My job at the Lighthouse had something to do with this. I was working during dating hours, and the one night she could go out on dates was the one night I really had things to do there. But once I asked her if she’d like to catch a movie during the week and she said she couldn’t.
“I have to stay with my father,” she said. “You know that, Chip.”
“He manages well enough Friday and Saturday nights, doesn’t he?”
“Well, those are the only nights I can go out. I’m not allowed to date during the week.”
“You could ask permission.”
“Asking’s not getting. Oh, Chip, I can’t go out with you anyway. I’m going steady with Jimmie Butler, you know that, I told you a thousand times.”
I said something about going steady being a Mickey Mouse institution.
She looked at me. “Do you think I ought to break off with Jimmie?”
“I guess not,” I said.
That was the only time I ever asked her for a date, and I was just as glad she turned me down. I guess I wanted to keep this a lunchtime thing and not let it get very intense.
There were a couple of reasons for this. One of them makes me look like Mr. Nice Guy, so I’ll throw it in first, and it was just that it wouldn’t have been fair of me to take up all that much of Lucille’s time. Because what Lucille wanted out of life was to get married as soon as she was done with high school and start having babies and spend the rest of her life there. And while that might not sound like something worth wanting, it was what she wanted, and it was probably what would be best for her. (Especially if Jimmie Butler developed a little control by doing the multiplication tables in his head or something.)
Anyway, Lucille wanted to be Mrs. Somebody. Maybe she would have been just as happy to be Mrs. Harrison as Mrs. Butler, but I really wasn’t ready for that. She just wasn’t that important to me, so I didn’t want to become all that important to her.
The other reason was more selfish.
See, I was just having too much fun the way things were going. It was a fantastic ego trip for me, the whole thing, and even knowing something is an ego trip isn’t enough to take the enjoyment out of it. For once in my life I was the teacher and she was the pupil, and I was getting a tremendous charge out of it. Instead of feeling like some utterly hopeless dope of a kid, I was the wise old man and she was the little innocent one. And every time I took her upstairs and let the stuffed animals watch me teach her something new and con her into doing it, well, it made me feel as if I was really somebody sensational.
(Which was another reason, I guess, that I had no desire to get in bed with Claureen or Rita. There was no way on earth I could feel like the wise old man with either of those two, and I guess I knew it would just bring me down in a bad way.)
By only seeing Lucille at lunch hour, I made that part of it be our entire relationship. And because we had so little time together we could just keep on going forward a little at a time instead of rushing straight into all-the-way sex. I didn’t realize at the time that this was something I wanted. Instead I told myself it wasn’t fair to rush her, that I wanted to let everything come at its own pace so it would be natural and good for her. But that was bullshit, really. Utter bullshit.
“You’re like a drug to me, Chip,” she said one day. “I just need more and more of you.”
“Must be a good kind of drug. You look prettier every day.”
“The girls ask me about you.”
“What do they ask?”
“What you’re like. Everybody knows about that place you work at. Some of them sort of want to go out with you. They want to come home with me and meet you. But they’re scared of you at the same time.”
“Scared of me?”
She nodded. “They think you must know things other boys don’t. The things I could tell them! And sometimes I just could die for wanting to tell someone. I feel I could burst from holding it all inside me.”
“I don’t think it would be a very good idea to tell anybody.”
“I know. I just say we hardly talk at all. That you don’t even know I’m alive.”
“Oh, I can tell you’re alive, all right.”
“Ohhhh—”
And a little later she said, “I’m scared of you, too, Chip.”
“Oh, come on. You must know by now you can trust me.”
“I know. But it used to be I could trust myself, and now I can t. I never knew I was like this.”
“Aren’t you glad you found out?”
“I don’t know.”
“Huh?”
“I just, oh, I don’t know.” Her face clouded, then suddenly brightened and she giggled. I asked her what was so funny.
“I was thinking about Jimmie.”
“What about him?”
“If he could see us now.”
If he could have seen us right then he would have come on the spot and saved himself ten dollars.
“He asked about you.”
“What did you tell him?”
“Same as I told the girls. Not even that much. But I was thinking what would happen if I told him about you and me and all.”
“He would probably kill one of us,” I said. And if he had to choose, I thought, he would pick her. I had never mentioned to her that I had seen Jimmie now and then at the Lighthouse, so I couldn’t tell her that he tended to back down pretty easily from fights. I didn’t hold this against him, though. In fact I preferred him that way.
Her hand dropped onto me. “The other night,” she said, “he wanted me to touch him.”
“Did you?”
“’Course not. I asked him what kind of a girl he thought I was.”
“What did he say?”
“He apologized,” she said, and giggled again. “He’s just a baby, I guess. I never used to think so. Not until I met you.”
Ego food.
At the beginning I thought I was going to get tired of her, maybe because she was so square. I suppose this would have happened if we had seen each other more, had dates and long conversations, or if I had met her friends or anything like that. But she left the boring part of her personality outside the bedroom, and once she stopped fighting the whole idea of sex she turned out to have quite a natural aptitude for it.
For a long time she spent half her time being passionate and the other half feeling guilty about it. At first she was very uptight every time we did something new, as if we were taking still another step along the road to Hell. This was fun in a way — first I taught her something new, and then I assured her it wasn’t awful.
It wasn’t long, though, before she wanted to do new things and came to bed looking forward to it. I guess what happened was that her mind finally realized I wasn’t going to make her have regular intercourse, so she set that up in her mind as the one absolute sin and decided it was perfectly all right to do absolutely anything else.
So I taught her things I had done before, of which there were not too many, and things I had heard about or read about, of which there were a ton, and some things that I more or less invented. I’m not saying that I thought of things no one had thought of before because I’m not sure there are any of those things left, but they were new to me.
“My God,” she would say. “When did you have time to learn all these things, Chip?”
She didn’t know we were learning some of them together.
And she liked everything we did. Everything. I did oral things to her and taught her to do them to me, and she lived up to what Willie Em had told me about Southern girls.
And we tried anal things, which I hadn’t done before. She didn’t like the idea at the beginning, and she thought it would be painful and disgusting, and when we were done she said it was painful and disgusting and cried a little and I told her we wouldn’t do it again.