It wasn’t true.

  The truth was something else again. The truth was this: that she now had approximately the same sort of scene as before, with all the violent irresistible wanting, but with orgasm present where it had formerly been denied to her. She got that much—a simple climax—but it didn’t affect her otherwise.

  Damnit, maybe she was just oversexed. That was the old-fashioned way of looking at it, a fashion which her Freudian and Kinseyan orientation had taught her to dismiss as a gross simplification of the real thing. But you had to admit that it was a handy frame of reference, she thought. People could be oversexed or undersexed—or maybe just sexed. And when you were oversexed you needed more of it than the average, and you needed it more often than the average, and you—

  Hell.

  Double hell.

  She spent an hour in the library, doing as much research as possible on nymphomania and lesbianism. She read some wild stuff—Stekel, Reich—but nothing opened any doors or turned any keys. She was in the same spot when she stopped reading as she had been when she started. She knew a few more things, but none of the things she had learned seemed to have any real bearing on her own situation. She was in the same bind as ever, with women instead of with men, with climax instead of with frustration.

  All right, she asked herself angrily. Just what the hell do you want, Sue Dale?

  A good question.

  I want to be happy, she thought. I want to love somebody and to be loved. I want to make love like an ordinary person, I want sex to be important but not the only thing. I want to relax, I want to belong, I want to be happy, I want to be happy, I want to be happy, I want to be happy, I want—

  A broken record. I want I want I want.

  Over and over.

  What can you get for yourself, Susan Dale? Make the best of it, she told herself savagely. Make the best of it, have your fun, learn to accept yourself, and when that itch gets to be too damned much for you, why, go ahead and find a nice willing girl to scratch it for you.

  She left the library. She walked across the campus, covering ground in long strides, hoping she would be able to run into Rhona Tyler or one of the other gay girls who went to Clifton. That was what she needed. A roll in the hay, a tussle in the sack, that was what she needed now, that was what she had always needed, that, it seemed, was all she would ever need.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  RAYMOND HEENEY’S ROOMMATE was lying in bed reading when Raymond Heeney returned to the room around one-fifteen. The roommate raised his eyebrows.

  “Hey,” he said.

  Ray ignored him.

  “Guess you just never sleep here,” he said. “I ought to rent out your bed.”

  “I’m gonna use it now.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where the hell were you last night?”

  “Getting my ashes hauled, simp.”

  “Again?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s all you ever think about,” the guy said. “You’re turning into a goddamned sex fiend.”

  Jealous, Raymond Heeney thought. The shmuck was jealous. Well, he had a right to be. You didn’t spend a night with Jan Cameron every day in the week. And you didn’t find a girl who would do what Jan Cameron would do every week in the year, either. Damn few girls would do that. Damn few girls who looked like Jan Cameron had to do that—with her looks, guys would be glad enough to ball her anyway she wanted to be balled. But the thing of it was, she loved to do it. She got a kick out of it.

  He thought back to that bull session. Would you want your own wife to do it?

  Hell, yes, he thought. If my wife wouldn’t do it, I’d kick her the hell out of the house.

  He would want his wife to do it. He would want his wife to want to do it. That was the whole point.

  “Ray?”

  The roommate, the goddamned roommate. “What?”

  “I wish I had your luck with girls, man.”

  “It’s not a matter of luck. It’s skill.”

  “Yeah, I guess so. Anyway, I wish I had it.”

  “You never been made, have you?”

  “No.”

  “You ought to.”

  “No kidding. Hell, I know it.”

  He had an idea. Why not send the kid to Jan? She wouldn’t mind. According to her, she didn’t give a glorious damn who she put out for. The more the merrier, to hear her tell it. She was trying to get a girl scout merit badge for sex, the way he figured it. And she had the badge coming already.

  “Listen,” he said. “I got a girl for you.”

  “Who?”

  “You know Jan Cameron?”

  “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “That’s who I was with last night. She’ll wear you out, man. She’ll dry you up and throw you away. There’s not a thing in the world she won’t do.”

  “You think she’d go for me?”

  He laughed. “She’d go for Frankenstein if he could get with it,” he said. “Just go over, look her up. Tell her you’re a friend of mine. That’s all you got to do.”

  “You mean it?”

  “Sure I mean it.”

  The guy hesitated, then suddenly squared his shoulders and marched out of the room. Ray smothered his laughter, then sagged on the bed and closed his eyes. The son of a gun wouldn’t be giving him such a pain in the neck now, anyway, he thought. He’d get his ashes hauled with Jan and he’d be a man and everything would be fine. Hell, maybe if Jan really went to work on the kid he’d wind up being another tough stud like Ray! The two of them could be a regular team. If the kid developed any class, between the two of them they could knock over every available chick on campus.

  He grinned, very pleased with himself. Then he closed his eyes again and dreamed sweet dreams of Jan Cameron’s hungry and generous mouth.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  KITTY WAS GONE. He went around the house yelling for Kitty, wondering where in hell she was, and then he remembered the conversation with her, remembered that she had left, that she was divorcing him. He couldn’t figure out how he had managed to forget all about it. It was strange the way things were sliding in and out of his mind lately. Maybe it was the drinking, something like that. He couldn’t be sure, but whatever it was he thought he was going crazy. He kept losing memories. Things brightened and faded, back and forth, and he had trouble remembering things.

  But Kitty was gone. He remembered that much, and then he wondered where she might be right now, what she might be doing. Maybe she was looking for a body, he thought. Well, whoever the lucky man was, he hoped she showed the guy a better time than she had ever showed Mrs. Boulton’s boy, Matthew. Because little Kitty had never shown him a thing, not a damn thing.

  He sank into the Morris chair, scratched a match and managed to get a cigarette lit. Wasn’t there a bottle of blend somewhere around the house? It was hard to remember. It was getting hard to remember anything. All the things he had learned, all the studying he had done, all the bachelor’s degree work, all the master’s degree work, all the doctoral thesis stuff—he didn’t understand how you could forget so much when you could learn so much and—

  Everything got foggy suddenly. He lost the thread of what he had just been thinking about and sat motionless for three full minutes, his mind full of nothing at all.

  Oh, yes.

  A bottle. Somewhere.

  Now where had he kept the liquor? In the refrigerator? In the bathtub, like gin?

  He found a bottle finally, almost full. He took it back to the living room and sat down with it. He looked over at the little record player, tried to remember what records they had, tried to decide what record he might like to hear. He went over, selected a Mozart piano sonata, and started to put it on the player.

  He stopped abruptly and smashed the disc over his knee.

  One at a time, one at a time, he broke all of the records. He stood there like a man obsessed and smashed every single record. Then, when he had finished with the records, he jumped up and down on the player and reduced it to junk.

  Smashed.

  Smashed.

  That was it. That was the answer. You had to smash everything. You had to get smashed, and then you had to smash everything. That was what he had been trying to remember.

  He sat down in the Morris chair again and went back to the bottle of blended rye. He kept drinking, slowly but steadily, and when he stopped it was because the bottle was empty. He looked at the empty bottle for a few moments. Then he hefted it by the neck and threw it straight at the living room window. There was the sharp cascade of falling, breaking glass. Then silence.

  Smash everything.

  Everything!

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  THE SUN WAS gone now, hidden for the time being behind heavy, black clouds. The way the clouds were building up, it looked as though it would probably start to rain sometime in the course of the night. Jan Cameron lay on her back on the grass and looked at the sky and wished that she were dead.

  That boy—she didn’t even know his name. He had come to her, had blurted out that he was Ray’s roommate. That was all she knew about him. He was Raymond Heeney’s roommate. And of course he wanted to make love to her.

  She had not refused him.

  He was gone now. He had fumbled around, and she had prepared him, and he had sacrificed his virginity in the yawning maw of her antique lust, and he had dressed and gone, and she was lying on the golf course and waiting for the earth to open up and swallow her just as she herself kept opening up to swallow man after man. He was gone and she was there nude, with that skirt and that peasant blouse lying on the grass beside her. The clothing she had worn when she went with Matt that first time. She didn’t change her clothes nowadays. She wore the same stuff always, with no bra and no panties, and she never bathed and never washed her hands or face and just waited for more boys to come and put themselves inside of her and make the world go away, at least for a little while.

  She ought to get dressed, she thought. She waited for a few minutes, as if perhaps she could lie there nude for awhile and then a boy would come along and make love to her, as if she was really just spending her whole life letting boys and men make love to her and as though that was all she had been born for.

  Matthew Boulton had known about her. He had said she was nothing but a whore and a slut and a tramp, and he was right.

  Completely right.

  Thoroughly right.

  She stirred herself finally, got her clothes on. At least she could make a pretense of neatness. She would go back to the dormitory and stand under the shower until her skin felt clean again. She would brush her teeth a few dozen times—she had a horrible taste in her mouth, and it wasn’t hard to figure out how she had gotten it. Although, to tell the truth, it wasn’t such a horrible taste after all. You could get to like it, after awhile.

  But she had to clean herself up. A shower, some new clothes, a little lipstick, a dab of perfume—even if she was going to be a tramp and a slut and a rotten whore, at least she could look and feel like a decent girl, like a human being.

  She was ashamed to walk into the dormitory. She was a sloppy tramp and she was certain that everyone must know about her by now. A girl—one she had liked, one who had always been friendly to her—walked by her now and pretended not to notice her. They knew, all right. They hated her and despised her.

  She got undressed and soaked under the shower for a long time. She washed herself thoroughly, then got out of the shower and toweled herself dry. She had brought clean clothes into the big communal bathroom with her, and she put them on now—a pair of plaid slacks, a neatly-pressed white blouse. The boys wouldn’t like the slacks, she thought. You can’t get your hand under slacks. But at least she wasn’t wearing bra or panties. All she had to do was peel down the slacks and she would be ready for business.

  She put on makeup, lipstick. She studied herself in the mirror. The sinfulness seemed to show. Of course, she thought. You couldn’t hide it. Not unless you were Dorian Gray.

  She was on her way out of the room when she saw the razor blade.

  Why not? A quick slash across each wrist. That was all it would take. A quick red line across each wrist, almost painless, and then she would bleed quickly to death and it would all be over. Why not do it? Why not get it all over with once and for all, why not take the easy way out?

  Why not die?

  And she was all clean and well-dressed, too. There was no point in dying sloppy. She would be pretty in death, a little pale because of the loss of blood, but—

  It occurred to her suddenly that they would find her dead body and discover that she wasn’t wearing any underwear. How embarrassing, she thought. And then she thought how ridiculous it was to worry about embarrassment in that kind of situation.

  She picked up the razor blade, ran her thumb against the edge. So sharp! It would be easy. Just a quick couple of strokes and then it would be out of her hands—

  “Jan Cameron! Jan Cameron!”

  She jumped backward, feeling guilty and embarrassed. The razor blade fell to the floor.

  “Telephone for Jan Cameron,” someone was yelling. “A boy on the line!”

  Of course, thought. A boy on the line. A boy who had heard about Jumping and Jumpable Jan, a boy who wanted to get his piece before she put a price tag on it.

  She sighed heavily and went to the phone and wondered who the boy would be and what they would do and how much the two of them would enjoy it.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  THE PAPERS WERE signed, with Matt’s name neatly forged in the proper places. She had taken the bus to Vandalia Airport, and now she was waiting for her flight to be called. It was taking off in half an hour, a jetliner bound for San Antonio. There she would board a puddle-jumper to El Paso and walk across to Ciudad Juarez on the other side of the border. Within twenty-four hours she would cross over the border, not married but single, not married to Matt Boulton but legally divorced from him.

  Simple.

  Clean, simple. Like a surgical operation, in a way. A part of the body was defective and had to be removed before the whole body died of the defect. So you cut that body open and you opened it up and you excised that defective organ and got it the hell out of there and sewed up the body and everything was all right again. Clean and simple as an appendectomy.

  She remembered when Matt had had his appendix out. Just a month after they were married, and it had ruptured on him and there was a horrible ambulance ride to the hospital and she was on pins and needles because they had just been married and she was crazy in love with him and she thought God forbid that he was going to die. But he lived.

  And now, for all she cared, he might as well die.

  Past, she thought. Past, over, done with. You couldn’t start thinking that way. He did not count any more, and neither did the years she had wasted as his wife. That was something that had happened, something that probably should never have happened in the first place, and something that was going to be rectified. soon as she got to Juarez. You couldn’t feel sentimental about Matt any more than you could have feel sentimental about his appendix when they cut it out of him. The appendix had been ruptured and so was Matt, and the sooner she cut him off completely the better her life would be as a result.

  But she was cutting those years out of her life. Cutting them away, writing them off as an error, a big mistake, something to be now forgotten forever.

  And what if she screwed things up again? What if she spent two or three or six or ten years on some other project, some business or some career or some man, and it went stale? Could she just cut that off, too, and throw it away, and keep slicing off and casting away bits and pieces of her life until she was old? And then what would she be? An old woman, she thought. An old woman who had done nothing, who had nothing, and who was nothing.

  At the steps to the plane she hesitated, wavered.

  No.

  No, she was doing the right thing.

  She had to be doing the right thing.

  She sighed heavily and climbed the steps to the plane and got aboard and took a wing seat by the window. She fastened her seat belt and observed the NO SMOKING sign. The plane took off neatly and the NO SMOKING sign went out and she lit a cigarette and relaxed as the jet headed for San Antonio—and, by extension, for El Paso and for Ciudad Juarez and for freedom and a chance at a newer and richer life.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  “YOU KNOW,” RHONA TYLER said thoughtfully, “this was one hell of a mistake, dear.”

  They were sitting in the school coffee shop, sharing a bag of salted nuts and sipping Cokes, looking for all the world like a pair of friendly coeds instead of a pair of lesbian lovers. Sue put down her cigarette and looked at the girl.

  “A mistake,” she said softly. “Oh, I don’t think so. I think we had a fairly good time in your room.”

  “Don’t talk so loud.”

  “Nobody can hear me.”

  “God I hope not. Listen, finish your Coke.”

  “Why?”

  “I want to talk to you.”

  “Can’t we talk here?”

  “No. And for Christ’s sake don’t be coy, Dale. Coyness is not necessary.”

  Witch, she thought. But she didn’t argue. She finished her Coke and got to her feet and Rhona followed her out of the coffee shop and out onto the lawn.

  They sat down on a bench. Rhona said: “If you’ve got a brain in your head, you’re going to play it a lot cooler than you played it today, Sue.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I mean the whole roof can fall in on us if anyone figures out what we are. Girls who sleep with other girls get expelled from Clifton College.”

  “They shouldn’t.”

  “That’s beside the point. That’s how it works, Sue. And girls who have to be playing flesh games all the time are the girls who get caught. You ought to learn to take it easy. You can’t go crazy like this, needing it all the damned time—”

  “You weren’t exactly an iceberg yourself.”

  “All right. I wanted to have you, I admit it. That doesn’t make any difference. You can really mess yourself up if you get too promiscuous, honey. It’s not healthy. You used to be a tramp with men and now you’re going to be a tramp with women—”