Free Superior Women by Alice Adams Page B

more malicious toward Lavinia than she should be. Whatever was going on between Lavinia and Gordon (and Megan sometimes caught a vague sense that Lavinia was not quite as “sure of him” as she sounded), it is probably easier to bear a lover’s death than his living absence in your life, which is the case with Megan, who now hears from George Wharton perhaps once a month. One beer at the Oxford Grill and then some furious necking, somewhere, and then a miserable month or so of silence. Megan has wished that George were dead; if he were dead she would behave much better, she is sure. “I’m surprised Lavinia isn’t wearing black,” she now says, quite viciously, to Cathy.
    Cathy looks at her and giggles, as in a somewhat academic way she says, “Actually in some cultures white is the mourning color. And she is wearing mostly white these days, if you’ll notice.”
    “God, what she must spend on clothes.” This remark does not make Megan feel guilty: it is okay to envy someone’s large clothes allowance, whereas it is certainly not okay to envy the death of a friend’s lover.
    Cathy suddenly giggles again, clearly at some random thought, as she asks, “Did you ever read those really old books about girls’ boarding schools? Grace Harlow or someone? There were a lot of them at a resort we used to go to. Anyway, there were always four girls. One beautiful and rich and wicked, and one big and fat and jolly. That’s Lavinia and Peg, of course.”
    “I’m not the big jolly one?” Megan asks, somewhat anxiously.
    “You’re not so jolly. And Peg is much bigger than you are.”
    “Well, thanks.”
    Cathy goes on. “I’m not too clear about the other two. I think one was poor and virtuous and the other one was very smart, or some combination like that.”
    Megan laughs. “Well, I’m poor and you’re virtuous, and God knows both of us are smart, so I guess it’ll work out all right?”
    “I guess. But is Lavinia wicked, really?”
    In a speculative way they regard each other, and then, again, they both begin to laugh. Later Megan wonders: was Cathy thinking of the four girls in those books when she said that it would be better if there were four of them?
    One of the things that Megan thinks about a lot, that spring, is her own virginity, her “virtue.” Despite all that violent necking with George, she is still technically a virgin; hands don’t count.
    “Technical virgin” is a favorite phrase of Janet Cohen’s, with whom Megan has continued to be friends. “All those technical virgins from Cabot Hall,” Janet will say, indicating an especially good-looking, mostly blond, and handsomely dressed group of girls, who all live in Cabot Hall.
    Uncertain as to her exact meaning, Megan cannot quite ask; she is forced to conclude, on her own, that the phrase could apply to herself; she herself is someone who has gone “almost all the way.” But does that mean that Janet and Adam Marr really do it, go all the way? She supposes that it must; they would surely feel that real sex is more honest.
    Megan wonders: should she and George have done it? Would he then have loved her, and taken her to the Cape, sailing, meetinghis parents? Would he have said that he loved her? Megan believes that Janet is right; actually doing it would have been more honest, and somehow cleaner.
    That winter, curiously, there was also a lot of talk about virginity in Megan’s Criticism of Poetry class. It came up particularly in discussions of Donne, and the sexual symbolism in the religious poetry: “I never shall be chaste, unless you ravish me.” And then, when they got to Auden, there was the difficult “distortions of ingrown virginity.”
Well.
    The professor, a dark, very pale-skinned man, almost luminous with intensity, had an odd gesture: with both hands stiffly outstretched before him, in a sudden motion he would dip them down, like opposing wings; he did this often, as he spoke of Donne. He talked about “the breaking