Dan Wakefield - Starting Over - A Novel

“Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm …”

When he kissed her then, long and hard, her mouth for the first time opened to him and she pressed her body against him.

It was not until, prone, on the couch, when Potter reached back for the zipper at the neck of her dress that Amelia stiffened, drew away, sat up. Cigarette time; but Amelia didn’t smoke. Potter did. Neither of them said anything. It was obvious that negotiations were necessary before further intimacy was achieved.

Amelia took his hand. “Phil, darlin’.”

“Yes?”

“Ah guess I’m real old-fashioned.”

“Yes?”

“Ah just don’t—go around—doin’ these things.”

“Of course not. I know you don’t.”

“Matter a fact, ah guess you could say—ah’m practically a virgin.”

“Practically?”

“Well, there was only this one man. And we were engaged. We were plannin’ to get married acourse, but it didn’t work out. Ya see, I know it’s not popular now, but I was raised to b’lieve that a woman should—save herself—for the one man, she would marry. And give him—everything.”

Potter swallowed hard, the everything reverberating in his imagination. His mind tried then to absorb the fact of an attractive, twenty-six-year-old woman being “practically a virgin.” The phrase itself was an old joke, and he wondered if she was putting him on. Then, looking into the wide and misty sincerity of her eyes, he was ashamed of himself for doubting her.

“All I know,” he said helplessly, “is I love you.”

“I know, darlin’,” she said sympathetically. “And I love you, too; that’s what makes it so difficult. Ah love you, and ah’d love to be able to—give myself to you.”

“Oh, God,” he said.

“There, there,” she soothed, stroking his forehead.

Later, they necked some more.

Later still, back home alone in bed, Potter masturbated, imagining “everything.”

That Saturday morning Amelia came over in bluejeans and a man’s white shirt tied at the waist, and began the redecoration of Potter’s apartment. Part of the redecoration included cleaning up the accumulated debris, the dirt and grime that he had allowed to grow, like some kind of experimental bacteria, throughout his living quarters. After taking a moldy piece of cheesecake out of the refrigerator and tossing it into a trash can, Amelia sighed, kissed Potter on the tip of the nose, and said, “You know, darlin’, you met me just in time.”

By five in the afternoon they were able to sit down for a drink in the sunny, glistening living room with bright yellow curtains fluttering at the windows, books neatly arranged in orange-crate shelves that Amelia planned to paint bright green the next weekend.

Amelia had brought supplies for dinner, and while Potter sipped a second drink she prepared a feast of boneless chicken breasts, brown rice, asparagus with hollandaise, a chilled Pouilly Fouissé and ambrosia for dessert. Ambrosia, food of the gods. Amelia made everything seem ambrosial, and Potter indeed felt like a god.

As well as bringing groceries, Amelia had brought two of the lush cushions from her own apartment so that she and Potter could dine at the living room coffee table in a simulation of oriental comfort. She had also brought a change of clothes, so that she wouldn’t have to sit down to dinner in the blue jeans and shirt she had worn for working around the house all day. For dinner she wore a long gingham dress with lace at the cuffs and collar, and an old-fashioned brooch. She looked like one of those wonderful young ladies in Degas, the kind who were taken for rides in canoes, holding a parasol and letting one hand gently drape itself into the water.

“You look wonderful,” Potter said.

“It must be because I feel wonderful.”

Potter, on hands and knees, crept from his pillow over to hers, and put his arms around her. “You are wonderful,” he said.

“Oh, Phil. Darlin’.”

They rocked into one another, clutched, kissed, stroked, licked, bit, nibbled, rubbed, gasped, gurgled, grew hard, and groaned hot declarations of love, until Potter, dizzy and breathless, broke away, sat up straight, slightly shaking, holding one of Amelia’s hands with both of his. “Listen,” he said, “will you marry me?”

Her eyes, large and moist and intent, searched his face. “Oh, Phil. Darlin’. Are you sure?”

“Yes. I think I am. But I want to be even more sure. I don’t want to make a mistake again. I want us to wait a while. To take our time.”

“Of course, darlin’.”

“Think of everything. Plan.”

“Oh, yes.”

“And Amelia. I don’t want to tell anyone yet, I mean like having a formal announcement or any of that. Not till we’ve decided everything, have everything worked out.”

“Of course, darlin’. It’ll be our secret.”

“You don’t mind?”

“Mind? Oh, darlin’. I think it’s wonderful. It’s exciting—a secret engagement!”

Potter hadn’t wanted to use that word. “Engagement.” It sounded too—certain. Irrevocable. But if Amelia wanted to think of it that way, he didn’t want to object. What the hell. It was only a word.

It turned out to be a magic word. The engagement, even though secret, was enough to satisfy Amelia’s scruples about further intimacy, and she allowed an escalation that led to removal of all her garments except for panties, a final barrier that couldn’t fall until Amelia was able to arrange for what she called “precautions.”

Amelia thought it would be nice if she and Phil could go away somewhere for the weekend after she obtained her precautions; instead of making love for the first time in Potter’s apartment, she felt it would be so much more romantic to have it happen in a new and lovely setting. The ocean, perhaps, or the mountains. Somewhere in the country, maybe.

Potter immediately agreed, but was privately apprehensive. He knew how disastrous “romantic weekends” could turn out to be. Like his weekend with Marilyn in Vermont. He felt superstitiously it might be bad luck to go to a Country Inn again, after the fiasco in Middlebury. He was also concerned about Amelia’s sense of protocol and propriety, fearing a motel room might seem shabby or illicit to her, might make her anxious or embarrassed and turn her off. She wasn’t experienced at this sort of thing, and Potter grew even more worried when he realized that in Amelia’s case “this sort of thing” not only included staying with a guy in a rented room somewhere but also the very act of making love. That is, if he believed her story about being “practically a virgin.”

He had known her for less than a month, knew nothing about her past except what she had chosen to tell him, and for all he knew she perhaps had moved to Boston not out of her proclaimed love of its historical and cultural attributes, but because she had such a wild reputation in Georgia no Southern gentleman would deign to marry her; perhaps those weekends she spoke of so dreamily at the Sigma Chi house at Chapel Hill had been drug-crazed orgies, perhaps she had been a football groupie and had laid every starting quarterback in the Southeastern Conference … Shit . Potter stopped himself, condemned himself, and felt ashamed and ridiculous for doubting Amelia’s account of her practically virginal past, a noble and remarkable record of purity stained but once, and even then only because she thought she was going to marry the guy. Though the fellow had scored with her, it was not, in retrospect, according to the rules, so the score was not really a legitimate score but more like a touchdown that is called back because of a penalty; it didn’t really count. On the other hand, when Potter thought about it, Amelia never said that she had only done it once with that guy but that she had only done it with that one guy, which left open the possibility that he had fucked her hundreds or thousands of times, that his fantastic love-making had turned her into a sensual beast, a creature of passion, and she hadn’t done it with anyone else because she knew it would never be so good again.…