He’d returned to school with a strict plan for himself. He would see Sharon only two evenings a week, and not stay over at her house at all, and he would study ten hours every day and try to ace every one of his finals and term papers. If he ran the table with A-pluses, he could still keep his GPA above 3.5—the figure which, though basically arbitrary, was his last plausible defense against the action he would otherwise be called upon to take.
His plan was sensible but not, it turned out, achievable. When he stopped by Sharon’s house, it was as if they’d been apart for five months, not five days. He had a thousand things to tell her, and as soon as he took down her corduroys it seemed mean and silly to have worried about their height difference. Not until he returned to his room, the following afternoon, did he lament his lack of willpower. He recalibrated his plan, assigning himself eleven hours of daily study, and stuck to this schedule until Friday, when he treated himself to another evening with Sharon. By the time he left her, on Sunday afternoon, he would have had to study fifteen hours a day to make the numbers work. He told himself that he was living in the moment, like an existentialist, and savoring their togetherness while it lasted, but he sensed something darker going on. Something almost spiteful—as if, by surrendering to Sharon’s elastic sense of time, and thereby ensuring that his grades would suffer, which would leave him no moral choice but to drop out of school, he were secretly preparing to punish her. She had no inkling of what the figure 3.5 signified to him, but she would understand it soon enough, and rue that she hadn’t insisted that he study.
What had made the coming punishment crueler was that Sharon was giving signs of loving him in an old-fashioned, romantic, totalizing way. Despite having presented herself as a free spirit, a Colette-reading sexual adventurer, and despite being too sophisticated to use mushy language, she seemed to have a longer-range vision for the two of them. No sooner had he told her about his conversation with his sister at Thanksgiving, the bequest from their aunt, than she’d become fixated on going to Europe with him. She respected him for refusing the money Becky had offered, but why not at least accept a free vacation? Wouldn’t it be amazing to be together in France? The two of them visiting the same places as his sister and his mother, but doing their own thing? Whenever she returned to the idea, to add or subtract some stop on their mythical itinerary, Clem simply closed his eyes and smiled. In his secret heart, he already knew that he would write to the draft board. The overriding reason to do it was that it was morally correct. He had further important reasons relating to his father and to Sharon, to whom he wanted to prove how seriously he’d taken her ideas, and who he hoped would admire the rightness of his action and compare him favorably with her brother Mike. And yet, ridiculously, in the waning days of the semester, as the reality of his academic failures had sunk in, the most salient attraction of forfeiting his deferment had been to avoid going to France with his girlfriend and his sister.
The morning sky was growing darker, not lighter, when he reached her house. He had a key he never used—despite a recent bicycle theft, the hippies refused to lock their back door. He let himself into the murk of their kitchen and hurried past the cheese-crusted crockery piled in and around the sink, which existed in a kind of hippie equilibrium, a steady state in which new dirty dishes were added at exactly the same rate that someone bothered to wash the older ones. Most of the hippies were too placidly self-absorbed to even know his name, but he’d received many a knowing smile in passing, and he was glad not to encounter anyone as he made his way upstairs. He sensed that the sum of his identity, in that house, consisted of being the dude who was boning the little chick on the fourth floor, which was uncomfortably close to a fair summation.
Sharon, in flannel pajamas, was mixing something at the plywood counter of the makeshift kitchenette outside her room. Clem stooped to kiss her curls and put his arms around her from behind. In his disordered mind, he was already halfway a soldier, arriving to do what soldiers did with a woman, but she shrugged him off playfully. “I’m making toast with sugar and cinnamon.”
“I’m not sure I can face food right now.”
“When was the last time you ate?”
“Sometime yesterday. I had a tuna-salad sub.”
“You definitely need food. But first—” She crouched to open her little refrigerator. “I bought champagne.”
“Champagne.”
“To celebrate.” She handed him the cold bottle. “You didn’t believe me, but I knew you could do it.”