Free Voices of a Summer Day by Irwin Shaw

and sharing her bed and her bourbon, he could not see himself marrying her. She was pretty in a faded blond way, but given to neurotic bouts of anger and tears and insisted that he eat no meat when he went out with her, because she was a vegetarian and could not stand the sight even of a slice of chicken on a platter. She was the first girl he’d ever known who went to a psychiatrist and, in exchange for the lovemaking and the whiskey, he had to listen to endless reports from the couch, mostly about her father and his sermons and dreams of animals dying in their own blood.
    “Marriage?” Benjamin asked. “Are you out of your mind? Do you know how much money I make a week?”
    “I don’t care,” Miss Prentiss said, turning her refined pale eyes and refined watery breasts in his direction as he lay, with the sheet up to his waist, in the rumpled bed. “I have a little money. And when Daddy dies I’ll have quite a bit more.”
    “Have I ever told you I love you?” Benjamin asked, seeking safety in brutality.
    “Do you love me?”
    “No.”
    “No,” Miss Prentiss said. She sipped calmly at her bourbon. “But I need you.”
    “Not that much, you don’t,” Benjamin said, wondering how he could get up and dressed and out of the apartment without seeming like a cad.
    “You don’t know,” she said. “I have great difficulty in being satisfied. Sexually, I mean.”
    “I hadn’t noticed,” he said.
    “Not with you,” she said. “That’s the point. With other men. The torment I’ve gone through.”
    “What’s so special about me?” Benjamin asked, half-suspicious and half-flattered and not averse to having his dearest illusions about himself confirmed.
    “You’re a Jew,” she said. “I can only have an orgasm with a bestial Jew.”
    “Let’s talk it over some other time, darling,” Benjamin said, getting out of his side of the bed and starting hurriedly to get dressed. “It’s late and I still have two hours work to do before I go to sleep.”
    As he walked toward the subway down the tree-lined street in Greenwich Village where Miss Prentiss lived, a street probably teeming with bestial Jews, Benjamin shook his head. That country club in Pennsylvania, he thought. What a collection!
    He was living in New York because of another woman—a woman he had seen only once for fifteen minutes. It was in a public hospital in Trenton. He had just been graduated from college and had managed to pass the examinations for teaching in grade school in the New Jersey state system and had been called with a hundred other candidates for a physical examination. The doctor turned out to be a short dumpy woman with thick-lensed glasses who looked at the half-naked young men she had to pass on as though they were all suffering from a loathsome disease. Another doctor had already checked Benjamin’s heart, lungs, and eyesight and had noted that Benjamin had had measles and whooping cough and did not limp or have any crippling deformities. The lady doctor merely was weighing and measuring the candidates. When it was Benjamin’s turn, she looked a long time at the scale as it came to rest. Her expression was one of distaste and her voice was disapproving as she called out, “One eighty-seven,” to the clerk at the table next to the scale.
    Benjamin stepped off the scales and picked up his shirt, trousers and shoes, wondering what school he would be assigned to and how long it would be before he could give up teaching for something for which he was better fitted.
    “I’m afraid you’ll be rejected, Mr. Federov,” the lady doctor said.
    “What?” Benjamin asked incredulously. The last time he had been sick had been at the age of six.
    “You’re obese, Mr. Federov,” the lady doctor said.
    “Obese,” he repeated stupidly. He looked down at his powerful hard arms, his tucked-in, narrow waist, at the long, granite-hard halfback’s legs. He was twenty-one years old and he could tear telephone books in half with