“I like being inside you.”

“No, that’s not it.”

“You like my not moving at first,” I said. “You push back and stop.”

“Because then it feels like I’m inside you.”

She raised up and shed her jeans and panties, and my fingers touched tight, damp curls.

Glenna opened her eyes. “Gordo. Can we, here?”

“Yes.”

“Yes only if you tell me why.”

“Why what?” I asked.

“Why you don’t move right away.”

“It’ll end if I start moving.”

“Not for a while.”

“No, but sometime,” I said, unbuttoning my dungarees and lowering myself on her as her hands came around behind me, pushing down my underwear.

“Now you can,” she said.

“Now I can?”

“Just be inside me.”

“I am.”

“I know,” she said. “That’s not what I mean.”

“You mean what?”

“I mean everything. I mean all the way inside me.”

“That’s ‘everything’?” I asked.

“Everything, yes.”

“There?”

“Everything there,” she said. “That’s what you want.”

“Everything I want.”

“Everything all the way inside me.”

Glenna pushed up against me, hard, and I pushed back, and we pressed together and clung to each other so tightly that it was an effort to breathe. I remained still until it was no longer possible, then I began to move, and Glenna slid her knees up around my hips, murmuring, “All the way, allthewayinsideme,” and I seemed to whirl away somewhere else, and Glenna was calling my name, summoning me to a place I was fast approaching, and neither of us lasted too long, not on this dazzling afternoon, in the drowsy, pine-scented air, with a golden light shining through the trees, and a breeze whispering over us, and I heard myself call back to her, and there was a long, sweet pause—perfect stillness—and when it was over, Glenna and I were wrapped up together, gasping, holding on, each of us inside the other.

Chapter 11

MY BASIC STRATEGY for dealing with Biff was to ignore him, but that was impossible once Glenna and I came back from Vermont, because he started putting me down with subtle and not-so-subtle insults.

One evening, Biff, Robin, Glenna, and I were at the trestle table in the kitchen, eating Biff’s latest culinary masterpiece, a brussels sprout soufflé, off the aquamarine Bennington stoneware. A black-and-white, portable TV was on the counter, and clips of the presidential candidates were rolling on The Huntley-Brinkley Report: Hubert Humphrey promising that he would bring peace to Vietnam; Richard Nixon promising that he would bring an honorable peace to Vietnam; and George Wallace promising that if a peace demonstrator sat down in front of his car, he’d run him over.

Sporting his customary expression of studied indifference, Biff said to me, “You’re voting for Wallace, aren’t you?”

“What makes you say that?” I asked, though I knew he was messing with me. Wallace, the former governor of Alabama, was a fervent racist and about as low as rattlesnake balls.

Biff said, “You’re always reading those war writers—Mailer, Jones, Shaw. I thought you’d be a fan of Wallace’s running mate.”