He put some records on the phonograph and we sat on the wide sofa with immense bolsters. We drank the wine and talked. He kissed me lightly a few times. Then he turned off the light and we lay together on the sofa.

“It’s nice to hold you like this,” he said, not quite letting go of himself. Even in the dark, I kept thinking of his looks, the blondness, the coolness.

“Is this your first time?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Well …” He got up, went to the bathroom and came back. “We have to be careful. You don’t want to get pregnant.”

When I was younger my head had been filled with stories of women losing their virginity, the pain, the humiliation and final abandonment by the men … but what I felt now was a kind of lightness, as though I would float away.

As I felt him becoming hard and soft, and the chill that followed as he tried to enter and failed, and tried again and finally pulled away and said, “It’s not going to work,” I was left with a sense of confusion. Maybe he did not like me enough. Maybe I had done something wrong. I waited for him to speak.

“I know it’s silly but I feel I’d be taking advantage of you,” he said.

“Advantage!”

“It’s just that … that it’s your first time.”

“But …”

He patted me affectionately. “You’ll come back here again and we’ll do it right then.”

He got up, put on another record and lay beside me again. We were quiet for a while.

“What are you thinking about?” I asked.

“Oh, just that this evening you’re with me.”

“Every night after you leave me I feel lost—I’ve been having bad dreams.”

“What do you dream?”

“They’re frightening dreams, but I never remember them.”

“Too bad.”

“Do you dream much?”

“Either I don’t dream or I don’t remember them.”

“You’re so peaceful.” Suddenly miserable, I pressed my head against his chest. “Tell me how to be so calm, how to stop worrying about everything.”

“Maybe I’m not so calm and rational as I seem—I certainly didn’t perform very well tonight.”

He began to caress me again. He was suddenly vigorous, forceful. I felt his skin, heard his hard breathing, as I came in and out of consciousness, lost in him.

He took me to Urbana, Illinois, to meet his parents. The television went on and on, giving out a numbing drone. It was a large house with beige wall-to-wall carpeting, furnished mostly in walnut. Pictures of shipwrecks and landscapes decorated the walls. No doors banged shut loudly, no footsteps were heard. It snowed, white flakes falling steadily before picture windows, covering the evergreens, the parked cars on the street, the pavement, muffling sounds.

His father was an engineer, a quiet withdrawn man who would lose interest in conversation quickly, then turn to the television screen. His mother spent hours cooking pies and roasts, watching a smaller television in the kitchen. They both had blond hair and Tony’s delicate features.