We found ourselves sequestered together in the dining room during meals; we found ourselves, of necessity, spending long afternoons together. My masturbatory exercises and schedule were completely disrupted by this but the alternative—leaving her—was worse for several reasons.
In the first place, I was as sexually curious as she was needful and it became apparent to me early on that she was accessible to me in a way which no female had ever been. I wanted to find out what it was about. In the second place, her father took to our relationship with an amused tolerance which soon escalated to indulgence; he interpreted Marie-Jean’s sexual itch as the need for a strong, warm relationship, and he began to insinuate himself on the edge of our relationship, granting my mother special attentions in and out of the dining hall and urging Marie-Jean and me to “see a lot” of one another. The poor man! He was, I realize in retrospect, so resigned to his daughter’s sluttishness that he thought of it as normal adolescent behavior. Perhaps he was even correct; this is a difficult thought which I have had recently and which almost impossibly mars this explosion of retrospection. If he were correct—if Marie-Jean were a normal, healthy, and affectionate if slightly misguided juvenescent—it would force me to make the most violent recalculations and reassessments of the affair and my role and this would topple my entire strategy. I had best pass the issue.
I want to describe the first time I made love to Marie-Jean. It occurred several days after our initial meeting and the phrase “to make love” is wildly inappropriate since, of course, it was nothing of the sort. Better, then, I want to describe my first joint masturbatory experience.
“Let’s stop the car,” she said, and as she said this hit the brakes and moved us slowly, gracelessly, off the panels of the road into the ominous gravel at the side. “I want to get out and walk a bit.” She elevated the emergency brake and put the keys in my pocket, tapped them proprietarily. “It’s getting stuffy in here.”
It was the second of our automobile excursions; Marie’s father owned a disreputable sedan and although she had no “driver’s license,” she was permitted to travel with it due to the barrenness of the country and certain relations which her father had with the local chief of police. I had accompanied her on the second of these trips almost gratefully; the alternative was sitting by the water with her and arguing almost with a frenzy about everything. We agreed on nothing at all. And there was no way that I could be free of her presence in the afternoons.
No, the car at least gave the impression of motion; a sense of displacement as we spun through the grey, blasted country jouncing merrily over stones in the road, our heads whirled back and forth toward one another by the impact, this fragmentary contact given the illusion of intimacy by the rattles and trembling of the car. It was far better to move than not to move because it delayed confrontation while giving its illusion. Her tight, bare arms, hovering over the wheel, the strong profile of her large breasts thrown into occasional violent juxtaposition with the machinery, the glint of her chin as she raised it, now and then, to peer upwards through the windshield, enticed me into some approximation of connection and when the car came to its abrupt stop it was with some difficulty that I was able to dislodge myself from the seat and stagger to the side of the road, cling to a post for momentary support while she emerged with a more spritely gait than mine. I had been imagining myself in the act of masturbating to her photograph.
She came toward me, almost jauntily, and took my arm, held it loosely and guided me toward the fields. “Let’s walk,” she said. “It’s nice here; the stink isn’t so bad in the afternoons and all of them are back in the barns. Besides, I’m tired of driving.”
I let her convey me and said, “It always smells here. That’s the worst thing about the country. There’s no peace.”
“But there is,” she said, looking at me sidewise. “There’s a lot of peace for your mother.”
“Is there?”
“Don’t you know what’s going on between her and father?”
“I don’t care,” I said, dodging some wheatstalks and then carelessly tripping so that I fell headlong, having to brush some eager gnats off me as I regained my balance.
“She and daddy are going to bed together.”
Actually, I had suspected as much—the fact of adult fornication having long since been impressed upon me by media if not my interior. But I felt it was my position to defend. “She is not,” I said, “and besides, if she is, your father is making her.”
“No he isn’t. He never has to make anybody. He told me that once; he can’t keep them away from him. No, your old mother and my daddy are right this moment in bed or close to it. Doesn’t that make you feel strange?”
“Why should it make me feel strange?” I asked; and indeed it didn’t. Sex was an abstraction, my mother was an abstraction, the two compounded moved to the level of utter unfeasibility. But it seemed to affect Marie-Jean profoundly for her mood shifted down from gaiety to one of solemnity as her hand dropped from mine and she moved more quickly away from me, forcing my untrained feet to a half-run through the stalks of grass.
“Well,” she said, “we ought to show them. We just ought to show them what we feel about that.”
“What do you mean?”
“Forget it,” she said and indeed, although I persisted, she would say nothing else. After a while I took her unresisting hand and stroked it, noting the soft leverage of her palm, the way the flesh of her elbow blended into her upper arm, the way that arm became the shoulder meshed with the soft, interesting roundness of her breast. Looked at in that way, women could be vaguely exciting, I thought, particularly if the thrusting and thrashing of masturbation were imposed upon them. I found my arm heightening to grasp her, found my body, somewhat to its horrified fascination, pushing her against me, found that our walk became stumbling and eventually graceless.
“You don’t know a thing, do you?” she said. “About how to handle a girl or like that, I mean.”
“How could I?” I said frankly. “I haven’t had that much experience.”
“I didn’t think you had.” She made an intricate gesture, showed me how her waist could be drawn against my arm in a position that enabled us to walk without colliding, move without scraping against one another. It was more practical but I felt the vague excitation fade. Besides, I had another thought.
“The car,” I said.
“What about it?”
“It’s parked out on the road. Will it be safe there?”
“No one ever comes along. Besides, what if they do? It’s an old car and no one could care about it less.”
“Well, if it were stolen we would have to get back another way. And what would you tell your father?”
“He doesn’t care.”
“But still, what would we tell him?”
She gave that indulgent shake of the head more characteristic of women, perhaps, than any of the other “secondary sexual characteristics,” and examined me darkly. “Sometimes,” she said, “I ask myself what I’m doing. Why I’m bothering. Really I do.”
“Bothering with what?”
“Oh, never mind,” she said. We were at a halt now in what seemed to be the geometrical center of acres and acres of farmland; cattle at some vast distance from us reduced to minuscule proportions, stooped over grass, the sun unevenly glaring between clouds over us, the thin stem of a farmhouse sending out clouds of irrelevant smoke through the meadow. There was the feeling of entrapment in limitless space, a feeling which I have heard ascribed to psychotics or those on the borderline of function. The impact of this vastness as I took it in was such that I had to kneel, almost in the penitential posture, my hands slipping gracelessly to the ground as I tried to pretend that I was examining grass stalks. Within me fluttered the first forecast of a genuine panic; the kind of panic I had not undergone for a long time and surely not in any circumstances like these.
“What’s wrong with you now?”
“I just felt dizzy for a minute. I’ll get right up. It’s sure a nice-looking big place, isn’t it?”
She shook her head and inhaled poisonously. “Maybe we should go back. You could get some tea and go to bed. We wouldn’t want you getting sick your first summer in the country.”
But, recapitulating phylogeny again, I had made it from knees to hands and knees to feet alone to an upright posture and stood in a position of careful equivocation, my face sidewise to the sun, squinting against the bright flickers of light which I perceived in the meadow. Marie-Jean looked at me incuriously and then must have seen something.
“I think you’ve got a little stroke,” she said. “Heat stroke, I mean. We can get you under that tree.”
“Heat stroke? What is that?”
“It’s when the sun boils your brains.”
Now that my condition had a name, a diagnosis and—indubitably—a prognosis, I felt myself on the verge of recovery already. Limply, I permitted her to lead me to a large apple tree which overhung a near corner of the meadow, a corner formed by the joining of two small patches of wire fence. Why the fence was there or what its purpose was I never gathered, but as I reached a hand out to touch it, she snatched it back with an exhalation of absolute fury. “It’s electrified,” she whispered. “What are you trying to do to yourself, anyway?”
