Vivian Hannity was still in a Catholic high school in the three stories within the series "Vivian and Cathy.” Certain incidents from that time more than four years earlier are mentioned here. The narrator, Paul D’Amato, was in his first years at City College during the series “My Summer with Nora.” His affair with her only lasted four months.
The immediate prequel to this story is “Vivian and Miranda,” in which Vivian moves into an apartment with her fellow Lehman College graduate Miranda (Mandy) Grossman. They start an affair together almost as soon as they are settled in.
Miranda, being more than a bit impulsive, then picks up Paul about a month later at his temporary movie theater job. Vivian finds out about it because he is often visiting the apartment, but she seems to accept it. Paul, however, doesn't know what is going on between the two women, although he has some suspicions. Not to be outdone, Vivian makes her own move on Paul as soon as her friend is out of town for a few days. That’s where this story starts.
*****
In early October, Miranda went out of town for a few days to visit some relatives in Massachusetts.
Late in the afternoon of the day that Miranda had left, I got a phone call from her roommate, Vivian Hannity. That was a surprise because until then I had only the most perfunctory relationship with her. After a few moments of chat about Mandy’s trip, she said, “Hey Paul, let’s have a drink together this evening. Is there someplace you think would be good?”
For a moment, I was unsure about what to do. This girl knew I was involved with her roommate, and yet she still had asked me for a date. However, I figured that if a lady had asked me to have a drink with her, I should go. Probably we were both being disingenuous about our true intentions, but I found her intriguing. I didn’t consider myself to be a “player,” so I initially didn’t think I was doing anything wrong. Besides, I couldn’t think of an acceptable way to refuse her request.
Anyway, I was going to be a gentleman and get her at the apartment, but she said she’d meet me at a bar.
Then I had to figure out a plausible place we could both reach by public transportation. I had a car, but I was a stickler about not driving after drinking. There was a bar called Lynch’s on Jerome Avenue near 210th Street. I had never been in it, but we both could get there by bus without any transfers.
I got there early and, at a few minutes after seven, I saw Vivian walking from the bus stop down the street. She was shorter and thinner than Mandy, and her blonde hair was lighter. I was struck by how she had dressed up for this date. She was wearing a black skirt, a blazer, nylon stockings, and medium-heeled black shoes.
Mandy had asked me, as sort of a joke, whether I have ever fantasized about Vivian. I denied it, but in fact, I had indeed done it a couple of times. I thought lovers should never ask that kind of question of each other so, rightly or wrongly, I felt justified in lying about it.
That evening, on Jerome Avenue, Vivian looked more enticing than ever, and I instantly wanted her. Paul, you can’t think like that; she’s just being friendly, right? But if that was true, then why had she dressed up for me?
As soon as we entered the bar, I felt like I had picked the wrong one. It was fairly small and quiet in there, and it was filled with the kind of morose, middle-aged and older Irish drinkers that were common in some New York bars. I looked at Vivian to see if she wanted to leave, but her expression and gestures said, no problem, it’s fine.
We saw some tables in the back, so we headed that way. All of the other customers were male, and most of them looked at her as she passed. Vivian didn’t seem at all self-conscious, and she returned their gazes. She even smiled at them a bit.
There was no waitress service, so we had to get our drinks from the bartender. I got a beer and Vivian had a gin and tonic
As soon as we sat down, the quiet in the place started to bother me. None of the other patrons were even talking to each other. However, there was a jukebox nearby. Before I used it, I wanted to check with the bartender for permission. He didn’t seem to care one way or the other, and he nodded.
I checked the playlist, and it was more interesting than I had expected. To start, I picked David Bowie’s “Young Americans.” It was a fast-paced, rousing kind of song, but only the last guy at the end of the bar seemed to notice it. As I sat down, he said to me, “What is this shit?”
I figured I’d humor him with politeness, so I replied, “Well sir, it seems we could all enjoy our drinks more with some musical accompaniment.”
“Ah, fuck that,” and he went back to his drink.
At least with the music going, I could now talk to Vivian with some privacy. She said, “As you can see, the Irish are not always a happy-go-lucky kind of people.”
“You’re Irish yourself, aren’t you?”
“Yes, but I’m third generation.” She indicated our fellow barflies, “For a lot of these guys, drinking is something they do because they have to, not because they truly enjoy it.”
“It’s a Wednesday night, but we’re here too.”
She smiled, “Well, we’re not like these guys, not yet anyway!”
Vivian was easy to talk to, and I felt relaxed as we discussed our lives. At one point I got up to pick more songs. I found the original 1965 version of “Gloria” by Van Morrison and the later cover by Patti Smith, so I did both of them. Smith went second.
Patti’s version started slowly, with lyrics beyond what Morrison had written. The grumpy guy at the end of the bar commented again, “Now what in the hell are you playing?”
“Sir, if you listen carefully, you’ll hear that this is a cover of what went before, which was the original by Van Morrison.” I decided to add, “He’s actually Irish.” Morrison was also a Protestant from Northern Ireland, but I assumed the old dude didn’t know that.
All he said was, “Ah, fuck him too.”
A little later Vivian told me she had gone to the Mount St. Ursula Academy, an all-girls Catholic high school only about a mile from where we were sitting.
She said, “We had those Catholic schoolgirl outfits. I especially liked the warm-weather versions with those little blue skirts and the white knee socks. I bet you look at those chicks now when they’re walking around the streets, don’t you?”
I knew she was being tongue-in-cheek with me, so I replied, “Me? Naw, I’d never do that.”
“The idea seemed to be to dress us like little girls even though we were actually nubile young women. I think the Church wanted to pretend that we were still innocent and asexual.
“I do like those knee-socks.”
“I’ve still got them; I’ll wear them for you if you like. They're not just white; I have different colors and designs. I also have some thigh-highs, which can be fun too.”
It struck me that she was offering to wear certain clothes simply because I found them appealing. She was already going beyond where I thought she might go that evening.
She went on with a story about her school. “What you don’t know is that we girls tried to get away with wearing the most outrageously sexy kind of panties underneath our uniforms. Sometimes the nuns would have a panty-check and if they didn’t like what they found – well, they’d take us into a room and paddle us, first on the seat of our underpants and then on our bare behinds.”
That was heady stuff to hear about, and it didn’t seem like something a woman would reveal in a normal conversation. It was a very sexualized topic. I tried to remain as casual as I could, “That was a bit harsh, wasn’t it?”
Vivian giggled, “Yes, but the thing was – even though it hurt, I discovered that I enjoyed it too. I found out later that is not uncommon for both genders.”
With that revelation, Vivian didn’t seem so quiet and modest as my previous impressions of her had been. I thought, she’s going to try to seduce me. It’s only a matter of time. In fact, she’s already started.
Since she had brought up the subject, I asked her, “So what kind of underwear got you into trouble?”
“Sheer see-through ones were popular; the most common colors were white, blue, and black. Also, anything lacy was good, especially if it was pink. Sometimes it could merely be white cotton ones with red hearts or roses on them.”
I had never imagined what those schoolgirls, including my Vivian here, were really doing and thinking while wearing their modest uniforms. Well, they were thinking about wearing provocative underwear and getting spanked for it. And some of them had liked it.
Man, I wished I had known how naughty they all had been back then. But it wasn’t like I was doing anything at that age to approach girls, even the ones at my own school.
She pretty much confirmed what I had been thinking and she was very direct about it. “You see, with the gender segregation and all that Catholic repression of our desires, it was a sexual hothouse in that school. All of us we’re boy-crazy, or to be more blunt, horny as hell. You could practically smell the estrogen in the air.”
Yeah, and if I had been there, the testosterone too. I vividly remembered the aching frustration and loneliness of my teen years. Oh wow, all those cuties in their knee-socks and bad-girl panties, and I hadn’t approached a single one.
At my public high school, the girls had their tight jeans and, in the warm weather, some of them had halter-tops. If I got the right angle, I could see the sides of their breasts. That was all bad enough, in the sense of being a trial by schoolgirl for me to endure.
I made up for lost time in college, although the various women I met kept dumping me although I had been very happy with them myself. Now, that summer, I had Miranda, who was a very pleasing girlfriend indeed. So what was I doing flirting – well, much more than flirting – with her best friend?
Just to have something to say to distract myself, I asked, “Who exactly was St. Ursula?”
“Oh, you’re going to be amazed by this. The story goes that, in the Fourth Century, near Cologne, she and 11,000 other virgins were massacred by The Huns. Supposedly they were all beheaded.”
“Eleven-thousand? That’s appalling. Why didn’t they, ah, screw all those chicks instead of killing them?”
“Who even knows if any of that is even true? The Church loves her, however. The Ursulines, the Order of St. Ursula, are nuns dedicated to educating girls. I guess they think it’s better to lose your head than to lose your hymen.”
I laughed at that. However, Vivian was disturbed by more than that. She said, “I hate the Church’s obsession with these martyrs, especially the female ones like St. Barbara, another woman who supposedly died to save her precious virginity.”
I could see that Vivian was extremely bothered by that whole aspect of her now lapsed religion. I said, “I’ve never heard of her.”
“I don’t believe most of the things that have been said about her, but there are these paintings from the late medieval period that show her being tortured and killed, and her tits are hanging out! The artists got away with it because they were depicting something with a religious theme. But, you see, underneath the Church’s piousness and chastity, there’s sadism, sexual sadism in fact.” Then she stopped and thought about what she had just said. “I guess this is a bit much to talk about.”
Yet I was impressed with the intensity in her, a side of her I hadn’t imagined existed. I was trying to think of a way to convey that to her when she changed the topic slightly. “And there's lesbianism too – not that there is anything wrong with lesbians. But those nuns probably didn’t know that half the girls liked being spanked by them.”
Fortunately, I had fed more coins into the jukebox, so our presumably Catholic fellow patrons couldn’t hear her opinions about their religion. Roxy Music’s “Love Is the Drug” was playing then.
I said, “And isn’t spanking a bit sadistic?”
“Come on, you know must know this, if it’s not too extreme, spanking can be a lot of fun.” Yeah, and Mandy was proof of that; she could be quite kinky at times. I found that out on the day I had met her.
Vivian went on, “When I graduated from high school, I was so done with the Church. I went to Lehman, which seemed normal by comparison. I could date guys and even bang them if I wanted to. I met Mandy there, of course, the first Jewish girl I ever really knew.”
“She’s pretty wild at times.”
“Isn’t she? I learned a lot from her.”
I speculated again that the two roommates had sexual encounters with each other. In fact, I was almost sure of it. Vivian was leaning forward and I looked into her light brown eyes. She’s lively, she’s smart, and she’s certainly intense. And I’m getting into a lot of trouble here with her right now.
She had set up everything perfectly for her next line. “Paul, come over to my apartment and we can share a joint.” It was Miranda’s apartment too, but she was up in New England.
Maybe I wasn’t that surprised, but I understood that she was pulling me into her web. With women, bounty sometimes brings more bounty. If a guy has no one, then he may have trouble landing a girl. But if he already has a girl, then her friends might want a piece of the action too. And I knew that Vivian wasn’t dating anyone at the moment. However, even though she knew I was going with Miranda, that didn’t seem to slow her down a bit.
A boundary was about to be crossed and I stepped right over it. I replied, “Sure, that sounds great.” Oh, that is really not such a great idea at all. I rationalized it by thinking that I couldn’t back out of it gracefully.
But of course, that wasn’t the truth. One didn’t go over to a woman’s apartment to get stoned and then just leave. She hadn’t specified it yet, but I was pretty sure that I’d be spending the entire night there with her. I had to admit to myself that I wanted this sweet Vivian for myself as well as having Miranda too.
She had apparently planned it all out and she was ready to go, “We’ll catch a livery cab to get over there, okay?”
On the way out, the barflies turned again to look at her. This time, Vivian smiled and gestured at them. “Bye guys, it was a pleasure meeting you all.” Not one of them said anything in reply. At the door, she stuck her ass out and waved the seat of her black skirt at them. I wondered if any of them ever still thought about sex at that point in their lives.
Outside, I said, “That certainly was a cheerful place, wasn’t it?”
“It’s that Catholic sense of guilt, of sin that I was talking about. They all feel they are sinners for drinking too much, so they have to make themselves extra miserable about it – as in refusing to talk to each other.”
“I’m a lapsed Catholic myself.”
“I know. I guess the Italians have their own version, but maybe the Irish are more fervent about it. By the way, St. Barbara was supposedly tortured and killed on orders from her own father, who was a pagan.”
She was back to one of her least favorite martyrs, and I tried to make a mild joke about it. “Not exactly Father of the Year, was he?”
“Its all so creepy, the only way I can handle it is by thinking it never really happened.”
I said, “I almost forgot about St. Sebastian and his arrows.”
“How does the Church come up with these horrible, sadistic tortures?”
“I don’t know, but they certainly have plenty of martyrs to go around.”
********
Back at her place on Sedgwick Avenue, she removed her jacket and left it on the end of the sofa. Then she lit up a doobie and we passed it back and forth. I said, “This is really strong stuff.”
“Yes, we should probably go easy with it.”
“Then let’s not puff anymore, at least not right now.” I was right on the line where I could feel its effects yet I could still talk lucidly. And think lucidly, or so I imagined.
I put it in an ashtray on a table and said, “Could you put on some music?”
She got up and put a record on the stereo system. It was Bruce Springsteen’s “The Wild, the Innocent & The E Street Shuffle.” I remembered how Mandy was high on cocaine when I had met her in the back of the Paradise Theater and how she had been singing a Judy Collins song.
I was about to tell that to Vivian, but then I realized that it was a bad idea to mention her friend at that point. Even though she wasn’t there, I could feel Mandy’s unseen presence in the apartment. I tried not to think about her, but that was difficult. I had often been with her in there, right on that sofa in fact. Something told me to wait for Vivian’s next move. I was finding out how bold she was, and I didn’t have to wait long.
Without saying anything, she slid over next to me and put her right arm around my shoulder. Then she put her face against mine and started kissing me. Of course, I kissed back, and we soon had a very nice make-out session going.
I didn’t try to touch her in intimate places, but I rubbed her arms and then her hair. That all seemed fine to me, but she soon upped the ante again. She pulled on one of my hands and said quietly, “Please, unbutton my blouse.”
When I had done that, she reached behind herself to undo her pink bra. Perhaps she assumed that she could do that with more finesse than any guy could do it. In any case, her relatively small breasts fell free but they jutted out quite nicely.
She whispered into my ear, “Please, suck on my tits. I really love that kind of thing.” I put my mouth around her nipples, which quickly stiffened as my lips encircled them. “That is so nice, please keep doing it.”
In a short while her eager hands dropped down and unbuckled and unzipped my pants; then she withdrew my erect cock and stroked it. It was all happening faster than I could think about it, but there was an advantage to that. I didn’t have time to think about Mandy or entertain any doubts about being such a cad.
She certainly had more to her plan and she told me what it was.
“On this first night together, we’ll just pleasure each other orally. Is that all right with you?”
It seemed strange that she had asked for my opinion as if I might say no. “Of course, I’m fine with that.” Then I thought, this first night? I knew for sure that I was getting deeper into this and that it was going to eventually be more than a one-night stand with only oral sex.
Actually, I didn’t want a one-night stand. I was already, perhaps unrealistically, imagining Vivian as being my “side-girl.” She seemed willing to do that for some reason. In any case, I was about to cheat on Mandy, that was certain.
Some women were like that; they wanted to follow their own scenarios and I tended to go along with whatever they asked for. She said, “I’ll do you first.”
She had been acting very abruptly and now she was ready to go. “Stand up in front of me and I’ll sit right here.”
As I got into position, I said, “Is this what you wanted to do when you were at St. Ursula’s?”
That seemed like a pretty dumb thing to say. I hoped she found my question amusing, and she indeed did. “I certainly did, but I didn’t get my first chance until I got to college.” I briefly wondered who that guy had been, but then she distracted me with something else. “You like imagining me as a bad little Catholic schoolgirl, don’t you?”
There was no point in denying it, “Of course, I like the idea.”
“I truly was such a bad girl, but I bet you wouldn’t have been able to approach me had you known me back then.”
She was trying to make a joke, but she was also teasing me. I tried not to react but she could tell from my expression that she had gone a little too far. She tried to walk it back a bit, “Oops, maybe I overdid that.”
I decided to both acknowledge it and laugh at it too. “Who cares what we would have done in eleventh or twelfth grade? We’re here now, and we can make up for anything we missed then.”
Vivian certainly knew how to make up for lost time by blowing me properly. She nibbled the tip of my cock; then she licked and kissed it from top to bottom. Soon she was taking me partially into her mouth while gripping me at the base with her right hand. I seemed to have a knack for saying the wrong thing during such moments. “I can tell you’ve obviously done this before.” One problem was that it could be interpreted as implying a certain sluttiness on her part.
But I didn’t need to worry because she seemed good-natured and yet enthusiastic about the whole thing. She stopped for a moment and answered, “Yes Paul, I definitely have done this before. And I’ll show you how well I’ve learned it.”
During this, I could feel the effect of the pot in my bloodstream. Marijuana always increased the intensity of sex for me, giving it a dreamy quality and yet also deepening the sensations inside my body. I was vaguely aware of hearing “Kitty’s Back” on the stereo system and then the beginning of the next song, “Wild Billy's Circus Story” – one of the few Springsteen songs I actually disliked.
There were other things on my mind by that point. I ran my hands through her hair and said silly things like, “Vivian, you suck on me so sweetly, you know that?” Sometimes, Mandy referred to her as Viv but she never used that nickname herself and neither did I.
Anyway, she was too involved to stop and respond, but I appreciated her attention to her efforts on me. Her right hand stroked the part of my shaft that didn’t go all the way into her mouth; her left hand rubbed my buttocks. I always liked it when women fondled my ass during sex, and I would often request it if they didn’t think of it first.
As I approached orgasm, which didn’t take very long, my thrusting became more frantic and I remember saying her name repeatedly. I briefly wondered if she was going to swallow it, and as I spurted into her mouth she did indeed take it all in.
Afterwards I fell over onto the sofa and caught my breath. I still said absurd things, “You’re such a good girl; you swallowed it all.”
“Not quite; there still is some on my lips.” Her tongue came out and she licked herself clean. “It’s going to be my turn soon.”
“Give me a moment to get my wits together.”
The moment was brief. She undid her skirt and took it off. I saw that her stockings only went thigh-high and her pink panties were part of a matching set with her bra. “Not bad, right?” She had known I’d see all of this when she had gotten dressed earlier.
She took her panties off and left them on the floor, and then sat there on the edge of the couch, her legs splayed apart. I got some very clear instructions from her. “Just kneel on the floor in front of me; you know how this should go.”
I asked her, “Does pot make you horny too?”
“Oh God, does it ever.”
Her pubic hair was light-colored and sparser than Mandy’s thick bush. I got into licking and kissing her cunt, which is something I had learned to do quite well. Now it was her turn to put her hands through my hair.
I stopped and said, “Are these the same panties that got you into trouble at school.”
She laughed at that, “Probably not this exact set, but something close, I’m sure.”
“But these wouldn’t fly with the nuns, in any case.”
“Oh, not at all. If they caught us with these, they would call us skanks. Then they would test the paddles on their own hands. I’ll always remember the sound that would make.”
As we continued, she put one of her hands down to help me. Mostly I used my tongue on the inside and sides of her cunt, while she flicked and fondled her own clitoris.
Her climax arrived quite quickly too. As I had seen other women do when then it went just right, she lifted her pelvis off the cushion and gyrated her crotch against my face. She called out my name as I had called out hers; then she just moaned loudly.
When she was done, I got up and sat next to her; we put our arms around each other. That was when a feeling of unease hit me. It was very similar to the awkwardness I had felt following my first abrupt sex with Miranda in the back of the Paradise Theater that summer. It was also like my first time ever with my new girlfriend Nora – she wasn’t even a girlfriend yet – in a college newspaper office three years earlier.
Maybe I’m one of those guys who prefers some build-up first, but sometimes I met women who were impatient to get things moving quickly. With Vivian, we had gone from being the merest acquaintances to being lovers in – well, how long had it been since I had gotten that phone call from her? A few hours?
At twenty-two, I was also aware of how fast these affairs could end if the women changed their minds and wanted it that way. More than once, I had been suddenly dumped and been caught by complete surprise.
I looked down at Vivian’s discarded pink panties on the floor, then I looked at her. Her bra was still open and her breasts were exposed, but she wasn’t looking at me. I wondered how she had perceived this evening.
It seemed quiet in the room and I noticed that the first side of the album had been finished, and had likely been so for a while. At least that gave me an excuse to do something, and I got up to look for another album. “Let me find something else to play.”
She replied, “No, just flip it over.”
“Okay, I do like that very last song, ‘New York Serenade.’ I’ll start with that one.” I got my pants back up and went over to the turntable.
When I came back to the couch, she appeared to be aware of my state of mind. “So, how are you doing?” That seemed like an oddly vague thing to say.
I came up with something rather inane myself. “Hey, I’m doing fine.” That wasn’t very clever but it was the best I could come up with.
For the first time, she seemed tentative and yet she was talkative too. “I know, all this has been quite sudden. I should tell you, I don’t want it to just end here. I’d like you to spend the night here with me. I’d like to do what we just did all over again. We can either go in my bedroom or just stay out here.”
I had already deduced all of that, so I wasn’t surprised. I suppose I was pleased but a bit anxious too, so I tried a joke. “So who goes first this time?”
“It doesn’t matter. I never quite had the knack for doing both at the same time.”
“You mean a ‘sixty-nine?’ That’s okay, I never got the hang of that either.”
“But you definitely have the energy for another go-round, don’t you?”
“Oh yeah, that’s certainly true.” At twenty-two, I imagined I had the stamina to be blown all night by her.
Vivian moved against me on the couch and entwined her limbs around mine. I liked the feeling of her warm smooth body pressing against mine. We sat there, listening to more than two minutes of instrumentals in that song, mostly a piano, until the lyrics finally started. Vivian almost immediately asked me a question I hadn’t expected, “Where is there a railroad track in Manhattan, besides the ones into Grand Central?”
I was the right guy to ask about that, “I think it refers to that West Side freight line. Their car may be over by that yard at 60th Street or somewhere near there.”
“I always assumed that Billy was a pimp and Jackie was one of his girls, one of his favorite girls, maybe.”
“Probably that’s it, I’d guess. ‘We’re going to boog-a-loo down Broadway and come back with the loot.’ That would make sense.”
“Broadway is just down the hill from here.”
I said, “Hah, yeah, and about eight miles north of where this is supposedly happening.”
She repeated a lyric, “ ‘It’s midnight in Manhattan.’ Well, it’s not quite that late yet, but it will be midnight in Kingsbridge Heights here soon enough.”
Instead of answering her, I looked out the window where it was fully night out there. The view was of the water of the Jerome Park Reservoir just across the street.
I thought, this Vivian is great – she’s so perceptive, for one thing – but Miranda is supposed to be my girl.
Almost two years earlier I had a girlfriend at City College that I had been going with for over a year. By that point, I was considering proposing marriage to her, but then she was suddenly gone and she did it with a very dramatic exit. I had only known Miranda for two months, and although she was a lot of fun to be around, I couldn’t yet imagine making any long-term plans with her.
I was pondering that when Vivian just had to surprise me again.
“I’ve had a female lover, you know. I’m sure I’ve never mentioned that to you.” I looked over at her and she caught my eye. I figured she’d have a follow-up and she would mention Miranda but, no, she was referring to someone else.
She had quite a story for me. “This was when I was at St. Ursula’s more than four years ago. It was a girl at my school named Cathy, and she talked me into that bad-girl panties game I mentioned. She even bought the right underwear for me. So anyway, one day the nuns caught us and paddled both of us, over a bench, side by side.” She smiled. “That was very kinky but it was also a lot of fun.”
I sometimes thought I had a pretty good idea of how women thought and acted, but then one would blindside me with something new like this tale. And she wasn’t done yet.
“After school, Cathy and I would sneak off, still wearing our uniforms, and we’d have sex together in Bronx Park.”
I didn’t want to sound rude but it seemed to come out that way, “You said you had sex in the park?”
“Oh yeah, in that wooded area, down the steps from 204th Street. Once this guy, he would have been about your age, walked in on us by accident. Cathy shooed him off, but was he ever surprised! I mean, we had our mouths on each other’s pussies. We joked about how much he must have jerked-off that night thinking about us.”
A wave of self-pity hit me. Oh, Vivian, I was like that guy; you have no idea how hard it was for me at that time and yet I had nobody. I was holding her hand and I squeezed it tighter. While doing that, I remembered seeing girls at that age and feeling both a yearning and also, underneath, a certain resentment towards them.
I had to get my wits together and get out of that negative mood. I looked at her and thought, what happened years ago doesn’t matter, she’s here now. And she had been very generous and affectionate towards me. Her exact motives about me seemed unimportant for the moment.
I asked, “Do you still know this girl, I mean the one who was your classmate?” She had brought up the topic, so I felt justified in asking for more info.
“No, this was a long time ago, more than four years as I said, and she went to another college. Her name was Cathy, by the way. The nuns accused her of being the ‘ringleader.’ She was always getting into trouble, while they thought I was a ‘good girl.’ Well, they were wrong about that!”
Yeah, baby, I can certainly see that now.
Vivian had more to tell me. “It wasn’t merely a lack of other sexual options that brought us together. We truly enjoyed each other; we both discovered – well, confirmed really – that we were bi-sexual underneath.”
Now I was even more sure that she had something going with Mandy. That meant that she was cheating on Vivian when she had started banging me in the aptly named Paradise Theater. That assumed, of course, that the same-gender issue was relevant in this case.
Without a doubt, in turn, I was now cheating on Mandy. It all seemed very complicated, but there was nothing I could do about it that evening. I had already made my choice and I had to own up to it.
I decided to get a beer and I offered to get one for her too. In the moments I was in the kitchen, I thought about what kind of person I had on my hands here. Most of my ex-girlfriends were lapsed Catholics – sometimes it seemed like that was half the city's population – but Vivian was the first one who had been in their schools until the twelfth grade. I was getting hints that it had a bigger impact on her than even she wanted to admit.
I came back and put a new album on the turntable. When I sat down and gave a bottle to her, I said on an impulse, “I propose a toast to the Mount St. Ursula Academy.”
We clinked our bottles and she said, “I’ll never forget what it was like in that place.”
“I guess you can never fully get away from the religion of your childhood, especially that one. I know I haven’t yet.”
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Lynch’s Bar really existed, but I was never in it. There was another bar nearby that did have an older Irish clientele much like the one described here. It happened to be just down the street from The Mount St. Ursula Academy. Both bars are gone now, but the school is still there. The Paradise Theater also still exists, but it is now used as a church.
The story of his first time with Nora is in the series “My Summer with Nora,” and it’s described in the first chapter, “In Hamilton Heights.”
