hundred and fifty miles. It would have been humiliating to have had her first sexual
experience with someone as ignorant as she was. With Ron she was getting a master. After
tonight she would not be calling herself Saint Catherine any longer. Instead she would
probably be known as “Catherine the Great.” And this time she would know what the
“Great” stood for. She would be fantastic in bed. The trick was not to panic. All the
wonderful things she had read about in the little green books she used to keep hidden from
her mother and father were about to happen to her. Her body was going to be an organ
filled with exquisite music. Oh, she knew it would hurt the first time; it always did. But
she would not let Ron know. She would move her behind around a lot because men hated
for a woman to just lie there, motionless. And when Ron penetrated her, she would bite
her lip to conceal the pain and cover it up with a sexy cry.
“What?”
She turned to Ron, appalled, and realized she had cried aloud. “I—I didn’t say
anything.”
“You gave a kind of funny cry.”
“Did I?” She forced a little laugh.
“You’re a million miles away.”
She analyzed the line and decided it was bad. She must be more like Jean-Anne.
Catherine put her hand on his arm and moved closer. “I’m right here,” she said.
She tried to make her voice throaty, like Jean Arthur in Calamity Jane.
Ron looked down at her, confused, but the only thing he could read in her face was
an eager warmth.
Lum Fong’s was a dreary-looking, run-of-the-mill Chinese restaurant located under
the Elevated. All through dinner they could hear the rumble of the trains as they ran
overhead rattling the dishes. The restaurant looked like a thousand other anonymous
Chinese restaurants all over America, but Catherine carefully absorbed the details of the
booth they were seated in, committing to memory the cheap, spotted wallpaper, the
chipped china teapot, the soy-sauce stains on the table.
A little Chinese waiter came up to the table and asked if they wanted a drink.
Catherine had tasted whiskey a few times in her life and hated it, but this was New Year’s
Eve, the Fourth of July, the End of her Maidenhood. It was fitting to celebrate.
“I’ll have an old-fashioned with a cherry in it.” Cherry! Oh, God! It was a dead
giveaway.
“Scotch and soda,” Ron said.
The waiter bowed himself away from the table. Catherine wondered if it were true
that Oriental women were built slantwise.
“I don’t know why we never became friends before,” Ron was saying. “Everyone
says you’re the brightest girl in the whole goddamned university.”