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of freedom from that tubby, arrogant, possessive, jealous little man, and I certainly do not intend to spend the rest of my life daydreaming wistfully what I might have done the only damned time I was ever given a chance, Mr. Brice. So might we carry these drinks into the bedroom?”
    She had been a tall carroty redhead, so uncompromisingly scrawny that I would have never considered making a pass at her. But her approach had been so shockingly abrupt, I couldn’t think of any simple way to evade it, and there didn’t seem to be time for any complicated way. So I found myself, drink in hand, trailing her stupidly into the bedroom of the motel suite. I soon found that the look of scrawniness disappeared completely when the clothing was gone. I was the instrument by which she was determined to avenge herself on life for dealing her sixteen years of very dreary marriage, and she was almost frighteningly determined not to waste a single moment. I went to look at the Buick on Friday afternoon and finally got to look at it on Monday morning, and I had to work fifteen straight twelve-hour days to catch up on my work after that redheaded weekend.
    Aside from such unexpected, unsought interludes, I was learning that a man can live without a woman. Sometimes the house is too empty. Sometimes the restlessness is like sickness. But I guess I wasn’t learning to live without any woman. I was still learning to live without Judy.
    I met Judy Caldwell during the tail end of the season ofmy last year of college ball. I was two months away from twenty-two, and she was a nineteen-year-old import from a girls’ college in the east, flown in for the football weekend by a fraternity brother who was so serious about her and had talked so much about her that we were prepared for a letdown. But when Judy entered a room and when she smiled and looked around, before saying a word, she turned all other females in the room to wax and ashes. With that careful, casual ruff of blonde amorous hair, the mobile mouth, those bottomless violet eyes, and her trim, taut look of tension under control, I thought her the most alive thing I had ever seen in my life. Before I ever heard her voice, I wanted to own her forever.
    She was, in the most comprehensive meaning of the phrase, a status symbol. In any given year there are not many nineteen-year-old girls of that wondrous breed. In a generation there are pitifully few—in any age bracket.
    If you acquire one of them, you can walk them into any public place in the civilized world and be marked at once as a man of rare luck, and special talent.
    Some of them move inevitably into the entertainment world. Liz Taylor and Julie Newmar are in that special pattern.
    They are beautiful and animated and they live deeply, wildly, constantly on some far out edge of emotional tension. They are incomparably feminine. They need and seek all the symbols of male strength, despising weak men. When they have decided exactly what they want, they go after it with a ruthlessness that would confound any pirate. No one can predict their next mood, especially themselves.
    They are tidy as panthers, and as blandly vain. Physically, they are like a blow at the heart. The skin texture is so flawless as to be unreal. Their bodies, in repose, or in movement, have an intricacy of curvings, lines, textures and hollows that make other women look curiously unfinished. They eat likewolves, laugh with the throat open wide, and wear the face of a child when they sleep. They sense that they are placed here for the purpose of living—and there will never be enough time for all of it.
    In any ten-minute span they can take you through fifty emotions, which will include a great many you never heard of and can never describe.
    In the bleakness of the jealousy of the men who cannot have them and the women who cannot match them, petty words are spoken: shallow, silly, arrogant, spoiled, wild, untrustworthy …
    But to the few men in each generation who