He smiled at the sound of her voice as it drifted through his head; it didn’t sound anything like Rodney Dangerfield. Then he felt his smile fade and wondered why he hadn’t wept yet. He looked out the window of the plane and a large chemical plant far below was making its own clouds beneath the others.
“Suicide happens,” Roger had told him in the car. Roger was Crane’s age, twenty-two, a slightly overweight, dark-haired guy, with thick glasses and the absent-mindedly sloppy appearance of somebody scientific, which he was, sort of: Roger was majoring in sociology. He’d apparently had some psych, too, because he had, in a well-meaning but irritating way, given Crane a mini-lecture on the subject of suicide.
“You don’t have to be depressed your whole life to commit suicide,” Roger said. “Just one day. Or night, or afternoon. But it only takes once.”
“Roger,” Crane said. “I don’t want to talk about this right now.”
“You got to, sooner or later.”
“Make it later.”
Now it was later, on the plane, and he still didn’t want to talk — or think — about it. But there it was: Mary Beth, twenty, dead. Mary Beth, long brown hair, wide brown eyes, wry little smile, supple little body, gone.
He pressed the heels of his hands against his forehead and sat forward in his seat.
“You okay, man?”
Crane turned and looked at the passenger in the next seat. Actually, there was an empty seat between them, here in second class, and that was okay with Crane: he didn’t care to make conversation, particularly not with another college student, this one a bearded long-haired throwback to the ’60s, in jeans and gray T-shirt, some jerk who thought Kent State happened last week.
“Need an aspirin or something?” the guy was saying. “I can go get the flight attendant for you.”
“No. That’s okay.” Why was he thinking this guy was a jerk? He was nice enough. The jerk.
“My name’s Phil Stanley,” the guy said, and held out his hand.
After just a moment, Crane took the hand, got caught in a sideways “soul” shake, and said, “My name’s Crane.”
“You a student, too?”
“Yes.”
“Headed back to school, huh? Where d’you go?”
“Actually, no. I go to Iowa. Graduate student — fall semester starts in a few weeks and I’m, uh...”
“Taking advantage of your last few weeks’ vacation. For sure. Don’t blame ya.”
“Right.”
“What you taking?”
“I’m a journalism major.”
“No shit? Me too. Or anyway, sort of — I’m into broadcast journalism.”
The guy would have to clean up his image if he wanted to go on camera, Crane thought, then, noticing the guy was expecting him to report back, said, “I’m in print media.”
“Oh, yeah? What’s your specialty?”
“I don’t know yet. Maybe investigative.”
“One thing this country’ll never run out of,” the guy said, shaking his mangy head, “is Watergates.”
Crane hated it when people invoked Watergate after he told them he was interested in investigative reporting. Maybe he could remember to quit telling people that. Maybe he should say he was interested in writing sports or something.
“That’s the ticket,” the guy was saying. “Keep the fuckin’ government on its toes.”
“And big business,” Crane said. “Don’t forget big business.”
“Right on,” the guy said.
Right on? Did that guy really say “right on”? Why do people like this always assume you’re liberal? And if you tell them you believe in the system, that you don’t see anything wrong with capitalism, why do they make you out as some sort of right-wing lunatic?
“Because,” Mary Beth used to say, “you are one. You think you’re middle-of-the road, mainstream America. A political moderate. Sure you are. Compared to the Ku Klux Klan. How many black folks you got in Wilton Junction? You never called anybody nigger ’cause you never saw one, except on TV. You’re just a reactionary hick, Crane, and I’m gonna educate you if I have to spend the rest of my life doing it...”
“Are you sure you’re okay?” the bearded guy was asking.
“Maybe I will take that aspirin,” Crane said.
The guy rose to go find a flight attendant.
Crane sat back in his seat and thought about the fight he and Mary Beth had had their first night together. He was living in an apartment that was actually half a house, a duplex, sharing it with three other guys who were gone for the weekend. He’d only known Mary Beth for a few weeks; he was a senior and she was a sophomore, and both had been at the University for over a year, Crane having transferred from Port City Community College just as she was enrolling as a freshman. But it was a big campus with a lot of students, and until some mutual friends introduced them they’d never even seen each other. He liked her sense of humor, and (one of the mutual friends told him) she liked his sandy brown hair and freckles; thought he had a nice, innocent look.
Which was what the fight was about, really.
He’d planned to seduce her, and that was a major step for him, requiring a lot of strategy, and making him very nervous, because he was less experienced than he supposed most other twenty-year-old males in this country to be. So he had cooked an Italian dinner for her (her favorite, and his), bought a Phoebe Snow album (her favorite — hardly his), dimmed the lights prior to her arrival, and found himself naked on the couch with her before the first course of the meal and without even taking the plastic wrapper off the goddamn Phoebe Snow album.
He was proud of himself, though — he didn’t come right away, like he thought he would; after all, it was his first time, and most people, on their first time, come right away. Not him. Which was something, anyway.
Of course it clearly wasn’t her first time, and that was part of what the fight was about, too.
“It was your first time, wasn’t it?” she said later, nibbling her lasagna.
“You weren’t supposed to know that,” he said, smiling a little.
“Hey, you did fine. Most guys come right away, their first time. You didn’t.”
“Neither did you.”
“Well I did in the long run, and that’s something, anyway.”
And they’d both smiled and finished their lasagna and wine and listened to Phoebe Snow (which he even sort of liked, at this point) and made love another time. Finally they watched a late movie about vampires — one of those sexy British ones from the ’60s — and that’s when the fight started.
“It sure wasn’t your first time,” he said. Out of nowhere. Surprised by the petulance in his own voice.
“I never said it was,” she said, still smiling, but on the edge of not.
“No big deal.”
“I’m glad you see it that way.”
“I do. It’s no big fucking deal.”
“Hey, ain’t we profane all of a sudden. ‘Farm boy says fuck.’ Stop the presses!”
“Don’t you make fun of me.”
“Then don’t you insult me.”
“All I said was—”
“Hey. Make you a deal.”
“What?”
“Don’t give me a bad time about not being a virgin, and I won’t give you a bad time about being one.”