"My Answer can't be made in a few words," I said stalling bravely, but ineffectually.

  "Just the characterization of an anatomical entry? How much longer can it take than the act itself?" she protested, laughing.

  For entry Marilyn used a familiar four-letterism, though no one who knew her could characterize her speech as anything but pure. It's how words are meant in the utterance that really counts. At any rate, it was the first time she'd ever used the word in a conversation with me.

  "It's a mistake to think of the most important of our acts in the terms of the shortness of its duration," I explained to her, making sure that I didn't sound as though I was reprimanding her. "That way you rob it of both its sweetness and meaning."

  "You said it"" she cried. "It's the substance of what I'm trying to tell you. What you resent in my description is what I have resented in all the efforts men before you made to engage me in love. Before you appeared, I was never approached by a man with anything but a brief plunge into my innards in mind. It's a wonder to me that the desiring elements in my nature didn't dry up completely under that neglect of years. That's why I need so much to know how I felt to you the first time we got together."

  By that time I was completely organized for what she wanted me to tell her, and how the telling was to be done, though I could not relieve my argument of the laboriousness it had fallen into.

  "Every woman is a different kind of attraction to each of the men drawn to her," I began. "To one man she's a mouth, to another no more that the rouge on the lips of that mouth. She can be one kind of shapeliness of bosom to one man, only the appearance of a bosom to another, and to a third something comparable only with the twin pyramids of Egypt. She is, and can be, it succession, a brow, hands, a torso, thighs like oars or beeches, knees, a skirt baring them to the winds and other men's eyes, pumps and stockings visible and invisible. She is never-failing eyes and hair to all men born with eyes and a since of smell, and when she is neither of these to one man it can turn out that she can be nothing at all to any other man.

  "A man begins the painful journey to one particular woman by medium of one of his five senses. He finds himself growing towards her the way trees are drawn towards one another because of proximities that exist deep down in their roots. This commonality of root in the vegetable world is its simplex. It corresponds to something in men and women we know as complex. A complex at the roots of their love-life is what draws men and women together. But if a woman fails in her equipment of complexes she can have no feelings of what draws a man to her. In this abysmal ignorance she often divests herself, after marriage, of the chief sources of her attractiveness. Only minutes before she finally yields to min, the man enters marital bed, loaded with the desires she has aroused in him. But because she has unwittingly cancelled out the attractions that drew him to her she no longer the woman he thinks he's in bed with. But this requires a little more specialized explaining. Which reminds me, do you happen to know what a complex is, darling?

  "Of course, dear," she answered. "No one can eat in Hollywood cafeterias for a week without becoming acquainted with the whole Freudian vocabulary."

  "Well, a fine point Hollywood stumbled over, darling, is the notion that the possession of a complex is a personal peculiarity. Or let's look at it this way.

  "Every human being grows up with the active assistance of at least one complex. Where more than one becomes necessary-due to developments unforeseen-more complexes appear and join in the action."

  "A man develops a yen for a woman for no more than the satisfaction he hopes to derive from her for one or more of his embattled complexes. But suppose-to complete the picture I've already made for you-the woman, before retiring with her newly won husband, carefully removes the attractive rouge, discards the particularly high-heeled shoes lets those breast which had challenged the firmness of the pyramids hang dismally down to her belly button, and so on down the line? What becomes of this man's entry, supposing he can keep his eyes shut long enough to be able to make it? How much worse off would he be if he tried, instead, to make his way through a keyhole?

  "A man burdened-or- shouldn't the word rather be exalted-with a mouth, breast, or shoe complex is quite helpless under the circumstances described above. But he need not remain so. It is still possible for such a man to achieve relief for himself and bliss for his mate by the simple device of explaining his condition to her to clear the way for a mutual understanding between them. And what would be the woman's cost of making her readjustment for him? She would only have to pretend that her man is still unconquered and go on flaunting herself before him as she did before the idea of their permanent union occurred to him.

  "Though she may regard his needs as mere whims, a good decent woman will react by complying with them. A slut will pretend outrage, accuse her husband of abnormal conduct, and make embarrassment the normal atmosphere of their home.

  "The saddest part of it, however, is that in most cases the man shrinks from taking his wife into his confidence, be she a good woman or a slut. He permits himself to act out of that idiotic shyness nature has endowed him with as an additional laid to the rest of his frustrations. He would haply pay his consort in what ever coin she might prefer to receive her sexual emoluments, but his tongue is tied to an antiquarian custom. His behavior is no less cowardly than that of the slut who would love the opportunity to belabor and scandalize him.

  "Have you any idea what I'm driving at, Marilyn?"

  "I'm not quite sure, dear, but I'm still to hear you describe  that feeling," she said.

  I knew what she expected of me, what I couldn't understand was why she needed so badly to hear me say it.

  "This is not to imply that these lust yielded me no service of satisfaction. Some durable measure of happiness each of them had for me in her turn-even if it was no more than the sniveling little triumph of getting into and coming out of her without a scratch.

  "However big or little  the joy afforded me by one of these woman, it always seemed to me to strike a neat balance between my need and her willingness to suffer my limited participation in it. There always was some joy, but it was a joy circumscribed by something in me that had made up its mind before it came into being that it would go so far and no farther with me.

  "With you it was entirely different, of course.When I realized that I was firmly imbedded in you, darling, the host of pleasures thronging through my senses swept aside all considerations and limitations. It felt as if a committee of angels had melted their seraphic wings into the softness of all softnesses, bowed down before my  impatient will, and bid me welcome,"

  By this time Marilyn was laughing so heartily I had to stop. I had to stop also because I had already exhausted all I had to say to her, and because it suddenly occurred to me that I knew what she was laughing about.

  "You're remembering, aren't you,"I asked, "that we went to bed without either of us bothering to shed as much as an article of clothing we were wearing?" I asked.

  She nodded, afraid to trust herself to opening her mouth, lest she get caught again in that fit of laughter.

  "I don't remember ever wanting to so it that way before, darling," I confessed, "though the urge to couple without divesting ourselves of our clothing, and without a prior word of discussion or agreement on the subject is one of the most powerful of human emotions-as the dim hallways of the world testify to so eloquently. Just thinking of it swings me back to the overwhelming enthusiasm with which we went at that first meeting of ours."

  "Me, too," she said and was swept back into laughter again and remained with it until big tears rolled down her cheeks.

  "What made you laugh this time?" I asked when she regained her breath.

  "It suddenly occurred to me how you must have felt, you who apparently suffer under the burden of all the complexes!" she cried.

  "It's not a laughing matter, baby," I warned her.

  "I didn't mean it that way, dear," she said apologetically. "And I'm doubly grateful to you for helping to bring that piece of business back to my mind, dear. I now understand more clearly than ever why sex seemed so repulsive to me until you-you with your while gang of complexes-came upon the scene  and swept me into bed. It was the words of recognition accompanying the act, which made all the difference between your initiative and there is, my dear.

  "Those early and later enemies of my sexual life were not attracted to me but to the promise of an easy conquest offered them by the sight of a poor, helpless orphan. I was to them like some wild creature fleeing through the woods of humanity whom any passing male with a loaded gun was license  to seize, pierce and forget.

  "You wanted me, all of me, so badly, you couldn't for the loving of me spare any item of what you saw of me, all of my accoutrements in linen, leather and flesh. That's why I surrendered to you so quickly and so completely. And that was why there was such infinite joy in it for both of us,,,"