“I GUESS you want me to tell you some more about the war,” said Andrew. He and Lorna were sitting on the sofa in the Hubers’ parlor, as they had on many evenings since Andrew’s return. Richard was standing, filling his pipe. Lena was sitting in her accustomed chair, knitting. Before she quite realized what she was doing, Lena let a sigh escape from her. When she discovered herself sighing, she tried to disguise the sigh as a yawn. When she realized that a yawn was every bit as bad as a sigh, she became confused about what to do next, and she burst out giggling. She glanced up from her work and saw that she had become the focus of attention.
Lorna rose from the couch and walked to her mother’s chair, where she stood behind her and squeezed her shoulders.
“I’m sure we’d love to hear some more about the war,” Lena said, with a hearty eagerness that made Richard wonder whether she needed a long rest.
“You needn’t feel that you have to tell us everything, my boy,” said Richard. “I’m sure that there are many things you’d rather keep to yourself.”
“Oh, no,” said Andrew. “Not at all. I’ve got a million stories to tell!”
“Ah,” said Lorna, barely audibly, “only half a million to go.”
Lena giggled again. Richard, who had heard Lorna well enough, gave her a stern glance. Andrew, who told himself that surely she could not have said what he thought he’d heard, gave her a bewildered look.
“What was that, Lorna?” he asked.
“I said, ‘We really have to go,’ ” said Lorna. She gave her mother another squeeze and smiled at her father, who applied himself to the tamping of his pipe.
When Lorna and Andrew had left, Lena let her knitting drop into her lap and said, looking straight ahead, “He really is a very nice boy.”
“Yes,” said Richard. “He’s a fine boy. A brave fellow.” He puffed at his pipe.
Lena said, “I only wish — ”
“Yes,” said Richard, “so do I.”
Lena went back to her knitting, and Richard stood puffing on his pipe and looking at the newspaper. He reminded himself, again, that Andrew was a good prospect. With the end of the war and the return to normal production, a wonderful optimism had spread through Chacallit. Hindsight allows us to see that this optimism was, insofar as it was based on the expectation of growth in the gentlemen’s furnishings industry, ill founded, but for the time being there seemed to be no reason to doubt that the industry on which Chacallit depended would prosper or that Andrew Proctor, who would one day ascend to the presidency of Proctor’s Products for Men, was a good prospect. So it was difficult for Richard, who wanted to see Lorna securely settled, to admit that he would really rather not have her settled on Andrew Proctor.
It was even more difficult for Lena to admit. She had seen the war take some of the best young men of Lorna’s age and had watched Lorna pass what she considered her peak. She had watched Lorna grow less and less interested in the men who might have been interested in her. She felt that Lorna expected too much, and she was afraid that if Lorna drove Andrew away, there might be no one left. So, a little ashamed of what she was doing, she had begun to push Lorna toward thinking seriously about marrying Andrew, even though, whenever Lena watched them walk away from the house together, she admitted to herself that she was glad not to be the one who would have to listen to Andrew for the rest of the evening.
Lorna tried to convince herself that Andrew’s failings didn’t matter, that she was imagining some and exaggerating others, that he really was good enough, but the truth struck her on the night when Andrew made love to her, on the back seat of his car, a Chevrolet. To be fair, her expectations may have been too high. Lorna was a nineteen-year-old virgin who in the last two years had spent approximately twenty-six hundred hours scrutinizing sexual performances of great diversity and sophistication and replicating them, in ivory, with painstaking exactitude. Though she didn’t yet know what she liked, she knew much about the art. When she decided that tonight might just as well be the night, her imagination summoned all the couples she had carved, all their frozen moments of sex. Lorna came at Andrew as a flame licks at tinder, and if Andrew had noticed that Lorna’s eyes burned brighter than his, that her breathing was quicker, her hands were hotter and bolder, and if, when she took his penis in her hands and inched herself toward him so that just the tip touched her, he had taken the time to notice her luscious concupiscence, then he would have cried out, “Oh, Lorna, take command, burn me up, consume me.” But Andrew didn’t notice any of that and wouldn’t have understood it if he had, and so when she approached him he thought she meant, “Take me, conquer me,” and he threw himself into the task with the cold-blooded single-mindedness that had made him a hero. He wrapped his arms around her, pressed her backward against the seat, and pushed himself, with one quick, grunting effort, as far into her as he could. Lorna hadn’t anticipated that, and she didn’t welcome it. Andrew began a steady humping progress toward his satisfaction, something like a forced march. A thought crossed Lorna’s mind: if there’s a medal for this, he’s determined to get it. She started to snicker, but she covered it with what she hoped sounded like a startled exclamation prompted by an unexpected pleasure.
Andrew stopped moving in her. Just stopped. He extended his arms and raised himself up so that they could look each other in the face and said, “I’ll bet you’ve wondered what this would be like. I know I have.” He grinned and winked and went back to his huffing and puffing and fucking. Lorna looked at the mouse-colored fabric lining the roof of the car and let her mind wander away from Andrew’s fuss and hubbub, and on its own her mind wandered back to the rainy night when Herb stood on her front porch shaking his umbrella, and just as Andrew reached the end of the march, fired his salute, and collapsed in the shade, a shiver ran through her and she realized that she wanted more than anything else to be with Herb.
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