The Unwitting Read Online Free PDF Page A

coat. “This wasn’t a good idea.”
    He put his hand on my arm. “Actually, it was. But just for the record, I’m sorry about ‘The Rich Boy’ comment. It was patronizing.”
    “Oh, no, I love being lectured on the American canon.”
    “So I noticed.”
    “Was I that obvious?”
    “Your face is an open book.”
    “And what’s the story now?”
    “The plot thickens. You’re less angry at me than you were a few minutes ago, but you don’t want to admit it. In fact, you’re beginning to like me.”
    “You have to get over that excessive modesty.”
    “You’re drawn to diffident men?”
    I had to smile, finally. “No.”
    “I didn’t think so.”
    We were still sparring, but something else was going on beneath. Not innuendo. It was more primitive than that. He reached across the table to stub out his cigarette, and his tweed jacket and shirt cuff pulled back from his wrist. I noticed the dusting of fine dark hair that curled around his leather watchband. Woody had been as smooth and hairless as a baby. I went on staring at his wrist. It struck me as grown-up; as more than grown-up, as virile.
    He asked if I wanted another drink. I looked at my watch and reminded him of the dorm curfew.
    “I thought you said you were a vet.”
    “There’s no housing for women vets. All you men and your wives have taken it.”
    “Don’t blame me. No wife in sight.” He hesitated. “You couldtake an overnight. I have a room in a boardinghouse on a Hundred and Twenty-First Street.”
    The suggestion was impossible. I had just gotten my period. I had just gotten my period! I still could not believe my luck. Besides, I knew what he was thinking. A girl who had been in the service had been around. He was wrong about that. The officers who were shipping out had reeked of desperation. The ones who were staying behind were on vacation from their real lives. I had been careful to steer clear.
    I told him I had to get back to the dorm and watched him take in the answer.
    “Now you’re the one with the telltale face,” I said.
    “You see heartbreak, right?”
    “I see you-can’t-blame-a-guy-for-trying.”
    Outside the bar, a new front had come through and the sky had cleared. He reached an arm around my shoulders. It seemed only civil to fit myself into the curve it made. Besides, a wind had come up, and the temperature had dropped.
    In front of the dormitory, several couples clung together in the glare of the lights that were supposed to be as sex-repressing as the saltpeter rumored to be in the Women’s Army Corps mess food, and were just as ineffective. He let go of my shoulders and turned to face me. We stood that way for a moment, only inches apart, as oblivious to the other couples as the couples were to us. I was waiting for what came next. He surprised me. With both hands, he opened his trench coat wide, as if he were holding a blanket, and wrapped it around me. I was engulfed.
    He bent his face to mine. His tongue tasted of bourbon and peanuts. The flavor was not unpleasant, even secondhand. I could feel his erection through his flannel trousers and my coat and woolen skirt and girdle. Somewhere in the back of my mind, a question floated aimlessly. What kind of a girl starts the day in love with one man and ends it inside the coat of another?

Two

    I THOUGHT I HAD learned my lesson with Woody, but I had learned nothing. If I wasn’t careful, I would turn into my mother, who had bet her life on a string of unreliable men, starting with my father, who’d disappeared before I was born, though they had married. I hadn’t taken her word for it but had gotten a copy of my birth certificate. I never told her that. Most kids keep secrets to protect themselves. I’d done my share of that, but I’d also kept them to protect her. It wasn’t altruism, only self-interest. Distraught was my mother’s natural state. I didn’t want to push her over the line into despair.
    Don’t misunderstand me. She was not a terrible