this time I suspected it was not a random selection.

"Good night, John or Glen or whoever you are…" she whispered, still smiling.

For the life of me, I couldn't get into Salinger. I would stare at the page for several minutes, and I all could think of were Ardis's last words to me, the warmth of our last kiss, and I had an uneasy feeling that this new relationship would soon end as quickly as it had begun. I had no sexual fantasies about her, even after I could tell from our last embrace that she was very well developed and was wearing no bra underneath her top. I only wanted to be close to her anyway I could.

I took much longer reading this 2nd book. I would read the words, but all I saw was Ardis's face. When we met again, I could see that my worst fears were confirmed. She wouldn't even let me in, and there was no smiling, no kiss, only this contemptuous glare and a desire to be rid of me. She was far from being the fellow phantom I imagined her to be, and whatever was being said about me by her mother and by her girlfriends was succeeding

in driving a wedge between us. I suspect her father, whom I met at our 2nd meeting, had the last word on me, and it was not encouraging. And Ardis herself was seeing the hopelessness of developing a relationship with someone so filled with self-loathing.

Of course all this crushed me. Although I had many doubts, each doubt hid a host of unformed hopes that by some miracle Ardis would come to love me and see who I really was. I cried more than once over this, and my mother tried to console me, but I only went in deeper into my thickening shell.

I was so far gone that I even refused to pose for pictures at my brother's wedding in the Spring of 1966. One photo was taken however, and looking back years later at it I had to wonder, as an adult with much better judgment, how I could not have seen how good looking I really was. I was dressed in a dark blue surge suit, trim and lightly tanned, with a full head of slightly long brown hair and blessed with sensitive hazel eyes and long lashes. I can see now what attracted Ardis to me initially; and looking back even more closely, I can see why she rejected me. As I would learn much later on, women of all ages are attracted as much to a degree of