Sharon was the seventeen-year-old daughter of Al “the Zipper King” Shatzky. With her family she had recently moved into Country Club Hills, the development of expensive ranch-type houses where his own parents now lived, on the outskirts of Camden, in a landscape as flat and treeless as the Dakota badlands. Zuckerman had met her in the four weeks between his graduation from Bass and his induction into the army in July. Before their meeting his mother had described Sharon as “a perfect little lady,” and his father had said she was “a lovely lovely child,” with the result that Zuckerman was not at all prepared for the rangy Amazon, red-headed and green-eyed, who arrived in short shorts that night, trailing sullenly behind Al and Minna. All four parents present fell over themselves treating her like a baby, as though that might convince the college graduate to keep his eyes from the powerful curve of haunch beneath the girl’s skimpy summer outfit. Mrs. Shatzky had just that day taken Sharon shopping in Philadelphia for her “college wardrobe.” “Mother, please,” Sharon said, when Minna began to describe how “adorable” Sharon looked in each of her new outfits. Al said (proudly) that Sharon Shatzky here now owned more pairs of shoes than he owned undershorts. “Daddy,” moaned Sharon, closing her jungle eyes in exasperation. Zuckerman’s father said that if Sharon had any questions about college life she should ask his son, who had been editor up at Bass of “the school paper.” It had been the literary magazine that Zuckerman had edited, but he was by now accustomed to the inaccuracies that accompanied his parents’ public celebration of his achievements. Indeed, of late, his tolerance for their failings was growing by leaps and bounds. Where only the year before he might have been incensed by some line of his mother’s that he knew came straight out of McCall’s (or by the fact that she did not know what an “objective correlative” was or in what century Dryden had lived), now he was hardly perturbed. He had also given up trying to educate his father about the ins and outs of the syllogism; to be sure, the man simply could not get it through his head that an argument in which the middle term was not distributed at least once was invalid-but what difference did that make to Zuckerman any more? He could afford to be generous to parents who loved him the way they did (illogical and uneducated though they were). Besides, if the truth be known, in the past four years he had become more Miss Benson’s student than their offspring…So he was kind and charitable to all that night, albeit “amused” by much of what he saw and heard; he answered the Shatzkys’ questions about “college life” without a trace of sarcasm or snobbishness (none, at any rate, that he could hear), and all the while (without success) tried to keep his eyes from their daughter’s perky breasts beneath her shrunken polo shirt, and the tempting cage of her torso rising from that slender, mobile waist, and the panthery way she moved across the wall-to-wall carpet on the balls of her bare feet…After alclass="underline" what business did a student of English letters who had taken tea and watercress sandwiches only a few weeks earlier in the garden of Caroline Benson have with the pampered middle-class daughter of Al “the Zipper King” Shatzky? By the time Zuckerman was about to graduate (third in his class, same rank as at Bass) from MP school, Sharon was a freshman at Juliana Junior College, near Providence. Every night she wrote him scandalous letters on the monogrammed pink stationery with the scalloped edges that Zuckerman’s mother had given the perfect young lady for a going-away present: “dearest dearest all I could think about while playing tennis in gym class was getting down on my hands and knees and crawling across the room toward your prick and then pressing your prick against my face i love it with your prick in my face just pressing your prick against my cheeks my lips my tongue my nose my eyes my ears wrapping your gorgeous prick in my hair-“ and so on. The word, which (among others) he had taught her and encouraged her to use during the sex act and also, for titillation’s sake, on the phone and through the mails-had a strong hold over the young girl locked up in the dormitory room in Rhode Island: “every time the ball came over the net,” wrote Sharon, “i saw your wonderful prick on top of it.” This last, of course, he didn’t believe. If Sharon had a fault as a student of carnality, it was a tendency to try a little too hard, with the result that her prose (to which Zuckerman, trained by Miss Benson in her brand of the New Criticism, was particularly attuned) often offended him by a too facile hyperbole. Instead of acting upon him as an aphrodisiac, her style frequently jarred him by its banal insistence, reminding him less of Lawrence than of those mimeographed stories his brother used to smuggle home to him from the navy. In particular her use of “cunt” (modified by “hot”) and “prick” (modified by “big” or “gorgeous” or both) could be as mannered and incantatory, in a word, as sentimental, as his own use, or misuse, in college of the adjective “human.” Nor was he pleased by her refusal to abide by the simple rules of grammar; the absence of punctuation and capitalization in her obscene letters was not exactly an original gesture of defiance (or an interesting one either, to Zuckerman’s mind, whether the iconoclast was Shatzky or cummings), and as a device to communicate the unbridled flow of passion, it seemed to him, a votary not only of Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, but also of Madame Bovary and The Ambassadors (he really could not read Thomas Wolfe any more), to have been conceived at a rather primitive level of imagination.
However, as for the passion itself, he had no criticism to make.
Practically overnight (correction: overnight), the virgin whose blood had stained his thighs and matted his pubic hair when he had laid her on a blanket in the back seat of his father’s new Cadillac, had developed into the most licentious creature he’d ever known. Nobody like Sharon had been in attendance at Bass, at least nobody he had ever undressed, and he had traveled with the college’s half dozen bohemians. Even Barbara Cudney, leading lady of the Bass Drama Society and Zuckerman’s companion during his final year of success and celebrity at college, a girl who had thrown herself all over the stage in Medea and was now studying at the Yale Drama School, had nothing like Sharon’s sensual adventurousness or theatricality, nor had it ever occurred to Zuckerman to ask of Barbara, free and uninhibited spirit that she was, such favors as Sharon virtually begged to bestow upon him. Actually the teacher was not so far out in front of his pupil as he led her to think he was, though of course his surprise at her willingness to satisfy his every whim and farfetched desire was something he kept to himself. In the beginning it exceeded all understanding, this bestiality he had awakened in her simply by penetration, and recalled to mind those other startling and baffling metamorphoses he had witnessed-his mother’s transformation into the Maiden Bereft when Sherman left home for the navy, and the descent of Sherman himself from glamor boy to orthodontist. With Sharon, he had only to allude to some sexual antic or other, give the slightest hint of an interest-for he was not without inhibitions-for her to fall into the appropriate posture or turn up with the necessary equipment. “Tell me what you want me to say, Nathan, tell me what you want me to do-“ As Zuckerman was a highly imaginative boy, and Sharon so anxious to please, there was, that June, very nearly something new and exciting to do every night.
The sense of adventure that surrounded their lovemaking (if such is the term that applies here) was heightened further by the presence often of the four parents in some other part of the house, or out on the back terrace, drinking iced tea and gabbing. While buggering Sharon on the floor beneath the ping-pong table in the basement of her parents’ house, Zuckerman would call out from time to time, “Nice shot,” or “Nice return, Sharon” -even as the feverish young girl whispered up from the canine position, “Oh it’s so strange. It hurts, but it doesn’t hurt. Oh Nathan, it’s so strange.”