The Love of a Good Woman

disgusting. To pass yourself around obediently and blamelessly, to whoever came up on the list—it was like temple prostitution. Lust served as your duty. It gave her a deep obscene thrill, to think of that.
    It hadn’t thrilled Sonje. She had not experienced sexual release. Cottar would ask her if she had, when she came back to him, and she had to say no. He was disappointed and she was disappointed for his sake. He explained to her that she was too exclusive and toomuch tied up in the idea of sexual property and she knew he was right.
    “I know he thinks that if I loved him enough I’d be better at it,” she said. “But I do love him, agonizingly.”
    For all the tempting thoughts that came into her mind, Kath believed that she could only, ever, sleep with Kent. Sex was like something they had invented between them. Trying it with somebody else would mean a change of circuits—all of her life would blow up in her face. Yet she could not say she loved Kent agonizingly.
    A S she walked along the beach from Monica’s house to Sonje’s, she saw people waiting for the party. They stood around in small groups or sat on logs watching the last of the sunset. They drank beer. Cottar and another man were washing out a garbage tin in which they would make the punch. Miss Campo, the head librarian, was sitting alone on a log. Kath waved to her vivaciously but didn’t go over to join her. If you joined somebody at this stage, you were caught. Then there were two of you alone. The thing to do was to join a group of three or four, even if you found the conversation—that had looked lively from a distance—to be quite desperate. But she could hardly do that, after waving at Miss Campo. She had to be on her way somewhere. So she went on, past Kent talking to Monica’s husband about how long it took to saw up one of the logs on the beach, she went up the steps to Sonje’s house and into the kitchen.
    Sonje was stirring a big pot of chili, and the older woman from the communal house was setting out slices of rye bread and salami and cheese on a platter. She was dressed just as she had been for the curry dinner—in a baggy skirt and a drab but clinging sweater, the breasts it clung to sloping down to herwaist. This had something to do with Marxism, Kath thought—Cottar liked Sonje to go without a brassiere, as well as without stockings or lipstick. Also it had to do with unfettered unjealous sex, the generous uncorrupted appetite that did not balk at a woman of fifty.
    A girl from the library was there too, cutting up green peppers and tomatoes. And a woman Kath didn’t know was sitting on the kitchen stool, smoking a cigarette.
    “Have we ever got a bone to pick with you,” the girl from the library said to Kath. “All of us at work. We hear you’ve got the darlingest baby and you haven’t brought her in to show us. Where is she now?”
    Kath said, “Asleep I hope.”
    This girl’s name was Lorraine, but Sonje and Kath, recalling their days at the library, had given her the name Debbie Reynolds. She was full of bounce.
    “Aww,” she said.
    The low-slung woman gave her, and Kath, a look of thoughtful distaste.
    Kath opened a bottle of beer and handed it to Sonje, who said, “Oh, thanks, I was so concentrated on the chili I forgot I could have a drink.” She worried because her cooking wasn’t as good as Cottar’s.
    “Good thing you weren’t going to drink that yourself,” the girl from the library said to Kath. “It’s a no-no if you’re nursing.”
    “I guzzled beer all the time when I was nursing,” the woman on the stool said. “I think it was recommended. You piss most of it away anyhow.”
    This woman’s eyes were lined with black pencil, extended at the corners, and her eyelids were painted a purplish blue right up to her sleek black brows. The rest of her face was very pale, or made up to look so, and her lips were so pale a pink that they seemedalmost white. Kath had seen faces like this before, but only in magazines.
    “This is Amy,” said Sonje. “Amy this is Kath. I’m sorry, I didn’t introduce you.”
    “Sonje, you’re always sorry,” the older woman said.
    Amy took up a piece of cheese that had just been cut, and ate it.
    Amy was the name of the mistress. The older woman’s husband’s mistress. She was a person Kath suddenly wanted to know, to be friends with, just as she had once longed to be friends with Sonje.
    T HE evening had changed into night, and the knots of