dinner which included the best Virginia ham I have ever tasted, the four of us go to a cretinous movie in Nyack. Afterwards, at a little past midnight, Jack and Dolores retire to their bedchamber while Mary Alice and I, ensconced in our love nest on the downstairs sunporch, resume our doomed ritual. I drink a great deal of beer, to make myself magisterial. The “smooching” begins, quite pleasurable at first, and after interminable minutes of this foreplay, there starts the repetitious and inevitable build-up toward what for me has now become a boring, nearly unbearable messiness. No longer needing me to initiate the move, Mary Alice gropes for my zipper, her mean little hand ready to perform its spiritless operation on my equally jaded appendage. This time, however, I halt her midway, prepared for the showdown I have anticipated all day. “Mary Alice,” I say, “why don’t we level with each other? For some reason we haven’t really talked about this problem. I like you so much, but quite frankly I can’t take any more of this frustrating activity. Is it fear of...” (I hesitate to be explicit, largely because she is so sensitive about language.) “Is it fear of... you know what? If it is, I just wanted to say that I have the means to prevent any... accident. I promise I’ll be very careful.” After a silence she leans her head with its fine luxuriant hair smelling so hurtfully of gardenia against my shoulder, sighs, then says, “No, it’s not that, Stingo.” She falls silent. “What is it, then?” I say. “I mean, don’t you understand that except for kissing I literally haven’t touched you—anywhere! It just doesn’t seem right, Mary Alice. In fact, there’s something down-right perverse about what we’re doing.” After a pause, she says, “Oh, Stingo, I don’t know. I like you very much too, but you know we’re not in love. Sex and love for me are inseparable. I want everything to be right for the man I love. For both of us. I was burnt so badly once.” I reply, “How do you mean burnt? Were you in love with someone?” She says, “Yes, I thought so. He burnt me so badly. I don’t want to get burnt again.”
And as she talks to me, telling me about her late lamented amour, a ghastly Cosmopolitan short story emerges, explaining simultaneously the sexual morality of these 1940s and the psychopathology which permits her to torment me in the way she has been doing. She had a fiancé, one Walter, she tells me, a naval aviator who courted her for four months. During this time before their engagement (she explains to me in circumlocutory language to which Mrs. Grundy would not have taken exception) they did not participate in formal sexual relations, although at his behest she did learn, presumably with the same lackluster and rhythmic skill she has practiced on me, to flog his dick (“stimulate him”), and indulged in this pastime night after night as much to give him some “release” (she actually uses the odious word) as to protect the velvet strongbox he was perishing to get into. (Four months! Think of Walt’s Navy-blue trousers and those oceans of come!) Only when the wretched flyboy formally declared his intentions to marry and then produced the ring (Mary Alice continues to tell me in vapid innocence) did she yield up her darling honey pot, for in the Baptist faith of her upbringing, woe as certain as death would alight upon those who would engage in carnal congress without at least the prospect of matrimony. Indeed, as she goes on to say, she felt it wicked enough to do what she did before the actual hitching of the knot. At this point Mary Alice pauses and, backtracking, says something to me which causes me to grind my teeth in rage. “It’s not that I don’t desire you, Stingo. I have strong desires. Walter taught me to make love.” And while she continues to talk, murmurously spinning out her banalities about “consideration,” “tenderness,” “fidelity,” “understanding,” “sympathy” and other Christian garbage, I have an unusual and overpowering longing to perpetrate a rape. Anyway, to conclude her tale, Walter left her before the wedding day—the shock of her