"Yeah, but I might still like the idea of spending a dirty weekend with you."
'Bonnie ..."
But she knelt forward and put a finger to his lips while she tried to keep herself from giggling.
"Never mind, Jeff. I was only kidding. Honest to God, you take things so seriously, sometimes it's impossible not to put you on."
Jeff made a face at her and then busied himself taking another gulp of whiskey and lighting a cigarette. The trouble was, she had a point, even if she didn't fully realize it. The weekend was disappearing fast, and he'd hardly begun to come to terms with this girl. He knew much more about her, he knew her intimately-but that didn't seem to matter. He hadn't found a way to use that knowledge and, if anything, he felt less sure of himself than he had before he'd come to Boston. Bonnie always seemed to be a step ahead of him, or she'd say something that would stop him in his tracks and make him wonder. He was the older, the one with the experience and the money, but in some way Bonnie had taken control of the situation, and never relinquished it.
The previous night had been a nonevent as far as Jeff was concerned. He'd wanted to begin talking about Georgianne, but with that one simple stabbing question in the middle of their love-making, she'd made it impossible for him to speak seriously. For someone essentially so innocent, she seemed to know him, and understand him, all too well. That was starting to frighten him.
They'd gone to a steakhouse for dinner and talked about sex-Jeff reluctantly, Bonnie enthusiastically. She informed him that she wasn't wearing panties under the dress she'd bought at Filene's. It was something she'd wanted to try doing once, since she'd read The Story of 0. Jeff didn't know the book.
"So how does it feel?"
"Put your hand up in there, and I'll tell you."
"Here? No thanks."
Then she told him about an associate professor who'd called her into his office one day to discuss a course. He mumbled vaguely for five or ten minutes and then casually asked her if she'd sit on his face. According to Bonnie, she had done it, but by then Jeff didn't believe a word she said. She was trying too hard, he thought, to make fact out of fantasysomething he had enough experience of to recognize.
"Does your mother know how you ... live at college?"
"What do you mean-how I live?"
"Well, you know. Does she know you sleep with men?"
"As opposed to women?"
"You don't sleep with women."
"And how do you know that?"
"Does your mother know?"
"What do parents ever know about their kids? Mom and I haven't really discussed it since she sent me off last year with all the usual warnings and advice. I love my mother, but she lives in her world and I live in mine. If I need to talk to her about something, she's always there. But she respects me, and my privacy."
"She trusts you."
"Right. Besides, you make it sound like I sleep around all the time. Actually, I'm very choosy."
"Uh-huh, like the associate professor."
"He was an exception, and so are you, for that matter. But then, I'm an exception for you too, right?"
"What do you mean?"
"Oh, I could tell right away, Jeff. You don't sleep around much at all, do you? We're really very alike in that regard. You sleep alone nearly all the time. . . ."
Sometime early Sunday morning Jeffs sleep had been disturbed by a strange voice. "One and two and three and four ... One and two and three and four ..." He rolled over in bed and opened his eyes. Bonnie was doing something on the floor. The television set was turned on, the volume low but clear. "One and two and . . ." Jeff blinked a couple of times and sat up. Now Bonnie was wearing only a pair of panties. She was doing exercises, along with the two girls in brightly colored, geometrically patterned leotards on the TV screen. A few minutes later, the television clicked off, and Bonnie slipped back into bed with him. She had worked up a light sweat, and her body was warm and arousing.
"Rise and shine," she whispered.
At that moment the thought had come to him that it might be the last of their love-making, but now, as they relaxed and passed the Scotch back and forth in the shelter of the dunes, he realized he'd been mistaken. They still had tonight, and tomorrow morning, unless he botched it. But he had to talk about Georgians and run that risk, because Georgianne was far more important than screwing Bonnie one more time.
"What do you think your mother is doing this afternoon?" he asked idly. "Right now."
"I don't know." Bonnie shrugged, and then said, "But what if she tried to call you? Your phone could be ringing in California right now, and you'd never know you missed her."
"I doubt it," he replied, turning his face away. Did she know what she was doing to him when she said things like that, or was she completely, innocently oblivious? He wasn't sure which was worse. All he knew was that when she got too close, little flares of pain or anguish went off inside him and he couldn't do anything about it.
"Are you a very lonely person?" Bonnie asked quietly. "I think you must be."
"Oh boy." Jeff tried to force a laugh, but it sounded weak. Triffids came to mind, the few times he had gone there in search of someone or something, the driven people he had met, the whole depressing scene. But Bonnie had kicked away the last block that held him back, and Jeff found that the words finally began to come easily to him. "Yes, I guess I am, or I have been. For a long time I never thought about whether I was lonely or not. After the divorce, I just worked and worked, and worked some more. Loneli ness is something you have to sit down and think about-you have to notice it one way or another. If you stay busy enough, you can get by for quite a while. But that doesn't mean it goes away. It does catch up with you sooner or later, like an illness that doesn't have any symptoms until it develops to a certain point...."
"Critical mass," Bonnie said.
"Yes. Exactly."
And what's beyond critical mass, Bonnie wondered. She had seen enough of Jeff over the past forty-eight hours, in bed and out, to get a clear impression of the man. He was more than lonely; he seemed to be possessed of strange demons. She had seen it in the stiffness of his manner, in his hunger for physical contact, in the way his eyes moved and his skin tightened across his face when he didn't know what to say. She had seen it immediately in the mirrored sunglasses and what he'd done to his hair, and in his willingness to go along with whatever she wanted to do (which was probably because he couldn't think of anything to do himself; he had very little spontaneity). And she had seen it again this morning. He'd gone out by himself for a few minutes and then returned to announce that he'd rented a car and they were going for a drive. That was fine, but as soon as they were on the highway heading south, it became clear he didn't know what to do next. Get off at Quincy? Braintree? Weymouth? Assinippi? He wanted to be the man, the one in charge, but he just didn't do a very good job of it-a fact that seemed to haunt him all the time.
Finally they had stopped in Plymouth for lunch at a fish shack and then a look at the Rock. They had proceeded on as far as Sagamore, where Jeff had decided abruptly that he didn't want to drive to the end of the Cape after all. So they meandered back north along the old coast road until they'd come across this neglected, unprepossessing patch of sea front. It wasn't much of a beach and it wasn't pretty, but they were near Manomet Point, and there would be people around if the weather were better.
"I think I reached that point when I met your mother again last year," Jeff said nervously. "Critical mass, or whatever you want to call it."
"Really?" Bonnie sat up, brushed some sand off her sweater, and dug her boot heels into the hard ground. "What did Mom say or do to ... ?"
"Nothing, really. But seeing her old family house for sale, and then meeting her after so many years, well, it made me sit back and think. I'd been rushing through my life, but like a zombie, blind to everything but the work in front of me. When I got back to California, I was still thinking about it, and I realized what I had been missing. All those years, I hadn't really been enjoying life at all. I decided that it wasn't too late and that I could change my life; it didn't even matter if I made mistakes or it didn't work outbecause the important thing was that I try, that I make the effort."