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Show 116 instep and she pulled it away. She had been doing that a lot lately and he considered telling her about it sometime when they were making love just to see how she handled discovery. He wondered if there was a unit for measuring guilt like there was for noise or light. This much later he wasn't sure what his intentions had been when he had found himself hidden and safe in Los Angeles again, but he suspected guilt had made him reckless the way intense light made you insensitive to color or the certainty of death made you calm. Without knowing exactly what it meant he'd decided, he had gotten laid that fall by a Mormon girl from Van Nuys whose fiance was on a mission in France, and when he went home for Christmas he went skiing both Sundays and alluded vaguely to telephone conversations with the bishop when his parents asked. They would talk for certain at Easter, he said. At Easter, however, he came down with a raging flu that lasted all week-he described the symptoms over the telephone with long pauses to gasp for strength-and a friend had put off going home herself to nurse him in the apartment she shared with another girl, after which he felt sordid and corrupt because he had never done it for an entire week before without leaving the house. He was never sure at exactly what point he had become a classifiably inactive Mormon, but the last summer he was home, when his mother cried every time he came in late and his father bitched that he never talked to them, never bothered telling them what his plans were when he finished school, what he was doing now, acted like a damned distant relative, he realized there was not a single thing he could tell them that wouldn't hurt them, and he suspected then that it had already happened. They came out for his graduation the following spring, and he introduced them to Yvonne, hoping their guilty secret did not show up in his face. They didn't ask if she was a member of the church, which relieved him but also made him |