Anyhow, she was bored by the holiday, therefore susceptible, and when she saw him approaching along the sidewalk on the afternoon of the third day, she just happened to decide to go out into the front yard at that moment, and being there, naturally, to speak to him.
“Hello, there, Brad,” she said.
“Hello, Fern.”
“You’re getting so big I hardly recognized you.”
“Well, I’m growing up, I guess.”
“And good-looking, too. Do you know that you’re very good looking, Brad? You’re just about the best looking boy I’ve seen in ages.”
Brad was in agreement with this judgment, although he would have omitted the qualification, but he didn’t think it would be prudent to say so.
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” he said.
“You are. You really are. What grade are you in now, Brad?”
“Im a senior. I graduate this spring.”
“Honest to God? I thought you were only a sophomore.”
“I skipped a couple of grades.”
“Well, if that isn’t just too much! Some people have everything, it seems. What does a boy as good-looking as you need with all those brains besides?”
“I don’t know. They’re pretty handy to have.”
“I’ll just bet they are. They make school a breeze, I bet. Are you coming up to my college next year, Brad?”
“I’m not sure about that. It looks like I’ll get several scholarship offers, and I’ll have to look them over before I decide.”
“I hope you come up to mine. It would be nice to have you there.”
“Well, thanks. Maybe I will, after all.”
“Where are you going now, Brad?”
“Home.”
“If you’re not in a hurry, why don’t you come in and have a cup of tea or a coke or something?”
“That would be fine if you’re sure you want me to.”
“Of course I’m sure. It isn’t often I get to talk with a boy as good-looking as you.”
“Oh, come off it. I’ll bet there are plenty of better looking boys up at your college.”
She denied this, as he had expected, and they went up to the house and inside together. In the living room, he sat on a sofa in front of a fireplace in which there was a small wood fire, and she asked him if he wanted a coke or tea.
He wanted a coke, but he had a notion that it would create a better impression if he took tea, and so he did, and she brought it in from the kitchen in a pot with sugar and lemon slices on a tray.
“How would you like some music?” she said. “Don’t you think some music would be nice?”
“Yes,” he said. “I’d like that.”
“What would you like to hear?”
“You choose something.”
“Here are the waltzes from Der Rosenkavalier. Do you care for these?”
He didn’t, knowing nothing about them, never having heard them. He had no appreciation whatever of music, in fact, this being one of his deficiencies that he was never able to correct. But he hated to confess to ignorance about anything, so he lied and said that he cared a great deal for the waltzes. She put them on the phonograph, and they began being played softly, but he was never aware in the slightest of the rare privilege he had that afternoon of executing, or suffering, his first seduction to the accompaniment of Strauss.
Fern sat down on the sofa beside him and poured tea and curled her legs under her, exposing a pair of nylon knees. The knees were quite close to his thigh, and when either of them shifted position a little, knees and thigh would touch lightly, and he began almost at once, in his youthful virility, to have a normal reaction that threatened to become apparent and prove embarrassing.
“In my opinion,” Fern said, “there is nothing quite like a fire and tea and music and good company. Don’t you agree?”
“Especially,” he said, “if half the company is you and the other half is me.”
“Well, what a charming thing to say, Brad. I was just thinking that myself.”
“It’s true. I’d much rather be here with you than with any other girl I know.”
“Do you mind that we’re all alone?” she asked, her eyes holding a bright sheen.
“I wasn’t sure that we were.”
“We are. My mother is at her bridge club and won’t be home until five at least. My father is at his shop, of course, and will be even later. Are you sure you don’t mind?”
“It makes it all the better as far as I’m concerned,” he said, grinning.
“I’ll bet a good-looking boy like you has been alone plenty of times with girls.”
“What makes you think so?”
“Because all the pretty girls with any sense would be trying to arrange it all the time, that’s what.” Fern’s voice was as soft as a caress and her eyes watched him with a warm and alert interest.
“Did you arrange it?” Brad asked.
“Well, I didn’t actually arrange it, because I just happened to be in the yard as you came by, but now that it’s sort of arranged itself, I’m perfectly satisfied.”
“Do you know what I’d like to do?”
“No. What?”
“I’d like to kiss you.”
“Say, you do work fast, don’t you?”
“What would you do if I did?”
“Better be careful. I might kiss you back, and you know what that can lead to.” She laughed lightly, her eyes warming him with their intensity.
“Tell me what.”
“I don’t think I’d better. You’re too young.”
“Come on and tell me. I dare you.”
“Something interesting, that’s all.”
“I’m going to go ahead and kiss you and find out,” he declared.
“Take your own chances, Brad.”
And so he did. His chances and her by the fire to Strauss.
To the magical music of the immortal waltzes, in shaggy pile before the dancing fire, she emerged in salacious three-four time from blouse and skirt and underthings. As nearly a poet at that time as he had ever been or would ever be, he thought that he had exposed, simply by removing her clothes, something wondrous and unique and entirely perfect — a new dimension in beauty that was his particular discovery. He explored the dimension with a kind of dreamy greed, his hands learning the shape and texture and response of small breasts and lean waist and agitated thighs. In the meanwhile, she was busy with his buttons, making her own discoveries, and in the end, locked head to toe, they still sustained, in spite of greed and agitation, the leisurely and lilting and enchanting illusion of having danced a peculiarly intimate waltz.
All this took quite a long and entertaining while, thanks to her superior ingenuity acquired through some experience. He felt for an instant immediately afterward a fearful dread of unpleasant consequences, for he had heard that many girls did this sort of thing in heat and haste and then became stormy vessels of regrets and recriminations.
To his vast relief, Fern did no such thing. She was, more than anything else, like a kitten full of cream. He was certain, in fact, that she literally gave off a soft purring that now and then assumed the intelligible sounds of endearments, and so he was fortunate enough to learn at the very first that there are women in the world who are capable of feeling a proper gratitude.
She continued to lie streatched out in front of the fire without embarrassment in nothing but stockings that had somehow not got removed. This lush lassitude proved, after a while, to be almost a major misfortune, for she was still there in that condition when a car turned suddenly into the drive outside.
Brad, as good luck would have it, was not quite so denuded, and he managed to get himself presentable in record time, while Fern scurried upstairs with her arms full of clothing.
When Mrs. Tillery, Fern’s mother, sailed into the living room a minute or two later, she discovered Brad sitting alone before the fire, neatly arranged and a perfect picture of rectitude.
He stood up, facing
her, and flashed his dimples as he made the slightest bow from the waist. Mrs. Tillery, for her part, thought only what a ravishingly handsome boy Brad was, and she was absurdly glad, considering the long gap of time between them, that she was herself still slim and sleek enough to stir a wanton thought.
“Good afternoon, Mrs. Tillery,” Brad said.
“Oh, it’s you, Bradley. How are you? Have you been having tea with Fern?”
“Yes, ma’m. She just went upstairs for something. When she comes down, I’ll have to be leaving.”
“Did you have a pleasant time?”
“Oh, yes. It was very nice. We listened to the waltzes from Der Rosenkavalier.”
“Those are nice, aren’t they? I think it’s so important for young people to learn to appreciate fine music.”
“I think so, too,” said Brad, who didn’t and never would.
At that moment Fern came into the room, repaired and composed, and Brad was compelled to admire an attitude of innocence so readily and perfectly assumed that it did not, as innocence must, seem assumed at all.
“Hello, Mother,” she said. “How was bridge?”
“Wonderful, darling. I had the most incredible run of good cards.”
“Brad and I have been having tea. It was fun, wasn’t it, Brad?”
“It surely was,” Brad agreed.
“Well,” Mrs. Tillery said, “I must change clothes and start thinking about dinner. Bradley, you must come for tea again sometime.”
“Thank you,” Braid said. “I’d like to.”
Fern took him to the door and showed him out, at the last moment giving his arm a firm squeeze and pursing her lips into the shape of a silent kiss. Returning after a minute to the living room, she found her mother still there.
“What a charming boy,” Mrs. Tillery said.
“He is, isn’t he?” Fern said.
“What a shame that he’s so much younger than you, darling.”
“He’s much more mature than most boys his age.”
“I could see that. Quite intelligent, too, I understand.”
“Well, he’s very interesting, I’ll say that for him.”
Saying it, however, she did not say precisely what she meant, and Mrs. Tillery, who had in fact been prompted by circumstances to recall a certain memorable episode among tea cups before a fire in her own past, did not, somehow, consider for a moment that anything remotely similar might have happened in the present instance.
Brad, making his way slowly toward his home in the next block, was considering with detachment a remarkable discovery that was later to be confirmed and reconfirmed and accepted as a significant and secret deficiency in the kind of person he was and had to be.
The discovery he had made with the fervent cooperation of Fern was simply that, while the imposition of his personality and the definitive capitulation of a partner in the act of love were enormously exciting and absolutely essential to his special ego, the act itself, for his part, was a flat disappointment. But he did not actually consider this a deficiency.
Eventually, indeed, he came to think of it as a peculiar strength. It helped him, in the end, to avoid becoming all mixed up and messy in a confusion of glands and brains.
3
NOW, A QUARTER of a century after Fern, at three o’clock in the afternoon of a Friday in his classroom at Peermont College, Brad was waiting for Maggie McCall.
It is hardly exact to say that he was waiting at three o’clock, however, for he had just dismissed his last class of the day, and Maggie could hardly have been expected to arrive on the instant from wherever she herself was required to be at that hour, conceding that she was required to be anywhere at all.
By ten minutes after, though, Brad certainly considered himself to be waiting, and he didn’t like it. By a quarter after he was definitely annoyed and feeling considerably less amiable than he had formerly felt. But then she arrived, at precisely a quarter after, a little flushed and breathless, and Brad began immediately to feel amiable again, and rather amused in a patronizing way.
She came in and stood at something like attention in front of his desk, like a private before his captain. He told her to sit down and relax, for God’s sake, and she did, crossing her legs and showing her knees, which he observed and admired.
“I’m sorry I’m late, Professor Cannon,” she said, “but I was on my way here, and would have been here at three or just a little after, as I promised, but then I met Buddy outside the library on the way, and he was even more difficult than usual. I had to stop and talk with him and explain why I couldn’t do something we had planned to do, which took simply forever, and that’s why I got here late instead of getting here on time, as I really intended.”
She completed this explanation, miraculously, with a reserve of breath, and he watched her for a few seconds afterward with his amused expression, one of his best that involved the precise cocking of the left eyebrow, while she waited quietly for whatever judgment he would decide to pronounce.
“Oh, that’s all right,” he said. “I only meant as near to three as you could make it. Who’s Buddy?”
“Buddy? Buddy’s a boy I know. Buddy Jensen. He’s a student here. I don’t suppose you’ve ever met him because he never takes anything like mathematics that might turn out to be difficult.”
“I do hope that he’s not the reason for your having neglected to prepare a single trigonometry assignment since the term began.”
“No, no. You musn’t blame Buddy. He’s persistent and often a bother, but I never permit him to interfere with anything I really want to do.”
“Am I to deduce that you didn’t really want to be here on time?”
“Oh, no. Why should you think so?”
“You said you never permitted Buddy to interfere with anything you really wanted to do, but you did, I believe, permit him to delay you.”
“Well, I didn’t mean it to be taken quite like that. I often have trouble saying exactly what I mean, to tell the truth, and some clever person like you is always twisting me up to mean something that I didn’t intend at all. Anyhow, Buddy was all upset because I couldn’t do this thing we had planned to do. I didn’t think a few minutes one way or the other would be very important.”
“Quite right. I rather suspect that Buddy himself isn’t very important. What do you say to disposing of him?” Brad picked up her paper, which had been lying at hand, and opened it. “This is a most charming little note, Miss McCall. I agree with you completely that stealing the top thirty-one feet of a pyramid was an exceptional piece of vandalism.”
“Besides removing the outer limestone casing.”
“True. Besides removing the outer limestone casing.
I’m flattered, since we apparently cannot communicate trigonometrically, so to speak, that you have devised this means of reaching me.”
“You aren’t angry?”
“Angry? Not at all.”
“I’m so glad. I thought you might be, and it would make me unhappy if you were. I only wanted to please you and make you notice me.”
“You’re an attractive girl, Miss McCall. It’s probable that I’d have noticed you in any event.”
“Thank you. It’s kind of you to say so.”
“It’s merely the truth, and I suspect that you are well aware of it.”
“Well, anyhow, I’ve never been told so by anyone so clever and important as you. It’s a great relief to know that everything is all right, after all.”
“Not entirely. We still have the small matter of trigonometry to discuss.” He tapped the paper with an index finger. “I’m gratified that you exonerate me of all blame for your almost perfect ignorance. As a matter of fact, I’m inclined to admire you, in a way. It must surely require considerable intelligence and ingenuity to sit in a class as long as you have sat in this one and learn absolutely nothing.”
She uncrossed her knees and placed them together and tugged at her skirt without any apparent effort. Lacing her fingers in her
lap, she stared down at them and shook her head slowly and looked up again sadly.
“You’re being sarcastic,” she said. “It’s all right, of course, because I deserve it. I suppose you will put me out of the class.”
“I haven’t said that.”
“I won’t blame you if you do. I admit that I’m hopeless.”
“Perhaps you would tell me why you enrolled in the class in the first place. You were surely aware of your deficiency in mathematics.”
“Oh, yes. I know practically nothing about mathemaries, except simple things that almost everyone knows.”
“I’m curious as to how you managed it. As you must know, there are certain prerequisites to the study of trigonometry. Have you ever had, for example, algebra and geometry?”
“I’ve had them, naturally, for I wouldn’t have been permitted to enroll in trig if I hadn’t. But I didn’t learn anything, or hardly anything, and so they don’t help much.”
“But you must have passed the courses. How do you explain that?”
“I think it must have been because the teachers liked me for some reason and wanted to be kind or something.”
“I see.”
“My marks weren’t very good, of course.”
They must have been average, he knew, or she would have been denied entrance into his class. He was tempted to ask if her teachers had been men or women, but the question would have been strictly rhetorical, for its answer and implications were already clear enough.
Watching her with lively curiosity accompanied by the faint prickliness, he tried to diagnose the quality of the impression she gave. A kind of compromised innocence? Suggestive demureness? He liked both phrases and repeated them in his mind. Sensing the deception of her overt propriety, he felt as if he had peeped into a pair of cotton bloomers and found the private parts of the Queen of Sheba.
“We still haven’t solved the mystery of your enrollment,” he said. “You obviously don’t care for mathematics. I’m sorry to say that it’s equally obvious that mathematics is something that you know practically nothing about. You have admitted as much. Why in the devil, then, did you take my class?”
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