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%u00a9Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights ReservedHOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS BOOK92 Jack Fritscher%u201cSorry,%u201d she said.%u201cI%u2019m sorry.%u201d I avoided her direct eyes.%u201cYou don%u2019t live around here.%u201dI prayed, wondering if male seed in the water could get inside their bodies.%u201cTourist?%u201d she asked. She was Sandra Dee. I was Troy Donahue. The lake was a summer place. Life was a movie. With dialog. %u201cLike...,%u201d I said, %u201c...another tourist.%u201d I swam off in a fast Australian crawl, never looking back, hearing echoes of Rip%u2019s biblical %u201chelpmate.%u201d Being set aside from sexual desire truly was difficult, though in a way Rip and Kenny would never guess. Not because desire was physical, but because it was mysterious.I wondered, I really wondered, treading water, warm on the surface, cool around my feet, what she looked like, the girl I could love and take for my wife. Perhaps my surrender to celibacy would make it easier to give her up if I could lessen the mystery, actually see her, if I could know what my flesh was losing, like Grace Kelly, blonde, not Marilyn Monroe, peroxide. This was harder, not knowing, because the mystery of her never appearing visible, incarnate, was so great. To see her swimming in the water, face and body and hair, and still be able to say, %u201cNo, my dear, we mustn%u2019t,%u201d must be easier than fighting off the fantasy of what might be.I turned to look for her, but she was gone. A vocation has its price. The priests always said that. But what of the girls men who become priests did not marry? What happened to them?I wanted to leave the beach. I was vexed with, not temptation exactly, but with unfocused sexual unrest, and Dempsey dropping out, and all those beer bottles. I swam back to shore. Rip and Kenny, towels around their necks, sat with Mike on a bench near the bathhouse, talking to the blonde girls who smiled, and sing-song said, %u201cBye-bye-eye, Ripley.%u201d%u201cGod, Ryan. Where were you?%u201d Mike said. %u201cGet changed so we can lose these two characters. My parents expect us home for supper.%u201d%u201cI%u2019ll go like this if it%u2019s all the same. Let%u2019s leave.%u201dIn my VW, Rip and Kenny sat in back. I was in no humor to talk.Mike pulled his old Ford out of the parking lot, still in the blue mood that had sent him to the middle of the lake alone.I drove my VW three car-lengths behind Mike, following him to his house. In my back seat, Rip rolled up another cigarette, and he and Kenny kept laughing, smoking, and bragging, like two drunks, about catching a train to Florida.%u201cWe could buy like a case of bourbon.%u201d