The Last Gentleman

The sand under her sheared against itself and made a musical sound. “Are you mad at me?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œYou act mad.”
    â€œI’m not.”
    â€œWhy are you different then?”
    â€œDifferent from what?”
    â€œFrom a certain nut who kissed a very surprised girl in the automat.”
    â€œHmm.”
    â€œWell?”
    â€œI’m different because you are different,” said the engineer, who always told the exact truth.
    â€œ Me! How?”
    â€œI had looked forward to being with you on this trip. But it seems you prefer Rita’s company. I had wanted to be with you during the ordinary times of the day, for example after breakfast in the morning. I did not have any sisters,” he added thoughtfully. “So I never knew a girl in the morning. But instead we have become like strangers. Worse, we avoid each other.”
    â€œYes,” she said gravely, conscious, he could not help but notice, of saying it so: gravely. “Don’t you know why?” she said at last.
    â€œNo.”
    She sifted the cool discrete sand into her palm, where it made a perfect pyramid, shedding itself. “You say you never had sisters. Well, I never had a date, boyfriends—except a few boys in my ballet class who had foreheads this low. Rita and I got used to living quietly.”
    â€œAnd now?”
    â€œI guess I’m clinging to the nest like a big old cuckoo. Isn’t that awful?”
    He shrugged.
    â€œWhat do you want me to do?” she asked him.
    â€œWhat do I want you to do?”
    â€œTell me.”
    â€œHow do you feel?”
    â€œHow do you feel? Do you still love me?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œDo you? Oh, I love you too.”
    Why did this not sound right, here on Folly Beach in old Carolina in the moonlight?
    One thing I’m sure of, thought he as he held her charms in his arms: I shall court her henceforth in the old style. I shall press her hand. No more grubby epithelial embraces in dogbane thickets, followed by accusing phone calls. Never again! Not until we are in our honeymoon cottage in a cottage small by a waterfall.
    But when he kissed her and there she was again looking at him from both sides at once, he had the first inkling of what might be wrong. She was too dutiful and athletic. She worked her mouth against his (is this right, she as good as asked).
    â€œWonderful,” she breathed, lying back. “A perfect setting.”
    Why is it not wonderful, he wondered, and when he leaned over again and embraced her in the sand, he knowing without calculating the exact angle at which he might lie over against her—about twenty degrees past the vertical—she miscalculated, misread him and moved slightly, yet unmistakably to get plainly and simply under him, then feeling the surprise in him stopped almost before she began. It was like correcting a misstep in dancing.
    â€œWhat is it?” she whispered presently.
    â€œNothing,” he said, kissing her tenderly and cursing himself. His heart sank. Was it not that she was right and that he made too much of it? What it was, though, was that this was the last thing he expected. It was part of his expectations of the life which lay before him that girls would be girls just as camellias were camellias. If he loved a girl and walked with her on Folly Beach by moonlight, kissed her sweet lips and held her charms in his arms, it should follow that he would be simply he and she she, she as complete as a camellia with her corolla of reticences and allurements. But she, Kitty, was no such thing. She didn’t know any better than he. Love, she, like him, was obliged to see as a naked garden of stamens and pistils. But what threw him off worst was that, sentient as always, he found himself catching onto how it was with her: he saw that she was out to be a proper girl and taking every care to do the right wrong thing. There were even echoes of a third person: what, you worry about the boys as good a figure as you have, etc. So he was the boy and she was doing her best to do what a girl does. He sighed.
    â€œWhat?” she asked again.
    â€œNothing,” he said, kissing her eyes, which were, at any rate, like stars.
    He sighed again. Very well, I’ll be both for you, boyfriend and girlfriend, lover and father. If it is possible.
    They stirred in the musical sand. “We’d better go back,” said the gentlemanly engineer and kissed her somewhat