Rapture

Bonnie wasn't quite her mother. Lying there in bed with her, Jeff felt more acutely aware of his age and the difference in years between them. Bonnie's body was taut and firm, but supple, the skin so silky, her breasts still approaching their time of ripe perfection, her face so girlish. Jeff's heart ached at all the time he'd lost. He was thirty-nine, a year away from the start of his fifth decade. His body was slackening everywhere, it seemed. A softness in the upper arms, the sides, and the buttocks. Lines appearing on his face. Steel-gray stubble when he didn't shave for a day or two. Jeff had longed for Georgianne twenty years ago, and he still did, but in all that time he'd never accomplished anything with her. Now he had reached this strange point where, effortlessly, he'd fallen into bed with her grown daughter. There was something perverse and disturbing about it. No matter how exquisitely pleasing it was, it only seemed to underline his failure.

Bonnie got out of bed, shook her long hair vigorously, and went toward the bathroom. She glanced back at Jeff, who smiled. He liked the way she walked in the nude, obviously proud of her fine young body. Bonnie was bolder than her mother had ever seemed, more aggressive, more adventurous, and much more willing. Wasn't that how he'd always wanted Georgianne to be? He'd never been able to find or arouse those qualities in Georgianne. He knew that he liked a certain measure of assertiveness in a woman, the ability to take the lead when necessary. That's what he had needed so long ago: for Georgianne to make the first move. He had simply turned up in Harvard Square, and Bonnie had taken charge immediately. That was fine. But Georgianne had never given the slightest signal, and as a result Jeff had remained emotionally paralyzed. When he thought about it like this, he found it impossible to avoid the conclusion that Georgianne was as much to blame as he was. It was sad. It hurt.

When Bonnie came out of the bathroom, she retrieved her drink from the television set and sat at the foot of the bed. She crossed her legs Indian-style, letting her full fluffy hair hang forward.

"Let's talk," she said.

"Okay..

Jeff sat up against the headboard. The bedcovers were a rumpled mess, but he kept the sheet over the lower half of his body. He thought that a woman's body was beautiful, meant to be looked at, but that a man's, with its ugly dangling genitals, was not, and he always felt uncomfortable with his own nakedness.

"Let's talk about us."

"Okay. "

"You really came all this way to see me, didn't you?"

Bonnie smiled slyly as she said this, and Jeff could see that she was enjoying the sense of importance it gave her. But he wasn't ready to indulge it.

"As I said," he explained calmly, "I had to come to Boston on business. When I finished my business, I decided to see if I could find you. That's all there is to it."

"Uh-huh, yeah, right," Bonnie said, laughing briefly, as if she saw a joke that Jeff didn't. "I don't know why I find that hard to believe ... but I do."

He shrugged. "If you'd gone to Yale, you'd be in New Haven now, and I'd still be here. Actually, I'd be out at Logan, getting on a plane for L.A."

"Yeah, well ..." Bonnie's expression changed, indicating that she was back in her naughty-kids-together mood. "So, what are we going to do?"

"What do you want to do?" Keep tossing it back to her.

"Okay. I think that you and I should have a nice, torrid little three-day affair, you know? Today, tomorrow, Sunday, and then on Monday morning we say good-bye, you go back to L.A., and I go back to my books. What do you say?"

He smiled. She was too much, but he liked it. "I'd say we're already well on the way."

"Right, right. Just between the two of us. We'll make it very torrid, outrageous, and special. Right?"

Jeff found this almost endearing. It might have amused him coming from some other woman, but Bonnie's honesty and openness transformed it into something else-something indeed special. It was hard to think of someone so sexually alive as innocent, but that was the word that came to his mind.

"All right. But listen to me," he said. "It will be just between the two of us. I want you with me all the time, from now until Monday morning. I don't want anyone to know-not your roommates or friends, and, most of all, not your mother. You have to promise me that."

"I do."

Those two words gave Jeff a sudden, queer thrill. "And you have to keep that promise. We're adults. This is not a kids' game."

"I know. I will." Bonnie was wide-eyed with enthusiasm. "Are we going to stay in here all weekend?"

"No. We'll go out. Why?"

"Well, I should go back to my room for a change of clothes at some point."

"That's not necessary," he said firmly. "I'll buy you something to wear. Something suitable for a restaurant or night club, and ... something else, suitable for wearing here ... for a minute or two ... until I tear it off."

"All right." Bonnie laughed. "Are you rich?"

"I have some money."

"A lot?"

"Enough."