I know you’re all avid for the next installment of our riveting tale, but I was actually thinking of writing another anti-Bush screed focusing on the irony of the "terrorist organization" Hamas winning one of his beloved elections when I read this article in Slate that said it all and more:
http://www.slate.com/id/2134917?nav=wp
I know with my comparatively vast readership Slate really needs my referral but here it is anyway. But the audience grows restive so now here’s the eagerly awaited PART FIVE!
And so there she was at the top of the stairs by the railing. It was fall, not that long after school had started and still fairly temperate, so I didn’t feel too bad about keeping her waiting. We’d been a person short in the "pit" at the dining hall washing dishes that night, making things unusually crazy and me unusually gross. After a shower I’d sprinted over but still cut it pretty close. I ran up to her and then hesitated, out of breath. …Hey…, I panted.
Hi.
Sorry…late…
Well, when you said the 7:30 show I didn’t know if you meant 7:30 or before 7:30
—
No, my bad…
I finally got enough wind to take a glance up at her. She was unusually dressed up for our casual campus, with a sweater, blouse and skirt, and, just as unusually, made up with lipstick and mascara. Hey, look at you.
She gave that full, engaging grin.
No, really, you look nice.
Come on, we’d better hurry.
Yeah, sure. I led the way into the almost full theater and took my usual seat up in the balcony by the railing. Kathy followed, settling back as I leaned forward, scanning the crowd over the edge in the instant before the lights went out.
The funny thing was that the movie was Bergman after all, one of my favorites, Through a Glass Darkly. It captured me quickly, with the cheery Swedish family slowly and inevitably exposing their tormented side. In the midst of my enjoyment I felt an unfamiliar anxiety myself, wondering if Kathy liked it, if I wasn’t laying a relationship ending bummer on her with all the angst and sexual tension. My eyes darted between the subtitles and her, trying to unobtrusively keep a sidelong watch. She seemed rapt enough, her lips open a little then twisting into a smile as she caught me glancing over, mouthing What?
Nothing
, I whispered. Do you like it?
She just nodded, gesturing dismissively, and from then on I tried to monitor her more by sense, registering the sound and tremor of her every shift in posture, and, even more, to just become conscious of the sheer physicality of her, of her very vibration, of the kinesics of her body. And what spoke to me, besides the very real gravity of her, was her posture, not spineless and loose like the rest of us as we lounged and draped ourselves over our seats in a fruitless attempt at comfort, but correct somehow, appropriate, not rigid but upright and proper, her knees pressed together and her back straight.
And of course this acute awareness of her body, my downward glance following the curve of her shapely legs crossed at the ankle, exposed by the slight hike in her skirt as she sat, became erotic, causing me to shift my own posture in the presence of a growing excitement.
Yes, there was the novelty, the newness of her, the difference from the girls I’d known before fueling my desire, but there was also something deeper than that, a classicism and purity about her, a vitality contained and veiled, like the form of a classical statue rendered even more compelling by the drapery shading and suggesting it.
Fortunately there was Bergman in front of me and by concentrating on it for a minute I was able to distract myself from the flood of feeling, caught up again in the movie as we sat there in the darkened theater, our arms decorously on separate armrests.
Was Kathy at all aware of what was going through me? Virginia was surely more familiar with it, would have expected it even – she drove men to distraction every day, but had Kathy ever engendered such passion? And how would she respond to it?
But the climax of Through a Glass Darkly captured me up and carried me through, captivated, to the ending, and we both sat there for a moment.
Soon enough, however, the usual restlessness seized me.
A Leak In The Safe 