Bridge of Sighs

me without a girlfriend,” he couldn’t help pointing out. And it would also be the end of their comfortable foursome.
    “I’m your friend.”
    “But you’re Lucy’s girlfriend.”
    “So tell Nan you just want to be friends.”
    Unfortunately, that simply wasn’t true. Though he wasn’t in love with her, he was still looking forward to the day in the not-too-distant future when she’d give herself to him. She probably would’ve done so already, if he’d pressed. He was tempted to point this out to Sarah and maybe get a little credit for gentlemanly restraint. Anyway, in his view, if Nan was vulnerable to anything it was her own vanity. And if Sarah was also worried about protecting her innocence, she was mistaken there as well. In the time they’d been going out, Nan had become increasingly obsessed with sex, or at least the idea of it. “Do you think they’ve done it yet?” she often asked him of this or that couple. To Noonan these constant speculations were as tiresome as the name-the-kids game she was always playing with Lucy.
    In the beginning he thought Nan found sex talk exciting, a kind of verbal foreplay, but he gradually came to suspect that she was deeply anxious and even more deeply conflicted. On the one hand, she didn’t want to have sex before her friends did, but neither did she want them to precede her into that promised land. She’d been among the last to get her driver’s license, which had been embarrassing enough. She refused to visit Noonan’s squalid flat above the Rexall, though on nights when her father let her have the Caddy she liked to drive him out to the old Whitcombe Estate and park in the trees near the entrance. Most nights there’d be two or three other cars in the vicinity, cars they’d sometimes recognize as belonging to friends. At first they’d just necked in the front seat, but lately things had gotten more interesting in the back. Nan now let Noonan put his hands up under her sweater and bra, which was nice, and sometimes they left the car running and the heater on, and she’d take the sweater and bra off, which was nicer still. It was a big backseat, yet Nan wouldn’t recline all the way, claiming that they might be tempted to go too far. He suspected the real reason was that she liked to keep an eye on the other cars. Whenever they’d done as much as they were going to do in the backseat and crawled back into the front, she’d wipe the foggy windshield clear and wonder out loud exactly what people parked nearby were doing. She hated to think it might be more interesting and exciting than necking and groping, but she was also distressed, he could tell, by the possibility that she was the only girl out here with her shirt off and her breasts exposed. What she really would’ve liked was to sneak a peek through those other fogged-up windows, not to actually watch anybody making out, but simply to see if they were ahead or behind her on the passion curve. Nan wanted to be somewhere in the safe middle. Her problem was that the middle, when it came to sex, was hard to locate. Worse, it changed week to week.
    Of all the couples she was curious about, none occupied her thoughts more frequently than Lucy and Sarah. “How far do you think they’ve gone?” she asked at least once a week. He told her he had no idea, though in truth he’d wondered the same thing. Lucy, he’d bet, was terrified of sex. Sarah, he imagined, was not. He supposed Lucy’s fear was trump, but who knew?
    “They haven’t yet,” Nan told him triumphantly one night in the backseat as she hooked her bra in back and adjusted her breasts in it. Noonan had some painful adjustments of his own to make. “I asked Sarah this afternoon, and she said they hadn’t.”
    “There,” he said. “Now you know.”
    Then she was visited by an unwelcome thought. “She could be lying.”
    “I doubt it,” Noonan said, and it was true; he did. Though wishful thinking might have been part of it.
    “Everybody lies sometimes,” Nan said, suddenly serious, her eyes glistening.
    Which made Noonan wonder if Sarah was right and Nan
was
vulnerable to something other than her own vanity. It was possible, and he didn’t want to hurt her. He did want to have sex with her, though, and Sarah’s advising him to walk away struck him as monstrously unfair. Okay, it was true. He didn’t love Nan. But he needed a more compelling reason than that. That very compelling reason was Sarah’s to give, but so far