Oh, Rhoda, how I have missed you.
But there is supposed to be sex in this book, isn’t there? I suppose I could write a chapter without having anybody do anything to anybody, just talking and thinking, but it seems a bad idea for the very first chapter of the book. The reader might get discouraged. It seems, oh, very egoish to feel that total strangers will be that interested in what one says or thinks, but everybody is always interested in what everyone else does or has done in bed, so there ought to be some sex here before this chapter is over.
(I don’t honestly see why it was a stupid question to ask how long a chapter should be. Smartass answers notwithstanding.)
Sex. I was going to have Harry talk me out of my foul mood and take me upstairs and to bed, but that isn’t what happened. It would be a nice way to get some sex into the chapter, and I guess it was a way that occurred to Harry too, not for the book but as a way to spend the afternoon, because he did make a medium-to-heavy pass, and I dropped the ball rather deliberately.
Sex. Rhoda, then, and what happened something like-ten years ago?
Ten years ago.
Ah, how weird this it! I sit here trying to remember, trying to recapture just exactly what it was like. It is hard, even, to remember the person one was that long ago, let alone the actual feel of an incident, the texture of a relationship.
It was at college, a girl’s college not more than forty miles nor less than five hundred years from the house I live in now. Rhoda and I were sophomores, and roommates. The previous year we had been freshmen and friends, and now we roomed together.
Those were desperate times, now that I think back on them. We were both dating furiously, and not quite getting slept with by Yale boys, most of whom seemed secretly more interested in strong drink than in us. And we tended to date the same boys, which has about it an air of incest, I think. Oh, you were out with Garrett tonight? Did he give you the sneaky hand-on-thigh routine? I think hes sort of sexy but just so obvious, wouldn’t you say? A bit much, all in all.
We both drank too much-no one had more than heard of grass, but all of us drank as a regular thing. And studied too little, until exams came up or papers came suddenly due and we dropped Dexedrine and worked the clock around. And we leaped constantly back and forth between exhilaration and despair. Yes, despair-they really were desperate times.
One night, then, wintry (I remember the ultra-long Yale blue-and-white scarf I wore then, wrapped endlessly around my neck) and bleak, and I came back from the library where I had gone to study and had instead dozed over some unreadable swill. Rhoda was sitting up in bed with a half-gallon of California wine. There were stains of spilled wine on the bedsheets.
I can see her now, the top sheet just covering the tops of her breasts, her rich auburn hair flowing to her shoulders. (Who else had long hair in those days? Hardly anyone. I should have, had I had any sense. I have at my best moments a sort of ethereal quality, which my blondish hair, now worn long, rather enhances, I would say. But then I couldn’t conceive of it.)
She was so beautiful, Rhoda was. I hated my own looks in those days and would have prayed, had prayer occurred to me as a logical means to any sort of end, to look less like myself and more like Rhoda. No one else there looked remotely like her. In a school full of girls, she looked like a young woman.
“Wine,” she said, extending the jug.
“We’re not using glasses?”
“We are getting in tune with more basic things. Wine straight from the jug. You crook your finger in the handle and let the jug rest on your upper arm, like so-”
I put a stack of records on. The Modern Jazz Quartet, J.J. and Kai, George Shearing. (Whatever happened to all those people?) We talked. I don’t remember what about. Rhoda was in a depression and trying to laugh and drink her way out of it. I was keeping her company, but not doing the world’s best job of it.
“Prissy?”
“Hmmm?”
“Everything’s so alone, isn’t it?”
“Everything’s a pain in the ass.”
“I think you’ve broken new philosophical ground. Everything’s a pain in the ass.”
“It really is.”
“I’ll tell you something, most people are a pain in the ass.”
“An unqualified pain in the ass.”
“How do you qualify one?”
“You have to pass an examination. On the state level, I think. What would I do if you didn’t exist?”
“It’s like God. You would have to invent me.”
“God would have to invent you?”
“No, I mean-”
“I know what you mean. I always know what you mean. We always know what we mean. Rho, I couldn’t study, I fell asleep over the book.”
“Do you think we’ll ever fall in love?”
“With our books?”
“With men. Boys. Whatever.”
“I don’t know. They’re all-”
“I know.”
“Sometimes I think I’m too selfish to fall in love. I mean too much involved with myself, actually.”
“I don’t think you’re a selfish person at all. Not even in that sense.”
“I don’t think I’m lovable.”
“Hell, pudding, I love you.”
“And I love you, but-”
“That’s the solution, then. We’ll become lesbians. This wine isn’t so bad once you get used to it.”
“When will that happen? I don’t seem to be getting used to it.”
“It takes time, that’s all. You know, we really could become lesbians.”
“I wish they had courses in it.”
“What would be more natural, Prissy, than for two people who love each other to become lovers?”
“Exactly.”
“You’re very beautiful.”
“Oh, come off it.”
“What would you do if I kissed you?”
“Close my eyes and think of Paul Newman.”
“Come here and try it.”
“Huh?”
Sitting upright, the bedsheet falling away from her full breasts: “Get over here and kiss me.”
Django, by the Modern Jazz Quartet. The smells of cigarette smoke and wine and unwashed clothes. Going to the bed, head buzzing with a feel of unreality, weird, weird. Her eyes draw me as light draws insects. Depths and intricacies. Kissing, her mouth under mine, warm, yielding, and then her arms flung convulsively around me, holding me. Her breasts under my breasts.
Voices in my brain. One, slightly hysterical, shouting that I was kissing my roommate, for Christ’s sake, that I was kissing a girl, for Christ’s sake, that I must be out of my mind or hopelessly perverted. A voice of soft reason saying Be careful, go slow, be careful, this is deep water. And another voice, light and free as myself, saying airily that nothing could feel this good and have anything bad about it.
“Did you think of Paul Newman?”
“I thought of you.”
“This is dynamite. Go lock the door.”
“Do you think-”
“Yes. And take off your clothes.”
“I feel embarrassed.”
