“Right you are! Nothing I like better than weddings—as long as they’re someone else’s!” He laughed heavily, his soft pale face puckered like a squeegee doll’s, his light hair falling boyishly over his forehead.

“That’s my cousin’s line!” Louis snickered, nodding toward Marguerite.

“So we’re off to a good start,” Lennart said. “Let’s drink to that.”

“Careful, Marguerite,” Louis said. “He turns melancholy with drink like all Nordics.”

It turned worse than that.

No one could ever understand how Marguerite, with all the advantages she had had, could have run off with Lennart Norenson like that. Nor could Marguerite understand. That was the only good part of it.

She and Lennart had left the reception to go to Keeler’s in Albany and had ended up in New Jersey. She felt he understood her (“Listen, kiddo, what are you doing here? What kind of a life is this for you alone with your folks in that big house and nothing to do?”). He was the first to have looked at her as a person and she valued him for it. Excited with drink and his attention, she had suddenly wanted to believe in the freedom and spontaneity of her life—she wanted to experience the precariousness of existence, outside the law and order of the Tudor house.

There was a quickie marriage, she forgot where. Mentally she made the necessary maneuvers and translated Len’s vulgarity into vigor, his ignorance into genuineness, and his height into protectiveness. Transformed to her needs, she took him. They spent a few nights in a tourist home that looked like the old house on Prospect Avenue. Len snored. He was heavy on top of her. His clean white flesh was soft and hairless and she felt embraced by mounds, suffocating mounds of cotton batting. She felt no pleasure.

Love and sex—she had often thought of them. Love and sex; the two were separate though perhaps not equal, as in well-meaning segregation; they were non-meeting, ever-propinquitous parallel lines which, to infinity, would never join. Sex was an insistent mechanism that pulsated through her and filled her with the mystery of its senseless imperative. It was also her ID card. If love were unattainable, there was always sex; and if it meant she got less, it also meant she’d be asked less, be less hurt.