“A lot of girls don’t enjoy it the first time,” he said.
“I hated it, George,” she said. “That’s the difference.”
“Did you hate me?”
“Yes, when you were . . . doing it.”
“I see.”
“So you see that it would be a mistake.”
“Would you let me try again?”
She wanted to bathe his sweat from her, wanted to be away from him, away so that she could rid herself of his filthy sperm, wash his taste from her mouth. But he was so concerned, so hurt. She allowed him to make love to her. He did vile things. First he cleaned her with a cloth from the bathroom, then he did a thing so sickening that she almost made him stop. Only her desire not to hurt him more, to convince him that marriage was impossible, stopped her from bolting.
“Nothing?” He had a moustache. He was revolting. She was crying quietly. To hide it from him, she bent up, pulled the sheet over his crouching body, hid his head and shoulders and face beneath it. Then she could pretend it wasn’t happening. He was a warm-wet feeling there, that was all. She closed her eyes. It was growing dark outside. It went on and on and she was able to divorce herself from the act.
She lay in total darkness, limply submitting to his touch, his obscene kiss, his fast, labored breathing. And her clitoris swelled. A tendril of something went shooting down, down, centered there. She jerked her eyes open, shocked. Darkness, the sheet over him. A stiffening in her legs, an almost imperceptible lifting of her loins. She recognized her feeling. She’d known it in her dreams. A wild hope sprang up in her. He, feeling his love-making bear fruit, redoubled his efforts. His tongue was a living entity. With a gasp, she pulled the sheet up, up, covered her head, hid herself from herself and from the world, tucked the sheet under her head and lowered her hands to pull on his shoulders, his head. He came to her, filled her, and there, in darkness, hidden by the covering sheet, air getting stale with their joint gasps, she found that certain body movements are instinctive.
She giggled wildly, happily. George kissed her, smeared his musky smell over her cheeks.
“See?” he asked.
She did not tell him that her first ecstasy had been a brief moment followed by sickening remorse, self-hate, shame. She had hope and she loved him.
In all her life she had never had anyone to love her and her alone. In all her life, till George, she had never had anyone.
In order for her to keep her scholarship, they were married in secret. She was just twenty. He was almost twenty-two. She lived in the girl’s dorm, he in a fraternity house. On weekends, when he had the money, they would drive to the Raleigh area motels. There they would hide beneath the sheets in darkness until her shame and disgust was overcome by her body.
Ten months after they were married, George had sex in the back seat of his car with vivacious, blond Grace Dowling. Had he been content with having Grace only once, Gwen would never have known. But he was greedy. Greedy George. On an ensuing occasion George and Grace parked behind the stadium and were surprised by the campus patrolman, a talkative fellow. The policeman let it be known that he had caught Grace Dowling, the blond cheerleader, the one with the great legs, with her flimsies down. The name of the boy was almost incidental to the story, but it was mentioned and the story got around to Gwen. Confronted, George confessed.
Ten months after they were married.
She would not see him. She withdrew into herself and accepted as a fact a suspicion she’d had all along. She was not enough woman for George. Her hang-ups were just too much. She could never make him happy. In all of her life, till George, she had had no one. Now she had no one again.
The reconciliation was brought about by George’s parents. Confused, hurt, guilty, George talked to his father, who then talked to his mother. Mrs. Ferrier, a handsome, kindly woman, talked with Gwen in Gwen’s room.
“If only you had not kept the marriage secret, darling,” Mrs. Ferrier said. “If only we’d known.”
Woman to woman, Mrs. Ferrier said, how foolish to live apart. Naturally a man would fall victim to the first loose girl who came along. Men, she explained, are weak creatures in some ways, lacking in resistance to the wiles of predatory women. It had happened, she insisted, simply because those two foolish children would not announce their marriage and live together as man and wife should. That, she announced, was the way it would be. There would be an immediate change. Gwen was not to worry about a foolish scholarship. The Ferriers would pay her expenses, would rent them a cottage. They were not wealthy people, but they had enough to help their son’s happiness.
“But I’m inadequate,” she said.
“Nonsense,” said her mother-in-law. “You just need counseling, that’s all.”
“Gwen, you need help.”
Under the sheets in the summer. Under the blankets in the winter. Cringing when she had to undress in front of him, hating it, loathing her body, feeling dirty. But, helpless hypocrite that she was, enjoying it once it was done.
3
Possum Creek had a tidal variation of some four feet. When the tide was full, it lost some of its muddy, black look and showed a tinge of the green ocean water which fed it. Falling, the tide carried debris from the vast marshes on the inland side of the island. The creek abounded in blue crabs in season, was dimpled with the jumps of popping mullet, had once, before upstream pollution, been a prime speckled-trout fishing ground. The creek meandered up from the Cape Fear alongside the northern end of Pine Tree Island, sweeping out in a U to eat into the marsh, coming back to lick the land and leave bare, black mud banks under the spreading branches of huge pines.
The island itself was a long one. In past years the Ferrier family had summered in a cottage on Big Hill Beach, a sprawling resort community which occupied the southern end of the island. Thus, George was familiar with the locality and had spent some of his boyhood exploring the creeks of the marshes in a small boat, trudging through the undeveloped woodlands at the northern end, digging for pirate gold, and doing all the other things young boys do when left to their own devices in an outdoor setting with plenty of salt water.
Upon graduation, George brought Gwen to Big Hill, covered her with musty-smelling sheets in the family cottage, and did what she’d come to believe he liked doing best. They had been married just over two years and he had a job lined up in Winston with the family firm. During the month spent on the beach, he escorted her to the places of his boyhood, including the point at the northern end.
She questioned the sudden transition from resort development to woodlands. George had coaxed a rusting jeep into operation, and they pushed through little-traveled logging roads to the point. There she saw the foundation ruins of what must have been a huge house. It had obviously burned down. Charred pieces of wood stuck up in exposed sandy spots.
“Old boy from New Jersey owns the whole end of the island,” George said. “This was his house. It burned before I was old enough to take advantage.”
“Of what?” she asked innocently.
George grinned lewdly. “They still talk about her. She was much younger. A real hot one. They still talk, some of the old boys, about how all they had to do was sneak through the woods, whistle, and she’d come out.”
“All men,” Gwen said, “are horrible.”
“Honey, it always takes two.”
She didn’t want to discuss it.
“Didn’t make any difference what age or how many. There was a little gazebo down by the clear pond. That’s where they’d go, with the old boy up in the house playing with his stamp collection or something.”
“George,” she said. “Please.”
The clear pond was an oddity. It was ovate, had the bright green color of the water holes left after a massive strip-mining operation for phosphates, held no life other than plant life, and owned its own grisly tradition. Once it had been a favorite spot for swimming, until a young couple, after the house had burned, had driven their car to the site and swam nude. Their car was discovered a full day later and their bodies a few hours after that, nude, close together, the girl’s arms still locked around the boy, her hair streaming upward in the clear, green water, her eyes wide, wild.