In the first semester of my sophomore year I fell in love. It was the biggest thing that had ever happened to me. Pretty? She would have knocked you back two steps. To this day I have no idea what she saw in me. I don’t even know if she loved me or not. I think she did at first. After that I was just a habit that’s hard to break, like smoking or driving with your elbow poked out the window. She held me for a while, maybe not wanting to break the habit. Maybe she held me for wonder, or maybe it was just her vanity. Good boy, roll over, sit up, fetch the paper. Here’s a kiss good night. It doesn’t matter. For a while it was love, then it was like love, then it was over.
I slept with her twice, both times after other things had taken over for love. That fed the habit for a little while. Then she came back from the Thanksgiving break and said she was in love with a Delta Tau Delta who came from her hometown. I tried to get her back and almost made it once, but she had something she hadn’t had before—perspective.
Whatever I had been building up all those years since the fire wiped out the B-movie actors who had once been my family, that broke it down. That guy’s pin on her blouse.
After that, I was on-again-off-again with three or four girls who were willing to sleep with me. I could blame it on my childhood, say I never had good sexual models, but that wasn’t it. I’d never had any trouble with the girl. Only now that the girl was gone.
I started being afraid of girls, a little. And it wasn’t so much the ones I was impotent with as the ones I wasn’t, the ones I could make it with. They made me uneasy. I kept asking myself where they were hiding whatever axes they liked to grind and when they were going to let me have it. I’m not so strange at that. You show me a married man or a man with a steady woman, and I’ll show you someone who is asking himself (maybe only in the early hours of the morning or on Friday afternoon when she’s off buying groceries), What is she doing when I’m not around?
What does she really think of me? And maybe most of all, How much of me has she got? How much is left? Once I started thinking about those things, I thought about them all the time.
I started to drink and my grades took a nose dive. During semester break I got a letter saying that if they didn’t improve in six weeks, my second-semester scholarship check would be withheld. I and some guys I hung around with got drunk and stayed drunk for the whole holiday.
On the last day we went to a whorehouse and I operated just fine. It was too dark to see faces.
My grades stayed about the same. I called the girl once and cried over the telephone. She cried too, and in a way I think that pleased her. I didn’t hate her then and I don’t now. But she scared me. She scared me plenty.
On February 9 I got a letter from the dean of Arts and Sciences saying I was flunking two or three courses in my major field. On February I3 I got a hesitant sort of letter from the girl. She wanted everything to be all right between us.
She was planning to marry the guy from Delta Tau Delta in July or August, and I could be invited if I wanted to be. That was almost funny. What could I give her for a wedding gift?
My heart with a red ribbon tied around it? My head? My cock?
On the fourteenth, Valentine’s Day, I decided it was time for a change of scene. Nona came next, but you know about that.
You have to understand how she was to me if this is to do any good at all. She was more beautiful than the girl, but that wasn’t it. Good looks are cheap in a wealthy country. It was the her inside. She was sexy, but the sexiness that came from her was somehow plantlike—blind sex, a kind of clinging, not-to-be-denied sex that is not so important because it is as instinctual as photosynthesis. Not like an animal but like a plant. You get that wave? I knew we would make love, that we would make it as men and women do, but that our joining would be as blunt and remote and meaningless as ivy clinging its way up a trellis in the August sun.
The sex was important only because it was unimportant.
I think—no, I’m sure—that violence was the real motive force. The violence was real and not just a dream. It was as big and as fast and as hard as Ace Merrill’s ’52 Ford. The violence of Joe’s Good Eats, the violence of Norman Blanchette. And there was even something blind and vegetative about that. Maybe she was only a clinging vine after all, because the Venus flytrap is a species of vine, but that plant is carnivorous and will make animal motion when a fly or a bit of raw meat is placed in its jaws. And it was all real. The sporulating vine may only dream that it fornicates, but I am sure the Venus flytrap tastes that fly, relishes its diminishing struggle as its jaws close around it.
The last part was my own passivity. I could not fill up the hole in my life. Not the hole left by the girl when she said good-bye—I don’t want to lay this at her door—but the hole that had always been there, the dark, confused swirling that never stopped down in the middle of me.
Nona filled that hole. She made me move and act.
She made me noble.
Now maybe you understand a little of it. Why I dream of her. Why the fascination remains in spite of the remorse and the revulsion. Why I hate her. Why I fear her. And why even now I still love her.
It was eight miles from the Augusta ramp to Gardiner and we did it in a few short minutes. I grasped the nail file woodenly at my side and watched the green reflectorized sign—KEEP RIGHT FOR EXIT I4—twinkle up out of the night. The moon was gone and it had begun to spit snow.
“Wish I were going farther,” Blanchette said.
“That’s all right,” Nona said warmly, and I could feel her fury buzzing and burrowing into the meat under my skull like a drill bit. “Just drop us at the top of the ramp.” He drove up, observing the ramp speed of thirty miles an hour. I knew what I was going to do. It felt as if my legs had turned to warm lead.
The top of the ramp was lit by one overhead light. To the left I could see the lights of Gardiner against the thickening cloud cover. To the right, nothing but blackness. There was no traffic coming either way along the access road.
I got out. Nona slid across the seat, giving Norman Blanchette a final smile. I wasn’t worried. She was quarterbacking the play.
Blanchette was smiling an infuriating porky smile, relieved at being rid of us. “Well, good ni—”
“Oh my purse! Don’t drive off with my purse!”
“I’ll get it,” I told her. I leaned back into the car. Blanchette saw what I had in my hand, and the porky smile on his face froze solid.
Now lights showed on the hill, but it was too late to stop. Nothing could have stopped me. I picked up Nona’s purse with my left hand. With my right I plunged the steel nail file into Blanchette’s throat. He bleated once.
I got out of the car. Nona was waving the oncoming vehicle down. I couldn’t see what it was in the dark and snow; all I could make out were the two bright circles of its headlamps. I crouched behind Blanchette’s car, peeking through the back windows.
The voices were almost lost in the filling throat of the wind.
“…trouble, lady?”
“…father… wind… had a heart attack! Will you…” I scurried around the trunk of Norman Blanchette’s Impala, bent over. I could see them now. Nona’s slender silhouette and a taller form. They appeared to be standing by a pickup truck.
They turned and approached the driver’s-side windowof the Chevy, where Norman Blanchette was slumped over the wheel with Nona’s file in his throat. The driver of the pickup was a young kid in what looked like an Air Force parka. He leaned inside. I came up behind him.
“Jesus, lady!” he said. “There’s blood on this guy! What—” I hooked my right elbow around his throat and grabbed my right wrist with my left hand.