About halfway through the hour one of them stopped to look over my shoulder. He looked, and he stayed. I kept writing, getting suddenly nervous. He had a nose cold, this proctor, and he sounded like a horse with pneumonia on a cold winter morning. Finally I turned back to look at him.
He was shaking his head as he read the page.
I shrugged.
He shrugged back, but at least he walked on. The bastard had shaken me up; I began having trouble concentrating on the question. Particularly since I hadn’t done any of the reading that was necessary to answer it. I was just sort of going along, putting down words. The answer didn’t mean anything, but then neither did the question.
I began to think of Sukie, and how she had looked when I left her at the airport. I wondered if she made it back all right. It was a drag for a single chick to hitch out to Berkeley at night. And then I wondered if she was meeting somebody afterward. I wondered if she had just wanted a ride to S.F., and that was why she had come in.
Then I started to think about how she had been in bed. It was obvious that she wasn’t learning anything from me, which was completely to be expected, but just then it seemed outrageous, absurd, that she should have been with anyone but me. Or that she ever would be with anyone but me in the future. I could feel irritation building, and I realized that I was jealous. Not even jealous, more…
“Five minutes,” the king proctor said, stepping to the microphone.
I looked back down at my bluebook. I still had another essay to go. I stared at the question, praying for inspiration, and I got it at the last minute.
29
I HAVE NEVER BEEN JEALOUS. At least, not about women. I have been jealous of objects, of things, and sometimes of traits; I remember especially a friend of mine when I was a kid. He held my unbroken admiration for years, because of his imagination. He effortlessly devised such wonders as the Burning-Bag-of-Shit Trick, conveniently placed on a neighbor’s doorstep—when the neighbor tried to stamp it out, well, that was his problem.
Also the Good Humor Man Stunt, in which one kid would sprawl out on the road, deathly ill, and enlist the Good Humor Man’s help, while another kid went to the back of the truck and climbed into the refrigerated compartment. There he would stay, eating himself sick, for a full block, at which time a similar catastrophic mid-road illness would again cause the truck to stop, and allow the half-frozen and satiated ice-cream fiend to escape giggling and shivering into the sunlight.
And I remember I was jealous of a guy who lived down the street from me one summer who had a cycle before I even had a driver’s license.
But as far as chicks went, I had never really felt anything. Certainly not jealousy. Chicks had been a necessary evil, giggling half-wits who played games until your balls were purple and then forgot their purses in the theater, or had to be in by midnight, or Weren’t That Kind of Girl, or some other crap.
And yet there I was, finished with the exam and by all reasonable expectations hot on the trail home, to blow some dope and collapse into bed, after being up almost forty-eight hours. But that wasn’t happening. Instead I went right back to my room and called her.
The phone rang a long time. Finally a dull voice said, “Hello?”
“Hello, is Sukie there?”
“Who?” A very dull voice, and then I remembered the time change.
“Sukie Blake, Susan, is she there?”
“What number are you calling?” the guy said. He was being very, very careful about waking up and I couldn’t stand it.
“Sukie, man, Sukie, the blond chick who lives upstairs, the one with the weird eye?”
“Oh.” He mulled that one over. “Yeah. Hold on.”
Then there was a silence. I stared around my room and lit a cigarette and blinked in the smoke.
“Hello?” Dazed voice.
“Hello, Sukie?”
“Who is this?” Really dazed.
“Sukie, what’s going on out there?”
“What?” She was beginning to wake up. “Who is this?”
I thought I heard some sound in the background. Some sound in the room. “Are you alone?”
“Goddamn it,” she said. “Who is this?”
“Peter,” I said.
She laughed. Three thousand miles away, I heard that laugh, and it made me smile. “Oh, Peter,” she said. “It’s seven-thirty in the morning.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I wanted to talk to you.”
There was a yawn at the other end, then, “How was your exam?”
That made me happy. She’d remembered I was going back to take an exam.
“Terrible. I thought about you the whole time.”
“What kind of an exam was it?”
“Economics.”
“Peter, that’s not good, you thought about me during an economics exam?” And after another yawn: “What did you think?”
Hmm, what did I think? That was a drag over the telephone. “Oh, you know.”
There was a pause. A short pause while she woke up still more. “You wanted to know if I was alone,” she said, her voice low and amused.
“No,” I said, “you weren’t awake. I asked how you were.”
“I’m not alone, Peter,” she said. “When you called I was in bed with eight puppies.”
“I didn’t ask you whether you were alone,” I said.
She gave a low laugh. “Peter, you’re sweet, do you know that?”
Well, that was it. Like walking out on a limb, and finally the limb snaps. I looked around the room, the goddamned dreary room, and I said, “Listen, I want to see you.”
She laughed again. “I want to see you, too.”
And then in a sudden rush I said, “Then why don’t you come out here?”
“To Cambridge?”
“Sure.”
“How, Peter?”
“I don’t know. There must be some way.”
She asked me then if I had any money. I didn’t. I asked her. She didn’t. Swell.
“Swell,” I said.
It was quiet on the line. A kind of depressing quiet.
“Maybe,” I said, “I can figure out some way to come out there.” But I knew it wasn’t true. In a few weeks I would have to start studying for finals. She must have known it wasn’t true, too, because she sounded sleepy again when she said, “All right, Pete.”
“No, really. I’ll figure something out.”
“I know. I believe you.”
And I guess in a way she did. Finally she said she was costing me money, and I said the hell with the money, but I couldn’t really afford to say that, so I hung up and realized that I was very tired and that I wanted to sleep for a long time.
30
I DIDN’T WAKE UP UNTIL lunchtime the next day. I am a man of few vices, one of them most unquestionably being the time I spend with my eyes closed. But as soon as I was up I was remembering Sukie, and the phone call, and all she’d said.
I caught up with John in the dining hall, and joined him over a plate of sawdust and beans.
John looked up and smiled. “Peter,” he said. “How’s the head today?”
“Fine. How’re the eats?”
“Awful,” said John. “I didn’t expect to see you for quite a while. Heard you had a little trouble with that economics exam yesterday.”
“Trouble?” I tried to look surprised.
“Heard you barely finished.”
I sighed. I thought he’d been talking about the Senior Tutor. I get messages from the Senior Tutor three times a year: after fall-term hour exams, after mid-terms, and after spring-term hour exams. I was expecting one any day now, but at least it hadn’t arrived yet.
“No, that was no trouble,” I said. “Just had better things to think about.”