of him was glad whenever he could tell Alexander truthfully that he did not have the money for some deal. Half of him was pleased he did not have it. So why not dispense it all on and around Carol? What difference did it make? It was not that he expected some return from it.
Carol. She was quite an interesting girl, Carol was. In her own right. And so now, sitting over the wheel, behind the sweep of the wipers in the rain, he was thinking. Exactly what he had hoped not to do,
Was there ever a woman who did not always already have some man on the string, in her own right, that she was committed to? None. Or very damn few. They were just like men. The idea of being alone, really alone, terrified them. So they clung onto whatever man they had, until they found another that suited them better.
So, the only real alternative to taking a woman away from some other man (who might not want her any more than she wanted him, until he found her being taken away) was the rebound. And she was rare. A woman who had broken up with someone, and was really free. For a short while. Usually the life-span of a rebound did not exceed three months, at the outside. By then she would have found a new one. Rebounding was all in the timing. You had to know, quickly, when not to waste your time. Winch had been quite a rebounder in his day, back when women really meant something to him.
It was right after the first time he had gone down on Carol that she had first mentioned her boyfriend to him.
They were both lying nude on the bed in the Claridge hotel room. He had not yet taken the little apartment. Carol was lying all sprawled out flat, arms and legs spread wide, staring at the ceiling. “Most men don’t like to do that,” she said faintly.
Winch had to smile. “You mean, most American men. I suppose not. I like it. I like doing it, and I like giving pleasure.”
She had such a magnificent young body. Young breasts, flat hips, prominent crotch bone mound. So unworn by living.
“Why do you think they don’t like it?”
“Oh,” Winch said lazily. “I suppose it’s our American religious training. American Christianity. Sex is all scrambled up in with our religion. Evil, dirty, filthy. Guilt. It shouldn’t be. It’s all very primitive. Medieval. But it’s all tied in with our puritanism.”
“I never thought of it quite like that,” she said. He felt a certain pause of intensity in the air, before she spoke on. She was still staring at the ceiling. But stiffly now. “My boyfriend—up at school—doesn’t like it at all, and won’t do it,” Carol said.
Instinctively Winch sensed he was expected to react to this. A test balloon. From where he lay on his elbow, looking over, looking down at her, he saw her eyes roll toward him once, then flick back to her close scrutiny of the ceiling. Her one cockeye seemed to waver around for a focus up there, on it.
He smiled. “He won’t?” he said, easily. “He doesn’t?” He let a little pause develop. “Well, he’s very young yet.”
“Yes he is!” Carol said vehemently. Her eye focus never left the ceiling. “Did you ever go to a whorehouse?”
Winch had to laugh. “Me? Yes. Sure. A lot of times.”
“He goes to a whorehouse a great deal.”
Winch chewed on this a moment. He was, for no reason he could isolate, enjoying himself immensely. No jealousy, no anguish. No pain. “He probably tells you he goes a great deal more than he actually does,” he said.
“Why?”
“To show off.”
“It’s the only way I can climax,” she said. “What you did. Unless I play with myself.”
“In my experience, my vast experience,” Winch smiled, “very few women can come from simple fucking.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t think there’s anything wrong with me, then?”
Winch shook his head. Climax. That must be one of her college words. He had noted that she never would say the word come. It had struck him, suddenly, that perhaps she might be lying to him about the boyfriend’s whorehouses. Could she be lying to him about the boyfriend, too, then?
She wasn’t lying. “I like to do it that way, too,” she said. “Like it. Like to do it. But I’d never dare try it, with him. Never dare even suggest it.”