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“I thought woman were more candid about sex, the physiology of it.”
“But they don’t go through a mental checklist of their bodily reactions.”
“It wouldn’t be strange for a man to notice he had an erection.”
“But he wouldn’t announce it to himself: ‘Hey, waddyaknow! I’m erect!’ ”
It’s late in the afternoon by now, dark outside. Lincoln has heard vehicles pulling up, people talking on the motel’s walkway. Mrs. Lunker warned him that with the weekend, rooms would be filling with ice fishermen.
“Maybe we should call it a day,” Lincoln suggests. “We’ve made a lot of progress. Let’s go have dinner.”
“No, I want to get this right,” Amy insists. “If we can’t get the sex right, nothing is going to work.”
So Lincoln sits next to Amy, and together—building the scene word by word—they describe how Mary Reilly goes from necking with Stephen on the sofa in her apartment to rolling around half-undressed on the soft carpet to having hurried and clumsy sex on her bed. Though Mary Reilly encourages the encounter, the sex for her is unsatisfying. For Lincoln, looking at the computer screen over Amy’s shoulder, catching whiffs of a fresh, flowery fragrance coming off her hair, tossing back and forth descriptions of states of arousal, brushing hands as he types in a few words himself, creating at last several airy paragraphs they can agree on—it all amounts to one of the most erotic experiences he has ever had. Amy apparently has the same reaction.
Just moments after Stephen has prematurely climaxed, and Mary, on her back beneath him, is left with nothing but the chapter-ending discovery that cobwebs have gathered in a ceiling corner of her bedroom, Lincoln and Amy fall into a frantic embrace. As they rush to rapturous, thrilling, and emotionally cleansing sex, he has only enough presence of mind to take the most essential precaution: he hits SAVE on Amy’s computer.
Afterward, lying together in the motel bed, Amy says, “I suppose that was a mistake.”
“I suppose so,” Lincoln agrees. “But it couldn’t be helped.”
“I’m not going to apologize.”
“Who would you apologize to?” Lincoln asks.
“Good point.” Amy considers for a few seconds. “You’re not married anymore.”
“Well, almost.”
“I suppose I could apologize to Duddleston. He’d be furious.”
“He must never know.”
Amy kisses Lincoln on the shoulder. “I’m not going to feel guilty, and neither should you.” She rests her head on his chest.
They lie that way for several minutes. From her slow breathing, Lincoln thinks she has fallen asleep. But suddenly she says, “John?”
“Hmm?”
“Why are you rubbing your arm?”
Lincoln stops. He didn’t realize he was doing it. “Just a habit,” he says.
Amy sits up on one elbow and looks hard into Lincoln’s face. “John, you must tell me how you broke your arm. Now.”
Lincoln wants to resist. The incident brings up memories and emotions that he’s purposely closed off. He never talks about it. But he can see that Amy’s electric, been-up-for-thirty-six-hours intensity won’t be denied. So as they lie in bed, Amy nestled against him, Lincoln tells her his somewhat less reflective, considerably abbreviated, but nonetheless largely reliable version of the following true story:
HOW JOHN LINCOLN BROKE HIS ARM
The summer before his senior year of high school, John Lincoln spent almost every evening with his best friend, Will Dewey. The Deweys lived near the Lincolns in the comfortable Washington suburb of Bethesda, and both families owned second homes in rural West Virginia, where the moms and kids moved every June when school let out. That summer of 1993 was the last that John and Will spent in the country. Afterward there would be trips to Europe and internships in far-flung cities—the sorts of experiences that would lead the boys permanently out of the nest and pull them apart from each other. But that summer they still lived at home, working for county road crews, earning just above the minimum wage.
Will and John had been friends forever, so inseparable that their classmates ran their names together as if the boys existed only in combination; Will and Johnny became Ouija, as in the mysterious board game. And in fact, the boys felt joined—privileged members of a kind of suburban aristocracy. Their families were prosperous, but more than that, the boys sensed that their parents were special—more sophisticated and creative, more alive. At parties—and their families were always throwing parties when the bo
ys were young—their fathers reigned as the smartest, wittiest men in the room. At school, compared to the moms of the other kids, the mothers of Will and John seemed younger, prettier, more stylish. While the boys’ classmates trudged home in the afternoons to watch TV or maybe take a tennis or ballet lesson, Ouija’s mothers whisked their children off to cultural experiences—a visit to the Corcoran Gallery, a tour of Ford’s Theater. Dinner-table conversations at both houses featured firsthand anecdotes about some of the most important people in the country. It helped that the boys themselves were bright and athletic, but through their friendship, they nurtured in each other the idea that they stood out—together they were a well-defended team against self-doubt.
Their summers encouraged the notion since in West Virginia their families were more privileged in almost every way than the local people. Will and John got to know some of the children from the nearby towns, mostly through sports, and the two Bethesda boys had occasional playdates with one or another West Virginia child. The boys had been well trained to be thoughtful and generous to others and to hide any sense of superiority. But they couldn’t help seeing how different their lives were.
That feeling of shared status peaked that last summer, and in some ways it no doubt echoed an attitude enjoyed by seventeen-year-old boys everywhere. The combination of near independence, physical prowess, and intense sexual desire creates a lush environment for breeding arrogance. Looking back years later, John Lincoln even came to think that he reached his peak on a particular August Friday night when, once again, he and Will set off together on an adventure. A few weeks before, Will’s father, a doctor with a flamboyant streak, had bought himself a red Porsche convertible, and for the first time, he let Will take it out for the evening. Of course, as on every other evening in the country when the boys borrowed a more modest family car, there was really no place to go. Sometimes they would find a basketball game, sometimes they would drive to the movie theater several towns over. But mostly they just cruised the country roads, scooping the loop, as they put it, going from one small town to another in a kind of circle, ceaselessly looking for excitement.
