This was absurd. Wasn't the double standard supposed to work the other way? A guy who was all worried about whether his fiancée was a virgin was supposed to be a hypocrite with plenty of notches on his own belt.

And it wasn't just a question of past partners and sexually transmitted disease. Quentin was hopelessly naïve. There were magazine articles at every grocery checkstand talking about techniques for satisfying a woman every time, but Quentin hadn't read any of them. Was Mad expecting him to know all these techniques? Did they even work? Was it hard to learn them? How romantic would it be on their wedding night if he had to keep stopping to check with a manual?

He had a couple of hours to kill before his flight. Instead of turning in his rental car he kept going down Bayshore and got off the freeway at the Hillsdale Mall, planning to pick up a book on how to be a good lover—he knew that no self-respecting American bookstore would be without a few of those. But to his chagrin Hillsdale was apparently the one mall in America without a single bookstore.

He ended up at the airport newsstand, which had an issue of Cosmopolitan that offered to explain how a woman could satisfy a man; but that wasn't really the subject matter he was looking for. On the flight east he tried to watch the movie, gave up and tried to sleep, and finally ended up trying to imagine what it was that he remembered from high school locker room talk and from being at Berkeley in the early seventies and from movies and television shows. Touching breasts was a big deal, he knew that. But was it a big deal for the guy or for the girl or both?

He was in a cold sweat, there in the airplane seat, just as if he had woken from that dream of being on a stage, expected to say lines in a play, only he didn't know what the play was and he'd never been to a single rehearsal. Sweating and trembling because he was going to have to take off his clothes and get into bed with a woman who had high expectations of him and he wasn't going to be able to deliver.