The Eden Express_ A Memoir of Insanity - Mark Vonnegut [5]
Feminine ardor made me suspicious. The fact is, I couldn’t take it. It was lots of different things. If a woman panted and moaned when I made love to her, I felt uncomfortable, sort of lonely. Maybe I was just jealous because I couldn’t lose my head like that. Maybe I thought women were faking something that was supposed to make me feel good. Maybe I thought that they were fantasizing about an old lover or maybe Mick Jagger. All I knew was that I felt left out. With Virge there wasn’t much trouble that way.
About a week after we had started living together, we were taking a walk by an old abandoned mill, a very romantic place. It was evening. She had been even more quiet than usual that day. But it was that silence that I was supposed to get used to, that I was supposed to understand and not worry about. Worrying about it proved something bad about me.
“I’ve been thinking about what’s going on between us.” Said very meaningfully.
“Huh?” Maybe I would have eventually got the hang of her silence if it had not so often been broken so ominously.
“I’ve been thinking maybe it’s screwed up.” She always got to bring the news, or at least write the headlines. The columns were my work. That was one of our unwritten rules from the very start.
I got the “Uh-oh” feeling in the pit of my stomach. Jig’s up, she’s figured out my game.
“You’re just lonely and want someone to sleep with.”
It was all I could do to keep a straight face. Could she really be that far off base? Did she really think it was that tough for me to get laid? If only it was true, I thought. It would be so much easier, so much more understandable.
I don’t remember how I actually answered the charge. It doesn’t really matter. Nothing much changed between us. I just got a little lonelier.
JUNE 1970. By the time of Virginia’s graduation I had beat the draft with an uncanny schizophrenic act at my physical and put in six months as a nine-to-five, work-within-the-system do-gooder. I had spent the next six wandering up and down the East Coast looking for friends and land to get a commune going and hanging around Swarthmore with Virginia trying to figure out what we’d do after she graduated.
During spring vacation we went down to her parents’ summer place in the mountains of North Carolina. Vincent and seven other people came with us. A lot of grass got smoked. Most of the people did some tripping. We went to a Blue Grass music festival. Zeke, the beautiful half-Labrador, half-Gordon-setter puppy Virginia had given me for Christmas, got hit and nearly killed by a motorcycle and had to be rushed to a Chapel Hill vet about a hundred miles away. It was a strange, jumbled week. Somewhere in there Virginia and I decided to head for British Columbia to look for land, as soon as she graduated.
“We’re going to British Columbia to get some land.” A bit vague, to be sure, but it seemed much more satisfying than most of my previous answers to the question “What are you doing?”
“I’m going to college” or “I’m working in Boston” just didn’t make it either for me or for whoever was asking. It didn’t lead to conversations either of us cared much about. Looking for land in B.C. was another matter entirely. Just about everyone, young and old, straights and freaks, wanted to stay up long into the night talking about that one.
Looking back on it now, what I find most amazing is how little argument we got from parents, professors, or anyone else. What few misgivings there were were vague, apologetic, and usually mumbled. I think the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, and war and assorted other goodies had so badly blown everybody’s mind that sending the children naked into the woods to build a new society seemed worth a try.
FAREWELL, CAPE COD AND FAMILY. I spent a few weeks working around the Barnstable yard before heading to hook up with Virginia. The family was in lousy shape, but the yard I could