Loss of Innocence Read Free

Clarice’s eyes glinted with humor. “And please don’t be shocked. These days shock is unbecoming unless you’re our mothers.”
    “I’m not shocked,” Whitney rejoined crisply. “I just don’t want to be shocking.”
    Clarice gave a twitch of her tan, graceful shoulders. “In your position, I’d feel the same. I just hope you don’t get restless, that’s all. Imagining things isn’t the same as doing them.”
    Whitney waded in up to her knees. “So maybe I’m just unimaginative,” she said over her shoulder.
    “You? I doubt it. So maybe having sex with Peter and imagining Paul Newman will work just fine.” Clarice stepped, beside her. “So how
is
it with Peter? You never really say.”
    Whitney smiled a little. “Would you settle for ‘sweet’?”
    “‘Sweet’? That’s lovely. But does the earth move? Or is it more like a mudslide?”
    Folding her arms, Whitney replied with mock dignity, “I have nothing more to say, Miss Barkley. You’ll have to rely on your own lurid fantasies.”
    To her surprise, Clarice did not respond in kind. Instead, she turned toward the sound, watching a sailboat in the distance. More seriously, she said, “I’m being kind of a pill, aren’t I? Maybe I envy you a little.”
    “Why should you?”
    Still watching the water, Clarice spoke more softly. “Your life is settled, all laid out in front of you. You have someone you love, who loves you. You don’t have to wonder who he’ll be, or if that man will want you, or how the two of you will live.”
    In faint surprise, Whitney studied Clarice’s flawless profile. It was she who had always admired her friend’s serene blond looks, her self-containment, her matchless ability to charm and engage others—especially men. “You can have your pick of guys,” Whitney assured her. “All you have to do is choose.”
    “I suppose,” Clarice replied in a distant tone. “But how will I know that he’s the right one?”
    Once again, Whitney felt her own good fortune. She, and not Clarice, was the one Peter Brooks had chosen.

Two
    For the rest of her life, Whitney felt certain, she would recall the moment perfectly, and everything that followed.
    They were in his dorm room at Dartmouth. It was a chill winter evening; snowflakes on the window melted into dots that blurred the darkness outside. Naked, she pulled the wool blanket up to her chin, watching Peter undress.
    The weekend had followed the usual pattern. Like other women’s colleges, Wheaton was a suitcase school: girls left for the weekend, or endured the consolation prize—a steak dinner on Saturday night—which exposed their datelessness. Boys seldom came to Wheaton: they were not allowed in the dorm rooms, and were less adaptable than women when it came to making conversation and fitting in with friends. Besides, alcohol was forbidden—this
was
a school for women, after all. Better to go where the guys were.
    Whitney’s suitemate, Payton Clarke, had their ticket to freedom—a car. So Whitney, Payton, and two other friends wrote their destination in the sign-out book and headed for Dartmouth, hopeful that, if delayed by love or folly past the Sunday evening deadline, they couldsneak back through the windows of co-conspirators. Leaving the snow-covered campus, the girls had felt the elation of escape; Payton turned on the radio, and they began singing along with Aretha, the Beatles, or even dumb stuff like “Kind of a Drag” by the Buckinghams, which Jill’s terrible voice made even funnier. They shared a prized invitation—Dartmouth Winter Carnival.
    Not that these weekends were always a bargain. Nor was this one: as Whitney had anticipated, the huge bonfire that marked the weekend was followed by binge drinking at Peter’s fraternity, during which several otherwise acceptable males devolved into buffoons with the wits of Neanderthals, an orgy of crudity which, for one guy, was capped by public retching. While Peter remained himself throughout,