All this could be glimpsed only in long hindsight. At the time, as her return to her home gave them more opportunities for intimacy than 120 Bay State Road or Bexley Hall had offered, they felt daring and furtive; in their minds it would have shocked their parents to see them and shocked God as well, if He had deigned to watch. Owen, with the furtive religiosity inherited from his pious grandparents, was not sure that He was not watching, much as He had watched over the house in Willow, in its snow globe of safety. Now, like the vibrant green beam of a science-fiction ray-gun, or like the ruby-red lasers that in science-fact would be developed in the next decade, God’s gaze perhaps penetrated through the Goodhues’ dormered roof into the third-floor room still flavored by her brother’s dirty socks and ratty comic books.

Phyllis liked, Owen discovered, having the back of her neck, with its sweaty pale tendrils, stroked; it loosened her up. And the bluish inner sides of her arms, turned submissively uppermost, and the backs of her thighs, his fingers curled to lightly scratch the goosebumped skin with his nails. He tussled her into advanced déshabille, to the goal of pink-faced nakedness, but he clung to her virginity, as something sacred, a threshold he could still retreat from. Not that he wanted to retreat; she was his prize, his captive princess. She was taller and slimmer than Elsie, with that same breathtaking give to her waist and bigger breasts, so big she made motions to disown them, fighting her hands as they fluttered in instinctive cover-up. When his mouth became too busy at her nipples, she pulled back, deflecting his rapturous smothered comments as if they were the asides of a bumbling lecturer. Product of an academic environment, Phyllis could produce an academic frown, a mental sniff of disapproval. She held him against her, however, with a certain skill, gripping his buttocks; she had done this before, let a boy come against her pelvic region, though her hands felt gloved in tentativity. When it came to mopping up, though, Phyllis participated efficiently, their hands intertwining with his handkerchief as it pursued the puddles of semen on her belly and in her pubic hair, curlier and darker than the hair on her head. On the night of their wedding, surveying the moonlit field of flesh of which he had taken legal possession that afternoon, at a ceremony as watered-down yet graceful as the Unitarianism of Cambridge could make it, he knelt between her legs and combed her luxuriant pussy, now his, as if preparing a fleecy lamb for sacrifice, until she irritably took the comb from his hand and tossed it away from the bed; it clattered against a baseboard over beneath the window.

Rejected again. He scarcely dared ask why she had done that—dismissed his currying, his proud adoration. “What was wrong?” he asked. “Did it hurt?”