Clem’s first response to her tirade had been condescension. Being female, and sentimental, Sharon didn’t seem to realize how grotesquely immoral the war was, or that her brother had been free to refuse to serve in it. He, Clem, in her brother’s place, would have refused to serve. But Sharon wouldn’t budge. Her brother loved his country and was a real man; when duty called, he reported. And what about all the boys from Black slums and Indian reservations her brother was serving with? They didn’t even know that not serving was an option. The result was that people like Clem got to be both safe and self-righteous.
“What was your lottery number?” she asked him.
“Terrible. Nineteen.”
“So somebody right now is in the jungle because your parents sent you to college.”
“But I wouldn’t have gone anyway.”
“It’s the same thing. Somebody is there because you’re not. Somebody like Mike. You’re all about the ‘grotesque immorality’ of the war. What about the grotesque immorality of making poor people and uneducated people and Black people be the ones to fight it? Why isn’t that equally grotesque? Why aren’t you protesting that?”
“It’s kind of implied, don’t you think?”
“No. I never hear anyone here talk about it. All I hear is contempt for the military.”
She was little, and female, but her thoughts were original. In Arizona, on his church group’s spring trip, he’d worked for a Navajo man, Keith Durochie, who’d lost a son in Vietnam. Only seventeen, uncomfortable in the presence of a parent’s loss, Clem had tried to sympathize with Durochie by lamenting how unjust it was to die in such a war, and Durochie had gone morose and silent. Clem had said the wrong thing, but he hadn’t known why. Listening to Sharon, he understood that, far from consoling Durochie, he’d dishonored his son’s death. What an ass he’d been.
“I’m really sorry I didn’t write back to you,” he said.
Her dark brown eyes were on him. “Walk me home?”
Already, that first night, he’d had the heart-fluttering sense that he would have to take action; that he’d glimpsed a moral truth which there was no going back and unglimpsing. He might have been spared if he’d had a higher draft number, but lottery ball 19 had followed an incalculable （“random”） trajectory to pairing with his birthday, and his heart went out to the uneducated kid who was serving in his rightful place. He didn’t want to be like his father, who merely professed to have sympathy for the underprivileged. Giving up his student deferment was an insanely steep price to pay for being more consistent than his father, but by the time he and Sharon reached her house, on one of the shabbier side streets of Urbana, his moral intuition was telling him to pay it.
At the top of the stairs to her front porch, she turned around and kissed him. He was one step below her, the stairs compensating for their rather extreme height difference. The kiss was the beginning of a long reprieve from the judgment he’d passed on himself. When he finally tore himself away from her, with a promise to call her the next day, the thought of Vietnam had been banished by the sweetness of her mouth, the welcoming scent of her skin, the parting of his lips by her bold little tongue, the great surprise of it all.
Her house was a clapboard wreck with a hippie-run bicycle store on the ground floor, hippie common rooms on the second floor, hippie bedrooms on the third, and Sharon, who detested hippies, in the only habitable room on the fourth. She looked to the world like a harmless small creature, but she had a way of getting what she wanted. The year before, after her sorority had expelled her for violating its rules, the hippies had given her the best room in their house. Among other things, it was the perfect room for uninterrupted sex. Clem would later come to see the wisdom of parietal regulations, which, outmoded norms of behavior aside, served to keep undergraduates from falling into a pit of pleasure and neglecting their studies, but on his second visit he’d gone up to her room in all innocence. After some hours of necking on her bed, in their clothes, Sharon went to the bathroom and returned wearing only a terrycloth robe. It transpired that she’d got impatient with the necking, also sore of chin and nose. She pushed Clem onto his back and undid his belt buckle. He said, “Wait, though.” She said it was okay, she was on the Pill. She’d lost her own virginity when she was seventeen, an exchange student in Lyon, France. The family she’d boarded with had an older son who went to the university but lived at home and was her lover for two and a half months, until they were detected. The ensuing shitstorm had resulted in her being sent home to Eltonville. A monumental embarrassment, she said, but worth it. After exchanging letters for a year, her lover had found someone else and she’d had further adventures on which she didn’t care to elaborate. Clem, supine, his belt unbuckled, was still trying to slow things down, to extend a discussion that seemed mandatory, when she took off the robe and lay down on him. “It’s easy,” she said. “I’ll show you.” In short order, he found himself looking up at the naked entirety of a girl he might have expected to uncover part by part, with much asking of permission, over a span of weeks or months. Seeing her altogether was such a visual overload he had to shut his eyes against it. She moved up and down on his erection until there was a cracking rip in the fabric of the universe. She fell forward and kissed him with her indeed very abraded mouth. He needed to know if she’d liked what had just happened. She said she had, very much. But, he persisted, had she…？ “All in good time,” she said. “I’ll show you.”