RoseAnn Discovers Dominance Pt. 35

I was eating lunch in the cafeteria with Paul when I drew Suzie's photo from my bag and handed it to him.

His eyebrows lifted. "She's for real?" exclaimed Paul. He held the photo delicately between his index fingers. "She's gorgeous!"

"And a little demanding and rough around the edges," I said. "But she's actively looking for the type of man you say you want to be."

He read the information printed on the back of the photo. "I'm a little intimidated. A professional model? She sounds out of my league. Can I think about it? " His face was a beet red.

"Not for long. Opportunity knocks, but it doesn't wait on your convenience. You told me what you want, and while you're puzzling about it, along comes the perfect opportunity. Don't let it slip away."

"Should I call her?"

"How about a double date with Craig and me? I'll set it up. That way, there's no commitments either way."

I returned to the apartment mid-afternoon. In a few phone calls, I'd set up a Wednesday evening double date at The Berghoff on Adams Street, a stone's throw from the Art Institute. Though the Berghoff typically bustled every night, Wednesday was quieter than most.

I sat at my desk and began working on a calculus assignment, but I couldn't divert my attention from the manila envelope on the corner of the desk. Angela Whitten had given it to me after Don's memorial service. I'd still been an emotional wreck after betraying Craig, and I'd just tossed it on my desk when I returned home. Just what keepsakes had Don collected, anyway?

I upended the envelope onto my desk blotter. There were the two photos I'd seen already--me at 17, and Don and I at the Senior Prom the following year. There were also a few movie tickets, a thin notebook, and a cellophane envelope.

The cellophane envelope was frail with time, and I had to handle it with my fingertips. It contained a small lock of black hair, tied with thin green string. I recalled the time he'd crept up behind me and cut it, over my laughter and feeble protests. My hair had been much shorter then.

There was also a square of white cardboard. I carefully lifted it from the cellophane. A single hair was held to it with Scotch tape. The tape was yellowed and dry, ready to fall off at a touch. Puzzled, I examined it closely until I was certain--it was a long, coiled pubic hair, jet black and almost certainly mine. There was only one way he could have gotten that--from his teeth or his clothing after that final date.

Tears came to my eyes when I realized again how terribly I must have hurt him. The only thing he had to remind him of the night in King's Grove was that lone pubic hair. He'd kept it all that time, perhaps taking it out from time to time to relive the night in his imagination. He would have to have known that his wife would find it someday. She'd hinted that there were 'more personal' items in the manila envelope, but I'd never have guessed just how personal.

I hoped Angela had given him what he seemed to need so badly.

I picked up the little pocket-sized notebook. The first few pages were filled with 'I love RoseAnn', written over and over in pencil. This continued for several pages, and I turned the leaves to see how long he'd continued, until I came upon a full-page pencil sketch of myself. I'd forgotten his talent for sketching.

As I turned the pages over, there were more sketches of me. Some were close-ups of my face or my legs. But the last one depicted our moments in the car. In that sketch, I lay back against a rear door of his car, my legs spread, my head thrown back, my eyes closed. He crouched between my thighs, face buried in my pussy.

A tear dripped on the corner of the page. I hadn't realized I'd begun to cry. I dabbed my eyes with a Kleenex.

The corners of the pages were decorated with hearts and more 'I love RoseAnn' scribbles here and there, decorated with doodles. As I turned the pages, I found drafts of letters that he'd apparently wanted to send to me. None were complete, and all were crisscrossed with changes and corrections. But I only riffled through the pages, afraid to read. The sketches had already made an emotional wreck of me. I stuffed the papers back in the manila envelope.

My first thought was to destroy the envelope and its contents. But these artifacts were my only link to Donald. If I'd acted differently that one evening in King's Grove, my life might be very different now. What if I'd rejected Craig when he begged to go down on me after the Cubs game? I'd still be fruitlessly searching for the right man, or I might even have gone crawling back to Mike. I owed everything to Donald as well as to Craig.

I put the manila envelope carefully away in my bottom dresser drawer where Craig wouldn't look. Unlike me, he respected privacy and would not go snooping. He would never see the contents of that envelope.

Epilogue

It happened that Paul and Suzie hit it off immediately. In fact, they went straight from our double date at the Berghoff Restaurant to her apartment. I didn't see Paul in class for two days, and when he did show up, he seemed more relaxed and content. Over the next years, the relationship continued to grow, just as Craig's and mine did. He didn't discuss the details with me, but there were times when he had to stand in the drafting class and could only sit with obvious pain. When Susan and I met, generally while modeling or at Rachel's 'consciousness raising' meetings, she was a much more agreeable person than she'd been on our first meeting.

Candy's story took a downturn when she one day found herself pregnant. Her blond boyfriend disappeared. She was forced to return to Bitumen to have her baby in the face of community gossip and shame. But she was far from the only young woman in Bitumen to have a fatherless baby, and she soon faded back into town society. It was years before she married and achieved what I'd call a normal life.

I enjoyed a few minutes of celebrity when I appeared in a full-page advertisement in Chicago Magazine, wearing a dazzling blue, black, and silver dress. Jimmy had done wonders retouching the photograph. Whatever the effect on Harley's business, I was assured of a steady flow of opera dresses thereafter.

Mike served his year in Viet Nam and returned to Bitumen with a pregnant Japanese wife in tow and the chip still on his shoulder. He was the only man in Bitumen that could get away with bringing someone of another race to town. Since Tomiko was a Christian, she soon found acceptance in the Church of Christ. Mike brought Tomiko to our Independence Day and Labor Day get-togethers, with an implied challenge to treat her with respect. She eventually won the affection of the families with her struggles to learn the subtleties of rural Midwest English.

In the face of that, my mother finally stopped carping about Mike, and gradually accepted the inevitability of my relationship with Craig, Instead, she began to hint--broadly--that we should get married. In fact, Craig and I had more or less decided that we would be married right after my graduation. He would have achieved tenure by then, and presumably I'd have employment of my own. There was no way to know at the time how fate would intervene in its ruthless way, but in the meantime, we still had three beautiful years ahead of us.

The End