Indignation by Philip Roth Read Free Book Online Page B

mostly about social events of the previous weekend or those of the weekend to come. I had enough of them and their socializing while waiting tables at the Willard.
    She ordered the snails and I didn’t. She was from wealthy suburban Cleveland and I wasn’t. Her parents were divorced and mine weren’t, nor couldthey possibly be. She’d transferred from Mount Holyoke back to Ohio for reasons having to do with her parents’ divorce, or so she said. And she was even prettier than I had realized in class. I’d never before looked her in the eyes long enough to see the size of them. Nor had I noticed the transparency of her skin. Nor had I dared to look at her mouth long enough to realize how full her upper lip was and how provocatively it protruded when she spoke certain words, words beginning with “m” or “w” or “wh” or “s” or “sh,” as in the commonplace affirmation “Sure,” which Olivia pronounced as though it rhymed with “purr” and I as though it rhymed with “cure.”
    After we’d been speaking for some ten or fifteen minutes, she surprisingly reached across the table to touch the back of my hand. “You’re so intense,” she said. “Relax.”
    “I don’t know how to,” I said, and though I meant it as a lighthearted, self-effacing joke, it happened to be true. I was always working on myself. I was always pursuing a goal. Delivering orders and flicking chickens and cleaning butcher blocks and getting A’s so as never to disappoint my parents. Shortening up on the bat to just meet the ball andget it to drop between the infielders and the outfielders of the opposing team. Transferring from Robert Treat to get away from my father’s unreasonable strictures. Not joining a fraternity in order to concentrate exclusively on my studies. Taking ROTC dead seriously in an attempt not to wind up dead in Korea. And now the goal was Olivia Hutton. I’d taken her to a restaurant whose cost came to nearly half of a weekend’s earnings because I wanted her to think I was, like her, a worldly sophisticate, and simultaneously I wanted dinner to end almost before it had begun so that I could get her into the car’s front seat and park somewhere and touch her. To date, the limit of my carnality was touching. I’d touched two girls in high school. Each had been a girlfriend for close to a year. Only one had been willing to touch me back. I had to touch Olivia because touching her was the only path to follow if I was to lose my virginity before I graduated from college and went into the army. There—yet another goal: despite the trammels of convention still rigidly holding sway on the campus of a middling little midwestern college in the years immediately after World War Two, I was determined to have intercourse before I died.
    After dinner, I drove out beyond the campus to the edge of town to park on the road alongside the town cemetery. It was already a little after eight, and I had less than an hour to get her back to the dormitory and inside the doors before they were locked for the night. I didn’t know where else to park, even though I was fearful of the police car that patrolled the alley back of the inn pulling up behind Elwyn’s car with its brights on and one of the cops coming around on foot to shine a flashlight into the front seat and to ask her, “Everything all right, Miss?” That’s what the cops said when they did it, and in Winesburg they did it all the time.
    So I had the cops to worry about, and the late hour—8:10—when I cut off the engine of the LaSalle and turned to kiss her. Without a fuss she kissed me back. I instructed myself, “Avoid rejection—stop here!” but the advice was fatuous, and my erection concurred. I delicately slipped my hand under her coat and unbuttoned her blouse and moved my fingers onto her bra. In response to my beginning to fondle her through the cloth cup of her bra, she opened her mouth wider and continued kissing me, now with the added