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Chapters (51)
  1. Introduction by Michael Bronski
  2. BEGINNING
  3. II
  4. III
  5. IV
  6. V
  7. VI
  8. VII
  9. VIII
  10. IX
  11. X
  12. XI
  13. XII
  14. XIII
  15. MIDDLE
  16. II
  17. III
  18. IV
  19. V
  20. VI
  21. VII
  22. VIII
  23. IX
  24. X
  25. XI
  26. XII
  27. XIII
  28. XIV
  29. XV
  30. XVI
  31. XVII
  32. XVIII
  33. XIX
  34. XX
  35. END
  36. II
  37. III
  38. IV
  39. V
  40. VI
  41. VII
  42. VIII
  43. IX
  44. X
  45. XI
  46. XII
  47. XIII
  48. XIV
  49. XV
  50. XVI
  51. About the Author

Up to now, that is. Now something had happened that couldn’t happen. The point was, what was he going to let it do to him?

The moment he opened his eyes, John Grandin remembered the walk in the fog, where he had gone, and what he had found; remembered, even more graphically, what had happened to his physical person as he held the bottle of sun-­tan oil in his hand and recalled the sensual scene earlier which inexplicably had angered him; inexplicable no longer. It was like waking up after a bad dream to discover that the dream had been only too true—was no dream at all and would carry on through the entire day, through many days or weeks, impossible to shake, forget, deny. The sense of shock which had gripped him last night on the beach was gone; in its place, an almost physical depression had taken over, a powerful but impotent protest which, though it cried out that such things could not be, was yet made senseless by the sickening realization that they could be and were. It was as if he had stood up and shouted in indignant outrage: “Look here, I won’t have it! That’s not the kind of man I am, do you hear?”—only to be forced to accept the reverberating echo which said: But you are.

But he would not have that sort of thing! Life was too short, life was complicated enough, there was his family, his students, his career; besides, Cliff Hauman, fond of him though he knew he was, no more wanted it than he did.

He could not call it accident; events had shown it to be inevitable, perhaps, and even just. But man was supposed to be a creature of his own will, able to decide for himself what he wanted or did not want, and to some extent the master of his destiny still—willful, unconscious, or momentary impulses notwithstanding. He remembered seeing an Odets play which had affected him deeply, one line of which disturbed him to such an extent that he could not get it out of his mind during the long wakeful night after. At one point the hero had said, “All my life I’ve been afraid to do something wrong and now I’ve done it.” This thought had struck him with such force that it almost seemed to have been written for him alone, though nothing in his life at the time had warranted such a disturbance over a mere handful of words.