🎧 308: They astonished ...

     They astonished each other. Lying in the dark, later, when each thought the other had fallen asleep, Herb asked himself the question Lorna had feared: Where on earth did she get those ideas? He couldn’t help wondering whether Lorna had had more experience than that provided by Andy Proctor, the hero of Chacallit. He knew about the back-seat session with Andy because Lorna had told him one evening, the same evening when he told her about Alice Mills. It had been one of those “damned confessional evenings that lovers insist on torturing themselves with,” according to May:

     Gad! Why do they do it? I mean — why don’t they have the sense to keep quiet about things that they ought to keep quiet about? Well — it was an evening when they went rowing on the bay in the moonlight. A favorite thing of theirs to do, of course, since it reminded them of the night the ballroom burned. But of course it reminded Lorna of that night in a rowboat with Luther too. So! She was of two minds on such occasions, as you can well imagine. Oh, anyway, Herb kicked things off. Why is it that men need to confess things? Clear the air! Get things out in the open! Lay my cards on the table! Get this off my chest! Brrrr! I get chills when I hear words like that. “May, I want to get something out in the open.” No thank you! Good night!
     Perhaps it’s just boasting, do you think? Well. Anyway, Herb told her about Whatever-her-name-was, that girl who fell in love with him while he was in France — Alice Mills. And then he told her about that strange couple — the ones he met at that gas station — you remember them. Oh, you know. Herb assumed the woman was Whoosis’s daughter, but she turned out to be his wife? Arthur and Tessie Norris. Well, Herb told Lorna all that. Lorna told Herb that he didn’t have to go into all of this for her sake, but he insisted. He said — and he honestly believed what he was saying — that he hoped that as the years went by Lorna would learn everything about him there was to know, since he thought it was important for a married couple not to hide anything from each other. Oooh. A ghastly idea. Ghastly. Well, Lorna — poor thing — felt she had to give something in return for all this honesty, so she gave him Andy. So to speak. Now what do you suppose happened? I’ll tell you what I suppose. What always happens. They both wound up thinking, Well, there must be more. Nobody would confess everything, so there must be more. Honesty is very dangerous.

     As time passed, Herb and Lorna began, little by little, to invite imagination into the big pine bed. Though Herb wondered about the sources of Lorna’s inspired lovemaking, he never recognized what should have been obvious, that some of the ideas had been his. Nor did he recognize Lorna’s inventiveness. Jealousy made him suppose that her ideas must come from other experiences.

In Topical Guide 308, Mark Dorset considers Ideas: Their Origins: Reciprocal “Inspiration” from this episode.

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