1

There is but one tune in the universe, and we each get to play it in turn on the various instruments of ourselves, albeit, as brasses, woodwinds, strings, or percussion; as sopranos, altos, baritones, basses, etc. But it is always the same tune, and we are rarely allowed any variation on it. We go on with our lives, getting fucked (or fucked over), dumbly believing in the beauty of our song, for if we didn't we would be truly doomed, not just merely disappointed. And so it goes. We remain full of dread, only lightly cursed, not classically doomed and worthy of a tragic end.

I am no different from anybody else in this regard. I live a life of consummate unoriginality, believing it to be unique. And so it is, but mostly in its minutiae. Thinking ourselves special, we crank ourselves out of bed each morning and commence a day of repetitious activity. We are ants dismantling a dry slice of bread, one thrown to the ground a week or so ago by a stranger. We work the gig both individual and collectively, cheering ourselves on with the message all will turn out well. Blindly, hopefully, we plunge on.

I am at that age when I have just become eligible for Medicare. (Thank you for your condolences, Friend.) Society says it is done with us. Yet I am most vital and doing the best work of my life. The right words still do not come easily, true enough, but seem better chosen, more appropriate, than in the past. And I have important things to say, I find. My life has counted for a lot. Interesting things have happened to me, too. (I know: it is hard to get through life without things happening to you, but some people manage, and their lives prove to be unlived at the end. This is the worst of fates.)

My life is special—I shan't be given another one. What did the wise man say? This is it, not the rehearsal? (You see how ordinary my observations are?) I am a writer who takes himself seriously. This is not the same as being a serious writer, or is it? Perhaps.

In a previous volume, I have examined my ancestors. This is the book, "Sorting It Out"—though it had various names before I settled on this one. And in the second volume, "Dostoyevsky and The Boy Scouts," I examined the short novels of that most interesting of Russian writers, and contrasted them with my adventures in the that old-fashioned American street gang.

So now I approach the period that followed. It is concerned with girls and young women. What a curious mixture they were. It makes me laugh, thinking back. So don’t mistake me, if you see a few tears.

After nearly 40 years of marriage that time seems distant. And it is. This was my love life. My God, is that what it’s called. In long retrospect it seems a lengthy span of raging sexuality and lust. I called this book "Rut," and it is apt, as good a title as what it is now, "Desperate Women." Why did I call it that? Well, a joke is involved, but it isn’t very funny. I called them desperate, because wouldn’t they have to be, to go out with the likes of me?

That isn’t entirely true. I am more typical of my time and situation than I might like to think. I would prefer to see myself as a minor star blazing an irregular course through the firmament, the cosmic ether, where there is no oxygen to sustain life, including this gasping one of mine. But I am no star; I can’t escape from my ordinariness. I suppose I ought to take pride in it, but I can’t. Neither am I ashamed of it. What happened to me happened in slightly different form to many young men of my time. Thus my tune is special, but it is also composed of the same old notes, inescapable, arranged in a highly limited scale. It can’t be helped

I would like to play my tune on my favorite instruments, the B-flat cornet, but it may be scored only for the piccolo's shrill register, my sound coming out tinny and higher than I’d like. Falsetto. You’ve heard it somewhere before, only you can't put the finger of your mind on it, and it leaves you scratching your head in bewilderment.

Women. All analogies fail when it comes down to the sweet, yielding female flesh. It remains with us—in memory, anyway—along with a few simple truths discovered en route. It is important to have loved and to have loved well. Yet we can give to others only what we have to spare at the time. We move through life, learning and dying a bit; we call it growth. We do the best we can with what is at hand. And at the next moment we vow to do better, but we rarely do. We keep repeating ourselves, until we die.

Recently I have been visited by a notion—a rather strange idea that is reluctant to go away. It says there is indeed an afterlife, and to it we must bring all the experience we have accumulated in a lifetime (this one chance of ours); its substance must sustain us through eternity. Our memories alone. We are (as it were) locked into a vacuum—a cigar shaped aluminum tube. It is unmistakable from a coffin. Our trapped experiences may correspond to somebody ‘s idea of heaven, another person’s concept of hell. It is all the same.

This is religious thinking essentially. I prefer to think of life in earthly terms, with death as an ending, a finality. The sky and earth and air and fire consume us unequally, as do the prosaic worms of the ground. (To avoid this is why we burn our dead.) But not yet—not for a while yet. Our time has not come. The future is still ours to manage to some extent. What we are able to do with it is what life is all about. Then we must feed on our own flesh for eternity, with no wine or blood wash it down.

Well and good. I would not want it much different. It is our fate. In the meanwhile, how wonderful the long perspective of time. To have suffered as we did is intolerable, of course, but the ways are what distinguish us from one another. It happened—so forget it. To have missed the pain would have been worse than no pain, no life, at all. And not have experienced some variety of women would be sad indeed.

They form the strongest of memories. Age is the time when we recover in tranquillity what burned and torment us most. Wordsworth told us this fragile truth. Ah, but what did he know about the price of onions?

Much seems light, even amusing, once the blood has cooled. What have we lost, what have we gained? How disturbing it is not to know the truth for certain. What was heavy is indeed lighter now—perhaps of gossamer weight. And thank goodness for small things. In our perception of the discrepancy is our pleasure, and the moderation of remembered pain.

2

I am grateful to have been born male. From time to time I try to imagine what it must be like to be female, but I can’t. Yet I try, for if I don’t, I will never begin to understand women and what they want.

Having no daughters, I am deprived of that enveloping terror that arrives when they reach puberty. It is a bad enough time for a boy—anxious and full of personal doubt. What must it have been like for her, my primary target? My foil? Did she experience the discomforts that I did? Surely she did.

What must it have been like, having men and boys looking at you with long eyes, knowing what they want to do to you—penetrate your body with their rude instrument? What horror and delight? And what was it like, finding out that she liked those hot stares, knowing the future was contained in them, in sex and probably in motherhood, as well? No, I can‘t imagine what it is like, only recognize it as real and prevailing.

We were in turmoil then. Rut is another word for it. Interestingly, Middle English "rut" means to roar. And roar we did, we boys; we howled at the moon nightly. Girls must have had an equivalent behavior, but I do not know what it is. I howled my lament, and listened for the echo off the moon—even when the sky was overcast and I could not see it, which was the usual case in Seattle. Often the moon was a but dim halo, far off behind a low cloud.

Now when you howl in the rain, you get a wet face. Your hair streams water. It not funny, not when you are living the rage and wrestling the octopus of desire. You try sort things out as best you can, but you are hindered by your limited understanding and experience.

And all the while you believe yourself unique, a veritable musical instrument of alto or soprano pitch. The tune you want to play is by the Beatles. It sounds much like "I Want To Hold Your Hand." You forget the words, after the first stanza, but you can whistle the rest. Besides, what else can you do, besides whistle and laugh at yourself? And, yes, you see a tear or two.

At first the girls arrived in pairs. A quirk, no doubt. Often they were sisters. There is an old joke about what one sister won’t do, the other will. I did not find this out to be particularly true. The other was usually along for the ride. We had to accommodate her.

I trace the start of m y sex life (such as it was) to one Bob Stratton. He was something of a character, with a slightly disreputable reputation. This made him attractive to girls and I suppose to myself. I had not thought of him in years and have great difficulty bringing back anything other than a vague shape. His face remains blank. Thin, great shock of blond hair, is all. Even his name was gone. It came back to me one morning in a half-waking state.

A writer learns early to exploit this time of day because it is when he receives messages from the unconscious without any hard effort or much chance of error. He must be ever available. When one chooses to research the past, he is hungry for whatever morsels are to be found in the drawer and snatches them up eagerly and crams them in his mouth. He requires regular nourishment and renewal. When enough morsels have arrived, they begin to arrange themselves in a pattern. This is when they are most useful to him. In time he becomes dependent upon them and looks forward to their timely arrival. By then he is addicted. He can do no work without them.

Bob Stratton was about my size, which is just short of six feet, and had blond or sandy-colored hair. He was slender. So was I. (I am slender again, after several decades of a portly appearance.) Bob was much better looking than I, not burdened with eyeglasses, or refusing to wear them, so I might in my own opinion look better, in spite of crossed eyes. He had an enviable cocky manner that girls liked. One wishes to be cocky and attractive, too, but knows he will only appear silly if he tries. This is the opposite of his intention. A boy wants to be looked up to and admired. Liked, even. H know this is next to impossible, so he settles for being disreputable—if only in a slightly successfully manner.

Since girls came in pairs then, Bob Stratton was often in need of somebody to date the other one. Dating little or not at all, I was happy to oblige. This worked out well for me, for he always wanted the ugly one. Or so it seemed to me. I guess this is how life finds somebody acceptable for everybody, or for everyone willing to play the game.

Our first double date was with Sharon and Sharleen. These were really their names; I don't remember which was which. It doesn’t matter now—perhaps not even then, for they were highly interchangeable. I remember once we traded dates on a date, only quickly to swap back again. We didn’t like what was different, I guess. Don’t ask me what this was. Each had the necessary female attributes that mattered so— jutting breasts and hips, lips caked with red lipstick, long auburn tresses, etc.

Ah yes, lipstick. Sticky stuff, with a sweet chewy taste. Girls put it on, boys kissed it off. It was a nice arrangement, a unending sources of pleasure for both. Sex is a game that, like other sports, requires practice. Lipstick is a commodity. It was ever present. Sometimes it got smeared on her teeth; often it got smeared all over your face. It was a kind of branding. If she impulsively gave you a peck on the cheek, she marked you, either intentionally or not, usually not, and it would remain there, her imprint would, until you discovered it and rubbed it away with a cloth. The scrubbing left a pink circle on your cheek that was getting shaved now about every fifth day, though that might be pressing things. You badly wanted your beard to come in, or at least to show a gray stubble. It couldn't happen fast enough.

Perfume. Girls wore perfume on many occasions, and often the smell was enough to choke a horse, probably because it was new to them (girls (not horses), and they did not know how much to spray or dot on. And since they all wanted to be sexy, they chose a heavy scent, one advertised widely in the magazines published for women. Magazines were how girls and women learned about the trappings of sex. A girl who wore perfume out on a date with you signified something you were never certain about, but it had a provocative effect. You could not be unaware of a girl's perfume and would wonder if she wore it to excite you into a seduction, or for some reason that did not involve you.

Girls were either passionate or not. It was called cold or frigid. Boys, fast or nice, and we never knew which we were or what girls preferred us to be. Girls had a sleepy, puffy look when they had been long kissed. Dreamy, you might call it. It was like being a little drunk. Maybe it is being drunk with love, or what passes for love, in the teenaged world of experience. It is almost always a limited form of sex with somebody who appeals to you a little or a lot, or is simply there, at the right moment. And that moment is always changing.

Kissing is an early manifestations of rut, of course. It is a wonderful and frightening thing for a boy to discover that a girl likes to be kissed and lightly fondled, and will submit to kissing for hours on the part of a scruffy boy who hardly knows what he is doing. And learns that a girl may desire nothing more from it than itself.

What? You mean, they don't desire sex, too? Sex that is maddening you? They like petting in and of itself, as an end, not a means. And you were thinking that if you did everything just right, this once, she would melt into the car seat and you would lower yourself over her and experience what you had heard so much about. There was that story about the key unlocking the door, etc.

You are not aware that, all the while, you are being programmed through sex for something else, something not of your choosing. For outright sex, raw sex, dirty sex, is generally not the prospect, and you didn't know it, boobie. You were being seduced yourself in countless subtle ways—you and your expectations. But if you knew this, even some of the ways, you might not be there tonight, breathing hard (or hardly breathing).

A girl needs a boy to be there. Present. For all her multifarious purposes. And if you knew this, you probably would be elsewhere. So what does she want, if not sex, as you picture it? Why does she sit in a cold parked car by the hour with you, lifting her face to yours every time you lower yours, cuddling happily, smiling dreamily into your face as you come up for air, her lips puffed from yours? If not the ultimate consummation, then what?

I am still trying to find out.

3

There were girls before them. I remember a ravishing eight-year-old named (honest-Injun) Winogene Sturgis, who dates back to when I was ten in Highland Park, Illinois, daily practicing my horn (that B-flat cornet) and selling iced pop at high school baseball games. Do not tell me that Winogene Sturgis was not beautiful, or that eight cannot be gorgeous. I know otherwise. She had raven hair, of that I am sure. (Maybe brown?) Otherwise I don't remember much. She is no doubt a grandmother now, perhaps a great-. Perhaps she will read these words and come rushing forward, shouting, "It is I. I am your Winogene. Take me!" But I will refuse her, the old bat, preferring to remember her as eternally eight, long before the imprint of rut has marked us all.

Next comes Betty Latimer, when I was fourteen. She too remains faceless—merely a dim shape. We went out on an afternoon date to a movie. It wasn't sexual, even though I considered putting my arm around the back of her chair in the theater and perhaps was even bold as to do it, touching nothing but metal and velvet upholstery. To have caressed Betty Latimer would have been not only unseemly but sacrilegious. "Why did you touch me?" she might rightly ask, and I would reply, fully of chagrin, "Beats me. Didn't we see somebody do this—perhaps earlier in this movie?" It might have happened; we might have observed it, but so what? It had no relevance to our small lives. And after the movie let out delivered her to her parents' front door as promptly as I had come to take her away, three hours earlier. Wow.

Did Betty have breasts? Of course, but I don't remember them in either the abstract or the particular. One on each side of her, no doubt. Equal sized and well balanced. She wore the uniform of the day—saddle shoes, ankle socks, plaid skirt, sweater of lambswool or cashmere (it was an affluent neighborhood and she probably had a sweater collection of Braemers that came from wool grown in Tibet and loomed in Scotland); that the wool of her sweater lay snugly across her collarbones and fell straight to her hips without interruption is most likely. She probably wore a strand of imitation pearls around her neck, a friendship ring from a girl on her right fourth finger, red on her lips, and braved no scent. We moved ahead through our Saturday afternoon adventure as two schooners gliding into a serene harbor. We docked and parted, unkissed.

It has taken me nearly this long to understand that girls use boys just as surely, and perhaps even more so, than boys use girls. Even when boys get more bold and there is that usual constant groping maneuver to be put up with. They continue to make use of us. It is not always so bad for them. A light maul is the price of admission. A girl cannot simply go out in public, alone. It is why they come in pair, for many of their occasions. And the situation where society (and each other's opinion) permits them to travel solo is mainly on Saturday afternoon shopping expeditions to known and familiar (and purportedly safe) department stores. This is where they wore those white gloves, remember?

To go anywhere else, a girl had to be accompanied. This meant a friend as companion, accomplice, escort, chaperon, consort, decoy, and diversion. Often it is another girl, for boys are scarce. So when I innocently took Betty Latimer on a fourteen-year-old's safari to the movies, I was participating in a complex social arrangement and fulfilling a specific expectation of hers and her mother. And here I had thought, all these years, I was using her to my advantage. No, she was using me to hers, just as surely. It forms an odd democracy. Glad to have that out of the way, insipid as it may be.

4

Of course I had my fantasy women. They had no relationship to the girls and women (usually mothers) in my real life. They were drawn from the pages of magazines (Varga, Petty, in my dad’s Esquire; even my mother's The Ladies's Home Journal yielded a few) or better yet the movies. Movies were more convincing, more sensual, much more interesting. They moved—both the movies and the women. They turned those very different bodies sideways and let you see their curves from various angles. O joy. It was as though they themselves could not get enough of what you could not get enough of, either—looking at them. It was insatiable. It went on all the live-long day and into the night. It never rested or even stopped to catch its breath.

Jeanne Crain was the reigning queen of boobs and their presentation. She was always twisting and turning so. It gave me a constant half-erection. She had long auburn hair, red lips that pouted and parted wetly in a troubled look that much resembled fright (even when there was nothing to be afraid of), and of course she wore the uniform of the day, a snug sweater. Or else a white blouse that V-ed to a microscopic waist bound by a leather belt drawn tight. Occasionally she left the screen and there resulted a huge hole in my heart. But soon she returned and furrowed her pretty brow, trembled, quivered her lip. I would kill for her—just point the way and indicate the male object. She had a wonderfully calculated vulnerability about her. If you asked her nicely (or not so nicely) there was nothing she wouldn't do for you. You had no idea what some of those things were, but they were why you would kill for her. Those things I would learn by heart and she would perform them serially for me. This I vowed, there in my Movietone dark.

Of course I can see now that my response was orchestrated here, too. Ah, women. Jeanne knew generally what was required of her, but if there were some specific things she didn’t, what were directors and dramatic coaches for, anyhow? How did they earn their pay?

So what else is new? Nothing, nothing, but my point is there was a time in the life of us young dogs when we were acutely vulnerable. We didn't know what lived inside each of us and could be exploited for profit. We bought our tickets and went inside grand theaters that lifted their great velvet veils for us and revealed . . . whatever mysteries the Powers That Be had decided on. Generally it was pulchritudinous. It was overwhelmingly female, as well.

Tell me, did girls go to the movies to learn how to become women? To become seductive and teach boys to give them their way? Did they learn the motions of seduction? Did they study how to flirt, roll their shoulders, shift their hips, look back with heavy lids, and . . . smile? Smile promisingly, provocatively? Did they practice in mirrors? And if they did, will they ever tell us so?

My wife would say, some did these things, some didn't. Women and girls weren't all that devious and sinister. And there is the games aspect. Playing with boys is exciting. It is interesting to see how they respond and to what. It is fun to dress up. Take on roles. Wear different and unusual garments— provided they aren't too outlandish, and you aren't seen by the wrong people doing this.

The key guiding principle I have learned (and it has taken me a lifetime to come to this simple realization) is that girls don't, or didn't, get to go anywhere interesting unless a boy took them there. Simple, isn't it? But so complex.

They stayed home instead. They washed their hair, hair which needed frequent washing if it is to have "the look." For the life of a girl or woman is made up of the mundane. Now boys are different. It isn't that their lives are not comprised of the ordinary; it's simply that they don't see life in such terms. A boy moves from one state of elation to another. In his mind he is in control of his fate and what is happening in his world. But a girl waits. It is what she does of necessity. For her there is no such thing as time pressing. There is all the time in the world. Whatever will come does so in its own sweet course.

She sits by a telephone and it doesn't ring. A girl's curse worse than the monthly. Yet she folds her hands and waits. When a boy calls, she exhibits disdain. What? Hasn't she waited all this time just for him? Well, she has, true, but she also simply waits Waiting is natural for her as it is for a cat.

Isn't this highly neurotic behavior? Of course. I never said it wasn't. It is customary, part of the woof and warp. A boy would go crazy waiting so. He calls at last and she acts surprised to hear from him. What has he been up to? She listens as though it couldn't matter less. What about her? Well, she has been busy, too. Doing what? Oh, things. What kind of things, he pushes? Washing sweaters. No kidding? You've been busy washing all those sweaters? A gloomy pall descends over his credulity and faith in her. She is obviously lying. She's been out with some guy she doesn't want to tell him about and he has been exploring her back azimuth and vectors, for she contains continents. He will bet she is recently returned from a sweaty encounter in a parked car and is fairly dripping with lust still. He simply cannot accept the fact that the world is how she describes it, even when he knows it is. He forces on it the steamy visions of his world. She was washing her multitudinous cashmere sweaters, sitting by the radio or the new TV, waiting for the phone to buzz so that she could answer it in the coolest, most bored, put-upon manner possible.

What on earth for?

Because (you dolt) it is ultimately satisfying to her.

5

I remember going to some island on a ferry with Bob Stratton ostensibly to visit these sisters, Sharon and Sharleen. I swear to God this was their names, but I can only imagine them as you must, according to such names bestowed on them by parents who must have loved the prospect of them greatly in order to put so much thought and deliberation into their names. And, no, they were not twins but merely sisters born a scant year apart and doomed to the endless proximity this always brings. No last name remains attached to that pair, alas.

Parents who selected the one name, say, Sharon, for the first-born (I might have it backwards here), held in shallow reserve the other name, Sharleen, for the child that was as sure to follow as the day the night, unless it were a boy, a son, and they had to delay another year or so before they could reward the first daughter with their selection of a euphonious companionate name and rival sibling who even looked like breathtakingly her.

We wandered around this island resort, two Bobs and the sound-alike, look-alike sisters. It was a little like regarding yourselves over and over in the Funhouse mirror. Of any two daughters, one is more slender. One is prettier, one more buxom. Occasionally one daughter has all the attributes, but there is usually a providence that balances them out and neither girl has more than her share, though it is often disputable which is the one. Our tastes vary widely. The tall, thin is more elegant, for instance, but lacking in chestal abundance, let us call it tastelessly, where the shorter one has bigger breasts and perhaps a prettier face but is a little dumb, or dumb seeming, and has an appropriate demeanor. And of course (important to a budding boy, perhaps vital) is the fact that one of the two is rumored to be more passionate. A guy can get more off of her, or so is the prevailing opinion. And there are those who follow these hints blindly, hopefully, desperately, while others (I'd like to think myself in their company, but I'm not so sure I am, or was) trust more to their eyes and like to be surprised, perhaps even delighted beyond measure, at what they encounter.

It was an island called Whidbey, with a settlement named Indianola, a word I've always liked more than it deserves, for reasons not apparent to me. It was summer; their parents had a home there or perhaps rented a summer cabin. It was a place for summer cabins, anyway, and that may be why I treasured it, for there were no such places in my life and my father was not interested in buying a cabin for my mother, brother, and myself to retreat to, not to mention serve as an escape for himself. So it was a place to visit in the company of my friends and to be enthralled with, it was so foreign and dreamy and exciting, or so I thought. If you think a thing is true, it is at least for the duration that you are able to think of it that way, and if this be long, so much the better, even if you are wrong in what you surmise about a place or even a person.

We danced. Of that I am sure, but I remember no live band, so it must have been to a jukebox, and I would have it in a huge outdoor pavilion down near the water, salt, made of peeled logs and open on every side, which may have been hexagonal, with a cement slab for a floor and overhead a ceiling very much in appearance like that of a thatched hut but of course made of logs again, locally obtained and subject over the years to a dry-rot condition. I can fairly smell that dank, musty odor of incipient rot as I write this. Picnic tables of cedar or redwood, with commensurable benches, uncomfortable to be sure, but so in keeping with the summertime evening ambiance as not only to be tolerable but to be preferred. The place was perfect for whatever we expected to do there, which was eat a basket supper with soft drinks that we bought at the foodstand and dance to the canned music of that year, or the one just past.

And talk. Boys and girls chatter. It is always insipid, vacuous conversation that must comprise some sort of code not intelligible even to the people speaking it but representing to them something just beyond the reach of words—something illusory, keen, vital, significant, ready to burst into being and blossom into meaning. Conversation that is elusive and oblique, mysterious, haunting, daunting, thrilling, each by turn.

We talked, we ate, we supped, we listened for the music to start, we pressed warm bodies on a tepid night tightly against each other, stickily, damp cheek to a cheek not ours (wonders), and staggered round the waxed floor (I was never much of a dancer, but Bob Stratton was), chest to breasts, knees knocking, thighs caressing, sweaty hands delightfully clasped. I think Sharleen was mine, but would not put money on it, and only Bob Stratton could possibly bet with me, and he is long gone into a separate, irretrievable life. Sharleen was taller, slenderer, arguably less pretty, and it was possible to clutch her more tightly because there was less of her to get in the way. I kissed her. I wondered (still do) why she would let me kiss her, or any girl would, for that matter. She was always waiting with a patient, upturned face for me to bestow my lips on hers and slurp a few times wetly before I came up gasping for air. What's with girls—don't they breathe? Have they no need for air? Do they have gills, or what?

Then there was the business of tongues. I'm not quite sure where that got started, or with whom; perhaps it was inherent in the very first kiss and the tongue just happened to come forward as if to wet the lips, only somebody else's tongue was present, and lo, the foreign lips touched others and a thrill was born, soon to be repeated. Tongues took on lives of their own. They explored new territories and established beachheads. Some were tentative, some bold, some first tentative and then bold, very bold. Some tried to choke you with their bulk. Others flicked out at you like a snake and then retreated; what do you do then, chase them into their lair? Is the retreat an open invitation? Do you try and find out? Is it a trap, to be met with a rebuff?

You kissed lower lips and chewed lightly on them. Or (better yet) she chewed on yours. Imagine, a real girl chewing with her true teeth on your old lip lightly, well short of the point of pain. Delicious. And then her tongue followed. If a tongue in a face could do a job like that on you, what might it do if it decided to explore your tender body? A shiver of terror and anticipation rushed down your spine and dissolved in a mush of jelly in your gut. To put it kindly.

You could kiss an upper lip, too, only there was less of it to captivate your mouth or for your lips to cling to, and upper lips led to nothing, whereas lower lips took you deeper into the cavernous mouth and to the Land of Tongue. A tongue was a curious instrument used previously to taste food with and to help masticate it. It pronounced words, retreating for guttural sounds and lunging forward for fricatives and sibilants. Otherwise it remained inert, so to speak, and lay loosely low in the jaw and waited, in the manner of the girl who owned it. In kissing it came lunging forward. It had a will of its own. Maybe it didn't know what it was doing, half the time. It was out of human control.

No memory, no guilt, no blame, either. That was the Life of The Tongue. It was never sorry. It offered no explanations, only sensation. It pleased the user and the recipient as well. Thus it was a wonderful, marvelous instrument. And to think that I had carried the damn thing around in my mouth, relatively unused, for sixteen years now. Simply incredibly marvelous to contemplate.

However, it is impossible for a boy in the grip of rut to kiss a willing girl with his tongue for very long without getting other ideas. And girls always feign astonishment that this should innocently happen to him and maintain that they themselves experienced no similar sensation. Indeed not. So what you did next is always a shock and a surprise to them. It is why they catch your hands as you extend them as quickly and as expertly as shortstop fields a ground ball hit at him. Just like that.

Why it is as though they could read your lewd thoughts.

6

It was on the island that I met Bonnie and Julie. They were friends of the charming Bob Stratton. I think he and I had paper routes together and shot baskets while waiting for the delivery truck to arrive with our day's load of newsprint. I don't know where Sharon and Sharleen went. They simply expired. I don't recall where slick Bob Stratton disappeared to, either. All I know is that for a long while I was dating another pair of sisters, first one, then the other. Bonnie came first. She was older and somewhat pretty. But Julie was the sexy one, and I had my eye on her and her possibilities from the start. She was about fifteen, and starting to become aware of herself and how boys looked at her sideways.

Bonnie and I were the same age and in the same level in high school. They were different schools, however. This was Seattle in the years just after the end of World War II. The city had increased only temporarily in size, and now there were cutbacks and the elimination of certain national programs that had swelled local employment. Seattle shrunk back to just under a half million. Such a size gives a city a specific configuration. Big, but not very big, it daily belts out its sustaining industries and all the subsidiary ones dependent on them. Meanwhile, the Navy pulled back its active fleet from where it was stationed at Pier 91 and adjacent bases on neighboring islands of Puget Sound. The Battleship Missouri, on which the Japanese had succumbed to General MacArthur and other less famous agents of government, was moored in Bremerton nearby. Fort Lawton had shrunk to a skeleton force of soldiers with no specific duties other than maintaining and serving reserve units. It is where I had climbed the fence to shine shoes (for great profit, I might add) and see movies before they hit the downtown theaters.

Always there was the rain. Bonnie attended Roosevelt High School and for me to reach her house I had to travel a dogleg course by bus, transferring downtown and heading wetly back North again. It took an hour. Roosevelt was prestigious, famous for a high percentage of its graduates going on to colleges and universities. In a year, then two, respectively Bonnie and Julie headed for Stanford. I remained at home, attending the University of Washington, which was not very far away from where they lived with their mother, a younger sister, and an even younger brother. As a self-centered teenaged boy, I paid the others practically no attention. I think by doing this, or by not being more observant, I missed a lot that was going on which was a long time coming to my notice.

My own high school was second tier. Queen Anne was situated on a hilltop and made proud mention of this dull fact early in its fight song. It was a rather formidable old concrete-and-stone fortress, and in the long winter months fairly streamed water from the skies, which darkened its normal gray to that of what the Navy painted its warships to make them undetectable against a stormy sea. This did not detract any from the aura of depression that surrounded the school and my having to go there for five straight years, for it was where the demographics indicated we must travel to commence our eighth grade. Again we rode the bus and again we had to transfer. Each transfer meant a long stand in the rain. There were no kiosks provided by Metro in an effort to woo and win more riders, as occurred in later years; instead, it was the good old Seattle Transit System, where you waited overlong, presented your curious slotted bus token to the driver, and took a seat in a vehicle that had been built before the war and was kept running throughout it and long afterwards by mechanical ingenuity. The bus continued along its route, gradually ridding itself of passengers until, just before our respective destinations, an empty seat appeared and we got to occupy it briefly. Meanwhile we steamed in the aisle.

I don't know why all these references to rain and the eternal grayness of buildings and skies, except this is how I remember it. They were not cheery days for me. Even in sunny spring and summer (we have beautiful falls, too), the place seemed to me to be presidingly heavy. This was, of course, a reflection of my own state of mind—a projection, psychologists tell us. I was hip to all this, having read a lot of psychology, along with my regular ration of Dostoyevsky, which does nothing to lift the spirits of a growing boy.

I went out for sports, as we all must, not knowing how else to measure ourselves, and in turn found that I had no athletic skills worth mentioning, and tired easily on the field. There is only one way to learn these cruel facts of life and it is by suiting up and turning out. I guess it is a refection of how badly we all wanted to be famous athletes, if only locally known. And it is a painful process by which the truth is delivered to our open gates.

There are several ways in which a boy can become notable, and one is by cultivating a fine disdain. This I excelled at. I came to it naturally and for a long while it was something recognized solely by me. It was not because I kept it well hidden. I exercised it at every opportunity, along with a biting sense of humor. Generally I and it were ignored. It was no more than I expected. I came to prefer obscurity. Still, I lived in a world of people, peers, classmates, and they probably are about the same the world over, differing only in minute particulars and exhibiting much the same natural and cruelty. It was fine by me; I would cope and endure.

I can't speak for Bonnie and Julie, though. They were lonely, too, I suspect. We served each other's needs and made use of each other's company. It is what friendship is, people drawn together by mutual dependencies. For as I said, girls need boys to take them places, otherwise they are relegated to Saturday afternoon shopping trips to department stores, perhaps to have lunch in the tea room, and to returned home sated with shopping but still largely discontent. So if I was used by them to go places on Friday and Saturday nights, which matters so much when you are young, it was perfectly acceptable to me. I was glad to oblige. I was so dismal and depressing a person that I wonder why they put up with me. I guess nobody much else was ringing their telephone. But it simply might be that they liked me.

I certainly liked them. They were nice girls—in several sense of the word. I think the fact that our friendship persisted in one form or another for a decade (far past the point of expediency) was based on the relationship not being obviously sexual. I mean, it was sexual, all right, but it was non-consummated sex, which goes to prove that it is possible to have a sexual relationship when you are young without it involving sex, sex as we later come to know and value it. It is difficult to do so, however.

We could talk on the telephone by the hour. I think there were weekday evenings when, having talked to Bonnie for more than an hour and she finally begged off with the excuse of schoolwork, I asked to speak to Julie, who was not very far away. They shared me, and if there was any vying I did not know of it. More likely I was a diversion, a male one, and valued for that currency more than any other. It's okay; they were my friends. Perhaps they were my very best friends, for there are things you can say to a girl, a woman, that a man cannot say to another man. Or else no other boy or man would let you prattle on so long about yourself and your petty interests. Women seem to more than tolerate such behavior; they actually encourage it.

Their home life was much more complex than I saw it as being. I glimpsed only the surface. There was the house on Fifteenth Avenue Northeast. It was fairly ordinary and in no way expressive of what they could afford, I soon learned, for about the time the girls were at Stanford (which is not exactly free), their mother moved to Laurelhurst and a house that cost probably three times as much. All the time the money was there, apparently.

A mother, I say, but no father. He was alluded, but not mentioned in my presence. I gathered he as not much in their life. The two younger children were locked into their age groups and budding identities enough to be unrecognizable as individuals. They were just the younger brother and sister. Of course in time they matured and went on to lives of their own, but I only heard mention of them indirectly and scarcely paid attention to it. This says a great deal about me, both then and earlier, and it is not something I want to dwell on, or my lack of powers of observation, for I went on to become a writer. To elaborate more might detract from my credibility.

The mother was a writer. What she wrote specifically, I have no idea. She was an officer in the local writers' group, which might have been PEN, or its forerunner, and was always busily typing up items at the dining room table—minutes, agendas, that kind of thing. I picture her as slightly overweight, with glasses and gray hair, a cigarette dangling from her lip, a cup of cold coffee beside the writing machine, heaps of books and papers and bound manuscripts surrounding her on both sides. She always seemed to disappear from the room shortly after I appeared at the front door. It never occurred to me until now that she might have found me anything less than charming, with my constant frown and preoccupation with myself. Boys, she knew, were a necessary ingredient to a girl's maturation, and I was a boy, and there were not an abundance of us around. So I had value to them.

A writer, she was also a dentist. A woman dentist, then and now, is a bit rare. It is an old-boys' bastion. Girls—women—are permitted in the form of chair-side assistants, dental hygienists (a new pseudo-science, and a budding art), book-keepers, and receptionists. But I don't think she was a practicing dentist. It was evenings and Saturdays when I was at their house, and these are not normal times for a dentist to be seeing patients, so I might be wrong here, and the fact that she was always home (or late in the evening, already gone to bed), but I don't think she had a practice. Tit is just my sense of things. The family's chief source of income was rental property.

During The Depression, both she and her husband were practicing. People had teeth in their mouths, and poor as many of them were, they had aching roots and cavities that must eventually be attended to. Dentists did well, and some of them turned away patients who did not have cash in hand. I don't accuse them of this, only state that they accumulated a lot of money and turned it over into property that was begging for a buyer. They owned a big apartment that later became a notable hotel, The Wilsonian. Several decades later they sold it for over a million dollars, I heard. By that time what remained of the family had moved to Los Angeles. Westwood Village. It is tony.

What their family life was like I have to imagine, and if I am too fanciful I will increase my chances of being wrong. I don't mean about what I observed, but about the family life that must have been theirs before I knew them well, the one including their father, the principal dentist, before he moved away. And the fact that I accidentally came across him some thirty years later while hunting for a house to live in has surely colored my picture, while supplying few new facts. Yet I can see him as I did then, incredibly seedy, overcome with the tremors, stubble-faced, thin as a pencil, the living room of his house darkened against the noonday sun outside his shrouded windows, his wife or live-in or whatever, arranged alongside him in a second, parallel overstuffed chair, looking overstuffed herself, both of them puffing away on cigarettes as though they were still rationed. Perhaps it was drink that undid him.

That day he seemed to have an insidious way of speaking as though from behind his cupped hand, though no hand was raised to his lips to muffle whatever he said. I recognized the name and pounced on it, it seeming a little unusual. "Are you Dr. X?" I asked, and quick on the heels of it, when it was not so much admitted as not denied, "Do you have two daughters, Bonnie and Julie? For if you do"—you see, I was certain—"I know them quite well. We have been good friends for many years."

This was not anything he wanted much to hear, I gathered. He offered me no conversational opportunities, no encouragement to go on. Again I surmised that indeed these were his daughters, but this had happened so long ago, you understand, to be of no concern of his. Or interest. Did I understand? Oh, I did, and though I wanted to press on I didn't because I realized it would do me no good. I would learn nothing more than this little. Already I knew more about them and their circumstances than he did, I suspected. I would end up informing him of a few things, and he had no wish to be told. So I clammed up, completed my business, and went on my way. I think I rented the house, but made my payments to an agency that took a percentage for its services and passed the remainder on to him, so that he would not be bothered with such things as leaky toilets and late collections.

I never saw him again. All this is prelude for the preposterous, and I will get to it in a minute. It is what I conclude, anyway, and what I guessed is surely an attitude of these modern times, and may be ephemeral. But I do not think I am far wrong, and if I am right what I propose might explain the great animosity I encountered in Julie many years later, when life had not always been gentle to her and she might be said to be harboring a grievance against mankind in general and men in particular, including me, an old friend.

At that time, only a decade earlier, I rediscovered her as I was undergoing an effort to uncover my past in order to do something special with it (which is to write this), and so took her to lunch for the second time. The first time had all the elements of a date, though she was now the mother of four and I had been married for 26 years myself and could resurrect no sexual interest in her. Still I found her interesting, for we shared (at least for a short while) a common past. The second time she disputed my choice of restaurant and bullied me in the direction of another one, meanwhile stopping off to retrieve some item that had been repaired in a shop. So this meeting was not pleasant or romantic-seeming at all. Just the opposite. I was relegated to the role of errand-runner’s companion. This was okay by me. The food in the restaurant she picked was not the kind I can readily digest, so I ordered only coffee and watched her eat a huge, spicy mound of rice and lamb that I ended up paying for. It cost about twice what it should have. I did not visibly wince.

In the parking lot, she picked an argument with me. I saw it coming. There was nothing I could do to avert it. It was, I saw, her way of saying goodbye. (Why did she need one?) A few terse words would have done the job, for I was agreeable. What we had had in common (youth, our respective sexual awakenings, college life) no longer linked us. We had separate existences that couldn't be yoked at this late date. She was a skilled dental hygienist that commanded $20 an hour—at the time, a lot of money. I was a poor writer. She was earning a Ph.D. degree in education (didn't pan out) and was thinking of entering law school (did).

So she began to tell me about some awful recent event when a man misread her intentions and came on strong and wouldn't be dissuaded. What was this, a confession? It seemed largely out of character. Worse, it seemed untrue. The story couldn't have happened the way she told it. It was a political statement, a story written around an agenda. Men were evil, women good. Men could only think of sex. Well, true, in one sense of the word, but what else is new? She had told the guy what's what and walked away. From where I could only guess. Such things were always happening to her. I wondered why.

She admitted (she even brought up the subject) that she was non-orgasmic. I had used the word, frigid, earlier, and she had leaped on it, attacking it, even though it wasn't used in regard to her. It was a bad word, a loaded word, a word that was sexist in nature. I had to agree. The correct word, medically speaking, was sexual dysfunction. I nodded up and down. A word is a merely a word, in my opinion. She spoke as though it was private territory. And I guess it was.

This might explain how, in a few years of dating mainly her, I made little sexual progress, though I suppose I tried. I was screwing practically every young female who would have me, but not Bonnie or Julie. We remained, as the song would have it, just friends. I let them know my prowess, with normal, immodest, masculine lack of aplomb.

My relationship with them was more than Platonic, but no much more. Julie was the one I was drawn to. We used to park by the hour, taking time out from necking to cool down over some cigarettes that restored us to a state of regular breathing. But I never got acquainted with more than her surface anatomy. I was sure she had two breasts, like any other girl, and a crotch that must have grown moist at times. But I could only guess this.

She insisted on engaging me, however, on a sensual level. What is it about girls—some girls, anyhow? They can go on kissing by the hour and apparently remain unaroused. They are content, satisfied. They do not see it as a preliminary to coitus. Girls differ widely, of course. Others I knew, even then, liked their sex straight from the bottle, as it were. A little foreplay was nice but not essential.

She continued her tirade, that day in parking lot, as my stomach churned from hunger and anxiety. I listened and expressed skepticism. She tensed, then gave me one example, two, of male beastliness. If what she said was accurate, or halfway true, there was no denying the animal quality of men. But I thought most of them were not so direct and obscene as she presented them as being. She strove to convince me.

"One time," she said, "my mother and I were out having drinks. Another restaurant, a nicer one. A man came over and started to talk to me. I didn't want to be rude, so I was polite and tried to get the idea across subtly that I wasn't interested in going somewhere with him. I mean, I was with my mother, for the love of Pete. Now I don't suppose he knew she was my mother. Mother always looks years younger than she is and I can only hope in time I am so blessed." She have me a little smirk.

"But he wouldn't go away. He persisted. He said he had a friend, and maybe his friend would like my friend. My mother, for goodness sake. So I looked at her and raised just one eyebrow. She shot me back a look of extreme non-nonchalance. 'Okay,' I said, going along with the gag, 'where's your friend? My friend is agreeable.'"

"My God," I said.

"Yes, isn't it simply bodacious? We wanted to find out, you see, what they expressly had in mind. Was it the obvious? So this guy came over and he was only about five years older than me. A good-looking guy, not fat, who looked prosperous and as if he had gone somewhere with his life."

"And?"

"And we went off with them. Why not? We were two adults, weren’t we? We had a couple of drinks in a different place. It was great fun—a brilliant joke we shared. They kept asking to be let in on the secret. Then, on the way from one place to another, they became beastly. Enough, I thought. But they were all over us Not so nice, not nice at all. Fearsome. Well, you may not know this, but I'm not always as pleasant as I am with you. I had to let them know how it was, and quickly. Not because she was my mother, which is true enough, but that neither of us was in any mood for what they had in mind."

"And that was what?"

"Why, sex. Sex right then and there. Sex in the car. Me in the front seat and, my God, my mother in the back seat with the other guy, scarcely older than me. Horrors."

Seems like old times, I half-hummed.

"What's that?"

I did not reply. Then I asked, "So what happened?"

"We got out, of course. They had completely misread our intention. I insisted that they pull the car over to the curb and let us out. Right now. It was on a dark arterial, in the rain, late, with a streetlight about every half-mile and no sidewalk, no curb. The most desolate of places. Boy, I can I ever pick them. But we had no choice, you see. The men were monsters."

I was not so sure that I could give her the response she wanted. You can’t feign indignation. Or I could, all right, but the matter of their duplicity seemed foremost to me. Men did not arouse on their own, unprovoked. There was the matter of raising their expectations. Sure, I was male, and I took their side; I could hardly envision any other. What were the women after, if not men and sexual experimentation, or else what is called playing the game of sex, simply turning their availability off and on, depending on how they feel at a given moment. "Maybe I will and maybe I won't": isn't that what it’s called? It isn’t ever fair. Only this time it was different. It was mother and daughter, an unlikely pair.

I looked at my old friend, her eyes flashing in ancient anger, her auburn hair cut short and fashionable and darker than I remembered it, bobbing at her neck, her long arms reaching out to express herself, her feet spread for better balance. She was desperately begging me to agree with her, and I simply couldn't do it. Vindication was beyond me, even as a gift.

We stared into each other's eyes, knowing we would probably not see each other again. There are some things in life, some situations, that are irreversible, terminal. Either one of the parties can initiate a crises. That is fair. The other party must abide. In this instance, Julie initiated the action, but if she hadn't I would have. Too much unseemly and unlasting had happened. Perhaps it was my intransigence that confirmed it was the ending.

All I would have to do is agree that she was right according to the circumstances she had elected to present to me—arranging and editing them as she wished. A friend would have done as much. But I couldn't. I was a stranger to her emotional life.

What she was asking me to do was yield. And for a man that is impossible.

7

I think he molested them. The father did. It is not important to know the particulars, which are more ugly than interesting and in a terrible way almost always the same. When I met him, that long day afterward, hiding as it were from the sun, did the male in me recognize the molesting male in him, its incontestable appearance, or did I manufacture this element afterwards from odd clues given me by both daughters? It hardly matters. But it might help explain human behavior and the vagaries of this life., which is all any of us can try to do.

I am no expert on the subject. For years I had denied (in spite of my readings in Freud during my early teens and later) that such things could happen in the world that surrounded me daily. In Vienna or Paris or Hong Kong or Tokyo, sure, fathers might molest their daughters, believing they had every right. It is textbook stuff. But surely not in America? Not in the America I inhabit, anyway.

It is unimaginable, just as much so as picturing your mother having sex with your father, for if I am wrong about this, and people imagine such things at many moments of the day, then all my values are skewed, and nothing I have to say will matter or make much sense anyway. So I have to act on my basic assumptions. Sometime long before he had been banished (I presume by his wife, the discoverer) there had been those stealthy nighttime mountings of the stair and fearful tremblings in the child's bed, as Daddy approached to "tuck her in"—surely in her mind a phrase destined to strike terror in a child's heart.

One daughter or two . . . or three? And what about the boy? It is hard to enter the mind of a man who molests children, especially his own, and mine balks. Usually I can make excuses for my kind, the male. I can put myself in, say, the shoes of a murderer, even a mass murderer. (Or so I thought; last night, I saw the movie, "Natural Born Killers," and was unable to; I could not accept the contradictory premise that such behavior lies in the heart of all of us, while at the same time only a rare few are "born" to behave this way, and can kill easily and with facility.) I can imagine the female sexual experience, however incorrectly. I can imagine practically anything, but not this, not molesting a child. For these two girls, not to mention the younger siblings, were prepubescent. They would have had to be. Now, when a woman's looks begin to go, and her daughters grow into young womanhood, there may be a weak case made for the husband/father seeing in the eldest daughter the same graceful, prurient motions he was attracted to in the mother. But age has decimated his wife’s appeal. I say, a case might be made, and I might be able to argue it before the court, even though I have no daughters. But it would be a vain exercise. I decline.

I will admit, as an exercise, too, however inappropriate here, looking at both my mother-in-law and sister-in-law, and trying to imagine myself approaching them carnally, as a man does a woman, and not being able to envision it at all— either the approach or deed. Aside from these paired instances of imaginative failure, I consider myself a typical randy male capable of almost everything. In short, a young man still, one in rut.

8

Without intending to, or wanting to, I find myself weaving back and forth in time, now in the near-present and immediately returning to the time I am writing about without such a perspective, a time in the late Forties and early Fifties. And I am helpless to do otherwise, for it isn't until the years have accumulated that we can look back and see that we have gained insight, not lost it.

For instance. When I rediscovered Julie, a decade or more ago, a path appeared to Sister Bonnie, the girl whom I had dated first and with whom I had a rather sweet, pure relationship. It's not that I was unsuccessful in seducing her, for this was never my intention, and we both had to get silly drunk on French Seventy-Fives at a party for a girl who was going away to a convent before Bonnie and I ever did any necking. It was conducted in the manner of children, a bit absurdly, and afterwards we were both embarrassed. We felt silly.

Now assuming that both sisters were girls with normal libidos, and plenty of experience by now had convinced me that girls could be randy, too, then my failure to establish advanced boy/girl relationships with either of them, that is, raw sex, came as a relief, in a way. I am not at fault here. Bonnie, for instance, was nice looking, with long blond hair that tended to go limp, bright eyes, good teeth, a mouth that was painted red for the occasion that I thought was mine, dressed fashionably and expensively well, as did all girls at Roosevelt High, a school that was yellow brick and functionally box-like, rather than looking like the haunt of hunchback Charles Laughton, complete with belltower, as was mine.

In short I took Bonnie places because she was nice to look at and I was proud to be seen with her—snively, snarly, smelly boy that I was. Why she went out with me has been earlier discussed: I asked her and she went, rather than continuing to be marooned at home, alone. I mean, how many times can a girl wash her hair and iron her only slightly wrinkled plaid skirt? (Or I suppose iron her hair and wash her skirt?) Not to mention again all those sweaters?

So when Julie and I ate our first lunch in an expensive restaurant of her choosing, and idled away hours over long coffee, loitering among the potted ferns and all that waxed oak furniture, I finally was compelled to asked, "How's Bonnie? What's she been up to?" For Julie did not bring up the subject of her sister, as I had expected.

I was unprepared for the twisted look and hesitant reply that I received. And then Julie began to speak. Bonnie had married a Stanford man, as was expected of her, and he had a lot of money. This was expected, too. An engineer. So far, well and good. She became the perfect Stanford wife, mentally prepared to have 2.8 children, cook gourmet meals, entertain his friends, live in an expensive house, buy season tickets to Cardinal (they were Indians, back then) football games, and go to Hawaii for three weeks vacation each February. She had a degree in education to fall back on, and if she were to be like the other Stanford women, she would teach for three or four years before commencing her family, have her children tightly bunched chronologically, and when the youngest was in her early teens return to teaching half-time; as the children entered college, she would begin to teach full-time, meanwhile continuing her duties deftly as her husband's help mate and associate. If you doubt the game plan, there are studies that will bear me out.

None of this happened, anyway.

Bonnie had no children. Instead she had breakdowns. She had to be hospitalized. The treatment of the day for what was broadly diagnosed as schizophrenia was electric shock treatments. Earlier she was fed Thyroxine in doses large enough to stop a horse in his tracks and leave him blinking. These events Julie told me in a bitter, off-hand manner. She did not agree with the treatments but was powerless to deter them. Each of the psychiatrists that treated Bonnie was described in turn as a scheming, conniving male whose efforts bordered on malpractice and who only thought of his wallet. I believed her.

The husband had stood by for a while, then deserted her. There was his side of the story, surely, I thought. How miserable it must have been to have a wife go mad on you by degrees. He settled some money on her in a divorce. Meanwhile the mother, who not so long ago had gone on an unhappy double-date with her second oldest daughter, had died. She left quite a lot of money, but it had to be divided in four equal parts. Bonnie's money had been put in a trust account, since she had been declared incompetent in every way. Julie was administrator of not only her mother's estate but also of Bonnie's share. For administrative expenses, Julie told me, she charged the estate at an hourly rate exactly equal to what she made as a dental hygienist. It was the usual method of establishing a reasonable basis for her time. I nodded wan agreement, hardly hearing the details. I was busy contemplating Bonnie gone mad and helpless.

In and out of institutions for decades until all her divorce money and inheritance were nearly gone, the remainder wisely protected by the competent sister from the clutch of scheming doctors, Bonnie was now living in Tacoma in a small apartment in a part of town I knew to be seedy. Nearby was a grocery she could walk to (she could never learn to drive a car) and a pharmacy where she got the prescriptions filled that kept her subdued and on an even keel.

"Can I visit her?" I asked, across the littered luncheon table.

"I suppose," Julie said softly, sadly, "but you won't like what you see."

"It's not important that I like it," I said stiffly.

"I only mean, she might not recognize you." She shrugged, indicating the subject didn’t much interest her.

"Why, have I changed so?"

"No, no, you still don't understand. The electroshocks have destroyed her memory. There are huge areas of her past that she has no recollection of. These include the period of time when we were all friends. Those certainly seem the halcyon days now, don't they?"

I nodded, though they didn't seem that great to me. I remembered them as highly fractured and somewhat tormented. I was most unhappy then. Most of the time when I saw the sisters (especially while I was in the Army at Fort Ord, down the Monterey Peninsula a short distance from Stanford), I was gloomy and depressed, complaining at every opportunity about my sad lot in life. They understood this not at all, the ragged life of a soldier, for they were but happy college students, as I had been only a few weeks ago, hovering over my books. Their pleasant life made me even more furious. How dare they . . . enjoy themselves? How thoroughly miserable I was.

Today the situation was reversed. It was they who were unhappy, each of them, while I had emerged from my blanket of worry and was enjoying a mild euphoria. Life was not a burden but a gift.

So I went to see Bonnie. Julie was right. Bonnie didn’t recognize me. She barely remembered me, but was polite and pleasantly distant as I tried to guide her into a state of cooperative remembrance while I supplied the clues, the events, the feelings for a heartfelt past we had once shared. She responded in bland, befuddled manner, not recalling a damn thing. Or so my study of her face indicated.

Imagine having your past ripped away from you, all that was important, your psyche rendered an empty bin. Then picture yourself encountering someone who had not only shared the past but participated in its formation, then tries to remember it with you, but only comes up with a blank, a void, at each instance. You feel as if your emotional pockets have been picked.

I watched her without seeming to. She had gained maybe sixty pounds since school days. She chain smoked now, this girl who couldn’t inhale while we stood outside at her prom, her hair threatening to descend. I mentioned the prom; she thought she had gone with somebody else. She was puffy and vague. She offered me coffee, which I didn't want, but agreed to drink some anyway and then found I couldn't. It wasn't squeamishness alone, though the place was filthy and I saw an insect moving among the unwashed dishes. The coffee was instant, two spoonsful to the cup, to which water was added from a glass pitcher taken from the microwave that had been heated for about twenty seconds. Ice-cold coffee, with chunks of coagulate floating around in it like balls of mud in a lake. I have to give her credit, though. She drank hers straight down and afterwards smacked her lips winningly.

I was in Tacoma to deliver mounted photographs to its art museum for a juried show that I was in. I won several honorable mentions, I learned later. I fashioned myself a photographer, working as an editor for the University in its engineering college and taking my own pictures as part of my job. This led to my learning the basic skills and branching out into more interesting pursuits, such as pretty girls, tree limbs, flowers, riverscapes, etc. I was now testing the market to see what my value was. But I wanted to see Bonnie, too, and learn how she was at first hand.

So I drove South, through winter mists and pockets of valley fog some thirty miles to Tacoma, veered off the freeway, located the museum, delivered my product, went to a phone booth, called a surprised and lethargic-sounding Bonnie, to whom I announced my intended visit. I heard panic start to rise in her voice, but hung up on her. She owed me something, if only for our collective past—whatever the discomfort. I was at her door in minutes. Julie had not misled me.

Besides being (there is no other word for it) fat, she wore her hair lopped off short below her ears. I think she did it herself, though I can't swear to it. How could her doctors allow her to possess sharp instruments? Those beautifully maintained teeth, the teeth of daughters of dentists, were stained and rotting. Her breath was foul. Well, if you have serious mental problems, taking care of your teeth is low on your order of priorities. First things not second.

This was at a time when mental-health funding from the state legislature was decimated, and men and women who had been institutionalized earlier were put back on the street and subjected to the terror at being made to live alone again. Bonnie checked into a clinic and had her prescriptions filled according to her description of her condition described to a doctor who had never seen her over the telephone. Drugs were ordered in large doses, for the important thing was to keep her quiet in her assigned apartment so she wouldn’t alarm her new neighbors. The authorities don’t want to hear complaints from angry strangers about you screaming at night, banging on the walls, playing your radio at top volume, and the like.

The girl I once drank French Seventy-Fives and got silly with told me she was an alcoholic. She seemed almost happy about it. Well, any identity is better than none, I guess. She went regularly to AA meetings; she had many friends in the group. There was a guy who came to see her and they watched TV together, since she had one and he didn't. People helped each other out in her world. This was the way it was among the disenfranchised, the folks who could not cope. The guy had major problems, but wouldn’t come out in the open and discuss them, as she could, among equals. Because they couldn't drink, they smoked cigarettes by the carton, told each other various versions of the truth about themselves, and drank her coffee. My stomach groaned with me.

"You can always tell an alcoholic," she told me, "by the number of cigarettes he smokes." She smiled sweetly, lighting up as if to illustrate the point.

These were words of such pithy wisdom I've never had occasion to doubt them. I treat them as facts. They are among my touchstones, and I haul them from time to time out to measure the stability of people’s lives, including my own.

9

Bonnie called me one night shortly after my visit. I was thrilled. Well, I wasn't thrilled so much as delighted that she hadn't thrown away the slip of paper I had given her with my telephone number on it. "Call me if you ever need anything," I had foolishly said. Did she want to chat about old times, I wondered?

That wasn't exactly it.

There was a man who was after her and wanted her money. All of it. No matter that Julie controlled it and paid all her bills, including the pharmacy, and doled out a little allowance that was sufficient for Campbell's soup, upon which she subsisted, and the Pall Mall cigarettes which gave her soul encouragement. There was more money, she hinted, money secreted in a special place only she knew about, and it was this stash he was after.

"Who is he?"

"I don't want to speak his name. It would encourage him. Oh, I know it well enough. He is very, very clever. He knows what I am doing at every moment, including this one." On and on she rambled. Only I could help her.

"What do you want me to do?"

She knew at once. Meet with him. Talk him out of his scheme. Because she slept with him once, out of womanly kindness, which is a kind of desperation, not liking him at all, or that sort of thing in general, he had gotten the idea that he owned her. Imagine. What a delusion. He wanted to exercise power over her. He was a demon, this man. If he got control of her money, he could make her do anything. She was truly afraid, I could tell. But she was clearly loony.

It was my first encounter with a schizophrenic and at first everything sounded reasonable. It was only by degrees that its outrageousness crept in. What she wanted me to do remained vague, and she wouldn’t tell me his name still; every time I tried to zero in on what to do she rejected it. Gradually I realized that what she really wanted me to do was listen. So I relegated myself to this role. The she became more pointed again. Maybe I could call him for her. The telephone is a useful instrument, she announced. I could use it to frighten him away. Bluff him. Would I do that for her? She remembered that I used to play poker. It would be easy for me.

While I was hemming and hawing, she searched for his number, but came up empty-handed. Her voice was now calm and had slowed to a drawl. Had she swallowed a pill?

It was three A.M. My wife had wakened at the ring, then gone back to sleep. I had been dozing off, my ear pressed to the receiver, startling myself into wakefulness when my elbow slipped off the table and jarred my head. At last I was able to hang up the phone.

I thought she might call again but she didn’t. For days I lived half in dread that her call would be next, particularly around bedtime, or later, as two A.M. crawled round, and I lay under my blanket, feigning sleep, staving off my own personal demons. I’ve found that you have to have a few to understand those of others. You want to keep them small and always off at a distance. But her call never came. But I would think of her, from time to time, remembering.

How different she was from that girl who had taken me to a Tolo, and a year later to her senior prom. Of course I was wildly in love with my first major girl friend and getting steady sex for the first time in my young life. How grand it was. It gives a boy confidence. He learns how to smile and be easy with people. He has a chance to look around and recognize some of the peculiarities of the great world outside his head.

Yet old friends are old friends. They remain. I had trouble getting Cary-my-Love to believe I could be friends with another girl, even two, and it would only be that. They were—for Christ’s sake—sisters. For if a boy is nightly banging a girl he loves, how can he want to be in the company of another girl, or two, if he doesn't love? Explain it. I'll admit, it is hard.

So Cary decided to call them up, Bonnie and Julie, and invited them to a matinee. She wanted to talk to them, she said. I guess she wanted to see what they looked like and if they were any competition. And they agreed to go to the Saturday afternoon movie with her. I was all atremble. I thought they might dissect me. They knew my many failings and would reduce me to a laughing stock.

What ego. I was barely mentioned, it turned out. They had other things to talk about. I still wonder what these were.

I took Cary to my senior prom, of course. It was within a week of Bonnie's. They were at the same place, The Nile Country Club on Lake Ballinger, a popular resort. It was just across the county line and you could drink there, but none of the Roosevelt graduates did; the kids from my school drank in parked cars. Afterwards they reeled around the dance floor, looking stupid. Roosevelt had its share of rowdies. Most of Bonnie's classmates were like her—staid and prim. True to their colors.

I bought Bonnie a corsage—my only expense of the night. Her dress must have cost her mother a fortune. It was white, or whitish blue, boned in front, strapless, which was not so much daring as conventional, even demure in her case, for she was pretty flat in front. It’s what they all were wearing. She was pretty, blond, and I was proud to be seen with her.

We both smoked then. She didn't inhale, but I sure did. At Roosevelt Hi it was daring for a girl to be seen holding a cigarette. Even at her final prom, when she would not be greeting her teachers, administrators, or chaperons again, she refused to light up. What would people think? So, when I couldn’t stand it any longer, we went outside. There was a mist down by the lake. A moment later she urged me to take her back inside. It was pleasantly cool, down by the lake, I reminded her, and hot inside. It didn’t matter, she told me. Let's go back, right now. Why, I asked? "Oh, all right. If we stay here any longer, my hair will come down."

She had curled it tightly all afternoon, you see, and spray held its big, looping curls in place. It was a tenuous arrangement. The damp air down by the water would take the curl out of it in minutes. She would spend the remainder of the evening with limp, lank hair. Surely I understood? Everybody would be laughing at her. So we returned to the dance floor—it was her prom, after all—and circled it some more. I was bored. The night was deadly dull. It couldn't have been much better for her.

I truly liked these girls and enjoyed their company. Sisters. Julie's prom the following year, went much the same way, but her hair was cut short for summer and in no danger of limply descending like seaweed. Julie did not smoke. These were the slight differences between these two events, one year apart. Neither stands out. Dance programs generally go unsigned and are kept to evoke memories when brought out and looked at perhaps in rushing old age. I remember a band and it was black, for only black musicians were deemed any good. There was the traditional last dance, a waltz, to be danced to cheek-to-cheek, dreamily, regardless of how you felt about who you were with, because it signified the end of high school, and hooray. The evening was designed for memories and you wanted them, even though it was fraught with sadness. You were being set free. We were all eager for the great unknown.

Bonnie went to Stanford the same year I began freshman studies at UW. Her school had denounced sororities years earlier and the girls all lived in dorms, while the boys had dorms, too, but many lived in fraternities, which persisted. Palo Alto was an attractive little city, with its tropical atmosphere (all those shaggy palms) and year-around shirt-sleeve weather. Many of us from the North fled to California for spring break, mainly for the sunshine and to get an early start on a tan. But there were the girls, too. They were known to be more beautiful. Were they all blond and slim? I would testify to it. California was a magical place still, especially the Bay Area, and it had not yet achieved the crime-ridden shame it soon would have. These were its golden years.

Bonnie came home for Christmas and I suppose I saw her. I don't remember. I recall dating Julie more than once, when I was a freshman. We had one of those on-again, off-again relationships, and for many years when she was unentangled and seeing me, and perhaps thinking of me in semi-serious terms, I was in hot pursuit of another girl. I remember dates when she had her attention elsewhere, others when she seemed specially dressed and perfumed for me. It was no doubt primarily for herself. We used each other for practice—and if this seems harsh, it is no worse than how teenager treat each other. It is a raw world they inhabit. It is also how we test ourselves in the crucible of each other, and discover what works, what doesn’t. It is how we escape from making mistakes later, when acts and consequences are more critical. I am referring to that long inch of time before our lives take on their ultimate shape.

Often a date is a test a girl prepares for you in which the amount you care for her is expressed in how much you are willing to spend on her. Only you don't know this for a fact. So you spend foolishly, trying to impress her. It is a never-ending game she plays, for she will never really be satisfied with the terms of your affection and requires you to buy hers over and over again. So to say that Julie kept me broke during this period, or that dates with her turned expensive, is an exaggeration, in a way, for such elements had always been present and I was more aware of them than I have let on. It doesn't take great awareness to know that following a date with her you are broke again.

And yet I enjoyed her company. (Why else would I repeat this easy victimization, if not happily, willingly?) She was intelligent—though I don't remember a single bright or brilliant remark of hers. Mostly we talked about ourselves, the world of students and teenagers, which is limited but endlessly fascinating for the people involved. Our dates began routinely with me arriving by bus, the Seattle Transit System's No. 7 Ravenna, having taken a No. 19, Carleton Park, from my parents house downtown to Fourth and Stewart, where I waited in the likely rain for the bus with "University Avenue" in the lighted window to appear, a veritable beacon of deliverance from the elements.

Lightly wetted and flushed, I climbed the half-dozen wooden steps to her front door and rapped lightly. Usually it was Bonnie who opened the door and bade me enter, but sometimes it was Julie or the younger sister, Milly, who gave me a nervous look. I represented the mysterious world of dates. Or else it was the brother, Jimmy, the youngest, who seemed to me unformed. Each in turn went to Stanford.

When my date was Julie, and she was busily waiting, a bit impatient (for my bus was often late), I felt honored, a special person, though I don’t know why. She had a way of making a boy—at least me—feel unique. Ordinary me. There was a coyness about her, a small flirtatiousness, that marked her as different. Who knew what the evening might hold? I didn’t, and usually had great hopes. Great hopes are generally followed by great disappointments.

She would get her coat and I would help her on with it. Now there is a moment of intimacy to highlight any young man's book. Talk about a moment of sheer sensual impact. I would draw the coat snug up around her neck and she would clutch it to her, wriggling both shoulders, while I held her briefly encircled in my arms, mine. How wonderful it was—as satisfying as anything that might take place later. But little did. Which I suppose is what kept me coming back for years.

A whiff of perfume, the after-scent rising from warm wool, the firm pressure of a shoulder, the infinitely soft brush of a breast, and its slow yield. A boy is not a totally callow creature. He is perceptive, impressionable, highly romantic. He values gentle things. And so does she, if only for the moment. And she must practice. Does not the apprentice quarterback-to-be roll out and throw his passes? (These are called Reps, I believe, and are not wholly without sexual correspondence.) The basketball player has his jump shot to work on, the baseball player his grounders or fly balls to shag. And young lovers have each other. They serve as mirrors. The question always is, "How am I doing?" And the only acceptable answer is, "Pretty darn good."

We kept each other coming back for more, though in all fairness there were times, many times, when one or the other of us couldn't be bothered. We had others on our minds. And as we matured those others became of paramount importance. It is not often that a boy has a girl like my Julie to follow through life for a decade or longer, not to mention some forty years more—however brief their episodes together might turn out to be. And I am grateful for the gift of time.

So while I banged others, there was usually Julie to come home to, so to speak. The Julie of my mind. I do not mean to suggest that she waited for me. Not her. There were times when I needed somebody, and the most I could get from her were a few minutes on the telephone. They had to do. A telephone to a girl is like a steering wheel to a boy, or is it the other way round? Some sexual melding has taken place since then. All I mean to say is that talking on the phone is as natural to a girl as breathing. And it is to a boy, as well. Similarly, to clutch a steering wheel is equally natural, so the grand and significant differences between men and women have narrowed and passed. Adieu.

There were times when I waited for her. I had gaps in my life and nobody to fill them up with. Then I thought of Julie. But we were on different tracks, or skewed courses. If there was a historical moment for us, it slipped by unnoticed by either of us a long time ago, or one or the other of us let it slide through his or her fingers without a second thought. For we cared as only you can care when you don't care. I mean, caring was an indulgence, unimportant, that we allowed our separate selves to lapse into on occasion, knowing that it mattered only in the abstract and did not count for much of anything. Which is just another way of saying we continued to use each other. And this is fair.

When Julie married, years later, it was to a man she had known just as long as me, and one I am sure she had not been intimate with, not anyway until shortly before they decided to get married (the time traditionally called being engaged) and that is when you become intimate, if not before, or else there is something very wrong with you, and you shouldn't get married. So maybe she was practicing as I call it on somebody else, all the while she was practicing on me, and he won out in the competition, or at least in her good opinion. It is our good opinion each of us must live with.

Each spring I made annual pilgrimages to Palo Alto in April, where I stayed at my national fraternity, Delta Tau Delta, a prestigious jock house at Stanford, and dated either Bonnie or Julie, depending on who was available and was willing to see me. Or who I felt that way about. It must have been a duty sometimes for either of them to entertain me. Good old Bob. So they fixed me up with a blind date, and sometimes even double-dated with me, if conditions were right. Or wrong.

What a peculiar sensation that was. I sat in the backseat with my date-for-the-evening, while my old girl friend sat in front with her current boy friend, who did not knowing anything about our past, such as it were, and after a movie or a dance or a snack the guy pulled into a dark lane to make out for a while. The evening took on a slightly promiscuous air—though nothing much took place. Yet it distressed me so, seeing a stranger kissing the lips I had once kissed—though usually not recently. A few times not so long ago. And then I thought, Was she more passionate with him than with me?

I dwell on this excessively, for it represents only a small element in an otherwise pleasant relationship and evening on the town. Most of the date went well enough. After the main event, we would drive into downtown Palo Alto to a cocktail lounge, where I urged them to join me in my new favorite beverage, the screwdriver. A beer drinker for several years, there was something greatly appealing to me about pure, clear vodka, which was mixed with what we considered to be "fresh" orange juice, albeit freshly frozen. The stuff served nicely for boys and girls just to get a little drunk as soon as possible.

For food, we all favored pizza. Pizza got its head start in California. Things have a way of happening there first. In the beginning there was nothing where the earth now stands, only a huge void, but soon pizza dough was created, along with cheese, tomato sauce, and all the condiments, including a hot oven and a man with an implement to fetch it out of the oven with. We used beer to wash it down with, and cigarettes completed it. These were the makings for a perfect date. It was Nirvana, or as close as one could come. It was second to sex in our imaginations.

In spite of the food and drink, I never felt really at home in California. Clearly I was a visitor. The Stanford Delts were tanned, muscular athletes, with beer dispensers and barbells in every room. One guy had the temerity to tell me that he had looked like me (scrawny and pale) when he had gone away to college, but had rigorously followed a program of workouts with weights and—look at him now. He flexed for me. I faked astonishment at the size of his pecs. I could do likewise, he was certain. Determined not to follow his example, I backed away, smiling hideously.

10

I had a lot of fun in San Francisco. Sometime I stayed at the Senate Hotel on Turk Street, where I was the youngest guest by some twenty years. I kid you not when I say I was referred to by the concierge (the old guy behind the desk, with hair growing out of his ears and nostrils but not atop his head) as Master Arnold, though I was twenty. When I received a phone call from Julie, while I was out prowling the streets, she was told only that I wasn't in my room. They were a mum crew. She was looking for somebody to buy her dinner when she came to town, shopping. When she told me the story, I laughed long and hard, not quite believing it was true.

I was spending a lot of time in bars on Market Street and was slow to learn that the beautiful older women who wanted me to buy them drinks, generally champagne cocktails, were professionals; bar girls were served tea, or else well-watered drinks, and either one cost me plenty, say, two dollars each, half of which was to be returned to the girl at the end of her shift. It took me about the price of one drink to figure it all out, and afterwards I deserve no mercy, which is to say I didn’t buy many more such drinks for either of us. A learning experience is worth the price, but should not require repetition.

San Francisco remained a city of mystery and romance. It was Bagdad-By-The-Bay, as Herb Caen characterized it in his daily newspaper column. And the name rang true to the extent that everybody believed it. All did, especially us visitors. The food was good (if it wasn’t the restaurant folded within six months) and cheap (if not cheap, people would go elsewhere, where it was). And the city shone. It truly did. There is something special about the atmosphere of a seaside city, where the industrial smog is washed out to the bay and daily replenished, and the fresh salt air constantly replaces it—sometimes with true fog; more often with newly scrubbed sky and stars.

I traveled to California usually by bus, when I could not cage a ride with friends headed South. And when some frat brother dropped me off at Palo Alto or downtown San Francisco, he was off to adventures of his own, so I was generally left alone, by myself in a strange city. Which is exactly what I wanted. When Julie came into town to have dinner with me, she often had a car she had borrowed from some girl in her dormitory, so there was a side benefit from spending all that money on her over the dining table. We got to go places expeditiously and in a style that the buses did not provide.

Often our destination was one of the several restaurants at the Sir Francis Drake, followed by a play. That this would set me back a full month‘s spending money at college did not much matter to her, nor to me (to be honest about it), though I remember one night standing flatfooted in front of some posh doorway and having to tell her that I simply did not have the cash to take us inside.

"Oh," she said evenly, surprised, as if this were unheard of among her friends, and quickly snapped open her purse and handed me over a twenty. It was big money then. I was not too embarrassed to accept it and the evening that followed. I suppose she thought no more about it, but the indignity has long lingered in my mind, and of course I paid her back within the month. Coming up short probably occasionally happened to her and her friends, but it was a temporary condition, one resulting from not planning ahead, and something of a joke. Plenty of money was always in the bank. To be absolutely out of money was astonishing, unprecedented.

Once I remembering riding all the way from San Francisco to Seattle with a friend from graduate school and declining burgers and even coffee at rest stops when we stopped. It was because I had no coin. When Rod began to suspect that I was not on a diet and asked me, outright, if I were broke, I lamely nodded my head that I was, he said, "For heaven’s sake," or words to that effect, "let me buy you a cheeseburger. It’s nothing. Think no more about it." And I let him, and it was delicious. I ate it in about two bites, wiping the mayonnaise off my chin with a grin. And I paid him back as soon as I could.

She took money for granted, always having it. They always did. I always wondered where it came from. It didn't seem that her mother had an active dental practice because she was always around the house when I came to call. Of course this was mostly on weekends. It is possible she had an office to go to during the week, but I don't think so. She kept herself busy writing, but I have no idea what she wrote about. Perhaps it was dental matters.

One daughter was at Stanford, the following year the second. A couple more years down the pike and Milly went there, too. Then Jimmy. If Bonnie went on to graduate school, it is possible the mother had three children in college at the same time. What that must have cost. The money had to come from somewhere, and lots of it. No doubt the monthly income from their properties, such as the Wilsonian, paid the bills. Is it possible that the mother and the loony father made so much money during the Depression that all six of them could live off the income the property and interest generated for the rest of their lives? I guess so. When they moved from Laurelhurst to Wedgewood, it was not a step down on the economic ladder.

All of which is interesting, at least to me, and of broad socio-economic concern to those who care about such things. I did not. I was always running out of money and having to hit my father up for more because he had me on a tight budget. We were not poor. My budget was much like somebody else's diet. I was always going off of it. My father thought of me in some respects as another one of his buyers. My continually coming up short was a sign I was not on top of my expenditures, not controlling operating costs, etc.; I practically had to crawl to get more money out of him to live on and indulge in my three main vices—girls, beer, and books. Probably in that order.

What he was doing, of course, was teaching me little lessons in fiscal responsibility through my multiple failures in planning ahead. I needed, he would say, to think things through, and not just live for the moment. (His words, true, but I know them well enough, and use them often myself, now that I am a father.) I deeply resented them at the time, though, disliked being taught things I didn't want to know about, but managed to absorb the lessons in spite of myself, and am more than a little grateful to him for what he belatedly taught me—principles and attitudes that have remained with me like a psychic scar now that he is gone. It is how we brand one another, and the scar remains, far into the future.

Now it is my son's turn to be on the receiving end.

11

I was not aware of any boy important in Julie's life, over so many years, including myself. Then, about her senior year, she met a student from India. He was black as he could be, but was not a Negro (as we called 'em then) but an Aryan, he informed us proudly, which is what we were, too, he added. (I didn't thank him for this bit of odd information; I received it coolly.) I remember riding around the Stanford campus with them in his car. It was obvious he had money. He was a Brahman, he told me; up until then I thought they were a special kind of bull. Perhaps they were, at least in Julie's opinion, for she regarded him with fascination from her station beside him in the front seat. She looked as though she expected him to rush at her in a sexual sense at any moment. Or not to, which would have been even worse, or so her attitude indicated. Of course I was hyper-tense to the situation. I knew his type. It was predatory.

He was a kind of male I had encountered before. His thoughts were always on women and how they perceived him. This one was a stranger in a strange country, hence immune from ordinary rules of propriety and behavior. It was a good place to be, for he could act with impunity. There were no lasting consequences to his acts, none that he couldn't escape by hopping aboard a plane and heading back to Pakistan or India. I never knew where precisely.

We rode around Palo Alto and its outskirts on a gray Sunday afternoon, a time of the week when there are decidedly limited things to do and most are boring. We looked at houses and streets and buildings and storefronts, all of which they and I had seen before. It was not all that big of a burg. It isn't only children who are bored on Sunday.

The city was undergoing rapid expansion and buildings poked the sky everywhere. Shi (for this was his name) exclaimed, "Look. That building is going up like a house on fire." Julie and I laughed a little too hard, as we might have done, only in each other's company. Shi regarded us peculiarly, almost angrily. Had we insulted him? I got a glimpse of what he might be like when he wasn't on his best behavior because he was in the company of a stranger.

Julie had more than glimpsed (forgive me here, my poor choice of words, but they are inescapable) his dark side. It was as black as he was dark, which was considerably, and it seemed to fit my perception of him and his personality, many years later when I learned she had had a baby by him and given it up for adoption. This she told me at that first luncheon, when we had lingered late, catching up on the past. And I realized, there in the restaurant, over my grilled cheese sandwich, that it is possible for a woman who says she is sexually dysfunctional to have sex often and satisfyingly enough with such a man to become pregnant by him, even if he terrifies her. Especially if he does.

Why she didn't get an abortion I will never know, and I dared not asked her, at this late date. It was a time when they were fairly available and everybody was paying a steep price for one. I had paid for a few and knew all about them.

It was her decision. Perhaps he was gone by the time she found herself pregnant. Or maybe she didn’t tell him. If she was like some women friends of mine, she might think the male was not to blame. She went to bed willingly. I suspect this was the case. He was the type to attract her—black does this—and make her respond, while at the same time the saner side of her mind recognized that any further association with him was impossible. Marriage was out of the question. Behind those keen hazel eyes lurked a practical intelligence. Put in cruder terms (mine) she might say to herself alone, Sure, he is okay to fuck, great, but only for that. And some like me might cynically add, She is having her Black Experience. I am sure this is what she said to herself and any female friend, though I don’t think she had one, or one she could confide in. Surely not Bonnie, who must have been slightly bananas by now.

There were several years after she had graduated in history from Stanford when she disappeared. She was lost to me. This state persisted. I did not know where to write her. But I was busy; we all were busy. She was thought to be working somewhere in Southern California, near her mother's new home. Of course she was really going through pregnancy then, followed by childbirth, after which she gave the child up immediately for adoption. (She would be prompt here.)

I can write a foolish little scenario in which the doctor and nurse both pull back in astonishment at the sight of the baby. I would have him a male child, black as his father, but of course an Aryan; Aryan on both sides, as Shi would point out. And Julie—weary with the birth of this first of the several children she would bear—would know pretty much what they were thinking, these people very much like herself in attitudes and values, but would think for them as well, saying: "A baby, yes, and mine. But don't look too closely or he will rent your heart, as his father did mine." And then she looked aside forever, cautioning herself not to touch him, not once, for you must never become tactually familiar with what you must give up.

Then went on with her life.

Since I had met him in Palo Alto, she could much later casually referred to him and the pregnancy, that afternoon in the first restaurant. I think she delighted in waiting all those years to shock and astonish me. She wanted to confront me with something out of our common past. Well, she did, all right, but I had lived in the real world, too, and had acquired experiences of my own. So I merely raised my eyebrows to about half-mast and said, "I'm sorry, Juliana."

Her story had caught me up in the varied past we had once shared. How long ago it was. It was then I should have told her about meeting her father, but somehow I couldn’t. It seemed either too much or too little to add, but not right on the button. Bitterness needs a voice; it is not willingly to hold its tongue forever. But there would never be a right time, I knew. We were virtual strangers.

I tried to travel back in time to when I was a young man, no more than a boy. Before I had met them, a second set of sisters. What was it like, when all of them lived together in the same house? The father functioning normally, a young man himself. Were they ever happy together? Husband, wife, our children, right after another. What was the specific occasion that merited him moving out? What special affront?

I would have it that it was about the time the mother was pregnant with the fourth child. She feared for it. She had no way of knowing, of course, that it would be a boy and theoretically safe from him. For if a man molests his eldest daughter, and then the daughter that is only a year or so younger, it only follows that the third daughter is at risk, and the fourth child (wouldn't he let her practice birth control, after all that had sadly passed by now?) already on the way would provide a further occasion for deep despair. All she could think of was how to rid herself and them of him forever.

How did she do it? What bit of craft or trickery or luck? Or was she simply the stronger one (sex aside) and bullied, screamed, him into leaving? Did her means involve money? Did she pay him off with much of their stash, just to have him gone, the children beyond reach?

Was most of the money hers, to begin with—the result of her special industry and wise management? How did they settle it—the proportions? How much there must have been in the first place to leave so much for her and the children afterwards. A million or more, in yesterday's terms.

For people even in the Depression needed dentistry. They paid with money destined for food and rent—anything to be rid of the pain. Those sad-eyed people lined up in the waiting room. The dentists lurking. It all added up.

12

Julie returned to the Bay Area a year later, worked for s while as a secretary (it wasn't so bad; it was what most girls did, then and now, with a degree in history from a good college), and applied to UC Medical School for admittance to its dental hygienist program. She was immediately accepted.

Why didn't she become a dentist, what with two parents behind her, growing up in a house where aspects of the practice were discussed over the dinner table? Beats me. I asked her once and she put me off with a shrug of her shoulders. It was as if to say, "Too much trouble." I knew that not the real reason, but she didn't want to go into it. I was owed no explanation.

Maybe her father had given dentistry a bad name to her. But then why go into a field where you would be working for dentists—male dentists almost entirely? It made no sense to me, but then much in my life doesn't. Surely she was smart enough to be accepted into dental school and succeed. It was almost as though she wanted to fall back on something inferior, less demanding, in light of what had happened to her—loving somebody unsuitable, who was cruel to her, having a baby by him, and then giving up the baby. It might not wreck her life permanently, but it sure would set it back for several years. And if she had any psychological problems, ones not unlike her sister (who was certifiably institutional by now), a lesser occupation would not make them any less. What would? Well, perhaps marriage and children.

Some are broken, some are permanently bent, and others flex and spring back virtually undamaged. There is no knowing ahead of time, which you are, but there are certain clues about others, and the perceptive can guess and make intelligent predictions. Most often they are wrong.

I saw her once about this time. Already she had other things on her mind and had decided not to tell me about her ordeal. (Or this was not the time to tell it, if I was. I had gone to San Francisco to see the bright city again and incidentally her. My heart was lonely. Now a city can be a target, but there has to be a person who is the real goal. I was going through a period of search, looking for a woman with whom I could spend the rest of my life. Julie was seeking a mate, too. Could we be the ones for each other? Decidedly no. It soon became clear. We spent little time with each other and were bored when we did. About this I can speak for her as well, for she made her attitude clear to me.

She married a man she had known as long or longer than me. (Is that possible? It was.) One might think a stranger might be more suitable or attractive than somebody like either of us, who were a pair of old shoes. She wanted somebody trustworthy, dependable. That was Keith. And even though I did not want to marry her and am perfectly content with whom I did, I suppose there is a resident core in me that thinks she should have held out for me, even though I might not be available to her. (Then she should have pined and lived out her life as a spinster, I suppose. So goes the male ego.)

And then there was that sexual dysfunctional business. Even though I had known for a long while that she was not eager for sex, at least not sex with me, sex matters. It is important to everybody and not just in terms of self-gratification. It stands for much else. It is a way of righting past wrongs. Licking one’s neuroses. Frigid? Not frigid with Shi, perhaps. Still, it was comforting to know that if she didn’t go to bed with me it was because she was as not motivated as the rest of us. Curious about what went on in bed, yes, but not driven by it. And there was the problem posed by Shi, the bastard. He beat her, I know he did, but he satisfied some dim urge in her that needed reaching; he scratched her itch, even if she didn't have orgasms by him. (But how do I know this? Only a guess, by golly. And I prefer it this way.)

Perhaps something else was at stake—an important factor that lies just below the consciousness and comes to life only at the calling of another. It is as much an astonishment to each of them and almost as important as having a baby together. Lets call this factor The Big Surprise.

On that visit we had a quarrel. We often did. Did she always instigate them or were some of them my fault? Whatever, they punctuated our relationship over a decade. They explain why we were always breaking up and not contacting each other for months on end. Then it would occur to one of us, usually me, that we had relinquished our old connection. Why not give Julie a call, I thought? And when I did, I was usually met with a warm response. "How are you?" Things picked up about where we left them. But not this time; this time in San Francisco was nearly permanent.

Clearly she had her mind on somebody else. I think she was tired of her old life and desperate to get married. A foreign city is not hospitable even to people who get to know it well. This makes it specially lonely. And she had rule me out some time ago. I had not been so firm in thinking about her. I didn’t know what I wanted. This was my usual condition.

And I had not slept with her, remember. This keeps a boy coming back for more punishment. Why not? Nearly every other girl will lie down for him. But Julie was not every girl. Since I was in San Francisco again, and wanted to see her, while the man she wanted was not able or willing to see her, she consented to see me, but reluctantly, condescendingly, which made me furious. I grew sullen and resentful. I'm sure I was unpleasant. In turn, she made me pay for her company. It was a little like sitting next to a bar girl. I spent willingly, of course.

She was angry at men in general, while wanting to get married badly. The two are not compatible. "Let the bastards pay," is how she thought of it. Of course she was bitter.

She wanted children, too. A child she could keep. A fine home. To have children, she had learned, you must first have a husband, home, and sex. Sex was requisite. There were worse things. It was a woman’s lot.

She married Keith, an engineer and about as staid a person as I have ever encountered. It was just what she wanted. They had children right away. Four. The same as her mother. Interesting, that. During that initial luncheon, she made oblique reference to their sex life. Keith could "have his way with her" on occasion, if he was nice. (Only if he was nice?) If he exercised "his silver tongue, the devil." I tried to imagine him as a devil, also with a silver tongue, but couldn't. Maybe you have to be female. When the bedroom door is closed, the kids all abed. . . . Still, no. It is an old shortcoming of mine.

I suppose he had to spend money on her first. Keith. Then she knew she was loved or highly valued. Whatever. Then her knees would part by degrees. I remember how rigidly those knees were locked with me. It takes all kinds to make a world. Maybe if I were tall and skinny and black and mean. An Aryan, of course, but special.

Keith would work all his productive life at Boeing, and if he did not come home promptly after work, there would be only one or two places he might go, and each was innocent enough; he had permission to go to either of them, but not for long. He mustn’t tarry. I thought of the various kinds of punishment that might be meted out.

While she raised her kids, she worked according to the time available by their ages. This was the Stanford plan. It is what women of our time did; my own wife followed nearly the same course. In college you studied a field for women in which there is a profession that pays well. Then you practiced (librarianship, teaching, dental hygiene, etc.) until you were ready to start your family. When you found yourself pregnant you stayed at home with your children until they started school and you resumed work in your field by stages, as you learn they no longer have such extensive use of you and your time. (You would never neglect them.) By the time they were in high school, you are working about half-time. With them in college you are able to resume work full-time and take on major administrative duties. You become a manager; it is as expected of you as of your husband before you. You both make a lot of money.

Or you do the sociologists one better. Julie went back to school and for a while it looked like she was going to earn a Ph.D. in higher education—not in a specific field but in education itself. But this did not happen. There remained something amiss, a wild-card factor. It kept the likely from becoming possible. She told me that she had offended her thesis adviser; she had done so knowingly. She seemed almost proud of it. I'm sure this was true, for I had detected a definite antagonism in her long ago, and could see how it might offend many people, mostly men. Whomever she worked with was in for a confrontation. She lobbied hard for women's rights and for equality in the job market, something that was badly needed in dentistry and even more in dental hygiene. But she knew all about this, when she decided to study it in San Francisco.

Then she headed for law school. It was the natural consequence. Why hadn't I guessed it, that it was what would come next? Law? It is not something that crosses my mind. I try to avoid all legal matters unless they bite me in the leg, so to speak. They rarely do. For Julie the law seemed a perfect fit. Once it occurred to me.

By this time, though, I had pretty much emptied my skull of thoughts of Julie—or Julianna, as she now called herself, and insisted that I do so, too. We parted angrily, that day in the parking lot, after the non-meal. She had hotly instigated our parting. It came as a relief, for I soon realized that we had not had a healthy relationship, all this time, and she had held me accountable for acts that were not mine but were attributed to me simply because I was male, the same sex as her father. And this was not fair or honest. But it helped explain some things.

She belonged to Keith, not me. So I was free of her, then and now, no longer the emotional property of this aging woman with the four growing children. She was part of the low-maintenance past and belonged there. And so it had been in reality, long ago, at the age of seventeen.

By then I had met my first true love, and could think of not much else. I know now that I am the same person as I was then. Sisters behind me, I would henceforth approach women singly. I was healed of my small wounds and was ready for what came next.

It was as much as I could handle and nearly killed me.

1

How do you know you love, unless you are nearly destroyed by love? If there is some other way, please inform me. It would be so much easier on my body and my mind.

And where do they come from, these women who are suddenly in our lives? Where do we meet them? Nobody introduces us that I am aware of. We are quietly walking along a street, one day, minding our own business, our need or our loneliness not on evident display, not seeming terribly desperate, and suddenly we are not alone, we are walking along with some succulent female beside us, a silly grin on our face, jabbering unintelligently away. And she, her face upturned to ours in special adoration, permits us all this foolishness and accepts it as her happy due, we never wonder why. Not for long, anyway. We believe it—she; her corporeal self—is our due. And perhaps she is.

Her name was Cary and she belonged to an unusual family. Somebody once said every American family is a Russian novel. Dostoyevsky, I'd say. Not who said it, I mean, but the one who writes the novels that so well define us. The saying sounds more like Kurt Vonnegut, but then, some days, everything I hear or read does.

There were four of them. Her father was Chub. Mildred was her mother. And there was Lars. Lars lived with them. Cary referred to Lars as her uncle. This was her way of explaining him and his presence. But he wasn't her uncle. This became clear to me by degrees, through I never quite focused my young mind on it. He was her mother's lover. It was an arrangement (as the French say, but none of us was French, so nobody says anything about it) that the three of them were agreed to. But not Cary. She wasn't consulted. At night, everybody went off to bed. Mildred went to Lars's. The others each has his own separate lonely one.

Lars and Chub used to play golf. Chub and Mildred were from the South. He had come North to do government work during the war and was currently stationed in Seattle. And just as I never precisely knew how it was that Cary came into my life, I never remotely knew how Lars came into Mildred and Chub's, nor dare ask, or was interested or snoopy enough to ask, if I had dared. It was a genial, happy arrangement, so far as I knew. Never did I get a clue that it was otherwise.

But Cary was miserable. She had dark depths I could not fathom, ones in which there was no room for me and ones I could not penetrate as I could much everything corporeal about her. And it was really something. Of course it is necessary for a lover to believe this; it comes, you might say, with the territory. Whether or not I was her first I cannot say. I suspect not. But she was mine, simple. Only life is never so simple, and though we might wish it were, we'd be disappointed if we ever got our way.

Chub was small, wiry, gentle, gracious. I picture him always a with an interested smile on his face, though he may have simply been mocking everything he heard. If so, it was not offensive, not cruel. He had a car, a '37 DeSoto sedan, black, left over from before the war, and he let Cary drive it, she his only daughter, though barely sixteen. And I, seventeen, remember driving it well, though I am uncertain whether he lent it outright to me for dates with her, or to her. Most of the time then I was driving my father's '41 Buick. He was generous, too, so we most often had wheels, though not ones of our own.

I was a senior in high school and must have met her the previous summer, for an early memory is of picking wild blackberries in the ravine between the two hills comprising Magnolia Bluff called (believe it or not) Pleasant Valley. It only got heavily settled after the war ended, which was recent, so there was a lot of building activity underway, as tractors moved through the valley, eating up the land and men soon were erecting single-storey building built of the first available post-war lumber. It was green, and over the years developed odd warps so that, for instance, doors had to be rehung and windows would not close and floors tilted and ceilings dipped. But there were patches of shallow woods and scrub and Himalayan blackberries grew in hedgerows and yielded a large, watery fruit that could be gathered in abundance. The fact that the berries were tart and seed-ridden did not much matter; a jelly could be made from them, with the seeds strained out through cloth, and the fruited could be thickened with tapioca and sweetened with tablespoons of sugar, and the product if baked in a fine crust was more than edible; we thought it wonderful, especially if vanilla (my life-long favorite) ice cream was added. At the end, the berry juice and the melting ice cream—the dregs of the dessert—could be scraped up with the edge of a fork and lifted with a spoon or even a fork (quickly there) to the lips. After the first spoon or two, the flavor quickly disappeared, but when the end was in sight, each remaining forkful telegraphed that next to nothing was left and it all soon would be gone.

That is what is meant by bitter/sweet.

My Cary was bitter\sweet, too. Her favorite phonograph record was "Black Lace." (Was that Sarah Vaughn or Billie Holiday? Or does it matter at all, after fifty years?)

There was a rumor that if you played "Black Lace" for some extreme number of times without relief you would go mad. She was interested in finding out if it was true. I had to admit (since I was often present) that it was haunting and beautiful. I didn't pay much heed to the madness aspect and thought at the time listening was Cary's expression of melancholy and didn't mean a thing. Now, I'm not so sure.

Her best friend was Maryann. She dated my friend, Don Kopp. Cary was dark and buxom, Maryann slender (about as flat-chested as they come) but pretty and blond. The two girls were the same grade in high school—juniors—and communicated in a private language whenever they didn't want to be overheard, which was sometimes, not often, in my company. It was called "Strawberry Talk," and was very much like Pig Latin, but you inserted the word strawberry after the initial consonant and tied on what remained to the end of strawberry. It was harder to understand that Pig Latin, which is one of the reasons why they spoke it, and speak it they did, with facility and speed. I was always a paragraph behind in my deciphering. This left me for all practical purposes incomprehensible. It was just what they wanted.

And since both were taking, among other subjects, typing (just in case) and competing for speed, they were always publicly doing the class exercises, while all the while repeating, "Exercises, exercises; can you do these exercises?" while their facing fingers did mirror images of each other's reaching one knuckle up, then extending the chosen finger outward, finally raising it to the vertical. Then the next finger. All through the day and night they'd signal each other and the set would begin. Only the thumb remained inviolate. All four other fingers, one hand facing the other, were worked in turn. It started out as a mocking game, but soon became a something of a nervous tic.

Don and Maryann became intimate long before we did. Perhaps from day one of their relationship; it sometimes happens. We would double date and go to drive-in movies in one or another's car, and the passionate display would begin. Soon Maryann and Don would drop out of sight. We listened for their heavy breathing and what came next; what came next was oddly quiet. They screwed with little movement and practically no heavy breathing, which was far different from what preceded it. I think this was a form of discretion. The idea was, they weren't doing what they were but something else, something tamer, or so we were supposed to think. And we played the game by appearing to believe that nobody up front had recently gotten plowed.

But if we had needed an example, it would serve. And it provided a subject for continual gossip and discussion between us. It was called "Doing It." It was a subject in which we were vastly interested. It could not be talked about too much. Of course what we were talking about was ourselves, what was to come.

High school is a terrible place. It is a prison to which young people are sentenced for an interminable time. Four years for many, it was five in my case, for we lacked a junior high in Magnolia and so we were bused (the first instance of mandatory bussing) to Queen Anne hill, up the counterbalance where in olden days the trolleys were literally pulled up with a mechanism making use of similar cars laded with concrete that balanced their weight and pulled them in the opposite direction, which was up a slope whose grade has been reported as 20 percent.

It was a dim, old fortress of a school, a veritable battleship sailing across a hilltop, or perched there, as solid as anything in this world. I went there each day with dread and exited some six hours later with a feeling of relief. And it was there that most surely I met Cary and she came into my life. It was probably at a hamburger joint directly across the entrance from the school, as though built there in collusion and reparation or payment for some old debt. Whatever it was where we all used to go—jocks, activity freaks, dorks alike—to buy and eat our lunch. There were three lunch periods. I worked two of them frying up and serving hamburgers. This was a highly prestigious job. The other lunch period was my own. It was when I ate my own Grizzly Hamburger and smoked a series of cigarettes over a lingering phosphate drink—cherry or lemon, or the best of all (and I made it myself) lemon with just enough cherry in it to give it color. I don't know this for a fact, but it was probably called a Pink Lady.

The proportions of phosphates had to be just right and I was an expert at making them.

The man who owned the place managed it. His name was George Lamereaux. Every morning he brought in fresh ground beef and cut it with some inert ingredient we all wondered about, mixed it into a huge pink mess, dipped them up with an ice cream scoop, squoze them out into mounds, flattened them into paddies, separated the paddies one from another with a piece of non-stick waxed paper, and stacked them to the heavens. These awaited us as eleven-thirty approached and the start of the first luncheon shift.

We hamburger slingers (as we were called, by some enviously) prepared the rest of the ingredients, except I can't remember the cheese, so Mr. Lamereaux must have done it himself, buying it in sheets and cutting it up into square slices that corresponded to the hamburger meat, but permitted a corner of cheese to jut out on four sides attractively. The condiments were commodious. Most people ordered a burger, or a cheese burger, with "everything." A few with aversions or allergies specified just what they wanted, and we had to hold all these materials in mind while we flopped out our burgers on the common stove and waited until it was time to turn them, a dozen or more at a time.

Mayonnaise, mustard, lettuce, tomato, onions, hot sauce (tomato and some unknown spices)—these comprised the works. Everything. And for ourselves, of course, there were the special versions of double meat, double cheese not sold to the others. We slingers were special.

No doubt Cary and Maryann ordered hamburgers from me and I prepared them, served them up, collected the money in my greasy and condiment-smeared fingers, and looked briefly, longingly, into their eyes, before going on to the next. The idea was to wait on the pretty girls first and to make them think you considered them special. Who knows, it might pay off in sexual favors, some day.

I know more about girls and women than I did then, or I had better, or else my life has been wasted in this one, narrow but important department. Most likely they had me singled out. As a matter of fact, Don Kopp slung burgers, too. Maybe we sat down and ate with them, after our shifts were over. Maybe they happened to be lingering. Anyway, Don and Maryann were running around together and perhaps doing it shortly before Cary and I had come together and were decidedly not yet doing it. Nor for some time to come. I would like to think that Cary had some vague mathematics at work in her head and it required that I successfully meet a series of small challenges or tests and be admitted to areas of her body by degrees as I passed them. Most mysterious the process, it may be a figment of a boy's active imagination; on the other hand, it may be God's truth and something a boy has to discovered anew in every instance, each instance being a real, live girl.

I was moderately keen on fishing and went out at every opportunity and seldom caught anything of note. Small rainbow trout from a hatchery and even smaller perch and crappie from my favorite (and only) lake, cottage. I mean, Cottage. It lay to the North of Seattle on the Woodinville-Redmond Road, and you could see it as you approached from the two-lane blacktop you sped along because there was no traffic to speak of. It was where we went in Chub's kind DeSoto and where, on a bet of her week's allowance (much greater than mine) I ate a solitary salmon egg embalmed in a jar in some substance we all believed was formaldehyde.

The trick was, I knew, not to bite into it but to plop it into my mouth, swirl it around, pretend to be chewing (while missing the tough little egg entirely), and then swallow the awful thing . . . whole. Which I did, while my Cary watched me closely from concern about ejection. She was correct but I didn't try it. And the thing stayed down. I think I gobbled something else on top—a sandwich that was mostly bread.

We would sit in a rented rowboat like most any other couple and rather than paddle her sweetly around the perimeter of the lake I rowed like crazy and tried to get my spoon or small plug to behave like I wanted it to. Or else we anchored and still fished with worms or with what was left from the jar one of which I had recently ingested.

My taking a girl fishing has always been a special treat. Just as some corporeal advance had marked another stage accomplished in our relationship, my bringing her along on a trip meant I was serious about her and could relax in my vigilance in having to do the right thing on a date, which was to take her out to some expensive place to eat or be entertained. (Vide Julie.) I could afford (wrong word) not to take her out to such a place and lure her to a lake or stream. And it too was a test. It was important to me that she respond well. She had to like being outdoors with me by a lake or a river. To respond in an ultra-feminine way to wind or a little rain or even some snow, well, it was a black mark that was nearly impossible to erase.

I don't know what happened to the fish we caught. Catch them we did, on occasion. Fishing is always like this. I remember the night of the second Joe Louis/Billie Conn fight. Following tradition it was in June. Now June is the best month for fishing, no matter what anybody might tell you or how badly they will sing the praises of May or blustery April. If you have to take a girl fishing, try for June, and if June is too far away, then warily select May, probably late in the month. True, most of the trout will be caught out, but there may be enough of them left to provide a diversion. Besides, with a fine girl beside you, it is not very important whether you catch a lot of fish. But a few helps gratify the day and improve temperaments, namely mine.

We wore bathing suits under our fishing clothes, for it was apt to be hot and there comes a time when fishing loses its appeal and the need to cool off with a plunge becomes paramount. And during the late afternoon it often becomes so hot that both parties strip to those bathing suits and work on their tans. A boat is a wonderful thing to tan in, though there is a tendency for the tops of your legs to fry, and also your arms and forehead. The sun, you see, comes first from overhead and then at a slant and finally disappears into the trees and roofs of cottages down at the West end of the lake, just above the dock with a raised diving board.

Cary in a bathing suit. Let me see. She was about sixteen, her breasts only a few years old. She was dark, from the American South, and said she matured early, partly due to the climate. I never believed a word of it and neither did she. Bathing-suit cleavage (it is never called this, not by us, not by the girls I knew, who generally called them bosoms, or sometimes boobs, like we did, which allied us on another front, so to speak) was a fact of life and a proud testament to her maturity and attractiveness. Phrasing it that way, I am aware, makes me sound like a female magazine writer. There they were, her boobs, her cleavage, staring out at me, all day long, from the stern seat of the boat, as I rowed us around the lake, trolling small silver spoons and waiting for a trout or giant (eleven inches is pretty big) crappie to hit.

The soft June evening when Louis beat Conn for the second time, I was trolling an orange F-7 Flatfish around the North end of the lake. Each time I turned, passing a certain low diving board, if I worked my lure right I would get a strike. The lake was glassy. A portable radio reported the fight, blow by blow, round my round. I kept my boat within earshot of it. This was important news happening right before my ears. The striking fish were crappie, two to one, but every other one (it only holds to reason) was a rainbow. Both were running just short of a foot. And while I would like to say that the trout fought best, I have to give the laurel to the crappie. It was more beautiful, too, with its green and violet sides, its pumpkin-seed shape, its tiny head. Yet I valued the trout more, valued it until I came to realize that wonderful night that the crappie was superior in every way except to the eyes of someone who looked at the bag I brought in at the dock.

With Cary there was a nice tantalizing aspect to being nearly naked, out on a lake with a multitude of people around us. A kiss and a light brush of breast with passing hand was about all that the situation permitted. We couldn't wait for night to fall; yes, we could, and there was the thrill, the delight. So dark to begin with, she would not burn as I would but turn a quick dark brown. It was even and becoming. But she liked a better shade of pale and soon was covering herself with a big, wide hat and long sleeves, even though it saddened me not to be able to see herself exposed. And she was right. From experience she had learned, long ago, to shun the sun. And to tell the truth, I liked certain parts of her enormously and was glad that they never saw the sun.

Burned myself and with that crinkly, hot feeling that light-skinned people acquires from too much time spent out of doors, especially in the sun, we took our rods and reels and smelly creel full of our mixed bag of fish to the car, kissed passionately for a short while (an hour), groped each other familiarly, and headed for home, where I suppose we cleaned and cooked the fish. Or else threw them in the garbage, what is what most people do, if the truth be known.

I seldom saw her at school. We existed outside of school, in our own place and time. We made time ourselves. It was what we created when we were together. The rest of what other people called time was a commodity that existed in meaningless abundance and was to be dispensed with, that is, used up until we could be together again. There is something grand about a boy and a girl, a man and a woman, who delight in each other's company and seek it out, at every opportunity. It is all that matters, and explains in part why lovers (or lovers-to-be) do the silly things that they do, that to other people seem pointlessly devious and untoward.

We became lovers one evening at Maryann's place, Don and Maryann in the bedroom, where they were used to retiring without preamble. Some time had passed since we met—I'd guess a month and a half. It was a length of time, anyway, that in her private measurement of intervals and actions, involvement and engagement, she deemed privately or with Maryann's collusion requisite to what was to happen next. And I didn't know. I was used to assaulting the fortresses (not Queen Anne High, this time) and being expertly rebuffed. I mean I tried; I tried every time we were together to seduce her. And I was kindly, affectionately, turned away.

And then suddenly there were no barriers, no armor, no fortress. She lay supine and accommodating beneath me and my exploring hands. For a moment I thought she was unconscious but, no, there were those deep brown eyes staring seriously into mine, as they always did. (Some close their eyes to kiss, and what else, while others don't; we didn't usually, only sometimes, and usually not until the other was looking, or detecting.)

We were on the sofa. Our friends were in the other room, doing what came naturally to them and what they didn't waste any time, we had noticed, getting around to, each time we were with them. The sofa was familiar ground. It was one of our usual beds, but not quite. No TV yet, there was the radio to listen to and the phonograph. It was a place to mess around when Maryann's parents went out for the evening. And when she and Don had retreated to her bedroom and bed, post haste.

You can look back in anger and you can look back in love, in affection, after the passage of much consummate time. But you must know that you cannot recreate events with any degree of accuracy or precision. And you can—even with the best of intentions and attention to veracity—be wrong in what you think happened and what you remember. Thus said, this is what I remember:

I unhooked her bra; it was one of the first things I did and, to speak the truth, she always seemed glad to be out of the harness. Both breasts swung free and, as I liked to think, mine. Quickly I encircled them with my open palms. The filled them, as we say, to overfilling. There was a marvelous soft yield to their firmness. The nipples hardened and turned slightly outward in their orientation. I lifted them, I turned in upon themselves slightly, I turned them out, I restored them to their original unshackled position, loosening my hold, feeling them return to their natural attitude. She was lying, of course, on her back, so they slightly splayed in their openness and accommodation to the likes of me. They were my arena, subject to my aegis. It was terrific, and she thought so too, to be so admired by a panting boy. They were my field of play for long periods of time and, thus, were fairly safe, for breasts we all know are diversionary in nature and lie far from the site of coitus, even while bearing some close relationship to it that has never, not until now anyway, been explored.

She wore a cashmere sweater, very finely knit and close fitting, and it honored her, those breasts ever on prominent display. She was the subject of much comment and loose talk. Girls tolerate this and in some instances thrive on this. But Cary was closed-mouthed about how she received this and if I ever asked her would have replied with a non-committal shrug. And perhaps did, though I can't remember. But whatever the response was in school to this testimony to self she was not about to end it or disguise it. She bore herself proudly, with a calculated look of obliviousness. In fact, all my girls and women did, and not all were so well endowed.

There was much sofa kissing going on. A boy took pride in being a good kisser. (My God, how long ago this was.) If a girl was known to be passionate, or otherwise, a boy had to be similarly proficient, and we faked expertise where we were lacking in direct experience. We learned as we went along; we feigned knowingness and became knowing. We applied our learning directly: we learned how to breathe through our noses, sometimes, and other times through our gasping mouths, as I have said, coming up for air, as after a high dive or jump into the lake.

And I suppose sometimes, when it got hot and heavy, we breathed through our ears, or else tried to, and emerged gulping air that wasn't there and having to resort, at last, to our busy mouths. Perhaps this was thought to be the male equivalent of passionate. And it leads me to wonder how many boys and girls are thought to be passionate, or whatever, when they only have breathing difficulties, such as plugged sinuses, some of it from too many lit cigarettes in a car's close interior?

We both smoked, of course. How else to show the world the degree of sixteen- and seventeen-year- old sophistication we had acquired? What other way to put it on frequent and bold display. And so daringly?

In the car or on the sofa we would frequently stop for a smoke and a cool down. Didn't everybody? Cigarettes had their uses. They were preparatory, dilatory, diversions, and ways of signaling the end of things that might last too long, such as partings.

We smoked Luckies for a while, its ancient green color having gone to war for camouflage purposes and never returning, so that the packet was white, with narrow red and I believe blue stripes, equally patriotic but more discrete. Or we smoked Chesterfields. Both were really lung stoppers. They left you with a brown mouth and thick tongue, a habitual phlegm collecting in your lungs and throat that had to be hawked away, but since both of you were doing it, smoking, it seemed the human condition visited on you both and nothing extraordinary. To kiss a mouth that, true, tasted of tobacco, tars, and nicotine was in an ironic way like kissing yourself; at least you had the same flavor. So you kissed, both as present pleasurable activity and as a means of signaling other pedestrian things, such as starts, stops, and pauses.

That night we kissed and resumed our usual wrestling around but did not stop ourselves for a smoke to cool down. She lay supine and vulnerable beneath me and my hands, and I knew it at once. Something had changed, something was different! Marvelous, wonderful. Sure, the breasts were mine, as always, and I proceeded my usual kneading of them, which per usual occupied a brief bit of sensual and consensual time. Then I followed my old manner of exploration of lower regions, those called nether. It was a land of materials—the taut wool of her tight skirt that had to be raised almost like skinning a wiener. Then the half-slip that rode along with it, slick, smooth, crinkly stuff that moved much faster and more readily, gathering itself together in bunches and bands, sliding ever upward and becoming more full. Then her panties, with which I was already quite familiar, or thought I was. How closely they followed her contours, including that of her pelvis. I did not know the term, Mound of Venus, but it was what my fingers sought, and usually were politely, kindly (more politely and kindly than my exploring hands) turned aside. Tonight, this magical night, there was no resistance and, you know, I found it odd and disconcerting. I mean, I expected to be turned aside, after so many forays, and to have that vast, female territory not old accessible but responsive was, well, a bit terrifying. This is a long-about way of saying I did not exactly know what to do next.

I mean I knew, but I hadn't been there before, and it is a frightening place, for at least the first time, no matter how attractive and exciting. You want to go there and you don't. Another time, perhaps. But there is no other time. You are wise enough a boy not to decline such an invitation, for it may not be repeated. It will not be, in fact, you know. For a fact. So you do, what? You seize the day—and whatever else comes immediately and easily to hand.

First you explore around the elastic edges of her panties, which she may permit but is not exactly to her liking or what she expects of you, poor inexperience lad that you are. I would say not, rip them off. No, not that, but doff them quickly, Ace. She will help. She will practically make them vanish in an instant. For she no more wants their impediment than you do. And then she is there for you, great acres of skin and softness and warmth. Yours. My God, what bounty and what bountifulness.

And your hands find their unerring but unsure way across that distance of centuries and cosmic space to her division, and you divide her to some small degree, and enter her moistness and unbelievable warmth, and sense it yielding to your boy's clumsy touch, more and more, and not knowing the anatomy any better than you know, say, the roadways of West Seattle, another foreign place, you begin to explore avenues and byways, making mistakes and taking detours, often where you don't expect them. And all the while the trip becomes a complex slipping and sliding. You are awash in a sea of mud that urges you on. And you make every boy's mistake of plunging deep with your longest finger or set of fingers and imitating the fucking motion, which is not what she wants or needs at all. The critical area whose name you do not even know or won't learn for many years escapes your touch, but that is okay, not so bad, for you are there at last and she has admitted you, and she realizes that you don't know much but are long and strong and possess the necessary equipment to do what comes next, or nearly next, if only you realize it and proceed. Be quick, but not too quick. And she may reach out for you as you reached our for her, an easier thing for her to do for the anatomy she desires is external, outstretched (or had better be by now), and approaching as a large tactile animal, often poking and brushing and lunging in her direction and she is willing.

She is willing, hooray. She is sunk deep into the cushion's of Maryann's dad's sofa, surrounded by amassed clothing bunched and gathered, most of it out of the way, and you have now dispossessed yourself of your pants at least halfway, at half-mast, and your Jockey shorts at about the same lowered level of discard, and are burrowing (ah, that's the right word for it) into either girl or sofa cushion, one can never be quite sure at a given moment. And then you make the great slide. I mean, the Great Slide. And you are Home, in the baseball sense of the word and every other, and as you sink in and plunge, only to retract and extend again, and again, the route becomes easier, quicker, more holy. And this is it. You are actually Doing It. It is what Maryann and Don do in the bedroom or front and backseat of somebody's car, every chance they get. And now you will and do, too.

Wonderful. The fact that you come early and that she doesn't at all does not matter, then, later, or in the future. Because it is the ultimate act of intimacy and it has been achieved. You are no longer boy friend and girl friend but lovers. You have entered the adult world, the world where fornication and adultery take place. And while not quite a man yourself, you are truly not a boy any longer, and so—congratulations.

2

Your whole relationship has changed. You are for once at ease. And both of you are looking forward to doing it again, for that is implicit in the act of having done it once, if you care for each other. And we loved each other; it is what we were both waiting for, even if I had to wait for her to know it first and communicate it on to slow me.

Everybody should love somebody in their senior year of high school. And you should—to put it the only way it can be put, so forgive me—fuck each other regularly and with joy. For if you don't, you are immeasurably impoverished for the rest of your life, and whatever fine and good happens afterwards, it will never make up for what didn't happen then. And you know this and I know this. And she knew this.

You teach each other and learn together. It is not important that anybody know anything, at the start. But one always knows more than the other. It is a matter of mathematics and probability theory. It is necessary, too, that one know more and be—however tacit—the teacher, for that is the person to give tactile permission to the halting one, the one deemed to learn and be ever grateful.

There were girls earlier who wanted to teach me the ultimate lesson. (Sex, not death.) There was Joan Sabotka, who rode home with me on countless schoolbuses and had me over to her house after school and on school evenings and made it known that she was available, accessible, and I simply did not know the degree to what her availability meant. So I took brief advantage of what had been dedicated to me more fully and thought I was systematically seducing her toward the ultimate conclusion—whatever that was. For I was a year older than Joan, but Joan was light-years older than me, and I didn't know this or what it signified, and accepted much less than what was there for me, and did not know.

What could be nicer and more meaningful for a boy of sixteen than a willing girl on a late afternoon couch in winter, with the eternal rain streaming down and streaking the windows of boyhood, and a warm girl waiting to have her nervousness allayed? How patient she was, how willing to give a halting boy time to become more sure of himself, more aggressive. And how disgusted she must have been, after numerous such afternoons, that he didn't have the good sense to take advantage of what was advantageous to him.

I'd like to think I broke up with Hot Joan, but suspect she soon declined offering the invitations I kept responding to on the after-school bus that had resulted in sweaty indecision and the inability to believe my great good luck was that.

Sure, she had huge teeth, heavy breasts, pimply patches on her cheeks, too much lipstick that had to be gnawed away before you got to the girl herself. She had a roll already around her waist that resembled Parker House rolls. She always wore a faint (sometimes not so faint) garlicky smell on her breath and sometimes she needed a bath. You could smell her juices without lifting your fingers to anywhere near your nose. And long afterwards.

She didn't want to go steady, she didn't want to go out on a date, she didn't want to introduce you to her parents (the latter, quite the contrary, for I was invited only when she was sure they were not to be home). She simply wanted a leisurely afternoon gray-day rainy fuck.

And I was too dumb to provide it.

Ah, to go back and relive all those unexercised, inexperienced, unrealized languid afternoons. But I would be different and so would she. And what would it mean, other than the vindication and validation of something so old and forgettable that it no longer matters, matters even less than it did then, which was plenty. It mattered plenty less.

Names fade and are gone, unavailable for resurrection, even during that waking moment when a writer lies prone, prone again, and awaits messages from his past in order to utilize them immediately for his raw material. For his art. To turn real people, girls mainly, into fiction or autobiography. Some sage writer recently said that we tell the truth in fiction and lie in non-fiction, especially in autobiography, and while I do not entirely agree, I see his point. Indood I deed.

There were countless (well, if I could remember them all, I could count them, surely) girls who existed for a brief tussle and went their ways as I go mine. I owe them a debt, but I'm not sure what for. For contributing a modicum, a morsel, to the sexual history of an aging male, as I contributed to theirs. And did we not make more likely and possible the marriage that lasted through the years by exemplifying the promise but dampening it with the reality that forbids future experiment in this one vital arena? I think so. Or so it was, in my case.

You press your face up against the willing face, female, much like some bird or mammal in its courting dance or short sexual preliminary, and it is why when we see this display on national public television we all laugh nervously and are inclined to look briefly away until it is over. It is because we recognize ourselves (at least our past selves) in such ludicrous behavior. We are the monkeys, the western grebes, the lizards that mate for themselves (as we did) but are caught by the camera for, I guess, our edification. And surely our amusement.

I dated, I mussed up girls, I was cruel to some and some were cruel to me, I forgot to call back when I said I would, I called back when I had committed some breach of behavior or trust that made me undatable for the second or the third time. My tongue lunged down the throat, searching for a responding tongue, with any female mouth that would accommodate mine. I thought I learned to master the hooks and eyes on the back of countless girls taut underwear, not realizing until late in life how inept I was and how they must have been laughing at me, all the while, behind the had that was until a moment ago unzippping my fly. For sex is like baseball, basketball, and football. You only get good and excel after much time on the field. You practice and you practice, and eventually somebody puts one right over the plate, or next to the rim, or in your outstretched hands as you cross the goalline. And you score.

But mostly a fluke.

If you sit long enough in a parked car with enough girls and smoke enough cigarettes and drink enough Pabst Blue Ribbon or Bud and you undo enough hooks (for some reason you never have to learn how to hook them back up, which must be even harder) and grope enough thighs and crotches, eventually one of the many warm-blooded girls will relent and you will slide Home. It only stands to reason. So, Sportsfans, you will score. You will prevail, if you do not quit too early in what is truly a game.

Sex is what you do, when you've done everything else first. Or sex is what you do first, so you can do everything else at a more leisurely, graceful pace. With boys and girls, it is what you have to do and get past before you can become again people. Boys and girls. But different. For sure what you are is different from what you were before. And these subtle elements are what lie at the heart of the boy-girl relationship. And in time, men-women, which is not terribly different.

Go some Sunday morning out to a convenience store to buy a fat newspaper, one bulging with colorful inserts. See the couples come straggling languidly in for theirs. Or for coffee and Danish to go. Or to set around an ice cream table, on ice cream-backed chairs, to eat and read selfsame newspaper. Look into their eyes. You will be seeing the dark spectrum of love. It is not exactly what Chris Christoferson meant when he sang about Sunday morning, coming down. But it comes close. You take away the booze and the dope, and you have next to the same thing, only much sweeter. God bless Sunday morning lovers and forgive them (not really necessary) for what they did Saturday night. For assuredly the day follows the night, and the night is ever grateful.

I do not envy young lovers or wish to return to that state of damnation, or whatever it is. Grace it is not, I am sure. Yet I behold them with empathy and a loving heart. I would assuage their necessary pain. I would not trade their pleasure for mine, or pay for it in the same coin. For time bestows peace, and what I see on Sunday morning may appear to be peace, but it is merely appeasement, appeasement of the senses. And the haunting insecurity remains. It is what makes such love sweet. Bitter as well.

3

Chub was an excellent amateur golfer, one of the best. A small man, his golf bag was nearly as big as he, and I had several opportunities to carry it for him. He used to travel around the country playing in tournaments and you could bet that any tournament within easy driving distance would have him in it.

Lars too played golf, but was not in Chub's league. He probably carried a handicap of about fifteen. Mildred stayed away from the golf course, and it was not to be alone with Lars, who was a lover of long-standing, I gathered, for they had ample other opportunity. Cary and I did not. So occasionally—not at tournaments but at practice rounds—she and I went with her dad and I caddied for him. The enormous leather bag could be strapped to a cart with wheels on the bottom, which made lugging it around less of a chore. Its handle had a bicycle-handlebar grip that made steering it easy, though it was still a little like a grocery cart with a bad wheel.

I remember one day specially. It was the middle of the week, off-season, and for some reason I can't remember she and I were not occupied with school. Perhaps it was a special holiday shared by schools and federal offices but not by business and state facilities. Anyway, we drove north in their better car on Highway 99 and turned off on the Smokey Point road to a course on the edge of a hamlet named Marysville. There could be found a fairly difficult course that Chub considered a challenge. There were certain holes that remained troublesome to him and he wanted to keep working on his drives and approach shots.

We had a good lunch at the clubhouse and it was my first club sandwich. At first I was suspicious of any sandwich with its crust cut off and divided into innocuous little squares or wedges. And each square was so tall, crammed with food, that it had to be held together with an inserted toothpick, err its contents would spill sideways onto and perhaps off the plate. I had enough good sense and presence of mind to remove the toothpick before I bit into it. I believe there was an olive impaled on the toothpick, as well. I was tempted to shoot this like a marble across the linen at Cary, but refrained myself. So I merely set it aside on the edge of the plate.

The sandwich was terrific. Chicken or turkey, cheese, ham, lettuce, tomato, or items that came close to these and when mixed together were simply delicious to my uneducated palate. Cary had one, too, and was more used to restaurant food than I, considering not much unusual or strange.

It was not often, not often at all, that she and I were together with other people present. Usually we found occasion to get off by ourselves and after a short preliminary were behaving like Maryann and Don, that is, Doing It. Afterwards, over a Chesterfield, we could relax and become people, at least for a while. Until rut once more over came us.

This was peculiar, being in the presence of others while still being together. A little like at a dance or the movies, but with less opportunity for a little dalliance, however momentary. So we became intensely aware of each other and the lack of opportunity to be alone together. (Alone together being a new oxymoron in my vocabulary, but I knew painfully what it meant, or what the opposite of it meant.) We were deprived of our opportunity, while still maintaining proximity. And it was simply awful.

We soon found occasion to brush against each other, while seriously pursuing a silly white ball of small size around the countryside. A brush led to a bump. She understood the game-within-the-game instantly. Built a little lower to the ground than I, she had a nice way of catching me lower than my center of gravity and sending me sprawling. In fact, the first Lars or Chub saw of anything of this (I think) was when I would go caroming off course and have to catch my balance. If they didn't know what was going on (and subtle was not in our vocabulary), they must have thought I had some whirling disease, or else my inner ear was misfunctioning.

I was determined to catch Cary and pay her back. There was the problem, however, of her anticipating me and ducking, just in the nick. Then I would really go sprawling. I think she was more athletic than I, better coordinated. So I had better beware of getting the better of her, unless I could anticipate her anticipation of me and catch her off guard, off balance. And she had this neat trick of catching me with her shoulder in the ribcage, which really hurt, and she knew it. She didn't mind hurting me at all, because I was the source of her other hurt, the hurt of deprivation, as I was also the solution to the problem of hurt, if only we could find a way to be alone.

Unfortunately Chub would not hit a drive into the shallow woods. And Lars, whose drives fell short of Chub's by fifty yards, was hitting his straight down the fairway. Lars carried his own bag, so Cary was free to bounce down the greensward in her white tennies. Me, I dragged the giant brown bag on its trolley and stuck to the general whereabouts of Chub.

Greens were nice. We stood only a few decent feet from each other, but close enough so we could hear each other's deep breathing. I think she was putting it on. And putting me on. But soon my own heavy breathing was genuine. Jesus, what I wouldn't give to be alone with her for about five minutes. But where? She gave me a look and a grin. The great thing about love and sex is that the other party knows exactly. Knows what you are going through because he or she is going through something very intense and similar.

We were okay, cool, for the first couple of tee-shots and even survived the greens. I enjoyed watching the way Chub sized up a shot, quickly approached the ball and its lie, took a couple of short practice swings, truncated, deft, and hit the ball cleanly. He was very tan, and always almost there was a cigarette dangling from his lower lip, held there not by lips but by wetness. His baldness was making a steady journey toward the back of his skull and his shiny forehead blazed with late-afternoon sunlight. As he came up to the ball, his resident half-smile disappeared and he was all grim business. I admired this greatly and knew I was looking at the genuine article. This professionalism could not be faked.

Lars simply played good golf. There was never any question of him beating Chub except, I suppose, in bed, but that was a matter satisfactorily solved between them long ago. I tried to picture, first, Chub in bed with Mildred, then Lars in bed with her (never tried all three of them in bed together, for nobody was that sophisticated, not for many years to come), but could not do either, though I had to admit to myself and I suppose Cary that I came closer with Mildred and Lars.

The only people I could really picture in bed were myself and Cary, and even the notion while out on the greensward was maddening. I saw nothing wrong, nor did she, in sweetly holding hands on the edge of the putting green, nor in tickling her warm palm with my middle pinky. It made her giggle out loud, this international sign for receptivity for sexual intercourse. She tickled back. you can never tell about a tickle whether it is a joke or the real thing. If the latter, then I had better find a place quickly. But there was no place.

For once I knew what longing meant. It doesn't mean wanting to. It means not being able to. Now as a long-married man I recognize its correspondence in being out to dinner, let us say, with one's very own wife, dressed to the teeth, perhaps in a plunging gown, with her face carefully made up for the world, not you, and seeing those unusual kohl-black eyes, the lacquered mouth, the flashing fingernails, and realizing you could have banged her all morning and throughout the afternoon, and didn't choose to, didn't think of it, but now she was inaccessible to you, this strange woman sitting opposite you across the linen and smiling broadly and speaking with such sophistication. Yours but not yours, not now.

It was a little like that, a childhood version of same, but with even more powerful emotional forces at work. By the fourth tee, we stood looking without obvious expression into each other's eyes. Have I said hers were brown and bottomless? And to say without expression is a lie. A lot of expression is buried there, only it is wearing a mask, it is designed for others not to see, and you must look hard, stare, to see what lies behind the coolness and flatout closedness of the expression that is really communicating on the most fundamental of levels. "I want you," it says. And it says that the other person wants you now.

To some stranger, however, even father or mother's lover and friend, the expression is blank, fathomless. It is how you look at somebody when you don't care a damn or care how that unimportant person regards you. It is how a boy looks at a car, but with even less interest or unguarded expression. Or how a girl looks in the mirror at herself—critically, unimpassioned, lifeless.

We had reached a point of such arousal and sensitivity that if I were to touch her lightly on that bare forearm with the tip of my little finger, let us say, I would not cause an orgasm (and by the way I doubt if Cary had orgasms with me) but would produce some sensual equivalent that was in no way inferior. Her skin would leap, her synapses would snap, her neurons would neurate (or whatever neurons do), and she would crackle to immediate attention as surely as electricity were applied to her circuitry. (Not many know that the right nipple of a woman is an anode, the left nipple the cathode; these are facts kept hidden by a conspiracy of women in all the physic textbooks, however true.) An so I touched her, so lightly, but all she did was sigh.

Desire is another form of poison. It is torture, pure and not so simple. The sigh was unexpected and exceeded what I had expected. She felt much more deeply than, all things. (Today I would say only that she felt them differently.) To be tapped into such electricity and depth of feeling, womanly feeling, was a privilege I was not worthy of, which is not to say I would turn it aside or turn it down. I was appreciative, if dimly so. That sigh. I had caused it. It did not matter that I might have been its instigator, but she was the source. The emotion I was experiencing—true, it was second hand—was solely hers. But in another way it was all mine. It was the only way it could be and I was fully satisfied with it and the product.

There are eighteen holes to a normal round of golf, and we are only on the tee of the fifth; I will save you from hole by hole (sounds pornographic, doesn't it?) encounters and only say that lust soon reaches its near zenith and surprises the participants with being able to sustain its pitch for a lengthy period of time. Cary's gaze for a while averted mine; I instantly understood: it was best not to look at each other and read in the mirror of the other person so much sexual terror. Or so my eyes said, surely. Hers simply had gone watery and weak. Her knees, too, I wondered?

At each tee I said a little prayer to the golfing gods to please, please, let Lars hit into the rough. Now there was next to no chance of Chub doing so. But two holes later, on the twelfth, which contained an attractive dogleg, since the hole (you see how persuasive this imagery is) was out of sight and promised shelter, if not outright obscurity, he hit a slice. I thanked my stars. The ball veered up and to the right in a crescent curve toward the trees and entered them.

"Damn," he hissed, from around his cigarette, and "Damn," I echoed, gleefully, grabbing the rubber handle of my cart and racing for the trees, even before Lars (who was up for this hole) had even approached the tee. Cary was right after me, hot on my heels, so to speak and otherwise.

"We'll help you find it, " I called out over my shoulder. Cary did not run, as I did, but wasted no time and did not deviate from a straight line. At last we found ourselves among the trees. Alas, they had more openness than I had anticipated and to try anything here was tantamount to full public exposure.

She stood beside me, her shoulder against my forearm at a little above elbow level. I could not hear her breathing and I'm sure I was holding my own breath, too.

"Baby," I murmured. It was the first time I had called her this and while it was used often in the movies it had a kind of affected sound, for normally I called her nothing. It was almost as though we had taken a vow never to pronounce each other's names, either in public or alone. Especially when alone.

She made some sign or sound of commiseration. I drew my hand slowly across one breast and on to the next, eliciting the taking of a deep breath and the rising of first one and then the other breasts, as though preparing to leap forward, which of course was a physical impossibility but it is a little like what it was like. The expression on her face was as if she had lost a friend. It was the look of infinite sadness and regret, though of course there was no cause for remorse or unhappiness. It is merely that unexpressed lust apes these other more worthy emotions and to the uninitiated might be mistaken for them.

Me, I mistook nothing. I was looking in a mirror. How wonderful, though awful, to ache in the selfsame way, with only minor variations. And to be the other's only form of relief—no matter how far off that relief might be.

And that was all until we approached the eighteenth tee and knew it to mark the end of all this open greenery and the beginning of better prospects for getting to be alone. Lars drove about 180 yards down the fairway and Chub 230, straight as a die. The clubhouse where they made such fragile, delicious sandwiches loomed lowly in front of us, painted white but with a red tile roof, California style. Lars shot next, using a number one iron, I believe. Again, straight but short. Chub selected a number three iron from my bag and after he shot the ball deftly handed the club to me to put back in without scarcely a look. All business, this guy. I let my hand drift to Cary's soft ass but did not let it linger there, though certain she would let me. There were two layers of cotton between my hand and her skin, one layer thick, the outside one, the other thin, the inside one. And below the ass, following the crack. . . .

She moved aside and I did, at the same precise moment. Did I hear a little low moan come from her, or was it mine? A few yards of turf came between us and stayed there, until we entered the club house and I heard the men tally their scores. In spite of the handicap, Chub won by two strokes. Yeah, I thought, he might win here, all the time, but just wait until the three of them return home.

Cary and I rode in back in the big car, Chub's second car, or perhaps it was Lars's. The men sat in front and smoked. We had the back windows rolled down, for it was a warm twilight. We cuddles; we were allowed to cuddle by common consent because it was widely known by now, including by the three adults, that we were going steady. In their book I am sure this did not mean that I was dorking her.

Being close in the family car was worse than being out on the course by several magnitudes. Because we knew where everything was, our respective areas of anatomy, maddeningly near while remaining impossibly out of reach by a matter of only inches. How I ached for a touch of her bare thigh and how she longed to have it caressed. And I think I might have, but it was my own repression that prevented me. For Cary might not have cared what these two people thought was going on, the cuckold and the adulterer, the disrupters of her childhood and destroyers of her domestic tranquillity, no matter how genteel and sane their life together appeared on the surface. For two men and a woman do not comprise a family, and she and they all knew it.

So I could probably have ploughed (or favorite word, and the budding writer in me did not know or care that it has sound Old English origins that made it not only highly appropriate but biologically correct) her right there, and she would have permitted it. Perhaps preferred it, for it was another way of spitting in their face. Cary hated them—what was going on in her home and her powerlessness to terminate it and become an ordinary family again. Better yet however and impossible to attain would be to have Mildred present and not exactly see but know for a fact what was going on—that the daughter could emulate the sexual passion of the mother but in a wholly acceptable way, one ordained by custom and time.

For what we were doing was simply fornication, while what they were doing was adultery, down and dirty. Our own love was clean, because for one thing we were young and pretty. Being young absolves participants from many dire consequences and, of course, all guilt.

For we were babes. I know that now.

Oh, yes. Chub drove the car into the enclosed garage and we disgorged. They went into the house and I could hear them greet Mildred, who was in the kitchen preparing the dinner we must all soon eat. I had left my light jacket in the car and had to return for it. Cary followed me. I banged her right there on the fender that had not yet cooled from the hot engine adjacent. It took us less than a minute, and if she did not come her amassed anger and pent-up frustration from the long afternoon created a tension whose release imitating one and convinced me, all these years. Well, up to now.

4

We were together for about a year. She was the vital love of my senior year in high school and for a short while into college, and I served a substantive role in her life, for I was the college student who dated a high school senior (herself now) until our worlds widened and divided irremediably, and we parted. We parted several times, before we parted for good.

It is implicit in a love affair that it end. Neither of you wants to admit it, and even on a visceral level it may be denied, but the heart knows, and the loins know, too. "Some day this will be no more." And it cannot be recreated, though it may be repeated, with 50 percent participation for either, but never the full participation of both that made it special and meaningful.

The fruit of love is to know you were loved, without doubt. Of the major women in my life I have no doubt, no lingering suspicions, that I was not loved, or loved only on a minor level with some emotion that comes up short in the final analysis and whispers at four A.M. that you experienced something less than the real thing. You do not have to die for love and had best not, but you do have to suffer, and the world knows if you don't suffer, fore or aft, left or right, long or short, acutely or piercingly, you did not love.

A good woman does not give her body often or thoughtlessly. It has to mean something beyond the ordinary. This is not to say, on a given Saturday night of the soul, she will not go into a bar, probably with a girl friend for psychic protection, with the full intention of getting laid by some stranger. Or she won't wake up next to some shaggy guy, reeking of cigars and booze, and think to herself, "Oh, Peggy, not again? I thought we were past all of that? I thought we had decided that all such shit lies behind us now?"

It means that even the Sunday morning in the company of some stubbled stranger with body odor and breath like a Labrador retriever has meaning, albeit obscure and difficult to nail to a board. It is hard work, searching for love, and it takes you to peculiar locations and weird corners of the land, the land of satiation, however short lasting. It is a search, a search-and-replace function, for there is always the pressing memory of the last lover to shadow and eclipse the unknown man who is vying to take his place and must be found adequate. But there is sex for sex's sake, too, and the loins demand and envelope without much regard for what the heart knows. Or wants. Or now realizes is good for it.

If you must fuck somebody and not mean it, fuck a stranger. I mean, you can mean it, that you need to get laid, but you need not care about the person, only the act. Strangers are best for this, though there is the AIDS scare to make us all sexually shy. Women use men this exact way, too. We used to not know this, or pretend not to, when women had feminine illusions and we men had to act accordingly, in concert, or risk dismissal before the ultimate deed.

Women (read girls) had to be seduced by degrees. What a joke. No woman was ever behind you in the stages of willing progression. It was always tardy you that lagged in catching up to what had been earlier not only promised but pledged. Like me upon Maryann's sofa, I could not believe my stars, my great good luck: she is parting for me. Because we do not believe ourselves worthy.

A man has a cock and it normally lies limp and to the side inside his pants and he is not aware of it until his bladder tells him it is time again to reel it out and take a pee. But let the right woman come along and he is born again as a penis. He has been reduced to this, or rather expanded. He is not much else. It is why little boys tell little girls to take mercy on them and give them relief. See? And they cannot deny that it is red and stiff and protrusive. The act they describe and demand is as old as Courtly Love of medieval times; "Mercy, mercy, sweet heart." This translate into, "Make the damn thing go down and disappear. So I can walk straight again, etc. Please. Pretty please?"

Now, there are a number of ways for her to do this. Her prerogative. You do not have to describe or define them to her, but you will, you do, for it is part of the courtship pattern, and she may await you doing this, for it is part of the code. You do not have to know the code, or believe in it, to follow it; it is inherent in where you are, with whom, and what you are presently doing, if anything. So you might as well believe in it, for it is palpable. Try, for instance, doing otherwise.

I wanted Cary to go down on me and she wouldn't. There you go, the honest truth. We both knew that Maryann was going down on Don, though he had the honor not to tell me about it or much of anything else about their relationship, as a matter of fact. So I used to haul it out in the parked car, where a little drop would sparkle at the end of it, and show it to her, its pathetic lamentable state, its little head turned slightly to the side (her side), reddish, and she would look at it as a spaniel might look at a tennis ball it did not want to retrieve, and wouldn't, and she would study it, her mouth agape slightly, too, and her neck would become rigid and no amount of caressing areas of her body designed for it or not would persuade her. These were times, you understand, when she was having her period. Mostly.

Now when a woman is having her period she may be randy, especially when the flow is heavy, but she has never accepted this condition as other than having the curse, as they put it, and the stuff when it hits the air stinks and is messy and sticky besides. It is not what she wants to be known for, you might say. She has illusions of sweetness and beauty and nice smells. And this is now. Decidedly not. And you agree.

So you try to persuade her to go down. You muster arguments, trying to convince her authoritatively as though it were part of a political agenda (which perhaps it is). You use the old school boy one about everybody is doing it. True enough, you both know. It is hygienic (it is?), it is prophylactic (it is!), it is nice (it is not). I like it. (You haven't yet experienced it, so how do you know? Well, you believe strongly that you will, and you are right.) There are many things you like that she does not, she tells you, and this is not exactly news. Also, you can tell that she is getting angry. And angry women do not give head, or good head. And with every male there is the distant fear that she might (she could, you know) bite it off. Distant, I say, and not very pressing.

And lamentably you say, as you had said long before, about the matter of penetration, that is now long behind you and a moot issue, "Why not?" Hating yourself for it and that whiny pleading tone. And she may answer you with the classic female non-specific answer that is the end-all and eternal and final, "Because."

Perhaps another night, as when she turned into a warmly yielding cushion on Maryann's sofa. For we did not believe ahead of time in our great good fortune. And we must always have something to look forward to and whose happening will sustain belief far into the unsure future. It is called hope.

5

Hope is not eternal, only long lasting, and in some instances fairly short. Short of entering the army, or some other branch of service in war time, college marks a major change in attitude and orientation. The past does not make the transition well. And people from that past seldom enter the new present and are happily accommodated there. They depart or dispensed with, often summarily.

I write this with regret, sometimes wishing I were another person, or one then with more thoughtfulness and kindness in his heart, not a boy of seventeen, with a lot on his mind that did not include Cary. There are few relationships that can survive such change. One enters a new world and the other remains behind in the old one. The two will not mix. A time exists when both parties believe they are successfully adjusting. This is the period of delusion. It includes many sweet reconciliations. It contains a bottomless pit of despair, as well.

I killed my love for Cary with other interests. And I killed her love for me with my obliviousness to her and my preoccupation with the points of interest in my new world. How awful of me. How I regret it. And how powerless I was to do otherwise. I am aware that such a situation repeats itself with nearly every young couple in one way or another, most of them similar. My situation was in no way unique. It was so common as to be a cliché. But a cliché is precisely that for good reason.

I took her to my pledge dance and showed her off to my new friends, this dark beauty. She was miserable in their company at my frat house. The evening was rife with doom. It can be without you exactly knowing it and you mistake it for something entirely different, such as miasma. She was always, remember, melancholy and fighting off a depression that threatened to swallow her. And while I was not the cause of all these mounting factors, I did not help them any, or reduce their cumulative impact. No, I abetted them. I overloaded the circuits of her despair.

She wore one of those low cut gowns that I liked, that all boys like, one which was a little too much for the occasion, or else she was, not the gown, for other girls wore evening dresses like hers but did not have such an impact. Which is complimentary, in a way, while at the same time damning. Only a pledge myself, along with 28 others, the chapter actives were there, and I did not realized that they looked at us as providers of their amusement. Some of the juniors and seniors asked my Cary to dance and, bewildered at what to do that was right, she danced with them. As for me, I did not know either what was protocol, what was condescending amusement on their part. I don't think anybody outright propositioned my Cary, but if they did she wouldn't tell me. It was not entirely that plunging dress, boned so it would not fail to support her but wondrously revealing. It was a red flag to the bull in each of them and, remember, as a pledge I and mine were considered fair game.

So let us suppose one of them did molest her or ask outright for the bestowal of a favor of a lewd kind. What would my sixteen-year-old-still Cary have said—with her deep brown eyes, dark skin, plunging bosoms bared to the cool October air? She and Chub and Mildred (I don't know about Lars, but he had no diminished accident trying to lose itself in the North) had soft, southern accents. They never shouted. They never voiced obscenities (so that when Cary said shit, it really meant something, and when once she said fuck, it meant what it meant, all right) or ordinary curse words, aside from a gentle damn or hell. So she would demurely turn their requests aside and pretend she didn't hear them or exactly understand their intent. Or perhaps none of this took place and it is my creation, but as surely as there are stars at night she was made to feel not at home, there in the world of universities and college fraternities and mixed drinks and, worst of all, sorority girls.

My Cary was none of the above. The question was, did I have enough good sense to recognize it?

5

"I don't like them," she murmured, one night when we were parked outside her parents (such as they were) house in Carleton Park and a soft rain was spotting the windshield of my father's car.

"Who?" I asked idly, my hand trapped inside the far side of her bra because I was too lazy to unhook it. I had, in fact., grown lazy about a while lot of things.

"Your friends. Those fraternity boys."

"Oh, them," I said, though I knew perfectly well. For the moment I wanted to distance myself from them. I was not like them, though of course I was and wanting to be even more so, for they were the key element in my new life as a college student.

"They're mean," she said, more meaningfully that even she knew and I would recognize for years.

"You're right," I said lazily, showing aptitude for the new hypocrisy that I saw all around me and towards which I was aspiring mightily.

"Oh, you're just saying that," she sighed, twisting so my hand—rather than coming free—was caught up even more tightly and my circulation was restrained to the point of being cut off; soon I'd be experiencing the old pins-and-needles.

How well my Cary knew me and the devious workings of my so-called mind.

She was into a gloom that was familiar to me, but with a shade more intensity than in the past. Did she know something I didn't? The radio played softly in the background, the way I had trained it to do, but then suddenly began outpouring noisy commercials in a never-ending staccato manner.

"Can't you turn that down?" she snapped.

Instead I turned it off.

"You didn't have to turn it off," she said, still snappishly. I did not turn it back on for several reasons.

I rubbed her neck, her shoulder, her elbow—all innocuous places that were known not to induce passion, not that inducing passion seemed to be any immediate prospect, for she had been rendered (by me) free of any and all erogenous zones. And I wanted to be accommodating, though I still had in mind some sex for the evening. I was broad minded as to what exactly it might be. It seemed clear she was in no mood for me to remove he scant panties and spread for me on the old stained front seat cushions. We were both of a mind, there. Car sex was not for either of us, not really. It was always uncomfortable and precluded any great, leisurely penetration and thrusting. Remember, we had had the best, or what each of us fashioned was the best, in our young minds.

Again I tried to persuade her to go down on me and again she declined, this time with a little shudder that I named revulsion. And here I had hoped she was still thinking it over.

I kissed her lips and they were cold. I mean, they were really cold, cold lips, not warm lips applied coldly. I briefly tried to convince her that a quicky on the cushions would be good for both of us and she silently restated her position that it would not be. I opened my car door and ambled over to her side and opened hers because I knew that it was a gesture important to her and her psyche. Leading her up to her parents' front door was a little like escorting a destroyer. Yet who was the destroyer, she or I? No neither of us. We were being done in by a quirk of fate.

How long had we been together, doing it for about half that length of time? A year, a year and a quarter? About that. At the door she turned and offered me what were to be her final lips. I supped of them and tasted them as if for the first time, analyzing (with my unexercised, unknown writer's mind) their components. Cigarettes, hamburger, onions, beer, garlic from long ago, such as lunch, and her own special sauce. A whiff, as always, of White Shoulders hung over all.

"Night."

"Night," she said, perhaps thinking unlike what I was thinking that it was goodbye.

A thing is not over until it is over. There is the awful denouement to be gone through. It cannot be avoided and will take place regardless of the willingness of the participants. Ours went this way: I called Cary, I think, and chatted with her, without asking her out. The truth was, I had no special event in mind and was tied up with college affairs and exchanges of my fraternity with some particular sorority each week in which in the back of everybody's childlike mind lies the possibility of something extraordinary happening.

What really happens is that your get paired up with some girl whose sorority sister thinks might like some guy like you as described by a fraternity brother who does not know you but things he does by certain outward signs. It goes like this:

What's he like? I dunno, sort of average, not too tall, not fat, wears glasses, not very smooth, if you know what I mean. Likes to read books and drinks beer. Seventeen.

And she goes, I have just the girl for him. She's exactly that way, too. Reads all the time, gets drunk at the drop of a hat, not too smooth, not exactly beautiful.

All the girls like her?

Exactly.

And they pair you up. You instantly despise each other but know you have two hours or longer to spend in each other's company and the reputation of your various houses are dimly connected to what or what not the pair of you do, so you put on a face and ask dumb questions, and if it is a dance you must dance with her, or else she will think you don't know how or else that she has BO. And then it is thankfully over and you go out with your buddies to a tavern and hoist a few and you await the next Friday night of your young soul, when you will go through the identical exercise again.

This was Cary's competition. If she had only known this, she wouldn't have worried. But she had no idea what it would be like nor, truthfully, did I, and so it posed a threat. This was the same girl, remember, who had taken my two sisterly dates to a matinee in which for the three of them to size each other up. I always wondered what they each saw in one another. A slut? Easy? What does he see in her? What does she see in him, for I know him well and put up with his foibles, all the same. She is nice? She is not nice?

Called up my Cary who was no longer truly mine and learned that she was dating now. What? Well, aren't you? A sorority exchange isn't a date by any reach of the imagination. What is it then? It's some stupid social program I can't get out of. The girls are all dogs.

That's what you call them?

Call who?

Call the girls?'

Who calls the girls?

You do. You call them dogs?

Sometimes we call them pigs.

Aren't there any kind words for them?

Sure.

What are they?

Can't remember.

Oh, you remember, all right.

I love you, Cary.

Bull shit. (She had recently learned to swear, not having any inclination up until recently.) All you love is your cock.

True, true. I'd agree to anything, just to have my way. But we were on the telephone and about eight miles of copper wire was the only thing that connected us. A telephone hardon is simply not long enough.

Who are you going out with?

None of your business. And by the way, one of your fraternity brothers called me up and asked me for a date.

I had no way of knowing whether this was true or not. Probably was. Yet she was the type that might be making it up.

Who?

Who what?

Who called you up?

Why do you want to know his name?

Beat the shit out of him, that's why.

You are not known to be any kind of fighter. Besides, he's bigger than you.

Bigger dick?

Thanks a lot.

This conversation is getting us nowhere.

Agreed.

So I think we'd better end it.

Maryann and Don had broken up. I didn't know what it meant, since they were always breaking up and having steamy reunions. So I gave her a call. She seemed surprised.

I want to get together and talk to you. About Cary.

I'm not sure I can help you there.

I think you can. Or are you busy?

Busy? You kidding? But I don't think it is a good idea.

Why not?

People might not understand.

We'll go to a movie. Then a milkshake. Where's the harm in that?

No harm, I guess.

Friday.

Well.

Friday, please. We'll talk.

Well, okay.

And after the movie, after the shake, I was all over her.

You just wanted to talk about Cary, she said, twisting away. That's what you said, what you promised.

Sure, that's what I meant, all that I had in mind. But, gee, you're so pretty. I've always thought you were pretty. That beautiful blond hair. Down to your shoulders. And that sweet mouth.

I had no idea. Look, I'm Cary's best friend.

I kissed her. She kissed back experimentally. She kissed what Cary had been kissing. She tried to analyze the taste. Of me. She touched her tongue to her lips, trying to puzzle it out. She seemed hesitant, undecided. I struck again. I put my tongue in her mouth and felt her thoughtlessly suck on it. Then she said: Hey, wait a minute.

Hmmm?

A kiss is just a kiss, but this is something else.

It is? What is it? Thinking, a sigh is just a sigh. We were two characters in a movie; that is, we were both acting out of character, which is okay, but she kept hauling us back to reality.

I discovered that Maryann was just as I thought, flat as a board.

Satisfied, she asked?

Satisfied?

Yes, that I'm flat chested? Next to nothing there. I've got about as much as you have.

You've got nice nipples.

Thanks a lot. Well, yes, thanks. I do have nice nipples.

Very nice nipples.

That isn't a nipple.

What isn't?

Where you have your hand.

Where do you have your hand?

On my cunt. I enjoin you, take it off.

In just another minute.

Robert?

It's nice to hear you speak my name. Thought I didn't have one, in your lexicon.

You are the only boy, honestly, who will say the word, lexicon.

It means dictionary.

I know what it means. Don uses big words, too.

All of us guys who've gone on to college use big words, every chance we get. It means we are being educated.

Truly, I didn't know where all this shit came from, but it was always available when I needed it. I think girls called it forth from boy and boys uttered it because girls required it, but I can't be sure. I believe that, left to our own devices, we wouldn't have issued it. We would have let it lie back in the cave.

Satisfied?

Girls nowadays were always asking me if I was satisfied far short of when I actually might be. For instance, instead of pushing my hand away she let me explore the aforesaid area to my heart's delight, which was considerable. I found that I now knew Maryann very, very well. And if I thought she was getting aroused from all the poking around my finger was doing and a modest increase in the flow of juices I was wrong. It was a new way of discouraging a boy without engaging in wrestling or, sometimes, a boxing match. It was called letting them get discouraged by a lack of female response, only, it never worked, for a boy, given such access, forgets about such critical things as appropriate female response and simply enjoys what seems to be permission to poke around until he gets his fill. Which is nearly never.

After about half an hour of this, playing at the game, Satisfaction, I began to get the message. I thought Maryann was about as activated as Cary would be, after a commensurate period of time, but Cary would have pushed me aside sooner and urged me to get on with it, while Maryann remained supremely supine. I finally got a clue when, without asking me or making any prior sign, she lit up a cigarette.

You want one, too? she asked.

I told her what I wanted, which is what I had wanted Cary to do for me, or to me, or whatever.

Fat chance. That'll be a cold day in hell. And various other assorted clichés of the day.

And I began, like the young asshole that I was: Why not? Aw, come on. Is it asking so much? And I probably made the mistake of saying that I knew she went down on Don, had actually known it for a fact when she disappeared behind the front seat back cushion and Don lay back as grateful recipient and my (then) Cary murmured, Big Show Off.

She would, however, allow her hand to rest idly on it, my instrument, and communicated again to me through that colossal passivity her lack of enthusiasm for it, in any manner that required her participation. On the other hand, it was an unfamiliar male organ and all in itself held a vague fascination for her, as it does for all of them. I tried to coax her into showing a little excitement, however feigned. She refused. So I reeled the thing in and zipped it up. Our date was ostensibly over.

At the front door of the house where I had lost my virginity, not to her but to her associate in crime and seduction, she turned to me and said, It was a lovely evening.

Huh?

I had a nice time.

You did?

Sure.

And she kissed me ambiguously, wetly and full on the mouth. She even gave me the promise of the tip of her tongue. I went away bewildered. Perhaps I had misunderstood. After all, this was our first date. Maybe the trading of partners takes some time and is different from, say, first assault with somebody new. And maybe she believed in illusion. She might kiss on the first date, but not screw and surely not go down. But on the second? More? And on the third? Bliss?

I called her, but she would not come to the phone. Another evening nearby I called Cary. She wouldn't come to the phone, either. Oh, boy. I had shot myself in the foot. In both feet. In the groin.

I was truly cut loose, a college student with no ties to the past and only the terrifying future in which to build my nest out of whatever bits of string and twigs I could find. Like an insect.

1

Since this is a book about desperate women, I should restrict myself to these, but when I stop to reflect on them—girls and women, and there is no difference except that wrought by time—I find that all of them are desperate, and what I have alluded to is the cosmic condition. I guess I'm saying that all women are desperate, and while that makes me a sexist in the opinion of some (all of them women) I do not think of it that way, nor intend it so, and only mean to indicate that there is something in the female psyche that causes a woman to perceive the limitations of her situation and the reduced extent to which she may escape from it, always with a dire tradeoff. For to marry generally means to have children and to have babies means diapers, and rare is the man who gravitates towards household chores, including changing and rising out a diaper, let alone many of them, or even washing them in a machine. So her lot is a shitty one, literally speaking. But she knows there are worse things in life than a loaded diaper, and he doesn't.

Let me illustrate. We have mousetraps, right, under the kitchen sink cupboard up at the river. Generally I set the traps (tricky, tricky) with a bit of Velveeta (because it is ever soft) cheese that fits in the yellow plastic trip lever of the trap. And when we get a mouse, which is often at some seasons of the year, the trap has to be emptied and refilled. To accomplish this, when I am the one fate determines will do it, I put on a single workglove, the left, and daintily carry the trap out of doors where, with the aid of a pencil, I pry back the steel wire of the death trap and let the mouse fall to the sorry earth beneath.

My wife simply picks up the trap in one ungloved hand, carries it out, and with the other unclad pinky pulls back the wire to let the mouse drop to the selfsame earth.

Men and women are different from one another in so many ways that it is a wonder that we speak the same language.

My wife would say, What makes you think we speak the same language?

And I would reply, Because I understood exactly what you said, just then.

And she would say, No, you just heard me say it. You didn't understand it one whit.

You mean, I don't understand spoken English?

Not when it is spoken by a woman, no, not really.

And what if she writes it down?

You think you understand it better because you are keyed to the written word, but you are wrong.

Then I don't understand anything any of you say—aloud or in writing?

You think you do.

And on and on.

2

So many girls and women faded into a past that is without meaning or content. How constant the search, how rough, how desperate. Men are desperate, too, but we mask it with other attitudes we deem more acceptable. A guy can always get angry and swear. (Fuck, piss, shit. There!) I swear a lot and expertly. I delight in new juxtaposition of old words for telling effect. Women and men swear differently. For instance, there is a woman I know whose chief appeal to me is her use of obscenity. Among her telling phrases that continues to engage me is this one: Bull fucking shit.

I don't know exactly what this means. It is telling, though. It is obscenity squared, perhaps cubed. It is an ordinary cuss word raised to the cosmic level by the insertion of the Old English phrase for sexual intercourse acutely misplaced and used solely as an intensifier, much as we did in the army, when it was used several times within a single sentence and in every uttered phrase. It is padding. It is adverbial in effect. Its intent is to make everything fore and aft more or worse than it already is. In this sense the word is desperate. It say that ordinary obscenity is not enough; it has been diluted by usage so that a single word—shit, let us say—no longer means that but indicates something only vaguely unpleasant. To return it to its original shocking meaning it must be intensified. Sally knows just how to do it. She is a telling speaker and an effective writer. But usually only when she resorts to obscenity. Which is thankfully often.

Sally is among my desperate women.

You do not use LSD, Librium, codeine, pot, benzedrine, phenobarbital, Percodan, etc., if you do not find life lacking or experience it as being too painful, too stressful. Not to mention using that old standby, booze. Abundantly.

On the edge of a writers' group that I was on the edge of, too, she suggested we go off to have a drink when the meeting broke up rancorously, as usual, and I tagged along, since she had astonished me by linking Virginia Woolf and John Updike in the same sentence, and doing so meaningfully and in a way I had never thought of before, or for that matter again, not until this exact minute. But she was well-read in a world of desultory readers at best and so I was captivated for a while, for this reason and because I was looking for an editor, knew it would have to be a woman (for men were as slovenly about language as I), and saw her as someone who could take my sloppy prose and turn it into something magical and marketable.

Sally was simply looking for somebody to get drunk with her in the afternoon and give her a dry poke.

Little do we know their uses for us when they enter our lives, these desperate women. We have ours, and they are nefarious and complex, and often we delude ourselves about what we have planned and know not what lies in our twisted hearts. They know what is in theirs, their twisted hearts, and have no need for delusion. And most often they get what they want , which is not what we simple males construe it to be, in all its commensurate awfulness.

All my life I have had this failing, when it comes to women. They can want to be made love to, and I always mistake it for something else. Lassitude, perhaps. When she lies back on the cushions so easily, I think it is because she is tired, or wants to be more comfortable, or likes looking up at a male (true, true), or is like a cat in having her back protected and all four sets of claws in ready strike. Wrong, wrong. She is sending you a signal, dick-head. She is announcing her availability as surely as though she were in estrus, which of course is biologically impossible, though there must be some equivalent condition, or else I have wrongly observed the species, all my life. And this is possible.

Now writers are enticed into literary conversations that are mostly name-dropping exercises, only we are all aware that somebody can call our bluff at any moment, just as we can call theirs, so it is a deadly and often embarrassing game of chance we play with each other. And you add the boy/girl element, that is, the prospect of raw sex, to it, it is about as deadly as it can get. But what fun. And why else have cocktail parties, read the New York Review, submit unwanted manuscripts to editors who will in all likelihood never read them, and spend all your day hunched over a computer, writing prose? Why indeed.

You do not—let me add—talk about the latest this or that, not in the circles I and mine frequent. You had best be reading somebody established, probably dead. A minor writer is best. You read who nobody else is reading and you speak authoritatively, for you have the last word. Who else in your circle, say, put down Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance at three A.M and can speak so freshly about its torturous plot twists? Nobody but you, boobie.

Sally was, by her count, sixteen years younger than I. She kept perversely remind me of our age difference. Why? Is it because she intended to bed me quickly? For otherwise, and even then, how did it matter? A woman of thirty-four can be in the company of a man fifty and raise no eyebrows; she can even send the world decided sexual signals. More exciting to her and him is if he is black—or yellow or brown. (I used to have coffee with an editor who was a Filipino, and the looks we got; I can see how the looks alone might entice some people to put themselves in the company they might not otherwise and how this might become a thrilling habit. Not for us.) Many men today can be found at twilight time with women young enough to be their daughters or granddaughters to their delight and everybody else's consternation. But sixteen years is not so much difference, not in my book. Perhaps in Sally's it was.

And while I say her chief appeal to me was in the prospect of taking a blue pencil (Sally would never use red) to my overwritten prose and making it, lo, wonderful, I have to admit she had a physical appeal. (I should certainly hope so, old sport.) She was slender, and while the vast majority of my desperate women were buxom she was flatchested in a way that was fashionable, since women were going braless under sweaters and blouses so that other women and men too could see their wherewithal, I had never met a woman who was making a career out of showing her nipples and scant breasts, and was resultingly fascinated. As I was supposed to be.

Also Sally was petite. That is the best way of saying she was less than five feet four and with small bones. French-looking, what with her dark hair cut short, just as Anais Nin wore hers. Sally had read Anais Nin, much more than I had then, as she had Woolf; I did not stop to think that I was being offered an assortment of fashionable feminist writers, but of course I was, what with some Henry Miller and aforesaid Updike thrown in, perhaps as literary slight-of-hand.

Sally was small and wore dresses and little shoes with small heels and nylons, fake pearls, scent, and I imagine for her lacquered fingernails, though I cannot recall for certain and she was of the type that chews fingernails, and those that do have nothing to paint and do not want to draw attention to the shame and let them remain unpainted so that they may slink into the fingers themselves and not be noticed. I think hers were cut short, for typing, and painted bright red, the color of that pretty mouth.

She had incredibly bad breath, full of booze and too many cigarettes. Maybe a bad tooth, as well. Perhaps if I had smoked myself I could have more easily overlooked this fault. But we rarely kissed. She probably had gum disease, as well. But she was sexy, cute, engaging, and had a pleasantly aggressive manner that made me feel important. Two well-read people can do this to and for each other.

And there was the matter of frequently saying whenever she disagreed or thought someone was lying, "Bull Fucking Shit." You had to love a girl for that, and while I tried, I couldn't quite manage it. There is something about uttering that wonderful phrase that precludes the deep, lasting emotion, however much it appeals at the moment.

Once, walking down a busy avenue from one shop or restaurant to another, and we had not been drinking, not even beer, she said to me in ordinary tones, "By the way, I give incredible head."

I stumbled on the curb at 45th St. and Brooklyn Avenue Northeast. You see, one remembers such utterances and even, twenty years later, where they took place. No doubt the curb itself now wears a commemorative plaque, if you only look low enough: it is very small and is set next to the stormwater drain. There, you see? "Pledge uttered here."

She had slightly bucked teeth, and when—later, but only a little later—I had occasion to call her on her bluff or take her up on her invitation, whatever it was, she begged off, on the pretext that her teeth prevented her from doing it successfully. Her live-in (whom I believe went on to become her third husband; already she had two children, a boy of twelve from her first husband, and a daughter of eight from her second, though there was some question over this, and it might have been the first again, though the two kids looked nothing alike) had told her emphatically that she ought never again try any such thing again unless she had her teeth removed and could take out the artificial set.

Did I think she should do this? she asked, with long black lashes innocently raised in my direction and those kohl-rimmed eyes lidded in violet.

It was the time for me to shout, Bull Fucking Shit, but I did not know enough to. Good editors are a rare find, besides.

That first afternoon, after the meeting ground down and four or five of us adjourned (as do writers in a short-story class, and we mimicked them in several ways) to a local tavern, one with the ambience of fake oak and potted ferns and a view of Portage Bay) and started quaffing schooners of draft beer. Boy, could she put it away. Now I am a modest drinker who has never believed that my masculinity was proved by how much I could swallow in a short while, so I soon slowed down and declined the proffered pitcher of suds when it made its rounds. Wonderful Sally never once did, though. Small to start with, it was as if both legs and the rest of her were hollow and served, as with the reputed camel, to store liquids, though I noticed she frequently went to the john but (unlike many women) was never there long. In fact, it took me longer to piss than it did her. Back she would come quickly, swaying slightly but in the manner of someone who drank often and a lot and had mastered the act. Or is it art?

You could see her sway, I mean, and she could see you see her sway and her eyes told you it was meaningless, she did it as a joke, she could not sway instantly, and was only swaying as a way of kidding you. And to give her her due, she did not bump any of the adjacent tables or chairs or patrons, and was no more responsible for all the puddles around the tabletop and glasses than any of us.

One by one the others excused themselves and wobblingly made their exits until there were just the two of us left. We both pretended surprise when we found we were alone. I was driving. She beheld my old Pinto and said, charmingly, "Old Shake-and-Bake, eh?"

"Bus stop's just across the street."

Pintos were thought by some who didn't own them to be a fire hazard, just because countless families had been engulfed in flames following small collisions and were suing Ford silly. Most of us owners didn't believe the reports and considered them frivolous.

Sally chose to ride and rode well. She occupied a small section of the bucket seat next to mine and there was the four-speed floorshift rising like a phallus between us. (Had never thought of it that way before or since.) We rode on, aimed vaguely in the direction of where she lived with her friend, Donovan. No, it wasn't the guy who wrote and played the songs. But it was a Sixties kind of name, even though this was the mid-Seventies. Not all the old crap had faded.

She wanted another drink. What, hadn't she had enough? I was afloat. Just one, she promised, pointing out the window of Old Shake-and Bake to another tavern up ahead. It was a familiar hangout of mine from years past, one that had gone through several metamorphoses funded by new buyers since the years I had frequented it. And honestly I didn't mind taking a look inside, after all this time, even though another drink was not what I needed, though I sure could use another pee.

So we went inside the Century and ordered, ugh, another pitcher. I paid; in for a dime, in for a dollar and a half: it had been running this way all afternoon and it seemed as though I were the only one of us with any money in my jeans. Neither of us could finish our glasses. I walked her home, which was about one city block away. She invited me inside. Would I like some coffee? No, no. Neither would she. She smiled. She would like to lie down for a few minutes. No, don't go. Would I mind? I could come along and hold her hand. Soft smile sleepily. I went up to the bedroom she and Donovan shared. It was mid-afternoon, the kids still in school or on the edge of being let out and going elsewhere, I gathered.

Sally lay down on the bed. I think she modestly retained her slip. Would I sit down and hold her hand a moment? She was feeling woozy and sleepy. Again she smiled. Tellingly.

I should have yelled her favorite epithet. I should have run for the door. Instead I stayed. I did what I was male-programmed to do. On the bedside was her little table with a lamp on it and a paperback book folded so that the spine was irrevocably cracked. Poor book, I thought. Also there was the first tube of K-Y jelly I had ever seen. (Didn't yet use the stuff at home; no need to.) I thought it was some kind of glue or unguent.

Dumb, dumb, dumb.

Eventually I stuck it in her. I mean, why else was I there if I didn't intend to lay her? Beats me. I guess I planned to and I planned not to, and the usual male ambivalence in me kept me forging ahead uncertainly, waiting to see what might happen. It was the worst, driest fuck of my life. I could not believe what my dick told me. It was so bad it was beyond belief. I think I even spoke my disappointment aloud, in just about those terms. But deciding to be kind to her, I fudged.

"That was the second worst fuck in my life," I informed her.

She explained how she usually did herself with her finger, while her boyfriend did her from behind. This was no vague description of being screwed from behind in the barnyard sense. No, it was what it was. She meant anally. She further explained that the location of her clitoris was such that a man's penis could not reach it hard enough to bring her to climax. This was disconcerting. So she had to get herself off by herself, she said, though the man was requisite to her full enjoyment of the act. But there were times, well, when she was alone and, frankly, felt randy. Then she did it alone.

I guess having been admitted into that Sahara of a vagina was qualification for my admittance into a frank discourse on what did it for her and what didn't. I remember the street remark about whether she ought to have removable teeth. Was that only a couple of hours ago? It was. As for myself in the rosy afterglow of sex, I found it neither rosy nor glowing but surely after. How had I gotten here? And why? Sally went on, her mouth held close to mine and her breath not any better than earlier. I believe she was smoking or perhaps had never stopped.

Once in, once out, nothing remained forbidden. She showed me a couple of pictures Donovan had taken of her, knowing I was nuts about photography. One had her topless at an upstairs window, looking out. It was rather nice. Her breasts were admittedly small, but the nipples were on parade. Perhaps it was a chill day. And the two boobs mounded slightly. There was the familiar sweet face, with the dark eyes, dark hair, bright mouth (though it was rendered in false black and white). Anais Nin again. The sloping shingled room that in a few more years would begin to leak its roof if not replaced, with its steep pitch, the window raised, the ruffled curtains flared at the opening, and one of them caught up by a gust and carried to one side. It made me think of Harry Callahan.

The other did not. It was a close up of Sally's . . . snatch. It's what she called it, that day, and so shall I. Donovan had taken it, too. But first he had pleaded for her to shave . . . that furry little animal. She obliged. This had not taken place long ago and explained something that had alarmed me—the stubble on her pelvis. Judging by a man's cheeks (my own) she and her lover had played the razor game only three days ago. I tried to assess her attitude, at the instant. Part of it was grudgingly shameful, but the other was boastful, proud. Look, it said, what my lover and I do for games. Isn't he original, isn't he unique?

No, I thought. A good juicy fuck and you wouldn't have to do this. No snaps. You would be set free. You could go on to other matters. And I saw for one of the few times in my life how people and sex are so different, even though they may be in frequent juxtaposition and speak familiar words that one thinks have the same meaning. We are as remote as stars and the ether stretched between and among us distant citizens contains no electrons and no recognizable frequencies for transmission of love or transmittal of sensual data. We are alone until death and communicate through babble that which is incomprehensible to one another. In short, we make sounds which we are pledged to acknowledge as recognizable, but they are not. They comprise but cosmic noise. It is what the ancients meant when they talked about the music of the spheres.

It might have been music, but it wasn't communication. And what Sally and I played was as though somebody with no coordination was beating with drumsticks on first a tin can, then on an oil-filled radiator.

3

I had to see her again, of course. And sleep with her one more time, if only so that my soul would know that she wasn't truly the worst piece of ass in my life, nor as I told her the second worst, but would permanently rank somewhere much farther down the ladder of badness. I wanted to redeem her rating and us. It was not hard to arrange, though by now I had begun to realize that she was using me to torment Donovan and perhaps get some privileged, unilateral commitment from him that he was unwilling to give. Could it be her marriage number three? No doubt. The rules included running around with others. I gathered that he was straying, too. Often they went places where they were sure to run into each other. Places where people drank. Then they would spot each other from across the thin room and know that fireworks were in the offing at home. This they craved.

Some people like to live like this and arrange their lives so that the agony continues for years.

Not I. I bedded Sally a second time and it was (praise God, though he had nothing to do with it) a little better. Might put her forevermore at the level of twelfth or thirteenth worst, which is not an awfully great compliment, either, for I had some bad times during my bachelor years when I might as well as have been fucking a tree as a real, live girl. (And they all were alive, I swear; no necromancy for this bad boy.) And there is their point of view to be considered, in all honesty. To say I was a phallic disappointment to them is to say nothing. True, I could always perform, always achieve ejaculation, but this is not what is required to please a woman, and I was usually so thoughtlessly concerned with only my own release that I didn't care or pay attention to hers. It was as if to say, I am going this direction, at this rate of speed, and if you want to ride along, fine by me, but it is up to you to find your enjoyment, for I don't care.

It is astonishing how many women will hop on board, considering the circumstances. What an accommodating lot. Desperate, yes, and lonely, too, and I have been told greatly in need of closeness and tenderness. Ha from this quarter. You'd get more tenderness out of a cheap steak. As for closeness, when you are being penetrated by so distant a somebody you might feel close to that person, even though he remains light-years away from you. Closeness is a girl kind of thing and boys don't care about it, only the act itself. And I cared only about myself. That was to change, but only by degrees, and there were years, decades, between the women.

In college there were four women I cared about, one greatly. The first was Celeste and my affection for her was misplaced. (Hers, too.) I saw her again some forty years later, and she had changed little, only in the greying of her hair. It had been black then, or so dark brown that it would pass for black in all but a certain angle of bright sunlight, when its highlights become gently evident. She too had that Anais Nin-kind of look, only I had no idea what Nin looked like or her mythic appeal to men (and women as well). She remained a dim ego ideal. Celeste was nicely rounded, fore and aft, though petite, but had a hard though domestic side to her personality, which was not large. She went to Roosevelt High and was in the same class as Bonnie, that is, my year at Queen Anne. She had identified me at some school dance and was probably more impressed with who I was with than by me myself. (Or is this false modesty?) Anyway, she asked me to a dance, a tolo, and I went.

I dimly knew her and remembered who she was—some vague female shape—with inexactness and difficulty. But here was a girl who wanted my company. She wanted to be seen in the company of unimpressive young me. What for? And if she did, what else might follow? I thought I had better look again—had I missed one in my wavering field of vision? What might take place, quickly, between a guy like me and a girl who singled me out? Oughn't she be . . . easy?

No woman is easy, not even the ones who are immediately sexually accessible to you. The difficulty, the complexity, is yet to come, and may be part of the far distant future. You get the dessert before the mashed potatoes. And if the dessert is vanilla ice cream (my favorite), the difference between them is not so great, visually speaking. One can—in the halflight—pass for the other. But it will not fool the mouth.

I drive by her parents' old house frequently, these days, for I live in the neighborhood, and think I spot the bus stop where I waited for my return ride home, on nights when I could not beg my father's car. Only it might not be that exact bus stop or that precise house, and I may be evoking memories from the wrong place to satisfy my still restless mind. The house has a stone front, is mono-storied, has a narrow front lawn that sweeps around a corner curve. There are in fact about three such houses vying to be hers, and none of them matter, matter not an iota, except for the fact that I need the assurance they can provide for factual verification of my ancient lust. (Or do I really, except in thinking that I do?) And if I don't, if any old house will do, then what is holding me back? Only the echoes of my mind, according to principles in song of the Wichita lineman.

Celeste occupies a less than celestial position in my youthful firmament. I think I was a freshman in college, dating Julie desultorily when I had no current girl friend from a class or neighboring sorority, and she doing the equivalent with me. Then came the tolo invitation from this scarcely identifiable quiet, dark-haired girl from the same school as Julie, and I became intrigued with the lewd possibilities. I mean, back then, girls didn't call up boys and ask them for dates. But in retrospect it may have been a ploy of Celeste's and she had used it more than in my one small instance. If so it was daring, bold for the time. Since there was nothing else daring about her, this element was and is startling to me, for she seemed the most ordinary and pedestrian of girls. Perhaps each has her extraordinary ways. After all, I am the boy who read Freud at fourteen and constantly bore in mind the case histories of Freud's (imitated paley, by the way, by Kraft-Ebbing) desperate women, most of whom had become arrested early by some horror in their family life. We have since learned that Freud knew this to be incest, or incest-related, but the conventions of his time forced him to describe it with the trauma theory and run-of-the-mill neurosis.

She had a dark side; they all do. It was desperate, as well. Who know what mysteries lurk behind those modestly lowered eyes? Or any eyes, open or not, so long as they are female? Not long ago I came across some letters written me by Celeste when I was away in the summer working in a pea cannery in Eastern Washington. I was lonely with my own brand of desperation (never said it was the private property of females, did I?), saddled with it, ridden by it, you might say, and was hungry for letters, much as I was a few years later when transported by the Army to all sorts of unpleasant places in which I had no say. So her letters, written in response to mine, most dutifully, for she was no writer, when recalled with the utmost of tranquility are, shall we say, less than exciting. So she washed her hair tonight? So she and her mother went to Frederick's and bought a new plaid skirt (blue and black and grey), some blouses, and a black sweater. Now the idea of a black cashmere sweater perhaps of the right size or one size too small on a young, body like Celeste's is enough to enflame the mind of any boy, but aside from whatever inadvertent prurience this might produce, her letters were soporific. The other day, hungry for my past, I dug some out of a box and started skimming through them. Dull, duller, dullest. And when I originally received them, hungry for content and a cure for my loneliness, they were just as disappointing.

So what was she then, aside from desperate? She was an ordinary girl, blessed with youth, nicely shaped bones, and flesh in just the right places. Heredity says a lot, in these departments; it also says a lot in regard to an absence of curiosity and intellect. But it is unfair to try to make somebody other than what they are, or were. She was a high- school senior, she took me to a dance, she made her corporeal person available to me, and I seized it. She fucked like a rubber ball. We used to lie on her trusting parents' livingroom sofa (the site of all major carnal crimes of my and every other boy's youth) and listen to Teresa Brewer sing, "Put another nickel in, in the nickelodeon," over and over, for it was the last 78 in the stack and the changer would keep replaying it till doomsday, if not attended to. And then I was putting it in her, and we were too busy attending to each other's needs to bother to do anything other than keep dully listening.

Forevermore the name alone, Teresa Brewer, will rekindle in me thoughts of lust.

There were some lowlights to our relationship, as well. They seem of more significance that the highlights, for they do not remain with me. (Lost to time.) The following year in college, following a dearth of dates with anybody other than Julie, Bonnie when she was home on vacation, and a girl down the block named Susan, I saw a lot of Celeste. We both took it for granted that we were going steady because we were fucking, every chance we got. I did not give her my frat pin; something undefined held me back. But I took her to the requisite number of dances. In the meanwhile she had started UW and pledged a less than great sorority, but that was okay because my fraternity was upper middle of the pack. This made us, I guess, social equals. We were equally distant from the top of the pecking order.

She was a Kappa Phi Something. When we had our spring prom, I had the family car, and many of my classmates were from the Eastern half of the state or out of state and required rides. We could get six uncomfortably in my dad's two-door Buick Special, so six I did. Driving off to the dance at one of those mucky low-land lakes that fringe the city, I picked up Tom and Bill, Tom's date, Bill's date, and headed for the dance pavilion. After a mile or two of easy travel, Bill asked gently if Celeste was meeting us there, or what? No, I had simply forgotten her.

Terrible, terrible, terrible. I wheeled on my heels and drove miles back to her parents' house, that emblem of stone and cedar and monocultural stolidity, and found her waiting quietly by the door. Boned in front, she pinned on her corsage (I didn't forget it, thankfully) with my clumsy hands following hers, alternating quick touches of skin and fabric. This night and all the others she looked predictably nice. Nice isn't really the right word, I know, for any boy with eyes could discern her lewd potential. And he would be right. You could not shock her in the sexual department, but you could provoke a moment's perplexity and bewilderment, while she thought your suggestion over. And then she would consent, usually without even the punctuation of a smile.

She didn't go down on me. (Add one more to the list.) I suppose in my usual unsubtle manner I tried to urge her to and once more utterly failed. But it didn't make her angry, my asking. She was of an even temperament.

Once Celeste and I went to a movie at the Varsity Theater. It was on the Ave, an easy walk from my frat house and her sorority. Often I was carless for a whole weekend and had to make do with bus rides for myself, or else we walked to local movies and cheap restaurants. She didn't like movies that were too out of the ordinary, risque, and fortunately nothing in 1949 much offended her or anybody else. So it was some light comedy we saw. Already she was a Republican in her mind and conservative in everything. Except for sex. With sex she was a liberal, an unreconstituted one. She'd fuck at the drop of a hat. And if you didn't have one, a hat, that is, that was okay, too. If she were a motorized vehicle, you'd have to say her warm-up time was zip.

After the movie let out, we walked down the street to where my car was parked around the corner. We passed a series of familiar storefronts. One sold furniture. Though late, its windows were all lit. A bedroom set, a livingroom sofa and matching armchair, a dining room table, upholstered chairs circling it, each place set with real china and linen.

Celeste slowed her pace. Her empty hand found the crook of my elbow and warmly took it; this was in itself unusual. She halted me. What for? To look in the window. But this was a fucking furniture store. She swung me round, on my own arm. Look, look, the action said. It is just a bed, I said. A bed is, you know, what people Do It in when they have one to go to. When they are, in other words, married.

This she communicated to me indirectly, though unmistakably, through my arm. I felt an chill run down my spine, which was odd, for it was a warm night. This was an intensely domestic situation she was regarding with such fond intensity. She seemed to be waiting for a response from me. I gave it in not bolting down the sidewalk and disappearing immediately from the scene.

She had a small sense of sexual adventure. If I suggested up against a tree, she was amenable, but there was no sense communicated that, Hey, we are doing it up against a tree, for Christ's sake. Lookee, lookee. It was just another place in a world full of places not precisely designed for dalliance. In all honesty, though, she gave the act itself thoughtful attention. But I don't think she was working on her orgasm. I think it was simply tactile. She was wonderfully compliant. This is not so great as it might sound. If she would do it anywhere, even with some degree of risk of discovery, there was no sense of thrill or appreciation of my originality. Front seat, back seat, across the trunk, over the fender, straddling a headlight, hot against a cooling grill—all were the same to her. She would accept each invitation to screw with the aplomb that another might receive a cup of coffee or the sharing of a cigarette.

I don't remember whether or not she smoked. I think she did, but was not hopeless addicted as the rest of us were. If a boy smoked, she smoked with him, even drawing the foul air back into her lungs to some extent but expelling it more quickly than us nicotine junkies did. And I can see smoke coming out of her delicate nostrils in tiny thin plumes, almost like an afterthought or an imitation of what smoking ought to be. So she smoked with me, who smoked like a factory, and so we had the same flavor—Chesterfields. They were a real lung stomper.

One time that was nicer than most we went off to the mountains. I was already seasonally visited by the need to be out of doors, perhaps fishing, and she was acquiescent. The problem wasn't that Celeste wasn't game; she was equally receptive to most any suggestion coming from me (except Going Down). She accepted all with equanimity. (Often it passed for spontaneity.) So when I said, Let's go the Sauk River and a little place I know called Clear Creek, which is beautiful, she replied, That sounds nice.

Sounds nice it might, but Clear Creek in March was a rugged place to be, with patches of snow still on the ground, giving the land a uniform zebra look that made known signs impossible to locate and identify. Even the trail was half obscured with thin, crusty snow. Patchwork obscuring of a trail is tantamount to having no trail at all, and as I led us cleverly upstream, following the canyon course of the creek it began to become aware to me that we were lost and getting loster.

On the way up to the river I had come to a fork in the road, which was dirt, one fork going to where we were headed, the other leading to a shadowy copse just out of sight. I pulled into the latter and wordlessly we climbed into the backseat and Did It, cold as it was. The moment the car heater was shut off, even with the windows cranked up tight, the inside temperature plunged to about 36 degrees. You have to give Celeste credit. Another girl would have whined her unwillingness to proceed.

She pulled those gossamer panties back on over thighs that were marked with gooseflesh and on which I could see the pink imprints of my open fingers. All the while I watched, fascinated. A girl can fuck the way a boy can belch and instantly be ready for the next approaching thing. It is a wonder.

We drove on, down the other fork, and came to the campground that was closed by the Forest Service for the winter and marked where the known highway ended. On the far side of the turnaround was the start of the trail to Frog Lake, but all the frogs of the year were terminated and their jellied egg masses lay frozen in the slime along the edge of the pond. Pond was the better word for it. But we did not head there, and it was only I, not Celeste, who was aware of the disappointment of what was now, in late winter, a mere puddle or marsh, rimmed with mush ice and banked with eighteen inches of old snow.

I had a compass but distrusted it because the nearby mountains were famous for their mineral deposits, including iron. No doubt the needle was being deterred some many degrees from indicating Magnetic North. I tried to make allowances for this in my mind and kept bearing ahead, clutching Celeste's mittened hand in my bare one and holding positive thoughts. Below us the wintergreen creek twisted back upon itself as though a snake in final agony. We were on a ridgeline, at the top of the canyon, and we sought its superior footholds. The true trail, I presumed, was an eighth of a mile away on our side of the creek, since we had never crossed it since leaving our car.

The sky grew gray, then grayer, with that gradual lessening of light that is common throughout the day in winter and is thought to mark the approach of night way earlier than one knows it will occur. And then the grayness took on another element, one connoting that darkness was indeed on the way and would accept no delay. Real dark it is called. This former phoney dark was quickly becoming the real thing.

Celeste, bless her, did not realize the extent of my concern. And while it was sure fun cuddling and banging her two hours earlier, it was presently the last thing on my mind. I was responsible for this poor, weak female creature, this babe in the deep woods. It was up to me and my lying compass to lead us out of here and back to the civilization posed by a lonely black sedan parked at the end of the recognizable world, that is, the Clear Creek Road.

And I did. It was mostly luck. The terrain dictated our eventual vindication: the trail lay to our right and was dimly recognizable as a slight variation in topographical closedness. One sensed the trail, rather than saw or spotted it. One followed it like some primitive faith, rather than by perceived grace. Something like that. I determined that Frog Lake, such as it was, in my mind's eye, lay off my left shoulder and over another ridge that loomed forbiddingly there; the creek continued to roar below us, like a snake with a loud mouth. The car squatted a half-mile to my right, just as I had known all along (but don't ask me to put any money on it). So we moved through patchy snow that received our boot (there were four) imprint and crunched drily, leaving in our wake the waffle tread of our soles. Mine, like the Daddy Bear, were much bigger than hers, which were more like Baby than Mama's. And its pattern was slightly different, as though wanting to exert an artistic independence and not quite succeeding.

It was awfully close to dark by the time we rounded a clutch of trees, a tight alder copse, and I saw below us the swathe of the newly ploughed road and my car, Jeffery, waiting for us. I sagged in my wet boots, felt my shoulders relax with a sigh, gulped a load of air that bit, and announced, as if I had known as much all along, "There we are!" It was a meaningful exaltation and Celeste had no idea how lost and frightened I was only a long moment ago.

We celebrated our luck by hopping into the cold back seat and grinding off a quick piece.

She was studying Sociology in school. It put me in mind of the girl in Max Schulman's Barefoot Boy With Cheek, which was required reading in all freshmen dormi

tories nationwide. The girl chooses Sociology because it is the Study of Man; she believes man not to encompass mankind but only the sub-species, the gender itself. The male sex. Any subject that describes itself so must contain words of wisdom useful to a girl anxious to find herself a husband. For if she wants to badly enough (right, Peter Pan?) she generally does. I mean it was me, myself, and I who had recently seen my (no longer) Cary wheeling a baby carriage down the sidewalks of Pleasant Village, and who had whirled and sprinted the other way, hopefully unnoticed.

Celeste became presumably pregnant, that spring. She told me seemingly matter of factly, as casually as all such information is communicated to the participating male in the same undertone, as a throwaway line, that her period was late, but not to worry. Such a statement is aimed at the heart and loins of the guy who is urged falsely not to worry. Worry he must, though. He must reprogram the thrust of himself and his life in a new and unwanted direction.

I am going to be a father. What can I do to escape? Any rocket leaving for the moon? Thumb held hopefully upraised? My good buddy Jerry Leach, a pledge bro of mine (God how I hate this terminology, but it is what he was, and what I was, in turn) urged caution. Wait, he said.

What do you mean, wait? She's fucking pregnant. She wants to get married. I told you all that furniture store shit, didn't I? Deadly sign. I used "sign," you see, in the sense that a hunter does.

Wait, said my friend.

Procrastinating is a thing I've always done well. Normally nobody has to urge me to do it. I learned it on my own and can execute it unattended, thank you. But I could feel the circle of doom, the noose of iron tightening. It was my neck. Married to Celeste, sure, but for all my life? I had so many things I wanted to do first. Such as some day marrying somebody else.

Wait.

Okay. Jerry Leach was, for Christ's sake, engaged himself. He was going to get married and have five kids. He knew much more about such things as periods as simple, unengaged I. His case was different, because Jean wanted to get married expressly, and said so in public, blowing his mind and everybody around him, us frat bros. "I want to have your babies," she urged him, right in front of us. It wacs as if to say, "Let's start right now." We would look at Jerry, then at her, and feel as though we ought to leave the room. Otherwise it might be embarrassing for us.

Wait, continued Jerry, who was wise.

What a lot he knew. Engaged sex is more meaningful than non-engaged sex because, when you love that much, rather than simply diddle frequently, the juices of genuine affection communicate through some vague osmosis to every concerned organ in the body the truth of life. Also, she might have had a pregnancy fear herself and learned to their mutual disappointment that she wasn't with child, after all, and they would have to continue to wait, for it was like that with them. Wonderful. Marriage wasn't any more than a formalizing event. They loved each other. He had even given her his stupid frat pin, square, with an Oriental design on it.

So I waited. And I waited some more. A month passed. Of course I could now fuck Celeste freely, without fear of pregnancy, for you cannot be knocked up twice, at least not concurrently, but somehow I had little urge to do so. And then one evening I reached down to Celeste's familiar loins and, lo, my hand encountered . . padding.

What's this?

I'm having my period. Didn't I mention it?

What!?

Yes, my period began yesterday. I forgot. (Forgot to throw the drowning man the life preserver, you mean?) Isn't that wonderful? So I'm not pregnant, after all. I imagine that's a big relief for you? (Meaning, since you didn't want to get married, anyway.)

I saw Celeste one more time after that. She had something of mine and I wanted it back. Something small and utterly forgettable. (No, it was not my life, thank you.) A book, I think. For she was not a reader.

4

I have always adored blondes and believe not only that they have more fun but that I do. And they are nicer to be seen with and easier to lay. Brunettes know this and respond as if determined to disprove the notion. Redheads are a breed apart and impossible to characterize consistently. But blondes, oh boy.

There was a steady but broken procession of fair-haired women trickling through the detritus of my fetid life, most of them of Swedish extraction. (That last word makes it sound like you mine them for the ore they contain, which is critical to some metal of your life, which is halfway true.) There is something wonderful about the continual encounter of baby-blue eyes, cascades of buttery-colored hair, pink cheeks, and bulging tits. All girls so endowed know they have something special and must take good care of it. They must also exploit it up to the max. And do.

My second such creature was Barbro Carlson. I remember next to nothing about her except she fit the template. I got nowhere with her. She was (as they say about horses that can't run a lick) for show. She consented to go out with me a few times because I held out the promise of spending beaucoup money I didn't have on her. It always works, guys.

Her father was employed by the railroad. This was long before I was a fireman on a diesel switch engine and,l thus, could speak the language expertly. Had I been able, I might have made more headway with Mr. Carlson, the engineer, and accordingly with his daughter, who believed she had the only aperture of consummate utility and beauty this side of Chicago. Only she didn't exactly say this. It was implicit in her attitude.

Which is not a bad attitude for a girl to have in the company of a boy whose self-esteem was low and needed bolstering. She was beautiful. Even now, when she must be a soggen old lady, I would run off with her, given the chance, just to be in the presence of such pulchritude, such as it was. I can safely say this now, since she is lost to time and if somehow resurrected for benefit of my ticking clock would surely laugh in my proffered face. Eventually I am sure she sold herself to the highest male bidder in the marriage mart.

I don't mean to disparage Barbro. If you were to pick up the high school annual from the year 1947 and turn to the middle of the book, where the junior class is, and find her at the end of the second row, right where she ought to be, you would be stunned by her bright, cheerful visage. She would have to be a cheerleader. She is of the type indigenous to Southern California and representative of the paradigm all girls have in mind when they apply chemicals to their hair in order to lighten it, faithfully to the roots, and dedicate themselves to the ritual of nightly washing it and putting it up in big, loopy rollers for the morrow.

Some are born that way and have an edge, though not by much. Art conquers all, all boys.

She was my second important blond and was preceded only in time, not in affection. The first, I truly do not remember her name, only the occasion, and this is no doubt continuing psychic punishment in her torture of me. Her hair may have come out of a bottle. If so, nobody looked too closely. She wore her sweaters as Lana Turner did and, some said, put the actress to shame. She would enter a room in one of her 74 (it was rumored) sweaters and tube skirt, and all conversations would stop, male and female and coed. The pause would last for as long as she was present. I mean, minor verbal skirmishes would start and stop, be reinitiated, briefly conducted, concluded, but nothing important or meaningful said, nothing that had to be closely attended to, nothing you couldn't afford to miss.

Let me call her LaVern, not because that was her name, which it wasn't, but because it well might have been, comes close, for she was decidedly a LaVern personality, if you catch my drift. To speak perceptively of her you have to use words like "catch my drift." She came from a questionable residential area next to a fashionable one. She dressed beautifully but carefully, as if to deny her origins. Her clothing was expensive and bought for somebody a little smaller in size. You could put somebody else in her clothing, but then they would be wearing clothing. Close wore her.

LaVern always had herself on display. It's what came through the window dressing. She was as tightly packed as cement in a sack. Once I took her to Playland, an amusement park, after much coaxing and many refusals. Finally a lacuna appeared in her schedule (read, sex live), an eclipse, a momentary void, and she sounded over the telephone to hesitate, which I took as encouragement. I pressed on with promises, embellishments.

Rides, you say?

Sure, lots.

Rolly Coaster?

Gulp, sure. My mind was on the tunnel of love.

Loop the loop?

Love the loop the loop, I said, though it had always made me more than queasy. Imagine barfing in front of a beautiful girl on the last swoop before the final droop. And get some of it on her. What would they say at school, where you were already a non-entity living in futile hopes of improving his lot? You'd be dog shit for the rest of your life.

We rode the bus out there, which was not exactly couth. My father had infuriated my by needing the car on his afternoon off from the giant retail establishment in which he worked as manager, one of many. My chagrin was unimaginable. We walked through acres of grassland approaching the amusement park's entrance. The war was recently over and many men had not yet been mustered out; the sight of a uniform was not only expected but still elicited some awe. As we approached, numerous girls could be sighted rolling around on the greensward with sailors, oblivious to all else but pleasure, their eyes pressed tightly closed as if to deny what was going on with their bodies. Out of sight, out of mind. The navy was getting all it could, which was plenty, in a hurry. The June sun streaked down. The scene was explicit, pornographic, right out of a French postcard painted by a failed Impressionist.

I threaded LaVern through this jungle of lust. Perhaps it would give her ideas. If so, I was handy. Don't girls get horn, too? And wasn't I the only boy with whom she had a date this weekend? My chance was about that of the pigeon, over there, becoming at once a hawk and devouring the other pigeon, busily eating somebody's spilled popcorn on the ground. But a boy has to hope, anyway.

We rode through the Tunnel O' Love in a barque designed much like the roller coaster but without any elevation on which to exercise its maneuvers. We cruised gently on an arm of the lake (appropriately named Bitter Lake) through a manmade tunnel, as couples in front of us and behind us became wantonly demonstrative. LaVern gave me a condescending little peck, as though I were her kid brother, and kept catching my hands in hers and returning them to me unopened, like letters. How deft she was, how much practice she must have had. But didn't her hands ever arrive on mine . . . a moment late, and sometimes forgetful of time? No, never, but I had to hope so, just looking at her.

Our date was miserable, and not just for her. If her mind was elsewhere, her body was pruriently right here and in proximity to mine. She wore her clothes like armor. She was soft, all right, but she was also hard, and in almost the same places. We drifted along the boardwalk, examining the booths and displays, the games of chance, the opportunities for fortune, but none of them seemed to offer any sport I might excel in, including the cement milkbottles stacked invitingly one atop the other and forming a sort of crude statuary. .

How badly I wanted to win her a stuffed animal by throwing a baseball at those leadened targets or by knocking over a succession of metal ducks, all in a row, that when hit with a .22 round would flip over with a ping. But I couldn't. With the .rifle she won herself a tiny box of chocolates, which she left on the counter of the next game-of-chance we came to. I believe it was a hoop toss, at which I came close, very close, at winning her a string of worthless glass beads.

We went into a photobooth and took four pictures of ourselves posed close together, striking silly faces. For all but the last one I removed by glasses so as to be more handsome, more suitable for the likes of her, and all of which later revealed my badly crossed eyes. Mine. Also I moved in two of them, so that my face was a blur. She liked this pair best. LaVern looked good in all of them. She saw the day as a joke, her expression said, and her eyes apologized for being caught in the company of a dolt such as me. She kept two photos and I kept two. Over the years both of mine have disappeared. I don't know what happened to one of hers but I do the other.

I found it a couple of weeks later on the floor of study hall, my fuzzy self staring crookedly up at me, its owner. Evidently she had given it to someone—a new beau, probably, and one considerably more deserving of it and her than I was. I understood completely. We were a poorly matched pair. This was our one and only date. I tried for another and learned the bad news. She gave our picture to some guy, there in study hall, and he had quickly torn off the half with me in it and kept lovely LaVern. I pocketed the snap of myself so that it and I would suffer no more indignity, at least for the moment. And then, suffering still, went on to other adventures of a sexual nature. Goodbye, LaVern.

While stationed in the army in Ketchikan, Alaska, I met Karen. She was a nurse and as blond as they get. Now a growing boy always likes the idea of nurses because they are familiar with all body functions and hence are never surprised at what might happen. Thus, if you got a hardon and it made walking difficult, she would presume it was because of her and would be flattered; she knew it was natural, and nothing to be worried about. You could walk around like you had a real live monster inside your pants (which you did have) and she would consider it routine, perhaps amusing. So nurses were known to be really nice.

I was stationed at a radio-transmitter site and had to wear my field uniform, that is, fatigues, each day to work, which gave me a disguise and freedom I would not normally have, in my normal garb as a young scholar and writer freshly conscripted out of graduate school. No, I was a foul dogface, and found that women liked me this way, for this was a military town, with the Coast Guard in regular constant attendance, and also the Army, namely the Signal Corps. The CG wore their tight blue-black uniforms everywhere, even in the evening, and thus were shamelessly conspicuous at the Elks, the Eagles, and the Moose Club, plus at all of those public bars that charged us more for our drinks. As service men we had automatic access to the private clubs (all named after dumb animals) and it is where we went nightly, myself in mufti.

I took Karen to the Elks, the best club in town, with a good restaurant attached down at one end. We danced to a real band, and when some swarthy swabbie tried to cut in she sweetly told him no, with a smile. It made me feel great. In return I spent all my money on her. But she seemed to know no more about sex than any of the other girls I knew who were not nurses. Perhaps even less.

Perhaps she was simply a nice girl. A girl who doesn't. There are those, you know. Rare. Definitions vary. A nice girl is one who isn't Doing It with you or most likely the guy she dated just before you, but might do it with the next guy, in the near future, but you can bet she will get married to him shortly. Any woman who is not an outright liar will tell you, Bunkie, that there is no such thing as a nice girl and a bad girl, and they are all one and the same, for each will behave as she will and must, being bad with one guy and good with another (though these words mean nothing), depending on circumstances, and circumstances count for a lot. They are everything.

So if she doesn't Do It with you, don't be disappointed. And if you learn that she Does It with somebody else later, do not let your heart break too easily. For there are stars in the sky that dictate such events and they have to be in just the right conjunction for vital things to happen, and if they aren't right for you, just now, assuredly they will be and soon, for it is the way of stars and the heavens, and you will be their happy recipient, just as you are now their victim. So hang in their Bunkie. Things are going to get better.

I didn't bed this blonde, Karen, but I did her neighbor, Ann, who was for the nonce not blond, though I had reliable reports that she had once been, not long ago. Herein lies a not awfully pleasant story. It is sad because Ann was not a very nice person. But one learns from such episodes and I did. And if one can ever achieve a God-like perspective (and I never have) one can see that Ann's behavior results from having been given a bad time herself, which is earthly motivation to pass it on. At the time, however, one concludes only that this is a truly despicable person. (And one no doubt is wrong.)

I met her at the Elks. It was a classy place for people of all classes to go to, and a woman could visit there semi-safely, all by herself, and not suffer any public indignities she did not want to suffer. And the fact that—three weeks ago—a man had followed a guy who had asked the man's wife to dance, (and who knows what else?) into the john and shot him twice at point-blank range with a three-fifty-seven Magnum pistol. It necessitated reconstruction of the entire West half of the building, including replacing all of the tile in the wall, for even the grout had been ruined.

Alaska. There you go.

I was a randy 23-year-old soldier in grey herringbone suit, narrow black tie, cordovan shoes, fur-felt Tyrolean hat left over from my vacation skiing at Sun Valley. Over my shoulder, or on my back, buttoned up tightly against the penetrating Ketchikan rain that never ceased for more than ten minutes, I wore a disreputable trenchcoat from Vaughan's, a cut-rate clothing store in Seattle of the Ivy League persuasion. My eyeglasses usually rode in my breast pocket so that I could pursue the delusion I was more handsome without them, giving me the spaced-out wandering-eyed look of some visitor to the planet. Add to this the unescapable fact that while in Ketchikan I was usually stumblingly drunk. Drunk and on the outlook for women.

It was a wonder that I found any with a similar attitude. That I did was because there are girls and women in small coastal cities of the American West that are equally desperate. Needy people have a way of finding each other (and finding each other out). So I must have come across Ann at the Elks, slobbering into a lowball glass, and asked her to dance, and she perfunctorily sized me up and found nobody else more handy or acceptable, and was mine for the evening and the next morning.

She was in business, what kind I had no idea, nor did I much care. Sex is a business, too. Somebody's office manager, I think. Now a woman who is not married or kept by a man has to have some way to make a living and hers, whatever, was vaguely honorable. Perhaps a stationary store. She was her own person, at any rate, sort of divorced (people in Alaska are vague about their marital status, largely because it has never been satisfactorily or finally settled), with a child of eight or ten. A boy. I saw him only once. It was memorable.

It was one night after coming home from one of our sustaining drunks at the Elks. We had completed ourselves (as they say) on the livingroom sofa; it was the one place in the world where I was truly comfortable and safe. Then we went to bed. Admittedly the order was backwards, but so be it. I awakened in the night and, as all drinkers do, had to pee; I had a notion of where the toilet was. To get there I had to pass a cot set up in the hall. On it was her son, ostensibly sleeping. But he wasn't, not quite. As I tiptoed past, he popped open an eye. It looked into mine. All my life I shall never forget its expression. It was pure Freudian hate.

He had seen numerous men, I suppose, who were banging his mother, and each of us in turn received his derision, a look better directed at his mother, but since he had to live with her for another decade he must continue to restrain himself. So long a time. The thought was chilling. Meanwhile the guys kept coming and going. A constant parade of them

The sex with this woman was incredible. I don't mean that it was good, only that it was strange beyond belief. She took her sex as some men take their whiskey, though she took her whiskey well watered, I remember, and steadily. I mean she would grab your cock and promptly unveil you to the elements. She would admit you (or me, or nearly anybody) to that rather commodious inner sanctum and proceed directly (do not pass Go, do not collect $200) to her separate and deniable orgasm. It was astonishing. I learned that man, at his worst is a tool, no more than a human dildo, and all of us, including the best, can be used that way, horribly. You are along for the ride—if that is what it is, and it is. And to be fucked in such a way, as a man often socks it to a woman, is degrading. If it should happen to you, Bunkie, the only side benefit is that it will expand your understanding. You will never make love to a woman in exactly the same way as you did in the past. Something will have been permanently altered.

The down side is that it will nearly wrench your cock off by the roots. You will probably come, though it will only be ejaculation, and you will gain no pleasure from it, only awful pain, and not pleasure passing itself off as pain, but pain, pure and not so simple, and you will leave her side shamed, not for what she has done to you, which is but use you, but for all the women you have used in the past. And when done with you she leaves you achingly alone. She has lost all interest in you as a person. Like a man, she rolls over on her side and is instantly asleep. It is her bed, after all. And she will leave you feeling like a small piece of shit at the side of the road.

The upside of being used is that it expands your soul. For instance, there are men who believe that to ejaculate is to come, but they are wrong. They have been alone with their hand too long. They have lost touch with the vital difference. And believe me—and this is hard to grasp and I think you have to be over fifty before these words have much meaning for you—it is possible to come, to achieve some happy degree of coming, and not ejaculate. You may save that for a later time. But your partner, she may not accept it for what it is, if she doesn't feel you mount to a rush and, yes, ejaculate. She may think you are lying about what you are experiencing, for men historically lie to women about sex and the two (or is it three or four?) sexes never quite trust one another about what they say is going on, down there.

Which brings me to cunnilingus. Down, I mean. (I know, you thought I'd never get there.) Either you have to be an animal, a lower Mediterranean type, or wonderfully in love to perform it, and even then there are inherent physical limitations. If you believe you can make her come satisfactorily (and not just tickle her fancy) she must be Lois Lane and you the caped guy who flies through the air. That's right, Superman. For normally you will lack the thrust and blind rigidity. So when Woody Allen tells Diane Keaton in Annie Hall that he is suffering from lockjaw afterwards, she lights up a cigarette to take the place of the joint that she had smoked to loosen her up originally. And neither is quite satisfied. For cunnilingus is next to impossible to do right. It is why we have fingers. God gave us fingers to get each other off, when the mouth fails and the usual way is not available, for some important reason.

But the mouth is wonderful, too. It beats the hell out of fingers in loving sweetness and is often nearly as good as the real thing, namely, Doing It. And feels better, too, though is no satisfactory substitute if you really want to get off.

Ah, how much we learn from life, and how extraordinary our teachers.

5

How things end is necessarily ugly. Or else they would go on and on. Ann and me, such as we were, could not be denied our awful experience.

One night we had a date to go (where else?) to the Elks. She wasn't home when I came by to pick her up and her son, Billy, did not know where she went. So, all by my lonesome, I went out drinking and, of course, looking for her. To the Elks. Shortly before midnight she showed up. Alone, thank goodness. Had she been away somewhere, getting herself off on some stranger's unfamiliar dick, that is, a new tool, and now, with the long Saturday night of an Alaskan winter lying ahead, dawn a long ways off still, she was exercising the Alaskan's prerogative of once more getting herself loaded again and perhaps falling-down drunk at the familiar Elks? I thought so.

She stood at the bar, like a man, looking very much a woman, but one recently used. A cigarette curled from her lip between swigs. She was a good-looking, but in a hard, turned-out manner. She could be approached without fear of being rejected, but a new fear resulted because she would probably do whatever you had in mind. It had its price. You knew you were in for an ordeal—what might be called sexual terror—but you were powerless to avoid it. It was much like why you drank too much. You were looking for punishment.. Yes, it was a form of self-torture, but—hey—this is Alaska, and what else is new?

We had a fight, right there on the dancefloor. How we got there I don't exactly remember. I had been drinking. I must have said something. Remember that I had been stood up with this woman whom I had been intimate with. When you sleep with someone, it is supposed to mean something, however little that might—in the long run—turn out to be. So I thought of her (ha-ha) as momentarily mine. Especially since we had another date. Boy, can a guy ever be wrong.

So I leaned up against the bar, western style, nursing my Scotch (or had I switched to cognac by then, with the idea of reducing the size of my hangover?) and gazing round the room like an unhappy gunfighter. And then she walked into the room; isn't that how Bogie put it? She had the admirable knack of being able to drink hugely and still walk upright, without clutching at chairbacks, for instance, to keep on a straight keel. I envied her that ability. She moseyed up to the other end of the bar (it was along bar) and stood looking round the room in that manner Alaskan women have, as if to say, Okay, you dudes, hang it out and let us have a look at what you were born with. A number of guys began to queue up.

It was understandable, too, because she was comely, in her hard, aging way. She was more than ten years older than this soldier, and being employed in business had developed that flair for looking both fashionable and ready. Her clothes fit her, and she wore nylons and heels; all of which will give a woman the look that makes men turn their heads. Her body went in and out in all the right places, and promised a soft landing. She continued to look good to me, even knowing that her loins were a meat grinder. Good luck, Charlie. I suppose it was her aloofness that called out to me, rather than its opposite: her availability in general. She was putting herself on the auction block again tonight. The cost was no more than a few rounds of drinks.

And while I knew all this, knew it for what it was, an awful fact, it continued to work on me. I simply had to have her. Why, why, why? I suppose to prove that I could do it. There was little competition—a couple of small, round Indian women who had gotten in under the wire and, once served, had somehow acquired general invulnerability. They could barely stand up and the challenge for some must have been to get them into bed before they passed out on their own.

There were a few other women about, wives whose husbands were not far away and who might be deemed available, but a tussle would surely ensue and a man who fashions himself a lover is in no mood to be asked to fight.

So, in short, Ann looked good to me again. I had had about six or seven of whatever it was I was drinking and so was on a sobriety par with everybody else in the room—coastguardsmen, commercial fishermen, pulpmill workers, loggers in town for the winter, etc. Your usual motley. We were vying for the small number of available women whom we outnumbered about ten to one.

Eventually I sloshed over and asked Ann to dance. She was a good dancer, give her her due, and she made me, a poor dancer, seem almost passable with her. She consented. his made me wonder if she even recognized me.

If there was any doubt, I soon identified myself and began to berate her for leaving me waiting on her doorstep. I was none too subtle about it. I didn't address her as Bitch, but my dissatisfaction was pointed.

She stopped in her tracks in her three-inch heels, distanced herself from me by a few inches, looked me hard in the eye—I whom she had not consented to recognize a few moments ago—and belted me across the cheek, catching me just under the left eye. Now, if you've never had this happen to you I can save you the experience by telling you what it was like. First you feel it in your ears, the report. It is a little like a thin cedar board being bent back upon itself until, suddenly, it shatters into a million splinters. It is reminiscent of a .22 short round being fired off in, say, a closet. Or of a beaver departing his pond in a hurry.

The sensation comes next. Your face begins to smart and puff. An ache begins under your eye, not much at first, and begins to spread out, generally downward, in the direction of your chin. A nice job. I gathered she had slapped a guy or two before. She had a quick hand-release and snap of her wrist. Not large to begin with, nor especially muscular, she had nevertheless learned how deliver a slap with economy. It was a little like a cat deciding, post-haste, to claw a dog. There is no warning, no avenue for escape. It is over almost before it has begun and you are left aching, nursing your wound. You wonder if the blood is going to flow.

I stood in the middle of the dancefloor staring at her. She stood looking, too, waiting for the impact to register and the bloom in my cheek to begin to flower. As the logger looks at the sawn Douglas fir before it begins to lean and with utmost delicacy to fall. My face flushed, mainly on one side. And the sting-effect became pronounced. For a moment there I thought of hitting her back—a great roundhouse right. But it was not in my character. Besides, in Alaska, you are only allowed to hit your wife in public and it was evident we were not married. This she knew, and the knowledge had given her catlike striking power. I had to admire it.

If I'd had a drink in my hand I would have thrown it at her. But my drink I had left at the bar, scarcely touched, It had probably—in the Alaskan manner—already been cleared away, my change scooped up. In some bars, every time you go to the john, the game of serving you begins all over again. You forfeit your drink, money. Each return to the bar you are born again. The bartender has never seen you before.

So I simply stood staring, as she walked off, this street-fighter of a woman, skilled in arts I never suspected existed in the world of women, the cold cock, for I could think of nothing else to do except faint, and that was non productive. She left me feeling slightly giddy and embarrassed. She returned to the bar, people stopped looking at me, dancers circled still, moving to the rhythm of Country Western, even though the tune was rock-and-roll. I recognized myself in them. It is a step appropriate for all occasions.

I returned to my station at the bar, which was bereft of all memories of me except a half-dozen wet rings the tender had missed. Even my cigarettes were gone. I realized the evening was over for me. Sure, I could go to another bar, one where they had never heard of me tonight, and start all over again, drinking and cruising with my eyes for women. I could manage to look less than half-drunk, and pass myself of for the meditative type, a deep thinker. But what was the point? My heart wasn't in it and my face hurt. I longed for bed, alone. So I returned to my bachelor apartment to sulk and curse and ruminate on the conditions under which women in Alaska get murdered on Saturday night. I believe I understood them quite well.

6

I suppose, like most servicemen, I had eyes for anyone under one-hundred and sixty pounds and of certifiable female anatomy. She should be between the ages of sixteen and sixty, though I might make notable exceptions. To say I was not lonely is to misread these words and to disregard their message.

Thus we come to Lois. This was back in Seattle still, before being sent to Alaska a few months later by the dreaded Army. Lois was the roommate of Jennifer, my father's secretary. I often had occasion to visit Dad at work, which was not far from my duty station. I was so warmly greeted by Jennifer—I was in uniform, which might have had something to do with it—that I asked her out. When I went to pick her up, her roommate greeted me even more warmly. I was unused to such heat. This was unusual for the city, which is known for a certain coldness, and suddenly my skies were Southern California. So I took Jennifer out on the town, thinking all the while of Lois, and her bright blue eyes and blond hair, which has always gone at a premium with me. The fact that her last name was Scandinavian did her cause no harm with me, for golden-haired Swedes are currency in the Pacific Northwest. They are also known to be hot.

This was unfair to Jennifer. My father was much admired by her, as often is the case with secretaries, and here I was, a junior version of the same, about her age, a young man with swagger and fashionably military, wearing my uniform sharply (there is only one way to wear a uniform, and that is right, correctly, hands out of the pockets, cap or hat squared away), and this I did, for a variety of reasons, one of which was having been stopped recently by a multi-service military police patrol. All of which is not to say that any of them women I met during this period were in love with my uniform, only to say that it was generally known that I was in the army, poor bastid, but subject to a plan that allowed me much freedom, including the wearing of civilian clothes, so long as I never forgot that every weekday at eight A.M. I changed back into a pumpkin again and was government issue for eight hours and subject to all its rules and regulations. It was an agreement I readily accepted, for I had experienced the opposite and now knew a good deal when I was offered one.

Somehow the evening with Jennifer got spent and I returned her home to an apartment whose door was opened by a sleepy Lois is nipple-pointed peignoir, rubbing her eyes like a little girl and yawning widely. Her eyes darted with promise. I know, this is a terrible way of putting it, but bad poetry comes close to describing the lambent situation. It was rife with conflict. Promptly I called Lois and she agreed to go out with me. I didn't specify where and she didn't ask.

It was winter and I had just bought a new (used) convertible to replace the car my father had towed away from in front of the family house while I was in basic training simply because it wouldn't run and was badly rusted. (The convertible, in turn, went to another girl, a notorious redhead, when I went overseas, and the promissory note I issued her got cancelled at the tagend of a letter I sent her a full year later. She kept the car, which by then had had several small collisions, and never acknowledged my letter or said thanks. So it goes.) I took Lois on its initial ride, the top down; knowing what was coming, she wore her new fur coat. Fur coats were unusual in my circle, but Lois was two years out of college—a Pi Phi, Phi Beta Kappa, class officer, etc.—and though a secretary was slated for management, so it was appropriate. She did not get such awards without knowing well the role she was expected to play in life and playing it well. And of all the Phi Beta Kappas I've known, all of them women, each was recognizably bright but not of outstanding intelligence and mainly recognizable for the practical realism with which she could assess a situation and respond to it promptly. Each provided me with uniform, mundane company, but tended to be flat-chested, though I am sure if I had got to know more of them the percentage of buxomness would have risen.

She was a cheerful, talented person, and I enjoyed her company, while remaining still in love with my recent past love, Cheryl (more on which anon). I was looking mainly for companionship, good conversation, social acceptability, etc. Lois was looking for sex. She had already met and in her mind accepted for marriage Dick, a fraternity brother of mine, but knew that her life experiences (as we might call them) were scant, so far, and she had about a year left in which to acquire more before being doomed to the limitations posed by marriage and motherhood. These were what she really wanted and was most gifted for. To put it another way, she was looking for a fling, and if I presented that to her and nothing more, for I was good for not much more. I was morose, frequently drunk, intellectually snooty, arrogant, and a host of other less charming things I do not wish to name. Lois didn't much care. She was out to get laid.

This aspect I was slow to recognize, I who thought of not much else, myself. There is a subtle irony in not spotting in another what most motivates you. Lois was always warmly reclining in front of me; I thought she found me a homey type, one you could relax around and let down your hair (hers was short, so it did not have far to go) with. She had a bright-eyed insouciance as to the consequences of making herself available to that part of myself that still remembered Cheryl. Lois was thinking of sex and not of getting comfortable. So she kept leaning back—on sofas, on cushions of cars, on the newly mown grass of Cowan Park, one cool day in May—and finally I got the message, this dull boy.

The maleness in me had to respond to the corresponding femaleness in her on the most elementary level, and did. And to be fair, I knew she loved Dick (no dirty meaning here, for some boys are doomed to carry that nickname through life, with all the attendant jocularity it causes) and planned to marry him, according to a fixed, biological timetable. So we were using each other, she and I,. but what else is new, among needy boys and girls?

Sex with her was a cleancut exercise, very much like ablutions or aerobics performed out of doors. I always felt better afterwards, even though I might be depressed and be murmuring to myself, "Cheryl, Cheryl, please forgive me," while no doubt Cheryl was off somewhere getting laid without rancor or remorse. I knew I wasn't enjoying sex other than for its prophylactic content—to keep excessive amounts of sperm from building up in my body and perhaps backfiring into my lymphatic system and sickening me. Or even worse, masturbating (something that never has been as much sport for me as for Portnoy, not since I early discovered real, live girls), or even worse, Going without.

You can fuck just to fuck, you know. It is what young people do—much like dogs. It is one of the many forms in which they waste themselves, for they know that sex is self-renewing, a muscle, which needs ever strengthening. If not, it becomes flaccid and unable to perform. We all must practice sex, or die of atrophy.

So we would have what might be called a date, and go out somewhere, or else stay in at her place, if Jennifer was out, but Jennifer dated rarely, so we went to a movie or a tavern and soon ended up at my place. Since I knew we would, I did not wash my dishes for several days beforehand—a little trick I picked up from Napoleon, who used to warn Josephine not to bathe because he would be home in a week or two. Similarly I did not bathe my dishes, knowing Lois would soon arrive at my bachelor apartment, look around at the chaos and amassed filth, sigh heavily, roll up her sleeves, tie a towel around her as an apron, and proceed to fill a basin with hot suds. Meanwhile, I would lie back on my cushion, spin a platter to ease her labor, open a beer, light a cigarette, and wait for the housecleaning to be done to her satisfaction. Then she would cook dinner. Often it was spaghetti, a favorite Swedish dish, by the way.

She made Dick a fine wife, I am sure, and not merely because I know they had four or five kids. They never went through the rigors of divorce, as did so many of my time. Nor for that matter did I.

She had a nice attitude toward sex. It was a part of life, like my dirty dishes, but I'd like to think a little more pleasurable to take on, though I'm certain she didn't come with me, for it was all I could do, loving another, to ejaculate, after which I would roll over and try to sleep, as was m,y wont. But she would rarely let me, for this Phi Bate was on a tight schedule, and getting laid was only part of her agenda for tonight. She had miles to go before she'd sleep. If a work-day night, there was her hair to attend to and eight solid hours in bed, alone, for the sleep her young body needed.

This made for a fine relationship of short duration. I can remember some good times. Her parents lived in Enumclaw, a tiny burg out in the country near Black Diamond (another unheard of place) that had as its chief distinction being where the storms hit the hardest and the wind in the winter blew down trees in quantity, so that the place was becoming to resemble Nebraska. There was a Friday night when she could stay over at my place, for Jennifer was away, and who else was to know? She got her eight hours, and so did I, and in the morning we drove to the country. It was a clear Saturday in late February, which around here can do an excellent imitation of mid-May, the black top on my tan Oldsmobile rolled back, the sun in our eyes and inching ever upward, the car radio playing Bach. It was the preludes and fugues, she told me.

She knew a lot about music. "That's Glenn Gould," she told me, turning the volume up enough to startle the birds in the telephone wires. He could be ever identified, she said, by his incessant humming. She played the piano herself, also the flute. The former for her own and now my enjoyment, the latter in the Junior Symphony Orchestra. One night she played for me Beethoven's Pathetique, which became that night my personal all-time favorite and led indirectly to the formation of my perennial favorite fantasy, one doomed, however, to unfulfillment. (Though my life is hardly over.) It goes like this:

I am lying on a divan in my tuxedo, the coat of which I've removed and draped over the back of a dining room chair. My black tie (not a clip-on) has been loosened but not removed. I am with a beautiful blond, one with long flowing hair, unlike Lois's. There is a grand piano in the room—a Baldwin. (They are good, aren't they?) On it is a crystal vase with a single red rose. Also a three-branched candelabra, of clear crystal, too, with yellow candles burning; they all are at different heights, which indicates they were either lit at different times or two of them are previously used.

At the piano is Lois, or most likely a look-alike, presumably from what follows. She plays this delightful piece of music with trills and arpeggios. The dream goes on for a long time and becomes intense. When she is over, and she has struck the final cord (which resounds), I applaud mightily from there on my couch, and acknowledges the tribute with a smile and a self-belittling nod of her head.

Her gown is white, her mouth is red, her hair is gold. I am dimly aware what Yeats said about yellow-headed women and am in agreement. She approaches, kneels, undoes the fly of my trousers,lowers my Jockeys to half-mast, and proceeds to blow me.

Not Lois, as with all of the others before her. Some wonderful, anonymous woman. But Lois had innate curiosity about the dick that had been ploughing her regularly for several months now, and she was interested in viewing it up close. She would even consent to kiss it, but not take it into her mouth, well, not far. Mostly she enjoyed regarding it as a found object, an art object, which I briefly interpreted as hesitation, or maybe the deliberation that precedes the act. Let her think about it a moment longer, I thought; perhaps it isn't clear in her mind what is required of her. But she just didn't like saying no, I guess. She hoped it might go away of its own accord. (Fat chance.)

Stalemate.

Romances (let us call them) have a way of either containing a memorable beginning or end, but not both. So I can remember first seeing Lois quite clearly, but not many specifics afterwards. But if she had Dick in mind (how often language betrays our intentions, no matter how careful we are), I gradually withered away in her affection. As for him, he went on to medical school and became a distinguished ophthalmologist, assigned first to West Point and, later, to the Presidio of San Francisco, where he performed complex eye surgery and ultimately took over the practice of the doc who half-straightened my own eyes. Small world.

Long before that, of course, we stopped seeing each other and she sent me the unmistakable signal that she was Engaged. Officially, ring and all. Since I was about to be sent overseas, I thought not very much of this change in status and saw it as a betrayal that would be best ignored. So I hesitated for about thirty seconds before I started calling up other women. My, how short a time it takes for them to marry and have babies. But I found a few who were responsive to a direct approach.

Though this sounds crass, it is common in how single people sort each other out and come to terms. Neither party is offended, if the right euphemisms are used. It saves a lot of time and money, too. The guy goes, in effect, I would like to take you out, on the shortest possible notice, and proceed directly to a place where we can be alone and expose myself to you to in a sexual manner. And she goes, in effect, I want to thank you for your politeness. I've had it referred to less indirectly and appreciate your use of oblique language. Let me see if I've got you straight. You want to come by for me, and enter my apartment and me immediately, without preamble. Right? Okay. What's in it for me? Any affection, consideration, appreciation, etc., or am I simply to act as a receptacle for your sperm—that load that's been troubling you for several days now? Give me a clue.

And then the guy falls back on some clever social stratagem. He suggest paid entertainment, or food, which he will graciously pick up the tab for? But it is she who will pay the price—it isn't what is ultimately involved they dispute but the cost to either one of them. And she must weigh in her mind the tussle ahead and how pleasant or un- it may be for her, which she is assuredly used to and considers her cosmic due in the arena of sex, and it has perks and downsides, but is the chief currency in the world in which they live and in which she will remain unless she somehow gets married, and then the future holds the additional burden of children, bless em. And damn them, too.

She weighs the costs and benefits, I say, and makes her decision to go out with him and either fend him off or give in in stages, and of this is her life comprised; she makes her decisions ceaselessly and nearly thoughtlessly, as she eases through life. And now he waits her decision. He endlessly awaits my lady, hanging on words as she speaks her deliberations, for therein lies his, ahem, release—even though it is momentary..

Myself having been experienced to my full but short hilt, Lois was ready for engagement ring and marriage, followed by an eternity of domestic bliss. I say this not at all bitterly but respectfully and with my usual blithe sarcasm, which is simply a form of self-expression and means nothing. I think I called her on the telephone once and heard her astonished reply, "But I'm engaged now." This signified a transmogrification of status which I was supposed to be inordinately respectful of. Ha.

I suggested that, just because she was engaged to Dick— a frat bro of mine and an acquaintance of long duration, going back to high school—was no reason not to keep seeing me and doing what we had always done together, though perhaps more mutually satisfying now, since we knew each other so well and had had a lot of practice. The appeal of my message was either lost on her or ignored because she simply could not believe I meant what I was saying. But she met with me once or twice, nonetheless. Once we screwed, as of old, and it was like old, no better or no worse, but simply a repeat experience, like attending a medium-good movie you had seen once and not walked out of and had left the theater together smiling your pleasure mildly. The other time she would not perform. Her wedding date was growing nigh and was too close for sexual comfort, I guess. Hers, not mine. But I think she was momentarily thrilled at the prospect of performing what might be called premature adultery.

There are so many possible place for young lovers to Do It, and they keep complimenting themselves on their inventiveness, long afterwards, each believing that they are original to degree they are not and recognizing only long afterwards that there are no truly new and delightful untried places, only places unexperienced to them and in need of testing. Thus Mom and Dad's living room rug must be a perennial site and repeatedly violated by each generation. I submit that it is not nearly so soft as it looks and will not support her back or raised haunches. But these are the words of an aging lecher who knows that youth disdains and triumphs over adversities as small and as these.

You can Do It on a tree, in a tree, under a tree, atop a tree, I suppose; all have been done. You can do it at the beach, on rocks, pebbles, stones, sand. Sand is bad, though, and you can either take my word for it or garner your own gritty experiences. You can Do It—like Burt and Deborrah did—in the surf or even under water, gargling salt and gasping for air, taking turns lunging for the surface. In the Jancussi or the hottub. (Cliche, cliche.) In the mud, the slime, in among the turtles and alligators and water moccasins. In the garage, the basement, the bathroom (no possible site has gone unexercised), the hallway, the closet, the porch, the utility room, on the stove, even in the refrigerator. The butcherblock table has been a frequent site, especially after the remake of Postman, with countless couples coupling amid dinner's forgotten vegetables, carrots and celery strewn round, unpeeled potatoes bouncing every which way. (Sorry, folks, but no points here for originality.) Every inch of the family car has been violated, and often. Likewise bicycles, fences posts, basketball courts, under or upon the crossbars of the football goalpost for the athletically inclined. On and on. There is no unlikely place I can think of that hasn't been put to carnal use, along with each of the body's several apertures. So it is best to stop this foolish categorizing, and do it soon.

Lois's father was a mortician. But it never popped into either my head or hers to do it at his place of work. (I can only speak for myself, of course.) In fact, the possibility only entered my head a moment ago, and then with revulsion. Our last screw was unmemorable and meaningless. It is how old lovers kiss goodbye. A handshake won't do and neither will a kiss as we know it. The only way a man really says adieu to a lover is with his dick. It is how they communicate. And she will accept it no other way.

It was no better or no worse than any of the other times. It was slightly therapeutic—prophylactic, in keeping with her new way of life. Have you ever taken a shower in water neither hot nor cold but somewhere in between? Tepid, I guess it is called? Warm enough to wash the soap away and not bring gooseflesh? Cold enough to leave you feeling invigorated and ready to move on to your next carnal adventure?

You understand me.

7

Then there was Hilda, sweet garrulous Hilda. She too would not go down on me (as much as she might have liked to, or so I think), perhaps she would have to stop talking first. Hilda led me to my most serious postulate: Women talk for many reason, and I won't be so stupid as to try to list them all, for they are numerous as the waves on an October sea, but they laugh, they giggle, mainly because they are nervous. Now there are many reasons for them to be nervous, some of them valid, some of them highly speculative, all of them serious (desperation being high on my list), but it explains a growing boy of almost any age can be in the company of a girl or a woman, and she will laugh often and long and loud, when nothing is funny.

Many times I have been wrongly encouraged by such behavior and thought my sense of humor was the cause, which encouraged me to try to be funnier, or funny longer, and they laughed more, and I thought I was hilarious, but I was probably only making them more nervous. Laughter is also a way a woman makes herself appear pleasant and accommodating to people, including other women. So it is not of itself sexual, though repeated light, tinkling laughter in the company of a man or men decidedly seems so. On the other hand, it may be not be, and denote only nervousness raised to a higher level.

During regular, ordinary sex, conversation can be held or continued; a meal can even be eaten by the untidy, by those who place gluttony above lust. Not I. So often when Hilda and I had routine, perfunctory sex (for sex is expected of each other among young couples, and when it does not take place, the one and the other are frightened into thinking that they may be at fault in some unapparent manner), she would often keep talking. She had roommates then, and a diversion or subterfuge was underway. Necking and general messing around was okay, in their book of decency, but outright down-and-dirty copulation was not permitted in the near presence of each other or while occupying the same abode. So while we drunkenly ground away, Hilda would maintain her normal rate of breathing (I took this as an insult, at first, but soon learned to think of it as natural) and her usual genial banter. It was not necessary for me to reply to what she said, and I often did not, even while playing the game of not having sex. So—a little like Edgar Bergen, who was ever alone in life—she would make her response to questions from me never uttered or asked, and then after an appropriate wait for the issue of more words from me, tinkle a laughter and make appropriate rejoinder. Thus the sex would be conducted time after time as if a Greek chorus were accompanying us, which perhaps it was.

We fooled nobody, of course. She knew this as well as I. What was important was to maintain the illusion that sex was not happening, when all three of us knew that it was. Or else she was more convincing an actress (and she was a student in drama) than I thought she was. Or her roommate was even dumber.

Never was I urged, though, to fuck more quietly or with less vigor. I was expected to excel at the game in the same direction, and in the same ways, that she did. And I tried. Huffing and puffing, I performed quietly. If she had orgasms (always important to me, but rarely experienced with my young women) she was successful at disguising them or making them sound like jocular exclamations.

"Oh? Really? No? You don't say." The trill, "Ha-ha-ha." "Oh my goodness. I can't believe my ears." And so forth. All may have signified a quick and exciting release, but I don't think so. But then what do I know? I was not on the receiving end, only the delivery.

One night after much drinking and a roommate (they were ever changing and each had to have her ears tricked, in turn), we had sloppy, noisy sex alone in the apartment, and afterwards I rolled right over as is my wont and fell fast asleep in my own jism. I awoke well after Saturday dawn, the sun in my face, glued to the sheet. When Hilda rose and began her usual cheery morning-after preparation of a large breakfast I stayed abed afixed and finally, in response to repeated queries as to why I hadn't risen, bade her bring me a basin of warm water so that I could loosen myself from the sheets without injury. She thought this hilarious.

When I went in the army and was stationed for a wild year in Seattle, I dated Lois but I also saw myriad women, including Hilda. She had a brother, who was in the army, too, also in the Signal Corps. I knew her mother and little sister, as well. They were a true family, coming all the way to the Pacific Northwest from North Carolina. She had a lingering accent which was highly appropriate to the theater and which without much more training became a form of theater speech, a dialect that resembled English-English, but was even more acute and penetrating.

She used to cook chickens on Sunday and I would eat them. It was a wonderful arrangement. The anodyne to the U.S. Army is a slender young blonde who will bake you chicken and biscuits. It makes the entire preceding week tolerable and you return to the next one mildly triumphant and calmed. When I went overseas, she wrote me faithfully. Which counts for a whole lot.

You can say all these kind and elevating things only about a woman you do not love, nor cared about greatly as a woman, or as a sexual partner, the knowledge of which all the while leaves you free, if not committed, to genuine like and enjoy her company. You do so for you know—in your deep heart's core—that she is a passing phenomena and counts least in the great scheme of things that is your life.

When my best friend of that era, Jack Leahy, got married, he asked Rick Bender to be his best man and me to be his usher. It was the next best thing and I was not offended at coming in second in his affections. Jack's wife's father was a famous drinker, as was Jack, but his wife's mother was a teetotaler, and certain illusions had to be maintained for the sake of propriety. There was a dry reception for appearances's sake and there was a wet one, in the basement of the building next door, which they managed, and I was the bartender.

As an inexperienced bartender I did not understand my role. I knew I was supposed to be sociable and interpreted this to mean that I should drink with the customers. The booze was free, paid for surreptitiously by Lars, her dad. So when a member of the wedding party approached the makeshift bar and ordered a drink, I did the only polite thing possible. I had one with him. Or her, though I remember only men coming up to me. I was not on the outlook for women because I had a date with Hilda later. She lived nearby and I was invited to drop by for a cup of coffee afterwards. This was a euphemism for quick sex.

There was plenty of time. The hour was eight-thirty. Suddenly it was midnight, the bar deserted except for one old friend of her dad's who had just gone to sleep in a chair. As for myself, my weight rested heavily on both forearms on what passed for the bar but my vision remained clear. The only problem was, where had all the time gone? I hurried over to Hilda's and sloshed up to the front door. My knuckles first brushed then grazed the door. She was in her jammers, her hair done up in those ugly wide blue or pink rollers that look like cheap machinery. That was no way to dress for a date, I thought, momentarily angry. She responded by not being particularly glad to see me, I thought. This I gathered from the tight parentheses round her unlipsticked mouth. I forget what transpired but know that I went home to my own empty bed.

8

So many inconsequential women from so long ago—a face here, an incident there, the slope of a shoulder, the shimmer of hair along the part, the long slide from calf to ankle to toe. If I remember them, or misremember them in some small detail, in turn I am sure the women remember me not at all. (I can quote some practical instances.) But each serves as a shard in the crumbling ruin of myself. If not so dramatic in real life, they contain bits of significance at least for me and help comprise me, such as I am. So I am grateful to them, every last one. Mercy, sweet heart.

There was Maryann (another one, not Cary's friend), dark and lanky and neurotic to a state bordering on psychosis, who was in love with a logger who was done with her, but who was waiting for him to return, waiting to no avail, waiting with the senseless desperation of the needy who know they are doomed but are not ready to admit it.. She lived next door to me in Ketchikan and was as miserable in her plight as I was in my own. Most of the time she would scarcely talk to me, though, and never for long. It was as though I didn't exist. But occasionally she would knock on the door to my basement apartment, late in the evening. I would know at once who it was and quicken. I'd admit her and wordlessly she would sit down on my sofa bed and somberly face me and we would begin the serious unbuttoning of each other's clothing; soon we we'd be lying on my bed, industriously Doing It. Afterwards, not quite wordlessly but close, she would rise and button herself back together by herself and turn on her heel and take herself out my door and not look back. Yes, she used me, but forgive her, for it is what we needy people often do.

I never turned her down, which says a lot about my own state. Always surprisingly and totally unpredictably, she would arrive in sad need (like a ferry in need of docking) and depart somehow sated or dimly pleased, whatever, hardly satisfied though, and I and we would be alone again, but a little less lonely than before. Elusive sleep might more easily arrive as a result. Or so was the fervent hope. She was pretty and hard—dark, tall, not my type. But then I clearly wasn't hers.

There was the beautiful redhead who went out with me exactly twice. I took her to expensive supper clubs that played good jazz, black music, and then she wouldn't go out with me anymore, Then I saw her late one night with Quincy Jones. He was a trumpet player then. I wanted to tell her I was one too, but it wouldn't have been enough and besides I wasn't any good and wasn't black..

And Cheryl (a stellar woman whom we are fast approaching), who in time was married for three hellish years to the critic John Simon, who had a lot of family money and was a Harvard Ph.d. in English, and who was previously screwing every female freshman students who would have him or who cared about a passing grade. (When discovered he was nearly rode out of town on a rail, covered with feathers.

He and I used to spend somber evenings drinking coffee together and discussing the vagaries, but four decades afterwards, when I contacted him about the whereabouts of Cheryl, he said he didn't remember me, but to contact Mercedes McCambridge, who had run a clinic for recovering alcoholics, where Cheryl once worked. That she was alive, he was sure. Well, I hadn't been—hence my inquiry. I forgave him instantly for not remembering me, which was okay, understandable, to be expected, for I was not widely known, nor my writing, though I was tempted to say there was a period of time (mine admittedly small) when we both wrote for Esquire. But I didn't.

I apologize for the overt name dropping. My life has been a modest one, one in part intentionally shyly lived. But I am reminded of the man who used to greet strangers, "Shake hands with the hand that shook the hand of Joe Louis." He was properly shunned. But I suppose there were those who rushed up to him and grabbed his paw eagerly. So keep him in mind as I prattle on. As Raymond Carver might say, "Please be one of those, please." I find the redundancy pleasing.

And one more instance of borrowed fame. Ann Rule, the famous mystery writer (very successful, very rich) says I once asked her for a date. I doubt it. This was back when I would ask out anybody who was vaguely female, weighed less than twelve stone, and was younger than sixty years. And she was, then. I remember only that she married a frat bro of mine, one who had a decided sexual identity problem, and had four children by him before they were divorced, and he died young and painfully of a brain tumor. What she may recall I am sure I have forgotten. But I admire her use of the active voice and the mastery of the simple, declarative sentence. I do not envy her success, and wish her only the best in the field in which she has excelled, and life in general.

Otherwise the famous and half-famous people I know did not come into my world as lovers or friends and associates of lovers but as literary personages in that other, longer-lasting existence——my life as a reader and writer. But my topic here is women, namely the desperate among them. If I were to cull out all the ones who were not, I would be left with a list alarmingly small. But that is not my problem.

Memory is.

9

Women exist as islands in the drowning sea of yourself. Between them there is much senseless swimming, with a lot of brine and bile and bilge water to be swallowed before you haul yourself up on her shore. Perhaps this one is it, the final shore, and you are saved from another season of misery afloat. Then the truth of your plight begins to dawn on you. She is as lost as you are, and conceives of you as her island. And the dawn turns out to be another grey day, but there is the pair of you to encounter it and haul yourselves up. Day follows day, for as long as you are blessed with the wonder of each other. You face your lot paired and mated, you hope forever. This makes life tolerable, though barely. You feel you can go on.

Boys sometimes play a game of walking down the street, sexually sizing up every female who comes into their field of vision. Would I fuck that one, is how they put it to themselves. Charming. The game is played by the numbers or else solo; aloud or silently. Girls are known to play a version of it, too, generally not on the street but in some social setting that is less coldly and alarmingly anonymous. At a dance or in a large lecture room, say, or perhaps at a business meeting, when they are supposedly too old and mature for such games. And the great secret is, girls are no more discriminating in whom they might choose than boys are. Perhaps less so. They will never admit playing it or the great, grudging breadth of men whom they deem acceptable to them. We poor isolated males must guess at what goes on in their minds, and we are more apt to be victims to the degree we think they are different from us. For they are not, not in many respects. Even their orgasms are like ours. (Don't let the secret out. It will ruin all the fun.)

O, what a vast and spangled world it is.

10

About my junior year in college my intellectual orientation changed. I stopped being interested in journalism and political science, and turned to English, namely the study of literature. First it was American lit, but I soon saw how it had sprung (sprung as in Hopkins's sense of rhythm, that is) from Europe and, most particularly, Great Britain, a country with which we shared more than a written and spoken language. So I moved ahead in one great stride.

As an English major, my life was different. I had been (however desultorily) a frat man or boy, trudging my way from its soup kitchen to my classes and returning after library hours to a dinner that had been kept warm for me in a cooling oven and to what was raucously called study hours. They began about eight and worked well enough for my first two years to get me initiated, but I was beginning to become enlightened in many ways, in short, to become educated, and found myself reading to all hours of the night and early morning and, of course, drinking beau coup beer. Also my taste in women had swiftly altered as I came to recognize their prevailing availability.

I began to date English majors; it was only natural. I was around them most of the day and often into the library evening. We shared a special world, only part of it pretentious. (Even pretentiousness has its reality.) And I found that most often female English majors were gorgeous. If not, they have other qualities that make up for it. One is easiness. But don't ask me what the others are. The fun is all in the discovery.

I would recommend the study of lit to a boys and girls of a particular bent. It is vaguely liberal and democratic with a small d. You don't have to want to be a writer to belong to the group, but it will add to your sexual success and adds to your immediate status, even if you have no talent for writing, or hear no call. To a large extent people are accepted for what they say they are, and part of this is how they present themselves, such as how they dress. To be known as a writer, a boy will affect button-down oxfordcloth shirts, tweed jackets, golf caps, brogues, and rep ties, ties that are always worn loose at the collar and set slightly askew. Girls in English wear peasant skirts and scoop-necked blouses that reveal cleavage when they bend low, as they often must do to show cleavage. Or else they layer themselves in heavy wool that clings and in boots envied by the army. Often the girls will go unshackled upstairs, and produce a certain jiggly bounce. Often they become slightly unshackled upstairs in their minds, as well. It comes from hearing too much lyric poetry.

For many of my time and interests, we were drawn to poetry as a means of expressing the deep emotions we were experiencing in our personal lives. Thus we gravitated to one of Ted Roethke's poetry courses; they were of two kinds, the appreciation or the writing of it. I tried first one, then the other, but was so recent a fraternity boy that I had affectations of a different kind and they stood in my way. Ted was cognizant of this and not unsympathetic. He often recognized the existence of what he deemed to be a good soul even while it remained in its formative stages. At the same time, being such a troubled person and great poet, he could not afford to be put upon. He had continually to defend himself from guys with sheathes of poems in their hands. Now, girls were an entirely different matter. Here he had more time and less fear. They posed no threat and he was not blind to the sexual challenge they presented, both at Washington and at Bennington, where he had taught earlier. They were all women there.

Which brings us to Janet. This account of desperate women would be incomplete without her, though in a way she played a small role in my life and I in hers. I think we'd both admit we were transitional for each other. She was right out of a sorority and unused to the Great World, as was I. So we were suitable for each other. I met her in Ted's poetry-appreciation class. It had started a day or two before I completed my registration, but I had made up my mind that this course was for me, definitely. It was held in one of the back rooms of austere old Parrington Hall, gloomy and dark. I was disturbed to find the primary seminar chairs around the long oak table already claimed and occupied with defiance. Janet sat on the right hand of the great man. We were all smokers then—how could you read, let alone write, poetry if you did not smoke continuously, drinking great hits of cold coffee all day long, and at night tap beer or tumblers of lightly watered Scotch? Well, you couldn't. It was by common consent.

Ted's package of cigarettes lay on the table, and if I were a better observer, or my memory stronger now, I could tell you the brand. The pack lay crumpled on its side, like a car that had been hit broadside but glancingly, and everybody lived, though crippled.. Every so often he would fish out a gnarly tube, lift it to his lips, let it hang there like an after thought, and wait with seeming inattention for some femme to light it for him. It was a quasi-carnal act and we all recognized it as such, and gave it our attention. It was enjoyable. Since he was a chain smoker, at least in class, it happened often.

Positioned at his right, Janet was the designated lighter. It was a significant role. Dutifully, somberly, submissive to a startling degree, she would respond to his need as if linked by fresh rubberbands. Up would come the book of matches, his or hers, the fingers would flash expertly, the cardboard match would flare and fill the immediate air with sulfur fumes, the gold and blue would die down to a persistent yellow, with a red core, and an interrupted poet just short of having a nicotine fit would remember what this odd Bunsen burner to his right flank was there for and without a pause in unlocking his wordhoard lean forward, accept the flame, acknowledge the lighter with a tiny nod (brightening Janet as if by lamplight), and continue what he was saying, while a new white cloud issued forth from his drooped lower lip and circled his fat, shaggy head like an ill-fitting halo.

And I, who couldn't write worth a damn and was unable to tell a metaphor from a simile, a dactyl from a strophe, would watch, mesmerized not so much by the seemingly innocent act in its entirety as by the great sexual current flowing from Janet to Ted. It was homage he took as his due, along with other liberties we boys presumed and kept enviously commenting on to each other:

"I'll bet he's fucking her," we would say, and he knew we were saying it, and delighted in knowing it, but he had a taste for ambiguity we had not yet the maturity to acquire and a keen eye for what was called in courts of law statutory rape, which could send him to jail. It did not hold him back, but it slowed him down some, we agreed.

She and I were taking creative writing classes as well, and this was our major. Fiction was. Beginners start with the short story and after having mastered it, ha-ha, move on to the novel. She and I found ourselves in the same class with bewildering frequency. It was unnerving. First in Will Stevens's (who urged me to drop out of school, if I really wanted to write great stuff, and move to Mexico, anywhere in Mexico, where the living was cheap and you could live off the G-I Bill, which was what he had done), then in good Grant Redford's, and finally in Markham Harris's advanced one. She was widely acknowledged as more talented than the rest of us and we were of course envious and spiteful. Rather than motivate us to write better, we often felt dispirited and wrote worse, loading up on our favorite alcoholic beverage (mine being a pint of Scotch, generally Teachers' Highland Cream, which was known to be best for a writer of English), and completing the prescribed quarterly mandate of five thousand words. I found I could do it in one night, thought the results might be incoherent by seven in the morning. Still, who was going to read it, really? I drew Bs, a rare B+, while Janet sucked in As, or an occasional A-, which I would have killed for.

After writing classes we would adjourn to a coffee shop or, better yet, a tavern. Will's course was at cruel eight o'clock in the morning, and often we came straggling into class late, blinking, or else missed it entirely. So to adjourn afterwards to a tavern at nine A.M. might seem a bit early for some of us, to others who had left the bar only an hour ago to go to class it seemed only natural. Usually it was coffee and our destination specifically, Howard's Coffeeshop, which also served a good, cheap breakfast. It was said the their coffee had no real coffee in it but chicory. It didn't much matter, so long as it was black and hot. It is where we hung out at any hour of the day or evening. Think of it as a maltshop with sinister overtones.

We had an affair, albeit a brief one, Janet and I. Fresh out of her daddy's tony house in Windemere and the dorm at Delta Something, where she served an apprenticeship, she was anxious to be rid of a piece of membrane that stood between her and womanhood, that is, sex and self-expression and personal freedom. I think Ted missed the mark here, or else was otherwise occupied at the moment and didn't see her availability. For Janet was definitely his type, being flatchested and tall and straight up and down as a board, with those enviable model's legs but rather thick ankles, in the manner of women writers. The chief things she had going for her were her cheekbones with commensurate high coloring, a flawless complexion, oft-washed dark hair cut expensively short so that it bounced on the sea of her neck, and bottomless brown eyes rimmed with kohl-dark lashes into which a man might fall as into a lush pit and drown delightfully. And there was the smoky promise that she would eagerly fulfill whatever he had in mind without so much as a blink or a blush.

She had a wonderful "I am yours" look that I kept wishing she would turn on me, not Ted. And she did, at last. (Many years later I learned that she had turned it on a surprising large number of men—practically all of us males in our relatively small circle of burgeoning literati. For when some girls discover sex it is all-encompassing and astounds them, the galloping possibilities. Every man is a potential source of pleasure and none of the women I knew at this time were blind to the possibility of sex with a wide range of types and characters, in their search for fulfillment. True, the search got pretty bizarre at times.

Ah, but I was the one who got Janet's cherry!

It is greatly looked forward to, the deflowering of some comely girl whom many desire. She had, as it were, come right out of the convent to a seedy English department whose guiding principle seemed to be, If it happens in a book, it should happen to you in Real Life (whatever that is), readily exemplified by English departments), and brook no delay. (We were always saying to each other things like Brooks No Delay.) Her invitation to the world of boys and men was so specific that it was usually mistaken as something else, such as intellectual curiosity or bad vision. But, no, it was raw sex she wanted. ("Brook No Delay," either.) I pride myself in being able to recognize pure lust for what it is, even though still relatively inexperienced myself.

We had a few dates, you might call them. And they fit the template of dates prescribed by the world of fraternities and sororities, which we pipings had just burst through the shell thereof. I took her places and spent money on her, not knowing that I didn't have to, that she was already mine for the picking, but the wasted time also served as a useful transitional phase, easing us from the known superficial world to the unknown superficial one in which anything darkly wonderful and exciting might happen, so long as it had a literary precedent.

One night I passed an important test with Janet's father. I had to steadily drink Manhattans with him as a rite of passage. He mixed them and we drank them, before, during, and after dinner. Now I had been in training for just such an event for the past two and a half years of college. I not only responded to the challenge but beat him at it, but not by much. Roaringly, stumblingly drunk, we called a truce. I had finished mine and he had stopped in the middle of his last one and sat regarding it as though it were ant poison. Janet had joined us in the early stages, then retreated to her room, knowing there was no place for a sodden girl here, or elsewhere, and her mother had wisely disappeared early in the evening. This left Dad (I think he was an investment banker or in the insurance game) and me to duke it out. I stumbled to my car and weaved the streets home without ticket or accident, believing in my heart that I had won fair maiden, namely the chastity of his daughter. And she agreed.

The task was not pleasant or easy.

All you lads out there, wanting to be in my position— beware. I caution you, by wishing to deflower virgins you are thinking to enact revenge on all womankind, or on some particular suffering sweetheart. You do not want to rid her of this useless bit of membrane. Trust me, your old dad. It is a thankless job and you must be up to it in several ways. It is tempting for me, even so many years later, to make light of the act and to clown around. Or to strain my bowels making apt analogy. This is not necessary. It has been done to death by my brethren before. I will only say it is not for the timid, not enviable, and you are apt to tip over your wheelbarrow and spill your whole load of bricks before you reach the long low wall of the fortress. And where will you be then? Probably men have had hernias doing what you intend.

Meanwhile she waits, bored and disappointed. You thrust. She accepts you as it were by degrees, as if grudgingly, which is the opposite of her intent. It is not her fault, it is not yours. It is life. The veins on your brow and neck stand out and that fine forehead of yours becomes beaded. You crack a joke to make up for what else you cannot crack. The task becomes decidedly medical in nature. You cannot exactly complain, for she is giving you what she has given no one before you and cannot give anyone else in the future. Her small gift. You are honored but need not be. You believe that you will live forever be in her memory, in a special niche. But will you? Whoever knows the mind of a female unburdened in this manner? Does she venerate, let us say, the man who hauls the garbage away? The dentist who extracts that noxious wisdom tooth? Is she any less the wiser for it? Then why should you, Bunkie, rise up in her estimation as her deliverer? Well, you won't.

We smoked afterwards, in the same manner as lovers do in bad movies. In the manner of the unfulfilled and the fulfilled. I talked, she listened, as I suppose I pontificated on Life. First-time sex is traditionally a time of epic disappointment. For both parties. She listened in her usual dutiful way—which I now think was the result of not liking to be seen in glasses. She had that fine disregard for propriety that recently laid women have. It was to my eyes the aftermath of an athletic event. Bare legs and thighs thoughtlessly exposed, her bra unhooked and unsnugged from modest her on one side, her hair rumpled, her cheeks even more prettily flushed than usual, all the lipstick gone from those thoroughly kissed bee-stung lips, the surprising emergence of freckles under her eyes normally hid by a veil of face powder, the wrinkle starting across her broad, intelligent forehead, her fingernails (at which I had never glanced before) chewed to the nubs and quite blunt and unattractive. All this was mine, however momentarily. It logically followed in the male mind.

I had opened the door for all who would follow me, a process of wide-eyed men and boys of all shapes and sizes and intellectual attainment, a lot or none—old men, kids with newspaper bags slung over narrow shoulders, oil-delivery men, mechanics, teaching assistants, bartenders, taxi drivers, restroom attendants, administrators, editors, clerks, soldiers, librarians of either sex or persuasion, produce dealers, electronic repairmen. Each was now adjudged a possible phallus. And while I had not made it all possible, I know I had made it easier for them, the world of men. And each of them, those many minions, owes me a debt of gratitude. I hauled bricks for them.

We had sex, truthfully, only a few times afterwards. It was as if we were done with each other and now the world lay in wait. And while she was grateful to me, I am sure, no doubt, I would have to say she was not unduly so. Only moderately so. When we were in the early stage of breaking up, we walked down to Lake Washington in June. It was a mild evening. She was thoughtfully preoccupied with the fact that our love affair was over. But not quite. She was filled to the brim with an ineffable sense of loss. Me too. It was my turn now to listen. Thoughtfully I looked out at the mirror surface of the water. A few trout had begun to rise. This was a wonder and claimed my attention.

A man has obligations to a girl for whom he had provided this necessary service, even though it does not much matter to her afterwards. He has initiated her to the intimate world of men and women and must continue to serve in this capacity until dismissed. How proud of himself he is. He must bang her often and find new and surprising locations in which to do it. It is a duty; he owes it to the rest of mankind and the reminder of his boyhood, which is quickly departing. And while he may think he is some grand liberator, her savior, he is not. He is duly repeating ancient behavior patterns imbedded in the race. His acts are genetically induced. In short, he is a bore.

This is not a good way to look at it. It is better, more ego-saving and salving for him to believe she cares about him in some special way, as she will about no other. And well she might, though probably not. Garbage man and dentist again.. So we moved on, the pair of us. Janet dated (a euphemism, you understand, both here and elsewhere) a number of guys, then was discovered by Archie and became his property for quite a long time. (Both of them thought of it this way, I am sure.) She married him, in fact—an odd type, very muscular, a street-fighting man, just the type who I would think would be repulsive to her but, no, I stand corrected. Sex is a white light. It is blinding.

Archie wrote short stories, too. (Christ, everybody did. It was in itself a cliche.) He thought of them as Chekovian, but they were really more like O'Henry. They were glib, they were quick, they had terse conversation, they contained deep Philosophical Insights. They were most ordinary. Archie went on to become a early contributor to TV drama, namely, Pallidin, Have Gun, Will Travel, where alas there was no room for his insights but where his other talents were made frequent use of. He became famous for about five years, not the Warholivian mandated five minutes.

Janet had three children by him, two of them twins; I knew that twins ran in her family because her mother was one, so the chance were high. Sometime they got divorced. I don't know the particulars, nor care to know. Before this, however, she worked as an editor at—get this—TV Guide in San Francisco. So much for all our literary aspirations.

How appropriate, I used to think. She got to list the times and channels on which his dramas were presented. Talk about your symbiosis. For fun, he used to go up to North Beach, cruise around in his car, spot some likely combination of guys (queers, I know now), and beat them up with his big leather belt wrapped round his knuckles to protect them from painful splits. A hobby of his, he did not to the best of my knowledge indulge himself in this round college.

He was very strong and with a guy named George once owned and operated a business putting in rockeries. Often he move those giant rocks around by hand. He employed me briefly, but soon learned I was unfit for it in several ways. He was known for paying wages in cash the same day as you earned them. His fame for this spread fast. We drove around posh neighborhoods in pickup trucks, spent time in coffeeshop and after work relaxing in taverns, but in our intense intervals worked harder than I have in my life. (Including at writing.)

But I am getting rather far afield. My point is this. We were all children together. This is our main claim on each other's lives. At the time we did not know this, or its relative importance in the scheme of things, only that we were struggling as hard as we could as individuals to get to know ourselves and our roles in life. These varied narrowly. We recognized that it had something to do with reading books—the best that has been writ or said, as some wag defined it rightly—and in adding our own store of words to the countless unread ones that accumulated largely unread before us.

It was our solemn goal and pledge to each other. To add to the hoard.

1

Which brings me to Cheryl, who has already been alluded to several times before. Ah, yes. She was the great love of my young life, and every growing boy ought to have a Cheryl, and I wish him one and good luck with her. Cheryl is the girl you don't marry but come close to. She is the one that breaks your heart, not through inattention but by the way she captivates your mind, along with your heart. (Not to mention your loins.) Cheryl is the one you meet when you are healthy and weigh one-hundred and sixty-five, we'll say, and when she leaves you (and Cheryl leaves you, make no mistake about it) you are down to one forty-five and quaking in your Rockports, your fingers gnawed to nubs, cigarettes burning themselves out in what is left of your mouth. It will take Hunter Thompson to do her justice and he is busy at the moment. Besides, he didn't know Cheryl, and might not have survived her as he has every other known drug and booze. And she would know these as well as he, and what I'm alluding to.

Some survive, many do not. In the graveyard of old warriors is more room for the losers than those who have mysteriously won out—who have made it through the dark tunnel and been reacquainted with the sun as friend. I have seen many go at the end of their terrible youth and thought Cheryl, but was wrong; like cautious I, she is numbered among the provident survivors. She might well thank her stars, for I would never have bet on it. But then I wouldn't have bet on myself.

I have carefully (it doesn't look that way but trust me) set the stage for her entrance by describing the budding literary world in which we all lived. It was a trying time, it was challenging, it was grand—we we who remain will tify to that. And it merits a volume of its own, but this is not the place. This is simply Cheryl's story, hers and mine, and I existed in her life as one of a great phalanx of men arriving in rapid succession at a sea of time when she was in her early mid-twenties. Her prime belonged to me, but, alas, it also belonged to the legion, fore and aft. But I'd like to think I got the best of it.

She was studying Drama. I capitalize it and so would she. It was a field of study, but it was also a vocation, and a vocation is something you don't turn off at five P.M. but keeps at you, naggingly round the clock, and around the block, giving you no peace. Not that you demand any. It is a personal demon.

I can generally remember where I met a desperate woman, or where we left each other weeping in the boozy night, but I can never recall both places and have learned to settle for one or the other, and be grateful for such things. And since our ending was drawn out for so long (she showed me mercy, in this regard) and contained so many painful episodes, I cannot be expected to have retained them all, and so our beginnings should emerge clearly, but don't, and I will have to construct them from approximates. I wish it were otherwise.

I mentioned a coffeeshop, one yclept Howard's. It was here we adjourned to, after some academic activity, or else where we began our day with the Number Six breakfast, which cost sixty-five cents and consisted of two eggs any which way, hashbrowns, toast with attendant jelly pack (grape or strawberry), and all the coffee you could drink over the next two hours.

Berkeley has its Robbie's, and Stanford and Harvard and Columbia their carbon copies of Howard's, perhaps several of them. These cafes have a pleasant, sinister atmosphere where you can hide from the sun and read and smoke. They all are delightfully littered, in spite of having their detritus regularly rearranged with a pushbroom by some student badly in need of spare change; he is either in throes of hangover or else drunk still from what has gone earlier. Howard's was ours—clean and well lighted. It wasn't open long into the evening and closed just after the dinner hour. It opened early and closed early, and was run by Howard and his corpulent lacquered wife, whose name was Mary, and she filled her space abundantly, being very short but increasing her height with these incredible high heels. I can picture her teetering above us, naggingly. Howard himself remained in the kitchen, cooking and keeping the waitresses on their toes with his reportedly omnivorous hands, hands which kept reaching out for them as they reached out for their orders. Or so was the story.

Mary managed the till and everything else, and was the official greeter. It was always issued unctuously, with a false bright red smile. She never had a word for any of us, and was always urging us to leave, as the noon hour approached or as dinner time neared. We in her mind were the necessary rabble that kept the place from being deathly in between; we spent little money and that was begrudged us. We ignored her, hunched over our coffee or tea, our faces pressed into a book which might be required reading. Not all classroom assignments were, for the literary mind has a life of its own and its connection to school is oblique.

It was here I first met Cheryl, then met her repeatedly, but for the life of me I don't remember when or the first time, either. But I do know that she wore her blond-blond hair in a ponytail, with flats upon her feet, a great swirling skirt expanding round her, and peasant blouse tucked into its waistband, one that was cut breathtakingly low. She was ample in front, noticeable, and so was her voice, which was resonant and enhanced with a dialect called Theater Speech. It is spoken still. It is penetrating and unlike what is uttered by most of us, announces itself as special and the property of someone of the Theater World. Also she danced, but then for all these female drama students it was de rigueur. She was one of a type, while remaining one of a kind.

First there was the void, then there was Cheryl. She filled my empty spaces. She was always a little smaller in true corporeal size than one thought she was. Which means she was bigger than life. So she was slight, slender, not tall, while at the same time being unmistakably there, huge, a presence. She was marvelously lithe, with large breasts that however my hands remember as light as a feather. (How can that be? Did they contain yeast, those veritable balloons?) Her hair Yeats has already spoken of and described how it alone would make us love her. Her feet were small, her fingers graceful and well-shaped. She had wondrous bones. If I ever had occasion to lift her off her feet (to throw her into bed, for instance) she would be amazingly weightless, as though hollow. (It might have come from not eating.) I could probably dance ballet today to her slight female form and have no hernia to show for it (could I but dance at all, I mean). I have heard that she recently had a hip replacement, and lament this news, attributing it to the many extension exercises she did for ballet purpose, which used to amuse me additionally and make me further marvel at her and how she could move. Yes, I can nearly see her now, not as a sixty-something year old but as one in her eternal twenties.

Cheryl, once located after nearly fifty years, said on the phone that she'd be interested in seeing me again. This struck fear into the old heart. She is long married, too, and lives in a fine house that rises over Lake Washington. I am greatly tempted, but shall not offer to avail myself until after this is written and, as they say, put to bed: I shall not be robbed of my memories, you see, not by some old lady who will do a poor impersonation. By one who will no longer produce a hardon. Still—what if she will, or does? Wouldn't that be infinitely worse, for then where will I be? I will know that I have grown old and futile, my days sadly numbered.)

Her teeth were small and even, and would flash when humor nipped at her—usually some gibe of mine. She had a marvelous dirty laugh, one I long to hear again and is locked into its niche in my mind. Still do. Her cheekbones were high, and the slope of cheek that descended from them would wear a natural high color, except when she became sick, which would be very sick, and it was here she became sallow and it would pluck at my heart to see it. So I loved her color, her bright blue-grey eyes, the nicely long lashes that she rarely darkened with mascara, but when she did, look out, or you'd be devastated, man or woman. I think even an animal might respond strongly to her eyes.

She was always sending out sexual signals, like a beacon. They were mixed. I think it was inherent in her personality and didn't mean anything in itself, such as general availability to men (or women, for that matter), but only signified that she wanted to be liked by as broad an audience as humanly possible. It was continually being mistaken for something else. (There is the possibility, of course, that it truly was something else, and even to this day I fail to recognize it—though of course I haven't seen her in all this time. But I am sure it is still there, that flashy ambience of spirit and soul. Or is the word ambivalence? I'm not sure.)

We began traditionally, dating, and ended up far less so, having bridged a few socio-sexual barriers that others of our time did not dare to broach, or rather few did. She lived at home with her mother in a section of the city I've always called Greenwood but is really Finney-Ridge; it is one of those mistakes that perpetrates itself over time and which we won't stand corrected on. We prefer to revert to old error. Their house stood on a corner, white, two-storeyed and clapboard, not very impressive but substantial and firm. It had a lot of small rooms. Mrs. Burgiss had a different last name from Cheryl and I gathered that she had been married at least twice before. There was a half-brother, but he lived away and Cheryl barely knew him, or what he was up to. Older. That makes for four marriages, or is it five?

Mrs. Burgiss owned a neighborhood bakery and worked there hard, daily. As do all bakers, she went to bed early and left in the dark for work, so she was always sleeping when I brought Cheryl home, which was of mercifully short duration. Soon we started daringly living together because it was the only practical way to make sense and order out of this life we had chosen and was impossible to avoid.. I remember the mother not at all, but think I looked her over several times—she was in her forties—and asking myself if the adage was true, that my Cheryl was going to look like this, in time? I don't remember what my eyes told me.

I suppose the only message I received (if I were able to recognize it as such) was that Cheryl would not be treated too kindly by time. Her mother was nothing special, that is, while Cheryl was extraordinary, but perhaps what she mainly had going for her was youth. Youth always has undeniable appeal. And the amount of abuse the young can suffer comes close to absolute, provided that the process is halted in time, say, by age 38. After which it is too late, I'm sorry. Cheryl in her prime was something to rave about, regardless of what the future might hold. I raved, and still do (All that is left me, you might say.).

Lived at home, I say, and so we began dating conventionally, as though expecting not much of each other and not wanting to be the source of disappointment in either case. Tricked by conditions I would say. I took her to ordinary movies and to fraternity functions, for I was proud to show her off and saw with pride the look of envy in the faces of my brothers who could not quite believe my great good luck, and how I might merit it. But often we went out beer drinking, just the two of us. That was best. She liked to drink as much as I, and there were a number of taverns that the literati from school attended nightly and I guess we were among their numbers. Now a drama major (today the field is called Theater Arts, and encompasses much besides acting) was vaguely honorable, intellectually speaking, and the girls were known to be beauties, not that English major girls were any slouch; actresses had a slight edge in every department and were known to be a little more free with their favors—though this is an ancient way of putting it, and we didn't use those words, not even in our minds. We all knew they were simpler easier. Sex was on everybody's mind

After our traditional date and attendant taking the measure of each other, we would quickly go some place to park in my old car, Jeffery, a '37 Pontiac sedan with a large backseat. She would hop in back as quickly as any girl I had known, but kept fielding me and my hands expertly, sometimes a little late, giving me access to her person by degrees neither slow nor fast but about right in both our opinions. I had heard somewhere, from sly boys with big mouths, that she had been dating a pair of Alpha Chis, ceremonially going out to dances and parties with one and covertly meeting the other afterwards, dropping her pants immediately for him. I did not choose to believe this at the time but now think it was in substance true. I found it easier to put a fresh coat of paint on the situation, though.

If true, she too was in transition. Not a sorority girl, she had the correct disdain for them and their world. They were expensively garbed sheep and could keep their wool, in her opinion. But she dated their male equivalent because that is where the action was. Fraternities had great parties, with lots of drinks and jazz bands. Boys were boys, after all, and not very different from each other, momentarily fun and easy to get mixed up with and later to forget. They had wide individual appeal, as did sorority girls to me (alas), and among them could be found attractive people that would serve one's purposes. These were largely to take you places and to have sexual experimentation with. I'm sure Cheryl fooled around with them, slept with some, and I do not begrudge her this, for then I would have to damn myself in a like manner.

Date one, bang another? It happens. When I was dating Hilda later, I could not understand how she could date me one night, bang me, then go out with another guy the next night. Miffed, she replied, "Well, I don't bang him, too. My goodness, what do you think of me?" And I was never sure whether her chief concern was what she did or what I, or anybody else, should think of her. But I believed her. She was a dancer, Hilda was, and she would go out with a man because he was a dancer of exhibition class, and I know not what else, and she was either cleverer in fooling me in this sole regard or telling the truth, and I prefer the latter version.

As for Cheryl, she was faithful to me, while being faithful was part of survival, and when and if she wasn't, well, she had her good reasons, among which was staying alive through the next few weeks. I understand this now much better than then, for a river of tempering time has flowed between both our banks and we have of necessity settled down some in both our thoughts and behavior. These are the consolations of time.

She had a spiritual side that I was quick to try to deny, having none of my own. Her mother's Christian Science has no doubt a mystical impact but took on its own direction, over the decades to come. On the phone recently (the one time we talked, it was for an hour) she mentioned Krishnamurti, and how his writings had given her enlightenment and spiritual ease, and I did not laugh aloud, for such is not a laughing matter, no matter how absurd it may sound to you, for if you love someone, or loved them, you must respect the painful and devious course their minds take, and what is necessary for (that word again) survival. And while I doubted all this, long doubted that she was the survivor type, she proved me wrong, and I'm sure the spiritual nature of her quest (for which there were many male partners that disappointed her and led to painful experiences) contributed greatly to the fact that she is still on the planet, while many of our dear contemporaries are not.

Would hop into the backseat of Jeffery, I say, and recline upon its green plaid upholstery fearlessly and eagerly, for she knew she would never suffer real harm from the likes of me, who loved her, and one such night, the rain drumming overhead on Jeffery's steel skull, I conducted my usual exploration of that superb body and learned that all resistance was gone. She was mine.

First there is astonishment, then there is joy. And then there is the hard work ahead of ploughing the one whom you love and who has previously been unavailable to you, this way, but who has issued you continual messages not to be discouraged, for her reluctance would succumb to patience and slow time. Not such slow time, either. Hang in there. Patience, yes, but a twenty-year-old boy does not have it in abundance and she, his love, knows this. She is pressed by demands, too. Sex does not stand alone.

Afterwards we sat smoking and talking. Both had the presence of mind, and honesty, to admit that it was not exactly the best piece of ass we had individually experienced, was in fact among the worst, laughing, a little embarrassed for ourselves and each other, but not worried either, happily beyond embarrassment both physical and mental for we were now pledged. We had exchanged bodily fluids, you might say. Above and below. She was carrying my seed in her warm enclave. We both knew it. Smoked as aftermath and conclusion and testimony and pledge.

It is what lovers do.

For we knew that next time would be light-years better. And it was. It did not take place that night, though. We were still maintaining appearances. She went inside to her mother's and snuggled into her bed, thinking of me. I went home to my rooming house (grossly inadequate to my needs now) and slow sleep, thinking of her, looking ahead to next time and how I would redeem not myself but us. We were now us, an entity. True, she was still Cheryl, I Bob, but we participated in this delightful and still separate entity that we had created between us by this simply union of the loins and the ensuing mixture of juices. Wow.

My rooming-house cell which I shared with a brilliant drunk from Reed who was purportedly studying chemical engineering was suddenly inadequate and I gave notice. The widow who owned the place and supported herself from its proceeds was relieved, for though I paid my rent regularly I brought friends, namely girls, to my room at all hours and she knew what for (being a mother herself) and not liking her home sullied with flagrant immorality. (Her words for it, you understand) If boys had to be boys, they could do it elsewhere. I agreed.

I found an upstairs apartment with minuscule kitchen and bath very near the University and my classes, with fold-down bed that occupied three-quarters its living space. It was expensive, though. Thirty-five dollars a month. Why, that was more than a dollar a day. Somehow I'd scrape it up. The place had a genteel demeanor, locking its front door at ten-thirty at night. My key was one of those that couldn't be duplicated under penalty of law. So when one of the plays that Cheryl was in was over, and I did not pick her up for some awfully good reason, such as a test or research paper being due the next morning, she would have to traipse her way across campus and throw pebbles at my window. (Soon all the small ones were used up.) Then I would raise myself up from my armchair, scramble over to the window to make sure it was her (for other friends announced their arrival the same way), and hasten down the carpeted stairs to admit her through the steel front door that had a little snap lock to close it.

And then she was mine again.

She was mine every night of our life together and I banged her like a metronome in celestial appreciation of the fact. Our love-making had progressed from (to put it in academic terms, which was only appropriate) D+ to A-, and we strove to raise that grade so there would be absolutely no doubt about the sex's rating on a cosmic scale. She provided me with that invaluable oral service I had been seeking ever since my first shy date at fourteen but was long unsuccessful at attaining. In the vast world of boys and girls it is common enough, goodness knows, but in my instance slow in arriving—though this was not my fault. And now here it was. at last. Of course I reciprocated. Thus we were mated, right-side up, that is, face-to-face, and in delightful reverse order, as well.

There is something wonderful on God's planet about being sucked lovingly by somebody who really cares about you.. Cares about both doing that and doing it to you. Now as a man, I cannot imagine myself doing this to another man, or why any of them would, nor can I truthfully understand why a girl will Do It and Does, and enjoys it so, but state without equivocation that it is the case and shout hooray.

It is not however an end in itself but a means to an end, an interesting interlude on the way to ordinary coitus and climax, and should be viewed as such, though there are others who will raise their heads knowingly from the task and hasten to present the other side of the case, and while I respect them I wonder about their honesty and credibility, and so must she, not to mention veracity. And as for the prophylactic benefits, I must take the female's side, in that it offers her not what she really needs or wants but some vague substitute, tiring and jaw-numbing, and while a few will settle for this, they are foolish and dumbly dominated and should not be so susceptible. A guy may take her to see countless pornographic movies (they certainly abound) and point out the woman's evident joy and excitement at seeing a man ejaculate in her face but she will not believe it, nor will he. She knows better and cannot be convinced otherwise, try as he might, perhaps. And if she succumbs to his will and argument and say, See, you were wrong, and rushes afterwards for the bathroom and a wet towel, she is again foolish, and I warn you here, dear, not to let yourself get in such a dumb situation, for it bodes ill. Best avoid it and, even if you are having your period, open yourself up to him in the usual manner, messy as it is, and afterwards take a shower together and laugh it off, for it is a better fate than being sprayed in the face by a housecat on the curtain of yourself. And do not be persuaded otherwise. Never.

Usually, after a preliminary or two, long or short, of cocksucking (to give it its true name, without more delicacy), my favorite indoor sport and now ours, I would enter her easily and proceed to drive us both to orgasm. Drinking all evening long often delayed this nicely (and sometimes bewilderingly) and occasionally produced disappointment, but we could easily smile and shrug it off and roll over and fall asleep. But new to sleeping with as woman alongside me, I had trouble sleeping and would lie awake, with this dense new body beside me, obviously dead to the world, and wonder how I got in this position and wish for a bed to myself again, and the ease of diagonal slumber on a mattress not large to begin with. And though sated would rise and light a cigarette and ponder man's fate (and my own), and eventually climb back into bed and tumble into uneasy sleep about the same time as the sun broke through my morning window.

Classes beginning at eight or nine generally got slept through, at least by me. Cheryl, after practically no rest, bounded out of bed and made a pot of coffee while she dressed (which was a tone poem in itself, or was it a symphony?), gulped down come coffee (leaving the chipped cup embossed in red), and flew out the door, a cigarette at her lip trailing smoke. Rising leisurely, as has been my life-long practice, I would eat cold cereal and toast, warm up the coffee, or else forego it and head the two long blocks up the street to Howard's, the source of many things, good and bad, and a fried egg breakfast, which was both.

We were on our own for lunch and sometime skipped it. We wandered back to the apartment at various times through the afternoon, sometimes finding the other person present (the front door was locked only at night and she had her own key—thrill—to the flat, though not to the imperial front door) but often not. I could while away whole afternoons over coffee with my friends, many of whom were writers; those who were not hung enviously on the fringe and were vaguely tolerated. Or else I would go to the library, where I needed to be, and read in the books put on reserve for my classes, for I had learned the hard way that if I did not read them I had to do an incredible job of fiction writing on my exams, some of which were expressly designed to prevent this.

I read voraciously. We all did. The idea was, in the next couple-three years, to have digested all the world's great literature so that one could speedily begin to write it. And my reading was incredible in range and volume. I allude the major contemporary authors, but only incidentally. There was much else crying to be read, such as the daily papers (full of the war in Korea) and assorted weekly and monthly magazines, not to mention the obscure quarterly journals with letters for names. Cheryl seems to have read steadily, too, though I don't remember seeing her doing this, exactly, and could be counted on to come up with the right names for all the right books, so she must have at least looked them over, or else was a better actress than I remember.

She was steadily in campus plays, though rarely got the leading role. Sometimes she came close, though. There was a lot of politics involved. Glenn Hughes was director of the school, a well-known prick nationally, and those whom he favored (generally those with the most talent—to be fair) went on to greater roles, while those he did not slipped into near oblivion. Cheryl was somewhere in the middle of the pack. Her flair was for emoting. Now there were a number of young, attractive girls, many of them with requisite golden hair, who could emote with flair. Since all of Shakespeare is emoting, in one way or another, it could pass itself among the uncritical as acting, that is, royal drama. But when you got into contemporary plays it was more difficult to hide behind declamation and trilling like Olivier did, and you had to be understood and tone it down a little, baby. This she had trouble doing, both on the stage in what we jocularly call real life.

I understood. They didn't fully appreciate her and her talent. It made me angry. And when she got to star in a Molnar play (and incidentally, several decades later, married the director, which should have been no surprise to me, for directors are always marrying actresses and getting it on with their students), it ran in the Showboat, one of three active University theaters, this one on the shore of Portage Bay. It is an arm of Lake Washington. I went to the opening, which was formal, and when some flunky attempted to turn me away at the door for wearing a tweed jacket and tie, I pushed on by him clutching my pass. I was used to having doors barred to me and overcoming all but the roughest obstacles. But Cheryl's mother and half-brother met the same response at the gate, this time by the great man himself, Director Glenn Hughes, a formidable presence, with a theatrical voice to boot, and in chagrin turned back and retraced their slow path down the gangplank that served as approach. I rushed after them and tried to get them to return but they would not.

The play went without hitch, which is the most you can hope for in the theater, where the possibility of dire event is ever present, both singly and in multiple instance. The play, however, was badly dated and consisted of a bunch of French nobles all milling about to no good purpose and saying unlikely things to each other. The fact that it was a comedy made the urge to laugh all the more acceptable, though the urge happened at all the wrong places. The occasions that were craftily designed to provoke laughter were met with a strange, echoing silence. The play ground on, like a summer storm. I could comprehend why Molnar was considered a safe, pleasant playwright and was not numbered among what we termed Major Figures. This might explain why Cheryl got cast and also the rest of the players, who were not outstanding.

The curtain fell, applause splattered, the mandatory curtain call was performed, everybody rose to go home, at last, the curtain lifted again to another splutter (one provided mainly by me), the actors and my beautiful evening-gowned Cheryl bowed once more, and the curtain descended for good. I could practically hear them all waiting and breathing behind the velvet, awaiting a third call to bow, but the man who controlled could not be persuaded solely by me. Besides, everybody had filed out of the theater, and now I did.

I went backstage and had the unpleasant task of explaining to my love why her mother and step-brother were not with me. Her mouth became a tiny red bud, her brow furrowed. She thought for a long moment. Then she picked up the bundle of long-stemmed red roses that the school's director routinely had delivered to the play's female star and delivered them herself—out the window and into waiting Portage Bay, two levels below. I admired this gesture and found its inherent contempt appropriate. Forevermore was the school's director a dirty word among us. I doubt whether the news ever got back to him, however, and if it did, in some unlikely manner, he cared. Either way, she got no more really good roles, but an endless series of minor ones. This led her to seek roles outside the University and, only a year later, to go on the road with a scrubby band of dedicated actors who were determined to bring Shakespeare to the provinces of Canada, namely private schools at the high-school level, whose administrators agreed that they badly needed some culture. When I went to Victoria on the ferry to see an after-school performance of Hamlet, I could barely refrain from laughing aloud with the students at how this somber play was performed. I had never thought of it as farce.

Cheryl's peers were not unlike the actors in the play-within-the play and perhaps had chosen them as their role models.

But this was in the future, when Cheryl had made her big break from home, school, me, and a succession of new suitors. At the moment, a marvelous one in my life and I would like to think in hers, we had begun a love affair of epic (some might dispute this term) proportions. It occupies in my staid life the position of a lodestar by which I can compare all that preceded it (inadequate, to be sure) and afterwards (inadequate, too, until it came to marriage, which is a whole different ballgame, with constraints that are in no way similar, and thus will not compare).

My apartment was in a building called the Hart. Unless I am wrong, this denotes a deer of the masculine persuasion. It is a medieval word and means a kind of stag. I should like to think of myself then as one. Whatever, the building was two-storey and of brick, with a central entrance and a fire escape to the rear that could not be entered from the street because of either a locked steel-grid gate and a raised ladder too high to leap for and catch from ground level—try as you might. And I did. Considering the place was occupied by both students and geriatrics, it was amazingly prim. The two groups were at constant loggerheads. Urged to leave first my rooming house I think Cheryl and I were next kicked out of the Hart after two or three months. It was not for drunken revels (which all took place outside of the premise) or for playing our phonograph records too loudly (Dave Brubeck, Jazz at the Phil, Gerry Mulligan), which we were careful not to do, but because of untoward behavior. Young people were simply not supposed to live together if they are not married. Today this attitude might be deemed hilarious and antique; today if unmarried young people are not living with someone, it is considered odd, peculiar, and living relationships with the opposite sex (or the opposite one) are permitted because protected by law. We would not have dreamed the future held such permissiveness.

So we moved. We had to leave, for we had no place to live. When I refused to believe them, they returned my rental check and told me a married couple was waiting to move in. Their first month's rental was already on deposit. Get out or they would call the law down on us. So we vamoosed. I found us a place in a slovenly apartment building much farther away from school. This was named— you have to have a taste for irony—the Monarch. Absolutely hilarious, unless you had t live there, and then it was something else. Our flat was three storeys up and I had accumulated a shitload of used books that had to be carried up all the stairs. What a task. But we were surrounded by a multitude of dissimilar people and myriad living arrangements, and were widely welcomed, while all the while not being looked at very closely. Perfect. Back stairs ran next to the bedroom window, and it was a real bedroom, however small, with a real double bed, not a Murphy that pulled down from the wall on a counterbalanced spring.

With such an exit that served also as an entrance, we were often surprised by visitors, sometimes during an afternoon break when we filled up the long, languid hours with long, languid sex. There would be a rap on the window from the knuckles of a friend arriving, followed by him bursting through the backdoor, which was invariably left unlocked. Then he (never a she) came into the bedroom and began blurting out whatever he had come to say, while we covered ourselves over with the blanket or left the bed, trailing sheet behind us.

When I found this apartment I was almost through my senior year and looking forward to starting graduate school immediately, for the war in Korea was progressing badly and my draft board was gnawing its way rapidly through its roster of candidates suitable for quick soldierhood, since nearly all of us in my neighborhood had gone on to college and those who hadn't were already arriving home in bodybags. On my way to the Monarch to look it over as a potential living site, I met a fellow English major who was already in grad school and having a terrible time of it. He murmured forlornly, "I think there ought to be a law against having gas ovens in apartments rented to graduate students. It's simply too inviting." I knew only vaguely what he meant, for I had survived a rainy winter quarter of Shakespeare's tragedies as an undergraduate, and believed that whatever followed would be gravy.

The specific oven proved a threat. It was lit by a recalcitrant kitchen match, one without backbone. The stove would fail to ignite from the pilot light and—gas streaming into the room—I would strike match after match, only to see them die in shrinking succession, until one would finally do its job and the oven would explode. Time after time. For a while neither Cheryl or I sprouted eyelashes. Now, a woman could always draw on new ones, but what could a poor guy do? I went browless for about a month.

Of course I exaggerate. Why not? In many ways, those were worrisome times. I would not live through them again, nor deny myself them, with all their fading remembered good and bad times. Our times forge us. They pound on the iron in the smithy of our souls and produce what turns out in the long run to be good, resounding metal. But we pay for it mightily. The price is our inexorable youth. But then youth exists in abundance to waste, and its time is not so long.

My day went like this. Rising late, I would head for class or not, and afterwards or sooner drop in at Howard's, sometimes for breakfast, but mainly for the company of people like Les and Janet and Archie and Ken Maclean and Levi Thompson and Liz Patterson and a Verna (who married Ken, and had four children by him) and Jack and Rick, the latter who drew continuously and painted in oils great ponderous canvases, and Gordy, who did cartoons and could play every known musical instrument, and Robin Drake and Rusty Little, a girl who was certifiably nuts but had beautiful red hair (and soon bore a baby by Jack), and Connie and Dave Norton, who had sexual-orientation problems but married each other in spite, and paid the price in quick divorce. (How mistaken we could be about each other.) A host of others, all in the arts or the fringe of same, some with aires and no talent, others with talent and no or minimal aires, fiction writers, poets, actors, homosexuals, athletes; providers, pretenders, poseurs, postures, preventers, parasites, provocateurs. Anything beginning with a P. Princes and peasants alike. A fine kettle of fish, all aswim in the resident confusion.

If you took fifteen credit-hours of classes, you were expected to be in class that many hours, but never were. Either you skipped or the professor did. Roethke never met his Friday classes, as many did not in the English department. So Fridays were generally free days, except for professors from other departments, such as history, who had never heard of the notion, and so there was a period of cultural lag until they caught up, and no-Friday classes became traditional nationwide. But we are born too late.

Everybody was sleeping with somebody, teachers and students alike, boys and girls, girls and girls, boys and boys, and I suppose boys with various imported farm animals, covertly, though for the life of me I never heard a reported instance except in textbooks on abnormal psychology—which we all read for instances of possibility. I had Cheryl to sustain me, and so was not much interested in what others did. to get off.

Sex every day for a year and a quarter, at the bare (excuse me) bones (excuse me again) minimum. Sometimes there would be an interval in which there seemed nothing else to do but see how many times we could make the other come in the shortest possible time. This was important hard work, or research. Books—studies, whether assigned by a teacher or by oneself—were a means of recuperation from sex. You smoked, you read, you ate snacks, you made yourself ready or nearly ready for the next carnal onslaught. Most women are willing partners in this. They will tell you that it really isn't necessary, however, that they already believe in your prowess, that you've proved it many times over; then they respond with delight when you push their protests aside and prepare to mount them again. The site is still slimy, whether from eagerness, receptivity, or from your previous activity, you can never be sure, but ease of entrance is important to a boy who has been there, say, twice in the past six hours, and it abets him. It eases his case. And there is a certain gritty feeling, as at the beach, with some sliding around, slippery, slithery, and a burning feeling when you come, and relief, at last, a brief peace or surcease when you slump back on your cushion and grin and say, "Well, I guess it was a little too soon. Another hour and I would have been much harder." And she smiles sweetly and lays her heavy head on your soft shoulder and breathes moist air into your ear and neck, squeezing your arm.

There is something adorable about a well-fucked woman or girl. That sleepy quality permeates the room. The room veritably . . . reeks from sex. The place smells like an elephant pen. A visitor would not mistake what was going on for anything else and might bolt for the door or window in search of fresh air. But to the instigators it is sweet perfume. After all, they manufactured it. Their loins gave it the essence of themselves. It is their love made corporeal, given olfactory existence.

We have entered a period of time without pretence. Boys and girls do not get together to play games or to be seen in public, only to be alone together for a prolonged period. To live thus you will do anything, everything. You pool your quarters and dollars for food and drink. When you have some money, you spend it lavishly on each other. You buy silly little presents that mean a lot and cost nothing. You treat. You lend, you take; it does not matter which. You do not offer particular thanks. Nor do you beg. Instead you share. You understand the true meaning of the word and believe in your bones what the socialists mean when they talk about giving to those who need by those who have, or have to ability to provide.

Everybody bangs everybody else at one time or another. My God, were I a sociologist (heaven forbid; being a writer is bad enough), I could put us all down on a wall chart, names represented by dots or stickon emblems, a veritable starry sky full of personages and ourselves, and with a crayon begin to draw lines between revolving constellations of friends and associates, and let red for now indicate carnal relations expressed two or more times, and the mutual sky would be laced with tracer fire. If I dispensed with economy and had yellow, let us say, represent one-time sexual uses of each other, the heavens would bear even more bright trajectory, scarlet and gold. God, observing all this, would beam, I'm sure. He would bless us and our lust. After all, He made us this way. (In His image?) For what we were doing was simply exploring the bounds and boundaries of love and its possibilities as best we could, in the manner best prescribed for us, and we cannot be faulted for being what we are and were, any more than a dog can avoid going around pissing on trees and defecating on people's lawns. We are what we are, all animals together.

I was a lover second. I was a literary nut first, waiting to be born into publication and preparing myself all the while much as the actor does, according to my teachers, Cheryl and Stanislavski. I have come up with a theory recently that a writer must read five hundred words for every one he is entitled to write. Perhaps it is a thousand. Ten thousand would be more like it. For every book he is determined to write, he must read five hundred books in preparation. Okay, a thousand books. And you can read all the books in the world, all the dreary magazine articles that pay their hack a miserable pittance, and never be ready for the main event. You can read every poetry anthology since the first dawn and never be able to get past "The" of your first sonnet. But many hear the call, and nearly all of them hear it wrong, with tin ears, and are doomed to a life of oblivion. One word that lives, we argue for. Okay, group. Here it is. Again. "The." Don't forget it.

A Poet. I was a poet then, the kind of writing for which I am the least skilled. I had a low-level talent for it. But—remember—a poet was not some sort of fruitcake who walked funny and lisps and affects floppy bow ties but a gladiator. Of words. We had Ted Roethke as example. Right at hand. He was a full professor, for Christ sake, drove a Buick, made more money thanks to Chairman Robert Heilman than any two of the uninitiated, who were ignoble scholars. He played tennis and fucked all the girls we couldn't get—and some that we could and didn't want. And he looked at us knowingly, one guy to another, and mocked us with his hard poet's eyes. He was a tough guy, all right, and could outdrink everybody, but paid the price for it and was taken away in handcuffs to parse himself out and get dried out. It was the price you paid for great poetry. We would all willingly come up with the coin, we thought—Jim Wright, Richard Hugo, Dick Salig, Mel LaFollette, Caroline Kiser, Wes Wehr. A legion of others. Only, when the payment was to be extracted, we all faltered. The legion plea bargained. It copped and opted out. Jim and Dick and Dick died in harness. The less talented droned on.

So I was an apprentice poet, one of a multitude, drunk on Yeats and Blake and The Lost Son Himself. I wrote shit. I wrote lots of merde and affected my own odd ways that were highly imitative, as was my verse. More, as we say, anon—or sooner. These are words intended mainly to define the person Cheryl found herself with and deemed adequate for her purposes, mysterious as those may be. As writers we had to produce, but not very much. Some words now and then. Lay them down neatly on the page. Time proved most of us would fall far short of the mark. But those who struck the bullseye dead on are all in the ground now, or else somberly consigned to ash and blown to the continent or the thankless sea. Those of us still alive (including Cheryl) are thankful for the air we breathe. Would we trade our minimal talent for longevity, given the sweet choice? Who knows? But who has any say in the matter, anyhow?

And Cheryl? Would she still trade her sweet ass for fame? Ask her, not me. I can only testify that it was sweet—he who had supped not exactly there but near by, where Yeats says love has pitched his tent. We would regularly devour each other and rise wondrously from our ashes, only to begin the meal again. In love there is no such thing as seduction, not unless it is mutual, not after the firs time, and perhaps not even then. There is only the willful coming together. Sometimes there are barriers to it: Hurry, my period is starting. Oh, this is my worst time. You got something to wear? No, well we shouldn't, but you are so darned cute. Stop shoving that thing in my face and put it where it belongs. Hey, I didn't mean back in your pants. Give it here. I'm only human.

Come in your face does not improve the complexion, I don't care what Hemingway tells you. You know, Hemingway was an asshole. Only women who were assholes would have him in bed. Just look at him, your hero. Fat, loud, those big cigars. Jeez, I pity them, those women. A mountain falling on them, poor bitches. And who could love some guy who was always pursuing the magic marlin or a giant tuna? Have a heart. Have two.

I was not yet a dedicated fisher yet myself and would never be so obsessed that I would turn down a loving woman in favor of a stupid fish, even though they occasionally shared a certain salty flavor. As the man says, some things take a lot of getting used to.

2

She danced, as well, took ballet lessons, and treated my living room windowsill as a barre, preferring a time when I was not home to watch, for I found her exercises provocative, but then I found most of everything about her arousing. Just looking, I always wanted to hump her. I can imagine her glancing down at the street, while she stretched out first one leg then the other as far as it would go and raised it to waist height, or higher, and bent over the thigh and touched her face to her knee, while the other poor dear leg would bear all the weight and torque and torture. I could picture her pudenda contorting prettily, her buttocks contracting and leering to one side, her little asshole expanding and tightening deliciously, her ribs showing beneath their frail skin, her breasts taut and always amazingly light in weight, like veritable down, all the while, though caught up in their tight cotton, sweat beginning to break out in droplets across her brow and running down her bright pink cheeks, her breathing coming faster and faster, as though approaching orgasm, the specific female odor starting to issue from her and filling the warm, closed room. The atmosphere was near identical to the aftermath of rut, dense and slightly threatening.

And decades later I have forgotten all this, the details, and when I remember them they have absolutely no effect on me, not as they did then, for besides being the victim of memory and its life-long prisoner, I guess it is, I am at the age of 65 now, kinematically unable to avail myself of the results of this vision, and am thus immune to any prurient effect short of what is literarily required of me and in need of being recorded here. So you understand this is mere history and may as well be lies or the ramblings of a mind approaching dementia.

Ha.

The Monarch. The Monarch reigns supreme. Or the Monarch reigns limitedly, authority restricted by Parliament. In our case, Cheryl and mine, when it rained the Monarch leaked around the kitchen windows, especially when the West wind did blow, and we had to caulk up the sill with towels, etc., to sop up the slowly dribbling water. Ah, the Monarch. To call it a dump is not to do it justice. It was to a dump what the beach at Carmel is to a pebble. It is to a lake compared to the droplet from the sky it absorbs. People from the Monarch, in search of a great good time and some classy diversion, might go to a refuse site and enjoy themselves extraordinarily.

The Monarch creaked and groaned continuously. At first I thought it was only when somebody was approaching along the tall staircase, or down the narrow hallway, but soon found that the noises took place at all hours and were independent of any weight being distributed across its surface. Late at night, and early in the morning, too, when even the most dissolute of us were abed, the old building protested the indignity, I reckon, of being old and poorly maintained. It was not the fault of us tenants, surely, for we did our level best; each time somebody moved out, the new occupant gave his rooms a fresh coat of watery paint, and since people were coming and going every three or six months, on an average, a period equalling the duration of a quarter's study at the University, the layers of thick pain in rainbow colors accumulating over the years was probably enough to narrow the room's dimensions noticeably. And since we bought cheap paint, and laid it on fast, with little fastidiousness, drips and caked splotches from the past got built upon and added to, so that the surface of most walls appeared randomly textured by somebody of no artistic taste. A fair palimpsest. The walls fairly dripped, even when they had dried, plus the ceiling showed signs of lowering all at once. Resoundingly.

The floor was coated with paint, too, some glossy brown enamel, and it chipped easily, and got recoated with, say, dark gray (Navy surplus, no doubt), and it with somebody's terrific innovation, Chinese red next, and each in turn became chipped and painted over, so that the floor had a quilted aspect, and this effect was attempted to be relieved with a rug, but so much had been spilled by so many on it that the rug began to take on the patchwork appearance of the floor beneath it. And surely once or twice somebody had dared to run a vacuum cleaner over the rug, but with bad results, and so successive tenants were warned against doing this, and received this recommendation with serious ears and pledged not to violate the rug again with physical abuse. So the rug received whatever was spilled on it and absorbed it and went on with its ruggy life, as some people are known to do with theirs, suffering continual abuse without complaint. The rug—like them—deserves our admiration, not our scorn.

Sometimes Cheryl would cook, but not often. Usually our meals were caught literally on the fly. One or the other of us would bring home burgers, enough for both, and sometimes the bringer would have already eaten his or hers, and the other's would arrive understandable cold, but get devoured anyhow, with gratitude. A cold cheese burger is not bad and in some ways superior, for the cheese no longer runs and drips and coats the hand but has become firm again, manageable, and one can nibble away its edges with the front teeth deliciously, like a mouse would, and the meat itself when it has lost all of its heat tends to congeal and approximate cardboard in color, texture, and even taste. I have always liked cardboard. And I won't mention the benefits of cold coffee except to say that it is what writers sustain themselves on and come almost to prefer, over time. The hot stuff loses its appeal and becomes a secondary choice, one low in value.

The writer says, "Don't bother to heat it up for me. It is just fine." Or, "Let it sit a while. It is too hot. I want to do another page or two first."

For I was writing in the Monarch. My usual 5,000 word short story for a quarter's worth of credit, or numerous poems that if a little bit better might be called awful. Everybody in the Monarch wrote or painted or played an instrument, usually late at night, some kind of music. I can only speak for us writers and say that, although many of us wrote near continuous, I can't think of a single decent piece of writing that came out of the place. What got written that was good generally came from small tight apartments or old houses, where there was room for a boy and a girl to expand their scale of living and not be ever in each other's faces. A house or any better apartment was beyond the reach of Cheryl and me; we were near destitute.

She worked as a secretary, half-time at Eagleston Hall, which was the headquarters of the local YWCA, and since the third letter in the acronym is religious, and the whole place had an athletic atmosphere, they had a rule against any cigarettes on the premise. Cheryl was a heavy smoker who exercised regularly (ballet) and stayed in good shape. Or else it was because any young person her age or mine was deemed healthy unless proved deathly ill, and could quickly recover from most illnesses in a snap. So she would take the cement stairs to Eagleston trailing smoke and, at the front door, flick her red-eyed butt over her shoulder and in the general direction of the street and face the next four hours of deprivation bravely.

I was not working at the moment, but had recently been laid off the extra-board of the Northern Pacific railroad, where I was a fireman on a diesel switch engine on the foggy outskirts of wintertime Seattle, South, where in Chicago the stockyards lay. We had their equivalent but this was the heyday of the railroad-shipping industry. What, pray, does a college student do, firing on a diesel engine performing yardwork—rearranging boxcars and the grey/green passenger cars that looked like they were owned by the army? He doesn't do anything, but he must do it for a twelve-hour shift, and he must not fall asleep on the job. (Can you say, "Featherbedding?")

I had bought myself a car (yclept Jeffery) and a radio-phonograph, all with the same two-week paycheck, and was roaringly flush. I'd been carrying 20 hours of undergraduate work and working when they called me in for 84 hours a week of railroading. (A twelve-hour shift daily, without respite, week after week. It was second shift, normally called graveyard.) This necessitate my sleeping through my morning classes—either at the Monarch or in my hard classroom seat, as Professor Brent Sterling droned on. Finally, when I was about to drop from chronic fatigue, the railroad took pity on me and . . . dropped me from the extraboard entirely, because a couple of aging engineers came back to work from illnesses, or whatever, and they had "bumped" everybody downward on the roster and the lowly extraboard, until the two last-hired of us were bid bye-bye. I left with relief, though, missing only the money.

So I was not working now, but had money for about the first time in my young life. I took the apartment at the Monarch with the assurance that Cheryl would immediately join me, but she had to work a subterfuge on her mother (the Christian Scientist baker, remember?), and that was that she was to have an apartment of her own. This she did, and it was only three blocks away from mine, and I helped her move in, most innocently as a friend, for the new apartment was mostly empty (both of ours were rented ostensibly furnished, but this means next to nothing and varies widely in what may be provided) and her best stuff went to my place. Also all of her clothes except those items she would never wear. So, blithely, humming a merry tune, we lugged her gear to her new place, bade her mother goodbye, and carted the still-full boxes and suitcases out the back door of her place and, on foot, over to mine.

There is always, always, an operative economic principle at work when couples move in together—say they to the contrary. They call it love. Since it was uncommon in our time, uncommon anyway among our friends (and our friends were about the most liberal, free-thinking people around), we had no couples to copy, no guidebooks, no examples to turn to for pungent advice. We had to say, instead, "Hey, I got some money, I'll pick up the first month's rent, no problem, and I can handle next month's, too, but after that, I'm not so sure." And she would interject, "That's okay, honey. If you can do that, I'll pay for the food out of my weekly paycheck." One of you might ask about the electricity and the gas, and matters would all shake out, but the following month the arrangement might change, depending. Because even though economics determine history in the broad and the personal schemes of things, love must come first. Love (or its nether name, sex) will work things out. You can bank on it.

It is important to be together whenever the activities of this vying world give pause. It is the most important thing on earth. So you plan and plot, you lie and scheme, and each night you return home to each other, and you greet each other wearily with smiles and distracted little wet kisses, and dry fucks, and small consoling pats on the head or back or else where, for this is done in the name of love, and will suffer no restraint, no challenge. It is of course precursor to the married state but without its moot assurances and opportunities for genuine rest and recharge. And in some ways it is more delicious. In many ways it is.

For we knew it wouldn't last, even while we lived in keeping to a manner than might endure, that is, faithfully and true. I'm sorry to drag out these old tired words from Hemingway and other romance writers, but they still work; they still hold meaning. You stay true to each other for so long as you can and then you stop being true and become something else. You behave with some degree of betrayal in your mind and loins, and you regret it afterwards, but you do it explicitly, being unable to do otherwise.

Twice Cheryl found herself pregnant by me, all within a scope of six months, and twice she had an abortion; we never thought of doing otherwise. Somehow we scraped up the money to pay for them. Mostly it fell to me. They were done by real doctors in real, tall office buildings, at a time when they were illegal as hell and prosecutable, but the police looked aside because sex was not yet outlawed (only its results) and there was not yet the Pill and girls would continue to give their tender bodies to persistent crude boys. And there was always the consequence. And no matter what Tess of the d'Ubervilles may tell you, it takes more than one tango to get a child with child.

I admit it. We had sex more than once. And we had it more than twice, too.

An abortion cost two hundred dollars. That is today's equivalent of about 800 or a thousand dollars, give or take a few hard-scrounged shekels. To pay the price, I did one or more of the following: wrote bad checks knowingly at the Blue Moon Tavern (and they were accepted stonefaced by Owner Jim, who probably knew they were bad, what the money was to go for, but that I would make them good eventually, which I did), hocked my typewriter (my God, a writer would go so far?), sold my watch to a graduate student who had no time, took my books to a used-book store—first the junky ones, that brought next to no money from the same people where I had bought them, not long ago, for next to nothing; then making my way slowly, hesitantly, to the medium-important ones; and finally bringing out my beauties, often American first editions, taking whatever they would give me for them, with a little disgusted shake of the head at how badly I was being ripped off.

The loss was nothing, I knew, compared to what my Cheryl was going through, all because of our love—because of what I had crassly done to her body and she had lovingly permitted me. That is, my nameless lust.

The doctor (who was a kindly man, she reported, and no hacker) issued her a diaphragm afterwards, with the admonition to use it all the time in the future, but when we tried (too soon, too soon) we had great difficulty inserting it (instructions were next to missing, or else had gotten lost in transit, namely, returning a sick girl home on a rainy night in a steaming car), and using the diaphragm became a kind of silly dilatory game, utilizing this great greasy object that looked like a donut, or oversized rubber, complete with extracting ring, and trying to insert it up in that familiar sweet snatch that had been visited one too many times recently. In no way could we could figure out a way to accommodate it, or even something half that size. So we would try to fuck with it more or less in place, only to have it spring out between us (as if having a life of its own, and a separate recalcitrant will). Then we paused, halted, and plucked the damn thing out and threw it to one side, continuing in due haste on our slippery route to the daily ecstasy.

I say this to explain how she got pregnant again so soon.

I was not particularly virile, you see, nor she exceedingly fertile, no more than any other pair, and to say we had sex frequently is to say nothing at all, to simply blow warm air out our mouths and give it no aspirated sounds, no fricatives, no gutturals to enhance it. All young lovers have sex and often. If not, there is something wrong with the relationship. I suppose there is a kind of love that goes round holding hands. Or that says, No, I won't. Or that murmurs, No, stop now. Or that utters, Please, and means it. But it must be some special love not found in dictionaries and so far beyond the reach of us Monarch dwellers as not count in the vast scheme of things. So I dismiss it.

We loved and fucked. As soon as we were able to, we Did It again. If somebody (a minister, for instance, for there were those, then and now; ministers fairly abound in some quarters) had urged restraint, we would have suggested his mental processes were impaired. He should be in the tower of the insane. For to tell lovers not to Do It is to try to drown a duck. Or to put it a better way, it is like throwing stones at the moon in hopes of injuring it so that it won't shine so. It is to hang a peach basket on a tree and not expect boys to throw large balls at it. You get my point.

We fucked before breakfast, when I awakened with what is usually called a piss-hardon. We fucked after the scrambled eggs and before the toast. Between cups of coffee or bottles of beer. Between reading assignments and classes. Before going out to the nightly tavern (Moon, Century, Rainbow, College Club, Al's, etc.) and sometimes hurried home after a couple of 15 cent schooners to Do It again, or else left the crowd early, with a glint in our eye. (Glint singular, for it is the same glint in both eyes.) We would look at each other in the library, from across our two-hour reserve book assignment due to be tested on the next morning and solemnly close our books and rise and don our coats and with serious intent move independently yet together in the direction of the door, not exactly running but with no wasted motion, either, and hasten the long blocks to the Monarch, where our crumpled bed awaited us. Ah, yes.

But often she was at the theater, performing. It was what they do, actresses and actors. There were a few destined to be famous, or at least widely recognized among the less than great. Robert Culp shone with his unique light, and everybody knew it and that he would be somebody, someday. And Lois Smith, who soon appeared on the stage, back East, and on TV dramas of a serious nature, but usually far back on the roster in a supporting role, indicating remoteness in the future from international fame. Others whose names escape me, including many who flared briefly in local production companies, made the trek to NYC or Hollywood, and died out teaching in dance schools or junior colleges around the West, bless them, (bless 'em all) and never stopped dreaming or believing in the dream, real theater, and bought tickets to other people's performances and applauded from the expensive front-row seats ever the loudest.

Plays generally started at eight or eight-thirty, and Cheryl who was chronically late to everything would never, never, be late to the theater. She would drag herself there bleeding, if necessary. And the daily strain was terrific. Actors and actresses have a nice way of helping each other out pharmaceutically, when the going gets tough, and often it does. An upper can make you breeze through your part, although those paying close attention may detect an unusual or misplaced flair. And when the curtain descends and the few hours of unwinding are permitted, the actor finds that he is racing too fast to sleep, and will keep going, talking, emoting, laughing, reciting, embellishing, comparing, chatting, drinking, phoning, smoking, driving, walking, eating, until everybody around him or her has fallen asleep. And still the happy thrill goes on.

I mean I took dexedrine exactly once and never will knowingly again. I think for a few hours there I was a bird. I did a day's work in a breeze and, looking at my watch, discovered that it was still ten o'clock in the morning. What to do with the remainder of my waking life? Surely not sleep? Sleep was held at arm's length for the rest of that day, through the coming night, and until mid-afternoon of the following day. And then I plunged—my clothes and all, a cigarette half-finished in my mouth—into a deep, black slumbering hole. I awakened a day later with a black tongue, a fire raging in my lungs.

Theater people are some of the finest human beings in the world. Of course they are damned and know it. It is what makes them wonderfully human. Their parties are absolutely unexcelled. They know how to have fun. Of course they are "on." On in the sense of "on camera." They play to each other and toss each other lines. The evening's production behind them, they are free—truly free, as none of us ordinary mortals ever are—to get thoroughly drunk or high, and enjoy themselves. And there is no acting there. (Or if so it is supremely good as to fool me and everybody else.)

The girls are pretty and the boys, well, the boys are pretty too, if you like boys who are overly handsome and tan from cosmetics. Girls in the theater often go out with boys who are gay for several reasons. One is they like them; the two share a world of dramatic intensity. Also, they are appreciative. They like girls the way girls like girls, but more kindly. And they are safe. These girls are usually beautiful and express themselves with flair, throwing broad gestures to the sky. Such expressions are often mistaken for wantonness, when they simply represent pure, expansive joy—joy being so rare in the workaday world that goes unrecognized. Its appearance confuses normal young men such as myself and they think they have been found irresistible and charming—at last. I'm sorry, but it is an act, mostly a performance based on enthusiasm and happiness, with perhaps a little speed thrown in. Nothing personal, but things are what they are, and I must say so. Sorry.

So girls in the theater often find themselves in the company of young men who do not, let us say, have a carnal interest in them, but are interested in every other way, and it comes as a treat and a great relief, not to be continually pawed and having to put your underwear back on when you are not alone. For if you are not in love, have despaired at ever or soon being, you may find that you think you will enjoy a simple good time out, and that means old friends and laughter, moderate food and drink, and participating in a world which is private in its sense of subtlety and shared allusions. In short, the theater.

But I was straight and out of an English department. English departments are different. Boy, are they. They are not fun and people do not loosen up pleasantly and have a good time. Too much is at stake—degrees, advancement, publication, reputations, etc.

To compare and contrast drama and English department parties is easy enough. Let me begin. Similarities over with, we come to how they differ. The list is long. English majors tend to be stiff and professorial. They hold their little glasses of sherry or white wine straight out and utter pronouncements that nobody is interested in hearing, whether they be right or wrong. The topic is literary figures and the latest in obscure books. They sip, they sup, they pontificate, they pronounce, they stare, they mock, they sneer (this they do better than anybody else), they ruminate, they consider, they declare, they deliberate, they offer, they disagree, they state, they advance, etc. They drink one drink, they drink two, they start number three. And then it happens, the social miracle. They are . . . transformed. No longer English majors or members of a department, they become in a flash The Monster, all hands and clammy eyes.

They grope, they climb, they feel, they roar, they cop, they grab, they hold, they mount, they bellow like stuck pigs. They stuff their mouths with food and guzzle prodigious amounts of keg beer. Eventually they pass out, but not before doing a mountain of damage. It is an incredible spectacle and a disgusting one; the degree of sudden change is unprecedented. I've glanced aside and missed the transformation. So warned, I've watch through an entire early evening keenly, waiting for the magic moment. And I've missed it again. It's not like watching a movie or stage production of, say, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in which it takes many moments of craft to produce the transmogrification. No, the English department party is speedy. Faster than one can say Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the stammering professor of Victorian studies become a maniac, hands flailing to grasp whatever sexual object is closest at hand. (Often he doesn't much care whether it be male or female, or a little of both.) He rips off his spectacularly weathered and tattered tweed coat, unzips his trousers, and with his hair flailing, spital flying from his mouth, shirttail riding akimbo, one chukka boot unlaced, the other missing he strikes out at random. His phallus is his weapon. And woe be to what he encounters, be it, human or animal.

The women denizens of English departments are not so pronounced in their dramatic changes, but alter they do, and markedly—also in the direction of licentiousness. Ugly, ugly. That wrap-round blanket skirt in striking blue and grey plaid loses its gigantic safety pin and its fabric shifts round alarmingly; her blouse becomes somehow unbuttoned, or else sans buttons from the aging professor's ripping hands; the nylons lose their garter connection and sag to ankle-height like shedding skins. Shoes get lost or thrown to blind corners, later to be tracked down like lost sheep. And coupling takes place with coupled couples conspicuously and copiously concupiscent.

They are not discreet, however, for immediacy takes precedent over decorum. It is understandable. No delay must be experienced between invitation, agreement, and performance; of this all participants are keenly aware. And the presence of others is not detriment; nay, it may even encourage coitus and loud, elaborate displays of affection by providing a ready audience. The idea of their passion being observed, recorded, and relayed is not offensive as it would be to most people or even to these same people, a few drinks ago. It is almost as though they, deprived of true expression that comes from reading so long and hard about the passion of others, seize the occasion and brook no delay. They are upon each other in a flash, and often come to completion of the act almost as quickly. It is as if they are relieved in having that sticky, troublesome business over with so promptly. On to the next target, generally a book.

A few, however, are not thoroughly sated, perhaps because of the shortness of time they are allowed. They recover fast, and are off again to find their next bullseye. You might think that, having once been through the process, they'd have become more selective this second time, but you would be wrong. The reverse is true, as if familiarity breeds something less than contempt, or else all of them—these newly liberated English majors—are engaged in coital competition to outdo each other in sheer volume and incident. Whatever, the amount of casual mating among members of the species (read English majors) is not necessarily all heterosexual in nature, increases mathematically and dramatically in type of expression. The scene is a true bacchanal, and casual as can be. What better way to get to know a stranger or to express random passion? Occasionally lasting friendships and real love are achieved this way, but most often the experiment proves disappointing and brings an ocean of regret. Fortunately the regret is as short lived as the memory of the event. A benevolent amnesia is attendant.

Drama parties are a lot of fun, while parties with English faculty and students (especially graduate students, including myself) are simply awful, ugly, and lamented afterwards.

I stuck with my kind out of dumb gratitude, I suppose, and because it was where most of my friends could be found. Cheryl, and a couple of other girls, and two or three gay boys who adored me and thought of me as their super big brother, were my only friends in drama, but I valued them. Many nights I would carry one of my young male friend home to his apartment, or that of a friend, and put him to bed; unused to drinking he had done what was not natural to him and passed out. Often it was at Cheryl's and my place. And since I truly like this guy, Ronnie, and also did not want to awaken to him snoring on my rug, or getting sick there, it was easier to pack him home to where he belonged, usually his parents' house. By doing so, I was recipient of his undying gratitude that I found misplaced and didn't want. But what is a straight guy to do? I understood their plight. These guys were my friends, sort of, and I didn't want to see them despised, ridiculed, or harmed. And they knew it. I would protect them. They didn't exactly take advantage of me so much as they knew they could depend on me, and they were right.

As for my fellow English majors, drunkenly asleep on my floor or somebody else's, they could drown in their own vomit, so far as I cared. I mean, after all, we were of the same breed, and should know enough not to violate the Aristotelian Golden Mean, not that I didn't regularly myself. But as the Three Musketeers sarcastically proclaim, "Every man for himself." This went for women, as well as men. (Without recognizing it, they were early libbers, not realizing that one day they would be seen as visionaries of the women's movement.)

It might be surmised that I had no respect for my peers, my fellow students of writing or of what other people have said in print in the long past. Not so. More truthfully it might be argued that I was no different from them in any way except perhaps in how candidly I would write on what was unique among us of a disgusting nature. That is, in time I would betray the cause. I could recognize in myself each and every one of their faults. It is this element of empathy achieved at first hand through direct experience that distinguishes English majors. Like our idol, Rimbaud, we must first destroy our sensibilities through drink, sex, and drugs, in order to achieve a superior sensibility that will be important later when we put pen to paper.

Cheryl was of both worlds, but mostly the other. Lucky her. She was at home most places, though she did not much like my fraternity brothers, some of whom had the same problem as with Cary of trying to hustle her, and failing, which was not exactly a compliment to me, nor to her, but sometimes takes place in the best of all worlds (which ours is not), and much preferred the world of theater, where she was comfortable and where her voice would carry and compete with and out exclaim practically everyone else, and for this trait was very much admired, there and elsewhere. And these were much nicer people, more innocent and lacking in duplicity and outright lewdness. But she could hold her own in my world and knew it well enough for what it was and not hold inordinate malice towards its inhabitants.

They liked her, too.

Girls in English were often in sororities and bound to that small world as if by tiny silken threads that would not permit them to stray far. They were considered intellectual lightweights by all of us males accordingly, though we acknowledged that they were highly ornamental. In comparison, Cheryl was no mental midget, but as a drama major and looking as astounding as she did was prejudged to be other than she was; in short, a dim bimbo. So because of their own shyness and inhibition (read inferiority complex) us guys in English were repressed in our words and actions until set free by a series of stiff drinks, after which they and I became the creatures described above. So she learned to watch out for them. I did, too..

I remember a wonderful party, held at my parents's house in Carleton Park at the end of my senior year, when at least two young women became pregnant. (This was one of the tests of how successful a party was, you see.) I sat in my usual chair (my very own chair) and watched a young composer whose music sounded distressingly like Charles Ives's chase my Cheryl around and through my mother's excellent rose garden. (The next day I studied the dirt for evidence and discovered the deep round imprint of her little high heels everywhere, as she moved among and between blooms and thorny stalks trying hard, but not too hard, to escape Paul's extended, piano-playing hands. This I watched as though some visitor to the planet who was on a mission only to observe. Of course I was full of Scotch and in that stunned state of mind that passes for chronic objectivity, just before it passes into unconsciousness.

Paul's wife, the late Ann London (who became national president of NOW, and who impressively debated William Buckley on national TV, and laid his tiny, pointy ears back hard, saw me as a viable male personage—she whom I had known casually for years, and while watching Paul's shenanigans for the umpteenth time, decided to inflict a like revenge. So she sauntered unsurely over to where I sat bemused and plopped her rather shapely but considerable butt on my lap. I promptly fell asleep.

I did not know what to say or do. This was fine by her, who did not want to hear anything special from me or for me to do anything explicit to her. So I did what any red-blooded American boy would do who had gulped five Scotches and was suddenly burdened by a not small woman. No, I did not pass out, as my colleagues often did. I simply rested my eyes for a prolonged spell.

I was aware that Ann had breasts, hips, pelvis, legs, neck, lips, etc., and they were all within my easy reach, but a great torpor was upon me and it was easier, more satisfying, just to remain where I was, her weight on my legs similar to that at the dentist, when he lays the lead blanket over you, prior to taking an X ray. It was not exactly a compliment.

As far as Paul and Cheryl were concerned, I cannot testify as to his success. I could not see well from where I was while still awake. I have only her account to go by, and it may not be too reliable; she might have told me what I wanted to hear instead of what had really happened. She might have put a smile on it, that is. And sometimes she outright prevaricated, I knew. It was for my own good, of course, and I soon learned to accept her words as facts.

Paul had his hands full with Cheryl. In several ways. I remember her as having a slow response time in terms of fending off roving hands. So he probably also got a good grab of whatever came into his hands. A breast or two. Some moist thigh. God knows what else. It maddened me to think about it and so I tried to stop. I wasn't entirely successful.

He monkeyed around with Cheryl and she probably didn't exactly discourage him—out of politeness, if for no other good reason. Of course I'm drawing on my own experiences for fuel. She was always careful not to offend. She would sacrifice a part of her person, if necessary. This I knew first hand. A real woman is like this. She knows men to be tender creatures who only pretend to be violent, assaultive animals with one thing on their mind, and must be treated with delicacy and consideration, or else they wilt. So she would not strike back, as much as I would like her to do.

I can see her smiling now, laughing, fending off Paul, wanting to stay in his good opinion of her. She would retreat a little from his advance, and with her own sweet hands held in front of her, their short nails lacquered red for tonight's occasion, urge him to keep his distance; she would keep him off less like a boxer than a Sumo wrestler, for she was skilled at close combat and determined to keep her privates parts to herself. Or so I hoped. Yet she wanted to remain likeable and liked. Thus the constant bright smile, the eyes twinkling with congeniality that might be mistaken for lust by someone who did not know her as well as I. And yet it was I who knew here to be truly lusty, too, but did not want to believe that she could be this way with another, or others. I did not want to be proven wrong. Yes, I was insecure, but deservedly so. If I was wrong, then there was no God, no Oversoul, no faithful Cheryl, no such thing as human trust and love. Nothing but the void.

Meanwhile, I slept, or seemed to, and Ann, mindful of not startling me by suddenly removing the bulk of herself from my thin lap, was faced with a dilemma What was there to do until Paul tired of pursuit and it was time to go home? It s seemed a long time off. She solved the problem by going to sleep herself. An excellent idea. But she awoke before me and somehow removed herself without my noticing it. I opened my eyes to a nearly empty room. Most of my friends had departed. But there was Cheryl still, staring thoughtfully into a corner. I looked there too, but saw nothing of note. Looking back I saw a cigarette burning itself out unattended in her hand. I wanted to point this out to her but she noticed it on her own and lifted it to her lips and drew on it.

Glancing around the room, I was struck by the sober fact that here I had grown up, been occasionally sick, been happy, been sad, and had written numerous short stories whose terribleness I had no idea of, or else I couldn't have finished writing any of them. Mine. Same old room, only different now in some minutiae.

Some people pass out; others sit staring long into areas that contain nothing visible. I looked for some clue. Cheryl was absorbed with something there I could not identify. I decided to break the silence strung between us:

"Cheryl?"

"Hmm?"

"Honey?"

"Huh?"

"You okay?"

"Of course I'm okay. What did you think?"

End of discussion.

I took her home. Since I was already "home," I mean I took her back to her place in the University District. Not my place, or ours, but the one that was properly hers. Her mother was coming for a visit in the morning and everything must look right. The fact that it still looked like nobody lived there didn't matter, not to Cheryl. It would do. The illusion would be maintained. Girls and women. For that matter, girls and their mothers. What a world. I was glad it was not mine, or mine however briefly. I kissed her sleepily at the door about four A.M. I considered nudging the door open with my knee and forcing myself in and having sex upon her, but we were both too tired and hungover. So it was back to the apartment alone and the lonely, rumpled bed. I felt a little like I'd been shot by rocket to the moon.

Cheryl's mother conducted a perfunctory inspection and found no sign of our living relationship; of course it was conducted somewhere else. Whew. I had subterfuges of my own. My parents often made surprise inspections. They were not so thoughtful as Mrs. Burgiss in the thoughtfulness in making an appointment. No, they just dropped in. My mother used the excuse of delivering my clean clothes, for she still did my laundry and could not be dissuaded. I never thought it was so that she could make these odd deliveries and check up on me. For my parents had met Cheryl and did not approve. It made no difference to me. No, that's not right. I simply decided to live with her anyway.

In the army a few month later I was introduced to the surprise inspection. My parents's was much like that. Talk about your deja vu in reverse. One's gear had to be in perfect order at all times or else there would be no pass—overnight or three-day, it didn't matter. No disarray was permitted. They would drop in on you at any time, you and your entire barracks. When they sprung this on me, it had a familiar ring. But I could not place it. Suddenly one day, while I was eating a chocolate fudge sundae, there it was. My folks. It took me right back to my days at the Monarch flat with Cheryl. My clean laundry. What a clever stratagem.

They were trying to catch me in the act literally. And they did, once. Cheryl and I were tearing off a piece just after dinner. There was a knock on the door. "Jesus," I sighed, "I'll bet it's them." She ran and hid in the closet. She stood and shivered behind my old tweed jackets while I tried to bore my parents and get them to leave. They could not understand my reserve and preoccupation. I stretched and yawned mightily and tried to look ready for bed. It was barely eight o'clock.

Seated on mismatched hardbacked chairs, they who always looked ill at ease looked especially so. Perhaps it was the general filthiness of the place, I reflected. Finally my mother said, "Well, I guess we had best be going." I did not protest. The stack of immaculate clothing stood in sharp contrast to the rest of the place. I yawned again and shot my arms out as far as they would go. I tried to look ready to drop.

They left. I was anxious to check Cheryl's condition. I threw the closet door open wide. She was about as I left her, wide-eyed and shivering slightly but with no noticeable goosebumps. She had put on my least favorite herringbone jacket, I observed, and it suited her. "Boy, what I have to go through for the likes of you." I smiled modestly. She added, "I don't think you're worth it." Smiled again.

"Any time," I said defensively, and we were off on yet another of those exchanges that don't quite comprise an argument but fall far short of being a loving dialogue.

Love souring? You bet your sweet ass, or rather hers. And when you bet, you sometimes lose. It comes with the roll of the dice.

Often she stayed late at the theater, and I grew thirsty, or a buddy dropped by, and we would go out for an early beer. She didn't seem to resent this, so I did it occasionally. She would join us, or else I would stop by for her with already a fine head on. There seemed to be no delay in her catching up. But she must have deeply resented it. And sometimes there were women in the party. So she might have been slightly miffed over that, as well.

I was not dating other girls, but the situation might have clear to the casual observer. I knew what I was doing. We were friends, a gang, and many of the couples changed partners weekly. The truth was (and such a statement doesn't mean I was lying before) everybody was sleeping with everybody else. We were a thoroughly heterosexual though humongous crowd, a mite randy , a tad promiscuous. And to put the kindest face on it, and it should be seen this way, we were all desperate (that word again) in our search for lifetime partners—however short a time that might turn out to be.

Boys kept trying to fit their key in the locks of all the girls around. When you found good sex (as it is called, then and now), or a great orgasm, the act and the partner tended to get repeated. Everybody was always getting pregnant and boys were busy scrounging up money to pay for the abortion. And there were girls even then who saw the responsibility for pregnancy as being mainly theirs, and disdained telling affectionate boys that they were at fault, even when they were, and did not lie when they were not sure, pinning it on some hopeless one of them (whoever's number came up in the sexual lottery), but took it on themselves to act nobly and honorably, scrounging up their own money to pay for it and going with a girl friend to the abortionist's office on the tenth floor of the innocuous office building housing ordinary doctors, lawyers, and dentists, and had the dreadful act performed on their own sweet bodies, the responsible male not in attendance.

One night (my?) Cheryl (still?) surprised me by coming into the Century Tavern with the ex-husband of her best friend, Beth. This was Nick Zanitis, a handsome devil about six years older than the rest of us and a war veteran; he looked a little like Gilbert Roland in his heyday or Kevin Klein ten years ago. I was having a quiet beer with my friend Jack Leahy. He looked up and, seeing Nick with Cheryl, and every male eye in the place on her, as always, because of her incredible good looks and rampant sexuality, said to me, "Well, if it has to be anyone, I'm glad it's Nick."

I threw my beer all over Jack, a fresh schooner's worth, and Jack, an Irishman, began throwing punches at me. I was amazed at how light they were and began catching them harmlessly in my open hands, as though I did this every day. It was much like playing softball with powderpuffs. This disdain infuriated him further and, of course, he was sopping wet. One punch I missed and it glanced like down off the side of my head. I could not believe its incredible lightness of being.

People strived to restrain him. He spilled backwards in his raw Irish fury, crashing into a wooden booth and separating it from the bench seat attached. It shattered. Pitchers and schooners and sodden cigarette packs went flying. People sprung from the booths and headed for safety. Ben, the bartender—he who was so fierce and unyielding to our daily pleas—ducked behind the counter and did not emerge until the fight was over.

Nobody joined in the tussle. Instead, stronger, more experienced hands—heavy customary drinkers, street fighters—interjected themselves and forced us apart with a bored air.

"Let me at him," cried Jack.

"Let him at me, " cried Bob.

But they didn't, wouldn't.

Ben, emerging from behind his warrior's shield of the bar, said, "Get out of here, both of you. Don't ever come back." We both took this as the daily hyperbole and paid it scant attention. But others urged us to leave, too. It seemed a good idea to both of us. So out the front door we went. We had lost our cigarette packs and change. But we had our wallets.

"What are we going to do?" I asked. We were dry.

Jack, never at a loss, said, "Let's get a half-case and go to my place and drink it."

"Good idea, " I agreed.

3

There had always been an element of jealous rage in our relationship. She was insecure and I played upon it, perhaps unknowingly. Her father I had gathered was a professional gambler with an alcohol problem. She had loved him dearly, but hadn't seen him for years and had nearly given up. He would dart into her life and out again, leaving in his trail a faint odor of booze and those small dark smokes that aren't quite cigars but a far cry from cigarettes. And some crumpled jacks and aces. I suppose he indulged her in teddy bears and little sips from his whiskey glass and twenty dollar bills. But he was always gone. Somewhere more interesting.

There had been a succession of men after him, mostly her mother's lovers, a few of them disguised as family friends. She was a pretty little girl and learned early she could charm most men and boys with her fabulous blue/grey eyes and fair hair. A bit later with her sweet shape. She matured early and soon found she had breasts that made boys turn their heads for a long look when she passed by. Such power. Boys, like daddy, controlled the revolving world. Women, girls, they were powerless creatures that got whatever they deserved the way that they deserved it, by looking and acting right. And her mother did not deny this. Looking at her mother, I could not picture her as a thing of beauty, but had to surmise that in her day she had the same great sex appeal as her daughter.

Boys always look quizzically at the mother and try to imagine themselves fucking that—as they would put it, with characteristic obscenity. And they always have (at least I have had) trouble picturing themselves engaged in the famous act of love. So what you do, Bruce, is console yourself with some romantic youthful vision before the mother's face had fallen hideously and childbirth and repetitious domestic labor had rendered her body a fleshy tub without much pneumatic promise. So you rewrite the story, redraw the lines of history, and create for yourself a Barbie Doll of the prurient kind. Use your imagination. And still you can't picture yourself fucking this aging woman. And she knows you can't and deeply resents you for it, not being able to or even wanting to or being able at the very least to envision it barely, and you are sorry, Mom, but it is how it is. Perhaps the vision is too close to reality in time and shape and in resemblance to your own mother, and that is why. What is deemed the Incest Barrier is too strong. It would be like doing mother herself.

I suppose I fight shy from visiting Cheryl today because of the memory of her mother—who was then twenty years younger than Cheryl is today. I need my illusions still. A writer requires both allusion and illusion, and will not willingly give them up, for if he does he is apt to be left alone, naked in the cosmos. The cosmos, incidentally, does not have electric heat or a warming oven for your boots. It does not issue mittens, either.

The temperature of absolute zero is 273.15 degrees below zero. Celsius scale. Absolutely. Guaranteed.

He who says, "When I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil," does not know what he is talking about. Or else he is whistling up his private alley and lying in his sleeve. Or is so stupid he doesn't know the consequence of what he is saying. I prefer not to be counted in their number.

So let us say in modest understatement that Cheryl was insecure. Insecurity can be played upon as the wind upon a harp. A boy with quick, blunt fingers will play upon her harp as he will upon her liquid body. He will without explicit knowledge that he is doing so exploit her as surely as if he sold her on the street for a hill of beans. But she will explore his corresponding weaknesses as well. She will render him trembling in the boots that are oversize for him. For he remains a vibrant boy and she is Cheryl, of course.

It is a shame, I've always thought, that baby-faced boys are greatly desired by girls who occupy the bodies of grown women. Time and again I've seen such couples on the streets of life and forgotten when I was once one of them. The girls are veritable Eula Vaners. They are soft sex machines, able to move through locomotion. They have loveliness lost on crass youth, on callow boys. I'm of a mind to walk right up to one of these couples, brush the male member (I mean, the boy) aside, and address myself directly to the female component, saying in a kind, fatherly tone, "I don't believe you believe, my dear, in the enormity of the situation you may find yourself in. It universal aspect. For this person strutting beside you does not have, believe me, your best interests at heart. He wishes to defile you, if he hasn't already. Now take myself. Not immodestly I might point out that I am much more suitable for you. You see, I once was a boy myself, hard as this may be to conceive of. And I had girls myself almost as lovely as you. Forgive me, but a few were even prettier and more curvaceous. I don't mean to slight you, darling, but I must utter the truth. Yes, I am a writer, and speak with a writer's notched tongue, but that is another matter. Disregard it.

And then I would proceed to explain to them that while I am not so smooth-cheeked or strongly angular anymore, I am indeed sexually experienced and can even, be it necessary, provide references. A veritable lineup of former vixens will spring forward to testify as to my skills in bed and how I pleased them, often several times in a night, and that not so far off in vanished time. You will be surprised and delighted. I am known as a performer, not a talker. But I like to talk, too, and provide sterling conversation, fore and aft.

Conversation, however, is not what I offer you. What I am going to suggest is that we ditch this mere boy you are with, with whom you thought you were smitten, and adjourn to the nearest motel and commence strenuous engagement in sex, post haste. Now such an approach might offend a woman with more experience, judging by the company you keep, but if I am wrong, I apologize, but do not let us waste time on more apologies when we could be utilizing it much more effectively. In short, my dear, let's fuck.

No, it won't work. It hasn't worked in the past, it won't work right now, and it will never work in the future. For if I think I know women, after all this time, I also recognize the limitations of such an approach, which are absolute. (If you still don't know what absolute is, it is 458.67 degrees below zero. Fahrenheit scale. Believe me or not.)

I bought my Cheryl wine and roses, chocolates and a corsage for my frat's spring prom. I paid the rent at the Monarch usually. I even washed a dish or two, but admit succumbing to my lifelong reluctance and letting them pile up in the sink until there was nary a clean one left. I tried to be attentive to her but must have failed due to self-preoccupation and -absorption, my unmitigated lack of concern about anything other than myself. And if I could do it all over again, be the thoughtful, slow fucker I know myself to be, due in part to the ravages of time, always watching out for her pleasure ahead of mine, bathing her with unflagging keen eyes, adoring her purely, stroking her tenderly (for it is tenderness above all they wish from us, when it is not downright roughness), buying her expensive dinners, sending her on chaste island vacations anywhere in the world, etc., I would not do it over again and she would not want me to.

We are what we are and what we have been. Prisoners of ourselves.

I had my friends, she had hers. Aside from Beth, Nick Zinitis's former wife, I can't think of any that were women, though. Hers, I mean. I had plenty. She would not comprehend that a man can be a friend with a woman. A man needs an understanding woman friend, especially when he has somebody he is fucking who is not understanding, a lot of the time. Women and men can be friends. (Of course this is the great delusion.) A(nother) woman can provide a respite from the terrors of a long-term sexual relationship going bad. (And we were.) She can provide sympathy, a kind ear, a loving body. Ah, there's the rub.

How do we tell a threat from an ally? It is in how we come to the test—the basic equipment that we bring, which is the sum total of our being, all of our experiences with the opposite sex to date, for good and for bad. (I know, I know: even the bad is good, but is it really?) We believe ourselves to be thoughtful, trusting persons who hold a mirror up to our behavior and see no conflict of interest reflected, no self-delusion, no mocking shame. And we are eternally wrong.

I would write down a list of the crimes I committed against Cheryl, but I can't for the life of me (and at the time it seemed my life itself was at stake) think of one. Only the crimes of torture she committed against the grand innocence of me. But if I could, I do not have enough words in my vocabulary or blank pages on which to put them all down. So why try to do it? I protest: I was not only not-guilty but marvelously innocent. Sure, I frequented the company of girls and women, some of them beautiful (rivaling certainly but never exceeding the Cheryl who was no longer quite mine), but that is only because beauties tend to dominate in my circle of intellectual friends, and, given the choice between parties of exact equal attainment, who will choose the ugly one? Not I, nor any of us lads.

I will record but two tiny crimes of mine, that pair being enough to prove I was not at fault. Once, when Cheryl had an abortion, and I considerately had gone without sex for so long as two or three days (longer than when she was having her period, which then seemed quite a while ago, and was), I became specially needy and loving, and she permitted me entrance and afterwards became infected with what I left in her, in her bloody wound, and got sick, sicker, sickest, and had to go to the doctor, barely able to walk to my car, and the doctor filled her with the new wonder drug, penicillin, and, lo, she became well again and (surprise, surprise) I went at her again, and filled her up again, and she infected again. And, Lord, I am so very, very sorry, even forty-five years later. But it was not my fault. It was hers. . . . For being so beautiful

The other instance was wanting to marry her and hounding her with my entreaties until she ran away from me—at first briefly, then for an intermediate length of time, and finally for good.

It had seemed to me that if we could conceive twice, in such a minimal span, we were designed for marriage and the raising of tots, and coming from a home in which divorce was not recurrent (unlike hers) it was only natural for me to harness our lust (still considerable) and bring it into the barn, so to speak, in terms of having a family. That we were ill suited to each other and temperamentally incapable of anything less or more than exactly what we already had, that is, a senior-year love affair of combustible intensity, we should have been grateful for our share of heaven. So I took her downtown for blood tests and bullied her into signing up for a marriage license with both our names on it, and buying a simple gold band at Frederick and Nelson's, the department store where my father worked and got us a discount, and brought her to meet my parents repeatedly, refusing to acknowledge that they didn't like her or her type (whatever that might be: candidate for non-traditional mother of the year, with apron yet and hubby not engaged in meaningful commerce), and kept refusing to give her or us their blessing, which meant a lot to me, then and later. But marry her I would, damn it and damn us, and my parents finally recognized my dedication, if not the saneness of my choice, and seemed to be going along with it, the gag. Still I refused to see Cheryl's side of the matter.

It was that I was a dumb, possessive, immature, writer/child who could not earn a living (her subsequent boy friends all had a lot of money, which should have told me something, albeit too late to be useful) and was driving her loony, she who had not so far to go in that direction as I, and that she must get away and fast. Or else not survive. Die. For I was dangerous to the likes of her, being ordinary and traditional, whereas she simply wanted to act and live freely for a while in the world of theater. So what was the harm?

She said, No, in so many ways, but they all came out, I love you. And if the fights were horrendous, the making up was sublime. Great, biting, screaming, teeth-gritting sex that left us gasping in a lather, grinning wildly at each other, exhausted. Why, the orgasms were almost worth the price. For the cost was one's health, tranquility, and the prospect of a future something less than a state of constant anguish. This we both knew in our hearts' bones. So it was a bitter/sweet event, our getting back together, each time, now that things had sickened and spoiled. I trace it back to those twin events that, I repeat, I was not responsible for but (hear me out) solely a participant in. It was Cheryl, not I, who let our love die. Me, I would have clutched it and her to my breastbone for the rest of my life—which would have been necessarily short.

I went into the army in spring of the next year, 1952, having given up twenty-five pounds on my already lean frame. If she had fed me better and tormented me less, I'd have sustained my weight on a diet of only beer and hardboiled eggs. She was a fair cook, on those occasions when nothing pressed her and she could go into the kitchen and stay there for an hour or so. And I don't remember her reading a single book, only playbooks, with lines to memorize, which she was good at—a quick study, they say. But she seemed to have read as much as I—I was slowly becoming knowledgeable. I mean, if I but mentioned a book, she had something keen and meaningful to say about it. Later I became suspicious that this too might be acting.

The army was pressing me. I knew it was a matter of time. I had fairly begged them to let me finish my undergraduate education before drafting me for the Korean War, and when a degree had been reluctantly bestowed on me and my draftboard hovered near again I dropped to one knee and pleaded a new case. Shouldn't I be given one short year more in which to get a second degree? Wouldn't the army benefit from it, true, in ways intangible, but to some degree wouldn't it be useful to them? Not especially smart to begin with, mightn't I go into Intelligence, become smart faster, and the enemy get defeated in half the time?

No, they replied; get ready to go. We see you as soldier material. Whatever intellectual attainments and degrees you may garner we are not interested in them, no matter how slickly you package your case. We want your body, young soldier. So . . . pack your duffle.

Meanwhile, Cheryl was inching away from me—first by the foot, then by the yard. A traveling group of players was organizing for an onslaught on the intellectual wilderness of Canada, and she was offered a subordinate role in performing repertory Shakespeare for the provinces. There was an ingenue (even more beautiful than not-quite-mine Cheryl) who had all the young starring parts and an older woman, one a bit haughty but just right for the mature parts, which left my love floating in the narrow middle. Nonetheless, she believed, she believed, the minor parts would add to her professional advancement. Everybody knew it. Didn't I? Well, not exactly. Shakespeare was famous for a number of good things, but not this.

Neither did I agree with the principle of taking my baby away from me, whatever the reason. Shakespeare was an old tree, in that he had been around for a stately length of time and would always remain available for the taking, his branches extended to the sky, his leaves and needles green, the carpet beneath him sheltered from rain, snow, and mud. Ever green. So, please, my love, remain at home with me. Stay here in Hell, where I can lay siege to you and beseech you. For my heart's sake—that boneless organ that has no spine but can be as hard as a cock with murderous intent.

She wanted my consent, you see. I remained important to her. She asked me with those famous blue-grey eyes, Please, please, tell me I can go. Let me. And I withheld permission. I withheld it because I knew that if I consented the most I would get of her in the future was a glimpse in passing, say, as the train pulled out of the station or the aircraft (they had propellers then) taxied on to the runway and bent into the wind for takeoff.

So she went off provisionally. (It is as good a way to go as any.) She could always bug out after the third performance of the first play, if she gave them notice, for her part was not large. There was the rollicking possibility of better things to come, since the ingenue was pregnant by a man who had handled scenery but was not in the troupe any longer. She was experiencing morning sickness, but since plays were performed as matinees and on the weekday in the evening, she was usually recovered by curtain time. Still, Cheryl had hopes. Of course she was pulling for the girl's complete recovery. An abortion would solve the problem, and soon did, but by then the troupe was in Calgary and I was languishing in Seattle, still in mufti but wondering how I would look in khaki, with my sallow complexion.

She wrote me dutifully, always in pencil, as if there were thoughts and feelings unwilling to be set down firmly in ink. And often her letters to me, full of reassuring strokes and endearments, had soft, fuzzy edges where she had changed her mind, or her intention had shifted. I tried to read through these worn places to find what her original thought had been, her feelings, but was never able to. I had to take her literally at her corrected word. This did not make for great confidence.

I had more than doubts, for I think I was suffering from a growing paranoia brought on by my own small betrayals, for it was possible for Cheryl to go off into the literal wilderness and act until eleven o'clock at night, and relax afterwards with her friends over a beer or joint or downer, and remain ever faithful to me, pure as the snows of Ontario, but a big boy like me, left alone in graduate school, is full of confusion and trepidation. I was in a state of diminished health (taking weekly vitamin shots, along with regular doses of penicillin for my recurring gum infection), and believed I could trust nobody entirely , least of Cheryl, and certainly not myself and my critical evaluation of situations.

It was only natural for a boy with normal urges to find himself often in the company of a sympathetic woman who wanted to allay what was troubling him so much, namely, a stiff prick. And while he (this anonymous needy person) and I will primly refuse and even feign insult at being so portrayed, our arguments are not convincing. We are miserable. And tiny betrayals (say, an afternoon' short fuck with some girl you are not attracted to and don't much like even) combine to produce a state very much like war, an internal war, and the boy finds him despising himself and grasping quite well why his Cheryl no longer finds him stimulating or fun. He cannot stand himself, either. And since he is doomed eternally to live with himself, he is unhappy for endless-seeming periods. To vent and avenge himself, on himself, he will find occasions to betray. And the self-loathing process goes on.

I did not enjoy myself in school, either. It was a highly competitive place, but then I was competitive, too. Fiercely so. Denied a teaching assistant's job (wise, wise) but offered the job of reader for a favorite professor who believed me to be reasonably familiar with modern American, modern British, and modern European literature, and while I wasn't all that sharp, there were not many around who were more so, so perhaps I stood out. I did, at least, with him—who kept giving me As. I was already reading for an professor (a neo-Nazi, by the way) who taught a group of weird cats who called themselves The Transcendentalists. A bunch of New England snobs was who they were, really, guys who thought of God as some sort of Addressable Ether. So among the blind the short-sighted will lead, and I did, although haltingly, with an occasional gross stumble.

At the same time that I was reading diverse student term papers on, say, Chekhov's plays, Forster's novels, and Hemingway's short stories, giving them passing or failing marks at my whim, I was writing badly in known metric forms, expressing my very real grief at the loss of Cheryl. (I even set one ballad to the tune of O Canada.) Sure, I can laugh at myself now, but at the time I had totally lost my sense of humor, balance, and perspective. I was waiting for the army to rescue me. Verily, when it did, it saved my life.

So I responded to Cheryl's uncertain pencil with my own uncertain but forceful ink, scratching out a word here and letting stand there some stupid statement designed to win her back but which probably infuriated her further. "When will you be home, baby?" I cried. "I miss you so." And not saying, or perhaps forgetting myself and doing so: "God, how I'd like to stick it in you, again, and walk you around the block (so impaled)." Other gentle epithets I might coin, alternating between the precepts of Courtly Love and those of current pornography. Those two, by the way, are not so far apart.

"Love me or leave me, " I sang to her, who had already left, as though I were slow to have learned the fact. And she encouraged me to believe, she did, in her return. To me. She was guilty, as I have maintained all along, of deception in the name and arms of love. "I miss you so," she hummed, at least on the page, she did. And I: If you do, why aren't you here? For I ne-e-ed you. Come home immediately. I command it." (Of course this isn't an order, only my fervent plea. Sugar? You hear me? Please? Your boobie speaks.

She did return, once briefly, and another time I took a long ferry ride to Victoria to watch a performance. We tore off a quick piece, then another, and continued until our loins felt like they had been sandpapered during the night by a crew of vicious dwarfs. The more we did it, the worse it got, until finally we looked at each other in exhausted dismay and, still not fully sated, acknowledged to our private selves that none of the old tricks of love still worked. They were but painful echoes of themselves. Even going down was. Putui.

You go down in the depressing stages of love with determination and fury. I'll show you, with my lips and tongue. Take that. No, you take that. And that. And love expresses itself in the metaphors of combat, fierce battle. A lick and a bite, each rendered a bit too tellingly. A lick and a promise, too, but a promise of what? Such a loss is nobody's gain.

We ate in sad restaurants and walked puddled streets and talked of the end of things, us and the world. We clung together like babies on the Lusitania, though each longed to swim free. For just as there a springtime for love, so there is its winter, and it must be endured. It cannot be denied or lightly skipped over; it must follow its awful course. There are dues in love, and they must be paid—annually if you are so lucky, but often much more frequently. Daily, weekly, monthly—just like the rent. For truly love is rented, even true love. It is not sold, for good. And it is not owned, for nobody owns anybody else. We are just each other's extended promissory note.

Lovers live with each other lovingly, but there is an economic piper to be paid, that is, the literal rent. The money must be found to provide a home for love. Love does not live alone, nor can it exist in a tent, not even for the few days of summer. Love must be buttressed, but those possessed by it are in no position to built walls for mission or mansion, or set their feet in slow-drying concrete. The nature of love is brief. Both parties know it and accept with the contract the sweet tenderness of what is known to be ephemeral and must die. But lovers begin to plea bargain. Dear God, let it and us last another day. (Me, too.) A week more. And it is a Faustian pact, but wholly one-sided in nature, for the devil is not party to it, no matter how much he may be entreated and enjoined. You plead your case to an empty sky, or rather to an unoccupied dot in the ether. Either way your words blast into space and die helplessly there. You are left gasping and gaping at the sky, while drops of unidentifiable liquid pepper fall on your tongue and leave you with the taste of metal on your lips. You breath is most foul.

I loved this woman, I maintain, and did her or our love no harm. I remained true in my fashion—though as Tommy Smothers once said, I might fool around a bit. Even my fooling around was pure in intent. It was pure because it was I who was fooling around. (With another it might be deemed adultery, I am aware.)

We saw each other through tears, and tears produce a cloudy vision. We saw each other, our remaining few last times, with longing hanging on the edge of aversion. We gave each other a version, a vision (a yellow basket). We pledged each other undying faithlessness. We clung to each other (at least I did, and it was my reason I clung to) not to let our partner escape. The best way to do this is was to dig in the old talons. Never let go. Hold the heavy heart in both hands and sigh a lot. Lock hands and fingers and toes in the name of love. Use rope and handcuffs, if necessary.

For love will leave on wings of haste. Love has to be nailed to the floor. You put love in a bottle and plunge in the cork, quick. You hammer shut all the doors. Windows you seal with ear wax and do not open them on pain of life. For it will escape you, love will, and when love flees, it throws its shorts and dirty socks in a valise and doesn't look back until it reaches the nearest motel and books itself into loneliness.

Love is quick to disclaim itself and its true purpose.

While she was in some remote forest of Winnipeg or New Brunswick, as far as she could get from me and still be on the continent, the army nuzzled its muzzle nearer and got ready to suck me up. I was inducted, in due course. There was a going-away party for me held by one Judd Pearson, an assistant professor of (me Gawd, I don't believe it) sociology, who drank red wine and regularly played the bongos till dawn. Everybody came except the one who I hope loved me most, Cheryl. She was now in Saskatchewan. It lasted till dawn. Judd explained to us how Tony Martin was a better tenor than Mario Lanza. It was heresy, but we loved him for it and recognized the provisional truth it contained. Really? Tony Martin? There were about 200 people present and I learned the yawning truth that parties were really not held to honor somebody but for the sake alone of the party. Big news there. So the fact that I was lonely at my own party was meaningless or, rather, to be expected. I drank in a corner (actually, under a dining room table) and recited T. S. Elliot to anybody who came near; my voice was as near to his as I could make it.

At seven A.M. I was the army's, not for evermore but for the next three years, which then seemed as long. I was transitioned from one life to another in unequalled haste. I was literally being whisked away to the ultimate life-in-death, namely the U.S. Army.

A plane (DC-4, for those who care) took us from Seattle to Portland. A cloudless sky should have warned us of what was in store. The air was rocky, and so were those of us who had partied the last night. This was most of us. We landed in Portland to pick up a few more and were air lifted rapidly to cruising height. Some fool began counting the bumps, a merry young soul. Lunch was served. It was cold fried chicken in a box. We nibbled warily. The plane decided to climb to a higher altitude in hope of escaping the turbulence. Young soldiers began to get sick. I was in the middle group of barfers, holding out longer than I should have. Soon we all began to look like we had been gassed— something we'd soon learn about at first-hand. Three-quarters of us were ill, and counting. The remainder were right as rain, still counting the bumps and asking to finish up our fried chicken, if we didn't want it. We arrived in Monterey, California, and the lovely ground rose firmly to meet us. We descended the gangplank of the aircraft and found steady red soil beneath our feet again. We began to revive. Hunger came to life again. We ate at the commissary of the South Monterey Bay Airport—pie, burgers, coffee, shakes, everything. It all looked good. We were reborn to our former selves but with a difference. We were suddenly soldiers.

Soldiers. God help us. Or anybody else.

Cheryl wrote to me during my basic training, but not very much. I remember best letters from other girls and women, namely Hilda and dear old Julie, who was but moments away at Stanford in Palo Alto, fifty miles off. It might have been a thousand. Those halcyon days of college were only weeks behind me, but I could remember them about as well as some old movie.

There is a place in the heart of an aging writer for all those who wrote letters to him in his time of need; they will never be diminished, no matter what came next. And Cheryl (who is never at fault here) did write me. When I returned to Seattle after eight weeks of pretending to be a killer soldier (weight regained, cheeks ruddied, hair lopped short, looking sleek and mean) my love was waiting for me. Sort of. I suppose with dread.

With returned physical health I had gone through a badly needed transformation, one designed to save my life. (she had saved hers another way.) I was wearing the infantry blue-piping and bloused boots and cunt cap that denoted the body of a fighting man, though beneath my weathered exterior beat the heart of a coward, a pacifist. I had made a mental pact with myself that if the army brought me so near as being shipped off to FECOM, I would at gangplank's boarding turn aside and reveal myself as an objector—conscientious or not, it did not matter to me. But a definite pacifist, one not to be persuaded otherwise or brain-washed into picking up a weapon and discharging it at some poor sap determined to be my enemy. My spirit thus far remained unbroken, though I had learned the wisdom of keeping my ideas to myself, my jaws clamped tight. Courts-martial is the world's worst punishment. The stockade at Leavenworth, Kansas, was where they sent AWOLs and deserters. Plus anybody who would not get on the boat when his cut orders said to.

Basic training behind me, I was to be returned to Seattle according to plan. This is what I had signed up for. I took the bus instead of flying, and rode for nearly thirty hours the torturous milk route between Fort Ord, San Francisco, and Seattle. Queen Elizabeth had just been crowned and the man beside me on the plush green seats was from England; he was determined to tell me why Britain no longer needed a monarch and how, if it did, this pedestrian woman was not the one for the job. He had a copy of Life magazine in which she was lavishly pictured, and he kept referring to it for visual evidence of the travesty being committed on the English people by this pious imposter. Page by page, he led me through the magazine and pointed out subtle evidence of her depravity and mental incompetence. I had to admit, he was convincing.

The Royals (as he called them) had been inbred for centuries and had continuous nose bleeds, all of them. They buggered each other often, regardless of rank or closeness within the family unit. When idiot bastards were born, their little lives were snuffed out, behind the scenes, and never reported. The guillotine for anybody who leaked the news. Meanwhile, waiting for the throne, they slobbered into their cuffs and threw porridge at each other, even when full grown. On and on he went, as my fever raged.

I was ill with that endemic (also epidemic) condition called URI. If I call it upper respiratory infection, you might mistake it for the common cold, which would be a big mistake. URI is to the common cold as a wren is to a turkey, a hangnail to AIDS, a perch fry to gallivanting Moby Dick. We had all been sick with it for weeks, but had managed to keep ahead of its development by leading an active life, one including practically no sleep; it had to have sleep, you see, in order to catch up with you. If you spent so much as seven consecutive hours in bed, it would devour you unwittingly. So the army kept us running, never giving us no more than three hours sleep, so we would grow up to be good soldiers, strong, tougher in battle. This in turn would lead to a higher percentage of us surviving in combat than was usually the case. So they kept us up and running, through the night and cold and wet, for our own benefits. If once you stopped, URI. I could not thank them enough.

But on that long ride home, the Brit beside me prattling on and on about the promiscuity of the new candidate for queen and the court around her, and how he now hoped now she would have the decency to stop, for good, I found myself in yet a far different environment, this one uncomfortably overheated. I began to sweat through my flannels and feel queasy and decidedly unwell. Could I make it to Portland, without an ambulance being summonsed to take me away? If so, could I endure another four hours to Seattle? Yes, but just barely.

I crashed into my parents' spacious house and old familiar bed, and in the morning, due at my duty station in downtown Seattle at eight A.M., found I couldn't move my flippers, let alone my fins. I was one sick fish, bobbing along underwater. So I called in sick, and was informed there was no such status in the army as being sick abed. Either you were at your duty station or you were on official sick call, which could only be determined by reporting promptly and now to Fort Lawton's medical center. Providently it was only a mile away, and I was highly familiar with the place, having shined shoes there as a boy, bought my cheap cigarettes there at the age of fifteen, gone to movies not yet released to the theaters there, and shot baskets at the gym that was right across the street from the, lo, this very same hospital.

My parents delivered me by sedan and a male nurse who walked a little peculiarly, I noted, as though suffering from breathing difficulties, took my temperature delicately with a tiny silver tube, and announced, "My goodness, you must get right into bed, you poor thing." It was old URI, incubated into something bordering on pneumonia or, worse, incurable TB. My temperature stood at 104 degrees, which was not normal for a functioning soldier.

My doctor, a Chinese/American, read my chart with evident boredom. Why not alarm? He wanted them to send him more interesting cases. Each day was the same old thing over again. He longed for a case of typhoid, I suppose, or perhaps the black plague, an epidemic of it. But not URI again. He was awaiting the day he'd get out—return to civilian life where he could pursue something intelligent, like gynecology.

Although a bit inattentive to me and my needs, he proved a good guy and he was delighted to find a patient who had gone to college. How rare. I was happy in turn to find one too, albeit a doctor and a cursed officer. We struck a no-tell bond over the works of William Faulkner, but not before he filled my ass with three million units of penicillin and gave me some oral APCs with codeine in them to keep me tranquil and nondisruptive.

Each day an orderly took my temperature and a chest X ray. The ravages of the disease showed up as lesions on my poor lungs. It was like TB, in a way, but differed in its lack of seriousness and how easily it could be cured with drugs and bed rest. Day by day my temperature came down like moisture evaporating from a rain gauge, for the last of the spring storms was abating. When I had reached 99 degrees of fever, or the absence of it, I was champing at the bit. Dressed in army pajamas (the only kind allowed in hospitals, for the rest of the time you slept in clean underwear, ready for the morrow) and a robe more suitable for a naval officer, at least in color, for it was the deepest of blue, I roamed the hallways of the single-level building and mooched cigarettes from my neighbors outside of the quarantine area. They had all been warned not to give us any of what was, indeed, the commonest currency, here or elsewhere in any military prison.

One afternoon I slipped out to a payphone in the hallway. This was not permitted, since I was still technically in isolation, but if I could make it out nobody would complain or forcibly return me to my bed, kicking and screaming. I called my friend, Rick, the guy who was Jack Leahy's best man at the wedding, he being the only one whose number I still remembered.

"Rick?"

"Yeah, Bob."

"You know where I am?"

"Fucking army hospital, right?"

"It is. Help me. I want to escape."

"You came to the right party. Speaking of which, there's one on for tonight."

"Oh?"

"Music, singing. No booze, though. Coffee house. Cheryl will be there. She's anxious to see you, buddy."

I won't say that I was eager to see her any more than I'd mention that, say, the sun poked above the horizon about six this morning.

" Let's go," I shouted, my hand muffling my shout over the mouthpiece of the phone.

The scam was this: after the patients had been fed their usual thin gruel dinner and our plates cleared away, I would saunter back to the firedoor of our wing (the contagion unit) and perhaps light a cigarette (forbidden, of course, but I had 'em now) or raise a lit match in the air as signal. This would mean for Rick, who was now outside, to blink his headlights to indicate where he was parked. Then I would casually open the back door, which we often did, for fresh air (the windows all painted being painted shut by some goon), stretching my arms, yawn, as we dogfaces were known to do at encountering the threat of freedom—and bolt for Rick's Chevy. I'd dive into the backseat and hide myself on the floor under a blanket, so nobody would suspect that Private Arnold was under the rug. Rick, with a squeal of tires, would head for the gate and wave goodbye at the blinking guard who had just admitted him just moments earlier. Clever, what?

And it worked just like that.

Now a coffee house differed from a coffee shop like Howard's and has in common only that both serve coffee. But the latter is boiled and full of chicory, while the former is specially brewed of imported beans and steamed and served in cups a fifth the size and at a cost five times as much. Also music is had at a coffee house. Folk music, something new, though old, having gone on in some quarters practically forever. It was the music-of-the-day, instantly intelligible and a groove.

Cheryl met me there. We were awash with shame and remorse. She was back in town momentarily, the Shakespeare tour having ended and the group disbanded. A happy coincidence for me, though filled with trepidation for the both of us. A lot of water had gone under our bridge, over our dam, through the roaring culvert that defined us. Where were we now, afloat? She had a new lover, I gathered, but was free for tonight to meet with me ("an old friend?") at an innocuous place—one without liquor and where only music and coffee were served. No sex. I can picture her explaining this to him, with those wide-open blue eyes of a gray tone, innocent as Cleopatra. I had heard such stories from her in my own time and knew how convincing she could be, if I only believed her. But I couldn't. (Could he?)

So we sat there, listening to some girl complaining about love, while her waterfall hair kept falling into her guitar strings and entangling there. She played as though it posed no problem. being strummed there. She sang of love unrequited, and we looked blankly at her, not comprehending; she sang of love fulfilled, and we nodded our heads in sage agreement. I remember quite specifically "Frankie and Johnny," goes on practically till dawn, but finally reaches its tragic climax, just as we had reached ours, and is over, as we were. I regarded Cheryl and noted again how her clothes fit her so well. I won't say that the evening marked our terminus, for that had been achieved some time ago, but it had a special sad significance. She knew it and I even I knew it and acknowledged it as some sort of tardy fact. But both of us continued to cling with ancient fierceness. But our fingers were like spiderwebs. The bonds kept breaking apart. They were as frail as fleeting thoughts.

We needed more.

Of course at the end of the evening we found ourselves in bed. It goes like this until you fuck for the final time. It is always the way, under sentence of banishment from the cosmos. By this time Cheryl was (for all practical purposes, that is, mine) in love with another, and plunged deep into the world of dexedrine and Martell brandy and phenobarbital to compensate for the ravishes of the first two. One lover, two lovers, three lovers, four? (How do I love you? Let me could the ways.) I kept after her, wanting to see her and see if we could smooth things our. Fool. The resulting times were painful for me beyond belief.

Finally we stopped it, or rather I did. The awfulness outweighed the joy by several orders of magnitude. She had one lover (at least I presume she slept with all of them who took her out, as she had with me) that ran a jazz club and broadcast local session with legends over the radio. An impresario is what he was, among other things.. Another guy was getting his Ph.D. degree in behavioral psychology, and would have succeeded admirably, only the rats refused to obey him and he couldn't complete his project. He went major bonkers. And finally there was John Simon, noted raconteur and recent Harvard Ph.D., who specialized in the seduction of young female students in search of grades enabling them to be initiated into their enabling sororities. He fucked them, willing or not, and rewarded them with deserving Cs and Ds—the intellectual's revenge. Quel betrayal. They were of course outraged, but what could they do? It is always the case with bullies.

John took Cheryl back to New York City, when his contract was up, where he wrote vicious books of literary criticism, laced with snide innuendo, and proving to the world that he was a power to contend with. And he was—an enemy to be avoided at all cost, and a threat to any married woman except his own.. He surprised me, marrying Cheryl while I was in the army overseas in Anchorage, unable to defend myself; of course this was all bluster; Cheryl was long gone from me and my world, wherever that spinning world now might happen to be. I'd lost her, and knew it in what was left of my mind.

It was into the frying pan for her, or into the crucible—I had no way of knowing which from my distant perspective. Either one would do equally well from the standpoint of turmoil. She soon started psychoanalysis, I heard, and John paid for it with family money, as part of the divorce settlement three years later. I have no doubt that she loved him at the start, though perhaps only as a masochist loves her tormenter, and am certain it was not how she loved me, which had a certain amount of sweetness and light, right up to our final days. This fragile thought is what I comforted myself with, during the long Alaskan winter. Loved me to some greater extent than she had the jazz buff, the rat man, the lewd professor she had married, plus others fore and aft I did not know of and thus cannot mock or reduce to some silly tag because of lack of information. But there were those, I am sure.

Years later I heard from Dave Norton, a mutual friend (dead from his own hand, a few years later, following a long siege of wine-thick days and nights alone in a room, watching American Bandstand on the tube), that there was to be a huge spring party and Cheryl would be there. Wasn't that great? So great I didn't dare attend—and neither did she, as it turned out. So it would have been safe for me, now stolidly married. I had healed, you understand? To see Cheryl might open old wounds that only grow a crust over the epidermis. No, thanks.

Did she not attend, perhaps, because of lingering outright fear of the power of me? It would be nice to be considered a sexual threat, after some twenty years, but I think not. My ego is not all that large. Now a husband twice that length of time, almost, it becomes a ludicrous though, I who am rendered not feeble but harmless by time.

I'm sure she had some better reason. Some reason better grounded in reality.

1

Each event in life is preparation for another, and each woman serves as unwitting warning for the next. Also as presentiment, preview, and precursor for what comes next. Cheryl behind me (or rather as far away across the country as it would be possible to go, NYC—Eve's Big Apple), I was psyched up for something less intense but more lasting. In short, love and marriage. And, no, the two are not incompatible or mutually exclusive, and should not be thought to be, though the statistics indicate that such a happy state occurs infrequently. But we never know. We live and learn, always the hard way. By experience.

So I began my search for, ahem, a mate. Somebody to put it in and plant it there. I began late in 1953, and it took me three full years. How long they were, too. To make the search more difficult, I remained government issue for much of that time. I was stationed in randy, ambiguous Alaska, where the women comprise a special breed. I won't say that all of them are savages, but that term characterizes a large percentage. Well, I had become a beast to match.

Though I had enlisted in the army just before I received my induction notice for the draft, and had already taken my physical and passed it (many of us wrecks did), I was in no way an eager soldier. But I made my wary peace with the forces of destruction in return for them promising not to devour me, for they had considerable power. They owned me. I was in for three, Regular Army, but since they had vacuumed me up right out of graduate school before I got my degree, I was able to petition them successfully for separation from active duty three months early to go back to school. I had applied to both Stanford and UC at Berkeley, though I had a fair amount of catch-up work still to do at the UW before I would give me my MA.

Stanford turned me down cold, while Cal offered me a scholarship—all of which is indicative of how subjective the process is. So I returned to Washington, my home state and the university that had so to speak educated me to date. That unfinished business needed to be followed through to completion. I returned to Fort Lewis just before Christmas Day, 1955, and was given a classic three-day pass over the holiday. My luck was that I drew KP on Christmas Eve Day. A soldier from Kentucky agreed to take my shift for $20. Thus I was able to spend the long holiday with my family, forty miles away, returning on the 27th for my official separation from active duty.

"Remember," we were cautioned, when separation was nigh, "you remain army property for forty-eight hours longer. So . . . be cool, guys. Don't pop that sergeant who's been giving you a bad time." The penalty was reactivation and a court-martial. I got the message.

I took my mustering-out pay and, still in uniform, walked out the gates of the rainy grey fort, with its austere cyclone fencing topped with barbed wire, and walked over to where a car awaited me at the curb, a friend inside. It was Jerry Courtier, who had been separated out only three months earlier and was now a highway patrol man. (I could not understand how somebody could exchange one uniform for another.) He drove me to Seattle, as I quickly shed my khaki skin, and pulled on jeans and a favorite flannel shirt. I was free, at last. School was to start in just a few days, the drear winter quarter, where I was registered for ten credits of graduate English classes. I looked forward to them as I never had before.

One of the courses was 505, Introduction to Literary Criticism, and you are right, it was as dull as a bus ride through a tunnel. It was, in fact, the same course I'd been attending and took an incomplete in the quarter before I was drafted. (The army never wastes any of your civilian time, taking me out of college the day after the term ended and letting me go just five days before the start of another term. It was just long enough to allow me to start thinking of myself in individual terms, not as part of some continuing collective effort.) I prepared myself mentally for a new life somewhat like I had remembered it but without the anxiety of the draft hanging over it. My mind was eager to get back into the daily academic grind. How I had missed the life of books and intellectual conversation.

If you carried a book around with you in the army, it marked you as some sort of wierdo, and I was accustomed to being greeted, along with a nudge in the ribs, with, "Hey, has he got into her pants yet?" And I was always having to reply, "Not yet, but soon," and leer back as a purely defensive measure. You go along to get along.

In the case of Anna Karenina or that other one, Emma (which schoolmates and I always called, Emma's Ovaries), it was true enough—the getting into the pants part. So maybe our two worlds were not so different. Questioner and questioned shared a certain prurient interest in the outcome. But isn't this foremost in the minds of all young men?

Now I was free to find my own Anna or Emma, and this matter was of high priority to me.

Back in the desolate winter of 1953—one of the chronic winters of this malcontented person—I had registered for the same course, but the task of locating all the bibliographic materials filled me with confusion and dismay. Instead of tracking them down in the bowels of the main library, Suzzallo, I hied myself to the nearest tavern. Now I was faced with overcoming my earlier trauma and overcoming it, or else succumbing to drink again.

A kind friend who had been through the maze earlier told me that the English department library now had a collection of the required reading and it was on two-hour reserve in Parrington Hall, the lair of us cave-dwelling bears who were expected to see no sunlight for another long winter. So I met with the seminar class, which numbered about a dozen plodding dullards unlike myself, whose manner I was supposed to emulate, and viewed its professor, an unknown entity yclept Merrill Davis. He fit the stereotype well enough but proved a kindly man troubled by an undisclosed illness that gave him a slightly distracted air. The illness was cancer and he was dead in just over a year. We soon discovered we were Faulkner buffs, and collected his first editions. This more than anything led to my getting a cool A in the course.

Little did I know that all graduate grades in English are either A or B, and B is tantamount to low pass, C fail, and A high pass; a secret register was kept in the department's graduate office and on it was recorded in indelible ink pluses or minuses, the sum total of which determined whether you would succeed or be turned back with the "gentleman's" B, the MA, the door to the widely coveted Ph.D closed to you. Merrill gave me a straight A, which would carry a student forward and could only be reduced in value by a low grade from another professor, perhaps a vindictive one.

(Else it might seem that Merrill was an easy grader, let me add that he gave Jim Lewis—a kind of resident genius but greatly disliked for his candor and arrogance—a D grade. Now a C was failing and an E could be repeated, while both of them were largely discouraging to a graduate student. But a D was diabolical in that the course could not be repeated and was etched on one's record forever. Not even a girl friend in the department office could remove it with deft bleach and improve it with marking pen. This was thought to have happened in the memorable past. So I believe, Faulkner aside, that I earned the grade from Merrill. Indeed I did.)

I earned it too because of the coming of reserve table, at which I camped each afternoon and sometimes into the evening, reading the assigned dullards and suffering the company a lot of pedants who believed there was nothing more exciting to do than discuss Horace and Sainte Beuve and Aristotle (always good for a laugh) and Tough Shit Elliot. But the important thing is that it was there, in the cloistered third-floor reading room, amid the ancient oak furniture and chalkdust, that I first saw the woman who was to become my wife and my life's companion. Well, I was ready for her.

Not so auspicious, our beginnings. I was content to look, there not being much else offered me. I'd look up from my copy of Smith and Parks, The Great Critics (black and green and boring), and see this la jeune fille sail across the room like a small sleek schooner in a powder-blue cashmere sweater, neither too small nor too big but just right for her. Breasts on parade; this was the order of the day. Her hair was blonde (not really, but how was I to know?) and tied back in a pony tail. She worn horn-rimmed glasses of a mottled brown kind; they did not make her look intellectual but still were kind of classy. Her eyes were the same blue as her sweater, I thought. Not really: this is kind of illusion created by not being able to get up close enough to verify the information. And when I was able to, much later in the year, in June, looking deep into her eyes at length was not what was on my mind, or hers. So it was long afterwards that I learned that they were hazel, much the same color as my own. Not that it mattered much, you understand.

It was how she moved, in her practical-for-work-and-whatever-else saddle shoes, brown and tan, and her ankle socks, worn over nylons so that you cannot tell if their legs are that brown and smooth and evenly tanned, or it is all illusion, and what else? Skirt one of those sausage wrap-arounds that seemingly restricts movement, while at the same time enhancing it and drawing attention to it through the constraint it provides. Knee-length, I recall, which is long, long, long, we've learned since. But to me its length seemed exactly right and perhaps just a tiny bit indecent in what it disclosed, which was just an occasional glimpse of not much thigh. Absolutely great.

To look was all I was allowed, her haughty glance told me, as it also dismissed me. Well, look then I would, and be satisfied. Her evident haughtiness bordered on disdain, it was coolly arrogance. Good; I tried to cultivate such qualities, too, especially when I went around without my glasses on, and could not see well and my pitiful eyes went uncorrected by the uncrossing lenses), but I fell short, at least in comparison. So I admired her for the same qualities I professed, but from afar—as she would have it. And I suppose I spoke to her about some library matter and received a terse monosyllable in reply, always to the point and not personally encouraging. This gave me no opportunity to advance my cause or to make my next sally, sortie, or move. Instead I backed away, my brow furrowed with frustration, grinning foolishly, my gaze averting itself from those marvelous breasts which lay only a few inches away from rivetting eyes that I now know were not blue, or anything like it.

Many odes are written to Bestform Bras, often misread to Breastform, and not to the girl herself. The design of the implement, the taut cotton fabric, the hooks and eyes, the double and triple stitching, the elastic, etc., and not the person or anatomy thus circumscribed. This duplicity is part and parcel of the ongoing commerce of sexuality in America, and is well and good. It is what draws us to each other and perpetuates the race. So the net effect is . . . excellent. But the personal effect can be devastating.

As a horny boy and a bit I was nightly roving the streets and alleyways of the University District, not looking as Ginsberg would have it "for an angry fix" but for a loving one, one from some caring female who might find me attractive, but all I could find was female images of myself, searching for much the same thing. Sometimes we would locate each other, usually over a schooner glass of suds, and without much preamble go home drunkenly to poke and be poked, and hump together blindly until one or both were relieved, and part in ennui and drunken, dry-mouthed stupor, to maybe come together again, but probably not. For this is how it was, kids, in post-war America, pre-AIDS, before the Pill made girls and women believe she was free to take her sex like a man, but love like a woman. It was a confusing time. Hence, the sexes were united in misery, if not much else.

Not this one, evidently. She glided aloof and imperial. Perhaps without distance correction to her vision she was unable to see well, and in that regard much like me, though I thought us nothing alike and was happy at the differences. Now that I know her eyes better, color and depth, I believe that she wore those glasses mainly for close-up work, such as reading book titles and shelf lists, and sacrificing mid- and distance-vision. So what I presumed was proper disdain for a stubble-faced, raunchy ex-soldier (namely, myself) was actually the inability to see him, or anybody else not already known by a few distinguishing characteristics. I was a blur to her. But I did not know this, nor was able to guess it, and put her in a category of women who did not have eyes for me, which was literally true.

I contented myself with staring lewdly and often but not wantonly or longly so. I would brush her with my eyes in those places where I would happily use my hands, eyes being hands' surrogates and sad substitutes, at that. I would do this tastefully, lovingly (though you cannot love that which you haven't yet experienced, I maintain, so it must be gently, lustfully instead), and she would be (nearly) unawares that it was happening to her, her body being sweetly enjoyed from about twelve to twenty feet away. And I would sit in my hard-backed yellow oak chair with metal cleats on each of its four feet and tip myself back, back, back until I was balanced delicately there and on the edge of collapse, my Smith and Parks opened to Reynolds' Discourse VIII, and leer like somebody twice my age, or thrice, and she would only be dimly conscious that (I'm guessing here) that some male head was pointed at her and perhaps in need of bibliographic assistance.

Of this I am sure I got my share, but no more, and was thus disappointed. She was a student librarian, nothing lower, working at an hourly scale and with a free five credits of classes as a perk. This I did not know yet. She was an undergraduate Art major, a student of Everett DuPen, the sculptor. She was also taking Psychology, History, Sociology—all the regular crap they saddle us with so that incompetents who have studied long may make a living and not starve; or such was my opinion then and in several instances now. She was helpful as a boy scout in arrears, trying to catch up on his good deeds. The librarian was already in the girl, though the girl was a long ways from officially being a librarian, which requires first a bachelor's degree and then a master's. All in good time.

I am trying to say that she helped me. She helped me immeasurably get through that tedious course taught by my friend the Faulkner man but in so impersonal a way that it seemed as if she were doing nothing, remaining frigidly distant like a planet. (Uranus, let's say.) Which perhaps she was, for who is less appealing than an unshaved, unbathed graduate student, with his mind on drink and the precepts of D.H. Lawrence, or perhaps the more advanced ones of Henry Miller? That's right, nobody.

I was one of many nobodies, roaming the aisles of Padelford Hall, my arms drooping ape-like, laden with books most people wouldn't read unless you paid them to and probably not even then, for there wasn't that much money in the world to subsidize knowledge of the dull type. Already hopelessly addicted to cigarettes and poetry, I'd slip out into the dry brown hallway to have myself a smoke every hour or so and hope, devoutly wish, that she would put down her stack of books to be shelved long enough to join me, but never did. They had a staff room in which to eat and smoke, and chat with each other, and laugh guardedly (it is hard for career librarians to learn to laugh expansively, yet learn they can, and do, but not until after years have unsurely gone by and they have triumphed over their personal selves and conditioning) and brace themselves for what came next, or still, which is more demanding graduate students like myself, who do not pay overdue fines and like to argue their moral imperative to behave any way they choose, for they believe themselves superiorCand well may be.

So I contented myself with visions of plunder. I'd undress her, slowly, more retardedly than in real life, as it turned out. The pornography of the mind is unable to keep up with the pace of unbuckled reality, I've since learned. I'd discard this garment, folding it slowly, appreciatively. I'd place it aside in a place where it wouldn't get rumpled or soiled by what came next. (Sure I would, but only in this land of folly.) I'd play the game of, May I?, the child's fable of asking first and obtaining permission before anything untoward might be permitted to occur. Delicious? I thought so.

I'd read my Smith and Parks. Longinus on The Sublime. Longinus to me was a dirty word, among the worst. Long, for instance, would well describe the workings of the center of my loins and the accumulation of the blood in the vein encircling my penis, while "inus" smacked of both anus and vagina, or its plural form vaginus, giving it a male ending (oh, come on now). And sublime would indeed describe the completion of the act(s) I was intending to bestow on her, this still unravished bride of the library's quietness. How did I know she was unravished? Well, any experience previous to me would shrink to such unimportance that in perspective it would turn out to be non-existent. So she was surely virgin, or virgin to me.

An English major can take the language and bend it to his wished, making it into the instrument of his choosing. A hammer or a trumpet. Similarly, given but the opportunity, he can force any complacent female in a compliant direction for his willful pleasure, the necessary ingredient being opportunity. For lack of opportunity limits expression, especially self-expression, while the mind is willing and the instrument already engorged, or whatever you might choose to call it.

I'd stare, and she would drift by on rubber-soled feet (pinkish), each breath going in and out of her ribcage evenly and thrillingly to me. I would mediate on it, the pure mechanics of what was involved in the pneumatic process, breathing. Now, I breathed, too, but it was nothing like this. I mean, my chest heaved smally, in and out, back and forth, as I drew in vital air, shallow or deep. It didn't make much difference. But when This One (I did not know her name) filled her lungs, the veritable universe expanded and nearly exploded, the cotton of her bra stretched tight and the individual woven threads being forced to the breaking point, but because there were so many of them bound and linked together they wondrously did not burst. And then on the antistrophe, as it were, the air would be let back into the cloistered room, her lungs, the cotton return to its unstretched shape, the universe assume its state of stasis, and life go on. Just think, she would repeat this process several times a minute, every minute of the day and night. Night, I thought. Ah. Unshackled, abed. It gave me pause, but then I didn't have very much else to do except attend two classes per day, four days a week, and read myself silly.

You get the idea. I was no hornier than any boy of twenty-five. You say a boy of twenty-five is a man? I'd say not, drawing on experience with a dull pencil.

Each night I went out on the prowl tenish. (In English, you see, we say such things this way.) The library would close but an hour earlier, and I'd return to my room, houseboat, or apartment and continue my desultory reading, but my eyes would hunger for people again, namely young women, or women of whatever age, and I'd commence my tavern prowl and, as stated earlier, often encounter some student or office worker of the decided female persuasion and attitude and attempt to effect a liaison. Nearly three years of pent-up army life rang in my ears and motivated me, drove my search. And I apologize to those young women who had the misfortune to be in the wrong place at what seemed to me the right time for any coarseness in my approach or any abruptness in my suggestion. I called it social intercourse, but it was unmistakably sexual. I believed the shortest distance between two sexually dissimilar objects was a phallic straight line.

I was reading again for Joe Harrison, the Rhodes Scholar professor whose turf included modern British, American, and European lit, keeping him from discovering how misguided he was in thinking me knowledgeable; this entailed my often splitting my last Chesterfield with him. He'd do the dirty work, taking the long slender tube, measuring it by eye, tearing it guardedly in half, staring at it with hungry eyes, and passing me the short side of the equation that had originally been all mine. And then I would light up this smoke that was already a butt. Usually he would slip his into his shirt pocket for "later." I don't know whether he was being tight, trying to quit (he had a terrible cough), or was forgetful about such small, unimportant matters as ownership. But sometimes he would honor me by smoking what was recently a full cigarette, not his, and we would sit blowing smoke at the ceiling or into each other's faces and talk about students and authors. The books he presumed I already knew thoroughly. Dream on.

Or else he knew full well the extent to which I was not well read and decided to overlook it, knowing quite critically and sadly that there were no others any better around. Or else he had grown immeasurably tired and old and no longer cared. Or cared, sure, but only to a degree. After all, his students would change over four times a year, but he had to remain ever himself, immutable. And that idea was intolerable.

Meanwhile I read for his classes and met with his students. I have waxed eloquent about sorority girls who study English, knowing it is easy and when they get married and have babies it is nice to have books around the house to look at and remember back, and remember that you were (however dimly) once acquainted with them. Emerson, for instance, wrote What Is Man? and Thoreau the essay Nature and Twain of course Walden, which is also a tiny body of water. A pond is where ducks live. He grew beans, one of them did. Who? (Whom?) (Short, multiple-choice type answer.) Don't bother me with details. That sort of thing.

While the one I loved from a far moved among books, clutching them to her cashmered bosom and lovingly shelving them, one at a time, (tenderly—as though plucking apples, but in VCR reverse), I satisfied my eyes, sort of, and planned seduction of other girls in my classes. John Simon was the paradigm for us randy students, readers, comp instructors, and budding lit teachers. We did not have his arrogance, of course, nor that fine hauteur, nor the thick Czech accent, or the cruel good looks (he looked like he might carry a dueling scar, and should have, but searching his cheeks you'd not find one there), nor the lack of conventional morality to hinder us, but we could try. With John gone (remember, he took Cheryl to faraway NYC), there was a lacuna in the seduction department of the English department, and we all tried to fill it by outdistancing each other in applied lust. That's not fair, I know, nor accurate, only one more barb thrown in the direction of the enviable target, the moist bullseye, namely the available girls and women, on and off campus.

There was Beth, for instance. Once we dispensed with the silly idea that her grade would be effected by her performance with me, truly, we got to be friends. It is not true that girls are innocents and men and boys take advantage of them by inventing the rules. And violating them. Girls make the rules, for Christ's sake, and boys play by them, and when violations are made, it is by common consent. The girl permits and encourages the violation; if not, the situation is one of rape, not consensual sex. And while this may sound hopelessly sexist and of another time, it was believed that with some young women you'd have to render them unconscious (say through drink) to screw them unwillingly, for otherwise they'd consent. And if they'd consent, why go to the trouble of rendering them insensate with drink? It would only reduce the pleasure for the two of you. This is what is known today as being counterproductive.

Beth was deft at avoiding seduction. But she would flirt with it and come knowingly close to the line. She lived at home (strike one) and belonged to a sorority (two strikes); she wanted to get married (three, and you're out) and I was not suitable, a dubious entity in that department and a decided health risk. There were other men about who had, for instance, professions. Beth deserved a lawyer or a dentist, but probably not a medical doctor, nor one of philosophy. But I don't know what or whom she got.

I do not want to imply that I was solely a lecher. I had begun my great enthusiasm for the out of doors and was beginning to believe that the simple act of fishing could transform the world, at least for me, into something palatable. So in spring, and it was spring now, I would venture out with fly rod and reel, and little fuzzy creatures I had tied on hooks, and try for some trout, and sometimes I would catch them. I remember one evening arriving at Beth's with a bunch of rainbows I had no use for and cleaning them, a good dozen, in her mother's kitchen sink and leaving them as my smelly gift.

Whether this was the reason or not, I was soon not seeing Beth any more. I remember, however, the snap of the elastic of her panties and the swiftness snap with which she delivered my errant hand back to me. She was quick, she was deft, that girl, and she was a pretty, decent young woman. The A she got in Modern British Lit was deserved. I never mixed business and pleasure, or rather pleasure and academe. Generally I stayed away from my dumber students because while sex is important the preliminaries take up a huge amount of time (conversation, and all), the going and coming, the getting and going, etc., and it is vital to be in the company of a woman who in addition to being lovely is highly engaging to talk to. And often there is the hope (rarely met) of her offering some pithy new insight about literature or life. Or (dare I hope?) both.

Then there was Harriet, a sprite. Sprites wear moss and wildflowers in their hair, which is kept unaccountably long and sometimes, when work is to be done, requires being bound up in knots or with tortoiseshell combs and held back out of the way. Harriets have kohl-black eyes, or else darkly circled ones that have gone long without sleep. Often they wear ballet slippers, but probably only dance by themselves. When it rains, the part down the center of their heads becomes bone white and wider-seeming, the hair cascading down each cheek darkly and plastered to their skulls, which are invariably small and well formed, as is the rest of Harriet. Such women have a dense, woodsy appeal. There used to be a popular song that went, "In Harriet you really want to bury it." I could have written it, but didn't.

Harriet lived in a little shack off the side of a hill, then retired to a cabin even smaller on the estate of a professor, one Wayne Burns. There she collected non-hallucinogenic mushrooms and made and drank herbal tea. It was rumored that she wrote poetry in the manner of Emily Dickinson, but nobody ever saw any, that I am aware of, and most poets of our time would shove you into a corner and read you their latest, even if you protested and screamed you didn't want to hear it. Harriet, a real writer? I doubt it. You could torture her and never hear an iamb slip out, I suspect because there were none. And while I'd like to think that Prof. Burns kept her there for carnal purpose, I don't think this was the case. While a sex fiend at heart, at least about sex in literature, he had a live-in mistress, and while it was unusual for that time and place, the idea that he might have another sweetie on the side that lived only a stone's throw away, in his very own cottage, is unlikely, though knowing what we know now the possibility that it was for a threesome comes to mind, and there is the additional chance that the live in and Harriet had a thing going, and perhaps Wayne was not directly involved, or else only watched, porn being a favorite genre of his.

I would escort Harriet here and there, never phoning first (for she didn't have a phone), and the ubiquitous rain would darken both of our hair, hers lovely, mine greasy and not recently washed, and I would read her my poetry (terrible) and this would open some small gate of understanding and she would grant me small affection. I'd try to stick my tongue down her throat and she would return it to me, with a show of repugnance, and would communicate an attitude intended to discourage me but never did, not for long. My hands would roam over her thin body, generally without a brassiere to impede my fingers or hinder me access, and I remember the geography of those small breasts, encountering first one and then the other, often disbelieving or not knowing exactly where I was until locating finally an unmistakable nipple, (an unenthusiastic one which, like bad bread, was slow to rise), and when I tried for further territorial explorations, her loins would fuse, her knees lock up as if with a key, and her female self retreat so distantly as to vanish for all practical purposes.

So while I had liberated her with my verse, it wasn't very much, nor very far, but better than if I hadn't, surely. It was as if she were saying, "Write me something better and maybe I will let you go further." What? I couldn't believe my ears. If what they were saying was true, this was literary criticism by body language. But I doubt if anybody except Dylan Thomas could penetrate such defense or much more.

Or Ted Roethke. Ha had probably already tried and, like the rest of us, failed. And maybe she preferred girls.

She was a rustic homebody at heart. She delighted in her aloneness. We were always walking out on a pier and back again. We would study the lap of waves, their shifting pattern. Well, I liked water, too. A bird would flit by and it would be a wonderful event for her. She was convincing, if it was an act. Also she missed a lot in nature and much else. She would see only some of the birds around. A robin or a flock of songbirds. All the ducks were ducks to her, without species or individual distinction. Harriet couldn't tell a widgeon from a goldeneye. Or care about them. And she didn't really see me, either, or detect that I was different, special, at least in my own mind's eye.

I can imagine a future for Beth as a dentist's wife, but for Harriet her foreseeable future is only a plunge into a dark wood. She had a tender heart and would not marry a commercial fisherman or a logger because of the destruction inherent in what they do for a living. An early environmentalist of a non-assertive, non-aggressive sort, she might in time gravitate to Audubon and become a life member of the society named after him, while not really liking birds, or preferring books more, namely, D. H. Lawrence. She would get her sex the same way, from books, rather than from needy men like myself.

Who else was there? Surely there were some others, students and hangers-on of the literary life as it exists on the nervous edge of campusCgirls from drama, girls from my seminar classes, girls who fashioned themselves already writers and poets, and would argue their case vehemently, but never produced except sexually. These comprised the vast realm of pretenders, generally nice boys and girls destined for careers in peripheral or associative fields (such as teaching), the women come across around midnight in neighborhood taverns, or else met in passing in bookstores and coffeehouses. But I can't think of any, none whose memories remain.

This was 1956. One hundred years previously, in June, on the fifteenth, to be precise, Sigmund Freud was born. I have it on good authority. I have already mentioned my great indebtedness to him and his ideas on infant sexuality, neurosis, dreams, hysteria, etc. He and Dostoyevsky were my lodestars, so to speak—my cotterpins, my paperclips, my nuts and bolts, etc. Well, a young woman named Ruth Lewis decided to throw a party to honor the great man's birthday. since he was large, the party must be large.

She invited everybody—anybody she either knew or had heard of. Total strangers, too, those unbeknownst to any of us; they were additionally welcome. She had a whole rented house to do it in. The event loomed large in everybody's expectations. You did not ask, "Are you going?" Everybody was going, needless to say. It was, "See you at the party." The only questions were who were you going with (unimportant, really, for a party is a party, and this is foremost) and what time would you arrive? Now there was no such thing as too earlyCa few came the day before, which was not adjudged prematureCbut there was a thing called as arriving too late. That might be after two or three the next morning. I've found it best to arrive about nine or ten. By then it is well underway.

People are still behaving as though the world won't end at dawn and everybody be shot. Later, folks don't want to waste a word or action before the apocalypse. They still say, "Hi," before they hop on top of each other, or sink down in the cushions of the sofa with a stranger. They put out their cigarettes in the ashtrays, not on each other. They pour whiskey into a glass and add ice and water or mixer; they do not point the bottle skyward and drink long and slow, afterwards wiping their lips on their shirtsleeves and howling at the ceiling light, mist