2

Winkler, tall and reserved, inclined his silver head and listened, absorbed, while Jack talked. He was kind and friendly, almost ceremoniously polite.

The Manns had greeted him earlier in the evening with misgivings. But he seemed more afraid of them than they of him, and it made them anxious to reassure him. Jack was naturally gregarious, Winkler naturally shy, so it was inevitable that Jack should take over the conversation. He spoke of Page and Sunny Pringle, answering Winkler’s questions about the safe, innocent side of their lives.

“Page was a good-looking boy,” Jack said. “Over six feet, blond, clean-cut. It’s a lucky thing, too, considering how he met Sunny.”

Laura kicked him under the table, the way she did when he spoke too warmly of other men, and poured Winkler some more coffee to distract him.

“He seemed very intelligent,” Winkler told Jack. “It’s hard for a stranger to judge, though, and I only talked with him for a little while in the restaurant where we met. He seemed to need somebody to talk to and I was there. Later he said he wanted you to know that the things you told him during your argument were beginning to make sense now. He said you’d know what he meant.”

Jack nodded. “Where did you meet?” he asked.

“It was a little hash house in Barstow. On Route 66. He was with the loveliest girl I ever saw. His wife?”

“Sunny,” Laura said.

“I’m surprised he asked you to come here,” Jack said. “I didn’t think he had much respect for me after that fight.” Laura gave him a warning frown, and he got up to get the Cointreau and liqueur glasses. While he poured, Winkler asked awkwardly, “Why was it a good thing Page was so handsome when he met Sunny? Didn’t she like a plain face?”

“It wasn’t the face,” Jack said. “It was the rest of him. He was stark naked.”

Winkler blanched a little. He had all the earmarks of a lawful upright man; a good man, but one with ordinary tastes and ordinary morals.

“Could I hear the story?” he said. “I asked for it, and I won’t condemn it.”

“It’s pretty rough, Mr. Winkler,” Jack said candidly. “And we don’t know you. I wouldn’t want the Pringles hurt.”

“They never will be, not by me,” Winkler said with a strange intensity that impressed Jack and Laura. Laura tried to shoot her spouse a strong “no” look, but Winkler had already persuaded him. She saw it coming and she was right. Jack would tell him, even though he was a stranger.

Or perhaps Jack, shrewd and intuitive with people, saw what Laura missed: that Winkler had known Page and Sunny somewhere before and that his feelings for them were warmer and deeper than he admitted.

* * *

The way Page met Sunny was simple and slightly shocking. She was a fair-haired, spirited girl with a lovely face. She was a college freshman and hadn’t learned to handle her emotions yet, but she had the willow-limbed grace and softness that men admire, and enormous charm. Her eyes were a double-take true green, and she had been “Sunny” ever since the first pubescent boy had noticed that kindling smile of hers.

It was mid-October, an Indian summer afternoon, smoky and golden and warm enough to work up a sweat. Sunny was playing baseball at Lake o’ the Woods with her sorority, fielding badly but enthusiastically.

Toward the end of the game she plunged through the underbrush at the edge of the field, chasing the ball, and there was Page. He was standing on the strip of beach bordering the lake, laughing and drying himself roughly with his flannel shirt. He was bare as a winter tree and he saw Sunny at the same moment she saw him. There was a startled silence and then the friend with Page, who was Jack Mann, his roommate, said, “See you later, children. You won’t be wanting a chaperone.”

Page threw his shirt on the ground and stared at Sunny. “Come on in,” he said softly. “The water’s fine.”

Sunny threw him an enchanting smile. “I lost my ball,” she said, embarrassed but fascinated.

Jack spotted it as he retreated from the scene and tossed it to Page. Page held it out, daring her to come and get it. And Sunny, with her heart beating hard and making her breathless, walked up to him and held out a bold hand. He dropped the ball into it, while she looked him up and down to show off her sophistication. But she discovered, with a bright blush, that she hadn’t any.

He laughed and she turned and ran, clutching the ball. But at the bushes she looked back. “You’re beautiful,” she cried. He kept laughing, watching her until she disappeared through the bushes and back to her game.

They met once again that day, when Page and Jack walked past her group on the way to Page’s ramshackle runabout. Jack climbed in while Page approached Sunny, who was cooking a wiener to death while she kept her eyes on him.

“I’m Page Pringle,” he said.

“How do you do?” Sunny answered solemnly. “I’m Sunny Rotheli.”

They smiled at each other. “Your hot dog is burning up,” he remarked.

She snatched her stick out of the fire and flipped the dog over her head into the leaves. “Oh!” she said.

He touched her fair face with his hand. “I’ll call you, Rotheli,” he said.

“You do that, Pringle,” she said, half irked and half infatuated.

Page gave Jack a crazy ride back to town.

* * *

They got off to such a fine start that it seemed like a pre-destined romance, if there are such things. They made a perfect couple, in a wonderful old-fashioned way, complementing each other. They even looked perfect: two blond heads, two pairs of green eyes, two quick smiles.

“You look like an old married couple,” Jack commented.

“What do you know about old married couples?” Page said.

But Jack, who was a good bit older than his undergraduate friend, insisted it was true. Page and Sunny took to each other in a way that seemed almost chemical, adopting each other’s gestures and expressions with a sort of passionate admiration. For those first few months the affair was fast and thrilling, even slightly delirious.

* * *

Their first date was a careful game of hints and titillations and sudden sweet impressions. He liked her voice, the firm lines of her body, her warmth. They would both have preferred to sit and look at each other without speaking, but they felt the necessity to impress each other with talk and were afraid to be quiet—until late in the evening when silence unexplainably became possible ... and lovely, and intimate.

They were sitting in Page’s car—“Bucephalus,” he called it, the rumbling warhorse. The cold autumn air touched them through a score of cracks in the doors and windows and made them pull closer together for warmth. Page put his arms around her and blessed the weather.

“You feel so sweet,” he told her.

“I’m not sweet,” she objected. “That’s for little girls.”

“How old are you, little girl?”

“Eighteen.”

“That’s pretty old.”

She sighed. “All right, seventeen, but only for six more weeks. And I know my way around, which I would have thought you’d notice. How old are you?”

“Twenty-eight. I’m a vet. Korea.” He kissed her neck, rubbing a hand in her bright hair, and then pulled away slightly to see her face. She was serious about “sweetness” being for children. But she had it, and in spite of her best efforts it showed.

Page could just begin to glimpse it as he held her in his arms and felt her pulsing against him in the dark. That was when the welcome silence fell, and neither of them worried about it. It was good to sit there and just hold each other, feeling each other’s breath or the tickle of a moving eyelash. So good that Page felt a curious sense of foreboding when Sunny’s closeness began to excite him. He almost wished it wouldn’t happen; not this fast, anyway. He held her tenderly, trying to control it, and wondered why in the name of reason he should feel a singing in his head over this pretty girl, superficially like so many other pretty girls he had known.

I want her to be perfect, he thought. I’m afraid she’ll disappoint me. Or maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m afraid I’m not good enough for her, good enough at love to satisfy her. And having challenged himself on a very touchy point, he kissed her ardently.

She reacted with a moan of pleasure that told him she had been restlessly waiting for it. It was almost too much. She went after his mouth like a bounty-hunter on a hot trail and he said, “Hey! Slow down, honey. Don’t rush it.”

Her face had a familiar determination and he asked, “Sunny, are you a virgin?”

“Heavens, no!” She was insulted. But she stopped pulling on his collar and trying to kiss him.

He let her discomfiture build a moment and then lifted her face and said, “It’s all right. I don’t mind. It’s a nice change.”

“You think I’m lying!” she exclaimed. “Page, I’m not a virgin. Oh, I’m not trying to brag, I think that’s crude. But you have a right to know the truth.”

“Then tell me the truth.” He said it gently, smiling, and offending her again with his fatherly attitude.

But the feel of his big arms around her softened her up a little. “Well,” she said reluctantly. “I’ve done everything else but.” She could feel him laughing silently at her and with an angry jerk she started to get out of the car. But he pulled her back.

“No, honey, don’t be mad. I didn’t mean to laugh.” But he was still laughing.

She struggled for possession of her hands, to give him a good whack, but he wouldn’t give them up. And suddenly, to her dismay, she felt a strong erotic spasm in response to his superior strength. At once she stiffened. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of exciting her, not when he didn’t play fair. In a small voice she asked, “How did you know I’m a virgin?”

“You laid it on too thick, Sunny.”

“Laid what on?”

“The sophistication bit.”

For a moment she thought she might cry with humiliation. And then laughter spilled over in her and saved her. “I must look like an idiot,” she said, embracing him again.

“There’s so much about you I don’t know,” Page said. “I want to know everything.”

“I’m not at all exciting,” she said naïvely.

“The hell you aren’t.” She could tell from the way he was breathing that she had said the wrong thing again.

“Well, my life isn’t exciting,” she corrected herself.

“It is now,” he said and she felt his firm, cool hand slip under her sweater. Beneath his strong fingers she felt a melting delight and suddenly the famous riddle of life seemed dazzlingly clear.

She yielded to him just to see what it was all about. And the brief surrender became permanent, a lifetime commitment.

He pushed her head back on the car seat, kissing her, catching her hands again and making them do strange things in strange places. She gave up trying to stop him then, from that night forward. The feel of his hard male body moving against her brought her to life all over and made her need him terribly; need things she had never even tried before.

It was Page who restrained her; Page who made her hands do what her body was aching to do instead until she began to cry with frustration. It had been an electric shock to her that she could feel like this about a man; about this man; and she couldn’t be content with going only halfway.

“Page, please,” she begged, but they had petted too ardently; it was too late. He collapsed beside her, answering her with sleepy kisses. When he came to himself somewhat, he wiped her wet cheeks with his fingers.

“Sunny?” he whispered, surprised. “Did I hurt you?”

“I wish you had,” she said.

“Darling, I couldn’t. Not like this. When it happens I want it to be right: a beautiful thing in a beautiful place. You deserve that. I’m no animal.”

“It should have been tonight,” she said, quivering.

“No.” He amazed himself. With any other girl he would have demanded it, but he didn’t want it that way with Sunny.

“You think I’m a born whore, don’t you?” she said tearfully.

“A born angel is more like it,” he said, holding her tightly. They both felt reckless and strange, loath to leave each other but faced with a curfew. Almost strangers and almost lovers, they looked at each other by the light of the street lamp outside, and said simultaneously, “I love you.” The coincidence of it startled them.

Page buried his face in her shoulder. “And I don’t even know you,” he marveled.

“You will,” she promised happily. “After we’re married.”