Jimmy ran water into a small aluminum stewer. It heated quickly on a gas flame, and he poured the bubbling water over tea bags in mismatched ceramic mugs. One was striped, and the other had Porky Pig on it. As they waited for their tea to cool, Jimmy was drawing invisible patterns on the maple table with his finger. His hair fell into his eyes, and he brushed it aside. It fell again, and when she reached to push it back for him, he grasped her hand and held it tightly.
“Can’t wait for this tea to cool,” he said. “That might take all night.”
“It might take till tomorrow,” she said with a slight gasp as he jumped up, pulling her by the hand.
His bed was piled with laundry. He threw the laundry on a chair and bounced onto the bed, dragging her down onto the blue comforter with him.
“I’ve been wanting you so long,” he said. “Every minute.”
“Jimmy,” she murmured.
“Turn off your mind and float downstream,” he half hummed.
They shed their clothes slowly and deliberately, exploring a little more as they went along, closer and closer, skin on skin, toward a quiet frenzy. With Jimmy, there was a grand difference from those other jabs and gropes, she kept thinking. Those fantasy guys, according to Frank the psychologist. This was real. The depth, the luxury, the rhythm.
The cut worm forgives the plow, she thought suddenly and almost laughed. Again and again, and more and more. Then time disappeared and they were traveling into space.
She wondered why he didn’t use a rubber or why he hadn’t asked her about the Pill. She didn’t tell him. They had plunged into each other without any thought to consequences. She thought he must have trusted her wholly to be prepared, but nothing would have stopped her.
Holding each other, the intensity of the pleasure, was beyond anything described in her books, wasn’t in any poem in the world.
“Here we have naming of the parts,” Jimmy said, as they explored each other in his big bed. Touching her breast, he said, “Bubble.”
“What do you call this?”
“Oh, that’s my pogo stick.”
She smiled. “That sounds like something you’d say in grade school.”
“No, I didn’t have such a powerful pogo then. It couldn’t do tricks.” He sneaked his hand up her thigh. “And what do you call this?”
“My bandersnatch. The dreaded bandersnatch will snatch you up.”
“No, you’re defenseless. My pogo stick is going to invade your velvet box.”
“My silk tunnel,” she corrected him. “And what are these?”
“Dog toys,” he said.
This was so adolescent, she thought. They were teenagers, shameless and silly. They were the first explorers. They sat cross-legged, two lotus blossoms, facing each other. Four naked knees nudging. She had never been this close with a boy, eyes open, staring at each other’s nakedness. In truth, she had never gotten a really good look at the mystery parts.
He touched her cheek and gazed straight at her. “That first day when we walked, I ran off. I was too shy with you, but I really wanted to stay. I couldn’t take my eyes off you in class.”
“I caught you staring at me.”
“I didn’t mean to. I just liked to look at you.”
“Why would you notice somebody like me?”
“There’s nobody like you. I didn’t notice anybody else.” Running his hand along her cheek, he said, “I thought you seemed so mature, you might look down on me. You were quiet. I thought you were so confident you would never take me seriously.”
“No. God, no, just the opposite. I was afraid you’d think I wasn’t good enough for you.”
“Don’t talk like that. You’re so classy.”
She laughed. “I never thought I’d hear that word.”
“You are a classy chick.” He grinned and rumpled her hair. “See. You don’t even need a tiara or a crown to be a queen. Why, you don’t even need clothes! You’re beautiful, just the natural way you are. Au naturel!”
He picked up his underwear from the floor.
“Your shorts are pink!”
“Like them?”
“They’re the color of Pepto-Bismol!”
“I washed the red bathroom rug with them and they turned pink. I have eleven pairs of deep-pink underpants.”
She was seized with mirth. Then she couldn’t stop, and giggles overcame her.
“I’m not laughing at you!” she sputtered. She laughed because he didn’t seem at all embarrassed. They laughed together, and they couldn’t stop. She was laughing that a boy would wash his underwear with a red rug, and he was laughing with her, laughing with her laughter. She was letting loose at last.
“I’m having such a good time,” she said eventually. “This is better than the Tilt-A-Whirl.”
“I love to see your face like that, all puffed up and red.”
He gazed directly into her eyes, and she was searching his face. She didn’t remember anything so close and warm.
SHE NEVER HAD an actual date with Jimmy, as she used to know the practice. They just fell in together. She couldn’t wait to see him and he seemed thrilled to see her. He called her Snooks. With Jimmy, she felt she was really with someone, not hiding behind questions, not assessing how she looked or acted. It always startled her when they were peering straight into each other’s eyes. His bright blue eyes.
“You’re really here,” she murmured.
She isn’t inventing him. But there is no snow. The sandstone buildings shine brightly in the sun. Something new will happen here.
IN THOSE FIRST weeks with Jimmy, they had fun just acting crazy, laughing together. She believed that falling in love could happen only once in life. Jimmy had a good voice, and he had a knack for remembering song lyrics. He could do Gilbert-and-Sullivan patter. He had played a policeman in a high-school production of “The Pirates of Penzance.” In the car, he sang Beatles songs, stomping his left foot so vigorously in time with the tune that the car seemed to bounce. “I could have been a Beatle,” he would say with mock braggadocio. He was unfailingly polite, always pausing at a threshold for her to enter before him and always opening the car door for her. He even had the money to take her out to eat. At the International House of Pancakes, she ordered Swedish pancakes with lingonberry syrup because she had never had lingonberries. He seemed charmed by her delight over such simple indulgences, and he let her drive his Mustang, which thrilled her, especially the way it zoomed so quickly after takeoff.
Jimmy had read widely in Freud, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger, giants of the mind, but he wasn’t a show-off in class. He didn’t even find the Twiggy girl attractive. She was trying too hard to be cool, he observed.
He swam laps daily at the university pool, where he had to pack his tumble of hair into a rubber cap. His body was limber and strong. He had a soft blue shirt that Ann admired. She loved to touch it and smell it.
AT HALF MOON BAY, Jimmy was standing in the sand, his toes in the water. “What do you think the ancients thought clouds were? What did they think they were seeing?”
Ann and Jimmy were gazing at layers of marshmallows, some with raised heads and some with pink cloaks.