Down the lane from the Foreign Languages Building, after he’d slipped his paper under the door of the classics department office, he came upon a mailbox. The next collection time was eleven a.m., and today was not a holiday. He faced the mailbox and considered his existential freedom to act or not to act. The strong thing to do was to drop his letter in the box. He might curse himself in the future—however wretched he felt now, army life was bound to bring worse—but if an action was morally right, a strong man was obliged to take it in the present. If he didn’t mail the letter now, he would arrive at Sharon’s with only the intention of mailing it, and he’d been down the intention-paved road before.
He closed his eyes and fell asleep in a heartbeat, reawakening in time to catch himself from falling over. In his hand he found a letter to his draft board. The throat of the mailbox made a rusty-jointed gulp as the letter went down it. He turned away and broke into a sprint, as if he might outrun what he’d done.
In the philosophy course he’d taken the previous spring, there was a curly-haired little mouse who sat in the same row he did, often wearing a pleated velvet French-style cap, and kept looking at him. One afternoon, when the bearded and beaded professor was holding forth on Sartre’s Nausea, extolling the idea that what we make of existence has nothing to do with what existence rawly is, Clem raised his hand to disagree. Reality, he said, operated according to laws discoverable and testable by scientific method. The professor seemed to think this proved his larger point—we impose our laws of science on a stubbornly unknowable reality. “But what about math?” Clem said. “One plus one will always equal two. We didn’t invent the truth of that equation. We discovered a truth that was always there.” The professor joked that they had a Platonist in their midst, and the hippies in the lecture hall turned to look at the square who’d challenged him, and the little mouse moved over to sit by Clem. After class, she praised his independence of mind. She adored Camus but couldn’t forgive Sartre for his communism.
Sharon was an Honors student, the first person in her immediate family to attend college. She’d grown up on a farm outside the downstate town of Eltonville, where communists were held in very low esteem. For the rest of the semester, she and Clem had sat together in class, and when she asked him for his home address he was happy to provide it. He’d never had a female friend besides Becky. In the letter Sharon then sent him, while he was at home in New Prospect, doing shovel work for the local nursery, she wrote about the heat and desolation of her family’s farmhouse in the summer. Her mother had died when she was twelve, her brother Mike was in Vietnam, her father and her younger brother made the farm run, and a hired Croatian woman did the cooking and housework. Her father had always excused Sharon from chores, and in her boredom as a child and her sorrow as a teenager she’d found refuge in reading. Her ambition was to be a writer or, as a fallback, to teach English in Europe. She’d already vowed never to spend another summer in Eltonville.
Clem wrote back to her and received a second letter so long she’d put three stamps on the envelope. It began with questions, devolved into stream of consciousness, short on punctuation, devoid of capital letters, and ended with a passage from Camus she’d copied out in French. He kept intending to take an evening and reply, but he never found the evening. He hung out with his friend Lester or watched TV with Becky, who’d cut back on her social life. Only when he returned to school and saw Sharon, walking by herself on the Main Quad, did the wrongness of his inaction come home to him. She threw him a hurt look, and this wasn’t right, he wasn’t a hurter, and so he pursued her. She greeted his apology with a shrug. She said, “I think I had a wrong idea about you.” Whether it was the challenge implicit in this, or the thing that people called guilt but was actually just a self-interested wish not to be thought ill of, he was moved to ask her out for pizza.
What had started their fight was the olive-drab jacket he wore to the pizzeria. For an antiwar protest the previous spring, he’d fashioned an electrical-tape peace sign for the back of it, and Sharon didn’t like it. She couldn’t stand the college peaceniks. Every morning, she said, she woke up afraid of hearing that her brother had been killed or maimed in Vietnam. Mike wasn’t a reader, he enjoyed hunting and fishing and had no ambition beyond inheriting the farm, but he was the kindest and most honorable person she’d ever known, and the peaceniks had only contempt for him. Who were they to spit on a person like her brother? They all had their student deferments, they got to smoke pot and have sex while people like her brother were dying, and they weren’t even grateful. They thought they were morally superior. Lucky white kids from the suburbs flashing their peace signs while other kids fought a war for them: it made her sick.