Lilith by J. R. Salamanca Page B

each other again.”
    “No. I want to know.” She made a slight negative motion of her head and watched me calmly and alertly.
    “Well, when I left here the other evening, I didn’t go right home. I went to see . . . someone else. And—well, you know what I wanted you to do—I did it with her, Laura.” I stared at the ground, speaking slowly and miserably. Laura sat silently for a moment and then said with a soft bitterness which I had never heard in her voice before, “I thought you didn’t like any of those other girls. I thought you weren’t interested in any of the things they liked. Well, it looks as if you’re interested in
some
of the things they like.”
    “No, it wasn’t any of those other girls at school,” I said. “It was—well, somebody you don’t know at all, Laura.”
    She pressed her lips together tightly with emotion. “And I guess that’s where you’ve been all this time. All this time I’ve been waiting for you to come back. I guess that’s why you don’t come to see me any more. I guess you think you’re in love with her or something, don’t you?”
    “Oh, no, Laura. It wasn’t anything like that. I thought you wouldn’t want to see
me;
that’s why I didn’t come back.”
    She turned again to face me and asked with steady, quiet intensity, “Do you love her, Vincent?”
    “No. Oh, my gosh. It wasn’t a
girl
at all, Laura. It was a woman. A woman I used to deliver groceries to.”
    “A
woman
?”
    “Yes. I went back to her house after I left here, and I did it with her. I mean I didn’t force her to, or anything. I could tell she wanted me to. And she’s pretty old. Maybe as old as my grandmother. That’s what I had to tell you. That’s why I said I couldn’t see you any more.”
    I sat silently, clenching my laced fingers together, waiting for her to revile me. But Laura expressed neither the outrage nor disgust which I expected; she sat quietly, and after a pause in which she seemed to have regained her composure completely she lifted her hand to brush her hair back thoughtfully and said, “Well, that’s different, then. As long as you don’t love her, I don’t really think it matters. I don’t see why we can’t just go on the way we were.”
    This seemed to me so insensitive, so harrowingly equivocal a thing to say that I could not reply (I have never been able to reply to it), but sat in a kind of afflicted silence. This was broken in a moment by the voice of Laura’s mother. She leaned out of the upstairs window, her face contorted with grief, and called down shrilly, “Laura—Laura, come up right away, please! I just can’t make him answer me. I’m afraid—I’m afraid he’s gone.”
    Laura was out of the glider in an instant, murmuring a swift apology to me as she ran across the lawn toward the steps. I did not leave immediately; when she had gone I sat for some time in the glider and looked up at the open window of the old man’s room, watching the white curtains blow out into the yard gently, jubilantly, from the soiled sills.

AFTER this my feelings toward Laura were never the same. Whatever intimacy or ardor may have existed between us was almost entirely extinguished, and I no longer held any hope for its development into the profound and meaningful attachment which I had once thought possible. I still saw her occasionally; I would walk home from school with her sometimes, and I think we went once or twice to a motion picture together, sitting on her front porch afterward and talking for a while in a constrained and artificial way. But the only moment of anything like true feeling that I experienced with her again was on the morning, a few months later, when I left Stonemont to join the army Laura came to the station to see me off and brought me a box lunch which she had packed for me to eat on the train. My grandparents were there also—both with wet eyes, looking suddenly terribly small and old—so that it was possible for us to speak only