He said: “Uh—”

  “My name is Jan Cameron.”

  “I see. Does that answer your question?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said quickly. “Yes, it does. You’ve made it all very clear now.”

  “Well, good.”

  “Thank you very much.”

  “Well,” he said.

  He started to gather up papers from his desk. Another class was due momentarily. She took her cue, turned, walked from the room. Her hips swayed as she walked, a little trick that college girls can perform equally as well as streetwalkers. But she knew as she did it that he was not watching her.

  In the hallway, on her way out of the building, she formed his name silently upon her lips. Just his first name, Matthew.

  She had the hour from nine to ten free. She spent it in the library, just sort of browsing through the stacks, picking up an occasional book, leafing through it, putting it back on its shelf. She found a slim volume of poems and studied a poem about the unicorn, a lament to the effect that the unicorn was extinct because the world as out of virgins and still pools. But the world was not quite out of virgins, she thought whimsically. It still had her, and she was as pure as the driven slush.

  At ten o’clock, she went to a required gym class and played badminton with a boy who was equally unenthusiastic about the sport. You had to have three years of gym to get out of Clifton—to get out with a degree, anyway. She personally felt it was somewhat less than human to make people knock a shuttlecock over a net at ten in the damned morning, but you just couldn’t beat the system. They played lackadaisically and the hour went away.

  From eleven to twelve she sat in a classroom and discussed Thoreau with the rest of the class. She hadn’t read the required reading—Walden and “Civil Disobedience,” specifically—but she managed to hold her own, asking a few pertinent questions and making a few incisive comments.

  At twelve, she went to the school cafeteria and wandered through the line, filling a tray with a sandwich and a dish of ice cream and a cup of light coffee. She ate the sandwich and the ice cream, drank the coffee. Another girl wandered over to join her. They talked, idly. The other girl finished her food and went away. Jan left her tray on the table and went to her room.

  She lived in Buchanan Hall, a three-story, brick building on the extreme western end of the campus. Her room was on the second floor. Her roommate, a cheerful manic-depressive named Madeline, had a few classes that afternoon. She wasn’t around.

  At first she tried studying. Lying on the bed, face down, head propped up by hands with the elbows supporting, shoes kicked off and feet bare, light gleaming down overhead. She tried concentrating on one of the books Matthew Boulton had discussed in his lecture, a horrid little work called Peregrine Pickle. By Smollet, of course. She read two chapters, then stopped abruptly when she realized that she had gone from page to page without taking in a word. That wasn’t reading at all. It was just time wasting.

  She closed the book, looked at the cover—from which you weren’t supposed to judge the book, although the judgment would have been incisive in this case, because the cover, too, was dull and colorless—and then sighed heavily and rolled over onto her side and dropped the book onto the floor.

  And she started to think.

  Think may not be the right word for it. Think more or less implies a conscious direction of the thought processes, as in the IBM motto and all of that jazz. Jan Cameron was not leading her thoughts, or directing them, or anything like that.

  They were leading her.

  By the nose.

  She was thinking of Matthew Boulton, of course. She let her mind take off in a happy little daydream. A daydream in which she and Matthew were riding in his car (a dusky and dusty Ford; she had seen him riding in it several times) and they were alone in time and space, riding a dingy road to the end of the world. The car stopped, and he led her outside and spread a blanket on the ground, and slowly they stripped the clothes from their bodies, and his hands turned her breasts into bundles of spongy lust, and—

  She knew better. You weren’t supposed to do it; it put pimples on your face, it sapped your strength, it rotted your brain, all of that. She knew that the myths were false, actually, but she still knew it might be better not doing it, and, still, she couldn’t help it.

  First she locked the door. Her fingers were trembling but she turned the bolt and assured herself of solitude for the time being, freedom from unpleasant interruptions. She drew the window shade; darkening the little room and eliminating the possibility of observation by foreign eyes.

  Then she took off all her clothes.

  She had one hell of a body. Fully dressed, with the firm young breasts straining at her bra and sweater and the plaid skirt encasing hips, she looked enticing enough. Nude, she was a goddess.

  Her skin was an ivory dream that glowed with the suggestion of coral. Her breasts were firm and full, large and succulent. Her belly was slightly rounded, echoing the fuller roundness of her plump buttocks, each one slightly and alluringly dimpled. Her thighs were full and round without being remotely heavy. Her legs were perfectly formed, and now, in the privacy of her room in Buchanan Hall, her body glowed with the tender flames of lust.

  Slowly, moving like a creature in the depths of a dream, she went to the bed and stretched out upon it. Her eyes closed, her arms and legs went limp. She lay on her back, remaining completely and totally motionless for several seconds while images of hot passion returned to her brain and took control.

  Then, just as slowly, her hands began to move.

  She placed both hands on her stomach, resting them there momentarily. Slowly, very slowly, her hands crawled like crabs, moving upward across satin flesh to the lusty mounds of her breasts. She breathed deeply, sighed desperately, and cupped her breasts with her hands. She felt their fullness, their firmness, the sweet softness of their texture.

  Her hands moved.

  The passion that was boiling within her started speeding up. She felt the rosebuds of her nipples going stiff against the palms of her hands, and she caught a nipple between the thumb and forefinger of each hand and began to play with them, pinching and pulling and prodding and driving herself wild with the sweet ecstasy of the stimulation. Boys had done this to her, boys had taught her these secrets about her body and its responses, but boys had never had quite this effect on her. With her own hands she was driving her own body wild.

  More.

  More—

  In her mind’s eye she was on that blanket at the edge of the world. And she was not alone. Matthew Boulton was with her, and these hands on her breasts were Matthew’s hands, not her own hands.

  More—

  She played with her breasts for minutes that seemed like hours. And then, slowly and a trifle reluctantly, her hands left her breasts and crawled downward again, over the slight curve of her belly.

  She gripped her thighs.

  And squeezed.

  The pain did not kill her passion. On the contrary, it heightened it.

  And her hands moved.

  Her hands probed, doing things no boy had yet done, doing things that had to be done, doing things that made her head swim and made her breasts simply ache and made her tender body burn with passion greater than anything she had ever experienced.

  Her body was in motion now. Her thighs flexed and relaxed, flexed and relaxed, working spasmodically. Her hips churned. And the springs of her bed began to groan in an unfunny imitation of the sweet music of love. She was alone, she was doing something wrong, she was sating herself by herself, and the bed was giving out with love’s tender melodies.

  More.

  More.

  More—

  At one point, near the end, she had a wild idea. She thought of herself as a boy scout starting a fire with two pieces of wood. Keep rubbing, she thought hysterically, and she would burst into flames. It was a hysterical idea, all right.

  But she didn’t laugh.

  At the end, it was a little like a cannon’s recoil. Her whole body tightened up like a spring and then exploded. She went completely limp, and for a few moments everything was black.

  Later, as she stood at the sink, she tried to remember whether or not she had screamed at the crucial moment. She thought alternately that she had, and that she hadn’t. She decided eventually that the scream had been an internal one. Her body had shrieked, even if her mouth had been quiet.

  It had been nice. It had been very nice, even. But her status, she thought, was still quo.

  Jan Cameron was still a virgin.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  SUSAN DALE WAS not a virgin.

  As a matter of complete fact, Susan Dale was every bit as far from virginity as Portland, Oregon is from Portland, Maine. Maybe even farther.

  Susan Dale was a tramp.

  In fact, at the precise moment that Jan Cameron was engaged in a frenetic do-it-yourself project, Susan Dale was doing unto others as she liked to have them do unto her. The others, in this case, were just one other.

  She was on the golf course. Clifton’s golf course was a weeded affair on which no one had played golf as far as anyone now alive could recall. There was a sport frequently played on the golf course, but it wasn’t golf.

  Susan Dale was playing with a boy named Roy was still going on, it was still happening, but she was no longer a reasonable facsimile of Susan Dale. She was off somewhere to the side, watching interestedly but by no means involved, while Roy Oakey was loving somebody else with her face.

  Roy’s body tensed. He gave a little cry, and his fulfillment was cast upon her like bread upon angry waters.

  For her there was nothing.

  Or next to nothing. A slight respite from tension. A certain feeling of completion, if not of satisfaction.

  Which, she thought sourly, was nothing new.

  She did not honestly know how many men or boys she had slept with. She had kept count up to fifty and had then stopped counting, and there had been a lot of water over the dam since then. But one thing was a constant.

  In all of those horizontal games, Susan Dale had never made it.

  She was frigid.

  Chapter Two

  THERE WAS NOTHING specifically wrong with the house, Kitty Boulton thought. It was on Pickford Street, which was neither a bad street nor a good street by Clifton, Ohio standards. The street ran for four blocks, cutting west from Springfield Avenue and winding up at the western edge of town. At the east end of Pickford Street, near Springfield Avenue, there were older homes; some of them had been around when Samuel Clifton formally founded the town in 1789. Here, where the Boulton house stood, the street contained postwar houses; little one-story jobs built in a hurry and not designed to last for several centuries, not by any stretch of the imagination.

  So there was nothing wrong with the house, yet at the same time there was really very little right with it. Five rooms, plus a half-hearted basement. Five rooms: A small living room, a medium-sized kitchen, a cubbyhole euphemistically referred to as a dinette, a master bedroom, and a secondary bedroom that, in the absence of progeny, Matt used for a study. Five rooms, each equipped with paper-thin walls and seven-foot ceilings, with crawl space overhead in place of an attic, with doors that no longer fit their frames, and with terrible furniture.

  Home.

  Kitty Boulton was in the living room, in an old excuse for a Morris chair. There was a book in her hand, but she was not exactly reading it. Now and then she would scan a page or two and go on for a while, but the book at the moment was immaterial, a prop. She was reading it, but if it had not been there she would barely have noticed its absence.

  There was a record on the lo-fi, a Haydn quartet performed less than brilliantly by the European chamber group playing it. She wasn’t exactly listening to the record, either. She was dimly conscious of it, and if it had abruptly ceased to play she would have noticed the change, but she was not following it intently.

  What she was doing, essentially, was quite simple. She was watching her husband drink.

  He was on the other side of the living room, sitting silently on the Victorian couch, pouring blended rye into a water tumbler and drinking it. Not in a frenzy—it took him a good fifteen minutes to finish each drink. But he was drinking steadily, four shots to the hour, and she knew with certainty that he would be utterly plowed by ten-thirty.

  Damn you, she thought.

  “Matt,” she said.

  He looked up. “What?”

  “Don’t you think you’ve had enough?”

  He looked at her, at the bottle, at the glass, at the bottle, and at her again.

  “No,” he said.

  “Matt—”

  “What?”

  “Our liquor bill’s been running high these days.”

  “So?”

  “Maybe you could cut down a little.”

  “I don’t drink so much.”

  “Matt—”

  “A quart lasts me two days. What’s wrong with that?”

  “You’re ruining your health, for one thing.”

  “Look—”

  “And you’re spending fifteen dollars a week on liquor. For another thing.”

  He just looked at her. She took his direct stare for close to thirty seconds. Then she turned away. She could imagine his smile of triumph and she swallowed, angry. Then she heard the sound of liquor being transferred first from bottle to glass and then from glass to Matt. God in heaven, she thought.

  Somewhere along the line, things had gone wrong. She was not sure exactly where the train had gone off the track. They met, they fell in love—or thought so—and they got married. The course of love ran smoothly enough. And then, somewhere along the line, they were strangers living in the same house.

  No, not strangers, she thought. Not strangers at all. They knew each other very well, perhaps too well. But there was nothing between them, no feeling, nothing.

  The Haydn quartet ended and the lo-fi turned itself off. She closed her book deliberately and set it down on the worn carpet. She raised her eyes to Matt. He was not looking at her. She sat there, eyes firm, and she watched him drink.

  He’s drinking himself to death, she thought.

  And she barely cared.

  Why?

  She got to her feet, left the room. The bedroom was no better. Master bedroom or not, it was intolerably small; with the walls seeming to close in on her. And it was utterly dominated by their big bed, and that in itself was a rather grisly joke. The bedroom was no good. She could not sit in it. So where could she sit? The kitchen? The silly dinette? Matt’s pompous little study?

  Outside, the air was clear as Steuben glass, cool as peppermint ice cream. She filled her lungs with it and began walking aimlessly down Pickford Street toward the center of town. She was a tall woman, auburn-haired, with a slightly angular figure. She was wearing a mannish white shirt, loose on her skimpy breasts, and a pair of chocolate slacks, tight on her boyish hips. There were lines at the corners of her eyes, other lines at the corners of her mouth. She was twenty-nine. Usually, and especially now, she looked a few years older than that.

  Washed out, she thought. Washed out and washed up and old before her time. And it didn’t have to be that way either. Money was a part of it. If they had enough money for her to dress decently, if she could afford to go to the beauty parlor once in a while, if she didn’t have to break her neck straightening the house and washing the floors and this and that and the other thing—

  And not just money. If she had a reason to care what she looked like, for instance. If Matthew was in love with her, and she with him. If they had friends, if they occasionally went over to someone’s house instead of sitting alone every night while Matt got drunk and she got old—

  If.

  It had not always been this way. She remembered the beginning, at Iowa State. They had been quite literally intoxicated with each other in those days. Completely in love, and quite satisfied to have nothing in the world to do but talk to each other. Matt was young and handsome and brilliant; she was young and rather pretty and very bright. And the world was theirs, pure and simple.

  There was no worry then about going stagnant, no thoughts of winding up in a rut. You went to college, you studied, you taught. And, because you yourself were bright and imaginative, you took it for granted that, sooner or later, you would wind up living a bright imaginative life with bright imaginative people who did bright imaginative things. You didn’t foresee a life of abject monotony. That was not in the grad school catalog. You didn’t even consider it.

  But you wound up with it, she thought.

  She remembered, suddenly, the first time with Matt; the first time the two of them had made love. It had been no meeting of virgins. She had been around too long to come to him in that state. She had breezed through a series of bittersweet love affairs, enough of them to qualify her as an embryonic woman of the world without in any way labelling her as a tramp. He had had more experience, which was only right and proper. He seduced, and she came to him willingly but with the proper amount of feminine reserve.

  The first time. His apartment—off-campus, furnished with stark second-hand pieces, lit with candles in Chianti bottles. He cooked a spaghetti dinner—homemade sauce, cold red wine, the works. They listened to chamber music. They kissed, and his hands found her small but not insignificant breasts and teased then into life.

  And they went to bed.

  She remembered. She walked the several blocks to Springfield Avenue, savoring the memory, smiling with it, glowing with it. And then she reacted to that memory, contrasting those days with the present days, and she burned with anger and fear—anger at what she was living through, fear of a future equally drab and lifeless.

  She turned at Springfield Avenue and walked through the center of town. If one man winks at me, she thought, I will go with him. If one man wants me, just simply wants me for whatever reason. I will let him have me. If one man speaks to me I will sleep with him and give him my body.

  No man did.

  By eleven o’clock she was back again at the house on Pickford Street. She picked up an empty bottle from the living room rug and dropped it into the trash can. She went to the bedroom. The lights were on. Matt was on his side of the bed, lying nude on top of the covers, mouth open, snoring. The sound of his snores filled the room, filled her ears, made her suddenly sick to her stomach. She could not look at his dismal nakedness without wanting to vomit.