have been worse than it was, worse than It was later to become, if it hadn’t been for the great compensating constant of Stella. Stella was the poetess-priestess of an island sanctuary, and if there were imperfections in her role of Sappho, there were also subtle mechanisms of the mind to reject recognition of them.
The men, for instance. God, the constant flow of panting men! Even they had been reduced by the devious mind to fantasy figures without body or place in the real scheme of things. One could even ignore, thanks to the adroit mind, Stella’s imperception, her insensitivity to the true character of the relationship of which she was part—her pretty, inept confusion when she tried, on rare occasions, to understand Kathy’s failure to display the orthodox signs of transformation beyond the intangible demarcation line.
“Kathy,” she’d said, “why is it you never go places like the other girls? You’re much prettier than any of them.”
“But I do, Stella. I go lots of places.”
“Please don’t be obtuse, darling. You know what I mean. Why don’t you go out with a nice boy once in a while? You’re old enough now. It would be good for you.”
“I’m not interested in boys, Stella.”
“Well, that’s the point. You ought to be interested in boys. And I happen to know that there are a great many boys who are interested in you. It isn’t that you don’t have opportunities. Look, darling. It isn’t natural for a pretty girl to be alone all the time. Will you please tell me why you have no interest in boys?”
And Kathy’s heart cried out in silence, Oh, Stella, can’t you see that I’m not alone at all? Can’t you see that I can’t be alone while I’m with you, and that I’m with you every minute of my life, because even when we’re physically apart I’m still with you in my mind, and that I can never be alone so long as you are here to touch or to think about? Oh, Stella, Stella, sweet shining Stella, can’t you see anything or understand anything or share with me just a little this feeling that I have?
But all she’d said was, “I don’t know, Stella. I’m just not interested.”
Then Stella had shrugged and laughed and looked prettily frustrated, because naturally she had this intimation that everything was not quite as it should have been, but she never knew, never actually knew, and it was fantastic, looking back, that she could sense this thing but never actually recognize it until it was much too late.
Kenny. Kenny Renowski. What right did he have to come filtering back after all this time from the dark and distant March day when he had been fixed for her as the symbol of a constant threat and, even more disturbing, of self-revelation? The March day of the wet, gray early spring when she had disposed of him once and for all, and had consigned him, she had hoped, to the oblivion of total repression. Damn him to hell, what right did he have to return from the dead by tenuous association with a cheap little drug store clerk to molest her now, at this precarious time, when she was poised on the verge of destruction and needed all her faculties for present trouble?
He had been one of the facile boys. One of the complacent and arrogant little aristocrats of adolescence that rise like cream—or scum, as she thought of them—to the surface of the human volume of every high school. She had been pretty, and he had been, of course, irresistible. Or so he had considered himself, and in the beginning it had been fun. It had been great fun to watch his obvious advances against her indifference, to follow with a mild sadistic pleasure the progressive stages of his incredulity and disintegration as he found the indifference to be impregnable. Oh, Christ, it was really funny! A lonely, withdrawn girl of no position, however pretty, totally unimpressed by his attention! It was really quite impossible. It wasn’t supposed to be that way at all. She was supposed to melt, to submit, to acknowledge his charm with appropriate concessions. She was supposed to wet herself with joy. And it was fine fun for a while, before the fun was killed, to watch the formula of conquest reverse itself. To see him debased by a green and sappy passion. To see him watching her in revolting humility, groveling inwardly, pleading with dog’s eyes.
She wondered how far she should permit the ridiculous business to go, and she decided that the limit should be imposed by her own stomach. So long, that is, as her perverse pleasure in his silly suffering was a larger factor than her revulsion. So she let it develop to its natural climax, and in the end it was she who suffered more. It was she who finally confronted for the first time, thanks to the catalyst of his fumbling aggression, a reality far more disturbing than a temporary glandular frustration.
He had fallen into the practice of standing on a certain corner to watch her pass on her way home from school. She never looked at him directly, but she was acutely aware of him, and she relished the sharp turmoil of emotions his presence aroused—the confusion of contempt and curiosity and genuine animus. He worked so hard to achieve a studied casualness, as if it were the purest coincidence that he just happened to be at that spot evening after evening at the very time she would be passing it. And finally, as she had known he would, he made a move.
It was this wet gray day in March with water dripping from the branches of trees and standing in little puddles on the sidewalk and in the street. In the air there was the lift, the raw promise, the damned lie of spring, and as she passed with a load of books under her arm, he fell in beside her and said, “Hello, Kathy.”
She increased the cadence of her steps a bit. “Hello,” she said.
“Let me carry your books, Kathy.”
She felt his hands on them, and she clamped them more tightly against her side. “No, thanks. I can carry them.”
“Oh, come on, Kathy. Don’t be like that.”
He tugged at the books, and rather than make a foolish issue of it, she released them suddenly.
“Oh, well. Go ahead and carry them if you want to.” She could sense at once the subtle change in his personality. Already, with such a nominal concession, his bruised ego began to recover, to reorganize itself along a line of dominance. She caught in the corner of her eye the change in his expression, the quick little lift of his chin, and her contempt for him swelled within her, assuming the proportions of exorbitant mockery. She speculated on the extent of his consternation if there were all of a sudden a contact of mental telepathy between them, and the thought prompted in her a wild urge to hilarious laughter.
“You’re a funny girl, Kathy,” he said.
“Am I?”
“What I mean is, you don’t seem to mix much. Sometimes it seems as if you just don’t like anyone.”
“Maybe I don’t.”
“Not even me?”
“Why should I make an exception of you?”
“I don’t know. Anyhow, I like you. I think you’re the prettiest girl in school.”
“Do you?”
“I just said so, didn’t I? Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”
“Not particularly.”
“You see what I mean? Why can’t you be nice to a guy?”
“If you don’t like the way I am, you can give me my books and leave. Nobody’s holding you here.”
Again from the corner of her eye, she saw the impact of her words on his ego, the swift collapse of the slight bloat that had developed
