I left home at the age of eighteen to further my education. I was a
halting, shy, unremarkable girl, with neither looks nor social graces to
recommend me. Certain events of my previous existence had left me with
little sense of my own worth or worthiness, and my yearning for
sympathetic companionship only hindered the progress of any new
attachment that I formed, by rendering me ever more trepidatious of the
affection I fain would inspire.
It happened, however, that there lived in my dormitory, indeed,
directly across the hall from me, a being well-calculated by his own
peculiar nature to suit my reserved ways. A happy, boisterous, generous
character, he yet had little of the giddy carelessness that so often
accompanies a sunny disposition. He was strangely drawn to those of a
dark and melancholic bent, and to coax a laugh from a dispirited, or
confidence from an unforthcoming, friend was one of his chief delights.
Still, we were often thrown together by circumstances before
Chance
intervened to stir a spark of interest in him towards me. One autumn
night, distraught with news from home, I sat upon the staircase, loathe
to enter my own room and face the unwelcome inquiries of my roommates.
Passing by, my kind neighbor asked most solicitously, what was wrong?
By declining, in my usual phlegmatic manner, to enlighten him, I
unwittingly drew to myself a piercing ray that I thought to have
deflected.
Encountering me again soon thereafter, he inquired again, and
with
alacrity, into my mood. This time, I confessed, and with some relief in
speaking it, too, I admit, to being but faintly improved in my outlook.
His willingness to repeat, consecutively and over the course of time,
the same question of me until he had penetrated to the truth, became the
pattern of our exchanges. It became a dire and intoxicating game for me,
perhaps for both of us.
Our friendship advanced. He drew me into the golden circle that
seemed
to radiate about him; shared with me the good fellowship he seemed to
generate so effortlessly wherever he went. I dined now not alone, but
with a jolly group of uproarious companions. At night we all would meet
in the hallways, teasing each other, laughing at everything,
sometimes far into the night. There were moments when I felt a twinge
of jealously at the ever-flowing prodigality of his beneficence, but he
continued to show me certain marks of preference, sometimes
indiscernible to the others, that kept my quiet, subtle nature aglimmer.
It was our especial custom always to go down together to brush our teeth
in our communal bathroom before bed.
And was such a scion unsusceptible of female attentions? No,
he was
not. He had an idol of his own, sacrosanct, a glowing image to match his
own, it seemed to me. Many plans, many castles in the air, and just a
very few apprehensions did I patiently endure to hear of. Drawn as I was
to him by feelings not those of a sister, yet they retained a meekness
more like an admiring younger sibling, who sought for approval, or any
kind of attention, than a seeker after a more mutual passion.
Winter came, and with it, the final fortnight of the semester.
Classes
ended and we had a week of exams and term papers to complete before
repairing home for the Yuletide holidays. We all of us labored at our
school work with feverish intensity. During this anomalous interval, my
friend and I met each night at midnight, when the library closed, for a
long walk. It was very cold. We rambled through brittle, sleeping
neighborhoods, decorated with varicolored Christmas lights. It began to
snow. We continued our contests of question and answer, and any topic
became an occasion for feints, his role to guess, mine to hint. A
tension, by turns playful and mournful, hung with our breaths in frosty
suspension.
Early in the spring, an unthinkable event: through some unaccountable
impulse against her own happiness, spurred, it must be, by the
intercession of worldly whisperers who gained their advantage in being
close at hand when her better counsel was afar, his lady broke her faith
with my friend, and dismissed him from her future. Shadows flitted
across his incandescence, and the balance of our roles, his to be
cheerful and mine to be pensive, was upset. A febrile confusion settled
in my mind. Our exchanges became so circuitous that sometimes when we
were talking, our friends would pointedly leave the room. Our game took
on a rigid armature, an imperative that sometimes seemed a malevolent
force to me, or an insatiable one. Miserable at times, now, I could only
slake my fears by becoming increasingly recalcitrant. But my
circumlocutions were never met with frustration, my muttering
half-avowals still seemed to spur curiosity, and this was my
reassurance, a trust I needed obsessively to test.
One night he came into my bedroom. I was lying on the bed, and
he lay
down beside me. He said, "I think I want to kiss you."
Reader, it should have been the happiest moment of my life! I
buried my
face in the bedclothes. Where there should have been joy, fear; where
acceptance, hesitation. I said, "I don’t think that I want you to."
Only from the most craven and puerile motives did I answer him
thus. He
should have questioned. He should have wheedled, have harassed, have
laid in waiting and ambushed a confession from my lips. He boldly rent
the curtain of our strange game, but my thirst for it was unquenchable.
To my shame, to my damnation, I turned away. He would ask me again, I
believed, again and yet again, until at last I acquiesced. But in just
this one, this most crucial, instance, he took my first answer at its
face value. I believed he knew my mind—I was wrong.
