The Progress of Love

they be frenzied or methodical? Would they roll on the bed half-undressed, or proceed as at the doctor’s? I thought the latter way would be more like them.
    Take that off. Yes. Now lie down. Open your legs. Calm orders, dumb obedience. Beatrice glazed, submissive. The barber’s apprentice, that scrawny, blotchy-necked fellow, grown imperious, ready to wield his perverse power. Now. Yes. Now.
    “One time, a boy asked me to do it,” MaryBeth said. “I nearly got him expelled.” She told me how, in Grade 7, a boy had passed her a note that said, “Do you want to F.?” and she had shown the note to the teacher.
    “Somebody wants me to do it,” I said. I was very surprised at myself. I kept my eyes down and did not look at MaryBeth. Who? she said, and what did he say exactly, and where did he say it? When? Was it anybody in our class? Why hadn’t I told her?
    She bumped down to the step below me, so that she could look into my face. She put her hands on my knees. “We promised we’d tell each other everything,” she said.
    I shook my head.
    “It hurts my feelings a lot you haven’t told me.”
    I rubbed my lips together as if to hold the secret in. “Actually, he’s in love with me,” I said.
    “Jessie! Tell me!”
    She promised me the use of her Eversharp pencil until the end of the school year. I did not respond. She said I could use her fountain pen as well. Her Eversharp pencil and her fountain pen, the set.
    I had been planning to tease her for a little longer, then totell her that it was all a joke. I did not even have anybody’s name in my head, in the beginning. I did now, but it was too outrageous. I couldn’t believe that I would ever say it.
    “Jessie, I’ll give you a bangle. Not lend. I said give . I’ll give you whichever bangle you want and you can keep it.”
    “If I was going to tell his name, I wouldn’t do it for a bangle,” I said.
    “I’ll swear to God I won’t tell. Cross my heart and hope to die.”
    “Just swear to God.”
    “I will. I swear to God, Jessie. I’ve sworn to God.”
    “Mr. Cryderman,” I said softly. I felt wonderfully lightened, not burdened, by my lie. “It’s him.”
    MaryBeth took her hands off my knees and sat up straight. “He’s old,” she said. “You said he was ugly! He’s married!”
    “I never said ugly,” I said. “He’s only thirty-three.”
    “You don’t even like him!”
    “Sometimes when you fall in love, it starts out that way.”
    Once, I knew an old woman who said to me, when talking about her life, that she had spent three years having an affair with Robert Browning. She was not in the least senile; she was a very competent and straightforward old woman. She didn’t say she loved Browning’s writing, or spent all her time reading about him. She didn’t say she had fantasies. “Oh, yes,” she said, “and then there was the three years’ affair I had with Robert Browning.” I waited for her to laugh or add some little explanatory word, but she did not do so. I have to think, then, that the affair she conducted in her imagination was so serious and strenuous that she forbade herself to describe it as imaginary.
    The affair I conducted that spring with Mr. Cryderman—in my head, and in front of MaryBeth—may not have been that important in my life, but it kept me busy. There was no more sense of drift and boredom, when MaryBeth and I were together. I had to keep arranging and rearranging things, then fit them into place by means of the bits of information I chose to give out. I consummated the affair but did not tell her, and was glad afterward becauseI decided to unconsummate it. I couldn’t adequately imagine the sequence of moves or what would be said afterward. I didn’t at all mind the lying. Once I had taken the plunge into falsehood—by saying Mr. Cryderman’s name—falsehood felt wonderfully comfortable.
    It wasn’t just by what I told, but by how I looked, that I dramatized what was going on. I did some contrary things. I didn’t pull my belts tight and make up my face and display myself as a youthful temptress. Instead, I took to wearing my hair in braids wrapped around my head, and I left off rouge and lipstick, though I still powdered heavily to make myself look pale. I went to school in a baggy crepe blouse of Aunt Ena’s. I told MaryBeth that Mr. Cryderman had asked me to dress like this and braid my hair. He could not bear the thought of anyone else looking at my hair or seeing the