Richard Grayson

We were eating Deaf Smith peanut butter sandwiches in the kitchen when she suddenly turned to me and said, “You know I love you, don’t you?” I just nodded, but it sort of freaked me out to hear her say it for the first time.

I guess I now feel differently than I did a couple of years ago: a quiet, homey, blue jeans and bacon-and-eggs kind of love is much preferable to stormy, highly intense passion.

We straightened the whole thing out without bitter words or crying. I told her I’m not the same person I was, that she isn’t Shelli, that I’m not Ivan, and either we’re honest with each other or not.

She smelled of Noxzema, which was nice, and she let me caress her bare breasts, and we tickled each other. Slowly we’re exploring each other, our minds as well as our bodies.

I find her amazingly passionate. We were in the middle of something, and I said, “Wow, quiet little Ronna, who would have thought?” and she stopped and looked at me and smiled and kissed me again.

It was midnight, and December, and the beach was dark and deserted and the waves were crashing onto the shore. We walked and then stopped to kiss, after which I said, “I love you.” She said, “It’s been so hard to be without you lately.”

Ronna and I went to Prof. Schlissel’s showing of “The Grapes of Wrath.” It was really beautiful, and in the dark I got enough courage to put my arm on Ronna’s soft shoulder. I felt shy and sexually aroused at the same time.

At 21, after over six years of psychotherapy, I will begin with my fourth therapist. I don’t consider therapy, as some of my friends do, a crutch. It really has helped me. It will be scary, starting over with a new therapist, but it’s also exciting.

I told her about my emotional problems and she started to tell me about how she had this need, and maybe still does, to touch everything she sees that she likes, so she’ll have at least some kind of permanence. At that moment I loved her. . .

I felt that talking and listening to the other guys in the group was helpful. Skip said something to me that sort of shocked me. “You’re just as promiscuous as I am,” he said. “Just not sexually.”

I went down to the Kingsman office and learned from Ronna that Henry Kissinger announced on TV that a Vietnam peace settlement was only a week away: a ceasefire, withdrawal, return of POWs. Nancy said, “Shouldn’t we be dancing in the streets, like at the end of World War II?”

We had a fascinating discussion about the upper class. When I mentioned Mary McCarthy’s “The Group” as a novel about a group of Vassar girls, Bart said I should say “women,” not “girls”: “You wouldn’t say ‘Harvard boys,’ would you?”