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the
night she’d approached him. In the year and a half they’d been
acquainted, the most intimate conversation they’d ever had involved
an analysis of the pretzels being served at a party they’d both
attended. Brad had argued that they were stale, and Daphne had
maintained that they were still edible. From such dialogues great
love affairs rarely blossomed.
    What they’d had wasn’t a great love
affair. It was one night, one truncated, vaguely sordid night, the
kind of night that left you with a hangover not just in your head
but in your soul.
    It all began with the call Daphne
had gotten that afternoon. Her parents had phoned her with the
splendid news that Helen was engaged to be married. Daphne wasn’t
the type of woman to begrudge her sister such happiness, even if
Helen was two years younger than Daphne. She was in no hurry to get
married; if Helen wanted to tie the knot before she turned
twenty-one, that was all right with Daphne.
    What demolished her was that
Helen’s fiance was Dennis Marlow. Dennis, the boy next door, the
boy—and then the man—with whom Daphne had been madly in love ever
since the day his family had moved into the house next to hers when
she was twelve. She and Dennis had done everything as a twosome:
walked, and later driven, to school together, collaborated on
science projects, swapped comic books and perused copies of girlie
magazines purloined from Dennis’s father’s night table. They’d
shared each other’s rock-and-roll CD’s, helped each other with
their homework, provided alibis for each other when one of them was
in trouble.
    As they got older, they’d
discovered the facts of life together. They’d kissed, they’d
touched, they’d experimented. They’d been such good friends, such
inseparable pals that it had seemed perfectly natural for them to
learn about their bodies together.
    But for Daphne, it had been more
than simply youthful experimentation. She had loved Dennis. He’d
loved her too, she supposed, but as far as he was concerned, it
hadn’t really been a romantic love. Daphne had been his buddy, his
fellow explorer. The incestuous implications notwithstanding, he’d
ultimately come to think of her as a sister.
    Or, more precisely, a
sister-in-law. After all they’d been through, Dennis decided that
the woman he truly desired wasn’t Daphne but her kid sister.
Daphne, he would later explain to her, was the greatest, terrific,
one in a million, the best friend a guy could have. What he didn’t
need to explain was that she wasn’t petite and pretty, aspiring to
devote her life totally to a man and ask only for his affection in
return. Daphne wasn’t Helen.
    The news of Helen’s engagement
agonized Daphne. She shut herself up inside her dormitory room,
refusing to speak to anyone until Andrea and Phyllis picked the
lock and forced their way inside. When she told them what had
happened, they supplied her with tissues and compassion. They
hugged her, they commiserated, they fed her M & M peanuts. They
took turns inventing gruesome ends for Dennis—to which Daphne would
object, “But then Helen’ll wind up a widow!” or “But then she’ll
have to go without sex for the rest of her married
life!”
    “Forget about Helen,” Andrea
exhorted Daphne. “Forget about them both. Eric’s frat is having a
party tonight. Come on, get smashed and forget about the whole
thing.”
    “Men aren’t worth it,” Phyllis
added knowingly. “Look how many times I’ve had my heart broken—and
how many times I’ve recovered. I know whereof I speak, Daffy—men
suck, and they aren’t worth crying over. Come to the party with us,
Daff. It’ll do you some good to get out and shop around. A few
beers, and you’ll be saying, ʻDennis who?’”
    Daphne let them talk her into it.
After dinner that night, she accompanied Phyllis and Andrea across
the hilly, frozen campus to the fraternity house where Eric and his
friends lived. In the rec room in the house’s finished