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Show AH, SWIMMERSI 235 rising everywhere and caught by the sun into a soft golden cloud, almost a halo. But I saw it another way too diat summer (once my eyes started opening) when she sat in the sun to dry it. She sat on a kitchen chair on die board walk in back of her back porch and brushed it until it caught the sun and reflected it with die brilliant sheen of metal. Yes, I was half in love with diat hair, but of course not with a grown and married woman. But I had seen her for the first time in a way which I have never forgotten, her lean and long young legs, and if it was several weeks before I saw her again to remember it was because I was criminally self-absorbed. True, my voice became less hesitantly and more predictably baritone but my life was still swinging on its physiological axis and I felt like a compass whose needle has decided to point soudi. Futilely I tried to resist - and yet there were moments when I felt as if I were finding die form and objective of my life, like a hound learning to point At girls. Ted Marshall was fine, boys were fine, the best, but it was Shirley who swung my heart like a May basket. How I loved her, blindly - yet I delayed a week asking her to the box supper, for there in die spring of my eighdi grade it occurred to me mat this wholesome girl, this kind as any young lady, this pure halo-bound child, this cynosure of beauty, dus apotheosis - this she, she had a terrible power. With no more than a smile and one littie word, no, she could shatter me like an old lightbulb; and mere I'd be, my ego burst, my poor fine soul twisted and exposed. She didn't say no. In fact, she gave me every encouragement short of tripping me and holding me down and Indian torturing my question out of me. But that was totally irrelevant: I loved her. Yet at die same time I deceived her constantly and eagerly without a twitch of shame or remorse, almost every night in my pre-sleep dreams. I was a grown man (eighteen at least), this was the Wild West (Zane Greyish), and she was - well, different from Shirley. Instead of a dress this one wore buckskin breeches, threw a leg over a saddle, used guns and rode hell-for-leather. As I recall, the only feminine dung about her was that she was too weak to defend herself against horde after horde of villains, which allowed me to save her from death or, preferably, from a fate worse than death, risking my life of course, which in turn allowed her to see the magnanimity, the nobility of my soul. Then we rode off together into a sexless sunset. Yet I deceived her too, deceived both Shirley and my dream without the slightest hesitation any chance I got or grabbed, albeit with some shame, for this time the feeling was erotic and die object any photo of undraped female flesh I could get my eyes on. Promising some of that, one movie I remember was about the illicit love of a sculptor and his model, die ad pictured die nude statue he had made of her, and I fought widi my modier, and won, and went. After roughly five hours they got around to diis big scene when she first posed 73 |