I got there at quarter past seven, but Iris kept me waiting. I don’t know what she was doing — making me suffer just a bit on general principles, taking extra care with her dress and makeup so as to reinforce the impression she would make on me, falling back on the prerogative of women, as the pursued, to do whatever they damned well pleased — but I found myself jumping up from the sofa every other minute and pacing round the lounge, much to the dismay of the RA, who was at least putting on a show of reading from the book spread out on the desk before her. I was keyed up, and I couldn’t really say why. Perhaps it was the anticipation — nearly three months apart, the exchange of letters and snapshots, the protestations of love on both sides — which was only to be expected. I couldn’t say that I’d been lonely over the summer, not exactly, not with Mac and Prok and the long hours I’d put in both traveling and at my desk, but I guess I did use the letters as an opportunity of opening up to her my hopes and aspirations (and fears; I was in line to receive my draft notice, as was practically every other man on campus), and that made the moment of our reunion all the more significant. And fraught. I’d quoted love poems to her as well—“Now while the dark about our loves is strewn,/Light of my dark, blood of my heart, O come!”—and now I would have to make good on all of that. And so would she. But did she care for me still? Had she found someone else? Was I worthy of her?
It was nearly eight, and at least thirty women had come down the stairs and passed through the portals of the inner sanctum to meet and embrace their dates and go off to the pictures or the skating rink or the backseat of the car, when Iris finally appeared. I’d been pacing, and I was at the far end of the lounge, my back to the room, when I heard the faint wheeze of the door pulling back against the pneumatic device that kept it closed. I jerked round and there she was. Can I state the obvious? She was very beautiful, and beyond beautifuclass="underline" she was special, one in a million, because I’d been writing to her and thinking of her all summer, because she was Iris McAuliffe and she was mine if I wanted her. I knew that then, knew it in the minute I saw her. This was love. This was it.
But how did she look? She’d curled her hair so that it hung in a succession of intricate lapping waves at her shoulders and framed the locket at her throat, the locket I’d given her, and whose picture was in that locket? Her dress — blue, sleeveless, cut to the knee — was new, purchased for the occasion, and her eyes, always her focal point, seemed to leap across the room at me (an illusion, I later realized, that was enhanced by the skillful application of mascara, eye shadow and rouge). She seemed smaller, darker, prettier than I’d remembered. I just stood there, helpless, and watched her as she crossed the carpet to me and let me hold her and kiss her.
“You’re back,” she said.
“Yes. And so are you. Did I miss Tommy?”
She nodded. “He had work, so he was only here for the day. He was disappointed, but he knew you were — where were you again?”
“Purdue. And DePauw.”
“He knew you were working.” The RA had fixed her eyes on us as if she had the power to look right through the layers of our clothing and our skin to reduce and examine our bones and even the marrow within. “He sends his regards.”
I felt bad for a moment, a sudden little stab of regret penetrating and then withdrawing like the blade of a knife, and I knew I should have been there for her — for her and Tommy too — but I dismissed it. There was nothing I could have done. Prok’s schedule had been set months in advance and I was powerless to alter it. “I wish I’d been here,” I said, glancing over my shoulder at the RA (not the limp blonde, but a new girl, heavyset, with a dead-white face and hair piled up like detritus on her head). The RA dropped her eyes. I turned back to Iris — Iris, whose hand I seemed to be holding — and said, “But you must be famished. How about a nice steak?”
Now that I was settled — or as settled as a man who was awaiting his draft notice in uncertain times could ever expect to be — there was no real impediment to my seeing Iris as often as I wanted. I no longer had to attend classes, take exams or write papers, and my hours with Prok were relatively stable, if far in excess of the standard forty-hour workweek. Our only problem was the travel — I was out on the road with Prok for three to four days every other week, and that pace was soon to accelerate — but Iris and I were able to adjust, because we wanted to. If before we were dating casually, feeling each other out, no hurry, no pressure or commitment, now things were different, radically different. We went everywhere together — we met for meals, attended concerts, went dancing, hiking, skating, sat in the lounge in the evenings, side by side, so close we were breathing as one, Iris working at her studies and I poring over Magnus Hirschfeld and Robert Latou Dickinson to keep up with the literature in the field. It got to the point where I felt hollow if she wasn’t there, as if I had no inner being or essence without her. When she was in class or I was at work or sitting in some second-class hotel staring into the eyes of an overfed undergraduate who was obsessed with Rita Hayworth or masturbated too much, I thought of Iris, only Iris.
The fall passed into winter and winter stretched across the holidays and into the New Year (we went home together, on the bus, to our respective families in Michigan City, and everything seemed new-made and cheerful, despite the fact that Tommy had been drafted into the United States Army and the Nazis, the Fascists and the Imperial Japanese were moving relentlessly forward on all fronts). We came back to the sunless gloom of January, the campus burdened with snow and afflicted with the kind of winds that made hats and scarves superfluous. I’d registered for the draft too, as required by law, along with all the other twenty-one to thirty-five-year-old men, but my number hadn’t come up and so we picked up where we’d left off, spending every minute outside of work or school in each other’s company. All was well. We were happy. I wrote Paul Sehorn long, chatty letters and found myself whistling as I strode across the barrens to the women’s dorm each evening after work (where I couldn’t resist joking with the RA, who had become as familiar and innocuous as a doting grandmother, though she couldn’t have been more than twenty).
There was one essential problem, though, and I’m sure you’ve anticipated me here. Sex. Sex was the problem. Even if Iris was willing, and to this point I wasn’t at all certain that she was, given her background and her virginity, there was absolutely no place we could go to put it to a trial. The year before, when I’d propositioned Laura Feeney in a headlong rush of sexual derangement, it was only bravado talking: I couldn’t have brought her home unless Mrs. Lorber had coincidentally died of a stroke in the very moment of my asking. And even if I could somehow have sneaked Iris through a second-story window in the middle of the night, there was my new roommate to consider (a senior from a remote hamlet by the name of Ezra Vorhees, whose sensibilities and personal hygienic habits were, shall we say, rustic, to put it mildly). It was frustrating. Iris and I would neck for hours in the lounge or the library till I was in pain — actual physical pain, from what undergraduates termed “blue balls” and Prok defined as an excess buildup of seminal fluids in the testicles and vas deferens — and then I would have to go back to my room and relieve myself under the blankets while my roommate pretended to be asleep. Whenever I could, I went to Mac, but I didn’t feel good about it, not anymore.
Prok was the one who came up with the solution. As I say, he’d taught me to drive that summer, and now, as I explained my situation to him, he demonstrated just how generous he was — and how much he was willing to go out of his way for me. I remember broaching the subject to him on one of our collecting trips (this time to Gary and a particular Negro neighborhood there, and more on that later), and his turning to me with a smile and saying, “Yes, it’s about time, Milk. You do need another outlet, as we all do. Why not this? Take the Nash. Take it any time you like.”