A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

Something more could have happened; she would not have opposed it. She was stirred by the party, intoxicated by her success at it, and this would have been part of that, and that would have been part of this. There is an unspoken understanding, a wordless language, at certain times, and even a youngster such as I was then, can sense and translate it. The half-turn her head made against my shoulder, lying inert, passive, submissive, the way her hand dropped off my arm and hung down loose, the play of her breath as soft as the ebb and flow of breath-mist on a mirror, against my face, were words enough, no real ones were needed. This is part of the race’s instinct.

But I didn’t want it to happen. I did, but I didn’t. And I made the didn’t master the did. She had me accustomed now, conditioned now. I wanted her this way, the way she was, the way she had been on the bench that night. I had this image of her. I wanted to keep it, I didn’t want to take anything away from it. (I didn’t realize until years later that that’s all there are, are our images of things. There are no realities. There are only the hundred different approximations of reality that are our images of it, no two the same, from man to man, from case to case, from place to place.)

There was a breathless springtime charm about her this way, a fragile sway she exerted over me, which would have been gone at a touch. Maybe a more heated, more grown love would have taken its place. But only for a while. Then that would have gone too, as it always does in such cases. And nothing would have been left. Not the first, not the second.

It wasn’t a mere matter of purity or non-purity. Even that young, I wasn’t narrow-minded. That was a mere cuticle-distinction.

It was partly possessive: You have something that belongs to you, that you value, like a bright new necktie or a leather wallet or a chrome lighter with your initials on it, and you don’t want to get a stain on it, you don’t want to deface it.

There was part self-esteem in it, I think. Your girl had to be better than any other girl around, or what was the use of her being your girl? You were so good yourself that you rated only the best, nothing less would do. Caesar’s sweetheart.

But it was idealistic, mostly. If you’re not going to be idealistic at that age, you’re never going to be idealistic at all.

I don’t know. I didn’t know then, I still don’t now. Who can explain the heart, the mind, the things they make you do?

I dropped one foot down to the step below, and took my arms off her.

“You better get inside, Vera.” I said. “You better say good-night to me.”

And then I said again, “You better hurry up and get inside, Vera.”

“Aren’t you going to kiss me good-night first?” she said softly.

“No, say it from up there. Not down here.”

She went up the three or four remaining steps to the level, and took her key out and opened the door with it. Then she turned and looked at me as she went in. I saw her put the backs of a couple of her fingers across her lips, then she tipped them toward me in a secretive kissing sign. Still looking at me to the last, she slowly drew the door closed past her face, very slowly and very softly, almost without a sound.

She didn’t come to the bench the next afternoon. I waited there for her for several hours, with that slowly fading afterglow you’re left with on the day after a party, wanting to share it with her by talking the whole thing over, but she didn’t come. Finally, when the early winter twilight had closed down and turned the whole world into a sooty, charcoal line drawing, all of black and gray, I got up and left, knowing she wasn’t coming anymore this late, and knowing just as surely I’d see her the following day. I didn’t even stop by her house to find out what had kept her away, because I felt sure it was nothing more than a case of her being overtired from the night before, and of having slept late as a result.

But the next day she didn’t come again, either, and I wondered about it. I wondered if she’d stayed out too late with me to suit her family, and they were keeping her away from me for a few days to show their disapproval. But they hadn’t been home yet themselves, to all appearances, when I’d brought her back.

Then I wondered if something had happened at the party that had offended or displeased her, something that she hadn’t told me about. But I remembered how she’d danced in exuberance out on the sidewalk after we’d left, so it didn’t seem likely it was that.