The Funny thing is that I kept getting more and more involved with Lucille without really getting involved with her at all. We spent about fifty minutes out of every lunch hour in her bedroom, but outside of that we didn’t see each other at all. I never stayed around after she got home from school, and on Saturdays she would generally manage to spend the day with a girlfriend. We never went to a movie or for a walk or anything.
My job at the Lighthouse had something to do with this. I was working during dating hours, and the one night she could go out on dates was the one night I really had things to do there. But once I asked her if she’d like to catch a movie during the week and she said she couldn’t.
“I have to stay with my father,” she said. “You know that, Chip.”
“He manages well enough Friday and Saturday nights, doesn’t he?”
“Well, those are the only nights I can go out. I’m not allowed to date during the week.”
“You could ask permission.”
“Asking’s not getting. Oh, Chip, I can’t go out with you anyway. I’m going steady with Jimmie Butler, you know that, I told you a thousand times.”
I said something about going steady being a Mickey Mouse institution.
She looked at me. “Do you think I ought to break off with Jimmie?”
“I guess not,” I said.
That was the only time I ever asked her for a date, and I was just as glad she turned me down. I guess I wanted to keep this a lunchtime thing and not let it get very intense.
There were a couple of reasons for this. One of them makes me look like Mr. Nice Guy, so I’ll throw it in first, and it was just that it wouldn’t have been fair of me to take up all that much of Lucille’s time. Because what Lucille wanted out of life was to get married as soon as she was done with high school and start having babies and spend the rest of her life there. And while that might not sound like something worth wanting, it was what she wanted, and it was probably what would be best for her. (Especially if Jimmie Butler developed a little control by doing the multiplication tables in his head or something.)
Anyway, Lucille wanted to be Mrs. Somebody. Maybe she would have been just as happy to be Mrs. Harrison as Mrs. Butler, but I really wasn’t ready for that. She just wasn’t that important to me, so I didn’t want to become all that important to her.
The other reason was more selfish.
See, I was just having too much fun the way things were going. It was a fantastic ego trip for me, the whole thing, and even knowing something is an ego trip isn’t enough to take the enjoyment out of it. For once in my life I was the teacher and she was the pupil, and I was getting a tremendous charge out of it. Instead of feeling like some utterly hopeless dope of a kid, I was the wise old man and she was the little innocent one. And every time I took her upstairs and let the stuffed animals watch me teach her something new and con her into doing it, well, it made me feel as if I was really somebody sensational.
(Which was another reason, I guess, that I had no desire to get in bed with Claureen or Rita. There was no way on earth I could feel like the wise old man with either of those two, and I guess I knew it would just bring me down in a bad way.)
By only seeing Lucille at lunch hour, I made that part of it be our entire relationship. And because we had so little time together we could just keep on going forward a little at a time instead of rushing straight into all-the-way sex. I didn’t realize at the time that this was something I wanted. Instead I told myself it wasn’t fair to rush her, that I wanted to let everything come at its own pace so it would be natural and good for her. But that was bullshit, really. Utter bullshit.
“You’re like a drug to me, Chip,” she said one day. “I just need more and more of you.”
“Must be a good kind of drug. You look prettier every day.”
“The girls ask me about you.”
“What do they ask?”
“What you’re like. Everybody knows about that place you work at. Some of them sort of want to go out with you. They want to come home with me and meet you. But they’re scared of you at the same time.”
“Scared of me?”
She nodded. “They think you must know things other boys don’t. The things I could tell them! And sometimes I just could die for wanting to tell someone. I feel I could burst from holding it all inside me.”
“I don’t think it would be a very good idea to tell anybody.”
“I know. I just say we hardly talk at all. That you don’t even know I’m alive.”
“Oh, I can tell you’re alive, all right.”
“Ohhhh—”
And a little later she said, “I’m scared of you, too, Chip.”
“Oh, come on. You must know by now you can trust me.”
“I know. But it used to be I could trust myself, and now I can t. I never knew I was like this.”
“Aren’t you glad you found out?”
“I don’t know.”
“Huh?”
“I just, oh, I don’t know.” Her face clouded, then suddenly brightened and she giggled. I asked her what was so funny.
“I was thinking about Jimmie.”
“What about him?”
“If he could see us now.”
If he could have seen us right then he would have come on the spot and saved himself ten dollars.
“He asked about you.”
“What did you tell him?”
“Same as I told the girls. Not even that much. But I was thinking what would happen if I told him about you and me and all.”
“He would probably kill one of us,” I said. And if he had to choose, I thought, he would pick her. I had never mentioned to her that I had seen Jimmie now and then at the Lighthouse, so I couldn’t tell her that he tended to back down pretty easily from fights. I didn’t hold this against him, though. In fact I preferred him that way.
Her hand dropped onto me. “The other night,” she said, “he wanted me to touch him.”
“Did you?”
“’Course not. I asked him what kind of a girl he thought I was.”
“What did he say?”
“He apologized,” she said, and giggled again. “He’s just a baby, I guess. I never used to think so. Not until I met you.”
Ego food.
At the beginning I thought I was going to get tired of her, maybe because she was so square. I suppose this would have happened if we had seen each other more, had dates and long conversations, or if I had met her friends or anything like that. But she left the boring part of her personality outside the bedroom, and once she stopped fighting the whole idea of sex she turned out to have quite a natural aptitude for it.
For a long time she spent half her time being passionate and the other half feeling guilty about it. At first she was very uptight every time we did something new, as if we were taking still another step along the road to Hell. This was fun in a way — first I taught her something new, and then I assured her it wasn’t awful.
It wasn’t long, though, before she wanted to do new things and came to bed looking forward to it. I guess what happened was that her mind finally realized I wasn’t going to make her have regular intercourse, so she set that up in her mind as the one absolute sin and decided it was perfectly all right to do absolutely anything else.
So I taught her things I had done before, of which there were not too many, and things I had heard about or read about, of which there were a ton, and some things that I more or less invented. I’m not saying that I thought of things no one had thought of before because I’m not sure there are any of those things left, but they were new to me.
“My God,” she would say. “When did you have time to learn all these things, Chip?”
She didn’t know we were learning some of them together.
And she liked everything we did. Everything. I did oral things to her and taught her to do them to me, and she lived up to what Willie Em had told me about Southern girls.
And we tried anal things, which I hadn’t done before. She didn’t like the idea at the beginning, and she thought it would be painful and disgusting, and when we were done she said it was painful and disgusting and cried a little and I told her we wouldn’t do it again.
And the next day she wanted to do it again and never said another word about it being painful or disgusting.
One day I brought a vibrator from the Lighthouse. I didn’t tell Geraldine I was borrowing it. I didn’t tell Lucille where it was from, either, but of course she would have had to know.
And finally one day we got our clothes off and got into bed and she asked me what I wanted to do, and I said we would just see what happened. And after a lot of things had happened she was lying on her back with her eyes closed and I was on top of her and our flesh touched.
She opened her eyes and asked me what I was doing.
I said, “I’m going to fuck you.”
“All right,” she said, and closed her eyes again.
Afterward she said, “I guess I should have let you do it right off. I knew it would happen the first day you kissed me. I knew it and I never forgot it and I was right, and we might just as well been doing it all along.”
“Are you sorry?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know.”
“Did I hurt you?”
“Not enough to talk about. You hurt me worse other times and I never minded it. Will I get a baby now, Chip?”
“No.”
“How come you’re sure?”
I showed her the condom.
“It looks so silly,” she said. “Did you buy it in a store or what?”
“I took it from—”
“From that place. I guess if Jimmie doesn’t marry me I can always work there, can’t I?”
“Don’t talk like that.”
“Knowing all you taught me. Unless you don’t think I’m pretty enough.”
“You’re beautiful.”
“I wonder do I look different now.”
“No.”
“I guess I’ll call the school in a few minutes and say I can’t come back today because my father needs me. I used to do that before you were working here.”
“You don’t have to worry, Lucille. No one can tell anything from looking at you.”
“That’s not why.” She stretched and wriggled her toes. “I guess I don’t want to get up and go putting on clothes again. I guess I liked what we did. I guess I want to do it again.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Do you have any more of those little things?”
“Uh, no.”
“Can you use them more than once?”
“It’s not a very good idea.”
“Oh, well,” she said. “There’s other things we can do, I guess. An old boy named Chip taught me a whole roomful of them.”
“You’re an angel.”
“I’m a devil is what I am. But I just don’t care.”
That was on a Friday afternoon in early March. I didn’t see her at all over the weekend. I was hoping Jimmie Butler would come to the Lighthouse Saturday night and start a fight so that I could brain him with the club. Don’t ask me why. Anyway, he didn’t show up.
I almost went to church the next morning. Just a nutty impulse.
Monday morning I helped myself to a box of a dozen rubbers on my way out of the Lighthouse. We used one of them that lunch hour, and afterward she told me she almost broke up with Jimmie Saturday night.
“But I didn’t. I wanted to, but I thought I’ll wait until the proms are over and all, because he’d have to find somebody to take and everything, and it’s easier to go along the way it is. And if I stopped going steady with him other boys might want to take me out, and at least I’m used to Jimmie. And I know I can handle him.”
“Why did you want to break up?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I just don’t like being with him is all. And I hate it when he touches me. I just don’t feel a thing. Sometimes I’ll pretend I like it but I don’t and it never does anything to me. He just keeps going with me now because it’s a habit. He doesn’t like it that I won’t let him do any more than he used to do, but if he went out with anybody else he’d have to start all over at the beginning, so I guess he thinks I’m better than nothing.”
“I think you’re better than anything.”
“I wouldn’t marry him, anyway. Even if he wanted. I don’t love him.”
“Did you love him before?”
“No, but I didn’t know it. I didn’t know anything. Not knowing what I was missing, I guess.”
I felt kind of weird. I had more than I had started out wanting in the first place, and I didn’t know whether or not I wanted it now, or what I was going to do about it.
She said, “I love you, Chip.”
I just wouldn’t tell her that I loved her. She never asked for the words, not once, not even by throwing out hopeful pauses which you were supposed to fill with the words. And I just wouldn’t say them.
I don’t know why I made such a big deal out of it. I mean, I love you doesn’t mean all that much. Nine times out of ten it’s a polite way of saying I want to ball you, and you know it and the girl you say it to knows it and just saying the words doesn’t send anyone out shopping for engagement rings.
The really dumb thing about it is that I could have said the words and meant them, because I did love her, whether or not I knew it at the time. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life with her, but that’s not what the words mean anyway. I dug her and I cared about her and I enjoyed being with her and I wanted good things to happen to her and I, well, I loved her.
But instead of saying the words I even managed to keep them out of my own mind. I would ask myself things like, Well, Chip kid, how will you get yourself out of this one? After all, old man, you’ve got to be gentle with the kid. You don’t want to break her little heart.
(I’ll tell you something, I really hate writing all this down, because until just this minute I never realized what a complete asshole I was. I felt so goddamned adult with Lucille, and when I look back at it all now I can’t believe I ever could have acted like such a shitty little snotnose. And I suppose a year from now I’ll be apologizing to myself for being such an immature moron now.)
Of course I loved her, for Pete’s sake. I loved her a lot more than she loved me, if you come right down to it, because I at least knew who she was and all, and what she knew about me was more lies than truth. She fell in love with me, or thought she did, because I taught her what her body was for.
Maybe I loved her for about the same reason. Oh, the hell with it.
But figure this out. The day she told me she loved me, I sent a postcard to Hallie in Wisconsin.