“Loved.”

“Huh?”

“We loved each other.”

“All right, whatever you want to call it. Anyway, you tried each other in bed and found out it was more fun than sleeping alone. So you were bisexual. So women are supposed to be bisexual at that age, it’s a stage they go through. You went through it, and before too very long you met me, Superjew, the ultimate male sex symbol, and you put away childish things.”

“I suppose so.”

“Look, when you were a kid, like a teenager and all, you used to masturbate, right?”

“And?”

“Well, everybody does, no? But afterward, when you outgrow it, you don’t have to look back on those days and feel consumed by guilt. You just wash your hands and carry on.”

I didn’t say anything. Outgrow it? Harry, I carefully did not say, I don’t seem to have outgrown it yet. There are nights, Harry, when we make love, and I can’t get no satisfaction, like the song says, and while you sleep the sleep of the sated male, I dip my little fingers in the honeypot.

Oh, Rhoda, how I have missed you.

But there is supposed to be sex in this book, isn’t there? I suppose I could write a chapter without having anybody do anything to anybody, just talking and thinking, but it seems a bad idea for the very first chapter of the book. The reader might get discouraged. It seems, oh, very egoish to feel that total strangers will be that interested in what one says or thinks, but everybody is always interested in what everyone else does or has done in bed, so there ought to be some sex here before this chapter is over.

(I don’t honestly see why it was a stupid question to ask how long a chapter should be. Smartass answers notwithstanding.)

Sex. I was going to have Harry talk me out of my foul mood and take me upstairs and to bed, but that isn’t what happened. It would be a nice way to get some sex into the chapter, and I guess it was a way that occurred to Harry too, not for the book but as a way to spend the afternoon, because he did make a medium-to-heavy pass, and I dropped the ball rather deliberately.