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Only once, toward the end of the summer, did she ask me what I was going to do for a living. Lying quietly on my arm, after a long silence, she suddenly said, "Jack, what are you going to do?"
I didn't know what the hell she was taking about. So I said, "What am I going to do? I am going to blow in your ear." And did it.
"What are you going to do? Do for a living? she asked, again.
"Going to blow in your ear for a living," I said.
She didn't smile. "I mean it," she said.
I didn't answer for a minute. Then I said, "I've been thinking I might study law."
She was quiet for a little, then said, "You just thought of that this minute. You just said it."
I had just said it. The subject of my future, as a matter of fact, was one on which I had never cared to dwell. I simply didn't care. I would think that I'd get a job, any kind of a job, and do it and collect my pay and spend the pay and go back to the job on Monday morning, and that would be all. I had no ambitions. But I couldn't sit there and say to A
I had played hell giving that impression.
She had seen right through me, like a piece of glass, and there wasn't anything to answer except to say that she was very wrong, that I was indeed going to study law, and what was wrong with studying law, please?
"You just made it up," she repeated stubbornly.
"Hell," I said, "I won't let you starve, I'll give you everything you've got. If you've got to have a big house and a lot of dresses and parties, well, I'll–"
But I didn't get to finish that.
"You know perfectly well, Jack Burden," she interrupted, "I don't have to have anything like that. You're just being mean. You're trying to put me in the wrong. I don't want anything like that. You know I don't. You know I love you and I'll live in a shack and eat red beans if you've got to live that way because what you want to do doesn't make any money. But if you don't want to do anything–even if you do just sort of get a job and have plenty of money–oh, you know what I mean–you know the way some people are." She sat up very straight on the seat of the roadster and her eyes, even in nothing but starlight, flashed that fine seventeen-year-old scorn. Then she fixed the gleam on me very steadily and said in a serious way that made her a fu
I laughed, it was so fu
That was the last I heard of it, except for one sentence. The next day, when she and I were lying out on the diving float, she said, all of a sudden, after a long sun-baked silence, "You remember last night?"
I said I did.
"Well," she said, "I meant it. I really did." Then she took her hand out of mine, slipped off the float, and swam away to keep me from making any answer.
I didn't hear any more about that business. And didn't think anything more about it. A
I never tried to hurry anything all summer. Not in the porch swing, or in the pine woods, or on the float at night when we swam out, or in the roadster. Everything that happened came to happen as simply and as naturally and as a gradually as a season coming on or a plant unrolling a leaf or a kitten waking up. And there was a kind of luxuriousness in not rushing things, in not driving toward the hot grip and awkward tussle and the leer for the boys back in the dormitory when you got in, a new sensuality in waiting for the massive current to take you where you belonged and would go in the end. She was young–she seemed younger to me then than she did later on looking back, for that summer I was so sure that I was old and jaded–and she was timid and sensitive and shy, but it wasn't any squealing, squeaking, pullet-squawking, teasing, twitching, oh-that's-not-nice-and-I-never-let-anybody-do-that-before-oh kind of shyness. Perhaps shyness is the wrong word for it, after all. Certainly it is wrong if back behind that word there is any implication or color of shame or fear or desire to be "nice." For in one way, she seemed to be detached from her very slender, compactly made, tight-muscled, soft-fleshed, golden-shouldered body, as though it were an elaborate and cu
We went quite a long way, that summer, and there were times when I was perfectly sure I could have gone farther. When I could have gone the limit. For that fine, slender, compactly made, tight-muscled, soft-fleshed, golden-shouldered mechanism which fascinated A