“I’m not coming back next semester,” he heard himself say. “I’m dropping out.”
Sharon rolled over immediately and stared at him, her cheeks wet.
“I’m giving up my deferment,” he said. “I’m going to do whatever they want me to do, which probably means Vietnam.”
“That’s insane!”
“Really? You were the one who said it was the right thing to do.”
“No, no, no.” She sat up and hugged the bedspread to her chest. “It’s already unbearable that Mike is there. You can’t do that to me.”
“I’m not doing it to you. I’m doing it because it’s right. My lottery number is nineteen. It’s just like you said—I should have gone already.”
“God, Clem, no. That is insane.”
In the year of his childhood when his genius brother had been old enough to play chess and young enough to be beaten, Clem had always, before moving to checkmate, asked Perry if he was sure about the last move he’d made. He’d considered this a gracious question for an older brother to ask, until one day Perry had choked up with tears—as a little kid, Perry had always been crying about one thing or another—and told Clem to stop rubbing it in. It was unclear to him now why he’d imagined that Sharon’s response would be any different.
“Vietnam won’t kill me,” he said. “We’re out of ground combat.”
“When did you start thinking this? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I’m telling you now.”
“Is it because I said I was in love with you?”
“No.”
“It was a mistake to say that. I don’t even know if it’s true. It’s like there are these words, they’re out there in the world, and you start wondering what it would be like to say them. Words have their own power—they create the feeling, just by the fact of your saying them. I’m so sorry I tried to make you say them. I love that you were honest with me. I love—oh, shit.” She slumped, crying again. “I am in love with you.”
He took a last puff on his cigarette and carefully mashed it out in her ashtray. “It wasn’t anything you said. I already sent the letter.”
She looked at him uncomprehendingly.
“I mailed it on the way over here.”
“No! No!” She began to beat on him with her little fists, not painfully. The sex scent rising off her and the aggression of his speech act inflamed him afresh. He thought of the time he’d staggered around her room with her impaled on him, how her smallness had made this excellent thing practicable. Fearful of falling back into the pit after so nearly breaking free of it, he grabbed her wrists and made her look at him.
“You’re a wonderful person,” he said. “You’ve totally changed my life.”
“That’s a good-bye!” she wailed. “I don’t want a good-bye!”
“I’ll write to you. I’ll tell you everything.”
“No, no, no.”
“Can’t you see this isn’t equal? I love who you are, but I’m not in love with you.”
“Now I wish I’d never met you!”
She threw herself onto the foot of the bed. The pity he felt was infinitely realer than the idea of being a soldier. He pitied her for being so small and loving him, and for the logical bind in which he’d put her, and for the irony of her having made him the person who would leave her, by introducing him to more existential forms of knowledge. He wanted to stay and explain, to talk about Camus, to remind her of the necessity of exercising moral choice, to make her understand how indebted he was to her. But he didn’t trust his animal self.
He leaned over and pressed his face into her hair. “I do love you,” he said.
“If you loved me, you wouldn’t leave,” she replied in a clear, angry voice.
He shut his eyes and was instantly half asleep. He forced them open. “I’ve got to go pack up my room.”
“You’re breaking my heart. I hope you know that.”
The only way out of the pit was to stand up, be strong, and walk away. When he opened her door and heard her cry out—“Wait!”—it nearly broke his own heart. Shutting the door behind him, he was seized by a spasming that he was surprised to recognize as sobbing. It was wholly autonomic, as uncontrollable as vomiting but less familiar—he hadn’t cried since the day Martin Luther King was assassinated. In a salty blur, he ran down a damply carpeted flight of stairs, past a thudding mass of Who sound in which the treble now was audible, down through a sharp smell of morning pot ignited in the common rooms, and out into cold, gray Urbana.