“Now, then, what do you mean by that? Want me to ask you if you’re like the English twirps? They won’t lay down and go about lovemaking properly because of their scruples about going to bed with a guy. Prefer to stand up and go it in doorways or in the tube stations, they do.”

“There, you see! You are a smart aleck!”

Sex with Alec was something she didn’t have to think about—could keep her feelings from. Sex pure and simple. Alec the maestro of acrobatics, life skills.

“Come on now, Maggie, you can do better than that—that’s the girl! Right on!” Achieving orgasm meant doing well. (“Well done, my girl!” “Thanks, Alec.”) Like getting the bull’s-eye throwing darts in a pub. It might have repulsed her, but it didn’t. It was physically exciting. His vulgarity and excesses matched her desolation and brought her sources of epidermic, nervous, unreasoning sensuous feeling that she had not known with her brief husband.

“But why is sex so important?” she’d groan, alarmed at herself.

“Come along there, Maggie, it’s perfectly simple—a case of cocks and cunts. Made for each other, they are.”

But she knew something else. Sex was the way to unpeel all those layers of lies that had been plastered on her consciousness. Family, God, Money, Success, Marriage—all she had to do to strip these plastered-on slogans from her was to derobe and screw them off. Fucking is fucking Mother, Middle-Class Virtues, a College Education, and Marrying Well, with its square coitus and family life around the backyard picnic-table. So you screw to unpeel; that’s classic, and sometimes even good. If you’re lucky, each time the overlay gets scraped away some more.

Work-outs, work-ins, work up, work down, work your way around the globe. “Come on, old girl, I’ll work your fucking ha’penny off,” Alec would invite her. The work principle; work as the Protestant Ethic; work as morality, well-being, purpose, Americanness, chosenness.

Marguerite thought of her father’s words: “No one is going to hand you everything on a tray. If you want to be happy and make something of yourself, you have to work at it. That’s what being American is all about—the chance to get someplace.”

To climax, for instance.

There were no illusions with Alec, nor did she want any. A five-day crossing and then good-bye.

She met Gillo Gatti in the British Museum. He was tall, his hair long and dark blond, and he wore a well-fitting gray flannel suit. As he approached her in front of a display of Greek vases with an air of studied detachment, she thought of a line from an Aldous Huxley novel: one goes to museums to find Old Masters and young mistresses.