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“I love you, too. No maybe or mistake about it.”
“Thank God,” she said, and snuggled close.
11
On our second visit to the Candlewood Bungalows, she was ready to talk about Johnny Clayton. “But
turn out the light, would you?”
I did as she asked. She smoked three cigarettes during the telling. Toward the end, she cried hard,
probably not from remembered pain so much as simple embarrassment. For most of us, I think it’s
easier to admit doing wrong than being stupid. Not that she had been. There’s a world of difference
between stupidity and naïveté, and like most good middle-class girls who came to maturity in the
nineteen-forties and-fifties, Sadie knew almost nothing about sex. She said she had never actually
looked at a penis until she had looked at mine. She’d had glimpses of Johnny’s, but she said if he
caught her looking, he would take hold of her face and turn it away with a grip that stopped just short
of painful.
“But it always did hurt,” she said. “You know?”
John Clayton came from a conventionally religious family, nothing nutty about them. He was
pleasant, attentive, reasonably attractive. He didn’t have the world’s greatest sense of humor (almost
none might have been closer to the mark), but he seemed to adore her. Her parents adored him. Claire
Dunhill was especially crazy about Johnny Clayton. And, of course, he was taller than Sadie, even
when she was in heels. After years of beanpole jokes, that was important.
“The only troubling thing before the marriage was his compulsive neatness,” Sadie said. “He had
all his books alphabetized, and he got very upset if you moved them around. He was nervous if you
took even one off the shelf—you could feel it, a kind of tensing. He shaved three times a day and
washed his hands all the time. If someone shook with him, he’d make an excuse to rush off to the lav
and wash just as soon as he could.”
“Also color-coordinated clothes,” I said. “On his body and in the closet, and woe to the person who
moved them around. Did he alphabetize the stuff in the pantry? Or get up sometimes in the night to
check that the stove burners were off and the doors were locked?”
She turned to me, her eyes wide and wondering in the dark. The bed squeaked companionably; the
wind gusted; a loose windowpane rattled. “How do you know that?”
“It’s a syndrome. Obsessive-compulsive disorder. OCD, for short. Howard—” I stopped. Howard
Hughes has a bad case of it, I’d started to say, but maybe that wasn’t true yet. Even if it was, people
probably didn’t know. “An old friend of mine had it. Howard Temple. Never mind. Did he hurt you,
Sadie?”
“Not really, no beating or punching. He slapped me once, that’s all. But people hurt people in
other ways, don’t they?”
“Yes.”
“I couldn’t talk to anyone about it. Certainly not my mother. Do you know what she told me on my
wedding day? That if I said half a prayer before and half a prayer during, everything would be fine.
During was as close as she could come to the word intercourse. I tried to talk to my friend Ruthie about
it, but only once. This was after school, and she was helping me pick up the library. ‘What goes on
behind the bedroom door is none of my business,’ she said. I stopped, because I didn’t really want to
talk about it. I was so ashamed.”
Then it came in a rush. Some of what she said was blurred by tears, but I got the gist. On certain
nights—maybe once a week, maybe twice—he would tell her he needed to “get it out.” They would be