🎧 282: Herb had planned ...

HERB HAD PLANNED, as soon as things settled down, to go to the tobacco shop, where there was a telephone, and call Lorna, but before he could get out, Ben’s wife, Herb’s aunt Louise, arrived with his cousins and a friend of his cousins’, Alice Mills. Alice was sixteen, a girl of striking beauty, with wide eyes, a lively, laughing mouth, and waves of fine golden hair that cascaded over her shoulders and caught and gilded even the poor dim light in the Pipers’ apartment. She was a quick blusher. She had voluptuous lips, and she kept them slightly parted in a look that made her seem naïve and vulnerable. She couldn’t take her eyes off Herb. She had fallen in love with him while he was in France.
     Before she had fallen in love with Herb, Alice had already developed a romantic attachment to the general idea that young men were fighting in France, suffering unspeakable horrors, and pining all the while for the girls they’d left behind, who pined in turn for them, sighing through slightly parted lips in a way that made them seem naïve and vulnerable. How Alice wished that she had been one of the girls that the boys had left behind, so that the poignant ache she felt in her heart might have some specific object, and so that, in his turn, the object of her heartache, some doughboy lying cold and miserable in a trench somewhere in France, might pine for her, specifically for her. Alas, the boys she knew were all too young for war, so none of them was likely to be heading over there with his heart full of her. She needed someone already over there, and so she chose Herb, her best friend’s cousin. She’d seen him before, but her memory of him was fuzzy enough not to interfere with her fantasy. She wrote letters to him but found that they never struck the note she had intended them to strike, and so never sent them. She prayed for his safety. She promised herself that, once he returned home, and they were firmly in love, she would always be faithful to him. She sat in the window seat at home, looked wistful, and sighed for him through her voluptuous lips. She stood in front of her mirror and admired the way she was maturing, touched her lips with her fingertips and tried to imagine what kissing her would be like for Herb, touched her breasts and tried to isolate her fingertips, tried to make them Herb’s, to feel her nipples tighten as he would, and, in bed, tried to remove herself from herself, put herself beside herself, be Herb beside her, caress herself as Herb would, beg herself to give herself to him as Herb would, tried to imagine climbing atop herself as Herb would, and slowly, gratefully, tenderly, reverently, augmenting her imagination with the handle on a darning egg, penetrating herself as Herb would. She succeeded well enough to convince herself that she was in love with Herb. She had never had a serious doubt that, given the opportunity, he would love her.
     When Herb saw Alice he was astonished. She wasn’t at all the little girl he remembered. She was beautiful. She was alluring. She seemed to adore him. What he felt for her he immediately took for love. He put off telephoning Lorna.

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