Chapter 5 

I approached my first weekend alone with trepidation. Saturday was a family day back in Alexandria, with a long cocktail hour (called "big people time" when I was a kid and my sister and I were shooed to our rooms) in the afternoon and my mom's chili for dinner, a meal we had for Saturday dinner for over 15 years. I was convinced that Saturday in Madison would reopen the floodgates and I would spend the day in bed sobbing.

When I awoke around 7 AM, the eastern sky was glowing a deep, opaque blue, and the rays of the sun were just touching the huge red and white radio tower across the street. I drove my car downtown and had a cup of coffee in a Dunkin' Donuts, watching the sunrise break over the dazzling white of Lake Mendota. Some of my favorite childhood memories were of the times my dad would wake me up at 5 AM and take me down to a truckstop, where we would sip our respective mugs of coffee and hot chocolate and stare manfully into the middle distance, just being men. It wasn't the same without Dad, but it was nice, with the coffee and donut smells battling it out with the clean, frigid air that swept around the room whenever someone opened the door. Afterwards, I roamed the downtown streets in search of a carwash and found the Octopus Car Wash on University Boulevard. I had planned this eminently useful excursion as a way of whistling in the dark, of doing something to avoid panic. However, as I cruised the quiet, brilliant streets of downtown Madison in my shiny car, my heat perking along and Randy Newman's Good Ol' Boys playing on the 8-track, I was suffused with a strange giddy joy with my surroundings and my place in them. I had spent my college years sleeping till noon and awake to 3 AM, and had only recently rediscovered the joys of early mornings, when the morally deficient folk are still asleep and even the largest city takes on the tenor of a small town. Prowling police cars cast long shadows, the only objects moving on the grounds of the state capitol. I parked and walked around the massive granite building, stark white in the early sun. The only sound was my feet crunching through the snowcrust. It was a magic moment, and my breath blew in thick white clouds with the breeze.

I decided that family or no, I was going to have chili for dinner. Mom had presented me with a "survival kit" when I left, full of official documents -- birth certificates, insurance papers -- and a list of family recipes. I drove back to the apartment, flipped on "Scooby- Doo" as background noise, and dug out the chili recipe. The ingredients looked fairly straight-forward -- tomato paste, meat, cumin, the usual stuff -- and I made a list and headed for the Eagle market.

Sad to say, at the age of 21, I'd never been shopping in a food store by myself. It was a new sensation, and I felt somewhat like an adult (also a new sensation) as I pushed my cart up and down the wide aisles. My one macho trait is that I will never ask directions, so it took me a while to find everything. I approached the cashier.

"Can I write a check for this?," I asked, sure everyone in the store was snickering at my ignorance.

"If you apply for a check-cashing card, we'll let you do it today."

I filled out the form, knowing that the "one week" listed under length of employment probably wouldn't help me. But, in a short while, I was presented with a little cardboard card and wrote my first check. Hey, I could get used to this!

Once home, I carried the TV into the kitchen and began to cook my first meal. I found a UHF station playing Pygmalion, and one of the happiest memories of my life is working in that little kitchen, the brilliant snowblind sunlight streaming through the balcony doors, with Leslie Howard and Wendy Hiller yelling at each other as the smells of my first pot of chili wafted through the rooms.

On Sunday, I decided to do my laundry -- again, a task I had never performed myself. I gathered all my clothes in a garbage bag and headed for the laundry room in the basement.



****************

Depressed by the generally go-to-hell fashions at the office, on the second Wednesday I wore my 3-piece grey pinstripe suit to work. I looked magnificent. Another drinking session was being held at Bud's that night, as it would every Wednesday night we were in Madison. I was standing at the bar, decoriously sipping my first beer and resolved not to overdo it, when I was cornered by Bette D., the Title XVI office manager. She was a short, brusque woman with owl-like glasses and an air of authority. She had a decent figure - - in fact, she was rather attractive -- but made great political pains to ignore it. She fancied herself a man-eater.

"Don't think I don't know what you're doing."

I looked down at her over my mug. She was standing with one foot on the bar rail, her ubiquitous Benson and Hedges' 100 clutched in her hand.

"Excuse me?"

She leaned close and hissed out her words in barely controlled civility.

"This isn't Washington, ace. If you can't take your macho bullshit and leave it at the door, you and I are going to have a serious problem."

My face reddened. Jesus Christ, what had I done now? I looked at my mug. Yes, it was my first. I hadn't been in the place five minutes. This woman was my supervisor, sort of. What kind of shit was I in for now?

She saw the panicked look on my face. "The suit," she said, stabbing her finger into my shoulder. "I am not going to roll over and play nice-nice because you happen to be wearing this macho fantasy rag. You think you're better than these people?" She gestured around the bar at the other SSAers. "I got news, ace. I don't care how fucking fancy your little lawyer suits are -- you still answer to me -- a woman. You got that?"

I nodded stupidly. One of the major regrets in my life is that I didn't dump my beer over her head at that momemt. Having made her point, Bette took a vodka gimlet from the bartender and disappeared into the murk.

I spent the next few hours sipping small quantities of beer with the gang, being regaled with hard-to-believe stories of my exploits the previous Wednesday, which only now was starting to come back to me in all its embarrassing details. We all conspired to avoid Bette, who was becoming this week's drunk. In a loud voice, she started to declaim on the sexual abilities of most of the men present, whether from personal experience or extrapolation I'm not sure.

"Scott! First you propose to me, and then you never call!" I whirled around and found Carolyn seating herself beside me. I looked at Dave.

"Yeah, you proposed to her."

She smiled and took a sip of my beer. "Don't worry, I won't hold you to it."

We laughed. Carolyn had one of the most direct, honest, no-shit faces I'd ever seen. Her short black hair, cut in the popular Hamel Camel, framed eyes of a startling frankness, and her tall slender body was covered in a no-nonsense black jumper. Seeing her in a sober state, I was struck with the Zen-like efficiency of her being. Between her and Dave, I was feeling as ornate as a Gothic house.

Carolyn and I started asking each other fairly standard questions about our backgrounds. She told me she was divorcing her Scott because he was "unmotivated." "He collects science fiction books," she said.

"Well, I've got quite a few science fiction books myself."

She gave me an amused smirk. "Not like Scott. Believe me."

After a few moments we discovered, to my by now numbed surprise, that she and I had grown up within 6 block of each other in the Near Northwest part of Chicago, albeit six or seven years apart. I very seldom met anyone from that neighborhood, which seemed to be a powerful black hole few escaped. After finding out that Doreen had worked in Crystal City and Eliot Stover's mother worked at SSA, I began to wonder if life wasn't a lot simpler than I had assumed. Now this revelation seemed to make it clear that I was somehow tapped into the secret of things, that I had some kind of trunk line to the Life Force, that things would always go right for me. It was a conviction that took a few years to fall, and fell with the roar of Jericho.

After a decent period of discovery, Carolyn started to leave.

"I have to catch the last bus."

My eyes lit up. "Where do you live? I could drive you."

She lived in a two-bedroom apartment on Broom Street, a few blocks from the state capitol on the isthmus between Lakes Mendota and Monona. We bundled up carefully and drove the three or four miles amid small talk.

"Did you hear about Otis Redding?," she asked. We were driving on a broad parkway that ran along the curving shore of Lake Monona. In the dark, the lights of downtown Madison shone with a clear, untwinkling clarity. It reminded me of the view of Boston from the Harvard Bridge, scaled down to Wisconsin proportions.

"I know he did "Dock of the Bay," I answered.

"No." She shifted her torso towards me. "He was killed in a plane crash in '68, right here in this lake." She gestured across the dark expanse to our right. "They never found his body."

I looked out over the lake. A famous person like that, still missing here?

Neither of us discussed the main topic, that being whether or not we were going to have sex. I presumed she thought so, but I tempered that belief with my usual waffling in case I totally misinterpreted the signs. I was remarkably clumsy at reading come-ons, put- downs and brush-offs. I'm 21 years old -- what else could she want from me? Maybe just a ride home, asshole. Don't be a turd.

Her building was a six-story urban apartment block, equidistant from the two lakes and the great granite dome of the capitol. We wended our way through the usual gamut of security locks and found ourselves outside her apartment.

"Would you like a drink or something?" She stood with the key poised, as if my answer might decide whether she opened the door or not.

"OK."

She swung the door open and I stared in amazement. The apartment was filled with paperback books. Columns and stacks and piles of books, reaching the ceiling in the corners and never less than chest high. Tunnels carved between the stacks led to the other rooms. I couldn't believe my eyes.

"I told you he collected science fiction books." She was watching my expression with a bemused smile.

She led me through one of the corridors to the kitchen, which was merely an alcove off the living room. I stopped to look at a few of the books. They were indeed science fiction books, some crumbling with age. Van Vogt, Dick, Heinlein, Kornbluth and a host of authors I didn't recognize. One stack, all five feet of it, turned out to be identical copies of Heinlein's The Door Into Summer, one of my favorites.

"These are all the same book," I said flatly.

She looked up from her ministrations. She was making a Scotch for herself and a beer for me. "He likes to keep extras," she said.

I glanced up, almost unable to see Carolyn through the books. A sudden dread. "Where is Scott, anyway?"

"Oh." She started down the tunnel, drinks in hand. "He works nights -- he won't be back until morning. C'mon, I'll show you the rest of the apartment."

What kind of woman would let her apartment be used like this? I did a quick reassessment of Carolyn and decided maybe she wasn't so serene after all. After all, the insane are the most beatific of all. I suddenly knew, with a crystalline clarity, that Scott was going to walk through the door any second, and that Carolyn was getting a rush from that knowledge. Besides, Scott, at least from the evidence of 126 copies of The Door Into Summer, wasn't hitting on all cylinders himself.

Swallowing my uneasiness, I followed behind Carolyn as she showed me the balcony (with a nice view of the city), the bathroom and the spare room, which was a brick wall of books. We ended up at the foot of their bed, a low oriental mattress in a small clearing. The bedspread was bright red satin, and the side table, no more than a foot high, held used wine glasses and an incense burner.

"This is the bed," Carolyn said, and she stood for a long moment with her arms crossed, staring at the center of the bed. Then, slowly, she swiveled her head up and over towards me.

Her eyes were speaking volumes, probably more than she wanted them to. They said, "Let's go to bed," but they also said "Let's go to bed so I can humiliate my husband," and "Let's go to bed so I can forget how shitty my life is," and "Let's go to bed because Scott doesn't hold me enough." Her eyes spoke so clearly, in fact, that I averted my eyes in red- faced embarrassment. It was like watching a friend get beat up at recess.

"Well, thanks for the beer, Carolyn, but I have to be going now." And I was out the door. I spent the next hour cruising the lake shore, thinking of Otis Redding and listening to "Wedding in Cherokee County" on the stereo.


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