The drive down to the movie theater was stiff with acrimony. Apparently Lorna Sue had confided in her mother, which was like confiding in the Pony Express, and for several days the entire family had been preparing for this night. Ludicrous, I thought. The whole idea had been to escape Herbie, to give our relationship a boost of intimacy and solitude. Now I faced the specter of disembowelment. Herbie Zylstra was not someone you wanted to upset. Under any circumstances. Ever. Standing in line at the movie theater, I kept my eyes open for sudden movement. "This advice," I said, "you could've asked me. I'm good with advice."

"Not this kind," said Lorna Sue.

"Like what?"

"Stuff. Female stuff."

At which point I nearly marched off into the night. (Certainly my life would have taken a far different trajectory.) Instead I shook my head. "What about the honor guard-where does that fit in? Most families, they'd get out the shotguns and start-"

"We're Zylstras," Lorna Sue said primly. "We're not most families."

For the next ninety-eight minutes we sat in the back row of the Rock Cornish Theater, Lorna Sue's eyes pinned to the screen, my own scanning the crowd. The film, I believe, was a Western, though I remember very little about it-periodic gunfire, people falling off horses. When it ended, we exited by a side door, circled around to the Pontiac, took a discreet route out to Highway 16.

Hormonal issues were no longer paramount. I was suddenly terrified, full of doubts, weakened by a strange biological fuzziness. (Perform: the word loomed before me like a locked door.) Thus, as I turned up the gravel farm road, I took a deep swallow of pride and informed Lorna Sue that we were calling it off. "It's just a bad time," I said. "I'm not ready."

She tilted her head back and chuckled.

"Too late, Tommy. Everybody knows. No matter what happens-either way-they'll think we did it. Besides, you're not getting the watch back."

"Keep it," I said.

"Oh, you know I will," said Lorna Sue. "It's mine. Whether we do anything or not."

Her voice had a mocking, singsong quality that compelled me to strike back. "All right," I said. "You asked for it."

Immediately, I turned onto a tractor path, thence into the dense, crunchy folds of an autumn cornfield. I pulled the emergency brake, listened for a moment, then got out and retrieved the blanket from the trunk. When I returned, Lorna Sue had moved to the backseat and was busy unbuttoning her blouse. "You can't just watch," she said. "Close your eyes, wait till I'm ready."

I sat there with folded hands, rigid, more apprehensive than aroused. Events seemed to have conspired against my receiving the slightest pleasure from all this.

"Look, I don't want to force you," I said. "We could always try later. Maybe after we're married awhile."

Lorna Sue shrugged. "Just make it fast."

She seemed relaxed, not in the least fearful, and as she spread out the blanket I found myself wondering about her family's reproductive history. Images of Herbie flashed through my thoughts. I peeked out the window, then turned back toward Lorna Sue. Bare to the waist, she was wearing mesh stockings hooked to a wire belt of some sort. Lower, at hip level, I discovered a number of wires and metallic flaps and what seemed to be a curtain of Christmas tree tinsel.

"What's this?" I asked.

Lorna Sue smiled. "Sexy, don't you think? My mother made it."

"Velva?"

"Mostly. Earleen helped with the tinsel."

I peered down with interest.

"A special treat," said Lorna Sue. Her eyes clouded. "You don't like it?"

Stupidly, I shrugged.

"Then hop to it," she said.

An impossible assignment, of course, but for the next several minutes I did my best to remove the contraption. One needed the dexterity of a juggler and the eyesight of a jeweler, but more than anything I was troubled by an image of Earleen and Velva rigging up this unlikely garment.

Eventually Lorna Sue sat up and lent a hand. She loosened a metal flap, lay back, and opened her arms to me.

"There," she sighed. "Do the rest yourself."

With no foreplay whatsoever, Lorna Sue yanked me down, clamped my head to her breasts, and began humming a soft, mostly indecipherable chant in my ear.

"Amen!" she squealed at one point.

Here, I reasoned, was a very complex young woman. I started to pull away, but then, to my relief, I felt an unmistakable hydraulic surge. I fumbled with my shoes and jeans and shirt, kicked off my underwear, and for the next few minutes succeeded in blocking out the world-prayers, bribery, blackmail, honor guards, Herbie, the whole dysfunctional Zylstra clan. I was powerful. I was the burglar at the door. Altogether, things went beautifully until the instant of entry, at which point Lorna Sue tugged at my ears and cried, "Stop it! My hair, for God's sake! There's no room!"

I kept lunging. "Plenty of room," I assured her. "A good fit."

"I don't mean there!"

She squeezed her legs shut, gripped my shoulders, and muscled me down into the foot well. We were roped together by three feet of braided black hair.

"It's just too darn crowded," said Lorna Sue. "I'll get a cramp. I can't even move." Her tongue moved across her upper teeth as she pondered the mechanics. "We'll have to go outside."

"Like where?"

"Anywhere. Let's go."

I glanced out at the windy cornfield. "You're kidding. It's almost winter."

"Hurry it up," she said. "Take the blanket."

Which brought us at last-inevitably-to the icy hood of my father's Pontiac.

It often amazes me how little we retain of the critical events in our lives. A snapshot here. An echo there. The details of my first conquest were largely swept away by a frigid October wind. I remember the critical gaze of an Indian-head ornament. I remember frost on the hood, the car shaking, Lorna Sue crying, "It hurts!"

Was there gratification in this? Delight? The most fleeting bliss?

Perhaps so. But I do not recall.

Lorna Sue hogged the blanket. She made whining noises. She yelled at me. She issued stern commands. Slower, she insisted. Faster. Gentler. Rougher. More romantic. She snaked an arm around my neck, yanked me down. She bit my throat. At one key juncture, when I began to falter, she emboldened me with the palm of her hand, levered me in again, beat on my buttocks.

All that I remember vividly. Along with the cold and the ferocious wind. We had left the engine running, with the idea it might warm us, but the elements that night were beyond the capabilities of my father's Pontiac. In hindsight, I now marvel at my youthful performance. I was valiant. Inexpert, no doubt, and outright shoddy by later standards, but I remain convinced that under the circumstances even a polar bear would have called it a night.

Afterward, there was no pillow talk.

We dressed quickly and drove back to town. I dropped her off a block from her house.

"Well, I hope you're happy," she said glumly. "I suppose now you'll just dump me."

I smiled. The notion had not yet occurred to me.

"All depends," I said thoughtfully. "You'll tell Herbie I backed off? Too much respect for his sister?"

Lorna Sue's eyes narrowed. "Anything else?"

"The whole family," I said. "Nobody hears a word."

"What else?"

"Tomorrow night. Someplace warm. Cute new costume."

She rolled her eyes and waited a moment. She knew what was coming.

"What else?"

"An expensive one," I said. "No crummy Timex."

Mrs. Kooshof was gone by the time I had finished telling my story, and the schnapps too.

For a considerable time I sat motionless at my desk, trolling through memory, all the good things. Lorna Sue's brown eyes. Her smell. Her laughter. How she purred and hummed and finally bared her teeth as we made love. How at the end she squealed, "I'm coming! I'm coming!" How the wind howled. How she wanted to do it again. How the word Pontiac would never again mean Pontiac.

Granted, there were bad things too. But the bad wasn't always so bad.

"Fucking cornfield," I murmured, but sweetly-a rare instance of Chippering profanity. Then I laughed, switched to cognac, and resumed my labors on young Toni's thesis.

Much later, in bed, Mrs. Kooshof said, "You actually married this crazy bitch? She married you?"

"Of course."

"But why?"

"A beautiful love," I said. "Greatest ever."

* Where, one might legitimately ask, was Toni's conscience? Did the girl lose even a wink of sleep over the fact that the fluid sentences and paragraphs of her thesis had been composed by a foreign hand? Apparently not. Several weeks later, when I probed for moral misgivings, the luscious little fraud giggled and said, "Well, heck, I don't mind."

* My paramour was under the misapprehension that I was at work on a commissioned essay for the journal Critique, a firm deadline rapidly approaching. Still, being female, she felt neglected. (Every man in America will surely sympathize.) * At least on my own part. For Lorna Sue, I fear, the word love was as treacherous as the Mississippi in late April. A wiser man than I would have purchased flood insurance.

* Not only my face but my chest and arms and portions of my upper thighs. I prefer the sleek look, and all my life, as part of my morning toilet, I have ridded myself of unnecessary body hair. Thomas H. Chippering, a la buff, is a sight not soon forgotten.

It strikes me that by accident, or out of anger and pain, I may well have painted an unflattering portrait of my former wife. Such was never my intent. I loved Lorna Sue desperately, even obsessively, and more than anyone on this earth, including her brother Herbie, I can appreciate those glittering gems at the center of her soul. As a corrective, therefore, I offer this short sampler of Lorna Sue's innumerable charms: -On not a single occasion, so far as I know, did Lorna Sue feign orgasm. She was brutally honest in this regard and kept me well informed.

-Though by no means expert in the kitchen, she was more than willing to try her hand at preparing a random meal. I remember, in particular, a heap of noodles seasoned with onion powder.

-I will tell the simple truth: I was in awe of her. As a twelve-year-old, and as a thirty-year-old, I dreamed Lorna Sue dreams. I lived inside her name. I was terrified of losing her even before she was mine to lose.

-I proposed to her at a New Year's Eve party, in a ballroom at the university's faculty club. I was a green, gangly graduate student; she was Lorna Sue, and beautiful. But we were in love. And for both of us it was a hard, happy, electric love, full of the past, full of the future. I had not planned on proposing that night, nor was marriage a topic we had ever talked about in any depth, but something in that festive ballroom: the temperature, the voices, the New Year's Eve nostalgia-something, I do not know what-something magical and terrifying and glorious, something radiant, seemed to wrap itself around us and lift us up and carry us off to another region of our universe. I looked at her. Lorna Sue looked at me. (How do I convey this without sounding like an eighteen-year-old?) I loved her so much, and she loved me, and I tried to speak, tried to say Marry me but could not-I said nothing, no words at all-and her face went bright and she said, "Yes, I will, yes."

-From the start, Lorna Sue and I had trouble sleeping in the same bed, a problem for which I was entirely to blame. I talked in my sleep. I twitched and moaned, flailed at demons, shouted the most vile obscenities. (Vietnam was still a fresh memory.) With the aid of earplugs, Lorna Sue did her best to endure all this, but in the end, after two or three weeks, she began spending nights in the spare bedroom. To this, of course, I vocally objected. "We're husband and wife," I reminded her. "I'll call a doctor. I'll find a cure."

Lorna Sue shook her head.

"Too expensive," she said. "The spare bedroom will be fine."

She was thrifty.

-In our fourth year of marriage, Lorna Sue and I attended a convention of the Modern Language Association in downtown Las Vegas, where I delivered to no small acclaim a scholarly paper entitled "The Verbs of Erotica." On our final evening, to cap a happy time, we indulged in some gaming at a blackjack table in the hotel's noisy casino. All night I handed her twenty-dollar bills. I won, she lost. But then, near midnight, our luck abruptly changed-a complete reversal of fortune-and Lorna Sue's stack of chips grew like a skyscraper, while mine dwindled to nothing. Without thinking, I reached over and helped myself to a handful of green chips, at which point Lorna Sue snatched my wrist and yelled, "They're mine!"

She was very thrifty.

-I do not mean to mock her. She was my sweetheart, the love of my life, the girl of my dreams. And I have lost her forever. Who, then, can blame me for some periodic vitriol? Look into your own broken heart.*-A devout Roman Catholic, Lorna Sue missed only a single Sunday Mass in our many years together. She believed in the blood of Christ, its real presence, and accepted without question the doctrines of corporeal resurrection and immaculate conception. Even in bed, making love, she radiated piety the way lesser spirits radiate passion or good cheer. Artificial birth control was forbidden. At the instant before climax, as I beat my biweekly retreat, Lorna Sue would reach down to make certain that our uncoupling was complete. "It's sad," she'd say, "how men are so ... so messy." Clean of mind, clean of body, she would produce a wad of Kleenex. (Do I exaggerate? I do not. And I can guarantee that over the years, no unwholesome substances gained entry into the pristine, well-vacuumed chapel of her soul.) -I have already discussed her long, black, braided hair. But I have not explained how her flesh-the tissue itself-smelled of chlorophyll and coconut oil. (Like the mountains of Vietnam, I thought.) She favored a bath gel called Youth, a perfume called Forever, expensive skin products from the laboratories of France and Switzerland. She made regular use of a sunlamp. Eternal vigilance and a set of tweezers had for the most part eliminated unsightly chin hair.

-We honeymooned in northern Minnesota, at a resort called Portage Pines, where we spent seven days in the company of Lorna Sue's family. The whole clan was there-Earleen, Ned, Velva, aunts and uncles, a jovial priest from Duluth, two cousins, the ever watchful Herbie. En masse, honeymooning as a family unit, we played charades, watched the sunsets, slept in the same communal loft each night. Awkward, yes. At times frustrating. Yet how could anyone fail to applaud Lorna Sue's devotion to kin, her filial piety? "I'm a Zylstra," she said. "This is how we do things."

-She had a way with words. Often pithy. Always eloquent. "Don't be an eighteen-year-old," she once said.

-She was independent. She took several vacations alone, several others with Herbie. There were times when she would vanish entirely, for days on end, without warning and without subsequent explanation. She had secrets. She knew how to keep them.

-How does one do justice to things aesthetic? Her pouty lips? Those puppy-brown eyes flecked with orange and violet? The smooth, sloping transition from hip to waist? Physically, Lorna Sue was a marvel of anatomical engineering, expertly tooled, made for the long haul. (On the day she walked out on me, her hair remained a lustrous coal black, her figure trim and dangerous.) Throughout our years of marriage, she had taken justifiable pride in her body, carefully attending to its needs, sometimes addressing it in the regal second person. She ran six miles a day. She avoided fats. She chewed vitamins like candy. At dinner one evening, when I suggested that we begin thinking about children, Lorna Sue put down her fork and hurried to a hallway mirror. "Ruin this?" she said.

-In strictly sexual terms, Lorna Sue's most attractive feature, far and away, had to be that mysterious, purply-pink scar on the palm of her left hand. Call me macabre, or call me Catholic, but I found it arousing to moisten that awesome cicatrix with the tip of my tongue, to close my eyes and envision the instant of penetration-iron nail, pliant flesh-the sudden pain, the release from pain, the little cry rising from her throat. How could my tongue go elsewhere? For whatever reason that wrinkly red scar had a powerful, hypnotic effect on me, like a piece of pornography.

Not so for Lorna Sue.

"God, you're such a sap," she told me. "It's just a worthless little scar. Nothing else."

She was a realist, not a sentimental bone in her body, yet at the same time something rang false in her voice. Too flat. Too pat. At times I suspected that her entire being, her sense of Lorna Sueness, was purely a function of that small jagged scar. She hated it and adored it. (As perhaps she hated and adored herself.) One evening I found her sitting on the lip of our bathtub, bleeding from the palm of her hand, using a nail file to gouge open the old wound.

She was crying.

She was a little girl again.

"For Pete's sake," she said, "give me some goddamn privacy."

She was a mystery.

-How can I overlook the virtue of fidelity? During my long, dangerous year in Vietnam, Lorna Sue never once stepped out on me. I know for a fact that she lived with her brother in Minneapolis. They shared a bedroom. She was chaperoned at all times.

-Sometimes at night I liked to relax in front of a good crime drama on TV. To her credit, no doubt, Lorna Sue found this sort of escapist fare beneath her. "How can you watch such garbage?" she'd mutter, often marching out of the room, sulking until I finally switched to a program of her choice. Lorna Sue had taste. She discriminated. Her eyes positively glowed through the full sixty minutes of Melrose Place.*

-Intelligent and well educated, with a bachelor's degree in art history, Lorna Sue was determined from the start to make something of her life. "I need a real career," she informed me on the eve of our wedding. "I mean, what if I divorce you or something? What if you get sick and die?" Thus, in our first year of marriage, she entered medical school at the University of Minnesota, then switched to law, then quickly back to medicine. In year two, she opened a dance studio in Saint Paul; in year three, in the wake of financial disaster, she received her calling as an actress, which led to a local television commercial featuring Lorna Sue's exquisite calves and a pair of no-run panty hose. Although none of these career alternatives panned out, Lorna Sue doggedly pursued her dreams, traveling widely, exploring professional options in California and New Jersey, always faithful to her original pledge.

She was no housewife. Indeed, she was barely a wife at all.

-She was a published author. Local church press. A cookbook. Her own kitchen-tested recipes. (This from a woman who only rarely set foot in a kitchen.) The pulses of our mother tongue, of course, were well beyond her, and in my role as ghostwriter I spent weeks translating the silly book into English, a chore for which I received the special thanks of a home-cooked dinner. (Noodles! Onion powder! Delicious!) She was tone deaf, to be sure, but determined to make the very best of herself.

-Unclouded by sentiment, guided by the ethics of realpolitik, Lorna Sue made her decisions with clearheaded pragmatism. She willed our love dead. She shot it through the heart. She divorced me. She did not look back. She removed herself to a new life, a new city, a new bed. She remarried almost instantly-a tycoon to boot. No time wasted. No decent burial, no mourning period.

I was never sacred to her.

-It would be instructive, finally, to explain how Lorna Sue came to lose her long black tresses. The place: my den. The time: a late evening midway through our marriage. The cause: a silly argument. (I was in the midst of rewriting her cookbook; Lorna Sue could not understand why all the "stupid commas" were necessary.) One thing led to another, and I made the mistake of suggesting that she find some other disciple to do her goddamn ghostwriting. It was the word disciple* of course, that set her off. (The ghostwriting was no problem.) "What's that supposed to mean?" she snapped, to which I responded with a churlish and very unfortunate remark about her "Jesus hair." She paled. She backed away. Then without a word she spun around and rushed to the bathroom. By the time I caught up with her she had already succeeded in hacking off a good twenty-four inches of hair, at least a pound's worth, and was in the process of plunging the scissors into the palm of her hand.