Eventually, though, he had learned that girls—just like boys—did not always look merely at the face when they were sizing up a prospect. They also liked the body. His parents had always encouraged both him and Lawrence to play sports. He had loved football from the first time he’d played it at age eight, not only for the fun of hitting, but for the anonymity bestowed by the helmet; in uniform he looked like everyone else. In baseball he always played catcher, so that he could wear a mask. And when he enrolled at Montpelier in the ninth grade, he was delighted to discover wrestling, a sport where he could also wear a mask. Warden was not a great athlete, but he was a willing one. He completed his workouts the best he could and considered himself an average performer with below-average appearance. Hence, he had been astonished during his junior year at Montpelier to overhear some girls behind the backstop talking about what a good build he had. He had liked that and had never forgotten it. At mixers, too, he had learned that he could make girls laugh by saying funny things about the chaperones out on the dance floor, but that it was easier to be funny with a group of girls, because as soon as he was alone with just one girl, he found himself helplessly speechless, and that a girl alone with him would eventually invent a clumsy excuse to leave.
Sewanee had offered him the same environment as Montpelier, but the difference was the automobile and the freedom to purchase a pint of whiskey from the bootleggers down the road and to spend a Saturday evening in Chattanooga. In those days he had discovered women who would consort with him, who would gladly go for a date if he had a ten-dollar bill or even a drink to offer them. They would dance at the roadhouses and laugh and sit in the car on country roads for quick, satisfying trysts. But he rarely had seen the same woman twice, and he had needed a drink or two of bourbon before he could relax enough to talk.
In his senior year of college he had found his Roxane. Her name was Elizabeth, and she was beautiful and bright and attentive. She had come up as a blind date, the friend of the girlfriend of Warden’s roommate. She went to Converse College in South Carolina, almost too far from the mountains of Tennessee, but Warden’s roommate had a car, and he was perfectly willing to drive across the mountain to visit the ladies at Converse. The four of them—Warden’s roommate, the roommate’s date, Warden himself, and Elizabeth—had become a regular set. Warden at last had understood what being in love meant. Elizabeth had been the woman with whom he had wanted to spend the rest of his life, and late in May, just before graduation, he had asked her to marry him. She had put off her answer. A week later, she had married his roommate.
He enjoyed telling the story now as a joke on himself. But it was a rueful joke. It had hurt at the time, and he had always assumed that the fault of losing her was his own.
Elizabeth was the last woman Warden had allowed himself to love until he met Cynthia. After Sewanee he had deliberately returned to Montpelier, to the monastic existence where he could be free of the distractions of women, but he had found women everywhere—other men’s wives, the nurses, the secretaries, beautiful women strolling along the sidewalks. He had kept himself in physical shape, had understood the benefits of exercise on the libido. At night he had dreams—delicious, tantalizing, excruciating fantasies of himself with all sorts and conditions of women.
Even after he and Cynthia were married, he experienced random moments of wonder that she could really be his wife—and stray moments of dread that, like his happiest dreams, this interlude of joy would end.
And now Cynthia was ill. It was his greatest fear come true. He had initially assumed that the thief would be a younger man with a handsome face, but over the past two years, Cynthia had nearly convinced him that such fears were silly, possessive, childish. He had taken to worrying over her being in an automobile accident whenever she commuted to Charlottesville to meet with the director of her dissertation. He had failed to consider sickness even last summer, when she had suffered the first of these brief episodes of blurred vision.
He wanted to protect her from whatever assault she faced.
Maybe the boys on the dorm were using some kind of incense to which she was allergic. Or maybe they had transmitted to her some obscure virus, one to which males were naturally immune.
He was tempted to fall into a metaphysical depression. Was he himself the cause of her troubles? By flouting the gods, by marrying this lovely young woman, had he aroused their anger, triggered their punishment? Which old culture warned that it was unwise to find a perfect love, for such a love would make the gods jealous?
Not fair, he corrected himself. Theirs was not a tragic story of star-crossed lovers; it was about the princess who kissed the frog. She kissed him and found that he remained a frog, and she married him anyway. The conventions
