XIV

They undressed in Janet's bedroom in the midst of her piles of material: books, magazines, sources of statistics, biographies, newspapers. The ghosts in the windowpanes undressed with them, for nobody could see in at the back of the house. Their dim and pretty selves. Janet pulled down the shades, lingering at each window and peering wistfully out into the dark, a shocking compound of familiar, friendly face and awful nude, while Laur climbed into Janet's bed. The bedspread had holes in it where the pink satin had worn thin. She shut her eyes.

"Put out the light."

"Oh no, please," said Janet, making the bed sway by getting into it. She held out her arms to the little girl; then she kissed her on the shoulder, the Russian way. (She's the wrong shape.) "I don't want the light," said Laur and jumped out of bed to turn it off, but the air catches you on your bare skin before you get there and shocks you out of your senses; so she stopped, mother-naked, with the currents of air investigating between her legs. "How lovely!" said Janet. The room is pitilessly well lit. Laur got back into bed-"Move over"-and that awful sensation that you're not going to enjoy it after all. "You have lovely knees," Janet said mildly, "and such a beautiful rump," and for a moment the preposterousness of it braced Laura Rose; there couldn't be any sex in it; so she turned off the overhead light and got back into bed. Janet had turned on a rose-shaded night lamp by the bed. Miss Evason grew out of the satin cover, an antique statue from the waist up with preternaturally living eyes; she said softly, "Look, we're alike, aren't we?" indicating her round breasts, idealized by the dimness. "I've had two children," she said wickedly and Laur felt herself go red all over, so unpleasant was the picture of Yuriko Janet-son being held up to one breast to suck, not, it seemed to Laur, an uncollected, starry-eyed infant but something like a miniature adult, on a ladder perhaps. Laur lay stiffly back and shut her eyes, radiating refusal.

Janet turned out the bedside light.

Miss Evason then pulled the covers up around her shoulders, sighed in self-control, and ordered Laur to turn over. "You can at least get a back-rub out of it."

"Ugh!" she said sincerely, when she began on the muscles of Laura's neck. "What a mess."

Laura tried to giggle. Miss Evason's voice, in the darkness, went on and on: about the last few weeks, about studying freshwater ponds on Whileaway, a hard, lean, sexless greyhound of a voice (Laur thought) which betrayed Laura in the end, Miss Evason stating with an odd, unserious chuckle, "Try?"

"I do love you," Laur said, ready to weep. There is propaganda and propaganda and I represented again to Janet that what she was about to do was a serious crime.

God will punish, I said.

You are supposed to make them giggle, but Janet remembered how she herself had been at twelve, and oh it's so serious. She kissed Laura Rose lightly on the lips over and over again until Laura caught her head; in the dark it wasn't really so bad and Laura could imagine that she was nobody, or that Miss Evason was nobody, or that she was imagining it all. One nice thing to do is rub from the neck down to the tail, it renders the human body ductile and makes the muscles purr. Without knowing it, Laur was in over her head. She had learned from a boy friend how to kiss on top, but here there was lots of time and lots of other places; "It's nice!" said Laura Rose in surprise; "It's so nice!" and the sound of her own voice sent her in head over heels. Janet found the little bump Whileawayans call The Key-Now you must make an effort, she said-and with the sense of working very hard, Laur finally tumbled off the cliff. It was incompletely and desperately inadequate, but it was the first major sexual pleasure she had ever received from another human being in her entire life.

"Goddammit, I can't!" she shouted.

So I fled shrieking. There is no excuse for putting my face between someone else's columnar thighs-picture me as washing my cheeks and temples outside to get rid of that cool smoothness (cool because of the fat, you see, that insulates the limbs; you can almost feel the long bones, the architectura, the heavenly technical cunning. They'll be doing it with the dog next). I sat on the hall window frame and screamed.

Janet must be imagined throughout as practicing the extremest self-control.

What else can she do?

"Now do this and this," she whispered hurriedly to Laura Rose, laughing brokenly. "Now do that and that. Ah!" Miss Evason used the girl's ignorant hand, for Laura didn't know how to do it; "Just hold still," she said in that strange parody of an intimate confession. The girl's inexperience didn't make things easy. However, one finds one's own rhythm. In the bottom drawer of the Wildings' guest room bureau was an exotic Whileawayan artifact (with a handle) that Laura Rose is going to be very embarrassed to see the next morning; Janet got it out, wobbling drunkenly.

("Did you fall down?" said Laura anxiously, leaning over the edge of the bed.

"Yes.")

So it was easy. Touched with strange inspiration, Laur held the interloper in her arms, awed, impressed, a little domineering.

Months of chastity went up in smoke: an electrical charge, the wriggling of an internal eel, a knifelike pleasure.

"No, no, not yet," said Janet Evason Belin. "Just hold it. Let me rest."

"Now. Again."

XV

A dozen beautiful "girls" each "brushing" and "combing" her long, silky "hair," each "longing" to "catch a man."

XVI

I fell in love at twenty-two.

A dreadful intrusion, a sickness. Vittoria, whom I did not even know. The trees, the bushes, the sky, were all sick with love. The worst thing (said Janet) is the intense familiarity, the sleepwalker's conviction of having blundered into an eruption of one's own inner life, the yellow-pollinating evergreen brushed and sticky with my own good humor, the flakes of myself falling invisibly from the sky to melt on my own face.

In your terms, I was distractedly in love. Whileawayans account for cases of this by referring back to the mother-child relationship: cold potatoes when you feel it. There used to be an explanation by way of our defects, but common human defects can be used to explain anything, so what's the use. And there's a mathematical analogy, a four-dimensional curve that I remember laughing at. Oh, I was bleeding to death.

Love-to work like a slave, to work like a dog. The same exalted, feverish attention fixed on everything. I didn't make a sign to her because she didn't make a sign to me; I only tried to control myself and to keep people away from me. That awful diffidence. I was at her too, all the time, in a nervous parody of friendship. Nobody can be expected to like that compulsiveness. In our family hall, like the Viking mead-hall where the bird flies in from darkness and out again into darkness, under the blown-up pressure dome with the fans bringing in the scent of roses, I felt my own soul fly straight up into the roof. We used to sit with the lights off in the long spring twilight; a troop of children had passed by the week before, selling candles, which one or another woman would bring in and light. People drifted in and out, lifting the silk flap to the dome entrance. People ate at different times, you see. When Vitti left for outside, I followed her. We don't have lawns as you do, but around our dwellings we plant a kind of trefoil which keeps the other things off; small children always assume it's there for magical reasons. It's very soft. It was getting dark, too.

There's a planting from New Forest near the farmhouse and we wandered toward it, Vitti idle and saying nothing.