The past Saturday, Jimmie Butler had been a customer at the Lighthouse. He had three quick beers for courage and went upstairs and spent ten dollars with Jo Lee. That worked out to about five dollars a minute. “All the rabbits ain’t out in the fields,” Jo Lee said afterward.
“Because he knows I won’t let him do anything if he tries to touch me there,” Lucille was saying.
“Why?”
She looked at me, wide-eyed.
“Why won’t you let him?”
“I won’t let anybody.”
“Why not?”
“Because I want to be pure, Chip.”
I looked into those wide blue eyes, and then I closed my own, and when I opened them she was still there.
“I want to be pure on my wedding night,” she said. “The way you look at me —”
I said, “What does a hand up your skirt have to do with being pure?”
“Chip!”
“Because it doesn’t make sense to me, Lucille.”
“One thing can lead to another.”
“One thing’s supposed to lead to another. That’s what life is all about. Life is just one damn thing leading to another.”
“Chip, nobody ever touched me there.”
“How about you?”
“Me?”
“Don’t you ever touch yourself there, Lucille?”
Her face had gotten gradually whiter during the course of the conversation. Now all the color that had drained out came back in a rush, until most of the blood in her body must have been in her head. She looked like a sunburn ad.
She hugged her breasts. There were tears in her eyes, and I felt awful.
“Hey,” I said. “Easy, honey.”
“Oh, Chip,” she said, and buried her face in my chest. I put my arms around her and rocked her gently. She was sobbing her heart out.
“Easy,” I said. “Baby, it’s completely normal. Everybody does it.”
“It’s a sin.”
“Lots of things are, if you believe everything they tell you. But the thing is that it feels good.”
“I—”
“And makes a person more relaxed.”
She drew back, looked at me with pain in her eyes. “I hardly ever used to do it,” she said. “Just a little once in a while before I went to bed, if I was feeling dreamy. And I would stop before anything happened. But these past few days—”
“Take it easy, honey.”
“—I’m just so terrible! And I’m so ashamed of myself. I go back to school and I can’t sit in my seat, and I go to the bathroom, and I, I, I, oh, Chip!”
“It makes you feel better, doesn’t it?” She hesitated, then nodded miserably. “It feels good, doesn’t it? And then it relaxes you.”
Another nod.
“But you feel bad about it because you think it’s a sin.”
“Well, it is.”
“Then everybody’s a sinner,” I said. And I told her that everybody did it except for people who were too stupid to figure out how, and that people scratched other parts of their bodies when they itched, and rubbed their muscles when they hurt, and what was the difference? By the time I was finished I sounded like a commercial for self-abuse, but she was sort of nodding along with me towards the end, and the panic scene was over.
So I just held onto her and kissed her a little in a friendly and nonsexual way, and then she remembered that it was time to go back to school, she would be late. She put her clothes back on and brushed her hair and lipsticked her mouth and went on her way, and I went downstairs and did the dinner dishes.
The next day I stayed above the waist and didn’t say anything about yesterday’s conversation. And out of the blue she said, “I did it again yesterday. Went to the bathroom and touched myself.”
“So did I.”
“You did?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Do you always?”
“Sometimes.”
(Actually that was the first time I had followed a session with Lucille with a session with myself. I had never really felt the need — our petting hadn’t been all that frustrating, really. But after the conversation we had had and the little speech I gave her, it seemed to me it would be almost a matter of copping out if I didn’t.)
“I never thought about that.”
“I thought about you,” I said. I petted her breast absently. “As a matter of fact, while I was doing it I pictured you in my mind. Doing it.”
“Oh, that’s just awful!”
“Actually it was kind of nice.” I propped myself up on an elbow and looked down at her. “You know,” I said, “since we’re both going to do it, why should we hide out in separate bathrooms? We could just do it here in your room before you go back to school.”
She stared.
“It would be fun,” I said. “We could watch each other.”
“Chip, you are the most terrible boy I ever met.”
I looked at her and her face went through some interesting changes. “Oh,” she said, in a small, desperate voice, and I kissed her. She gave the kiss everything she had.
“I guess I’m terrible, too,” she said.
“I’ll tell you something that’s even nicer, Lucille. Let me do it for you.”
“Chip, don’t talk that way.”
“If you’re going to do it anyway,” I said reasonably, “it can’t be any more of a sin if you use somebody else’s hand. All you have to do is lie back and close your eyes and let your mind go anywhere it wants to. It’s a lot better when someone else does it for you, you know.”
“Is it?”
“And you feel a lot better afterward. You feel together inside instead of feeling all apart by yourself.”
“That’s how I felt yesterday. I felt tingly and I felt relaxed and I felt I was the only person in the world.”
I lifted her skirt and put my hand on her thigh. She was so soft there.
“Chip, I’m afraid.”
“Don’t be.”
“But I am, I am. Look how far we’re going already and it’s such a short time and, oh, you’re not even my boy friend. Here I’m going steady with a boy I don’t do half of this with, and I’m doing all this with you.”
“It’s what we both want, Lucille.”
“I graduate high school a year from June. And after graduation I’ll marry Jimmie Butler, and I want to be pure for him. I want to be a virgin, Chip.”
“All I’ll do is touch you.”
“You promise?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know if I can trust you.”
“You can trust me, Lucille.”
“Ohhh,” she said.
I raised her skirt all the way and took off her panties. She didn’t help and she didn’t struggle either. Her face was so unhappy I almost felt like calling the whole thing off, but that would have been even worse for her.
I kissed her mouth, then her breasts, and I put my hand on her belly and let it move down to her. She was all soft and moist and warm.
She didn’t get excited right away. I guess part of her was fighting it, but the other part of her won eventually and she panted and squirmed and made beautiful little sounds. She got almost there and hovered on the edge for a long time, trying to make it and trying not to make it, and I was starting to worry that it wouldn’t work and she would wind up deciding that bathrooms were better than beds.
But then she got there, got all the way there, and in my mind I was there with her, feeling what she felt. I held her for a long time before I raised myself up and looked at her face.
She was glowing and she looked impossibly beautiful and I felt a lot like God.
Eight
The Funny thing is that I kept getting more and more involved with Lucille without really getting involved with her at all. We spent about fifty minutes out of every lunch hour in her bedroom, but outside of that we didn’t see each other at all. I never stayed around after she got home from school, and on Saturdays she would generally manage to spend the day with a girlfriend. We never went to a movie or for a walk or anything.