When She Was Good by Philip Roth Page A

might not like the idea now any more than he had in high school, but the money Roy had saved in the service was his own, and he could spend it just as he liked. The family car had to be asked for days in advance and had to be back in the garage at a specific time every night; only with a car of his own would he ever be truly independent. With a car of his own he might just give this Littlefield a run for her money—once he had made sure that she wasn’t just an extrovert and nothing else … And if she was? Should that stop him? Something about the muscles in her legs told Roy that Monkey Littlefield either had gone all the way already, or would, for an older guy who knew how to play his cards right.
    … Up in the Aleutians it seemed that almost every guy in the barracks had gotten some girl to go all the way, except Roy. Since it didn’t hurt anyone, and wasn’t so much a lie as an exaggeration, he had intimated that he himself had gone all the way pretty regularly with this girl from the University of Minnesota. One night after lights out, Lingelbach, who really had the gift of gab, was saying that the trouble with most girls in the U.S.A. was that they thought sex was something obscene, when it was probably the most beautiful experience, physical or spiritual, that a person could ever have. And because it was dark, and he was lonely—and angry too—Roy had said yeah, that was why he had finally dumped this girl from the University of Minnesota, she thought sex was something to be ashamed of.
    “And you know something,” came a southern voice from the end of the barracks, “in later life those are the ones wind up being the worst whores.”
    Then Cuzka, from Los Angeles, whom Roy couldn’t stand, began to shoot his fat mouth off. To hear him talk, he knew every sex secret there ever was. All you have to do to make a girl spread her chops, said Cuzka, is to tell her you love her. You just keep saying it over and over and finally (“I don’t care who they are, I don’t care if they’re Maria Montez”) they can’t resist. Tell them you love them and tell them to trust you. How do you think Errol Flynn does it? asked Cuzka, who acted most of the time as though he had a direct pipeline to Hollywood. Just keep saying, “Trust me, baby, trust me,” and meanwhile start unzipping the old fly. Then Cuzka began to tell how his brother, a mechanic in San Diego, had once banged this fifty-year-old whore with no teeth, and soon Roy felt pretty lousy about saying what he had out loud. Skinny and scared as Bev had been, she was really a good kid. How could she help it if her parents were strict? The next day he was able partially to console himself over his betrayal by remembering that he hadn’t actually mentioned her name.
    Lloyd Bassart had come to the conclusion that Roy ought to apprentice himself to a printer over in Winnisaw. His fatherliked to say the word “apprentice” just about as much as Roy hated to hear him say it. The knowledge of this aversion in his son didn’t stop him, however: Roy ought to apprentice himself to a printer over in Winnisaw; he knew his way around a print shop, and it was an honorable trade in which a man could make a decent living. He was sure that the Bigelow brothers could find a place for Roy—and not because he was Lloyd Bassart’s boy but because of the skills the young man actually possessed. Artists starve, as anyone knows, unless they happen to be Rembrandt, which he didn’t think Roy was. As for enrolling in college, given Roy’s grades in high school, his father could not imagine him suddenly distinguishing himself at an institution of higher learning by his scholarly or intellectual abilities. Though Alice Bassart pointed out that stranger things had happened, her husband did not seem to believe they would in this instance.
    Lloyd Bassart was the printing teacher at the high school-not to mention the right arm of the principal, Donald “Bud” Brunn, the one-time