Girl Getting Educated at Noon on Sunday

"Would you have Dinner with me one night this week?" he asked the girl at a pause in the foaming, churning breakers of sound. It rose, it rose again, it fell, it rose, and then there was a pause.

"No," she answered, smiling sweetly.

"But I thought—you seem—that look on your face——" She had a way of fixing her eyes against his as they danced. She had a way of moving against the way he moved.

"Sure I grok you," she said.

Slightly comforted and emboldened, he nevertheless gave up and thought he might as well be a scientist about it. "What did I do wrong?" he asked.

"Nothing," she said. The amplified sitar, the electric violin, the wired harpsichord and the pile-driving rhythm instruments were being launched once more to another victory against the stoned and the stunned. There was a willingness to be overcome.

"You have a friend?"

"Nothing special," she said. "I came here with a group—all friends."

"Then why not?"

She stood a little sideways, gazing at him with her clear sweet hilarious smile, as the acid-rock music of the Salvation Auditorium in San Francisco crested once again. He liked her eyes—smile wrinkles at the corners of the eyes of a girl who couldn't have been more than 22. He liked the healthy slim California look: silk blouse, checked Carnaby pants, slouching healthy spine—a gutsy challenging teasing funny chick. Good style.

"Then why not?" he asked again.

"I don't make dates. Plots, no. I don't make that scene," she said.

He frowned. "What a drag."

"But I'll go home with you now," she said, without changing the expression but leaning now from right to left instead of from left to right. "Cuba, si—plans, no."

He had her by the elbow and was pushing through the crowd toward the door. He was thinking: We both must smell of smoke. He was thinking: But no beer, that was another generation. He was thinking: Oh, man, let's get out of here, and lucky the car is parked nearby, before she changes her mind. Tu penses, donc tu n'es pas—think a little less, please. This is the time to shut it off.

The Anonymous Artists of America, a strong acid-rock group, was pouring its ardent heart and amplified soul into a song called When I Was Worried:

When I was worriedYou made the stars turn pinkWhen I was worriedYou taught me not to thinkYou said you'd make me feel realfineJust sign here on the dotted lineAnd then you made me love you, Dr. Swain.

Or maybe the song was called Dr. Swain. The dance at the Salvation Auditorium south of Mission Street in San Francisco had not yet come to the scheduled feature attraction: silent Zen contemplation of stones, pennies and corncobs by everyone seated in a circle. However, in the meantime, while waiting to draw up legs in the mandala posture, there was pop and op body painting, there were strobe lights changing everyone into stop-action dancers, there was the band, there was the drip, bubble and bounce light show, there were two projectors doing bits of film, there were Hell's Angels and Berkeley students, there were free apples, free licorice, there were posters and petitions to sign and costumes and the dreamy joy making of people in every known variety of high. Including horniness. The previous number had been introduced by the bushy-bearded leader of the band as "an oldie but a goodie, a dusty diamond, a pearl of some kind of price.... Some a you folks out there might remember gettin' pregnant to this song, 'way back in nineteen and sixty-four." The way his beard grew, it looked as if he were walking upside down. He was wearing ecstatic dress—swirls, spangles, silks. The crowd included everything, even clean-shaven gawkers. Including Jim Curtis, just looking around tonight and just finding this girl, this lovely sweet funny girl whose name he didn't even know yet. He would get her outside before he would ask her to repeat her name. He hadn't been able to hear it over the Anonymous Artists of America. It would be better, perhaps, to ask it when they were already on their way.

"I only," she was saying. "I only," she was explaining. "I only," she murmured sweetly at him, "go with people I grok by accident. Dating is a drag."

"Yeah, sure," he said, thinking this was a time to emphasize the areas of agreement.

"Sometimes it means you're lonely. Sometimes it means you're going home with Dr. Swain, say, or nobody else, and that's something else. But I'd rather make it by myself than play that girlie-girl-girl game, the cop-out sex game, you know?"

"Sure, yeah," he said, being on the safe side. He would disagree later. Now was still the time to be agreeable, even a little more. "Jeez, they're a good band," he said.

"They're coming up strong. Write their own songs, communal 'em together, too."

"Who's Dr. Swain?"

She gave him her first puzzled and disappointed look. It crossed her charmed, pleased, healthy, sinewy face like a cloud; it made her body bend another way, backward and looking, as if she were wearing bifocal granny glasses, octagonally dubious. What had he done wrong? How had he let her down? "You don't know who Dr. Swain is?" she asked.

He walked on without answering. He would not compound his sin. He would wait and see if maybe Dr. Swain came to mind. As a matter of fact, he knew lots of doctors—surgeons, internists, Ph.D.s in various fields, particularly the Romance area—and he himself was a professor of French at San Francisco State; but how could a chap know everybody, such as Dr. Swain? It's a big country—the scene is big. She seemed to forgive and forget his failure; for, a moment later, emerging from the convolutions of fret, he found her still by his side.

Out through the crowd; out into the crowd waiting on the sidewalk, the kids without the $2.50 to get past the guards, the white cops brooding, the kids selling revolutionary buttons (Yellow Power, Support Viet Rock, Marcel Proust Is A Yenta), the musicians from the next group, the Santa Fe Weed, unloading their cargo of horns, strings and fuse boxes from their paisley-painted hearse, the astonished winos, relics of pre-mind-expansion, stunned in the doorways, an urban-renewal expert with a clipboard, counting the traffic, the Negro cops watching, the idlers noticing, the pile-up of cycles and Vespas and Hondas, the sports cars slowing down, the teeny-boppers giggling in duos, hoping to be invited in. Air, blessed sea-drift air of San Francisco. Jim took a deep breath. A noise of revving entered with the air, but it was oxygen, all the same. The lungs can take vibration. The girl—his girl—was smiling at a spade cat in spats, opera slippers and a long white double-breasted parking-attendant coat with the words Rent-a-Trip stenciled in psychedelicecstatic script above the pocket. Jim's lungs could not take this vibration.

Uncool was his spirit.

An effort. Wars are won by the steady. A moral equivalent of war must be fought by new forms of steady.

Uncool to cool, over, he thought.

Abruptly, Jim Curtis had one of those ideas that provide a turning point of sorts—for an evening or for a life, depending on the energy of the decision and the richness of deposit it leaves after combustion. He swung round on the crowded sidewalk, a sidewalk like a Turkish bazaar, and, half facing her, put his arm about the girl whom he was escorting to his apartment and, instead of asking her name, he took her chin in his hand, pressed it upward gently and kissed her; and then, not dislodging his mouth, he slipped around and they slipped together and kissed deeply there amid the murky crowd. Someone nearby was saying mumble-mumble-mumble. Jim did not care to listen. He was kissing. When they separated, the girl said, "It does good to kiss someone now and then."

"Yes, it does good," he said.

"I didn't expect that," she said.

"Neither did I."

She smiled sweetly. "You probably didn't hear my name," she said. "Sue Cody."

"I'll tell you my name, too," he said, and told her. She moved her lips, as if she had trouble remembering names, though she could always recall the face of the man who had kissed her. She looked as if she had not very often been kissed; felt, squeezed, taken home, rumpled, jumped on, yes, but not, like this, just kissed on the street by a man delighted with silk blouse, narrow pants, graceful dancer's slouch, well-articulated spine. However the clothes clung to her, he realized that he had thought until kissing her that she was a slender, willowy colt of a girl. Well, she was a slender and willowy colt, but she was also opulent. And smart. And funny. (You can tell all that from a kiss? he asked himself.) And crazy. (From a kiss? You can tell? Jim?)

"Mumble-mumble-mumble," she said, and smiled radiantly. "And just think of Buffalo Bill; that way, you can remember my name," she said.

"Wha'?"

"Think about it, Fred. It'll come to you."

"You're tough, aren't you?"

For answer she said nothing. She slid over toward him as close as she could. She took hold of his arm. She was humming When I Was Worried. Well, that's a hard tune to keep. She was clever, she had music in her, probably mathematics, too; or she had heard it a lot. And tough, to her age, he recalled, it means boss, it means very fine.

It was one of those easy drives home, knowing that the mystery is to be unraveled and no fright in it. Pleasure, not pride; pleasure, not anxious lust; joy in the certain slide of present and coming events. There was a nimbus of fog about the street lamps. A few deep baying notes reverberated from the Golden Gate—freighters, fog. Tonight Jim liked himself. This was a surprising pleasure, too.

It does good to kiss a girl, he thought. And a strong acid-rock moll is used to going home with strange men, perhaps, but not so used to being kissed impulsively first on the wide space of sidewalk in front of the Salvationist Building. Oh, Sue Cody, I like you, he thought. She was making Jim like himself. That's a nice way to begin a friendship and end an evening.

It sort of occurred to him that like maybe they would just go up to his place and scramble some eggs in wine and talk and drink a bit of wine or smoke a bit of pot (he kept it with his collection of Rimbaud, Verlaine, René Char, Henri Michaux and St. John Perse). Just that. Maybe no more. A girl who took to a kiss so sweetly might understand. It was a way to dissolve nervousness: Go slow. Sure, she would understand; but then, it was not necessary to go slow, she had understood so well already, he had understood her so well, it was not necessary to understand, he was not nervous—not, not, not nervous—well, not very nervous. Instead of 10 percent delight and 90 percent nervousness, which was the usual proportion on first meetings, it was only 10 percent nervousness and 83 percent delight. The minority seven percent was divided among curiosity (five percent), residual panic (one percent) and fatherly concern, hypoglycemia, itchy nose and effort to recall cleanliness of undershorts (trace factors).

"Let's kiss again. I grok that," she was saying.

"Can't. Driving."

"Mind if I——"

"Go right ahead. I'll keep my eye glued to the road and my mighty hands on the wheel. My iron will enables me to respond without moving."

He paused at the intersection. Her breath was upon his cheek and her merry eyes were examining his jaw line. In the throbbing neon of a corner bar (Das Gupta Sutra, did it say? Could it say that? Could a bar get away with an Indian raga neon sign?), she was acquainting herself with his profile ("Jim Curtis, not Fred," she was saying), and then she was tenderly pressing her lips to his cheek, she was leaning over the gearshift, her hands were exploring, her....

"Wait!" he said.

She pouted.

"My iron will," he said, "even with all my steel on the side of the National Safety Council, we are about to become a mere statistic in the annals of sober driving, if you keep that up."

"You don't love me," she said.

"I want to stay alive in order to get you home and jump on your bones," he said.

This sentimental comment seemed to console her.

"What's my name?" she asked. "Quick!"

"Suecody-as-in-Buffalo-Bill."

"Right. Very good. I don't have a phone, it's a drag. But we're here, aren't we, 'cause you stopped the wheels, and that's what counts."

"We're here," he said, meaning they were there. The top of Twin Peaks, where he lived, lay shrouded in wisps of fog, thick rolling stretches and then layers of clear mountain air. They were washed in the damp ocean currents slowly drifting through the Golden Gate on a mild October evening. Smoke and noise and confusion were being rinsed away; hair would smell good; he took his time leading her up the walk to the harebrained wooden steps. It was a house broken up into apartments—a dental student, a secretary who voted to the right but bounced on her bed with hippies, the shrewd old lady who owned the building. Jim's apartment was the best one, the one with a fireplace and a view of the cool city. Hang up the painted bodies, he wanted to tell her (Sue Cody, he would remember the name); hang up the rock bands and the strobe lights, hang up the Goodwill Industries clothes, hang up the hang-ups, we're home.

"We're home," he said.

"I grok it here," she answered.

"You're not here yet."

"Close enough. I grok it."

He switched on lights and lit the fireplace. He burned real oak logs, not pressed sawdust. He was pleased that she could see his books and papers on his desk. He was hoping she couldn't hear the rhythmic sound of the right-wing hippie upstairs. He had met her in such a frivolous way, he wanted her to think him serious. If he had met her at school—a graduate student, a secretary—he would have hoped for the good luck to impress her as frivolous. "Play against my type, whatever it is," he said.

"What?"

"I'm mumbling to myself. I live alone and get to talking to myself."

"Well, you're not alone now, are you? Let's kiss again."

Hand on tight pants and nothing beneath them. Hand on silken blouse. Gentle mouth and hard right hand. Gentle left hand rubbing and hard mouth. "Oh, good, good," he said.

She broke away, laughing. "Do you know what you're doing?" she asked.

"Trust me."

"But I could feel your heart pounding."

"That's all right, trust me."

"Gee, Jim. Jim, that's a, you're a, I mean a funny person. Again!"

And they kissed and he made a sweet slip-slip-slipping sound as he pulled the blouse out. He tugged, it caught, it gave, she greedily explored him. "Would you believe I never kissed like this before?" she asked.

"Don't say would-you-believe," he said.

"I never did. More, more," she said.

Later, he thought, he would try to figure her out. Now was not the time for that. She was shameless without clothes on. He switched off the light and she stood at the window, looking out at the dim and deserted street. No one could see in, but still, how did she know that? She stood naked in the window, musing over the bushes gently swaying in the wind and fog, while he fled to the bathroom. He spent a few minutes there.

She called to him: "What's that noise upstairs?"

"Thump-thump?" he asked.

"Right."

"Never mind," he said.

"Groovy," she said. "You hear me? I like your house."

He waited before returning. He wanted a space of silence. Let her look out the window; let her absorb the quiet of Twin Peaks and being with this man, Jim Curtis, who he was. He wanted to be easy with her, all organs easy and relaxed, ready to play. When he returned, she was still naked in the window, in the light of the street, bathed in a bluish suffusion that seemed to come from within her flesh rather than from the fog-diffused glow.

"You look blue," he said.

"It's from inside. You've heard about bions? My bions are glowing."

"It's the light off the street."

"You don't know what bions are, friend, and that's why I dare to say it. Dirty, dirty, dirty talk, in a way. It means I like you." She said like instead of grok.

"Bions?" he asked.

"Let's now," she said, suddenly hoarse, tugging at him. "Oh, you're sweet and I like you."

"Sue."

Returning to himself by her side, Jim wondered if it would be all right to ask her for a date in, say, five minutes. To meet again in this bed in five minutes. Or would that be uncool? Or should he go all the way and propose meeting also tomorrow, no matter what she felt like tomorrow? Dare he make a plan with her? Dare he ask her to make a plan?

Here he was, her body opened to him, joyful to him, and he could do anything with it, with her—perhaps—but tomorrow was the great question, and tomorrow and tomorrow, where she said she lived only by impulse and happenstance.

"Would you?" he asked.

"Would I what?" she said.

"Never mind. Later."

"Do you like music, maybe?" she suggested. One toe moved as if to prod him off the bed toward his rig.

"Yes, sure."

"You got any raga-rock? The Four Tops' freak-out of Reach Out I'll Be There? Any folk backlash soul? The Ballad of the Green Bra?"

"Uh," he said, "the Jean-Paul Kreder Ensemble doing Chants de la (concluded on page 90) Girl Getting Educated (continued from page 84) Renaissance? There's Perdre le Sens Devant Vous, there's...."

Silence. "Well, any Beatle record is OK. Rubber Soul."

There would always be the danger with this girl of her taking over. That was the second danger. The first was that she would just disappear into thin unamplified raga-rock in the distant air. Danger made Jim's nose itch. He was looking for danger. The moral equivalent of war was suddenly this gear-laden, eyes-aslant, body-greedy young lady. He wanted to open her up to the world beyond tripping and Motown records: to Jim Curtis.

He was not sure he could manage. To persuade her that she needed him, but for what? To learn French? What else did he know that she didn't know?

Maybe he could just give up. Senator Everett Dirksen, he thought, plays it cool.... Well, he would follow his nose, and where his nose led him—ah, that was nice.

She was sighing. "Nice, nice," she was saying, "oh, yes."

He forgot all his ideas and plans. She was delicious.

• • •

An hour later, she sat up suddenly and pulled the sheet over them both. "You don't have to take me home," she said, "if you don't mind my spending the night here."

"Mind?" he said incredulously.

"Well, some men, they like to be alone afterward, I don't know, I met a boy one time he had to change the sheets and all. You never know when you'll find a freaky kind. He had all sorts of ideas he wanted to try out, but afterward—clean sheets, no me. I didn't grok that."

"Sh."

"Another one, he wanted a full meal sent up by the Chinese Chinkaroony Kitchen. Wow. Not a snack—food food. And then he had a frozen pizza, it was more like a waffle with cheese. I'm used to a guy he wants his morning gruel before he goes out into the rice fields, but—— And then the real freak, he——"

"Never mind, I don't want to hear," he said.

"Yeah, I suppose," she said into the dark. "Maybe you're sleepy. Am I losing my mystery, talking so much?"

He laughed and rolled over upon her and kissed her cheek, licked her cheeks, kissed and butted her gently, and she giggled and sang, " 'When I was worried, You taught me not to think,' " and pretty soon they must have both been asleep, because he heard a dawn bird twittering. The fog lay heavy outside. They had never drawn the curtains. He should get up or the sun would wake them. He would get up soon. He would get up right away to draw the curtains. He was sleeping.

Hours later, when she saw his eyes open, one at a time, it turned out that she had been waiting for his two eyes so she could say, "You know what? You taught me to sleep with a man, to sleep. I was comfortable. I was lying there in the crook of your elbow——"

She had been lying there, warm and obedient, asleep, yes, from when he almost got up to pull the curtains.

"It's not bad," he said, "to do that."

"No," she said submissively, "it's not bad to do that, either."

She didn't make dates, but she would stay home with him now. She didn't make plans, but she would search in his eyes with the love-me look, the I-love-you look, eyes glowing and sweet, tender for real, feeling for real, desire for real, all there for him now. No, she would tell him nothing much about who she was. ("Well, you know...." she said.) No, she would make no promises for the future. "It's so beautiful right now, let's not think ahead, let me now, let me do that now, let me, oh, let me sweet——"

It's not so bad to do that.

It was nearly noon.

What if she was right and he was wrong? What if her way, no plans, was the right way, and his way, think ahead, think about protecting her, think about the future, was the wrong way? He had taught her to kiss, true; he had taught her to sleep sweetly, tightly rolled against him, all right, yes; but what if she could teach him about snatching joy on the run? He would be grateful. He caressed her body, thinking this over. He rubbed her tummy. She was saying shyly, "Can we kiss again?"

She tasted good. Her skin shone with good health. "Wild rice, no sugar, but honey, no candy, fruits but not too much, whole-grain cereals, good things like that, what's grown in the area— corn——"

"It's a good thing, that's all. It's not the macrobiotic eating."

She giggled.

"Now should we get up?"

"If," she said, sighing, "you want to."

It was that reluctant sighing remark that led him into his false step. It was his own fault, but it was her sigh that led him. Was she tired? Was she disappointed? "Was I ...?" he asked. "Was it ...?"

She smiled with that bright alertness he recalled from the stranger he had met less than a day earlier. "Well." she said, "I've known boys who came more often than you,"—she marshaled her ideas briskly—"but I don't know, it's nice with you."

"You're the second best in that department I've ever known," he said maliciously, furiously. "You're the third or fourth prettiest girl I've ever met, and in the sack, you know, making it, you're fairly close to the top—maybe even second, as I said. Or third, anyway. You like that? You like that, kid?"

"Oh," she said.

"Use a little imagination. Look: Other person here! Me human being! Me no Tarzan—me sentient critter! Me jealous, me proud, me——"

She stroked him gently. "You nice boy," she said. "Look, all I meant was—oh, I hate to go out on a limb about anything—I like you."

He looked at her straight in the eyes, as he had done only a few hours ago, already it seemed an age ago, finding each other in the crowd on the dance floor. Yet what did he know about her? What else did he know about her, Buffalo Bill Sue Cody whatever-her-name? "I like you very much," he said.

"I like you very much," she repeated in a tone like his.

And they both laughed together.

"It sounds like hypnotism," she said, "we say it so often, but it feels good. Oh, it do."

"It isn't necessary to tell the whole truth," he said. "Let me explain this situation to you—this sort of situation. You can express the good part, that's enough. "

She looked hurt. "But weren't you asking me? I did say something wrong, Dr. Swain?"

She poked him. She wanted him to giggle along with her.

He swung his legs down to the floor. He sat, slightly slumped, on the edge of the bed. She stroked his spine, thinking about the massage, about yoga, about sport, about all the things that told her that his Posture spelled discouragement in a questioning curve of spine. He was sulking. He was disappointed. He was wondering what had got him into this. He was jealous. He was thinking about a future of deception. He was going to ask her to be kind. He was about to ask her to be loyal and faithful. He was about to try to make her forget everything but him. He was making trouble for himself. He was making trouble for her.

She was following his eyes avidly. She was ready for the new stage. She was obedient to him, as she had been obedient to her Negro, her Mexican, her hip nonpainters and media-mix experts. She was a sweet girl. She grokked him for more than the moment.

And so she could learn to be miserable; that is, to fall in love. The afternoon sun lay aslant on their still, willing bodies.