Black and white, that’s most of what I remember. Her hair was black and soft, and her skin was white and soft, and her voice had slowed and gotten girlish with the effects of liquor and being romanced. I was on the floor peeling down her pantyhose while she rested a hand on the top of my head for balance. Then we were sitting on the bed while she cupped her hands under those sizable breasts, pointing them at me like guns. “I want them to be even bigger,” she told me so softly I strained to hear, “for you.” Her breasts being smooched made her smile in the slanted streetlight like a round-faced cartoon character, a cat-and-canary smile. When I carried the courtesies down below, this seemed to startle her, so she stiffened a bit before relaxing her legs and letting them spread. The men she had known before didn’t do this, back then before Vietnam took away our innocence, but ever since my days of car-seat courtship I’ve liked to press my face into a girlfriend’s nether soul, to taste the waters in which we all must swim out to the light. I strove to keep my manly focus amid the jiggling caused by government-issue alcohol, and my wondering what time it was, and the jostling of my conscience, and the distractions of this environment, with its sadness of the single girl. Black and white—her little room was sucked dry of color like something on early TV, her bureau with its brushes and silver-framed photos of the family that had hatched her, an armchair with a cellophane-wrapped drugstore-rental book still balanced on one arm, where she had left it before heading off this morning into her working day, her FM/AM/shortwave portable radio big enough to pick up stations from Antarctica, her narrow bed with its brass headboard that was no good to lean on when we had done our best and needed to reminisce and establish limits.

“Lordy,” I said. This was something of a lie, since when the main event came up I had lost a certain energy to the good times behind us, beginning hours ago at the party. I had felt lost in her.

She touched my shoulder and said my full name tentatively, as if I wouldn’t like it. “Eddie Chester.” She was right; it sounded proprietorial and something in me bristled. “You really are a god.”

“You should catch me sober sometime.”

“When?” Her voice pounced, quick and eager like it had been at first. The pieces of white beside her swollen pupils glinted like sparkles on TV. Her propped-up pillow eclipsed half her face and half a head of black hair mussed out to a wild size.