The Other Side of Midnight

"So am I." And she was. She really was. She could be certain that Ron was a good lover. He had been factory-tested and approved by every horny coed within a radius of a 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."

"You know how people exaggerate."

"And you're damned pretty."

"Thank you." She tried to make her voice sound like Katherine Hepburn in Alice Adams and looked meaningfully into his eyes. She was no longer Catherine Alexander. She was a sex machine. She was about to join Mae West, Marlene Dietrich, Cleopatra. They were all going to be sisters under the foreskin.

The waiter brought the drink and she finished it in one quick nervous gulp. Ron watched her in surprise.

"Easy," he warned. "That's pretty potent stuff."

"I can handle it," Catherine assured him, confidently.

"Another round," he told the waiter. Ron reached across the table and caressed her hand. "It's funny. Everybody at school had you wrong."

"Wrong. No one at school's had me."

He stared at her. Careful, don't be clever. Men preferred to bed girls who had excessively large mammary glands and gluteus maximus muscles and exceedingly small cerebrums.

"I've had a--thing for you for a long time," she said, hurriedly.

"You sure kept it a secret." Ron pulled out the note she had written and smoothed it out. "Try our Cashier," he read aloud, and laughed. "So far I like it better than the Banana Split." He ran his hands up and down Catherine's arm and his touch sent tiny ripples down her spine, just like the books said it would. Perhaps after tonight she would write a manual on sex to instruct all the poor, dumb virgins who didn't know what life was all about. After the second drink Catherine was beginning to feel sorry for them.

"It's a pity."

"What's a pity?"

She had spoken aloud again. She decided to be bold. "I was feeling sorry for all the

virgins in the world," she said.