Indignation by Philip Roth Page B

said. “I wouldn’t have dreamed of asking for it. I don’t even know her. And she blew me. Did you ever hear of that happening?”
    “Nope,” replied Elwyn.
    “It’s because her parents are divorced.”
    Now he turned to look at me. He had a round face and a large head and his features were so basic that they might have been modeled on those carved by a child for a Halloween pumpkin. Altogether he was constructed on completely utilitarian lines anddid not look as though he had, like me, to keep a sharp watch over his emotions—if, that is, he had any of an unruly nature that required monitoring. “She tell you that?” he asked.
    “She didn’t say anything. I’m only guessing. She just did it. I pulled her hand onto my pants, and on her own, without my doing anything more, she unzipped my fly and took it out and did it.”
    “Well, I’m very happy for you, Marcus, but if you don’t mind, I’ve got work to do.”
    “I want to thank you for the car. It wouldn’t have happened without the car.”
    “Run all right?”
    “Perfect.”
    “Should. Just greased ’er.”
    “She must have done it before,” I said to Elwyn. “Don’t you think?”
    “Could be,” Elwyn replied.
    “I don’t know what to make of it.”
    “That’s clear.”
    “I don’t know if I should see her again.”
    “Up to you,” he said with finality, and so, in silence, I lay atop my bunk bed barely able to sleep for trying to figure out on my own what to think of Olivia Hutton. How could such bliss as had befallen me also be such a burden? I who should have been the most satisfied man in all of Winesburg was instead the most bewildered.
    S trange as Olivia’s conduct was when I thought about it on my own, it was more impenetrable still when she and I showed up at history class and, as usual, sat beside each other and I immediately resumed remembering what she had done—and what I had done in response. In the car, I had been so taken by surprise that I had sat straight up in the seat and looked down at the back of her head moving in my lap as if I were watching someone doing it to somebody other than me. Not that I had seen such a thing done before, other than in the stray “dirty picture”—always raggedy-edged and ratty-looking from being passed back and forth between so many hundreds of horny boys’ hands—that would invariably be among the prized possessions of the renegade kid at the bottom of one’s high school class. I was as transfixed by Olivia’s complicity as by the diligence and concentration she brought to the task. How did she know what to do or how to do it? And what would happen if I came, which seemed a strong likelihood from the veryfirst moment? Shouldn’t I warn her—if there was time enough to warn her? Shouldn’t I shoot politely into my handkerchief ? Or fling open the car door and spray the cemetery street instead of one or the other of us? Yes, do that, I thought, come into the street. But, of course, I couldn’t. The sheer unimaginableness of coming into her mouth—of coming into anything other than the air or a tissue or a dirty sock—was an allurement too stupendous for a novice to forswear. Yet Olivia said nothing.
    All I could figure was that for a daughter of divorced parents, whatever she did or whatever was done to her was okay with her. It would be some time before it would dawn on me, as it has finally (millennia later, for all I know), that whatever I did might be okay with me, too.
    Days passed and I didn’t ask her out again. Nor after class, when we were all drifting into the hallway, did I try to talk to her again. Then, one chilly fall morning, I ran into her at the student bookstore. I can’t say that I hadn’t been hoping to run into her somewhere, despite the fact that when we met in class I didn’t even acknowledge her presence. Every time I turned a corner on that campus, I was hoping not only to see her but to hear myselfsaying to her, “We have to go on another