Chase: Roman

have?’ he asked.
        ‘Please do,’ she said. She moved against him and tilted her head back, offering her lips to him and, perhaps later, everything.
        He held her and kissed her for a long while. She was blue, spotted with yellow, edged with crimson as the light-boxes played.
        ‘You kiss very well,’ she said.
        And perhaps he should have stopped at that point, before he had proven that there was nothing else at all he could do but kiss. He wanted her, and he thought that what he needed was bed with her, but he found that she was like a recorder of the past and that his touch activated the tapes; she radiated his memories of other women, dead women, became a history of his guilt. As herself, she was desirable, but as an archetype, she destroyed desire unknowingly.
        ‘I'm sorry,’ he said as they lay on her bed, staring at the dark ceiling that seemed, at times, only inches away from their faces.
        ‘For what?’ she asked. She was holding his hand, and he was glad for that.
        ‘Don't humour me,’ he said. ‘You were expecting more.’
        ‘Was I?’ she asked, rising on one elbow and peering at him beside her in the gloom. ‘Well, even if that's so, you were expecting more too. If I use your reasoning , I owe you an apology.’
        His attitude toward her consideration was distinctly ambivalent, for though he appreciated the way she spared his feelings and tried to coax him into good humour, he wanted to be humiliated. He did not know exactly why he should feel that way.
        He said, ‘You're wrong about that, because I really wasn't expecting anything more.’
        ‘Oh?’
        ‘I haven't been able to,’ he said. ‘Not since - since I came back from Nam.’ He had never told anyone but Dr Cauvel the history of his impotency, but now he seemed to be using it to elicit the scorn she had been withholding.
        She moved closer to him, and rising further, began to gently brush the hair from his forehead. She said, That's a bitch all right, but it isn't everything. You can still stay the night, can't you?’
        ‘After this?’
        ‘I said this wasn't all,’ she snapped. ‘It would be very nice just to have someone to sleep with, to warm the other half of the bed. All right?’
        ‘All right,’ he said.
        ‘Hungry?’ she asked, changing the subject before he could find some other point to drag the original conversation on. ‘Let's go fix an omelet.’
        He gripped her hand more tightly than before and said, ‘Wait a bit yet.’ They lay side by side, quiet, as if listening. When he wasn't crying any more, he let her turn on the light, and they went to make a snack.
        
        At breakfast the next morning, Chase said, ‘If I - if we'd made love last night, would that have been normal for you?’
        ‘Having a man overnight, on the first date?’ she asked.
        ‘Yes, that.’
        ‘Not normal, no.’
        ‘But it has happened before?’
        She mopped up the yellow of her last egg with a piece of buttered toast. ‘Twice before,’ she said.
        He finished his eggs and picked up his coffee. He said, ‘I wish -’
        ‘Stop it!’ she said, with much more force in her quiet voice than he had heard before. ‘You really are the masochist, aren't you?’
        ‘Maybe.’
        She leaned back, finished. ‘But you'd like me to tell you it was something special with you, even though we didn't actually do anything.’
        ‘No,’ he said.
        She smiled. That's a lie, Ben. You do want me to say it was something special, but you won't believe me if I say it was.’
        ‘How could it have been?’ he asked.
        ‘It was,’ she said. She blushed, a fact he found both old fashioned and delightful in such a liberated woman. ‘Ben, it was rather special, and I like you very much.’
        ‘Perhaps it wasn't special,’ he said. ‘Just different.’
        ‘Bullshit.’
        ‘The fact remains that we didn't -’
        She interrupted him. ‘I feel more comfortable with you, happier, more myself than I've ever felt with anyone in my life. And all of that, only the morning after our first date.’
        ‘You feel comfortable because you feel safe.’
        ‘A lie,’ she said.
        When he looked up a moment later, to see the cause of her abrupt answer and the ensuing silence, he was surprised to see tears in her eyes. He said, ‘Okay, Glenda. I'm sorry. And