would never make a date ahead, and he had a way of not phoning on Saturday night—this was to preserve his freedom and keep me from knowing where I stood. Marriage was never mentioned, of course—he was getting his Ph.D. on an allowance from his father—but neither of us saw anybody else. Nights when he hadn’t called, I hung near the phone in agony; when he did call, and we went somewhere to neck, it often ended with me crying like mad on his shoulder—I didn’t know why. Sadness interested him, and he treated mine with great deference, kissing me with a kind of scientific respect and muttering words like Sehnsucht into my ear. The farthest he’d ever gone was to lean against my blouse and quote into it, but this seemed to me very far.
“I’d never told Ben about Tyng, and I didn’t this time; I was in such a high state of dejection I hardly noticed him. He’d got me out of the cubicle, bought us both hot dogs, and walked me to our favorite stretch along the river, before I realized that he was hanging on to my arm and looking at me with a humility I’d seen on the faces of young husbands walking their pregnant wives.
“I wasn’t noticing him, you see; it must have been clear to him that I was swept up in some powerful emotion that was bigger than I. And for people like—well, like Ben—the sight of another person in the throes, divorced from reason, offering a breast for the eagles to pick at and so on, has an attraction just as strong as sex. That’s why lots of times you’ll see a weak man or an ugly woman with an entourage otherwise hard to explain; it’s because they have this talent for letting life blow through them, for seeming to be swept away. And the people who hang around them don’t even hope to get into the act; all they ask is to get close enough to be shaken a little themselves—something like kissing the Pope’s ring, or being touched by the king for pox.
“Of course, there’s another, simpler explanation for the way Ben acted—that he thought I was thinking of some other boy. Whichever it was, between it and the evening, he was done for.
“It was a gorgeous evening, one of those butterfly-blue ones. Every once in a while the river gave a little shantung wrinkle and then lay still; there was one sailboat low in the foreground, like Whistler’s signature. Behind us, the windows of the Alpha Delt house were open, but there was nobody in them; everybody was off for the Easter holidays. Ben knew the grad student who acted as janitor in exchange for an apartment in the basement, an older man who was doing some kind of endless project on the Risorgimento and went off now and then with the merchant marine, until he had enough funds for another go at research. His door was always unlocked, and we’d been there once or twice alone. That evening there was a note tacked to the door: ‘Back next Wednesday at eighteen hours.’
“Ben led me inside, murmuring, ‘Say something, darling; you look so sad. I’ve never seen you look so sad!’ By this time I wasn’t, of course—he’d never called me darling before, and I knew that for him words spoke much louder than action—but I had the sense to hold my tongue and keep my sad expression, and on a young skin I suppose the wish to murder and the wish to love look much the same.
“He took off my dress, and the sight of me in my long cotton slip sent him down on one knee, his arms flung wide; it was a pose like the gallants in those slightly shady, illustrated editions of Mademoiselle de Maupin or the Heptameron —both of which Ben had. I was in an odd rig for seduction; there was a fashion on then for Oxford glasses, silver-rimmed ones that snapped open like lorgnettes, and mine hung down over my chest on a chain. My shoes were much too sedate for me too—terribly long, pointed ones, like dachshunds’ muzzles—and my stockings, heavy gunmetal silk, were rolled. Despite all this, we were able to lose our heads. Or at least we thought
“I’d never told Ben about Tyng, and I didn’t this time; I was in such a high state of dejection I hardly noticed him. He’d got me out of the cubicle, bought us both hot dogs, and walked me to our favorite stretch along the river, before I realized that he was hanging on to my arm and looking at me with a humility I’d seen on the faces of young husbands walking their pregnant wives.
“I wasn’t noticing him, you see; it must have been clear to him that I was swept up in some powerful emotion that was bigger than I. And for people like—well, like Ben—the sight of another person in the throes, divorced from reason, offering a breast for the eagles to pick at and so on, has an attraction just as strong as sex. That’s why lots of times you’ll see a weak man or an ugly woman with an entourage otherwise hard to explain; it’s because they have this talent for letting life blow through them, for seeming to be swept away. And the people who hang around them don’t even hope to get into the act; all they ask is to get close enough to be shaken a little themselves—something like kissing the Pope’s ring, or being touched by the king for pox.
“Of course, there’s another, simpler explanation for the way Ben acted—that he thought I was thinking of some other boy. Whichever it was, between it and the evening, he was done for.
“It was a gorgeous evening, one of those butterfly-blue ones. Every once in a while the river gave a little shantung wrinkle and then lay still; there was one sailboat low in the foreground, like Whistler’s signature. Behind us, the windows of the Alpha Delt house were open, but there was nobody in them; everybody was off for the Easter holidays. Ben knew the grad student who acted as janitor in exchange for an apartment in the basement, an older man who was doing some kind of endless project on the Risorgimento and went off now and then with the merchant marine, until he had enough funds for another go at research. His door was always unlocked, and we’d been there once or twice alone. That evening there was a note tacked to the door: ‘Back next Wednesday at eighteen hours.’
“Ben led me inside, murmuring, ‘Say something, darling; you look so sad. I’ve never seen you look so sad!’ By this time I wasn’t, of course—he’d never called me darling before, and I knew that for him words spoke much louder than action—but I had the sense to hold my tongue and keep my sad expression, and on a young skin I suppose the wish to murder and the wish to love look much the same.
“He took off my dress, and the sight of me in my long cotton slip sent him down on one knee, his arms flung wide; it was a pose like the gallants in those slightly shady, illustrated editions of Mademoiselle de Maupin or the Heptameron —both of which Ben had. I was in an odd rig for seduction; there was a fashion on then for Oxford glasses, silver-rimmed ones that snapped open like lorgnettes, and mine hung down over my chest on a chain. My shoes were much too sedate for me too—terribly long, pointed ones, like dachshunds’ muzzles—and my stockings, heavy gunmetal silk, were rolled. Despite all this, we were able to lose our heads. Or at least we thought
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