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Rupert opened a bank account in Fort Greene, in his own name, the day after he got his first week’s pay. He had worked thirty-two hours, earning twenty-four dollars in wages and twenty-four in tips, all of it in cash. The work was tiring. Listening was the most tiring. It will get easier, he thought. He worried about money. He’d spent a hundred and sixty dollars in five weeks, though that included two months’ rent. He took twenty dollars and bought himself a pair of khakis, two white shirts, two white T-shirts, underwear, and a pair of tan suede desert boots. He deposited the rest of his inheritance, three hundred and fifty dollars, in a savings account. He was living on the edge. He had worked out a monthly budget: sixty dollars for rent, eight dollars for subway fares, thirty dollars for lunches and snacks, bringing his expenses, not including toothpaste and a movie, to ninety-eight dollars. His monthly income, he calculated, was two hundred dollars. He wanted to save a hundred and twenty-five dollars a month for law school. He wondered whether he could get by some days on two meals. He doubted it. Mrs. Wolinski’s meals were missing essential food groups. She piled on the rice, potatoes, and noodles, lubricating them with margarine and tiny dollops of gamey meat whose provenance was doubtful. Rupert suspected horse; he’d eaten it often during the war. Vegetables, when she served them, were turnips, sprouts, and parsnips, boiled for thirty minutes. Dessert was a butter cookie and canned peaches or pineapple slices. Fresh fruit never entered her house. Breakfast was always the same, scrambled eggs and sausage and a fried tomato, out of a can. Dinner, in theory, had a fourteen-day rotation, but it seemed always the same, barely better than the sodden meals served at his English schools. Mrs. Wolinski was also living on the edge.
There was another lodger, an old Polish man, in his late sixties, who came out of his room only for dinner. He paid an extra five dollars a week to have Vera and not Ruta clean his room. For ten dollars a week, Vera let him grope her breasts above her clothes as she dusted. She didn’t tell her mother, but Ruta knew and collected another five dollars a week in hush money. “Vera’s jailbait,” Ruta would remind the groper. “I’d hate to have to report you to the vice squad.”
As the days passed, Rupert found Vera almost blindingly distracting. He had never known such longing. Meals were a trial, the worst part of his days. Vera always sat next to him. “The old Pole is so disgusting,” she’d say. “You don’t mind, do you, Robbie?” He inhaled her even as he stared down at his plate. Sometimes, reaching across him for the salt or mustard, she grazed his chest with her hand. At other times, she turned toward him, brushing her breast against his arm. He fought the attraction by ignoring her, never looking at her directly, never speaking to her. Miss Frost stepped outside her librarian’s role and warned him against the Wolinskis. “Don’t stay too long. There’ll be a baby and it will be yours no matter who the father is.”
After eight weeks, Vera, gauging that his will was greater than his desire, decided to make a move. He got home from work at two thirty a.m. Everyone else in the house was asleep. She listened as he washed up, then went to his door and waited until he had turned out the light. She stepped silently into his room. She slipped off her nightie and slithered between the sheets. Rupert froze; his heart raced. “Go away,” he said. Vera took his hand and placed it on her breast. “I want you to make love to me,” she said. He took his hand back. “No,” he said. “I can’t.” “Yes, yes, you can,” she said. “I’m not a virgin.” Afraid to look at her, Rupert spoke to the ceiling. “Virgin or no, you’re only seventeen. Come back when you’re eighteen if you want to.” Vera got out of the bed. She pulled back the sheet to look at his erection. She leaned over and kissed it, as she might a baby’s head. “Until my birthday then,” she said.
Rupert had been tested and had survived. He knew he wouldn’t survive a second test. He went to a drugstore near Farrell’s and bought ten condoms. “One girl? Ten girls?” the pharmacist said. Taking Miss Frost’s warning, Rupert sounded out the bar owner about the possibility of sleeping in the bar’s back room. It had a bed, a sink, and a lightbulb. He could use the bar’s restroom and shower at the Brooklyn Y. He explained he was likely to lose his lease in a few months. The owner said he could have it. “Five bucks a week. Get your own linens. And locks.”
Rupert began to grow less afraid of Vera. She was becoming fawning in her attention to him. Staying up one evening until he came home from the bar, she leapt up as the door closed. “What do you do when you go out at night?” she asked him. “I see friends,” he said. “Do you see women?” she asked. He didn’t answer but walked up the stairs to his room. Despite his inexperience with women, he saw his advantage. He would let her pursue him. She was experienced. He didn’t want a virgin; one in the bed was enough. Not to show his ignorance at the hour, he went to pornographic movies on Forty-Second Street. They mystified him as much as they aroused him. He understood the nun fantasies but not the men who kept their clothes on. He would try it. He wondered if he’d like to bugger a woman. The movies made it exciting for the man and he was never physically repelled by girls or women, the way he was with boys and men. He thought of visiting a prostitute, but he was afraid of the clap. Vera was so clean, so young. He would wait for her.
The evening of her eighteenth birthday, Vera went out with friends. She didn’t go to Rupert’s room. He knew it was her birthday; there was a cake with candles at dinner. The old Pole bought her a gold bracelet. A weight had been lifted; he might paw Vera without the threat of the vice squad. Mrs. Wolinski raised his rent the next week to eighty dollars a month. Vera also raised her rate, to twenty dollars a week, and let him grope her under her blouse. She stopped cleaning his room.