Her hands felt small and very soft.
“I can’t believe it,” she said. “When did you get here?”
“About an hour ago.”
“Are you going to be studying here?”
“No.”
“Oh.”
“I was in the area,” I said, “and I thought I would drop in and see you.”
“Wow, that’s really great. Oh, wow. Like I can’t really believe all this.”
“Yeah.”
“I got your cards. I was going to write to you, but there was never a return address.”
“Well, I never stayed in one place very long.”
“Oh.”
“I wrote you a couple of letters, too.”
“I never got them.”
“I never mailed them.”
“Oh.”
“You look fantastic.”
“So do you. You filled out a lot, didn’t you? You were thinner. You didn’t used to be so big in the shoulders, did you?”
“I guess not. Hallie—”
“Could we sort of walk this way, Chip? I have this class.”
“Oh, sure.”
“I suppose I could cut it.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“Well, I really shouldn’t. They keep a record of cuts. It’s pretty idiotic but they do.”
“I don’t want you to get in trouble.”
“It wouldn’t be trouble, exactly—”
“I mean, it’s not as if I have to be on the road in an hour or anything. I mean, I could meet you after class.”
“That would be great.”
“What is it, an hour?”
“Uh-huh. If you could meet me out in front? By the step over there?”
“In an hour. Sure.”
“Great.”
You want to know something? I wasn’t going to write all this shit. I had it planned differently. The last chapter, Chapter Sixteen, only has twenty-seven words in it. (In case you forgot: There were some other girls during the rest of the summer. Some I got to and some I struck out with. Paragraph. None of them were very important.)
Well, it wouldn’t have been a hell of a lot of trouble to take those twenty-seven words and make twenty-seven pages out of them. Or even more. Because whether what happened for the rest of the summer was important or not, it might have been mildly interesting. One time I double-dated with this farmhand. We took out two sisters and each screwed one of them and then traded girls and screwed them again. I had never done anything like that before, and it would have been interesting enough to make a scene out of. It would have made a damned good scene, as a matter of fact.
So there would have been plenty to write about, and the book would have been long enough to stop with me just getting to Wisconsin, or just getting ready to drive to Wisconsin. That was the way I originally planned to do it.
Hell.
That would have been cheating. Because the way this book ends, the way I’m ending it now, is sort of the point of it. Or part of the point of it.
But it’s a fucking pain in the ass to write it. (They may take that line out. I hope not.)
I went someplace and had a hamburger and a cup of coffee. On one side of me some students were talking about the draft lottery, and on the other side some students were talking about Gay Liberation. They already seemed liberated enough to me.
I was back in front of the building two minutes before the hour was up. Those ten minutes took another hour. Then some clown rang a bell and a few seconds later people started coming out of the building. Eventually one of them was Hallie, and she came over to me and held out her hands again, and I took them again. I asked her how the class was, and she told me, and we wasted a few words on that kind of garbage.
Then I said, “Is there some place we can talk?”
“My room?”
“I don’t know. Am I allowed there?”
“I’ll allow you.”
“I mean—”
“We have twenty-four hour open halls,” she said.
“I thought maybe we could go for a ride.”
“Oh, you’ve got a car?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Okay.”
When we got to it she said, “Wow, a Cadillac! Look who turned out to be rich.”
“It’s a ’54. I mean it’s worth maybe fifty dollars.”
“It looks great. When did you buy it?”
“I got it in the spring. Somebody gave it to me.”
“Oh.”
“It runs pretty good, though.”
“I didn’t know they made them with standard shift.”
“I think this may have been the only one.”
“Maybe it’s an antique or something.”
“I suppose if I keep it long enough.”
“Yeah.”
There was a lot more brilliant conversation like that. I just drove around forever without paying much attention to where we were, and we kept trying to get conversations going, and they kept being like what I quoted. She told me what courses she was taking and I told her some of the places I had been, and I kept getting more uptight about the whole thing, and I guess she did, too.
At one point I said, “Listen, I have this room. You know, a motel room. I mean we could talk there.”
“Oh.”
Eventually there was a red light and I stopped for it. I turned to her and said, “I don’t mean to ball or I would have said it, but I want to open up and rap with you because we have to, and I don’t want to do it sitting under a tree or in your dormitory or in this fucking car.”
“Okay.”
“You don’t mind?”
“No, of course not. It’s weird, isn’t it? A whole year, and we never really knew each other.”
“It’ll be all right.”
It was still a little awkward at first, partly because the bed took up about eighty percent of the room, and there was only one chair. No matter how much you say that you just want to talk, in a situation like that it’s hard to pretend there isn’t a bed in the room. I had her sit on the chair and I sat on the edge of the bed.
It wasn’t really rapping at first, but it got there. I told her some of the things I had done. I especially told her about Geraldine and the Sheriff, and how I had sort of become the child the two of them had never had together.
She told me about her brother, who had been in the service when we met, just on his way overseas at the time. They sent him to Vietnam and he was on a patrol and stepped on a landmine.
“It happened in the middle of December. But they waited until I came home for Christmas vacation before they told me about it. We were just starting to get close that summer. Before then, you know, an older brother and a younger sister, we never had that much to say to each other. And now I’ll never get to talk to him again. Sometimes I think I’m beginning to get used to it, and then I find out that I’m not.”
And later she said, “I never knew you were a writer. No Score.”
“Huh?”
“No Score.”
“You lost me.”
“Your book,” she said. “No Score, by Chip Harrison. I read it about a week ago.”
“It’s published?”
“You didn’t know? It’s all over the stands. All over Madison, anyway.”
“That’s really weird. I even forgot about it I mean, I kept looking for it and it never turned up, and I guess I thought they decided not to bother. They didn’t pay me very much money and I thought they decided to write it off. What was the title?”
“No Score. Don’t you even remember the title?”
“I had a different title for it I guess they decided to change it. It’s been about a year since I wrote it.” Then something occurred to me. “Oh,” I said. “I guess you read it, huh?”
She nodded.
“It wasn’t very good, huh?”
“I thought it was good.” She had a funny look on her face. “I never expected to be in it, though.”
; “Oh.”
“You didn’t even change my name. I thought you could get in trouble that way, not changing names.”
“I changed everybody else’s name.”
“What made me so lucky?”
“I just couldn’t think of another name for you,” I said. “It was just Hallie Hallie Hallie in my mind and I couldn’t think of you any other way.”
“You put down the things we did and everything. The words we said to each other.”
“I didn’t think anybody would know who it was.”
“Oh, of course not. How could they? Hallie from the Hudson Valley who goes to school in Wisconsin. How could anybody possibly figure out it was me?”
“Oh, wow.”
“It’s okay, Chip.”
“Yeah, it’s sensational. I never even thought. I didn’t think about anybody reading it that I would actually know. Or that was in it.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It doesn’t?”
“No. Honest.” I looked at her, and she was smiling shyly. “I never guessed it was your first time. With me, I mean.”
“Oh. Well, it didn’t seem like something I wanted to announce.”
“When I first read it I was furious.”
“I can imagine.”
“What really got me was that I couldn’t even write to you and tell you how mad I was. I wrote a letter to your publisher just the other day. If they send it to you, you’ve got to promise not to read it.”
“They wouldn’t know where to send it.”
“I guess they’ll send it back to me then. I’ll tear it up.” Her face opened. “But after I stopped being mad, I guess it made me proud. Do you know what I mean?”
“I hardly remember what I wrote, Hallie.”
“Maybe I can refresh your memory,” she said. She stood up and took off her sweatshirt.
I said, “Last time you were wearing a bra.”
“I got into Women’s Lib a little last spring. I decided they were generally full of shit, but they’re right about bras. Do you think I need one?”
“No.”
She kicked off her sandals, unfastened her dungarees. “You’ve still got all your clothes on,” she pointed out.
“Hallie, we don’t have to. Honestly.”
“Don’t you want to?”
“Yeah, but I don’t think you do.”
“Would I do it if I didn’t want to?”
I looked into those big eyes. “You might,” I said. “You might just because you thought you should.”
“I really want to, Chip.”
“Come here.”
I kissed her and felt her breasts against my chest. For some reason or other I felt like crying. I kissed her again and let her go, and she took her dungarees off and I started to get out of my clothes.
We made love.
She had her eyes closed. I put my hand on her stomach. She was shiny with sweat.
After a while I said, “Tell me about it.”
“Huh?”
“What went wrong?”
“Huh?” Her eyes opened. “Nothing went wrong. I had an orgasm.”
“I know.”
“So?”
“So you weren’t really there. You were somewhere else and it wasn’t right.”
“Oh, wow.”
“Or else I’m a little flaky, which is possible.”
“No.”
“I’m right, then.”
“Yeah. Shit.”
“What’s the matter?”
She turned away. “I didn’t think you would be able to tell. I guess that was pretty stupid, thinking that. I’m sorry, Chip.”
“There’s nothing to be sorry about.”
“Yes there is. The thing is, oh, I don’t know—”
I waited.
“The only way is to say it. I have an old man.”
For a minute I thought she meant her father. I had spent the past nine months with people who were several years behind on their slang. Then I realized what she meant and I said, “Oh. A guy.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, I figured you would be seeing guys. And the rest of it, as far as that goes.”
(This was a lie. Not that I had ever expected that Hallie would be sitting up in Wisconsin saving herself for me. But I just managed never to think about her with anybody else. I don’t much like to think about it now, if you want to know.)
“I’m sort of involved with him.”
“In a heavy way?”
“Kind of heavy, yeah.”
“Oh.”
“Like we’re living together.”
“Oh.” Why did I suddenly feel as though I was dying? “For very long?”
“Well, we were sort of together starting in April, but not actually living together. And he was in New York for the summer, he lives out on the Island, and we saw each other a few times during the summer, and when we came back to campus we started, uh, living together.”
“In your room?”
“No. He has this apartment off campus. I keep some of my clothes and things at my room because there isn’t much space at his place. But I sleep there, and cook meals and like that.”
“Oh.”
“I don’t think it’s a forever thing or anything, but, oh, I dig him, you know, and it’s very much what I’m into right now.”
“Sure.”
She turned to me. There were tears running out of her eyes but she wasn’t really crying, and the tears never got anywhere near her voice.
She said, “I’m really a bitch. I should have told you out in front and we never should have balled. Maybe all I really am is a cunt.”
“Don’t talk like that.”
“I just don’t want you to hate me and you’ve got every right in the world.”
“Why should I hate you? I love you, why the hell should I hate you?”
“Oh, shit,” she said, and this time she let go and cried.
Epilogue
October 17, 1970
Miss Geraldine Simms c/o The Lighthouse Bordentown, South Carolina
Dear Geraldine:
Awhile ago I sent you a copy of a book I wrote called No Score. I hope you got it, because otherwise this won’t make too much sense. Or maybe it will—it seems to me I told you most of what happened in No Score at one time or another.
Anyway, along with this letter I’m sending you the carbon copy of another book I wrote.
I just finished it. In fact I haven’t finished it yet, I’m finishing it right now.
If you read No Score, you may remember that there was an Epilogue at the end that told what happened to me after the actual story of the book ended. I decided the other day that this book ought to have an Epilogue also and I couldn’t decide exactly how to do it. While I was trying to work it out in my head I also decided I wanted to write you a letter, and I thought about it some more and decided that, in a sense, this whole book was a letter to you. So I’m killing two stones with one bird.
What I hope you’ll do now, Geraldine, is read the carbon of the book all the way through and then come back to the letter.
Did you go back and read the carbon copy? Thanks. And if you didn’t, I forgive you. I never heard of a letter with an intermission before.
After Hallie said Oh, shit and started crying, that was about it. Of course in books it can just end like that (which is why I ended it like that) and in life it can’t, because the two people are stuck there in the room and, unless the boiler blows up and kills them all, they still have certain dumb unimportant things they have to say to each other, like while they’re putting on their clothes.
Just as an example:
“You know, Chip, you would really like him. I mean it, you ought to meet him sometime.”
“No way.”
“No way you could like him or no way you could meet him?”
“Right both times.”
“Yeah.”
That kind of dialogue, Geraldine. It was tons of fun, believe m
e. I had a wonderful time.
Then I drove her back to her dormitory, and then she insisted that I wait while she got the copy of my book so I could autograph it for her. I wanted to drive away but I also wanted to see her again.
I won’t tell you what I wrote in the book. I wrote something, and closed the book, and told her not to read it until later. She nodded.
“Well,” I said.
“Chip.”
“What?”
“Write to me.”
“Should I?”
“And this time put a return address.”
“Really? All right, sure.”
“Chip? It was the timing, I think. I mean, oh, you know what I mean.”
“Sure.”
“I mean, people like us, we’ll probably run into each other again.”
“We probably will.”
There was more but that’s enough. I went back to the motel and packed because all I wanted to do was drive away from there, though I was afraid to trust myself on the road. But I couldn’t sleep either.
I thought about getting drunk but if you were between eighteen and twenty-one all they would serve you was beer. I was a couple of days short of nineteen but my ID said I was a couple of days short of eighteen. Maybe they would have served me beer anyway. I didn’t really care because I didn’t think I could get drunk enough on beer, not the way I felt.
Do you remember the glass of corn whiskey you gave me that last night? That’s what I really wanted.
I sat around there for a while feeling numb and empty and lost and alone. I had never felt this alone before because there had always been Hallie somewhere in the distance, and now there wasn’t. It didn’t feel good.
Then I remembered my book. No Score. I had hardly looked at the copy I signed for Hallie. I left the motel and went to drugstores and bookstores looking for it. It was really weird seeing it on the stands. My name all over the place, on the spine and the cover and at the top of every even-numbered page. I wanted to buy all the copies they had, but who was I going to give them to? I bought one copy and took it back to my room and read it.