“So, what do you think?” she said.
“I think you’re amazing,” he said, humping away.
“Okay.” She faintly nodded, as if to herself.
He paused and lowered his face to kiss the mouth that had spoken the magic words. She turned her face away from his.
“Why didn’t you want to take your clothes off today?”
“I don’t know. It seemed like it might be exciting, somehow.”
Again the dubious little nod.
“Sharon,” he pleaded. He knew that a conversation needed to be had, and that it would not be a good conversation, but his very strong preference was to have it just a little bit later. By way of expressing this preference, he shut his eyes and moved his hips again. The pleasure was undiminished, but she immediately spoke again.
“I want you to say you’re in love with me, too.”
He opened his eyes. As far back as September, when the needle of his mind had stuck in a groove playing Sharon, he’d had the impulse to say he was in love with her. He’d suppressed it because he was following her lead in everything and had gathered that romantic declarations weren’t comme il faut. It was true that, after his crisis at Thanksgiving, he’d been glad he’d kept his mouth shut earlier. But now he could feel, in his own nerves, how transformative it might be for Sharon to hear the magic words from him. It was so transformative, in fact, that he felt he could speak them with some honesty.
“You don’t even have to mean it,” she said. “I’m just curious how it feels to hear it.”
He nodded and said, “I’m not in love with you.”
It took him a moment to realize that his tongue had slipped. He truly hadn’t meant to say that. He was aghast.
“Say you are, though,” she said.
“I was trying to. It just came out wrong.”
“To put it mildly!”
He extended his arms, looked down at their furry point of contact, and shook his head against a bitter truth in him. “I … I don’t know what I am. I don’t think I can say it.”
Her face twisted up as if the truth had scalded it.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“It’s okay.” She managed a wry smile. “I tried.”
“God, Sharon, I am so sorry.”
“It’s really okay. You can go ahead and finish.”
She was generous to the last, but even in his supremely inflamed state he understood the wrongness of taking more pleasure from her now. He started to withdraw.
“No, do it,” she said, trying to pull him back in. “Just forget I said that thing.”
“I can’t.”
She was weeping. “Please do it. I want you to.”
He couldn’t. He remembered the sex talk, or what had passed for a sex talk, that his mother had given him before he left for college. Whatever else he might hear on campus, she’d said, sex without commitment was empty and ruinous. This was the ancient wisdom. As with the parietal rules, he was realizing too late that old people weren’t entirely stupid. Beneath him was a weeping girl to prove it.
Getting out of bed made him conscious of the obscenity of his erection. While Sharon lay and wept, he yanked up his jeans and put on his peacoat. In the hippie bedroom below them, a familiar bass line started up, the same Who album they’d been hearing for weeks. He shook Sharon’s pack of cigarettes, pulled one out with his lips, and struck a match. Back in September, he’d tried one of her Parliaments and liked it. By the time he’d realized that smoking, like sex, did not in itself confer manhood, he was wretchedly addicted.
“Can I make you some toast?” he said.
No answer. Sharon had pulled the bedspread onto herself and was facing the wall, her crying detectable only as a faint shaking of her curls. Her bed was a double mattress on a box spring, her desk a hollow-core door on sawhorses, her bookshelves pine one-by-tens with cinder-block supports. He remembered his first sight of her books, the great quantity of French-language paperbacks, the austere whiteness and uniformity of their spines. Back then, three months ago, he couldn’t have imagined anything sexier in a woman than high intelligence. Even now, if he and she had been all mind and genitals and nothing else, he might have imagined a future for them.
He wondered if he should simply leave now—whether this would be the kind thing to do or the cowardly thing. He’d planned to break up with her by letter because he wanted to speak to her mind-to-mind, rationally, well clear of the inviting pit. But now he’d hurt her, and she was crying. Maybe the situation spoke for itself? Maybe further talk would only be hurtful? He sat down on the edge of her bed, drew smoke into his abused lungs, and waited to see what he would do. Again the existential freedom, to speak or not to speak. Beneath the floor, the Who continued their thumping.