Free Fatal Vision by Joe McGinniss Page A

question about it. That was the year our love flowered.
     
    I remember your heart would just leap into your throat at a phone call or when you'd see her return address on a letter and you would joyously finish school on a Friday at noon and start hitchhiking or taking the bus up to Skidmore.
    It was an enormously exciting time but it was also a delicate time because Colette was not at all like my prior girlfriends. She was very delightful and warm but yet she had this little bit of aloofness about her which some people took to mean snottiness, but it was never that, it wasn't that at all. If anything, it was timidity on her part. As I got to know her well and we fell in love and whatnot, I realized that it wasn't from a real aloofness, but more from a hesitancy and a slight fear of the world in general.
    Basically, she was a very shy person without too much self-confidence. She did not at all have the sort of widespread contact that I enjoyed or my brother or my sister enjoyed, and she kind of leaned on my self-confidence and we had—that was part of our relationship: she liked my leadership and I liked her vulnerability and femininity.
    She was always questioning and bright and intuitive and alert, but she had this—sort of an underlying anxiety at all times—very soft and feminine and attractive in a way—and it was nice, sort of, to be her—her boyfriend and her protector.
    We were writing each other constantly. I remember I wrote her a long, urn, poem, several pages in length, and she thought it was extremely romantic. I think, probably, in retrospect, it was one of the worst things ever written. It was terrible. It was very sophomoric. But I remember that she kept it and—it was, you know, a sophomoric thing to do, but we were young and in love.
    I was pretty active in my pursuit. You know, it was okay for me to go to New York and possibly pick up a girl, or even have Penny Wells down on a weekend, but it wasn't special anymore. There was nothing neat about that. The specialness was Colette.
    She said she had occasional other dates and I think that's true. As a matter of fact, L remember one specific weekend during the winter. I called her and she apologized—you know, I was going to go up to see her on short notice—and she apologized profusely because she had a blind date arranged by her roommate.
    The blind date came over from Dartmouth for the weekend, and I remember spending the whole time kind of jealous and angry and hurt, and waiting all through the week for a letter, which I got about Friday of the following week, in which she said the weekend was a bust.
    Whether that was a transparent lie or not, it certainly lifted my spirits. I remember, like, refal ling in love when I got the letter saying that her weekend with the blind date was a disaster, the guy from Dartmouth was a quote, animal, unquote, which was what we all kidded everyone from Dartmouth about being.
    I remember Thanksgiving of that freshman year. Colette was not going to come down, which seemed very strange, and she told me that it was because of funds. She didn't have the funds to come down. And I remember thinking ^ how weird that was, with Freddy and Mildred living in such, you know, supposed splendor in Greenwich Village.
    And I know this sounds ridiculous and self-serving, but it's not. I sent her something like thirty dollars or forty dollars for her bus ticket down to New York. Now I know it sounds ridiculous, but I remember writing to her and sending her either, like, two twenty-dollar bills or a forty-dollar check, and told her don't be absurd, you know, come down for Thanksgiving, it would be very lonely for you to be up there at Skidmore.
    And I remember her calling me and thanking me, and then she invited me in. Now, I wasn't there the whole weekend, I don't remember exactly how long, but I stayed overnight at the apartment in Greenwich Village, on Washington Square, and the things that I remember most were two things.
    One was