Thinks of Sage on and off the rest of the day: car ride home, shucking corn, taking the clothes off the outside line and folding them as he stood there, little during dinner and then when washing the dishes, and that night, in the dark when he’s outside the house peeing, he imagines them standing and him holding her, face looking up at his from a height his wife’s would be until he changes it in his head so it’s even with his, then on a bed, side by side rubbing the other’s body, and then she turns over on her stomach so he can get behind her, then the two of them in the back of a car trying to find a comfortable position to screw in, both completely naked though he thinks they’d only be naked from the waist down, if that, no matter where they parked. He never did anything like that in a car — at the most heavy petting and not for some twenty years, the last time in front of the woman’s house in the front seat of her car, just as a joke: “You know,” he said, or something like this, and they’d been sleeping together for months, “I haven’t made out with a girl in a car for years, and never one behind the wheel, so is it all right if we don’t go in just yet and sort of futz around a little out here?” and she said, “Go ahead, I wouldn’t mind fooling around like that too; it’d be different.” But how does one go about having sex in a car? He knows, to do it half in and half out of a car, she’d sit off the end of the seat with her legs outside and of course the door open and the man would do it standing with her legs up on his shoulders or against his chest or somewhere around there, or leaning over her with her legs around his waist or hanging over the side. He once, in a New York state park years ago, walked past a young couple doing it that way or something like it. But entirely in the car with the door closed? Probably in the backseat with her sitting on his thighs and facing him. Or she could sit with her back to him and in the front seat too, he supposes, depending on the size car. Sage saying when she’s on top of him in his head, “I’m in love with you, I don’t care about the age difference,” with the same smile she had when she spoke of overindulging on popovers. It gets him excited. It’s almost black out now, no moon or stars and no other house or light of any kind for half a mile, he’s behind the unlit patio, door’s closed to it from the kitchen so he’s out of view, and he forces his penis back through the fly, zips up or tries to but has to push the penis down again before he can get the zipper up over the bulge, feels the last of the pee dribbling down his thigh, not just drops but a stream. Did it too quickly, should have shook more — why’d he rush as if he were about to be caught with his hard-on out? He might think of her later if he makes love with his wife, but only up to a point. In fact if he thinks anymore of her he’ll almost definitely make love to his wife even if she’s not at first in the mood to, simply through his persistence and the way he has when he wants to very much and various things he does and her willingness after a while or just resignation to it, feeling it easier to give in than resist if she wants to get to sleep, and she also knows he’ll be quick.
Then he thinks of the time — he’s sitting at the kitchen table now reading a book, kids asleep, wife somewhere else in the house, little radio on the windowsill next to him tuned to a classical music concert taped in St. Louis — he was a guest waiter in a children’s sleep-away camp, still in college but troubled about what he’d do when he graduated — journalism, Garment District, advertising, law, grad school in English or international relations, stay an extra year in college to get his predentistry requirements out of the way or take some education courses the next two terms so he could become a junior high school teacher for a few years, or just quit college now and join the army or odd-job it around Europe and the States till he knew what he wanted to do — and met a girl there, someone very beautiful and intelligent whom he flipped for — marriage, he began thinking, why not marriage and babies early on which’ll force him into some profession and give him a draft deferment and all the sex he wants? — and when he tried kissing her the second time one night she said something to him like — it was outside, in the middle of a baseball diamond, and she was trying to get her arm out from under his to point out some constellations she recognized in the sky and which he’d said he was interested in—“Let’s be frank about this right away, Gould: I can in no way become involved with you romantically. It’s the lack of chemistry or the void of something else and maybe of a dozen things; it’s not that there’s some other guy I specially like, although this would be the most propitious time for me to start a new relationship, since I’m completely free in every possible way and the surrounding conditions here are so perfect for it. But that’s how it is and will always be between us, I’m afraid, so please, I can see you’re a very persistent fellow when you want to be, but don’t think you can ever change it,” and he said, “Hey, fine by me; I can’t see any problem with your decision, and not to make you feel small, but there are plenty of little fishies in the sea,” and shook her hand good night, and after a few days’ sadness and then downright despair for two weeks he got her parents’ phone number and called, actually put a hanky over the mouthpiece to disguise his voice, though he’d never talked to them before — he supposes he didn’t want any speech mannerisms or defects detected and later relayed to her and she could say “Oh, you mean with a weak R and drops his G’s; I know the jerk”—and said to her father, because he answered, “Excuse me, you don’t know me, but your daughter (he forgets her first and last names now) is sleeping around. All I can say about how I know this is I’m one of the many guys she’s doing it with but the only one who resents the others and wants her all to himself, even, if you can believe this after what I said about her activities, eventually to marry her,” and hung up. A stupid, awful thing to do, despicable, he knew that then, knew it before he did it but hardly thought twice about doing it, for he was crazy in love and couldn’t stand seeing her swimming in the lake or walking around in shorts or escorting her campers into the mess hall and thought maybe her parents would come up and whisk her away and that’d be the end of her in his life, besides being jealous, to the point where his stomach ached and he couldn’t sleep because he kept thinking of them, of this drippy, brainy squirt she was going with now and, he knew, would soon be screwing. She later came up to him and said, “Did you call my home the other night and talk to my dad? Don’t lie that you didn’t,” and he said, “Me? How would I even know where you live and what your father’s name is and so on to get your phone number?” and she said, “I’ve mentioned what borough I live in and that his first name is Jackson, a not very common first name, so it’d be a cinch to find him through Information or if the camp office has a Brooklyn phone book, which it has to, since half the campers come from there,” and he said, “Maybe you did tell me all that but I don’t recall it and I didn’t call him, I’m sorry, but also for how it’s obviously making you so upset,” and she said, “You’re a big bull artist if there ever was one and you know it. It could only have been you, as you’re the only guy I know stupid and juvenile enough to do it.” He didn’t believe she was sure it was him, continued to think of her almost constantly, stomachaches, trouble falling asleep, every time he saw her and the brainy squirt; they looked even happier, holding hands, necking in front of everybody, they had to be sleeping with each other now but where would they do it? — each had a bunk with six to seven campers in it — in the woods, maybe, late at night, or they pooled their money for a motel room or did it in someone’s car; and a couple of weeks later he called her home again, her mother answered and he said, hanky over the mouthpiece, in what he thought was a thick Middle European accent, that he was the camp director, Rabbi Berman, and he thinks her daughter’s pregnant and wants her and her husband, for the sake of Sandy’s campers — that was her name, Sandy — to come up and get her off the grounds immediately—“The girl’s a disgrace!” he yelled, and hung up. He didn’t know what happened after that, if the parents came up or even told Sandy about it or called the director, but she didn’t accuse him of making a second call and continued to avoid him the rest of the summer, turning around and hurrying away from him if she saw him heading in her direction, leaving the social hall or one of the local bars alone or with her boyfriend if Gould was there at the same time.