Character Analysis
Slocum's got Virginia on the mind. He thinks of her when he sits at his desk. He thinks of her when he's at home with his wife. He really misses how she would laugh and smile a lot, and he especially regrets not going past first base with her.
Okay, let's back it up.
Virginia was the twenty-one-year-old receptionist who worked at the auto insurance claims agency with Slocum back when he was seventeen years old. The two would fool around, but they never took it all the way in the storeroom like Tom and Marie Jencks did.
Virginia represents Slocum's unrequited fantasies of teenage love and lust. Though he's been with other women, he never got his fix back when he was a teenager. We here at Shmoop find it interesting that the girl from Slocum's past whom he was unable to touch is named Virginia, or virgin. Hmm, coincidence? We think not.
But that's kind of the point: Slocum's fantasies about Virginia are so powerful precisely because they're fantasies and not reality. Would he really have had the ultimate experience with her that he imagines? It's pretty unlikely. Reality would intervene in one way or another.
Anyway, Slocum and Tom eventually left the company to go fight in the war, and they never went back or spoke to Virginia ever again. "I tried. I'm sorry. I miss her. I love her. I want her back. I remember her clearly now when I try to remember everything important that ever happened to me" (3.38), Slocum laments.
He calls the insurance agency many years later and learns that Virginia killed herself with gas, just as her father had done. Slocum recalls how she always joked that she wanted the inscription on her tombstone to read: "Here lies Virginia Markowitz. She was a very good lay, even though she was Jewish" (3.64). Yeah, because that's exactly what we want on our tombstones too. Not.
To Slocum, the death of Virginia means the death of his teenage naïveté. It seems that no sexual encounters can ever fulfill him in the way that his fantasies about Virginia do. But would Slocum even want Virginia if she were alive now? Knowing Slocum, and knowing how nothing makes him or anyone else happy, probably not.
Sorry Virginia, guess you'll just always be the one who got away.