Within six months, however, the only time Buck would make love to her was when he was drunk, but not every time he was drunk, for by that time he was getting drunk often. All Doreen’s strategies had failed by then — filmy negligees, soft music, flattery, faked orgasms, even marijuana. But nothing she did allowed Buck to come to her directly, good-humoredly, with simple hunger and tenderness and admiration neatly intertwined. If anything, her strategies only made it worse, because Buck always noticed them immediately and grew either desperate to respond to them or else grew angry and accused her of accusing him of being unable to function sexually without atmosphere and stimulants. That was when she committed adultery for the first time — after Buck had grabbed the two marijuana cigarettes from her hand and had flushed them down the toilet and stomped out of the trailer, leaving her alone in bed. She had got out of bed and had walked to the trailer next door in her nightgown, barefoot, to the kid she had bought the marijuana cigarettes from, Bruce Severance, thinking that what she wanted was to buy another cigarette, this one to smoke alone, defiantly in front of the TV, so that when Buck came back smelling of booze and still angry at her, she wouldn’t much care. But she and Bruce had got to talking, he loved to talk, especially about marijuana, and she had not realized that marijuana was such an interesting subject, that there was so much to know about it, and for about five minutes, standing against the wall of his trailer, the kid had made love to her. He had simply come up against her when she had started to leave, had pulled her nightgown to her hips, and then, with one quick hand, had unzipped his fly, releasing his erect penis, which he had inserted. It was over before she had realized it had begun.
“What … what if I get pregnant?” she whispered into his ear.
“Don’t worry, man. You won’t.”
“I won’t?”
“Tantric birth control, man. It takes years to learn, but it works. You won’t get pregnant,” he promised.
She felt his semen dribbling down the inside of her thigh, and she drew her nightgown back down and stepped away.
“Just don’t forget to wash, man,” the kid said, and he asked if she wanted to use his bathroom.
She stammered no, no, she’d better get back, because her husband could be coming in any minute and he would be drunk and mean.
The kid agreed and opened the door for her. He kissed her on the nape of her neck as she passed by him and went out, but she barely felt his kiss, for she was terrified that she had been impregnated by him.
For a month after that night she felt dirty and almost evil, but when she discovered that she was not pregnant, she no longer felt dirty or almost evil. In fact, she felt downright eager to do it again. Not with Bruce Severance, however, for, even though he was a few years older than she, he was a kid to her, a long-haired pretentious kid, and what she wanted was a man, a grown man who was sure of himself and had a broad smile and could explain things to her and would be kind and tolerant and patient with her when she could not understand what he explained. That was why she made love to Leon LaRoche, who lived in number 2, two trailers down from where she lived with Buck.
Leon was in his late twenties then, and he dressed nicely, because of his job as a teller at the Catamount Savings and Loan, and he was a bachelor who smiled easily and who liked to explain things slowly, methodically, calmly, with tolerance and even affection for Doreen when she seemed not to know what he was talking about. He talked politics with her, for there was an election that fall, and though her family had always voted Republican, Doreen was thinking of registering as a Democrat for this, her first election, and Leon explained to her what she should tell her family when they found out she had registered as a Democrat, which they surely would do, since the lists of registered voters and their party affiliations were required by law to be posted in public places. He told her about Roosevelt and Jack Kennedy and civil rights, which she thought fascinating, for, even though she had heard of all three, no one had ever explained them to her slowly, carefully, and with a sure, precisely accurate knowledge of what she did not know, which meant that no one had ever told her about these things without confusing her or else condescending to her.
She touched his knees with hers — she was wearing a plaid cotton shirtwaist dress, and he wore his shirt and tie and dark brown suit pants (his jacket he had carefully hung in the closet on arriving home from the bank for lunch, which he preferred to fix for himself at home rather than spend the extra $475 a year he had calculated it would cost to eat lunch in town at the Copper Skillet). Then she reached forward between their chairs and touched his knees with the palms of her hands, running her fingertips up the insides of his legs, until she was touching his crotch. He reached out and took her by the shoulders and drew her forward and down, so that her face was laid against his tightening thigh. Then he unzipped his fly, and she drove both her hands in, working and massaging him until the red head of his penis was shoving its way past the folds of cloth toward her mouth.
Afterward, Leon hurriedly drew his crotch away from Doreen’s mouth and said something about having to fix his lunch and get back to work on time, and Doreen had left his trailer in tears and had gone back to her own place and had vomited. As with Bruce, she felt dirty for about a month, although of course this time her guilt was not compounded by a fear of being pregnant, and then one morning she woke up, Buck was gone to work, and as she looked down her long, muscular legs to her feet and wiggled them deliciously, she felt fine again. It was a cold February morning, two weeks before the presidential primary, and when she went into the bathroom to shower, she discovered that during the night the cold water line to the shower had frozen solid. Water ran smoothly through all the other pipes, so she reasoned that, as the day warmed, the shower line would thaw on its own and probably was not frozen solidly enough to burst the pipe. She knew that by noon at the latest everything would be working properly again. But she also thought of Howie Leeke, the recently divorced plumber who was awfully good-looking and had a funny, raspy way of talking and quick gray eyes, so she called the plumber.