It was really sort of poor sex she didn't come or even feel much that I could see. She was very amateurish and uninformed in bed, which touched me. But her not being able to say no protected me from having so great a fear of sexual failure that I would not have been able to be worried about her pleasure, or to be concerned about her in bed. I was amazed that she was so docile and then I saw that is was maybe partly that she didn't want to risk saying no to me-she didn't want me to be hurt and difficult, she didn't want me to explode she had a kind of hope of making me happy so that I'd then appreciate her and be happy with her and let her know me: I'm putting it badly. She said, 'Damn you-why couldn't you wait?' But even while she was saying that, she was taking off her blouse. I said, 'I'm naked, Orra, under this sheet.

She began to chatter right away, to complain that I was still in bed she seemed to think I'd been taking a nap and had forgotten to wake up in time to get ready for her arrival. When she knocked on the door, I said, 'Come in,' and she did. I left the door unlatched and I lay naked on my bed under a sheet. We had agreed to meet in my room, to get a little drunk cheaply before going out of dinner. In the last spring of our being undergraduates, I finally got her. She made any idea I had of psychological normalcy or of justice absurd since normalcy was not as admirable or as desirable as Orra or rather she was normalcy and everything else was a falling off, a falling below and justice was inconceivable if she, or someone equivalent to her if there was an equivalent once you had seen her, would not sleep with you. It seemed to me Orra was proof that life was a terrifying phenomenon of surface immediacy. It was because seeing someone in actuality who had such a high immediate worth meant you had to decide whether such personal distinction has a right to exist or if she belonged to the state and ought to be shadowed in, reduced in scale, made lesser, laughed at.Īlso, it was the case that you had to be rich and famous to set your hands on her she could not fail to be a trophy, and the question was whether the trophy had to be awarded on economic and political grounds or whether chance could enter in. To see her in sunlight was to see Marxism die. She was a somewhat scrawny, tuliplike girl of middling height. Truly, people on first meeting her often involuntarily lifted their arms as if about to fend off the brightness of the apparition.

Her looks were like a force that struck you.

Innocence by harold brodkey book