Limitations by Scott Turow Read Free Book Online Page A

Virginia, where there were few open questions, whether about God or Yankees or Negroes, felt like growing up in a lightless closet. By high school, he was determined to escape and read Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg, bards of the liberation that he believed in as a matter of spirit but that he had no idea how to practice.
    Which was why it mattered so much to him that he was a virgin. He was supposed to be, of course, if you had asked his minister or his teachers or his parents. It was 1964. But both body and soul yearned for freedom.
    Six weeks into his initial term, the college had its first party weekend. Having forsaken his high school girlfriend, a pretty but narrow young woman, he watched with envy as other hometown girls arrived on campus. George was miserable and alone. The reliable bond of male affection that had been forged in those first weeks was broken now by the preeminent claim exerted by the other half of the species.
    As recompense for abandoning their double, George’s roommate had bought him a cheap bottle of Scotch. Alcohol was one of the grave sins condemned in his home that he had been quickest to take up, and George was soon drunk on hard liquor for the first time in his life. By now it was nearly 10:00 P.M. The couples had finished their restaurant dinners, danced in the sweaty mash of fraternity parties, and were retreating to the dorm for the moments that mattered most to many of these young men, before parietal hours ended and the women had to return to the local rooming houses or the dorms at a nearby female college where they had been put up. With the Scotch under his arm, George careered through the halls. The doors to most of the rooms were cracked open an inch or two in accord with university rules, allowing tracks from Meet the Beatles! to scream out from the hi-fis within. Knowing that men and women were in each other’s arms, necking, groping, running the bases, George was battered with longing.
    In that condition, he ran into his best friend, Mario Alfieri. Mario had come here from Queens on a wrestling scholarship and seemed as out of place in genteel Charlottesville as a platypus. Boisterous, profane, wisecracking, he was the renegade George wanted to be, and they had developed a quick appreciation for each other. Coming downstairs, carrying a bucket of ice, Mario grabbed George’s elbow.
    ‘You won’t believe this,’ he said, repeating it several times as he bent with laughter. ‘Brierly’s got a girl up in the second-floor hallway pulling a train.’
    George knew the term, but still he looked at Mario without comprehension.
    ‘No lie,’ Mario said. ‘She’s out in a refrigerator box, entertaining the troops. So, Georgie boy, listen to me. You’re saved. Saved.’ Mario knew George’s barren sexual history. ‘Get yourself up there.’
    ‘Did you go?’
    ‘I have a date, knucklehead.’ George had met the young woman briefly. She was the sister of another wrestler whom Mario had been persuaded to invite blind on the promise that she was as irreverent as he was. In person, Joan had proved even prettier than her snapshot, but she was also one of those rare women who seemed defiant even standing still. ‘Five to one, I get nothing off her,’ Mario had whispered to George.
    ‘What about the syph?’ George asked now, contemplating what supposedly was occurring upstairs.
    ‘What about getting laid?’ Mario reached back to his wallet and slapped the emergency prophylactic always there into George’s hand. ‘Greater love,’ Mario said. He pushed his friend to the staircase with both hands.
    Coming off the landing, George found a scene that seemed entirely improbable, notwithstanding Mario’s description. A huge carton, about eight feet long and four feet high, had been wedged across the threshold of Hugh Brierly’s room at the far end of the hall. Projecting between the open flaps on one side, George saw a white shirttail and four naked legs, two with pairs of men’s