CHAPTER 1 Past My Future A few weeks after my fifteenth birthday, a friend of my parents, a Mr. Gordon, asked me -- quietly and directly -- if I would like to have an adventure with him. He asked his question on a sunny afternoon while he and I sat together at the edge of my family's swimming pool, splashing our feet and talking. Mrs. Gordon sat with my mother a few yards away; they were tanning themselves and chatting. I appreciated how quietly Mr. Gordon spoke. Only I could hear him.

Of course I knew that if I wished, I could brush his question aside as more of his teasing. But I knew, too, that if I let my mother and Mrs. Gordon know what he had just said, he would be in trouble. I told him yes -- a yes just as quiet and direct as his question. There came a pause in our conversation -- and in our kicking of the swimming pool water -- during which he and I kept looking at each other. I noticed Mr. Gordon had shaved closely and recently. It pleased me to think maybe he'd done that for me.

He said, "Well." And I said, "Well?" And he said, "Well, Marcy, I shall be in touch with you." Thinking about that day and those few minutes of conversation beside the pool, I ask myself if I understood exactly what he had in mind. I wasn't an infant. And I was very well aware that he was married to my mother's friend. But to be perfectly frank, I wanted my adventure with Mr. Gordon to be a sexual one. Not long before, I'd read some magazine articles that my parents had given me and parts of the books that they'd hidden away from me.

One night, months earlier, I was supposed to be attending a country club dance; instead, I was walking around the golf course and smoking cigarettes with a boy. He and I had some very exciting kissing, which led, logically, to his putting his hand on my breast. If he hadn't gotten nervous and laughed about what we were doing -- which I took to mean that he was laughing at my breast -- that boy could have gone a lot further with me than he did. Had he whispered that he wanted me to take off my clothes, I would have taken them off. I'd had no experience with that kind of intensity; it took only a few moments for me to reach the point of being vulnerable to the boy. When you're older, you learn to stop short of that point or else to move to it as quickly as possible; that night I was intoxicated by what I hadn't ever felt before. The boy was a year ahead of me in school, but the next day, when I thought about what we'd done, I understood that he had no more experience than I and probably even less knowledge. I would have tried whatever he knew enough about to ask for.

Instead of a request, I got his inane whinny of a laugh. I was still trying to get used to my breasts. One seemed to be ahead of the other, which, for all I knew, made them comical. But I felt certain that even if they were, Mr. Gordon wouldn't laugh. He had always paid reserved attention to me, had brought me presents, had once even called me from Singapore to wish me happy birthday. Whereas someone my own age would casually humiliate me, Mr. Gordon had for years been offering me careful respect.

So I said yes. When you go into a room with one other person and lock the door behind you, you are momentarily free of every principle by which people ordinarily speak and act with each other. How you're going to be -- what you say and do, what you think and feel -- with that person is entirely up to the two of you. You may legislate as you wish. I learned that from spending a number of afternoons in a seventh-floor view-of-the- lake sublet in Marsden Towers. Because I was on the track team at school, my parents didn't question me about how I spent.