When She Was Good

by Philip Roth

  “No, no—”

  “Yes!” he cried triumphantly. “Please!”

  And then he began to say trust me to her, over and over, and please, please, and she did not see how she could stop him from doing what he was doing to her without reaching up and sinking her teeth into his throat, which was directly over her face. He kept saying please and she kept saying please, and she could hardly breathe or move, he was over her with all his weight, and saying now don’t fight me, I could love you, Angel, Angel, trust me, and suddenly into her mind came the name, Babs Egan.

  “Roy—!”

  “But I love you. Actually now I do.”

  “But what are you doing!”

  “I’m not doing anything, oh, my Angel, my Angel—”

  “But you will.”

  “No, no, my Angel, I won’t.”

  “But you’re doing it now! Stop! Roy, stop that!” she screamed.

  “Oh, damn it,” he said, and sat up, and allowed her to pull her legs out from under him.

  She looked out the window at her side; the glass had fogged over. She was afraid to look over at him. She didn’t know whether his trousers were just down, or completely off. She could hardly speak. “Are you crazy?”

  “What do you mean, crazy? I’m a human being! I’m a man!”

  “You can’t do something like that—by force! That’s what I mean! And I don’t want to do it anyway. Roy, get back in front. Dress yourself. Take me home. Now!”

  “But you just wanted to. You were all ready to.”

  “You had my arms pinned. You had me trapped! I didn’t want anything! And you weren’t even going to—to be careful! Are you absolutely insane? I’m not doing that!”

  “But I would use something!”

  She was astonished. “You would?”

  “I tried to get some today.”

  “You did? You mean you were planning this all day long?”

  “No! No! Well, I didn’t get them—did I? Well, did I?”

  “But you tried. You were thinking about it and planning it all day—”

  “But it didn’t work!”

  “Please, I don’t understand you—and I don’t want to. Take me home. Put your trousers on, please.”

  “They’re on. They were always on. Darn it, you don’t even know what I went through today. All you know is your own way, that’s all. Boy, you are another Ellie—another c.t.!”

  “Which is what!”

  “I don’t use that kind of language in front of girls, Lucy! I respect you! Doesn’t that mean anything to you at all? You know where I was this afternoon? I’ll tell you where, and I’m not ashamed either—because it happened to involve respect for you. Whether you know it or not.”

  And then, while she pulled her slip down and rearranged her skirt, he told his story. For almost an hour he had waited outside Forester’s for Mrs. Forester to go upstairs and leave her goofy old husband alone at the counter. But once Roy got inside, it turned out that Mrs. Forester had only gone back into the storeroom, and she was up by the register ready to wait on him before he could even turn around and walk out.

  “So what could I do? I bought a pack of Blackjack Gum. And a tin of Anacin. Well, what else was I supposed to do? In every store in town my father’s name is a household word. Every place I go it’s ‘Hi, Roy, how’s G.I. Joe?’ And people see me with you, Lucy. I mean, they know we’re going together, you know. So who would they think it was for? Don’t you think I think about that? There’s your reputation to consider too, don’t you think? There are a lot of things I happen to think about, Lucy, that maybe don’t cross your mind, sitting in school all day.”

  Somehow he had confused her. What really did she want him to do? To have bought one of those things? He certainly wasn’t going to use it on her. She wasn’t going to let him plan what he was going to do to her hours in advance, and then act as though the whole thing was the passion of the moment. She wasn’t going to be used or tricked, or be treated like some street tramp either.

  “But you were overseas,” she was saying.

  “The Aleutians! The Aleutian Islands, Lucy—across the Bering Sea from the U.S.S.R.! Do you know what the motto is up there? ‘A woman behind every tree’—but there are no trees. Get it? What do you think I did up there? I made out order forms all day. I played eighteen thousand ping-pong games. What’s the matter with you!” he said, sinking in disgust into the seat. “Overseas,” he said sourly. “You think I was up in some harem.”

  “… But what about with someone else?”

  “I never did it with anyone else! I’ve never done it in my entire life, all the way!”

  “Well,” she said softly, “I didn’t know that.”

  “Well, it’s the awful truth. I’m twenty years old, almost twenty-one, but that doesn’t mean I go around doing it with every girl I see. I have to like the person, first of all. You listen to stupid Ellie, but Ellie doesn’t know what she’s talking about. The reason, Lucy, I don’t take Monkey Littlefield out is because I don’t happen to respect her. If you want the truth. And I don’t like her. And I don’t even know her! Oh, forget it. Let’s just go, let’s just call it quits. If you’re going to listen to every story about me you hear, if you can’t see the kind of person I am, Lucy, then pardon my language, but the hell with it.”

  He liked her. He actually did like her. He said people knew that they were going together. She hadn’t realized. She was going with Roy Bassart, who was twenty and had been in the service. And people knew it.

  “—over in Winnisaw,” she was saying. Oh, why was she going on and on with this subject?

  “Sure, I suppose they have them over in Winnisaw, they probably give them out on the streets in Winnisaw.”

  “Well, you could have driven over, that’s all I mean.”

  “But why should I? Even going into Forester’s on Broadway is going too far, as far as you’re concerned. So what’s the sense? Who am I kidding? Myself? I spent a whole afternoon hanging around outside waiting for that old hag to disappear, and it wouldn’t have made any difference anyway. You’d only hate me worse. Right? So where does that leave me? Well, what is it you want to say, Lucy? That you’d say yes, if I had something?”

  “No!”

  “Okay, now we know where we stand! Fine!” He threw open the back door on his side. “Let’s go home! I can’t take any more of this, really. I happen to be a man and I happen to have certain physical needs, as well as emotional needs, you know, and I don’t have to take this from any high school kid. All we do is discuss every move I make, step by step. Is that romantic to you? Is that your idea of a man-woman relationship? Well, it’s not mine. Sex is one of the highest experiences anybody can have, man or woman, physical or mental. But you’re just another one of those typical American girls who thinks it’s obscene. Well, let’s go, Typical American Girl. I’m really a good-natured, easygoing guy, Lucy, so it really takes something to get me in a state like this—but I’m in it, all right, so let’s go!”

  She didn’t move. He was really and truly angry, not like somebody who was trying to deceive you or trick you.

  “Well, what’s the matter now?” he asked. “Well, what did I do wrong now?”

  “I just want you to know, Roy,” she said, “that it isn’t that I don’t like you.”

  He made the sour face. “No?”

  “No.”

  “Well, you sure do hide it.”

  “I don’t,” she said.

  “You do!”

  “… But what if you don’t like me? Really? How can I know you’re telling the truth?”

  “I told you, I don’t lie!”

  When she didn’t respond, he came closer to her.

  “You say love,” Lucy said. “But you don’t mean love.”

  “I get carried away, Lucy. That’s not a lie. I get carried away, by the mood. I like music, so it affects me. So that’s not a ‘lie.’ ”

  What had he just said? She couldn’t even understand … />
  He climbed back into the car. He put his hand on her hair. “And what’s wrong with getting carried away by the mood anyway?”

  “But when the mood leaves you?” she asked. She felt as though she weren’t there, as though this were all happening a long time ago. “Tomorrow, Roy?”

  “Oh, Lucy,” he said, and began kissing her again. “Oh, Angel.”

  “And what about Monkey Littlefield?”

  “I told you, I told you, I don’t even know her—oh, Angel, please,” he said, sliding her down against the new slipcovers he himself had installed. “It’s you, it’s you, it’s you and only you—”

  “But tomorrow—”

  “I’ll see you tomorrow, I promise, and the next day, and the next—”

  “Roy, I can’t—oh stop—”

  “But I’m not.”

  “But you are!”

  “Angel,” he moaned into her ear.

  “Roy, no, please.”

  “It’s okay,” he whispered, “it’s all right—”

  “Oh, it’s not!”

  “But it is, oh, it is, I swear,” he said, and then he assured her that he would use a technique he had heard about up in the Aleutians, called interruption. “Just trust me,” he pleaded, “trust me, trust me,” and, alas, she wanted to so badly, she did.

  A week before Lucy’s graduation the news arrived: Roy had been accepted at the Britannia School of Photography and Design, which had been established, according to the catalogue and brochure, in 1910. They were delighted to enroll him for the September session, they said, and returned with the letter of acceptance the dozen studies of Lucy he had enclosed with his application.

  At the little impromptu party he gave that evening in Roy’s honor—Ellie and Joe, Roy and Lucy, Mr. and Mrs. Bassart—Uncle Julian said they all owed a debt of gratitude to Lucy Nelson for being so photogenic. She deserved a prize too, so he gave her a kiss. He was still somebody whom she hadn’t made up her mind she actually approved of, and when she saw his lips coming her way she had a bad moment in which she almost pulled away. It wasn’t just Mr. Sowerby’s behavior with his wife, or his language, that caused her to be slightly repulsed; nor the fact that someone five foot five and smelling of cigars wasn’t particularly her idea of attractive. It was that during the last month there had been several occasions when she thought she had caught him looking too long at her legs. Could Roy be telling his uncle what they were doing? She just couldn’t believe it; he might know they parked up at Passion Paradise, but so did Ellie and Joe Whetstone, and all they did was neck. At least that’s what Ellie said—and surely what her parents believed. No, nobody knew anything at all, and Mr. Sowerby was probably only looking at the floor, or at nothing, those times she thought he was looking at her legs. After all she was just eighteen, and he was Eleanor’s father, and her legs had no shape, or so she thought, and it was ridiculous to imagine, as she had when she had found herself alone with him in the house one Saturday afternoon, that he was going to follow her up to Ellie’s room and try to do something to her. She was getting sex on the brain, too. She and Roy really had to stop what they had begun, she just knew it. He liked it so much he was dragging her up there every night, and maybe she liked it too, but liking it wasn’t the issue … What was, then? That’s what Roy asked, whenever she started saying, “No, no, not tonight.” But why not tonight, if last night?

  Anyway, when Mr. Sowerby kissed her it was loud and on the cheek, and everyone was laughing, and Mrs. Sowerby was right there watching, trying to laugh too. It was as unlike Lucy as anything could be—in a way it was one of the strangest things she had ever done—but in the confusion that came of being told in public that she was attractive, in the excitement that came of being so much a part of this celebration, of this family, of this house, she shrugged her shoulders, turned bright red and kissed Uncle Julian back. Roy applauded. “Bravo!” he cried, and Mrs. Sowerby stopped trying to laugh.

  Well, too bad for her. There really was very little Lucy could do that met with Mrs. Sowerby’s approval. She was a dowdy, snobbish woman who even seemed to hold against Lucy the fact that it was she who had finally had the strongest influence in deciding what Roy should become. Which was certainly none of Mrs. Sowerby’s business—even though that did appear to be the case: why Roy had decided to go to photography school in Fort Kean, where Britannia was located, seemed to have less to do with the quality of the training he would receive there—or with whatever natural talent he had for taking pictures, to be frank—than with the fact that Lucy happened to be going down to school in Fort Kean too.

  That Roy had been guided in his decision by such a consideration was hardly a fact that displeased Lucy. On the other hand, it was one more refutation of that idea she had formed of him before they had met: that he was a serious young man who had choices before him of real magnitude and gravity. No, he wasn’t exactly turning out to be entirely as she had imagined him back then—not that that was all to his discredit, however. For one thing, he really wasn’t as rude and ill-mannered as he had first appeared. And he wasn’t indifferent to others’ feelings; least of all to hers. Once the showing off had stopped, once he was no longer as frightened of her (she realized) as she had been of him, he was altogether sweet and considerate. In his amiability he even reminded her a little of Mr. Valerio, which was certainly a compliment.

  Nor was he superior in his attitudes, which was something she had just assumed would be the case, given his age and experience. He never tried to boss her around—except for sex; and even there she knew that when she decided enough was enough (probably that very night), there was nothing he would be able to do to force her to resume. There was nothing he could have done to force her to start, either, only why hadn’t she realized that at the time? The worst that could have happened was that he would never have seen her again. And would that have been a tragedy? Truthfully, there were a lot of important ways in which she was discovering that she didn’t like Roy that much. At times it even seemed as though it were she who was two and a half years older than Roy, not the other way around. She simply couldn’t bear him when he sang those songs into her ear, first of all. He was so childish sometimes, even if he was now twenty-one and old enough to vote, as he kept saying to everyone. Sometimes the things he said were nothing less than stupid. In the car, for instance, he kept telling her that he loved her … But was that stupid? What if it was true? Or what if he was only saying it for fear that if he didn’t she wouldn’t let him go all the way any more? Oh, she knew, she knew, she knew—they should never have started up in the car. It wasn’t right if you weren’t married, and it was even worse with someone you never could marry, either. We must stop! But somehow it made no more sense to stop now that they had begun than it had made to start in the first place. What she should really stop was the whole stupid thing!

  Yes, she was very, very confused—even on that wonderful, cheery night at the Sowerbys’, which began with Uncle Julian (as Roy had encouraged her to call him) kissing her as though she were another member of the family, and ended with his bringing out of the refrigerator a real bottle of French champagne, exploding cork and all … Oh, how could she possibly believe the suspicion, growing larger in her every day, that he probably wasn’t going to have one of any consequence at all, when they all stood around him with glasses raised, and said in unison, “To Roy’s future!”

  After graduation she began her summer schedule at the Dairy Bar: from ten to six, every day but Wednesday and Sunday. Midway through July she and Roy drove down to Fort Kean one Wednesday to look for a place for him to live in September. After inspecting each rooming house he came back to where Lucy sat in the parked car, and said he didn’t think the place was right, at least for him; either the room smelled funny, or the landlady looked suspicious, or the bed was too short, something he had had enough of for sixteen months in the Aleutians. In the one place that was ideal—one huge room with a bed in it that used to be the landlady’s husband’s (who’d been
six foot five), where the toilet was spotless, and the roomer guaranteed a shelf of his own in the refrigerator—there was no private entrance.

  Well, said Lucy, there had to be.

  At four that afternoon they had the worst argument they had ever had with each other, and far and away the worst Roy had ever had with anyone, his father included. To what was still the best all-around deal, all she could do was vehemently shake her head and say no, there had to be a private entrance if he expected ever to see her again. Suddenly, crying out, “Well, I don’t care—it’s me who has to live here!” he wheeled the Hudson around and drove back to the house with the long bed.

  When he got back to the car he took a road map from the glove compartment and on its face carefully drew a rectangle. “This is my room,” he said, managing not to look at her. It was on the first floor, a corner room with two tall windows on either side; all four let out onto a wide porch surrounded by shrubs. They were as good as four private entrances. At night a person could just step in and out of the windows exactly as though they were doors … Well, what did she want to say? Was she really planning on never speaking to him again, or did she have an opinion to express?

  “I expressed my opinion,” she said. “It didn’t mean anything to you.”

  “It did.”

  “But you went ahead and rented the room anyway.”

  “Because I wanted to, yes!”

  “I have nothing further to say, Roy.”

  “Lucy, it’s a room! It’s only a room! Why are you doing this?”

  “You did it, Roy. Not me.”

  “Did what?”

  “Acted like a child, again.”

  Before starting back to Liberty Center, Roy drove around to the Fort Kean College for Women. He pulled the car to the curb so Lucy could take another look at her new home. The college was across Pendleton Park from the main business section of Fort Kean. It had been built as a boys’ preparatory school in the 1890’s; in the thirties the school went under, and the property had been unused until the war, when it was occupied by the Army Signal Corps. After V-J Day the site had been purchased by the state, barracks and all, for its expanding educational program. It was certainly not the ivy-covered college campus one saw in the movies, or read about in books; the barracks that the Army had thrown up, long faded yellow buildings, were used as classrooms, and the administration building and dormitory was an old square fortress-like structure of gray stone that stood almost directly onto the street and resembled the County Courthouse in Winnisaw. At the sight of it, however, Lucy thought, “Only fifty-nine days more.”