Donna threw her coat over the back of one of his kitchen chairs and went to work on his dishes, few as they were. “So,” she said, “are you going to find Peter for me?”
“Is that his name?” Gregor said. “Just Peter?”
“Peter Desarian. It might have been Bagdesarian originally. I don’t know why I think that. Armenians don’t usually change their names unless they’re going to be actors. Like Mike Connors.”
“Mike Connors?”
“He was Krekor Ohanian. Originally.” She looked into the sink. He really hadn’t had a lot of dishes, just some coffee cups and some spoons and the chipped, dessert-size plate he put his toast on. These were now stacked neatly in his dish drainer, dripping small beads of water. “You know what bothers me about all this? How it happened. That’s what bothers me.”
Gregor had visions of arcane sexual practices, black magic rituals, God knew what. “I don’t think I understand,” he said.
Donna threw herself into an empty chair. “I don’t mean the mechanics of it. That was simple enough. Everything was simple enough, really, except the other thing was so stupid. Really stupid.”
“What other thing?”
“Being ashamed of being a virgin.”
Gregor’s astonishment must have shown on his face. Donna blushed furiously and looked away. “Maybe we should talk in code. You might find it easier.”
“No, no.” Gregor recovered himself, took a deep breath, and counted to ten.
“I know it wasn’t the same when you were young,” Donna was going on. “I mean, everybody was a virgin then, right? Until they got married. Either that or they were bad. But, Mr. Demarkian, I’m twenty-one. Until I met Peter, I was the only person in the whole Art Institute who’d never had sex.”
“I know it may have seemed that way,” Gregor said.
“Karen Arkmanian’s been on the pill since she was sixteen,” Donna said. “And most of the girls I knew in high school took the plunge before the end of senior year. Except me.”
“Why not you?”
Donna shrugged. “I don’t know. I had a boyfriend then. This was out in Ardmore. About a month before our prom, when everybody was buying tickets and looking for dresses, he gave me an ‘or else.’ And I just got so mad. I got so mad. It just seemed like the worst thing anybody had ever done to me. So I told him—”
“To go stuff it,” Gregor said.
“Exactly,” Donna said.
“Maybe that was common sense. If all your friends really were having, ah, making love, maybe that wasn’t common sense. Not everybody is ready for the same things at the same time.”
Donna sighed. “I don’t know about common sense, Mr. Demarkian, but I was getting really scared. Especially after I got to the Art Institute. Everybody there is so sophisticated. That was one of the reasons I got Daddy to buy me the apartment. I shared an apartment for a while, a rented one, with a girl from school. She was very nice, but she was always going to bars and bringing home men. And I started to feel, well—”
“Unpopular?”
“Repressed,” Donna said. “That was the other thing. I took this psychology course in the summer. And it was, like, I hadn’t even ever really felt the urge. If you see what I mean. It wasn’t just that I was a virgin. It was that I didn’t care I was a virgin.”
“Did you feel the urge with this Peter?”
“No. I just didn’t mind the whole idea. With most boys, you know, I’d get really turned off. I was beginning to think I was a lesbian.”
“Were you attracted to women?”
“I wasn’t attracted to anybody.”
“Fine,” Gregor said. “I don’t think you’re a lesbian. For that, you have to be attracted to women. I don’t think you’re repressed, either, whatever that means. Excuse me. I don’t have a lot of respect for psychology.”
Donna laughed. “Right now, I don’t have any. I can’t believe I did this. I can’t believe it. And for what?”
“Did you at least enjoy yourself?”
“With the sex, you mean? I don’t know. It was all right, I guess. Kind of an anticlimax.”
“My wife used to tell me it often is. For women.”
“Not for men?”
“Not that I’ve ever heard of.”
“If men weren’t so crazy, I’d wish I was one.” Donna went back to the sink. There was a dish towel hooked over one of the knobs on the cabinet next to the window. She picked it up and started drying coffee cups. “Mrs. Arkmanian said you could find him for me,” she said. “Peter, I mean. She said you could find him and maybe get him to talk to you.”