The Last Gentleman

lewdly so she wouldn’t feel she had failed. It seemed to be his duty now to protect her non-virtue as best he could. After all, he mused, as he reckoned girls must have mused in other ages, if worst comes to worst and all else fails I can let her under me—I shan’t begrudge her the sacrifice. What ailed her, him, them, he wondered. Holding her hand as they returned to the Quality Court, he flexed his wrist so that he could count his pulse against her bone.
    Mainly their trouble—or good fortune, as the case might be—was that they were still out of phase, their fervors alternating and jostling each other like bad dancers. For now, back at the cooler and she then going ahead of him with her pitcher on the rim of her pelvis, desire like a mighty wind caught him from behind and nearly blew him down. He almost fainted with old motel lewd-longing. “Wait,” he whispered— oh, the piercing sorrow of it, this the mortal illness of youth like death to old age. “Wait.” He felt his way along the blotting-paper wall like a blind man. She took his outstretched hand.
    â€œWhat is it, dearest?”
    â€œLet’s go in here,” he said, opening the door to a closet which housed a giant pulsing Fedders.
    â€œWhat for?” she asked. Her eyes were silvery and turned in.
    â€œLet us go in the service room.” For it is here and not by moonlight—he sighed. Her willingness and nurse-tenderness were already setting him at naught again.
    â€œThere you are,” said Rita, opening the door opposite. “Where in the world was the ice machine?”
    And off he went, bereft, careening down the abstract, decent, lewd Quality corridor.
    The next day they went their separate ways as before, he mooning off with Jamie in the Trav-L-Aire, keeping the days empty and ears attuned to the secret sounds of summer. They met again in Beaufort. Kitty and Rita filled the day with small rites. They both took Metrecal and made a ceremony of it at every stop, lining up the wafers on a Sèvres dish, assembling a miniature stove from Lewis and Conger to heat the water for their special orange-flavored tea. Or if Kitty had a hangnail, the afternoon was spent rounding up Q-tips, alcohol, cuticle scissors.
    6 .
    One hot night they stopped at a raw red motel on a raw red hillside in Georgia. The women had got tired of the coast and took to the upcountry in search of hooked rugs and antiques. And the engineer had to admit that it was the pleasantest of prospects: to buy a five-dollar chiffonier and come down through six layers of paint to old ribby pine from the days of General Oglethorpe.
    The two youths had dawdled as usual and it was almost midnight when the Trav-L-Aire came groaning up the hill, bucket swinging under her like a Conestoga wagon, and crept into a pine grove bursting with gouts of amber rosin still fragrant from the hot afternoon. It was too hot to sleep. Jamie sat in the cab and read his Theory of Sets. The engineer strolled over to the cinder-block porch of the motel, propped his chair against the wall, and watched a construction gang flattening a hill across the valley. They were making a new expressway, he reckoned. The air throbbed with the machinery, and the floodlights over the hill spoiled the night like a cast in a black eye. He had noticed this about the South since he returned. Along the Tidewater everything was pickled and preserved and decorous. Backcountry everything was being torn down and built anew. The earth itself was transformed overnight, gouged and filled, flattened and hilled, like a big sandpile. The whole South throbbed like a diesel.
    â€œâ€”but here am I, Ree, twenty-one and never been to college!”
    â€œThen go to a good one.”
    He knew now why he had left the camper. It had come over him again, the old itch for omniscience. One day it was longing for carnal knowledge, the next for perfect angelic knowledge. Tonight he was not American and horny but English and eavesdropper. He had to know without being known.
    Not ten feet behind him and through the open window, Rita and Kitty lay in their beds and talked. The Trav-L-Aire had crept up the hill with its lights out—had he planned it even then? He had come onto the porch as silently as an Englishman entering his burrow in Somerset.
    â€œHave I told you what I want to be?”
    â€œI’m afraid you have.”
    â€œI want to be an ordinary silly girl who has dates and