ELIZABETH HAYSOM WAS INTRODUCED TO JENS SOERING at a dormitory barbecue in August 1984. He was barely eighteen and looked sixteen. She was twenty and looked it.
At UVA, first-year Echols Scholars, all of whom are enrolled in the College of Arts and Sciences, are assigned to a dormitory called Watson Hall, which they share with the Rodman Scholars from the School of Engineering. Watson Hall is a brick, four-story building on the western edge of the Grounds, close enough to Scott Stadium to hear Cavalier fans cheering on bright Saturday afternoons. It is a coed dorm, women on floors one and three, men on two and four. At the beginning of each year school officials sponsor a social so the students can get acquainted.
Oddly, considering the depth of their later attachment to each other, when Elizabeth and Jens first met, there was no instant magic. When Jens’s dark eyes met Elizabeth’s blue ones, there were no sparks. Later, Elizabeth confided to her roommate, Charlene Song, that when she was introduced to Jens, she was convinced he was a little wimp. “No,” she said, “I take that back. I thought he was an aggressive little wimp.”
Around Thanksgiving her attitude began to change. Jens would sidle up to her and open a conversation about women. He was especially anxious to talk about French women, whom he held in very low regard. Amused at first, Elizabeth broadened the subject of their conversations, and soon they discovered they had a lot in common.
One of the things that attracted Elizabeth to Jens was the very thing he made such a big deal about: his foreignness. He had a European aura about him that Elizabeth found irresistible. The other thing she found compelling about him
was the very thing that had made him repellant to the girls at Lovett: his weirdness. He wore it like a badge; he exulted in being different. She sopped it up.
For that matter, Elizabeth was weird, too. When she came to Virginia from Europe, she brought with her the thought patterns she had developed while growing up in England. Her ways were different from those of the American students, and, like Jens, she rejoiced in her unconventionality. She decorated her dorm room with her own drawings and hung tapestries on the walls. Invariably, she had a David Bowie album blasting in the background. Like Jens, she delighted in saying outlandish things strictly for their shock value, but could keep her dormmates entertained for hours with tales, real and imagined, of her travels through Europe with Melinda.
At twenty she was two years older than most of the other first-year-men and clearly had different ideas and goals. While most of the first-year women at UVA in that period were somewhat conscientious about their dress, Elizabeth was noticeably shabby. Her dress for the day, any day, apparently consisted of whatever she happened to put her hands on first. She favored skirts with tights underneath and loose blouses, but whether anything matched or not appeared immaterial. She was a hippie two decades too late.
In addition to her peculiar habits, the one thing that set her apart more than anything else was her accent. It was beautiful, the envy of the women of Watson. It helped make her exotic and brought her respect in the dorm as a “woman of experience.”
Although she was careful about letting it show, she despised Americans. She felt infinitely superior to them. In a letter to her Berlin benefactor, Colonel Herrington, written from Yugoslavia during the Christmas holidays of 1984, her contempt was evident. She brandished her Britishness just as brazenly as Jens did his Germanness.
Elizabeth, who had always been active in extracurricular activities, talked her way onto the First-Year Judiciary Committee; knowing that only eleven students would be
picked for the group out of seventy-three applicants, she went to great lengths to promote herself for the post. But once she got on the committee, she seemed to lose interest. When she participated in group proceedings, she spent much of the time passing humorous notes to other committee members and making faces behind people’s backs.
While Elizabeth dated frequently and spent a lot of time with friends, Jens kept almost exclusively to himself. In Watson Hall, as at Lovett, Jens was remembered mainly for his arrogance, his belligerence in expressing his opinions, and his cynical approach to college life. At UVA football is a popular sport, second only to basketball. Yet Jens spent a lot of time denigrating Cavalier fans and making fun of the game because of its “violence.” As at Lovett, his pessimism did not endear him to his fellow students. One classmate told a reporter from the student newspaper, “He irritated a lot of people with his ‘I am great’ kind of attitude.”
Although he, along with another student, announced plans to develop a Trivial Pursuit-type game using facts about the university, the project never got off the ground. But that may have been because he started dating Elizabeth.
Once they got to know each other, Jens and Elizabeth clung together as kindred spirits, as allies in an ocean of shallow Americans. Nothing could have made Jens happier.
Elizabeth and Jens began dating seriously in November. For Jens, it was his first flesh-and-blood relationship. Elizabeth was not only good-looking and smart, she also was suave and sophisticated and worldly, a girl who could speak eloquently about literature and film and bisexualism. Even better, she knew what she was talking about. By the time classes broke for the Christmas holidays, they had decided, as Elizabeth put it, “to be in love.”
THEY WERE NOT A PARTICULARLY HANDSOME COUPLE, this rosy-cheeked eighteen-year-old and the pale, aloof twenty-year-old. Elizabeth was slightly pudgy, and her hair was short, most likely still growing out from her mohawk of the previous autumn. Jens had put himself on a weightlifting
regimen and had slimmed down. He was no longer as plump as he had been in high school, but no one was going to mistake him for a linebacker either. Still, Jens was a good three inches taller than Elizabeth, so they fit together well. She was fair with blue eyes, light hair, and well-proportioned features. Not beautiful, but definitely striking. Jens had a German’s creamy skin. He wore his dark hair in bangs that hung low on his forehead, almost colliding with his heavy brows. When he smiled, his exceptionally wide mouth split his face neatly, revealing large, gappy teeth. Elizabeth’s smile, on the other hand, was shy and fetching, accentuated by deep dimples. Her teeth were shining white and perfectly shaped, the handiwork of an expensive dentist.
When the two began dating regularly, Jens underwent a noticeable personality change. His cynicism and arrogance virtually evaporated. It was as though his soul had been exposed to light for the first time. At Lovett and in the dorm his classmates had found him sour and disagreeable. But after he began dating Elizabeth, he seemed like an entirely different person. He became much more tolerant, even jolly and chatty. This was especially true with Elizabeth, whom he was anxious to impress with his wit and knowledge. This was not at all the same Jens who had barely exchanged a dozen words with the girls in his high school. With Elizabeth he could hardly stop talking, rambling on for hours about literature, psychology, philosophy, science, foreign relations, and the tribulations of being an outsider in the American system. She was new to America, he told her, but he had been around long enough to know first-hand just how corrupt the system was. It probably was the only thing they discussed in which he had more experience than she.
Elizabeth, who had at first thought she would like to go to Cambridge and major in history, had changed direction. Her main interest had become writing. Not long after they met, she divulged to Jens that she was working on a novel. He was overjoyed. For hours she and Jens discussed literary works they had read and ones they wanted to write. They
spent hours poring over Shakespeare, rewriting some of the master’s scenes to make them more relevant, in their view, to the twentieth century.
This reawakened old urges in Jens. He had come to UVA intending to major in psychology, but as the relationship with Elizabeth grew deeper, his focus shifted to film and screenwriting. He even enrolled in an upper-level screenwriting class and announced plans to produce a movie.
But one thing seemed odd: Though they were so much alike, with such similar backgrounds, their approach to college education contrasted markedly. Elizabeth’s class work was disappointing. Maybe it was because she was older, had spent an extra year in high school, and had been out of school for a year before she enrolled at UVA. Or maybe it was because, as she later swore, she was more interested in drugs than books. While she had been an outstanding student at Wycombe Abbey, at UVA she was less than mediocre. In her first semester her grades were C’s with one F. Her adviser called her in for a chat and warned her she was going to have to do better. Jens, on the other hand, was on the Dean’s List for his first two semesters.
While much of their shared interest was in intellectual issues, they also had two other passions. One was a desire to design a supercar. They spent weeks studying diagrams and plans for a vehicle they envisioned as a cross between a Porsche and a Ferrari. This was curious since neither showed much prior interest in automotives. Neither had a car nor appeared to have much desire in owning one except for the conveniences it could offer in the way of transportation. Elizabeth couldn’t even drive a car without an automatic transmission. Nevertheless, they approached the supercar idea as design engineers, convincing each other that some day their hybrid would actually be built.
Their other passion was passion, which was rather lopsided. Although Jens talked a good game, going into extensive detail with Elizabeth about what he called his “bizarre sexual fantasies,” he was a limited performer. He was impotent.
But that was only a semi-impairment. Elizabeth was partial to oral sex anyway, and Jens compensated for his inability to maintain an erection by performing cunnilingus on Elizabeth. The best he could do on his own was think about her and masturbate.
THEY ALSO SPENT HOURS, AS YOUNG LOVERS DO, TALKING about their families, their hopes, their goals. Not surprisingly, Jens bared his soul, confessing his most secret thoughts. He confided to her how he clashed with his father, whom he described as a hot-tempered martinet, an intolerant, work-obsessed drone, who had driven his mother to alcoholism and the brink of suicide. He felt sorry for his mother, he admitted, because of the abuse she had to take from his father.
He did not escape this abuse either, he said, explaining how his father was always critical of him because he wanted to express his individuality. The verbal abuse also extended to his younger brother, Jens said, who was an artist at heart but who had been disillusioned by his father.
Although he spoke harshly about Klaus, Jens’s real venom was reserved for his maternal grandmother, whom he said he hated because of the way she treated Anne-Claire. “My mother wanted to divorce my father and go live with her, but she said no,” Jens told Elizabeth. “Then she asked her mother to give her some money so she could get started on her own, but the old lady wouldn’t do it.”
“Maybe she couldn’t afford to,” Elizabeth suggested.
“Oh, she could afford it all right,” Jens said bitterly. “She has about a million dollars in the bank, and that doesn’t include God knows how much money she’s wasted over the years. A share of that is due my mother and me. Someday,” he vowed, “we’ll get it.”
Elizabeth eagerly reciprocated in this fervor to expose family skeletons. She guessed that she loved her parents, she said, especially her father, but her affection was tempered with anger because of the way they had treated her when
she was young. Often, Elizabeth said, Derek and Nancy would leave her by herself while they partied or visited with friends. Once, before she was ten years old, Derek and Nancy went away for the afternoon, leaving her alone with her large, rambunctious puppy. The dog bit her, opening a horrible wound on her cheek. “See,” she told Jens, pointing to her face, “the scar is still there.”
With blood streaming down her face, she ran to a neighbor’s house screaming for help. The neighbor took her to the hospital, where the wound was sewn up. But the incident was not quickly forgotten. It provoked an investigation by the child welfare agency, Elizabeth said, and the social worker handling the case recommended that she be removed from Derek and Nancy’s custody.
Soon after that, Elizabeth continued, they sent her away to boarding school, where she was exposed to more damaging things than a dog bite. In her first school, an institution in Switzerland, she was raped by three Frenchmen, she claimed. More injurious than the attack, however, were her parents’ reactions. Derek tried to pretend the incident never happened while Nancy called her a whore and accused her of provoking the rape.
From then on, Elizabeth added, her relationship with her mother deteriorated. Whenever she was home from school for vacation her mother would come into her bedroom every night, disrobe, and climb into bed with her. Then, Elizabeth said, Nancy would make sexual advances toward her.
Elizabeth told a flabbergasted Jens that the situation worsened when she came home after her adventure with Melinda. Not long after she moved in with Nancy and Derek in Virginia, Nancy cornered her in her bedroom one afternoon and forced her to strip. Nancy then ordered her to assume strange poses and photographed her in the nude. Later, Elizabeth said, Nancy delighted in showing the pictures to her women friends, one of whom backed her in a corner at a party and leeringly confessed how much she had enjoyed seeing the photos. While her mouth was hanging
open in astonishment, Elizabeth said, the woman, with a wink and a laugh, reached out and tweaked her nipple.