It was midnight, and December, and the beach was dark and deserted and the waves were crashing onto the shore. We walked and then stopped to kiss, after which I said, “I love you.” She said, “It’s been so hard to be without you lately.”
Ronna and I went to Prof. Schlissel’s showing of “The Grapes of Wrath.” It was really beautiful, and in the dark I got enough courage to put my arm on Ronna’s soft shoulder. I felt shy and sexually aroused at the same time.
At 21, after over six years of psychotherapy, I will begin with my fourth therapist. I don’t consider therapy, as some of my friends do, a crutch. It really has helped me. It will be scary, starting over with a new therapist, but it’s also exciting.
I told her about my emotional problems and she started to tell me about how she had this need, and maybe still does, to touch everything she sees that she likes, so she’ll have at least some kind of permanence. At that moment I loved her. . .
I felt that talking and listening to the other guys in the group was helpful. Skip said something to me that sort of shocked me. “You’re just as promiscuous as I am,” he said. “Just not sexually.”
I went down to the Kingsman office and learned from Ronna that Henry Kissinger announced on TV that a Vietnam peace settlement was only a week away: a ceasefire, withdrawal, return of POWs. Nancy said, “Shouldn’t we be dancing in the streets, like at the end of World War II?”
We had a fascinating discussion about the upper class. When I mentioned Mary McCarthy’s “The Group” as a novel about a group of Vassar girls, Bart said I should say “women,” not “girls”: “You wouldn’t say ‘Harvard boys,’ would you?”
When I hesitatingly told Josh the story about Allan that Stacy had told me in bed last night, he said, “So her idea of foreplay is telling you about all your friends who’ve been impotent with her?”
I saw Debbie, who was – as usual – depressed and depressing. Perhaps she was just having her period. That’s always the way I figure I can excuse girls’ black moods. I wish guys had that excuse, too; I’d be having my period a couple of times a week.
Dr. Wouk said all I’ve got now are “pieces of people,” and I’ll have to give up these parts of people if I want a “whole” of one girl. “I assume you mean ‘whole’ with a W,” I said. To Dr. Wouk’s credit, she cracked up.