“Upsilon Lambda Phi. ‘If you laugh too hard, ULP.’ My father wanted me to pledge Ulps. He claimed it had more status. Fortunately I wasn’t sophisticated enough to know what he was talking about, so I joined the fraternity all my friends were joining. What nonsense it all was.”
He took her to a basketball doubleheader at Memorial Auditorium. He showed her his office. One Saturday afternoon he took her for a drive in the country. There was an orchard where you could pick your own apples for a dollar a bushel.
Beyond kissing her good night, he never made a pass at her. At the very beginning she interpreted this as strategy on his part; he would keep things very platonic, then move in swiftly for the kill. But as time passed she realized that he was not going to attempt to take her to bed, and on reflection she found that this did not really surprise her at all. In New York she had taken it for granted that any man she went out with would try to get her to bed at the earliest opportunity. But she was not in New York now. She was in Buffalo, going with a steady stable man who thought in long-range terms.
He gave her a diamond solitaire for Christmas. “We always exchanged gifts at Chanukah,” he said, “but I think kids should get something for Christmas, too. I’d even be inclined to have a tree for the kids’ sake. Of course I’d have to take it down whenever my parents came over.”
“Or hang a picture in front of it.”
“Even better. I hope I’m not presuming too much. I gather it’s considered proper to let the girl pick out the ring, but I wanted to surprise you. You can exchange it if it’s not what you want.”
“It’s just exactly what I want.”
“What I want is for us to be married. I’ve never proposed to a girl before. There was never anyone I wanted to marry. There were two or three I thought about marrying but it wasn’t what I wanted and it never went that far. I was beginning to think I would never meet anyone. And then your Aunt Claire and my Aunt Rhoda sat down over a card table, and here I am with the only girl in the world. I’m not dreaming, am I?”
She shook her head, unable to speak.
“I love you, Andrea.”
They were invited to a New Year’s party at the home of a Polish couple in Orchard Park. “I suppose we ought to go,” he said. “I knew Cass in law school and we’ve been doing some business with his firm lately. They don’t touch negligence and they’ve been giving us some referrals. I don’t suppose it’ll be much fun, so if you can’t stand the idea just say so.”
“I don’t mind. I always hate New Year’s Eve anyway, so if we go someplace where we don’t expect much, at least we won’t be disappointed.”
The party was about what she’d expected. She didn’t know anyone there and Mark knew only the host. Everybody was married and half the women were pregnant. The men gathered in one room and discussed cars and told Kennedy jokes. The women sat around in another room and talked about toilet training. There was a pile of funny hats on the table next to the bottles of Schenley’s, and she told him she was damned if she was going to put one on.
“You won’t have to,” he said. “Wait right here.” She waited, drink in hand, and after a few minutes he returned with their coats. “I told Casimir we’d absolutely promised to be at a family party by the stroke of twelve. Not that he’ll remember anything. It’s a quarter after eleven, and at the rate he’s going he’ll be under the sofa by midnight.”
Outside, a light snow was falling. “We won’t ever be like that,” she said. “Tell me we won’t.”
“Like Cass and Ellie?”
“Like all those people. The women were worse than the men. I want to have babies, but I don’t want to spend the rest of my life talking about their diapers. Let’s try not to be boring, Mark.”
“It’s a deal.” They reached his car and he held the door for her, then walked around and got behind the wheel. “Well, we put in an appearance,” he said. “But I couldn’t see starting 1963 with a dose of terminal boredom. Anyway, I’ve got a wonderful idea. I’ll show you my office.”
“I’ve seen your office, silly.”
“Humor me.”
On the big table in the conference room was an ice hamper with two bottles of Mumm’s Cordon Rouge. They sat on the long leather couch and drank one of the bottles and necked. She had not had champagne in ages and it was delicious. She had not necked in ages, either, and his mouth and hands turned out to be an ideal accompaniment for champagne. He made gentle, leisurely love to her, and she felt so very much at ease that she began to grow passionate without exactly realizing what was happening to her.
After a long time he sat up and looked at his watch. It was twelve-thirty. “Well, what do you know about that,” he said, marveling. “Here I was hoping to steal a kiss at the stroke of midnight, and now I’ll have to wait a full year for the privilege. Privilege.”
“I think you’re a little bit drunk.”
“Well, maybe a bit.”
“And you don’t have to steal anything, you know. You do know that, don’t you?”
He undressed her slowly, his large hands very gentle and capable. Someone had told her once that the size of a man’s hands was a good indication of the size of his penis. She had dismissed this as absurd folk wisdom at the time, but lately she had noticed his hands and remembered the old myth and wondered if there was anything to it. She was delighted now to find that, in his case at least, it was quite true. He was large, and she liked that. For all that she had heard and read to the effect that penis size was not important, she felt it was important to her.
It had been such a long time. There had been, since her return to Buffalo, no sexual frustration, no nights of longing, until she began to wonder if that final week in New York had permanently affected her capacity for sexual desire. Sex had become so slight a factor in her life that this thought itself was less a cause for worry than dispassionate speculation.
Her head was wonderfully light from the champagne, her body deliriously in tune after their love play. Now she inhaled the intermingled scents of his cologne and the leather couch, and she felt his weight upon her and his bulk within her, and oh my, oh yes, what a lovely way to start the year.
“Oh, Mark.”
“My girl, my baby girl.”
“Oh my God.”
She had had a diaphram in New York. For all she knew it was still there, zipped in its pink plastic carrying case and tucked away in the second drawer of the bird’s-eye maple dresser on Jane Street. Two days after he first made love to her she went to a gynecologist at Linwood and Utica and asked to be fitted. He asked her if there was any particular reason why she didn’t want to take contraceptive pills. She decided there wasn’t. He took her blood pressure and listened to her heart and gave her a prescription for Enovid, with instructions to begin taking them five days after the start of her next period.
She left his office praying she would get a next period to begin with. Neither she nor Mark had taken any precautions, and he insisted he would be just as pleased if she were pregnant; it would give him an excuse to move up the wedding date. But her period came on schedule, and after that she took her pills faithfully. Invariably their nights together concluded at his office, with her bare bottom sticking to the brown leather of the conference room couch.
They had first-class seats on the flight from New York to Puerto Rico. The seats were more comfortable than in the tourist section, and the drinks were free. She told him she had never flown first class before.
“You don’t want to get used to it,” he said. “It’s a ridiculous extravagance.”
“Then why are we doing it?”
“Because I feel ridiculously extravagant.”