The Group (6 page)

Dottie turned even redder. According to Kay, a climax was something very unusual, something the husband brought about by carefully studying his wife’s desires and by patient manual stimulation. The terms made Dottie shudder, even in memory; there was a horrid bit, all in Latin, in Krafft-Ebing, about the Empress Maria Theresa and what the court doctor told her consort to do that Dottie had glanced at quickly and then tried to forget. Yet even Mother hinted that satisfaction was something that came after a good deal of time and experience and that love made a big difference. But when Mother talked about satisfaction, it was not clear exactly what she meant, and Kay was not clear either, except when she quoted from books. Polly Andrews once asked her whether it was the same as feeling passionate when you were necking (that was when Polly was engaged), and Kay said yes, pretty much, but Dottie now thought that Kay had been mistaken or else trying to hide the truth from Polly for some reason. Dottie had felt passionate, quite a few times, when she was dancing with someone terribly attractive, but that was quite different from the thing Dick meant. You would almost think that Kay did not know what she was talking about. Or else that Kay and Mother meant something else altogether and this thing with Dick
was
abnormal. And yet he seemed so pleased, sitting there, blowing out smoke rings; probably, having lived abroad, he knew more than Mother and Kay.

“What are you frowning over now, Boston?” Dottie gave a start. “To be highly sexed,” he said gently, “is an excellent thing in a woman. You mustn’t be ashamed.” He took her cigarette and put it out and laid his hands on her shoulders. “Buck up,” he said. “What you’re feeling is natural. ‘
Post coitum, omne animal triste est
,’ as the Roman poet said.” He slipped his hand down the slope of her shoulder and lightly touched her nipple. “Your body surprised you tonight. You must learn to know it.” Dottie nodded. “Soft,” he murmured, pressing the nipple between his thumb and forefinger. “De-tumescence, that’s what you’re experiencing.” Dottie drew a quick breath, fascinated; her doubts slid away. As he continued to squeeze it, her nipple stood up. “Erectile tissue,” he said informatively and touched the other breast. “See,” he said, and they both looked downward. The two nipples were hard and full, with a pink aureole of goose pimples around them; on her breasts were a few dark hairs. Dottie waited tensely. A great relief had surged through her; these were the very terms Kay cited from the marriage handbooks. Down there, she felt a quick new tremor. Her lips parted. Dick smiled. “You feel something?” he said. Dottie nodded. “You’d like it again?” he said, assaying her with his hand. Dottie stiffened; she pressed her thighs together. She was ashamed of the violent sensation his exploring fingers had discovered. But he held his hand there, between her clasped thighs, and grasped her right hand in his other, guiding it downward to the opening of his robe and pressed it over that part of himself, which was soft and limp, rather sweet, really, all curled up on itself like a fat worm. Sitting beside her, he looked into her face as he stroked her down there and tightened her hand on him. “There’s a little ridge there,” he whispered. “Run your fingers up and down it.” Dottie obeyed, wonderingly; she felt his organ stiffen a little, which gave her a strange sense of power. She struggled against the excitement his tickling thumb was producing in her own external part; but as she felt him watching her, her eyes closed and her thighs spread open. He disengaged her hand, and she fell back on the bed, gasping. His thumb continued its play and she let herself yield to what it was doing, her whole attention concentrated on a tense pinpoint of sensation, which suddenly discharged itself in a nervous, fluttering spasm; her body arched and heaved and then lay still. When his hand returned to touch her, she struck it feebly away. “Don’t,” she moaned, rolling over on her stomach. This second climax, which she now recognized from the first one, though it was different, left her jumpy and disconcerted; it was something less thrilling and more like being tickled relentlessly or having to go to the bathroom. “Didn’t you like that?” he demanded, turning her head over on the pillow, so that she could not hide herself from him. She hated to think of his having watched her while he brought
that
about. Slowly, Dottie opened her eyes and resolved to tell the truth. “Not quite so much as the other, Dick.” Dick laughed. “A nice normal girl. Some of your sex prefer that.” Dottie shivered; she could not deny that it had been exciting but it seemed to her almost perverted. He appeared to read her thoughts. “Have you ever done it with a girl, Boston?” He tilted her face so that he could scan it. Dottie reddened. “Heavens, no.” “You come like a house afire. How do you account for that?” Dottie said nothing. “Have you ever done it with yourself?” Dottie shook her head violently; the suggestion wounded her. “In your dreams?” Dottie reluctantly nodded. “A little. Not the whole thing.” “Rich erotic fantasies of a Chestnut Street virgin,” remarked Dick, stretching. He got up and went to the chest of drawers and took out two pairs of pajamas and tossed one of them to Dottie. “Put them on now and go to the bathroom. Tonight’s lesson is concluded.”

Having locked herself into the hall bathroom, Dottie began to take stock. “Who would have thunk it?” she quoted Pokey Prothero, as she stared, thunderstruck, into the mirror. Her ruddy, heavy-browed face, with its long straight nose and dark-brown eyes, was just as Bostonian as ever. Somebody in the group had said that she looked as if she had been born in a mortarboard. There was something magistral about her appearance, she could see it herself, in the white men’s pajamas, with her sharp New England jaw protruding over the collar, like an old judge or a blackbird sitting on a fence—Daddy sometimes joked that she ought to have been a lawyer. And yet there was that fun-loving dimple lurking in her cheek and the way she loved to dance and sing harmony—she feared she might be a dual personality, a regular Jekyll and Hyde. Thoughtfully, Dottie rinsed her mouth out with Dick’s mouthwash and threw back her head to gargle. She wiped off her lipstick with a bit of toilet tissue and peered anxiously at the soap in Dick’s soap dish, thinking of her sensitive skin. She had to be awfully careful, but the bathroom, she noted with gratitude, was
scrupulously
clean and placarded with notices from the landlady: “Please leave this room as you would expect to find it. Thank you for your cooperation”; “Please use mat when taking shower. Thank you.” The landlady, Dottie reflected, must be very broad-minded, if she did not object to women’s coming to visit. After all, Kay had spent whole weekends here with Harald.

She did not like to think of what women guests Dick had had, besides Betty, whom he had already mentioned. What if he had brought Lakey here the other night, after they took Dottie home? Breathing hard, she steadied herself on the washbasin and nervously scratched her jaw. Lakey, she argued, would not have let him do what he had done with
her
; with Lakey, he would not have dared. This line of thought, however, was too unsettling to be pursued. How had he known that
she
would let him? There was one queer thing that her mind had been running away from: he had not really kissed her, not once. Of course, there could be explanations; perhaps he did not want her to smell the liquor on his breath or perhaps she had hali herself …?
No
, said Dottie firmly; she would have to stop thinking this way. One thing was clear; anyone could see it. Dick had been hurt, very much hurt, she repeated, nodding, by a woman or women. That made him a law unto himself, as far as she was concerned. If he did not feel like kissing her, that was
his
business. Her lustrous contralto rose humming as she combed out her hair with her pocket comb: “He’s the kind of a man needs the kind of a woman like me-e.” She did a gay dance step, stumbling a little in the long pajamas, to the door. Her fingers snapped as she pulled out the overhead light.

Once she was settled in the narrow bed, with Dick sleeping heavily beside her, Dottie’s bird thoughts flew affectionately to Mother, Class of 1908. Urge herself as she would to get her beauty sleep after a
very
tiring day, she felt a craving to talk and share the night’s experiences with the person whom she designated as the nicest person in the world, who never condemned or censured, and who was always so tremendously interested in young people’s doings. Tracing back the steps of her initiation, she longed to set the scene for Mother: this bare room way west in Greenwich Village, the moon’s ray falling on the monk’s-cloth bedspread, the drawing table, the single wing chair with the neat slip cover, some sort of awning material, and Dick himself, of course, such an individual, with his restless chiseled face and incredible vocabulary. There were so many details of the last three days that would appeal to Mother: the wedding and going with him and Lakey that afternoon to the Whitney Museum and the three of them having dinner afterward in a dinky Italian restaurant with a billiard table in front and wine in white cups and listening to him and Lakey argue about art and then going to the Modern Museum the next day, again the three of them, and to an exhibition of modernistic sculpture, and how Dottie had never suspected that he was even thinking of
her
because she could see that he was fascinated by Lakey (who wouldn’t be?) and how she was still sure of that when he turned up at the boat this morning to see Lakey off, pretending that he wanted to give her some names of painters in Paris for her to meet. Even when he had asked
her
, at the dock, when the boat had sailed and there was a sort of a letdown, to have dinner with him tonight at that same restaurant (what a time she had finding it in a taxi, from the New Weston!), she had told herself that it was because she was Lakey’s friend. She had been scared stiff at being alone with him because she was afraid he would be bored. And he
had
been rather silent and preoccupied until he looked straight into her eyes and popped that question.
“Do you want to come home with me?”
Would she ever, ever forget the casual tone of his voice when he said it?

What
would
startle Mother, undoubtedly, was the fact that there had been no thought of love on either side. She could hear her own low voice explaining to her pretty, bright-eyed parent that she and Dick had “lived together” on quite a different basis. Dick, poor chap, her voice announced coolly, was still in love with his divorced wife, and, what was more (here Dottie took a deep breath and braced herself), deeply attracted to Lakey, her
very
best friend this year. In Dottie’s imagination, her mother’s blue eyes widened and her gold curls trembled with the little palsied shake of her head, as Dottie leaned forward, impressively, and reiterated, “Yes, Mother, I could still swear it. Deeply attracted to Lakey. I faced the fact that night.” This scene, which her fancy was rehearsing, was taking place in her mother’s little morning room on Chestnut Street, though her mother, in actuality, had already left for the cottage at Gloucester, where Dottie was expected tomorrow or the day after: tiny Mrs. Renfrew was dressed in her tailored powder-blue Irish linen dress, with bare, tanned arms, from golfing; Dottie herself was wearing her white sharkshin sports dress and brown-and-white spectator pumps. She finished her piece, stared at her toes, and fingered the box pleats of her dress, waiting calmly for her mother to speak. “Yes, Dottie, I see. I
think
I can understand.” Both of them went on talking in low, even, musical voices, her mother a little more staccato and Dottie rumbling slightly. The atmosphere was grave and thoughtful. “You are sure, dear, the hymen was punctured?” Dottie nodded, emphatically. Mrs. Renfrew, a medical missionary’s daughter, had been an invalid too in her youth, which gave her a certain anxiety about the physical aspect of things.

Dottie turned restlessly in the bed. “You’ll adore Mother,” she said to Dick in imagination. “She’s a terrifically vital person and much more attractive than I am: tiny, with a marvelous figure, and blue eyes and yellow hair that’s just beginning to go grey. She cured herself of being an invalid, by sheer will power, when she met Daddy, her senior year at college, just when the doctors said she’d have to drop out of her class. She decided that it was wrong for a sick person to marry and so she got well. She’s a great believer in love; we all are.” Here Dottie flushed and inked out the last few words. She must
not
let Dick think she was going to spoil their affair by falling in love with him; a remark like that one would be fatal. To let him see that there was no danger, it would be best, she decided, to frame a statement of some sort, clarifying her position. “I’m very religious too, Dick,” she essayed with an apologetic smile. “But I think I’m more pantheistic than most communicants of the Church. I love the Church for its ritual, but I believe God is everywhere. My generation is a little different from Mother’s.
I
feel—all of us feel—that love and sex can be two separate things. They don’t have to be, but they can be. You mustn’t force sex to do the work of love or love to do the work of sex—that’s quite a thought, isn’t it?” she appended hurriedly, with a little nervous laugh, as her sources began to fail her. “One of the older teachers told Lakey that you have to live without love, learn not to need it, in order to live
with
it. Lakey was terrifically impressed. Do you agree?” Dottie’s fancied voice had been growing more and more timid as she proffered her philosophy to the sleeping man by her side.

Her imagination has dared to mention Lakey’s name to him in connection with love because she wanted to show that she was not jealous of the dark beauty, as he always called her; he did not like “Lakey” for a nickname. One thing Dottie had noticed was the way he absently straightened his tie whenever Lakey turned to look at him, like a man catching sight of himself in a subway mirror. And the way he was always serious with her, not mocking and saturnine, even when they disagreed about art. Yet when Dottie had murmured, several times, “Isn’t she striking?” as they stood waving at her from the pier, in an effort to gain his confidence and share Lakey between them, he had merely shrugged his shoulders, as though Dottie were annoying him. “She has a mind,” he retorted, the last time Dottie mentioned it.