Crossroads

For a twenty-year-old farm girl from southern Illinois, Sharon knew a lot about sex. Some of it she’d learned in France, the rest she knew from reading books. To Clem the most shocking thing she knew was that she really, really liked to have her vulva licked. Licking a vulva hadn’t been on his most distant radar; the Latin word for it, although he’d seen it in a dictionary, had only been a word. If pressed, he might have guessed that it was a technique for seasoned lovers, a sort of hard drug to which ordinary intercourse was a gateway. He certainly couldn’t have imagined doing it with a girl who was still confusing the names of his two brothers. Still less could he have imagined loving it. The only thing better than seeing and smelling and tasting her vulva was the moment when he got to put his penis in it; and therein lay the problem.

He now saw that his supposed self-discipline, the outstanding study habits his parents and his teachers had always praised, had not been discipline at all. He’d excelled at school because he’d enjoyed learning things, not because he had superior willpower. As soon as Sharon introduced him to more intense forms of pleasure, he discovered how hopelessly undeveloped the muscles of his will really were. He found himself skipping organic chem lab for hardly any reason, just to take a long walk with her, not even to have sex, just to be near her. He had his first experience of fellatio on a morning when he should have been in Roman history. He failed to prepare for his cellular biology midterm because putting his penis in Sharon’s vulva had offered more pleasure, in the moment, than studying did. What this said about his self-control was bad enough. Worse yet was how it undermined his best moral argument for keeping his deferment—the idea that he could better serve humanity by working diligently at school, becoming a leader in the field of science, than by serving as a grunt in Vietnam. If he couldn’t keep his grade point average above 3.5, he truly had no right to a deferment.

Sharon, for her part, was wonderfully untroubled. She couldn’t be drafted, and she only took the kind of courses where a gifted writer got an automatic A. She could outline a paper just by talking it through with Clem, whereas he needed to study hard, by himself, to memorize organic radicals. She was a true reader, accustomed to solitude, and preferred having no friends to having friends less remarkable than she was. Clem didn’t have good friends at U of I yet himself, but one of his science study mates, Gus, had asked him to room with him, clearly hoping to deepen their friendship, and now Gus was barely speaking to him, because Clem had hurt his feelings by spending all his time with Sharon. She was every bit as hungry for pleasure as he was, but it didn’t seem to derail her life the way it did his. She was never in a hurry to be somewhere, and he’d come to crave what she did to his sense of time, her serene indifference to the clock, nearly as much as he craved her body. As long as he could stay curled up inside her neatly ordered life, as if it were his own life, and never leave her room, he felt all right. Only when he left her room was he engulfed by anxiety, and only by returning could he relieve it.

Though he would have denied it, vehemently, if she’d asked him, another reason he preferred to be in her room was that he felt awkward with her in public. The difficulty, such as it was, lay not in what she was in herself. He was proud of her intelligence, proud of her pretty face and prettier figure, proud of her limpidly unaffected manner. The difficulty lay in what she was in relation to him, namely, fourteen inches shorter. She had never, not once, made reference to their height difference, and he hated himself for even being aware of it. The way the world judged people by their physical appearance, which they had no control over, and which had nothing to do with their mind or their personality, was totally unjust. In theory, he was happy to be so much taller than Sharon, because it demonstrated his commitment to equality and to the marriage of true minds, irrespective of physical impediment. In practice, too, when they were alone in bed, the almost illicit littleness of her naked body was an added turn-on. But in public, try as he might, he couldn’t help feeling that people were staring at them and drawing conclusions about him.

At Thanksgiving, when he went home to New Prospect and saw Becky, who was now a fully grown woman, his discomfort had become acute. Becky and her friends, especially Jeannie Cross, were so resplendent that they might have been a different species, and Becky had made an uncharacteristically cutting remark about the height difference of Tanner Evans and Laura Dobrinsky. Although Clem had looked forward to telling his sister that he had a girlfriend, he sensed right away that Becky had no interest in Sharon—didn’t want to meet her, didn’t want to hear about her, wouldn’t approve of her. When he proceeded to gush about the beauty of Sharon’s mind, and to describe the extremity of her allure, the depth of the sensual pit he’d fallen into, his words sounded hollow and abstract. The whole conversation was deeply embarrassing. He came away from it ashamed of his sexuality, ashamed by extension of Sharon herself, and more painfully aware of their dimensional incongruity. Their relationship, which until then had seemed open-ended, now felt temporary, as if Sharon were merely his “first girlfriend,” the sweet but dimensionally unsuitable person with whom he’d lost his virginity. Intentionally or not, Becky had caused him to scrutinize his feelings for Sharon, and he found them lacking. They weren’t rugged enough for him to declare to his sister, “I don’t care about your superficial judgment, she’s the person I love,” and they weren’t powerful enough—didn’t strongly enough suggest an enduring future of togetherness—to serve as an argument against giving up his student deferment. They were more like an escape, a reprieve, from his moral duty.