Now she looked at him, her eyes wounded, pleading, inarticulate. You can make me do this, her eyes said, but please don't. Don't, I love you, can't it be over?

No — it could not. Because that was not the bottom of her wanting, and both of them knew it.

Say it.

I forgot about smoking in front of you, Tom.

Good. Now say 'I'm sorry.'

I'm sorry, she repeated dully.

The cigarette lay smoking on the pavement like a cut piece of fuse. People leaving the theater glanced over at them, the man standing by the open passenger door of a late-model, fade-into-the –woodwork Vega, the woman sitting inside, her hands clasped primly in her lap, her head down, the domelight outlining the soft fall of her hair in gold.

He crushed the cigarette out. He smeared it against the blacktop.

Now say: I’ll never do it again without your permission.'

I'll never . . .

Her voice began to hitch.

. . . never . . . n-n-n —

Say it, Bev.

. . . never d-do it again. Without your p-permission.

So he had slammed the door and gone back around to the driver's seat. He got behind the wheel and drove them back to his downtown apartment. Neither of them said a word. Hah the relationship had been set in the parking lot; the second half was set forty minutes later, in Tom's bed.

She didn't want to make love, she said. He saw a different truth in her eyes and the strutty cock of her legs, however, and when he got her blouse off her nipples had been rock hard. She moaned when he brushed them, and cried out softly when he suckled first one and then the other, kneading them restlessly as he did so. She grabbed his hand and thrust it between her legs.

I thought you didn't want to, he said, and she had turned her face away . . . but she did not let go of his hand, and the rocking motion of her hips actually speeded up.

He pushed her back on the bed . . . and now he was gentle, not ripping her underwear but removing it with a careful consideration that was almost prissy.

Sliding into her was like sliding into some exquisite oil.

He moved with her, using her but letting her use him as well, and s he came the first time almost at once, crying out and digging her nails into his back. Then they rocked together in long, slow strokes and somewhere in there he thought she came again. Tom would get close, and then he would think of White Sox batting averages or who was trying to undercut him for the Chesley account at work and he would be okay again. Then she began to speed up, her rhythm finally dissolving into an excited bucking. He looked at her face, the raccoon ringlets of mascara, the smeared lipstick, and he felt himself suddenly shooting deliriously toward the edge.

She jerked her hips up harder and harder — there had been no beergut between them in those days and their bellies clapped hands in a quickening beat.

Near the end she screamed and then bit his shoulder with her small, even teeth.

How many times did you come? he asked her after they had showered.

She turned her face away, and when she spoke her voice was so low he almost couldn't hear her. That isn't something you're supposed to ask.

No? Who told you that? Misterogers?

He took her face in one hand, thumb pressing deep into one cheek, fingers pressing into the other, palm cupping her chin in between.

You talk to Tom, he said. You hear me, Bev? Talk to Papa.

Three, she said reluctantly.

Good, he said. You can have a cigarette.

She looked at him distrustfully, her red hair spread over the pillows, wearing nothing but a pair of hip –hugger panties. Just looking at her that way got his motor turning over again. He nodded.

Go on, he said. That's all right.

They had been married in a civil ceremony three months later. Two of his friends had come; the only friend of hers to attend had been Kay McCall, whom Tom called 'that titsy women's-lib bitch.'

All of these memories went through Tom's mind in a space of seconds, like a speeded-up piece of film, as he stood in the doorway watching her. She had gone on to the bottom drawer of what she sometimes called her 'weekend bureau,' and now she was tossing underwear into the suitcase — not the sort of stuff he liked, the slippery satins and smooth silks; this was cotton stuff, little –girl stuff, most of it faded and with little puffs of popped elastic on the waistbands. A cotton nightie that looked like something out of Little House on the Prairie. She poked in the back of this bottom drawer to see what else might be lurking in there.

Tom Rogan, meanwhile, moved across the shag rug toward his wardrobe. His feet were bare and his passage noiseless as a puff of breeze. It was the cigarette. That was what had

really gotten him mad. It had been a long time since she had forgotten that first lesson. There had been other lessons to learn since, a great many, and there had been hot days when she had worn long-sleeve d blouses or even cardigan sweaters buttoned all the way to the neck. Gray days when she had worn sunglasses. But that first lesson had been so sudden and fundamental —

He had forgotten the telephone call that had wakened him out of his deepening sleep. It was the cigarette. If she was smoking now, then she had forgotten Tom Rogan. Temporarily, of course, only temporarily, but even temporarily was too damned long. What might have caused her to forget didn't matter. Such things were not to happen in his house for any reason.

There was a wide black strip of leather hanging from a hook inside the closet door. There was no buckle on it; he had removed that long ago. It was doubled over at one end where a buckle would have gone, and this doubled-over section formed a loop into which Tom Rogan now slipped his hand.

Tom, you been bad! his mother had sometimes said — well, 'sometimes' was maybe not such a good word; maybe 'often' would have been a better one. You come here, Tommy! I got to give you a whuppin. His life as a child had been punctuated by whuppins. He had finally escaped to Wichita State College, but apparently there was no such thing as a complete escape, because he continued to hear her voice in dreams: Come here, Tommy. I got to giveyou a whuppin. Whuppin . . .

He had been the eldest of four. Three months after the youngest had been born, Ralph Rogan had died — well, 'died' was maybe not such a good word; maybe 'committed suicide' would have been a better way to put it, since he had poured a generous quantity of lye into a tumbler of gin and quaffed this devil's brew while sitting on the bathroom hopper. Mrs Rogan had found work at the Ford plant. Tom, although only eleven, became the man of the family. And if he screwed up — if the baby shat her didies after the sitter went home and the mess was still in them when Mom got home . . . if he forgot to cross Megan on the Broad Street corner after her nursery school got out and that nosy Mrs Gant saw . . . if he happened to be watching American Bandstand while Joey made a mess in the kitchen . . . if any of those things or a thousand others happened . . . then, after the smaller children were in bed, the spanking stick would come out and she would call the invocation: Come here, Tommy. I gotto give you a whuppin.

Better to be the whupper than the whupped.

If he had learned nothing else on the great toll-road of life, he had learned that.

So he flipped the loose end of the belt over once and pulled the loop snug. Then he closed h is fist over it. It felt good. It made him feel like a grownup. The strip of leather hung from his clenched fist like a dead blacksnake. His headache was gone.

She had found that one last thing in the back of the drawer: an old white cotton bra with gunshell cups. The thought that this early-morning call might have been from a lover surfaced briefly in his mind and then sank again. That was ridiculous. A woman going away to meet her lover did not pack her faded Ship 'n Shore blouses and her cotton K-Mart undies with the pops and snarls in the elastic. Also, she wouldn't dare.