Jim seemed to like me. He thought I was funny. He’d not been exposed to much irony in his life, but my little jokes and jabs amused him.
After a few weeks of courtship, he began kissing me. That was pleasant, but he did not take further liberties with my body. I didn’t ask for anything more, either. I didn’t reach for him in a hungry way, but only because I felt no hunger for him. I felt no hunger for anything anymore. I had no access anymore to my appetites. It was as if all my passion and my urges were stored up in a locker somewhere else—somewhere very far away. Maybe at Grand Central Station. All I could do was go along with whatever Jim was doing. Whatever he wanted was fine.
He was solicitous. He asked if I was comfortable with various temperatures in various rooms. He affectionately started calling me “Vee”—but only after asking permission to give me a nickname. (It made me uncomfortable that he inadvertently settled on the same nickname my brother had always called me, but I said nothing, and allowed it.) He helped my mother repair a broken horse jump, and she appreciated him for it. He helped my father transplant some rosebushes.
Jim started coming around in the evenings to play cards with my family. It was not unpleasant. His visits provided a nice break from listening to the radio or reading the evening papers. I was aware that my parents were breaking a social taboo on my behalf—namely: consorting with an employee in their home. But they received him graciously. There was something warm and safe about those evenings.
My father came to like him more and more.
“That Jim Larsen,” he would say, “has the best head on his shoulders in this whole town.”
As for my mother, she probably wished that Jim had more social standing, but what could you do? My mother herself had married neither above nor below her class, but at exact eye level to it—finding in my father a man of the same age, education, wealth, and breeding as herself. I’m sure she wished I would do the same. But she accepted Jim, and for my mother, acceptance would always have to be a stand-in for enthusiasm.
Jim wasn’t dashing, but he could be romantic in his own way. One day when we were driving around town, he said, “With you in my car, I feel that I am the envy of all eyes.”
Where did he come up with a line like that? I wonder. That was sweet, wasn’t it?
Next thing you know, we were engaged.
I don’t know why I agreed to marry Jim Larsen, Angela.
No, that’s not true.
I do know why I agreed to marry Jim Larsen—because I felt sordid and vile, and he was clean and honorable. I thought maybe I could erase my bad deeds with his good name. (A strategy that has never worked for anyone, by the way—not that people don’t keep trying it.)
And I liked Jim, in some ways. I liked him because he wasn’t like anybody from the previous year. He didn’t remind me of New York City. He didn’t remind me of the Stork Club, or Harlem, or a smoky bar down in Greenwich Village. He didn’t remind me of Billy Buell, or Celia Ray, or Edna Parker Watson. He damn sure didn’t remind me of Anthony Roccella. (Sigh.) Best of all, he didn’t remind me of myself—a dirty little whore.
When I spent time with Jim, I could be just who I was pretending to be—a nice girl who worked in her father’s office, and who had no past history worth mentioning. All I had to do was follow Jim’s lead and act like him, and I became the last person in the world I had to think about—and that’s exactly how I wanted it.
And so I slid toward marriage, like a car sliding off the road on a scree of loose gravel.
By now, it was the autumn of 1941. Our plan was to get married the following spring, when Jim would have enough money saved to buy us a house we could share comfortably with his mother. He had purchased a small engagement ring that was pretty enough, but that made my hand look like a stranger’s.
Now that we were engaged, our sensual activities escalated. Now when we parked the Buick out by the lake, he would take off my shirt, and delight himself with my breasts—making sure at every turn, of