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windshield until the heater took hold. Electricity buzzed in the pit of my stomach.
Come and get me
, she had said.
I need you to come and get me
. I was half drunk and tense with excitement and frightened. Both hands on the wheel, I took in a big lungful of smoke without taking the cigarette from my mouth. Nineteen years old, I felt that something was about to happen, something that would fix me forever like an insect caught in amber, something that would commit me beyond deviation or retraction or even regret. God was about to put his mark on me and I knew it and it scared hell out of me. Now, looking back with the forgiving, solicitous, but lordly wisdom of adulthood, I have no quarrel with what I felt then. I was right.
    She was sitting alone in the empty Student Union in a big leather armchair near the console radio that stood at the far end of the lounge. It was 8:30 on a Saturday night. But that made no difference. The Student Union was always empty. Rugs, upholstered furniture, piano, card tables, magazines, space, always empty, just like the lounges in Boys’ Clubs and YMCAs. Later I would see similar lounges in USOs and military day rooms, always empty, and in their emptiness, a symbol of the echoing void between the young and those who administered them.
    She had on a black cashmere cardigan sweater and a plaid skirt. She got right up when she saw me.
    “I got my white charger outside,” I said. “Want to get up behind and ride off?”
    “Yes.”
    “Where you want to go?”
    “I don’t care. I just had to get away from Nick.”
    I held her camel’s-hair coat and she slipped into it and I smelled her perfume, and barely, beneath the musk, the scent of her, which was a little like the scent of crushed bittersweet leaves that my father had taught me to chew when I was very small.
    In Herman’s Chrysler again we drove slowly downtown.
    “Nick wanted to get engaged,” Jennifer said.
    “And you didn’t want to?”
    “No.”
    “Probably thought you loved him,” I said.
    “Well, I …” She stopped and looked over at me. I couldn’t see her face in the dark car, but I felt bad. It was an easy point and she didn’t need to be scored on right now.
    “What I felt was affection—what he wants is ownership,” she said.
    “Sometimes,” I said, “it almost seems that you’re even smarter than I am.”
    She smiled at me.
    I could feel the tension shivering along my arms. I felt as if I were trembling internally.
    “Want to go to Bill’s Café?” I said. “No one ever goes there. We’ll be alone.”
    She nodded. I thought about Nick at the frat party looking for his date, full of himself and his surprise, the ring in his pocket, looking for Jennifer and slowly realizing something and feeling the sickness in his stomach and the humiliation and feeling alone.
    Bill’s served draft beer in steins for thirty cents. We each had one. Across from me Jennifer’s face was almost gaudy with possibility, serious and grateful, full of relief,intensely interested in me, affectionate, gorgeous, and electric with personality, dense with contained animation, beautiful beyond correlative, desirable beyond speech. I was numb with desire, terrified with epiphany, barely able to breathe.
    “I’m sorry to break up your Saturday night, Boonie,” she said.
    My throat was nearly closed. I took a shallow breath and said, “You didn’t.” My voice was hoarse, I could hear it shaking. “I would rather be with you than do anything else on earth.”
    She smiled and looked down and took a tiny swallow of her beer. I struggled for steadiness. Here it was, my life, every happiness, all meaning, here staring at me, now, not yet twenty years old and I had to turn the corner and win it or lose it right now, without help, with almost no experience, with my emotions tearing about inside in jagged and mongrel confusion.
    I said, “You got to tell him.”
    Jennifer’s head came up and she stared at me. “Nick?” she