SHORT STORIES: ‘One Night Stand, With Mittens’

One Night Stand

It was January, and I was back at college in New York after a two-week Christmas holiday break. My hometown boyfriend–a holdover from freshman year when I lived at home and was a dayhop at a Catholic college two bus rides away– had broken up with me in a most vexing manner. I had transferred to Barnard, a three-hour train ride away, and in my absence, my boyfriend’s heart evidently had not grown fonder. On the contrary, he proved unable to endure the distance, preferring convenience to my physical and intellectual charms. On our last real date together, we danced with abandon to the Temptations, who prophetically sang, “I’m losing you.” Alongside us in the gym were his friends and their steady girlfriends, all girls I’d met during my year as a commuter student.

And until two odd things happened, I had no idea that I was indeed losing him. First, he presented me with a very long black plastic cigarette holder for Christmas. I had ordered the Selected Poems of Stephen Spender for him from a bookshop on Fifth Avenue, carefully chosen just the right wrapping paper and blank gift card, and lovingly inscribed it with a quotation from his favorite Spender poem, “I think continually of those who were truly great” –very heady stuff. I sat on the brocade sofa in my parents’ living room holding the flat rectangular box and thinking it might be an imitation pearl necklace or a silk scarf. When I lifted the lid and saw the cigarette holder, for an instant I had the impulse to throw it at him, but I took it all in good humor. That was my first mistake, most likely inviting my soon-to-be-erstwhile boyfriend’s next move.

I gave a party between Christmas and New Year’s, inviting his crowd and their girlfriends, plus a few classmates from my high school days. He showed up, right on time, but with a very young woman in tow. Her name was Melissa. She was learning to be a cosmetologist. She was sweet and innocent, and she acted like my boyfriend was her boyfriend. It was a cliché, right? You know, “It’s My Party and I‘ll Cry If I Want to,” but I didn’t cry. I clenched my teeth, dissembling, while the party dragged on and on. Within two days, the cigarette holder was tossed in the garbage can in my girlfriend’s back yard, mingled with the wrapping paper, ribbon and other Christmas detritus. I had snapped my boyfriend’s pathetic little gift in two after I drank four glasses of cheap champagne in Anna’s kitchen. First, I demonstrated various uses for a plastic cigarette holder: chopstick; hair fastener chopstick; bookmark; cane for a troll; conductor’s baton. Then, I broke it two and started crying. Anna lit a cigarette for herself and then one for me. She told me my boyfriend was a jerk, that he was not my type, and that the hair stylist-to-be was a stupid little moron. I tossed back another glass of champagne and told her she was the best friend a girl could have.

I took the train back to New York, feeling rejected, rejectable, and ten pounds overweight. I had finals in two weeks, and I hadn’t opened one book since I got off the train a week before Christmas, my suitcase full of paperbacks for my American literature and epistemology classes. I vowed to subsist on coffee, hardboiled eggs and fruit, to drop that extra avoirdupois, and to snag all A’s and A minuses. Men were the very last thing on my mind.

The next afternoon, my dorm neighbor from across the hall rapped sharply on my door. I had been studying for hours, rereading The Scarlet Letter, writing up note cards to test my memory of novels, short stories, and the professor’s lectures. I couldn’t stop thinking back to that last rendezvous I’d had with the Bastard, as I now referred to him. My hair needed a good trim and a shampoo, and I was wearing my favorite study outfit, an old gray sweatshirt worthy of the Colgate toothpaste villain, Mr. Tooth Decay, and baggy jeans.

“You free tonight?” Rachelle asked brightly. I couldn’t imagine what she wanted from me. She was a poli sci major who never seemed to study but earned A’s in all her courses. “Time to get out the golden shovel,” was her favorite expression, and she repeated it like a mantra in the days before midterms and final exams. She was a petite, curvy girl with a perfect hairdo, large brown eyes, pale skins and freckles. She swore like a sailor, and her room was the most disorganized mess I’d ever seen. Yet she emerged daily from it, with that shiny swinging hair, in a perfect wool sheath dress, nylons and heels. She was engaged to be engaged to Sumner. No one had ever met him as far as I could tell, but when she wasn’t preparing to dazzle her professors on tests or papers, Rachelle was packing her suitcase for Boston. She flew there every two or three weeks on a cheap student fare. Sumner was in medical school and the relationship sounded very adult and serious.

“I’ve got work,” I told her.

“Oh, come on, I met this cute guy at a party last week, he’s in town just for tonight, and he has a friend,” she said.

“What about Sumner?” I asked her.

“It’s fine, it’s no big deal, just beers and cheeseburgers at the Gold Rail,” she said. This bar, on the far side of Broadway, was still unfamiliar territory for me. I hewed to the West End, where the politicos and poets drank beer and ate comfort food kept warm for hours on the steam tables. Ginsberg and Kerouac had once claimed the West End as their territory. The Gold Rail was the bar of frat boys and jocks, not my type at all.

I demurred again. “I have so much to read. My hair’s really dirty. Thanks, but I’m really not in the mood,” I told her. I didn’t want to admit to her that I had recently been dumped for a hairdresser-to-be.

She wouldn’t take no for an answer. “Just a couple hours,” she promised. “I met the friend today, he’s very nice. Graduate student in English, at Berkeley. From Maine.”

Now I was intrigued. “In English? At Berkeley?” I thought it over for about fifteen seconds and relented.

A few hours later, showered, shampooed, hair as presentable as possible, wearing the preppiest outfit I could come up with—pleated plaid skirt, pullover sorority sweater, tassel loafers and tights— I met Rachelle in the hall and we went down the stairs to the dorm lobby where our dates awaited us. Hers was boisterous and big, a football player type. Mine was slender, handsome and bookish looking. I was intimidated, because this Jake was 23, four years older than me. I had never been on a date with anyone that old.

The evening was full of beer, pitchers and pitchers of beer. I made many trips to the bathroom at the Gold Rail. I waved to girls I recognized, and they seemed surprised to see me at the athletes’ favorite watering hole. Jake told me that he was from Yarmouth, Maine, that his mother played the cello in the Yarmouth Symphony, and that he hated Berkeley and missed the East. As the evening wore on, Rachelle and her date increasingly ignored us and became more and more absorbed in one another. I became drunker and drunker and found myself laughing at almost everything Jake had to say.

It was a cold night, and at midnight when we left the Gold Rail, I realized I had lost my gloves. Jake wore a toggle car coat, a wool cap, and mittens. “Here,” he said, “wear this on your right hand.” He handed me one of his mittens. “Now, put your other hand in your pocket,” he told me. He did the reverse, and we walked up Broadway, weaving back and forth, my left hand and his right in our respective pockets, while we held mittened hands. He sang some Simon and Garfunkel, and I joined in.

In those days of in loco parentis, we had a one a.m. weekend curfew in the dorms. Couples gathered in the lounge area near the check in desk making out, more and more ferociously as the time of curfew drew nearer. I had often come in from a movie or the ballet with friends, glanced to the left and been taken aback by the amount of necking, petting and dry humping going on, on those settees and armchairs. I thought it was a distasteful display of undisciplined sexuality, and couldn’t understand why these people weren’t off at a frat house or in someone’s apartment bedroom, where they could satisfy their every urge out of the public view.

All the way back to Hewitt Hall, Jake was asking me to spend the night with him at his friend’s apartment. He pleaded. “No,” I told him. “No, I couldn’t possibly.” I was thinking of how he was going to take a late morning flight back to the west coast the next day. I’d probably never see him again, never hear from him again. I was drunk enough to say that to him. “What does that matter?” he asked.

We entered the dormitory, and I steered him to the left. It was almost empty, as few students had returned from Christmas break. We found a dark corner, far from the lights of the reception desk and the doorway. And there commenced the longest makeout session not leading up to having sex I’ve ever experienced, before or afterwards. Over and over, Jake asked me to come with him to his friend’s apartment. Over and over I contemplated it, presented rational arguments as to why I would not, then second-guessed myself. At one o’clock, the guard at the front desk announced that it was time for guests to leave so he could lock the doors. For a second I froze, wondering if I would go back out into the cold night with Jake, or go up to my room.

I said goodnight. He did not seem wholly disappointed that I had refused him. He gave me one more long, sensuous kiss and left.

For a few days I thought about him, his stories of growing up in Maine, his musical mother, his tales of graduate seminars at Berkeley. I wished he had asked for my number, or my last name, or my address. For a few weeks, I checked my mailbox, hoping for a postcard from him with a witty comment about Hawthorne or Leslie Fiedler.

Then I mostly forgot about him.

Exams came and went, and the new semester began. I made friends with some seniors who taught me to drink scotch and play “Who would you kick out of bed first?” They took me to the ballet, and afterwards, to dinner at a French restaurant, where we ate escargots and shrimp scampi, and drank three bottles of vin blanc. In the spring we went to the Cloisters museum and they talked about their plans for after graduation. I grew my hair long for the first time in my life, and for my twentieth birthday, my new friends gave me a box of hair ribbons. We shared inside jokes and met for dinner most weeknights, at the dorm cafeteria. They stayed on to graduate, and I went home, free, unattached and satisfied, to my last college summer.

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