“That’s three hundred dollars,” I said. I felt weak from the loss of blood and the running back and forth.
“You completely misunderstood me.”
“Why did you say you wanted the money back?”
“You know I didn’t mean that!”
Yet it was too late. She was balling up the bills, and that was how I left her, crumpling the money like wastepaper. I wanted to stop her. I wanted to take it. But it wasn’t mine.
I couldn’t face the pool after that. I sat on a bench by the river until darkness fell at about eight o’clock; and when I couldn’t stand to see another happy hand-holding couple strolling past me I stood up and started writing in my head, the beginning of a poem, Drunk on the drooping street, watching your sad ass retreat but couldn’t go any further. On the bus home, reading Baudelaire I decided that the word that described my feeling for Lucy was spleen.
I had not avoided her. I worried; but because I felt so ignorant I did not want to think too hard about her. The day after Labor Day and then the whole week before I left for Amherst I called Miss Murphy’s and left notes at Pinckney Street. I was sure she had gone away. She hadn’t asked where the money had come from. She didn’t care. And I felt it had been that money that had ruined our love.
She called the day before I left home. My mother answered and handing me the receiver she said sourly, “It’s some girl.”
That was how little she knew. In her eyes I had spent the summer getting fresh air at the MDC pool, and had saved some money, but not enough.
She was listening, so I could not say what I wanted to Lucy, nor could I ask any leading questions. But Lucy seemed rather detached, too. She had registered at Boston University, she said. She had found a place to live on Newbury Street. She had agreed to stuff envelopes for the presidential campaign. And she finished by saying, “I’ve been out all day buying books.”
I had worried about her! I had sat on the bus and for the thousandth time that summer gone back and forth to Boston on the shuddering thing, looking at the poster that said For regularity take a lemon in water every day for thirty days. But she was all right: she had a new room, she was buying books and starting classes. And I was heading for Amherst in my army surplus clothes. I was short of money, doomed to a part-time job, and had to look for a place to live. Another summer had come and gone, and I hadn’t written anything except some bitter poems.
“I’m leaving tomorrow,” I said.
“What time?”
“I don’t know.” I didn’t want to see her.
“How are you going?”
“Bus.”
After I hung up I was annoyed that I hadn’t said anything to her, and when my mother said, “What do you mean you can’t find your pen? It didn’t just walk away!” I screamed at her.
“What’s got into you?” she said.
“I wish I weren’t going back to school.”
“Where do you wish you were going?” she said, and her tone was that smug stumping one, as if I didn’t have an answer.
“California,” I said. “Or Africa.”
“With your attitude you’ll never go anywhere.”
You don’t know me, Ma, I thought. My secrets were safe.
There was only one bus to Amherst, and I was early because I had a duffel bag full of old clothes and a suitcase stuffed full of books. It was a hot Friday in mid-September and I had dragged all this luggage from Medford, bumping people on the bus. I saw other college students with suitcases, and looking happy and hopeful. I wanted to tell them I was a communist and watch their faces harden. But I didn’t believe it anymore. Maybe it was better to say nothing and just go away. But was there any point in going if no one missed you?
I got a shock when I saw Lucy standing by herself, staring at me near the ticket window, like a ghost that’s turned into a person.
“Do you have a minute?” she said.
She had always seemed pale, and I had found it attractive. But today she seemed plumper, her face a bit fuller and a little blotchy from overdoing it — pink hot-spots on her face and arms. She was wearing a yellow dress. Her sunglasses had white frames — new ones.
I realized that I was afraid of her as I was afraid of Mrs. Mamalujian.
“I’m really glad to see you,” I said.
We found an Irish-looking bar in Park Square. What a summer it had been for going into bars! The television was on — Kennedy making a speech: more promises, more rhetoric. His campaign was all promises about starting over again, doing good in the world, lots of work to do. But he was not going to roll up his sleeves and dig in — we were. He would be sailing off Hyannisport and the rest of us were going to backward countries to show them how to raise chickens.
“He looks so smug,” Lucy said.
“I thought you were stuffing envelopes for him.”
“No. I’m doing that for the Young Republicans. What’s wrong?”
“Becoming a Republican is like becoming a protestant.”
“I am a protestant,” she said.
“I mean, it’s not like believing in something. It’s like putting on a hat.”
“You think you have all the answers, don’t you?” she said, and she sounded so much like Mrs. Mamalujian that I began talking fast to change the subject.
“Kennedy’s going to be the next president,” I said. “Nothing bad ever happens to him. He lives a charmed life. We’re going to be stuck with him for eight years.”
“So you’re a Republican, too.”
“I’m an anarchist,” I said.
“God, you say some stupid things,” she said, and sighed.
A man next to her said to the bartender, “Did you just fart?”
The bartender said no.
“It must have been me,” the man said, and frowned and raised his glass.
“Let’s sit over there,” I said.
Kennedy was saying We will go forward like a man reciting blank verse.
In the booth, Lucy said, “I owe you some money.”
“That’s okay,” I said, but I was also thinking how much I would like to have three hundred dollars. It was hard for me to brush it aside: that was a motorcycle. “I don’t want it. Hey, are you feeling all right?”
We both knew what that was a euphemism for.
She said, “I’m fine.”
She wasn’t pregnant, that was for sure, or it would have shown.
“I want to repay you,” she said.
She seemed very tense. Was it what I had said about Republicans and protestants? She was a different person from the one who had walked along Pinckney Street with me last July — even different from the person who had shown me where the whale had washed up at Manomet. She was like someone I had known a long time ago that I was still forgetting.
“I really do want to give it back,” she said. “Don’t you want it?”
It was dark in the bar but she didn’t take her sunglasses off.
I tried not to be tempted by the thought of her giving me the money back. But I was.
I said, “I don’t care,” and hated myself for not having the guts to say no.
Lucy said, “You’re just going to get on the bus and ride away, as if nothing’s happened. Just turn your back on everything and everyone. Just vanish.”
I said nothing; I glared at her, because that was exactly what I wanted to do, and that she had nailed me down like that left me nothing more to say.
“You probably have a girlfriend in Amherst.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t even have a place to live.”
“Know what I think?” she said — and her voice was nastier than I had ever known it, not her voice at all—“I think you’re going to be all right. Better than all right. I can see it. You’re going to be a success. I don’t know what it will be, but it’s going to happen.”