Girl on the Best Seller List Read Free Page A

repeatedly that he liked her and everything about her never seemed to make her feel better. In a very subtle way his reassurances seemed only to make him appear all the more a fool in her eyes. As though she were saying: Well, all right, I know I’m no bargain, and if you’re too dumb to see that, then you’re no bargain either.
    In a way, sandwiched between their gradual getting used to one another, between the rare moments when they would laugh together, say casual endearments, and eventually neck in the back seat of Milo’s old Plymouth, there was an uncanny unfitness about them as a couple. Even physically. Their noses were always colliding in an embrace; she would laugh just as Milo was about to kiss her, and his lips would be bruised by her teeth. They were clumsy on the dance floor, though with anyone else Milo was an excellent dancer. Even alone, when they had conversation, the normal rhythm was lacking: they interrupted each other; they both paused at the same time, so that there were long silences when neither of them could think of what to say, and when thoughts did occur to them, they came simultaneously and resulted in a near-shouting head-on collision. There were other things, too. Milo felt sorry for people Gloria felt were just stupid. Milo would say, “If someone would just give him a chance,” while Gloria would say, “He’s obnoxious, he deserves to be ignored.” Milo was a liberal. He believed in racial equality, and sometimes things he read in the newspaper would make him very angry; things about a race riot, or an example of discrimination — things like that. Whenever he talked about it, Gloria would lash out at him for being in a fraternity Jews couldn’t join; she would call him a hypocrite, and a bigot, and the discussion would end with her malicious and triumphant attack on him, with the issue he had brought up forgotten. Gloria was anti-religion, anti-Republican, anti-management, anti-everything, until Milo found himself more and more reluctant to talk about such matters with her. More and more he kept silent, simply listening, except when Gloria told him about the unfair things that had happened to her — the snubs, the ridicule, all the offenses against her, which were imagined in some cases, in others real. Then Milo would speak gently, compassionately. “You’re just as pretty as other girls, Glo. You just have it in your mind you’re not.” (A lie.) “You did have a rough childhood, and you
did
come from pretty poor circumstances, but you had the guts to rise above it, didn’t you? And that’s something.” (The truth.) “You are well-liked, Glo. People like you…. I do need you, honey. Don’t say I don’t need you.” And so it went, falsehoods, truths, words pouring out of him to make her feel better — his arms locking out all the injuries, his mouth kissing away her anxieties. Why?
    For a while, in the back seat of the Plymouth, Milo never tried to do more than kiss Glo. She was not particularly passionate, but she seemed to enjoy it when he was. As he experimented more and more, he realized this. He kissed her tenderly and slowly; then roughly, with a bare edge of violence in his manner. He kissed her eyes and her ears and her neck, and he let his tongue slip into her mouth. When there were no more ways left to kiss her, he began to tell her how attractive the rest of her was. She denied this, and he became all the more vehement in his protests. For a period, he seemed to dwell constantly on her lovely bosom, thinking of everything on earth he could compare it with, as he pressed her close to him. It seemed to anger her, until he felt he must prove that he meant it by fondling her. The only reason he had never tried before was that he was slightly old-fashioned. He did not think it was fair to a girl. He did not like men who took advantage of women.
    Tortured by a suspicion that Gloria would never believe his well-meant compliments about her breasts until he paid