Half-teasing, half-curious, Whitney said, “Just between us, Clarice, how many guys have you slept with?”
“More than you have,” Clarice answered briskly, “which wouldn’t be hard. But please don’t play the innocent, Whitney. Both of us broke sexual barriers.”
“Me? How did I manage that?”
“By sleeping with Peter. We’ve already rejected this ridiculous notion of being virgins until we marry, turning our honeymoon into the Amateur Hour. Because of the Pill, we can have the freedom men do. The difference being we still have to pretend we’re different.”
“I thought you just said we are different.”
“Women have more self-control, for sure—we’ve had to. But for the longest time I thought we were another species, because that’s what our mothers said. They raised us in the cult of virginity, to be sacrificed on the altar of marriage in exchange for eternal love. What nonsense.”
Whitney smiled in recognition. “After we were engaged, my mom said, ‘Peter will be gentle, I’m sure. But if it hurts, tell him.’ I couldn’t figure out whether she really believed I was still a virgin, or just wanted to preserve the myth.”
“Such a trap,” Clarice said ruefully. “Sleeping with my first guy was really a big deal. So I tried to believe I loved him. Then I realized I didn’t have to marry him just because I’d opened up my legs. And if that made no sense, neither had saving it for marriage.”
“And you didn’t regret it?”
Clarice shook her head. “I was free to do what I wanted. Don’t you ever want to have sex just because you feel like it?”
“Sure,” Whitney conceded. “That’s when I remember my suitemate’s paper on masturbation. Required reading among our friends.”
“Sometimes you have to be your own best friend,” Clarice concurred with a smile. “But the Pill has given us choices—no pregnancy, no risky abortions, and all we have to worry about is getting some disease. We can sleep with whomever.”
Whitney paused to scan the beach: in the warm mid-afternoon sun, kids scampered in the surf, and a few fishermen with fly rods had begun casting into the waters. Pensive, Clarice pulled out a pack of Chesterfield filters and lit one, another small act of rebellion indulged out of her parents’ sight. In her friend’s contemplative silence, Whitney reflected on how Clarice’s commentary echoed in her own life—anxieties about missed periods, the silence between girls and their mothers. Though it occasionally unnerved her, Whitney valued Clarice’s candor.
Still, she sometimes wondered about her friend. The more reckless of her college acquaintances had picked up guys at Charlie’s, the townie bar, and one had even bragged about sleeping with Wilt Chamberlain before she contracted herpes. For Whitney, she became the cautionary tale that confirmed Anne Dane’s advice—if you sleep around, bad things will follow, and your reputation will be ruined. Ostensibly, Clarice’s code was different: she could sleep with who she wanted as long as she was discreet. But in an odd way, Whitney realized, both Clarice and Anne arrived at the same place—reputation was perception.
Stubbing out her cigarette, Clarice interrupted Whitney’s musing, “On the subject of Peter, let me pose a hypothetical. If you hadn’t decided to sleep with him, would you be getting married now?”
Whitney recalled the pressure she had felt to yield: though Peter’s desire had been sweetly pressed, she was overcome by the fear of losing the first boy who had ever loved her. “I don’t know,” she answered honestly. “But I’m glad I did.”
“You should be,” Clarice said firmly. “Men care even more about sex than they do about baseball. It’s only a fraction of the time they spend with us, and their orgasm is over in ten seconds. But they think about it for hours, which keeps them coming back. Though they don’t know it, their penises empower us. And when we lose our figures, or our looks, the power goes away. We can only hope that our husbands sentimentalize us when we’re old. Unless, of course, they’re much older than we are.”
Clarice said this so clinically that Whitney felt the chill of loneliness. “I wonder how much power Janine has.”
“Very little,” Clarice responded with a phlegmatic shrug. “She’s way too anxious to have any sense of strategy.”
“But you do.”
“I’d like to think so. God knows women should have one. Men like our fathers make the world, allowing others to live in it. The difference is that your dad could eat mine alive.” Clarice’s expression became serious. “Your grandfather Padgett was smart—your mother too. They needed a man to preserve their place in business, and picked out Charles Dane. Now your family goes on as it should. Maybe that’s what I meant about Ben resembling your father—someone who can take life by the throat.”
It was revealing, Whitney thought, that Clarice had doubled back to Ben and her father. “Do you mind me asking, Clarice, if something’s worrying you?”
Clarice frowned at this, as though begrudging an answer. “My mom worries.”
“Should she?”
“I’ve got no way of telling, and no interest in Dad’s business. All I know is that we made our money three generations back. My father runs the company because he’s the only son, not because he’s good at it.” Clarice gazed off in the distance. “Lately, I’ve thought he’d rather be painting landscapes. Which would be fine, except that it concerns my mother. Which has started me wondering if there’s trouble.”
Through other friends, Whitney had seen fathers who had frittered away a family business or squandered an inheritance, trading affluence for struggle, respect for pity. But she had never imagined this threatening Clarice. “If it came to that,” she assured her friend, “I’m sure my dad would help.”
Clarice smiled a little. “I guess he could, couldn’t he?”
The next morning, Whitney returned to Dogfish Bar.
This time she brought a book to read, chosen over The Confessions of Nat Turner by her parents’ friend, Bill Styron—John Updike’s Couples, a novel of adultery among the upwardly mobile residents of a New England suburb. But though the first few chapters were seductive enough to intrigue her, she turned back to her diary.
Today, she found, her subject was Clarice.
Clarice has always competed with me, lightly, for my dad’s attention. I’ve never thought about it much; when it comes to jealousy, Janine had all my attention. But now I realize more clearly that my father symbolizes the dominant male who can protect the only life Clarice has known. Which would explain the instinctive rejection/attraction I think she feels for Ben, for all their differences in class. Perhaps because my father, too, came from nothing.
Pausing, Whitney gazed out at the calm blue horizon, waiting for fresh thoughts to surface. But the one that did stirred discontent with herself.
I just caught myself wondering if Clarice was jealous of me. How foolish—Janine is one thing; Clarice another. Perhaps I need to imagine that more attractive women—my sister, my best friend, even my mother—secretly envy me for reasons I can’t even name. Worse than projection, such fantasies are pathetic; worse yet, they make no sense. Believing that other people wish they were you is the first step toward the insane asylum.
Putting down the journal, she headed for the water, resolved to exorcise her toxins through a vigorous swim.