Contrary Pleasure Read Online Free PDF Page B

this.
    They hadn’t even let him stay at the University long enough to take the
exams. He would have made a mess of them. So perhaps it was a good thing to
have gotten out of them. It was funny how that first year, the freshman year,
had gone so well. The grades had been pretty good. He’d made the basketball
squad and been pledged to a good fraternity.
    The trouble had started in April. There was a good smell of spring that
last April. Clear days, warmer than they should have been, and the sort of lazy
air that made you feel as if you wanted something without knowing exactly what
you wanted. It was the crazy season. You couldn’t learn anything out of the
books. People took all the class cuts they could afford. People pulled kid
tricks or got in fist fights for no reason. And the girls looked good. They
looked wonderful with that warm spring air teasing their skirts, and wonderful
the way they walked arm in arm and giggled and looked back at you.
    He met her on an April afternoon. He had a two o’clock lab. And he walked
right up to the door of the lab building and turned around and walked away. He
knew he would have to make up the cut. But it was an afternoon when you couldn’t spend two hours in there in the stink, setting up an experiment, making the
dull notations. He dropped his lab book off in his room in the fraternity
house. The house was deserted. His feet on the staircase made empty echoes. He
walked for a time, feeling free and guilty. He went into a campus beer joint, a
cellar place with steins and mottoes and sawdust. He hooked an elbow on the bar
and he drank and felt a curious mixture of listlessness and excitement. The
place was narrow and there was a row of rustic booths across from the bar. He
saw her sitting there alone. He could tell that she wasn’t one of the coeds. It
was the way she was dressed, and she looked a bit older. She was using the
straight pretzel sticks to make designs on the table top. She wore her black
hair long, and it swung forward as she leaned over the table and every once in
a while she would comb it back with her fingers. She was small and trim and
dark and she looked blue. He watched her, with that feeling of inevitability
and excitement growing inside him. He had some more beers and it was like
remembering the time the other kids had jumped off the garage roof into the
snow and he had waited a bit too long before jumping, and stood there, frozen,
the others taunting him until at last he had shut his eyes and jumped.
    All she could do, he decided, is give me a real chill job, so he carried
his beer over and stood by the booth, hoping he looked casual and relaxed, hoping
the tautness didn’t show, and when she looked up at him blankly, he said “Know
the match game?”
    She looked up at him, unsmiling, and he saw that she was not quite as
good-looking close up. Her cheeks were a bit roughened and pitted with scars of
adolescent acne, and her pallor had that faintly waxy look of Latin women. He
guessed she was maybe twenty-five. He was glad he’d changed to his good sports
jacket when he dropped his lab notebook off at his room.
    “I’ve played,” she said, looking amused.
    “Play you for a beer?”
    “Sure.” He sat across from her. They played with the pretzel sticks. She
won. Her lipstick was dark red and she had applied it a bit carelessly. She
wore a frothy white blouse, a dark, severe suit. Her purse was big and red and
she wore no hat. He realized she was a little bit high. Her eyes were very
black and very alive, and her small face had a pertness to it, a triangularity which, with its overtones of coarseness,
excited him.
    Her name was Elise, and she said Brock was a nice name and she asked him
if he was a senior. That made him feel good. He said he was and he told her he
was twenty-one and she told him he was just a kid, which annoyed him because
she seemed to be laughing at him.
    “What do you do, Elise?”
    “I’m a singer. I sang at the Golden Room for a