The Progress of Love

the things he accepts that make a difference. He baffles her, and compels her. She loves this man with a baffled, cautious, permanent love.
    When she pictures him, she always sees him wearing his brown three-piece suit, an old-fashioned suit that makes him look like a doctor from his classically poor and rural childhood. He has good-looking casual clothes and she has seen him in them, but she thinkshe isn’t at ease in them. He isn’t at ease with being rich, she thinks, though he feels an obligation to be so and a hatred for any government that would prevent him. All obedience, acceptance, sadness.
    He wouldn’t believe her if she told him that. Nobody would.
    She is shivering, even with her jacket on. She seems to have caught something of the girl’s persistent and peculiar agitation. Perhaps she really is sick, has a fever. She twists around, trying to compose herself. She closes her eyes but cannot keep them closed. She cannot stop herself from watching what is going on across the aisle.
    What is going on is something she should have the sense and decency to turn away from. But she hasn’t, and she doesn’t.
    The whiskey glasses are empty. The girl has leaned forward and is kissing the man’s face. His head is resting against the cushion and he does not stir. She leans over him, her eyes closed, or almost closed, her face broad and pale and impassive, a true moon face. She kisses his lips, his cheeks, his eyelids, his forehead. He offers himself to her; he permits her. She kisses him and licks him. She licks his nose, the faint stubble of his cheeks and neck and chin. She licks him all over his face, then takes a breath and resumes her kissing.
    This is unhurried, not greedy. It is not mechanical, either. There is no trace of compulsion. The girl is in earnest; she is in a trance of devotion. True devotion. Nothing so presumptuous as forgiveness or consolation. A ritual that takes every bit of her concentration and her self but in which her self is lost. It could go on forever.
    Even when the girl’s eyes open and she looks straight out across the aisle, with an expression that is not dazed and unaware but direct and shocking—even then, Mary Jo has to keep looking. Only with a jolting effort, and after an immeasurable amount of time, is she able to pull her own eyes away.
    If anybody was to ask her what she was feeling while she watched this, Mary Jo would have said that she felt sick. And she would have meant it. Not just sick with the beginnings of a fever or whatever it is that’s making her dull and shivery, but sick withrevulsion, as if she could feel the slow journeys of the warm, thick tongue over her face. Then, when she takes her eyes away, something else is released, and that is desire—sudden and punishing as a rush of loose earth down a mountainside.
    At the same time, she is listening to Dr. Streeter’s voice, and it says clearly, “You know, that girl’s teeth were probably knocked out. In some brawl.”
    This is Dr. Streeter’s familiar, reasonable voice, asking that some facts, some conditions, should be recognized. But she has put something new into it—a sly and natural satisfaction. He is not just sad, not just accepting; he is satisfied that some things should be so. The satisfaction far back in his voice matches the loosening feeling in her body. She feels a physical shame and aversion, a heat that seems to spread from her stomach. This passes, the wave of it passes, but the aversion remains. Aversion, disgust, dislike spreading out from you can be worse than pain. It would be a worse condition to live in. Once she has thought this, and put some sort of name to what she is feeling, she is a little steadier. It must be the strangeness of being on the flight, and the drink, and the confusion offered by that girl, and perhaps a virus, that she is struggling with. Dr. Streeter’s voice is next thing to a real delusion, but it isn’t a delusion; she knows she manufactured it herself. Manufactured what she could then turn away from, so purely hating him. If such a feeling became real, if a delusion like that got the better of her, she would be in a state too dreary to think about.
    She sets about deliberately to calm herself down. She breathes deeply and pretends that she is going to sleep. She starts telling herself a story in which things work out better. Suppose the girl had followed her to the back of the plane a while ago; suppose they had been able to talk? The story slips