The following day was when the papers were due. I was already sitting there when Nora came bopping in. Later that year, I would see Young Frankenstein, and how she had moved reminded me of Madeline Kahn’s entrance into a bedroom. That was the scene late in the film where Peter Boyle is trying to read The Wall Street Journal.

I thought, Nora, try to be a little more subtle.

She plopped into the seat right next to me – she had never done that before – and she started a faked coy simpering.

“Hi Paul, how are you are you today?” She pulled out her term paper. “This thing is so good. I really want to thank you for it.” I wondered if she had even attempted to read it. In any case, what I had gotten from her for it was way beyond merely adequate.

She batted her eyelashes at me. Sometimes she wasn’t a particularly good actress and I could analyze the show she was trying to put on. She continued, “You’re just such a sweetie-pie.”

I had only really been with her for about twelve hours, and I wasn’t quite sure how to handle her. A compliment seemed to be in order. “You’re pretty sweet too.”

She was wearing jeans today. From their dark blue color, I figured that they must be almost new. She turned sideways in her seat. I got the impression that she wanted me to notice her thighs. She was on the slender side, but not too much so, and her pants were rather tight.

Nora, play it straight; don’t mess around with me.

“I just know you’ll write more for me next semester.”

That was absolutely the wrong thing for her to say. Either she was my girlfriend or she was not. I wasn’t going to be her flunky just to get laid. She could write her own damn papers from now on. Yet it didn’t seem worth directly contradicting her now. “All right, we’ll see how it goes.”

She pouted and puckered her lips as if in a kiss. That was irksome, and I tried to come up with some blatant statement that in turn would irk her. I couldn’t think of anything.

At the end of class, she came up to me at the front of the room. This sudden new bubbly version of herself, even though at least part of it was an act, had me off balance. She went back to the same issue, “I did ask you about writing more papers for me next semester, right sweetheart?”

Sweetheart? I tried to keep it brief, “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

She pouted at me, “Come on, you don’t have to trade it for something from me.” That had been a blowjob, but it soon turned into a lot more. She still had the coy/flirty thing going. “Except for my affection, of course.”

It was time to shoot this down. “I already know that. I think, in fact, that you are more than capable of writing your own papers.” She looked surprised. That may have been the first time someone had ever indicated that she had intellectual abilities.

I said, “Come on, let’s go to the West End and have a drink; let’s celebrate the end of the term. We can get a cab.” That was a bar and grill across the street from Columbia University.

She gave a scoffing motion with her hand, “Don’t bother with a cab. There’s a bus right here on Convent Avenue.”

“Well, if it’s good enough for you, then it’s good enough for me.”

I started toward the door and she fell in next to me. Once we were in the hallway, she somehow couldn’t control her bubbliness until we got to the bar. She took my arm and lead me, “So how did it feel to get your cherry busted last night?”

I tried to get clever, “What makes you think that happened?”

“Oh, come on, I had been ragging on you about it for a while and you never denied it. It was just so damn obvious with you; I said that before.”

I remembered how angry I had been with her. She had gone beyond mere teasing into humiliation. But in the end, she came through for me in a big way. She seemed to be tongue-in-cheek as she wagged a finger at me, “Now, you’ll never forget your first girl, will you? Especially since I’m such a really bad girl and you know exactly why.”

“I know, it’s not just metaphorical.” You have to be a liberal arts student to throw the word metaphorical around in a conversation.

She said, “Well, I’m not going to be at it forever, you know. I mean my profession, you could call it.”

I thought, Yeah, I’ll believe that when I see it.

She went on, “Besides, if you merely wanted a nice girl, they’re a dime-a-dozen around here.”

Somehow, that struck me as funny. I think this girl is going to be fun, but she can also be very high maintenance. I looked over at her, and she smiled at me. It wasn’t faked – I could recognize those. It was genuinely warm.

*********

We got our papers back in in the last minutes of the last class of the semester. We were standing in the room looking at our papers when she quietly said, “I want to see you downstairs.” Then she left without me.

I found her standing in the driveway outside Wagner when I came down. She obviously was not happy.

“Look at this fucking thing! He only gave me a C on it.” She had it in her hand and she shook it at me. “What did you get?”

“Ah, a B.”

“What kind of jerk-ass stunt are you trying to pull? You think you didn’t have to put any effort into my paper?”

“Nora, simmer down. Let me see what he wrote on it.” After looking at hers, and then my own, I said, “I think the one I wrote for you is actually better than the one I did for myself. I don’t know what his issue is; sometimes it’s just arbitrary, I think.”

“What I think is that you stiffed me; I don’t think you lived up to your end of the bargain. I almost wish I could take back everything I gave you.” Maybe she was trying to be tongue-in-cheek, but she sounded mean and sour.

I gave myself a moment to consider how much leverage I had over her. We had sex only that one time. We were due for more when I went out to her house in Maspeth the next day. Her uncle would be at work. By now, I had figured out that I really had to push back against her, even though it wasn’t natural for me to do that. If didn’t, I’d have to get rid of her, or, more likely, she’d be the one to dump me.

I had my lines ready, “My end of the bargain? Nora, honey, if you’re going to look at this as just a business deal again, then, well...” I pretended to look around. “Assuming that is the way you see it, then if there was a door here, I’d show it to you and tell you to go through it.”

That move had some risk in it. Our relationship was still very new, and it could easily end at any moment. Yet, I could tell from her expression that she was interested in how I’d handle this. I had one more thing, “Everything you gave to me? It’s everything I took from you.”

I knew she was going to backpedal, but maybe not in one swoop. Her next attempt at defense didn’t seem that convincing. She whined, “You think you’re such a clever little asshole.”

“And you’re so full of yourself. You think you’re a really hot little piece, but you’re actually a stupid cunt.” Was that overdoing it? No, consider what she just said to you. “If you’re going to give me this bullshit – well the semester is over, I’m just going to say, ‘Bye.’”

She didn’t seem to like that. I still wasn’t entirely sure what she saw in me, but maybe that didn’t matter. She was here now.

“When I come out to Maspeth tomorrow, I’m going to spank your arrogant ass again.” She must have noticed that I had said “when,” not “if.”

“Oh yeah? How are you going to do that?” Now I knew I had her.

She had one of her cute hot-weather outfits on. I noted her sleeveless top – actually, it had straps over her shoulders – and her bared midriff. Her faded blue jeans were ones I had seen before. That girl had an attitude at times, and she liked to show off her body.

I grabbed her by her belt and pulled her closer to me. “I’ll tell you how. I like these jeans. Wear them tomorrow, and I’ll take them down and put you over my lap. Nora, baby, you have such pale skin; it turned so red on that night when I beat you on your sweet ass.”

I had seen her look before, a mixture of anxiety and anticipation. It seemed like a good time to deescalate. I gave her paper back, perhaps as a token of reconciliation, and she put it into her bag. Then we just stood there for a minute without speaking or even looking at each other.

I knew that I had won this match, but I wanted to give her a way to save face. The best way to do that was to just assume she was in agreement with me, and go on to something else.

She figured it out for me. “How about we share a joint right now?” She laughed, “Call it a peace pipe; well, actually, it’s a peace doobie.”

Leave it to her to carry marijuana around on her person. I said, “I’ll go for that; let’s find some place inside Finley.” That was the student center building right next to us. It had been the site of our memorable Salient office encounter. We found a first-floor window bay that was suitable. We each had a few puffs, just enough to feel the effects, but not be totally wasted.

Afterwards, we made out in one of the first-floor lounges just down the hallway. As we did that, she said, “Pot always makes me feel horny.” It did the same for me. She moved over and sat on my lap; she started pushing her behind against my crotch. She was now in her fake giggly mode. “My, someone has a big boner; I can feel it. I wish there was someplace we could go right now.”

Actually, I was a bit embarrassed because there were a couple of other people in the room, although they seemed to be ignoring us. Anyway, it was early afternoon, and there was no secure place for us to go; not the newspaper office, not a restroom.

But she was clever, “I know, we can use that water tank room upstairs.”

I was the one who had told her about it. One day, a friend from the newspaper had taken a few people on a little tour of the place. On the highest level of the building, above the fifth floor, there was a sort of attic that contained a big, open-top water tank.

I said, “I don’t remember if the door is locked or not.” Did that guy have a key?

“Then, let’s go have a look.”

Up there, the door was indeed unlocked; also, it could be latched from inside. She said, “This looks pretty good.”

Actually, it didn’t. Except for the ten-foot-high tank, there was nothing in there. There were no lights, only whatever daylight that came through some slats.

I said, “So what are we going to do in here?”

“You’ll see; just watch.”

She did some unexpected things. The first was to undo my pants and pull them down. Her next steps were to take down her own jeans and panties, turn around, and start grinding her bare ass against my bare crotch.

She was very enthusiastic about it. Her hips swung back and forth; then she would gyrate them against my front. While doing all that, she was singing something that consisted entirely of doo and tah-doo, It sounded like whatever Simon and Garfunkel did in “Mrs. Robinson.” Then it became dee and tah-dee repeated several times.

It felt wonderful, and I held on to her hips as she moved around. I was soon ejaculating all over her behind, her back, and even the bottom of her blouse.

She noticed the latter. “You bad boy; look what you’ve done to my clothes.”

I was leaning on the tank trying to catch my breath. “Go downstairs and put some water on one of those paper towels from the bathroom.”

“I was kidding, don’t worry about it. Anyway, it’s time for you to eat out my cunt.” Wow, that was subtle.

There was nowhere to go except on the filthy floor. I said, “All right, take your jeans all the way off and we’ll see what we can do.”

She lay down facing up and I was facing down between her legs. The floor had some gritty stuff on it and I wondered how she could stand having her bare ass against it, but she didn’t seem to mind. Soon everything was going very well. One of her sandaled feet was propped up on the tank; the other was waving around in the air.

I had noticed before that she was a woman who could have very abrupt orgasms. At one moment, we were just going along, and in the next, she was yelling and bouncing around. Her thighs gripped my head; then she relaxed.

I rolled over and lay next to her. It was strange to be on the floor of that room with our genitals exposed. There was a ladder going up the side of the tank. I had been up there once, and the scummy green water inside looking unsuitable for washing one’s hands, much less as drinking water.

What does she see in me anyway? Why did she agree to go to dinner with me on that night? Then I had an insight, or maybe it was just a hypothesis.

Maybe she had just been dealing with customers for a while, maybe for months. In all that time since February, I would have thought that a boyfriend would have come around once in a while to meet her after class. I never saw one; maybe that’s why she had been so morose. Maybe I’m the first guy in a long time to simply like her for herself,

After staring at the ceiling for a minute or so, I tried to comment on her singing. “If I look around, I guess all I will see are sympathetic eyes.”

She raised herself and laughed, “Yeah, that’s exactly it!”

My thought was, this is going to be an interesting but strange relationship. But at least, I did have a relationship.

*****

It has since been demolished, but in 1974 the tank room described here was a real place in a building at City College.