3

“I don’t know what made me say it,” Page said, crushing his cigarette in an ashtray and walking nervously around his room. “We said it together. ‘I love you.’ It was the damnedest thing.” He clapped his hands against his sides and let himself fall on the couch next to Jack Mann. “Help me out, Jackson,” he said. “I don’t want a passionate romance with a freshman virgin.”

“You have something against freshmen?” Jack said.

“Well, I’m not in love with her, for one thing. I just said I was. You know, the moon and the rest of it. She smelled so nice.”

“I never saw you in such a hurry to back out of an affair before. No matter how she smelled.”

“I never worried about an affair before.”

“It’s obvious you’re nuts about the girl,” Jack said.

“The hell!” Page snapped. “She wants to get married.”

“Good for her.”

“You louse!”

“Hang on to her, boy,” Jack advised. “She’s a rare one.”

Page got up and paced around again. “Well, what do you do if you’re in love with a girl but you don’t want to marry her?” he asked.

Jack shrugged. “Live with her?”

Page grimaced and gave up.

* * *

But if Page complained, he was also intrigued with the idea of letting himself get hooked. He didn’t want to be married, it was true. But he didn’t want to be in love either, and that was already a lost cause.

Jack was not fooled. He was a sharp student of humanity. He had to be: it was part of his self-defense. Any man who feels for other men what Jack Mann felt has to guard himself carefully. He watches his tongue, which might slip; his hands, which might wander; his wisecracks and lies, and guards his feelings with a tough sense of humor.

The virtue of Jack’s abnormality was that he understood people instinctively. He knew Page, and nothing Page could say would hide from Jack his love for Sunny.

* * *

By the following spring, Sunny Rotheli was no longer a virgin. But it had all been accomplished in a beautiful place at a beautiful time: a starry evening, a rich, perfumed hotel room, a dime-store diamond. Sunny had felt a wistful nostalgia for the drafty auto and the cold October moon, but it couldn’t be helped. She had enough sense to realize she was special to him and that he would not take her there where he had made love to so many other girls.

Their infatuation did not abate, although Page kept hoping the thing would burn itself out from sheer overheating.

As for Sunny, all that mattered now was to get Page to propose. She tried everything: teasing, threats, even subversion. She complained to Jack and tried to promote sabotage from behind the lines.

But while Page would admit to any poetic excess of passion, he wouldn’t propose marriage.

“Live with me, then,” Sunny said mournfully.

“I can’t ask you to do that,” he protested.

“You aren’t asking me, you worm!” she said. “I’m asking you.”

“Somebody has to protect you from yourself,” he said. But the truth was he had promised himself a year or two of travel after college. He had seen Korea in the Marines and it wasn’t his idea of a pleasure cruise. Now he dreamed of Europe.

He had a little money and a lot of wanderlust saved up. He was sure he could write, and he was going to prove it in a Paris garret, find a rich older woman to keep him, become noticed and influential, and come home to claim Sunny in triumph.

Actually, beyond the daydreams, he didn’t know what he wanted to do, except give himself a champagne playtime before he settled down to the beans-and-gravy of earning a living. He meant to earn the living with his typewriter, with words. And he might even take Sunny at her word: make her his mistress and dispense with the marriage bit.

But as Jack kept telling him, Sunny was the kind of girl you marry and consider yourself damn lucky to have caught. She would make a poor and moody mistress but a sensual and loving wife. She needed security with one man. After that she’d be all loving and giving, like Sunday’s child.

“What do you know about women?” Page would blow off at Jack when they discussed it.

“I like ’em,” Jack said with a cynical amusement he couldn’t share with Page. Loneliness was the abiding condition of Jack’s life. It was the reason a close friendship like the one with Page meant so much to him.

“I like them too. But that doesn’t mean I understand them!” Page said.

“Hell, you don’t like them. You just love them.”

“I like Sunny,” Page restored.

“Oh, Sunny. She’s the one you’re going to marry. That’s the one woman a man has got to like as well as love,” Jack said.

“Thanks, Dorothy Dix. Why don’t you write a column on the subject? You’d make a mint.”

“Damn right I would,” Jack said. “I’d have every old maid in the country sending me sachets.”

“Including Sunny Rotheli,” Page said.

“She won’t be an old maid. If you turn her down like the ass you are, somebody else will grab her fast.”

“I’ll be through school in June, and by God, I’m taking off,” Page said, gazing out the window. “I’ve planned it for two years. Once you’re married, you’re stuck with furniture and drooling babies and a jealous wife. And eight hours of brown-nosing a day to support the whole ugly mess. No thanks, man. Not for me.”

“Not even with Sunny?”

“Not for a while.”

* * *

“He meant it, too,” Jack told Winkler. “Came June that year and he promised Sunny he’d be around all summer. She lived in one of the Chicago suburbs, Hillsburg—west, on the Burlington line.”

Winkler was motionless listening to this story that had started out like so many classic college romances and had turned slowly into something so frighteningly different. He was fascinated and repelled at the same time by the brilliant little man talking to him. Jack was too calmly frank about himself; so frank he confounded Winkler, who found that he had become the helpless audience of a sort of modern ancient mariner.

“So Page went back on his promise, and didn’t see Sunny?” Winkler asked when Jack paused for a drink.

“He took off for Europe,” Jack said. “He was afraid if he saw her once more he wouldn’t go. It was then or never. But the poor guy outfoxed himself. He was even unhappier over there than Sunny was back here.”

“What did Sunny do?” Winkler said.

“What could she do? Went back to school for two more years. She didn’t see him again until the summer before her last year in college. I had gone to New York by that time, but they told me about it later. Page had just started to work for the Chicago Tribune. Decided to use his writing ability in journalism.”

“Was Sunny still in love with him?” Winkler asked.

“Yes. Oh, she got engaged to some hometown guy, and she might have married him. It shook Page up to find that ring on her finger. He proposed to her on the spot ... gave her such a rush she couldn’t turn him down. But when she said yes, neither of them suspected their marriage would end up the horrifying mistake it did.”