I asked a lot of people various dumb questions until someone told me where you could find out where a student was staying, and somebody there told me what dorm she was in, and various other people pointed me toward it.
I went and stood in front of it. I didn’t know whether it was all right for me to go in or not. I thought of stopping some girl on the way out and asking her to find Hallie for me, but instead I just waited.
And then two girls came out, and one of them was Hallie.
She looked exactly the way she had looked a year ago. Exactly. She was wearing dungarees and a sweatshirt and sandals, and her granny glasses made her brown eyes look even bigger than they were. Her hair, straight and glossy brown, was a year longer than it had been.
I said, “Hallie?”
She looked at me, and stared, and said, “Chip?”
I nodded, waiting for her to run up and throw herself into my arms. (I had rehearsed this scene a lot.) She didn’t exactly do this. What she did was say something to the other girl about seeing her in class, and then she walked slowly toward me, a smile spreading on her lips, and reached out her hands for mine.
Her hands felt small and very soft.
“I can’t believe it,” she said. “When did you get here?”
“About an hour ago.”
“Are you going to be studying here?”
“No.”
“Oh.”
“I was in the area,” I said, “and I thought I would drop in and see you.”
“Wow, that’s really great. Oh, wow. Like I can’t really believe all this.”
“Yeah.”
“I got your cards. I was going to write to you, but there was never a return address.”
“Well, I never stayed in one place very long.”
“Oh.”
“I wrote you a couple of letters, too.”
“I never got them.”
“I never mailed them.”
“Oh.”
“You look fantastic.”
“So do you. You filled out a lot, didn’t you? You were thinner. You didn’t used to be so big in the shoulders, did you?”
“I guess not. Hallie—”
“Could we sort of walk this way, Chip? I have this class.”
“Oh, sure.”
“I suppose I could cut it.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“Well, I really shouldn’t. They keep a record of cuts. It’s pretty idiotic but they do.”
“I don’t want you to get in trouble.”
“It wouldn’t be trouble, exactly—”
“I mean, it’s not as if I have to be on the road in an hour or anything. I mean, I could meet you after class.”
“That would be great.”
“What is it, an hour?”
“Uh-huh. If you could meet me out in front? By the step over there?”
“In an hour. Sure.”
“Great.”
You want to know something? I wasn’t going to write all this shit. I had it planned differently. The last chapter, Chapter Sixteen, only has twenty-seven words in it. (In case you forgot: There were some other girls during the rest of the summer. Some I got to and some I struck out with. Paragraph. None of them were very important.)
Well, it wouldn’t have been a hell of a lot of trouble to take those twenty-seven words and make twenty-seven pages out of them. Or even more. Because whether what happened for the rest of the summer was important or not, it might have been mildly interesting. One time I double-dated with this farmhand. We took out two sisters and each screwed one of them and then traded girls and screwed them again. I had never done anything like that before, and it would have been interesting enough to make a scene out of. It would have made a damned good scene, as a matter of fact.
So there would have been plenty to write about, and the book would have been long enough to stop with me just getting to Wisconsin, or just getting ready to drive to Wisconsin. That was the way I originally planned to do it.
Hell.
That would have been cheating. Because the way this book ends, the way I’m ending it now, is sort of the point of it. Or part of the point of it.
But it’s a fucking pain in the ass to write it. (They may take that line out. I hope not.)
I went someplace and had a hamburger and a cup of coffee. On one side of me some students were talking about the draft lottery, and on the other side some students were talking about Gay Liberation. They already seemed liberated enough to me.
I was back in front of the building two minutes before the hour was up. Those ten minutes took another hour. Then some clown rang a bell and a few seconds later people started coming out of the building. Eventually one of them was Hallie, and she came over to me and held out her hands again, and I took them again. I asked her how the class was, and she told me, and we wasted a few words on that kind of garbage.
Then I said, “Is there some place we can talk?”
“My room?”
“I don’t know. Am I allowed there?”
“I’ll allow you.”
“I mean—”
“We have twenty-four hour open halls,” she said.
“I thought maybe we could go for a ride.”
“Oh, you’ve got a car?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Okay.”
When we got to it she said, “Wow, a Cadillac! Look who turned out to be rich.”
“It’s a ’54. I mean it’s worth maybe fifty dollars.”
“It looks great. When did you buy it?”
“I got it in the spring. Somebody gave it to me.”
“Oh.”
“It runs pretty good, though.”
“I didn’t know they made them with standard shift.”
“I think this may have been the only one.”
“Maybe it’s an antique or something.”
“I suppose if I keep it long enough.”
“Yeah.”
There was a lot more brilliant conversation like that. I just drove around forever without paying much attention to where we were, and we kept trying to get conversations going, and they kept being like what I quoted. She told me what courses she was taking and I told her some of the places I had been, and I kept getting more uptight about the whole thing, and I guess she did, too.
At one point I said, “Listen, I have this room. You know, a motel room. I mean we could talk there.”
“Oh.”
Eventually there was a red light and I stopped for it. I turned to her and said, “I don’t mean to ball or I would have said it, but I want to open up and rap with you because we have to, and I don’t want to do it sitting under a tree or in your dormitory or in this fucking car.”
“Okay.”
“You don’t mind?”
“No, of course not. It’s weird, isn’t it? A whole year, and we never really knew each other.”
“It’ll be all right.”
It was still a little awkward at first, partly because the bed took up about eighty percent of the room, and there was only one chair. No matter how much you say that you just want to talk, in a situation like that it’s hard to pretend there isn’t a bed in the room. I had her sit on the chair and I sat on the edge of the bed.
It wasn’t really rapping at first, but it got there. I told her some of the things I had done. I especially told her about Geraldine and the Sheriff, and how I had sort of become the child the two of them had never had together.
She told me about her brother, who had been in the service when we met, just on his way overseas at the time. They sent him to Vietnam and he was on a patrol and stepped on a landmine.
“It happened in the middle of December. But they waited until I came home for Christmas vacation before they told me about it. We were just starting to get close that summer. Before then, you know, an older brother and a younger sister, we never had that much to say to each other. And now I’ll never get to talk to him again. Sometimes I think I’m beginning to get used to it, and then I find out that I’m not.”