mindless sex in my life," I said. "You know, do it with the guy, and then you don't have to worry about him calling you the next day, stuff like that. Where's the clubhouse, and how come nobody told me about the meetings?"

The other girls began chipping in suggestions and ideas. In thirty seconds it had become a big joke, one that lasted all the next week in the sorority. Someone even put a sign up on the bulletin board about a sex club, and "Memberships Wanted". In all of that nobody thought to ask if it was real.

I'd clued in Mary Alice, and we stopped double-dating. Instead I made time for more events with other girls, and that included Roxanne. Wesley and I had had a long talk. He'd grown up in Louisiana, and he knew how the System worked. He was improving his own image at the same time, and we worked well together, covering for each other, and making sure the right image was being portrayed to the world.

The point of this was that Roxanne and the others came down on the gossipers like a ton of bricks. They chalked it up to envy, and that was the whole point. The gossipers were seen as petty. The originator of the gossip came in for criticism, and pretty soon the whole idea was dismissed. What was better, and the thing I was after, was that if any of these girls was questioned in the future, it would all be remembered as a big joke.

I missed the parties. Wesley and I tried to make it up to each other, but it wasn't the same. I missed the sheer fun of the parties. I was building a future, though, and I kept that in mind when I sat in my room on a Sunday afternoon and reflected on what I could be doing.

LSU had gone through the stupid fad of students having to do "community service" before graduation. I'd never bought into the concept. The idea of a college education was to prepare you for those futures that needed levels of intelligence and skill you couldn't get at lower levels in the school system. Now bringing blankets to homeless people is worthwhile, having electrical engineers do that is kind of a waste, not that I was an engineering student.

We were among the first states to get the state government out of the business of doing that. The government closed its offices and saved a ton of money spent on administrators—did you know up to two-third of the money spent on those programs went for salaries?—and yet got the same results by encouraging local community organizations to do the same thing. Churches took the lead, doing what they traditionally did before certain elements in society did their best to destroy them.

So mostly I had to worry about my grades, which were good enough, and my social connections, which were in fine shape. Graduation rolled around, and I made my folks proud with the whole cap-and-gown thing. The party afterwards was restrained, at least by my standards. Nobody got naked, and if any of that happened, it was in private that night. God, I missed it.

My immediate future was planned out. Right after school I had a job lined up. I had a few classes I still had to take, things LSU offered. But while that was going on, I was busy moving in with Wesley.

Back in our grandmother's time this would have been unthinkable. But society had come full circle, and a couple setting up a household together, even though not married, didn't get the tongues wagging. We were a couple, we just hadn't simplified things yet with marriage vows. Those were coming, we just hadn't saved up enough.

It did seem odd to wake up in the middle of the night and hear someone breathing right next to me. There were little things I had to get used to, like getting ready in the morning. All my life I'd had a routine. A guy changes that. They need the bathroom too, and so you can't spend too much time there. Sorority living doesn't prepare you for that. It's an experience you only learn about by doing.

A couple of weeks after moving in together we were just finishing furnishing the apartment when, on a Sunday afternoon, we had reason to drive down the same road where George and Martha lived. The back of our car was crammed with things we'd bought at a discount sale, and it was raining, making things a little dicey. As we passed George and Martha's we saw the cars parked neatly on their driveway.