Crossroads

Getting out of bed made him conscious of the obscenity of his erection. While Sharon lay and wept, he yanked up his jeans and put on his peacoat. In the hippie bedroom below them, a familiar bass line started up, the same Who album they’d been hearing for weeks. He shook Sharon’s pack of cigarettes, pulled one out with his lips, and struck a match. Back in September, he’d tried one of her Parliaments and liked it. By the time he’d realized that smoking, like sex, did not in itself confer manhood, he was wretchedly addicted.

“Can I make you some toast?” he said.

No answer. Sharon had pulled the bedspread onto herself and was facing the wall, her crying detectable only as a faint shaking of her curls. Her bed was a double mattress on a box spring, her desk a hollow-core door on sawhorses, her bookshelves pine one-by-tens with cinder-block supports. He remembered his first sight of her books, the great quantity of French-language paperbacks, the austere whiteness and uniformity of their spines. Back then, three months ago, he couldn’t have imagined anything sexier in a woman than high intelligence. Even now, if he and she had been all mind and genitals and nothing else, he might have imagined a future for them.

He wondered if he should simply leave now—whether this would be the kind thing to do or the cowardly thing. He’d planned to break up with her by letter because he wanted to speak to her mind-to-mind, rationally, well clear of the inviting pit. But now he’d hurt her, and she was crying. Maybe the situation spoke for itself? Maybe further talk would only be hurtful? He sat down on the edge of her bed, drew smoke into his abused lungs, and waited to see what he would do. Again the existential freedom, to speak or not to speak. Beneath the floor, the Who continued their thumping.

“I’m not coming back next semester,” he heard himself say. “I’m dropping out.”

Sharon rolled over immediately and stared at him, her cheeks wet.

“I’m giving up my deferment,” he said. “I’m going to do whatever they want me to do, which probably means Vietnam.”

“That’s insane!”

“Really? You were the one who said it was the right thing to do.”

“No, no, no.” She sat up and hugged the bedspread to her chest. “It’s already unbearable that Mike is there. You can’t do that to me.”

“I’m not doing it to you. I’m doing it because it’s right. My lottery number is nineteen. It’s just like you said—I should have gone already.”

“God, Clem, no. That is insane.”

In the year of his childhood when his genius brother had been old enough to play chess and young enough to be beaten, Clem had always, before moving to checkmate, asked Perry if he was sure about the last move he’d made. He’d considered this a gracious question for an older brother to ask, until one day Perry had choked up with tears—as a little kid, Perry had always been crying about one thing or another—and told Clem to stop rubbing it in. It was unclear to him now why he’d imagined that Sharon’s response would be any different.

“Vietnam won’t kill me,” he said. “We’re out of ground combat.”

“When did you start thinking this? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I’m telling you now.”

“Is it because I said I was in love with you?”

“No.”

“It was a mistake to say that. I don’t even know if it’s true. It’s like there are these words, they’re out there in the world, and you start wondering what it would be like to say them. Words have their own power—they create the feeling, just by the fact of your saying them. I’m so sorry I tried to make you say them. I love that you were honest with me. I love—oh, shit.” She slumped, crying again. “I am in love with you.”

He took a last puff on his cigarette and carefully mashed it out in her ashtray. “It wasn’t anything you said. I already sent the letter.”

She looked at him uncomprehendingly.

“I mailed it on the way over here.”

“No! No!” She began to beat on him with her little fists, not painfully. The sex scent rising off her and the aggression of his speech act inflamed him afresh. He thought of the time he’d staggered around her room with her impaled on him, how her smallness had made this excellent thing practicable. Fearful of falling back into the pit after so nearly breaking free of it, he grabbed her wrists and made her look at him.

“You’re a wonderful person,” he said. “You’ve totally changed my life.”

“That’s a good-bye!” she wailed. “I don’t want a good-bye!”

“I’ll write to you. I’ll tell you everything.”

“No, no, no.”

“Can’t you see this isn’t equal? I love who you are, but I’m not in love with you.”

“Now I wish I’d never met you!”

She threw herself onto the foot of the bed. The pity he felt was infinitely realer than the idea of being a soldier. He pitied her for being so small and loving him, and for the logical bind in which he’d put her, and for the irony of her having made him the person who would leave her, by introducing him to more existential forms of knowledge. He wanted to stay and explain, to talk about Camus, to remind her of the necessity of exercising moral choice, to make her understand how indebted he was to her. But he didn’t trust his animal self.