“At something,” I said to Jodi.
“If you come up to my room,” she said, “and if we drink the wine there, you are going to be a success. At something. At something that’s fun.” And she stepped so close to me that I could feel her. We were smack dab in the middle of the campus, and there were probably people around, and I did not care. Her breasts bumped into me and I remembered them — in the water, in the bed, firm and lovely in my hands. She did something with her hips, sort of throwing them at me. And I remembered things that were very nice to remember.
I looked at her. She was in uniform — sweater and skirt, saddle shoes. I looked at her and sweater and skirt melted away in a dissolve no Hollywood studio could attempt to duplicate. I saw a naked Jodi in Technicolor and cinemascope. She bounced at me again and naked breasts banged into me, naked hips offered themselves.
I had nothing to say. But I had things to do. I took her arm in my arm, possessive as a papa bear, and off we went to the little dormitory room that she called home.
“The best way,” she said, “is nonchalance. We’d better not try to sneak in. If we do, somebody will see us, and we’ll look sneaky. That’s no good.”
That sounded reasonable enough.
“But if we walk in as though we have every reason in the world to be there,” she went on, “we’ll look natural enough. They’ll think we’re studying together or something.”
“We will be.”
She giggled a charming giggle. “Studying,” she mused. “It’s a shame. I mean, you ought to get a diploma for it. If you’re good enough.”
“So you think you’d be good enough?” Remember, she was less experienced than I was. Not many people could have made that statement. So here, for a change, I was the Voice of Authority, the old man on the mountain, the accomplished lecher teaching the young prodigy how to get ahead on a horizontal basis.
“Practice,” she said, “makes perfect.”
“So let’s practice.”
Her room was on the third floor of the sterile brick dormitory. She led the way and up the stairs we went. A girl met us, stopped to chat. We chatted amiably about something or other. And, incredibly, it was working. The girl noticed me, all right. And there I was, leading the lovely Jodi up the primrose stairway, and there was this girl, noticing the fact and thinking nothing of it. Nonchalance, then, was the ticket.
Then we were in the room. Jodi, happily, did not have a roommate. She barely had a room. It was the single, the room the architects had made a mistake about, the little cubicle crouched precariously across the narrow hall from the community bathroom. The room had a bed, sort of, and a dresser, and an excuse for a closet. The dresser and the closet were unnecessary for the time being. The bed was there — inviting, beckoning — and we were there — hungry, eager — and the wine was there, red and sour.
“I really would like some wine,” she said. “Unless you’re in a hurry.”
There was something strange about that line. We were there to make love, you see, and her attitude was that, while she’d like to sip Chianti and talk for a moment or two, she’d be perfectly willing to stretch out on the rack if I was in a rush. Generosity? No, more than that. Here was a girl who understood the place of woman in the total scheme of things. Here was a girl who knew the proper position of woman in the social order.
“Let’s have some wine, then.”
“We’ll have to drink it out of the bottle.”
I said that was fine, and she yanked out the cork, and she took a drink. She could drink magnificently. I watched with mute admiration while the level of wine in the bottle went steadily down. Then she passed the bottle to me. I almost wiped off the neck instinctively, the way you always do when someone hands you a bottle, but I remembered that I was going to make love to this girl in a minute or two and there didn’t seem to be much point in such health precautions. I drank, taking as much as she had taken, and passed the bottle back to her.
She finished it and heaved it at the wastebasket. It missed and struck first the wall and then the floor. It bounced twice on the floor before it cracked, and when it cracked it did not fool around. It shattered into splintered glass.
“Damn,” she said thoughtfully. “We’d better not go barefoot. Not over there, anyhow.”
She turned to me. We were sitting on the edge of that very narrow bed, and when she turned to me I took her in my arms and I kissed her. It was not one of those kisses that sent a striking bolt of passion shooting through the last atom of one’s being. It was a much more contemplative sort of kiss. She was there, and I was there too, and our mouths were together and it was nice.
Her lips parted and my tongue stole past them like a thief in the night.
The kiss was long. It was one of those slow kisses that let us think over and decide that everything was going very well indeed. The kiss ended and she stood up. She peeled the sweater over her head. She was not wearing a bra, and it was just as well, because if she had been I would have torn the damned thing off of her. She did not need a bra — it would have been like harnessing a whirlwind. The whirlwind was unharnessed and my hands reached for cool soft flesh. Her nipples were buds a-blooming.
“That’s nice,” she said. “Very nice. When you stroke them and like that. It feels good.” There was something detached about her words and about the way she said them, as if she were carefully taking stock of just what I was doing and just how good it felt. I bent down and put one of those nipples to lips and she very suddenly stopped talking. Her muscles went tense and then her body began to move with something that had to be passion.
“Let me take everything off,” she said. “All my clothes. Then we can fool around for a while and then we can do it. But I don’t want to mess my skirt.”
“Fine,” I said. It may well go down in history as the understatement of the century.
She got undressed. Rather, the skirt flowed off of her, and the panties flowed off of her, and the silly saddle shoes fell from her feet, and the socks followed them, and everything that I was looking at belonged to Jodi, and consequently to me as well.
“You like?”
A silly question.
“Now you get undressed, Harvey. I want to watch. Unless you’re bashful.”
If I was, I decided, I could get over it. I felt a wee bit self-conscious stripping my clothes off, especially the way she stared at me with a cross between curiosity and desire, but I managed.
“You like?” I asked. I had to say something.
“Mmmmmm.”
And then toppled we to the bed, as Time might put it. And then kissed we, as backward rolled sentences while whirled the mind. And then fondled we, and stroked me, and touched we, and then, whee!
“Harvey—”
I wondered what she wanted.
“Harvey, do you have a thing?”
I was lost.
“So I won’t get a baby,” she said.
“Oh.”
“Because that wouldn’t be any good. Getting a baby, I mean. Inconvenient.”
I did not have a thing. For weeks I had carried one around in my wallet, just as most college students do. But, sad to say, I had used it. Before I met Jodi. Before I got next to Jodi, anyway. And, thinking about it, I had an unhappy thought.
“Last time—”
She was right there with me. “Last time,” she said, “there was nothing to worry about. But—”
“I don’t have one.”
“Then we can’t do it.”
That was something to ponder. “We can start to,” I said thoughtfully. “And before anything happens, we can stop, and then—”
“A friend of mine did that.”