It is possible that this has the same narrator as in the Lynn Kepler stories (e.g., "The Back of Paradise") but it is certainly on a different time-line. In this series, he is still a virgin in 1974.
*********
Chapter 1: The Hooker of Hamilton Heights
The story of how I landed my first girlfriend is pretty unconventional. At first glance, one would think we were completely unsuited for each other. Yet, although we irked each other at times, for a while we clicked.
Before her, I expected that I would meet a "nice" girl, however that was defined. I was looking for something long-term, not merely causal sex. Who I did wind up with was more than I had bargained for.
That girl was a fellow student, but she also did some amateur hooking around campus to make ends meet. She was brazen, profane, and she could turn nasty; she had an attitude that said she didn't give a shit about anything.
Yet I found her to be very witty and smart too. In the right mood, she could be quite affectionate towards me. And man, the sexual stuff she offered to me, including her kinky side, was beyond whatever I had ever hoped for.
She drew me into her web; then I turned it around and pulled her into mine. We're weren't particularly subtle about how we did it. She was too brash; I was too inexperienced to do anything but run on instinct. Love can be a wonderful but strange thing.
*****
Throughout my freshman modern European history course in the spring of 1974, Nora Meara sat between me and the windows. I caught her name during some first-day introductory chat but then I quickly forgot what her last name was.
Out of habit, most students in college classes gravitated towards the same spot in the room every day. I always kept an empty seat between us. Had I been more experienced and more assertive, I might have simply dropped in right next to her and chatted with her at the beginning and end of each class.
For a while, I noticed her clothes more than anything else. During the winter months, she wore jeans and boots most of the time. As the weather warmed up, I saw more of her body. She went for pullover tops and short skirts. One of my favorites of the latter was a cute blue denim one. Once in a while, she had a mid-length skirt for variety.
If she did wear jeans during the spring months, she invariably had a midriff-baring top. She seemed to need to have a certain amount of herself on display. When I was bored in class I would try to glance over at her; she never seemed to notice. If her navel was exposed I tried to look at that.
On her more numerous skirt-wearing days, she had a habit of splaying her legs out carelessly. I tried to determine what kind of panties she had but I never could get the correct angle for a view. I amused myself by imagining she had no panties at all.
After being in schools of one sort or another for fourteen years, my mind wandered at times in class. As the weeks passed, I assessed her more carefully, comparing her to other girls I had seen but didn't really know on campus. She was probably about five-foot-seven, but her legginess made her seem taller. I noted her lanky dark-blonde hair, fair skin, and steel-rimmed glasses.
I speculated about socializing with her somehow, even asking her for a date, but I never seemed to get an opening. She rarely -- perhaps actually never -- participated in class and she had little to say to me. In fact, she said very little to anybody else in the room.
Nora's attention must have wandered too as she spent a fair amount of time looking out the window. Our building, City College's Wagner Hall, was on a bluff called Hamilton Heights. Alexander Hamilton had indeed once lived in this neighborhood and his house still stood on Convent Avenue, just north of the campus.
Now, nearly 175 years later, the view from up here to the east showed long blocks of Harlem tenements and newer housing projects with the gray-green towers of the Triborough Bridge beyond. I wasn't sure that was what Hamilton had intended for America, but that was what we had now.
When the midterm papers were returned to us, she did complain to me about her low grade. She said, "Oh man, I can't believe it -- he gave me a D. This really sucks."
I wasn't sure she was even addressing me, but there was no one else close enough. I looked over and she turned the paper so that I could see it. By chance, I could also read the info on the title page and I finally caught her last name again: Meara.
"So what did you get?" she asked me.
"Ah, it looks like an A."
"It doesn't merely look like an A, it is one." I caught a tone of mean-spirited envy. She grimaced and turned away. By this point in the semester, I was getting the impression that she wasn't merely quiet; there was something morose about her.
******
In June, after the end-term paper had been assigned, I heard her say, "Hey, Paul." I glanced over at her. "Look, I'd like to talk to you about something, I mean something about this course."
I replied, "Sure, what is?"
"Tell you what, meet me over in the Finley cafeteria..." She looked at her watch, a delicate gold one. "In say, twenty minutes. We can have some coffee." That was in the building across the way from ours.
I nodded, "I'll be there." I tried to sound casual, but if she had asked me to meet her in the Mojave Desert I might have checked the Amtrak schedule to Barstow. In actuality, all I had to do was walk across the driveway to the student center.
"Great. I'll see you there." She grabbed her bag and walked out. I watched the back of her skirt, her long white legs moving as they carried her out of the room.
An anomaly that I couldn't figure out was why she just didn't walk over to Finley with me. But I accepted that as a minor detail; I felt upbeat. I had joined one of the student newspapers the previous fall but hadn't managed the land a date with any of the girls on the staff. For one thing, the number of female members was considerably lower than the male ones.
Now, in a surprising development, this Nora girl had suddenly chosen me -- for something, I wasn't quite sure what yet. When I got there I purchased my coffee and then went to look for her. She saw me and waved me over to her table
Her first few sentences seemed inconsequential, but I let her talk. I sat there thinking,
hey I'm on a date, just a coffee date, but it's a start.
This Nora girl was a bit on the sullen side from what I had seen of her so far; there was some kind of unhappiness in her.
I had the habits and thoughts of a nineteen-year-old virgin. I remembered the masturbation fantasies I had had about Nora: lifting up her little skirts, finding pretty panties or no panties at all. That was followed by coupling with her while standing up in a Wagner Hall restroom or taking her on the grungy sofa in a student newspaper office.
There really had been no Nora with me in that stall or office, but now she was here at the table -- steel-rimmed glasses, dark-blonde hair, short skirt, the whole package. For the first time, I was close enough to notice a few freckles on her face. It was just the two of us there with our lousy cafeteria coffee.
She spent about a minute complaining about that coffee. Then she said, "So, Paul, I've got a deal that I want to discuss with you."
I had expected some sociable student chat and I didn't know what she was talking about.
"Okay, what do you mean?"
She needed to set the scene first, "As I mentioned, I haven't been doing that well in this course. In fact, I'm sort of in trouble with it. As I told you, I got a D on the mid-term paper. You remember that?"
"Sure, I remember it."
"Well, since you seem to be doing so well with it -- I mean the course -- I could use some help with all this. I mean from you."
A fantasy came to me, sudden but almost complete. Maybe we could have study dates, I could help her with her work, and then, well, romance would bloom.
I said, "I could do that." I thought I would do more than that if she asked me, like throw my coat into the mud so she could cross a puddle. Of course, it was June and I didn't have a coat, but the point was: