She turned off the lights and removed her own clothing in the darkness. Now, feeling as she did, she did not even want to look upon her own bare body. She stripped, let her clothes fall on the floor—What was the point in being neat, anyway? And she slipped under the covers and closed her eyes, wondering how long it would take for her to fall asleep.

  It took quite a while.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  “PRETTY GOOD FLICK,” Herbie White said.

  “I enjoyed it.”

  “Solid. Want to make the tavern?”

  “If you’d like,” Jan said.

  “Sure.”

  They walked across Springfield Avenue, then headed uptown half a block to the tavern, Clifton’s major college hangout. The oppressive atmosphere of the place was colonial, with candle-molds and footwarmers hanging here and there from the ceiling, each one a sort of Damoclean sword. They took a booth in the back. A waiter appeared, and Herbie White ordered two steins of Carling’s. The waiter went away.

  “Well,” Herbie White said.

  Jan didn’t answer him. Instead she studied him across the small table. He was appealing, she thought abstractly. A suitably blond crew-cut. Collegiate horn-rimmed glasses. A moderately pugnacious jawline. A boatneck sweater over a button-down oxford cloth shirt. Khakis. A perfectly proper Joe College type, one she had dated maybe half a dozen times, one who wanted to get in her pants.

  There was only one thing wrong with him.

  She didn’t like him at all.

  “You’re tough to figure,” Herbie White said.

  “I am?”

  “Yeah.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “You want to know why?”

  “Why?”

  “You keep it all in. You sit there and think about things and you don’t talk. Most girls, now, they never stop talking. They can talk an hour at a clip without running out of gas. You just sit there and think.”

  “If I’m no fun, you can date somebody else.”

  “Hey! I didn’t mean anything.”

  “Oh.”

  “I was just talking.”

  That’s the truth, she thought. The waiter brought the beers then, which was fortunate, because it obviated the necessity for conversation. Jan picked up her stein and sipped the cold beer. It wasn’t bad, she thought, but there was something just too preciously Joe College and Betty Coed about sitting in the tavern and drinking steins of beer. What would she drink on a date with Matthew? Not a date, she corrected herself. An evening out. Not a date, for God’s sake.

  Wine, she decided. Or cocktails.

  Not beer.

  Definitely not beer.

  They drank their beer. Herbie White ordered another round. He wasn’t really a bad guy, Jan told herself. Nor was it that he was too immature for her. If anything, he was just right for her. She felt very worldly at times, but it was basically a big put-on. She was just a kid. He was a year older, a nice upper-middle-class boy, the type her parents would be quick to grant total approval as a prospective son-in-law. He was flip and light-headed, but he was also dead serious about vital things like money and pension plans and getting ahead in the world and the sanctity of the home.

  And he wasn’t just out with her to get in her pants, either. That was one of his main short-range objectives, but his interest went further than that. He wanted to date her, on a more or less steady basis. Eventually he would want to get engaged to her, and then he would want to marry her. She seemed to fit his image of what sort of girl would make an ideal wife for a solid citizen interested in the good life.

  But she couldn’t stand him. He bored the hell out of her. And she especially couldn’t stand him when she thought of The Man; the only man, the one who barely knew she was alive but got her so dizzy she couldn’t stand it.

  I.e., Matthew Boulton.

  “Drink up,” Herbie White suggested. “Time to split.”

  His speech irritated her, too. Herbie, who took racial discrimination more or less for granted, who wouldn’t want either to lynch Negroes or, saints forbid, to live near them, did his best to sound like a Negro musician. It struck her as somehow inconsistent.

  She finished her beer—most of it, anyway—and they left the tavern and went to his car. It was a Plymouth, three years old, and equipped with tail fins and flashy upholstery and almost everything other than a decent engine. He started the car and headed along Limestone and out toward the edge of town.

  On the way, he talked. About the picture he had seen, about one of the crazy things someone in his dorm had done, that sort of nonsense. All of this, she thought, was patently absurd. They were going to park someplace, and he was going to see how hot he could get her, and on the way he had to chatter on and on about perfect irrelevancies. It did not make any sense at all to her.

  Then the parking ritual. An embarrassing moment when he pulled a short way off the road and cut the engine, killing the lights and jerking the emergency brake. Now, of course, he had to stop talking. He sat still, and his arm crawled across the back of the seat at her. And, because it was part of the game, she went to him and their mouths met.

  He tasted a little beery. He kissed her, tentatively and then somewhat more confidently, and at first she went through the motions without feeling a thing. Odd, she thought. Here she was with a real man—or boy, depending on how you looked at him—and she could be touched and kissed and feel nothing. And that afternoon she had been alone in her own room with nothing for company but her own wicked thoughts and her busy little hands, and she had been hotter than noon on the Equator.

  Odd.

  He kissed her again, and his hands began doing things. They roamed across her back at first, in a caress that was more nuisance than excitement. They pulled her sweater free from the waistband of her skirt and dipped up under the back of the sweater rubbing the taut flesh of her back. They fumbled briefly with the bra clasp, then succeeded in opening it. They pulled gently but persistently at the bra in a misguided effort to remove it while leaving the sweater intact. That sort of maneuver worked nicely with strapless bras, but she didn’t happen to be wearing a strapless bra. So it wasn’t working.

  If he had kept up with the bra, she would have come dangerously close to laughter. Fortunately he shifted his tactics, withdrawing his hands completely and pressing his mouth to hers, kissing her. His tongue moved out to ooze over her lips. Obediently she let her mouth come open and his tongue snuck in like a thief in the night.

  That was one thing about college, she thought. You learned how to kiss. There were girls she knew who would defend their honor at gunpoint but who were fully capable of engaging in kissing sessions that lasted four or five hours at a clip. And Herbie White knew how to kiss. His tongue did delicious things to the inside of her mouth, meeting her tongue, saying hello, getting acquainted. She closed her lips around the invading tongue and sucked hard on it. Their mouths worked incessantly.

  Then, cleverly, he worked the sweater up over her head. There was a moment of truth when the sweater was bunched up around her neck and their mouths were still locked in osculatory combat. Obviously, he couldn’t pull the sweater over her head without interrupting the kissing bee.

  She solved the problem by breaking off the kiss, sitting back in the seat, and tugging the sweater over her head. Then she let her arms fall forward so that the bra straps slipped down over her shoulders. He pulled the bra off, a wolfish gleam in his blue eyes, and his hand took complete possession of her ripe breasts, caressing and holding them.

  It was a funny feeling, she thought. She was not exactly excited, but she was not bored, either. It was something else. She wanted to be kissed, wanted to be caressed, wanted to be touched and fondled and probed. And at the same time she did not wish to feel like a participant in the act, nor did she want things to get out of hand. The whole thing was very hedonistic at root. She wanted pleasure, stimulation.

  He obliged.

  Things follow a pattern on the college campus. Rebellious youth, anxious to cast aside the patterns of bourgeois conformity, only succeeds in shaping new patterns and adhering to them like iron filings to a magnet. The patterns in college-level dating procedure, subgrouping Sex, are as patterned as anything Amy Lowell ever griped about. And Herbie White was no pattern-smasher.

  First the hands on the breast while the mouth French-kissed her. Then the hands moving from the breasts slowly down the body to the knees, while the lips got busy on the breasts. That was kind of a fun thing for Jan, because it left her with nothing much to do. She sat with her eyes closed and her hands at her sides and she let his lips do wild things to her breasts.

  Clever things. Moving around each nipple in turn, describing ever-diminishing concentric circles which wound up with the lips pressing hard against the very tip of the nipple like a finger ringing a doorbell. The lips gliding softly but persistently over her tenderness and planting a trail of hungry kisses over the breasts, and the lips parting and then coming together around the nipple hard, kissing the nipple, drawing out the throbbing little bud and making it ache pleasantly.

  Then more of the pattern.

  The hands again.

  The hands were clever. With the lips running interference over the breasts, the hands seized the opportunity to make a preliminary sortie up beneath the skirt. The skin on Jan’s thighs was softer than down, more sensitive than an open wound. She began to vibrate with the beginnings of genuine excitement, felt passion starting to run through her body like a sword through silk.

  Then—

  Then he took her pants off.

  This was a new landmark, she thought. He had never done this before. They had played their games, but always with the sheer protection of panties between he and she. Now the panties were off, and his hand was finding her, touching her.

  It felt great.

  It really did, she thought. It really felt wonderful. It had felt pleasant enough when she had done it herself that afternoon, and now it was considerably better, because now he was kissing her breasts at the same time; a little refinement which was impossible to do by yourself, unless you were constructed along rather unorthodox lines.

  He kept touching, caressing. For a college kid, she thought, he knew quite a lot about a woman’s body. He wasn’t perfect, though. Not by a long shot. He worked largely by trial and error. When she gave a throaty little gasp, he guessed correctly that he had hit on a winning move, and he repeated it. When he got no reaction, he concluded that what he was doing was not very good. There were a few exasperating times when she had an impulse to shove him aside and show him how to get optimum results, but she didn’t think that would go over too well.

  And then, just as he was getting ready for the finale, she got hold of herself.

  Figuratively, that is.

  Not literally.

  He was moving away from her, fumbling with his chinos. And, pushing him aside, she said: “No.”

  “Baby—”

  “No,” she said firmly.

  It never ceased to amaze her how absolutely fanatic college boys were about being obedient to the wishes of their sexual playmates. She said no; therefore he could not conclude the performance along obvious lines. It evidently never occurred to Herbie White to disregard her no and go ahead and take her anyway. It just as evidently never occurred to him that there were times when a girl said no without meaning it, or that there were also comparable times when a girl said no and meant no and yet would love nothing so much as a good old-fashioned case of technical rape. Caveman techniques might be overrated in certain quarters, but they had their merits now and then.

  And this was one of those times. Despite this big thing she had for Matthew Boulton, despite the whole love affair she had built up in her mind with him, despite the lack of enthusiasm she felt for Herbie White, one good, wild, little rape would have sent her head over heels in love with Herbie.

  The clown missed his cue.

  Instead he pulled away from her, his whole body shaking dramatically.

  And he said: “I’m—I’m sorry, honey.”

  You should be, she thought. And you’ll never know why.

  “But you can’t leave me like this,” he went on. “A man—a man can’t get that excited and then stop.”

  Neither, she thought sourly, can a woman.

  “There’s—a way, honey.”

  College boys, she thought sardonically, are no damned good at all. With the fate of the nation in the hands of boys like Herbie White, the only sensible thing to do was disarm and hope the Russians left us somewhat alone. Because the trouble with college boys was very simply stated. They were all too willing to settle for half. They had victory within their grasp, and they were glad to be content with an ineffectual little manual love.

  Well, why not, she thought. If this kept up, she could bill herself as the girl with the fastest hands in Clifton. That afternoon her hands had done things to herself. Now they would do things to Herbie. A full life, she thought. From hand-in-gland to gland-in-hand in just a few brief hours.

  Great.

  Terrific.

  “Will you?” he asked, beseechingly.

  “Yes,” she said, sincerely.

  It was almost humorous, except for the sad fact that he was taking it all so seriously. Sighing luxuriously, he sat back in his seat and closed his baby blue eyes. Like a sultan, she thought abruptly. Like an oriental potentate in a divan waiting for some harem candidate to come and be nourished at the fount of power.

  God.

  Where to start? She considered kissing him on the mouth, then decided that such a gesture would only be ridiculous. This was no time for affection or the pretense of passion. This was only a time for the necessities of passion, the release of gratification. They were not imitation lover and imitation loved any longer. He was just a soldier, and it was time for her to give him a dishonorable discharge.

  She reached for him, found him. This was a form of foreplay in which she had never participated before, and at first she was somewhat stunned by the dimensions of the problem. It was quite a problem, and unbelievably large problem.

  Maybe it was good he hadn’t raped her, she thought. If you put such a huge problem into such a small solution, it would probably hurt like hell.

  She smiled at the image. And then, suiting her actions to the problem, she took matters into her own little hands.

  Again, it was a process of trial and error. She tried various techniques, and sooner or later she hit on a few successful ones, and his passion mounted. She watched him, her eyes on his face while her hands were elsewhere.

  At first he kept his eyes closed. He began to breathe heavily as his passion increased, and his body began to writhe slightly in the spasmodic motions of passion confined to a car’s front seat. Then, as things progressed, he suddenly opened his eyes. She thought for a moment that he wanted to look at her face, or something. But he just wanted to watch what she was doing.

  He watched.

  She went on doing it.

  It was impossible for her to get intimately involved in the act. There was something too fundamentally revolting about the whole procedure for her to abandon her mind to it. She thought how unutterably foolish it all was, how basically childish it seemed to be. That was the root of the trouble, she had to admit. He was a child and she needed a man. Only a little boy would be so willing to settle for half. Only a little boy could enjoy such a feeble substitute for genuine sex. Only a little boy could be so desperately awkward about everything he did.

  And she needed a man.

  With a boy, you could never entirely relax. You kept your guard up, on the one hand, and at the same time you had nothing real to guard yourself from, no real danger threatening you. Only with a man could you permit yourself to be a woman.

  So, even while her hands were saying one thing, her brain was saying another. Tomorrow, she promised herself, she would see Matthew Boulton again. Not as a student seeking an answer to an unimportant question.

  As a woman.

  Her hands went on. Beads of sweat dotted Herbie’s forehead. He was breathing harshly, his whole body shaking.

  More.

  More—

  “Oh, God,” he said.

  And then he shuddered, trembling in the warmth of her hands, and he shook and trembled, and then all was still and quiet.

  Oh, God, she thought.

  “Baby,” he said, “you’re an angel.”

  Angel, she thought, you’re a baby.

  Chapter Three

  MAKE NO MISTAKE about it. Technology has played a tremendous role in the sexual revolution of mid-twentieth century America. It has become platitudinous to speak of the effect of the automobile, for example, upon the morality of the young. Couples who were once locked to the sofa in the parlor now had a travelling bedroom at their command, a bedroom which can be parked in any secluded nook, put to use, and then driven quickly away. But the automobile is a temporary thing at best. Once you’ve reached a certain stage of sexual development you want quarters a bit more dedicated to creature comfort than a motor car.

  The motel is the next step. The motel, a fairly recent phenomenon, is an immeasurable boon to lovers.

  Take the pre-motel days. Can you imagine dating a girl and taking her to a hotel in the center of town for an hour or two of amorous dalliance? Impossible, obviously. In the first place, the desk clerk would probably toss you both out on your respective behinds. In the second place, nine times out of ten you would meet her father as he was heading home from a Rotary Club meeting, or something equally exciting. But the motel, down the road a piece, combines perfect safety with total comfort, and all priced within the reach of the average lecher’s pocket book.

  The Anthony Payne motel was located on Route 68, an outgrowth of Springfield Avenue heading to Xenia. The Anthony Payne motel—or the Tony, as Clifton’s student body affectionally called it—charged six dollars for a room. They did not care who rented the room. They did not care what happened in the room. They cared about the six dollars, and that was all they cared about.