differential calculus so long as you’ve got a beautiful phizz. Besides, she couldn’t do differential calculus. Nor had she ever considered herself a particularly intelligent girl. She had gone to business school and scraped through, and she was a fairenough secretary at a small hardware concern, and she was convinced at the age of thirty-seven that the Big Romance legend that had been foisted upon her by the fiction con men was just a great big crock.
She didn’t mind it being a great big crock.
She told herself she didn’t mind.
She had said good-bye to her virginity when she turned twenty-nine. She had been disappointed. No trumpets blasting, no banners unfurling, no clamorous medley of gonging bells. Just pain. Since that time, she had dabbled. She considered sex the periodic gratification of a purely natural urge. She approached sex with the paradoxical relentlessness of an uncaged jungle beast and the precise aloofness of a Quaker bride. Sex was like sleep. You needed both, but you didn’t spend your life in bed.
And now, at thirty-seven, long since her parents had given up all hope for her, long since she herself had abandoned the Big Romance, the Wedding in June, the Honeymoon at Lovely Lake Lewis legend, she felt lonely.
She kept her own apartment, primarily because her jousting with sex would never have been understood by her parents, partly because she wanted complete independence—and alone in the apartment, she could hear the creaking of the floor boardsand the unrelenting drip of the water tap, and she knew complete aloneness.
It is a big world.
From somewhere out in that big world, a mature attractive man of thirty-five sought an alliance with an understanding woman of good background.
Cut and dried, cold and impersonal, stripped of all the fictional hoop-dee-dah. The man could have been advertising for a Pontiac convertible or a slightly used power mower. She supposed it was this directness of approach that appealed to her. Understanding. Could she understand his appeal? Could she understand his loneliness, the single cipher in a teeming world of matched and mismatched couples? She thought she could. She thought she could detect honesty in his simple appeal.
And because she detected honesty there, her own dishonesty left her feeling somewhat guilty. This was the fifth draft of her letter, and her age had changed with each draft. In the first letter, she’d claimed to be thirty. The second letter advanced her age by two years. The third letter went back to thirty again. Number four admitted to thirty-one. She had done a bit of soul-searching before starting on the fifth rewrite.
He was, when you considered it, thirty-five. But he’d said he was mature. A mature man of thirty-five isn’t a college kid with a briar pipe. A mature man of thirty-five wanted and needed a woman of understanding. Could this not mean a woman who was slightly older than he, a woman who could…mother him? Sort of? Besides, wasn’t complete honesty essential at this stage of the game? Especially with this man whose plea was devoid of all frills and fripperies?
But thirty-seven sounded so close to forty.
Who wants a forty-year-old spinster? (Should she mention that she was wise in the ways of the world?)
Thirty-three, on the other hand, sounded too suburban housewife—skirt and blouse and nylons and loafers, going to meet the 6:10. Was that what he wanted? A scatterbrained little blonde who hopped into the station wagon in compliance with the Commuter Romance legend—the automaton who set the roast according to her husband’s train schedule? The robot who had the shaker full of martinis waiting for dear, tired, old hubby: Hard day at the mine today, sweetheart?
Or was he looking for the sleeker model? The silver-toned beauty in the red Thunderbird rushing over country lanes. Gray flannel pedal-pushers, white blouse, bright-red scarf at the throat, push-button control, push-pull-click-click: Dahling, we’re
She didn’t mind it being a great big crock.
She told herself she didn’t mind.
She had said good-bye to her virginity when she turned twenty-nine. She had been disappointed. No trumpets blasting, no banners unfurling, no clamorous medley of gonging bells. Just pain. Since that time, she had dabbled. She considered sex the periodic gratification of a purely natural urge. She approached sex with the paradoxical relentlessness of an uncaged jungle beast and the precise aloofness of a Quaker bride. Sex was like sleep. You needed both, but you didn’t spend your life in bed.
And now, at thirty-seven, long since her parents had given up all hope for her, long since she herself had abandoned the Big Romance, the Wedding in June, the Honeymoon at Lovely Lake Lewis legend, she felt lonely.
She kept her own apartment, primarily because her jousting with sex would never have been understood by her parents, partly because she wanted complete independence—and alone in the apartment, she could hear the creaking of the floor boardsand the unrelenting drip of the water tap, and she knew complete aloneness.
It is a big world.
From somewhere out in that big world, a mature attractive man of thirty-five sought an alliance with an understanding woman of good background.
Cut and dried, cold and impersonal, stripped of all the fictional hoop-dee-dah. The man could have been advertising for a Pontiac convertible or a slightly used power mower. She supposed it was this directness of approach that appealed to her. Understanding. Could she understand his appeal? Could she understand his loneliness, the single cipher in a teeming world of matched and mismatched couples? She thought she could. She thought she could detect honesty in his simple appeal.
And because she detected honesty there, her own dishonesty left her feeling somewhat guilty. This was the fifth draft of her letter, and her age had changed with each draft. In the first letter, she’d claimed to be thirty. The second letter advanced her age by two years. The third letter went back to thirty again. Number four admitted to thirty-one. She had done a bit of soul-searching before starting on the fifth rewrite.
He was, when you considered it, thirty-five. But he’d said he was mature. A mature man of thirty-five isn’t a college kid with a briar pipe. A mature man of thirty-five wanted and needed a woman of understanding. Could this not mean a woman who was slightly older than he, a woman who could…mother him? Sort of? Besides, wasn’t complete honesty essential at this stage of the game? Especially with this man whose plea was devoid of all frills and fripperies?
But thirty-seven sounded so close to forty.
Who wants a forty-year-old spinster? (Should she mention that she was wise in the ways of the world?)
Thirty-three, on the other hand, sounded too suburban housewife—skirt and blouse and nylons and loafers, going to meet the 6:10. Was that what he wanted? A scatterbrained little blonde who hopped into the station wagon in compliance with the Commuter Romance legend—the automaton who set the roast according to her husband’s train schedule? The robot who had the shaker full of martinis waiting for dear, tired, old hubby: Hard day at the mine today, sweetheart?
Or was he looking for the sleeker model? The silver-toned beauty in the red Thunderbird rushing over country lanes. Gray flannel pedal-pushers, white blouse, bright-red scarf at the throat, push-button control, push-pull-click-click: Dahling, we’re
Similar Books
