Adios, Scheherazade

The change was inside him. Somewhere inside his head a relay had clicked over, like a long distance telephone call being completed, and suddenly the world was a new and different thing, and he was new and different, and Beth was new and different, and everything suddenly seemed much brighter and happier and gayer and younger and somehow more possible than it had seemed only the day before, only a few days before.

It was hard to define any specific instant when the change took place. The closest he could come was one night last week, after Beth had gone to sleep, when he had been lying awake in bed, thinking about his life, and suddenly he had started to think about the first time he and Beth had ever made love, back when they were both still in college.

It had been late spring, a Saturday night, and they had gone to a movie together. They had been casually dating all semester, starting with a blind date arranged by a mutual friend shortly after Christmas vacation, and over the course of the months since then the relationship had gradually deepened. They were spending more and more time with each other and their necking sessions in his car, an old secondhand Buick convertible, had grown more and more intense. She had told him one night that she was still a virgin and that she wanted to save herself for the man she would marry and he had respected that, but it had been hard sometimes to come so close to the object of his desire and then have to turn away, but he never tried to force his attentions on her, she being more valuable to him than any momentary gratification. Besides, there was another girl, not a coed like Beth but a girl from the town, who was known to be easy. When the demands of nature grew too intense to be withstood, Paul always knew he could go to Carol, and from time to time he did, but in his heart and in his mind he always remained true to Beth.

It had never occurred to him that Beth herself might decide to end the stalemate of their relationship, and he hadn’t supposed for a minute when they entered the movie theater that night that there would be anything between them but the usual petting.

The movie wasn’t very good, and they sat in the rear row of the balcony unobserved, and kissed and petted till Paul began to feel the passion rising in him like heat in a furnace. He could see that Beth was caught up in it, too, more than she’d ever been before, but he didn’t think that meant anything in particular, so when he slipped his hand under her skirt in the darkness of the theater he couldn’t at first believe it. She wasn’t wearing a thing under the skirt, not a thing!

In the dim light reflecting back from the Technicolor movie showing on the screen, Paul saw Beth’s eyes gleaming with mischief, saw the amused grin on her lips. She pulled his head closer, till her lips were by his ear, and then whispered, “Patience should be rewarded.”

He couldn’t say a word. His hand was touching her beneath the skirt, cupping the hot pulsating core of her being, and all at once he understood that tonight was going to be the night, and that the reward he was being offered was precious indeed.

“The heck with this movie,” he whispered throatily, suddenly feeling overpowering desire for her, the need to have her now.

“Yes,” she said, and he could hear the same throatiness in her voice, the same need, the same passionate unwillingness to wait another minute, another second, the same violent desire to have it now.

They got up from the seats, fumbling for their coats in their haste, and hurried from the theater. Paul had parked the convertible down the block to the right and they walked down there with hurrying steps, climbed aboard, and Paul started the engine and steered the car away from there.

It was a pleasant night, late May, warm enough to drive with the top down. A full moon rode high in the sky, which was clear and full of stars, with here and there a small fluffy cloud, its outlines etched in silver by the moonlight shining on them.

Whenever Paul glanced across at Beth, sitting beside him on the front seat, he saw the moonlight reflected in her eyes, saw the lovely smile on her lips, saw the fresh soft body waiting there for him, all for him, waiting impatiently only for him.

He exceeded the speed limit, but there was little traffic. He drove out of town along the old river road to a turnoff he knew, a place where a dirt road angled down toward the river. He drove down there and stopped the convertible near the bank of the river. He switched off the headlights, and in the light of the moon the river looked like a silver highway, and the girl beside him in the car looked like a goddess.

He approached her delicately, made suddenly shy, and when he kissed her he felt her lips trembling against his. “I’ll be gentle,” he murmured against her lips, and she murmured back, “I know you will, Paul.”