Philip Roth - Indignation

What happened when I took her out exceeded anything I could have imagined in the library bathroom, had I the daring to retreat to one of the stalls there to relieve myself temporarily of my desire. The rules regulating the lives of the girls at Winesburg were of the sort my father wouldn’t have minded their imposing on me. All female students, including seniors, had to sign in and out of their dormitories whenever they left in the evening, even to go to the library. They couldn’t stay out past nine on weekdays or past midnight on Fridays and Saturdays, nor, of course, were they ever allowed in male dormitories or in fraternity houses except at chaperoned events, nor were men allowed inside the women’s dorms other than to wait on a florally upholstered chintz sofa in the small parlor to pick up a date whom the attendant downstairs would summon on the house phone; the attendant would have gotten the young man’s name from his student ID card, which he was required to show her. Since students other than seniors were prohibited from having cars on campus — and in a college with a preponderantly middle-class student body, only a few seniors had families who could provide for a car or its upkeep — there was almost no place where a student couple could be alone together. Some went out to the town cemetery and conducted their sex play against the tombstones or even down on the graves themselves; others got away with what little they could at the movies; but mostly, after evening dates, girls were thrust up against the trunks of trees in the dark of the quadrangle containing the three women’s dorms, and the misdeeds that the parietal regulations were intended to curb were partially perpetrated among the elms that beautified the campus. Mainly there was no more than fumbling and groping through layers of clothing, but among the male students the passion for satisfaction even that meager was boundless. Since evolution abhors unclimactic petting, the prevailing sexual code could be physically excruciating. Prolonged excitation that failed to result in orgasmic discharge could set strapping young men to hobbling about like cripples until the searing, stabbing, cramping pain of the widespread testicular torture known as blue balls would slowly diminish and pass away. On a weekend night at Winesburg, blue balls constituted the norm, striking down dozens between, say, ten and midnight, while ejaculation, that most pleasant and natural of remedies, was the ever-elusive, unprecedented event in the erotic career of a student libidinally at his lifetime’s peak of performance.

My roommate, Elwyn, loaned me his black LaSalle the night I took out Olivia Hutton. It was a weeknight, when I wasn’t working, and so we had to start out early to get her back to her dormitory by nine. We drove to L’Escargot, the fanciest restaurant in Sandusky County, about ten miles down Wine Creek from the college. She ordered snails, the featured dish, and I didn’t, not only because I’d never had them and couldn’t imagine eating them, but because I was trying to keep the cost down. I took her to L’Escargot because she seemed far too sophisticated for a first date at the Owl, where you could get a hamburger, french fries, and a Coke for under fifty cents. Besides, as out of place as I felt at L’Escargot, I felt more so at the Owl, whose patrons were usually jammed into booths together alongside members of their own fraternities or sororities and, as far as I could tell, spoke mostly about social events of the previous weekend or those of the weekend to come. I had enough of them and their socializing while waiting tables at the Willard.

She ordered the snails and I didn’t. She was from wealthy suburban Cleveland and I wasn’t. Her parents were divorced and mine weren’t, nor could they possibly be. She’d transferred from Mount Holyoke back to Ohio for reasons having to do with her parents’ divorce, or so she said. And she was even prettier than I had realized in class. I’d never before looked her in the eyes long enough to see the size of them. Nor had I noticed the transparency of her skin. Nor had I dared to look at her mouth long enough to realize how full her upper lip was and how provocatively it protruded when she spoke certain words, words beginning with “m” or “w” or “wh” or “s” or “sh,” as in the commonplace affirmation “Sure,” which Olivia pronounced as though it rhymed with “purr” and I as though it rhymed with “cure.”

After we’d been speaking for some ten or fifteen minutes, she surprisingly reached across the table to touch the back of my hand. “You’re so intense,” she said. “Relax.”

“I don’t know how to,” I said, and though I meant it as a lighthearted, self-effacing joke, it happened to be true. I was always working on myself. I was always pursuing a goal. Delivering orders and flicking chickens and cleaning butcher blocks and getting A’s so as never to disappoint my parents. Shortening up on the bat to just meet the ball and get it to drop between the infielders and the outfielders of the opposing team. Transferring from Robert Treat to get away from my father’s unreasonable strictures. Not joining a fraternity in order to concentrate exclusively on my studies. Taking ROTC dead seriously in an attempt not to wind up dead in Korea. And now the goal was Olivia Hutton. I’d taken her to a restaurant whose cost came to nearly half of a weekend’s earnings because I wanted her to think I was, like her, a worldly sophisticate, and simultaneously I wanted dinner to end almost before it had begun so that I could get her into the car’s front seat and park somewhere and touch her. To date, the limit of my carnality was touching. I’d touched two girls in high school. Each had been a girlfriend for close to a year. Only one had been willing to touch me back. I had to touch Olivia because touching her was the only path to follow if I was to lose my virginity before I graduated from college and went into the army. There — yet another goal: despite the trammels of convention still rigidly holding sway on the campus of a middling little midwestern college in the years immediately after World War Two, I was determined to have intercourse before I died.

After dinner, I drove out beyond the campus to the edge of town to park on the road alongside the town cemetery. It was already a little after eight, and I had less than an hour to get her back to the dormitory and inside the doors before they were locked for the night. I didn’t know where else to park, even though I was fearful of the police car that patrolled the alley back of the inn pulling up behind Elwyn’s car with its brights on and one of the cops coming around on foot to shine a flashlight into the front seat and to ask her, “Everything all right, Miss?” That’s what the cops said when they did it, and in Winesburg they did it all the time.

So I had the cops to worry about, and the late hour—8:10—when I cut off the engine of the LaSalle and turned to kiss her. Without a fuss she kissed me back. I instructed myself, “Avoid rejection — stop here!” but the advice was fatuous, and my erection concurred. I delicately slipped my hand under her coat and unbuttoned her blouse and moved my fingers onto her bra. In response to my beginning to fondle her through the cloth cup of her bra, she opened her mouth wider and continued kissing me, now with the added enticement of the stimulus of her tongue. I was alone in a car on an unlit road with my hand moving around inside someone’s blouse and her tongue moving around inside my mouth, the very tongue that lived alone down in the darkness of her mouth and that now seemed the most promiscuous of organs. Till that moment I was wholly innocent of anyone’s tongue in my mouth other than my own. That alone nearly made me come. That alone was surely enough. But the rapidity with which she had allowed me to proceed — and that darting, swabbing, gliding, teeth-licking tongue, the tongue, which is like the body stripped of its skin — prompted me to attempt to delicately move her hand onto the crotch of my pants. And again I met with no resistance. There was no battle.