First Love and Other Sorrows: Stories

by Brodkey, Harold

  Caroline was motionless.

  “You’re ruining everything,” Elgin said.

  “You have too many illusions about me,” Caroline said coldly. She pulled away from his grasp and lay down on his old, battered raincoat and put her hands under her head. “There are a lot of things you don’t know about me. I didn’t want to tell you I loved you because I wanted to hold you. There, what do you think of that?”

  Elgin hit himself on the chest. “You think that’s bad? Well, I always intended to seduce you, right from the beginning. God!” He lay down, too, on the damp grass, two feet away from her, and he put his hands under his head.

  Lying like that, they quarrelled in this peculiar way, libeling themselves, lowering the object of love in the other’s eyes.

  “I think it’s loathsome that we sleep together,” Caroline said. “I feel like a you-know-what.”

  “I hate seeing you every day,” Elgin said. “Not because of you but because I’m always afraid you’ll see through me. Also, I miss having free time to study—that’s how cold-blooded I am.”

  There was a full moon that night, and its light was no chillier than what these two young people said about themselves. But after a while Elgin rolled over and took Caroline in his arms. “Please don’t hate me.”

  “I don’t hate you. I love you.”

  “I love you, too. God, it’s hell!”

  They decided to be more sensible. The next day they didn’t meet in Widener. Elgin stayed in his room, and at three o’clock the phone rang.

  “It’s me—Caroline.”

  “Oh God, you called. I was praying you would. Where are you?”

  “In the drugstore on the corner.” There was silence. “Elgin,” she said at last, “did you have any orange juice today?”

  He ran, down the stairs, along the sidewalk, to the drugstore, to have his orange juice.

  One day, Elgin told Caroline he was going to stay home and play poker with some of the boys in his entry. Caroline said that was a good idea. She had to write her mother; for some reason, her letters home had got her mother all upset, and she wanted to take some time and calm the old biddy down. “Poor thing,” said Caroline. “She’s had such an empty life, and I’m so important to her.” Then she smiled a thin, nervous smile. “Of course, when I think how stupid she is, I wonder what I’ll find to say to her.”

  Elgin played poker. He lost four dollars and sixty cents. At eleven-thirty, he excused himself from the game and went out on the street. He walked hurriedly, jogging part of the distance, until he stood on the sidewalk across from Cabot Hall, looking up at the light in Caroline’s room. Finally, a shadow passed over the window, and Elgin felt what he could only describe as anguish.

  He looked in the gutter until he found a pebble, and then he hurled it at Caroline’s window. It struck. The shadow appeared again, standing quite still. At that moment, a policeman rounded the corner. Elgin thrust his hands in his pockets and walked up the street. The policeman stopped him.

  “Hey, buddy, did you just throw something at that building?”

  “No, Officer.” Elgin was sweating and looked so pitiable the officer said, “I guess it was a trick of the light.”

  When Caroline asked him if he had come by Cabot the night before, he denied it.

  The next day, he and Caroline went up to his room. As Elgin closed the door, Caroline threw herself onto the couch. She looked pale and unhappy, and she was making a face, preparing herself for what was coming. But Elgin walked over and stood next to the couch and said, “Caroline, we’ve got to be chaste. God!” he cried. “It’s not easy to say this, and if your feelings get hurt, I don’t know what I’ll do!”

  “They’re not hurt.”

  “I want you to be happy,” he said, looking down at her. “I think we ought to get married.”

  “We’re under age, Elgin—you know that. Our parents won’t let us.”

  “We’ll tell them you’re pregnant. We’ll do something.”

  Caroline jumped up. “But I don’t want to marry you! You won’t make me happy. I’m scared of you. You don’t have any respect for me. I don’t know how to be a good wife.”

  “Listen, Caroline, we haven’t done the right thing. You want to have children?”

  A pink, piteous flush covered Caroline’s face. “Oh,” she said.

  “We ought to get married,” he said doggedly. “It won’t be easy, but otherwise we’ll never be happy. You see, what we didn’t figure out is the teleology of the thing. We don’t have a goal. We have to have a goal, do you see?”

  “Elgin, we can’t be foolish. If we really love each other, we have to be very practical or else we’ll just cause each other very needless pain.”

  They looked at each other, pure at last, haloed by an urge to sacrifice.

  “I may not be right for you,” Caroline whispered. “We’ll wait. We’ll wait until fall. We’ll have the summer to think things over.”

  Elgin frowned, not liking to have his sacrifice ignored. “I’m willing to marry you,” he said.

  “No, it’s not right,” said Caroline. “We’re too young. We couldn’t have children now. We’re too ignorant. We’d be terrible parents.” How it pained her to say this!

  “If you feel that way,” Elgin said, “I think we ought to plan to break up. Nothing sudden,” he added, to ease the sudden twinge that was twisting his stomach. “When school’s over.”

  Caroline hesitated, but it seemed to her dreamlike and wonderful to be free of this febrile emotion. And atonement would be so wonderful…. At the same time, she was hurt. “All right,” she said with dignity. “If you want.”

  Elgin turned away from her. “Caroline, tell me one thing,” he said with his back to her. “Emotionally, would you like to marry me?”

  “Yes.”

  “God!” he said. “You’re so practical!”

  “I’m not!” she cried. “I can’t help it.” She wrung her hands. “If you tried to carry me off, I wouldn’t resist,” she said. “But if you ask me, I think—I think—”

  He didn’t have to marry her; he wouldn’t have to worry about supporting her; he hadn’t lost his career. Elgin felt irrepressible relief welling up in him. “God, how we love each other.”

  Caroline laughed. “It’s true.” She laughed a little more. “It’s so true!” She threw her arms around his neck and kissed him.

  Of course, they didn’t stick to Elgin’s plan of breaking up when school ended. They decided they would take a vacation from each other, and meet in the fall, when college began again, as friends. This agreement seemed to remove a great weight from them. They had only two weeks of the reading period and three weeks of exams left to be together, but they resumed some of their old habits—the walks between classes, for instance, and the trips to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts—and they even took to reading stories aloud again, preferring Chekhov and Colette. The sweetness and the sadness of their predicament were what they loved, and they threw themselves into the role of well-disciplined lovers with all their energy. Hardly a day passed without their thinking of some new gesture toward each other. Elgin gave flowers to Caroline; she bought him cuff links and books of poetry. Elgin left off suspecting that he was being made a fool of, and was actually gentlemanly, opening doors for Caroline and lighting her cigarettes. Caroline was ladylike and concealed her moods. They engaged in roughhouse; Elgin pulled her hair and she pummelled him when they sat on the riverbank. They were chaste. They referred sometimes to the times when they had listened to the nightingale, and while the chastity didn’t come easily to them, the act of sacrifice did. Elgin put on weight, and his face regained its color. “My goodness,” Caroline said. “I think knowing me has improved your looks.” It seemed they had found the secret of being happy together, in the imminence of separation, and while they didn’t understand the paradox, they knew it was true.

  But as their five last weeks passed, they discovered why it was true. All the pain of the relationship was
now bound up with the parting and not with the things they did to each other. “It’s dreadful,” Caroline said. “I have feelings. They’re like heavy mice that come out of holes and sit in my stomach and weigh me down.”

  They had been so proud of themselves, so free and relaxed and peaceful together, and now, when they saw what this parting was going to be like, all their vivacity and happiness flagged, they lost interest in talking to each other, and all they wanted was to get it over with.

  On the last day of exams, they went up to Elgin’s room at six o’clock. Elgin had bought a bottle of champagne and rented two glasses. Caroline was all dressed up because she was going to catch a train for Baltimore at nine o’clock. She had on a small hat, which she kept eying in the mirror. Poor Elgin was nervous about opening the champagne. “It’s imported,” he said. “I don’t want to sound tight, but if half of it explodes or comes out in foam, I won’t be happy.” Caroline laughed, but when the cork popped, she turned very serious. She was afraid of what Elgin would toast; she was afraid it would ruin her self-possession.

  Elgin slowly poured the champagne into the two glasses. Then the two young people, alone in the room, picked up their glasses and held them together. “To our reunion in the fall,” Elgin said. “God knows what it will be like.” They drank.

  Caroline put her glass down. “Let’s play a record and dance,” she said. Elgin put on a Cole Porter L.P., and he and Caroline circled around the room, dodging the furniture, pausing to take occasional sips of their champagne. At six-thirty, they went downstairs and ate in the dining hall.

  By seven-fifteen, they were back upstairs in Elgin’s room, sitting on the bunk, kissing each other with a dry, intense helplessness. At quarter of eight, Caroline said she had to go. Elgin pulled away from her; she had taken off her hat, and her dress, made of some pretty gray-blue material, was hopelessly rumpled. With his hands, he set her just so on the bunk. Then he took out his pocket comb and combed her hair. “There,” he said.

  “Do I look prettier now?” Caroline asked.

  “Yes,” Elgin said.

  They walked downstairs and out the door of Adams House. When they reached the sidewalk, Caroline said, “I don’t want you to come with me. I want to go back to the dorm alone. All right?”

  Elgin nodded.

  “I’ll write you from Europe,” Caroline said. “Goodbye,” she said and walked away, up the sidewalk; she tried to walk crisply but her feet dragged because she felt tired. Slowly, the hoped-for sense of relief was coming; she was free of Elgin, she had herself back, but not all of herself. Elgin still held some of her, and she would never get it back except when he was beside her.

  Elgin sat on the steps in front of Adams House and buried his face in his hands. “God!” he said to himself. “I love her.” And he wondered what would become of them now.

  LAURIE DRESSING

  LAURIE LEANED TOWARD THE mirror on her dressing table and carefully drew the outline of her lips on her mouth. Her tiny pearl-handled brush moved without wavering. She studied the outline for a moment and then decided it was too passionate. Laurie was nineteen, a junior at Wellesley. She was wearing a virulent-purple bathrobe her favorite cousin, a would-be actor named Vergil, had given her when she was sixteen. It was, as Laurie said, a woman of the world’s bathrobe, even though by now it was a little faded and stained. In the cleft of the bathrobe was the lacy top of a black slip. Laurie’s brush hovered over the points of her lips. Innocence, she thought—a sort of ripe innocence, for a Chestnut Hill White. But, how the hell do you design ripe innocence? Laurie’s more familiar mouths wouldn’t do at all—the one she called “sullen juvenilia,” for instance, or “it’s springtime and time to laugh.” Henry White was taking her home to meet his mother, and even though Laurie had no intention of becoming engaged, still Henry was rich enough that she might change her mind. It would make her mother very happy. Her mother would say gravely, “Laurie, I hope you’ll be very happy.” But if she became engaged to Martin, whose father was not rich, her mother would cry softly and say, “Laurie, how could you?” It wasn’t that her mother was a conscious snob; as far as Laurie knew, her mother wasn’t conscious of anything much. It was just a matter of playing by pitch; some things sounded right to Mama, and some things didn’t. Laurie had a tendency toward the somethings that didn’t and so she was forced to think of herself as a rather racy young girl.

  She raised her upper lip and painted a faint lurking smile at the corners. There, she thought, I’m good-natured. With her eyebrow pencil she drew a line on the rim of her eyelids, to darken her eyelashes. Her blondish hair was cut short and fluffy around her head. She pushed at her hair and moved it around. The face in the mirror smiled at her wanly. Laurie’s nose was large, her lips full, her eyes kind and shining. When she looked in the mirror, she invariably dilated her eyes and pulled in her lips, and so she thought she had a blank, polite face. But she was wrong. She had an asymmetrical face, a strangely dignified, knowing girl’s face, bright with a peculiar dazzle, perhaps of health, perhaps of carelessness.

  The trouble was, she thought, that if you married someone poor, it was obviously lechery. But if you married someone rich, everyone congratulated you as if you had performed some act of unusually intricate virtue. Even liberals. Laurie rose from the mirror, and the minute she did so, her face flowed back to its normal expression, brighter and more wary. Of course, if you were enclosed in the sort of physical envelope she was, people thought of you as lecherous anyway, no matter what you did, Laurie thought hopefully. Men fell in love with you, older men, younger men, little boys.

  She took off her bathrobe and backed up to the mirror on her closet door. Her back was straight, her rear ample (too ample; with sudden savagery, she swatted it), her legs acceptable. She slid into a daydream where she was a musical-comedy star who made lots of money and didn’t have to marry. Laurie gave an exploratory bump and grind, and then burst out laughing at herself. It had been such a very dignified bump and grind. With one hand on her stomach and the other gyrating in space, she closed her eyes and tried to do better.

  Her roommate, Carey, came in. “Laurie, what the hell you doing?”

  “Shaking my tail. It’s good for the waistline. You ought to try it. You’re a little thick in the middle.”

  Carey was a tall, flat-chested, athletic girl with protruding teeth, who loved horses. She frowned. “You’re not very witty,” she said. “You’re not even funny.”

  Laurie opened her closet door and looked at her dresses. Carey opened a drawer, made a few angry noises, and then left the room. Laurie relaxed. She began to lift dresses out of the closet and hold them in front of her. Then, suddenly, she felt like crying. After all, tonight might be the night when she became engaged, when she pledged her honor to marry a man, and in her family the women stayed married. She would be obliged to spend an entire lifetime with this one man….She quickly grabbed another dress and held it up. It was brown silk, with tiny black figures on it, and it had sleeves that went only to the middle of her forearm. It was her sophisticated dress (Laurie, defenseless and alone, puckered her lower lip and pressed the dress against her body); her mind swam with memories. In that dress she had sipped her first Martini…. At the Plaza, too. It was with Roy Delbert and his father and his father’s third wife. The men had leaned across the table and lit her cigarettes, and Mrs. Delbert had persistently, gallantly, asked her questions about her college courses. But nothing could have turned Laurie back into a mere college girl that day, nothing could touch her. She remembered clearly only the beating of her heart…and slipping her shoes off under the table, her new high heels, green I. Millers with pointed, uncomfortable toes. Roy’s face was a blur. Though he’d been the one who cried… Laurie flung her dress on her bed and fell down beside it. How could he expect her to promise to marry him? She had been seventeen at the time. He had called her a cruel bitch. Laurie ran her hands wonderingly over her face. Was she a bitch? Was she coarse and cruel? It was terribly imp
ortant to know. But Laurie’s mind refused to enter into a discussion. She felt sick and unhappy, but her mind did nothing. She would be late; she would make Henry White wait and wait and wait. She lit a cigarette.

  The first time she’d ever been called a bitch was at practically her very first dance. It was her first big dance. In Philadelphia. She’d gone down from New York on the train to her cousin Phyllis’s. Phyllis had an expensive formal of white tulle; it was someone’s coming-out party. Laurie had a rather bargain-type dress, calico and proper, from Best’s. What her mother called reasonable and what Laurie called cheap. Fourteen ninety-five and with plenty of material at the seams. She’d been pudgy then, but her skin had the healthy glaze that comes from sunshine and ten hours of sleep a night. She had always hoped she would be attractive, and it was very likely she would find out that night. Phyllis had been hateful from the moment they started dressing for the party. She said Laurie’s humming got on her nerves. She said Laurie hogged the mirror. And when the boys had arrived and Phyllis and Laurie were about to start downstairs, Laurie took one last hopeful look at herself in the mirror and then she threw her head back and laughed with delight. Phyllis grabbed her by the arm and yanked her toward the head of the stairs. Phyllis was seventeen then, two years older than Laurie, and thin; she looked well in suits. “You fat little bitch!” she muttered as they went down.

  Laurie sat up. She had been pretty bad at that party. She’d tucked her bodice a little lower than it had been at Best’s. And the boys. Laurie, on her bed, in her college room, shivered with delight. She’s been stared at and pleaded with and cut in on and kissed…. “Oh, goodness me!” Laurie said aloud. “I certainly liked that,” she whispered to herself. “And the flowers. So many boys sent me flowers that weekend, and I promised to write them all, and I never wrote a single one.”

  The buzzer sounded in the hall: three long and a short. Laurie went to the doorway of her room, frowned, and then slowly, graciously, sauntered down the hall to the telephone. It was Henry. Laurie told him she wasn’t nearly dressed. Maybe he’d better go have coffee and come back in twenty minutes.