Free Superior Women by Alice Adams

Really, thanks very much.”
    “My pleasure.” He makes a gesture as though touching his hat to her (so like Potter, that) and then he is gone.
    Lavinia does not hear from Gordon all the next day, New Year’s Day. Rather expecting that he will just come over, in Potter’s car, probably, and take her somewhere (she plans to be very kind and understanding; anyone can drink too much) she spends the day alone, reading, but she is all dressed, all day, in one of her best white sweaters, and she stays carefully within range of the floor phone; she has let the girl on bells know where she is. Thank God the dorm is almost deserted, and especially that none of her friends are around: no Peg with her booming questions, “Well, where’s Mr. Shaughnessey keeping himself today?” Or Megan, with her too-intelligent, hypersensitive eyes; Megan would not ask but she would visibly wonder. Cathy at least would be incurious; in fact heaven knows what Cathy is thinking, most of the time. Very possibly she disapproves of a nice Catholic boy like Gordon taking up with a wicked Episcopalian. (Gordon has told Lavinia that his religion is not very important to him, but sometimes she wonders: does he only say that for her benefit, in the same way that he says that he never really cared for his old girl friend, Marge?)
    •     •     •
    No word from Gordon, not that day or the next, and then vacation is over, and everyone is back. Lavinia tells all her friends that Gordon has been restricted, such a bore.
    She admits to herself that she is suffering, and admits it to no one else, of course not. She is in actual pain, and it takes all her tricks of makeup, eye cream, and varieties of powder, not to let it show. When Megan was suffering most over George Wharton, she used to slop around in her Levi’s and a torn old sweater, no makeup, her broken heart all over her silly fat face. (But Lavinia really likes Megan, the little fool. She will never tell Megan about Connie Winsor; Megan will find out for herself, and Lavinia will be as comforting as she can. She has even thought of introducing Megan to one of Gordon’s friends, maybe Potter?—but then Megan is so—so fat, and her clothes are never right.)
    And how ridiculous all this
love
is, Lavinia concludes. She is deeply contemptuous of her own pain, as she was of Megan’s; she is aware of being extremely foolish, she knows. “Love,” finally, turns out to have no meaning at all. Harvey was madly in love with her, and she was (she is) madly in love with Gordon, who (quite possibly) still loves Marge. And Megan is in love with George, who is practically engaged to Connie Winsor.
    Nevertheless, she will not allow Gordon to drift off from her like that, or whatever it is that he imagines himself to be doing.
    She sends him a telegram, at Eliot House. “Please meet me at St. Clair’s for tea at four on Thursday.”
    Lavinia, in her softest sweater, looks fragile, delicately bruised, rather than accusatory. And she speaks very softly. “I just wanted to see you again,” she says. “I missed you, and I wondered.”
    “Ah, Lavinia, you’re too good and beautiful for me, I always knew it. And there’s things, things with my family, friends of my family. Things you’d never understand.”
    Smiling sadly, “understandingly,” Lavinia is at the same time thinking how
Irish
he sounds; God, almost a brogue. She says, “You mean your family won’t approve of me? Of us?”
    “Well, that’s a hard way to put it, but you could say that, you could indeed. But Lavinia, when I see you I only know that I love you. Ah, beautiful Lavinia—”
    Dear God, is he going to cry? The cheap lower-class mick. “I love you too,” she says.
    Gordon leans toward her, and there are indeed tears in his eyes. “Besides,” he says, “no one’s supposed to know this, but we’re shipping out next week.”
    “Shipping out?” For a moment sheer panic makes it hard for Lavinia to breathe. A second