If his weeks were consumed with study, his weekends were devoted to what he chose to feel was debauchery. Isabel Drake proved to be a woman of infinite variety and insatiable appetite. She seemed to delight in instructing and guiding him in what, a few months earlier, he would have considered perversion. He did not delude himself into believing that it was love. She was charmed by his innocence and took joy in his youthful vigor and stamina. It was so far from being love that sometimes on Sunday nights as he drove back to Portland, physically wrung out and even sore from his exertions, he felt that he had somehow been violated.
For the first few weekends Flood had accompanied him, delivering him, as it were, into Isabel’s hands. Then, almost as if he had assured himself that Raphael would continue the visits without him, he stopped going down to the lake. Without Flood’s presence, his knowing, sardonic eyes always watching, Isabel’s demeanor changed. She became more dominant, more demanding. Raphael sometimes had nightmares about her during the week, vivid, disconnected dreams of being suffocated by the warm, perfumed pillows of her breasts or crushed between the powerful white columns of her thighs. He began to dread the weekends, but the lure of her was too strong, and helplessly he delivered himself each Friday evening to her perfumed lair by the shores of the lake, where she waited sometimes, he almost felt, lurked-in heavy-lidded anticipation.
“Have you read the Karpinsky book yet?” It was the girl, Marilyn Hamilton, and she spoke to him as they came out of the library one evening after it closed. ‘
“I’m nearly finished with it,” he replied.
“I don’t know,” she said, falling into step beside him, “but it seemed to me that he evades the issue.”
“He does seem a little too pat,” Raphael agreed.
“Glib. Like someone who talks very fast so you don’t have time to spot the holes in his argument.”
They had stopped near the center of the broad lawn in front of Eliot Hall.
“Pardee seems to think a lot of him,” Raphael said.
“Oh yes,” the girl said, laughing slightly. The vibrance of her voice pierced him. “Mr. Pardee studied under Karpinsky at Columbia.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“My sister found out. She took the course a couple years ago. Mr. Pardee won’t mention it in class, of course, but it’s a good thing to know.” She suddenly mimicked their instructor’s gruff voice and deliberately antigrammatical usage. “Since he ain’t about to accept no disrespect.”
Raphael laughed, charmed by her.
She hesitated and then spoke without looking at him. “I saw you play in that game last month,” she told him quietly.
“Oh,” he said, “that. It wasn’t much of a game, really.”
“Not the way you played, it wasn’t. You destroyed them.”
“You think I overemphasized?” he asked, grinning.
“I’m trying to pay you a compliment, dammit.” Then she grinned back.
“Thank you.”
“I’m making a fool of myself, right?”
“No, not really.”
“Anyway, I thought it was really spectacular–and I don’t like football very much.”
“It’s only a game.” He shrugged. “It’s more fun to play than it is to watch.”
“Doesn’t it hurt when you get tackled like that?”
“The idea is not to get tackled.”
“You’re a stubborn man, Raphael Taylor,” she accused. “It’s almost impossible to talk to you.”
“Me?”
“And will you stop looking at me all the time. Every time I look up, there you are, watching me. You make me feel as if I don’t have any clothes on.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’ll start making faces at you if you don’t stop it,” she warned. “Then how would you feel?”
“The question is how are you going to feel when people start to think your gears aren’t meshing?”
“You’re impossible,” she said, but her voice was not really angry. “I have to go home and study some more.” She turned abruptly and strode away with a curiously leggy gait that seemed at once awkward and almost childishly feminine.
“Marilyn,” he called after her.
She stopped and turned. “What?”
“I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“No, you won’t. I’m going to hide under the table.” She stuck her tongue out at him, turned, and continued across the lawn.
Raphael laughed.
Their growing friendship did not, of course, go unobserved. By the time it had progressed to the stage of going for coffee together at the Student Union Building, Flood became aware of it. “Raphael’s being unfaithful to you, ‘Bel,” he announced on one of his now-infrequent visits to the lake.
“Get serious,” Raphael told him, irritated and a little embarrassed.
“Don’t be a snitch, junior,” Isabel said quite calmly. “Nobody likes a snitch.”
“I just thought you ought to know, ‘Bel.” Flood grinned maliciously. “Since I introduced you two, I feel a certain responsibility.” His eyes, however, were serious, even calculating.
“Our relationship isn’t that kind.” She still seemed unperturbed. “I don’t have any objections if Raphael has other diversions-any more than he’s upset by my little flings.”
Raphael looked at her quickly, startled and with a sudden sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach.
“Oh, my poor Angel,” she said, catching the look and laughing, “did you honestly think I was `saving myself’ or you? I have other friends, too, you know.”
Raphael was sick, and at the same time ashamed to realize that he was actually jealous.
In bed that night she brought it up again. She raised up on one elbow, her heavy breast touching his arm. “How is she?” she asked, “The other girl, I mean?”
“It’s not that kind of thing,” he answered sulkily. “We just talk-have coffee together once in a while, that’s all.”
“Don’t be coy,” she said with a wicked little laugh, deliberately rubbing her still-erect nipple on his shoulder. “A young man who looks like you do could have the panties off half the girls in Portland inside a week.”
“I don’t go around taking people’s panties off.”
“You take mine off,” she disagreed archly.
“That’s different.” He moved his shoulder away.
“Why is it different?”
“She’s not that kind of a girl.”
“Every girl is that kind of a girl.” She laughed, leaning forward so that the ripe breast touched him again. “We’re all alike. Is she as good as I am?”
“Oh, for God’s sake, ‘Bel. Why don’t we just skip all this? Nothing’s going on. Flood’s got a dirty mind, that’s all.”
“Of course he has. Am I embarrassing you, sweet? We shouldn’t be embarrassed by anything-not here.”
“What about those other men?” he accused, trying to force her away from the subject.
“What about them?”
“I thought-well-” He broke off helplessly, not knowing how to pursue the subject.
“Are you really upset because I sleep with other men once in a while? Are you really jealous, Angel?”
“Well-no,” he lied, “not really.”
“We never made any promises, did we? Did you think we were `going steady’ or something?” The persistent nipple continued its stroking of his shoulder.
“I just didn’t think you were-well-promiscuous is all.”
“Of course I’m promiscuous.” She laughed, kissing him. “I had you in bed within twelve hours of the moment I met you. Is that the sort of thing you’d expect from a nice girl? I’m not exactly a bitch in heat, but a little variety never hurt anyone, did it?”
He couldn’t think of anything to say.
“Don’t sulk, Angel,” she said almost maternally as she pulled him to her again. “You’ve got my frill attention at the moment. That’s about the best I can promise you.”
His flesh responded to her almost against his will. He’d have liked to have been stubborn, lout she was too skilled, too expert.
“You should try her, Raphael,” Isabel said almost conversationally a couple of minutes later. “A little variety might be good for you, too. And who knows? Maybe she’s better at it than I am.” She laughed, and then the laugh trailed off into a series of little gasps and moans as she began to move feverishly under him.
vi
The idea had not been there before. In Raphael’s rather unsophisticated views on such matters, girls were divided into two distinct categories-those you took to bed and those you took to school dances. It was not that he was actually naive, it was just that such classification made his relations with girls simpler, and Raphael’s views on such things were simplistic. He had been raised in a small, remote city that had a strongly puritanical outlook; his Canadian mother had been quite firm about being “nice,” a firmness in part deriving from her lurking fear that some brainless sixteen-year-old tramp might unexpectedly present her with a squalling grandchild. Raphael’s football coach at high school, moreover, had taught Sunday school at the Congregational church, and his locker-room talks almost as frequently dealt with chastity as they did with the maiming
of middle linebackers. Raphael’s entire young life had been filled with one long sermon that concentrated almost exclusively on one of the “thou shalt nots,” the only amendment having been the reluctant addition of “-with nice girls.” Raphael knew, of course, that other young men did not make a distinction between “nice” girls and the other kind, but it seemed somehow unsporting to him to seduce “nice” girls when the other sort was available-something on the order of poaching a protected species-and sportsmanship